There is, however, a British dream — though I have never seen the phrase anywhere before. It is an anxiety dream, of the lean kine eating the fat. Joseph in the Old Testament is summoned to interpret a dream of Pharaoh’s, that seven fat cattle are eaten by seven lean ones, and that seven good ears of corn are eaten by seven poor ones. In the midst of plenty, Pharaoh has had a dream of famine. He assigns Joseph to store grain for seven years, in preparation for seven bad years, and disaster is averted. A glance at the world will assure one instantly that the dreams of cultures are much more typically urgent and recurrent anxiety dreams than the sort of delusional daydreaming Americans are said to be prone to.
In the British version of Pharaoh’s dream, the lean kine are the poorest members of the population, who have half devoured the class just above them. The British, a practical race, and one whose prophets have warned them of the exponential increase in the numbers of lean kine, so that they have not enjoyed the assurance given to Pharaoh that his troubles would sometime end, have taken practical steps — in the thick of the dream, of course, from which they have never wakened. It was in his prosperity that this warning came to Pharaoh, and it has been through the centuries of British prosperity that their dream has haunted them. And here is the strange part, the place where British experience departs unequivocally from its biblical analogue. The very thrift and saving required to keep disaster at bay actually increased the numbers of lean kine and their voracity and — if I do not overstep the strange metaphor unpardonably — their rage. The alternative, as Malthus and others were quick to point out, was to feed the creatures, thereby accelerating their increase in numbers, without finally diminishing their voracity. Wealth does not deserve the name which must constantly be guarded and worried over, and the British, however rich, have always felt poor. But with Charles Booth we have arrived at that cusp, that threshold moment, when capitalist Britain is about to emerge as socialist Britain, and the nightmare is finally about to end. If we pause here we can witness this epochal change. It requires careful watching, for there is as little change to the outward eye as there is in bread after consecration.
Though Booth himself was no socialist, he proposed that socialist institutions — prisons, poorhouses — might act as a catchment for those elements which cannot function in an individualist culture. In what particular this would depart from the state of things then prevailing I cannot tell.
Friedrich Engels’s study of the conditions of the working class in Manchester tends to describe streets and quarters — how they were built, how populated, what sanitary conditions prevailed in them — or to describe categories of workers and factory conditions. Booth turned much of his attention to families, which he describes in terms of their cleanliness, thrift, and sobriety, the presence or absence of which correlates with their class ranking on a scale of his own devising. Just as Engels’s method reflects his belief that the working class were victims of their circumstances, Booth’s reflects the more usual assumption that moral failure is the great cause of distress, with the inevitable corollary that poverty, if it is done right, is entirely consistent with happiness and well-being. Thus, for Booth, the cause of misery is found in the miserable. Charles Booth did not, however, foresee abandoning the feckless to their misery — they were, after all, a drain on the economy: “Ill-paid and half-starved as they are, they consume or waste or have expended on them more wealth than they create.”
His solution will sound familiar. Class A, his designation for “the lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers, and semi-criminals,” could be “gradually harried out of existence.” The more fortunate Class B, the “ill-paid and half-starved,” are still, in Booth’s elegant phrase, du trop, a phrase that should surely be translated as “redundant.” His scheme for eliminating this class is gentler than harrying them out of existence, though not by much. In his view, “if they were ruled out we should be much better off than we are now; and if this class were under State tutelage — say at once under State slavery — the balance-sheet would be more favorable to the community.” Like Carlyle, he considers slavery a humane reform, but unreachable. For him the difficulty lies “in the question of individual liberty, for it is as freemen, and not as slaves, that we must deal with them. The only form compulsion could assume would be that of making life otherwise impossible; an enforcement of the standard of life which would oblige every one of us to accept the relief of the State in the manner prescribed by the State, unless we were able and willing to conform to this standard. The life offered would not be attractive.”
Let us pause here to note certain features of this plan. First, the social amelioration it has as its object would “rule out” a class of people who supposedly represent a drag on the economy of a nation which was at that time the richest in the world, and in the history of the world. The shared characteristic that defines them as a class according to Booth’s system is their extreme poverty, which, as he freely grants, can be brought on by illness or accident. Nevertheless, they are “as freemen” to be compelled to “accept a regulated life,” in “industrial groups, planted wherever building materials were cheap.” Granting that these groups would not be economically competitive, “it would be merely that the State, having these people on its hands, obtained whatever value it could out of their work. They would become servants of the State.” Accounts should be kept of the value produced by each family, expressed as deficiency, of course, since the enterprise would not be profitable. “It would, moreover, be necessary to set a limit to the current deficiency submitted to by the State, and when the account of any family reached this point to move them on to the poorhouse where they would live as a family no longer. The Socialistic side of life as it is includes the poorhouse and the prison, and the whole system, as I conceive it, would provide within itself motives in favour of prudence, and a sufficient pressure to stimulate industry.”
The thing most striking about this proposal is that there is nothing new in it. It criminalizes poverty, making poverty entail penal servitude. Like the fourteenth-century Ordinance of Labourers, it assumes that those who do not work continuously are, even in their misery, an expense to the state, and that the state has a right to make the balance sheet more favorable by seizing upon their labor. One wonders what form coercion would take if it were not limited by the “freedom” of its objects. The use of separation of family members as leverage on their behavior — specincally, in extracting economic value — was a feature of the New Poor Law of 1834, notorious and widely practiced. Even infants and mothers were separated. Booth is simply pointing out that the poorhouse, a part of “the Socialistic side of life as it is,” would still have terrors for his Class B “sufficient to stimulate industry.” Booth’s scheme would merely extend the sanctions against pauperism to include those who had eluded that status by scrounging and suffering, through religious or private charity, or through the openhandedness of the more fortunate poor. Like the old vagabonds, they would be punished in anticipation of transgression, for “to bring Class B under State regulation would be to control the springs of pauperism.” Booth offers in support of his proposed reforms to eliminate the non-productive classes the observation that “the Socialists think it can be done by self-devotion on the part of the capable, and a final sternness which shall enforce obedience by the threat of starvation.”