It is a fair conjecture concerning the results of this general movement, that it will ultimately assign to the economic interests of life their own proper secondary place. With the gradual disappearance of private profit and wages will pass the present ascendancy of the economic motive over the whole of life. It is significant of the intrinsic impulse of this movement that the promoters of the national guild movement should contemplate the separation of the conduct and control of the commercial and industrial elements of national life from the business of the national legislature, so that that body may attend to things other and greater than bread. This does not mean that the economic aspects of life will lose their proper importance; it simply means that they will be deprived of their present paramountcy; and how much that means for the right kind of social progress, for the development of a completely human order of life, it is impossible to do more than fancy. But it will be a great day when men awaken to the fact that the centre of gravity of life is not in the body but in the mind.
V
To have transformed the status of the worker is, however, only a part of the problem of work. An industrial democracy may conceivably be no better than a glorified capitalist, a national profit-making concern. But this keeps us still within the vicious circle of economic domination, with the dangers of degeneration greatly increased. For in place of individuals exploiting individuals, we should have nations endeavouring to exploit nations—with two certain consequences, war and a reaction to competitive individualism; and our last state would be worse than the first. Our complete emancipation from the economic motive requires not only a new status for the worker but a new doctrine of work. Industry must no more be conceived as a means of national wealth than of individual wealth.
The true doctrine of work is present in germ in the British Labour Party’s formula of “workers whether by hand or by brain.” The inclusion in one category of the industrial and professional classes should exert a very profound influence upon the popular attitude to manual labour. Much of the traditional habit of looking upon manual labour as being intrinsically inferior to brain work is due to a stupid lack of discrimination. For skilled labour often requires as nice a co-ordination of mind and hand, and as sensitive a nervous organisation as the most recondite surgery. The competent engineer is in no sense the mental inferior of the accountant; probably the engineer has on the whole the more highly organised mind; yet the engineer is popularly assigned to a relatively lower social rating. The conventional social divisions of those who work are entirely absurd and seem chiefly to depend upon the clothes one wears. That toil is regarded as inferior which cannot be performed without soiling clothes of a more or less ceremonial cut.
But when once it is realised that the work of the physician or the clergyman is different only in kind and not in social worth from the work of the machinist or the farm-labourer, we shall have a more reasonable basis for classification; and though it is true that the minister (being no more immune from the pressure of social atmosphere than other men) has not been unmindful of his stipend or the doctor of his fee, yet both callings have preserved enough of the ideal of disinterested social service to pass on something of the same impulse into occupations which the common mind regards solely as means of livelihood. This indeed, must be the first element in our doctrine of work. It must be regarded primarily as a social service. John Ruskin long ago tried to teach us that in every nation there were four great intellectual professions: the soldier’s, to defend it; the pastor’s, to teach it; the lawyer’s, to establish justice in it; and the merchant’s, to provide for it; and it was, he added, the duty of each of these on due occasion to die for it. What was novel in Ruskin’s doctrine was that there was a due occasion on which a merchant should die for his country. But why should we stop at the merchant? There is no reason why this principle should not be extended to every kind of labour essential to the life of the nation. At least there should be nothing inconceivable in the idea that every member of the community should develop the same degree and quality of social devotion. And (let it be repeated once more) the industrial records of this time of war do make this expectation into something more than a chimæra. The splendid social devotion which the emergency of war has discovered and released should and could be made a permanent asset. It is entirely a question of the right kind of education.
If the impending revolution in the worker’s status brings with it (as it should) a sense of genuine partnership, its natural sequel should be a growing consciousness of participation in a great social task. Every man would come to look upon his job as an integral and indispensable part of the common service. This would add a new interest and worth even to the purely mechanical tasks which the growth of large-scale production has so greatly multiplied. It would be no more than a partial solution of the entire problem involved in routine mechanical toil; but it would go a great way towards mitigating its inevitable dreariness, and it would certainly bring with it a quality of personal satisfaction in work which working for a living at a job in which one’s sole interest is one’s hire cannot possibly afford.
VI
Yet neither the habit of regarding work as participation in a social task nor the element of comradeship which we may reasonably expect to grow out of such a way of conceiving work, nor yet the amelioration of the purely external conditions of modern industrial production, can possibly be accepted as furnishing a final solution of the problem of work. It is probable that under existing conditions, some such changes as these are all we can hope for over large areas of industrial life; perhaps, indeed, without a general recognition of the real social significance of large scale production, the best we can ever do will consist of further modification of industrial conditions along these lines. Yet all this does virtually nothing to make work a means of worthy self-expression.
The high degree of specialisation which has followed the introduction and improvement of industrial machinery, confines large multitudes of people to occupations which consist of repeating the same small routine operation all day and every day; and the mentally benumbing and demoralising consequences of this type of work is one of the commonplaces of social observation. Not the least of the social services of Trade Unionism is that it has furnished to men occupied in purely mechanical work an interest which has helped to keep their minds alive. It is rarely recognised how inevitably certain of our graver social evils are connected with the devitalising influences of modern industrial conditions. Undoubtedly one of the most powerful causes of the deadly grip of the drink traffic upon society is the opportunity it provides of reaction from the depressing and deadening round of the shop. The saloon strikes a kind of psychological balance with the factory. The well-meaning persons who suppose that open spaces, museums, art galleries, and the like will furnish effectual off-sets to the public house, overlook the fact that the peculiar depression to which the factory worker is subjected demands a relief more vivid and more violent than these more refined avenues of diversion offer. Temperance reformers have greatly neglected this aspect of their problem; and prohibition without any accompanying provision for the healthy equilibration of human energies is likely to have consequences that may astonish and perhaps confound its advocates.
But the remedy for this and the other penalties which society has to pay for its industrial system is not to be found in the abandonment of large-scale processes and reversion to an earlier fashion of production. Machinery certainly supplanted a more human, kindlier way of life; and not even the extensive factory legislation which has tempered the worst excesses of the new way, has compensated for the passing of the amenities of the older system. We have, however, to count upon the permanence and the still further extension of large-scale processes. Obviously it is not intrinsically an evil thing, potentially it is an asset of incalculable value to society. Even its monotonies have their uses; for a certain amount of routine work is good for every man. It is only evil when it is excessive. The disadvantages which belong to large-scale production are on the whole incidental, and owe their origin chiefly to laissez faire and the economic motive. Once this vicious connection is dissolved and production for need and use becomes the general rule, the very proficiency of our large-scale processes will liberate a great volume of human energy for the pursuit of the spiritual ends of life.