All schemes of social reform that are revolutionary are widely chimerical to the thoughtful evolutionist, for were we suddenly to deprive our richer classes of property, privilege, and power, we should simply create a general abasement of our national civilization. Our upper classes, rendered effeminate by ill-spent leisure and all the artificial pleasures of a voluptuous and inane life, are incapable of directing civilization to the highest and noblest ends. Yet it is out of their midst that springs the demand for commodities ministering to all the amenities and refinements of a civilized life. It is refinement alone that demands refinement, culture that demands culture; and were the control of human labour to pass suddenly from the hands of the upper into those of the lower classes, which are still, in the mass, degraded and unenlightened, there would be no effective demand for these commodities, and the science and art implicated in their production would inevitably, though gradually, disappear.
Progressive evolution culminates in social justice, and the principle of private property in land, which implies an injurious monopoly in what is essential to human life (and is therefore socially unjust), is certain to be consciously relinquished at a given stage of the nation’s intellectual and moral advance.
Having traced the evolution of the individualistic system of industry, and seen that the inherent evils of the system have their source in the private ownership of land and capital, which “necessarily involves the complete exclusion of the mere worker, as such, from most of the economic advantages of the soil on which he is born, and the buildings, machinery, and railways he finds around him” (Sidney Webb), let me now sum up and state the paramount evils that have to be overcome. For the workers these are—low wages, long hours of toil, difficulty of obtaining work, and, when it is obtained, uncertainty of being permitted to retain it. For the community generally there are further evils, viz., first, the mal-production of commodities made manifest in food adulteration and in a perpetual output of objects that, instead of promoting and conserving civilization, debase and corrupt public taste and morals; and, second, the mal-production of human life, for poverty is a social force that directly tends to racial degeneration. A population born and bred in our city slums becomes physically, mentally, and morally unfit.
The facts of poverty and the unemployed are impossible to deny. Frederick Harrison’s picture is accurate; ninety per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home they can call their own beyond the end of the week, have no bit of soil or so much as a room that belongs to them, have nothing of any kind except so much of old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism. This is the normal state of the average workman in town or country. (Report of Ind. Ref. Congress, 1886.)
As regards the children of these workmen, fifty per cent. die before they reach five years of age, while eighteen per cent. only of upper class children die at the same age. The industrial evolution of the last 150 years, with its labour-saving machinery and highly organized masses of wage-workers, has done nothing at all to lessen poverty. Poverty has steadily kept pace with the increase of population.
But observe in the present day there is one significant feature that forces itself upon public attention—a feature revealing to the social student our approach to that stage of evolution spoken of by William Clarke in the passage I quote as motto to this chapter: “Each institution tends to cancel itself.... Its special function and progress produce effects tending to negate the original function.”
If we look minutely into the latest developments of large businesses, we find that the diminution in the number of competitors does not as a rule lead to an easing of the competitive struggle. As Mr. J. A. Hobson observes and demonstrates: “It is precisely in those trades which are most highly organized, provided with the most advanced machinery, and composed of the largest units of capital, that the fiercest and most unscrupulous competition has shown itself.” (Evolution of Capital, p. 120.) There is an increase, in short, of the elements destined to destroy competition. The anxiety, arduousness, and wastefulness of strife among the rival competitors, becomes so intolerable that a mutual truce and amalgamation is sought after as a release. When fully realized, the amalgamation becomes a monopoly, and competition, that much vaunted check to counteract the natural rapacity of private capitalists, ceases altogether. Let industrial monopoly be fairly established, and behold! competition, with all its merits, real or assumed, is abrogated.
But industrial monopoly in private hands becomes intolerable to the public, so that invariably, in the long run, the community either puts a forcible stop to the monopoly, or assumes it, and administers it as a State function.
We may confidently assert that as large industries approach to the stage of absorption into monopolies of federated groups of wealthy capitalists, the more general and widespread grows dissatisfaction and resentment on the part of the dispossessed smaller capitalists who have been beaten out of the field.
Now, the trend of movement to-day, through the whole fields of production and distribution, is from business on a small scale to business on a large scale, and the formation of limited companies, rings, trusts, etc. By purchasing raw material in greater quantities an immense saving is effected, and the same occurs in the advertising of goods and in organizing numerous workers instead of a few. These savings make it possible to lower the price of the finished commodity to the public. Hence the change from smaller to larger commercial enterprises is favourable to public interests up to a certain point. But the moment monopoly point is reached, the position straightway becomes reversed. Henceforward the public have no protection from a sudden raising of prices, for, the competitive check having been withdrawn, monopolists dominate their respective fields of production and distribution, and the individually selfish forces alone hold sway.