Duties of Commerce to the State

The State has a primary right to be fairly served. Prices should not be arbitrarily raised by any wholesale merchant who happens to be in a position to do so, or by any cartel of dealers in league for that purpose. Prices should be regulated by the cost of production, and should not be an indication of demand; they should rise beyond the cost of production augmented by a fair profit only when the supply is insufficient (production not being artificially restrained) to meet some abnormal demand, and only as a means of checking and regulating the excessive demand. We find instead that any dealer or group of dealers will raise their prices almost absent-mindedly as soon as they are in a position to meet a demand which cannot be postponed. Thus it is that governments are habitually overcharged in all their contracts and purchases; because governments have neither the time nor the opportunity for casual dealings, and because they do not undertake such transactions at all unless their absolute necessity has already been decided.[23] So at the beginning of the war English warehouses were full of all sorts of commodities required by the governments of the Allies; but the urgency of war prevented any sort of bargaining; and the private merchants took advantage of the situation to the amount of about two hundred per cent. At present however I am dealing with trade in time of peace and I must not flavour the ordinary facts with any consideration of War Office contracts. It is enough to state the fact that in ordinary times the private tradesman regards a special demand as an opportunity for raising prices rather than as the stimulus of supply; a rule which is most easily detected in the experience of Government departments.

The State, through its individual citizens, has a primary right to obtain the particular commodity which it happens to prefer, without restrictions imposed for the benefit of any particular tradesman. We find instead that the ordinary purchaser no longer has any effective, or selective, demand. He has to buy what he is given. The informal organisation of the Trust system, primarily a financial operation,[24] has involved the whole market in a network of interdependent industries. The sale of the finished product is controlled and restricted by the vendors of the raw material. Corn is imported by shipbuilders; ships are built by iron merchants; iron furnaces are controlled by coal owners, and coal mines are secured by money-lenders.

The system of the tied house, originally an indigenous corruption of the liquor trade, is being extended to every industry in the land. We can no longer buy the bread we like, but have to eat whatever by-product least interferes with the miller's profits.

The consumer's loss of any power of effective demand would not necessarily be of national importance, if at least there were any guarantee that the unique commodity offered by the average trust system were genuine and of good quality. One of the State's most elementary rights is that of ensuring to its citizens a pure supply of elementary commodities. Yet Commerce has taken no steps, even in its own interests, to suppress the horrid arts of adulteration, in which the motives of the thief usurp the methods of the poisoner, with results which may be inferred from the meagre chronicles of the analyst.[25]

Education is the life of the State.[26] It is therefore of the gravest importance that Commerce should in no circumstances whatever be allowed to interfere with the education of the future citizens. Yet, before the war, in spite of the legislation of the last fifty years,[27] no less than a quarter of a million children of school age were exempted from school attendance for employment in various occupations.[28] Even apart from such improper exemptions the "School Age" fixed by law in itself gives quite insufficient protection. The brain of a girl hardly begins to wake up, or take any natural interest in the acquisition of general ideas, before she comes to puberty. But all over London girls of thirteen or fourteen leave school and are sent by their mothers to earn half a crown a week matching patterns or sewing on sequins.

More generally, the State is entitled to demand from Commerce that it should co-operate sincerely with the other elements in the State in pursuing the real objects of civilisation, inspired by an altruistic regard for the whole of which it is a part, that is by what is really "enlightened self-interest"; by what Plato has called Temperance[29] and Mr. H. G. Wells "a sense of the State."[30] We find instead that the trader has "day and night held on indignantly" in his disastrous hunt for markets, destroying by accident or design whatever amenity in the world does not contribute to his "one aim, one business, one desire."

After all, in our present pre-occupation with the horrors of war, we must not exaggerate their extent. War at its maddest rivals but cannot, at present, surpass the mortality caused by tuberculosis, alcoholism and syphilis, which peaceful Commerce, hand in hand with Christianity, carries into the remotest parts of the earth. Some reader may have noticed by this time that I am not a collector of statistics, but gather my illustrations as I go from any scrap of paper that comes to hand. It is a lazy trick; but at any rate one escapes the fallacy of over-elaborated evidence, by calling as witness the man who happens to be in the street at the moment. So at this point I happen to notice in the Manchester Guardian an extract from the report of the Resident Commissioner in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate. This is what it says of the natives:—

The cotton smock for women and the cotton trousers and shirts for men, which in the mind of the people seem now so indispensable to professed Christianity, while reducing the endurance of the skin, render it the more susceptible to the chills which wet clothing engenders. The result is colds, pneumonia, influenza—eventually tuberculosis.

We may notice a not unexpected coincidence which the Resident Commissioner apparently omits to mention. It is that "professed Christianity," by insisting on the propriety of cotton garments for the islanders hitherto well clad in a film of coco-nut oil and a "riri or kilt of finely worked leaves," is conferring a very appreciable benefit on the Manchester trade in "cotton goods." "Our colonial markets have steadily grown," says the Encyclopædia, "and will yearly become of greater value." ...