THE SERVILE STATE AGAIN

Utopia of Userers, et al

by Gilbert K. Chesterton

THE SERVILE STATE AGAIN, UTOPIA OF USERERS, ET AL by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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I read the other day, in a quotation from a German newspaper, the highly
characteristic remark that Germany having annexed Belgium would soon
re-establish its commerce and prosperity, and that, in particular,
arrangements were already being made for introducing into the new province
the German laws for the protection of workmen.

I am quite content with that paragraph for the purpose of any controversy
about what is called German atrocity. If men I know had not told me they
had themselves seen the bayoneting of a baby; if the most respectable
refugees did not bring with them stories of burning cottages--yes, and of
burning cottagers as well; if doctors did not report what they do report
of the condition of girls in the hospitals; if there were no facts; if
there were no photographs, that one phrase I have quoted would be quite
sufficient to satisfy me that the Prussians are tyrants; tyrants in a
peculiar and almost insane sense which makes them pre-eminent among the
evil princes of the earth. The first and most striking feature is a
stupidity that rises into a sort of ghastly innocence. The protection of
workmen! Some workmen, perhaps, might have a fancy for being protected
from shrapnel; some might be glad to put up an umbrella that would ward
off things dropping from the gentle Zeppelin in heaven upon the place
beneath. Some of these discontented proletarians have taken the same view
as Vandervelde their leader, and are now energetically engaged in
protecting themselves along the line of the Yser; I am glad to say not
altogether without success. It is probable that nearly all of the Belgian
workers would, on the whole, prefer to be protected against bombs, sabres,
burning cities, starvation, torture, and the treason of wicked kings. In
short, it is probable--it is at least possible, impious as is the
idea--that they would prefer to be protected against Germans and all they
represent. But if a Belgian workman is told that he is not to be
protected against Germans, but actually to be protected by Germans, I
think he may be excused for staring. His first impulse, I imagine, will
be to ask, "Against whom? Are there any worse people to come along?"

But apart from the hellish irony of this humanitarian idea, the question
it raises is really one of solid importance for people whose politics are
more or less like ours. There is a very urgent point in that question,
"Against whom would the Belgian workmen be protected by the German laws?"
And if we pursue it, we shall be enabled to analyse something of that
poison--very largely a Prussian poison--which has long been working in our
own commonwealth, to the enslavement of the weak and the secret
strengthening of the strong. For the Prussian armies are, pre-eminently,
the advance guard of the Servile State. I say this scientifically, and
quite apart from passion or even from preference. I have no illusions
about either Belgium or England. Both have been stained with the soot of
Capitalism and blinded with the smoke of mere Colonial ambition; both have
been caught at a disadvantage in such modern dirt and disorder; both have
come out much better than I should have expected countries so modem and so
industrial to do. But in England and Belgium there is Capitalism mixed up
with a great many other things, strong things and things that pursue other
aims; Clericalism, for instance, and militant Socialism in Belgium; Trades
Unionism and sport and the remains of real aristocracy in England. But
Prussia is Capitalism; that is, a gradually solidifying slavery; and that
majestic unity with which she moves, dragging all the dumb Germanies after
her, is due to the fact that her Servile State is complete, while ours is
incomplete. There are not mutinies; there are not even mockeries; the
voice of national self-criticism has been extinguished forever. For this
people is already permanently cloven into a higher and a lower class: in
its industry as much as its army. Its employers are, in the strictest and
most sinister sense, captains of industry. Its proletariat is, in the
truest and most pitiable sense, an army of labour. In that atmosphere
masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men; and to
insult an officer is death.

If anyone ask how this extreme and unmistakable subordination of the
employed to the employers is brought about, we all know the answer. It is
brought about by hunger and hardness of heart, accelerated by a certain
kind of legislation, of which we have had a good deal lately in England,
but which was almost invariably borrowed from Prussia. Mr. Herbert
Samuel's suggestion that the poor should be able to put their money in
little boxes and not be able to get it out again is a sort of standing
symbol of all the rest. I have forgotten how the poor were going to
benefit eventually by what is for them indistinguishable from dropping
sixpence down a drain. Perhaps they were going to get it back some day;
perhaps when they could produce a hundred coupons out of the Daily Citizen;
perhaps when they got their hair cut; perhaps when they consented to be
inoculated, or trepanned, or circumcised, or something. Germany is full
of this sort of legislation; and if you asked an innocent German, who
honestly believed in it, what it was, he would answer that it was for the
protection of workmen.

And if you asked again "Their protection from what?" you would have the
whole plan and problem of the Servile State plain in front of you.
Whatever notion there is, there is no notion whatever of protecting the
employed person _from his employer_. Much less is there any idea of his
ever being anywhere except under an employer. Whatever the Capitalist
wants he gets. He may have the sense to want washed and well-fed
labourers rather than dirty and feeble ones, and the restrictions may
happen to exist in the form of laws from the Kaiser or by-laws from the
Krupps. But the Kaiser will not offend the Krupps, and the Krupps will
not offend the Kaiser. Laws of this kind, then, do not attempt to protect
workmen against the injustice of the Capitalist as the English Trade
Unions did. They do not attempt to protect workmen against the injustice
of the State as the mediaeval guilds did. Obviously they cannot protect
workmen against the foreign invader--especially when (as in the comic case
of Belgium) they are imposed by the foreign invader. What then are such
laws designed to protect workmen against? Tigers, rattlesnakes, hyenas?

Oh, my young friends; oh, my Christian brethren, they are designed to
protect this poor person from something which to those of established rank
is more horrid than many hyenas. They are designed, my friends, to
protect a man from himself--from something that the masters of the earth
fear more than famine or war, and which Prussia especially fears as
everything fears that which would certainly be its end. They are meant to
protect a man against himself--that is, they are meant to protect a man
against his manhood.

And if anyone reminds me that there is a Socialist Party in Germany, I
reply that there isn't.