V
To have transformed the status of the worker is, however, only a part of the problem of work. An industrial democracy may conceivably be no better than a glorified capitalist, a national profit-making concern. But this keeps us still within the vicious circle of economic domination, with the dangers of degeneration greatly increased. For in place of individuals exploiting individuals, we should have nations endeavouring to exploit nations—with two certain consequences, war and a reaction to competitive individualism; and our last state would be worse than the first. Our complete emancipation from the economic motive requires not only a new status for the worker but a new doctrine of work. Industry must no more be conceived as a means of national wealth than of individual wealth.
The true doctrine of work is present in germ in the British Labour Party’s formula of “workers whether by hand or by brain.” The inclusion in one category of the industrial and professional classes should exert a very profound influence upon the popular attitude to manual labour. Much of the traditional habit of looking upon manual labour as being intrinsically inferior to brain work is due to a stupid lack of discrimination. For skilled labour often requires as nice a co-ordination of mind and hand, and as sensitive a nervous organisation as the most recondite surgery. The competent engineer is in no sense the mental inferior of the accountant; probably the engineer has on the whole the more highly organised mind; yet the engineer is popularly assigned to a relatively lower social rating. The conventional social divisions of those who work are entirely absurd and seem chiefly to depend upon the clothes one wears. That toil is regarded as inferior which cannot be performed without soiling clothes of a more or less ceremonial cut.
But when once it is realised that the work of the physician or the clergyman is different only in kind and not in social worth from the work of the machinist or the farm-labourer, we shall have a more reasonable basis for classification; and though it is true that the minister (being no more immune from the pressure of social atmosphere than other men) has not been unmindful of his stipend or the doctor of his fee, yet both callings have preserved enough of the ideal of disinterested social service to pass on something of the same impulse into occupations which the common mind regards solely as means of livelihood. This indeed, must be the first element in our doctrine of work. It must be regarded primarily as a social service. John Ruskin long ago tried to teach us that in every nation there were four great intellectual professions: the soldier’s, to defend it; the pastor’s, to teach it; the lawyer’s, to establish justice in it; and the merchant’s, to provide for it; and it was, he added, the duty of each of these on due occasion to die for it. What was novel in Ruskin’s doctrine was that there was a due occasion on which a merchant should die for his country. But why should we stop at the merchant? There is no reason why this principle should not be extended to every kind of labour essential to the life of the nation. At least there should be nothing inconceivable in the idea that every member of the community should develop the same degree and quality of social devotion. And (let it be repeated once more) the industrial records of this time of war do make this expectation into something more than a chimæra. The splendid social devotion which the emergency of war has discovered and released should and could be made a permanent asset. It is entirely a question of the right kind of education.
If the impending revolution in the worker’s status brings with it (as it should) a sense of genuine partnership, its natural sequel should be a growing consciousness of participation in a great social task. Every man would come to look upon his job as an integral and indispensable part of the common service. This would add a new interest and worth even to the purely mechanical tasks which the growth of large-scale production has so greatly multiplied. It would be no more than a partial solution of the entire problem involved in routine mechanical toil; but it would go a great way towards mitigating its inevitable dreariness, and it would certainly bring with it a quality of personal satisfaction in work which working for a living at a job in which one’s sole interest is one’s hire cannot possibly afford.