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The Capitalist Is in the Dock
Now it is this offering of a false economic excuse for the sweater that is
the danger in perpetually saying that the poor woman will use the vote and
that the poor man has not used it. The poor man is prevented from using
it; prevented by the rich man, and the poor woman would be prevented in
exactly the same gross and stringent style. I do not deny, of course,
that there is something in the English temperament, and in the heritage of
the last few centuries that makes the English workman more tolerant of
wrong than most foreign workmen would be. But this only slightly modifies
the main fact of the moral responsibility. To take an imperfect parallel,
if we said that negro slaves would have rebelled if negroes had been more
intelligent, we should be saying what is reasonable. But if we were to
say that it could by any possibility be represented as being the negro's
fault that he was at that moment in America and not in Africa, we should
be saying what is frankly unreasonable. It is every bit as unreasonable
to say the mere supineness of the English workmen has put them in the
capitalist slave-yard. The capitalist has put them in the capitalist
slaveyard; and very cunning smiths have hammered the chains. It is just
this creative criminality in the authors of the system that we must not
allow to be slurred over.
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