Progress and History

by Unknown

'It is not the well-informed and those eager to teach', he says in another passage,

who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization; it is the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found men studying the quality of vines grown on different pockets of earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and the Rhine have done for ages. And even so the English generations have watched the produce of their varying soils. When or how was it learnt—was it at Oxford or at Cambridge?—that the apples of Devonshire are so specially fit for cider? Or how is it that hops are growing—some of them planted before living memory—all along the strip of green sand which encircles the Weald—that curious strip to which text-books at last point triumphantly as being singularly adapted for hops? Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge was not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists, boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing water. When the peculiar values of a plot of land have been established—as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too strong' for bricks—then further forms of localized knowledge are brought to supplement this, until at last the bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the field; and immediately new problems arise. The old farm-cart, designed for roots or manure, has not the most suitable shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide wheels, which were intended for the softness of ploughed land, are needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon, therefore, the local wheelwright begins to lighten his spokes and felloes, and to make the wheels a trifle less 'dished'; while his blacksmith binds them in a narrower but thicker tyre, to which he gives a shade more tightness. For the wheelwright learns from the carter—that ignorant fellow—the answer to the new problems set by a load of bricks. A good carter, for his part, is able to adjust his labour to his locality. A part of his duty consists in knowing what constitutes a fair load for his horse in the district where he is working. So many hundred stock bricks, so many more fewer of the red or wire-cut, such and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or straw, or coal, or drain-pipes, or slates, according to their kinds and sizes, will make as much as an average horse can draw in this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts (as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are put before a cart and load which the London carter would deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey.

So it goes throughout civilization: there is not an industry but produces its own special knowledge relating to unclassified details of adjustment.[76]

It is this craft-knowledge and common professional feeling which is at the basis of all associations of workpeople, from the semi-religious societies of ancient times, which met in secret to worship their patron-god—Hephaestos, the god of the metal-workers, or Asclepios, the god of the doctors—through the great guilds of the Middle Ages to the trade unions and professional organizations of to-day. Trade unions do not exist simply to raise wages or to fight the capitalist, any more than the British Medical Association exists simply to raise fees and to bargain with the Government. They exist to serve a professional need: to unite men who are doing the same work and to promote the welfare and dignity of that work. It is this which renders so difficult the problems of adjustment which arise owing to the introduction of new and unfamiliar processes. Professional associations are, and are bound to be, conservative: their conservatism is honourable and to their credit: for they are the transmitters of a great tradition. The problem in every case is to ensure the progress necessary to the community without injury to that sense of 'fellowship in the mystery' on which the social spirit of the particular class of workmen depends. It is from this point of view that recent American proposals in the direction of 'scientific management' are most open to criticism: for they involve the break-up of the craft-spirit without setting anything comparable in its place. In fact, Mr. F. W. Taylor, one of the inventors of what is called the 'system' of scientific management, frankly ignores or despises the craft-spirit and proposes to treat the workman as a being incapable of understanding the principles underlying the practice of his art. He goes so far as to lay it down as a general principle that 'in almost all the mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time, but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real or intense relationship between the workman and his work, stands self-condemned. If we are looking for real industrial progress it is elsewhere that we must turn.

This leads us naturally on to the second great division of our subject: progress in the methods of co-operation between man and man in doing industrial work. For if man is a social animal his power to do his bit and his consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least, from his social environment. The lonely craftsman perfecting his art in the solitude of a one-man workshop does not correspond with our industrial ideal any more than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship, William Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of industry in his immortal sentence: 'Fellowship is Life and lack of Fellowship is Death.' Our study of the workman, then, is not complete when we have seen him with his tools: we must see him also among his workmates. We must see industry not simply as a process of production but as a form of association; and we must realize that the association of human beings for the purpose of industrial work involves what is just as much a problem of government as their association in the great political community which we call the State.

It is difficult to see the record of the progress of industrial government in clear perspective for the simple reason that the world is still so backward as regards the organization of this side of its common life. The theory and practice of industrial government is generations, even centuries, behind the theory and practice of politics. We are still accustomed in industry to attitudes of mind and methods of management which the political thought of the Western World has long since discarded as incompatible with its ideals. Two instances must suffice to illustrate this. It is constantly being said, both by employers and by politicians, and even by writers in sympathy with working-class aspirations, that all that the workman needs in his life is security. Give him work under decent conditions, runs the argument, with reasonable security of tenure and adequate guarantees against sickness, disablement and unemployment, and all will be well. This theory of what constitutes industrial welfare is, of course, when one thinks it out, some six centuries out of date. It embodies the ideal of the old feudal system, but without the personal tie between master and man which humanized the feudal relationship. Feudalism, as we saw in our study of political government, was a system of contract between the lord and the labourer by which the lord and master ran the risks, set on foot the enterprises (chiefly military), and enjoyed the spoils, incidental to mediaeval life, while the labourer stuck to his work and received security and protection in exchange. Feudalism broke down because it involved too irksome a dependence, because it was found to be incompatible with the personal independence which is the birthright of a modern man. So it is idle to expect that the ideal of security will carry us very far by itself towards the perfect industrial commonwealth.

Take a second example of the wide gulf that still subsists between men's ideas of politics and men's ideas of industry. It is quite common, even in these latter days, and among those who have freely sacrificed their nearest and dearest to the claims of the State, to hear manufacturers and merchants say that they have a 'right to a good profit'. The President of the Board of Trade remarked openly in the House of Commons after many months of war that it was more than one could expect of human nature for coal-owners not to get the highest price they could. Such a standpoint is not merely indecent: it is hopelessly out-of-date. Looked at from the political point of view it is a pure anachronism. There used to be times when men made large fortunes out of the service of government, as men still make them out of the service of the community in trade and industry to-day. In the days of St. Matthew, when tax-gathering was let out by contract, the apostle's partners would probably have declared, as Mr. Runciman does to-day, that it was more than one could expect of human nature that a publican who had a government contract for the collection of the taxes should not get all he could out of the tax-payer. It is, indeed, little more than a century ago since it was a matter of course in this country to look upon oversea colonies merely as plantations—that is, as business investments rather than as communities of human beings. The existence of Chartered Company government marks a survival of this habit of mind. The old colonial system, which embodied this point of view, proved demoralizing not only to the home government but to the colonists, as a similar view is to the working class, and it led to the loss of the American colonies as surely as a similar attitude on the part of employers leads to unrest and rebellion among workpeople to-day.

We have thus a long way to travel before the ideals of politics have been assimilated into the industrial life of the community and have found fitting embodiment in its kindred and more complex problems. But at least we have reached a point where we can see what the problem of industrial government is. We can say with assurance that a system which treats human beings purely as instruments or as passive servants, and atrophies their self-determination and their sense of individual and corporate responsibility, is as far from perfection in industry as the Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings, with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them in this—that they too often stand for similarly authoritarian ideas of government and direction. Industry is still an autocracy, as politics was in the days before the supremacy of Parliament. Power still descends from above instead of springing from below. It is a power limited no doubt by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the government of England used to be before the transference of sovereignty from the monarch to the representatives of his subjects. It was recently announced in the press that Lord Rhondda had bought a group of Welsh collieries for 2 millions, and that as a result 'Lord Rhondda now controls over 3-1/2 millions of capital, pays 2-1/2 millions in wages every year, and is virtually the dictator of the economic destiny of a quarter of a million miners. Rumours are also current', the extract continues, 'that Lord Rhondda is extending his control over the press of Wales'.[78] The existence of such power in this twentieth century in the hands of single individuals, not selected from the mass for their special wisdom or humanity, is a stupendous fact which must give pause to any one who is inclined to feel complacent about modern industrial progress. In days gone by political power was as irresponsible as the economic power wielded to-day by Lord Rhondda; and it descended from father to son by hereditary right in the same way as the control over the lives of countless American workers descends to-day as a matter of course from John D. Rockefeller senior to John D. Rockefeller junior. If there is any reality at all in our political faith we must believe that a similar development towards self-government can and must take place in industry. It may be that generations will elapse before the problems of industrial government find a final and satisfactory constitutional solution. But at least we can say that there is only one basis for that solution which is compatible with a sound ideal of government, or indeed with any reasoned view of morality or religion—the basis of individual and corporate freedom with its corresponding obligations of responsibility and self-respect. No nation, as Abraham Lincoln said, can remain half-slave and half-free: and it was a greater than Lincoln who warned us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. It is this underlying conflict of ideals in the organization of our existing economic system which is the real cause of the 'Labour unrest' of which we have heard so much in recent years.

With this warning in our minds as to the imperfections of our modern industrial organization, let us briefly survey the record of the forms of economic association which preceded it.