A Letter to Posterity 3

	Up to the end of the last century the difference in condition between the very rich and the very poor was obviously too great to justify on any count, but much had been done to bridge the gulf long before the socialists came to power. Successive governments had brought in ever-higher rates of income tax with a sharply rising scale according to income; so that by 1940 the great bulk of all taxation was borne by the moderately well off and richer classes. In fact, a married workman with 4 children could earn up to 400 a year without paying any tax at all, whereas a millionaire with an income of 50,000 had to surrender 44,000 in taxation. Again, under the old system there were many abuses of power, particularly through economic pressure, whereby workers were often compelled to labour overlong hours in unhealthy conditions; but here again, during the first 40 years of the present century an enormous amount had been done to redress these evils. Education and health services had beenmade free to all, hours of work restricted, minimum wages set for all types of labour, insurance of workers against accident made compulsory on employers, and both unemployment pay and old-age pensions assured to all below a certain income level.
	It was far from being a perfect world, but the masses were no longer at the mercy of chance or the caprice of their masters, and were fully protected from either calamity or want. No one would seek to deny that the worker’s own representatives and the trade union movement played a great part in bringing about these reforms; yet the fact remains that the laws concerning them were mainly introduced and passed by just-minded and humane legislators drawn from the old ruling classes. However, having agitated for such reforms for so long, the ‘all men are equal’ advocates were far from content and are now in the process of lightening the natural burden of the workers to a point where the wealthy and even the stability of the nation is threatened. Employers are now no longer allowed to run their businesses as they think best but have become the bond slaves of socialist state planning. The school leaving age has been put up to 16, and a 5 day working week has been instituted in the mines, the railways and many other industries. This means that while workers are being protected and provided for, whether employed or not, from the cradle to the grave, they are no longer putting in a sufficient number of working hours to pay for the benefits they receive. To continue on these lines can only end in national bankruptcy, or a reversal of policy by which, as in Soviet Russia, the vast majority of the theoretically classless society are compelled to work appallingly long hours to maintain the state bosses and a huge non-productive bureaucracy. The doctrine of ensuring every child a good start in life and equal opportunities is fair and right, but the intelligent and the hardworking will always rise above the rest, and it is not a practical proposition that the few should be expected to devote their lives exclusively to making things easy for the majority. In time, such a system is bound to undermine the vigour of the race. If the rewards of ability and industry are to be taken from those who rise to the top, they will cease to strive, and if the masses are pampered too much they will regard protection from all the hazards of life as their right, and become lazy. There is only a limited amount of wealth in each nation’s resources. If it is not added to year by year by vigorous enterprise, made possible by the majority of the people doing an honest day’s work, but instead, gradually drained away in bettering the condition of the masses without their making an adequate return, the nation that follows such a policy is bound to go into a decline; then the general standard of living will fall, instead of becoming a Utopia, as the ‘all men are equal’ theorists fondly imagine. And this is the slippery slope to which the new socialist government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ has now brought a once rich and prosperous Britain. Socialist controls now make it impossible for any ambitious young man to start his own business. Socialist taxation operates against any man of initiative immediately his efforts place him in a higher income-tax group. Socialist laws actually forbid workers in all the great national industries to work overtime or better themselves by changing their employment. Socialist ‘planning’ forbids any man to kill his own sheep or pig, cut down his own tree, put up a wooden shelf in his own house, build a shack in his garden, and either buy or sell the great majority of commodities – without a permit. In fact, it makes all individual effort an offence against the state. Therefore, this Dictatorship of the Proletariat, instead of gradually improving the conditions in which the lower classes live, as has been the aim of all past governments, must result in reducing everyone outside the party machine to the level of the lowest, idlest and most incompetent worker. Realising that many thousands of our young people are planning to leave Britain for the dominions, colonies and other countries overseas, where unshackled by the bureaucratic socialist octopus, men are still free to carve out a fortune for themselves, and enjoy the rewards of hard work and enterprise. Man began as a member of a herd. He became different from the animals only when the urge to become a real person – an individual – gave him the courage to back away from the herd. The desire to remain free and independent forced him to think and act for himself. In the process he developed his imagination, his ability to reason, his strength of purpose, his audacity, his powers of concentration, and his expectation towards a still greater freedom in some afterlife more perfect than the present. As an individual, often subject to the orders of others, but rarely reduced to a mere part in a soulless machine, men achieved a variety of great civilisations – a feat beyond the bounds of all probability had he always been regimented and had his thoughts moulded for him into a uniform pattern by state propaganda.