the end of it. The beginnings of a decline, in every age of history, have
always had the appearance of being reforms. Nero not only fiddled while
Rome was burning, but he probably really paid more attention to the fiddle
than to the fire. The Roi Soleil, like many other soleils, was most
splendid to all appearance a little before sunset. And if I ask myself
what will be the ultimate and final fruit of all our social reforms,
garden cities, model employers, insurances, exchanges, arbitration courts,
and so on, then, I say, quite seriously, "I think it will be labour under
the lash."


The Sultan and the Sack

Let us arrange in some order a number of converging considerations that
all point in this direction. (1) It is broadly true, no doubt, that the
weapon of the employer has hitherto been the threat of dismissal, that is,
the threat of enforced starvation. He is a Sultan who need not order the
bastinado, so long as he can order the sack. But there are not a few
signs that this weapon is not quite so convenient and flexible a one as
his increasing rapacities require. The fact of the introduction of fines,
secretly or openly, in many shops and factories, proves that it is
convenient for the capitalists to have some temporary and adjustable form
of punishment besides the final punishment of pure ruin. Nor is it
difficult to see the commonsense of this from their wholly inhuman point
of view. The act of sacking a man is attended with the same disadvantages
as the act of shooting a man: one of which is that you can get no more out
of him. It is, I am told, distinctly annoying to blow a fellow creature's
brains out with a revolver and then suddenly remember that he was the only
person who knew where to get the best Russian cigarettes. So our Sultan,
who is the orderer of the sack, is also the bearer of the bow-string. A