Commerce originated in social need and should be a social service; nor indeed has its perversion to profit-making prevented it from rendering substantial services to society. Apart from its provision of the necessities of life, many of its inventions have added much to the wealth of life independently of their immediate purposes. The unique facilities for travel which we moderns enjoy owe their origins in the first instance to the demand for better commercial transport. Stephenson’s first locomotive was intended to haul coal trucks. The increasing socialisation of life in our time owes much to the economic motive that has popularised the telegraph and the telephone; and the supreme achievement of Mr. Henry Ford is not a miracle of standardised production, but the contribution which his car has made to the socialisation of the farmer’s life. Our knowledge of the earth’s surface and its peoples, and through this, one of the foundations of the coming internationalism, we owe greatly to the enterprise of the trader. For a hundred great services beyond its ministry to the elementary human needs of food and clothing, we are debtors to commerce and to those merchant venturers in many ages who laid its broad modern foundations. Yet just because we acknowledge a manifest debt even to profiteering commercial enterprise, it is the more necessary that we should assail its modern ascendency over life, and its own perversion to individual aims, and point out the havoc which its more modern developments have wrought. It would be foolish and undiscriminating to say that it is the sole source of our social confusion, but it is simple truth to say that it has become its chief direct occasion; and the result is to be traced to the circumstances which have changed commerce from its essential function as a great social service to a scramble for private gain. The restoration of commerce to its own proper place and office is bound up with a recovery of a true view of life as a whole, with a new understanding of those things other and greater than bread by which it is ordained that men shall live.

II

The paramountcy of the economic motive is no modern phenomenon, and it would be a mistake to identify it exclusively with the modern commercial civilisation. Its modern beginnings are no doubt to be found in the appearance of the small merchant class in the era of craftsmanship; and the difference between him and the merchant prince of the twentieth century is mainly a difference of scale—this difference being chiefly due to the high mobility of property when it assumes the form of money, and the increased facilities for mobilising it through the development of the credit system and the improvement in the means of communication. The fundamental impulses and instincts which determine the social order are broadly identical throughout history. That is why Marx’ economic interpretation of history is probably the most luminous and fruitful clue to the course of human affairs that historical study has yet yielded to us. We are not justified in assuming (as some have done) that it is the only valid clue; still less are those disciples of Marx justified who have developed his theory of historical interpretation into the metaphysical dogma of economic determinism. That economic factors have controlled the general drift of human affairs in the past does not necessarily mean that they are predestined to do so in perpetuity.

Yet even those who most vehemently denounce the existing profit-making organisation of society are still obsessed by the notion that social transformation is chiefly an affair of economic revolution. Their thought appears to run wholly within the economic circle. It is in some respects the strangest paradox of modern times that the Russian people with their long and unique tradition of spirituality should have been so completely captured (to all appearance) by the doctrinaire materialism of the Marxian school and have accepted the view that the Kingdom of Heaven comes by a proletarian capture of economic power. The circumstance is, of course, capable of explanation, for in Russia, as elsewhere, political power has gone with economic power; and the Russian revolutionary knew what the Frenchman of 1789 did not know, namely, that no political revolution could be complete or permanent which was not an economic revolution at the same time. That, therefore, the Russian revolution should have been primarily economic is not strange—since Marx had lived and written in the interval between 1789 and 1917; but it remains a somewhat singular fact that the spiritual idealism of Feodor Dostoievsky and Lyof Tolstoi have been so little manifest during these last surprising months. This preoccupation with economic change is characteristic of the attitude of those everywhere who are most urgent in their endeavour after social transformation. The advocates of the National Guild Movement are never weary of reiterating that political power belongs to those who wield economic power, and of urging that the workers should make themselves masters of the economic resources of society as the necessary preliminary of laying hold of the political power.[[13]] This may be a sound counsel of immediate strategy; but it is full of disaster if it is treated as a permanent principle of social practice. For it leaves us still within the vicious circle where the purely economic interests are paramount. Whensoever we consent to the statement that the one thing needful to society is a more equitable distribution of the wealth which its industry produces, we are still within the same hopeless universe of discourse. A more equitable distribution of wealth is needed; so much is obvious. But having secured it, what then? Will the City of God then come down from heaven? Or are we content with the hope of a redeemed society which goes no farther than a vision of a community of healthy and contented animals? It is certain that, so long as our thought of social regeneration moves chiefly within the existing framework of wealth production and wealth distribution, our effort will create a range of new social problems of an acute and probably less soluble kind. That we should labour to humanise and to socialise the existing commercial and industrial organisation goes without saying; but there is no certainty that after we have done so, the same economic pre-occupation will not still fill our minds. It is not enough to work for change that only transfers the power to produce and to enjoy wealth from the hands of a small minority to those of the great majority. That is indeed only change, and not necessarily progress. There will be fewer people with more butter on their bread than they need; and fewer people with less than they need; and that will be something gained. But it does not necessarily follow that we will not still be chiefly concerned about bread and butter, and whatever elaborations upon that simple theme that our enlarged resources may tempt us to seek.

[13]. This is not to be taken as meaning that the National Guild Movement is destitute of a spiritual outlook. On the contrary, see, for instance, the last chapter of S. G. Hobson’s Guild Principles in War and Peace.

This is not in any sense an argument for spending less energy upon the urgent task of accomplishing the radical economic changes which social well-being plainly requires; it is rather a renewed plea that we should ask ourselves whether we are moving conformably with a vision of man and life as a whole. Whether we rank as reformists or revolutionists we should endeavour to see the evils we hate and the manner and matter of the remedy in the light of a philosophy of comprehensive and coherent human good. The scheme of social insurance established in Great Britain before the war was a response to a definite social need; but it is now no longer open to question, that both in respect of its content, and the method of its institution, its promoters failed to appreciate the precise nature and conditions of the need; and the final solution of the problem which evoked the measure has been confused and retarded. And generally, so long as we think exclusively of social advance in economic terms, out of relation to their context in life, we are subordinating the greater thing to the lesser, and are in continual danger of postponing the greater thing into an impossible future. We become and remain virtual opportunists (even though we call ourselves revolutionaries!), only moving spasmodically and incoherently within the very circle of institutions and tendencies which have wrought our present confusion, until we have gained that social perspective in which the economic requirements of life take their proper place.

Properly understood, this place is a relatively humble one. In our analysis of personality in the previous chapter, four major instincts were defined. The first, the instinct of self-preservation has to do with the maintenance of physical life; the second, the third and the fourth, as they appear in their full development, are mainly concerned with the spiritual expression of life. The first is the necessary basis of the other three—the foundation, as it were, upon which they build; but the real significance and joy of life are associated predominantly with the impulses of creativeness, sociability, and reflection. Now, the economic business of life has to do almost exclusively with the instinct of self-preservation; its function ends with the provision of the conditions and materials of a wholesome physical existence. Yet to-day, the economic interests absorb virtually the whole of life; the ultimate interests of life—that range of things which we may broadly call spiritual, if they are not subordinated to and absorbed in the economic motive, are consigned to the odds and ends of time which we are able to spare from the sovereign business of making a fortune or making a living. The distinctive human interests of religion, thought, art, and recreation are no more than occasional alternatives which enable us to some extent to repair the wear and tear of the ceaseless economic drive. The real revolution we need is the general conviction that to put it roughly—as the kitchen is to the home, so the economic interest is to the rest of life. The kitchen is indispensable to the home; and there are exceptional persons to whom it is the most important part of the home. Yet it is no more than a strictly subordinate part of the home. When we have finished with the business of procuring and eating bread, then the real business of life begins. It is indeed necessary that the kitchen should be in tune with home, and that the work of producing and distributing the primary necessities of life should be organised so as to be consistent with the spiritual realisation of life. We can, of course, no longer admit a dualism of material and spiritual; for the spiritual may and must infuse the material and subordinate it to its own ends. To-day the material has made the spiritual ancillary to itself; and the soul is the drudge of the body. The radical problem of the future is how to reverse this position and to enthrone the spiritual.

What the spiritual realisation of life implies we can no more than dimly guess. We may speak of love and art; but the potentialities of social and creative achievement in human nature have yet to be explored. A material civilisation has largely kept mankind in a state of arrested development on every side save that which has to do with the conditions of its physical life. Psychology is busily, though not yet very successfully, explaining that hidden world of life which lies beyond the frontiers of consciousness; there are (and this is virtually all we can say) vast possibilities and powers latent within us of which we have only occasional and indistinct intimations. We have tested the power and the range of those endowments of which we are already aware; and the triumphs of art and science show how nobly and richly our nature is equipped. Nevertheless, all that art and science have yet accomplished are but the promise of that glory that is still to be. But the full release of all our powers—known and unknown—is contingent upon a social setting more richly human, that is to say, more spiritual in temper, and outlook, than mankind has hitherto known. This social setting will come when we make up our minds to break the tyranny of the economic motive and to deliver life from the infamous despotism of things. No man knows to what heights of creative achievement and personal self-realisation we may not attain when once the economic preoccupation which swallows our best energies is dissipated, and we are free to become all that we have it in us to be, when powers of fellowship and creation now inert and unknown are awakened in us, and we press on to those peaks of attainment of which prophets have spoken and which angels have desired to see.

III

The task before us, therefore, is the deliverance of life from the ascendency of the economic motive; and at bottom this means the redemption of commerce from the obsession of profit-making. In other words, commerce must be conceived and conducted as a social service. It is true that in the early days of modern commercialism, the principle of competition was regarded as the heaven-sent panacea for human ills. Men became dithyrambic about laissez-faire, and though they perforce admitted that the growth of the commercial system had caused certain glaring evils, yet they maintained that these were no more than the inevitable accidents of a process of readjustment. Let the system only work out its inherent logic to the end, and there will be a golden age for everybody. The system has had a fair trial; and so far from achieving the results confidently predicted by its advocates, it has failed hopelessly to provide even a tolerably secure and sufficient subsistence for the great mass of men. It is indeed difficult to see how it could be otherwise or how those who uphold it could have expected a different result. There is no doubt that the system has stimulated the production of wealth; and this its protagonists accurately foresaw; but they apparently supposed that the distribution of wealth would look after itself. It had indeed done so, in a fashion which has deprived the mass of toilers of that security of physical subsistence which is a necessary condition of liberty and of the liberation of the spiritual impulses. So far from adequately fulfilling the elementary services of providing men with a steady and reasonable supply of the necessities of life, it has made life itself insecure and precarious.