differences and misunderstandings. After all, they are the necessary
result of freedom, and what do the Bible and Greece mean but moral and
intellectual freedom? We want no formal and artificial unity: to us
change, progress, conflict and division are the breath of our life. Just
as the cluster of little towns in the Aegean islands and valleys prized
before all things their political and intellectual independence, so is
it with these small countries nestling on the shores of the Atlantic.
Politically they have always refused to acquiesce in the establishment
of any common authority over them, whether it comes from outside or even
from among themselves, and so also they always repudiate the ascendancy
of any single or partial intellectual doctrine. Each party and each
nation adds its own contribution; all have a common origin, and all
spring from the same root. Since the bonds have been relaxed and the
dominion of the Universal Church overthrown, we see nothing from the
rivalry of political systems and passing schemes of thought; they chase
each other like the storms which arise from the Atlantic and pass in
quick succession over our shores. It is this change and succession which
is to us the breath of our life: we know nothing of the steady static
weather of the great continents, where rain and drought have each their
measured and settled space: and we know nothing, and will know nothing,
of the formal and authoritative rule combining all Europe into one
realm, whether political or intellectual. For we know that unity and
permanence does not belong to this life, and our nearest approach to
truth is to be found not in a settled system but in the thousandfold
interactions of half-truths and partial systems.
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until death shatters it to fragments.
A unity there is, but it is the unity of the countless and varied
flowers that carpet the meadows in spring, the unity of the common
spirit of life which animates them all.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
Leach, _The Schools of Medieval England_. Methuen.
Mullinger, J. Bass, _The Schools of Charles the Great_.
Paulsen, _Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts_.
Rashdall, _Universities in the Middle Ages_. Clarendon Press.
Foster Watson, _Grammar Schools_. Cambridge University Press
Woodward, _Erasmus_. Cambridge University Press.
IX
COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES
Commerce and finance are departments of life in which mankind approaches
nearer to unity than in any other. They are practical expressions of the
instinct of self-preservation which is the first law of nature. They
spring straight from the acquisitiveness which is a universal
characteristic of human nature and indeed of animal and vegetable
nature. Every living thing wants to acquire food. Adam Smith indeed
restricts the trading instinct to mankind. 'The propensity', he says,
'to truck, barter, or exchange one thing for another ... is common to
all men and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know
neither this nor any other species of contracts. Two greyhounds in
running down the same hare have sometimes the appearance of acting in
some sort of concert. Each turns her towards his companion or endeavours
to intercept her when his companion turns her towards himself. This,
however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental
concurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular
time. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one
bone for another with another dog.'[24]
Mr Cannan, in his edition of the _Wealth of Nations_, very judiciously
points out in a note on this passage that 'it is by no means clear what
object there could be in exchanging one bone for another'. Probably if
one rummaged the literature of dog stories one would find plenty of
examples of commerce between dogs, and when they perform tricks to get
food, we detect the germ of the exchange of a service for a commodity.
When a bee takes honey from a flower and leaves in exchange the pollen
from a flower of an opposite sex, it may be said to be at once a
merchant, a carrier, and a matrimonial agent, and the brilliant colours
with which flowers attract these merchants have been compared to the
advertising posters of the human trader. But however the case may be in
the animal and vegetable world, there can be no question that the
trading instinct appears at a very early stage of human development. In
boys the instinct to trade or swop articles appears long before they
feel any inclination to fall in love or to give much serious thought to
religion. The classical example is given by Mark Twain, who relates how
Tom Sawyer exchanged one of his own teeth, which had been pulled out
that morning, for a tick in the possession of Huckleberry Finn, and then
'the two boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before'. In fact,
of course, they both were wealthier than before, because each had got
something that he wanted more than the article with which he had parted;
and this pleasant result sums up the whole genesis and basis of
commerce.
But though commerce is thus merely an expression of an instinct which is
primitive and universal, it does not follow that it is its only or even
its earliest expression. Perhaps its earliest and most natural
expression was through robbery, with or without violence. A primitive
savage who saw something that he wanted would probably, if strong
enough, hit its owner on the head and take it, and this short and simple
method of acquisition still occasionally reappears in the realms of the
most highly civilized diplomacy. Nevertheless, at a very early stage its
limitations became obvious, and quite at the dawn of recorded history we
find commercial transactions referred to as an established branch of
human intercourse. The Old Testament story has not gone far before it
tells us of buying and selling. In the twenty-third chapter of Genesis
we find a very interesting bargain recorded between Abraham and Ephron.
Sarah had died in Kirjath-arba:
'the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to
mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham stood up from
before his dead, and spake unto the sons of Heth, saying, I am a
stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a
buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.
And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him, Hear
us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the choice of
our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee
his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead. And Abraham
stood up and bowed himself to the people of the land, even to the
children of Heth. And he communed with them, saying, If it be
your mind that I should bury my dead out of my sight; hear me,
and intreat for me to Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give
me the cave of Machpelah, which he hath, which is in the end of
his field; for as much money as it is worth he shall give it me
for a possession of a buryingplace amongst you. And Ephron dwelt
among the children of Heth: and Ephron the Hittite answered
Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even of all that
went in at the gate of his city, saying, Nay, my lord, hear me:
the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it
thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee:
bury thy dead. And Abraham bowed down himself before the people
of the land. And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the
people of the land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray
thee, hear me: I will give thee money for the field; take it of
me, and I will bury my dead there. And Ephron answered Abraham,
saying unto him, My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four
hundred shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury
therefore thy dead. And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and
Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the
audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver,
current money with the merchant.'
In this very early and curious example of a bargain we find the seller
continually expressing reluctance to sell and asking the buyer to accept
as a gift the commodity that he wants. It appears from the sequel that
this is merely an example of Oriental politeness. At any rate, the end
of the bargain was that Abraham paid the money, four hundred shekels of
silver, which is described as 'current money with the merchant', thus
apparently showing that this system of payment in metals was already a
regular feature of commercial transactions. Coined currency had not yet
been developed, for we may note that Abraham weighed the silver.
When we come to the days of Solomon we find something like a developed
international trade. The fifth chapter of the first book of Kings
describes how Solomon, on taking the throne of his father, sent to
Hiram, king of Tyre, and stated his purpose to build a house unto the
name of the Lord his God, asking Hiram to send his servants to hew cedar
trees out of Lebanon, and saying that he would give hire for Hiram's
servants according to all that he should appoint. Hiram replied that he
would do all that Solomon desired concerning timber of cedar and
concerning timber of fir. 'My servants shall bring them down from
Lebanon unto the sea: and I will convey them by sea in floats unto the
place that thou shalt appoint me, and will cause them to be discharged
there, and thou shalt receive them: and thou shalt accomplish my desire,
in giving food for my household. So Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees and
fir trees according to all his desire. And Solomon gave Hiram twenty
thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty
measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year.'
According to this arrangement it would appear that Solomon paid for the
timber that he imported by exporting to Hiram wheat and oil, but it is
shown in a later chapter that the transaction was not a purely
commercial one. At the end of twenty years, when Solomon had finished
the building of the temple, he gave Hiram as further consideration
twenty cities in the land of Galilee, 'and Hiram came out from Tyre to
see the cities which Solomon had given him; and they pleased him not.
And he said, What cities are these which thou hast given me, my brother?
And he called them the land of Cabul [explained in the margin as meaning
"displeasing" or "dirty"] unto this day. And Hiram sent to the king
sixscore talents of gold.'[25]
Apart from this transaction between the two kings, Solomon appears to
have developed a very considerable foreign trade, presumably exporting
wheat and oil and other agricultural products. His imports appear to
have been various. Chapter ten of the first book of Kings states that
'the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in
three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver,
ivory, and apes, and peacocks.' ... 'And the king made silver to be in
Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycomore trees that
are in the vale, for abundance. And Solomon had horses brought out of
Egypt, and linen yarn: the king's merchants received the linen yarn at a
price.'
The whole question of Solomon's balance of trade is a very interesting
one, and deserves the attention of some Hebrew scholar who may be able
to throw light upon it. In these days it is rather difficult to see how
a purely agricultural country could have found the means of paying for
all these articles of pure luxury which Solomon imported so freely. It
must be noted, however, that 'all the earth sought to Solomon, to hear
his wisdom, which God had put in his heart. And they brought every man
his present, vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and garments, and
armour, and spices, horses, and mules, a rate year by year'. From this
it appears that Solomon was able to exchange his wisdom for a very
considerable part of the imports which came into his country, and so
perhaps we may take it that Solomon's wisdom is the earliest recorded
example of what is now known as an invisible export. A modern equivalent
would be the articles which English writers contribute to American
newspapers and are paid for, ultimately, by the shipment to England of
American wheat and cotton. It is also interesting to note in these days,
when personal economy and simplicity of life are so freely preached,
that Solomon's very luxurious imports were followed by evil
consequences, imports of an enormous number of strange women, and a
consequent turning away of his heart after false gods.
When we come to secular history, the very first chapter of the first
book of the first history ever written deals with a question of
commerce. Herodotus, who has been called the Father of History, opens
his work with a few introductory words stating that 'these are the
researches which he publishes in the hope of thereby preventing the
great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and Barbarians from losing
their due meed of glory, and withal to put on record what were their
grounds of feud'. And then he plunges straight into his story, as
follows: 'According to the Persians best informed in history, the
Phoenicians began the quarrel. This people, who had formerly dwelt on
the shores of the Erythræan Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean
and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they
say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the
wares of Egypt and Assyria. They landed at many places on the coast, and
among the rest at Argos, which was then pre-eminent above all the
states included now under the common name of Hellas. Here they exposed
their merchandise, and traded with the natives for five or six days; at
the end of which time, when almost everything was sold, there came down
to the beach a number of women, and among them the daughter of the king,
who was, they say, agreeing in this with the Greeks, Io, the child of
Inachus. The women were standing by the stern of the ship intent upon
their purchases, when the Phoenicians, with a general shout, rushed upon
them. The greater part made their escape, but some were seized and
carried off. Io herself was among the captives. The Phoenicians put the
women on board their vessel, and set sail for Egypt. Thus did Io pass
into Egypt, according to the Persian story, which differs widely from
the Phoenician: and thus commenced, according to their authors, the
series of outrages.'[26]
Commerce is thus a striking example of the unity of mankind, being a
practically universal form of human activity which arises as soon as man
verges from the earliest stages of barbarism. In the case of individuals
it is easy to see how this desire to exchange commodities between one
individual and another meant so great an increase in human efficiency
that it had only to be thought of to be universally adopted. The
primitive savage, doing everything for himself, building his own hut,
killing or finding his own food, and making his own clothes, such as
they were, was an extremely versatile and self-sufficing person. At the
same time the comforts that he enjoyed were probably not very
satisfactory. His hut was almost certain to be draughty and to let in
rain through the roof; his hunting and finding of food must have very
often left him with his larder empty, and the state of his wardrobe was
probably simple rather than satisfying. It would inevitably happen that
certain members of the tribe would show greater efficiency than others
in doing a certain one of these various businesses which are essential
even to the simplest form of human life. Thus the tendency to
specialization begins to show itself. The skilful hut-builder builds
huts not only for himself but for other members of the tribe; he
acquires further skill by constant practice and the huts are more
quickly built and better when finished. The other tribesmen, in effect,
pay him by supplying him with a certain amount of food and clothes. The
tendency for specialization would make very rapid progress, and it is
easy to see how at a very early date and in the most primitive
communities there would be bowyers, arrow-makers, and leather-dressers,
and how various kinds of artificers would arise, supplying the wants of
the community in some special line, and receiving from the community all
the commodities which they required apart from those which they produced
themselves. The individuals of the community thus become mutually
dependent, and live by one another's production. Hence comes unity, and
with it a fresh cause of disunion, owing to the likelihood of
quarrelling over the exchanges effected.
As progress developed and the communities at a greater distance became
acquainted with one another's wants and the various kinds of goods that
certain districts supplied, this tendency to specialization and
consequent exchange of goods would grow in an ever-widening circle.
Instead of the tribe being a commercial unity, the zone in which the
interchange of goods went on would widen as far as the geographical and
other boundaries allowed it. In the same country one district would be
found to be specially well adapted for agriculture, and another for
pasture; another, being well supplied with metals, would naturally
provide a race of smiths and producers of rough tools for industry, and
the exchange of commodities between districts with these various
capacities would mean that the specialization of production would go
steadily further, and that a whole town or village would be found in
which the great majority of the inhabitants were at work upon one
particular form of industry, relying for the other kinds of commodities
that they required upon the activity of a similar community living in
the next valley or on the other side of the river. This widening-out
process would naturally extend itself over the borders of different
countries. Obstacles to this process would be found in the differences
of language and probably in the difficulties of transport. On the other
hand, it would be greatly stimulated by the different ideas of value
that prevailed in different communities. Value depends upon the extent
to which anybody wants a thing, also on what he thinks it is worth, that
is to say, the number of commodities in his possession with which he is
prepared to part in order to secure it. Obviously commodities coming in
from foreign countries, and being unknown or rare in the country in
which they are offered, if they are otherwise at all attractive, possess
a certain amount of what is called scarcity value, which makes them
easily saleable by adventurous merchants who arrive with the cargo.
The stories of fortunes made by merchants who travelled among simple
native tribes with cargoes of glass beads and were able to exchange
these gaudy baubles for gold or rubber or other commodities which are
valuable in civilized countries, have often been told, and opportunities
for trading of this kind must have been very much more frequent when
communication was comparatively difficult. Value to a great extent being
determined by local convention and local habit, the profits of the
trader were likely to be considerably increased the further he got from
his home market. If he took away with him plenty of things which were
in abundant supply at home and consequently cheap, he would almost
certainly be able to bring back a large number of things which were
plentiful in a far-away community, and consequently cheap for him to
acquire, and scarce in his own district and consequently sure of a good
market. This difference of standard of value in different countries was
a great stimulus to foreign trade, also a great help to bringing mankind
together, though it sometimes ended in disillusionment. It has been
asserted that even within the memory of man an English merchant traded
with a primitive community in which gold and silver were exchangeable
weight for weight. For some years he did a very pleasant and profitable
trade by taking a cargo of silver and bringing back with him the same
weight in gold, the value of which in England happened to be sixteen
times as great, or more. Unfortunately, when he made his last voyage he
was met at the mouth of the river by a friendly native, who informed him
that the community was waiting for him with tomahawks, and he hastily
put to sea again. For the rest of his life he cherished a grievance
against this curious people with which he had dealt, according to his
own view, on perfectly equitable terms, having sold them a commodity at
a price to which they were accustomed, and which they regarded as quite
correct, with the result that they proposed to murder him because they
found that the price was not in accordance with that current in other
parts of the world.
By this business of exchange of commodities between one community and
another, the process of specialization or division of labour which has
already been referred to as its basis has been developed to
extraordinary lengths. Its effect has been to increase enormously the
wealth available, while at the same time the concentration of the
individual has narrowed down his work so that he now no longer
specializes on making one commodity, but on making a part of a fraction
of a commodity.
Adam Smith's chapters on division of labour are so well known that there
is no need to point out the very great economic benefits that arise from
it. Clearly, any man who spends all his working time upon one particular
process of productive activity acquires thereby a skill and rapidity in
carrying out his part of the operation which would be impossible to any
worker who has to carry the manufacture of an article from the beginning
to its end. Just as we saw, when the primitive savage left off doing
everything for himself and took to building huts for the rest of the
community, that the huts became much more water-tight and comfortable,
so the process goes still further, and building becomes very much more
rapid and very much more cheap and efficient when a large number of
specialists are set to work on the various very different processes
required for the construction of a house. The consequence is that the
production of goods is very greatly cheapened and made much more rapid,
but at the same time the worker tends to become an artisan instead of a
craftsman, and his work is likely to be much more monotonous and much
more trying. Instead of seeing his product grow under his hand from its
beginning to its end, with constant changes in the nature of its call on
his energy and care, he is employed during the whole of his working time
on some mechanical process, with the result that he himself becomes
something very like a machine. What he has gained in the power to make
and acquire commodities cheaply and quickly is offset to a certain
extent by the less interesting and varied nature of his work.
It also follows that as the worker becomes a specialist he becomes
dependent upon other members of the community for the supply to him of a
large number of things which he requires for his own existence. If he
spends his life in making one commodity or in making part of one
commodity, it is clear that his requirements of all the things that are
necessary for life apart from what he makes himself can only be
satisfied by the willingness of the community to take the commodity that
he makes in payment for those which it produces and of which he is in
need. When he works for himself, he only makes things that he knows
himself to need; when he works to sell to others, he has to speculate on
the hope that the others will want what he makes.
Commerce thus not only shows the unity of mankind by being a universal
feature of his existence, but increases that unity by making each
individual dependent upon the exertions of his fellows, and on their
willingness to take from him stuff which he is turning out; but if
commerce thus promotes unity, it also tends to create a certain amount
of friction and disagreement between one man and another when
differences of opinion arise concerning the value of the product which
each man is making, that is to say, concerning the amount of goods which
the rest of the community is prepared to give him in exchange.
This consideration is also very strongly evident with regard to
international trade. Here the division of labour is assisted by the
difference in the products of different countries. There can be no doubt
that the exchange of commodities between one nation and another tends to
bring them together and to promote unity and harmony of interests. At
the same time it is also likely to be fruitful in quarrels and
bickering. We saw that Hiram was very much dissatisfied with the cities
in Galilee which Solomon presented to him in the course of their
semi-commercial transactions. He appears to have retaliated by making
Solomon a very handsome present in gold; but Hiram seems to have been a
very exceptional person, and it is probable that most traders who are
dissatisfied with the consideration received would not have been so
generous in expressing themselves.
International commerce has also been a fruitful cause of disunion rather
than unity when various nations have quarrelled with one another
concerning the right to trade with a third people. If one nation is
trading with another greatly to its profit, it feels that it has a
grievance when it finds that a neighbouring nation is sending cargoes to
the same destination and undercutting it and taking the cream of the
trade. After religion, it is probable that trade has produced more
bloodshed than any other form of human activity. At the same time there
can be no doubt that on the whole its influence has been strongly on the
side of unity and that it has done more to break down international
barriers than any other influence that has operated in the course of
history. The trader, as such, believes entirely and whole-heartedly in
the unity of mankind. All that he wants to do is to buy his products as
cheaply as he can and to sell them at the best possible price. Whether
he buys at home or abroad, or whether he sells at home or abroad, is a
matter of complete indifference to him except that, as has been shown,
owing to variations in value in different parts of the world, he is
probably likely to be able to make larger profits from foreign trade
than in commerce at home. National preferences sometimes induce him to
encourage home industry by buying home products when foreign goods would
have paid him better, but in so far as this happens, he ceases to be a
trader as such and becomes a mixture of trader and patriot. As buyers
and sellers, however, mankind is, on the whole, singularly free from
international prejudices. It was thought at one time that importation of
foreign goods into England would be considerably checked by insisting
upon marks of origin, that is to say, that imported goods should be
stamped as such. This expectation, however, seems to have been entirely
disappointed, since most buyers were not concerned with the question of
the country whence the commodity that they bought came, and only
considered whether it suited their purses and was what they wanted.
Sometimes there is actually a prejudice in favour of foreign goods, and,
curiously enough, this is found to be so even in countries in which a
protective policy has been very highly developed. It is, or was a few
years ago, common to see in American newspapers, flaming advertisements
heralding sales of imported goods, which were definitely stated to be
such obviously because the sellers thought that they were likely to be
able to sell them better because they were stated to be so. It is also a
proud boast of English manufacturers that in many countries on the
Continent it is common, or was until quite lately, for native
manufacturers to sell their goods more easily in their home markets by
describing them as English. Political and national prejudice seems to be
overruled by the common human desire for something new and strange, and
consequently, in spite of all friction that has arisen from
international trade, and of the number of wars which have had their
origin in commercial questions, there is good reason for the assertion
that on the whole commerce has been a mighty promoter of intercourse
among the nations and of the unity of mankind. If it had not been for
commerce, the cheapening and quickening of communication could never
have been carried out. The trader goes first, and after him the
traveller and the tourist.
This claim can be made with perhaps even more certainty when we proceed
to the realm of finance. If commerce is international and unifying,
finance is perhaps even more so. Finance, of course, arises out of
commerce and is an essential part of its machinery. By finance we mean
the machinery of money--money-dealing and money-lending. Money becomes
necessary as soon as the exchange of commodities, which is the meaning
of trade, becomes fairly developed. At first, primitive peoples
exchanged their commodities one for another, but a difficulty arose when
out of a pair of possible traders one had something which the other
wanted but the other had not. For example, if the arrow-maker had arrows
to sell and wanted to buy fish, there obviously could be no bargain if
his friend who wanted to buy arrows had only got deerskins to give in
exchange. It was essential to the development of trade that some
commodity should be hit on which could always be taken in exchange and
so form a circulating medium. We have seen from the twenty-third chapter
of Genesis that a certain weight of silver had in Abraham's time begun
to assume this function. Economic text-books tell us that many other
commodities had the form and function of money before the metals came
into use. Until quite lately there were many places in which the use of
an agreed medium of exchange had not been adopted to facilitate the
purposes of commerce. Jevons begins his very interesting book on money
by relating how
Some years since, Mdlle Zélie, a singer of the Théâtre Lyrique at
Paris, made a professional tour round the world, and gave a
concert in the Society Islands. In exchange for an air from
_Norma_ and a few other songs, she was to receive a third of the
receipts. When counted, her share was found to consist of three
pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four chickens, five thousand
cocoa-nuts, besides considerable quantities of bananas, lemons,
and oranges. At the Halles in Paris, as the prima donna remarks
in her lively letter, ... this amount of live stock and
vegetables might have brought four thousand francs [£160], which
would have been good remuneration for five songs. In the Society
Islands, however, pieces of money were very scarce; and as
Mademoiselle could not consume any considerable portion of the
receipts herself, it became necessary in the meantime to feed the
pigs and poultry with the fruit,'[27] and so her receipts
consumed one another.
This is an example of the inconvenience which the invention of money
overcame. In primitive communities it took the form of cowry-shells or
tobacco or gunpowder or any commodity which was in universal request in
the place. All the seller wanted to do was to be able to obtain for his
product a certain amount of stuff which he could rely on being able to
exchange for other things that he wanted. In the end the precious
metals, with their strong appeal to human vanity, and their utility for
adorning temples and so propitiating divine favour, ousted all other
commodities which had been used for money; and they are now to a great
extent ousted by pieces of paper, which still, however, represent claims
to so much gold.
The discovery of a circulating medium enormously facilitated the
progress of commerce, and it was not long before a class of people grew
up who specialized in this particular form of business and became
financiers and moneylenders. Bankers and financiers were known in Rome
and Athens, and we know that some machinery existed by which the
monetary claims of one country on another could be settled by something
that fulfilled the functions of the modern bill of exchange. The actual
provision of metallic currency has from the earliest times been almost
entirely under the control of the government which took into its own
hands, as an essential part of the police protection which it gives to
the people, the coining of currency, stamping the coin in such a way
that anybody who took one might know that he was getting a certain
weight of a precious metal. But the money-dealing business very soon
developed the machinery of credit by which anybody who had an enterprise
or a venture out of which he expected to make an attractive profit
could, if he had sufficient property to pledge, provide himself with the
means to finance it between the day that he started on his operations
and the day when he brought home his profits: and this business also
became international, though not, perhaps, as rapidly as commerce had
overstepped the boundaries between one people and another.
In the _Merchant of Venice_ we find Antonio trading with all the
countries of the then known world,
From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England,
From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,
but we do not find that Shylock was lending money on at all the same
international scale. When communication was slow, difficult, and
untrustworthy, money-lending at a distance was made very risky, because
it was impossible for the lender to keep the watchful eye on the
borrower's operations and credit that is required if he is to feel
comfortable in his venture. For a Lombard Street banker to lend money to
a merchant in Cheapside payable at a year hence was, until comparatively
lately, a much safer enterprise than to lend it to a merchant in Paris,
because the local borrower was always under the lender's observation. If
he were overtrading or living on too lavish a scale it would at once be
noticed and reported.
Nevertheless, international finance made steady progress through
somewhat obscure beginnings. We know that Philip II of Spain was heavily
indebted to moneylenders all over the Continent, and that by his famous
repudiation he carried consternation throughout Europe.[28] Edward III
was also heavily indebted to Florentine bankers, and he also omitted to
pay his debt; and it is said that the descendants of the Florentine
bankers still have a claim against the English Crown in
consequence[29]; but it was not until after the creation of stock
exchanges and the machinery of a public market in securities that
international finance became a question of general importance.
Here also the effect has been for unity combined with a good deal of
disunion. Twenty years ago it used to be said that feeling in the
Western States of America was very strongly anti-English because most of
the Western farmers were indebted to English moneylenders, and on the
whole it may be said that the relations between the borrower and lender
are not likely to be so friendly and so likely to promote unity as those
between buyer and seller. There is really no logical reason why this
should be so: the basis of the bargain between the two is exactly the
same. In commercial transactions one man sells to another because the
other man wants something that he has got more than he does. It is
exactly the same with the borrower and lender of money. A man borrows
because he wants money and is prepared to pay a rate of interest for it.
The lender lends because he has money to lend and wants to earn interest
on it. Nevertheless there is something in this relationship which seems
to produce discord. It is not many years since the Australian newspapers
used to talk of England as John Bull Cohen, implying that the English
money market made more than it ought to do by developing, with the help
of its financial resources, the production and commerce of the young
countries of the world. Perhaps it is human to feel a grudge against a
creditor, because the money has to be paid back, whereas a commercial
bargain is done with. Nevertheless, after allowing for all the friction
that money-lending seems to produce, there can be no question that the
establishment of the international market in securities has enormously
widened the world's output of commodities, and it has greatly promoted
that unity of interests which has brought mankind together more than
anything else.
Englishmen are always supposed to be particularly insular. Nevertheless,
any one who looks at the Official List daily published by the London
Stock Exchange and sees the enormous number of Government and municipal
loans from all parts of the world, the number of foreign railways, and
the number of foreign enterprises of all kinds which are dealt in on the
London Stock Exchange, cannot avoid the conclusion that this practice of
investing money abroad, which has been followed here to a greater extent
than in any other country, must have very greatly widened the
Englishman's horizon and forced him to confess that at least from one
point of view dwellers in foreign countries have some right to exist. At
any rate, in practice English investors not only have shown that they do
not recognize international barriers, but there have even been times
when foreign securities have actually been preferred to English. A few
years ago it was reported by stockbrokers that many of their clients
would not invest money at home and insisted whenever possible that it
should be placed abroad. To such an extent has this process been carried
on that it is now calculated by statisticians that no less than four
thousand millions of English money have been placed outside England,
about one-half of this having been lent to foreign countries, and about
one-half to our own colonies. Here again, as in commerce, there arises a
possibility of quarrelling, not only between the lender and borrower but
also between rival groups of lenders in different countries. When an
economically backward country is being developed with the assistance of
capital from nations which are at a further stage of economic progress,
the moneylender is supposed to acquire a certain amount of political
prestige and privilege which makes other nations, which have an eye to
increasing their influence in the borrowing country, jealous concerning
such operations. A curious example was presented not long ago by China.
China wanted to borrow, and probably the only countries which had any
genuine surplus of capital available for export were England and France.
Nevertheless, owing to the political side issues involved, Russia,
Germany, and the United States also all insisted on taking part in the
business of lending money to China. China was compelled to borrow more
money than it wanted, so that all these so-called civilized Powers could
share in the operation, and the absurdity of the position was increased
by the fact that some at least of the Powers which lent the money would
have had to borrow it somewhere before they could do so.
This freedom with which England has furnished financial resources to the
rest of the world is sometimes called in question as having had, or
being likely to have, bad effects upon the activity of production at
home. It is quite clear that the progress of international commerce and
the division of labour among nations by which commodities of all kinds
have been very greatly cheapened could not have been carried out if
England and other comparatively far developed countries had not supplied
the necessary capital for the development of the relatively backward
parts of the earth. If English money had not gone into building railways
in America, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and all over the world, and
supplying capital to the farmers and others who opened up these
countries, food could not have been nearly as cheap as it is or as it
was before the war, and clothes and other necessaries of life would have
been at a very different price. In fact, it may be said that if England
had not acted as she has, as the world's financier, the development of
the world's trade to anything like its present scale would have been
altogether impossible. If we could feel sure that the distribution of
the world's production had been as satisfactory as the wonderful
increase in its output, there would be no question that all classes in
England had been very greatly benefited by its financial activities
abroad. As it is, it is sometimes argued that English capital going
abroad stimulates production in other countries and increases the demand
for labour there, but that the demand for labour in England and its
reward might have been on a higher scale if English capital had been
kept at home. This is a question which is, happily perhaps, outside my
province at present, but it is one which demands serious attention. This
much can be said, that the years in which English capital has gone
abroad with the greatest rapidity have also been those in which our
export trade has been most active, and it is obvious that this must be
so, because when England exports capital it does so in the form of
lending money either to a foreign Government or to a foreign
municipality, or to some company, English or foreign, which is
conducting some enterprise in a foreign country.
In whatever way the money is lent the result is that the country to
which it is lent is given so much buying power in England and
consequently its demand for English goods is to that extent stimulated.
It does not follow, of course, that the whole amount of money that it
borrows is actually spent in England. It is possible that the Canadian
railway which is raising money in England may spend it by buying steel
rails in Belgium, but in practical fact the net result is that somebody
or other abroad is given a claim on England which finally, by some
roundabout process, takes effect in a demand for English goods and
services. At the same time, when one does admit that international
finance is essential to international commerce and that the
specialization, which is an essential product of commerce, is thereby
quickened, we have to remember that the objections, such as they are,
which can be put forward against the division of labour among
individuals cannot be overlooked altogether when the division of labour
is applied to nations.
Dr. Bowley, in his book on England's foreign trade, puts the matter
dramatically as follows:--
The limit to the indefinite division of labour is to be found in
the social, intellectual, and moral objections to specialization.
It is not pleasant to contemplate England as one vast factory, an
enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual
uproar, and at intense pressure for the rest of the world. Nor
would the Continent of America, divided into square, numbered
fields, and cultivated from a central station by electricity, be
an ennobling spectacle.'[30]
This is a picturesque expression of the objections to the unity of
mankind if carried too far through the process of specialization. While
admitting their force, it is not necessary to admit that the
specialization process need go quite to that length. Even if England
became one vast factory, it need not necessarily follow that it must
work in semi-darkness, continual uproar, or at intense pressure, but it
is all to the good that a specialist of Dr. Bowley's eminence should
call our attention to certain things which have to be guarded against.
On the other hand, we may contend that if England became one vast
factory, it would only do so because it paid it so well to do so, that
that vast factory might be made more in accordance with William Morris's
ideal than the picture of Inferno drawn by Dr. Bowley. We might imagine
England one vast Garden City, dotted over with factories, each of which
might be as beautiful as a cathedral, embowered and surrounded by fruit
trees and gardens, in which a highly educated and technically trained
population would work for five or six hours a day, and spend the rest of
their time in intellectual leisure and healthy exercise and home life
under ideally happy conditions.
It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely,
if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owing
to the very obvious reason that for the present all our available
capital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to go
into expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has set
a new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter of
making payments to one another. In olden times, when war was a
gentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted by
it. At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctually
paid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and thereby
established a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished for
several decades. Now that nations have taken to going to war with tooth
and nail, throwing their whole available population into the field and
using every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, to
beat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due from
one country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have been
abandoned. When the war is over it is possible that investors will
remember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than they
were before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any country
with which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved in
war.
War has also shown the great inconvenience that arises when the mutual
dependence of nations one on another for certain products leaves them
crippled because international exchange is interrupted. International
trade and finance, in their full and free development, have been shown
to depend on the assumption that peace is secure. Unless the present war
should be so ended as to secure peace for all time, it seems likely that
all nations will aim at being able to rely, at least for the essentials
of life and of defence, on home production or on a supply from countries
with which war may be regarded as impossible. If this be so, then unity
through trade and finance will be less universal, but more close-knit in
its narrower scope.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
A.L. Bowley, _England's Foreign Trade_. Swan Sonnenschein.
C.K. Hobson, _The Export of Capital_. Constable.
W.S. Jevons, _Money and the Mechanism of Exchange_. Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner & Co.
Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, chs. i-iv.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 24: _Wealth of Nations_, Bk. I, ch. ii.]
[Footnote 25: 1 Kings ix.]
[Footnote 26: Rawlinson's translation.]
[Footnote 27: Jevons, _Money as Mechanism of Exchange_, p. 1.]
[Footnote 28: Motley, _United Netherlands_, ch. xxxiii.]
[Footnote 29: Thorold Rogers, _Economic Interpretation of History_, ch.
xx.]
[Footnote 30: _England's Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century_, by
A.L. Bowley.]
X
INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION
We have learned to look upon the doctrine of interdependence of classes
within the nation as a truth self-evident to all eyes unblinded by
wilful prejudice or ignorance of that disabling kind charitably defined
by the Roman Catholic Church as invincible. To say that unemployment in
the mills of Lancashire or the shipyards of the Clyde not only affects
the happiness and well-being of cotton operatives and boiler-makers and
the great businesses which are carried on by their means, but depresses
the national vitality and puts a drag on the national energy throughout
the kingdom--to assert that no people can be wholly strong and vigorous
while any corner of its territory or any layer in its social strata
remains in the possession of a group physically weak, mentally
undeveloped, and morally below the standard of ethics which, as a
people, it has tacitly agreed to accept as necessary, seems to many of
us in these days to state truisms. Yet it is not so long ago that facts
which we now presume to be familiar, at least to every undergraduate,
were the dangerous discovery of the few who, in an age when people said
'Socialist' as Mr. Pecksniff said 'Pagan', had the temerity to point
out, that in things human and political as in mechanics, a chain was and
could be no stronger than its weakest link. Even now, in the reaction,
often only half conscious, of the employing class against any force
which tends to raise the employed to a social plane less removed from
that on which they themselves move, in the genuine dislike of
education, concealed under ceremonial phrases in days of peace but
breaking into fire and fury when the natural man is roused by a touch of
excitement, we can see how skin-deep in many cases is the general belief
in the widely proclaimed creed that economically as well as spiritually,
we are all members one of another. And if the truth of our
interdependence as citizens has won acceptance slowly and grudgingly,
because the facts that prove it lie other-where than on the surface, it
is easy to understand that the interdependence which is international,
resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in the
web of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmost
corners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within the
consideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannot
escape, and with which, therefore, he is bound to reckon. That,
doubtless, is why international movements in general arouse so little
interest in the mind of the average reader of newspapers. He does not
regard them as practical. The persons engaged in promoting them he
defines as cranks, dividing them into two classes, of whom one may be
dismissed as harmlessly absurd, while the other ought probably to be
suppressed as dangerous.
The events of the first week of August 1914, where the interdependence
of countries is concerned, might and did throw some light on the
journalistic mirror into which civilized man looks morning by morning,
but it was light of the crudest kind. The result of the illumination, in
numerous instances, was only to make a great number of people reflect
with astonishment on the number of things which this country is in the
habit of purchasing from abroad, comment with indignation on her folly
in not having made them all at home, and, when passion rose sufficiently
high, express a resolution that, however deeply they might need the
enemy's products, they would never buy any of them again. To do them
justice, this was not the attitude of the men confronted with the actual
difficulty of inventing substitutes for raw materials of which the
source had suddenly dried up. Those who sat in factory offices ruefully
contemplating models of goods to the making of which Germany, Belgium,
and Austria had hitherto sent some indispensable contribution, did not,
even while they set about inventing something that should replace this
contribution, belittle what they had lost. They knew, and said, that
while they were confident of producing a working substitute, they did
not pretend to offer in every case the precise quality which seemed to
be the special gift of the German, or Belgian, or Austrian trader.
Perhaps it was not after all only sheer laziness on the part of the
British manufacturer, and sheer lack of patriotism on the part of
British governments which induced our commercial leaders to concentrate
on one field of production and abandon another. To each nation, as to
each man, his gift. Some realization of this law may have come
instinctively to practical workers engaged in practical tasks.
If the organizers of production among us have not been forward in the
past to promote international action in the matter of labour
legislation, this is not from any failure to realize the effect of
inequality of industrial conditions upon nations competing in the
markets of the world. This effect was naturally greatest in cases where
the countries concerned were geographically contiguous and engaged in
direct rivalry with one another in respect of manufactures falling under
the same trade category. Here is the perfect case of competition, in
which any circumstance tending to lessen production on the one side is
immediately counted as an advantage to the other. But the pressure is
felt even where the territory of the rival is situated at the other side
of the world, even where the article produced belongs to a different
class of manufacture. In normal times long distance transport is easy
and long distance freight rates cheap, so that the question of distance,
although still to be reckoned with, is no longer a determining factor in
the sum of consideration. Again, the network of prices which controls
the ultimate cost of production of any finished article is so complex
that it is difficult in many cases to rule out this or that set of
industrial conditions in one country as being without importance for a
given factory in another. The price of a pair of corsets sold retail in
Paris may have been subtly influenced by a strike of smelters of iron
ore in Silesia; and your china tea-set may be dearer to-morrow by reason
of a sudden outbreak of foot and mouth disease among the herds of the
Argentine. Quite naturally, therefore, it has come about that
manufacturers, in opposing proposals to make existing labour legislation
either more stringent in detail or wider-reaching in scope, have put
forward, as their principal objection, the plea that such reforms in
favour of the worker would place British industry at a disadvantage with
that of countries where the action of the manufacturer remained
comparatively unfettered. The distrust, as well as the dislike of long
hours as a means of increasing production, together with the belief that
healthy and pleasant surroundings conduce to the development of the
worker's powers as well as to the satisfactory maintenance of his
physical condition, has made remarkable progress among the more
intelligent of the employing class since the twentieth century began.
But there is still, in nearly every trade, a considerable mass of
masters who rarely think and never experiment, who turn a deaf ear to
the representations of their managers and foremen when these, coming
into direct personal contact with the employed, take note of results due
to over-strain which are invisible to the head of the business in his
office, and who continue to suppose, with their fathers, that limitation
of the working period necessarily restricts output and spells
commercial loss. Such men, hearing that their own manufacture is
produced, let us say in Russia, by men working twelve hours a day to
their men's nine, and paid at a considerably lower rate than that which
obtains in their own works, would certainly not dream of drawing any
other conclusion than the, to them, obvious one that the result of this
difference must be a lowered cost of production. Inquiries which should
prove, as did those of Sir Alfred Mond's firm when confronted with such
a case, that the cost of production per ton was actually higher under
the long hour and low wage system would never be instituted by them, and
their results, when made by others, leave them sceptical if not
suspicious.
Recognizing this mental attitude in a large section of the business men
of every country, and bearing in mind that, in order to secure the
efficient administration of labour laws, the legislator must be able to
carry with him at least the general consent of the majority of those
employers to whose trades they apply, it becomes clear that if we would
remove all objection to complete and adequate protective law for the
workers we must first dispel the fear of the manufacturer that such law
would handicap him unfairly in the international market. And what way so
apt to this end as the bringing of his competitors under a law similar
in character and as far as possible uniform in its provisions?
It is a proof of the prescience of Robert Owen that, even before he had
succeeded in planting the first small seed which was to grow into the
flourishing tree of British industrial legislation, he had grasped the
necessity and formulated the demand for international action in the
matter of Factory Laws. Owen's labours at home have, naturally enough,
bulked so large in the estimation of historians and publicists in their
writings on this subject, that the continental side of his activities
has received comparatively little attention at their hands.
Nevertheless his correspondence with European governments on the abuses
and needs of industrialism as it existed in the early years of the
nineteenth century are among the most remarkable he ever wrote; and his
appeal to the Congress of the Holy Alliance in 1818 shows how thoroughly
prepared he was to treat national reform as the first step to a system
which should be international. Had the statesmen of his time, too busy
in their making and unmaking of kingdoms to heed his arguments and
appeals, turned their attention from those high matters (in which, after
all, their achievement was for the most part neither brilliant nor
beneficial) to the homelier details of their people's lives, social
progress would have been indefinitely hastened, and we might have been
spared the sorry spectacle of one industrial nation after another
committing the blunders and painfully learning the lesson of its
predecessors at the cost of much avoidable human suffering. For, in this
matter of industrial legislation, as in many others, men are
astonishingly slow to learn by example. Perhaps the most remarkable case
in point that has occurred is that of Japan, at this hour still in
course of being worked out before our eyes. Here we have a nation
brimful of intelligence, quick of apprehension, with a genius for
selecting from the polity and procedure of other States exactly those
features best fitted to promote prosperity and efficiency and an
unmatched power for assimilating and reproducing them in the form
suitable to its own tradition of development, following the Western
Powers along the crooked path of their early dealings with industrialism
and allowing the very conditions which stunted and degraded the
Lancashire cotton operative of the 'thirties to be created in the mills
of Osaka.
Since the days of Owen ideals of industrial conditions have mightily
grown and developed. This was inevitable, since the standards of social
comfort and hygiene have undergone complete transformation during the
last century. But the important points to note are, first, that it is
not only 'reformers' who put forward these ideals, but that they have
become to a large extent common to all classes of the people, and,
secondly, that the raising of the standard which proceeded at a slow,
irregular rate for, roughly speaking, a hundred years, quickening in one
decade and remaining almost stationary during the next, is now
proceeding with comparative rapidity. Already such a rate of mortality
and sickness as was common in the trades technically called dangerous
twenty years ago has come to be regarded as monstrous and would no
longer be tolerated with patience. This acceleration in the raising of
industrial standards is doubtless largely due to the conscious
participation of the workers themselves in the business of providing for
their own protection; but it may also be referred in some degree to a
quickened conscience and a more intelligent appreciation of the
importance of the manual worker in the national economy on the part of
the public as a whole. The same movement has been taking place, in
different degrees according to their differing circumstances, among the
other industrial peoples of the Old World and the New. The quicker this
advance on the part of some nations the more keenly was the failure of
others to make progress in the same _ratio_ felt by those belonging to
the first group. An uneasy consciousness that the backward nations were
beginning to constitute an obstacle to progressive domestic legislation
on the part of the advanced nations began to manifest itself. It
appeared that the lame ducks were setting the pace for the whole fleet,
and it was seen that self-defence no less than concern for the welfare
of the human race at large demanded the devising of some machinery by
which the movements of these laggards should be quickened.
Thus, seventy years after Owen had appealed in vain to the Powers in
session at Aix-la-Chapelle, a definite step was taken towards an
international agreement directed to the benefit of the working classes
of Europe. It must not be supposed that during this interval no
inheritor of Owen's tradition had been found or that his doctrine had
been altogether forgotten for want of a preacher. Now and again prophets
arose who, if they did not share Owen's genius, were at least his equals
in sincerity and energy. Dr. Ernst Francke, in the article reprinted
from the _Economic Journal_ of June 1909, which I have recommended for
reference at the end of this chapter, names one of these devoted
pioneers, Daniel Legrand, an Alsatian manufacturer who for thirty years
did his best to induce France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Switzerland
to agree on a minimum of industrial legislation. Some very useful work
in the same direction was done, during the years following the
Franco-German War, by a Belgian publicist; and in 1876 Colonel Frey,
President of the Swiss Federal Council, took the first official step in
the direction of international labour treaties, by a speech in the
Council recommending that Switzerland should take the lead in an
endeavour to establish them. To the Swiss Government belongs the honour
of addressing the first circular note to the governments of Europe
proposing the calling of a conference as a first step towards this end.
This conference never met. The idea of international labour legislation
was in the air, and voluntary societies composed of social reformers
were beginning not only to discuss but to support it. The international
meetings of organized workmen, such as the miners and cotton operatives,
in different countries had familiarized the continental mind with the
possibility of common action between peoples in respect of labour
questions. Nowhere did the proposal for the conference arouse more
general interest than in Germany, where the present German Emperor,
then at the beginning of his career, was showing an active interest in
German conditions of industry. It seemed that he too desired to call a
conference, and on his request that he should be given precedence in the
matter, the Swiss Government gracefully gave way. So it fell out that
the first conference on workmen's protection met in Berlin, at the
invitation of the German Government, in March 1890. There were fifteen
delegates, all the governments of Europe, except those of Russia and the
Balkan States, being represented. The chair was occupied by the then
Minister of Commerce, Freiherr von Berlepsch, a man of broad and
enlightened views and singularly sympathetic character, who subsequently
became one of the founders of the International Association for Labour
Legislation, and has probably, more than any other individual, secured
the success of its biennial meetings.
At this conference, which the German Emperor stated in precise terms to
have been called in view of the problems raised by international
competition, a wide range of subjects was discussed by the delegates of
the different States, including employment in mines, Sunday work, child
labour, the employment of women and young persons, and administrative
measures. While on many points agreement was found to be possible, and
the general principles which should underlie industrial legislation were
accorded ready acceptance, there was enough of objection, reservation,
and allegation of constitutional difficulty to prevent the conclusion of
anything in the nature of an international treaty. At the time the
conference appeared to have failed of its object. Subsequent events
have, however, shown that this was not the case. The failure to frame an
official agreement probably showed that the ground had not yet been
sufficiently laboured, and that further action in the direction of
inquiry and discussion was necessary before the taking of so novel a
step could be justified to the official mind; but it is certain that the
recognition by the representatives of all the Western States that
international action in labour questions was desirable in itself, and a
goal at which governments should aim, not only laid the foundation for
future State action, but gave to the voluntary work of obtaining the
materials for building on that foundation an impetus and a sanction
which it could have obtained in no other way.
That work was speedily set on foot and continued during the next ten
years. It was greatly aided by the action of the International Labour
Congress held at Zurich in 1897, when the trade unionists who composed
the gathering passed resolutions in favour of the establishment of an
International Labour Office, and by the Congress of Brussels which
assembled at the invitation of Freiherr von Berlepsch, soon afterwards.
At the latter gathering, which included a number of distinguished
members of parliament, men of science, lawyers, and economists from
France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, the view
that for the present progress must be made by the way of private
initiative prevailed, and the creation of three national committees,
having for their object the foundation of an international association
for labour legislation, quickly followed. These committees, which had
their head-quarters in Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna respectively, were
by the good offices of Professors Cauwès and Jay enabled to call an
international congress in Paris in the year of the Great Exhibition, and
at this congress the Association was actually founded, and its statutes,
provisionally drafted by Professor Mahaim and presented by the Belgian
committee, were adopted. A president, a general secretary, and an
international committee were provisionally appointed. The functions of
the Association were also defined. It was designed to serve as a bond
between all those who, in industrial countries, are convinced supporters
of the principle of protective legislation; to facilitate the study of
labour legislation by the publication of the labour laws of the
different States, and of reports on their administration; to assist in
the compilation of international statistics of labour and of all studies
tending to bring into harmony the existing national industrial codes;
and finally, it was charged with the duty of organizing the meetings of
international congresses in which labour legislation should be
considered. A very important part of its business was to consist in the
publication in German, French, and English of a periodical collection of
all labour laws newly in force in different countries.
This has been, from the first, the work of the International Labour
Office, the fixed head-quarters of the Association, which serves as an
exchange and clearing-house for all information pertinent to the
Association's work. It is in perpetual session at Basle, and to it all
reports and inquiries are addressed by the national sections, while from
it issue circulars for the sections' consideration and requests for
national investigation of problems which appear ripe for international
treaty. The spade work of the Association is done by the national
sections in their own countries, all action of the Association being
necessarily based in the first instance on the reports received from
them at head-quarters. There are now fifteen[31] such national
sections--an increase of eight on the original group of seven formed in
1901. The actual membership of the Association has trebled in ten years.
The seven sections to which belongs the place of honour at the head of
the roll, are those of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Holland, Belgium,
France, and Switzerland. Great Britain did not form a section till
1904, and it was not till 1910 that the British Government sent official
representatives to the biennial meetings. The official representatives
constitute a very important element at those gatherings. They attend the
plenary meetings and take part in discussions, often contributing hints
on their governments' attitude towards a given reform which are
invaluable to those who are framing or modifying proposals with a view
to government acceptance; and are also frequently present at the sitting
of commissions charged with the consideration of detail, where they can
hear the opinions and arguments of experts on every important point in
debate. When resolutions are before the conference they do not
vote--although in respect of voting right they stand on the same footing
as other delegates. But on occasion they are not afraid to express
opinions on the merits and tendencies of those resolutions which may
have a determining effect on the votes of their fellow members, and I
have known a few weighty words from such a man as M. Arthur
Fontaine,[32] commending a proposal on which feeling was largely
divided, to turn the scale at once in its favour.
The delegates of a section are elected by the section itself. They may
be either men or women, and their number is in proportion to the size of
the section, the maximum figure being eight, as far as voting delegates
are concerned, but substitute members and experts may be present in
addition. The following is a list of the fifteen sections represented at
Zurich in 1912: Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy,
the United States, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain,
Sweden, Norway, and Finland. In addition the following countries and
dominions sent government representatives only: Russia, Rumania,
Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, and the Australian
Commonwealth.
A brief account of the Association's method of doing business may be
interesting. Meetings are held once in two years, in the month of
September, different towns in Switzerland being selected in turn for the
place of assembly. The four conferences which I personally attended as
British delegate took place in Geneva, Lucerne, Lugano, and Zurich.
There are two plenary assemblies, the first having as chief business,
apart from the hearing of introductory addresses, the appointment of the
five commissions into which the conference splits up for actual work;
the second meeting to receive the reports of these commissions and their
recommendations, and decide upon the adoption or rejection of the
latter. The trilingual rule is followed, delegates addressing the
assembly either in French, German, or English, as they prefer, each
speech being followed by a brief _résumé_ in the other two languages
from the interpreter. In the commissions, by an unwritten but generally
accepted custom, French and German are the only languages used.
(Latterly the representatives of the United States of America, with the
individualistic courage that becomes them, have shown a disposition to
rebel against this custom and defy it; but the close of the Zurich
meeting left it uncertain whether in this particular the New World will
be able to prevail over the Old.) In the dignified speech-making of the
General Assembly the recurrent changes of language, if a little
disconcerting at first, can be faced with tolerable equanimity; but when
it is a question of the quicker verbal sword-play which goes on in the
commissions, the member imperfect in the tongues finds his position
occasionally difficult. The sympathies of every humane person must go
out to the expert who, having just made a telling _exposé_ of his case
in French well practised for the occasion, encounters a crushing
rejoinder in German of which he can barely follow the general drift.
The composition of these commissions--in which all the real work of the
conferences is done--is truly heterogeneous. A commission may represent
a dozen nationalities; it will certainly contain specimens of every
social class, members of the most varied shades of thought in politics,
religion, and sociology. I can still remember the constituents of my
first commission at Geneva in 1906. Our subject was the night-work of
young persons. At the head of the table was a professor of Civil Law in
the University of Louvain. On either side of him sat a Catholic clerical
member of the German Reichstag; a German Protestant pastor from Bavaria;
a distinguished Parisian engineer; an Austrian nobleman interested in
social reform; a Hungarian man of science; a Dutch factory inspector; a
Swiss Trade Union secretary; and myself. We were a motley crew, but the
strange 'pattern' which we must have presented to the observation of any
higher intelligences interested in our deliberations had no effect on
the goodwill and good humour with which they were conducted.
The range of subjects considered at international meetings is very wide.
It includes all questions relating to the labour of women, young persons
and children; matters of health and hygiene, with special reference to
the use of poisonous material in industry, and the regulation of
dangerous trades; workmen's insurance; the establishment of wages boards
and minimum rates as preventives against sweating; the extension of the
ten-hours' day and the Saturday half-holiday to be the legal rule in all
industrial countries; and the introduction of the three-shift system and
the eight-hour working day in continuous industries. As it is obvious
that questions so large, touching so deeply the domestic life and habits
of every people, cannot possibly be settled either out of hand or all
at once, the Association's study of each separate problem is always
prolonged and, according to the circumstances and the difficulty of the
case, more prolonged in one instance than in another. Like the old
pioneers of National Factory legislation, the Association has proceeded
along the line of least resistance: not because it lacks courage, but
for reasons of sheer prudence. If it was to become, in the words of M.
Millerand, the present French Minister of War, one of its oldest and
staunchest members, 'the laboratory in which international treaties are
made', it was clear that it must not propose for international
acceptance reforms which even among the most progressive peoples were
looked upon as doubtful or dangerous. Accordingly it chose for the
subject of its first great efforts two reforms in relation to which it
could count with certainty upon a considerable amount of sympathy, and
proposed international legislation prohibiting the night-work of women
in factories, and the manufacture, importation, and sale of matches made
with white phosphorus. Information on both these subjects was collected
by means of the national sections; the Association in conference drew up
proposals and recommendations to the governments concerned; the
governments consented to a diplomatic conference at Berne, and the
conventions concluded in 1906 were the happy result of their meeting.
But it must not be supposed that these results were reached without
difficulty. Even as regards so comparatively simple a reform as the
abolition of the night-work of women--to be carried out, after
considerable 'delays' in favour of those countries in which night-work
by women had hitherto been an accepted industrial custom--the adjustment
of the change to the varying circumstances of each State proved a
delicate business, and agreement could never have been reached but for
the willingness of the more backward States to make substantial
sacrifices and encounter possible risks. For this reason, the allowance
of some years of grace before adherence to the treaty should become
practically binding was a measure almost of necessity. It would have
been unreasonable and might have been cruel to insist on Belgium and
Hungary assimilating their practice in such a matter to that of Great
Britain without ample time to prepare for the change. Thirteen States
adhered to this treaty.
The difficulties in the white phosphorus case were at first sight even
more striking, and, to begin with, only seven States--Germany, France,
Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Luxemburg--were signatories of
this convention. Of these, the first five had previously prohibited the
use of white phosphorus within their own frontiers. Room was, however,
left for the entry of other States into the convention at a subsequent
date, with the result that the scope of the treaty has been gradually
extended, and that we now find ourselves fairly within sight of the
banishment from manufacture of one of the most deadly of all industrial
poisons, and the consequent disappearance of an industrial disease
peculiarly dreadful in its nature and symptoms. The tardy adhesion of
the United Kingdom to this treaty remains a matter of regret; but the
procedure of the Indian Government and of all the British self-governing
dominions in following the mother country when at last she determined to
take action has done much to redeem that tardiness. Obviously, it was
the prohibition of the importation and sale of phosphorus matches in
India and the Dominions which has forced the Scandinavian and Belgian
manufacturers who were opposing complete prohibition to seek for
substitutes for white phosphorus. At the present moment only Japan and
Sweden among manufacturing countries stand outside the convention, the
United States, whose constitution forbade her to impose prohibition by
direct legislation, having brought about the desired result by the
imposition of a prohibitive tax.
Is this all? it may be asked. If the question be of treaties signed,
sealed, and ratified, the answer must be 'Yes'. On the subject of the
night-work of boys and the hours of women and young persons, proposals
were actually considered and conventions drafted by an official
conference at Berne in 1913. The draft conventions were far from
admirable: their framers went so far in the spirit of compromise to meet
the objections of the backward States that the provisions laid down, had
they been accepted without modification, would have tended to depress
rather than to raise the standard of international opinion on the
questions to be affected by them. We need not, therefore, feel much
regret that the war has swept them, with so many other pre-war schemes,
into the wastepaper-basket. The vast question of minimum rates of wages
and their regulation by the State is obviously still too much in the
experimental stage of its solution (even in this country where
experiments have been boldest) for it to be possible to make it the
subject of international agreement. As a subject of international
discussion it has had its place, and an increasingly important place,
for at least eight years past in the studies of the sections and the
discussions of the Association meeting. Upon no question has public
international opinion ripened more rapidly. In 1906, at Geneva, where
the conditions of home workers were first under discussion, a few daring
delegates met in corners and whispered under their breath the words
'Wages board'. By 1910, at Lugano, an English woman delegate was elected
joint president of the Association's Home Work Committee, 'as a
recognition of Great Britain's achievement in passing the first Trade
Boards Act'; at Zurich, in 1912, a two-day conference on the legal
minimum wage preceded the meeting of the Association, and a whole sheaf
of minimum wage bills introduced by private members into the Chambers of
different countries was before the delegates, together with an official
measure of the French Government. To watch this change of attitude was
to see international thought in the making. To appreciate its full
significance, it is necessary to bear in mind the different aspects
presented by the 'sweating' difficulty in this country and in the great
industrial States of the Continent. The French or German social reformer
sees it mainly, if no longer exclusively, as a problem of home work. Now
home work in Great Britain is a by-product of a strictly limited class
of industries, affecting a comparatively small class of the population;
in France and Germany it forms a highly important section of the general
industrial structure, it is interwoven, to an extent rarely grasped by
British students, with the life, and habits, and productive power of the
nation. Much more courage--and greater freedom from prejudice--was
required in the one case than the other. The remarkable advance towards
definite action on the part of the State in relation to the
establishment of minimum rates for home workers which took place between
1906 and 1913 could not have been achieved in so short a time but for
the labours of certain voluntary associations led by men of insight,
candour, and indefatigable devotion. In this connexion the pioneer work
of the late Comte de Mun and Professor Raoul Jay has been of inestimable
value. Realizing themselves, as did few unofficial reformers, the wide
nature of the movement in which they had engaged and the impossibility
of confining it in its sweep and effects to a section of the manual
workers, they succeeded in gradually bringing home to the ablest among
their fellow-workers the necessity for closing the gulf which French
mental habit had fixed between factory and home workers and preparing
to treat both classes on a similar footing of equity. In
Germany,--where, as we might expect, there was less forwardness to
launch unofficial schemes and a disposition to work rather from the
first through authoritative channels--experiments were being made under
the Home Work Act which, if of little value in themselves, seemed the
earnest of much better things.
If this result only had been attained, the meetings of the Association
and the labours of the sections would not have been in vain. But far
more was in process of achievement when the work of the Association was
interrupted by the catastrophe of the European War. The adoption in all
industrial countries of the 'English week', with its half-holiday so
much coveted by the continental worker--the establishment of a uniform
working day--the gradual introduction of the eight-hours shift into such
'continuous industries' as steel-smelting and glass-blowing--an
international agreement to eliminate the use of lead from many branches
of the pottery industry and to limit and safeguard its use in all
others,--these were only some among the questions which study and
investigation and discussion had brought to a stage at which the
Association could look upon them as fit matter for potential
international conventions in August 1914. Now that its activities are,
for the most part, in suspense, it is well to remember that its greatest
achievement was the proof, again and again renewed, that it is possible
for persons of twenty different nationalities, holding the most diverse
opinions on nearly every subject under the sun, not only to act together
but to find common motives of action so strong as to break down every
sundering barrier of political doctrine and religious creed. Whatever of
suspicion or antipathy might flourish outside the boundaries of the
international association, these evil weeds have never taken root inside
them. Is it Utopian to dream, when the days of peace shall have
returned, of a reconciliation within its borders for those between whom
at present the great gulf of division seems hopelessly fixed?
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
_History of Factory Legislation_, Harrison and Hutchins. Macmillan.
Revised edition.
Frederic Keeling, _Child Labour in the United Kingdom_. P.S. King.
Clementina Black, _Sweating_. Duckworth.
R.H. Tawney, _Studies in the Minimum Wage_: (i) _Chainmaking_; (ii)
_Tailoring_. G. Bell & Sons.
J.A. Hobson, _Work and Wealth_. Macmillan.
Edward Howarth and Mona Wilson, _West Ham: A Study_. Dent.
Sir Thomas Oliver, M.D., _Dangerous Trades_. John Murray.
_Annual Reports of International Association for Labour Legislation_
(_British Section_), 1906-14. To be obtained of the Secretary, Queen
Anne's Chambers, 28 Broadway, Westminster.
Ernest Barker, _Nationalism and Internationalism_. C.S.U. Pamphlets,
Mowbray, Oxford.
Dr. Bauer, _International Legislation_. Mowbray, Oxford.
Ernest Francke, 'International Labour Treaties,' _Economic Journal_
(June, 1909). Reprinted separately, Macmillan.
Albert Métin, _Les Traités Ouvriers_. Armand Colin: Paris.
E. Mahaim, _Le Droit International Ouvrier_. Librairie Recueil-Sirey:
Paris.
Fagnot, Millerand et Strohl, _La Durée légale du Travail_. Félix Alcan:
Paris.
Paul Boyaval, _La Lutte contre le Sweating System_. Félix Alcan: Paris.
Students might also consult the following Reports:
_Le Travail à Domicile en France_. Ministère du Travail: Paris.
_Le Travail à Domicile en Belgique_. Ministère du Travail: Bruxelles.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: These figures represent the position at the last meeting
of the Association held at Zurich, 1912.]
[Footnote 32: The distinguished Permanent Head of the French Labour
Office.]
XI
COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM
Earlier ages were more able than ours to believe in the good old days.
We, knowing more of the past than our forefathers did, can find in it no
golden age. But our eyes do not rest even upon the present. In the
nineteenth century men thought they were at the end of a process, and
their evolutionary creed was often only a polite method of saying what
fine fellows they were. Now we look forward. The future seems to us
longer than the past and more important than the present; and we
ourselves seem to be at the beginning rather than at the end of time. A
knowledge of the past has made it impossible to believe that growth has
stopped, and we understand how different the future may be, in part at
least, by perceiving how different even this grimy and blood-stained
present is from the still more inhuman past.
Among the recorded changes the Economists write of an increasing
interchange of goods, and we can see as well an increasing interchange
of ideas across the frontiers of States. Music, painting, literature,
and science have all been influenced; and ideas concerning political,
economic, and social facts have been affected by that interchange which
has developed our philosophy, our science, and our art. No one nation
has originated all; and each nation has depended on hints and hypotheses
which have arisen in others.
But the interchange of ideas on social life has led to an increase of
ideals, which are plans of action emotionally appreciated and therefore
motive forces. Some of these are the Utopias of individual thinkers;
but we shall consider here only those more powerful ideals which are
shared, however vaguely, by many. In this case also, as in the purely
intellectual sphere, the fire spreads from group to group, from nation
to nation; and as the interchange of ideas increases knowledge, so the
exchange of enthusiasm makes action more powerful. A really effective
ideal, however, cannot arise except from the perception of definite
evil. Vague discontents may cause such revolution as leads to reaction;
but the clear sight of evil is the only source of reform. We may take it
for granted, then, that although an ideal is nerveless if it is not
passionate, it is futile unless it is based on knowledge. Therefore a
hint must be given of the evils from the knowledge of which ideals of
social reform now rise. That all is not well in the relations of man to
man or of group to group must be fairly obvious to any one with
imagination enough for sympathy. General dissatisfaction and universal
cures for society are childish; but the perception of this and that evil
gives rise to different plans for reform which all originate in the
enthusiasm which is an ideal. We may put aside the long history of the
growth of this shared enthusiasm for better relations between men,
whatever their ability, their rank, their race, or their government.
The common ideals of the present are the result of a gradual
development, but we shall consider them here as attempts to deal with
existing evils and plans for a better future.
* * * * *
Some social evils of the present are perhaps as old as any settled
civilization. Such are disease and personal violence. Some are due to
forces which have come into existence recently, owing to increased
communication and accumulated wealth. Such are extreme poverty and the
dehumanizing of social relations. With both kinds of evil we are moved
to deal, and we are not deterred from the attempt to reform even
long-established evil; for we feel that we do not know what is possible.
Nothing is inevitable. This is not the place to give in detail the
description of those evils which are being dealt with. It is enough if
we recognize that it is no abstract or airy theory of equality or human
nature which moves us to action. All real theories are intensely
personal: and no theory has ever yet moved men unless they saw through
it to the crude facts. However it may be phrased in a theory of society,
we recognize it as evil that disease, leading to premature death, should
be as common as it is. As a social evil it may be said to disturb
seriously the relations between men. We see also that it is a social
evil that men should use fraud or violence in compelling labour or in
the pursuit of riches. Of the newer social evils there is the physical
and spiritual deterioration which seems to result from the massing of
men in great cities. There is also the dehumanizing of the relations
between master and man. And this is like in kind to the dehumanizing of
all functions in the vast institutions of modern times. The director of
a company comes to regard himself as part of a machine; and so does the
shareholder. So eventually does the agent of the State. Until at last we
reach the immense evil that human action is done for which no moral
responsibility is felt. How then shall we act? What has been done and
what is still hoped for? The answer to such questions will be a
statement of ideals.
One may speak of ideals of social reform from two different points of
view; either with respect to (1) the changing sentiment which produces
movements for reform or with respect to (2) the institutional change
which embodies that sentiment. The two are complementary parts of one
historical movement: and it is difficult to divide them as cause and
effect. For sentiment, becoming enthusiasm, certainly causes
institutional change, and yet the reformed institution invariably
creates a new sentiment. The province of law and of social custom is to
lead as well as to register--a dynamic as well as a static influence, to
increase order and to incite to liberty. In actual life, therefore, it
is often impossible to separate the sentiment from its embodiment in
measures of social reform.
For purposes of study, however, one may divide. We may put aside the
moving sentiments--the passions, however faint, which urge men to wish
for a better future--and we may consider first the particular instances
of reform.
* * * * *
One definite and in some sense new departure in the results of the
shared enthusiasms of nations has been the industrial legislation of
recent years. That has been already dealt with. But, although in an
economic age such as ours industrial reform may seem the most striking,
it is not the only effect of our shared enthusiasm and later ages may
not think it the most important. There has been reform of social evils
owing to the interchange between nations of ideas on education,
religious toleration, medicine, and sanitation, the treatment of
criminals, the suppression of slavery and many other subjects. All these
and many more reforms are, as it were, registered in institutional
(legal or administrative) change.
Perhaps it is better to begin with a definite instance of the working of
an ideal, lest it may seem that we are speaking only of an empty
aspiration. We may take as an example the reforms connected with
medicine and sanitation, and those only in so far as they have been
officially established by the joint action of states. This is a very
restricted embodiment of a social ideal, since of course we may find
the same use of common labour between men of different races in the
private contest with disease or in the municipal preventive medicine
which in every great city owes much to investigators and practitioners
of other nations. But it is better to take the most tangible effect in
purely governmental action.
The French Government proposed an international conference, which met in
1851, to deal with infectious disease; and a second conference met in
1856. In 1865 the outburst of cholera in the East led to a third
congress at Constantinople. Great Britain opposed treaties for
regulating quarantine, &c., because of the delay which might be caused
to the pursuit of shipping interests. But at last a treaty was made in
1892 at Venice for protection against cholera. Further and more
effective treaties were agreed to by civilized states in 1897 and 1903.
A bureau of information concerning infectious disease was established at
Paris, and commissions to supervise were established in Turkey and
Egypt. With regard to sleeping sickness Great Britain took the
initiative; and a conference met in 1907, in London, at which six
countries were represented. So much with respect to disease; we may now
turn to examples of the joint action of states as regards crime.
The African slave traffic has been dealt with since 1885 (Berlin
Conference) by the European States acting together on certain general
principles. And what is known as the White Slave traffic was the subject
of arrangement between fifteen states in the conference at Paris in
1902.
Again, the reform of prisons and penitentiaries has been much assisted
by international congresses since 1846. The last was held in 1910 in
America, at which twenty-eight states were represented. A secretariat
has been established at Berne for the exchange of expert opinion and for
making suggestions to governments.
These are examples of a very numerous class of reforms undertaken by
the _joint action_ of governments. They are all comparatively recent and
most of the twenty-eight unions between governments for concerted action
have been established during the years of European peace between 1871
and 1914. In these instances the States of Europe have put their
precious sovereignties into their pockets; although the lawyers and
diplomatists explain the situation in the old terms.
With respect to all these movements for social reform three points must
be noticed: first, the initiative in most reform has come from private
enterprise and not from diplomacy or governments. Secondly, this private
interest has spread from the few of one nation to the few of another
before any effective result was attained. Thirdly, the states have not
acted together because of any general theory of international action,
but simply because certain social evils could not be dealt with at all
by any state acting separately. Whatever hampers common action, then,
also hinders effective reform in dealing with disease or crime. I need
not elaborate the conclusion.
* * * * *
There are also instances of governmental action being _directly
influenced_ by the practice of other states, even when there has been no
common action. The two most striking reforms of recent years have been
in education and religious toleration. Of education enough has already
been said. The interest from our point of view here is chiefly in the
effect of education on social structure. It is increasingly evident that
of all forces for transforming a nation, education is the most powerful;
but no one nation can transform its education effectively without
respect to the mistakes and successes of its neighbours. This has been
perceived and acted upon. The influence, for example, of Germany on
England is sufficiently well known. German precedents were quoted in the
House of Commons in the early days of state education for England: and
the Education Acts of 1870 and 1876 were largely due to the impression
made in England by the success of state education in Prussia. Coleridge,
Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold definitely acknowledged a debt to Germany.
But Germany owed something to England in the perception of the value of
surroundings and corporate life in schools. France also was affected by
English education; and, in fact, French educators had to come to England
to find the thing for which the French gave us the name--_Esprit de
Corps_.
The United States have been very definitely influenced in their
University education both by Germany and England; and their Government
has in primary education certainly established for all states the
transforming possibilities of a school system. It must be remembered
that the crudity of civilization and its apparent corruption in the
United States are European not American. It is because Europe has
neglected its duty, enslaved and brutalized its peoples, that social and
political evil enters with the immigrants; and all this mass of European
incompetence, the result of neglect or evil-doing in Ireland, Poland,
the Slavonic Countries and Italy, the Government of the United States
exorcises with education: and the effect is spreading beyond the
frontiers of the States. A further effect of influence passing from
nation to nation has been the change with regard to the relations of
State and Church. In England it is some years since the State persecuted
in the supposed interest of religion; but we remember that the abolition
of tests against Roman Catholics was as late as 1830 and as against Jews
as late as 1850. Even the most backward of European countries have been
affected by the general feeling. In 1874 Austria for the first time
allowed any creed, not dangerous to morals, to be preached; and
ecclesiastical power is not any longer to be used against any but
members of the particular Church which is offended. In Spain there are
still some obstacles to public manifestations of any religious belief
but that which is most prevalent; free worship in private, however, is
at last allowed. Thus, the general tendency, spreading from the nations
which are most intricately divided in religion, has been towards what is
called toleration. Connected with this has been the gradual recognition
of civil marriage; in which the old privilege of the most powerful
Church is no longer recognized by the modern State. Law and custom have
both changed.
Perhaps the general attitude has not really changed. We persecute more
for political than for religious unorthodoxy; or it may be that in our
more economic age we forbear to burn heretics only because we cannot
afford the faggots. But in any case the relations between men in society
are more justly arranged, even where religion is concerned.
* * * * *
We have thus examples of (1) joint governmental action and (2) separate
actions of governments influenced directly by foreign governments.
There are also certain results of the interchange of ideals between
nations which are not yet, or only in part, registered in legal or
political institutions. Such for example is the changed position given
to women. A change has occurred quite outside the political or even the
economic sphere, both in the habits of western humanity and in their
guiding conceptions.
The change is affecting the meaning of marriage, since we are becoming
inclined to suppose that man and woman are not simply male and female.
Human individuality is given a new value; and there is no telling yet
what the new attitude may involve in lessening the friction due to
primitive and obsolete tradition or in making society more reasonable
and civilized. The source of the change is undoubtedly an enthusiasm
which has been influenced by men and women of all nations. Ibsen has a
place in the history of social transformation. And besides, the contact
between nations has made it possible for the freer position of women in
one group to affect the domestic slavery of another.
In the position of children, also, an immense change is proceeding. We
cannot fail to call it social reform, that the child should be given so
much more definite a place in the social organism. Aristotle thought
woman was a mistake of nature's in the attempt to make man; and nearly
all philosophers have treated children as if they ought to be rather
ashamed of themselves for not being grown up. I speak of philosophers in
the wide sense of the term, for I do not think the metaphysicians knew
that there was such a thing as a child in the universe. However that may
be, we can hardly believe that as late as the nineteenth century parents
really imagined that they knew what was good for their children. In our
more sceptical age, children have generally to be careful not to allow
their parents to read certain books, and in every well brought up
family, it is thought that parents should be seen and not heard. A
social change has occurred in the comparative importance we assign to
childhood and age.
Thirdly, there is gradually coming about a transformation of social
castes. One must speak carefully; for in the West we are supposed not to
have castes. There is, however, an uncomfortable feeling that society is
not one, that the two cities which Plato said would divide and destroy
the true city of men are now established--the rich and the poor. I do
not mean those with £3,000 a year, and those with £160 a year. It is not
a question for the Exchequer. I mean that great numbers in all
'civilized' nations are ill-fed and ill-clothed from birth, and die
prematurely. To perceive it is to desire action which perhaps no state
can perform. But that we perceive it is something. Read the complacent
rhymes of Lord Tennyson about 'freedom slowly broadening down' and then
turn to contemporary literature, to Jean Richepin or John Galsworthy,
and you will acknowledge that a common ideal of social reform has come
into existence. We are at least restless in face of a social
organization which wastes humanity during long years of peace almost as
completely, though not so recklessly, as during a few months of war.
Something has been already done--English writers and English experience
have given a motive power to Hungarian, Russian, Finnish, Turkish,
Persian, and Indian democracy. Groups of men have claimed, for example
in South America, their right to free development. And everywhere during
the period of European peace the contact between nations was teaching
every nation the force of its own character, while the new complexities
of society were weakening the old dividing lines of caste between
individuals.
In all these matters we seem to be moved by a desire for a freer social
atmosphere. Whether law or administration changes or not, it is clear
that most European nations have undergone in the years of peace from
1871 to 1914 considerable social changes. How far they are effective in
all nations and in all classes it is very difficult for a contemporary
to judge. It may be that the social structure of the decorative upper
fringe or of the bedraggled hem of society is much the same as it was
before communication was easy and transit rapid. But the central body
of European society is certainly changed; and, after all, between the
scum and the dregs is the good soup.
* * * * *
Such are the changes which have been introduced into social life owing
to the interdependence of nations. But we should not understand what has
happened if we accepted the mere record of achievements. The future is
built not only upon what we have done, but upon what we hope to do.
Reforms accomplished do not make us more satisfied to endure evil not
yet reformed--for always working in the achieved present is the ideal
which transformed the past into what we now see.
We may turn, then, to consider some general features of the force
working in social reform which is not yet achieved. And for that purpose
we put aside established law and custom to consider the implied
attitude.
Now that political privilege and inequality before the law are more or
less removed, there is a greater concentration upon the underlying
social injustice. We all accept it as good that the activities of
government should not be for the benefit of the few, or that the money
should not be drawn from one class. We suppose at least that there
should be one law for rich and poor.
To any one with a knowledge of history this seems an immense step since
small classes in every nation held political privilege, made law for
others, and forced tribute from the majority. Not that all is justice
and liberty. The law still, with noble impartiality, forbids both the
millionaire and the pauper to steal bread. Of course it is not directed
against the poor. The law never forbids the poor man to cheat the state
out of more than £3,000 a year. Again, political power still depends on
the social position of your cousins and your aunts. But something has
been done.
We hear much more nowadays about social than about political or legal
reform. That, in itself, is a sign of a change of attitude. In the
revolution of 1381 the crowds came marching to London swearing, in the
words of the old chronicle, that there would be no peace in the land
till each and every lawyer was slain. In the revolutions of 1830 and
1848 it was 'death to the politicians'. Now--it may be that we despair
of lawyers or politicians, dead or alive. In any case the attention of
those in every state who are moved by enthusiasm for a better society is
concentrated less upon votes and laws than upon the distribution of
well-being.
Secondly, there has been a transference of enthusiasm of the religious
or poetic kind from the sphere of contemplation or aloofness to that of
earthly and even material action. Ideals of social reform do not any
longer involve a neglect of food and clothing: we are all more and more
convinced that it is idle to preach culture to a starving man, or to
talk of liberty to one whose whole life is a bestial struggle for bare
food and covering. I speak of normal times. In England, France, and
Germany, social betterment means giving to a greater number security of
bare life, upon which alone the good life can be built.
It will be seen that I imply a disagreement with the Tolstoian
conception of reform; in so far as that involves a neglect of food and
clothing and generally of what are called material goods. That
conception is not perhaps powerful among those who deal with what is
usually called social reform. It is not 'modern', and it is also
dependent upon a mistaken argument in ethical theory. An unfortunate
confusion made by what is called Eastern, Stoic, or Mediaeval asceticism
led to the idea that because the mind is more important than the body,
the body has no importance at all. But we need not deal with this theory
in detail, especially as the general attitude of to-day is opposed to
it. There is undoubtedly a concentration upon the bare necessities of
human life with a view to discovering how these can be shared more
generally.
We are fully aware of the immense social danger in the desire for
riches; but that is no objection to the desire for bread and clothing
and the bare necessities of human life. And the seemingly materialistic
enthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilization
is no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoian
simplicity. Poetry is not all rhyming couplets: religion is not all for
the intellectually or artistically incompetent. So, a world in which
twenty per cent. of humanity did not slowly starve to death would not
necessarily be less worthy of admiration. Nor would religion disappear
if every one were healthy, unless religion means the result of
neurasthenia or dyspepsia or premature ageing. No doubt there is some
exaggeration in this element of the common social ideals. Not even a
poor man lives on bread alone; and it is indeed possible to have a
perfectly well-fed society which would be quite barbarous. But we must
regard the fine flower of culture as purchased at too high a price if,
for the sake of a few connoisseurs and courtiers not to say bourgeois
plutocrats, the majority in every nation must lack a bare human life.
Some declare that the division between nations is more important than
that between the rich and the poor. It may be so; but the only reason
must be that what the few have, the many, however dimly, may hope to
share or may be induced to think they do share. Humanity is infinitely
gullible. But in every nation there is rising a murmur which may yet
become an articulate cry.
The writers of modern Utopias in their detailed conception of what is
desirable may speak only for themselves; but it is a sign of the common
enthusiasm that they all attach so much importance to organization and
to physical health. This indicates that we all, in every nation, look
forward, however vaguely, to a society in which human life shall be less
difficult for the majority to obtain. We speak sometimes of the
redistribution of leisure--August Bebel made it one of the chief
articles of his creed. But this as an ideal does not indicate any desire
that the dock-labourer should have time to loaf in a club, or his wife
time to play bridge, except in so far as time to loaf is an opportunity
for some other employment than the mere struggle for food. There is
nothing inevitable in a situation which makes the development of most of
the human faculties a privilege of a few and an impossibility for the
greater number. Nor is it correct to suppose that the half-starved and
the ill-clothed should be satisfied with being 'virtuous', and leave it
to others, possibly wicked and certainly far from simple, to cultivate
art and science.
Nor again is it absurd to hope for a world in which all should have at
least the opportunity for the development of any faculties they may
possess. The social gain would be immense. It would be like the change
from a harmony which is produced by a few amateurs to one of a full
orchestra.
Thirdly, it is increasingly evident that no one state or nation can act
effectively in social reform unless it acts in concert with others.
Treaties of commerce, common prison legislation, and common measures for
sanitation and medicine have proved effective because they are in the
nature of things. They are necessary means for the desired prosperity
even of the most selfish and segregated state.
But ignorance and prejudice and irrational violence spread as easily as
disease or crime. Knowledge is not secure until it is widespread; and
civilization perishes, which is segregated in a world of barbarism.
Therefore education also, in its widest sense, must be contrived in
common. Not merely school systems influenced by foreign ideas, but the
very atmosphere of thought must change in harmony among all nations, if
we are not to go toppling down into the abyss from which by painful
centuries we have ascended.