It matters little whether our masters stoop to state the matter in the form that every prison should be a school; or in the more candid form that every school should be a prison.  They have already fulfilled their servile principle in the case of the schools.  Everyone goes to the Elementary Schools except the few people who tell them to go there.  I prophesy that (unless our revolt succeeds) nearly everyone will be going to Prison, with a precisely similar patience.

VIII.  THE LASH FOR LABOUR

If I were to prophesy that two hundred years hence a grocer would have the right and habit of beating the grocer’s assistant with a stick, or that shop girls might be flogged, as they already can be fined, many would regard it as rather a rash remark.  It would be a rash remark.  Prophecy is always unreliable; unless we except the kind which is avowedly irrational, mystical and supernatural prophecy.  But relatively to nearly all the other prophecies that are being made around me to-day, I should say my prediction stood an exceptionally good chance.  In short, I think the grocer with the stick is a figure we are far more likely to see than the Superman or the Samurai, or the True Model Employer, or the Perfect Fabian Official, or the citizen of the Collectivist State.  And it is best for us to see the full ugliness of the transformation which is passing over our Society in some such abrupt and even grotesque image at 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