THE SYMBOLISM OF KRUPP

Utopia of Userers, et al

by Gilbert K. Chesterton

THE SYMBOLISM OF KRUPP, UTOPIA OF USERERS, ET AL by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The curious position of the Krupp firm in the awful story developing
around us is not quite sufficiently grasped. There is a kind of academic
clarity of definition which does not see the proportions of things for
which everything falls within a definition, and nothing ever breaks beyond
it. To this type of mind (which is valuable when set to its special and
narrow work) there is no such thing as an exception that proves the rule.
If I vote for confiscating some usurer's millions I am doing, they say,
precisely what I should be doing if I took pennies out of a blind man's
hat. They are both denials of the principle of private property, and are
equally right and equally wrong, according to our view of that principle.
I should find a great many distinctions to draw in such a matter. First,
I should say that taking a usurer's money by proper authority is not
robbery, but recovery of stolen goods. Second, I should say that even if
there were no such thing as personal property, there would still be such a
thing as personal dignity, and different modes of robbery would diminish
it in very different ways. Similarly, there is a truth, but only a
half-truth, in the saying that all modern Powers alike rely on the
Capitalist and make war on the lines of Capitalism. It is true, and it is
disgraceful. But it is _not_ equally true and equally disgraceful. It is
not true that Montenegro is as much ruled by financiers as Prussia, just
as it is not true that as many men in the Kaiserstrasse, in Berlin, wear
long knives in their belts as wear them in the neighbourhood of the Black
Mountain. It is not true that every peasant from one of the old Russian
communes is the immediate servant of a rich man, as is every employee of
Mr. Rockefeller. It is as false as the statement that no poor people in
America can read or write. There is an element of Capitalism in all
modern countries, as there is an element of illiteracy in all modern
countries. There are some who think that the number of our
fellow-citizens who can sign their names ought to comfort us for the
extreme fewness of those who have anything in the bank to sign it for, but
I am not one of these.

In any case, the position of Krupp has certain interesting aspects. When
we talk of Army contractors as among the base but active actualities of
war, we commonly mean that while the contractor benefits by the war, the
war, on the whole, rather suffers by the contractor. We regard this
unsoldierly middleman with disgust, or great anger, or contemptuous
acquiescence, or commercial dread and silence, according to our personal
position and character. But we nowhere think of him as having anything to
do with fighting in the final sense. Those worthy and wealthy persons who
employ women's labour at a few shillings a week do not do it to obtain the
best clothes for the soldiers, but to make a sufficient profit on the
worst. The only argument is whether such clothes are just good enough for
the soldiers, or are too bad for anybody or anything. We tolerate the
contractor, or we do not tolerate him; but no one admires him especially,
and certainly no one gives him any credit for any success in the war.
Confessedly or unconfessedly we knock his profits, not only off what goes
to the taxpayer, but what goes to the soldier. We know the Army will not
fight any better, at least, because the clothes they wear were stitched by
wretched women who could hardly see; or because their boots were made by
harassed helots, who never had time to think. In war-time it is very
widely confessed that Capitalism is not a good way of ruling a patriotic
or self-respecting people, and all sorts of other things, from strict
State organisation to quite casual personal charity, are hastily
substituted for it. It is recognised that the "great employer," nine
times out of ten, is no more than the schoolboy or the page who pilfers
tarts and sweets from the dishes as they go up and down. How angry one is
with him depends on temperament, on the stage of the dinner--also on the
number of tarts.

Now here comes in the real and sinister significance of Krupps. There are
many capitalists in Europe as rich, as vulgar, as selfish, as rootedly
opposed to any fellowship of the fortunate and unfortunate. But there is
no other capitalist who claims, or can pretend to claim, that he has very
appreciably _helped_ the activities of his people in war. I will suppose
that Lipton did not deserve the very severe criticisms made on his firm by
Mr. Justice Darling; but, however blameless he was, nobody can suppose
that British soldiers would charge better with the bayonet because they
had some particular kind of groceries inside them. But Krupp can make a
plausible claim that the huge infernal machines to which his country owes
nearly all of its successes could only have been produced under the
equally infernal conditions of the modern factory and the urban and
proletarian civilisation. That is why the victory of Germany would be
simply the victory of Krupp, and the victory of Krupp would be simply the
victory of Capitalism. There, and there alone, Capitalism would be able
to point to something done successfully for a whole nation--done (as it
would certainly maintain) better than small free States or natural
democracies could have done it. I confess I think the modern Germans
morally second-rate, and I think that even war, when it is conducted most
successfully by machinery, is second-rate war. But this second-rate war
will become not only the first but the only brand, if the cannon of Krupp
should conquer; and, what is very much worse, it will be the only
intelligent answer that any capitalist has yet given against our case that
Capitalism is as wasteful and as weak as it is certainly wicked. I do not
fear any such finality, for I happen to believe in the kind of men who
fight best with bayonets and whose fathers hammered their own pikes for
the French Revolution.