Our modern world runs on fuel. It burns its way through the years. The
ancient civilizations made no such use of combustion. A few sticks
kept the pot boiling, and a bag of charcoal served the purposes of the
smith. Torches and oil lamps were convenient but not indispensable. Man
set fire to his world seriously only 200 years ago.
The tradition is, therefore, that coal and oil are commodities like
marble or leather, to be bought and sold in the same fashion, chaffered
over, refused, or withheld. Quite insidiously they have become
fundamental necessities for our social and economic order, but the old
ways of dealing remain. We still treat them as incidental commodities.
Perhaps the old methods have hung about too long. We may be on the road
to very profound changes in our dealings with oil and coal.
In America the more prominent issue is oil. Both here in England
and in America, “Oil,” Mr. Upton Sinclair’s book, in spite of his
peculiar methods of advertisement, has crept insidiously and surely
to a success. I find quite a number of my friends reading it. I see
strangers reading it in the train. Evidently people want ideas about
oil. In Britain the more urgent aspect of the fuel question is the
coal-mining issue. The General Strike, following the coal lock-out of
1926, settled nothing. In the Labour débâcle that ensued the miners
lost most of the points they had fought for; they had to accept longer
hours and a lower standard of living, and the industry readjusted
itself to the conditions of a declining industry. It has continued to
decline. There remain great numbers of miners unemployed, and profits
are unsatisfactory. Coal trouble is becoming the chronic ailment of
Great Britain.
There was a phase in the British coal drama when coal production
was subsidized. I believe that for the effective, permanent
re-establishment of British prosperity there must be a return to
subsidized coal. It is the only way of reconciling two otherwise
incompatible needs, an abundant cheap supply of the various sorts of
coal needed for British shipping, transport, and industrial activities,
and a decent standard of life for the body of men needed to win the
coal.
No doubt, to those who hold to the old-fashioned way of regarding
coal as something you can do without and still play your part in life
it is shocking to think of the community paying for coal to be sold
again at a loss, for that is what the subsidy amounts to, but to any
one who grasps its altered status as a social necessity it will be no
more shocking than the abolition of toll-gates and the provision of
high-roads at the common expense.
Suppose the coal supply firmly established on a subsidized basis
and the subsidy counterbalanced by a countervailing duty on the
export of coal--because there is no reason whatever why the British
taxpayer should pay in part for the coal consumed by the foreign
industrialist--what would be the effect upon the community as a whole?
Manifestly there would be a cheapening of transport, a stimulation
of the metallurgical industries, a cheapening of the cost of power,
and either a reduction of wages or an elevation of the standard of
life of the ordinary worker, enabling him to spend the money he would
save on coal on manufactured goods. I cannot imagine anything but a
general stimulation of the entire economic life of the community.
Cheaper transport and cost of production would invigorate the country’s
competitive export of manufactured goods and in its turn react upon the
coal industry with an enlarged demand for coal.
Naturally a subsidized undertaking will mean a controlled industry;
there is not the slightest benefit to the community if either coal
owners or coal merchants are allowed to intercept and absorb the
subsidy. A subsidy means compounded royalties, restricted profits, and
scientific direction. And as naturally the recognition of coal-mining
as a public service will change the status of the miner.
The present condition of the mining worker has been the result of slow
developments, and like most social arrangements that have grown up
slowly, it is a thoroughly bad complex of laws, customs, and tolerated
conventions. Only usage blinds us to the absurdity of a system by which
a man who has specialized in coal-winning, and who is ready and willing
to go into the mine and win his stint of coal for the community, should
not have every facility given him to discharge his task. It should
be possible to calculate the cost to the community of a miner from
his birth to his death; it should be possible to charge up to him his
schooling, housing, keep, holidays, recreations, police protection,
medical attendance, funeral, grave, and everything else he requires and
consumes. Against this it should be possible to set as an equivalent so
many tons of this or that sort of coal. If he wins less than that he is
a parasite; if more, he is robbed. And equally it should be possible to
make his stint of coal-winning easy and convenient for him, instead of
leaving it as laborious, uncertain, vexatious, and humiliating as it is
now.
It is the business of a civilized community to determine that
equivalent between coal and consumption, and arrange for the miner
to justify his existence as a consumer as easily and pleasantly as
possible, slowly or quickly as he chooses. If he sees fit to work like
the devil, long spells and all the year around, and get it over and be
assured of all his elemental needs thereafter for the rest of his life,
while he meditates, goes or walks, paints pictures or writes poetry,
he ought to be able to do so without making existence intolerable for
a fellow-miner with a more leisurely conception of his life-work. A
modern civilized community ought to be able to cater for its labourers
on such flexible terms. It ought to command sufficient intelligence to
estimate ahead what it will want in the way of coal, and enlist its
miners on long-term agreements for a definite amount of work that will
make them as safe in their jobs as civil servants.
We are so used to the scrambling quality of life, as we know it, to
the desperate grabbing and holding of scraps of property, to strikes
and lock-outs, to unemployment, fluctuating prices, speculative
cunning, uncertainty, servitude, and frustration, that few of us
succeed in realizing that these things are not now necessary. However
unavoidable they may have been for mankind in the past, they are not
now unavoidable. The chancy and disagreeably adventurous way we live is
not the only possible nor the best way of living. It is a phase out of
which our race may pass.
The reason why our community cannot figure out what the life task of
a coal-miner should be is simply because it does not know enough about
things that can be quite effectively known. It cannot figure out even
its broad staple needs and supplies and be certain of them as yet,
even within quite wide limits. So we have to guess and gamble our way
through life, to overcharge and underpay and “keep on the safe side.”
We hoard if we can. We think ourselves lucky if we can saddle the
world with a debt for the loan of our hoarded accumulations. We cannot
imagine freedom and independence except in the rôle of a well-secured
creditor. Again, we have to fall back on the gold standard for monetary
purposes because we have not the necessary facts for a regulated
currency, although theoretically a regulated currency is a far more
desirable thing than a currency resting finally for its sanctions on
a brute quantity of gold. We not only live in anxieties that could
be dispelled; by virtue of this same ignorance, we sicken and die of
diseases which might have been prevented or cured. We are still as much
the prey of chance as any other animals. All our lives are worried,
shadowed, belittled, and laid waste by the preoccupations arising out
of the lack of that comprehensive knowledge without which the sane and
comprehensive direction of human affairs is impossible.
Now what I am writing here of life, its present uncertainty and
disorder, is to be found in the lamentations of the preacher and in the
pessimistic literature of the Egypt of five thousand years ago. The
reader of Breasted’s “Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient
Egypt” will find passages about human life that say exactly what my
last paragraph repeats. But what is new, what we have clear in our
minds to-day, is the growth of a body of knowledge charged with the
promise of order and assurance to replace these ancient distresses.
Then, indeed, the world was limitless and dreams of control absurd.
Now, in the last three centuries, we have begun the surveying and
mapping of the whole planet. After contours and topography follow
geological surveys, biological exploration, climatology, economic
appraisal. As the surveyor advances the prospector disappears. We are
bringing all the material basis of human life into the sphere of the
calculable. We are numbering the people, always an annoying process
to the ancient gods. In quite a few years we shall know within quite
small limits the population of the world and its rate of increase;
we shall know, within the limits of a few hundred tons, its annual
requirements of wheat and rice, steel and coal, cotton and wool. We
shall know how and where to get these and all other staple commodities.
We shall be able to work out the whole processes of getting and
distributing the material requirements of human life upon lines not of
commercial adventure, but clear certitude. We shall have a grip upon
disease, of which our present attempts at public and world hygiene
are only the faintest first intimations. And the little scattered
band of meteorologists who now observe and guess about the weather
will have been reinforced and developed into a big, competent, world
organization, which may even forecast our crops and anticipate our
shortages within a continually closer margin of accuracy years ahead.
Do not the achievements of science in the past two centuries fully
justify what I have written here? And if this is so, and if there is
this clear prospect of a world in which we can plan out the general
activities of mankind on estimates, trustworthy to within a very small
fraction of the total amount, is it conceivable that any of the main
disputes of our present economic world-scramble will survive? You may
call me a dreamer in these matters, but it is not I who dream, it is
you, who are not properly awake to what man has done and what man can
hope to do.
I wish my wakefulness was more contagious than it seems to be.
Britain the Sleeper mutters “Muddle through” in its sleep, and will
not open its eyes to the facts that are in the same room with it.
The heavy industries of the old country grow heavier and heavier.
Unless those drowsy eyelids can be lifted, unless Britain can rouse
itself--within a very brief term of years--to meet the irksome demand
for more knowledge, more science, and more imaginative courage, it
must sink into a permanently inferior position to the United States
of America and to a renascent Central Europe. Leadership is for those
who will lead, and the direction in which the world has to be led
is manifestly towards the systematic control and stimulation of the
production of basic substances in the common interest. Production
primarily for profit in raw materials and basic substances, like
the mere commercialization of the transport services, works out in
the crippling of the higher types of industrial life. The movement
for the conservation of forests and other national resources from
the recklessness of unbridled private enterprise in America, with
which President Roosevelt identified himself, was merely one early
recognition of what is now becoming a widely recognized truth. With
the development of material civilization and the accumulation of exact
knowledge, the concern of the commonweal spreads into fields that were
once left quite legitimately to adventurous exploitation. For Great
Britain, in respect to fuel, the issue is now a vital one. Either she
must prepare to subsidize and then nationalize her coal supply, or
she must face the clear prospect of retrocession from her position of
leadership in the world.
_30 October, 1927._