For example, the cost of a single yard of cloth produced by machine is hundreds of times greater than the cost of a single yard of it produced by hand. Obviously, the power-loom is a very costly piece of machinery to build, and so is the engine that drives it. If you produced on a power-loom only the amount of cloth a weaver could make by hand, nobody could afford to buy it. But when you produce on the power-loom a quantity of cloth one hundred times greater than a weaver can make by hand, then, of course it is much cheaper. And the more you produce the cheaper it is. So with anything. The greater the quantity, the lower the cost. Hence the terms quantity, or mass-production, meaning, first, to standardize the product, as to make it all black, all one texture, all one width or shape, and then to bring a chain of machine-power continuously to bear upon its multiple production.
Observe the working of this principle. Take watches. At one time they were made by hand, slowly, laboriously, in stances being not uncommon of a craftsman spending half his lifetime to make a very fine one. Under these conditions watches are rare and costly. Only the very rich can buy them. Suddenly they began to be made by machines. A very good watch can be made for fifty dollars. There are a million people who want watches at that price. This is an original demand, a kind of vacuum, represented by a million people who have never had watches and now for the first time may possess them. Watches cannot be made fast enough to meet this want. The industry, for that reason, expands very fast. Then all at once the demand is satisfied. The million have watches. The vacuum has been filled. Hereafter the demand will tend to be static: it will increase slowly as the population increases or as people in general grow richer, little by little. The watch-making industry, therefore, is depressed. It has to limit production. Now comes someone with the idea that by carrying the machine method further a watch can be made for ten dollars. There are twenty million people who can afford to buy watches at that price. The ten-dollar watch appears. The demand again is like a vacuum, twenty times greater than the first. For a while ten-dollar watches cannot be made fast enough. The makers of fifty-dollar watches throw away their old machines, install new ones, increase their production, reduce their costs, and not only make what was a fifty dollar watch for twenty-five but contribute also, in a competitive manner, to the supply of ten-dollar watches. Suddenly what happened before happens again. The twenty million have watches. The vacuum is filled. Then someone says: “But there are one hundred million who would buy watches at two dollars”. So the process is repeated, still lower in the pyramid. The two-dollar watch is not a fine watch, but it will keep time; and as you would know, with the improvement that has taken place in machine practice the cost of making any kind of watch, even the finest, has been greatly reduced. A watch ceases to be a luxury or a token of caste. It is a necessary part of man’s personal equipment, all the way down to the base of the pyramid.
There you have the cycle. The use of the machine is to cheapen the cost of production. The sign is quantity. When the supply at a given price has overtaken the effective demand you have either to idle your machinery, in which case your cost of production will rise, or open a wider demand at a lower price. To lower the price and keep a profit you have to cheapen the cost of production still more. This you can do only by increasing the quantity, which again overtakes the demand, creating again the same necessity to cheapen the cost by increasing the quantity in order to be able to make a lower price for greater demand. Thus supply pursues demand, downward through the social structure.
There is at last a base to the pyramid—its very widest point. When that is reached—what? Well, then you need bazaars in a foreign sun, heathen races of your own to train up in the way of wanting the products of your machines, new worlds of demand. You turn to foreign trade. And if you are an aggressive country that has come late to this business, as Germany was, and find that most of the promising heathen races are already adopted and that all the best bazaar-sites are taken, you may easily work yourself into a panic of fear and become a menace to the peace.
IV
WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE
What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the surplus product of your machines? That industry will be unable to make a profit?
No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born—at least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their machines artificial things that are exchanged for food. It is usually the case, too, that they have to buy the raw materials on which their machines act, as Great Britain buys raw cotton from the United States and Egypt, and wool from Australia, to feed her great textile industries; having manufactured this material, she sends it forth again as cloth, to be exchanged for wheat in Canada or beef in South America.
As you begin with machines your population divides. It becomes part rural and part industrial, and so long as the rural part of it can feed the industrial part there is no trouble. But a time soon comes when the need of the industrial workers for sustenance is greater than the native production of food. This time inevitably comes because the machines call up people so rapidly. Then you have to look abroad for food. That means you have to go into other countries—peasant-countries—where there is a surplus of meat and grain, and exchange there your manufactured goods for food. And you begin to think and speak of your economic necessity.
There is no such necessity really. To assert it is to say a preposterous thing, namely, that when your industrial population has increased beyond the native food-supply, to a point at which you are out of balance, you are obliged to import food so that your industrial population may continue to increase and your cities to grow and your necessity to become greater and greater in an endless spiral.
It cannot be endless. One of two things will determine the sequel. Either presently the resources of those peasant-nations that produce a surplus of food will be exhausted or they will in time think to become industrial nations, too, and eat their own surplus. There is no lucid reason why a population should not disperse as it begins to exceed the native food-supply—that is to say, migrate to the sources of food.