I
When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food, his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. He might not even decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a miner. If the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a tunnelling company, to earth he went. He had ceased to be Economic Man, the being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go round by making a beeline to the best pay available. Now he was ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who least admire it. No one was left to say of a job any longer that you might “take it or leave it,” for leaving was barred. You could not be called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. You had become a true “proletarian” under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. It might not be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you. Dr. Johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between a flea and a louse. It is as hard to decide between the charms of a “sanitary fatigue” when done for our War Office and when done for Mr. Lenin.
In a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all—the sense in which men like to break the ice in the Serpentine for a swim. He had willed it. He felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done. But he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses. They liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by colonel or Soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting problem in self-government. They liked meals which they did not choose, and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their season, like grass. They liked quarters which they might perhaps have to share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be sought for, rented, furnished, and, on every Monday, paid for with a separate pang. They liked, at any rate as the lesser evil, work which was no subject of either collective or individual bargain, but came out of the sky, like the weather, usually open to objection, but sometimes not.
Perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the “souls Christian by nature” of the theologians. You might even have suspected that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic and of the communistic State, but between two contrasted human types—the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and State-fixed pay in a State-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven, however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. So that the only ideal solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its States, into two hemispheres, as trains are divided into “non-smoking” and “smoking.” A little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed be happy in the other’s paradise.