[65] _The Commonwealth of Nations_, Part I, p. 73.
[66] _Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier_, ii. 276.
VIII
PROGRESS IN INDUSTRY
A. E. ZIMMERN
In our study of Government we traced the upward course of the common
life of mankind in the world. We saw it in the increasing control of Man
over his physical environment, and we saw it also in his clearer
realization of the ultimate ideal of government--the ordering of the
world's affairs on the basis of liberty. We have now to turn aside from
this main stream of social development to watch one particular branch of
it--to survey man's record in the special department of economics. We
shall no longer be studying human history, or the history of human
society, as a whole, but what is known as economic or industrial
history.
It is important to be clear at the outset that economic or industrial
history _is_ a tributary stream and not the main stream: for there are a
number of people who are of the contrary opinion. There has been an
increasing tendency of recent years to write human history in terms of
economic or industrial progress. 'Tell me what men ate or wore or
manufactured,' say historians of this school, 'and we will tell you what
stage of civilization he had reached. We will place him in his proper
pigeonhole in our arrangement of the record of human progress.' Did he
use flint implements or fight with nothing but a bow and arrow? Did he
use a canoe with a primitive pole which he had not even the sense to
flatten so as to make it into a serviceable paddle? Then our
sociologist will put him very low down on his list of the stages of
human progress. For the modern sociologist is a confirmed plutocrat. He
measures the character of men and races by their wealth. Just as
old-fashioned people still think of the society of our own country as a
hierarchy, in which the various classes are graded according to their
social prestige and the extent of their possessions: so students of
primitive civilization classify races according to their material
equipment, and can hardly help yielding to the temptation of reckoning
their stage of progress as a whole by the only available test. Thus it
is common, especially in Germany and the United States, to find
histories of what purports to be the progress of mankind which show man
first as a hunter and a fisherman, then as a shepherd, then as a tiller
of the soil, and then work upwards to the complicated industrial system
of to-day. We are asked to accept the life of Abraham or David among the
sheepfolds as the bottom of the ladder, and the life of a modern
wage-earner under the smoky sky of a manufacturing area as the top; and
when we complain and say, as men like William Morris and Stephen Graham
are always saying, that we would far prefer to live in David's world, in
spite of all its discomforts, we are told that we have no right to
quarrel with the sacred principle of Evolution.
To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to deny its
spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of the progress of the
human _spirit_ at all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or
rather the increasing complication, of _things_, rather than of the
advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as
the Kingdom of Man--still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us
helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows
nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy
and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of
mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the
foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile
the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean
streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations
of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we
are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to
which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield--that Economic
Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern world.
No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion or consent to bow
the head before such fancied necessities. The function of industry, he
will reply, is to serve human life not to master it: to beautify human
life not to degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics is
not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its bounds and exceeds
its functions it must be controlled and thrust back into its place by
the combined activities of men. The soul is higher than the body, and
life is more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches, and the
welfare of the community more important than its economic and material
progress. These great processes, which the increase of man's knowledge
has set in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men originated
them: men administer them: and men must control them. Against economic
necessity let us set political necessity: and let the watchword of that
political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and the well-being
of mankind.
With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our subject.
What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek for 'house-keeping'. If
writers and thinkers on the subject had only kept this simple fact in
mind, or used the English word instead of the Greek, the world would
have been saved much misery and confusion. Political economy is not,
what Mill and other writers define it to be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It
is the art of community-housekeeping, and community-housekeeping, as
every woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch of the art
of community-management or government.
Housekeeping, of course, is not a selfish but a social function.
Housewives do not lay in bread and cheese simply to gratify their own
desire to be possessors of a large store, but for the sake of their
household. The true housekeeper or economic man is the man who is
consciously ministering to the real needs of the community. Like the
ruler or minister in the political sphere, he is a man who is performing
a public service.
This is equally true whether the housekeeper has a monopoly of the
purchase of bread and cheese for the household, or whether he or she has
to compete with others as to which is to be allowed to serve the public
in that particular transaction. Just as, under the party system, which
seems to be inseparable from the working of democratic institutions, men
stand for Parliament and compete for the honour of representing their
neighbours, so in most systems of industry men compete for the honour of
supplying the public. Competition in industry is practically as old as
industry. In the earliest picture that has come down to us of Greek
village life we read of the competition between potter and potter and
between minstrel and minstrel--a competition as keen and as fierce, we
may be sure, as that between rival shopkeepers to-day. For the opposite
of competition, as has been truly said, is not co-operation but monopoly
or bureaucracy: and there is no short and easy means of deciding between
the rival systems. Sometimes the community is better served by
entrusting one department wholly to one purveyor or one system of
management--as in the Postal Service, or the Army and Navy. Sometimes it
is clearly better to leave the matter open to competition. Nobody, for
instance, would propose to do with only one minstrel, and seal the lips
of all poets but the Poet Laureate. Sometimes, as in the case of the
organized professions and the liquor trade, a strictly regulated system
of competition has been considered best. No doubt the tendency at the
present time is setting strongly against competition and towards more
unified and more closely organized systems of doing business. But it is
important to make quite clear that there is nothing immoral or
anti-social about the fact of competition itself, and nothing
inconsistent with the idea of service and co-operation which should
underlie all social and economic activity. It is not competition itself,
as people often wrongly think, which is the evil, but the shallow and
selfish motives and the ruthless trampling down of the weak that are too
often associated with it. When we condemn the maxim 'the Devil take the
hindmost', it is not because we think we ought to treat the hindmost as
though he were the foremost--to buy cracked jars or patronize incapable
minstrels. It is because we feel that there is a wrong standard of
reward among those who have pushed to the front, and that the community
as a whole cannot ignore its responsibility towards its less fortunate
and capable members.
It is, indeed, quite impossible to abolish competition for the patronage
of the household without subjecting its members to tyranny or tying them
down to an intolerable uniformity--forcing them to suppress their own
temporary likes or dislikes and to go on taking in the same stuff in the
same quantities world without end. For the most serious and permanent
competition is not that between rival purveyors of the same goods,
between potter and potter and minstrel and minstrel, but between one
set of goods and another: between the potter and the blacksmith, the
minstrel and the painter. If we abolished competition permanently
between the British railways we could not make sure that the public
would always use them as it does now. People would still be at liberty
to walk or to drive or to bicycle or to fly, or, at the very worst, to
stay at home. Competition, as every business man knows, sometimes arises
from the most unexpected quarters. The picture-house and the bicycle
have damaged the brewer and the publican. Similarly the motor-car and
the golf links have spoilt the trade in the fine china ornaments such as
used to be common in expensively furnished drawing-rooms. People sit
less in their rooms, so spend less on decorating them. The members of
the household always retain ultimate control over their economic life,
if they care to exercise it. 'Whoso has sixpence,' as Carlyle said, 'is
sovereign (to the length of sixpence), over all men; commands Cooks to
feed him, Philosophers to teach him, Kings to mount guard over him,'--to
the length of sixpence. Passive resistance and the boycott are always
open to the public in the last resort against any of their servants who
has abused the powers of his position. A good instance of this occurred
in the events which led to the so-called Tobacco riots in Milan in 1848.
The Austrians thought they could force the Italians in their Lombard
provinces to pay for a government they hated by putting a heavy tax on
tobacco. But the Italians, with more self-control than we have shown in
the present war, with one accord gave up smoking. Here was a plain
competition between a monopoly and the consumer, between tobacco and
patriotism: between a united household and an unpopular servant: and the
household won, as it always can unless its members are incapable of
combined action or have been deprived by governmental tyranny of all
power to associate and to organize.
We are faced then with a community or household which has certain wants
that need to be supplied. The individual members of the community are
justified, within the limits of general well-being,[67] in deciding what
are their own wants and how to satisfy them. They claim the right to
_demand_, as the economists put it, the goods and services they require,
bread and cheese, poetry, tobacco, motor-bicycles, china ornaments. In
order to meet those demands, which are stable in essentials but subject
to constant modification in detail, there is ceaseless activity,
rivalry, competition, on the part of the purveyors--on the side of what
economists call _supply_. The business of housekeeping, or what is
called the economic process, is that of bringing this demand and this
supply into relation with one another. If the members of the household
said they wanted to eat the moon instead of sugar, their demand would
not be an economic demand: for no housekeeper could satisfy it.
Similarly on the supply side: if the baker insisted on bringing round
bad epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead of sugar,
the supply, however good it might seem to the baker and the grocer, and
however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their
work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on
behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for
something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon,
the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till
they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word
for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor
supplied something undreamed of by the household, but otherwise good of
its kind, he might succeed in persuading the household to like it--in
other words, in creating a demand. The late Sir Alfred Jones, by putting
bananas cheap on the market, persuaded us that we liked them. Similarly
Mr. Marvin, who deals in something better than bananas, has persuaded us
all to come here, though most of us would never have thought of it
unless he had created the demand in us.
Economic Progress, then, is progress both on the side of demand and on
the side of supply. It is a progress in wants as well as in their means
of satisfaction: a progress in the aspirations of the household as well
as in the contrivances of its purveyors: a progress in the sense of what
life might be, as well as in the skill and genius and organizing powers
of those to whom the community looks for help in the realization of its
hopes. It is important that this double aspect of our subject should be
realized, for in what follows we shall have no opportunity to dwell
further upon it. Space compels us to leave the household and its wants
and aspirations out of account and to direct our attention solely to the
side of supply; although it must always be remembered that no real and
permanent progress in the organization of production is possible without
improvements in the quality and reduction in the number of the
requirements of what is called civilization.[68] What we have to watch,
in our study of progress in industry, is the history of man as a
purveyor of the household: in other words, as a producer of goods and
services: from the days of the primitive savage with his bark canoe to
the gigantic industrial enterprises of our own time.
We can best do so by dividing our subject into two on somewhat similar
lines to the division in our study of government. Let us consider
industry, first as an activity involving a relationship between man and
Nature; secondly, as involving what may be called a problem of
industrial government, a problem arising out of the co-operation between
man and man in industrial work. In the first of these aspects we shall
see man as a maker, an inventor, an artist; in the second as a subject
or a citizen, a slave or a free man, in the Industrial Commonwealth.
Man as a maker or producer carries us back to the dawn of history. Man
is a tool-using animal and the early stages of human history are a
record of the elaboration of tools. The flint axes in our museums are
the earliest monuments of the activity of the human spirit. We do not
know what the cave men of the Old Stone Age said or thought, or indeed
whether they did anything that we should call speaking or thinking at
all; but we know what they made. Centuries and millenniums elapsed
between them and the first peoples of whom we have any more intimate
record--centuries during which the foundations of our existing
industrial knowledge and practice were being steadily laid. 'One may say
in general,' says Mr. Marvin,[69]
that most of the fruitful practical devices of mankind had
their origin in prehistoric times, many of them existing
then with little essential difference. Any one of them
affords a lesson in the gradual elaboration of the simple. A
step minute in itself leads on and on, and so all the
practical arts are built up, a readier and more observant
mind imitating and adapting the work of predecessors, as we
imagined the first man making his first flint axe. The
history of the plough goes back to the elongation of a bent
stick. The wheel would arise from cutting out the middle of
a trunk used as a roller. House architecture is the
imitation with logs and mud of the natural shelters of the
rocks, and begins its great development when men have learnt
to make square corners instead of a rough circle. And so on
with all the arts of life or pleasure, including clothing,
cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting.
How did this gradual progress come about? Mr. Marvin himself supplies
the answer. Through the action of the 'readier and more observant
minds'--in other words, through specialization and the division of
labour. As far back as we can go in history we find a recognition that
men are not all alike, that some have one gift and some another, and
that it is to the advantage of society to let each use his own gift in
the public service. Among primitive peoples there has indeed often been
a belief that men are compensated for physical weakness and disability
by peculiar excellence in some sphere of their own. Hephaestos among the
Greek gods was lame: so he becomes a blacksmith and uses his arms. Homer
is blind: so instead of fighting he sings of war. They would not go so
far as to maintain that all lame men must be good blacksmiths or all
blind men good poets: but at least they recognized that there was room
in the community for special types and that the blacksmith and the poet
were as useful as the ordinary run of cultivators and fighting men. The
Greek word for craftsman--[Greek: demiourgos]--'worker for the people,'
shows how the Greeks felt on this point. To them poetry and
craftsmanship were as much honourable occupations or, as we should say,
professional activities as fighting and tilling. Whether Homer took to
poetry because he could not fight or because he had an overwhelming
poetic gift, he had justified his place in the community.
Specialization is the foundation of all craftsmanship and therefore the
source of all industrial progress. We recognize this, of course, in
common speech. 'Practice makes perfect,' 'Genius is an infinite capacity
for taking pains,' are only different ways of saying that it is not
enough to be 'ready' and 'observant', but that continued activity and
concentration are necessary. A perfect industrial community would not be
a community where everybody was doing the same thing: nor would it be a
community where every one was doing just what he liked at the moment: it
would be a community where every one was putting all his strength into
the work which he was by nature best qualified to do--where, in the
words of Kipling:
No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as They Are.
Progress in industry, then, on this side, consists in increasing
specialization and in the perfection of the relationship between the
workman and his work. Man in this world is destined to labour, and
labour is often described as the curse of Adam. But in reality, as every
one knows who has tried it, or observed the habits of those who have,
idleness is far more of a curse than labour. Few men--at any rate in the
temperate zone--can be consistently idle and remain happy. The born
idler is almost as rare as the born poet. Most men, and, it must be
added, most women, are happier working. If holidays were the rule and
work the exception the world would be a much less cheerful place than it
is even to-day. Purposeful activity is as natural to man as playing is
to a kitten. From a purely natural point of view, no one has ever given
a better definition of happiness than Aristotle when he defined it as
_an activity of the soul in the direction of excellence in an unhampered
life_. By excellence, of course, in this famous definition, Aristotle
does not mean simply virtue: he means excellence in work. It is
impossible, as we all know, to be good in the abstract. We must be good
in some particular directions, _at_ some particular thing. And the
particular thing that we are good at is _our_ work, our craft, our
art--or, to use our less aesthetic English word, for which there is no
equivalent in Greek, our duty. If happiness is to be found in doing
one's duty, it does not result from doing that duty badly, but from
doing it well--turning out, as we say, a thoroughly good piece of work,
whether a day's work or a life work. There is a lingering idea, still
held in some quarters, that the more unpleasant an activity is the more
virtuous it is. This is a mere barbarous survival from the days of what
Nietzsche called slave-morality. We are each of us born with special
individual gifts and capacities. There is, if we only knew it, some
particular kind or piece of work which we are pre-eminently fitted to
do--some particular activity or profession, be it held in high or in low
repute in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady happiness
of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that it ministers to human
progress and to the glory of God deliberately to bury our talent out of
sight and to seek rather work which, because it is irksome and
unpleasant to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or really
well? No one who knows anything of education or of the training of the
young, no one, indeed, who has any love for children, would dare to say
that we should. Our State educational system, miserably defective though
it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering to the
special gifts of its pupils--of trying by scholarships, by Care
Committees, by the institution of schools with a special 'bias', to meet
the needs of different kinds of young people and to set them in the path
on which they are best fitted to travel.
In doing this the modern State is only trying to carry out the
principle laid down in the greatest book ever written on
education--Plato's _Republic_. Plato's object was to train every citizen
to fill the one position where he could lead the best life for the good
of the State. His aim was not to make his citizens happy but to promote
goodness; but he had enough faith in human nature--and who can be an
educational thinker without having faith in human nature?--to be
convinced that to enable men to 'do their bit', as we say to-day, was to
assure them of the truest happiness. We of this generation know how
abundantly that faith has been confirmed. And indeed we can appeal in
this matter not only to the common sense of Education Authorities or to
the philosophy of the ancients, but to the principles of the Christian
religion. The late Professor Smart, who was not only a good economist
but a good man; has some very pertinent words on this subject. 'If for
some reason that we know not of,' he remarks,[70]
this present is merely the first stage in being; if we are
all at school, and not merely pitched into the world by
chance to pick up our living as best we can ... it seems to
me that we have reason enough to complain of the existing
economic system.... I imagine that many of our churchgoing
people, if they ever get to the heaven they sing about, will
find themselves most uncomfortable, if it be a place for
which they have made no preparation but in the 'business' in
which they have earned their living.... A man's daily work
is a far greater thing towards the development of the God
that is in him than his wealth. And, however revolutionary
the idea is, I must say that all our accumulations of wealth
are little to the purpose of life if they do not tend
towards the giving to all men the opportunity of such work
as will have its reward _in the doing_.
And of his own particular life-work, teaching, he remarks, in words that
testify to his own inner peace and happiness, that 'some of us have got
into occupations which almost seem to guarantee immortality'.