(2) Commanders with their staff of Organizers. These direct and
co-ordinate the movements of the masses in directions judged to be for
the general welfare. They are followed by
(3) The Rank and File, consisting of those who live and work along
accepted and well-established lines in all grades of society, taking no
risks and making no changes.
(4) The Stragglers, or those who work for themselves alone, without
reference to the needs and prospects of the community. Among these
must be classed the squatters and backwoodsmen, and small crofters and
peasants who grow their own food and weave their own cloth. They do not
belong to civilized society, though they do no harm to it and cannot
quite escape its influence.
(5) The Campfollowers and Vultures, who have no regard for the welfare
of the community, but prey upon it for their own ends.
Classes (1) and (2) are by far the most important and valuable
constituents of the human race. They are the growing element, the
“cambium,” the grey matter of the brain. Whoever has sufficient
originality to strike out an original course, combined with loyalty
to humanity at large or to a smaller community; whoever is capable
of leadership, whether in war or peace, art or commerce, industry
or politics; whoever can lead others forward and inspire them with
courage to face difficulties――he belongs to the _élite_ of mankind,
to whatever grade of society he may belong. Far behind his class come
the rank and file of commonplace drudges, who work in a rut and submit
to being led like sheep. They may be clerks, domestic servants, trade
union operatives, pensioners, or small investors. They form the large,
undistinguished, but useful mass of humanity. Many kings have belonged
to this class.
Both the large capitalist and the trade union boss I should class
among the Commanders, and I should assign them a high rank in human
progressive elements. The former is often a Pathfinder in commerce and
industry, and the latter often points the way to the betterment of
manual workers. Both are in a position of great power, but are exposed
to the temptation to abuse it. The financier may succeed in restricting
the free market in an important human community for his own enrichment
and aggrandizement. The trade union boss may make a “corner” in a
certain form of labour and so deprive the community of some essential
commodity, such as housing accommodation. When this degeneration takes
place, both these types must be put into the Vulture class.
The same judgment must be passed on those who use the machinery of the
medium of exchange to further objects contrary to the interests of the
community, such as usurers, and purveyors of intoxicant drugs. These
also are among the Vultures.
When the first armed man transferred a method employed by nature into
a new medium, and derived his armour from the outer world instead
of growing it in his own organism, he took a step which led to many
similar re-interpretations. One of the most important of such steps
was Organization. The very word recalls its “organic” origin. The
organs of the human body form an interdependent community with a common
interest. The organs again are composed of tissues, and the tissues of
individual cells having, as many biologists believe, a rudimentary
consciousness of their own. All these――some millions of millions of
millions――form a vast and closely-organized community consisting of
many more distinct individuals than there are human beings on earth.
The human race is such an organized community. A swarm of bees is
another, but while the latter only deals with “natural” food-supplies
and housing materials, the human community, thanks primarily to the use
of fire, gathers its resources from realms utterly inaccessible to the
ordinary animal, and establishes an unassailable superiority. Thus the
human army, consisting of Pathfinders, Organizers, Rank and File, and
Stragglers, with a trail of Vultures behind, presses ever forward on
its victorious march of progress.
Its general procedure may be represented as follows:
The Pathfinders are in front, seeking out new avenues of advance.
They may discover a new coal mine or oil well or mineral deposit; a
more economical method of lighting and heating; an improved method
of weaving or printing; a new medicine; a new formula for expressing
numerical relations; an improved method of transmitting news; or merely
a simplified method of mending socks. Whatever it may be, the new
discovery is passed on to the organizers, the captains of industry, the
capitalists and financiers, and the trade unions. In a well-organized
community, the discovery or invention is given every opportunity of
proving its value. Where vested interests and monopolies stand in the
way, either in the camp of the capitalists and property holders or
in the ranks of labour, much opposition may be encountered, and the
community may be deprived of the advantages of the new discovery. But
if there is no such opposition, the work incidental to the utilization
of the discovery is distributed by the organizers among the rank and
file, consisting of mechanics, clerks, and small investors. As soon as
the industry is successfully established, the Vultures begin to hover
round. Some of them seek to drive the industry into a corner where
it can only exist by serving the interests of the Vultures. Other
Vultures endeavour to corner the labour trained by the pathfinders and
pioneers and hold the new industry to ransom. But in a well-organized
community these nefarious activities are kept within bounds. The
pathfinders, the organizers, and the rank and file are given their due
credit and reward, and the community reaps the full benefit of the
discovery.
And now let us examine the activities of the Pathfinders. In classical
times the most audacious and renowned of these were the Phœnicians,
who, armed with their shields and corselets of “oak and triple
bronze,” sailed through the Pillars of Hercules out from the tideless
Mediterranean into the unknown terrors of the Atlantic. Their ships
were seen in the Baltic, trading woven purple garments for amber, and
on the British coasts in search of tin. At the request of an Egyptian
Pharao, they circumnavigated Africa, and brought back wildly improbable
but, nevertheless, true stories about new constellations and the sun
culminating in the north.
In Egypt itself explorers and discoverers of another kind were busy.
The science of Chemistry was born there, and named after “Chem,”
the native name of Egypt. In Greece and its colonies the science of
Geometry attained a high standard, while Syracuse stands out as the
home of Archimedes, one of the greatest mathematicians, physicists,
and inventors of all time. These Pathfinders enriched humanity with
priceless gifts. They surveyed the field of possible discovery from a
high altitude, and their clear vision traced out the paths to higher
achievement, to be trodden by their successors.
Had they lived in better-organized communities, their labours would
have been turned to greater advantage, and would have benefited a
greater number of their fellow men. But the day of capitalism and
mass-production had not yet come. The splendid achievements of an
Archimedes only served to benefit a tyrant, and his single-handed
scientific fight against the Romans ended in disaster to his beloved
city.
In Greek and Roman days, owing to the lop-sided organization of human
society, scientific discoveries could only benefit a few powerful
people. The downtrodden underlings were unaffected by the work of the
Pathfinders. They had to await the dawn of the Industrial Age before
they could take part in the progress of the _élite_. Yet it must be
put to the credit of the Hieros, the Medicis, and the greater of the
Bourbon and Stuart Kings that they fostered the advancement of science
and protected the Pathfinders from the persecution of ecclesiastical
and other vultures.
The invention of gunpowder laid low the chivalry of the Middle Ages.
The Hobbling God triumphed over the mail-clad monopolist on horseback.
The Sudden Fire armed the foot-soldier with a winged shaft of death.
The stone-thrower had became the unerring sharp-shooter. The range of
human power increased apace. The glass-blower with his fiery furnace
produced cunning contrivances of glass which increased the range of the
human eye twenty or thirty-fold. A free philosopher like Spinoza could
discourse of the fundamental substance without fear or favour, since
the grinding of optical glasses assured him an independent livelihood.
Then came the French Revolution with its clarion call to a wider
organization of humanity, which was eventually brought about, not by
speeches and pamphlets, but by the harnessing of coal to inaugurate the
Mechanical Age.
The nineteenth century saw the fulfilment of the dream of an organized
Humanity, a human world unified, not by the spread of humanitarian
philosophies, but by the material bonds of progress.
Some of my critics have ridiculed my “robust” belief in the reality of
progress through invention and the use of machinery. I see no reason
to modify my view. A generation ago, Ruskin deplored the spread of
railways which scored their lines through “bleeding landscapes.” To me
a railway line is a thing of beauty, wherever it may be found. It is a
symbol of a higher will and of a purpose transcending the puny sphere
of the individual. To see the rails is as if the sinews and muscles
of some supernatural being were made visible and accessible to me.
And who shall say that I am wrong in that feeling? A railway _is_ an
organization superior to man. “Societies,” says Edward Carpenter,[3]
“not only of bees (as Maeterlinck has shown), but of all creatures
up to man, have, _qua_ societies, a life of their own, inclusive of
and superadded to that of their individual members.” And so a railway
appears to me as an individual of a higher order, closely organized and
endowed with a life of its own. Its mental equipment is its personnel,
its directors, clerks, drivers, guards and porters. Its body consists
of rails, bridges, tunnels, stations and rolling stock. It has a
soul and a living purpose. It has a power of self-maintenance and
self-preservation and a rudimentary memory.
[3] _The Art of Creation._
I heartily sympathize with the child who adores a locomotive engine.
To him, nothing could be more lavishly fraught with beauty. I saw a
little while ago a powerful engine at Waterloo Station at the head
of an express train for Bournemouth. It was a thing of perfect and
satisfying beauty. Its lines suggested calmness and strength and speed.
The wisp of steam about its safety valve spoke of well-controlled
powers within its massive frame. The driver, a clear-eyed man with
trusty hands and sturdy body, was a noble representative of Hephæstus.
One felt that the load of health-seeking humanity behind him was in
safe hands, that his nerves and muscles would work as perfectly as
the engine he regarded with such loving attention, and that the 108
miles of the non-stop journey would be accomplished without a hitch.
The beneficent monster lay there in the morning sun, ready to spring
forward on its swift trajectory across the “bleeding landscape”! And
there are people who can look upon the eager children in the train,
armed with their spades and buckets for playing in the health-giving
southern sunshine, and deny the progressiveness of the Mechanical Age!
They will probably argue, of course, that if it were not for the
smoke of the city, due to the “fires of Hephæstus,” there would be no
necessity to have trains to carry the children to the seaside. But the
smoke of cities is due mainly to incomplete combustion in domestic
hearths, and the remedy lies not in the discouragement of mechanical
invention but in its further extension until it provides us with a
smokeless city.
The fires of Hephæstus are fashioning a new world. They are welding
humanity into a coherent mass. All the metals, all the ninety chemical
elements, are being pressed into service. Whose service? The service
of a race whose destiny we can as yet only dimly appreciate. Already
we command temperatures varying from a region within a few degrees of
the absolute zero to within a few hundred degrees of the heat of the
sun. The sight of our eyes has been supplemented to such an extent that
we can appreciate and deal with some fifteen octaves of visible and
invisible light instead of the single octave “naturally” accessible
to our sight. We command pressures of tons per square millimetre and
degrees of vacuum down to a hundred-millionth of an atmosphere. We can
photograph the track of a single atom tearing its way through moist
air. We can print 500,000 copies of a paper of 150,000 words daily
and sell it for a penny. We have banished bears and wolves from our
home countries and have learnt to wage war against invisible germs of
disease. We have acquired the power of bringing beautiful music into
the homes of our humblest citizens. The luxuries of our forbears are
the common possessions of our own generation. If we are not happier
than our ancestors, the fault lies in ourselves, in our ingratitude
and lack of imagination. Or must we conclude that happiness is a
negligible thing in the great scheme of progress, and that that scheme
does not concern itself with our individual feelings?
I for one believe that happiness is on the up-grade, too. Hephæstus is
not only a strong and a clever god, but a god with a sense of humour
and a very lovable character.