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OUROBOROS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
_For the Contents of this Series see the end of
the Book_
OUROBOROS
OR
THE MECHANICAL
EXTENSION OF MANKIND
BY
GARET GARRETT
LONDON:
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
_Ouroboros was a fabulous snake, the encircling serpent, that swallowed
its own tail. It represented an infantile thought of the human mind for
wish-fulfilment by magical means. Man’s heroic business was to conquer
the reptile. As he did this he seized the object he most desired. He
might even wish himself into solid gold._
Made and Printed in Great Britain by M. F. Robinson & Co. Ltd. at the
Library Press, Lowest
CONTENTS
PAGE
I THE QUEST SINCE ADAM 7
II THE MACHINE AS IF 23
III THE LAW OF MACHINES 31
IV WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE 42
V THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS 58
VI IN PERIL OF TRADE 72
VII DIM VISTAS NEW 84
OUROBOROS
I
THE QUEST SINCE ADAM
One story of us is continuous. It is the story of our struggle to
recapture the Garden of Eden, meaning by that a state of existence free
from the doom of toil.
So long as the character of our economic life was agricultural, as it
almost wholly was until a very recent time, the attack was naïve. In
the file of prayers, if one is kept, the thickest, dustiest bundle is
that of our supplications for plenty—miraculous plenty without worry or
price. We were loth to believe that the second arrangement between God
and Adam made at the gate of exit:
Cursed is the ground for thy sake;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread
was forever; and for a long time afterward local weather conditions
were wistfully misunderstood, as a chastisement when they were bad and
a sign of relenting when they were good. It was forever. Nature’s ring
was closed, never again to open for any darling fructuary.
That is to say, man’s taking from the soil is an arbitrary wage. He
may increase the gross of it a little by exerting himself more: the
scale he cannot alter. If tilth for the individual has been made easier
somewhat and more productive by the use of wheeled implements, power
tools and now airplanes to dust the orchard with insecticide, these,
you must remember, represent a tremendous increase of effort by mankind
at large upon the principle of limited fecundity that governs the earth.
When at length the realistic mind perceived that here was a natural
fact upon which prayers, thanksgiving, sacrifice, idolatry, and the
pretentions of magic were all alike wasted, the spiritual part of us no
doubt had been willing to accept the sentence. Not so the earthy and
lusty part. The curse was heavy. There was never a risk man would not
take, no kind of heroic exertion he would spare himself, to escape the
evil, the boredom, the drudgery of repetitious toil.
From such puerile motivation came the Age of Discovery, then physical
science, purposeful mechanical invention, the industrial era, and
all the artificial marvels of the modern world. These effects are
historically traceable; and, if it should occur to you to wonder
why they are so much more vivid and astonishing in the West than in
the East, that is easily explained. The European mind went on with
the phantasy of an earthly paradise of plenty and leisure after the
Oriental mind in weariness of wisdom had given it up.
Until four hundred years ago the Europeans believed that somewhere in
the world was a fabulous land whose inhabitants lived as in dreams,
eating and drinking from golden vessels, wearing priceless jewels like
common beads, sated with ease and luxury. King, courts, astronomers
and navigators believed this. The vulgar fancy was for a place such as
Cockaigne of the medieval ballads, where all features of the landscape
were good to eat or drink and nobody ever was obliged to work. In quest
of this mythical region the pioneer feats of circumnavigation were
performed.
What a disparity between the character of the motive and the shape of
the dead!—or is it that men do not know their motives?
The earth was explored. It was found to be round and full of labour.
This, of course, was a terrible disappointment.
The ceaseless mind then turned to alchemy with the idea that base
metals were changeable into gold; from this came chemistry and the
study of matter and physical phenomena in a new way, taking nothing for
granted. This was the beginning of true Science. As to what might come
of it practically there was at first only the rudest kind of notion.
Dimly it was understood that exact knowledge must somehow increase
man’s power, give him control of the elementary circumstance, enable
him perhaps to command that which hitherto he had got by hazard. When
a great body of fact-knowledge had been accumulated, men began to see
little by little how it might be dynamically applied. Then the epoch of
Mechanical Invention.
The idea of machines was not new. Long before the beginning of the
Christian era the ancients had produced many wonderful automatic
devices; but mechanical knowledge with them was a department of magic.
The use of machines was to mystify the multitude. Brazen figures were
made to move, dragons to hiss, temple doors to open and close, trees
to emit musical sounds, and lamps to trim themselves perpetually by
means of floats, cogwheels, cylinders, valves, and pistons—all acting
on sound principles of pneumatics and hydraulics. Much of this ancient
technology was lost or forgotten. The European mind rediscovered it
gradually in a spirit of scientific curiosity, with no clear economic
intention. And, but for a simple practical idea, one that was very slow
to come through, the machine no doubt would still be what it anciently
was—an object of superstition, the toy of wonder, an accessory of
priestcraft.
And what an obvious idea it was!—merely to exploit the machine’s slave
value. Merely to see an engine as a beast of burden and the loom as a
projection of the hand, both instruments of magnified production, to
spare the labour of mankind.
That moment in which the use of mechanical energy came to be so
conceived was one of elemental significance. All the chances of human
life were altered, though not as anyone supposed or as they were meant
to be.
The course of internal evolution requires to be imagined. It is slow
beyond perception. It may not be a fact; or, for aught we know, it may
be finished in the species. Suddenly man begins to augment himself by
an external process. His natural powers become extensible to a degree
that makes them original in kind. To his given structure—the weakest
among animal structures in proportion to its bulk—he adds an automatic,
artificial member, responsive only to his contact, answerable only to
his will, uncontrolled by nature, fabulous in its possibilities of
strength, variation, and cunning.
His use of it in three generations has changed the design of
civilization out of recognition. That change alone which sets our time
off abruptly from all time before is the fact of potential plenty. We
take this for granted as if it were a natural fact, whereas, instead,
all the circumstances have been invented.
We who are born to the view cannot see it. We cannot imagine what it
was like to live in a world where famine was a frequent visitation and
all things were scarce. Yet never until now has the human race known
what plenty was. Immemorially the word has signified food.
See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has
blessed. God give thee of the dew of the heaven and the fatness of the
earth and plenty of wine and corn.
The cornucopia, horn of plenty, never contained a fabricated thing—only
the fruits of the earth.
That old meaning of the word has been recently lost. Modernly we speak
of ‘goods’; we talk of the standard of living, which is understood
of course to include proper quantities of food, and to mean, besides
food, an endless number of artificial things which people increasingly
require for their comfort and well-being.
Mechanical energy does not produce food. Nor has the principle of
limited fecundity that governs the earth been suspended. Yet the
machine has enormously increased the food-supply in two ways: first,
agriculture is equipped with power—tools, so that one man now may
perform the labour of many; second, transportation has made all the
food-producing areas of the world accessible, so that grain from the
middle of the North American continent and grain from Argentina are
mingled unawares in the European loaf.
This use of the machine to distribute food swiftly over the whole world
from where there is a surplus to where that surplus is needed has
had profound political, economic, and social consequences, beginning
with an increase of the human species vastly beyond any number that
had at any time previously existed or could ever before have been
sustained upon the earth. That is the one most awesome phenomenon of
the industrial era. The North American continent has been peopled from
European stock. Its present population is equal to that of all Europe
in 1800. This drain of emigration notwithstanding, the population of
Europe in the same time has trebled.
And still there is plenty.
Where it is not actual, it is potential. Who have not plenty are either
too inert or too ignorant to put forth the modern effort. What people
may use, enjoy, and consume now is an _x_ quantity, determined neither
by the rhythms of nature nor any biological principle, but simply by
the free total of their own exertions.
Faster than the race has multiplied the powers of the machine have
increased. One of these is the power of transportation, whereby the
food product of the whole earth is made uniformly available. The other
power is represented by a divisible product of artificial things
tending to exceed the sum of effective human desire.
To wishful desire there is no limit whatever; but there is a point at
which the effort necessary to obtain the object—that is, the toil—will
be weighed against the desire to possess it, and only when and if the
object is deemed worth the effort is desire effective in the economic
sense.
From the paradox mentioned—that tendency of the machine’s divisible
product to overwhelm the sum of effective desire—we get a series
of complex phenomena of which there is nowhere yet a complete
understanding.
This now is a buyer’s world where formerly it was the seller’s.
Business no longer sits in Asiatic dignity waiting for its customers;
it must up and seek them. The buyer is pursued.
As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float through my window.
They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday
a motor-truck stopped at his house and unloaded a self-playing piano. I
saw it and noticed that it got slightly damaged squeezing through the
tiny doorway.
What does this mean? First, it means that the day before yesterday a
salesman from the city went through this road selling self-playing
pianos for a nominal cash sum down and the balance on monthly
instalments. He sold one there, another in the next house but one, and
a third further on. How many he sold to the end of the road I do not
know.
But what does it mean that the city sends a man through a country road
in southern New Jersey to sell pianos in this beguiling manner to
people who cannot afford them? Those who bought them I know were all
in debt for other things bought on the instalment plan. It means there
is a necessity to sell this industrial product. It is the necessity of
a factory that has overtaken the normal demand for self-playing pianos
and must force the sale of its surplus. It is the necessity of all who
work in that factory and live thereby. It is the necessity of industry
in general, governed as it is by a principle it did not invent.
The principle is that the divisible product of the machine is cheap in
proportion to the quantity. Remember that principle. We shall meet it
again.
As with player-pianos and radio-sets in my country road, so with all
manner of artificial things, with the whole divisible product of the
machine, in every road, every street, every market of the world. How
to produce enough is no longer any problem at all. How to sell what
is increasingly produced—that is the problem. Evidence thereof is the
commonest thing we see. It is painted in the landscape. It illuminates
the cities at night. It is in our marginal vision when we read. There
is no lifting one’s eyes to heaven, no casting them down in shame, no
seeing whatever without seeing it.
Each day a forest is cut down and consumed for wood-pulp to make the
paper on which producers advertize their wares. The use of advertizing
is to stimulate in people a sense of wanting. Selling is a high
profession to which men are trained in special schools. To exchange
goods for money over a counter, to higgle with the individual
buyer—that is not selling. Clerks and peddlers do that. Selling is
to create new ways of wanting, new habits of comfort and luxury, new
customs of having. This is done by agitating the mass-imagination
with the suggestive power of advertizing. Business reserves its most
dazzling rewards for one who can think of a way to make thousands,
millions, whole races of people want that thing to-day which they knew
not the lack of yesterday.
Why is this so? Because there is never enough wanting.
And why is there never enough wanting? Because the divisible product of
the machine tends to increase faster than wanting.
What advertizing cannot accomplish governments may undertake. There are
backward, inert, idle races that do not want much. They are content
to do with little. It becomes therefore the diplomatic and military
business of the powerful industrial governments to change the ways of
such races. They must be brought forward, modernized, electrified,
taught how to want more. Why? In order that they shall be able to
consume their quota of the machine’s divisible product. Plenty shall be
put upon them.
There is no limit to that blessing. Those who have it are anxious to
share it, must share it in fact, in order to keep it for themselves,
under the principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to
the quantity produced. The more the cheaper; the fewer the dearer.
Are you beginning to suppose that man has found what he sought? Since
in this extraordinary manner he appears to have provided himself with
plenty, shall that dusty bundle of prayers be recalled or sent to the
furnace?
As to his prayers, they were never frank. Perhaps for that reason he
should wish he had them back. He prayed for plenty; what he secretly
associated with the thought of plenty was leisure—freedom from toil.
And once more he is disappointed, thwarted by his own inventions.
Plenty he has achieved. Toil he has not escaped.
The machine that was to have been a labour-saving device becomes an
engine of production that must be served. It is as if you could not
save labour at all—as if you could make it only more productive,
thereby achieving an abundance of things with no effect whatever upon
the necessity to perform monotonous labour. All this labour-saving
machinery we live with notwithstanding, never were people more
complaining of their tasks. That might mean only that they were
increasingly conscious of an abating evil; but there is no certainty
that the abatement even where it is noticeable is permanent. The signs
are otherwise.
In all material respects people are better off than ever before. Their
bodies are more comfortable, their minds are free from the terror
of hunger, they have much more to enjoy and consume and hope for,
because their labour is more richly rewarded in things. See the amazing
quantity and variety of things such as only the rich could once afford
now circulating at the base of the human pyramid. Not necessaries only.
Silks, watches, ornaments, shoes like those of queens and ladies,
plated ware, upholstered furniture, soft beds, besides things that were
formerly non-existent and therefore beyond the reach of kings, sultans
and nabobs, such as electric lights, plumbing, motor-cars. In the
United States a motor-car to every six persons! And still no sign that
the curve of human contentment is rising; no sign that the curse of
toil will ever be got rid of.
Instead of saving labour the machine has multiplied it. True, the hours
of industrial labour are fewer than they were, e.g. now eight where
they were ten and twelve a day; but this is merely to compare worse
with better where better is, and that is not everywhere. For a proper
contrast compare the industrial with the idyllic task. Even eight
hours of labour a day continuously performed by the industrial worker
represents a much greater sum of annual effort than his ancestor put
into the soil. Consider also how the machine, directly or indirectly,
has laid new work upon races hitherto naively existing in a state of
nature.
The riddle is that industrial civilization, having created to its
unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a
contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome
than ever. As toil it is more productive—there is more to consume. Life
has been expanded. It is safer. Physically it is inconceivably richer.
Was that the goal? What else is gained?
You would think that when man had found a way to provide himself with
artificial things in unlimited plenty and a way at the same time to
spread the food supply evenly over the face of the earth, the gift
of universal peace might follow. Never was the peace more frail; and
this, as we shall see—the frailty of the peace—is also a product of the
machine.
What force is this by fumbling found that man has put in motion? Its
pulsations he controls; its consequences so far have controlled him,
and modern life has become so involved in a mechanical spiral that we
cannot say for certain whether it is that we produce for the sake of
consumption or consume for the sake of production.
II
THE MACHINE AS IF
Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able
to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of
life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow. We know it to be
the exterior reality of our own ideas. Thus we are very familiar with
it, as with our arms and legs, and see it in much the same way—that is
to say, imperfectly and in some aspects not at all. Certainly it would
look very different if for a moment we could see it from an original
point of view with the eye of new wonder.
Fancy yourself a planetary tourist come visiting here, knowing
beforehand neither God nor man, unable therefore to distinguish
intuitively between their works.
Would you not think the machine that spins silk threads by the ton
from cellulose more wonderful than the silkworm similarly converting
the mulberry leaf in precious quantities, or a steel ship more amazing
than a whale? What of the mechanical beast with a colorless fluid in
its tail and a flame in its nose that runs sixty miles an hour without
weariness? Would it not seem superior in many ways to the horse that
goes forty miles in a day and falls down?
Suppose, moreover, that you know the tongue of men and are able to ask
them questions. You ask particularly about the automobile, which you
have mentally compared with the horse; whereupon they take you to the
factories in Detroit to see the automobile in process of becoming,
under conditions of mass-production, two or three taking life with a
snort every minute. In this factory, they tell you, they make only one
hundred a day, very fine ones; but in another they make five hundred,
and in another five thousand a day.
You ask them who makes the horse.
They do not know. They teach their children to say God makes it. The
horse is a natural thing.
Then the automobile is an unnatural thing?
They say no, smiling a little. Not an unnatural thing. The automobile
is a mechanical thing because they make it themselves.
You ask them why they say they make it.
At this they are distressed. There has been some slip of understanding
in the use of language. They explain it carefully. The horse is born.
There is no horse-factory. The automobile is made, as you have seen, in
factories.
Still it is not explained. You argue it with them. What is it they do
in the factory? They perform certain acts in relation to automobiles.
These, of course, are necessary, vital acts. If they were not
performed, automobiles could not be. And yet, how does this prove they
make automobiles? You ask them.
They ask you to say what else it could prove.
You may say it proves only that they are fathers of automobiles; and,
since they seem mystified greatly by this answer, you remind them that
in relation to their own children also they perform certain vital acts,
essential to beget them and without which children could not be, yet
they are never heard to say they make children. They say children are
born.
This has to be left as it is. Further explanations lead to worse
confusion.
You ask them certain other questions. How long have they been on the
earth—themselves? How long have they had machines? What did they do
before they had machines?
By their replies certain facts are established in your mind, and from
these facts you make certain deductions, all clear enough to you but
incomprehensible to them.
The facts are as follows: People have been here on the earth a very
long time, millions of years they think. Machines they have had
for only a very short time, or, as you now see them, for only two
generations. Before they had machines nearly everyone tilled the soil.
There was no industry save handicraft. In the space of one hundred
years these conditions have so remarkably changed that now only half
the people are required to till the soil; the other half live by
industry. This does not mean what you thought at first; it does not
mean that half the fields have been abandoned so that half the people
might go into industry. You are careful to get this straight, for
it is very important. On the contrary, since machines appeared whole
new continents of land have been opened to cultivation. This was
necessary in order to feed the industrial workers who live in cities,
far off from fields, and buy their food, whereas formerly everyone
generally speaking produced his own food, even the people of what once
were called cities going forth seasonally to till and reap the earth.
Actually, the number of people engaged in agriculture has greatly
increased; yet it is only half the population where before it was the
whole of it. What does this mean? It means that since the advent of
machines the human race has enormously increased in number; it has so
increased that the half of it which now is agricultural is greater
than the whole of it was before. The new, non-agricultural half is the
industrial part: it is the part that serves machines.
This fact is so astonishing that you wish to verify it. You ask them
what would happen if all the machines in the world should vanish
suddenly away. Their answer is that half the people living would perish
in a week. And that is what you thought.
What may you deduce from these facts?
First, you will be amused that people are so naïve as to think they
make machines. Then you may say there are two kinds of people here,
agricultural and industrial. The earth makes one kind; machines make
the other. And you will feel as sure of this as if you had proved it
to your senses when you have looked at a typical industrial city where
people live densely in compacted habitations with no visible errand on
earth but to run to and fro tending the machines that hum night and
day in the factories. Those tall, cylindrical, erupting forms called
smokestacks will appear to you as generative symbols. If they were not
there, neither would the people be there. Not only would the people
not be there. They would be nowhere. They could never have existed. If
the smokestacks disappeared, so would all these people, the industrial
part of the population, leaving only the agricultural part—the part
belonging to the soil—as it was before.
As a planetary tourist, you may be at least as certain these thoughts
are true as men are that they are untrue; and even if they were true
that would make no difference really. The problems are practical. We
must think of machines as machines act, logically.
One difficulty is that whereas the machine is automatically, unerringly
logical, and nothing else, man has only a little logic; he has,
besides, emotions, sentiments, instincts. In his unlogical character he
has often opposed himself to the machine, meaning to destroy it. At the
opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first railroad in
Great Britain and the first in the world, the anti-machine feeling of
British craftsmen was dramatically symbolized by a lone weaver seated
at a loom on a high hill. England was the industrial machine’s first
habitat on earth. There fanatical men led mobs against it.
Frail and clumsy as it was at first, its life was indestructible. And
now man would not dare destroy it if he could. His own life is bound
up with it. Steadily it has grown more powerful, more productive, more
ominous. It has powers of reproduction and variation which, if not
inherent, are yet as if governed by an active biological principle.
Machines produce machines. Besides those from which we get the
divisible product of artificial things, there are machines to make
machines, and both kinds—(both the machines that make machines and
those that transform raw materials into things of use and desire)—obey
some law of evolution.
Compare any kind of machine you may happen to think of with what its
ancestor was only twenty-five years ago. Its efficiency has doubled,
trebled; its shape has changed; and, as it is in the animal kingdom so
too with machines, suddenly a new species appears, a sport, a freak,
with no visible ancestor.
Man’s sense of material power within his environment has increased
proportionately. It is colossal. Benefits such as formerly he would
have thought beyond supernatural agency if he could have imagined
them at all he now confers upon himself. More without end presents
only technical difficulties. No physical circumstance forbids him.
Nevertheless the fact, and only the more strange it is, that for
reasons which he names economic or political he seems powerless to
inform the augmenting body of machine phenomena with a rational or
benign spirit.
III
THE LAW OF MACHINES
No longer do we speak of machines. They are too numerous and too
different. We speak of industrial equipment, which means machine-power
in general.
As you may know, the industrial equipment of the world is increasing by
terrific momentum. The machine is spreading over the face of the earth
like an idea new truth. And this is so notwithstanding the fact that
the industrial equipment already existing in the world is so great that
if for one year it were worked at ideal capacity the product could not
be sold for enough to pay the wages of labour, to say nothing of the
cost of material, overhead charges, or profit. Markets would be glutted
with goods. Producers would be ruined.
It follows that the pressing anxiety of industry is how to regulate and
limit production in order not to overwhelm its markets. Its chronic
nightmare is overproduction, meaning a quantity of divisible products
in excess of the immediate sum of effective desire. Hence combines,
pools, rings, cartels, committees, and associations of manufacturers,
which the courts are powerless to prevent even where they are forbidden
by law. These are a vital measure of mutual preservation. Yet they are
but protocols of truce. They very soon break down and have to be made
all over again.
Control of production, save here and there for a little while, is
a myth. It could be managed only in case there was a monopoly of
machine-power. Once there was. There is no longer, and never will
be again. Industrial production, taking it broadly, increases in an
uncontrollable manner.
The evidence is notorious, first in the efforts of national industry to
increase the sale of goods in its own country, and then in the strife
among industrial nations for access to foreign markets.
A steam calliope jamming its way through the crowded street of New York
City to advertize a new model of a popular motor-car at a reduced price
is a spectacle to bear reflection. It is a symptom of saturation in
the home market. When Henry Ford was making only a thousand cars a day,
he did not advertize. There was a ready cash-demand for the whole of
his product. When his output passed five thousand cars a day, he began
to advertize on billboards and to sell on the instalment plan.
As the natural cash-demand for a thing is overtaken, it begins to be
pressed for sale on credit. At this point finance steps in. Credit
companies with millions of capital are formed expressly for the purpose
of lending buyers the money with which to buy. Desire shall be made
effective. Selling on credit in this manner has latterly and suddenly
assumed such proportions as to represent in the affair of business a
new pattern. Some old-fashioned minds have been debating it as an evil.
They attack it on the ground that it betrays the virtue of thrift. But
thrift has ceased to be a virtue. To consume—to consume more and more
progressively—to be able to say in the evening “I have consumed more
to-day than I consumed yesterday”, this now is a duty the individual
owes to industrial society.
For see what would happen if people all over the world should return of
a sudden to the former ways of thrift—to the habit of doing without?
There would be depression in industry. Machines would stop. Millions
who tend them would be disemployed. Nothing would be safe, not even
your own money, for there would be panic on the exchange and trouble at
the bank.
One is not speaking of the United States alone. The multiplication of
things is greater here than anywhere else because we make machines
faster and work them harder; but you will find the same necessity
acting also in France, the very cradle of thrift, where now cheap
motors are sold on credit: anyone who will buy may borrow the money to
buy with. Why is this in France? To stimulate the motor habit? To serve
a private profit-motive? The habit will follow; the profit may. But
there is another reason, touching foreign trade, which we are coming to
elucidate.
In order to sell abroad, an industrial nation must be able to produce
cheaply. To produce cheaply, it must produce in large quantities by
a multiple method called mass-production. And you can safely manage
this mass-production only provided you have a fairly large and constant
base of domestic demand. So the sale of French motor-cars in France,
though it be on credit, must be large enough to support the method
of mass-production, for otherwise France would be unable to meet the
competition of Ford, who now exports motor-cars to Europe—even builds
them there. Then the British manufacturers, to meet the competition of
both France and Ford, also undertake against their genius to produce
motor-cars by the quantity method, and, having achieved the method,
their next dilemma is what to do with the product. They advertize at
home to create a popular motor-car habit and at the same time press
their cars for sale in foreign markets, even in France and Germany, as
these countries press theirs for sale in Great Britain.
Competition among industrial nations to exploit one another’s internal
markets is but one profile of all that dangerous activity taking place
in the name of foreign trade. The industrial powers holding their feet
in China’s doorway and France fighting the native in Morocco are other
aspects of the same thing. China so long as possible shall be an open
market for the surplus product of western machines; there shall be more
wanting in Morocco.
The industrial equipment of the world meanwhile goes on increasing,
though it is already so great that its capacity cannot be fully
utilized. In the United States alone there is probably enough surplus
machine-capacity to satisfy the whole demand of Great Britain’s
foreign customers for staple merchandise, such as textiles, iron and
steel manufacturers, rubber tires, motor-cars, electrical apparatus,
machinery, glass, garments, shoes, cutlery, and so on. Great Britain
not only has a surplus of machine-power; she has besides an excess of
man-power represented by say one and one-quarter millions unemployed.
She could easily take on the entire foreign trade of France; but in
France also there is a surplus of machine-power. Both Great Britain
and France dread the competition of Germany, whose production of goods
with her existing equipment could be increased, under incentive, nobody
knows how much.
The exterior facts do not make sense. They represent industry to be
witless, in that, while dreading surplus as the evil that devoureth
profit, it is at the same time bent to push supply to a point beyond
saturation. Industry does not do this. Necessity does it. There is an
interior fact. The tendency of the divisible product of machines to
exceed the sum of effective desire is the last thing that industry
wishes for. It is owing to a principle hitherto mentioned, namely, the
principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to the quantity
produced. Which now is to be explained.
It is the economic function of the machine to cheapen production. There
is otherwise no point to it. But, if we say things are more cheaply
made by machine than by hand, we speak very loosely. What we mean is
that a quantity of things is more cheaply made by machine than by hand.
For example, the cost of a single yard of cloth produced by machine is
hundreds of times greater than the cost of a single yard of it produced
by hand. Obviously, the power-loom is a very costly piece of machinery
to build, and so is the engine that drives it. If you produced on
a power-loom only the amount of cloth a weaver could make by hand,
nobody could afford to buy it. But when you produce on the power-loom a
quantity of cloth one hundred times greater than a weaver can make by
hand, then, of course it is much cheaper. And the more you produce the
cheaper it is. So with anything. The greater the quantity, the lower
the cost. Hence the terms quantity, or mass-production, meaning, first,
to standardize the product, as to make it all black, all one texture,
all one width or shape, and then to bring a chain of machine-power
continuously to bear upon its multiple production.
Observe the working of this principle. Take watches. At one time they
were made by hand, slowly, laboriously, in stances being not uncommon
of a craftsman spending half his lifetime to make a very fine one.
Under these conditions watches are rare and costly. Only the very
rich can buy them. Suddenly they began to be made by machines. A very
good watch can be made for fifty dollars. There are a million people
who want watches at that price. This is an original demand, a kind of
vacuum, represented by a million people who have never had watches
and now for the first time may possess them. Watches cannot be made
fast enough to meet this want. The industry, for that reason, expands
very fast. Then all at once the demand is satisfied. The million have
watches. The vacuum has been filled. Hereafter the demand will tend
to be static: it will increase slowly as the population increases or
as people in general grow richer, little by little. The watch-making
industry, therefore, is depressed. It has to limit production. Now
comes someone with the idea that by carrying the machine method further
a watch can be made for ten dollars. There are twenty million people
who can afford to buy watches at that price. The ten-dollar watch
appears. The demand again is like a vacuum, twenty times greater than
the first. For a while ten-dollar watches cannot be made fast enough.
The makers of fifty-dollar watches throw away their old machines,
install new ones, increase their production, reduce their costs,
and not only make what was a fifty dollar watch for twenty-five but
contribute also, in a competitive manner, to the supply of ten-dollar
watches. Suddenly what happened before happens again. The twenty
million have watches. The vacuum is filled. Then someone says: “But
there are one hundred million who would buy watches at two dollars”.
So the process is repeated, still lower in the pyramid. The two-dollar
watch is not a fine watch, but it will keep time; and as you would
know, with the improvement that has taken place in machine practice the
cost of making any kind of watch, even the finest, has been greatly
reduced. A watch ceases to be a luxury or a token of caste. It is a
necessary part of man’s personal equipment, all the way down to the
base of the pyramid.
There you have the cycle. The use of the machine is to cheapen the
cost of production. The sign is quantity. When the supply at a given
price has overtaken the effective demand you have either to idle your
machinery, in which case your cost of production will rise, or open a
wider demand at a lower price. To lower the price and keep a profit you
have to cheapen the cost of production still more. This you can do only
by increasing the quantity, which again overtakes the demand, creating
again the same necessity to cheapen the cost by increasing the quantity
in order to be able to make a lower price for greater demand. Thus
supply pursues demand, downward through the social structure.
There is at last a base to the pyramid—its very widest point. When that
is reached—what? Well, then you need bazaars in a foreign sun, heathen
races of your own to train up in the way of wanting the products of
your machines, new worlds of demand. You turn to foreign trade. And
if you are an aggressive country that has come late to this business,
as Germany was, and find that most of the promising heathen races are
already adopted and that all the best bazaar-sites are taken, you may
easily work yourself into a panic of fear and become a menace to the
peace.
IV
WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE
What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the
surplus product of your machines? That industry will be unable to make
a profit?
No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into
existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born—at
least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are
gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their
machines artificial things that are exchanged for food. It is usually
the case, too, that they have to buy the raw materials on which
their machines act, as Great Britain buys raw cotton from the United
States and Egypt, and wool from Australia, to feed her great textile
industries; having manufactured this material, she sends it forth again
as cloth, to be exchanged for wheat in Canada or beef in South America.
As you begin with machines your population divides. It becomes part
rural and part industrial, and so long as the rural part of it
can feed the industrial part there is no trouble. But a time soon
comes when the need of the industrial workers for sustenance is
greater than the native production of food. This time inevitably
comes because the machines call up people so rapidly. Then you
have to look abroad for food. That means you have to go into other
countries—peasant-countries—where there is a surplus of meat and grain,
and exchange there your manufactured goods for food. And you begin to
think and speak of your economic necessity.
There is no such necessity really. To assert it is to say a
preposterous thing, namely, that when your industrial population has
increased beyond the native food-supply, to a point at which you are
out of balance, you are obliged to import food so that your industrial
population may continue to increase and your cities to grow and your
necessity to become greater and greater in an endless spiral.
It cannot be endless. One of two things will determine the sequel.
Either presently the resources of those peasant-nations that produce a
surplus of food will be exhausted or they will in time think to become
industrial nations, too, and eat their own surplus. There is no lucid
reason why a population should not disperse as it begins to exceed the
native food-supply—that is to say, migrate to the sources of food.
In this new political dogma of an absolute economic necessity to
import food and raw materials in exchange for manufactures the ancient
myth-wish reappears. The machine does not abolish the curse of toil. It
was not the escape men sought. But it does create a preferred task.
Traditionally, the peasant-task has been despised: it bore the curse
direct. And, when the machine made it possible for many to embrace
instead what was deemed the lesser affliction of industrial labour
gregariously performed in cities, the impulse thereto was headlong.
Hence the rise of that angular phenomenon called the industrial
nation—a nation able to buy its food, therefore delivered from the fate
of peasantry and for that reason entitled to consider itself of higher
caste than agricultural nations.
Hence the tumescent city as one of the most alarming appearances of
our time.
Hence, also, that idea of economic necessity, which, getting control
of the political mind of Europe, inevitably involved the world in a
machine-war. What made that war so terrifying, so destructive, so
extensive, was the power of the machine—an inconceivable power except
as it disclosed itself from day to day. No one beholding the event from
a firmamental point of view could have supposed it was a war between
races of men. Man in contrast with the machines he served was pitifully
insignificant.
In Germany the task of bending the country’s industrial equipment to
the uses of war was assigned to a man who possessed one of the very
brilliant Jewish minds in the world. In him were combined the three
high characteristics of his race, which are loyalty, intellectual
realism, and dreaming imagination. His practical job was more complex
than that of the Chief of Staff. Yet his mind was not wholly occupied
with this care. His critical faculties and his imagination were always
free.
Reflecting on the economic meaning of the war, he was led to examine
the essential character of international trade, and so perceived
clearly how wasteful, preposterous, and dangerous a great deal of it
was—Germany pressing the surplus product of her machines for sale in
Great Britain, the British doing likewise in Germany, both competing
at home and abroad with the industrial surplus of the United States,
ships passing on the seas with cargoes of similar goods endlessly
duplicated, and all the machine-craft nations seeking peasant-nations
to be exploited for food in exchange for manufactures. It was true in
this way the world had been growing richer in things, and yet the cost
was frightful. The resort to force was a confession that international
trade was bankrupt in reason and understanding.
He was competent to reach a conclusion standing himself at the head of
one of Europe’s great industries. And he made a dream. It was that,
when the war had come to an end and people were themselves again, they
would see the vital importance to civilization of dividing among them
the work of the world agreeably to their special aptitudes and the
facts of environment—those to produce a surplus of whatever it was
they had a genius for making and the materials ready; these others
another kind of thing in which their skill and situation gave them an
advantage; and so on through the whole series of natural and artificial
things with which human wants are satisfied. Thus duplication and
strife would be eliminated. Not only would there be enough of
everything: from the elimination of senseless waste in private and
public war there would be a saving of power and capital sufficient to
water all the deserts of the earth and recreate man’s vistas here.
As a dream, it was most alluring. As a plan it was worthless, for it
contained two fatal assumptions, namely, that you could always find a
Solomon to administer it and that people would submit to the benevolent
tyranny of his wisdom. He himself was destined by his end to illustrate
how people really behave. Shortly after the close of the war he was
murdered in the name of fanatic nationalism.
It was a sign.
The war released a flood of repressed passions in nationalism.
Great and small groups of submerged people asserted rights of
self-determination and clothed themselves with frontiers and
nationhood. Nearly all of these, together also with old countries
whose character until then had been agricultural, were concurrently
seized with the thought of economic independence—that is to say, with
the thought of having machines and industries of their own, for they
had seen a new thing. Industrial nations and none other were powerful
in the world. Nations without machines were helpless, subject, in fact,
to those that had them.
Enormously stimulated in its function of reproduction by the onset of
this human idea, the machine broke bounds. No one now has any control
of it.
Only a few years ago Great Britain alone controlled it. She had a
monopoly of its power and use by right of having been the first to
develop it, and she was for a while the only nation having a large
surplus of manufactures to sell in foreign countries. Then came
Germany, France, and Belgium. Of these Germany was Great Britain’s most
aggressive rival, making nearly all of the same things and most of them
cheaper. After 1870 the United States developed industry very fast
but for twenty years more her exports were principally agricultural
because she herself consumed the entire product of her machines,
besides importing manufactured goods from Europe in exchange for meat
and grain and raw cotton. It was not until about 1890 that American
machine-products began to invade the markets of the world in a large
way. And at about the same time Japan appeared as an industrial nation,
having in a few years equipped herself with Western machines and
trained her imitative hand to mind them.
Such, roughly, was the economic state of the world at the outbreak of
the War. The powerfully industrialized nations were four in Europe,
counting little Belgium; one in the West; and one in the East—six
altogether, representing hardly more than one-fifth of the world’s
total population.
If we regard only the countries where the industrial population had so
outrun the native food-supply that the sale of manufactures in foreign
lands to pay for food had either become, or was believed to be, a vital
transaction, then we count out the United States. This country is still
self-nourished. That leaves only five, and the competition among these
five for markets, for colonies, and heathen tribes to be instructed
in wanting, for private pathways by land and sea to the sources of
food, for access to the raw materials required by their machines, was
already desperate and dangerous. Between two of them it was deadly.
Even then it was so. Since then the machine has multiplied tremendously
where its habitat was and has gone migrating, besides, all over the
earth.