CIVILISATION AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT.
Sec. 1. _Imperfect Adjustment of Industrial Structure to its
Environment._
Sec. 2. _Reform upon the Basis of Private Enterprise and Free Trade._
Sec. 3. _Freedom and Transparency of Industry powerless to cure the
deeper Industrial Maladies._
Sec. 4. _Beginnings of Public Control of Machine-production._
Sec. 5. _Passage of Industries into a public Non-competitive
Condition._
Sec. 6. _The "raison d'etre" of Progressive Collectivism._
Sec. 7. _Collectivism follows the line of Monopoly._
Sec. 8. _Cases of "Arrested Development:" the Sweating Trades._
Sec. 9. _Retardation of rate of Progress in Collective Industries._
Sec. 10. _Will Official Machine-work absorb an Increasing Proportion
of Energy?_
Sec. 11. _Improved Quality of Consumption the Condition of Social
Progress._
Sec. 12. _The Highest Division of Labour between Machinery and Art._
Sec. 13. _Qualitative Consumption defeats the Law of Decreasing
Returns._
Sec. 14. _Freedom of Art from Limitations of Matter._
Sec. 15. _Machinery and Art in production of Intellectual Wealth._
Sec. 16. _Reformed Consumption abolishes Anti-Social Competition._
Sec. 17. _Life itself must become Qualitative._
Sec. 18. _Organic Relations between Production and Consumption._
Sec. 19. _Summary of Progress towards a Coherent Industrial Organism._
Sec. 1. Modern industrial societies have hitherto secured to a very
inadequate extent the services which modern machinery and methods of
production are capable of rendering. The actual growth of material
wealth, however great, has been by no means commensurate with the
enormously increased powers of producing material commodities afforded
by the discoveries of modern science, and the partial utilisation of
these discoveries has been attended by a very unequal distribution of
the advantages of this increase in the stock of common knowledge and
control of nature. Moreover, as an offset against the growth of
material wealth, machinery has been a direct agent in producing
certain material and moral maladies which impair the health of modern
industrial communities.
The unprecedented rapidity and irregularity of the discovery and
adoption of the new methods made it impossible for the structure of
industrial society to adjust itself at once to the conditions of the
new environment. The maladies and defects which we detect in modern
industry are but the measure of a present maladjustment.
The progressive adjustment of structure to environment in the
unconscious or low-conscious world is necessarily slow. But where the
conscious will of man, either as an individual or as a society, can be
utilised for an adjusting force, the pace of progress may be
indefinitely quickened. A strongly-rooted custom in a man yields very
slowly to the pressure of changed circumstances which make it useless
or harmful, unless the man consciously recognises the inutility of the
custom and sets himself to root it out and plant another custom in its
place. So the slowness of this work of industrial adjustment has been
in no small measure due to the lack of definite realisation by the
members of modern communities of the need and importance of this
adjustment. A society which should bring its conscious will to bear
upon the work of constructing new social and industrial forms to fit
the new economic conditions, may make a progress which, while rapid,
may yet be safe, because it is not a speculative progress, but one
which is guided in its line of movement by precedent changes of
environment.
Regarding, then, this conscious organised endeavour, enlightened and
stimulated by a fuller understanding of industrial forces in their
relation to human life, as a determinant of growing value in the
industrial evolution of the future, it may properly belong to a
scientific study of modern industry to seek to discover how the forces
of conscious reform can reasonably work in relation to the economic
forces whose operations have been already investigated.
In other words, what are the chief lines of economic change required
to bring about a readjustment between modern methods of production and
social welfare? The answer to this question requires us to amplify our
interpretation of the industrial evolution of the past century, by
producing into the future the same lines of development, that they may
be justified by the appearance of consistency with some rational
social end. The most convenient, and perhaps the safest way to meet
this demand is to indicate, with that modesty which rightly belongs to
prophecy, some of the main reforms which seem to lie upon the road of
industrial progress, rendered subordinate to larger human social ends.
Sec. 2. So far as the waste of economic maladjustment consists in the
excessive or defective application of various kinds of productive
force at different points of industry, upon the existing basis of
individual initiative and control, the reforms which are desirable
must be considered as contributing to the more complete establishment
of "free" competition in industry.
The complete breakdown of all barriers which impede the free flow of
commerce and the migration of capital and labour, the fullest and
widest dissemination of industrial information, are necessary to the
attainment of the individualistic ideal of free trade. Perfect
transparency of industrial operations, perfect fluidity of labour and
of wealth would effect incalculably great economies in the production
of commercial wealth. The free-trader, in his concentration upon the
achievement of the latter economy, has generally failed to do full
justice to the importance of the former. He has indeed to some limited
extent recognised the value of accurate and extended industrial
information as the intellectual basis of free trade. But, in common
with most economists, he has failed to carry this consideration far
enough. It is generally admitted that the increased publication of
accounts and quotations of stock, springing out of the extension of
joint-stock enterprise, the growth of numerous trade journals, the
collection and dissemination of industrial facts by government bureaux
and private statisticians, are serviceable in many ways. But the
extreme repugnance which is shown towards all endeavours to extend the
compulsory powers of acquiring information by the state, the extreme
jealousy with which the rights of private information are maintained,
show how inadequately the true character of modern industry is
grasped. In the complexity of modern commerce it should be recognised
that there is no such thing as a "self-regarding" or a private action.
No fact bearing on prices, wages, profits, methods of production,
etc., concerns a single firm or a single body of workers. Every
industrial action, however detailed in character, however secretly
conducted, has a public import, and necessarily affects the actions
and interests of innumerable persons. Indeed it is often precisely in
the knowledge of those matters regarded as most private, and most
carefully secreted, that the public interest chiefly lies. Yet so
firmly rooted in the business mind is the individualistic conception
of industry, that any idea of a public development of those important
private facts upon which the credit of a particular firm is based,
would appear to destroy the very foundation of the commercial fabric.
But, although in the game of commerce a single firm which played its
hand openly while others kept theirs well concealed might suffer
failure, it is quite evident that the whole community interested in
the game would gain immensely if all the hands were on the table.
Many, if not most, of the great disasters of modern commercial
societies are attributable precisely to the fact that the credit of
great business firms, which is pre-eminently an affair of public
interest, is regarded as purely private before the crash. As industry
grows more and more complex, so the interest of the public and of an
ever-wider public in every industrial action grows apace, and a
correspondingly growing recognition of this public interest, with
provision for its security, will be found necessary. So far as the
natural changes of industrial structure in the private business fail
to provide the requisite publicity, the exercise of direct public
scrutiny must come to be enforced. The reluctance shown alike by
bodies of employers and of workers to divulge material facts is in
large measure due to the false ideas they have conceived as to the
nature of industrial activity, which education can do something to
remove, but which, if not removed, must be over-ruled in the public
interest.
Sec. 3. It must not, however, be supposed that the most thorough
transparency of industry, any more than the removal of the political
barriers which prevent Free Trade, would tend to bring about the
desirable adjustment between the healthy social organism and the
environment of machine-production. Full free trade would supply,
quicken, and facilitate the operation of those large economic forces
which we have seen at work: the tendency of capital to gravitate into
larger and fewer masses, localised where labour can be maintained upon
the most economical terms: a correspondent but slower and less
complete organisation of labour in large masses: the flow of labouring
population into towns, together with a larger utilisation of women and
(where permitted) children for industrial work: a growing keenness of
antagonism as the mass of the business-unit is larger, and an
increased expenditure of productive power upon aggressive commercial
warfare: the growth of monopolies springing from natural, social, or
economic sources, conferring upon individuals or classes the power to
consume without producing, and by their consumption to direct the
quantity and character of large masses of labour.
The complete realisation of full free trade in all directions has no
power whatever to abate the activity of these forces, and would only
serve to bring their operation into more signal and startling
prominence.
For the waste of periodic over-production visible in trade depression,
for the sufferings caused by ever larger oscillations in prices and
greater irregularity of employment of capital and labour, for the
specific evils of long hours or excessive intensity of labour,
dangerous and unwholesome conditions of employment, increased
employment of women and children, and growth of large-city life,
freedom of trade conjoined with publicity of business operations can
furnish no remedies.
It has been seen that these injuries to individuals and groups of
individuals, and through them to society, arise naturally and
necessarily from the unfettered operation of the enlightened
self-interest of individuals and groups of individuals engaged in
obtaining for themselves, by the freest use of industrial means
available, the largest quantity of money.
So far as these evils are in form or in magnitude the peculiar
products of the last two centuries, they are in large measure
traceable to methods of production controlled by machinery, and to the
social estimate of machine-products which gives machinery this
controlling power.
If this is so, such progress as shall abate these evils and secure for
humanity the uses of machinery without the abuses will lie in two
directions, each of which deserves consideration: (i) an adequate
social control over machine-production; (2) an education in the arts
of consumption such as may assign proper limits to the sphere of
machine-production.
Sec. 4. That machinery subject to the unrestricted guidance of the
commercial interests of an individual or a class cannot be safely
trusted to work for the general welfare, is already conceded by all
who admit the desirability or necessity of the restrictive legislation
of Factory Acts, Mines Regulation Acts, and the large growth of public
provisions for guarding against economic, hygienic, and other injuries
arising from the conditions of modern industrial life.
These provisions, whether designed directly to secure the interests of
a class of employees, as in the case of Factory Acts, or to protect
the consuming public, as in the case of Adulteration Acts, must be
regarded as involving an admission of a genuine antagonism between the
apparent interests of individuals and of the whole community, which it
is the business of society to guard against.
All this legislation is rightly interpreted as a restriction of the
freedom of individual industry under modern methods of production,
required in the public interest. Uncontrolled machine-production would
in some cases force children of six or eight years to work ten hours a
day in an unhealthy factory, would introduce suddenly a host of
Chinese or other "cheap" workers to oust native labour accustomed to a
higher standard of comfort, would permit an ingenious manufacturer to
injure the consumer by noxious adulteration of his goods, would force
wages to be paid by orders upon shops owned or controlled by
employers, would oblige workers to herd together in dens of
infection, and to breed physical and moral diseases which would injure
the body politic. The need of a growing social control over modern
machine-production, in cases where that production is left in the main
to the direction of individual enterprise, is admitted on every side,
though the development of that control has been uneven and determined
by the pressure of concrete grievances rather than by the acceptance
of any distinct theory of public responsibility.
Other limitations upon individual freedom of industry imply a clearer
recognition of the falsehood of the _laissez faire_ position. The
undertaking by the State or the Municipality, or other units of social
life, of various departments of industry, such as the railways,
telegraphs, post-offices, is a definite assertion that, in the supply
of the common services rendered by these industries, the competition
of private interests cannot be relied upon to work for the public
good.
Sec. 5. The industries which the State either limits or controls in the
interest either of a body of workers or of the consuming public may be
regarded as passing from a private competitive condition to a public
non-competitive condition. If therefore we wish to ascertain how far
and in what directions social control of modern production will
proceed, we shall examine those industries which already exhibit the
collective character. We shall find that they are of two kinds--(1)
industries where the size and structure of the "business" is such that
the protection afforded by competition to the consuming public and to
the workers has disappeared, or is in frequent abeyance, (2)
industries where the waste and damage of excessive competition
outweighs the loss of enterprise caused by a removal or restriction of
the incentive of individual gain. As we have seen in the analysis of
"trusts," these two characteristics, wasteful competition and
monopoly, are often closely related, the former signifying the process
of intense struggle, the object and ultimate issue of which is to
reach the quiet haven of monopoly. Generally speaking, social control
in the case of over-competing industries is limited to legislative
enactments regarding conditions of employment and quality of goods.
Only those industries tend to pass under public administration where
the monopoly is of an article of general and necessary consumption,
and where, therefore, a raising of prices considerably above the
competition rate would not succeed in evoking effective competition.
Since the general tendency of industry, so far as it falls under
modern economies of machinery and method, is either towards wasteful
competition or towards monopoly, it is to be expected that there will
be a continual expansion of State interference and State undertakings.
This growing socialisation of industry must be regarded as the natural
adjustment of society to the new conditions of machine-production. As
under the economies of machine-production the business-unit, the mass
of capital and labour forming a single "firm" or "business," grows
larger in size and more potent in its operations, the social
disturbances which it can occasion by its private activity, the
far-reaching and momentous results of its strain of competition, the
probability of an anti-social exercise of "monopolic" power over the
whole or part of its market-area, will of necessity increase. The
railway and shipping industries, for example, in countries like
England and the United States, have already reached a stage of
industrial development when the social danger arising from an
arbitrary fixing of rates by a line or a "pool" of lines, from a
strike or lock-out of "dockers" or railway men, is gaining keener
recognition every year. The rapidly growing organisation of both
capital and labour, especially in the fundamental industries of coal,
iron, and machine-making, in the machine-transport industries, and the
most highly evolved manufactories, gives to a body of employers or
employed, or to a combination of both, the power at any moment to
paralyse the whole or a large portion of the entire trade of a country
in pursuit of some purely private interest or resentment, or in the
acquisition of some strategical position, which shall enable them to
strengthen their competing power or gain a monopoly. Although the
organisation of masses of capital and of labour may, as is often
urged, make industrial strife less frequent, the effects of such
strife upon the wider public, who have no opportunity of casting a
vote for war or peace, are more momentous. Moreover, as these private
movements of capital and labour proceed, the probability of combined
action between employers and employed in a particular industry, to
secure for themselves some advantages at the public expense, will be
a factor of increasing importance in industrial evolution.
The Trade Union movement and the various growths of Industrial
Partnership, valuable as they are from many points of view, furnish no
remedies against the chief forms of economic monopoly and economic
waste; they can only change the personality and expand the number of
monopolists, and alter the character, not the quantity, of economic
waste. Society has an ever-deepening and more vital interest in the
economical management of the machinery of transport, and this interest
is no whit more secure if the practical control of railways and docks
were in the hands of the Dockers' Union or the Amalgamated Society of
Railway Servants, or of a combined board of directors and trade union
officials, than it is under present circumstances. On the contrary, an
effective organisation of capital and labour in an industry would be
more likely to pursue a policy opposed to the interests of the wider
public than now, because such a policy would be far more likely to
succeed.
Sec. 6. When it is said that modern industry is becoming essentially more
collective in character and therefore demands collective control, what
is meant is that under modern industrial development the interest of
the industrial society as a whole, and of the consuming public in each
piece of so-called private enterprise, is greater than it was ever
before, and requires some guarantee that this interest shall not be
ignored. Where the industry is of such a kind, and in such a stage of
development, that keen competition without undue waste survives, this
public interest can commonly be secured by the enactment of
restrictive legislation. Where such partial control is insufficient to
secure the social interest against monopoly or waste, State
management, upon a national, municipal, or such other scale as is
economically advisable, must take the place of a private enterprise
which is dangerous to society. This necessity becomes obvious as soon
as the notion of a business as being purely "private" or
"self-regarding" in its character is seen to be directly negatived by
an understanding of the complex social nature of every commercial act.
So soon as the idea of a social industrial organism is grasped, the
question of State interference in, or State assumption of, an industry
becomes a question of social expediency--that is, of the just
interpretation of the facts relating to the particular case. In large
measure this social control is to be regarded, not as a necessary
protection against the monopolic power of individuals, but as
necessary for the security of individual property within the limits
prescribed by social welfare. Modern machine-evolution, as is seen,
permits and encourages the wanton invasion and destruction of forms of
capital by the competition of new savings employed in an anti-social
way. It likewise tends to the frequent destruction of the value of
that labour power which is the sole property of the mass of workers.
"The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the
original foundation, so it is the most sacred and inviolable."[289]
There are certain wastes of economic power involved in all
competition; there are certain dangers of monopoly attaching to all
private conduct of industry. Collective control deals with these
wastes and dangers, adjusting itself to their extent and character.
Sec. 7. To the question how far and how rapidly may this extension of
collective control proceed, no more definite answer is possible than
this, that as a larger and larger amount of industry passes into the
condition of the most highly evolved machine-industries of to-day, and
develops along with the corresponding economies, corresponding dangers
and wastes, larger portions will pass under restrictive legislation or
State management.
The evolution in the structure of capitalist enterprise, while it
breeds and aggravates the diseases of trade depression, sweating,
etc., likewise prepares the way and facilitates the work of social
control. It is easier to inspect a few large factories than many small
ones, easier to arbitrate where capital and labour stands organised in
large masses, easier to municipalise big joint-stock businesses in
gas, water, or conveyance. Every legislative interference, in the way
of inspection or minor control, quickens the evolution of an industry,
and hastens the time when it acquires the position of monopoly which
demands a fuller measure of control, and finally passes into the ranks
of public industry.
Thus it would follow that, unless proceeding _pari passu_ with this
evolution there was a springing up or an expansion of other
industries not so amenable to large machine production and therefore
not prone to the dangers and wastes which appertain to it,
collectivism would absorb an ever-increasing proportion of industrial
effort.
Sec. 8. At present it appears that there are two great classes of
productive work which have not fallen under machine-industry and
capitalism in its typical form. There is that work which machinery is
technically competent to perform, but which it cannot economically
undertake so long as large quantities of very cheap labour are
available. This class comprises the bulk of what are commonly called
the "sweating" trades, the cheap low-skilled domestic workshop labour.
The other class consists of artistic and intellectual work which
cannot be successfully undertaken by machinery. The first of these
classes is universally admitted to comprise cases of arrested
development. The irregular working of the more highly-evolved
industries, the successive supplantation of branches of skilled labour
by machinery, the blind migration of labour from distant parts, keeps
the large industrial centres supplied with a quantity of unskilled and
untrained labour, which can be bought so cheaply that in the lowest
branches of many trades it does not pay the _entrepreneur_ to incur
the initial cost of setting up expensive machinery and the risk of
working it. The social and moral progress of industrial nations
requires, as a first condition of orderly progress, that these cases
of arrested growth shall be absorbed into the general mass of
machine-industry. These problems of "the sweating system," the
unemployed, the pauper class, the natural products of the working of a
system of competition where the competitors start from widely
different lines of opportunity, can never be solved by the private
play of enlightened self-interest, unless that enlightenment take a
far more altruistic form than is consistent with the continuance of
competitive industry. This is the fundamental paralogism of that
school of reformers who find the cure of industrial maladies in the
humanisation of the private employer. A whole class of employers
sufficiently humane and far-sighted to consistently desire the welfare
of their employees (and no fewer than the whole class would suffice,
for otherwise the less benevolent will undersell and take the business
from the more benevolent) would be so highly civilised that they
would no longer be willing to compete with one another so as to injure
one another's business: they would out of pure goodwill organise into
a "monopoly," and working this monopoly for the exclusive interest of
themselves and their employees, rack-rent the consuming public; or if
their benevolence extended to all their customers they would socialise
their business, conducting it for the greatest good of all society.
Such a form of socialised industry, dependent upon the moral character
of perishable individuals, would possess all the weaknesses charged
against State socialism without any of the educative advantages or the
security and stability of that system. The "captain of industry"
remedy is a sentimental and not a scientific one. Once regard
"sweating" as a case of arrested development and the true line of
progress will be seen to lie in the absorption of these backward
industries into the main current of industrial movement, leaving them
to pass through the necessary phases of machine-production and to be
subjected to an increasing pressure of social control until they are
ripe for society to undertake. Then there will remain outside of
capitalist machine-industry only that class of work which is artistic
and therefore individualistic in character.
Sec. 9. We now stand face to face with the main objection so often raised
against all endeavours to remedy industrial and social diseases by the
expansion of public control. Competition and the zest of individual
gain, it is urged, furnish the most effective incentive to enterprise
and discovery. Assuming that society were structurally competent to
administer industry officially, the establishment of industrial order
would be the death-blow to industrial progress. The strife, danger,
and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to
industrial vitality.
How much force do these objections contain in the light of the
information provided by our study of industrial evolution? It should
be recognised at the outset that the economic individualist is not a
conservative, defending an established order and pointing out the
dangers attending proposed innovations. Our analysis of the structure
of modern industry shows the progressive socialisation of certain
classes of industry as a step in the order of events, equally natural
and necessary with the earlier steps by which machine-industry
superseded handicraft and crystallised in ever larger masses with
changing relations to one another. The indictment against social
control over industry is an indictment against a natural order of
events, on the ground that nature has taken a wrong road of
advancement. It is only possible to regard the legislative action by
which public control over industry is established as "unnatural" or
"artificial" by excluding from "Nature" those social forces which find
expression in Acts of Parliament, an eminently unscientific mode of
reasoning.
But though this growing exercise of social control cannot be regarded
as "fighting against the constitution of things,"[290] it may be
considered by those who hold we have no guarantee of the future
development of the human race, as one of the lines of action in which
the advancing enfeeblement of man may express itself: the abandonment
of individual strife in commerce may be regarded as a mark of
diminishing vitality, which seeks immunity from effort and an equable
condition of material comfort, in preference to the risks and
excitement of a more eventful and arduous career. Order will be
purchased at the price of progress: the abandonment of individual
enterprise in industry is part of the decadence of humanity. This is
the interpretation which Dr. Pearson, in his _National Life and
Character_, places upon the socialistic tendencies of the age: the
suppression of competitive industry in order to cure poverty, physical
misery, and social injustice, will produce a society which is
"sensuous, genial, fibreless." The validity of such a judgment rests
upon two assumptions: first, that social control of industry
necessarily crushes the spirit of individual enterprise and checks
industrial progress; second, that extension of State control over
capitalist industry necessarily implies a diminished scope of
individual control in the production of wealth.
The first assumption is open to a number of criticisms which must be
held to greatly modify its force, and which may be summarised as
follows:--
(1) Much individual enterprise in industry does not make for
industrial progress. A larger and larger proportion of the energy
given out in trade competition is consumed in violent warfare between
trade rivals, and is not represented either in advancement of
industrial arts or in increase of material wealth.
(2) History does not show greed of gain as the motive of the great
steps in industrial progress. The love of science, the pure delight of
mechanical invention, the attainment of some slight personal
convenience in labour, and mere chance, play the largest part in the
history of industrial improvements. These motives would be as equally
operative under state-control as under private enterprise.
(3) Such personal inducements as may supply a useful stimulus to the
inventive faculty could be offered in socially-controlled industry,
not merely publicity and honour, but such direct material rewards as
were useful.
Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the
motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand,
the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing
an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in
mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few
great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the
other hand, the _entrepreneur_, with just enough business cunning to
recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward
which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required
to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.
(4) The same charges of weakened individual interest, want of
plasticity and enterprise, routine torpidity, are in a measure
applicable to every large business as compared with a smaller. Adam
Smith considered them fatal barriers to the growth of joint-stock
enterprise outside a certain narrowly-defined range. But the economies
of the large business were found to outweigh these considerations. So
a well-ordered state-industry may be the most economical in spite of
diminished elasticity and enterprise.
But while these considerations qualify the force of the contention
that state-control would give no scope for industrial progress, they
do not refute it. The justification of the assumption by the State of
various functions, military, judicial, industrial, is that a safe
orderly routine in the conduct of these affairs is rightly purchased
by a loss of elasticity and a diminished pace of progress. The arts
of war and of justice would probably make more advance under private
enterprise than under public administration, and there is no reason to
deny that postal and railway services are slower to adopt improvements
when they pass under government control.
It may be generally admitted that, as the large modern industries pass
from the condition of huge private monopolies to public departments,
the routine character will grow in them, and they will become less
experimental and more mechanical. It is the nature of machines to be
mechanical, and the perfection of machine-industries, as of single
machines, will be the perfection of routine. Just in proportion as the
machine has established its dominancy over the various industries, so
will they increase in size, diminish in flexibility, and grow ripe for
admission, as routine businesses, into the ranks of state-industry. If
the chief object of society was to secure continual progress in
military arts and to educate to the utmost the military qualities, it
would be well to leave fighting to private enterprise instead of
establishing state monopolies in the trade of war. It sacrifices this
competition, with the progress it induces and the personal fitness it
evolves, in order that the individual enterprise of its members may be
exercised in the competition of industrial arts, inducing industrial
progress and evolving industrial fitness. The substitution of
industrialism for warfare is not, however, understood to imply a
diminution of individual enterprise, but an alteration in its
application.
If, starting from this point of view, we regard human life as
comprising an infinite number of activities of different sorts,
operating upon different planes of competition and educating different
human "fitnesses," we shall understand how the particular phase of
industrial evolution we are considering is related to the wider
philosophic view of life. All progress, from primitive savagedom to
modern civilisation, will then appear as consisting in the progressive
socialisation of the lower functions, the stoppage of lower forms of
competition and of the education of the more brutal qualities, in
order that a larger and larger proportion of individual activity may
be engaged in the exercise of higher functions, the practice of
competition upon higher planes, and the education of higher forms of
fitness.
If the history of past civilisation shows us this, there is an _a
priori_ presumption that each further step in the repression of
individual enterprise and in the extension of state-control does not
mean a net diminution in individual activity or any relaxation of
effort in self-assertion, but merely an elevation of the plane of
competition and of the kind of human qualities engaged. This is, in
fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human
progress requires that one after another the lower material animal
functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount
of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher
functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities.
To suppose that the reduction of all machine-industry to public
routine services, when it becomes possible, will imply a net
diminution in the scope of individual self-expression, rests upon the
patent fallacy of assigning certain fixed and finite limits to human
interest and activity, so that any encroachment from the side of
routine lessens the absolute scope of human spontaneity and interest.
If, as there is reason to believe, human desires and the activities
which are engaged in satisfying them are boundless, the assumption
that an increase in the absolute amount of state-control or
routine-work implies a diminution of the field for individual
enterprise is groundless. The underlying motive, which alone can
explain and justify each step in progressive socialism, is the
attainment of a net economy of individual effort, which, when it is
released from exercise upon a lower plane of competition, may be
devoted to exercise upon a higher. If the result of extending social
control over industry were merely to bring about a common level of
material comfort, attended by spiritual and intellectual torpor and
contentment, the movement might be natural and necessary, but could
hardly be termed progress.
But such a view is based upon a denial of the axiom that the
satisfaction of one want breeds another want. Experience does not
teach the decay but the metamorphosis of individuality. Under
socialised industry progress in the industrial arts would be slower
and would absorb a smaller proportion of individual interest, in order
that progress in the finer intellectual and moral arts might be
faster, and might engage a larger share of life. To future generations
of more highly evolved humanity the peculiar barbarism of our age
will consist in the fact that the major part of its intelligence,
enterprise, genius, has been devoted to the perfection of the arts of
material production through mechanical means. If it is desirable that
more of this individual energy should be engaged in the production of
higher forms of wealth by competition upon higher planes, this can
only be achieved by the process of reducing to routine the lower
functions. Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the
work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher
individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality.
Industrial progress would undoubtedly be slower under state-control,
because the very object of such control is to divert a larger
proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations in order
to apply them in producing higher forms of wealth. It is not, however,
right to assume that progress in the industrial arts would cease under
state-industry; such progress would be slower, and would itself
partake of a routine character--a slow, continuous adjustment of the
mechanism of production and distribution to the slowly-changing needs
of the community.
Sec. 10. A most important misunderstanding of the line of industrial
development arises from a conviction that all production of wealth
embodied in matter tends to pass under the dominion of machinery, that
an increasing number of workers in the future will become
machine-tenders, and that the state-control of machine-industry would
bring the vast majority of individuals into the condition of official
machine-workers. This, however, is by no means a reasonable forecast.
In competitive machine-industry, although it is to the interest of the
individual business to "save" as much labour as possible, the play of
competition causes to be made and worked a much larger quantity of
machinery than is enough to maintain the current rate of consumption,
and thus keeps in the ranks of manufacture a much larger quantity of
labour than is socially necessary. Yet in a typical manufacturing
country like England statistics show that the proportion of the
working population engaged in machine manufactures is not increasing.
If, then, by the gradual elimination of competition in the
machine-industries, the quantity of machine-work were kept down to
the social requirements of the community's consumption, the proportion
of machine-workers would be less than it is, assuming the demand for
machine-made goods continued the same.
But what, it may be said, will become of the increasing proportion of
the workers not required by machinery? will they go to swell
indefinitely the ranks of distributors? Will the number of merchants,
jobbers, speculators, shopkeepers, agents: middlemen of various sorts,
grow without limit? Assuming that the work of distribution were left
to competitive enterprise, and that the quantity and quality of
consumption remained the same as now, this result would seem
necessarily to follow. The labour saved in manufacture would pass, as
it does now, to intensify the competition of the distributive trades
and to subdivide into needlessly small fragments the necessary but
limited amount of distributive work. But these assumptions are not
necessarily correct. If, as seems likely, the increased intensity of
competition forced the growth of strong monopolies in certain
departments of distribution, the anti-social power thus bestowed upon
individuals would necessitate the extension of state-control to them
also. The work of distribution would thus pass into routine-industry
administered by the public for the public interest. Thus the area of
socialised industry would extend until it absorbed one after another
all industries possessing the machine-character and capable of
administration by routine. It might thus appear that, after all, the
forebodings of the individualist would be verified, the work of life
would be reduced to a dull monotonous mechanism grinding out under
bureaucratic sway an even quantity of material comforts for a
community absorbed in the satisfaction of its orderly behaviour.
This goal seems inevitable if we assume that no change takes place in
the quantity and quality of the consumption of the community, that
individual consumers save or try to save the same proportion of their
incomes as now, and apply the portion that they spend to the purchase
of increased quantities of ever-cheapening machine-made goods.
But are we justified in considering it necessary, or even probable,
that consumption will in amount and character remain unchanged? In
proportion as the large industries pass into the condition of
monopolies, whether under private or public control, the area of safe
and profitable-investment for the average "saving" man will be more
restricted. Thus some of the useless "saving" which takes the shape of
excessive plant, machinery, and other forms of capital will be
prevented. In other words, the quantity of consumption will increase,
and this increase will give fuller employment to the machinery of
production and? to the labour engaged in working it and in
distributing the increased product. If, however, increased consumption
merely took the form of consuming increased quantities of the same
material goods as before, the gain would be limited to the rise of
material comfort of the poorer classes, and this gain might be set off
by the congested and torpor-breeding luxury of the better-to-do. A
mere increase in quantity of consumption would do nothing to avert the
drifting of industry into a bureaucratic mechanism.
Sec. 11. It is to improved quality and character of consumption that we
can alone look for a guarantee of social progress. Allusion has been
already made to the class of artistic and intellectual work which
cannot be undertaken by machinery. It must never be forgotten that art
is the true antithesis of machinery. The essence of art in this wide
sense is the application of individual spontaneous human effort. Each
art-product is the repository of individual thought, feeling, effort,
each machine-product is not. The "art" in machine-work has been
exhausted in the single supreme effort of planning the machine; the
more perfect the machine the smaller the proportion of individual
skill or art embodied in the machine-product The spirit of machinery,
its vast rapid power of multiplying quantities of material goods of
the same pattern, has so over-awed the industrial world that the craze
for quantitative consumption has seized possession of many whose taste
and education might have enabled them to offer resistance. Thus, not
only our bread and our boots are made by machinery, but many of the
very things we misname "art-products." Now a just indictment of this
excessive encroachment of machinery is not based upon the belief,
right or wrong, that machinery cannot produce things in themselves as
fit or beautiful as art. The true inadequacy of machine-products for
human purposes arises from the fact that machine-products are exactly
similar to one another, whereas consumers are not. So long as
consumers consent to sink their individuality, to consume articles of
precisely the same shape, size, colour, material, to assimilate their
consumption to one another, machinery will supply them. But since no
two individuals are precisely similar in physical, intellectual, or
moral nature, so the real needs of no two will be the same, even in
the satisfaction of ordinary material wants. As the dominance of
machinery over the workers tends to the destruction of individuality
in work, obliging different workers to do the same work in the same
way with a premium upon the mere capacity of rapid repetition, in the
same way it tends to crush the individuality of consumers by imposing
a common character upon their consumption. The progressive utilisation
of machinery depends upon the continuance of this indiscriminate
consumption, and the willingness of consumers to employ every increase
of income in demanding larger and larger quantities of goods of the
same pattern and character. Once suppose that consumers refuse to
conform to a common standard, and insist more and more upon a
consumption adjusted to their individual needs and tastes, and
likewise strive to follow and to satisfy the changing phases of their
individual taste, such individuality in consumption must impose a
corresponding individuality in production, and machinery will be
dethroned from industry. Let us take the example of the clothing
trade. Provided the wearing public will consent to wear clothes
conforming to certain common patterns and shapes which are only
approximate "fits," machinery can be used to make these clothes; but
if every person required his own taste to be consulted, and insisted
upon an exactitude of fit and a conformity to his own special ideas of
comfort, the work could no longer be done by machinery, and would
require the skill of an "artist." It is precisely upon this issue that
the conflict of machine _versus_ hand-labour is still fought out. The
most highly-finished articles in the clothing, and boot trades are
still hand-made; the best golf-clubs, fishing-rods, cricket bats,
embody a large amount of high manual skill, though articles of fair
average make are turned out chiefly by machinery in large quantities.
These hand-made goods are produced for a small portion of the
consuming public, whose education and refinement of taste induces them
to prefer spending their money upon a smaller quantity of commodities
adjusted in character to their individual needs, than upon a larger
quantity of common commodities.
Assuming that industrial evolution places an increasing proportion of
the consuming public in secure possession of the prime physical
necessaries of life, it is surely possible that they too may come to
value less highly a quantitative increase in consumption, and may
develop individuality of tastes which require individual production
for their satisfaction. In proportion as this happens, hand-work or
art must play a more important part in these industries, and may be
able to repel the further encroachments of machinery, or even to drive
it out of some of the industrial territory it has annexed. But
although the illustration of the present condition of the clothing
trades serves to indicate the nature of the contest between machinery
and art in the region of ordinary material consumption, it is not
suggested that social progress will, or ought to, expel machinery from
most of the industries it controls, or to prevent its application to
industries which it has not yet reached. The luxury and foppish
refinement of a small section of "fashionable" society, unnaturally
relieved of the wholesome necessity of work, cannot be taken as an
indication of the ways in which individuality or quality of
consumption may or will assert itself, in a society where social
progress is based upon equality of opportunity, and the power to
consume has some just relation to ability and merit. It seems
reasonable to expect that on the whole machinery will retain, and even
strengthen and extend, its hold of those industries engaged in
supplying the primitive needs of man--his food, clothing, shelter, and
other animal comforts. In a genuinely progressive society the object
will be so to order life as to secure, not merely the largest amount
of individual freedom or self-expression, but the highest quality. If
an undue amount of individuality be devoted to the production and
consumption of food, clothing, etc., and the conscious, refined
cultivation of these tastes, higher forms of individual expression in
work and life will be neglected. The just economy of individuality
will therefore relegate certain branches of production to machinery,
in order that the energy saved by such routine-work may be set free
for higher individual endeavour. The satisfaction of the primary
animal wants--hunger, thirst, cold, etc.--are common to all; in these
purely physical demands there is less qualitative difference in
different men; as the needs are the same the consumption will be the
same. The absence of wide individual differences of taste marks out
the commodities for routine or machine-production. As individuals are
nearest alike in their prime physical needs, so, as they gradually
develop higher material wants, and, after these are satisfied,
aesthetic, intellectual, moral wants, their individualism becomes more
and more marked. It is therefore in the most highly developed, or, as
they are sometimes called, the more "artificial" wants of man, that
the diversity of individual nature shows itself most strongly, and
demands a satisfaction peculiar to itself which only art can give. In
a highly evolved society it is likely that many physical needs, and
even some intellectual needs, will be common to all, and will engage
little individual attention. These may be graded as routine wants, and
may be satisfied by machine-made goods. As a society, safely ordered
in the supply of ordinary physical comforts, continued to develop, a
less and less diversity would show itself in the ordinary aspect of
its material civilisation, because the individuality which once found
expression there is raised to a higher plane of activity. The
enrichment and enlargement of human life in such a society would
undoubtedly manifest itself in a greater likeness between the
individual members in the lower modes of life, but the extent of
individual difference in the higher modes would be ever widening. The
object of the levelling in the lower processes of life would be that
higher individual differences might have opportunity to assert
themselves. In a progressive society thus conceived, where
socialisation and individuation grow inseparably related and reacting
on one another, there is evidently no fixed limit to the progress of
machinery. As each higher want is educated, some lower want will drop
into the position of a routine-want, and will pass into the rightful
province of machinery. But though a large proportion of material
commodities would doubtless be made by machinery, it is not signified
that art will be banished from what are commonly called the industrial
arts. On the contrary, art may be in many ways the friend and
co-operator of machinery, the latter furnishing a routine foundation
for the display of individual taste and of individual satisfaction in
the consumer. One of the most hopeful signs of the last few years is
the growing intrusion of art into the machine-industries,--the
employment of skilled designers and executants who shall tempt and
educate the public eye with grace of form and harmony of colour. In
pottery, textile wares, hardware, furniture, and many other
industries, the beginnings of public taste are operating in demand for
variety and ornament. May not this be the beginning of a cultivation
of individual taste which shall graft a fine-art upon each
machine-industry, apportioning to machinery that work which is hard,
dull, dangerous, monotonous, and uneducative, while that which is
pleasant, worthy, interesting, and educative is reserved for the human
agent?
Sec. 12. Machinery is thus naturally adapted to the satisfaction of the
routine wants of life under social control. The character of
machine-production, as has been shown, is essentially collective. The
maladies of present machine-industries are due to the fact that this
collective character is inadequately recognised, and machinery, left
to individual enterprise and competition, oppresses mankind and causes
waste and commercial instability. In a word, the highest division of
labour has not been yet attained, that which will apportion machinery
to the collective supply of the routine needs of life, and art to the
individual supply of the individual needs. In this way alone can
society obtain the full use of the "labour-saving" character of
machinery, minimising the amount of human exertion engaged in tending
machinery and maximising the amount engaged in the free and
interesting occupations. Engaged in satisfying the steady, constant
needs of society under social regulation, machinery would no longer be
subject to those fearful oscillations of demand which are liable
unforeseen to plunge whole masses of workers into unemployment and
poverty, and to waste an infinite amount of "saving." Where the
fluctuations in consumption were confined to the region of individual
taste, the changes of taste and growing variety of consumption would
furnish the education of the artist, who will acquire skill and
flexibility by freely following and directing the changing tastes of
consumers.
In such a forecast it is of course useless to endeavour to predict
how far art will continue to occupy itself with industry, or how far,
set free by machinery, it will be absorbed in the creation of finer
intellectual or spiritual products, or in what are now termed the fine
arts. This must depend upon the nature of the harmonious development
of human capacities of effort and enjoyment under conditions of
individual freedom, and the interaction of the free development of
individuals in a society founded upon an equality of the material
means of life. The study of the qualitative development of consumption
in modern society is only just beginning to be recognised as the true
starting-point of economic science, for although many of the older
economists did verbal homage to the importance of this branch of
study, it has been reserved for recent thinkers to set about the
work.[291]
Sec. 13. It is hardly too much to say that the whole of social progress
depends upon the substitution of qualitative for quantitative methods
of consumption. In so far as individuals apply their growing ability
to consume in order to demand increased quantities of the same
articles they consumed before, or flash variety of fashionable goods
in no wise adjusted to individual need or taste, they extend the
dominion of machinery. In so far as they develop individual taste,
delicacy rather than quantity of satisfaction, they give wider scope
to work which embodies conscious human skill and deserves the name of
art.
But there is another bearing of this point of equal significance.
Political economists have a dismal formula called the Law of
Diminishing Returns, which casts a dark shadow upon industrial
progress as it is commonly conceived. The more food and clothing,
fuel, and other material goods we require, the further we have to go
for the material, and the harder it is to get: we must plough inferior
lands yielding smaller crops, we must sink deeper shafts for our coal
and iron. As our population grows ever larger, and this larger number
wants more and more pieces of the earth to feed its machines and to
turn out the increased quantity of goods, the drain upon natural
resources is constantly increasing. The material world is limited; in
time Nature will become exhausted, and, long before this happens, the
quantity of human labour required to raise the increased supply of raw
material in the teeth of the Law of Diminishing Returns will far
exceed the economies attending large-scale machine-production.
This danger will also be found to result entirely from the
quantitative estimate of human wealth and human life.
Confining our view for the moment to that branch of production which
is engaged in providing food, to which the Law of Diminishing Returns
is held to apply with special rigour, we can see without difficulty
how, by a progressive differentiation of consumption, we can mitigate
or even utterly defeat the operation of this law. If the inhabitants
of a country persist in maintaining a single narrow standard of diet,
and use the whole of their land for growing wheat and raising sheep,
not merely do they waste all other fine productive qualities belonging
to certain portions of the cultivated or uncultivated soil, but every
increase in their narrow consumption drives them to worse soil,
obliges them to put more labour into a quarter of wheat or a sheep,
and increases the proportion of their aggregate product which goes as
rent.[292] If, on the other hand, a community cultivates a varied
consumption and seeks to utilise each portion of its soil for whatever
form of food it can grow best, instead of grading its land exclusively
according to its wheat or sheep-raising capacity, it is able to defeat
the "niggardliness of nature" which asserts itself when the community
insists upon a continual extension of the same demands. For land which
may be very bad for wheat-growing or grazing, which may even be "below
the margin of cultivation" for these purposes, may be well adapted for
producing other commodities. A large variety of alternative uses will
enable us to get the largest net amount of utilities out of Nature,
and a community which, in lieu of an extension of demand for the same
commodities, asserts its civilisation in the education of new demands
and a greater complexity in the standard of its comfort, may draw
from the land an indefinite increase of wealth without putting forth
more labour or paying higher rent. It is simply one more example of
the economy attainable by division of labour and specialisation of
function.
Sec. 14. What applies to food will equally apply to the use of the earth
for providing the raw material of all other forms of material wealth.
A people with growing variety of consumption is ever finding new and
more profitable uses for slighted or neglected capacities of nature.
The social progress of nations must be chiefly determined by the
amount of their intelligent flexibility of consumption. Mere variety
of consumption in itself is not sufficient to secure progress. There
must be a progressive recognition of the true relations, between the
products which can be most economically raised upon each portion of
the soil, and the wholesome needs of mankind seeking the full
harmonious development of their faculties in their given physical
environment. A progressive cultivation of taste for a variety of
strong drinks, though it might provide an increased number of
alternative uses for the soil, and might enhance the aggregate
market-values of the wealth produced, would not, it is generally held,
make for social progress. That nation which, in its intelligent
attainment of a higher standard of life, is able to thoroughly
assimilate and harmonise the largest variety of those products for
which their soil and climate are best adapted, will be foremost in
industrial progress and in the other arts of civilisation which spring
out of it.
The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our
material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the
limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to
utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in
proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those
adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call
Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves
of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns. So long as we
continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel,
we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what
we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to
demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate,
highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without
adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not
laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours,
clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come
to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, _i.e._ artistic,
goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be
given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of
matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a
qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the
limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of
space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we
shall be likewise free.
Sec. 15. So far the consideration of reformed qualitative consumption has
been confined to material goods. But a people moving along the line of
progress, seeking ever a more highly qualitative life, will demand
that a larger proportion of their energy shall be given to the
production and consumption of intellectual goods.
This world likewise is at present largely under the dominion of
Machinery and a Law of Diminishing Returns. By making of our
intellectual life a mere accumulation of knowledge, piling fact upon
fact, reading book upon book, adding science to science, striving to
cover as much intellectual ground as possible, we become mere
worshippers of quantity. It is not unnatural that our commercial life
should breed such an intellectual consumption, and that the English
and American nations in particular, who have beyond others developed
machine-production and the quantitative genius for commerce, should
exhibit the same taste in their pursuit after knowledge. Pace, size,
number, cost, are ever on their lips. To visit every European capital
in a fortnight, see acres of pictures, cathedrals, ruined castles,
collect out of books or travel the largest mass of unassorted and
undigested information, is the object of such portion of the
commercial life as can be spared from the more serious occupations of
life, piling up bale after bale of cotton goods and eating dinner
after dinner of the same inharmoniously ordered victuals.
Our schools and colleges are engaged in turning out year by year
immense quantities of common intellectual goods. Our magazines,
books, and lectures are chiefly machine-products adjusted to the
average reader or hearer, and are reckoned successful if they can
drive a large number of individuals to profess the same feelings and
opinions and adopt the same party or creed, with the view of enabling
them to consume a large number of copies of the same intellectual
commodities which can be turned out by intellectual machinery, instead
of undergoing the effort of thinking and feeling for themselves. This
danger, connected with the rapid spread of printed matter, is a grave
one. Happily there are visible here also counteracting influences,
forces that tend to individualise intellectual consumption and thus to
stimulate the higher arts of intellectual production. In a progressive
community it will be more fully recognised that it is not sufficient
to induce people to give more time and attention to intellectual
consumption; they must demand intellectual goods vitally adjusted to
their individual needs.
Sec. 16. To the increased regard for quality of life we must likewise
look to escape the moral maladies which arise from competition. For
what is the cause of anti-social competition? It is the limitation of
quantity. Two dogs are after one bone. Two persons wish to consume one
commodity at the same time. Now, even in material goods, the more
qualitative consumption becomes, and the more insistent each
individual is upon the satisfaction of his peculiar tastes, the
smaller will be the probability that two persons will collide in their
desires, and struggle for the possession of the self-same commodity.
Even in art-objects which are still bounded by matter, among genuine
lovers of art the individuality of each stands out in mitigation of
the antagonism of competition, for no two will have precisely the same
tastes or estimates, or will seek with equal avidity the same
embodiments of art. As we rise to purely intellectual or moral
enjoyments, competition gives way to generous rivalry in co-operation.
In the pursuit of knowledge or goodness the rivalry is no longer
antagonism--what one gains another does not lose. One man's success is
not another's failure. On the contrary, the enrichment of one is the
enrichment of all. Both in the production and the consumption of the
highest goods of Science, Art, and Virtue, social, not anti-social,
motives are the chief stimulus. In the highest forms of consumption,
the practice of the noblest arts of life, the enjoyment of the finest
intellectual and spiritual goods, there is no purely selfish
consumption. For though the highest individuality is then attained,
the enjoyment of one individual requires the enjoyment of others. The
attainment of the highest reaches of knowledge is impossible for the
individual without the constant and increasing aid of other minds and
the inspiring "spirit of the age"; the enjoyment of such knowledge is
in an even wider communication. The practice and enjoyment of the arts
of goodness are necessarily social, because the good life can only be
lived in a good society. Spinoza has summed up the truth in
saying--"The highest good is common to all, and all may equally enjoy
it." So it appears that the highest goods are essentially at once
individual and social, pointing once more the attainment of the higher
synthesis in which the antagonism of the "one" and the "all," which
shows itself in the lower planes of competing effort and enjoyment,
disappears.
Sec. 17. One necessary condition of this progressive life cannot be
ignored. Human life itself must become more qualitative, not only in
its functional activities, but in its physical basis. The greatness
and worth of a community must be seen more clearly to consist not in
the numbers, but in the character of its members. If the number of
individuals in a society continually increases, no reform in methods
of consumption can prevent the constant increase in the proportion of
human energy which must be put into the production of the prime
material necessaries of physical life which are, and in spite of all
improved methods of treating nature will remain, ultimately subject to
a law of diminishing returns: so, less and less energy can be spared
for the life of varied and delicate consumption, high individuality
and intellectual and moral growth. Professor Geddes has well expressed
the importance of this truth: "The remedy lies in higher and higher
individuation--_i.e._, if we would repress excessive multiplication,
we must develop the average individual standard throughout society.
Population not merely tends to out-run the means of subsistence, but
to degenerate below the level of subsistence, so that without steadily
directing more and more of our industry from the production of those
forms of wealth which merely support life to those which evoke it,
from the increase of the fundamental necessities of animal life to
that of the highest appliances of human culture, degeneration must go
on."[293]
Sec. 18. One final consideration remains. Modern large-scale industry has
enlarged and made more distinct an unnatural and injurious separation
of the arts of production and the arts of consumption. Work has become
more and more differentiated from enjoyment, and in a twofold way.
Modern machine-industry has in the first place sharpened the
distinction between the "working classes," whose name indicates that
their primary function is to labour and not to live, and the
comfortable classes, whose primary function is to live and not to
labour, which private enterprise in machine-industry has greatly
enlarged. The extremes of these large classes present the divorcement
of labour and life in startling prominence. But since work and
enjoyment are both human functions, they must be organically related
in the life of every individual in a healthy community. It must be
recognised to be as essential to the consumer to produce as for the
producer to consume. The attempt on the part of an individual or a
class to escape the physical and moral law which requires the output
of personal exertion as the condition of wholesome consumption can
never be successful. On the plane of physical health, Dr. Arlidge, in
his book upon _The Diseases of Occupations_, points the inevitable
lesson in the high rate of disease and mortality of the "unoccupied
class" in that period of their life when they have slaked their zest
for volunteer exertion and assume the idle life which their economic
power renders possible. The man of "independent means" cannot on the
average keep his life in his body nearly so long as the half-starved,
ill-housed agricultural labourer, from whose labour he draws the rents
which keep him in idleness. The same law applies in the intellectual
world. The dilettante person who tries to extract unceasing increments
of intellectual or aesthetic enjoyment from books or pictures or
travel, without the contribution of steady, painful intellectual
effort, fails to win an intellectual life, for the mere automatic
process of collecting the knowledge of others for personal consumption
without striving to enlarge the general stock, congests and
debilitates the mind and prevents the wholesome digestion and
assimilation.
The same necessary evil arises from the sharp separation of the
processes of production and consumption in the individual life of the
worker. Industry which is purely monotonous, burdensome,
uninteresting, uneducative, which contains within itself no elements
of enjoyment, cannot be fully compensated by alternate periods of
consumption or relaxation. The painful effort involved in all labour
or exertion should have linked with it certain sustaining elements of
related interest and pleasure. It is the absence of this which
condemns machine-tending from the human standpoint, it is the presence
of this which distinguishes every art. Hence in a progressive society
we must look to see not the abolition of machinery, but the diminution
of machine-tending which attends the growing perfection of machinery,
in order that the arts may be able to absorb a larger share of human
exertion.
The arts of production and consumption will, in the evolution of a
wholesome industrial society, be found inseparable: not merely will
they be seen to be organically related, but rather will appear as two
aspects of the same fact, the concave and the convex of life. For the
justly ordered life brings the identification of life, a continuous
orderly intake and output of wholesome energy. This judgment, not of
"sentimentalism" but of science, finds powerful but literally accurate
expression in the saying of a great living thinker, "Life without work
is guilt, work without art is brutality." Just in proportion as the
truth of the latter phrase finds recognition the conditions which make
"life without work" possible will disappear. Everything in human
progress will be found to depend upon a progressive realisation of the
nature of good "consumption." Just in proportion as our tastes become
so qualitative that we require to put our own spontaneity, our sense
of beauty and fitness, our vital force, into whatever work we do, and
likewise require the same elements of spontaneity and individuality in
all we enjoy, the economic conditions of a perfect society will be
attained.
Sec. 19. This forecast of the social and industrial goal seems justified
by a thoughtful interpretation of the tendencies visible in the
development of modern industry. How fast may be the progress towards
such an ideal, or how far such progress may be frustrated or impaired
by the appearance of new or the strengthening of old antagonistic
forces, lies beyond the powers of legitimate speculation. The
endeavour to test industrial evolution by reference to the wider
movements of human life brings into prominence two great tendencies
whose operations, attested not dimly by modern history, are in close
accord with the general trend of the development of social and
individual life and the relations subsisting between the two.
As modern industrial societies develop they disclose certain material
wants which are common to all or most members, and are less subject to
fluctuations in quantity or quality of demand than others. These
routine wants, representing that part of consumption which is common,
can be supplied most economically by highly organised machinery and
highly concentrated methods of production. But so long as the
machinery for the satisfaction of the common wants remains outside the
common control, and is worked for the benefit of sections of the
community whose interests conflict, both with one another and with the
general interest, an immense amount of waste and danger arises from
the working of the machinery, and grave social maladies are
engendered. These maladies evoke in the best ordered and most
intelligent communities an increasing pressure of public control. This
public control is strengthened and extended in proportion as the
highly evolved structure of the industry enables its administrators to
exercise powers of monopoly either in relation to the treatment of its
employees, or in relation to the price or quality of the commodities
it supplies to the public. Such industries as develop these economic
powers of monopoly in the highest degree, and in relation to the
supply of prime necessaries or comforts of common life, pass gradually
into the condition of public industries organised for the public good.
It seems likely that all the important machine industries engaged in
satisfying common routine wants will gradually develop the monopolic
characteristics which accrue to large production, and will pass by
degrees through the different phases of public control until they
become merged in public industry.
This so-called socialistic movement in industry represents the growing
cohesiveness of modern societies. At all times there is a strong
natural tendency to supply common wants by common efforts. So long as
the common wants in their wider significance only extend to protection
of the person and of certain forms of personal property, state-work is
confined within these protective limits, and the work of producing
common wealth, so far as it exists, is left to village communities or
other small units of social organisation. As the elements of steady
common consumption grow in number, the common organisation of activity
to supply them will grow, and where the supply has at first been left
to private enterprise, the abuse of power and growing inconvenience of
competition will drive them into public industry. But since the very
_raison d'etre_ of this increased social cohesiveness is to economise
and enrich the individual life, and to enable the play of individual
energy to assume higher forms out of which more individual
satisfaction may accrue more and more human effort will take shape in
industries which will be left to individual initiative and control,
the arts in which the freedom of personal spontaneity will find scope
in the expression of physical or moral beauty and fitness and the
attainment of intellectual truth. The infinite variety which these
forms of artistic expression may assume, fraught with the
individuality of the artist, will prevent them from ever passing into
"routine" or "common" industries, though even in the fine arts there
will be certain elements which, as they become part of the common
possession, will become relatively void of individual interest, and
will thus pass into a condition of routine activity. The idea of
continuity in human progress demands this admission. But since each
encroachment of routine into the "finer arts" is motived by a prior
shifting of the interest of the consumer into forms of higher
refinement, there will be a net gain and not a loss in the capacity of
individual exercise in artistic work. In every form of human activity
the progress of routine industry will be the necessary condition of
the expansion of individual freedom of expression. But while the
choice and control of each higher form of "industry" will remain
individualistic, in proportion as the moral bonds of society obtain
fuller conscious recognition, the work of the "artist" likewise will
be dedicated more and more to the service of his fellow-men. Thus will
the balance of the social and individual work in the satisfaction of
human wants be preserved, while the number of those wants increase and
assume different values with the progress of the social and individual
life.
FOOTNOTES:
[289] _Wealth of Nations_, p. 110.
[290] Spencer, _Contemporary Review_, March 1884.
[291] Professor Jevons' work upon this branch of Economics was marred
by an attempt to treat it purely mathematically, that is to reduce
qualitative to quantitative differences--an impossibility. Among
recent writers, Professor Patten, of Pennsylvania University, has made
by far the most important contributions towards a systematic treatment
of the economics of consumption.
[292] Patten's _Premises of Political Economy_, chap. iv.
[293] Professor Patrick Geddes, _Claims of Labour_. Cf. _The Evolution
of Sex_, chap, xx. (Contemporary Science Series: Walter Scott).
INDEX.
Abraham, _Report on Employment of Women_, 315
Adjustment in progressive industry, 351
Agriculture, 32, 41, 102;
agricultural labour, 333
Andrew, S., _Fifty Years' Cotton Trade_, 297
Apprentices, statute of, 26
Arkwright, 50, 56
Arlidge, Dr., 252, 255, 320, 336, 337, 379
Art in industry, 371-378
Ashley, Professor, _Economic History_, 38
Babbage, _Economy of Manufactures_, 50-51, 236, 249
Baines, _History of Cotton Manufacture_, 23, 37
Baker, _Monopolies and the People_, 128, 134, 139, 147
_Board of Trade Journal_, 241
Balance of trade, 15
Banking, 42
Bertillon, 303
Birtwistle, T., 248
Boehm-Bawerk, _Positive Theory of Capital_, 101, 196.
Booth, Charles, _Labour and Life of the People_, 41;
_Occupations of the People_, 226, 228, 290
Bowley, A.L., _England's Foreign Trade_, 174
Brassey, _Foreign Work and English Wages_, 265-266
Brentano, _Uber die Ursachen der heutigen Not_, 58;
_Hours and Wages in Relation to Production_, 78, 91, 270
Burnley, _Wool and Wool-Combing_, 33, 51, 94
Business, evolution of the, 10, 35, 40, 88, 92
Cairnes, J.E., _Logical Method of Political Economy_, 8;
_Some Leading Principles of Political Economy_, 211
Canada, town population, 331
Canals, 25
Cannan, E., _Production and Consumption_, 214;
_Decline of Urban Immigration_, 327 (note)
Capital, meaning of, 5;
fixed, 40;
growing size of, 92-93;
excessive forms of, 170, etc.;
definitions of, 209-215;
concentration of, 117-122
Capitalism, 4, 40;
factors in growth of, 73-81, 101
Carding, 57
Cartwright, 58, 75
Census, occupations of the people, 71, 228;
town population, 328;
mortality in towns, 334
Chalmers, _Estimate_, 23
Chartered companies, 18
Child-workers, in domestic industry, 32;
in factory, 297, 307, 319;
legal protection of, 322-323;
child mortality, 337
Climate, 73, 109
Clothier, 39, 40, etc.