ocial hardship caused now-a-days by new
inventions and economies in method. There will exist throughout the
world an organized economic survey, which will continually prepare and
revise estimates of the need of iron, coal, cloth and so forth in the
coming months; the blind speculative production of our own times is
due merely to the dark ignorance in which we work in these matters,
and with such a survey, employment will lose much of the cruel
intermittence it now displays. The men in these great productive
services, quite equally with teachers and railwaymen, will be
permanently employed. They will be no more taken on and turned off by
the day or week than we should take on or turn off an extra policeman,
or depend for our defence upon soldiers casually engaged upon the
battlefield at sixpence an hour. And if by adopting some ingenious
device we dispense suddenly with the labour of hundreds of men, the
Socialist State will send them, not into the casual wards and colonies
as our State does, to become a social burthen there, but into the
technical schools to train for some fresh use of their energies. Taken
all round, of course, these men, even the least enterprising or able,
will be better off than they are now, with a fuller share of the
product of their industry. Many will no doubt remain as they are,
rather through want of ambition than want of push, because under
Socialism life will be tolerable for a poor man. A man who chooses to
do commonplace work and spend his leisure upon chess or billiards, or
in gossip or eccentric studies, or amusing but ineffectual art, will
remain a poor man indeed, but not be made a wretched one. Sheer toil
of a mechanical sort there is little need of in the world now, it
could be speedily dispensed with at a thousand points were human
patience not cheaper than good machinery, but there will still remain
ten thousand undistinguished sorts of work for unambitious men....

If you are a farmer or any sort of horticulturist, a fruit or flower
grower, let us say, or a seedsman, you will probably find yourself
still farming under Socialism--that is to say, renting land and
getting what you can out of it. Your rent will be fixed just as it is
to-day by what people will give. But your landlord will be the
Municipality or the County, and the rent you pay will largely come
back to you in repairs, in the guiding reports and advice of the
Agricultural Department, in improved roads, in subventions t