An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation Part 13

The state of the industrial arts is a joint heritage of the community at large, but where, as in the modern countries, the work to be done by this technology requires a large material equipment, the usufruct of this joint heritage pa.s.ses, in effect, into the hands of the owners of this large material equipment.

These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology, the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no cla.s.s or condition of men in the modern community--with the possible exception of politicians and the clergy--can conceivably contribute less to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to production being managed for private gain, it happens that these investors are not only not given to the increase and diffusion of technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in r.e.t.a.r.ding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail.

Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.

Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations designed to supersede these appliances. The bearing of owners.h.i.+p on industry and on the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts, and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the market.

The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing of private owners.h.i.+p in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage--refusal to let production go on except it affords them an unearned income--the expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic establishments.

This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with privation and insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered.

How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame of mind of that unblest ma.s.s of the population who will have opportunity to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.

At the risk of what may seem an excessively wide digression, there is something further to be said of the capitalistic sabotage spoken of above. The word has by usage come to have an altogether ungraceful air of disapproval. Yet it signifies nothing more vicious than a deliberate obstruction or r.e.t.a.r.dation of industry, usually by legitimate means, for the sake of some personal or partisan advantage. This morally colorless meaning is all that is intended in its use here. It is extremely common in all industry that is designed to supply merchantable goods for the market. It is, in fact, the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all expedients in business enterprise that has to do with supplying the market, being always present in the businessman's necessary calculations; being not only a usual and convenient recourse but quite indispensable as an habitual measure of business sagacity. So that no personal blame can attach to its employment by any given businessman or business concern. It is only when measures of this nature are resorted to by employees, to gain some end of their own, that such conduct becomes (technically) reprehensible.

Any businesslike management of industry is carried on for gain, which is to be got only on condition of meeting the terms of the market. The price system under which industrial business is carried on will not tolerate production in excess of the market demand, or without due regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust its operations, by due acceleration, r.e.t.a.r.dation or stoppage, to the market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry; which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management, and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.

To anyone who is inclined to see these matters of usage in the light of their history and to appraise them as phenomena of habituation, adaptation and supersession in the sequence of cultural proliferation, there should be no difficulty in appreciating that this inst.i.tution of owners.h.i.+p that makes the core of the modern inst.i.tutional structure is a precipitate of custom, like any other item of use and wont; and that, like any other article of inst.i.tutional furniture, it is subject to the contingencies of supersession and obsolescence. If prevalent habits of thought, enforced by the prevalent exigencies of life and livelihood, come to change in such a way as to make life under the rule imposed by this inst.i.tution seem irksome, or intolerable, to the ma.s.s of the population; and if at the same time things turn in such a way as to leave no other and more urgent interest or exigency to take precedence of this one and hinder its being pushed to an issue; then it should reasonably follow that contention is due to arise between the unblest ma.s.s on whose life it is a burden and the cla.s.ses who live by it. But it is, of course, impossible to state beforehand what will be the precise line of cleavage or what form the division between the two parties in interest will take. Yet it is contained in the premises that, barring unforeseen contingencies of a formidable magnitude, such a cleavage is due to follow as a logical sequel of an enduring peace at large. And it is also well within the possibilities of the case that this issue may work into an interruption or disruption of the peace between the nations.

In this connection it may be called to mind that the existing governmental establishments in these pacific nations are, in all cases, in the hands of the beneficiary, or kept cla.s.ses,--beneficiaries in the sense in which a distinction to that effect comes into the premises of the case at this point. The responsible officials and their chief administrative officers,--so much as may at all reasonably be called the "Government" or the "Administration,"--are quite invariably and characteristically drawn from these beneficiary cla.s.ses; n.o.bles, gentlemen, or business men, which all comes to the same thing for the purpose in hand; the point of it all being that the common man does not come within these precincts and does not share in these counsels that a.s.sume to guide the destiny of the nations.

Of course, sporadically and ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious and undistinguished ma.s.s may now and again find his way within the gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office for any of its responsible officials, even for those of a very scant responsibility, fall to the level of the habitual livelihood of the undistinguished populace, or indeed to fall below what is esteemed to be a seemly income for a gentleman. Should such an impecunious one be thrown up into a place of discretion in the government, he will forthwith cease to be a common man and will be inducted into the rank of gentleman,--so far as that feat can be achieved by taking thought or by a.s.signing him an income adequate to a reputably expensive manner of life. So obvious is the antagonism between a vulgar station in life and a position of official trust, that many a "selfmade man" has advisedly taken recourse to governmental position, often at some appreciable cost, from no apparent motive other than its known efficacy as a Levitical corrective for a humble origin. And in point of fact, neither here nor there have the underbred majority hitherto learned to trust one of their own kind with governmental discretion; which has never yet, in the popular conviction, ceased to be a perquisite of the gently-bred and the well-to-do.

Let it be presumed that this state of things will continue without substantial alteration, so far as regards the complexion of the governmental establishments of these pacific nations, and with such allowance for overstatement in the above characterisation as may seem called for. These governmental establishments are, by official position and by the character of their personnel, committed more or less consistently to the maintenance of the existing law and order. And should no substantial change overtake them as an effect of the war experience, the pacific league under discussion would be entered into by and between governments of this complexion. Should difficulties then arise between those who own and those who do not, in any one of these countries, it would become a nice question whether the compact to maintain the peace and national integrity of the several nations comprised in the league should be held to cover the case of internal dissensions and possible disorders partaking of the character of revolt against the established authorities or against the established provisions of law. A strike of the scope and character of the one recently threatened, and narrowly averted, on the American railroads, e.g., might easily give rise to disturbances sufficiently formidable to raise a question of the peace league's jurisdiction; particularly if such a disturbance should arise in a less orderly and less isolated country than the American republic; so as unavoidably to carry the effects of the disturbance across the national frontiers along the lines of industrial and commercial intercourse and correlation. It is always conceivable that a national government standing on a somewhat conservative maintenance of the received law and order might feel itself bound by its conception of the peace to make common cause with the keepers of established rights in neighboring states, particularly if the similar interests of their own nation were thought to be placed in jeopardy by the course of events.

Antecedently it seems highly probable that the received rights of owners.h.i.+p and disposal of property, particularly of investment, will come up for advis.e.m.e.nt and revision so soon as a settled state of peace is achieved. And there should seem to be little doubt but this revision would go toward, or at least aim at the curtailment or abrogation of these rights; very much after the fas.h.i.+on in which the a.n.a.logous vested rights of feudalism and the dynastic monarchy have been revised and in great part curtailed or abrogated in the advanced democratic countries.

Not much can confidently be said as to the details of such a prospective revision of legal rights, but the a.n.a.logy of that procedure by which these other vested rights have been reduced to a manageable disability, suggests that the method in the present case also would be by way of curtailment, abrogation and elimination. Here again, as in a.n.a.logous movements of disuse and disestablishment, there would doubtless be much conservative apprehension as to the procuring of a competent subst.i.tute for the supplanted methods of doing what is no longer desirable to be done; but here as elsewhere, in a like conjuncture, the practicable way out would presumably be found to lie along the line of simple disuse and disallowance of cla.s.s prerogative. Taken at its face value, without unavoidable prejudice out of the past, this question of a subst.i.tute to replace the current exploitation of the industrial arts for private gain by capitalistic sabotage is not altogether above a suspicion of drollery.

Yet it is not to be overlooked that private enterprise on the basis of private owners.h.i.+p is the familiar and accepted method of conducting industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency of life and death in the apprehension of the kept cla.s.ses. It should accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away international dissension, that the division of cla.s.ses would come on in a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit.

And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division of opinion on these matters might presently s.h.i.+ft back to the old familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic, or conservative, peoples to safeguard the inst.i.tutions of the received law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.

In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook is that of a return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation, certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security.

National integrity and autonomy are to be preserved on the received lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of diplomacy without afterthought, whatever that might conceivably mean.

There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently, in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of cla.s.s and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in the first instance.

Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of human culture, how the common man is to fare under this regime of law and order,--the ma.s.s of the population whose place it is to do what is to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted as a matter of course that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisation of archaic inst.i.tutions, the measure of archaism varying from one to another.

With due stabilisation and with a sagacious administration of the established scheme of law and order, the common man should find himself working under conditions and to results of the familiar kind; but with the difference that, while legal usage and legal precedent remain unchanged, the state of the industrial arts can confidently be expected to continue its advance in the same general direction as before, while the population increases after the familiar fas.h.i.+on, and the investing business community pursues its accustomed quest of compet.i.tive gain and compet.i.tive spending in the familiar spirit and with c.u.mulatively augmented means. Stabilisation of the received law and order will not touch these matters; and for the present it is a.s.sumed that these matters will not derange the received law and order. The a.s.sumption may seem a violent one to the students of human culture, but it is a simple matter of course to the statesmen.

To this piping time of peace the nearest a.n.a.logues in history would seem to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and pa.s.sably the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature.

The scheme of law and order, indeed, appears in neither instance to have changed so far as the altered circ.u.mstances would seem to have called for. To the common man the Roman peace appears to have been a peace by submission, not widely different from what the case of China has latterly brought to the appreciation of students. The Victorian peace, which can be appreciated more in detail, was of a more genial character, as regards the fortunes of the common man. It started from a reasonably low level of hards.h.i.+p and _de facto_ iniquity, and was occupied with many prudent endeavours to improve the lot of the unblest majority; but it is to be admitted that these prudent endeavours never caught up with the march of circ.u.mstances. Not that these prudent measures of amelioration were nugatory, but it is clear that they were not an altogether effectual corrective of the changes going on; they were, in effect, systematically so far in arrears as always to leave an uncovered margin of discontent with current conditions. It is a fact of history that very appreciable sections of the populace were approaching an att.i.tude of revolt against what they considered to be intolerable conditions when that era closed. Much of what kept them within bounds, that is to say within legal bounds, was their continued loyalty to the nation; which was greatly, and for the purpose needfully, reenforced by a lively fear of warlike aggression from without. Now, under the projected _pax orbis terrarum_ all fear of invasion, it is hopefully believed, will be removed; and with the disappearance of this fear should also disappear the drag of national loyalty on the counsels of the underbred.

If this British peace of the nineteenth century is to be taken as a significant indication of what may be looked for under a regime of peace at large, with due allowance for what is obviously necessary to be allowed for, then what is held in promise would appear to be an era of unexampled commercial prosperity, of investment and business enterprise on a scale hitherto not experienced. These developments will bring their necessary consequences affecting the life of the community, and some of the consequences it should be possible to foresee. The circ.u.mstances conditioning this prospective era of peace and prosperity will necessarily differ from the corresponding circ.u.mstances that conditioned the Victorian peace, and many of these points of difference it is also possible to forecast in outline with a fair degree of confidence. It is in the main these economic factors going to condition the civilisation of the promised future that will have to be depended on to give the cue to any student interested in the prospective unfolding of events.

The scheme of law and order governing all modern nations, both in the conduct of their domestic affairs and in their national policies, is in its controlling elements the scheme worked out through British (and French) experience in the eighteenth century and earlier, as revised and further accommodated in the nineteenth century. Other peoples, particularly the Dutch, have of course had their part in the derivation and development of this modern scheme of inst.i.tutional principles, but it has after all been a minor part; so that the scheme at large would not differ very materially, if indeed it should differ sensibly, from what it is, even if the contribution of these others had not been had.

The backward nations, as e.g., Germany, Russia, Spain, etc., have of course contributed substantially nothing but r.e.t.a.r.dation and maladjustment to this modern scheme of civil life; whatever may be due to students resident in those countries, in the way of scholarly formulation. This nineteenth century scheme it is proposed to carry over into the new era; and the responsible spokesmen of the projected new order appear to contemplate no provision touching this scheme of law and order, beyond the keeping of it intact in all substantial respects.

When and in so far as the projected peace at large takes effect, international interests will necessarily fall somewhat into the background, as being no longer a matter of precarious equilibration, with heavy penalties in the balance; and diplomacy will consequently become even more of a make-believe than today--something after the fas.h.i.+on of a game of bluff played with irredeemable "chips." Commercial, that is to say business, enterprise will consequently come in for a more undivided attention and be carried on under conditions of greater security and of more comprehensive trade relations. The population of the pacified world may be expected to go on increasing somewhat as in the recent past; in which connection it is to be remarked that not more than one-half, presumably something less than one-half, of the available agricultural resources have been turned to account for the civilised world hitherto. The state of the industrial arts, including means of transport and communication, may be expected to develop farther in the same general direction as before, a.s.suming always that peace conditions continue to hold. Popular intelligence, as it is called,--more properly popular education,--may be expected to suffer a further advance; necessarily so, since it is a necessary condition of any effectual advance in the industrial arts,--every appreciable technological advance presumes, as a requisite to its working-out in industry, an augmented state of information and of logical facility in the workmen under whose hands it is to take effect.

Of the prescriptive rights carried over into the new era, under the received law and order, the rights of owners.h.i.+p alone may be expected to have any material significance for the routine of workday life; the other personal rights that once seemed urgent will for everyday purposes have pa.s.sed into a state of half-forgotten matter-of-course. As now, but in an accentuated degree, the rights of owners.h.i.+p will, in effect, coincide and coalesce with the rights of investment and business management. The market--that is to say the rule of the price-system in all matters of production and livelihood--may be expected to gain in volume and inclusiveness; so that virtually all matters of industry and livelihood will turn on questions of market price, even beyond the degree in which that proposition holds today. The progressive extension and consolidation of investments, corporate solidarity, and business management may be expected to go forward on the accustomed lines, as ill.u.s.trated by the course of things during the past few decades. Market conditions should accordingly, in a progressively increased degree, fall under the legitimate discretionary control of businessmen, or syndicates of businessmen, who have the disposal of large blocks of invested wealth,--"big business," as it is called, should reasonably be expected to grow bigger and to exercise an increasingly more unhampered control of market conditions, including the money market and the labor market.

With such improvements in the industrial arts as may fairly be expected to come forward, and with the possible enhancement of industrial efficiency which should follow from a larger scale of organisation, a wider reach of transport and communication, and an increased population,--with these increasing advantages on the side of productive industry, the per-capita product as well as the total product should be increased in a notable degree, and the conditions of life should possibly become notably easier and more attractive, or at least more conducive to efficiency and personal comfort, for all concerned. Such would be the first and unguarded inference to be drawn from the premises of the case as they offer themselves in the large; and something of that kind is apparently what floats before the prophetic vision of the advocates of a league of nations for the maintenance of peace at large.

These premises, and the inferences so drawn from them, may be further fortified and amplified in the same sense on considering that certain very material economies also become practicable, and should take effect "in the absence of disturbing causes," on the establishment of such a peace at large. It will of course occur to all thoughtful persons that armaments must be reduced, perhaps to a minimum, and that the cost of these things, in point of expenditures as well as of man-power spent in the service, would consequently fall off in a corresponding measure. So also, as slight further reflection will show, would the cost of the civil service presumably fall off very appreciably; more particularly the cost of this service per unit of service rendered. Some such climax of felicities might be looked for by hopeful persons, in the absence of disturbing causes.

Under the new dispensation the standard of living, that is to say the standard of expenditure, would reasonably be expected to advance in a very appreciable degree, at least among the wealthy and well-to-do; and by pressure of imitative necessity a like effect would doubtless also be had among the undistinguished ma.s.s. It is not a question of the standard of living considered as a matter of the subsistence minimum, or even a standard of habitually prevalent creature comfort, particularly not among the wealthy and well-to-do. These latter cla.s.ses have long since left all question of material comfort behind in their accepted standards of living and in the continued advance of these standards. For these cla.s.ses who are often spoken of euphemistically as being "in easy circ.u.mstances," it is altogether a question of a standard of reputable expenditure, to be observed on pain of lost self-respect and of lost reputation at large. As has been remarked in an earlier pa.s.sage, wants of this kind are indefinitely extensible. So that some doubt may well be entertained as to whether the higher productive efficiency spoken of will necessarily make the way of life easier, in view of this need of a higher standard of expenditure, even when due account is taken of the many economies which the new dispensation is expected to make practicable.

One of the effects to be looked for would apparently be an increased pressure on the part of aspiring men to get into some line of business enterprise; since it is only in business, as contrasted with the industrial occupations, that anyone can hope to find the relatively large income required for such an expensive manner of life as will bring any degree of content to aspirants for pecuniary good repute. So it should follow that the number of businessmen and business concerns would increase up to the limit of what the traffic could support, and that the compet.i.tion between these rival, and in a sense over-numerous, concerns would push the costs of compet.i.tion to the like limit. In this respect the situation would be of much the same character as what it now is, with the difference that the limit of compet.i.tive expenditures would be rather higher than at present, to answer to the greater available margin of product that could be devoted to this use; and that the competing concerns would be somewhat more numerous, or at least that the aggregate expenditure on compet.i.tive enterprise would be somewhat larger; as, e.g., costs of advertising, salesmans.h.i.+p, strategic litigation, procuration of legislative and munic.i.p.al grants and connivance, and the like.

It is always conceivable, though it may scarcely seem probable, that these incidents of increased pressure of compet.i.tion in business traffic might eventually take up all the slack, and leave no net margin of product over what is available under the less favorable conditions of industry that prevail today; more particularly when this increased compet.i.tion for business gains is backed by an increased pressure of compet.i.tive spending for purposes of a reputable appearance. All this applies in retail trade and in such lines of industry and public service as partakes of the nature of retail trade, in the respect that salesmans.h.i.+p and the costs of salesmans.h.i.+p enter into their case in an appreciable measure; this is an extensive field, it is true, and incontinently growing more extensive with the later changes in the customary methods of marketing products; but it is by no means anything like the whole domain of industrial business, and by no means a field in which business is carried on without interference of a higher control from outside its own immediate limits.

All this generously large and highly expensive and profitable field of trade and of trade-like industry, in which the businessmen in charge deal somewhat directly with a large body of customers, is always subject to limitations imposed by the condition of the market; and the condition of the market is in part not under the control of these businessmen, but is also in part controlled by large concerns in the background; which in their turn are after all also not precisely free agents; in fact not much more so than their cousins in the retail trade, being confined in all their motions by the constraint of the price-system that dominates the whole and gathers them all in its impersonal and inexorable net.

There is a colloquial saying among businessmen, that they are not doing business for their health; which being interpreted means that they are doing business for a price. It is out of a discrepancy in price, between purchase and sale, or between transactions which come to the same result as purchase and sale, that the gains of business are drawn; and it is in terms of price that these gains are rated, ama.s.sed and funded. It is necessary, for a business concern to achieve a favorable balance in terms of price; and the larger the balance in terms of price the more successful the enterprise. Such a balance can not be achieved except by due regard to the conditions of the market, to the effect that dealings must not go on beyond what will yield a favorable balance in terms of price between income and outgo. As has already been remarked above, the prescriptive and indispensable recourse in all this conduct of business is sabotage, limitation of supply to bring a remunerative price result.

The new dispensation offers two new factors bearing on this businesslike need of a sagacious sabotage, or rather it brings a change of coefficients in two factors already familiar in business management: a greater need, for gainful business, of resorting to such limitation of traffic; and a greater facility of ways and means for enforcing the needed restriction. So, it is confidently to be expected that in the prospective piping time of peace the advance in the industrial arts will continue at an accelerated rate; which may confidently be expected to affect the practicable increased production of merchantable goods; from which it follows that it will act to depress the prices of these goods; from which it follows that if a profitable business is to be done in the conduct of productive industry a greater degree of continence than before will have to be exercised in order not to let prices fall to an unprofitable figure; that is to say, the permissible output must be held short of the productive capacity of such industry by a wider margin than before. On the other hand, it is well known out of the experience of the past few decades that a larger coalition of invested capital, controlling a larger proportion of the output, can more effectually limit the supply to a salutary maximum, such as will afford reasonable profits. And with the new dispensation affording a freer scope for business enterprise on conditions of greater security, larger coalitions than before are due to come into bearing. So that the means will be at hand competently to meet this more urgent need of a stricter limitation of the output, in spite of any increased productive capacity conferred on the industrial community by any conceivable advance in the industrial arts. The outcome to be looked for should apparently be such an effectual recourse to capitalistic sabotage as will neutralise any added advantage that might otherwise accrue to the community from its continued improvements in technology.

In spite of this singularly untoward conjuncture of circ.u.mstances to be looked for, there need be no serious apprehension that capitalistic sabotage, with a view to maintaining prices and the rate of profits, will go all the way, to the result indicated, at least not on the grounds so indicated alone. There is in the modern development of technology, and confidently to be counted on, a continued flow of new contrivances and expedients designed to supersede the old; and these are in fact successful, in greater or less measure, in finding their way into profitable use, on such terms as to displace older appliances, underbid them in the market, and render them obsolete or subject to recapitalisation on a lowered earning-capacity. So far as this unremitting flow of innovations has its effect, that is to say so far as it can not be hindered from having an effect, it acts to lower the effectual cost of products to the consumer. This effect is but a partial and somewhat uncertain one, but it is always to be counted in as a persistent factor, of uncertain magnitude, that will affect the results in the long run.

As has just been spoken of above, large coalitions of invested wealth are more competent to maintain, or if need be to advance, prices than smaller coalitions acting in severalty, or even when acting in collusion. This state of the case has been well ill.u.s.trated by the very successful conduct of such large business organisations during the past few decades; successful, that is, in earning large returns on the investments engaged. Under the new dispensation, as has already been remarked, coalitions should reasonably be expected to grow to a larger size and achieve a greater efficiency for the same purpose.

The large gains of the large corporate coalitions are commonly ascribed by their promoters, and by sympathetic theoreticians of the ancient line, to economies of production made practicable by a larger scale of production; an explanation which is disingenuous only so far as it needs be. What is more visibly true on looking into the workings of these coalitions in detail is that they are enabled to maintain prices at a profitable, indeed at a strikingly profitable, level by such a control of the output as would be called sabotage if it were put in practice by interested workmen with a view to maintain wages. The effects of this sagacious sabotage become visible in the large earnings of these investments and the large gains which, now and again, accrue to their managers. Large fortunes commonly are of this derivation.

In cases where no recapitalisation has been effected for a considerable series of years the yearly earnings of such businesslike coalitions have been known to approach fifty percent on the capitalised value. Commonly, however, when earnings rise to a striking figure, the business will be recapitalised on the basis of its earning-capacity, by issue of a stock dividend, by reincorporation in a new combination with an increased capitalisation, and the like. Such augmentation of capital not unusually has been spoken of by theoretical writers and publicists as an increase of the community's wealth, due to savings; an a.n.a.lysis of any given case is likely to show that its increased capital value represents an increasingly profitable procedure for securing a high price above cost, by stopping the available output short of the productive capacity of the industries involved. Loosely speaking, and within the limits of what the traffic will bear, the gains in such a case are proportioned to the deficiency by which the production or supply under control falls short of productive capacity. So that the capitalisation in the case comes to bear a rough proportion to the material loss which this organisation of sabotage is enabled to inflict on the community at large; and instead of its being a capitalisation of serviceable means of production it may, now and again, come to little else than a capitalisation of chartered sabotage.

Under the new dispensation of peace and security at large this manner of capitalisation and business enterprise might reasonably be expected to gain something in scope and security of operation. Indeed, there are few things within the range of human interest on which an opinion may more confidently be formed beforehand. If the rights of property, in their extent and amplitude, are maintained intact as they are before the law today, the hold which business enterprise on the large scale now has on the affairs and fortunes of the community at large is bound to grow firmer and to be used more unreservedly for private advantage under the new conditions contemplated.

The logical result should be an accelerated rate of acc.u.mulation of the country's wealth in the hands of a relatively very small cla.s.s of wealthy owners, with a relatively inconsiderable semi-dependent middle cla.s.s of the well-to-do, and with the ma.s.s of the population even more nearly dest.i.tute than they are today. At the same time it is scarcely to be avoided that this wholly dependent and impecunious ma.s.s of the population must be given an appreciably better education than they have today. The argument will return to the difficulties that are liable to arise out of this conjuncture of facts, in the way of discontent and possible disturbance.

Meantime, looking to the promise of the pacific future in the light of the pacific past, certain further consequences, particularly consequences of the economic order, that may reasonably be expected to follow will also merit attention. The experience of the Victorian peace is almost as pointed in its suggestion on this head as if it had been an experiment made _ad hoc_; but with the reservation that the scale of economic life, after all, was small in the Victorian era, and its pace was slack, compared with what the twentieth century should have to offer under suitable conditions of peace and pecuniary security. In the light of this most instructive modern instance, there should appear to be in prospect a growth of well-bred families resting on invested wealth and so living on unearned incomes; larger incomes and consequently a more imposingly well-bred body of gentlefolk, sustained and vouched for by a more munificent expenditure on superfluities, than the modern world has witnessed hitherto. Doubtless the resulting growth of gentlemen and gentlewomen would be as perfect after their kind as these unexampled opportunities of gentle breeding might be expected to engender; so that even their British precursors on the trail of respectability would fall somewhat into insignificance by comparison, whether in respect of gentlemanly qualities or in point of cost per unit.

The moral, and even more particularly the aesthetic, value of such a line of gentlefolk, and of the culture which they may be expected to place on view,--this cultural side of the case, of course, is what one would prefer to dwell on, and on the spiritual gains that might be expected to accrue to humanity at large from the steady contemplation of this meritorious respectability so displayed at such a cost.

But the prosaic necessity of the argument turns back to the economic and civil bearing of this prospective development, this virtual bifurcation of the pacified nation into a small number of gentlemen who own the community's wealth and consume its net product in the pursuit of gentility, on the one hand, and an unblest ma.s.s of the populace who do the community's work on a meager livelihood tapering down toward the subsistence minimum, on the other hand. Evidently, this prospective posture of affairs may seem "fraught with danger to the common weal," as a public spirited citizen might phrase it. Or, as it would be expressed in less eloquent words, it appears to comprise elements that should make for a change. At the same time it should be recalled, and the statement will command a.s.sent on slight reflection, that there is no avoiding substantially such a posture of affairs under the promised regime of peace and security, provided only that the price-system stands over intact, and the current rights of property continue to be held inviolate. If the known principles of compet.i.tive gain and compet.i.tive spending should need enforcement to that effect by an ill.u.s.trative instance, the familiar history of the Victorian peace is sufficient to quiet all doubts.

Of course, the resulting articulation of cla.s.ses in the community will not be expected to fall into such simple lines of sheer contrast as this scheme would indicate. The cla.s.s of gentlefolk, the legally const.i.tuted wasters, as they would be rated from the economic point of view, can not be expected personally to take care of so large a consumption of superfluities as this posture of affairs requires at their hands. They would, as the Victorian peace teaches, necessarily have the a.s.sistance of a trained corps of experts in unproductive consumption, the first and most immediate of whom would be those whom the genial phrasing of Adam Smith designates "menial servants." Beyond these would come the purveyors of superfluities, properly speaking, and the large, indeed redundant, cla.s.s of tradespeople of high and low degree,--dependent in fact but with an illusion of semi-dependence; and farther out again the legal and other professional cla.s.ses of the order of stewards, whose duty it will be to administer the sources of income and receive, apportion and disburse the revenues so devoted to a traceless extinguishment.

There would, in other words, be something of a "substantial middle cla.s.s," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-cla.s.s illusion that they are of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-cla.s.s population would engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to believe, in some pa.s.sable fas.h.i.+on, that they touch the substance of things at something nearer than the second remove. They would in great part appear to be people of "independent means," and more particularly would they continue in the hope of so appearing and of some time making good the appearance. Hence their fancied, and therefore their sentimental, interest would fall out on the side of the established law and order; and they would accordingly be an element of stability in the commonwealth, and would throw in their weight, and their voice, to safeguard that private property and that fabric of prices and credit through which the "income stream" flows to the owners of preponderant invested wealth.

Judged on the state of the situation as it runs in our time, and allowing for the heightened efficiency of large-scale investment and consolidated management under the prospective conditions of added pecuniary security, it is to be expected that the middle-cla.s.s population with "independent means" should come in for a somewhat meager livelihood, provided that they work faithfully at their business of managing pecuniary traffic to the advantage of their pecuniary betters,--meager, that is to say, when allowance is made for the conventionally large expenditure on reputable appearances which is necessarily to be included in their standard of living. It lies in the nature of this system of large-scale investment and enterprise that the (pecuniarily) minor agencies engaged on a footing of ostensible independence will come in for only such a share in the aggregate gains of the community as it is expedient for the greater business interests to allow them as an incentive to go on with their work as purveyors of traffic to these greater business interests.

The current, and still more this prospective, case of the quasi-self-directing middle cla.s.s may fairly be ill.u.s.trated by the case of the American farmers, of the past and present. The American farmer rejoices to be called "The Independent Farmer." He once was independent, in a meager and toil-worn fas.h.i.+on, in the days before the price-system had brought him and all his works into the compa.s.s of the market; but that was some time ago. He now works for the market, ordinarily at something like what is called a "living wage," provided he has "independent means" enough to enable him by steady application to earn a living wage; and of course, the market being controlled by the paramount investment interests in the background, his work, in effect, inures to their benefit; except so much as it may seem necessary to allow him as incentive to go on. Also of course, these paramount investment interests are in turn controlled in all their manoeuvres by the impersonal exigencies of the price-system, which permits no vagaries in violation of the rule that all traffic must show a balance of profit in terms of price.

The Independent Farmer still continues to believe that in some occult sense he still is independent in what he will do and what not; or perhaps rather that he can by shrewd management retain or regain a tolerable measure of such independence, after the fas.h.i.+on of what is held to have been the posture of affairs in the days before the coming of corporation finance; or at least he believes that he ought to have, or to regain or reclaim, some appreciable measure of such independence; which ought then, by help of the "independent means" which he still treasures, to procure him an honest and a.s.sured livelihood in return for an honest year's work. Latterly he, that is the common run of the farmers, has been taking note of the fact that he is, as he apprehends it, at a disadvantage in the market; and he is now taking recourse to concerted action for the purpose of what might be called "rigging the market" to his own advantage. In this he overlooks the impregnable position which the party of the second part, the great investment interests, occupy; in fact, he is counting without his host. Hitherto he has not been convinced of his own helplessness. And with a fine fancy he still imagines that his own interest is on the side of the propertied and privileged cla.s.ses; so that the farmer const.i.tuency is the chief pillar of conservative law and order, particularly in all that touches the inviolable rights of property and at every juncture where a division comes on between those who live by investment and those who live by work. In pecuniary effect, the ordinary American farmer, who legally owns a moderate farm of the common sort, belongs among those who work for a livelihood; such a livelihood as the investment interests find it worth while to allow him under the rule of what the traffic will bear; but in point of sentiment and cla.s.s consciousness he clings to a belated stand on the side of those who draw a profit from his work.