Under such conditions a body of workers who used their strong strategic position to extort extravagant terms for themselves at the expense of their fellow-workers might properly be described as exploiting the community. But at present such a statement is meaningless. It is meaningless because before the community can be exploited the community must exist, and its existence in the sphere of economics is to-day not a fact but only an aspiration. The procedure by which, whenever any section of workers advance demands which are regarded as inconvenient by their masters, they are denounced as a band of anarchists who are preying on the public may be a convenient weapon in an emergency, but, once it is submitted to analysis, it is logically self-destructive. It has been applied within recent years, to the postmen, to the engineers, to the policemen, to the miners and to the railway men, a population with their dependents, of some eight million persons; and in the case of the last two the whole body of organized labor made common cause with those of whose exorbitant demands it was alleged to be the victim. But when these workers and their sympathizers are deducted, what is "the community" which remains? It is a naïve arithmetic which produces a total by subtracting one by one all the items which compose it; and the art which discovers the public interest by eliminating the interests of successive sections of the public smacks of the rhetorician rather than of the statesman.
The truth is that at present it is idle to seek to resist the demands of any group of workers by appeals to "the interests of society," because to-day, as long as the economic plane alone is considered, there is not one society but two, which dwell together in uneasy juxtaposition, like Sinbad and the Old Man of the Sea, but which in spirit, in ideals, and in economic interest, are worlds asunder. There is the society of those who live by labor, whatever their craft or profession, and the society of those who live on it. All the latter cannot command the sacrifices or the loyalty which are due to the former, for they have no title which will bear inspection. The instinct to ignore that tragic division instead of ending it is amiable, and sometimes generous. But it is a sentimentality which is like the morbid optimism of the consumptive who dares not admit even to himself the virulence of his disease. As long as the division exists, the general body of workers, while it may suffer from the struggles of any one group within it, nevertheless supports them by its sympathy, because all are interested in the results of the contest carried on by each. Different sections of workers will exercise mutual restraint only when the termination of the struggle leaves them face to face with each other, and not as now, with the common enemy. The ideal of a united society in which no one group uses its power to encroach upon the standards of another is, in short, unattainable, except through the preliminary abolition of functionless property.
Those to whom a leisure class is part of an immutable order without which civilization is inconceivable, dare not admit, even to themselves, that the world is poorer, not richer, because of its existence. So, when, as now it is important that productive energy should be fully used, they stamp and cry, and write to The Times about the necessity for increased production, though all the time they themselves, their way of life and expenditure, and their very existence as a leisure class, are among the causes why production is not increased. In all their economic plans they make one reservation, that, however necessitous the world may be, it shall still support them. But men who work do not make that reservation, nor is there any reason why they should; and appeals to them to produce more wealth because the public needs it usually fall upon deaf ears, even when such appeals are not involved in the ignorance and misapprehensions which often characterize them.
For the workman is not the servant of the consumer, for whose sake greater production is demanded, but of shareholders, whose primary aim is dividends, and to whom all production, however futile or frivolous, so long as it yields dividends, is the same. It is useless to urge that he should produce more wealth for the community, unless at the same time he is assured that it is the community which will benefit in proportion as more wealth is produced. If every unnecessary charge upon coal-getting had been eliminated, it would be reasonable that the miners should set a much needed example by refusing to extort better terms for themselves at the expense of the public. But there is no reason why they should work for lower wages or longer hours as long as those who are to-day responsible for the management of the industry conduct it with "the extravagance and waste" stigmatized by the most eminent official witness before the Coal Commission, or why the consumer should grumble at the rapacity of the miner as long as he allows himself to be mulcted by swollen profits, the costs of an ineffective organization, and unnecessary payments to superfluous middlemen.
If to-day the miner or any other workman produces more, he has no guarantee that the result will be lower prices rather than higher dividends and larger royalties, any more than, as a workman, he can determine the quality of the wares which his employer supplies to customers, or the price at which they are sold. Nor, as long as he is directly the servant of a profit-making company, and only indirectly the servant of the community, can any such guarantee be offered him. It can be offered only in so far as he stands in an immediate and direct relation to the public for whom industry is carried on, so that, when all costs have been met, any surplus will pass to it, and not to private individuals. It will be accepted only in so far as the workers in each industry are not merely servants executing orders, but themselves have a collective responsibility for the character of the service, and can use their organizations not merely to protect themselves against exploitation, but to make positive contributions to the administration and development of their industry.
[[1]] Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 9261-9.