IV
“The question,” the Memorandum continues, “of the retail prices of household commodities is emphatically the most practical of all political issues to the woman elector. The male politicians have too long neglected the grievances of the small household, which is the prey of every profiteering combination.” And this brings us to the answer to our question how far the present orientation of labour satisfies the conditions we have laid down as necessary to worthy social progress. The rigid fixing of the retail prices of household commodities,—the primary necessities of life—plainly substitutes the principle of production for need and use for that of production for profit; and while this of itself does not eliminate the profiteer altogether, it tends so to limit the area of exploitation as to bring the small household, which is after all the unit of society, within reasonable distance of a healthy security of material circumstance. Moreover, the principle of the National Minimum virtually dissolves the connection between work and the means of subsistence, so that the worker gains security of maintenance and a large accession of freedom and independence. Still further, the principle of democratic control brings to every worker complete immunity from exploitation by those upon whom an antecedent economic advantage has conferred power and enables him to graduate to the dignity and responsibility of partnership.
But what then? Having achieved this new status, it is certain that he will not be satisfied. For the thing that is stirring in the mind and heart of organised labour to-day is something much deeper than a desire for a more satisfactory physical life or for economic independence. Labour is indeed unable to make articulate more than the margin of the new desire of which it is aware; but the phenomenon which we have called “labour unrest” properly understood, is the result of a craving, imperious and not to be denied, for a larger life. Of this larger life the worker instinctively feels that economic security and independence are the indispensable pre-requisites. According to the measure of his intelligence and insight, he is aiming for these things. That is the inwardness of the present stirrings of organised labour. The worker knows that while he is compelled to hire himself out at a price in order to provide himself and his children with bread, under conditions which make a sufficiency of bread permanently uncertain, and which virtually deny him the opportunity of being anything more—from his first working day to his last—than the tool of interests from which he is powerless to detach himself, he can never become the man he might be or experience the joy of life which his intuitions declare to be his rightful inheritance. The greater part of life, and especially of the worker’s life, is an unredeemed and unexplored tract; and the possibilities hidden in those regions beyond, eye hath not seen neither hath ear heard. But dimly and indistinctly the worker has caught glimpses of this promised land and he has set his face that way. But he has justly perceived that between him and the promised land lies the “great divide” of economic disinheritance with all that it entails of insecurity and bondage. To-day he has come so far as to be in the very act of crossing this divide. That he does not discern clearly what manner of life awaits him in his promised land is no wonder; for none of us know, since as yet none of us have tasted save only in brief and transitory moments the rare quality of the fellowship and the creative urge which belong to the life of spiritual freedom. The British Labour Party speaks of “the promotion of music, literature, fine art, which have been under capitalism so grossly neglected, and upon which, so the Labour Party holds, any real development of civilisation fundamentally depends.” This is a hint of the “milk and honey” of the promised land, and it is only in hints we can speak until we have entered upon our inheritance of spiritual life, and have begun to explore its untold riches. But the road into that land is the road of economic freedom and independence; and that is the road which organised labour is making to-day. It has discovered that “society, like the individual, does not live by bread alone,—does not exist only for perpetual wealth production.” If it makes bread and produces wealth, it is only that men may live, and living may together strive to achieve the glorious liberty of the sons of God.
It is a fair conjecture concerning the results of this general movement, that it will ultimately assign to the economic interests of life their own proper secondary place. With the gradual disappearance of private profit and wages will pass the present ascendancy of the economic motive over the whole of life. It is significant of the intrinsic impulse of this movement that the promoters of the national guild movement should contemplate the separation of the conduct and control of the commercial and industrial elements of national life from the business of the national legislature, so that that body may attend to things other and greater than bread. This does not mean that the economic aspects of life will lose their proper importance; it simply means that they will be deprived of their present paramountcy; and how much that means for the right kind of social progress, for the development of a completely human order of life, it is impossible to do more than fancy. But it will be a great day when men awaken to the fact that the centre of gravity of life is not in the body but in the mind.