world had been opened up and pre-empted, labour was beginning to demand
and even get more adequate wages, competition, once hailed as "the life
of trade" was becoming so fierce that dividends were dwindling.
Something had to be done and in self-defense industries began to
coalesce in enormous "trusts" and "combines" and monopolies.
Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became
international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and
ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naïveté
into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors
could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of
letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines,
expending millions annually in its operations, making the modern
newspaper possible, and ultimately developing the whole system of
propaganda which has now become the one great determining factor in the
making of public opinion.
When the twentieth century opened, that industrialism which had begun
just a century before, had, with its various collateral developments,
financial, educational, journalistic, etc., become not only the greatest
force in society, but as well a thing operating on the largest scale
that man had ever essayed: beside it the Roman Empire was parochial.
The result of this institution, conceived on such imperial lines, was,
in the field we are now considering, the total destruction of the sense
of the holiness of labour and of joy in work. It extended far beyond the
limits of pure industrialism; it moulded and controlled society in all
its forms, destroying ideals old as history, reversing values, confusing
issues and wrecking man's powers of judgment. Until the war it seemed
irresistible, now its weakness and the fallacy of its assumptions are
revealed, but it has become so absolutely a part of our life, indeed of
our nature, that we are unable to estimate it by any sound standards of
judgment, and even when we approximate this we cannot think in other
terms when we try to devise our schemes of redemption. Even the
socialist and the Bolshevik think in imperial terms when they try to
compass the ending of imperialism.
Under this supreme system, as I see it, the two essential things I have
spoken of cannot be restored, nor could they maintain themselves if, by
some miracle, they were once re-established. The indictment cannot be
closed here. The actual condition that has developed from industrialism
presents certain factors that are not consonant with sane, wholesome and
Christian living. Not only has the unit of human scale in human society
been done away with, not only have the sense of the nobility of work and
joy in the doing been exterminated, but, as well, certain absolutely
false principles and methods have been adopted which are not susceptible
of reform but only of abolition.
Of some of these I have spoken already; the alarming drift towards
cities, until now in the United States more than one-half the population
is urban; the segregation of industries in certain cities and regions;
the minute division of labour and intensive specialization; the abnormal
growth of a true proletariat or non-land-holding class; the flooding of
the country by cheap labour drawn from the most backward communities and
from peoples of low race-value. Out of this has arisen a bitter class
conflict and the ominous beginnings of a perilous class consciousness,
with actual warfare joined in several countries, and threatened in all
others where industrial civilization is prevalent. With this has grown
up an artificially stimulated covetousness for a thousand futile
luxuries, and a standard of living that presupposes a thousand
non-essentials as basic necessities. Production for profit, not use,
excess production due to machinery, efficient organization, and surplus
of labour, together with the necessity for marketing the product at a
profit, have produced a state of things where at least one-half the
available labour in the country is engaged in the production and sale of
articles which are not necessary to physical, intellectual or spiritual
life, while of the remainder, hardly more than a half is employed in
production, the others are devoting themselves to distribution and to
the war of competition through advertising and the capturing of trade by
ingenious and capable salesmen. It is a significant fact that two of the
greatest industries in the United States are the making of automobiles
and moving pictures.
It is probably true to say that of the potential labour in the United
States, about one-fourth is producing those things which are physically,
intellectually and spiritually necessary; the remaining three-fourths
are essentially non-producers: they must, however, be housed, fed,
clothed, and amused, and the cost of this support is added to the cost
of the necessities of life. The reason for the present high cost of
living lies possibly here.
Lest I be misunderstood, let me say here that under the head of
necessities of life I do not mean a new model automobile each year,
moving pictures, mechanical substitutes for music or any other art, and
the thousand catch-trade devices that appear each year for the purpose
of filching business from another or establishing a new desire in the
already over-crowded imaginations of an over-stimulated populace.
Particularly do I not mean advertising in any sense in which it is now
understood and practised. If, as I believe to be the case, production
for profit, rather than for use, the reversal of the ancient doctrine
that the demand must produce the supply, in favour of the doctrine that
the supply must foster the demand, is the foundation of our economic
error and our industrial ills, then it follows that advertising as it is
now carried on by billboards, circulars and newspapers, by drummers,
solicitors and consular agents, falls in the same condemnation, for
except by its offices the system could not have succeeded or continue to
function. It is bad in itself as the support and strength of a bad
institution, but its guilt does not stop here. So plausible is it, so
essential to the very existence of the contemporary régime, so knit up
with all the commonest affairs of life, so powerful in its organization
and broad in its operations, it has poisoned, and continues to poison,
the minds of men so that the headlong process of losing all sense of
comparative values is accelerated, while every instinctive effort at
recovery and readjustment is nullified. How far this process has gone
may be illustrated by two instances. It is only a few months ago that a
most respected clergyman publicly declared that missionaries were the
greatest and most efficient asset to trade because they were unofficial
commercial agents who opened up new and savage countries to Western
commerce through advertising commodities of which the natives had never
heard, and arousing in them a sense of acquisitiveness that meant more
wealth and business for trade and manufacture, which should support
foreign missions on this ground at least. More recently the head of an
advertising concern in New York is reported to have said: "It is
principally through advertising that we have arrived at the high degree
of civilization which this age enjoys, for advertising has taught us the
use of books and how to furnish our homes with the thousand and one
comforts that add so materially to our physical and intellectual
well-being. The future of the world depends on advertising. Advertising
is the salvation of civilization, for civilization cannot outlive
advertising a century."
It is tempting to linger over such a delectable morsel as this, for even
if it is only the absurd and irresponsible output of one poor, foolish
man, it does express more or less what industrial civilization holds to
be true, though few would avow their faith so whole-heartedly. The
statement was made as propaganda, and propaganda is merely advertising
in its most insidious and dangerous form. The thing revealed its
possibilities during the war, but the black discredit that was then very
justly attached to it could not prevail against its manifest potency,
and it is now universally used after the most comprehensive and
frequently unscrupulous fashion, with results that can only be perilous
in the extreme. The type and calibre of mind that has now been released
from long bondage, and by weight of numbers is now fast taking over the
direction of affairs, is curiously subservient to the written word, and
lacking a true sense of comparative values, without effective leadership
either secular or religious, is easily swayed by every wind of doctrine.
The forces of evil that are ever in conflict with the forces of right
are notoriously ingenious in making the worse appear the better cause,
and with every desire for illumination and for following the right way,
the multitude, whether educated or illiterate, fall into the falsehoods
of others' imaginings. Money, efficiency, an acquired knowledge of mob
psychology, the printing press and the mail service acting in alliance,
and directed by fanatical or cynical energy, form a force of enormous
potency that is now being used effectively throughout society. It is
irresponsible, anonymous and pervasive. Through its operation the last
barriers are broken down between the leadership of character and the
leadership of craft, while all formal distinctions between the valuable
and the valueless are swept away.
I have spoken at some length of this particular element in the present
condition of things, because in both its aspects, as the support of our
present industrial and economic system and as the efficient moulder of a
fluid and unstable public opinion, it is perhaps the strongest and most
subtle force of which we must take account.
With a system so prevalent as imperial industry, so knit up with every
phase of life and thought, and so determining a factor in all our
concepts, united as it is with two such invincible allies as advertising
and propaganda, it is inconceivable that it should be overthrown by any
human force from without. Holding it to be essentially wrong, it seems
to me providential that it is already showing signs of falling by its
own weight. Production of commodities has far exceeded production of the
means of payment, and society is now running on promises to pay, on
paper obligations, on anticipations of future production and sale, on
credit, in a word. The war has enormously magnified this condition until
an enforced liquidation would mean bankruptcy for all the nations of the
earth, while the production of utilities is decreasing in proportion to
the production of luxuries, labour is exacting increasing pay for
decreasing hours of work and quality of output, and the enormous
financial structure, elaborately and ingeniously built up through
several generations, is in grave danger of immediate catastrophe. The
whole world is in the position of an insolvent debtor who is so deeply
involved that his creditors cannot afford to let him go into bankruptcy,
and so keep him out of the Poor Debtor's Court by doling out support
from day to day. Confidence is the only thing that keeps matters going;
what happens when this is lost is now being demonstrated in many parts
of Europe. The optimist claims that increased production, coupled with
enforced economy, will produce a satisfactory solution, but there is no
evidence that labour, now having the whip-hand, will give up its present
advantage sufficiently to make this possible; even if it did, payment
must be in the form of exchange or else in further promises to pay,
while the capacity of the world for consumption is limited somewhere,
though thus far "big business" has failed to recognize this fact. At
present the interest charges on debts, both public and private, have
reached a point where they come near to consuming all possible profits
even from a highly accelerated rate of production. Altogether it is
reasonable to assume that the present financial-industrial system is
near its term for reasons inherent in itself, let alone the possibility
of a further extension of the drastic and completely effective measures
of destruction that are characteristics of Bolshevism and its
blood-brothers.
Assuming that this is so, two questions arise: what is to take the place
of imperial industry, and how is this substitution to be brought about?
I think the answer to the first is: a social and industrial system based
on small, self-contained, largely self-sufficing units, where supply
follows demand, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where in all industrial operations some system will obtain which is more
or less that of the guilds of the Middle Ages. I should like to go into
this a little more in detail before trying to answer the second
question.
The normal social unit is a group of families predominantly of the same
race, territorially compact, of substantially the same ideals as
expressed in religion and the philosophy of life, and sufficiently
numerous to provide from within itself the major part of those things
which are necessary to physical, intellectual and spiritual well-being.
It should consist of a central nucleus of houses, each with its garden,
the churches, schools and public buildings that are requisite, the
manufactories and workshops that supply the needs of the community, the
shops for sale of those things not produced at home, and all necessary
places of amusement. Around this residential centre should be sufficient
agricultural land to furnish all the farm products that will be consumed
by the community itself. The nucleus of habitation and industry,
together with the surrounding farms, make up the social unit, which is
to the fullest possible degree, self-contained, self-sufficient and
self-governing.
Certain propositions are fundamental, and they are as follows: Every
family should own enough land to support itself at need. The farms
included in the unit must produce enough to meet the needs of the
population. Industry must be so organized that it will normally serve
the resident population along every feasible line. Only such things as
cannot be produced at home on account of climatic or soil limitations
should be imported from outside. All necessary professional services
should be obtainable within the community itself. All financial
transactions such as loans, credits, banking and insurance should be
domestic. Surplus products, whether agricultural, industrial or
professional, should be considered as by-products, and in no case should
the producing agency acquire such magnitude that home-consumption
becomes a side issue and production for profit take the place of
production for use.
All this is absolutely opposed to our present system, but our present
system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore
vicious. I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the
failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the
factory system and advertising, but its concomitant, the segregation of
industries, is equally objectionable. To ship hogs 1,500 miles to be
slaughtered and packed in food form, and then ship this manufactured
product back to the source from which the raw material came; to feed a
great city with grain, potatoes and fruits coming from 1,000 to 3,000
miles away, and vegetables from a distance of several hundred miles,
while the farms within a radius of fifty miles are abandoned and barren;
to make all the shoes for the nation in one small area, to spin the wool
and cotton and weave the cloth in two or three others; to make the
greater part of the furniture in one state, the automobiles in a second
and the breakfast food in a third, is so preposterous a proposition that
it belongs in Gulliver's Travels, not in the annals of a supposedly
intelligent people. The only benefit is that which for a time accrued to
the railways, which carted raw materials and finished products back and
forth over thousands of miles of their lines, the costs of shipment and
reshipment being naturally added to the price to the consumer. The
penalties for this uneconomic procedure were borne by society at large,
not only in the increased costs but through the abnormal communities,
each with its tens of thousands of operatives all engaged in the same
work and generally drawn from foreign races (with the active
co-operation of the steamship lines), and the permanent dislocation of
the labour supply, together with the complete disruption of the social
synthesis.
With production for profit and segregation of industries has come an
almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour. Under a
right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified. The
dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as
possible each man should carry through one entire operation. This is of
course now, and always has been under any highly developed civilization,
impossible in practice, except along certain lines of art and
craftsmanship. The evils of the existing system can in a measure be done
away with the moment production for use is the recognized law, for it is
only in bulk-production that this intensive specialization can be made
to pay. Bulk-production there will always be until, and if, the world is
reorganized on the basis of an infinite number of self-contained social
units, but in the ideal community--and I am dealing now with ideals--it
would not exist.
Allied with this is the whole question of the factory method and the use
and misuse of machinery. It seems to me that the true principle is that
machinery and the factory are admissible only when so employed they
actually do produce, in bulk operations, a better product, and with less
labour, than is possible through hand work. Weaving, forging and all
work where human action must be more or less mechanical, offer a fair
field for the machine and the factory, but wherever the human element
can enter, where personality and the skilled craft of the hand are given
play, the machine and the factory are inadmissible. The great city,
creation of "big business," segregation of industries, advertising,
salesmanship and a hundred other concomitants of modernism, have built
up an abnormal and avaricious demand for bulk-production along lines
where the handicraft should function. It becomes necessary--let us
say--to provide a million dollars worth of furniture for a ten million
dollar hotel (itself to be superseded and scrapped in perhaps ten years)
and naturally only the most intensive and efficient factory system can
meet this demand. Rightly, however, the furniture of a community should
be produced by the local cabinet makers, and so it should be in many
other industries now entirely taken over by the factory system.
For the future then we must consciously work for the building upward
from primary units, so completely reversing our present practice of
creating the big thing and fighting hopelessly to preserve such small
and few doles of liberty and personality as may be permitted to filter
downward from above. This is the only true democracy, and the thing we
call by the name is not this, largely because we have bent our best
energies to the building up of vast and imperial aggregates which have
inevitably assumed a complete unity in themselves and become dominating,
tyrannical and ruthless forces that have operated regardless of the
sound laws and wholesome principles of a right society. Neither the
vital democracy of principle nor the artificial democracy of practice
can exist in conjunction with imperialism, whether this is established
in government, in industry, in trade, in society or in education.
If we can assume, then, the gradual development of a new society in
which these principles will be carried out, a society that is made up of
social units of human scale, self-contained, self-supporting and
self-governed, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where bulk-production is practically non-existent, the sub-division of
labour reduced to the lowest practicable point, machinery employed to a
much less extent than now, and the factory system abolished, what
organic form will labour take on in place of that which now obtains? It
is possible to forecast this only in the most general terms, for life
itself must operate to determine the lines of development and dictate
the consequent forms. If we can acquire a better standard of comparative
values, and with a clearer and more fearless vision estimate the rights
and wrongs of the contemporary system, rejecting the ill thing and
jealously preserving, or passionately regaining, the good, we shall be
able to establish certain broad, fundamental and governing principles,
and doing this we can await in confidence the evolution of the organic
forms that will be the working agencies of the new society.
I have tried to indicate some of the basic principles of a new society.
The operating forms, so far as industry is concerned, will, I think,
follow in essential respects the craft-guilds of the Middle Ages. They
will not be an archaeological restoration, as some of the English
protagonists of this great revolution seem to anticipate, they will be
variously adapted to the peculiar conditions of a new century, but the
basic principles will be preserved. Whatever happens, I am sure it will
not be either a continuation of the present system of capitalism and
profit-hunting, or nationalization of industries, or state socialism in
any form, or anything remotely resembling Bolshevism, syndicalism or a
"dictatorship of the proletariat." Here, as in government, education and
social relations, the power and the authority of the state must decline,
government itself withdrawing more and more from interference with the
operation of life, and liberty find its way back to the individual and
to the social and economic groups. We live now under a more tyrannical
and inquisitorial regime, in spite of (partly perhaps because of) its
democratic forms and dogmas, than is common in historical records.
Nationalization or state socialism would mean so great a magnifying of
this condition that existence would soon become both grotesque and
intolerable. We must realize, and soon, that man may lose even the last
semblance of liberty, as well under a nominal democracy as under a
nominal despotism or theocracy.
The guild system was the solution of the industrial problem offered and
enforced by Christianity working through secular life; it presupposed
the small social and industrial unit and becomes meaningless if
conceived in the gigantic and comprehensive scale of modern
institutions. "National guilds" is a contradiction in terms: it takes on
the same element of error that inheres in the idea of "one big union."
In certain respects the Christian guild resembled the modern trade
union, but it differed from it in more ways, and it seems to be true
that wherever this difference exists the guild was right and the union
is wrong. Community of fellowship and action amongst men of each craft
trade or calling is essential under any social system, good or bad, and
it would be inseparable from the better society that must sometime grow
up on the basis of the unit of human scale, for these autonomous groups,
in order to furnish substantially all that their component parts could
require, would have to be of considerable size as compared with the
little farming villages of New England, though in contrast with the
great cities of modernism they would be small indeed. In these new
"walled towns" there would be enough men engaged in agriculture, in the
necessary industrial occupations, in trade and in the professions to
form many guilds of workable size, and normally these guilds would
neither contain members of two or more professions or occupations, nor
those from outside the community itself. The guild cannot function under
intensive methods of production or where production is primarily for
profit, or where the factory system prevails, or where capitalism is the
established system, or under combinations, trusts or other devices for
the establishing and maintenance of great aggregates tending always
towards monopoly. However much we may admire the guild system and desire
its restoration, we may as well recognize this fact at once. The
imperial scale must go and the human scale be restored before the guild
can come back in any general sense.