At first the mother-of-all-industries, the savage woman, was the only beast of burden. Then stronger animals were pressed into the service, and reached their height of usefulness in the age of caravan traffic. The drag, the sled, and final triumph—the wheel, were invented, and the world rolled on more and more swiftly. With the wheel grew the road, and civilisation leaped forward. The road became a railroad, tireless mechanical forces superseded the quadruped, and the distribution of social products to-day is truly marvellous.
The goods of the round world are gathered into local distributing centres, carried across continent and ocean, and scattered in tiny parcels to the millions upon millions of remote consumers. Each section contributes its particular wealth. The ice goes south, the oranges go north, the coffee goes west, the tobacco goes east, the manufactures go everywhere.
If we could watch a little globe in action and see the coal pouring slowly up out of little holes, and flowing off in black streaks across land and sea; the oil going with it, but farther and faster; the wheat yellowing whole provinces, heaped up in golden mountains, carried off in thick yellow streams in train-loads and shiploads; the gloves of France on the hands of Americans, the tools of Americans in the hands of Russians; the whole flux and swing of our social circulation wherein one man’s life is fed and strengthened by the fruit of thousands of far-born foreigners,—if we could get this clearly in mind, the organic relation of society would be plainer.
On what line of race-advantage has this tremendous evolution come to pass? Why distribute so widely? Why is it not better to produce and consume locally, each man for himself, as Tolstoi would have us?
The advantage is easily demonstrated if we accept the working plan of organic evolution. If the development of Society is in the universal line of march; if it is, if not an “object,” at least an observed tendency, for the loose scarce-human proto-social stuff to move on steadily toward an always-increasing degree of common intelligence, common activity, common enjoyment, common peace, and power, and love,—then every process which promotes this movement is advantageous.
Since the development of a society requires common service, and that common service requires for its wise direction a common consciousness, therefore every modification of human activity which develops common consciousness is advantageous. Since the line of advance in socialisation is from a state of self-supporting individualism toward a state of collectively supporting socialism, therefore every extension of our economic processes along that line is advantageous. Self-support develops only egoism. Mutual support develops mutualism. The more general the base of our maintenance, the more general our advance toward omniism—toward that degree of common consciousness which shall best protect, supply, and develop everyone.
When each man took care of himself, he had no interest in, or love for his neighbour; when their small “spheres of influence” touched, there was a combat. In such conditions no Society was possible. When small communities or large are self-supporting, they have no interest in, or love for each other; this stage of development is the stage of war. Their “spheres of influence” touch, and there is combat. When the economic processes of the world are in common—and they are already beginning to be so—we have the sure basis for common consciousness, for international peace, and all high development; only hindered by the preserved ghosts of previous national, local, and personal “states of mind.”
That mutual love which Tolstoi and his kind would see established depends primarily on the widest extension of our common interest, the widest distribution of our specialised production. The law of organic advantage in such relation is clear. Self-support is a very short range of life. Any trifling accident may break the circuit, and the individual is lost. The wider the circuit of distribution the safer the component individual. With the universal insurance of Society’s whole working base, there is the largest wealth possible; the largest safety, the smallest risk from any source. There is also, still more importantly, a gain in development.
In a large well-running organism there is room for rest, for the accumulating of energy to apply to special needs. Too prolonged disuse will ultimately eliminate the neglected part, to be sure; but for the time being, a well-organised society can support in idleness those whose service is no less valuable for being intermittent and irregular. The basic “vital organs” work all the time. The later “special organs” not only may but must rest. Our “special senses,” our delicate nervous system, the dominating brain, are easily injured by use which is perfectly normal to heart or lung. By wide distribution society is enabled to support all its parts, whether active or passive, and so preserve a greater sum of usefulness. We approximate the same idea in any mutual benefit or insurance society.
It is to broaden the base of supplies and extend the time of payment—a sort of physical credit system. A society where the widest possible range of productivity is maintained, with the largest margin for emergencies, is richer and stronger than one which has “all its eggs in one basket.” So the underlying laws of social advantage have worked upon the human race, developing transportation facilities, physical, mechanical, and psychical (meaning here those purely mental agreements and hypotheses by which we facilitate commerce), until we have a system of distribution which would seem, at first sight, quite equal to the needs of the world.