ideas of politics and men's ideas of industry. It is quite common, even
in these latter days, and among those who have freely sacrificed their
nearest and dearest to the claims of the State, to hear manufacturers
and merchants say that they have a 'right to a good profit'. The
President of the Board of Trade remarked openly in the House of Commons
after many months of war that it was more than one could expect of human
nature for coal-owners not to get the highest price they could. Such a
standpoint is not merely indecent: it is hopelessly out-of-date. Looked
at from the political point of view it is a pure anachronism. There used
to be times when men made large fortunes out of the service of
government, as men still make them out of the service of the community
in trade and industry to-day. In the days of St. Matthew, when
tax-gathering was let out by contract, the apostle's partners would
probably have declared, as Mr. Runciman does to-day, that it was more
than one could expect of human nature that a publican who had a
government contract for the collection of the taxes should not get all
he could out of the tax-payer. It is, indeed, little more than a century
ago since it was a matter of course in this country to look upon oversea
colonies merely as plantations--that is, as business investments rather
than as communities of human beings. The existence of Chartered Company
government marks a survival of this habit of mind. The old colonial
system, which embodied this point of view, proved demoralizing not only
to the home government but to the colonists, as a similar view is to the
working class, and it led to the loss of the American colonies as surely
as a similar attitude on the part of employers leads to unrest and
rebellion among workpeople to-day.
We have thus a long way to travel before the ideals of politics have
been assimilated into the industrial life of the community and have
found fitting embodiment in its kindred and more complex problems. But
at least we have reached a point where we can see what the problem of
industrial government is. We can say with assurance that a system which
treats human beings purely as instruments or as passive servants, and
atrophies their self-determination and their sense of individual and
corporate responsibility, is as far from perfection in industry as the
Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable
sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with
redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of
the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings,
with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful
traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or
workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them
in this--that they too often stand for similarly authoritarian ideas of
government and direction. Industry is still an autocracy, as politics
was in the days before the supremacy of Parliament. Power still descends
from above instead of springing from below. It is a power limited no
doubt by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative
control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the government of England
used to be before the transference of sovereignty from the monarch to
the representatives of his subjects. It was recently announced in the
press that Lord Rhondda had bought a group of Welsh collieries for 2
millions, and that as a result 'Lord Rhondda now controls over 3-1/2
millions of capital, pays 2-1/2 millions in wages every year, and is
virtually the dictator of the economic destiny of a quarter of a million
miners. Rumours are also current', the extract continues, 'that Lord
Rhondda is extending his control over the press of Wales'.[78] The
existence of such power in this twentieth century in the hands of single
individuals, not selected from the mass for their special wisdom or
humanity, is a stupendous fact which must give pause to any one who is
inclined to feel complacent about modern industrial progress. In days
gone by political power was as irresponsible as the economic power
wielded to-day by Lord Rhondda; and it descended from father to son by
hereditary right in the same way as the control over the lives of
countless American workers descends to-day as a matter of course from
John D. Rockefeller senior to John D. Rockefeller junior. If there is
any reality at all in our political faith we must believe that a similar
development towards self-government can and must take place in
industry. It may be that generations will elapse before the problems of
industrial government find a final and satisfactory constitutional
solution. But at least we can say that there is only one basis for that
solution which is compatible with a sound ideal of government, or indeed
with any reasoned view of morality or religion--the basis of individual
and corporate freedom with its corresponding obligations of
responsibility and self-respect. No nation, as Abraham Lincoln said, can
remain half-slave and half-free: and it was a greater than Lincoln who
warned us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. It is this
underlying conflict of ideals in the organization of our existing
economic system which is the real cause of the 'Labour unrest' of which
we have heard so much in recent years.
With this warning in our minds as to the imperfections of our modern
industrial organization, let us briefly survey the record of the forms
of economic association which preceded it.
The earliest form of industrial grouping is, of course, the family; and
the family, as we all know, still retains its primitive character in
some occupations as a convenient form of productive association. This is
particularly the case in agriculture in communities where peasant
holdings prevail. But the family is so much more than an industrial
group that it hardly falls to us to consider it further here.
Outside the family proper, industrial work among primitive peoples is
often carried on by slaves. It was a step forward in human progress when
primitive man found that it was more advantageous to capture his enemies
than to kill or eat them; and it was a still greater step forward when
he found that there was more to be got out of slaves by kind treatment
than by compulsion. This is not the place in which to go into the vexed
questions connected with various forms of slavery. Suffice it to say
that it is a profound mistake to dismiss the whole system in one
undiscriminating condemnation. Slavery involves the denial of freedom,
and as such it can never be good. But other systems besides slavery
implicitly involve the denial of freedom. Some of the finest artistic
work in the world has been done by slaves--and by slaves not working
under compulsion but in the company of free men and on terms of
industrial equality with them. This should serve to remind us that, in
judging of systems of industry, we must look behind the letter of the
law to the spirit of the times and of social institutions. Slavery at
its best merges insensibly into wage-labour at its lower end. Many of
the skilled slaves of ancient Greece and Rome are hardly distinguishable
in status from a modern workman bound by an unusually long and strict
indenture and paid for his work not only in money but partly in truck.
In order to stimulate their productive capacity it was found necessary
in Greece and Rome to allow skilled slaves to earn and retain
money--although in the eye of the law they were not entitled to do so;
and they were thus frequently in a position to purchase their own
freedom and become independent craftsmen. Slavery in the household and
in small workshops is open to many and serious dangers, which need not
be particularized here; but the worst abuses of slavery have always
taken place where slaves have been easily recruited, as in the early
days of European contact with Africa, and when there were large openings
for their employment in gangs on work of a rough and unskilled
character. The problem of slavery in its worse forms is thus at bottom a
cheap-labour problem analogous to that which confronts North America and
South Africa to-day; and there is an essential difference which is often
ignored between the educated slave in a Roman Government office who did
the work of a First Division Civil Servant for his imperial master and
his compeer working in the fields of South Italy: and between the
household servants of a Virginian family and the plantation-slaves of
the farther South. Let us remember, in passing judgement on what is
admittedly an indefensible system, that during the war which resulted in
the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders of the South trusted
their household slaves to protect the women and children during their
absence from home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There is
another side to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as surely as there is another side
to Mr. Carnegie's paean of modern industrialism in his _Triumphant
Democracy_.
Systems of serfdom or caste which bind the workman to his work without
permitting him to be sold like a slave may be regarded as one step
higher than slavery proper. Such systems are common in stable and
custom-bound countries, and persisted throughout the European Middle
Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change gradually broke
up the system in this country and left the old-time villein a free but
often a landless and property less man. The transition from serfdom to
the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal
dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it
was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional
position of service to the community to a blind and precarious
individualism. It was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from
status to contract. This famous nineteenth-century aphorism is eloquent
of the limitations of that too purely commercial age. Every thinking man
would admit to-day that status at its best is a better thing than
contract at its best--that the soldier is a nobler figure than the army
contractor, and that corporate feeling and professional honour are a
better stimulus to right action than business competition and a laudable
keenness to give satisfaction to a valuable customer. We have always
suffered from the temptation in this country of adapting business
methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods
to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship
itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an
unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the
idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat
the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a
loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. Such
theories and battle-cries may serve for a 'nation of shopkeepers'; but
that opprobrious phrase has never been true of the great mass of the
English people, and it was never less true than to-day.
The idea of industrial work as the fulfilment of a contract, whether
freely or forcibly made, is thus essentially at variance with the ideal
of community service. It is difficult for a man who makes his livelihood
by hiring himself out as an individual for what he can get out of one
piece of work after another to feel the same sense of community service
or professional pride as the man who is serving a vocation and has
dedicated his talents to some continuous and recognized form of work. It
is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory in
principle compared with the guilds of the town workmen in the Middle
Ages and with the organized professions of to-day; and it is this which
explains why trade unions of recent years have come to concern
themselves more and more with questions of status rather than of wages
and to regard the occupation which they represent more and more as a
profession rather than a trade. No one has laid bare the deficiencies of
the wage-system more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous chapter in
which he foreshadows the principle of collective bargaining. 'What are
the common wages of labour', he there remarks,[79]
'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between
those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same.
The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as
little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in
order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of
labour.... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the
combinations of masters, though frequently of those of
workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that
masters rarely combine is as ignorant of the world as of the
subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of
tacit but constant and uniform combination not to raise the
wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this
combination is everywhere a most unpopular action and a sort
of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We
seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the
usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which
nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into
particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even
below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost
secrecy till the moment of execution; and, when the workmen
yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though
severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other
people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted
by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who
sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind,
combine of their own accord to raise the price of labour.
Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of
provisions, sometimes the great profit which their masters
make by their work.'
These words were written 140 years ago, but, as we all know, they are
still true of the working of the system to-day. Indeed the war has
served to emphasize their truth by showing us how deeply entrenched are
the habits of bargaining and of latent antagonism which the working of
the wage-system has engendered. It is the defect of the wage-system, as
Adam Smith makes clear to us, that it lays stress on just those points
in the industrial process where the interests of employers and
workpeople run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far more
important aspects in which they are partners and fellow-workers in the
service of the community. This defect cannot be overcome by
strengthening one party to the contract at the expense of the other, by
crushing trade unions or dissolving employers' combinations, or even by
establishing the principle of collective bargaining. It can only be
overcome by the recognition on both sides that industry is in essence
not a matter of contract and bargaining at all, but of mutual
interdependence and community service: and by the growth of a new ideal
of status, a new sense of professional pride and corporate duty and
self-respect among all who are engaged in the same function. No one can
say how long it may take to bring about such a fundamental change of
attitude, especially among those who have most to lose, in the material
sense, by an alteration in the existing distribution of economic power.
But the war has cleared away so much of prejudice and set so much of our
life in a new light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the
realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no country in the
world is in a better position than we are to redeem modern industry from
the reproach of materialism and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis,
and that the country which shall first have had the wisdom and the
courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension of human
liberty and happiness and will have shown that along this road and no
other lies the industrial progress of mankind.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
1. _Economics_:
H. Clay, _Economics for the General Reader_. 1916.
Ruskin, _Unto this last_.
Smart, _Second Thoughts of an Economist_. 1916.
2. _Man and his Tools_:
Marvin, _The Living Past_. 1913.
F. W. Taylor, _The Principles of Scientific Management_. 1911.
Hoxie, _Scientific Management and Labour_. 1916.
3. _Industrial Government_:
Aristotle, _Politics_ (Book I, chapters on Slavery).
Zimmern, _The Greek Commonwealth_ (chapters on Slavery). 1911.
Ashley, _The Economic Organization of England_. 1914.
Unwin, _Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries_.
S. and B. Webb, _The History of Trade Unionism_.
Macgregor, _The Evolution of Industry_ (Home University Library).
Wallas, _The Great Society_. 1914.
G. D. H. Cole, _The World of Labour_. 1915.
_Round Table, June 1916 (Article on the Labour Movement and the
Future of British Industry)._
FOOTNOTES:
[67] Including the well-being of the producers--a point which is too
often overlooked.
[68] On this point see _Poverty and Waste_, by Hartley Withers, 1914,
written before the war, which has driven its lessons home.
[69] _The Living Past_, pp. 20, 21.
[70] _Second Thoughts of an Economist_, p. 89.
[71] _Principles of Economics_, vol. i, p. 11. It is interesting to note
that in his latest book, _Inventors and Money-making, lectures on some
relations between Economics and Psychology_ (1915), Professor Taussig to
some extent goes back upon the point of view of the extract given above.
[72] A similar inquiry on a much larger scale was made by Adolf
Levinstein in his book _Die Arbeiterfrage_ (Munich, 1910). He examined
4,000 workpeople, consisting of coalminers, cotton operatives, and
engineers. With the exception of a few turners and fitters almost all
replied that they found little or no pleasure in their work.
[73] _The Great Society_, p. 363.
[74] Especially the wonderful results obtained from the young criminals
at the Little Commonwealth in Dorsetshire.
[75] See _Readings in Vocational Guidance_ by Meyer Bloomfield (Boston,
1915).
[76] _Lucy Bettesworth_, pp. 178-80, and 214-16.
[77] This sentence is practically an unconscious paraphrase of a passage
from Aristotle's defence of slavery.
[78] _The Welsh Outlook_, August 1916, p. 272.
[79] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, ch. viii.
IX
PROGRESS IN ART
A. CLUTTON BROCK
It is often said that there can be no such thing as progress in art. At
one time the arts flourish, at another they decay: but, as Whistler put
it, art happens as men of genius happen; and men cannot make it happen.
They cannot discover what circumstances favour art, and therefore they
cannot attempt to produce those circumstances. There are periods of
course in which the arts, or some one particular art, progress. One
generation may excel the last; through several generations an art may
seem to be rushing to its consummation. This happened with Greek
sculpture and the Greek drama in the sixth and fifth centuries; with
architecture and all kindred arts in western Europe in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, and at the same time with many arts in China. It
happened with painting and sculpture in Italy in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, with literature in England in the sixteenth
century, with music in Germany in the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth. But in all these cases there followed a
decline, often quite unconscious at the time and one of which we cannot
discover the causes. Attempts are made by historians of the arts to
state the causes; but they satisfy only those who make them, for they
are, in fact, only statements of the symptoms of decline. They tell us
what happened, not why it happened. And they all seem to point to two
conclusions about the course of the arts, both of which would make us
despair of any settled progress in them. The first is that the practice
of any art by any particular people always follows a certain natural
course of growth, culmination, and decay. At least it always follows
this course where an art is practised naturally and therefore with
success. Art in fact, in its actual manifestations, is like the life of
an individual human being and subject to inexorable natural laws. It is
born, as men are born, without the exercise of will; and in the same way
it passes through youth, maturity, and old age. The second conclusion
follows from this, and it is that one nation or age cannot take up an
art where another has left it. That is where art seems to differ from
science. The mass of knowledge acquired in one country can, if that
country loses energy to apply or increase it, be utilized by another.
But we cannot so make use of the art of the Greeks or of the Italian
Renaissance or of our own Middle Ages. In the Gothic revival we tried to
make use of the art of the Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We
imitated without understanding, and we could not understand because we
were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages. Art, in fact, is always a
growth of its own time which cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell
why it grows in one time and among one people and not in another.
That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of
it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a
product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a
dream. But that it is not; for men produce it in their waking hours and
with the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints a
picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He exercises will and
choice in all his actions, and the man who buys a picture does the same.
We talk of inspiration in the arts as something that cannot be
commanded, but there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can
make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will. It jumps
into one mind and not into another just like an artistic inspiration.
And further we are taught and trained in the arts as in the sciences;
and success in both depends a great deal upon the nature of the
training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to
those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to
make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre
to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine
school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact
that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works
even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled
all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools
in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from
Florence, they were quickened from Florence, however much their art kept
its own natural character. But this school which had the best teaching
also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was higher and its
heights were higher; and for this reason, that the whole Florentine
intellect went both into the teaching and into the practice of painting
and sculpture. The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the
scientific faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never
relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was eager for
knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint things as he saw them; he
tried to discover how they were made, what were the laws of their growth
and construction; and his knowledge of these things changed the
character of his vision, made him see the human body, for instance, as
no mediaeval artist had ever seen it; made him see it as an engineer
sees a machine. Just as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man
who does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw more in the
human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw it with a scientific as well
as an aesthetic passion, and all this science of his enriched his art so
that there has never since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at
once so logical and so expressive.