Progress and History Part 12

We have thus a long way to travel before the ideals of politics have been a.s.similated into the industrial life of the community and have found fitting embodiment in its kindred and more complex problems. But at least we have reached a point where we can see what the problem of industrial government is. We can say with a.s.surance that a system which treats human beings purely as instruments or as pa.s.sive servants, and atrophies their self-determination and their sense of individual and corporate responsibility, is as far from perfection in industry as the Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of the ma.s.s of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings, with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them in this--that they too often stand for similarly authoritarian ideas of government and direction. Industry is still an autocracy, as politics was in the days before the supremacy of Parliament. Power still descends from above instead of springing from below. It is a power limited no doubt by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the government of England used to be before the transference of sovereignty from the monarch to the representatives of his subjects. It was recently announced in the press that Lord Rhondda had bought a group of Welsh collieries for 2 millions, and that as a result 'Lord Rhondda now controls over 3-1/2 millions of capital, pays 2-1/2 millions in wages every year, and is virtually the dictator of the economic destiny of a quarter of a million miners. Rumours are also current', the extract continues, 'that Lord Rhondda is extending his control over the press of Wales'.[78] The existence of such power in this twentieth century in the hands of single individuals, not selected from the ma.s.s for their special wisdom or humanity, is a stupendous fact which must give pause to any one who is inclined to feel complacent about modern industrial progress. In days gone by political power was as irresponsible as the economic power wielded to-day by Lord Rhondda; and it descended from father to son by hereditary right in the same way as the control over the lives of countless American workers descends to-day as a matter of course from John D. Rockefeller senior to John D. Rockefeller junior. If there is any reality at all in our political faith we must believe that a similar development towards self-government can and must take place in industry. It may be that generations will elapse before the problems of industrial government find a final and satisfactory const.i.tutional solution. But at least we can say that there is only one basis for that solution which is compatible with a sound ideal of government, or indeed with any reasoned view of morality or religion--the basis of individual and corporate freedom with its corresponding obligations of responsibility and self-respect. No nation, as Abraham Lincoln said, can remain half-slave and half-free: and it was a greater than Lincoln who warned us that we cannot serve both G.o.d and Mammon. It is this underlying conflict of ideals in the organization of our existing economic system which is the real cause of the 'Labour unrest' of which we have heard so much in recent years.

With this warning in our minds as to the imperfections of our modern industrial organization, let us briefly survey the record of the forms of economic a.s.sociation which preceded it.

The earliest form of industrial grouping is, of course, the family; and the family, as we all know, still retains its primitive character in some occupations as a convenient form of productive a.s.sociation. This is particularly the case in agriculture in communities where peasant holdings prevail. But the family is so much more than an industrial group that it hardly falls to us to consider it further here.

Outside the family proper, industrial work among primitive peoples is often carried on by slaves. It was a step forward in human progress when primitive man found that it was more advantageous to capture his enemies than to kill or eat them; and it was a still greater step forward when he found that there was more to be got out of slaves by kind treatment than by compulsion. This is not the place in which to go into the vexed questions connected with various forms of slavery. Suffice it to say that it is a profound mistake to dismiss the whole system in one undiscriminating condemnation. Slavery involves the denial of freedom, and as such it can never be good. But other systems besides slavery implicitly involve the denial of freedom. Some of the finest artistic work in the world has been done by slaves--and by slaves not working under compulsion but in the company of free men and on terms of industrial equality with them. This should serve to remind us that, in judging of systems of industry, we must look behind the letter of the law to the spirit of the times and of social inst.i.tutions. Slavery at its best merges insensibly into wage-labour at its lower end. Many of the skilled slaves of ancient Greece and Rome are hardly distinguishable in status from a modern workman bound by an unusually long and strict indenture and paid for his work not only in money but partly in truck.

In order to stimulate their productive capacity it was found necessary in Greece and Rome to allow skilled slaves to earn and retain money--although in the eye of the law they were not ent.i.tled to do so; and they were thus frequently in a position to purchase their own freedom and become independent craftsmen. Slavery in the household and in small workshops is open to many and serious dangers, which need not be particularized here; but the worst abuses of slavery have always taken place where slaves have been easily recruited, as in the early days of European contact with Africa, and when there were large openings for their employment in gangs on work of a rough and unskilled character. The problem of slavery in its worse forms is thus at bottom a cheap-labour problem a.n.a.logous to that which confronts North America and South Africa to-day; and there is an essential difference which is often ignored between the educated slave in a Roman Government office who did the work of a First Division Civil Servant for his imperial master and his compeer working in the fields of South Italy: and between the household servants of a Virginian family and the plantation-slaves of the farther South. Let us remember, in pa.s.sing judgement on what is admittedly an indefensible system, that during the war which resulted in the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders of the South trusted their household slaves to protect the women and children during their absence from home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There is another side to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as surely as there is another side to Mr. Carnegie's paean of modern industrialism in his _Triumphant Democracy_.

Systems of serfdom or caste which bind the workman to his work without permitting him to be sold like a slave may be regarded as one step higher than slavery proper. Such systems are common in stable and custom-bound countries, and persisted throughout the European Middle Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change gradually broke up the system in this country and left the old-time villein a free but often a landless and property less man. The transition from serfdom to the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional position of service to the community to a blind and precarious individualism. It was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from status to contract. This famous nineteenth-century aphorism is eloquent of the limitations of that too purely commercial age. Every thinking man would admit to-day that status at its best is a better thing than contract at its best--that the soldier is a n.o.bler figure than the army contractor, and that corporate feeling and professional honour are a better stimulus to right action than business compet.i.tion and a laudable keenness to give satisfaction to a valuable customer. We have always suffered from the temptation in this country of adapting business methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizens.h.i.+p itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. Such theories and battle-cries may serve for a 'nation of shopkeepers'; but that opprobrious phrase has never been true of the great ma.s.s of the English people, and it was never less true than to-day.

The idea of industrial work as the fulfilment of a contract, whether freely or forcibly made, is thus essentially at variance with the ideal of community service. It is difficult for a man who makes his livelihood by hiring himself out as an individual for what he can get out of one piece of work after another to feel the same sense of community service or professional pride as the man who is serving a vocation and has dedicated his talents to some continuous and recognized form of work. It is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory in principle compared with the guilds of the town workmen in the Middle Ages and with the organized professions of to-day; and it is this which explains why trade unions of recent years have come to concern themselves more and more with questions of status rather than of wages and to regard the occupation which they represent more and more as a profession rather than a trade. No one has laid bare the deficiencies of the wage-system more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous chapter in which he foreshadows the principle of collective bargaining. 'What are the common wages of labour', he there remarks,[79]

'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same.

The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit but constant and uniform combination not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which n.o.body ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost secrecy till the moment of execution; and, when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of labour.

Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions, sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work.'

These words were written 140 years ago, but, as we all know, they are still true of the working of the system to-day. Indeed the war has served to emphasize their truth by showing us how deeply entrenched are the habits of bargaining and of latent antagonism which the working of the wage-system has engendered. It is the defect of the wage-system, as Adam Smith makes clear to us, that it lays stress on just those points in the industrial process where the interests of employers and workpeople run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far more important aspects in which they are partners and fellow-workers in the service of the community. This defect cannot be overcome by strengthening one party to the contract at the expense of the other, by crus.h.i.+ng trade unions or dissolving employers' combinations, or even by establis.h.i.+ng the principle of collective bargaining. It can only be overcome by the recognition on both sides that industry is in essence not a matter of contract and bargaining at all, but of mutual interdependence and community service: and by the growth of a new ideal of status, a new sense of professional pride and corporate duty and self-respect among all who are engaged in the same function. No one can say how long it may take to bring about such a fundamental change of att.i.tude, especially among those who have most to lose, in the material sense, by an alteration in the existing distribution of economic power.

But the war has cleared away so much of prejudice and set so much of our life in a new light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no country in the world is in a better position than we are to redeem modern industry from the reproach of materialism and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis, and that the country which shall first have had the wisdom and the courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension of human liberty and happiness and will have shown that along this road and no other lies the industrial progress of mankind.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

1. _Economics_:

H. Clay, _Economics for the General Reader_. 1916.

Ruskin, _Unto this last_.

Smart, _Second Thoughts of an Economist_. 1916.

2. _Man and his Tools_:

Marvin, _The Living Past_. 1913.

F. W. Taylor, _The Principles of Scientific Management_. 1911.

Hoxie, _Scientific Management and Labour_. 1916.

3. _Industrial Government_:

Aristotle, _Politics_ (Book I, chapters on Slavery).

Zimmern, _The Greek Commonwealth_ (chapters on Slavery). 1911.

Ashley, _The Economic Organization of England_. 1914.

Unwin, _Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries_.

S. and B. Webb, _The History of Trade Unionism_.

Macgregor, _The Evolution of Industry_ (Home University Library).

Wallas, _The Great Society_. 1914.

G. D. H. Cole, _The World of Labour_. 1915.

_Round Table, June 1916 (Article on the Labour Movement and the Future of British Industry)._

FOOTNOTES:

[67] Including the well-being of the producers--a point which is too often overlooked.

[68] On this point see _Poverty and Waste_, by Hartley Withers, 1914, written before the war, which has driven its lessons home.

[69] _The Living Past_, pp. 20, 21.

[70] _Second Thoughts of an Economist_, p. 89.

[71] _Principles of Economics_, vol. i, p. 11. It is interesting to note that in his latest book, _Inventors and Money-making, lectures on some relations between Economics and Psychology_ (1915), Professor Taussig to some extent goes back upon the point of view of the extract given above.

[72] A similar inquiry on a much larger scale was made by Adolf Levinstein in his book _Die Arbeiterfrage_ (Munich, 1910). He examined 4,000 workpeople, consisting of coalminers, cotton operatives, and engineers. With the exception of a few turners and fitters almost all replied that they found little or no pleasure in their work.

[73] _The Great Society_, p. 363.

[74] Especially the wonderful results obtained from the young criminals at the Little Commonwealth in Dorsets.h.i.+re.

[75] See _Readings in Vocational Guidance_ by Meyer Bloomfield (Boston, 1915).

[76] _Lucy Bettesworth_, pp. 178-80, and 214-16.

[77] This sentence is practically an unconscious paraphrase of a pa.s.sage from Aristotle's defence of slavery.

[78] _The Welsh Outlook_, August 1916, p. 272.

[79] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, ch. viii.

IX

PROGRESS IN ART

A. CLUTTON BROCK

It is often said that there can be no such thing as progress in art. At one time the arts flourish, at another they decay: but, as Whistler put it, art happens as men of genius happen; and men cannot make it happen.