Progress and History

by Unknown

In our study of Government we traced the upward course of the common life of mankind in the world. We saw it in the increasing control of Man over his physical environment, and we saw it also in his clearer realization of the ultimate ideal of government—the ordering of the world's affairs on the basis of liberty. We have now to turn aside from this main stream of social development to watch one particular branch of it—to survey man's record in the special department of economics. We shall no longer be studying human history, or the history of human society, as a whole, but what is known as economic or industrial history.

It is important to be clear at the outset that economic or industrial history is a tributary stream and not the main stream: for there are a number of people who are of the contrary opinion. There has been an increasing tendency of recent years to write human history in terms of economic or industrial progress. 'Tell me what men ate or wore or manufactured,' say historians of this school, 'and we will tell you what stage of civilization he had reached. We will place him in his proper pigeonhole in our arrangement of the record of human progress.' Did he use flint implements or fight with nothing but a bow and arrow? Did he use a canoe with a primitive pole which he had not even the sense to flatten so as to make it into a serviceable paddle? Then our sociologist will put him very low down on his list of the stages of human progress. For the modern sociologist is a confirmed plutocrat. He measures the character of men and races by their wealth. Just as old-fashioned people still think of the society of our own country as a hierarchy, in which the various classes are graded according to their social prestige and the extent of their possessions: so students of primitive civilization classify races according to their material equipment, and can hardly help yielding to the temptation of reckoning their stage of progress as a whole by the only available test. Thus it is common, especially in Germany and the United States, to find histories of what purports to be the progress of mankind which show man first as a hunter and a fisherman, then as a shepherd, then as a tiller of the soil, and then work upwards to the complicated industrial system of to-day. We are asked to accept the life of Abraham or David among the sheepfolds as the bottom of the ladder, and the life of a modern wage-earner under the smoky sky of a manufacturing area as the top; and when we complain and say, as men like William Morris and Stephen Graham are always saying, that we would far prefer to live in David's world, in spite of all its discomforts, we are told that we have no right to quarrel with the sacred principle of Evolution.

To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to deny its spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of the progress of the human spirit at all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or rather the increasing complication, of things, rather than of the advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as the Kingdom of Man—still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield—that Economic Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern world.

No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion or consent to bow the head before such fancied necessities. The function of industry, he will reply, is to serve human life not to master it: to beautify human life not to degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics is not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its bounds and exceeds its functions it must be controlled and thrust back into its place by the combined activities of men. The soul is higher than the body, and life is more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches, and the welfare of the community more important than its economic and material progress. These great processes, which the increase of man's knowledge has set in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men originated them: men administer them: and men must control them. Against economic necessity let us set political necessity: and let the watchword of that political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and the well-being of mankind.

With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our subject.

What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek for 'house-keeping'. If writers and thinkers on the subject had only kept this simple fact in mind, or used the English word instead of the Greek, the world would have been saved much misery and confusion. Political economy is not, what Mill and other writers define it to be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It is the art of community-housekeeping, and community-housekeeping, as every woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch of the art of community-management or government.

Housekeeping, of course, is not a selfish but a social function. Housewives do not lay in bread and cheese simply to gratify their own desire to be possessors of a large store, but for the sake of their household. The true housekeeper or economic man is the man who is consciously ministering to the real needs of the community. Like the ruler or minister in the political sphere, he is a man who is performing a public service.

This is equally true whether the housekeeper has a monopoly of the purchase of bread and cheese for the household, or whether he or she has to compete with others as to which is to be allowed to serve the public in that particular transaction. Just as, under the party system, which seems to be inseparable from the working of democratic institutions, men stand for Parliament and compete for the honour of representing their neighbours, so in most systems of industry men compete for the honour of supplying the public. Competition in industry is practically as old as industry. In the earliest picture that has come down to us of Greek village life we read of the competition between potter and potter and between minstrel and minstrel—a competition as keen and as fierce, we may be sure, as that between rival shopkeepers to-day. For the opposite of competition, as has been truly said, is not co-operation but monopoly or bureaucracy: and there is no short and easy means of deciding between the rival systems. Sometimes the community is better served by entrusting one department wholly to one purveyor or one system of management—as in the Postal Service, or the Army and Navy. Sometimes it is clearly better to leave the matter open to competition. Nobody, for instance, would propose to do with only one minstrel, and seal the lips of all poets but the Poet Laureate. Sometimes, as in the case of the organized professions and the liquor trade, a strictly regulated system of competition has been considered best. No doubt the tendency at the present time is setting strongly against competition and towards more unified and more closely organized systems of doing business. But it is important to make quite clear that there is nothing immoral or anti-social about the fact of competition itself, and nothing inconsistent with the idea of service and co-operation which should underlie all social and economic activity. It is not competition itself, as people often wrongly think, which is the evil, but the shallow and selfish motives and the ruthless trampling down of the weak that are too often associated with it. When we condemn the maxim 'the Devil take the hindmost', it is not because we think we ought to treat the hindmost as though he were the foremost—to buy cracked jars or patronize incapable minstrels. It is because we feel that there is a wrong standard of reward among those who have pushed to the front, and that the community as a whole cannot ignore its responsibility towards its less fortunate and capable members.

It is, indeed, quite impossible to abolish competition for the patronage of the household without subjecting its members to tyranny or tying them down to an intolerable uniformity—forcing them to suppress their own temporary likes or dislikes and to go on taking in the same stuff in the same quantities world without end. For the most serious and permanent competition is not that between rival purveyors of the same goods, between potter and potter and minstrel and minstrel, but between one set of goods and another: between the potter and the blacksmith, the minstrel and the painter. If we abolished competition permanently between the British railways we could not make sure that the public would always use them as it does now. People would still be at liberty to walk or to drive or to bicycle or to fly, or, at the very worst, to stay at home. Competition, as every business man knows, sometimes arises from the most unexpected quarters. The picture-house and the bicycle have damaged the brewer and the publican. Similarly the motor-car and the golf links have spoilt the trade in the fine china ornaments such as used to be common in expensively furnished drawing-rooms. People sit less in their rooms, so spend less on decorating them. The members of the household always retain ultimate control over their economic life, if they care to exercise it. 'Whoso has sixpence,' as Carlyle said, 'is sovereign (to the length of sixpence), over all men; commands Cooks to feed him, Philosophers to teach him, Kings to mount guard over him,'—to the length of sixpence. Passive resistance and the boycott are always open to the public in the last resort against any of their servants who has abused the powers of his position. A good instance of this occurred in the events which led to the so-called Tobacco riots in Milan in 1848. The Austrians thought they could force the Italians in their Lombard provinces to pay for a government they hated by putting a heavy tax on tobacco. But the Italians, with more self-control than we have shown in the present war, with one accord gave up smoking. Here was a plain competition between a monopoly and the consumer, between tobacco and patriotism: between a united household and an unpopular servant: and the household won, as it always can unless its members are incapable of combined action or have been deprived by governmental tyranny of all power to associate and to organize.

We are faced then with a community or household which has certain wants that need to be supplied. The individual members of the community are justified, within the limits of general well-being,[67] in deciding what are their own wants and how to satisfy them. They claim the right to demand, as the economists put it, the goods and services they require, bread and cheese, poetry, tobacco, motor-bicycles, china ornaments. In order to meet those demands, which are stable in essentials but subject to constant modification in detail, there is ceaseless activity, rivalry, competition, on the part of the purveyors—on the side of what economists call supply. The business of housekeeping, or what is called the economic process, is that of bringing this demand and this supply into relation with one another. If the members of the household said they wanted to eat the moon instead of sugar, their demand would not be an economic demand: for no housekeeper could satisfy it. Similarly on the supply side: if the baker insisted on bringing round bad epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead of sugar, the supply, however good it might seem to the baker and the grocer, and however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon, the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor supplied something undreamed of by the household, but otherwise good of its kind, he might succeed in persuading the household to like it—in other words, in creating a demand. The late Sir Alfred Jones, by putting bananas cheap on the market, persuaded us that we liked them. Similarly Mr. Marvin, who deals in something better than bananas, has persuaded us all to come here, though most of us would never have thought of it unless he had created the demand in us.