The scattering of industries over the country—so as to bring the factory amidst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profits which it always finds in being combined with industry (see the Eastern States of America) and to produce a combination of industrial with agricultural work—is surely the next step to be made, as soon as a reorganisation of our present conditions is possible. It is being made already, here and there, as we saw on the preceding pages. This step is imposed by the very necessity of producing for the producers themselves; it is imposed by the necessity for each healthy man and woman to spend a part of their lives in manual work in the free air; and it will be rendered the more necessary when the great social movements, which have now become unavoidable, come to disturb the present international trade, and compel each nation to revert to her own resources for her own maintenance. Humanity as a whole, as well as each separate individual, will be gainers by the change, and the change will take place.
However, such a change also implies a thorough modification of our present system of education. It implies a society composed of men and women, each of whom is able to work with his or her hands, as well as with his or her brain, and to do so in more directions than one. This “integration of capacities” and “integral education” I am now going to analyse.
FOOTNOTES:
[169] The remarks of Prof. Issaieff—a thorough investigator of petty trades in Russia, Germany and France—(see Works of the Commission for the Study of Petty Trades in Russia (Russian), St. Petersburg, 1879-1887, vol. i.) were for me a valuable guide when I prepared the first edition of this book. Since that time the two industrial censuses of 1895 and 1907 have yielded such a valuable material, that there are quite a number of German works which came to the same conclusions. I shall mention them further on.
[170] See K. Buecher’s Preface to the Untersuchungen über die Lage des Handwerks in Deutschland, vol. iv.
[171] The foundation for this creed is contained in one of the concluding chapters of Marx’s Kapital (the last but one), in which the author spoke of the concentration of capital and saw in it the “fatality of a natural law.” In the “forties,” this idea of “concentration of capital,” originated from what was going on in the textile industries, was continually recurring in the writings of all the French socialists, especially Considérant, and their German followers, and it was used by them as an argument in favour of the necessity of a social revolution. But Marx was too much of a thinker that he should not have taken notice of the subsequent developments of industrial life, which were not foreseen in 1848; if he had lived now, he surely would not have shut his eyes to the formidable growth of the numbers of small capitalists and to the middle-class fortunes which are made in a thousand ways under the shadow of the modern “millionaires.” Very likely he would have noticed also the extreme slowness with which the wrecking of small industries goes on—a slowness which could not be predicted fifty or forty years ago, because no one could foresee at that time the facilities which have been offered since for transport, the growing variety of demand, nor the cheap means which are now in use for the supply of motive power in small quantities. Being a thinker, he would have studied these facts, and very probably he would have mitigated the absoluteness of his earlier formulæ, as in fact he did once with regard to the village community in Russia. It would be most desirable that his followers should rely less upon abstract formulæ—easy as they may be as watchwords in political struggles—and try to imitate their teacher in his analysis of concrete economical phenomena.
[172] The Economic Interpretation of History.
[173] Les Progrès de la Science économique depuis Adam Smith, Paris, 1890, t. i., pp. 460, 461.
[174] See the discussions in the Reichstag in January, 1909, on the Polish Syndicates, and the application that is made to them of the paragraph of the law of the associations relative to language (Sprachenparagraph).
[175] See [Appendix X].