THE PECUNIARY STANDARD
“The deeper cause of the oppression of the factory operative and of
the terrible degradation and pauperisation of the agricultural
labourer, was not the mere fact that machines were invented which
multiplied the efficiency of labour, but the previous
monopolisation, in the period of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, and during the earlier part of the eighteenth century,
of the land and of education. The great change then took place in
the current philosophy of life, which made the whole of the
governing classes of England, with exceptions practically
negligible, accept with avidity the idea merely more clearly
formulated by political economists, that the highest duty of man was
to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market.”
PATRICK GEDDES.
I
THE saying that “man shall not live by bread alone” has been in familiar
circulation so long and on authority so good that it is remarkable how
slightly it has affected the general conduct of life. Bread and the
things symbolised by bread in the saying are and must remain the first
care of men, but they are first only in the sense of being preliminary,
the necessary conditions of the main and supreme business of life. Yet
modern civilisation as a whole has shown no manifest sign of a
conception of life which requires that the chief interest and energy of
men should be directed to ends of a higher order than that of
maintaining physical existence. This fact is to some extent obscured
from us by the elaborate development of commercial organisation, so that
multitudes of men are engaged in enterprises and vocations apparently so
removed from the actual business of clothing, feeding and housing other
men that they are not aware of being connected with it at all. Yet the
entire structure of commerce rests upon the requirement that certain
primary physical needs of men must be met. That men shall be fed,
clothed, sheltered, provided with heat and light,—here is the source of
commerce. Around these primary needs certain other demands have
gathered—for elaboration in food and clothing, comfort in the home, and
the like; and a multitude of commercial activities of a secondary kind
have been set afoot and added to the sufficiently complex business of
providing society with the first necessities of life. This secondary
life of commerce is mainly parasitical and feeds upon the other, and its
vitality depends as much upon the success with which demands are
ingeniously created as upon the power to produce the supply profitably.
Added to this vast business of production is an enormous machinery of
distribution; and in these or in financial operations, originally
derived from them but now largely controlling them, we are all more or
less directly engaged. There are a few professional occupations which
remain outside this classification, which (to use Carlyle’s phrase) “are
boarded and lodged on the industry” of the community to which they
belong,—the doctor, the clergyman, the lawyer, the teacher, the actor,
the artist, the journalist; yet so strong and imperious is the
commercial tradition that the non-productive vocations are required to
justify their existence by providing the inspiration, the health, the
recreation and the knowledge necessary to the effectual and prosperous
working of the economic machine. Society seems (outside the “leisure
class”) feverishly engaged in keeping itself alive.
Yet if its only purpose were to keep itself alive, it would not need to
be so busy. But to the first impulse of production and exchange has been
added another interest, that of making profit and accumulating wealth.
In the process of exchange the opportunity was found of securing a
margin of personal advantage; and gradually this margin of personal
advantage has become the chief incentive to commercial enterprise. It
does not belong to our purpose to trace the history of this change; it
is enough that we should observe the fact that the profit-seeking motive
has become the real driving force of modern commerce, and that
historical circumstances, such as the introduction of large scale
processes, the world-wide ramifications of commerce through improved
facilities of travel and transportation, the invention of the telephone
and the telegraph, the growth of trusts, combines, and monopolies have
made possible fabulous increments and accumulations of profit.[12]
Footnote 12:
For an analysis of the process by which simple barter has grown into
the modern intricate system of commerce, with its fine flower in “big
finance,” see Thorstein Veblen, _The Instinct of Workmanship_, chap.
V., VI., VIII. More summarily in Geddes and Slater, _Ideas at War_,
Chap. III., IV., V. For a useful analysis of the current commercial
organisation see Cole, _Self-Government in Industry_, pp. 178, 179.
The effect of this upon a generation habituated to the profit-making
temper has been to set up the multi-millionaire as the type of
perfection toward which aspiring youth should be encouraged to strive.
We go into business not to feed and clothe each other, but to make
money; and since from the nature of the case only comparatively few of
us have the capacity and the opportunity to become commercial supermen,
the rest of us remain in business to feed and clothe ourselves, or (as
we say) to “make a living.” Commerce, which owes its origin to social
need, has almost wholly lost the social motive. If we are not making
money ourselves, we hire ourselves out as the money-making tools of
others; and while some of us aim at larger profits, the rest of us hope
for larger wages. The economic motive is universal, and it expresses
itself exclusively in the pecuniary standard. “The Almighty Dollar” is
more than a gratuitous exercise in satire, it describes the spirit of an
age.
Much has been heard since the war began of the profiteer, on both sides
of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the quarrel. But the profiteer is
not a phenomenon peculiar to war-time. Like the poor, he is always with
us; the war has but served to reveal him more vividly in his proper
character. His peculiar crime is that he makes the extremity of his
country the opportunity of private gain. But what he does in time of
war, he does no less sedulously in time of peace. His sin takes a deeper
dye in war-time because the national need is greater, and his
opportunity is much enlarged. Yet the story of how “big business” has
endeavoured, and has largely succeeded in the endeavour to control the
legislative machinery of the nations in its own interests in normal
times, is a very deplorable and shameful chapter in modern history. It
is, of course, no new thing that legislatures should show themselves
tender to economic interests; there is even yet no legislature in the
world which is not more careful of the rights of property than of the
welfare of men—except, perhaps, in Russia. By a curious paradox, those
who most jealously guarded the sanctities of property, were once the
implacable critics of commercial enterprise, but that phase has passed
away. Landed aristocracies, no less than bourgeois manufacturers, have
been so seduced by the lure of large and swift gain that the old line of
demarcation has disappeared; and the doctrine of property rights has
been invoked to secure the sanctity of the capitalist system of
industry. The “governing classes” in Europe and America, who to-day are
the economically powerful, have become an unholy alliance which exploits
the state in the interests of trade. It is not the English brewers and
publicans only who say, “our trade, our politics,” though these
particular people may be the only ones who have the effrontery to say so
in public. It is always the profiteer’s cry; and whenever in the past a
piece of social legislation has been introduced in England, he raises
the scare cry that “capital will leave the country,” which simply means
that he esteems his profits more highly than he does his country. He is
the author of the inspiring doctrine that “trade follows the flag”;
which prostitutes national idealism to the sordid business of
profiteering; and so deeply has this poison entered into our life that
Christian missions to the non-Christian world are frequently commended
on the ground that they do pioneering work for the trader.
All this is, of course, trite and commonplace; and ever since the early
part of the nineteenth century there has been a continuous and
increasing note of protest against the modern commercial doctrine of
competitive profit-making. It must, however, be admitted that the
protest has not gained much headway against the evil; on the contrary
the evil has, during this same period, grown by leaps and bounds, so
that the earlier twentieth century witnessed its supreme achievements.
Mr. John D. Rockefeller is the tragical culmination of the process in
our generation; and there is no reason to suppose that he is the last,
or greatest figure of the line of Crœsus. Nor will the subordination of
life to the business of pecuniary gain be effectually stayed until we
seriously take in hand the profiteering ideology which governs all our
thought and conduct. The main ingredient in the social heredity of this
generation is the profit-making impulse; that is the atmosphere which it
has breathed and which constitutes its habitual universe of discourse.
Art and religion alike have been infected with the spirit; the current
repute of an artist is fixed by the prices which his pictures command;
and the prosperity of a Christian congregation is judged by its
statistical returns. It is required of education that it shall minister
primarily to commercial efficiency; and the outcry against the study of
the classics, and the demand for a more exclusively scientific and
technical education reflect the essentially commercial orientation of
our educational outlook. It is, perhaps, the most deplorable aspect of
this latter tendency that it so often becomes vocal in persons whose
academic training should have provided them with a more discriminating
view of life. Even in the universities, which should be the impregnable
citadels of spiritual idealism, there is an inclination to capitulate to
the monstrous and deadly doctrine that the end of national life is
commercial supremacy.
Commerce originated in social need and should be a social service; nor
indeed has its perversion to profit-making prevented it from rendering
substantial services to society. Apart from its provision of the
necessities of life, many of its inventions have added much to the
wealth of life independently of their immediate purposes. The unique
facilities for travel which we moderns enjoy owe their origins in the
first instance to the demand for better commercial transport.
Stephenson’s first locomotive was intended to haul coal trucks. The
increasing socialisation of life in our time owes much to the economic
motive that has popularised the telegraph and the telephone; and the
supreme achievement of Mr. Henry Ford is not a miracle of standardised
production, but the contribution which his car has made to the
socialisation of the farmer’s life. Our knowledge of the earth’s surface
and its peoples, and through this, one of the foundations of the coming
internationalism, we owe greatly to the enterprise of the trader. For a
hundred great services beyond its ministry to the elementary human needs
of food and clothing, we are debtors to commerce and to those merchant
venturers in many ages who laid its broad modern foundations. Yet just
because we acknowledge a manifest debt even to profiteering commercial
enterprise, it is the more necessary that we should assail its modern
ascendency over life, and its own perversion to individual aims, and
point out the havoc which its more modern developments have wrought. It
would be foolish and undiscriminating to say that it is the sole source
of our social confusion, but it is simple truth to say that it has
become its chief direct occasion; and the result is to be traced to the
circumstances which have changed commerce from its essential function as
a great social service to a scramble for private gain. The restoration
of commerce to its own proper place and office is bound up with a
recovery of a true view of life as a whole, with a new understanding of
those things other and greater than bread by which it is ordained that
men shall live.
II
The paramountcy of the economic motive is no modern phenomenon, and it
would be a mistake to identify it exclusively with the modern commercial
civilisation. Its modern beginnings are no doubt to be found in the
appearance of the small merchant class in the era of craftsmanship; and
the difference between him and the merchant prince of the twentieth
century is mainly a difference of scale—this difference being chiefly
due to the high mobility of property when it assumes the form of money,
and the increased facilities for mobilising it through the development
of the credit system and the improvement in the means of communication.
The fundamental impulses and instincts which determine the social order
are broadly identical throughout history. That is why Marx’ economic
interpretation of history is probably the most luminous and fruitful
clue to the course of human affairs that historical study has yet
yielded to us. We are not justified in assuming (as some have done) that
it is the only valid clue; still less are those disciples of Marx
justified who have developed his theory of historical interpretation
into the metaphysical dogma of economic determinism. That economic
factors have controlled the general drift of human affairs in the past
does not necessarily mean that they are predestined to do so in
perpetuity.
Yet even those who most vehemently denounce the existing profit-making
organisation of society are still obsessed by the notion that social
transformation is chiefly an affair of economic revolution. Their
thought appears to run wholly within the economic circle. It is in some
respects the strangest paradox of modern times that the Russian people
with their long and unique tradition of spirituality should have been so
completely captured (to all appearance) by the doctrinaire materialism
of the Marxian school and have accepted the view that the Kingdom of
Heaven comes by a proletarian capture of economic power. The
circumstance is, of course, capable of explanation, for in Russia, as
elsewhere, political power has gone with economic power; and the Russian
revolutionary knew what the Frenchman of 1789 did not know, namely, that
no political revolution could be complete or permanent which was not an
economic revolution at the same time. That, therefore, the Russian
revolution should have been primarily economic is not strange—since Marx
had lived and written in the interval between 1789 and 1917; but it
remains a somewhat singular fact that the spiritual idealism of Feodor
Dostoievsky and Lyof Tolstoi have been so little manifest during these
last surprising months. This preoccupation with economic change is
characteristic of the attitude of those everywhere who are most urgent
in their endeavour after social transformation. The advocates of the
National Guild Movement are never weary of reiterating that political
power belongs to those who wield economic power, and of urging that the
workers should make themselves masters of the economic resources of
society as the necessary preliminary of laying hold of the political
power.[13] This may be a sound counsel of immediate strategy; but it is
full of disaster if it is treated as a permanent principle of social
practice. For it leaves us still within the vicious circle where the
purely economic interests are paramount. Whensoever we consent to the
statement that the one thing needful to society is a more equitable
distribution of the wealth which its industry produces, we are still
within the same hopeless universe of discourse. A more equitable
distribution of wealth is needed; so much is obvious. But having secured
it, what then? Will the City of God then come down from heaven? Or are
we content with the hope of a redeemed society which goes no farther
than a vision of a community of healthy and contented animals? It is
certain that, so long as our thought of social regeneration moves
chiefly within the existing framework of wealth production and wealth
distribution, our effort will create a range of new social problems of
an acute and probably less soluble kind. That we should labour to
humanise and to socialise the existing commercial and industrial
organisation goes without saying; but there is no certainty that after
we have done so, the same economic pre-occupation will not still fill
our minds. It is not enough to work for change that only transfers the
power to produce and to enjoy wealth from the hands of a small minority
to those of the great majority. That is indeed only change, and not
necessarily progress. There will be fewer people with more butter on
their bread than they need; and fewer people with less than they need;
and that will be something gained. But it does not necessarily follow
that we will not still be chiefly concerned about bread and butter, and
whatever elaborations upon that simple theme that our enlarged resources
may tempt us to seek.
Footnote 13:
This is not to be taken as meaning that the National Guild Movement is
destitute of a spiritual outlook. On the contrary, see, for instance,
the last chapter of S. G. Hobson’s _Guild Principles in War and
Peace_.
This is not in any sense an argument for spending less energy upon the
urgent task of accomplishing the radical economic changes which social
well-being plainly requires; it is rather a renewed plea that we should
ask ourselves whether we are moving conformably with a vision of man and
life as a whole. Whether we rank as reformists or revolutionists we
should endeavour to see the evils we hate and the manner and matter of
the remedy in the light of a philosophy of comprehensive and coherent
human good. The scheme of social insurance established in Great Britain
before the war was a response to a definite social need; but it is now
no longer open to question, that both in respect of its content, and the
method of its institution, its promoters failed to appreciate the
precise nature and conditions of the need; and the final solution of the
problem which evoked the measure has been confused and retarded. And
generally, so long as we think exclusively of social advance in economic
terms, out of relation to their context in life, we are subordinating
the greater thing to the lesser, and are in continual danger of
postponing the greater thing into an impossible future. We become and
remain virtual opportunists (even though we call ourselves
revolutionaries!), only moving spasmodically and incoherently within the
very circle of institutions and tendencies which have wrought our
present confusion, until we have gained that social perspective in which
the economic requirements of life take their proper place.
Properly understood, this place is a relatively humble one. In our
analysis of personality in the previous chapter, four major instincts
were defined. The first, the instinct of self-preservation has to do
with the maintenance of physical life; the second, the third and the
fourth, as they appear in their full development, are mainly concerned
with the spiritual expression of life. The first is the necessary basis
of the other three—the foundation, as it were, upon which they build;
but the real significance and joy of life are associated predominantly
with the impulses of creativeness, sociability, and reflection. Now, the
economic business of life has to do almost exclusively with the instinct
of self-preservation; its function ends with the provision of the
conditions and materials of a wholesome physical existence. Yet to-day,
the economic interests absorb virtually the whole of life; the ultimate
interests of life—that range of things which we may broadly call
_spiritual_, if they are not subordinated to and absorbed in the
economic motive, are consigned to the odds and ends of time which we are
able to spare from the sovereign business of making a fortune or making
a living. The distinctive human interests of religion, thought, art, and
recreation are no more than occasional alternatives which enable us to
some extent to repair the wear and tear of the ceaseless economic drive.
The real revolution we need is the general conviction that to put it
roughly—as the kitchen is to the home, so the economic interest is to
the rest of life. The kitchen is indispensable to the home; and there
are exceptional persons to whom it is the most important part of the
home. Yet it is no more than a strictly subordinate part of the home.
When we have finished with the business of procuring and eating bread,
then the real business of life begins. It is indeed necessary that the
kitchen should be in tune with home, and that the work of producing and
distributing the primary necessities of life should be organised so as
to be consistent with the spiritual realisation of life. We can, of
course, no longer admit a dualism of material and spiritual; for the
spiritual may and must infuse the material and subordinate it to its own
ends. To-day the material has made the spiritual ancillary to itself;
and the soul is the drudge of the body. The radical problem of the
future is how to reverse this position and to enthrone the spiritual.
What the spiritual realisation of life implies we can no more than dimly
guess. We may speak of love and art; but the potentialities of social
and creative achievement in human nature have yet to be explored. A
material civilisation has largely kept mankind in a state of arrested
development on every side save that which has to do with the conditions
of its physical life. Psychology is busily, though not yet very
successfully, explaining that hidden world of life which lies beyond the
frontiers of consciousness; there are (and this is virtually all we can
say) vast possibilities and powers latent within us of which we have
only occasional and indistinct intimations. We have tested the power and
the range of those endowments of which we are already aware; and the
triumphs of art and science show how nobly and richly our nature is
equipped. Nevertheless, all that art and science have yet accomplished
are but the promise of that glory that is still to be. But the full
release of all our powers—known and unknown—is contingent upon a social
setting more richly human, that is to say, more spiritual in temper, and
outlook, than mankind has hitherto known. This social setting will come
when we make up our minds to break the tyranny of the economic motive
and to deliver life from the infamous despotism of things. No man knows
to what heights of creative achievement and personal self-realisation we
may not attain when once the economic preoccupation which swallows our
best energies is dissipated, and we are free to become all that we have
it in us to be, when powers of fellowship and creation now inert and
unknown are awakened in us, and we press on to those peaks of attainment
of which prophets have spoken and which angels have desired to see.
III
The task before us, therefore, is the deliverance of life from the
ascendency of the economic motive; and at bottom this means the
redemption of commerce from the obsession of profit-making. In other
words, commerce must be conceived and conducted as a social service. It
is true that in the early days of modern commercialism, the principle of
competition was regarded as the heaven-sent panacea for human ills. Men
became dithyrambic about _laissez-faire_, and though they perforce
admitted that the growth of the commercial system had caused certain
glaring evils, yet they maintained that these were no more than the
inevitable accidents of a process of readjustment. Let the system only
work out its inherent logic to the end, and there will be a golden age
for everybody. The system has had a fair trial; and so far from
achieving the results confidently predicted by its advocates, it has
failed hopelessly to provide even a tolerably secure and sufficient
subsistence for the great mass of men. It is indeed difficult to see how
it could be otherwise or how those who uphold it could have expected a
different result. There is no doubt that the system has stimulated the
production of wealth; and this its protagonists accurately foresaw; but
they apparently supposed that the distribution of wealth would look
after itself. It had indeed done so, in a fashion which has deprived the
mass of toilers of that security of physical subsistence which is a
necessary condition of liberty and of the liberation of the spiritual
impulses. So far from adequately fulfilling the elementary services of
providing men with a steady and reasonable supply of the necessities of
life, it has made life itself insecure and precarious.
How this situation has come about may be stated summarily in a few
words: (_a_) The pursuit of profit tends to lower the cost of
production, while it raises the price of the product. Chief among the
costs of production is the payment of labour,—that is to say, wages. The
result of this tendency is to depress the income of the worker and at
the same time to raise his expenditure and since there is no limit fixed
at either end the standard of life is in constant danger of being
lowered beneath the point of reasonable subsistence. It often happens
that wages show an increase over given periods of time; but it is an
increase of money-wages and not of real wages; since the period of
wage-increase is generally also a period of a disproportionate increase
in the price of commodities. Some check has been placed upon the
decrease of wages by Trade Union action; but this is offset by the
partial elimination of competition in the markets through the growth of
Trusts and Combines, and the consequent upward tendency of prices.
(_b_) This insecurity is accentuated by the fact that the maintenance of
profits frequently require a check upon productivity in order to tighten
the market by reducing the supply of commodities. It is estimated that
in America this interference with production has kept productivity down
anywhere between twenty-five and fifty per cent. below its possible
maximum. This obstruction is effected by such devices as the diminution
of working hours, dismissal of workmen, and periodic stoppages of work.
(_c_) A further element of insecurity is to be found in the circumstance
that labour is itself treated as a commodity, subject to market
fluctuations, its price governed by the relation of supply to demand,
like any other commodity. In order to prevent an undue rise in the price
of labour, the industrial system has evolved a _reserve of labour_,
commonly called unemployment. In normal times, there is in every trade a
chronic margin—varying in amount—of unemployed men; and no man knows
when his turn may come to fall into the reserve. It naturally happens
that the less efficient man goes first—the man least equipped to face
the demoralising effects of unemployment. The result is that he
degenerates into an unemployable and swells the volume of the human
driftwood of our social order.
(_d_) Insecurity arises also from the unquestioned and unchallenged
authority of the owners or representatives of the invested capital,
against whose verdicts there is no appeal. The worker is at the absolute
mercy of the master or the foreman; and he can usually find work only at
the sacrifice of his freedom. Should he display any signs of restiveness
and be dismissed, the growth of Trusts and Employers’ Associations has
made it possible to deny him employment within the area over which such
bodies exercise control.
This takes no account of the dehumanising and despiritualising effects
of the machine industry under the conditions of the profit system. That
is an aggravation of the situation which must be considered in another
connection. Here we are concerned to note the failure of commerce under
a profit system to provide the conditions of security of life for the
mass of men. And not the least disastrous consequence of this failure is
the deep social schism it has engendered. It has created the criminal
antithesis of great wealth and great poverty in great cities, and the
virtually open warfare between capital and labour. The investor and the
employer are bent on larger dividends upon the outlay of capital; the
worker is seeking a larger return upon his outlay of labour. In the
struggle the worker is at a disadvantage. For while capital and labour,
the producers, are fighting, the casualties of the struggle are chiefly
among the consumers. But the consumers are mostly composed of the
labourer and the tenement-dweller, that is to say, the working-class
itself. So that the worker in the struggle is divided against himself.
If he is successful in his struggle for higher wages, the advantage is
lost through the increased price of commodities; for the employer pays
the higher wages out of higher prices. In the issue, the worker is
caught in the vicious circle of a continuous struggle against himself,
which to dependence and insecurity adds an unending confusion.
No question is here raised as to the legitimacy of profit; we are
concerned only to point out the consequences of a system which permits
an unlimited expansion of profits; and it should be clear that the
redemption of commerce and its restoration to the status of the social
service it should be, are to be wrought first by imposing a limit upon
profit-making.
This requires two measures:
First, the production and distribution of the necessities of life should
be definitely placed outside the sphere of competition. The British
Labour Party in its memorandum on reconstruction, proposes that the
coal-supply shall be so organised that the ordinary householder shall be
able to have his coal delivered at his door, at a uniform price all over
the country and all through the year—just as he buys postage stamps. But
the principle should be extended to all the essential commodities.
Flour, milk, coal, meat, wool, cotton and their immediate derivatives
should be withdrawn from the circle of competitive commerce, and be no
more subject to the fluctuations of a market manipulated in the interest
of profit-making than the water-supply is. There is no reason why the
supply of these primary articles should not be so regulated as to bear a
reasonably constant proportion to the demand. For those who argue that
this would dislocate the customary economic processes, a two-fold answer
may be returned. First, that the customary economic processes deserve to
be dislocated; and second, that the only possible justification of the
customary economic processes is derived from an economic theory which is
no longer relevant to the facts of life. In point of actual fact, the
standardisation of prices has become in recent years increasingly
common—the elimination of competition by the formation of trusts and
combines has had the result of fixing prices with a considerable
rigidity; and during the war, it has been done on a very large scale. In
neither case is it suggested by any one that it has had a deleterious
effect upon commerce. In this proposal for the standardisation of
prices, there is nothing new; it is simply a revival of the mediæval
custom of the _justum pretium_—according to which buyers and sellers and
market authorities together determined a price for each commodity which
should be equally fair to the producer and the consumer; and a return to
this practice—with such modifications as modern conditions require—is
opposed only by those who still hold to the curious illusion that Adam
Smith spoke the last word upon this subject.[14]
Footnote 14:
Revelations of after-war profiteering in Great Britain and America are
creating a definite demand for standardisation of prices. And if we
are to have Wages Boards, why not Prices Boards?
Second: A limit should be placed upon profits, dividends, incomes and
fortunes. This may be done by taxation, inheritance duties and other
devices already familiar to the managers of public finance. We should
agree to make it cease to be worth anyone’s while to exploit the public,
by fixing rigid bounds to the accumulation of private wealth; and this
we may do with a good conscience. For all wealth is socially produced;
and the society which produces it has the first claim upon it. This is a
position which can be challenged only by those who still hold that the
possession of property confers upon its possessors a “divine right” to
take the lion’s share of the wealth produced by the industry of the
whole community.
It will be maintained that measures of this kind will take away the
incentive to industry and commercial progress. But it may be pointed out
in reply that the economic end of British life so far from being
disastrously undermined by wholesale interference with economic laws
during the war, seems to have been in a rather healthier condition than
it had ever known previously. Profits were limited; prices were
standardised; the old competitive basis was largely suspended. Virtually
all those incentives of self-regard and gain which we have been told
were essential to economic development were put out of business. Yet
production reached an unprecedented point, both in quality and in
amount. Another incentive was indeed operative; but this incentive was
not of the personal kind. The peril of the nation in the great hazard of
war evoked a social solidarity which proved a more powerful incentive to
industry than the self-regarding instincts ever provided. This is our
sufficient answer to those who still hold to the cynical superstition
that the only motives on which we can rely in dealing with human nature
are those of selfishness. What is needed to stimulate effort and
devotion is the sense of direct participation in a great social task;
and there is no reason to suppose that the systematic education of a
couple of generations may not make this same social idealism the normal
driving force of national effort. It is no doubt true that, as things
are, only such a challenge to patriotic feeling as war brings, could
achieve such a result; but it is our business to discover the stimuli
which will make this same intensity of devotion a permanent fact.
But, it may be said, the economic conditions of wartime are abnormal,
and economic “laws” must be disregarded in the stress of national
crisis. This is, of course, partly true and partly untrue. So far as
production is concerned, the only change that war requires is greater
speed and greater volume; the difference is one of degree and not at all
of kind. It is only in the region of finance that war-time conditions
work havoc with economic “laws”; and the experience of war-time has
taught us the useful lesson that these “laws” have no permanent
character. They are on the contrary contingent and derivative affairs,
being no more than general statements concerning economic tendencies
which are set afoot and sustained by the ways in which men habitually
act. If men could be induced to act differently, then we should require
to formulate a new set of “laws.” The greatest revelation of the war in
many respects is the tremendous achievement of industrial production in
Great Britain under the influence of a social emotion, and without any
of the common incentives of personal advantage. It may be conceded that
this social emotion was to some extent stimulated by a group antagonism,
but in the main it was the love of and the desire to preserve—in spite
of its faults—that particular social synthesis described as British that
lay behind this great performance. And once more let it be repeated that
the peril of war is not the only organ of social vision.
It is not pretended that commerce will be redeemed automatically by
placing a limitation upon the profit-motive; but without such a
limitation, it cannot be redeemed at all. It must enter into our scheme
to provide means of kindling the social vision which will transform
commerce into a social service; and this implies certain changes of
temper and method in the system of education. There is no reason why we
should not come to regard the business of feeding and clothing the
people as much a department of the public service as that of educating
or that of providing them with water or the time of day, or of
transmitting their correspondence; and there is no reason for supposing
that a right education will not provide in time as effectual a spur to
patriotism as the peril of war.
IV
It is, however, not enough to standardise the cost of living and to
impose a limit upon profits; for we have still no adequate guarantee
against a lowering of the standard of life. It does not necessarily
follow that the surplus profits will go to the raising of wages, or that
standardised prices will make for a sufficient living. It is necessary
to define a minimum standard of life. The demand for a minimum wage is a
beginning in this direction, but under the profit system, the minimum
wage defined as a money-wage is something of a snare. For so long as
prices tend to fly upward, no minimum wage can effectually prevent a
depression of the standard of life. It is only as we succeed in fixing a
minimum “real wage” which takes account of the cost of living that we
approach a satisfactory estimate. But, again, under the present
system—the relation of supply to demand in the labour market will render
even a minimum “real wage” exceedingly precarious.
The only satisfactory solution of this difficulty is to dissolve the
connection between work and wages. The assumption that men will not work
unless they must is not true; but it is the truth that while men are
compelled to work by the coercion of fear—whether of hunger or of
punishment—they will not do the most or the best work of which they are
capable. That workmen nowadays are apt to do as little as they can for
as much as they can get is not to be disputed; and organised labour
combines with its demand for larger wages another demand for fewer
working hours, and under certain conditions imposes restrictions on
output. But this is simply the answer in kind which labour returns to
capital. It is the vicious sequel of a vicious system. Capital buys in
the cheapest and sells in the dearest market; and labour having been
brought up in the same school does the same thing. If capital tries to
extort as much as it can out of labour, it is not to be wondered at that
labour should take a hand in the game.
We have to recognise that the best workmanship requires two conditions;
first—that the worker shall have a direct interest in the thing he
produces, second, that he shall enjoy the freedom which comes from a
sense of guaranteed security. To the former we shall have to return at a
later stage in the argument. Concerning the latter, we have seen how the
present system exposes the worker to a grave and vexatious insecurity.
It is stupid to suppose that men will habitually put their best into
their work under such conditions as these. The whole system is
intrinsically demoralising to all whom it touches. It is demoralising to
the employer because he comes to regard the worker as a mere “hand,” a
tool; and that is a frame of mind which saps his own manhood. It is
demoralising to the worker because it treats his physical energy as a
thing to be bought and sold at a price, the highest price he can extort;
and since a man’s labour is actually inseparable from his person, it
reduces him to a condition of servility, which, within a certain limit,
is as real as that of a chattel slave. He has neither independence nor
security. Over against this state of things, we must affirm that a man’s
subsistence shall be guaranteed to him as a customary practice, in good
weather and in bad, in sickness and in health, in work or unemployment.
The British Labour Party’s proposal of a national minimum standard of
life universally enforced is certainly one of the cornerstones of a
wholesome social order. The cynic will probably say that this will be
the paradise of the slacker; and no doubt there would be some persons
base enough to evade their share of productive labour. But we can count
upon the public opinion of a society in which freedom has created a new
sense of social obligation and a new quality of fellowship, to make a
slacker’s life not worth living. It may very fairly be doubted whether
at the worst the slacker who remained incorrigible would constitute so
great a tragedy—either in number or in kind—or constitute so clear
evidence of the bankruptcy of a system as do the innumerable and
increasing derelicts of the present industrial order.
These three measures, the standardisation of the cost of living, the
limitation of profits, the institution of a minimum standard of life are
necessary to the redemption of commerce. For to redeem commerce, we must
in the first instance, take away from it the power and the opportunity
of exploiting life for the ends of private gain. But this process
secures another result. It ensures for the mass of the people a
reasonable security and sufficiency of physical subsistence, so that the
pre-occupation with self-preservation need no longer arrest their
spiritual development. We establish the foundations of freedom—freedom
from fear, from anxiety, from the autocracy of the employer or his
agent—and confer upon the ordinary man a new status, in which we may
with good hope expect to find him susceptible to a social vision
powerful to evoke his devotion and to bring his will into captivity to
its obedience. Commerce and industry will then no longer be a vast
scramble of competition and exploitation, but a generous social
co-operation.
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