FOOTNOTES:

[267] According to Arthur Young, in 1770 half the population was already urban. But though the townward drift, owing in large measure to the land-hunger of the aristocracy and wealthy merchant class, and the labour-saving economy of large farming, was clearly visible before the development of machine-industry, it is probable that Young's estimate goes beyond the facts.

[268] Mr. Cannan points out that this is due on the one hand to the healthier conditions of the towns whose natural increase is larger; on the other hand, to an increased migration from the rural parts to foreign countries. ("The Decline of Urban Immigration," National Review, January 1894.)

[269] Ravenstein, Statistical Journal, June 1889.

[270] Preliminary Report (c. 6422), p. 23.

[271] It is often pointed out that an Urban Sanitary District is not always a town. But if rural areas are sometimes classed as towns, many large outskirts of towns, practically partaking of the character of the towns, are not included. The figures cited above may therefore be regarded as a fairly accurate account of the growth of town life.

[272] Longstaff, "Rural Depopulation," Journal of Stat. Soc., Sept. 1893.

[273] Cf. Longstaff, Studies in Statistics, p. 157.

[274] These Canadian statistics are quoted from Dr. Longstaff's paper in Journal of Statistical Society, Sept. 1893.

[275] Report of Commissioners, etc., vol. XXX. p. 65.

[276] Newsholm, Vital Statistics, p. 137. (Sonnenschein.)

[277] Vol. iv. p. 23.

[278] Levasseur, vol. ii. p. 402.

[279] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 155.

[280] Diseases of Occupations, p. 33.

[281] Dr. Arlidge, pp. 25, 26.

[282] Quoted by Professor Marshall, Principles of Political Economy, p. 258. Cf. also Statistical Society, March 1873, for U.S.A. statistics.

[283] Dr. Arlidge, p. 30.

[284] W.D. Morrison, "The Study of Crime," Mind, vol. i. N.S., No. 4.

[285] Levasseur, vol. ii. p. 456.

[286] Claims of Labour, p. 196.

[287] One of the specific advantages in America has been the absence of any serious endeavour on the part of legislation to put down Truck. The grossest abuses of Truck appear in country manufacturing towns of the United States.

[288] J.S. Mackenzie, An Introduction to Social Philosophy, p. 101.



CHAPTER XIV.

CIVILISATION AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT.

Sec. 1. Imperfect Adjustment of Industrial Structure to its Environment. Sec. 2. Reform upon the Basis of Private Enterprise and Free Trade. Sec. 3. Freedom and Transparency of Industry powerless to cure the deeper Industrial Maladies. Sec. 4. Beginnings of Public Control of Machine-production. Sec. 5. Passage of Industries into a public Non-competitive Condition. Sec. 6. The "raison d'etre" of Progressive Collectivism. Sec. 7. Collectivism follows the line of Monopoly. Sec. 8. Cases of "Arrested Development:" the Sweating Trades. Sec. 9. Retardation of rate of Progress in Collective Industries. Sec. 10. Will Official Machine-work absorb an Increasing Proportion of Energy? Sec. 11. Improved Quality of Consumption the Condition of Social Progress. Sec. 12. The Highest Division of Labour between Machinery and Art. Sec. 13. Qualitative Consumption defeats the Law of Decreasing Returns. Sec. 14. Freedom of Art from Limitations of Matter. Sec. 15. Machinery and Art in production of Intellectual Wealth. Sec. 16. Reformed Consumption abolishes Anti-Social Competition. Sec. 17. Life itself must become Qualitative. Sec. 18. Organic Relations between Production and Consumption. Sec. 19. Summary of Progress towards a Coherent Industrial Organism.

Sec. 1. Modern industrial societies have hitherto secured to a very inadequate extent the services which modern machinery and methods of production are capable of rendering. The actual growth of material wealth, however great, has been by no means commensurate with the enormously increased powers of producing material commodities afforded by the discoveries of modern science, and the partial utilisation of these discoveries has been attended by a very unequal distribution of the advantages of this increase in the stock of common knowledge and control of nature. Moreover, as an offset against the growth of material wealth, machinery has been a direct agent in producing certain material and moral maladies which impair the health of modern industrial communities.

The unprecedented rapidity and irregularity of the discovery and adoption of the new methods made it impossible for the structure of industrial society to adjust itself at once to the conditions of the new environment. The maladies and defects which we detect in modern industry are but the measure of a present maladjustment.

The progressive adjustment of structure to environment in the unconscious or low-conscious world is necessarily slow. But where the conscious will of man, either as an individual or as a society, can be utilised for an adjusting force, the pace of progress may be indefinitely quickened. A strongly-rooted custom in a man yields very slowly to the pressure of changed circumstances which make it useless or harmful, unless the man consciously recognises the inutility of the custom and sets himself to root it out and plant another custom in its place. So the slowness of this work of industrial adjustment has been in no small measure due to the lack of definite realisation by the members of modern communities of the need and importance of this adjustment. A society which should bring its conscious will to bear upon the work of constructing new social and industrial forms to fit the new economic conditions, may make a progress which, while rapid, may yet be safe, because it is not a speculative progress, but one which is guided in its line of movement by precedent changes of environment.

Regarding, then, this conscious organised endeavour, enlightened and stimulated by a fuller understanding of industrial forces in their relation to human life, as a determinant of growing value in the industrial evolution of the future, it may properly belong to a scientific study of modern industry to seek to discover how the forces of conscious reform can reasonably work in relation to the economic forces whose operations have been already investigated.

In other words, what are the chief lines of economic change required to bring about a readjustment between modern methods of production and social welfare? The answer to this question requires us to amplify our interpretation of the industrial evolution of the past century, by producing into the future the same lines of development, that they may be justified by the appearance of consistency with some rational social end. The most convenient, and perhaps the safest way to meet this demand is to indicate, with that modesty which rightly belongs to prophecy, some of the main reforms which seem to lie upon the road of industrial progress, rendered subordinate to larger human social ends.

Sec. 2. So far as the waste of economic maladjustment consists in the excessive or defective application of various kinds of productive force at different points of industry, upon the existing basis of individual initiative and control, the reforms which are desirable must be considered as contributing to the more complete establishment of "free" competition in industry.

The complete breakdown of all barriers which impede the free flow of commerce and the migration of capital and labour, the fullest and widest dissemination of industrial information, are necessary to the attainment of the individualistic ideal of free trade. Perfect transparency of industrial operations, perfect fluidity of labour and of wealth would effect incalculably great economies in the production of commercial wealth. The free-trader, in his concentration upon the achievement of the latter economy, has generally failed to do full justice to the importance of the former. He has indeed to some limited extent recognised the value of accurate and extended industrial information as the intellectual basis of free trade. But, in common with most economists, he has failed to carry this consideration far enough. It is generally admitted that the increased publication of accounts and quotations of stock, springing out of the extension of joint-stock enterprise, the growth of numerous trade journals, the collection and dissemination of industrial facts by government bureaux and private statisticians, are serviceable in many ways. But the extreme repugnance which is shown towards all endeavours to extend the compulsory powers of acquiring information by the state, the extreme jealousy with which the rights of private information are maintained, show how inadequately the true character of modern industry is grasped. In the complexity of modern commerce it should be recognised that there is no such thing as a "self-regarding" or a private action. No fact bearing on prices, wages, profits, methods of production, etc., concerns a single firm or a single body of workers. Every industrial action, however detailed in character, however secretly conducted, has a public import, and necessarily affects the actions and interests of innumerable persons. Indeed it is often precisely in the knowledge of those matters regarded as most private, and most carefully secreted, that the public interest chiefly lies. Yet so firmly rooted in the business mind is the individualistic conception of industry, that any idea of a public development of those important private facts upon which the credit of a particular firm is based, would appear to destroy the very foundation of the commercial fabric. But, although in the game of commerce a single firm which played its hand openly while others kept theirs well concealed might suffer failure, it is quite evident that the whole community interested in the game would gain immensely if all the hands were on the table. Many, if not most, of the great disasters of modern commercial societies are attributable precisely to the fact that the credit of great business firms, which is pre-eminently an affair of public interest, is regarded as purely private before the crash. As industry grows more and more complex, so the interest of the public and of an ever-wider public in every industrial action grows apace, and a correspondingly growing recognition of this public interest, with provision for its security, will be found necessary. So far as the natural changes of industrial structure in the private business fail to provide the requisite publicity, the exercise of direct public scrutiny must come to be enforced. The reluctance shown alike by bodies of employers and of workers to divulge material facts is in large measure due to the false ideas they have conceived as to the nature of industrial activity, which education can do something to remove, but which, if not removed, must be over-ruled in the public interest.

Sec. 3. It must not, however, be supposed that the most thorough transparency of industry, any more than the removal of the political barriers which prevent Free Trade, would tend to bring about the desirable adjustment between the healthy social organism and the environment of machine-production. Full free trade would supply, quicken, and facilitate the operation of those large economic forces which we have seen at work: the tendency of capital to gravitate into larger and fewer masses, localised where labour can be maintained upon the most economical terms: a correspondent but slower and less complete organisation of labour in large masses: the flow of labouring population into towns, together with a larger utilisation of women and (where permitted) children for industrial work: a growing keenness of antagonism as the mass of the business-unit is larger, and an increased expenditure of productive power upon aggressive commercial warfare: the growth of monopolies springing from natural, social, or economic sources, conferring upon individuals or classes the power to consume without producing, and by their consumption to direct the quantity and character of large masses of labour.

The complete realisation of full free trade in all directions has no power whatever to abate the activity of these forces, and would only serve to bring their operation into more signal and startling prominence.

For the waste of periodic over-production visible in trade depression, for the sufferings caused by ever larger oscillations in prices and greater irregularity of employment of capital and labour, for the specific evils of long hours or excessive intensity of labour, dangerous and unwholesome conditions of employment, increased employment of women and children, and growth of large-city life, freedom of trade conjoined with publicity of business operations can furnish no remedies.

It has been seen that these injuries to individuals and groups of individuals, and through them to society, arise naturally and necessarily from the unfettered operation of the enlightened self-interest of individuals and groups of individuals engaged in obtaining for themselves, by the freest use of industrial means available, the largest quantity of money.

So far as these evils are in form or in magnitude the peculiar products of the last two centuries, they are in large measure traceable to methods of production controlled by machinery, and to the social estimate of machine-products which gives machinery this controlling power.

If this is so, such progress as shall abate these evils and secure for humanity the uses of machinery without the abuses will lie in two directions, each of which deserves consideration: (i) an adequate social control over machine-production; (2) an education in the arts of consumption such as may assign proper limits to the sphere of machine-production.

Sec. 4. That machinery subject to the unrestricted guidance of the commercial interests of an individual or a class cannot be safely trusted to work for the general welfare, is already conceded by all who admit the desirability or necessity of the restrictive legislation of Factory Acts, Mines Regulation Acts, and the large growth of public provisions for guarding against economic, hygienic, and other injuries arising from the conditions of modern industrial life.

These provisions, whether designed directly to secure the interests of a class of employees, as in the case of Factory Acts, or to protect the consuming public, as in the case of Adulteration Acts, must be regarded as involving an admission of a genuine antagonism between the apparent interests of individuals and of the whole community, which it is the business of society to guard against.

All this legislation is rightly interpreted as a restriction of the freedom of individual industry under modern methods of production, required in the public interest. Uncontrolled machine-production would in some cases force children of six or eight years to work ten hours a day in an unhealthy factory, would introduce suddenly a host of Chinese or other "cheap" workers to oust native labour accustomed to a higher standard of comfort, would permit an ingenious manufacturer to injure the consumer by noxious adulteration of his goods, would force wages to be paid by orders upon shops owned or controlled by employers, would oblige workers to herd together in dens of infection, and to breed physical and moral diseases which would injure the body politic. The need of a growing social control over modern machine-production, in cases where that production is left in the main to the direction of individual enterprise, is admitted on every side, though the development of that control has been uneven and determined by the pressure of concrete grievances rather than by the acceptance of any distinct theory of public responsibility.

Other limitations upon individual freedom of industry imply a clearer recognition of the falsehood of the laissez faire position. The undertaking by the State or the Municipality, or other units of social life, of various departments of industry, such as the railways, telegraphs, post-offices, is a definite assertion that, in the supply of the common services rendered by these industries, the competition of private interests cannot be relied upon to work for the public good.

Sec. 5. The industries which the State either limits or controls in the interest either of a body of workers or of the consuming public may be regarded as passing from a private competitive condition to a public non-competitive condition. If therefore we wish to ascertain how far and in what directions social control of modern production will proceed, we shall examine those industries which already exhibit the collective character. We shall find that they are of two kinds—(1) industries where the size and structure of the "business" is such that the protection afforded by competition to the consuming public and to the workers has disappeared, or is in frequent abeyance, (2) industries where the waste and damage of excessive competition outweighs the loss of enterprise caused by a removal or restriction of the incentive of individual gain. As we have seen in the analysis of "trusts," these two characteristics, wasteful competition and monopoly, are often closely related, the former signifying the process of intense struggle, the object and ultimate issue of which is to reach the quiet haven of monopoly. Generally speaking, social control in the case of over-competing industries is limited to legislative enactments regarding conditions of employment and quality of goods. Only those industries tend to pass under public administration where the monopoly is of an article of general and necessary consumption, and where, therefore, a raising of prices considerably above the competition rate would not succeed in evoking effective competition. Since the general tendency of industry, so far as it falls under modern economies of machinery and method, is either towards wasteful competition or towards monopoly, it is to be expected that there will be a continual expansion of State interference and State undertakings. This growing socialisation of industry must be regarded as the natural adjustment of society to the new conditions of machine-production. As under the economies of machine-production the business-unit, the mass of capital and labour forming a single "firm" or "business," grows larger in size and more potent in its operations, the social disturbances which it can occasion by its private activity, the far-reaching and momentous results of its strain of competition, the probability of an anti-social exercise of "monopolic" power over the whole or part of its market-area, will of necessity increase. The railway and shipping industries, for example, in countries like England and the United States, have already reached a stage of industrial development when the social danger arising from an arbitrary fixing of rates by a line or a "pool" of lines, from a strike or lock-out of "dockers" or railway men, is gaining keener recognition every year. The rapidly growing organisation of both capital and labour, especially in the fundamental industries of coal, iron, and machine-making, in the machine-transport industries, and the most highly evolved manufactories, gives to a body of employers or employed, or to a combination of both, the power at any moment to paralyse the whole or a large portion of the entire trade of a country in pursuit of some purely private interest or resentment, or in the acquisition of some strategical position, which shall enable them to strengthen their competing power or gain a monopoly. Although the organisation of masses of capital and of labour may, as is often urged, make industrial strife less frequent, the effects of such strife upon the wider public, who have no opportunity of casting a vote for war or peace, are more momentous. Moreover, as these private movements of capital and labour proceed, the probability of combined action between employers and employed in a particular industry, to secure for themselves some advantages at the public expense, will be a factor of increasing importance in industrial evolution.

The Trade Union movement and the various growths of Industrial Partnership, valuable as they are from many points of view, furnish no remedies against the chief forms of economic monopoly and economic waste; they can only change the personality and expand the number of monopolists, and alter the character, not the quantity, of economic waste. Society has an ever-deepening and more vital interest in the economical management of the machinery of transport, and this interest is no whit more secure if the practical control of railways and docks were in the hands of the Dockers' Union or the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, or of a combined board of directors and trade union officials, than it is under present circumstances. On the contrary, an effective organisation of capital and labour in an industry would be more likely to pursue a policy opposed to the interests of the wider public than now, because such a policy would be far more likely to succeed.

Sec. 6. When it is said that modern industry is becoming essentially more collective in character and therefore demands collective control, what is meant is that under modern industrial development the interest of the industrial society as a whole, and of the consuming public in each piece of so-called private enterprise, is greater than it was ever before, and requires some guarantee that this interest shall not be ignored. Where the industry is of such a kind, and in such a stage of development, that keen competition without undue waste survives, this public interest can commonly be secured by the enactment of restrictive legislation. Where such partial control is insufficient to secure the social interest against monopoly or waste, State management, upon a national, municipal, or such other scale as is economically advisable, must take the place of a private enterprise which is dangerous to society. This necessity becomes obvious as soon as the notion of a business as being purely "private" or "self-regarding" in its character is seen to be directly negatived by an understanding of the complex social nature of every commercial act. So soon as the idea of a social industrial organism is grasped, the question of State interference in, or State assumption of, an industry becomes a question of social expediency—that is, of the just interpretation of the facts relating to the particular case. In large measure this social control is to be regarded, not as a necessary protection against the monopolic power of individuals, but as necessary for the security of individual property within the limits prescribed by social welfare. Modern machine-evolution, as is seen, permits and encourages the wanton invasion and destruction of forms of capital by the competition of new savings employed in an anti-social way. It likewise tends to the frequent destruction of the value of that labour power which is the sole property of the mass of workers. "The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation, so it is the most sacred and inviolable."[289]

There are certain wastes of economic power involved in all competition; there are certain dangers of monopoly attaching to all private conduct of industry. Collective control deals with these wastes and dangers, adjusting itself to their extent and character.

Sec. 7. To the question how far and how rapidly may this extension of collective control proceed, no more definite answer is possible than this, that as a larger and larger amount of industry passes into the condition of the most highly evolved machine-industries of to-day, and develops along with the corresponding economies, corresponding dangers and wastes, larger portions will pass under restrictive legislation or State management.

The evolution in the structure of capitalist enterprise, while it breeds and aggravates the diseases of trade depression, sweating, etc., likewise prepares the way and facilitates the work of social control. It is easier to inspect a few large factories than many small ones, easier to arbitrate where capital and labour stands organised in large masses, easier to municipalise big joint-stock businesses in gas, water, or conveyance. Every legislative interference, in the way of inspection or minor control, quickens the evolution of an industry, and hastens the time when it acquires the position of monopoly which demands a fuller measure of control, and finally passes into the ranks of public industry.

Thus it would follow that, unless proceeding pari passu with this evolution there was a springing up or an expansion of other industries not so amenable to large machine production and therefore not prone to the dangers and wastes which appertain to it, collectivism would absorb an ever-increasing proportion of industrial effort.

Sec. 8. At present it appears that there are two great classes of productive work which have not fallen under machine-industry and capitalism in its typical form. There is that work which machinery is technically competent to perform, but which it cannot economically undertake so long as large quantities of very cheap labour are available. This class comprises the bulk of what are commonly called the "sweating" trades, the cheap low-skilled domestic workshop labour. The other class consists of artistic and intellectual work which cannot be successfully undertaken by machinery. The first of these classes is universally admitted to comprise cases of arrested development. The irregular working of the more highly-evolved industries, the successive supplantation of branches of skilled labour by machinery, the blind migration of labour from distant parts, keeps the large industrial centres supplied with a quantity of unskilled and untrained labour, which can be bought so cheaply that in the lowest branches of many trades it does not pay the entrepreneur to incur the initial cost of setting up expensive machinery and the risk of working it. The social and moral progress of industrial nations requires, as a first condition of orderly progress, that these cases of arrested growth shall be absorbed into the general mass of machine-industry. These problems of "the sweating system," the unemployed, the pauper class, the natural products of the working of a system of competition where the competitors start from widely different lines of opportunity, can never be solved by the private play of enlightened self-interest, unless that enlightenment take a far more altruistic form than is consistent with the continuance of competitive industry. This is the fundamental paralogism of that school of reformers who find the cure of industrial maladies in the humanisation of the private employer. A whole class of employers sufficiently humane and far-sighted to consistently desire the welfare of their employees (and no fewer than the whole class would suffice, for otherwise the less benevolent will undersell and take the business from the more benevolent) would be so highly civilised that they would no longer be willing to compete with one another so as to injure one another's business: they would out of pure goodwill organise into a "monopoly," and working this monopoly for the exclusive interest of themselves and their employees, rack-rent the consuming public; or if their benevolence extended to all their customers they would socialise their business, conducting it for the greatest good of all society. Such a form of socialised industry, dependent upon the moral character of perishable individuals, would possess all the weaknesses charged against State socialism without any of the educative advantages or the security and stability of that system. The "captain of industry" remedy is a sentimental and not a scientific one. Once regard "sweating" as a case of arrested development and the true line of progress will be seen to lie in the absorption of these backward industries into the main current of industrial movement, leaving them to pass through the necessary phases of machine-production and to be subjected to an increasing pressure of social control until they are ripe for society to undertake. Then there will remain outside of capitalist machine-industry only that class of work which is artistic and therefore individualistic in character.

Sec. 9. We now stand face to face with the main objection so often raised against all endeavours to remedy industrial and social diseases by the expansion of public control. Competition and the zest of individual gain, it is urged, furnish the most effective incentive to enterprise and discovery. Assuming that society were structurally competent to administer industry officially, the establishment of industrial order would be the death-blow to industrial progress. The strife, danger, and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to industrial vitality.

How much force do these objections contain in the light of the information provided by our study of industrial evolution? It should be recognised at the outset that the economic individualist is not a conservative, defending an established order and pointing out the dangers attending proposed innovations. Our analysis of the structure of modern industry shows the progressive socialisation of certain classes of industry as a step in the order of events, equally natural and necessary with the earlier steps by which machine-industry superseded handicraft and crystallised in ever larger masses with changing relations to one another. The indictment against social control over industry is an indictment against a natural order of events, on the ground that nature has taken a wrong road of advancement. It is only possible to regard the legislative action by which public control over industry is established as "unnatural" or "artificial" by excluding from "Nature" those social forces which find expression in Acts of Parliament, an eminently unscientific mode of reasoning.

But though this growing exercise of social control cannot be regarded as "fighting against the constitution of things,"[290] it may be considered by those who hold we have no guarantee of the future development of the human race, as one of the lines of action in which the advancing enfeeblement of man may express itself: the abandonment of individual strife in commerce may be regarded as a mark of diminishing vitality, which seeks immunity from effort and an equable condition of material comfort, in preference to the risks and excitement of a more eventful and arduous career. Order will be purchased at the price of progress: the abandonment of individual enterprise in industry is part of the decadence of humanity. This is the interpretation which Dr. Pearson, in his National Life and Character, places upon the socialistic tendencies of the age: the suppression of competitive industry in order to cure poverty, physical misery, and social injustice, will produce a society which is "sensuous, genial, fibreless." The validity of such a judgment rests upon two assumptions: first, that social control of industry necessarily crushes the spirit of individual enterprise and checks industrial progress; second, that extension of State control over capitalist industry necessarily implies a diminished scope of individual control in the production of wealth.

The first assumption is open to a number of criticisms which must be held to greatly modify its force, and which may be summarised as follows:—

(1) Much individual enterprise in industry does not make for industrial progress. A larger and larger proportion of the energy given out in trade competition is consumed in violent warfare between trade rivals, and is not represented either in advancement of industrial arts or in increase of material wealth.

(2) History does not show greed of gain as the motive of the great steps in industrial progress. The love of science, the pure delight of mechanical invention, the attainment of some slight personal convenience in labour, and mere chance, play the largest part in the history of industrial improvements. These motives would be as equally operative under state-control as under private enterprise.

(3) Such personal inducements as may supply a useful stimulus to the inventive faculty could be offered in socially-controlled industry, not merely publicity and honour, but such direct material rewards as were useful.

Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.

(4) The same charges of weakened individual interest, want of plasticity and enterprise, routine torpidity, are in a measure applicable to every large business as compared with a smaller. Adam Smith considered them fatal barriers to the growth of joint-stock enterprise outside a certain narrowly-defined range. But the economies of the large business were found to outweigh these considerations. So a well-ordered state-industry may be the most economical in spite of diminished elasticity and enterprise.

But while these considerations qualify the force of the contention that state-control would give no scope for industrial progress, they do not refute it. The justification of the assumption by the State of various functions, military, judicial, industrial, is that a safe orderly routine in the conduct of these affairs is rightly purchased by a loss of elasticity and a diminished pace of progress. The arts of war and of justice would probably make more advance under private enterprise than under public administration, and there is no reason to deny that postal and railway services are slower to adopt improvements when they pass under government control.

It may be generally admitted that, as the large modern industries pass from the condition of huge private monopolies to public departments, the routine character will grow in them, and they will become less experimental and more mechanical. It is the nature of machines to be mechanical, and the perfection of machine-industries, as of single machines, will be the perfection of routine. Just in proportion as the machine has established its dominancy over the various industries, so will they increase in size, diminish in flexibility, and grow ripe for admission, as routine businesses, into the ranks of state-industry. If the chief object of society was to secure continual progress in military arts and to educate to the utmost the military qualities, it would be well to leave fighting to private enterprise instead of establishing state monopolies in the trade of war. It sacrifices this competition, with the progress it induces and the personal fitness it evolves, in order that the individual enterprise of its members may be exercised in the competition of industrial arts, inducing industrial progress and evolving industrial fitness. The substitution of industrialism for warfare is not, however, understood to imply a diminution of individual enterprise, but an alteration in its application.

If, starting from this point of view, we regard human life as comprising an infinite number of activities of different sorts, operating upon different planes of competition and educating different human "fitnesses," we shall understand how the particular phase of industrial evolution we are considering is related to the wider philosophic view of life. All progress, from primitive savagedom to modern civilisation, will then appear as consisting in the progressive socialisation of the lower functions, the stoppage of lower forms of competition and of the education of the more brutal qualities, in order that a larger and larger proportion of individual activity may be engaged in the exercise of higher functions, the practice of competition upon higher planes, and the education of higher forms of fitness.

If the history of past civilisation shows us this, there is an a priori presumption that each further step in the repression of individual enterprise and in the extension of state-control does not mean a net diminution in individual activity or any relaxation of effort in self-assertion, but merely an elevation of the plane of competition and of the kind of human qualities engaged. This is, in fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human progress requires that one after another the lower material animal functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities.

To suppose that the reduction of all machine-industry to public routine services, when it becomes possible, will imply a net diminution in the scope of individual self-expression, rests upon the patent fallacy of assigning certain fixed and finite limits to human interest and activity, so that any encroachment from the side of routine lessens the absolute scope of human spontaneity and interest. If, as there is reason to believe, human desires and the activities which are engaged in satisfying them are boundless, the assumption that an increase in the absolute amount of state-control or routine-work implies a diminution of the field for individual enterprise is groundless. The underlying motive, which alone can explain and justify each step in progressive socialism, is the attainment of a net economy of individual effort, which, when it is released from exercise upon a lower plane of competition, may be devoted to exercise upon a higher. If the result of extending social control over industry were merely to bring about a common level of material comfort, attended by spiritual and intellectual torpor and contentment, the movement might be natural and necessary, but could hardly be termed progress.

But such a view is based upon a denial of the axiom that the satisfaction of one want breeds another want. Experience does not teach the decay but the metamorphosis of individuality. Under socialised industry progress in the industrial arts would be slower and would absorb a smaller proportion of individual interest, in order that progress in the finer intellectual and moral arts might be faster, and might engage a larger share of life. To future generations of more highly evolved humanity the peculiar barbarism of our age will consist in the fact that the major part of its intelligence, enterprise, genius, has been devoted to the perfection of the arts of material production through mechanical means. If it is desirable that more of this individual energy should be engaged in the production of higher forms of wealth by competition upon higher planes, this can only be achieved by the process of reducing to routine the lower functions. Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality. Industrial progress would undoubtedly be slower under state-control, because the very object of such control is to divert a larger proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations in order to apply them in producing higher forms of wealth. It is not, however, right to assume that progress in the industrial arts would cease under state-industry; such progress would be slower, and would itself partake of a routine character—a slow, continuous adjustment of the mechanism of production and distribution to the slowly-changing needs of the community.

Sec. 10. A most important misunderstanding of the line of industrial development arises from a conviction that all production of wealth embodied in matter tends to pass under the dominion of machinery, that an increasing number of workers in the future will become machine-tenders, and that the state-control of machine-industry would bring the vast majority of individuals into the condition of official machine-workers. This, however, is by no means a reasonable forecast. In competitive machine-industry, although it is to the interest of the individual business to "save" as much labour as possible, the play of competition causes to be made and worked a much larger quantity of machinery than is enough to maintain the current rate of consumption, and thus keeps in the ranks of manufacture a much larger quantity of labour than is socially necessary. Yet in a typical manufacturing country like England statistics show that the proportion of the working population engaged in machine manufactures is not increasing. If, then, by the gradual elimination of competition in the machine-industries, the quantity of machine-work were kept down to the social requirements of the community's consumption, the proportion of machine-workers would be less than it is, assuming the demand for machine-made goods continued the same.

But what, it may be said, will become of the increasing proportion of the workers not required by machinery? will they go to swell indefinitely the ranks of distributors? Will the number of merchants, jobbers, speculators, shopkeepers, agents: middlemen of various sorts, grow without limit? Assuming that the work of distribution were left to competitive enterprise, and that the quantity and quality of consumption remained the same as now, this result would seem necessarily to follow. The labour saved in manufacture would pass, as it does now, to intensify the competition of the distributive trades and to subdivide into needlessly small fragments the necessary but limited amount of distributive work. But these assumptions are not necessarily correct. If, as seems likely, the increased intensity of competition forced the growth of strong monopolies in certain departments of distribution, the anti-social power thus bestowed upon individuals would necessitate the extension of state-control to them also. The work of distribution would thus pass into routine-industry administered by the public for the public interest. Thus the area of socialised industry would extend until it absorbed one after another all industries possessing the machine-character and capable of administration by routine. It might thus appear that, after all, the forebodings of the individualist would be verified, the work of life would be reduced to a dull monotonous mechanism grinding out under bureaucratic sway an even quantity of material comforts for a community absorbed in the satisfaction of its orderly behaviour.

This goal seems inevitable if we assume that no change takes place in the quantity and quality of the consumption of the community, that individual consumers save or try to save the same proportion of their incomes as now, and apply the portion that they spend to the purchase of increased quantities of ever-cheapening machine-made goods.

But are we justified in considering it necessary, or even probable, that consumption will in amount and character remain unchanged? In proportion as the large industries pass into the condition of monopolies, whether under private or public control, the area of safe and profitable-investment for the average "saving" man will be more restricted. Thus some of the useless "saving" which takes the shape of excessive plant, machinery, and other forms of capital will be prevented. In other words, the quantity of consumption will increase, and this increase will give fuller employment to the machinery of production and? to the labour engaged in working it and in distributing the increased product. If, however, increased consumption merely took the form of consuming increased quantities of the same material goods as before, the gain would be limited to the rise of material comfort of the poorer classes, and this gain might be set off by the congested and torpor-breeding luxury of the better-to-do. A mere increase in quantity of consumption would do nothing to avert the drifting of industry into a bureaucratic mechanism.

Sec. 11. It is to improved quality and character of consumption that we can alone look for a guarantee of social progress. Allusion has been already made to the class of artistic and intellectual work which cannot be undertaken by machinery. It must never be forgotten that art is the true antithesis of machinery. The essence of art in this wide sense is the application of individual spontaneous human effort. Each art-product is the repository of individual thought, feeling, effort, each machine-product is not. The "art" in machine-work has been exhausted in the single supreme effort of planning the machine; the more perfect the machine the smaller the proportion of individual skill or art embodied in the machine-product The spirit of machinery, its vast rapid power of multiplying quantities of material goods of the same pattern, has so over-awed the industrial world that the craze for quantitative consumption has seized possession of many whose taste and education might have enabled them to offer resistance. Thus, not only our bread and our boots are made by machinery, but many of the very things we misname "art-products." Now a just indictment of this excessive encroachment of machinery is not based upon the belief, right or wrong, that machinery cannot produce things in themselves as fit or beautiful as art. The true inadequacy of machine-products for human purposes arises from the fact that machine-products are exactly similar to one another, whereas consumers are not. So long as consumers consent to sink their individuality, to consume articles of precisely the same shape, size, colour, material, to assimilate their consumption to one another, machinery will supply them. But since no two individuals are precisely similar in physical, intellectual, or moral nature, so the real needs of no two will be the same, even in the satisfaction of ordinary material wants. As the dominance of machinery over the workers tends to the destruction of individuality in work, obliging different workers to do the same work in the same way with a premium upon the mere capacity of rapid repetition, in the same way it tends to crush the individuality of consumers by imposing a common character upon their consumption. The progressive utilisation of machinery depends upon the continuance of this indiscriminate consumption, and the willingness of consumers to employ every increase of income in demanding larger and larger quantities of goods of the same pattern and character. Once suppose that consumers refuse to conform to a common standard, and insist more and more upon a consumption adjusted to their individual needs and tastes, and likewise strive to follow and to satisfy the changing phases of their individual taste, such individuality in consumption must impose a corresponding individuality in production, and machinery will be dethroned from industry. Let us take the example of the clothing trade. Provided the wearing public will consent to wear clothes conforming to certain common patterns and shapes which are only approximate "fits," machinery can be used to make these clothes; but if every person required his own taste to be consulted, and insisted upon an exactitude of fit and a conformity to his own special ideas of comfort, the work could no longer be done by machinery, and would require the skill of an "artist." It is precisely upon this issue that the conflict of machine versus hand-labour is still fought out. The most highly-finished articles in the clothing, and boot trades are still hand-made; the best golf-clubs, fishing-rods, cricket bats, embody a large amount of high manual skill, though articles of fair average make are turned out chiefly by machinery in large quantities. These hand-made goods are produced for a small portion of the consuming public, whose education and refinement of taste induces them to prefer spending their money upon a smaller quantity of commodities adjusted in character to their individual needs, than upon a larger quantity of common commodities.

Assuming that industrial evolution places an increasing proportion of the consuming public in secure possession of the prime physical necessaries of life, it is surely possible that they too may come to value less highly a quantitative increase in consumption, and may develop individuality of tastes which require individual production for their satisfaction. In proportion as this happens, hand-work or art must play a more important part in these industries, and may be able to repel the further encroachments of machinery, or even to drive it out of some of the industrial territory it has annexed. But although the illustration of the present condition of the clothing trades serves to indicate the nature of the contest between machinery and art in the region of ordinary material consumption, it is not suggested that social progress will, or ought to, expel machinery from most of the industries it controls, or to prevent its application to industries which it has not yet reached. The luxury and foppish refinement of a small section of "fashionable" society, unnaturally relieved of the wholesome necessity of work, cannot be taken as an indication of the ways in which individuality or quality of consumption may or will assert itself, in a society where social progress is based upon equality of opportunity, and the power to consume has some just relation to ability and merit. It seems reasonable to expect that on the whole machinery will retain, and even strengthen and extend, its hold of those industries engaged in supplying the primitive needs of man—his food, clothing, shelter, and other animal comforts. In a genuinely progressive society the object will be so to order life as to secure, not merely the largest amount of individual freedom or self-expression, but the highest quality. If an undue amount of individuality be devoted to the production and consumption of food, clothing, etc., and the conscious, refined cultivation of these tastes, higher forms of individual expression in work and life will be neglected. The just economy of individuality will therefore relegate certain branches of production to machinery, in order that the energy saved by such routine-work may be set free for higher individual endeavour. The satisfaction of the primary animal wants—hunger, thirst, cold, etc.—are common to all; in these purely physical demands there is less qualitative difference in different men; as the needs are the same the consumption will be the same. The absence of wide individual differences of taste marks out the commodities for routine or machine-production. As individuals are nearest alike in their prime physical needs, so, as they gradually develop higher material wants, and, after these are satisfied, aesthetic, intellectual, moral wants, their individualism becomes more and more marked. It is therefore in the most highly developed, or, as they are sometimes called, the more "artificial" wants of man, that the diversity of individual nature shows itself most strongly, and demands a satisfaction peculiar to itself which only art can give. In a highly evolved society it is likely that many physical needs, and even some intellectual needs, will be common to all, and will engage little individual attention. These may be graded as routine wants, and may be satisfied by machine-made goods. As a society, safely ordered in the supply of ordinary physical comforts, continued to develop, a less and less diversity would show itself in the ordinary aspect of its material civilisation, because the individuality which once found expression there is raised to a higher plane of activity. The enrichment and enlargement of human life in such a society would undoubtedly manifest itself in a greater likeness between the individual members in the lower modes of life, but the extent of individual difference in the higher modes would be ever widening. The object of the levelling in the lower processes of life would be that higher individual differences might have opportunity to assert themselves. In a progressive society thus conceived, where socialisation and individuation grow inseparably related and reacting on one another, there is evidently no fixed limit to the progress of machinery. As each higher want is educated, some lower want will drop into the position of a routine-want, and will pass into the rightful province of machinery. But though a large proportion of material commodities would doubtless be made by machinery, it is not signified that art will be banished from what are commonly called the industrial arts. On the contrary, art may be in many ways the friend and co-operator of machinery, the latter furnishing a routine foundation for the display of individual taste and of individual satisfaction in the consumer. One of the most hopeful signs of the last few years is the growing intrusion of art into the machine-industries,—the employment of skilled designers and executants who shall tempt and educate the public eye with grace of form and harmony of colour. In pottery, textile wares, hardware, furniture, and many other industries, the beginnings of public taste are operating in demand for variety and ornament. May not this be the beginning of a cultivation of individual taste which shall graft a fine-art upon each machine-industry, apportioning to machinery that work which is hard, dull, dangerous, monotonous, and uneducative, while that which is pleasant, worthy, interesting, and educative is reserved for the human agent?

Sec. 12. Machinery is thus naturally adapted to the satisfaction of the routine wants of life under social control. The character of machine-production, as has been shown, is essentially collective. The maladies of present machine-industries are due to the fact that this collective character is inadequately recognised, and machinery, left to individual enterprise and competition, oppresses mankind and causes waste and commercial instability. In a word, the highest division of labour has not been yet attained, that which will apportion machinery to the collective supply of the routine needs of life, and art to the individual supply of the individual needs. In this way alone can society obtain the full use of the "labour-saving" character of machinery, minimising the amount of human exertion engaged in tending machinery and maximising the amount engaged in the free and interesting occupations. Engaged in satisfying the steady, constant needs of society under social regulation, machinery would no longer be subject to those fearful oscillations of demand which are liable unforeseen to plunge whole masses of workers into unemployment and poverty, and to waste an infinite amount of "saving." Where the fluctuations in consumption were confined to the region of individual taste, the changes of taste and growing variety of consumption would furnish the education of the artist, who will acquire skill and flexibility by freely following and directing the changing tastes of consumers.

In such a forecast it is of course useless to endeavour to predict how far art will continue to occupy itself with industry, or how far, set free by machinery, it will be absorbed in the creation of finer intellectual or spiritual products, or in what are now termed the fine arts. This must depend upon the nature of the harmonious development of human capacities of effort and enjoyment under conditions of individual freedom, and the interaction of the free development of individuals in a society founded upon an equality of the material means of life. The study of the qualitative development of consumption in modern society is only just beginning to be recognised as the true starting-point of economic science, for although many of the older economists did verbal homage to the importance of this branch of study, it has been reserved for recent thinkers to set about the work.[291]

Sec. 13. It is hardly too much to say that the whole of social progress depends upon the substitution of qualitative for quantitative methods of consumption. In so far as individuals apply their growing ability to consume in order to demand increased quantities of the same articles they consumed before, or flash variety of fashionable goods in no wise adjusted to individual need or taste, they extend the dominion of machinery. In so far as they develop individual taste, delicacy rather than quantity of satisfaction, they give wider scope to work which embodies conscious human skill and deserves the name of art.

But there is another bearing of this point of equal significance. Political economists have a dismal formula called the Law of Diminishing Returns, which casts a dark shadow upon industrial progress as it is commonly conceived. The more food and clothing, fuel, and other material goods we require, the further we have to go for the material, and the harder it is to get: we must plough inferior lands yielding smaller crops, we must sink deeper shafts for our coal and iron. As our population grows ever larger, and this larger number wants more and more pieces of the earth to feed its machines and to turn out the increased quantity of goods, the drain upon natural resources is constantly increasing. The material world is limited; in time Nature will become exhausted, and, long before this happens, the quantity of human labour required to raise the increased supply of raw material in the teeth of the Law of Diminishing Returns will far exceed the economies attending large-scale machine-production.

This danger will also be found to result entirely from the quantitative estimate of human wealth and human life.

Confining our view for the moment to that branch of production which is engaged in providing food, to which the Law of Diminishing Returns is held to apply with special rigour, we can see without difficulty how, by a progressive differentiation of consumption, we can mitigate or even utterly defeat the operation of this law. If the inhabitants of a country persist in maintaining a single narrow standard of diet, and use the whole of their land for growing wheat and raising sheep, not merely do they waste all other fine productive qualities belonging to certain portions of the cultivated or uncultivated soil, but every increase in their narrow consumption drives them to worse soil, obliges them to put more labour into a quarter of wheat or a sheep, and increases the proportion of their aggregate product which goes as rent.[292] If, on the other hand, a community cultivates a varied consumption and seeks to utilise each portion of its soil for whatever form of food it can grow best, instead of grading its land exclusively according to its wheat or sheep-raising capacity, it is able to defeat the "niggardliness of nature" which asserts itself when the community insists upon a continual extension of the same demands. For land which may be very bad for wheat-growing or grazing, which may even be "below the margin of cultivation" for these purposes, may be well adapted for producing other commodities. A large variety of alternative uses will enable us to get the largest net amount of utilities out of Nature, and a community which, in lieu of an extension of demand for the same commodities, asserts its civilisation in the education of new demands and a greater complexity in the standard of its comfort, may draw from the land an indefinite increase of wealth without putting forth more labour or paying higher rent. It is simply one more example of the economy attainable by division of labour and specialisation of function.

Sec. 14. What applies to food will equally apply to the use of the earth for providing the raw material of all other forms of material wealth. A people with growing variety of consumption is ever finding new and more profitable uses for slighted or neglected capacities of nature. The social progress of nations must be chiefly determined by the amount of their intelligent flexibility of consumption. Mere variety of consumption in itself is not sufficient to secure progress. There must be a progressive recognition of the true relations, between the products which can be most economically raised upon each portion of the soil, and the wholesome needs of mankind seeking the full harmonious development of their faculties in their given physical environment. A progressive cultivation of taste for a variety of strong drinks, though it might provide an increased number of alternative uses for the soil, and might enhance the aggregate market-values of the wealth produced, would not, it is generally held, make for social progress. That nation which, in its intelligent attainment of a higher standard of life, is able to thoroughly assimilate and harmonise the largest variety of those products for which their soil and climate are best adapted, will be foremost in industrial progress and in the other arts of civilisation which spring out of it.

The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns. So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, i.e. artistic, goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we shall be likewise free.

Sec. 15. So far the consideration of reformed qualitative consumption has been confined to material goods. But a people moving along the line of progress, seeking ever a more highly qualitative life, will demand that a larger proportion of their energy shall be given to the production and consumption of intellectual goods.

This world likewise is at present largely under the dominion of Machinery and a Law of Diminishing Returns. By making of our intellectual life a mere accumulation of knowledge, piling fact upon fact, reading book upon book, adding science to science, striving to cover as much intellectual ground as possible, we become mere worshippers of quantity. It is not unnatural that our commercial life should breed such an intellectual consumption, and that the English and American nations in particular, who have beyond others developed machine-production and the quantitative genius for commerce, should exhibit the same taste in their pursuit after knowledge. Pace, size, number, cost, are ever on their lips. To visit every European capital in a fortnight, see acres of pictures, cathedrals, ruined castles, collect out of books or travel the largest mass of unassorted and undigested information, is the object of such portion of the commercial life as can be spared from the more serious occupations of life, piling up bale after bale of cotton goods and eating dinner after dinner of the same inharmoniously ordered victuals.

Our schools and colleges are engaged in turning out year by year immense quantities of common intellectual goods. Our magazines, books, and lectures are chiefly machine-products adjusted to the average reader or hearer, and are reckoned successful if they can drive a large number of individuals to profess the same feelings and opinions and adopt the same party or creed, with the view of enabling them to consume a large number of copies of the same intellectual commodities which can be turned out by intellectual machinery, instead of undergoing the effort of thinking and feeling for themselves. This danger, connected with the rapid spread of printed matter, is a grave one. Happily there are visible here also counteracting influences, forces that tend to individualise intellectual consumption and thus to stimulate the higher arts of intellectual production. In a progressive community it will be more fully recognised that it is not sufficient to induce people to give more time and attention to intellectual consumption; they must demand intellectual goods vitally adjusted to their individual needs.

Sec. 16. To the increased regard for quality of life we must likewise look to escape the moral maladies which arise from competition. For what is the cause of anti-social competition? It is the limitation of quantity. Two dogs are after one bone. Two persons wish to consume one commodity at the same time. Now, even in material goods, the more qualitative consumption becomes, and the more insistent each individual is upon the satisfaction of his peculiar tastes, the smaller will be the probability that two persons will collide in their desires, and struggle for the possession of the self-same commodity. Even in art-objects which are still bounded by matter, among genuine lovers of art the individuality of each stands out in mitigation of the antagonism of competition, for no two will have precisely the same tastes or estimates, or will seek with equal avidity the same embodiments of art. As we rise to purely intellectual or moral enjoyments, competition gives way to generous rivalry in co-operation. In the pursuit of knowledge or goodness the rivalry is no longer antagonism—what one gains another does not lose. One man's success is not another's failure. On the contrary, the enrichment of one is the enrichment of all. Both in the production and the consumption of the highest goods of Science, Art, and Virtue, social, not anti-social, motives are the chief stimulus. In the highest forms of consumption, the practice of the noblest arts of life, the enjoyment of the finest intellectual and spiritual goods, there is no purely selfish consumption. For though the highest individuality is then attained, the enjoyment of one individual requires the enjoyment of others. The attainment of the highest reaches of knowledge is impossible for the individual without the constant and increasing aid of other minds and the inspiring "spirit of the age"; the enjoyment of such knowledge is in an even wider communication. The practice and enjoyment of the arts of goodness are necessarily social, because the good life can only be lived in a good society. Spinoza has summed up the truth in saying—"The highest good is common to all, and all may equally enjoy it." So it appears that the highest goods are essentially at once individual and social, pointing once more the attainment of the higher synthesis in which the antagonism of the "one" and the "all," which shows itself in the lower planes of competing effort and enjoyment, disappears.

Sec. 17. One necessary condition of this progressive life cannot be ignored. Human life itself must become more qualitative, not only in its functional activities, but in its physical basis. The greatness and worth of a community must be seen more clearly to consist not in the numbers, but in the character of its members. If the number of individuals in a society continually increases, no reform in methods of consumption can prevent the constant increase in the proportion of human energy which must be put into the production of the prime material necessaries of physical life which are, and in spite of all improved methods of treating nature will remain, ultimately subject to a law of diminishing returns: so, less and less energy can be spared for the life of varied and delicate consumption, high individuality and intellectual and moral growth. Professor Geddes has well expressed the importance of this truth: "The remedy lies in higher and higher individuation—i.e., if we would repress excessive multiplication, we must develop the average individual standard throughout society. Population not merely tends to out-run the means of subsistence, but to degenerate below the level of subsistence, so that without steadily directing more and more of our industry from the production of those forms of wealth which merely support life to those which evoke it, from the increase of the fundamental necessities of animal life to that of the highest appliances of human culture, degeneration must go on."[293]

Sec. 18. One final consideration remains. Modern large-scale industry has enlarged and made more distinct an unnatural and injurious separation of the arts of production and the arts of consumption. Work has become more and more differentiated from enjoyment, and in a twofold way. Modern machine-industry has in the first place sharpened the distinction between the "working classes," whose name indicates that their primary function is to labour and not to live, and the comfortable classes, whose primary function is to live and not to labour, which private enterprise in machine-industry has greatly enlarged. The extremes of these large classes present the divorcement of labour and life in startling prominence. But since work and enjoyment are both human functions, they must be organically related in the life of every individual in a healthy community. It must be recognised to be as essential to the consumer to produce as for the producer to consume. The attempt on the part of an individual or a class to escape the physical and moral law which requires the output of personal exertion as the condition of wholesome consumption can never be successful. On the plane of physical health, Dr. Arlidge, in his book upon The Diseases of Occupations, points the inevitable lesson in the high rate of disease and mortality of the "unoccupied class" in that period of their life when they have slaked their zest for volunteer exertion and assume the idle life which their economic power renders possible. The man of "independent means" cannot on the average keep his life in his body nearly so long as the half-starved, ill-housed agricultural labourer, from whose labour he draws the rents which keep him in idleness. The same law applies in the intellectual world. The dilettante person who tries to extract unceasing increments of intellectual or aesthetic enjoyment from books or pictures or travel, without the contribution of steady, painful intellectual effort, fails to win an intellectual life, for the mere automatic process of collecting the knowledge of others for personal consumption without striving to enlarge the general stock, congests and debilitates the mind and prevents the wholesome digestion and assimilation.

The same necessary evil arises from the sharp separation of the processes of production and consumption in the individual life of the worker. Industry which is purely monotonous, burdensome, uninteresting, uneducative, which contains within itself no elements of enjoyment, cannot be fully compensated by alternate periods of consumption or relaxation. The painful effort involved in all labour or exertion should have linked with it certain sustaining elements of related interest and pleasure. It is the absence of this which condemns machine-tending from the human standpoint, it is the presence of this which distinguishes every art. Hence in a progressive society we must look to see not the abolition of machinery, but the diminution of machine-tending which attends the growing perfection of machinery, in order that the arts may be able to absorb a larger share of human exertion.

The arts of production and consumption will, in the evolution of a wholesome industrial society, be found inseparable: not merely will they be seen to be organically related, but rather will appear as two aspects of the same fact, the concave and the convex of life. For the justly ordered life brings the identification of life, a continuous orderly intake and output of wholesome energy. This judgment, not of "sentimentalism" but of science, finds powerful but literally accurate expression in the saying of a great living thinker, "Life without work is guilt, work without art is brutality." Just in proportion as the truth of the latter phrase finds recognition the conditions which make "life without work" possible will disappear. Everything in human progress will be found to depend upon a progressive realisation of the nature of good "consumption." Just in proportion as our tastes become so qualitative that we require to put our own spontaneity, our sense of beauty and fitness, our vital force, into whatever work we do, and likewise require the same elements of spontaneity and individuality in all we enjoy, the economic conditions of a perfect society will be attained.

Sec. 19. This forecast of the social and industrial goal seems justified by a thoughtful interpretation of the tendencies visible in the development of modern industry. How fast may be the progress towards such an ideal, or how far such progress may be frustrated or impaired by the appearance of new or the strengthening of old antagonistic forces, lies beyond the powers of legitimate speculation. The endeavour to test industrial evolution by reference to the wider movements of human life brings into prominence two great tendencies whose operations, attested not dimly by modern history, are in close accord with the general trend of the development of social and individual life and the relations subsisting between the two.

As modern industrial societies develop they disclose certain material wants which are common to all or most members, and are less subject to fluctuations in quantity or quality of demand than others. These routine wants, representing that part of consumption which is common, can be supplied most economically by highly organised machinery and highly concentrated methods of production. But so long as the machinery for the satisfaction of the common wants remains outside the common control, and is worked for the benefit of sections of the community whose interests conflict, both with one another and with the general interest, an immense amount of waste and danger arises from the working of the machinery, and grave social maladies are engendered. These maladies evoke in the best ordered and most intelligent communities an increasing pressure of public control. This public control is strengthened and extended in proportion as the highly evolved structure of the industry enables its administrators to exercise powers of monopoly either in relation to the treatment of its employees, or in relation to the price or quality of the commodities it supplies to the public. Such industries as develop these economic powers of monopoly in the highest degree, and in relation to the supply of prime necessaries or comforts of common life, pass gradually into the condition of public industries organised for the public good. It seems likely that all the important machine industries engaged in satisfying common routine wants will gradually develop the monopolic characteristics which accrue to large production, and will pass by degrees through the different phases of public control until they become merged in public industry.

This so-called socialistic movement in industry represents the growing cohesiveness of modern societies. At all times there is a strong natural tendency to supply common wants by common efforts. So long as the common wants in their wider significance only extend to protection of the person and of certain forms of personal property, state-work is confined within these protective limits, and the work of producing common wealth, so far as it exists, is left to village communities or other small units of social organisation. As the elements of steady common consumption grow in number, the common organisation of activity to supply them will grow, and where the supply has at first been left to private enterprise, the abuse of power and growing inconvenience of competition will drive them into public industry. But since the very raison d'etre of this increased social cohesiveness is to economise and enrich the individual life, and to enable the play of individual energy to assume higher forms out of which more individual satisfaction may accrue more and more human effort will take shape in industries which will be left to individual initiative and control, the arts in which the freedom of personal spontaneity will find scope in the expression of physical or moral beauty and fitness and the attainment of intellectual truth. The infinite variety which these forms of artistic expression may assume, fraught with the individuality of the artist, will prevent them from ever passing into "routine" or "common" industries, though even in the fine arts there will be certain elements which, as they become part of the common possession, will become relatively void of individual interest, and will thus pass into a condition of routine activity. The idea of continuity in human progress demands this admission. But since each encroachment of routine into the "finer arts" is motived by a prior shifting of the interest of the consumer into forms of higher refinement, there will be a net gain and not a loss in the capacity of individual exercise in artistic work. In every form of human activity the progress of routine industry will be the necessary condition of the expansion of individual freedom of expression. But while the choice and control of each higher form of "industry" will remain individualistic, in proportion as the moral bonds of society obtain fuller conscious recognition, the work of the "artist" likewise will be dedicated more and more to the service of his fellow-men. Thus will the balance of the social and individual work in the satisfaction of human wants be preserved, while the number of those wants increase and assume different values with the progress of the social and individual life.

FOOTNOTES:

[289] Wealth of Nations, p. 110.

[290] Spencer, Contemporary Review, March 1884.

[291] Professor Jevons' work upon this branch of Economics was marred by an attempt to treat it purely mathematically, that is to reduce qualitative to quantitative differences—an impossibility. Among recent writers, Professor Patten, of Pennsylvania University, has made by far the most important contributions towards a systematic treatment of the economics of consumption.

[292] Patten's Premises of Political Economy, chap. iv.

[293] Professor Patrick Geddes, Claims of Labour. Cf. The Evolution of Sex, chap, xx. (Contemporary Science Series: Walter Scott).



INDEX.

Abraham, Report on Employment of Women, 315

Adjustment in progressive industry, 351

Agriculture, 32, 41, 102; agricultural labour, 333

Andrew, S., Fifty Years' Cotton Trade, 297

Apprentices, statute of, 26

Arkwright, 50, 56

Arlidge, Dr., 252, 255, 320, 336, 337, 379

Art in industry, 371-378

Ashley, Professor, Economic History, 38

Babbage, Economy of Manufactures, 50-51, 236, 249

Baines, History of Cotton Manufacture, 23, 37

Baker, Monopolies and the People, 128, 134, 139, 147

Board of Trade Journal, 241

Balance of trade, 15

Banking, 42

Bertillon, 303

Birtwistle, T., 248

Boehm-Bawerk, Positive Theory of Capital, 101, 196.

Booth, Charles, Labour and Life of the People, 41; Occupations of the People, 226, 228, 290

Bowley, A.L., England's Foreign Trade, 174

Brassey, Foreign Work and English Wages, 265-266

Brentano, Uber die Ursachen der heutigen Not, 58; Hours and Wages in Relation to Production, 78, 91, 270

Burnley, Wool and Wool-Combing, 33, 51, 94

Business, evolution of the, 10, 35, 40, 88, 92

Cairnes, J.E., Logical Method of Political Economy, 8; Some Leading Principles of Political Economy, 211

Canada, town population, 331

Canals, 25

Cannan, E., Production and Consumption, 214; Decline of Urban Immigration, 327 (note)

Capital, meaning of, 5; fixed, 40; growing size of, 92-93; excessive forms of, 170, etc.; definitions of, 209-215; concentration of, 117-122

Capitalism, 4, 40; factors in growth of, 73-81, 101

Carding, 57

Cartwright, 58, 75

Census, occupations of the people, 71, 228; town population, 328; mortality in towns, 334

Chalmers, Estimate, 23

Chartered companies, 18

Child-workers, in domestic industry, 32; in factory, 297, 307, 319; legal protection of, 322-323; child mortality, 337

Climate, 73, 109

Clothier, 39, 40, etc.

Collet, 305, 307, 311, 312

Competition, 104, 108, 118, 120, etc.; "unfair," 146

Consumption, insufficient quantity, 180, etc; progressive, 284; quality of, 368

Concentration of industry, 38, 101

Cooke-Taylor, The Modern Factory System, 36, 37, 50, 66, 251-252, 255

Corner, 127, 129

Cotton, 24, 37, 55, 63, 105; consumption of, 80; machinery, 90, 247; statistics, 228; spinning labour, 246; factory legislation, 322

Cournot, Recherches sur les Principes Mathematiques de la Theorie des Richesses, 97

Crime in towns, 340

Crompton, 56

Cunningham, History of English Industry, 14, 19, 42, 55; Uses and Abuses of Money, 236, 251

Custom, in women's industries, 311

Decentralisation, 345

Defoe, Tour, 25, 28, 32, 33, 38, 40

Depression of trade, 171, 206, etc.

Dilke, Lady, 301 (note)

Differentiation, 106

Diminishing returns, law of, 374

Dodd, C.S.T., Ten Years of the Standard Oil Trust, 130, 144

Domestic industry, 35, 69, 78

Dress trades, 293, 294

"Driving," 248, 249

Economy of competitive power, 118; of high wages, 261-286

Ellison, T., History of the Cotton Trade, 76, 228

Europe, growth of towns, 329

Factor, 41

Factory, 37, 39, 57; system, 50, 319, 320; legislation, 321-323

Fairs, 30, 105

Foreign trade, in England, 13, 73; Europe, 20, 106

Foxwell, H.S., The Claims of Labour, 341

Foundational industries, 102

France, English trade with, 16; machine-development, 74; employments, 233; town population, 328, 335; treaty, 63

Free trade, 63, 79, 352-354

Gas-tar, 53

Geddes, Professor Patrick, The Evolution of Sex, 379; The Claims of Labour, 379

Germany, 79; cotton trade in, 77-78, 81; town population, 329

Giffen, R., Essays in Finance, 175

Gould, 272, 284

Gunton, G., The Economic and Social Aspect of Trusts, 138, 149, 153; Wealth and Progress, 271, 309

Guyot, Yves, Principles of Social Economy, 219

Hargreaves, 56

Halifax, 31, 33, 41, 301 (note)

Hearn, Plutology, 211

Hodge, evidence before House of Lords, 57

Holland, trade of, 16, 17, 26; towns in, 327