industry and the best measure of success in any industrial system is the
degree to which it enables men to 'do their bit' and so to find
happiness in their daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively
religious language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the
God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that in the great
battle which Ruskin and William Morris fought almost single-handed
against all the Philistines of the nineteenth century, Ruskin and
Morris, however wrong they may have been on points of practical detail,
were right in principle. Let us make up our minds that a world in which
men have surrendered the best hours of the day to unsatisfying drudgery,
and banished happiness to their brief periods of tired leisure, is so
far from civilized that it has not even made clear to itself wherein
civilization consists. And when we read such a passage as the following
from a leading modern economist, let us not yield to the promptings of
our lower nature and acquiesce in its apparent common sense, but
remember that economists, like all workmen, are bounded by the limits of
their own particular craft or study. 'The greater part of the world's
work,' says Professor Taussig,[71] the leading exponent of Economics at
Harvard,
is not in itself felt to be pleasurable. Some reformers have
hoped to reach a social system under which all work would be
in itself a source of satisfaction. It is probable that
such persons are made optimistic by the nature of their own
doings. They are writers, schemers, reformers; they are
usually of strongly altruistic character, and the
performance of any duty or set task brings to them the
approval of an exacting conscience; and they believe that
all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit.
The world would be a much happier place if their state of
mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are
of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any
loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work
for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a
humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There
must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering
and sawing, and all the severe physical exertion which,
however lightened by tools and machinery, yet can never be
other than labour in the ordinary sense of the word.
When Professor Taussig assures us that 'the great mass of men are of a
humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or loftiness of character'
he is simply denying the Christian religion. To argue the point with him
would carry us too far. We will do no more here than remind him that the
people to whom the Founder of Christianity preached, and even those who
were chosen to be its first disciples, were, like this audience,
distinctly humdrum, and that assuredly the American Professor would not
have discerned in them promising material for a world-transforming
religious movement. What people see in others is often a mirror of
themselves. Perhaps Professor Taussig, in spite of his excellent book,
is rather a humdrum person himself.
When, however, Professor Taussig declares that 'the greater part of the
world's work is not in itself felt to be pleasurable' he is saying what,
under existing conditions, we must all recognize to be true. A year or
two ago Mr. Graham Wallas made an investigation into this very question,
the results of which confirmed the general impression that modern
workmen find little happiness in their work.[72] But two of the
conclusions which he reached conflict in a rather curious way with the
statement of Professor Taussig. Mr. Wallas's evidence, which was largely
drawn from students of Ruskin College, led him to the conclusion 'that
there is less pleasantness or happiness in work the nearer it approaches
the fully organized Great Industry'. The only workman who spoke
enthusiastically of his work was an agricultural labourer who 'was very
emphatic with regard to the pleasure to be obtained from agricultural
work'. Professor Taussig, on the other hand, selects four agricultural
occupations, ditching, delving, sowing, and reaping, as
characteristically unpleasant and looks to machinery and the apparatus
of the Industrial Revolution to counteract this unpleasantness. But the
most interesting evidence gathered by Mr. Wallas was that relating to
women workers. He had an opportunity of collecting the views of girls
employed in the laundries and poorer kind of factories in Boston. 'The
answers', he says,[73] 'surprised me greatly. I expected to hear those
complaints about bad wages, hard conditions and arbitrary discipline
which a body of men working at the same grade of labour would certainly
have put forward. But it was obvious that the question "Are you happy?"
meant to the girls "Are you happier than you would have been if you had
stayed at home instead of going to work?" And almost every one of them
answered "Yes".' Why were they unhappy at home? Let Professor Taussig
reflect on the answer. Not because they had 'rough' or 'coarse' or
'humdrum' work to do, as in a factory or laundry, but because they had
nothing to do, and they had found idleness unbearable. 'One said that
work "took up her mind", she had been awfully discontented'. Another
that 'you were of some use'. Another thought 'it was because the hours
went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time,
there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.' 'Asked a little
girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It
made her feel she was worth something.' And Mr. Wallas concludes that it
is just because 'everything that is interesting, even though it is
laborious, in the women's arts of the old village is gone': because
'clothes are bought ready-made, food is bought either ready-cooked, like
bread and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of cooking':
in fact just because physical exertion has been lightened by books and
machinery, that 'there results a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose
existence has hardly been indicated by our present method of
sociological enquiry'.
It would seem then that the task of associating modern industrial work
with happiness is not impossible, if we would only set ourselves to the
task. And the task is a two-fold one. It is, first, to make it possible
for people to follow the employment for which they are by nature best
fitted; and secondly, to study much more closely than heretofore, from
the point of view of happiness, the conditions under which work is done.
The first task involves a very considerable reversal of current
educational and social values. It does not simply mean paving the way
for the son of an engine-driver to become a doctor or a lawyer or a
cavalryman. It means paving the way for the son of a duke to become,
without any sense of social failure, an engine-driver or a merchant
seaman or a worker on the land--and to do so not, as to-day, in the
decent seclusion of British Columbia or Australia, but in our own
country and without losing touch, if he desires it, with his own natural
circle of friends. The ladder is an old and outworn metaphor in this
connexion. Yet it is still worth remembering that the Angels whom Jacob
observed upon it were both ascending and descending. It is one of the
fallacies of our social system to believe that a ladder should only be
used in one direction--and that the direction which tends to remove men
from contact and sympathy with their fellows. But in truth we need to
discard the metaphor of the ladder altogether, with its implied
suggestion that some tasks of community-service are more honourable and
involve more of what the world calls 'success' than others. We do not
desire a system of education which picks out for promotion minds gifted
with certain kinds of capacity and stimulates them with the offer of
material rewards, while the so-called humdrum remainder are left, with
their latent talents undiscovered and undeveloped.
Recent educational experiments,[74] and not least that most testing of
all school examinations, the war, have shown us that we must revise all
our old notions as to cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short
of real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such personage as
the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally a man of unusual energy and
mental power directed into wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose
special powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the routine
of school life. And just as the criminal points to serious defects in
our social system, so the dunce points to serious defects in our
educational system. The striking record of our industrial schools and
reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do
when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the
chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and
outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the
University. We need a system which treats every child, rich or poor, as
a living and developing personality, which enables every English boy and
girl to stay at school at least up to the time when his or her natural
bent begins to disclose itself, which provides for all classes of the
community skilled guidance in the choice of employment based upon
psychological study of individual gifts and aptitude,[75] which sets up
methods of training and apprenticeship in the different trades--or, as I
would prefer to call them the different professions--such as to
counteract the deadening influence of premature specialization, and
which ensures good conditions and a sense of self-respect and
community-service to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether
their bent be manual or mechanical or commercial or administrative, or
for working on the land or for going to sea, or towards the more special
vocations of teaching or scholarship or the law or medicine or the cure
of souls. No one can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness
associated with our existing social system is due to the fact that,
owing to defects in our education and our arrangements for the choice of
employment, there are myriads of square pegs in round holes. This
applies with especial force to women, to whom many of the square holes
are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack of opportunities
for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions of custom and, in some
cases, to narrow and retrograde professional enactments. The war has
brought women their chance, not only in the office and the workshop,
but in higher administrative and organizing positions, and not the least
of its results is the revelation of undreamt-of capacities in these
directions.
In the second task, that of perfecting the adaptation between men and
their tools, we have much to learn from the industrial history of the
past. It is natural for men to enjoy 'talking shop', and this esoteric
bond of union has existed between workmen in all ages. We may be sure
that there were discussions amongst connoisseurs in the Stone Age as to
the respective merits of their flint axes, just as there are to-day
between golfers about niblicks and putters, and between surgeons as to
the technique of the extraction of an appendix. A good workman loves his
tools. He is indeed inseparable from them, as our law acknowledges by
forbidding a bankrupt's tools to be sold up. Give a good workman, in
town or country, a sympathetic listener and he is only too ready to
expatiate on his daily work. This sense of kinship between men and their
tools and material is so little understood by some of our modern expert
organizers of industry that it is worth while illustrating it at some
length. I make no apology, therefore, for quoting a striking passage
from an essay by Mr. George Bourne, who is not a trade unionist or a
student of Labour politics but an observer of English village life, who
has taken the trouble to penetrate the mind of what is commonly regarded
as the stupidest and most backward--as it is certainly the least
articulate--class of workmen in this country, the agricultural labourer
in the southern counties. 'The men', he writes,
are commonly too modest about their work, and too
unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of
discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by
itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in
technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not
dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of
evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical
skill exercised in country labours may be purely deduced
from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country
tools.
The beauty of tools is not accidental, but inherent and
essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the
wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the
curves of an adze-head or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or
steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more
indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (in the limits of
its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for
different soils: it is widened out or narrowed; it is
deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the
foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the
technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar
example of beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by
the admired shape of boats, which, however, is so variable
(the statement is made on the authority of an old
coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch
of shore may be dangerous, if not entirely useless, at
another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines
the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share,
so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is
responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all
tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow.
But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because
there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its
calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the
violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of
power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious
as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with
anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example
of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler
tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat,
fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the
skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants,
adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal
order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law
of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and
prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees
is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and
convexity in the beer-barrel; the same that, exerting itself
with matchless precision through the trained senses of
haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles
of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the
beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper
handling of it technique is present ...
'It is not the well-informed and those eager to teach', he says in
another passage,
who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization; it is
the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found men
studying the quality of vines grown on different pockets of
earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and the Rhine have
done for ages. And even so the English generations have
watched the produce of their varying soils. When or how was
it learnt--was it at Oxford or at Cambridge?--that the
apples of Devonshire are so specially fit for cider? Or how
is it that hops are growing--some of them planted before
living memory--all along the strip of green sand which
encircles the Weald--that curious strip to which text-books
at last point triumphantly as being singularly adapted for
hops? Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge
was not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted
upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists,
boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the
knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb
knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing water.
When the peculiar values of a plot of land have been
established--as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too
strong' for bricks--then further forms of localized
knowledge are brought to supplement this, until at last the
bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the field;
and immediately new problems arise. The old farm-cart,
designed for roots or manure, has not the most suitable
shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide wheels,
which were intended for the softness of ploughed land, are
needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon, therefore, the
local wheelwright begins to lighten his spokes and felloes,
and to make the wheels a trifle less 'dished'; while his
blacksmith binds them in a narrower but thicker tyre, to
which he gives a shade more tightness. For the wheelwright
learns from the carter--that ignorant fellow--the answer to
the new problems set by a load of bricks. A good carter, for
his part, is able to adjust his labour to his locality. A
part of his duty consists in knowing what constitutes a fair
load for his horse in the district where he is working. So
many hundred stock bricks, so many more fewer of the red or
wire-cut, such and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or
straw, or coal, or drain-pipes, or slates, according to
their kinds and sizes, will make as much as an average horse
can draw in this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are
bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts
(as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are
put before a cart and load which the London carter would
deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey.
So it goes throughout civilization: there is not an industry
but produces its own special knowledge relating to
unclassified details of adjustment.[76]
It is this craft-knowledge and common professional feeling which is at
the basis of all associations of workpeople, from the semi-religious
societies of ancient times, which met in secret to worship their
patron-god--Hephaestos, the god of the metal-workers, or Asclepios, the
god of the doctors--through the great guilds of the Middle Ages to the
trade unions and professional organizations of to-day. Trade unions do
not exist simply to raise wages or to fight the capitalist, any more
than the British Medical Association exists simply to raise fees and to
bargain with the Government. They exist to serve a professional need: to
unite men who are doing the same work and to promote the welfare and
dignity of that work. It is this which renders so difficult the problems
of adjustment which arise owing to the introduction of new and
unfamiliar processes. Professional associations are, and are bound to
be, conservative: their conservatism is honourable and to their credit:
for they are the transmitters of a great tradition. The problem in every
case is to ensure the progress necessary to the community without injury
to that sense of 'fellowship in the mystery' on which the social spirit
of the particular class of workmen depends. It is from this point of
view that recent American proposals in the direction of 'scientific
management' are most open to criticism: for they involve the break-up of
the craft-spirit without setting anything comparable in its place. In
fact, Mr. F. W. Taylor, one of the inventors of what is called the
'system' of scientific management, frankly ignores or despises the
craft-spirit and proposes to treat the workman as a being incapable of
understanding the principles underlying the practice of his art. He goes
so far as to lay it down as a general principle that 'in almost all the
mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so
great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to
actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this
science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him
or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient
mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent
industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time,
but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make
happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as
involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real
or intense relationship between the workman and his work, stands
self-condemned. If we are looking for _real_ industrial progress it is
elsewhere that we must turn.
This leads us naturally on to the second great division of our subject:
progress in the methods of co-operation between man and man in doing
industrial work. For if man is a social animal his power to do his bit
and his consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least, from his
social environment. The lonely craftsman perfecting his art in the
solitude of a one-man workshop does not correspond with our industrial
ideal any more than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general
religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship, William
Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of industry in his immortal
sentence: 'Fellowship is Life and lack of Fellowship is Death.' Our
study of the workman, then, is not complete when we have seen him with
his tools: we must see him also among his workmates. We must see
industry not simply as a process of production but as a form of
association; and we must realize that the association of human beings
for the purpose of industrial work involves what is just as much a
problem of government as their association in the great political
community which we call the State.
It is difficult to see the record of the progress of industrial
government in clear perspective for the simple reason that the world is
still so backward as regards the organization of this side of its common
life. The theory and practice of industrial government is generations,
even centuries, behind the theory and practice of politics. We are still
accustomed in industry to attitudes of mind and methods of management
which the political thought of the Western World has long since
discarded as incompatible with its ideals. Two instances must suffice to
illustrate this. It is constantly being said, both by employers and by
politicians, and even by writers in sympathy with working-class
aspirations, that all that the workman needs in his life is security.
Give him work under decent conditions, runs the argument, with
reasonable security of tenure and adequate guarantees against sickness,
disablement and unemployment, and all will be well. This theory of what
constitutes industrial welfare is, of course, when one thinks it out,
some six centuries out of date. It embodies the ideal of the old feudal
system, but without the personal tie between master and man which
humanized the feudal relationship. Feudalism, as we saw in our study of
political government, was a system of contract between the lord and the
labourer by which the lord and master ran the risks, set on foot the
enterprises (chiefly military), and enjoyed the spoils, incidental to
mediaeval life, while the labourer stuck to his work and received
security and protection in exchange. Feudalism broke down because it
involved too irksome a dependence, because it was found to be
incompatible with the personal independence which is the birthright of a
modern man. So it is idle to expect that the ideal of security will
carry us very far by itself towards the perfect industrial commonwealth.