something towards improving what they call the "conditions" of their
workers; but a worker might have his conditions as carefully arranged as a
racehorse has, and still have no more personal property than a racehorse.
If you take an average poor seamstress or factory girl, you will find that
the power of chastising her through her property has very considerable
limits; it is almost as hard for the employer of labour to tax her for
punishment as it is for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tax her for
revenue. The next most obvious thing to think of, of course, would be
imprisonment, and that might be effective enough under simpler conditions.
An old-fashioned shopkeeper might have locked up his apprentice in his
coal-cellar; but his coal-cellar would be a real, pitch dark coal-cellar,
and the rest of his house would be a real human house. Everybody
(especially the apprentice) would see a most perceptible difference
between the two. But, as I pointed out in the article before this, the
whole tendency of the capitalist legislation and experiment is to make
imprisonment much more general and automatic, while making it, or
professing to make it, more humane. In other words, the hygienic prison
and the servile factory will become so uncommonly like each other that the
poor man will hardly know or care whether he is at the moment expiating an
offence or merely swelling a dividend. In both places there will be the
same sort of shiny tiles. In neither place will there be any cell so
unwholesome as a coal-cellar or so wholesome as a home. The weapon of the
prison, therefore, like the weapon of the fine, will be found to have
considerable limitations to its effectiveness when employed against the
wretched reduced citizen of our day. Whether it be property or liberty
you cannot take from him what he has not got. You cannot imprison a slave,
because you cannot enslave a slave.


The Barbarous Revival