Progress and History

by Unknown

And of his own particular life-work, teaching, he remarks, in words that testify to his own inner peace and happiness, that 'some of us have got into occupations which almost seem to guarantee immortality'.

Let us, then, boldly lay it down that the best test of progress in industry and the best measure of success in any industrial system is the degree to which it enables men to 'do their bit' and so to find happiness in their daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively religious language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that in the great battle which Ruskin and William Morris fought almost single-handed against all the Philistines of the nineteenth century, Ruskin and Morris, however wrong they may have been on points of practical detail, were right in principle. Let us make up our minds that a world in which men have surrendered the best hours of the day to unsatisfying drudgery, and banished happiness to their brief periods of tired leisure, is so far from civilized that it has not even made clear to itself wherein civilization consists. And when we read such a passage as the following from a leading modern economist, let us not yield to the promptings of our lower nature and acquiesce in its apparent common sense, but remember that economists, like all workmen, are bounded by the limits of their own particular craft or study. 'The greater part of the world's work,' says Professor Taussig,[71] the leading exponent of Economics at Harvard,

is not in itself felt to be pleasurable. Some reformers have hoped to reach a social system under which all work would be in itself a source of satisfaction. It is probable that such persons are made optimistic by the nature of their own doings. They are writers, schemers, reformers; they are usually of strongly altruistic character, and the performance of any duty or set task brings to them the approval of an exacting conscience; and they believe that all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit. The world would be a much happier place if their state of mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering and sawing, and all the severe physical exertion which, however lightened by tools and machinery, yet can never be other than labour in the ordinary sense of the word.

When Professor Taussig assures us that 'the great mass of men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or loftiness of character' he is simply denying the Christian religion. To argue the point with him would carry us too far. We will do no more here than remind him that the people to whom the Founder of Christianity preached, and even those who were chosen to be its first disciples, were, like this audience, distinctly humdrum, and that assuredly the American Professor would not have discerned in them promising material for a world-transforming religious movement. What people see in others is often a mirror of themselves. Perhaps Professor Taussig, in spite of his excellent book, is rather a humdrum person himself.

When, however, Professor Taussig declares that 'the greater part of the world's work is not in itself felt to be pleasurable' he is saying what, under existing conditions, we must all recognize to be true. A year or two ago Mr. Graham Wallas made an investigation into this very question, the results of which confirmed the general impression that modern workmen find little happiness in their work.[72] But two of the conclusions which he reached conflict in a rather curious way with the statement of Professor Taussig. Mr. Wallas's evidence, which was largely drawn from students of Ruskin College, led him to the conclusion 'that there is less pleasantness or happiness in work the nearer it approaches the fully organized Great Industry'. The only workman who spoke enthusiastically of his work was an agricultural labourer who 'was very emphatic with regard to the pleasure to be obtained from agricultural work'. Professor Taussig, on the other hand, selects four agricultural occupations, ditching, delving, sowing, and reaping, as characteristically unpleasant and looks to machinery and the apparatus of the Industrial Revolution to counteract this unpleasantness. But the most interesting evidence gathered by Mr. Wallas was that relating to women workers. He had an opportunity of collecting the views of girls employed in the laundries and poorer kind of factories in Boston. 'The answers', he says,[73] 'surprised me greatly. I expected to hear those complaints about bad wages, hard conditions and arbitrary discipline which a body of men working at the same grade of labour would certainly have put forward. But it was obvious that the question "Are you happy?" meant to the girls "Are you happier than you would have been if you had stayed at home instead of going to work?" And almost every one of them answered "Yes".' Why were they unhappy at home? Let Professor Taussig reflect on the answer. Not because they had 'rough' or 'coarse' or 'humdrum' work to do, as in a factory or laundry, but because they had nothing to do, and they had found idleness unbearable. 'One said that work "took up her mind", she had been awfully discontented'. Another that 'you were of some use'. Another thought 'it was because the hours went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time, there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.' 'Asked a little girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her feel she was worth something.' And Mr. Wallas concludes that it is just because 'everything that is interesting, even though it is laborious, in the women's arts of the old village is gone': because 'clothes are bought ready-made, food is bought either ready-cooked, like bread and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of cooking': in fact just because physical exertion has been lightened by books and machinery, that 'there results a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose existence has hardly been indicated by our present method of sociological enquiry'.

It would seem then that the task of associating modern industrial work with happiness is not impossible, if we would only set ourselves to the task. And the task is a two-fold one. It is, first, to make it possible for people to follow the employment for which they are by nature best fitted; and secondly, to study much more closely than heretofore, from the point of view of happiness, the conditions under which work is done. The first task involves a very considerable reversal of current educational and social values. It does not simply mean paving the way for the son of an engine-driver to become a doctor or a lawyer or a cavalryman. It means paving the way for the son of a duke to become, without any sense of social failure, an engine-driver or a merchant seaman or a worker on the land—and to do so not, as to-day, in the decent seclusion of British Columbia or Australia, but in our own country and without losing touch, if he desires it, with his own natural circle of friends. The ladder is an old and outworn metaphor in this connexion. Yet it is still worth remembering that the Angels whom Jacob observed upon it were both ascending and descending. It is one of the fallacies of our social system to believe that a ladder should only be used in one direction—and that the direction which tends to remove men from contact and sympathy with their fellows. But in truth we need to discard the metaphor of the ladder altogether, with its implied suggestion that some tasks of community-service are more honourable and involve more of what the world calls 'success' than others. We do not desire a system of education which picks out for promotion minds gifted with certain kinds of capacity and stimulates them with the offer of material rewards, while the so-called humdrum remainder are left, with their latent talents undiscovered and undeveloped.

Recent educational experiments,[74] and not least that most testing of all school examinations, the war, have shown us that we must revise all our old notions as to cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short of real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such personage as the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally a man of unusual energy and mental power directed into wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose special powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the routine of school life. And just as the criminal points to serious defects in our social system, so the dunce points to serious defects in our educational system. The striking record of our industrial schools and reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the University. We need a system which treats every child, rich or poor, as a living and developing personality, which enables every English boy and girl to stay at school at least up to the time when his or her natural bent begins to disclose itself, which provides for all classes of the community skilled guidance in the choice of employment based upon psychological study of individual gifts and aptitude,[75] which sets up methods of training and apprenticeship in the different trades—or, as I would prefer to call them the different professions—such as to counteract the deadening influence of premature specialization, and which ensures good conditions and a sense of self-respect and community-service to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether their bent be manual or mechanical or commercial or administrative, or for working on the land or for going to sea, or towards the more special vocations of teaching or scholarship or the law or medicine or the cure of souls. No one can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness associated with our existing social system is due to the fact that, owing to defects in our education and our arrangements for the choice of employment, there are myriads of square pegs in round holes. This applies with especial force to women, to whom many of the square holes are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack of opportunities for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions of custom and, in some cases, to narrow and retrograde professional enactments. The war has brought women their chance, not only in the office and the workshop, but in higher administrative and organizing positions, and not the least of its results is the revelation of undreamt-of capacities in these directions.

In the second task, that of perfecting the adaptation between men and their tools, we have much to learn from the industrial history of the past. It is natural for men to enjoy 'talking shop', and this esoteric bond of union has existed between workmen in all ages. We may be sure that there were discussions amongst connoisseurs in the Stone Age as to the respective merits of their flint axes, just as there are to-day between golfers about niblicks and putters, and between surgeons as to the technique of the extraction of an appendix. A good workman loves his tools. He is indeed inseparable from them, as our law acknowledges by forbidding a bankrupt's tools to be sold up. Give a good workman, in town or country, a sympathetic listener and he is only too ready to expatiate on his daily work. This sense of kinship between men and their tools and material is so little understood by some of our modern expert organizers of industry that it is worth while illustrating it at some length. I make no apology, therefore, for quoting a striking passage from an essay by Mr. George Bourne, who is not a trade unionist or a student of Labour politics but an observer of English village life, who has taken the trouble to penetrate the mind of what is commonly regarded as the stupidest and most backward—as it is certainly the least articulate—class of workmen in this country, the agricultural labourer in the southern counties. 'The men', he writes,

are commonly too modest about their work, and too unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical skill exercised in country labours may be purely deduced from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country tools.

The beauty of tools is not accidental, but inherent and essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the curves of an adze-head or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (in the limits of its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for different soils: it is widened out or narrowed; it is deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar example of beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by the admired shape of boats, which, however, is so variable (the statement is made on the authority of an old coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch of shore may be dangerous, if not entirely useless, at another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat, fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants, adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and convexity in the beer-barrel; the same that, exerting itself with matchless precision through the trained senses of haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper handling of it technique is present ...