There can be no doubt of the great social and political dangers involved in so enormous an aggrandisement of the commercial and manufacturing class as we shall most of us live to witness. What is called the problem of the unemployed grows every year more difficult and less obviously hopeful. Moreover, the concentration of great wealth in a few hands is in itself a political danger, even apart from the fact that it implies widespread impoverishment. There are dangers of corrupt legislation, for instance, and other dangers too.
But there will be another great force at work in which may be foreseen the solution of many difficulties beside this. When public education becomes rationalised; when it is employed chiefly as a means of character-making; when the universal education of mankind has the effect of turning out men and women capable of thinking, and not merely of remembering, the teeming population of the working class will begin to exercise an intelligent influence on the legislature—which at present it certainly cannot be said to do. And one thing which the intelligently-elected Parliaments of the new age will assuredly discover is this principle: that it is not good for the State that any one man, or any one associated body of men, should possess an inordinate amount of wealth.[2]
Once this principle is discovered and acted upon; once it is illegal for any person or corporation to be seised of more than a certain fixed capital; the dangers of inconvenient aggrandisement will vanish. Nor is this principle in any way unprogressive or injurious to the commonwealth. It is, in fact, not even injurious to the individuals affected. No reasonably-enlightened being can pretend that a sensible hardship would be inflicted on millionaires by being forbidden to pile Pelion upon Ossa in their present insane manner. A very rich man, compelled to desist from the accumulation of wealth, and consequently driven to the task of finding out how to enjoy it intelligently, would be almost infinitely better off for this constraint. The effect of the ordinance for the limitation of wealth will be to remove all temptation to concentrate manufactures in a few hands. It will open the doors shut by trust companies on competition. It will multiply factories of moderate and convenient size: and one other effect of it will be to improve many manufacturing processes in themselves. There are a great many things which can be cheaply turned out in uniform batches, every article exactly the counterpart of every other, hideous in economical uniformity, because they all emanate from one or two great factories, which, if the manufacture of them were distributed over a number of small factories, would, from this circumstance alone, and from the stress of wholesome competition, be greatly improved. Probably many industries, desirable in themselves, but driven out of successful being by our present system of concentrated manufacturing, would revive. Crafts of what we call regretfully the good old kinds would spring up, rejuvenated: cheap uniformity would cease to be the principal ideal of manufacture. The people would be able to afford agreeable furniture, utensils, decorations, and household goods of all kinds, where they now have to put up with horrible but cheap makeshifts. For one great advantage of the ordinance just predicted must not be lost sight of. When you restrain the rich from becoming inordinately richer, you concurrently save the poor from being made proportionately poorer. This ideal, it should be remarked, is in no sense socialistic. It is, on the contrary, the natural development of individualism.
Hardly less certain is it that before the beginning of the twenty-first century all manufactures and all commerce will be co-operative, the workers in every industry being paid, not by fixed wages, but by a share in the produce of their labour. Instead of the profit of all trade and manufacture being secured to the managers and owners of lands, machinery, transport and other commercial utilities; while labour, the equally necessary and indeed the preponderant element of production, is reckoned as a mere element of cost, in the form of wages; the profit will be shared all round. The more prosperous the enterprise, the more money the workers will receive. No man will be able to grow rich by sweating his workmen. Neither will the present degrading temptation for every workman to perform his task as perfunctorily and as lazily as he can, so long as he does not get dismissed from work altogether, survive this reform. On the contrary, it will be directly worth every man’s while to do his work as well as he possibly can. The dignity of labour—a phrase now justly mocked—will become an elevating and delightful practicality. A great many articles of everyday use will be better made than it is possible to get them made to-day. The spectacle of the producers of wealth herding in squalid cabins, clothed in the rags of cast-off clothing, eating garbage, enjoying nothing but intoxication, will give way to a more wholesome and natural state of affairs. Nor will the owners of machinery, of factories and the like long oppose this development. What are called labour-troubles will cease to exist when the interest of employer and employed is identical. The problem of the unemployed will solve itself. Leisure, and an opportunity to employ leisure wisely, will have been bestowed upon the poor as well as we have seen that it will be bestowed upon the rich. A man will have no need to spend practically all the unfatigued hours of every day at the bench, the loom, or the lathe. He will want recreation. While one batch of men is seeking this there will be an opportunity for other batches to work. And work itself, once it is work for an intelligent objective, once it is work that there is a comprehensible reason for trying to execute as well as it can possibly be executed, will lose much of its irksomeness—to the vast improvement alike of the product and the producer.
[1] There is a contrivance already in existence which not only weighs what is placed upon it, but can also be made to calculate the value of the goods at any desired rate per ounce, pound or hundredweight. [↑]
[2] A practical objection to this principle may be here anticipated and answered. Politicians may say that for any one nation to be the pioneer in the adoption of such a policy would have the effect of driving trade and manufactures into other countries where the restriction did not exist. But there are so many highly necessary reforms open to a similar objection that I think there is no doubt that ultimately the jurists of all nations will agree upon some arrangement for universal legislation, whereby laws not affecting the relations of one country with another will be simultaneously enacted by a comity of nations. We have already one very imperfect example of such a procedure in the Convention against bounty-helped sugar. [↑]