PEACE AND THE PRICE SYSTEM
Evidently the conception of peace on which its various spokesmen are
proceeding is by no means the same for all of them. In the current
German conception, e.g., as seen in the utterances of its many and
urgent spokesmen, peace appears to be of the general nature of a truce
between nations, whose God-given destiny it is, in time, to adjust a
claim to precedence by wager of battle. They will sometimes speak of it,
euphemistically, with a view to conciliation, as "assurance of the
national future," in which the national future is taken to mean an
opportunity for the extension of the national dominion at the expense of
some other national establishment. In the same connection one may recall
the many eloquent passages on the State and its paramount place and
value in the human economy. The State is useful for disturbing the
peace. This German notion may confidently be set down as the lowest of
the current conceptions of peace; or perhaps rather as the notion of
peace reduced to the lowest terms at which it continues to be
recognisable as such. Next beyond in that direction lies the notion of
armistice; which differs from this conception of peace chiefly in
connoting specifically a definite and relatively short interval between
warlike operations.
The conception of peace as being a period of preparation for war has
many adherents outside the Fatherland, of course. Indeed, it has
probably a wider vogue and a readier acceptance among men who interest
themselves in questions of peace and war than any other. It goes hand in
hand with that militant nationalism that is taken for granted,
conventionally, as the common ground of those international relations
that play a part in diplomatic intercourse. It is the diplomatist's
_métier_ to talk war in parables of peace. This conception of peace as a
precarious interval of preparation has come down to the present out of
the feudal age and is, of course, best at home where the feudal range of
preconceptions has suffered least dilapidation; and it carries the
feudalistic presumption that all national establishments are competitors
for dominion, after the scheme of Macchiavelli. The peace which is had
on this footing, within the realm, is a peace of subjection, more or
less pronounced according as the given national establishment is more or
less on the militant order; a warlike organisation being necessarily of
a servile character, in the same measure in which it is warlike.
In much the same measure and with much the same limitations as the
modern democratic nations have departed from the feudal system of civil
relations and from the peculiar range of conceptions which characterise
that system, they have also come in for a new or revised conception of
peace. Instead of its being valued chiefly as a space of time in which
to prepare for war, offensive or defensive, among these democratic and
provisionally pacific nations it has come to stand in the common
estimation as the normal and stable manner of life, good and commendable
in its own right. These modern, pacific, commonwealths stand on the
defensive, habitually. They are still pugnaciously national, but they
have unlearned so much of the feudal preconceptions as to leave them in
a defensive attitude, under the watch-word: Peace with honour. Their
quasi-feudalistic national prestige is not to be trifled with, though it
has lost so much of its fascination as ordinarily not to serve the
purposes of an aggressive enterprise, at least not without some shrewd
sophistication at the hands of militant politicians and their diplomatic
agents. Of course, an exuberant patriotism may now and again take on the
ancient barbarian vehemence and lead such a provisionally pacific nation
into an aggressive raid against a helpless neighbour; but it remains
characteristically true, after all, that these peoples look on the
country's peace as the normal and ordinary course of things, which each
nation is to take care of for itself and by its own force.
The ideal of the nineteenth-century statesmen was to keep the peace by a
balance of power; an unstable equilibrium of rivalries, in which it was
recognised that eternal vigilance was the price of peace by
equilibration. Since then, by force of the object-lesson of the
twentieth-century wars, it has become evident that eternal vigilance
will no longer keep the peace by equilibration, and the balance of power
has become obsolete. At the same time things have so turned that an
effective majority of the civilised nations now see their advantage in
peace, without further opportunity to seek further dominion. These
nations have also been falling into the shape of commonwealths, and so
have lost something of their national spirit.
With much reluctant hesitation and many misgivings, the statesmen of
these pacific nations are accordingly busying themselves with schemes
for keeping the peace on the unfamiliar footing of a stable equilibrium;
the method preferred on the whole being an equilibration of
make-believe, in imitation of the obsolete balance of power. There is a
meticulous regard for national jealousies and discriminations, which it
is thought necessary to keep intact. Of course, on any one of these
slightly diversified plans of keeping the peace on a stable footing of
copartnery among the pacific nations, national jealousies and national
integrity no longer have any substantial meaning. But statesmen think
and plan in terms of precedent; which comes to thinking and planning in
terms of make-believe, when altered circumstances have made the
precedents obsolete. So one comes to the singular proposal of the
statesmen, that the peace is to be kept in concert among these pacific
nations by a provision of force with which to break it at will. The
peace that is to be kept on this footing of national discriminations and
national armaments will necessarily be of a precarious kind; being, in
effect, a statesmanlike imitation of the peace as it was once kept even
more precariously by the pacific nations in severalty.
Hitherto the movement toward peace has not gone beyond this conception
of it, as a collusive safeguarding of national discrepancies by force of
arms. Such a peace is necessarily precarious, partly because armed force
is useful for breaking the peace, partly because the national
discrepancies, by which these current peace-makers set such store, are a
constant source of embroilment. What the peace-makers might logically be
expected to concern themselves about would be the elimination of these
discrepancies that make for embroilment. But what they actually seem
concerned about is their preservation. A peace by collusive neglect of
those remnants of feudalistic make-believe that still serve to divide
the pacific nations has hitherto not seriously come under advisement.
Evidently, hitherto, and for the calculable future, peace is a relative
matter, a matter of more or less, whichever of the several working
conceptions spoken of above may rule the case. Evidently, too, a peace
designed to strengthen the national establishment against eventual war,
will count to a different effect from a collusive peace of a defensive
kind among the pacific peoples, designed by its projectors to conserve
those national discrepancies on which patriotic statesmen like to dwell.
Different from both would be the value of a peace by neglect of such
useless national discriminations as now make for embroilment. A
protracted season of peace should logically have a somewhat different
cultural value according to the character of the public policy to be
pursued under its cover. So that a safe and sane conservation of the
received law and order should presumably best be effected under cover of
a collusive peace of the defensive kind, which is designed to retain
those national discrepancies intact that count for so much in the
national life of today, both as a focus of patriotic sentiment and as an
outlet for national expenditures. This plan would involve the least
derangement of the received order among the democratic peoples, although
the plan might itself undergo some change in the course of time.
* * * * *
Among the singularities of the latterday situation, in this connection,
and brought out by the experiences of the great war, is a close
resemblance between latterday warlike operations and the ordinary
processes of industry. Modern warfare and modern industry alike are
carried on by technological processes subject to surveillance and
direction by mechanical engineers, or perhaps rather experts in
engineering science of the mechanistic kind. War is not now a matter of
the stout heart and strong arm. Not that these attributes do not have
their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the
chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this
warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science,
industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked
before, it is no longer a gentlemen's war, and the gentleman, as such,
is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played.
Certain consequences follow from this state of the case. Technology and
industrial experience, in large volume and at a high proficiency, are
indispensable to the conduct of war on the modern plan, as well as a
large, efficient and up-to-date industrial community and industrial
plant to supply the necessary material of this warfare. At the same time
the discipline of the campaign, as it impinges on the rank and file as
well as on the very numerous body of officers and technicians, is not at
cross purposes with the ordinary industrial employments of peace, or not
in the same degree as has been the case in the past, even in the recent
past. The experience of the campaign does not greatly unfit the men who
survive for industrial uses; nor does it come in as a sheer interruption
of their industrial training, or break the continuity of that range of
habits of thought which modern industry of the technological order
induces; not in the same degree as was the case under the conditions of
war as carried on in the nineteenth century. The cultural, and
particularly the technological, incidence of this modern warfare should
evidently be appreciably different from what has been experienced in the
past, and from what this past experience has induced students of these
matters to look for among the psychological effects of warlike
experience.
It remains true that the discipline of the campaign, however impersonal
it may tend to become, still inculcates personal subordination and
unquestioning obedience; and yet the modern tactics and methods of
fighting bear somewhat more on the individual's initiative, discretion,
sagacity and self-possession than once would have been true. Doubtless
the men who come out of this great war, the common men, will bring home
an accentuated and acrimonious patriotism, a venomous hatred of the
enemies whom they have missed killing; but it may reasonably be doubted
if they come away with a correspondingly heightened admiration and
affection for their betters who have failed to make good as foremen in
charge of this teamwork in killing. The years of the war have been
trying to the reputation of officials and officers, who have had to meet
uncharted exigencies with not much better chance of guessing the way
through than their subalterns have had.
By and large, it is perhaps not to be doubted that the populace now
under arms will return from the experience of the war with some net gain
in loyalty to the nation's honour and in allegiance to their masters;
particularly the German subjects,--the like is scarcely true for the
British; but a doubt will present itself as to the magnitude of this net
gain in subordination, or this net loss in self-possession. A doubt may
be permitted as to whether the common man in the countries of the
Imperial coalition, e.g., will, as the net outcome of this war
experience, be in a perceptibly more pliable frame of mind as touches
his obligations toward his betters and subservience to the irresponsible
authority exercised by the various governmental agencies, than he was at
the outbreak of the war. At that time, there is reason to believe, there
was an ominous, though scarcely threatening, murmur of discontent
beginning to be heard among the working classes of the industrial towns.
It is fair to presume, however, that the servile discipline of the
service and the vindictive patriotism bred of the fight should combine
to render the populace of the Fatherland more amenable to the
irresponsible rule of the Imperial dynasty and its subaltern royal
establishments, in spite of any slight effect of a contrary character
exercised by the training in technological methods and in self-reliance,
with which this discipline of the service has been accompanied. As to
the case of the British population, under arms or under compulsion of
necessity at home, something has already been said in an earlier
passage; and much will apparently depend, in their case, on the further
duration of the war. The case of the other nationalities involved, both
neutrals and belligerents, is even more obscure in this bearing, but it
is also of less immediate consequence for the present argument.
* * * * *
The essentially feudal virtues of loyalty and bellicose patriotism would
appear to have gained their great ascendency over all men's spirit
within the Western civilisation by force of the peculiarly consistent
character of the discipline of life under feudal conditions, whether in
war or peace; and to the same uniformity of these forces that shaped the
workday habits of thought among the feudal nations is apparently due
that profound institutionalisation of the preconceptions of patriotism
and loyalty, by force of which these preconceptions still hold the
modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions
favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These
preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come
down from the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution
underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most
widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient
preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday
experience of these peoples has not seriously worked at cross purposes
with the patriotic spirit and its bias of national animosity; and what
discrepancy there has effectively been between the discipline of workday
life and the received institutional preconceptions on this head, has
hitherto been overborne by the unremitting inculcation of these virtues
by interested politicians, priests and publicists, who speak habitually
for the received order of things.
That order of things which is known on its political and civil side as
the feudal system, together with that era of the dynastic States which
succeeds the feudal age technically so called, was, on its industrial or
technological side, a system of trained man-power organised on a plan of
subordination of man to man. On the whole, the scheme and logic of that
life, whether in its political (warlike) or its industrial doings,
whether in war or peace, runs on terms of personal capacity, proficiency
and relations. The organisation of the forces engaged and the
constraining rules according to which this organisation worked, were of
the nature of personal relations, and the impersonal factors in the case
were taken for granted. Politics and war were a field for personal
valor, force and cunning, in practical effect a field for personal force
and fraud. Industry was a field in which the routine of life, and its
outcome, turned on "the skill, dexterity and judgment of the individual
workman," in the words of Adam Smith.
The feudal age passed, being done to death by handicraft industry,
commercial traffic, gunpowder, and the state-making politicians. But the
political States of the statemakers, the dynastic States as they may
well be called, continued the conduct of political life on the personal
plane of rivalry and jealousy between dynasties and between their
States; and in spite of gunpowder and the new military engineering,
warfare continued also to be, in the main and characteristically, a
field in which man-power and personal qualities decided the outcome, by
virtue of personal "skill, dexterity and judgment." Meantime industry
and its technology by insensible degrees underwent a change in the
direction of impersonalisation, particularly in those countries in which
state-making and its warlike enterprise had ceased, or were ceasing, to
be the chief interests and the controlling preconception of the people.
The logic of the new, mechanical industry which has supplanted
handicraft in these countries, is a mechanistic logic, which proceeds in
terms of matter-of-fact strains, masses, velocities, and the like,
instead of the "skill, dexterity and judgment" of personal agents. The
new industry does not dispense with the personal agencies, nor can it
even be said to minimise the need of skill, dexterity and judgment in
the personal agents employed, but it does take them and their attributes
for granted as in some sort a foregone premise to its main argument. The
logic of the handicraft system took the impersonal agencies for granted;
the machine industry takes the skill, dexterity and judgment of the
workmen for granted. The processes of thought, and therefore the
consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the
personal agents engaged, and of the personal relations of discretion,
control and subordination necessary to the work; whereas the
mechanistic logic of the modern technology, more and more consistently,
runs in terms of the impersonal forces engaged, and inculcates an
habitual predilection for matter-of-fact statement, and an habitual
preconception that the findings of material science alone are
conclusive.
In those nations that have made up the advance guard of Western
civilisation in its movement out of feudalism, the disintegrating effect
of this matter-of-fact animus inculcated by the later state of the
industrial arts has apparently acted effectively, in some degree, to
discredit those preconceptions of personal discrimination on which
dynastic rule is founded. But in no case has the discipline of this
mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a
definitive conclusion. Meantime war and politics have on the whole
continued on the ancient plane; it may perhaps be fair to say that
politics has so continued because warlike enterprise has continued still
to be a matter of such personal forces as skill, dexterity and judgment,
valor and cunning, personal force and fraud. Latterly, gradually, but
increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the
mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the
turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has
come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the
industrial arts.
What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political
strategy and the political preconceptions of the new century, is a
question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a
ready answer. It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful,
undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of
prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues
would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the
ancient discipline to which men have been subjected. So much, however,
would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic
animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely
decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn
punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their
increasing disserviceability,--as would be done, e.g., or at least
sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to
keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national
interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a
state of mutual envy and distrust.
* * * * *
Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this
modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much
the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to
a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and
order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added
that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same
mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so
confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the
ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise
in dominion.
As has been noted above, modern warfare not only makes use of, and
indeed depends on, the modern industrial technology at every turn of the
operations in the field, but it draws on the ordinary industrial
resources of the countries at war in a degree and with an urgency never
equalled. No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much
less to make headway in warlike enterprise, without the most
thoroughgoing exploitation of the modern industrial arts. Which
signifies for the purpose in hand that any Power that harbors an
imperial ambition must take measures to let its underlying population
acquire the ways and means of the modern machine industry, without
reservation; which in turn signifies that popular education must be
taken care of to such an extent as may be serviceable in this manner of
industry and in the manner of life which this industrial system
necessarily imposes; which signifies, of course, that only the
thoroughly trained and thoroughly educated nations have a chance of
holding their place as formidable Powers in this latterday phase of
civilisation. What is needed is the training and education that go to
make proficiency in the modern fashion of technology and in those
material sciences that conduce to technological proficiency of this
modern order. It is a matter of course that in these premises any
appreciable illiteracy is an intolerable handicap. So is also any
training which discourages habitual self-reliance and initiative, or
which acts as a check on skepticism; for the skeptical frame of mind is
a necessary part of the intellectual equipment that makes for advance,
invention and understanding in the field of technological proficiency.
But these requirements, imperatively necessary as a condition of warlike
success, are at cross purposes with that unquestioning respect of
persons and that spirit of abnegation that alone can hold a people to
the political institutions of the old order and make them a willing
instrument in the hands of the dynastic statesmen. The dynastic State is
apparently caught in a dilemma. The necessary preparation for warlike
enterprise on the modern plan can apparently be counted on, in the long
run, to disintegrate the foundations of the dynastic State. But it is
only in the long run that this effect can be counted on; and it is
perhaps not securely to be counted on even in a moderately long run of
things as they have run hitherto, if due precautions are taken by the
interested statesmen,--as would seem to be indicated by the successful
conservation of archaic traits in the German peoples during the past
half century under the archaising rule of the Hohenzollern. It is a
matter of habituation, which takes time, and which can at the same time
be neutralised in some degree by indoctrination.
Still, when all is told, it will probably have to be conceded that,
e.g., such a nation as Russia will fall under this rule of inherent
disability imposed by the necessary use of the modern industrial arts.
Without a fairly full and free command of these modern industrial
methods on the part of the Russian people, together with the virtual
disappearance of illiteracy, and with the facile and far-reaching system
of communication which it all involves, the Russian Imperial
establishment would not be a formidable power or a serious menace to the
pacific nations; and it is not easy to imagine how the Imperial
establishment could retain its hold and its character under the
conditions indicated.
The case of Japan, taken by itself, rests on somewhat similar lines as
these others. In time, and in this case the time-allowance should
presumably not be anything very large, the Japanese people are likely to
get an adequate command of the modern technology; which would, here as
elsewhere, involve the virtual disappearance of the present high
illiteracy, and the loss, in some passable measure, of the current
superstitiously crass nationalism of that people. There are indications
that something of that kind, and of quite disquieting dimensions, is
already under way; though with no indication that any consequent
disintegrating habits of thought have yet invaded the sacred close of
Japanese patriotic devotion.
Again, it is a question of time and habituation. With time and
habituation the emperor may insensibly cease to be of divine pedigree,
and the syndicate of statesmen who are doing business under his
signature may consequently find their measures of Imperial expansion
questioned by the people who pay the bills. But so long as the Imperial
syndicate enjoy their present immunity from outside obstruction, and can
accordingly carry on an uninterrupted campaign of cumulative predation
in Korea, China and Manchuria, the patriotic infatuation is less likely
to fall off, and by so much the decay of Japanese loyalty will be
retarded. Yet, even if allowed anything that may seem at all probable in
the way of a free hand for aggression against their hapless neighbours,
the skepticism and insubordination to personal rule that seems
inseparable in the long run from addiction to the modern industrial arts
should be expected presently to overtake the Japanese spirit of loyal
servitude. And the opportunity of Imperial Japan lies in the interval.
So also does the menace of Imperial Japan as a presumptive disturber of
the peace at large.
* * * * *
At the cost of some unavoidable tedium, the argument as regards these
and similar instances may be summarised. It appears, in the (possibly
doubtful) light of the history of democratic institutions and of modern
technology hitherto, as also from the logical character of this
technology and its underlying material sciences, that consistent
addiction to the peculiar habits of thought involved in its carrying on
will presently induce a decay of those preconceptions in which dynastic
government and national ambitions have their ground. Continued addiction
to this modern scheme of industrial life should in time eventuate in a
decay of militant nationalism, with a consequent lapse of warlike
enterprise. At the same time, popular proficiency in the modern
industrial arts, with all that that implies in the way of intelligence
and information, is indispensable as a means to any successful warlike
enterprise on the modern plan. The menace of warlike aggression from
such dynastic States, e.g., as Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan is
due to their having acquired a competent use of this modern technology,
while they have not yet had time to lose that spirit of dynastic loyalty
which they have carried over from an archaic order of things, out of
which they have emerged at a very appreciably later period (last half of
the nineteenth century) than those democratic peoples whose peace they
now menace. As has been said, they have taken over this modern state of
the industrial arts without having yet come in for the defects of its
qualities. This modern technology, with its underlying material
sciences, is a novel factor in the history of human culture, in that
addiction to its use conduces to the decay of militant patriotism, at
the same time that its employment so greatly enhances the warlike
efficiency of even a pacific people, at need, that they can not be
seriously molested by any other peoples, however valorous and numerous,
who have not a competent use of this technology. A peace at large among
the civilised nations, by loss of the militant temper through addiction
to this manner of arts of peace, therefore, carries no risk of
interruption by an inroad of warlike barbarians,--always provided that
those existing archaic peoples who might pass muster as barbarians are
brought into line with the pacific nations on a footing of peace and
equality. The disparity in point of outlook as between the resulting
peace at large by neglect of bootless animosities, on the one hand, and
those historic instances of a peaceable civilisation that have been
overwhelmed by warlike barbarian invasions, on the other hand, should be
evident.
* * * * *
It is always possible, indeed it would scarcely be surprising to find,
that the projected league of neutrals or of nations bent on peace can
not be brought to realisation at this juncture; perhaps not for a long
time yet. But it should at the same time seem reasonable to expect that
the drift toward a peaceable settlement of national discrepancies such
as has been visible in history for some appreciable time past will, in
the absence of unforeseen hindrances, work out to some such effect in
the course of further experience under modern conditions. And whether
the projected peace compact at its inception takes one form or another,
provided it succeeds in its main purpose, the long-term drift of things
under its rule should logically set toward some ulterior settlement of
the general character of what has here been spoken of as a peace by
neglect or by neutralisation of discrepancies.
It should do so, in the absence of unforeseen contingencies; more
particularly if there were no effectual factor of dissension included in
the fabric of institutions within the nation. But there should also,
e.g., be no difficulty in assenting to the forecast that when and if
national peace and security are achieved and settled beyond recall, the
discrepancy in fact between those who own the country's wealth and those
who do not is presently due to come to an issue. Any attempt to forecast
the form which this issue is to take, or the manner, incidents,
adjuncts and sequelae of its determination, would be a bolder and a more
ambiguous, undertaking. Hitherto attempts to bring this question to an
issue have run aground on the real or fancied jeopardy to paramount
national interests. How, if at all, this issue might affect national
interests and international relations, would obviously depend in the
first instance on the state of the given national establishment and the
character of the international engagements entered into in the formation
of this projected pacific league. It is always conceivable that the
transactions involving so ubiquitous an issue might come to take on an
international character and that they might touch the actual or fanciful
interests of these diverse nations with such divergent effect as to
bring on a rupture of the common understanding between them and of the
peace-compact in which the common understanding is embodied.
* * * * *
In the beginning, that is to say in the beginnings out of which this
modern era of the Western civilisation has arisen, with its scheme of
law and custom, there grew into the scheme of law and custom, by settled
usage, a right of ownership and of contract in disposal of
ownership,--which may or may not have been a salutary institutional
arrangement on the whole, under the circumstances of the early days.
With the later growth of handicraft and the petty trade in Western
Europe this right of ownership and contract came to be insisted on,
standardised under legal specifications, and secured against molestation
by the governmental interests; more particularly and scrupulously among
those peoples that have taken the lead in working out that system of
free or popular institutions that marks the modern civilised nations. So
it has come to be embodied in the common law of the modern world as an
inviolable natural right. It has all the prescriptive force of legally
authenticated immemorial custom.
Under the system of handicraft and petty trade this right of property
and free contract served the interest of the common man, at least in
much of its incidence, and acted in its degree to shelter industrious
and economical persons from hardship and indignity at the hands of their
betters. There seems reason to believe, as is commonly believed, that so
long as that relatively direct and simple scheme of industry and trade
lasted, the right of ownership and contract was a salutary custom, in
its bearing on the fortunes of the common man. It appears also, on the
whole, to have been favorable to the fuller development of the
handicraft technology, as well as to its eventual outgrowth into the new
line of technological expedients and contrivances that presently gave
rise to the machine industry and the large-scale business enterprise.
The standard theories of economic science have assumed the rights of
property and contract as axiomatic premises and ultimate terms of
analysis; and their theories are commonly drawn in such a form as would
fit the circumstances of the handicraft industry and the petty trade,
and such as can be extended to any other economic situation by shrewd
interpretation. These theories, as they run from Adam Smith down through
the nineteenth century and later, appear tenable, on the whole, when
taken to apply to the economic situation of that earlier time, in
virtually all that they have to say on questions of wages, capital,
savings, and the economy and efficiency of management and production by
the methods of private enterprise resting on these rights of ownership
and contract and governed by the pursuit of private gain. It is when
these standard theories are sought to be applied to the later situation,
which has outgrown the conditions of handicraft, that they appear
nugatory or meretricious. The "competitive system" which these standard
theories assume as a necessary condition of their own validity, and
about which they are designed to form a defensive hedge, would, under
those earlier conditions of small-scale enterprise and personal contact,
appear to have been both a passably valid assumption as a premise and a
passably expedient scheme of economic relations and traffic. At that
period of its life-history it can not be said consistently to have
worked hardship to the common man; rather the reverse. And the common
man in that time appears to have had no misgivings about the excellence
of the scheme or of that article of Natural Rights that underlies it.
This complexion of things, as touches the effectual bearing of the
institution of property and the ancient customary rights of ownership,
has changed substantially since the time of Adam Smith. The "competitive
system," which he looked to as the economic working-out of that "simple
and obvious system of natural liberty" that always engaged his best
affections, has in great measure ceased to operate as a routine of
natural liberty, in fact; particularly in so far as touches the fortunes
of the common man, the impecunious mass of the people. _De jure_, of
course, the competitive system and its inviolable rights of ownership
are a citadel of Natural Liberty; but _de facto_ the common man is now,
and has for some time been, feeling the pinch of it. It is law, and
doubtless it is good law, grounded in immemorial usage and authenticated
with statute and precedent. But circumstances have so changed that this
good old plan has in a degree become archaic, perhaps unprofitable, or
even mischievous, on the whole, and especially as touches the conditions
of life for the common man. At least, so the common man in these modern
democratic and commercial countries is beginning to apprehend the
matter.
Some slight and summary characterisation of these changing circumstances
that have affected the incidence of the rights of property during modern
times may, therefore, not be out of place; with a view to seeing how far
and why these rights may be due to come under advisement and possible
revision, in case a state of settled peace should leave men's attention
free to turn to these internal, as contrasted with national interests.
Under that order of handicraft and petty trade that led to the
standardisation of these rights of ownership in the accentuated form
which belongs to them in modern law and custom, the common man had a
practicable chance of free initiative and self-direction in his choice
and pursuit of an occupation and a livelihood, in so far as rights of
ownership bore on his case. At that period the workman was the main
factor in industry and, in the main and characteristically, the question
of his employment was a question of what he would do. The material
equipment of industry--the "plant," as it has come to be called--was
subject of ownership, then as now; but it was then a secondary factor
and, notoriously, subsidiary to the immaterial equipment of skill,
dexterity and judgment embodied in the person of the craftsman. The body
of information, or general knowledge, requisite to a workmanlike
proficiency as handicraftsman was sufficiently slight and simple to fall
within the ordinary reach of the working class, without special
schooling; and the material equipment necessary to the work, in the way
of tools and appliances, was also slight enough, ordinarily, to bring it
within the reach of the common man. The stress fell on the acquirement
of that special personal skill, dexterity and judgment that would
constitute the workman a master of his craft. Given a reasonable measure
of pertinacity, the common man would be able to compass the material
equipment needful to the pursuit of his craft, and so could make his way
to a livelihood; and the inviolable right of ownership would then serve
to secure him the product of his own industry, in provision for his own
old-age and for a fair start in behalf of his children. At least in the
popular conception, and presumably in some degree also in fact, the
right of property so served as a guarantee of personal liberty and a
basis of equality. And so its apologists still look on the institution.
In a very appreciable degree this complexion of things and of popular
conceptions has changed since then; although, as would be expected, the
change in popular conceptions has not kept pace with the changing
circumstances. In all the characteristic and controlling lines of
industry the modern machine technology calls for a very considerable
material equipment; so large an equipment, indeed, that this plant, as
it is called, always represents a formidable amount of invested wealth;
and also so large that it will, typically, employ a considerable number
of workmen per unit of plant. On the transition to the machine
technology the plant became the unit of operation, instead of the
workman, as had previously been the case; and with the further
development of this modern technology, during the past hundred and fifty
years or so, the unit of operation and control has increasingly come to
be not the individual or isolated plant but rather an articulated group
of such plants working together as a balanced system and keeping pace in
common, under a collective business management; and coincidently the
individual workman has been falling into the position of an auxiliary
factor, nearly into that of an article of supply, to be charged up as an
item of operating expenses. Under this later and current system,
discretion and initiative vest not in the workman but in the owners of
the plant, if anywhere. So that at this point the right of ownership has
ceased to be, in fact, a guarantee of personal liberty to the common
man, and has come to be, or is coming to be, a guarantee of dependence.
All of which engenders a feeling of unrest and insecurity, such as to
instill a doubt in the mind of the common man as to the continued
expediency of this arrangement and of the prescriptive rights of
property on which the arrangement rests.
There is also an insidious suggestion, carrying a sinister note of
discredit, that comes in from ethnological science at this point; which
is adapted still further to derange the common man's faith in this
received institution of ownership and its control of the material
equipment of industry. To students interested in human culture it is a
matter of course that this material equipment is a means of utilising
the state of the industrial arts; that it is useful in industry and
profitable to its owners only because and in so far as it is a creation
of the current technological knowledge and enables its owner to
appropriate the usufruct of the current industrial arts. It is likewise
a matter of course that this technological knowledge, that so enables
the material equipment to serve the purposes of production and of
private gain, is a free gift of the community at large to the owners of
industrial plant; and, under latterday conditions, to them exclusively.
The state of the industrial arts is a joint heritage of the community at
large, but where, as in the modern countries, the work to be done by
this technology requires a large material equipment, the usufruct of
this joint heritage passes, in effect, into the hands of the owners of
this large material equipment.
These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology,
the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the
material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no
class or condition of men in the modern community--with the possible
exception of politicians and the clergy--can conceivably contribute less
to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large
owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to
production being managed for private gain, it happens that these
investors are not only not given to the increase and diffusion of
technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in
retarding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail.
Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the
general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are
commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the
plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in
its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.
Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the
community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of
this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material
appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of
established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations designed to
supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on
the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing
which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts,
and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the
supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and
privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit
to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the
workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the
market.
The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing
of private ownership in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can
show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and
whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage--refusal to
let production go on except it affords them an unearned income--the
expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay
the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find
that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or
useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of
superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic
establishments.
This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it
may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its
adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of
its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these
matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common
man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with
privation and insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear
this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced
standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the
view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively
the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered.
How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training
inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of
these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has
to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame
of mind of that unblest mass of the population who will have opportunity
to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national
interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.
At the risk of what may seem an excessively wide digression, there is
something further to be said of the capitalistic sabotage spoken of
above. The word has by usage come to have an altogether ungraceful air
of disapproval. Yet it signifies nothing more vicious than a deliberate
obstruction or retardation of industry, usually by legitimate means, for
the sake of some personal or partisan advantage. This morally colorless
meaning is all that is intended in its use here. It is extremely common
in all industry that is designed to supply merchantable goods for the
market. It is, in fact, the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all
expedients in business enterprise that has to do with supplying the
market, being always present in the businessman's necessary
calculations; being not only a usual and convenient recourse but quite
indispensable as an habitual measure of business sagacity. So that no
personal blame can attach to its employment by any given businessman or
business concern. It is only when measures of this nature are resorted
to by employees, to gain some end of their own, that such conduct
becomes (technically) reprehensible.
Any businesslike management of industry is carried on for gain, which is
to be got only on condition of meeting the terms of the market. The
price system under which industrial business is carried on will not
tolerate production in excess of the market demand, or without due
regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the
side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust
its operations, by due acceleration, retardation or stoppage, to the
market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to
say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So
long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is
managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity
of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a
remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by
well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry;
which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management,
and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business
management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of
sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes
to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.
* * * * *
To anyone who is inclined to see these matters of usage in the light of
their history and to appraise them as phenomena of habituation,
adaptation and supersession in the sequence of cultural proliferation,
there should be no difficulty in appreciating that this institution of
ownership that makes the core of the modern institutional structure is
a precipitate of custom, like any other item of use and wont; and that,
like any other article of institutional furniture, it is subject to the
contingencies of supersession and obsolescence. If prevalent habits of
thought, enforced by the prevalent exigencies of life and livelihood,
come to change in such a way as to make life under the rule imposed by
this institution seem irksome, or intolerable, to the mass of the
population; and if at the same time things turn in such a way as to
leave no other and more urgent interest or exigency to take precedence
of this one and hinder its being pushed to an issue; then it should
reasonably follow that contention is due to arise between the unblest
mass on whose life it is a burden and the classes who live by it. But it
is, of course, impossible to state beforehand what will be the precise
line of cleavage or what form the division between the two parties in
interest will take. Yet it is contained in the premises that, barring
unforeseen contingencies of a formidable magnitude, such a cleavage is
due to follow as a logical sequel of an enduring peace at large. And it
is also well within the possibilities of the case that this issue may
work into an interruption or disruption of the peace between the
nations.
In this connection it may be called to mind that the existing
governmental establishments in these pacific nations are, in all cases,
in the hands of the beneficiary, or kept classes,--beneficiaries in the
sense in which a distinction to that effect comes into the premises of
the case at this point. The responsible officials and their chief
administrative officers,--so much as may at all reasonably be called the
"Government" or the "Administration,"--are quite invariably and
characteristically drawn from these beneficiary classes; nobles,
gentlemen, or business men, which all comes to the same thing for the
purpose in hand; the point of it all being that the common man does not
come within these precincts and does not share in these counsels that
assume to guide the destiny of the nations.
Of course, sporadically and ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious
and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the
gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in
council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently
evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office
for any of its responsible officials, even for those of a very scant
responsibility, fall to the level of the habitual livelihood of the
undistinguished populace, or indeed to fall below what is esteemed to be
a seemly income for a gentleman. Should such an impecunious one be
thrown up into a place of discretion in the government, he will
forthwith cease to be a common man and will be inducted into the rank of
gentleman,--so far as that feat can be achieved by taking thought or by
assigning him an income adequate to a reputably expensive manner of
life. So obvious is the antagonism between a vulgar station in life and
a position of official trust, that many a "selfmade man" has advisedly
taken recourse to governmental position, often at some appreciable cost,
from no apparent motive other than its known efficacy as a Levitical
corrective for a humble origin. And in point of fact, neither here nor
there have the underbred majority hitherto learned to trust one of their
own kind with governmental discretion; which has never yet, in the
popular conviction, ceased to be a perquisite of the gently-bred and the
well-to-do.
Let it be presumed that this state of things will continue without
substantial alteration, so far as regards the complexion of the
governmental establishments of these pacific nations, and with such
allowance for overstatement in the above characterisation as may seem
called for. These governmental establishments are, by official position
and by the character of their personnel, committed more or less
consistently to the maintenance of the existing law and order. And
should no substantial change overtake them as an effect of the war
experience, the pacific league under discussion would be entered into by
and between governments of this complexion. Should difficulties then
arise between those who own and those who do not, in any one of these
countries, it would become a nice question whether the compact to
maintain the peace and national integrity of the several nations
comprised in the league should be held to cover the case of internal
dissensions and possible disorders partaking of the character of revolt
against the established authorities or against the established
provisions of law. A strike of the scope and character of the one
recently threatened, and narrowly averted, on the American railroads,
e.g., might easily give rise to disturbances sufficiently formidable to
raise a question of the peace league's jurisdiction; particularly if
such a disturbance should arise in a less orderly and less isolated
country than the American republic; so as unavoidably to carry the
effects of the disturbance across the national frontiers along the lines
of industrial and commercial intercourse and correlation. It is always
conceivable that a national government standing on a somewhat
conservative maintenance of the received law and order might feel itself
bound by its conception of the peace to make common cause with the
keepers of established rights in neighboring states, particularly if
the similar interests of their own nation were thought to be placed in
jeopardy by the course of events.
Antecedently it seems highly probable that the received rights of
ownership and disposal of property, particularly of investment, will
come up for advisement and revision so soon as a settled state of peace
is achieved. And there should seem to be little doubt but this revision
would go toward, or at least aim at the curtailment or abrogation of
these rights; very much after the fashion in which the analogous vested
rights of feudalism and the dynastic monarchy have been revised and in
great part curtailed or abrogated in the advanced democratic countries.
Not much can confidently be said as to the details of such a prospective
revision of legal rights, but the analogy of that procedure by which
these other vested rights have been reduced to a manageable disability,
suggests that the method in the present case also would be by way of
curtailment, abrogation and elimination. Here again, as in analogous
movements of disuse and disestablishment, there would doubtless be much
conservative apprehension as to the procuring of a competent substitute
for the supplanted methods of doing what is no longer desirable to be
done; but here as elsewhere, in a like conjuncture, the practicable way
out would presumably be found to lie along the line of simple disuse and
disallowance of class prerogative. Taken at its face value, without
unavoidable prejudice out of the past, this question of a substitute to
replace the current exploitation of the industrial arts for private gain
by capitalistic sabotage is not altogether above a suspicion of
drollery.
Yet it is not to be overlooked that private enterprise on the basis of
private ownership is the familiar and accepted method of conducting
industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in
the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency
of life and death in the apprehension of the kept classes. It should
accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away
international dissension, that the division of classes would come on in
a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of
exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit.
And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division
of opinion on these matters might presently shift back to the old
familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put
down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic,
or conservative, peoples to safeguard the institutions of the received
law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.
* * * * *
In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the
nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook is that of a
return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war
came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of
war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation,
certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among
the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security.
National integrity and autonomy are to be preserved on the received
lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as
before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary
equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of
diplomacy without afterthought, whatever that might conceivably mean.
There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an
arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace
that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently,
in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries
and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised
the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism
greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more
particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of
the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of
innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for
the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of class
and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in
the first instance.
Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are
singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which
they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of
the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of
immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of
human culture, how the common man is to fare under this régime of law
and order,--the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is
to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these
pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of
parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted as a matter of course
that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all
their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may
be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisation of archaic
institutions, the measure of archaism varying from one to another.
With due stabilisation and with a sagacious administration of the
established scheme of law and order, the common man should find himself
working under conditions and to results of the familiar kind; but with
the difference that, while legal usage and legal precedent remain
unchanged, the state of the industrial arts can confidently be expected
to continue its advance in the same general direction as before, while
the population increases after the familiar fashion, and the investing
business community pursues its accustomed quest of competitive gain and
competitive spending in the familiar spirit and with cumulatively
augmented means. Stabilisation of the received law and order will not
touch these matters; and for the present it is assumed that these
matters will not derange the received law and order. The assumption may
seem a violent one to the students of human culture, but it is a simple
matter of course to the statesmen.
To this piping time of peace the nearest analogues in history would seem
to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably
the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and
order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after
all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature.
The scheme of law and order, indeed, appears in neither instance to have
changed so far as the altered circumstances would seem to have called
for. To the common man the Roman peace appears to have been a peace by
submission, not widely different from what the case of China has
latterly brought to the appreciation of students. The Victorian peace,
which can be appreciated more in detail, was of a more genial character,
as regards the fortunes of the common man. It started from a reasonably
low level of hardship and _de facto_ iniquity, and was occupied with
many prudent endeavours to improve the lot of the unblest majority; but
it is to be admitted that these prudent endeavours never caught up with
the march of circumstances. Not that these prudent measures of
amelioration were nugatory, but it is clear that they were not an
altogether effectual corrective of the changes going on; they were, in
effect, systematically so far in arrears as always to leave an uncovered
margin of discontent with current conditions. It is a fact of history
that very appreciable sections of the populace were approaching an
attitude of revolt against what they considered to be intolerable
conditions when that era closed. Much of what kept them within bounds,
that is to say within legal bounds, was their continued loyalty to the
nation; which was greatly, and for the purpose needfully, reenforced by
a lively fear of warlike aggression from without. Now, under the
projected _pax orbis terrarum_ all fear of invasion, it is hopefully
believed, will be removed; and with the disappearance of this fear
should also disappear the drag of national loyalty on the counsels of
the underbred.