The Psychology of Nations / A Contribution to the Philosophy of History

by G. E. Partridge

The good and evil of work put upon us some of the most perplexing of our problems. Industry, we say, is the way to the rich and the abundant life. It makes life more complex. The relations of life are multiplied by it. It represents and it achieves man's conquest over nature. It puts force into his hands. It has its ideal side and its romance. It gives scope to pure motives of creativeness. But the industrial life has also its dark side. It has created the city with all its good and its evil. It has created great nations, but see what the added populations consist of. It brings on the old age of nations. It stands for struggle that is often fruitless and unproductive. It engenders moods and arouses interests and powers that lead to wars and revolutions. It fosters sordid interests, and has made almost universal the necessity of an excess of toil in order barely to live. The great majority of workers do not live in their work, because they produce nothing that is in itself satisfying. The spirit remains outside their daily life. Life is divided into a period of toil without deep interest and motive, and play which may be only a narcotic to kill the sense of monotony and fatigue. Individuals have specialized at the expense of a whole life. Men have been exploited and used like material things. Bergson says that by industry man has increased his physical capacities, but now it is likely that his soul will become mechanized rather than that his soul will become great like his new body. Industry, worst of all, has become an end in itself, rather than a means to higher ends. To live, on the one hand, to gain wealth on the other, men give all there is in them to toil.

We saw all this before the war, but one important result of the war has been that we now see that this industrial life which has so rapidly created new institutions, and which grips the world almost like a physical law, is not in all its ways so fixed and inevitable as we had perhaps thought. In regard to the industrial life, more than in any other department of life, we see new and radical thought, and the possibility of conscious effects, although it must be admitted that some of the proposed changes may well cause apprehension.

We had hoped, even before the war, to see industry and art become gradually more closely related, and to see industry become more socialized. Its physical hardships were to some extent already being ameliorated. We hoped to separate the great industrial interests from politics, and to curb the powers industry has that make it a trouble producer in the world. But now, after the war, we see possibilities of more fundamental changes in the industrial order than these improvements implied. Our thoughts now touch upon the whole theory of the industrial life. We see that by a coördinated effort and common understanding which it is no longer chimerical to hope for, the conditions of the industrial life might be very different. In the first place we are convinced that the world could produce vastly more and could use its products with far greater economy than now. We see that much greater return for less labor could be gained. Even the desires themselves upon which many of the evils of industrialism are based have shown themselves to be controllable. It is no longer idle to believe that the restraint and coöperation necessary to eliminate most of the poverty from the world are possible to be attained. The isolation of the individual worker, which has made his struggle so hard, seems about to be relieved to some extent at least. We even hope for permanently better relations between the capitalist and the laborer, and to see some of the evils of competition, even the industrial competition among nations, lessened.

Although the interest here is in the relations of industry to education, rather than in the practical changes pending in the industrial world, we must think of the two as related. Changes that take place in political and industrial conditions will be likely to be temporary and ineffectual unless they are supported by changes in the field of education. The reformer and the educator must work together.

Noyes says that the most fundamental change that has occurred during the war has been the world-wide assertion of public control of industry by the government. Perkins says that centralization is the order of the day, and that the government now properly takes on many functions that once belonged to the states, and that this process of centralization naturally extends to international relations. Smith speaks of the growing interdependence of government and industry which will especially give security to investment in productive enterprises. Hesse says that there must be national team work in all industries, and that in a democracy everything that autocracy can accomplish must be repeated, but upon a basis of voluntary coöperation. In France it has been proposed by Alfassa that there shall be established a department of national economy, to bring about a closer coöperation than there has been in the past among private interests, and to centralize industry. Wehle thinks that in America, even before the war, industrial concentration was leading to political concentration and that the states were losing their relative political importance. The grappling of states individually with large industrial problems is now, he says, at an end. Dillon has expressed the view that England ought to adopt industrial compulsion. Clementel, the French minister of commerce, thinks France ought to substitute for liberty without restraint in the industrial field, liberty organized and restricted.

There can be no doubt that the world is thoroughly awake to the need of more effectual coöperation in industry, and it is natural that the first thoughts should turn to government control as the simplest and readiest method of securing it. When we examine these suggestions about the coördination and centralization of industries it becomes evident that most writers have been strongly influenced by Germany's remarkable success, both in peace and war, under the system of governmental control of industries. The manner in which the German government turned all the country into one great industrial plant has appealed to the imagination, and many writers see in centralization under the control of government the means of curing most of the evils of industrialism. There are many proposals, all the way from the plan to introduce cabinet ministers with limited power to have oversight over industry to the total abolishment of the capitalistic system and all the rights of property. Many of course, while still believing in concentration and coöperation, cling to the system of private and individual ownership, and believe that the best results will be obtained in the end without any radical change in the relations between government and industry, and without resorting to any socialistic reform.

Another phase of the problem of industry in which we may expect to see great changes in the future concerns the status of labor and its relation to capital. The rising of the laboring class is certainly the greatest internal result of the war. Here again the question is whether the changes will take place by coöperation or by compulsion—either on the part of government or of some organized class. Will labor and capital continue to be antagonistic, or will they find common interest; or will the only solution be again some radical change involving change of government or abrogation entirely of our present system of ownership? That the position of labor has become stronger as a result of the war no one can doubt. Perkins says we are just entering upon a period of copartnership, when the tool-user will be part tool-owner, and capital and labor will share more equally in the profits. Increase in wages will not be the remedy, but only profit sharing. Others think the same; they see that the laborer's discontent is not all a protest against his hard physical conditions. He wants more social equality, more equality of status in the industrial world. He objects not so much to what the capitalist has as to what he is.

There has no more illuminating document come out of the war than the report on reconstruction made by a subcommittee of the British Labor Party. This report calls for a universal minimum wage; complete state insurance of the workers against unemployment; democratic control of industries; thorough participation by the workers in such control on the basis of common ownership of the means of production; equitable sharing of the proceeds by all who engage in production; state ownership of the nation's land; immediate nationalization of railroads, mines, electric power, canals, harbors, roads and telegraph; continued governmental control of shipping, woolen, leather, clothing, boots and shoes, milling, baking, butchering, and other industries; a system of taxation on incomes to pay off the national debt, without affecting the living of those who labor.

Although such a document as this could hardly up to the present time have been produced by American workmen, since here political doctrines of socialism have never obtained a strong hold upon the laboring classes, in England these radical demands are nothing surprising. They have the support at many points of so keen a thinker as Russell. Russell does not, it is true, believe that Marxian socialism is the solution of the problem of capital and labor, but he does believe in the state ownership of all land, that the state therefore should be the primary recipient of all rents, that a trade or industry must be recognized as a unity for the purposes of government, with some kind of home rule such as syndicalism aims at securing. Industrial democracy, as planned in the coöperative movement, or some form of syndicalism, appears to him to be the most promising line of advance.

That such demands and proposals as these are significant signs of the times can hardly be doubted. That from now the status of the workman will be changed and changed in directions more satisfactory to the workman we may accept as one of the chief results of the war. Politically the laborer is prepared to assert his independence. Both his social and his industrial status are likely to be improved. He will be better safeguarded against unemployment. Wages in the old form and the old tradition that the worker has no contract with his employer will, in all probability, be less generally acceptable. Work, if these new conditions are realized, will mean more to the worker. His own interests and the purposes of his work will be more harmoniously related. The individual made more secure in his work, protected more by law and participating more in the affairs of business and government, will have a sense of playing a more dignified part in the social economy. Conceal as we may the inferiority of the laborer's position under the pretenses of democracy and liberty and equality, this inferiority of position exists and the inequality that prevails in democratic society is certainly one of the fertile sources of evil in the world to-day. We have still to see to what extent the workman, his lot ameliorated in many ways, and his position changed, will himself become a new and different man, and thus make the world itself a different place in which to live. All that is thus suggested we have a right at least to hope for now. If it is also worked for with intelligence and good will, why should it not come to pass?