Upon the waste connected with the trades and services of luxury I have already dwelt at some length. Here it is only necessary to remind the reader that it is of two kinds. There is the multiplication of servants and attendants upon rich men and their houses and animals,[54] and there is the employment of nominally useful workmen in the manufacture and repair of the instruments of luxury.
Turning to the marketing and distribution of commodities we have many forms of waste of labour to study. Each manufacturer in a trade, selling his goods in competition with others, sends out his agent or agents to assert, not always truly, that his wares are the best and the cheapest, and to secure orders for them. Thus a large number of able-bodied men are divorced from production and made a quite unnecessary factor in distribution. At the Census of 1901, 64,322 commercial travellers were enumerated in England and Wales, as against 44,055 in 1891! These men are usually of an exceedingly capable type, whose work, better directed, might be of great service in useful production.
Each factory, however small, must have its separate clerical staff, and to thousands of men wasted as travellers we have to add tens of thousands wasted as clerks. In the United Kingdom, in 1901, there were 439,972 commercial or business clerks, as against 300,615 in 1891.
The commodities produced by the wasteful competitive factories are often, too often, dealt with by wholesale middlemen, agents, brokers, factors, merchants, who, with their staffs of clerks and warehousemen account for an uncertain but considerable number of the working community. Our imports of food, which in an organized community could so easily be handled by a single staff at each port, are scrambled for by a great host of merchants, factors and commission agents.
A most conspicuous waste in distribution is in advertising, one of the most unnecessary of all trades. In the game of competition, those often win, not who supply the best goods, but who say that they supply the best goods. As a result there has sprung up an enormous industry with many branches which is engaged in pushing the sale of a few good and many worthless articles. It "employs" thousands of male and female clerks and canvassers, and directly and indirectly lays many nominally useful trades under contribution. Printers, authors and journalists, enamellers, carpenters, bill-stickers, paper-makers and others are engaged to furnish the materials of the advertisements. Altogether it is probable that some 80,000 people find a "living" in connexion with advertising, when they should be doing useful work. Some part of the stream of useful commodities is directed to them, and in return they give nothing. Individually, they may be honest, industrious people, doing the work they are employed to do to the best of their ability. From a national point of view they are wasting their time. It may be added that when they are pushing the sale of "patent" medicines, whiskies and complexion creams they are doing something worse than waste time.
Chiefly arising out of our commercial system of distribution and the crimes and misdemeanours which it creates, the various branches of the legal profession absorb a considerable number of able-bodied men who contribute nothing to the wealth of the nation but who are rewarded by a large share of the national income. At the Census of 1901 as many as 27,184 barristers and solicitors and 42,339 law clerks were recorded.[55] These 69,523 individuals with their dependents, probably numbering nearly 300,000 in all, help to attenuate the thin stream of ponderable commodities which flow from the places where people labour to useful ends.
We pass to the work of the hundreds of thousands of retail shopkeepers and their servants, and here again we find a vast amount of wasted labour. In each trade in each district there are a quite unnecessary number of tradesmen hunting for profits. It is not uncommon to find half-a-dozen butchers' men calling for orders upon the householders of a single street.
It is sometimes represented to shopkeepers that any movement towards collectivism threatens their livelihood. Shopkeepers will do well to remember that it is unrestrained individualism which is their worst enemy. In almost every branch of retail distribution the multiple shop principle is eliminating the independent shopkeeper and substituting badly paid shop "managers." Apologists of individualism boast of the economy which is thus being achieved. Thus M. Leroy Beaulieu in his "Collectivism" (which is an attack on collectivism) writes, "The tendency of civilization, where freedom exists, appears to be towards a reduction in the number of persons who live entirely by commerce, owing to the gradual substitution of large for small industries that is now in progress. Would it be possible for collectivism to act more rapidly or efficiently?" M. Leroy Beaulieu forgets that the crushing of the small shopkeeper by private monopolists accentuates the error of distribution, while collectivism economizes labour for the general good.
What I have written does not apply, of course, to all fields of labour. It has long been recognized that certain services can only be effectually and efficiently performed under one management. Railways, tramways, water-service, lighting, and so forth have come to be looked upon as "natural monopolies." Even Mr Henry George, who thought that "Socialism tended towards Atheism" and who considered that "limitation of working hours and of the labour of women and children" could only be enforced by methods which "multiply officials, interfere with personal liberty, tend to corruption and are liable to abuse,"[56] admitted the existence of "necessary monopolies" which might be treated as functions of the State. Indeed, it is apparent to the most unthinking that between two points A and B there can only be one best route for a railway, and that, therefore, railway service between points A and B should be a monopoly. Similarly it would be an obvious absurdity to construct two sewers in one road, competing with each other for the removal of refuse, or for two or more gas managements to run mains in the same streets. In these and many other cases it is clearly recognized that economy of labour is consistent with monopoly alone, and the only question that remains to decide is whether the necessary monopoly should be in public or private hands. I do not purpose here to discuss that question, for at this date it is scarcely an open one. An overwhelming weight of opinion has decided that public ownership must go with monopoly, wherever monopoly is shown to be necessary.
It is not so generally recognized that proper economy of labour and a proper distribution of the products of labour can only be secured by: