For the elimination of the profit-interest, and the regulation of production on the basis of calculated demand, will at once lead to a very considerable diminution in the number of working hours. It is questionable whether, with industrial processes properly organised, it would be necessary for any man to spend more than four hours a day in the actual production of necessities. This refers, of course, to the strictly mechanical departments of production. In agriculture, which depends upon seasons and weather conditions, it is obvious that a standardised day is impracticable. Moreover, agriculture is an avocation which has its own peculiar compensations. It is carried on in the open-air and has elements of variety and change to which the industrial worker is a stranger. Yet, even in agriculture the great extension of mechanical and labour-saving instruments should go far to mitigate the acknowledged disadvantages of the life. The evils attaching to the work of the farmer and his labourer are, however, largely extrinsic. It is the dullness and monotony of his spare hours that weigh most heavily upon him.[[19]] With the industrial, it is different. He does not lack opportunity of social life in so much as he lives normally in large populous centres; but the atonic condition to which he is reduced by the circumstances of his work, renders him incapable of creating and enjoying the best kind of fellowship. He is either too weary for any kind of fellowship and sits at home reading the newspaper, and then to bed; or he turns in his need of compensating excitement to the questionable atmosphere of the public-house. A small minority of tougher mental and nervous fibre will cultivate an allotment or seek diversion in books or sport; but the majority have neither inclination nor energy for any active pursuits. The remedy for this trouble lies in the drastic shortening of the working day for all men who are engaged in the mechanical process of production. With the increasing application of science to industry, under conditions of production for use, it is impossible to say how short the necessary working day may become. And if it became the rule, as it probably should, that no member of society should be exempt from a share in the work of maintaining its natural life and so take his part in mechanical production, there is no reason why the indispensable mechanical toil expected of the individual should not be reduced to a very low point indeed.
[19]. The present wholly inadequate remuneration of the agricultural labourer does not come under discussion here, as the argument assumes that the principle of the national minimum is accepted. This assumption is the more reasonable in view of the fact that in England a minimum wage for agricultural labourers has been fixed and is to operate for five years.
If in addition men are trained from childhood to take the view that this toil is a necessary social task, and therefore, intrinsically noble and honourable, the whole atmosphere in which it is discharged would be organically changed. To-day, the prevailing note of speed and competition reduces the place and sense of comradeship to very narrow limits. The general attitude of antagonism between capital and labour infects the air, and not only makes co-operation between the administrative and productive functions impossible, but introduces a subtle poison of disintegration into the mutual relations of the operatives. The only comradeship which appears to exist is that which is created by the need under present conditions of safeguarding class interests. When men of all classes have been brought up to regard a certain amount of mechanical toil as an honourable obligation to the society to which they belong, they will naturally accept their share in the common task and bring themselves to it in a spirit of comradeship.
VII
But it is useless to suppose that we have done all that is needed when we have thus relieved the irksomeness of the day’s work. Indeed, we have (if we leave it at that) only created a great peril—the peril of deterioration which always attends unused or ill-used leisure. “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do;” and the antidote to idleness lies in providing things to do that unoccupied hands will turn to do with readiness. Yet it were fatal to regard this as a problem of utilising spare time. We have indeed a greater and worthier task on hand; and the drastic shortening of the statutory working day provides us with our opportunity.
Genuine social progress and content is, as we have seen, to be achieved only under conditions where men have the opportunity, and are trained in the exercise of the instinct of creativeness. For the great majority of men, the means of this self-expression must be found in some sort of manual activity. It must take the form of work. Perhaps the solution lies in the principle of “one man, two trades”; of which one shall be some part of the mechanical toil involved in social upkeep, and the other a craft in which a man may exercise and express something of his own independent mind. Possibly we may distinguish the two types of occupation as utility-trades and vocations, the one necessary quality of the latter being that men should be able to put their whole souls into their tasks; and in so far as these tasks are of a direct productive kind, since they are not tasks of mere utility, they may fitly be tasks of beauty as well. We require something of the nature of a revival of the older type of craftsmanship in which the æsthetic faculties found room for expression; and in the matter of clothing and house-furniture and decoration there is ample room for the development of a revived craftsmanship where use will go hand in hand with beauty. It should plainly be an organic part of educational policy to provide for the early laying of the foundations of original and creative craftsmanship. In any wise system of education, the period of adolescence should be marked by a very definite differentiation of vocational training (without neglecting the other elements of a generous education). Aptitudes should be watched for; and the growth of the youth should be stimulated along the lines of his natural inclinations. Especially should any signs of independent and original creative power be encouraged. Change of this sort can, of course be brought about only gradually; but it should be faced seriously if society is ever to be emancipated from its baleful subjection to the economic motive.
That we find it difficult to believe that any change along these lines is possible is due chiefly to a lack of acquaintance with any other conditions than those which exist to-day. But William Morris and John Ruskin found no difficulty in believing that men would work “for the joy of the working,” provided that they had work to do which had in it the elements of joy. It was so that they worked themselves; and the substance of their teaching was a plea that work should be made once more a delight by being raised to the plane of art—that is to say, that it might become the avenue of independent creative self-expression. It would doubtless take several generations before this doctrine could be established as a habit of mind and society organised conformably to it, but it is no cheap speculation which foresees, arising out of a progressive liberation and discipline of the creative instincts of a community, a new birth of art. The creative urge would, like the sun, shoot out coronas of flaming achievement; art itself might climb to a plane it has never hitherto known and break out in directions which we in our present state of spiritual purblindness cannot anticipate. At least, it is something to be remembered that those days in England in which industry was alive with a fine craftsmanship and a generous comradeship, were also the days which produced the finest monuments of English art.
VIII
The organisation of society upon lines of this kind would be a protracted and difficult task; and here one is concerned more with the definition of a tendency rather than the precise measures necessary to make it effective. Obviously there must be large exceptions to any rule of life in any vital and developing social order. But the reduction of mechanical toil to the lowest practicable point, and a generous development of the idea and practice of the vocational life seem to be essential. And the general principle which we desire for mechanical tasks of production should be applied in other regions, as for instance in the distributive trades and in those occupations which are concerned with the disposal of waste. The increasing emphasis on hygiene has led to the multiplication of a number of “waste-occupations,” the street-cleaner, the drain-man, the garbage-man and so forth. Within this region we have every right to expect so large an extension of scientific and mechanical methods of dealing with the waste products of life as to make some at least of these occupations wholly superfluous. This type of occupation has meantime, the very undesirable and injurious effect of relegating those who are engaged in it to a condition of much social inferiority; and this is the more unjust, insomuch as the health of the community depends so greatly upon its being faithfully performed. It was a happy inspiration to clothe the New York street-cleaners in white; and it should have a sacramental suggestion for their fellow citizens. For we are familiar with a word which describes a multitude “arrayed in white garments.” The innovation established a point of contact between urban cleanliness and holiness; and it is within this cycle of social judgment that the waste occupations should be placed. We should then take more kindly to the only equitable solution of the problem presented by this class of work, namely that it should be shared out and that all the members of the community should be liable to be called out in companies, as they are now for jury service, to do their part of this indispensable work. This brings the waste occupations into the same category as the productive trades; in point of fact, it is there they really belong. There can be no intrinsic difference of worth between the work of providing for the needs of society and the work of disposing of its waste. For without either of these, society cannot live.
The only class for which there should be no room in a healthy social order is the social parasite. It is to this class that the “idle rich” belong, the people who neither toil nor spin yet fare sumptuously every day at the expense of the labour of others. To this class also belongs the large “flunkey” class—butlers, footmen, door-openers, and other uniformed persons who are arrayed in fine apparel doing little things for us that we ought to do for ourselves. It is just neither to these persons nor to society that they should be allowed to continue in careers of such complete uselessness. So far as Europe is concerned this class has already largely disappeared, for the Army or industry has swallowed it up; and it is not likely ever to re-emerge on the pre-war scale. We must add also to this parasitic class those who are engaged in luxury trades—with the caveat that it is exceedingly difficult to draw a strict frontier line between necessity and luxury on the one hand, and on the other, between luxury and the thing that may minister to the legitimate comfort, the health, the beauty and the general enrichment of life. But there are some things so palpably on the wrong side of the line that there should be no difficulty in identifying them. It is a subject worth some reflection here that the war is teaching us to do without many things which we had come to regard as necessities. It is a sad commentary upon the civilisation we had produced, that it left us with a hunger which we endeavoured to appease by an elaboration of the fringes of life. We had gradually accumulated a range of comforts and conveniences, and not a few superfluities, which had come to be regarded as indispensable. But the war has taught us how few things are after all needful. We have all the materials of joyful life when we have food to eat, a home to live in, freedom and congenial work, comradeship and love. And unless these become more and more the sure possession of all, our social progress is no more than a laborious sham.