Chapter III.
THE PECUNIARY STANDARD
“The deeper cause of the oppression of the factory operative and of the terrible degradation and pauperisation of the agricultural labourer, was not the mere fact that machines were invented which multiplied the efficiency of labour, but the previous monopolisation, in the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, of the land and of education. The great change then took place in the current philosophy of life, which made the whole of the governing classes of England, with exceptions practically negligible, accept with avidity the idea merely more clearly formulated by political economists, that the highest duty of man was to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market.”
Patrick Geddes.
I
THE saying that “man shall not live by bread alone” has been in familiar circulation so long and on authority so good that it is remarkable how slightly it has affected the general conduct of life. Bread and the things symbolised by bread in the saying are and must remain the first care of men, but they are first only in the sense of being preliminary, the necessary conditions of the main and supreme business of life. Yet modern civilisation as a whole has shown no manifest sign of a conception of life which requires that the chief interest and energy of men should be directed to ends of a higher order than that of maintaining physical existence. This fact is to some extent obscured from us by the elaborate development of commercial organisation, so that multitudes of men are engaged in enterprises and vocations apparently so removed from the actual business of clothing, feeding and housing other men that they are not aware of being connected with it at all. Yet the entire structure of commerce rests upon the requirement that certain primary physical needs of men must be met. That men shall be fed, clothed, sheltered, provided with heat and light,—here is the source of commerce. Around these primary needs certain other demands have gathered—for elaboration in food and clothing, comfort in the home, and the like; and a multitude of commercial activities of a secondary kind have been set afoot and added to the sufficiently complex business of providing society with the first necessities of life. This secondary life of commerce is mainly parasitical and feeds upon the other, and its vitality depends as much upon the success with which demands are ingeniously created as upon the power to produce the supply profitably. Added to this vast business of production is an enormous machinery of distribution; and in these or in financial operations, originally derived from them but now largely controlling them, we are all more or less directly engaged. There are a few professional occupations which remain outside this classification, which (to use Carlyle’s phrase) “are boarded and lodged on the industry” of the community to which they belong,—the doctor, the clergyman, the lawyer, the teacher, the actor, the artist, the journalist; yet so strong and imperious is the commercial tradition that the non-productive vocations are required to justify their existence by providing the inspiration, the health, the recreation and the knowledge necessary to the effectual and prosperous working of the economic machine. Society seems (outside the “leisure class”) feverishly engaged in keeping itself alive.
Yet if its only purpose were to keep itself alive, it would not need to be so busy. But to the first impulse of production and exchange has been added another interest, that of making profit and accumulating wealth. In the process of exchange the opportunity was found of securing a margin of personal advantage; and gradually this margin of personal advantage has become the chief incentive to commercial enterprise. It does not belong to our purpose to trace the history of this change; it is enough that we should observe the fact that the profit-seeking motive has become the real driving force of modern commerce, and that historical circumstances, such as the introduction of large scale processes, the world-wide ramifications of commerce through improved facilities of travel and transportation, the invention of the telephone and the telegraph, the growth of trusts, combines, and monopolies have made possible fabulous increments and accumulations of profit.[[12]]
[12]. For an analysis of the process by which simple barter has grown into the modern intricate system of commerce, with its fine flower in “big finance,” see Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship, chap. V., VI., VIII. More summarily in Geddes and Slater, Ideas at War, Chap. III., IV., V. For a useful analysis of the current commercial organisation see Cole, Self-Government in Industry, pp. 178, 179.
The effect of this upon a generation habituated to the profit-making temper has been to set up the multi-millionaire as the type of perfection toward which aspiring youth should be encouraged to strive. We go into business not to feed and clothe each other, but to make money; and since from the nature of the case only comparatively few of us have the capacity and the opportunity to become commercial supermen, the rest of us remain in business to feed and clothe ourselves, or (as we say) to “make a living.” Commerce, which owes its origin to social need, has almost wholly lost the social motive. If we are not making money ourselves, we hire ourselves out as the money-making tools of others; and while some of us aim at larger profits, the rest of us hope for larger wages. The economic motive is universal, and it expresses itself exclusively in the pecuniary standard. “The Almighty Dollar” is more than a gratuitous exercise in satire, it describes the spirit of an age.
Much has been heard since the war began of the profiteer, on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the quarrel. But the profiteer is not a phenomenon peculiar to war-time. Like the poor, he is always with us; the war has but served to reveal him more vividly in his proper character. His peculiar crime is that he makes the extremity of his country the opportunity of private gain. But what he does in time of war, he does no less sedulously in time of peace. His sin takes a deeper dye in war-time because the national need is greater, and his opportunity is much enlarged. Yet the story of how “big business” has endeavoured, and has largely succeeded in the endeavour to control the legislative machinery of the nations in its own interests in normal times, is a very deplorable and shameful chapter in modern history. It is, of course, no new thing that legislatures should show themselves tender to economic interests; there is even yet no legislature in the world which is not more careful of the rights of property than of the welfare of men—except, perhaps, in Russia. By a curious paradox, those who most jealously guarded the sanctities of property, were once the implacable critics of commercial enterprise, but that phase has passed away. Landed aristocracies, no less than bourgeois manufacturers, have been so seduced by the lure of large and swift gain that the old line of demarcation has disappeared; and the doctrine of property rights has been invoked to secure the sanctity of the capitalist system of industry. The “governing classes” in Europe and America, who to-day are the economically powerful, have become an unholy alliance which exploits the state in the interests of trade. It is not the English brewers and publicans only who say, “our trade, our politics,” though these particular people may be the only ones who have the effrontery to say so in public. It is always the profiteer’s cry; and whenever in the past a piece of social legislation has been introduced in England, he raises the scare cry that “capital will leave the country,” which simply means that he esteems his profits more highly than he does his country. He is the author of the inspiring doctrine that “trade follows the flag”; which prostitutes national idealism to the sordid business of profiteering; and so deeply has this poison entered into our life that Christian missions to the non-Christian world are frequently commended on the ground that they do pioneering work for the trader.
All this is, of course, trite and commonplace; and ever since the early part of the nineteenth century there has been a continuous and increasing note of protest against the modern commercial doctrine of competitive profit-making. It must, however, be admitted that the protest has not gained much headway against the evil; on the contrary the evil has, during this same period, grown by leaps and bounds, so that the earlier twentieth century witnessed its supreme achievements. Mr. John D. Rockefeller is the tragical culmination of the process in our generation; and there is no reason to suppose that he is the last, or greatest figure of the line of Crœsus. Nor will the subordination of life to the business of pecuniary gain be effectually stayed until we seriously take in hand the profiteering ideology which governs all our thought and conduct. The main ingredient in the social heredity of this generation is the profit-making impulse; that is the atmosphere which it has breathed and which constitutes its habitual universe of discourse. Art and religion alike have been infected with the spirit; the current repute of an artist is fixed by the prices which his pictures command; and the prosperity of a Christian congregation is judged by its statistical returns. It is required of education that it shall minister primarily to commercial efficiency; and the outcry against the study of the classics, and the demand for a more exclusively scientific and technical education reflect the essentially commercial orientation of our educational outlook. It is, perhaps, the most deplorable aspect of this latter tendency that it so often becomes vocal in persons whose academic training should have provided them with a more discriminating view of life. Even in the universities, which should be the impregnable citadels of spiritual idealism, there is an inclination to capitulate to the monstrous and deadly doctrine that the end of national life is commercial supremacy.