The mere differences in thickness of population and facility of movement
that have been discussed thus far, will involve consequences remarkable
enough, upon the _facies_ of the social body; but there are certain
still broader features of the social order of the coming time, less
intimately related to transit, that it will be convenient to discuss at
this stage. They are essentially outcomes of the enormous development of
mechanism which has been the cardinal feature of the nineteenth century;
for this development, by altering the method and proportions of almost
all human undertakings,[20] has altered absolutely the grouping and
character of the groups of human beings engaged upon them.
Throughout the world for forty centuries the more highly developed
societies have always presented under a considerable variety of
superficial differences certain features in common. Always at the base
of the edifice, supporting all, subordinate to all, and the most
necessary of all, there has been the working cultivator, peasant, serf,
or slave. Save for a little water-power, a little use of windmills, the
traction of a horse or mule, this class has been the source of all the
work upon which the community depends. And, moreover, whatever labour
town developments have demanded has been supplied by the muscle of its
fecund ranks. It has been, in fact--and to some extent still is--the
multitudinous living machinery of the old social order; it carried,
cropped, tilled, built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owning
this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound
usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often
equestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility,
in most European countries it is organized as a nobility; it is
represented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and in
China--the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organized
social system the old order ever developed--it finds its equivalent in
the members of a variously buttoned mandarinate, who ride, not on
horses, but on a once adequate and still respectable erudition. These
two primary classes may and do become in many cases complicated by
subdivisions; the peasant class may split into farmers and labourers,
the gentlemen admit a series of grades and orders, kings, dukes, earls,
and the like, but the broad distinction remains intact, as though it
was a distinction residing in the nature of things.[21]
From the very dawn of history until the first beginnings of mechanism in
the eighteenth century, this simple scheme of orders was the universal
organization of all but savage humanity, and the chief substance of
history until these later years has been in essence the perpetual
endeavour of specific social systems of this type to attain in every
region the locally suitable permanent form, in face of those two
inveterate enemies of human stability, innovation, and that secular
increase in population that security permits. The imperfection of the
means of communication rendered political unions of a greater area than
that swept by a hundred-mile radius highly unstable. It was a world of
small states. Lax empires came and went, at the utmost they were the
linking of practically autonomous states under a common _Pax_. Wars were
usually wars between kingdoms, conflicts of this local experiment in
social organization with that. Through all the historical period these
two well-defined classes of gentle and simple acted and reacted upon
each other, every individual in each class driven by that same will to
live and do, that imperative of self-establishment and aggression that
is the spirit of this world. Until the coming of gunpowder, the man on
horseback--commonly with some sort of armour--was invincible in battle
in the open. Wherever the land lay wide and unbroken, and the great
lines of trade did not fall, there the horseman was master--or the
clerkly man behind the horseman. Such a land was aristocratic and tended
to form castes. The craftsman sheltered under a patron, and in guilds in
a walled town, and the labourer was a serf. He was ruled over by his
knight or by his creditor--in the end it matters little how the
gentleman began. But where the land became difficult by reason of
mountain or forest, or where water greatly intersected it, the pikeman
or closer-fighting swordsman or the bowman could hold his own, and a
democratic flavour, a touch of repudiation, was in the air. In such
countries as Italy, Greece, the Alps, the Netherlands, and Great
Britain, the two forces of the old order, the aristocrat and the common
man, were in a state of unstable equilibrium through the whole period of
history. A slight change[22] in the details of the conflict for
existence could tilt the balance. A weapon a little better adapted to
one class than the other, or a slight widening of the educational gap,
worked out into historically imposing results, to dynastic changes,
class revolutions and the passing of empires.
Throughout it was essentially one phase of human organization. When one
comes to examine the final result, it is astonishing to remark the small
amount of essential change, of positively final and irreparable
alteration, in the conditions of the common life. Consider, for example,
how entirely in sympathy was the close of the eighteenth century with
the epoch of Horace, and how closely equivalent were the various social
aspects of the two periods. The literature of Rome was living reading in
a sense that has suddenly passed away, it fitted all occasions, it
conflicted with no essential facts in life. It was a commonplace of the
thought of that time that all things recurred, all things circled back
to their former seasons; there was nothing new under the sun. But now
almost suddenly the circling has ceased, and we find ourselves breaking
away. Correlated with the sudden development of mechanical forces that
first began to be socially perceptible in the middle eighteenth century,
has been the appearance of great masses of population, having quite
novel functions and relations in the social body, and together with this
appearance such a suppression, curtailment, and modification of the
older classes, as to point to an entire disintegration of that system.
The _facies_ of the social fabric has changed, and--as I hope to make
clear--is still changing in a direction from which, without a total
destruction and rebirth of that fabric, there can never be any return.
The most striking of the new classes to emerge is certainly the
shareholding class, the owners of a sort of property new in the world's
history.
Before the eighteenth century the only property of serious importance
consisted of land and buildings. These were "real" estate. Beyond these
things were live-stock, serfs, and the furnishings of real estate, the
surface aspect of real estate, so to speak, personal property, ships,
weapons, and the Semitic invention of money. All such property had to be
actually "held" and administered by the owner, he was immediately in
connection with it and responsible for it. He could leave it only
precariously to a steward and manager, and to convey the revenue of it
to him at a distance was a difficult and costly proceeding. To prevent a
constant social disturbance by lapsing and dividing property, and in the
absence of any organized agency to receive lapsed property, inheritance
and preferably primogeniture were of such manifest advantage that the
old social organization always tended in the direction of these
institutions. Such usury as was practised relied entirely on the land
and the anticipated agricultural produce of the land.
But the usury and the sleeping partnerships of the Joint Stock Company
system which took shape in the eighteenth and the earlier half of the
nineteenth century opened quite unprecedented uses for money, and
created a practically new sort of property and a new proprietor class.
The peculiar novelty of this property is easily defined. Given a
sufficient sentiment of public honesty, share property is property that
can be owned at any distance and that yields its revenue without thought
or care on the part of its proprietor; it is, indeed, absolutely
irresponsible property, a thing that no old world property ever was.
But, in spite of its widely different nature, the laws of inheritance
that the social necessities of the old order of things established have
been applied to this new species of possession without remark. It is
indestructible, imperishable wealth, subject only to the mutations of
value that economic changes bring about. Related in its character of
absolute irresponsibility to this shareholding class is a kindred class
that has grown with the growth of the great towns, the people who live
upon ground rents. There is every indication that this element of
irresponsible, independent, and wealthy people in the social body,
people who feel the urgency of no exertion, the pressure of no specific
positive duties, is still on the increase, and may still for a long time
increasingly preponderate. It overshadows the responsible owner of real
property or of real businesses altogether. And most of the old
aristocrats, the old knightly and landholding people, have, so to speak,
converted themselves into members of this new class.
It is a class with scarcely any specific characteristics beyond its
defining one, of the possession of property and all the potentialities
property entails, with a total lack of function with regard to that
property. It is not even collected into a distinct mass. It graduates
insensibly into every other class, it permeates society as threads and
veins of gold permeate quartz. It includes the millionaire snob, the
political-minded plutocrat, the wealthy sensualist, open-handed
religious fanatics, the "Charitable," the smart, the magnificently dull,
the great army of timid creatures who tremble through life on a safe
bare sufficiency,[23] travellers, hunters, minor poets, sporting
enthusiasts, many of the officers in the British Army, and all sorts and
conditions of amateurs. In a sense it includes several modern royalties,
for the crown in several modern constitutional states is a _corporation
sole_, and the monarch the unique, unlimited, and so far as necessity
goes, quite functionless shareholder. He may be a heavy-eyed sensualist,
a small-minded leader of fashion, a rival to his servants in the gay
science of etiquette, a frequenter of race-courses and music-halls, a
literary or scientific quack, a devotee, an amateur anything--the point
is that his income and sustenance have no relation whatever to his
activities. If he fancies it, or is urged to it by those who have
influence over him, he may even "be a king!" But that is not compulsory,
not essential, and there are practically no conditional restrictions
whatever laid upon him.
Those who belong to this shareholding class only partially, who
partially depend upon dividends and partially upon activities, occur in
every rank and order of the whole social body. The waiter one tips
probably has a hundred or so in some remote company, the will of the
eminent labour reformer reveals an admirably distributed series of
investments, the bishop sells tea and digs coal, or at any rate gets a
profit from some unknown persons tea-selling or coal-digging, to eke out
the direct recompense of his own modest corn-treading. Indeed, above the
labouring class, the number of individuals in the social body whose
gross income is entirely the result of their social activities is very
small. Previously in the world's history, saving a few quite exceptional
aspects, the possession and retention of property was conditional upon
activities of some sort, honest or dishonest, work, force, or fraud. But
the shareholding ingredient of our new society, so far as its
shareholding goes, has no need of strength or wisdom; the countless
untraceable Owner of the modern world presents in a multitudinous form
the image of a Merovingian king. The shareholder owns the world _de
jure_, by the common recognition of the rights of property; and the
incumbency of knowledge, management, and toil fall entirely to others.
He toils not, neither does he spin; he is mechanically released from the
penalty of the Fall, he reaps in a still sinful world all the practical
benefits of a millennium--without any of its moral limitations.
It will be well to glance at certain considerations which point to the
by no means self-evident proposition, that this factor of irresponsible
property is certain to be present in the social body a hundred years
ahead. It has, no doubt, occurred to the reader that all the conditions
of the shareholder's being unfit him for co-operative action in defence
of the interests of his class. Since shareholders do nothing in common,
except receive and hope for dividends, since they may be of any class,
any culture, any disposition, or any level of capacity, since there is
nothing to make them read the same papers, gather in the same places, or
feel any sort of sympathy with each other beyond the universal sympathy
of man for man, they will, one may anticipate, be incapable of any
concerted action to defend the income they draw from society against any
resolute attack. Such crude and obvious denials of the essential
principles of their existence as the various Socialistic bodies have
proclaimed have, no doubt, encountered a vast, unorganized, negative
opposition from them, but the subtle and varied attack of natural forces
they have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor the
natural organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether too
chaotic and diffused for positive defence. And the question of the
prolonged existence of this comparatively new social phenomenon, either
in its present or some modified form, turns, therefore, entirely on the
quasi-natural laws of the social body. If they favour it, it will
survive; when they do not, it will vanish as the mists of the morning
before the sun.
Neglecting a few exceptional older corporations which, indeed, in their
essence are not usurious, but of unlimited liability, the shareholding
body appeared first, in its present character, in the seventeenth
century, and came to its full development in the mid-nineteenth. Was its
appearance then due only to the attainment of a certain necessary degree
of public credit, or was it correlated with any other force? It seems in
accordance with facts to relate it to another force, the development of
mechanism, so far as certain representative aspects go. Hitherto the
only borrower had been the farmer, then the exploring trader had found a
world too wide for purely individual effort, and then suddenly the
craftsmen of all sorts and the carriers discovered the need of the new,
great, wholesale, initially expensive appliances that invention was
offering them. It was the development of mechanism that created the
great bulk of modern shareholding, it took its present shape
distinctively only with the appearance of the railways. The hitherto
necessary but subordinate craftsman and merchant classes were to have
new weapons, new powers, they were to develop to a new importance, to a
preponderance even in the social body. But before they could attain
these weapons, before this new and novel wealth could be set up, it had
to pay its footing in an apportioned world, it had to buy its right to
disturb the established social order. The dividend of the shareholder
was the tribute the new enterprise had to pay the old wealth. The share
was the manumission money of machinery. And essentially the shareholder
represents and will continue to represent the responsible managing owner
of a former state of affairs in process of supersession.
If the great material developments of the nineteenth century had been
final, if they had, indeed, constituted merely a revolution and not an
absolute release from the fixed conditions about which human affairs
circled, we might even now be settling accounts with our Merovingians as
the socialists desire. But these developments were not final, and one
sees no hint as yet of any coming finality. Invention runs free and our
state is under its dominion. The novel is continually struggling to
establish itself at the relative or absolute expense of the old. The
statesman's conception of social organization is no longer stability but
growth. And so long as material progress continues, this tribute must
continue to be paid; so long as the stream of development flows, this
necessary back eddy will endure. Even if we "municipalize" all sorts of
undertakings we shall not alter the essential facts, we shall only
substitute for the shareholder the corporation stockholder. The figure
of an eddy is particularly appropriate. Enterprises will come and go,
the relative values of kinds of wealth will alter, old appliances, old
companies, will serve their time and fall in value, individuals will
waste their substance, individual families and groups will die out,
certain portions of the share property of the world may be gathered, by
elaborate manipulation, into a more or less limited number of hands,
conceivably even families and groups will be taxed out by graduated
legacy duties and specially apportioned income taxes, but, for all such
possible changes and modifications, the shareholding element will still
endure, so long as our present progressive and experimental state of
society obtains. And the very diversity, laxity, and weakness of the
general shareholding element, which will work to prevent its organizing
itself in the interests of its property, or of evolving any distinctive
traditions or positive characters, will obviously prevent its
obstructing the continual appearance of new enterprises, of new
shareholders to replace the loss of its older constituents....
At the opposite pole of the social scale to that about which
shareholding is most apparent, is a second necessary and quite
inevitable consequence of the sudden transition that has occurred from a
very nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one.
This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great number
of people without either property or any evident function in the social
organism. This new ingredient is most apparent in the towns, it is
frequently spoken of as the Urban Poor, but its characteristic traits
are to be found also in the rural districts. For the most part its
individuals are either criminal, immoral, parasitic in more or less
irregular ways upon the more successful classes, or labouring, at
something less than a regular bare subsistence wage, in a finally
hopeless competition against machinery that is as yet not so cheap as
their toil. It is, to borrow a popular phrase, the "submerged" portion
of the social body, a leaderless, aimless multitude, a multitude of
people drifting down towards the abyss. Essentially it consists of
people who have failed to "catch on" to the altered necessities the
development of mechanism has brought about, they are people thrown out
of employment by machinery, thrown out of employment by the escape of
industries along some newly opened line of communication to some remote
part of the world, or born under circumstances that give them no
opportunity of entering the world of active work. Into this welter of
machine-superseded toil there topples the non-adaptable residue of every
changing trade; its members marry and are given in marriage, and it is
recruited by the spendthrifts, weaklings, and failures of every superior
class.
Since this class was not apparent in masses in the relatively static,
relatively less eliminatory, society of former times, its appearance has
given rise to a belief that the least desirable section of the community
has become unprecedentedly prolific, that there is now going on a "Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit." But sooner or later, as every East End
doctor knows, the ways of the social abyss lead to death, the premature
death of the individual, or death through the death or infertility of
the individual's stunted offspring, or death through that extinction
which moral perversion involves. It is a recruited class, not a breeding
multitude. Whatever expedients may be resorted to, to mitigate or
conceal the essential nature of this social element, it remains in its
essence wherever social progress is being made, the contingent of death.
Humanity has set out in the direction of a more complex and exacting
organization, and until, by a foresight to me at least inconceivable, it
can prevent the birth of just all the inadaptable, useless, or merely
unnecessary creatures in each generation, there must needs continue to
be, in greater or less amount, this individually futile struggle beneath
the feet of the race; somewhere and in some form there must still
persist those essentials that now take shape as the slum, the prison,
and the asylum. All over the world, as the railway network has spread,
in Chicago and New York as vividly as in London or Paris, the
commencement of the new movement has been marked at once by the
appearance of this bulky irremovable excretion, the appearance of these
gall stones of vicious, helpless, and pauper masses. There seems every
reason to suppose that this phenomenon of unemployed citizens, who are,
in fact, unemployable, will remain present as a class, perishing
individually and individually renewed, so long as civilization remains
progressive and experimental upon its present lines. Their drowning
existences may be utilized, the crude hardship of their lot may be
concealed or mitigated,[24] they may react upon the social fabric that
is attempting to eliminate them, in very astounding ways, but their
presence and their individual doom, it seems to me, will be
unavoidable--at any rate, for many generations of men. They are an
integral part of this physiological process of mechanical progress, as
inevitable in the social body as are waste matters and disintegrating
cells in the body of an active and healthy man.
The appearance of these two strange functionless elements, although the
most striking symptom of the new phase of progressive mechanical
civilization now beginning, is by no means the most essential change in
progress. These appearances involve also certain disappearances. I have
already indicated pretty clearly that the vast irregular development of
irresponsible wealthy people is swallowing up and assimilating more and
more the old class of administrative land-owning gentlemen in all their
grades and degrees. The old upper class, as a functional member of the
State, is being effaced. And I have also suggested that the old lower
class, the broad necessary base of the social pyramid, the uneducated
inadaptable peasants and labourers, is, with the development of
toil-saving machinery, dwindling and crumbling down bit by bit towards
the abyss. But side by side with these two processes is a third process
of still profounder significance, and that is the reconstruction and the
vast proliferation of what constituted the middle class of the old
order. It is now, indeed, no longer a middle class at all. Rather all
the definite classes in the old scheme of functional precedence have
melted and mingled,[25] and in the molten mass there has appeared a vast
intricate confusion of different sorts of people, some sailing about
upon floating masses of irresponsible property, some buoyed by smaller
fragments, some clinging desperately enough to insignificant atoms, a
great and varied multitude swimming successfully without aid, or with an
amount of aid that is negligible in relation to their own efforts, and
an equally varied multitude of less capable ones clinging to the
swimmers, clinging to the floating rich, or clutching empty-handed and
thrust and sinking down. This is the typical aspect of the modern
community. It will serve as a general description of either the United
States or any western European State, and the day is not far distant
when the extension of means of communication, and of the shareholding
method of conducting affairs, will make it applicable to the whole
world. Save, possibly, in a few islands and inaccessible places and
regardless of colour or creed, this process of deliquescence seems
destined to spread. In a great diversity of tongues, in the phases of a
number of conflicting moral and theological traditions, in the varying
tones of contrasting racial temperaments, the grandchildren of black and
white, and red and brown, will be seeking more or less consciously to
express themselves in relation to these new and unusual social
conditions. But the change itself is no longer amenable to their
interpretations, the world-wide spreading of swift communication, the
obliteration of town and country, the deliquescence of the local social
order, have an air of being processes as uncontrollable by such
collective intelligence as men can at present command, and as
indifferent to his local peculiarities and prejudices as the movements
of winds and tides....
It will be obvious that the interest of this speculation, at any rate,
centres upon this great intermediate mass of people who are neither
passively wealthy, the sleeping partners of change, nor helplessly
thrust out of the process. Indeed, from our point of view--an inquiry
into coming things--these non-effective masses would have but the
slightest interest were it not for their enormous possibilities of
reaction upon the really living portion of the social organism. This
really living portion seems at first sight to be as deliquescent in its
nature, to be drifting down to as chaotic a structure as either the
non-functional owners that float above it or the unemployed who sink
below. What were once the definite subdivisions of the middle class
modify and lose their boundaries. The retail tradesman of the towns, for
example--once a fairly homogeneous class throughout Europe--expands here
into vast store companies, and dwindles there to be an agent or
collector, seeks employment or topples outright into the abyss. But
under a certain scrutiny one can detect here what we do not detect in
our other two elements, and that is that, going on side by side with the
processes of dissolution and frequently masked by these, there are other
processes by which men, often of the most diverse parentage and
antecedent traditions, are being segregated into a multitude of
specific new groups which may presently develop very distinctive
characters and ideals.
There are, for example, the unorganized myriads that one can cover by
the phrase "mechanics and engineers," if one uses it in its widest
possible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describe
such a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universally
applicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced,
oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough,
until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his additions of crockery
and plumbing, the electrical engineer with his little tests and wires,
the mining engineer, the railway maker, the motor builder, and the
irrigation expert. Even if we take some specific branch of all this huge
mass of new employment the coming of mechanism has brought with it, we
still find an undigested miscellany. Consider the rude levy that is
engaged in supplying and repairing the world's new need of bicycles!
Wheelwrights, watchmakers, blacksmiths, music-dealers, drapers,
sewing-machine repairers, smart errand boys, ironmongers, individuals
from all the older aspects of engineering, have been caught up by the
new development, are all now, with a more or less inadequate knowledge
and training, working in the new service. But is it likely that this
will remain a rude levy? From all these varied people the world requires
certain things, and a failure to obtain them involves, sooner or later,
in this competitive creation, an individual replacement and a push
towards the abyss. The very lowest of them must understand the machine
they contribute to make and repair, and not only is it a fairly complex
machine in itself, but it is found in several types and patterns, and so
far it has altered, and promises still to alter, steadily, by
improvements in this part and that. No limited stock-in-trade of
knowledge, such as suffices for a joiner or an ostler, will serve. They
must keep on mastering new points, new aspects, they must be intelligent
and adaptable, they must get a grasp of that permanent something that
lies behind the changing immediate practice. In other words, they will
have to be educated rather than trained after the fashion of the old
craftsman. Just now this body of irregulars is threatened by the coming
of the motors. The motors promise new difficulties, new rewards, and new
competition. It is an ill look-out for the cycle mechanic who is not
prepared to tackle the new problems that will arise. For all this next
century this particular body of mechanics will be picking up new
recruits and eliminating the incompetent and the rule-of-thumb sage. Can
it fail, as the years pass, to develop certain general characters, to
become so far homogeneous as to be generally conscious of the need of a
scientific education, at any rate in mechanical and chemical matters,
and to possess, down to its very lowest ranks and orders, a common fund
of intellectual training?
But the makers and repairers of cycles, and that larger multitude that
will presently be concerned with motors, are, after all, only a small
and specialized section of the general body of mechanics and engineers.
Every year, with the advance of invention, new branches of activity,
that change in their nature and methods all too rapidly for the
establishment of rote and routine workers of the old type, call together
fresh levies of amateurish workers and learners who must surely
presently develop into, or give place to, bodies of qualified and
capable men. And the point I would particularly insist upon here is,
that throughout all its ranks and ramifications, from the organizing
heads of great undertakings down to the assistant in the local repair
shop, this new, great, and expanding body of mechanics and engineers
will tend to become an educated and adaptable class in a sense that the
craftsmen of former times were not educated and adaptable. Just how high
the scientific and practical education may rise in the central levels of
this body is a matter for subsequent speculation, just how much
initiative will be found in the lowest ranks depends upon many very
complex considerations. But that here we have at least the possibility,
the primary creative conditions of a new, numerous, intelligent,
educated, and capable social element is, I think, a proposition with
which the reader will agree.
What are the chief obstacles in the way of the emergence, from out the
present chaos, of this social element equipped, organized, educated,
conscious of itself and of distinctive aims, in the next hundred years?
In the first place there is the spirit of trade unionism, the
conservative contagion of the old craftsmanship. Trade Unions arose
under the tradition of the old order, when in every business, employer
and employed stood in marked antagonism, stood as a special instance of
the universal relationship of gentle or intelligent, who supplied no
labour, and simple, who supplied nothing else. The interest of the
employer was to get as much labour as possible out of his hirelings; the
complementary object in life of the hireling, whose sole function was
drudgery, who had no other prospect until death, was to give as little
to his employer as possible. In order to keep the necessary labourer
submissive, it was a matter of public policy to keep him uneducated and
as near the condition of a beast of burden as possible, and in order to
keep his life tolerable against that natural increase which all the
moral institutions of his state promoted, the labourer--stimulated if
his efforts slackened by the touch of absolute misery--was forced to
devise elaborate rules for restricting the hours of toil, making its
performance needlessly complex, and shirking with extreme ingenuity and
conscientiousness. In the older trades, of which the building trade is
foremost, these two traditions, reinforced by unimaginative building
regulations, have practically arrested any advance whatever.[26] There
can be no doubt that this influence has spread into what are practically
new branches of work. Even where new conveniences have called for new
types of workmen and have opened the way for the elevation of a group of
labourers to the higher level of versatile educated men,[27] the old
traditions have to a very large extent prevailed. The average sanitary
plumber of to-day in England insists upon his position as a mere
labourer as though it were some precious thing, he guards himself from
improvement as a virtuous woman guards her honour, he works for
specifically limited hours and by the hour with specific limitations in
the practice of his trade, on the fairly sound assumption that but for
that restriction any fool might do plumbing as well as he; whatever he
learns he learns from some other plumber during his apprenticeship
years--after which he devotes himself to doing the minimum of work in
the maximum of time until his brief excursion into this mysterious
universe is over. So far from invention spurring him onward, every
improvement in sanitary work in England, at least, is limited by the
problem whether "the men" will understand it. A person ingenious enough
to exceed this sacred limit might as well hang himself as trouble about
the improvement of plumbing.
If England stood alone, I do not see why each of the new mechanical and
engineering industries, so soon as it develops sufficiently to have
gathered together a body of workers capable of supporting a Trade Union
secretary, should not begin to stagnate in the same manner. Only England
does not stand alone, and the building trade is so far not typical,
inasmuch as it possesses a national monopoly that the most elaborate
system of protection cannot secure any other group of trades. One must
have one's house built where one has to live, the importation of workmen
in small bodies is difficult and dear, and if one cannot have the house
one wishes, one must needs have the least offensive substitute; but
bicycle and motor, iron-work and furniture, engines, rails, and ships
one can import. The community, therefore, that does least to educate
its mechanics and engineers out of the base and servile tradition of the
old idea of industry will in the coming years of progress simply get a
disproportionate share of the rejected element, the trade will go
elsewhere, and the community will be left in possession of an
exceptionally large contingent for the abyss.
At present, however, I am dealing not with the specific community, but
with the generalized civilized community of A.D. 2000--we disregard the
fate of states and empires for a time--and, for that emergent community,
wherever it may be, it seems reasonable to anticipate, replacing and
enormously larger and more important than the classes of common workmen
and mechanics of to-day, a large fairly homogeneous body--big men and
little men, indeed, but with no dividing lines--of more or less expert
mechanics and engineers, with a certain common minimum of education and
intelligence, and probably a common-class consciousness--a new body, a
new force, in the world's history.
For this body to exist implies the existence of much more than the
primary and initiating nucleus of engineers and skilled mechanics. If it
is an educated class, its existence implies a class of educators, and
just as far as it does get educated the schoolmasters will be skilled
and educated men. The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of the
England of to-day, in--or a little way out of--orders, with his
smattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuous
mathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparable
snobbishness, certainly does not represent the schoolmaster of this
coming class. Moreover, the new element will necessarily embody its
collective, necessarily distinctive, and unprecedented thoughts in a
literature of its own, its development means the development of a new
sort of writer and of new elements in the press. And since, if it does
emerge, a revolution in the common schools of the community will be a
necessary part of the process, then its emergence will involve a
revolutionary change in the condition of classes that might otherwise
remain as they are now--the older craftsman, for example.
The process of attraction will not end even there; the development of
more and more scientific engineering and of really adaptable operatives
will render possible agricultural contrivances that are now only dreams,
and the diffusion of this new class over the country side--assuming the
reasoning in my second chapter to be sound--will bring the lever of the
improved schools under the agriculturist. The practically autonomous
farm of the old epoch will probably be replaced by a great variety of
types of cultivation, each with its labour-saving equipment. In this, as
in most things, the future spells variation. The practical abolition of
impossible distances over the world will tend to make every district
specialize in the production for which it is best fitted, and to
develop that production with an elaborate precision and economy. The
chief opposing force to this tendency will be found in those countries
where the tenure of the land is in small holdings. A population of small
agriculturists that has really got itself well established is probably
as hopelessly immovable a thing as the forces of progressive change will
have to encounter. The Arcadian healthiness and simplicity of the small
holder, and the usefulness of little hands about him, naturally results
in his keeping the population on his plot up to the limit of bare
subsistence. He avoids over-education, and his beasts live with him and
his children in a natural kindly manner. He will have no idlers, and
even grand-mamma goes weeding. His nett produce is less than the
production of the larger methods, but his gross is greater, and usually
it is mortgaged more or less. Along the selvage of many of the new roads
we have foretold, his hens will peck and his children beg, far into the
coming decades. This simple, virtuous, open-air life is to be found
ripening in the north of France and Belgium, it culminated in Ireland in
the famine years, it has held its own in China--with a use of female
infanticide--for immemorable ages, and a number of excellent persons are
endeavouring to establish it in England at the present time. At the Cape
of Good Hope, under British rule, Kaffirs are being settled upon little
inalienable holdings that must inevitably develop in the same
direction, and over the Southern States the nigger squats and
multiplies. It is fairly certain that these stagnant ponds of
population, which will grow until public intelligence rises to the pitch
of draining them, will on a greater scale parallel in the twentieth
century the soon-to-be-dispersed urban slums of the nineteenth. But I do
not see how they can obstruct, more than locally, the reorganization of
agriculture and horticulture upon the ampler and more economical lines
mechanism permits, or prevent the development of a type of agriculturist
as adaptable, alert, intelligent, unprejudiced, and modest as the coming
engineer.
Another great section of the community, the military element, will also
fall within the attraction of this possible synthesis, and will
inevitably undergo profound modification. Of the probable development of
warfare a later chapter shall treat, and here it will suffice to point
out that at present science stands proffering the soldier vague, vast
possibilities of mechanism, and, so far, he has accepted practically
nothing but rifles which he cannot sight and guns that he does not learn
to move about. It is quite possible the sailor would be in the like
case, but for the exceptional conditions that begot ironclads in the
American Civil War. Science offers the soldier transport that he does
not use, maps he does not use, entrenching devices, road-making devices,
balloons and flying scouts, portable foods, security from disease, a
thousand ways of organizing the horrible uncertainties of war. But the
soldier of to-day--I do not mean the British soldier only--still insists
on regarding these revolutionary appliances as mere accessories, and
untrustworthy ones at that, to the time-honoured practice of his art. He
guards his technical innocence like a plumber.
Every European army is organized on the lines of the once fundamental
distinction of the horse and foot epoch, in deference to the contrast of
gentle and simple. There is the officer, with all the traditions of old
nobility, and the men still, by a hundred implications, mere sources of
mechanical force, and fundamentally base. The British Army, for example,
still cherishes the tradition that its privates are absolutely
illiterate, and such small instruction as is given them in the art of
war is imparted by bawling and enforced by abuse upon public drill
grounds. Almost all discussion of military matters still turns upon the
now quite stupid assumption that there are two primary military arms and
no more, horse and foot. "Cyclists are infantry," the War Office manual
of 1900 gallantly declares in the face of this changing universe. After
fifty years of railways, there still does not exist, in a world which is
said to be over devoted to military affairs, a skilled and organized
body of men, specially prepared to seize, repair, reconstruct, work, and
fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a
railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be
hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other
of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of
affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars
between European powers, prepared and organized to accept the old
conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leave
the art of war essentially unmodified, but sooner or later--it may be in
the improvised struggle that follows the collapse of some one of these
huge, witless, fighting forces--the new sort of soldier will emerge, a
sober, considerate, engineering man--no more of a gentleman than the man
subordinated to him or any other self-respecting person....
Certain interesting side questions I may glance at here, only for the
present, at least, to set them aside unanswered, the reaction, for
example, of this probable development of a great mass of educated and
intelligent efficients upon the status and quality of the medical
profession, and the influence of its novel needs in either modifying the
existing legal body or calling into being a parallel body of more expert
and versatile guides and assistants in business operations. But from the
mention of this latter section one comes to another possible centre of
aggregation in the social welter. Opposed in many of their most
essential conditions to the capable men who are of primary importance in
the social body, is the great and growing variety of non-productive but
active men who are engaged in more or less necessary operations of
organization, promotion, advertisement, and trade. There are the
business managers, public and private, the political organizers,
brokers, commission agents, the varying grades of financier down to the
mere greedy camp followers of finance, the gamblers pure and simple, and
the great body of their dependent clerks, typewriters, and assistants.
All this multitude will have this much in common, that it will be
dealing, not with the primary inexorable logic of natural laws, but with
the shifting, uncertain prejudices and emotions of the general mass of
people. It will be wary and cunning rather than deliberate and
intelligent, smart rather than prompt, considering always the appearance
and effect before the reality and possibilities of things. It will
probably tend to form a culture about the political and financial
operator as its ideal and central type, opposed to, and conflicting
with, the forces of attraction that will tend to group the new social
masses about the scientific engineer.[28]...
Here, then (in the vision of the present writer), are the main social
elements of the coming time: (i.) the element of irresponsible
property; (ii.) the helpless superseded poor, that broad base of mere
toilers now no longer essential; (iii.) a great inchoate mass of more or
less capable people engaged more or less consciously in applying the
growing body of scientific knowledge to the general needs, a great mass
that will inevitably tend to organize itself in a system of
interdependent educated classes with a common consciousness and aim, but
which may or may not succeed in doing so; and (iv.) a possibly equally
great number of non-productive persons living in and by the social
confusion.
All these elements will be mingled confusedly together, passing into one
another by insensible gradations, scattered over the great urban regions
and intervening areas our previous anticipations have sketched out.
Moreover, they are developing, as it were unconsciously, under the
stimulus of mechanical developments, and with the bandages of old
tradition hampering their movements. The laws they obey, the governments
they live under, are for the most part laws made and governments planned
before the coming of steam. The areas of administration are still areas
marked out by conditions of locomotion as obsolete as the quadrupedal
method of the pre-arboreal ancestor. In Great Britain, for example, the
political constitution, the balance of estates and the balance of
parties, preserves the compromise of long-vanished antagonisms. The
House of Lords is a collection of obsolete territorial dignitaries
fitfully reinforced by the bishops and a miscellany (in no sense
representative) of opulent moderns; the House of Commons is the seat of
a party conflict, a faction fight of initiated persons, that has long
ceased to bear any real relation to current social processes. The
members of the lower chamber are selected by obscure party machines
operating upon constituencies almost all of which have long since become
too vast and heterogeneous to possess any collective intelligence or
purpose at all. In theory the House of Commons guards the interests of
classes that are, in fact, rapidly disintegrating into a number of quite
antagonistic and conflicting elements. The new mass of capable men, of
which the engineers are typical, these capable men who must necessarily
be the active principle of the new mechanically equipped social body,
finds no representation save by accident in either assembly. The man who
has concerned himself with the public health, with army organization,
with educational improvement, or with the vital matters of transport and
communication, if he enter the official councils of the kingdom at all,
must enter ostensibly as the guardian of the interests of the free and
independent electors of a specific district that has long ceased to have
any sort of specific interests at all.[29]...
And the same obsolescence that is so conspicuous in the general
institutions of the official kingdom of England, and that even English
people can remark in the official empire of China, is to be traced in a
greater or lesser degree in the nominal organization and public
tradition throughout the whole world. The United States, for example,
the social mass which has perhaps advanced furthest along the new lines,
struggles in the iron bonds of a constitution that is based primarily on
a conception of a number of comparatively small, internally homogeneous,
agricultural states, a bunch of pre-Johannesburg Transvaals,
communicating little, and each constituting a separate autonomous
democracy of free farmers--slaveholding or slaveless. Every country in
the world, indeed, that is organized at all, has been organized with a
view to stability within territorial limits; no country has been
organized with any foresight of development and inevitable change, or
with the slightest reference to the practical revolution in topography
that the new means of transit involve. And since this is so, and since
humanity is most assuredly embarked upon a series of changes of which we
know as yet only the opening phases, a large part of the history of the
coming years will certainly record more or less conscious endeavours to
adapt these obsolete and obsolescent contrivances for the management of
public affairs to the new and continually expanding and changing
requirements of the social body, to correct or overcome the traditions
that were once wisdom and which are now obstruction, and to burst the
straining boundaries that were sufficient for the ancient states. There
are here no signs of a millennium. Internal reconstruction, while men
are still limited, egotistical, passionate, ignorant, and ignorantly
led, means seditions and revolutions, and the rectification of frontiers
means wars. But before we go on to these conflicts and wars certain
general social reactions must be considered.