FOOTNOTES:

1.Man's Control over Nature:Ray Lankester,The Kingdom of Man, and other essays. 1912.Demolins,Comment la route crée le type social.Curtis (ed. by),The Commonwealth of Nations. Vol. i, 1916.Murphy,The Basis of Ascendancy. 1909.Introduction to the Study of International Relations(Greenwood and others). 1916.2.Political Ideals:The Jews: Todd,Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel. 1904.Greece:Aristotle's Politics, translated by B. Jowett. 1908.Dickinson,The Greek View of Life. 1909.Barker,The Political thought of Plato and Aristotle. 1908.Rome: H. Stuart Jones,The Roman Empire. (Story of the Nations.) 1908. Warde Fowler,Rome(Home University Series).The Middle Ages: A. L. Smith,Church and State in the Middle Ages. 1911.Gierke,Political Theories of the Middle Ages(introduction by Maitland). 1900.Miscellaneous: Wallas,Human Nature in Politics. 1908.Acton,The History of Freedom, and other essays. 1909.Lowell,The Government of England.Bülow,Imperial Germany. 1916.

FOOTNOTES:[53]A. L. Smith,Church and State in the Middle Ages, pp. 207-8.[54]Lankester,Nature and Man, Romanes Lecture, 1905, pp. 27-9.[55]The Commonwealth of Nations, edited by L. Curtis, Part I, p. 130.[56]Ibid., p. 166.[57]P. H. Kerr inAn Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 1915, p. 149.[58]A still better name would be the Great Responsibilities.[59]Second Thoughts of an Economist, 1916, pp. 17-18, 22.[60]Freedom and other Essays, p. 22.[61]Isaiah lxvi. 2; lvii. 19, 21; ii. 3, 4.[62]Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, ch. xvi. 5.[63]End of Book I of theEcclesiastical Polity.[64]Gierke,Political Theories of the Middle Age, pp. 8 and 10.[65]The Commonwealth of Nations, Part I, p. 73.[66]Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier, ii. 276.

[53]A. L. Smith,Church and State in the Middle Ages, pp. 207-8.

[54]Lankester,Nature and Man, Romanes Lecture, 1905, pp. 27-9.

[55]The Commonwealth of Nations, edited by L. Curtis, Part I, p. 130.

[56]Ibid., p. 166.

[57]P. H. Kerr inAn Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 1915, p. 149.

[58]A still better name would be the Great Responsibilities.

[59]Second Thoughts of an Economist, 1916, pp. 17-18, 22.

[60]Freedom and other Essays, p. 22.

[61]Isaiah lxvi. 2; lvii. 19, 21; ii. 3, 4.

[62]Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, ch. xvi. 5.

[63]End of Book I of theEcclesiastical Polity.

[64]Gierke,Political Theories of the Middle Age, pp. 8 and 10.

[65]The Commonwealth of Nations, Part I, p. 73.

[66]Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier, ii. 276.

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 historyisa 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 sociologistwill 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 humanspiritat all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or rather the increasing complication, ofthings, 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 greatmass 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 usedthe 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 onepurveyor 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, betweenpotter 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 havebeen 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 todemand, 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 callsupply. 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 suppliedsomething 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.

Economic Progress, then, is progress both on the side of demand and on the side of supply. It is a progress in wants as well as in their means of satisfaction: a progress in the aspirations of the household as well as in the contrivances of its purveyors: a progress in the sense of what life might be, as well as in the skill and genius and organizing powers of those to whom the community looks for help in the realization of its hopes. It is important that this double aspect of our subject should be realized, for in what follows we shall have no opportunity to dwell further upon it. Space compels us to leave the household and its wants and aspirations out of account and to direct our attention solely to the side of supply; although it must always be remembered that no real and permanent progress in the organization of production is possible without improvements in the quality and reduction in the number of the requirements of what is called civilization.[68]What we have to watch, in our study of progress in industry, is the history of man as a purveyor of the household: in other words, as a producer of goods and services: from the days of the primitive savage with his bark canoe to the gigantic industrial enterprises of our own time.

We can best do so by dividing our subject into two onsomewhat similar lines to the division in our study of government. Let us consider industry, first as an activity involving a relationship between man and Nature; secondly, as involving what may be called a problem of industrial government, a problem arising out of the co-operation between man and man in industrial work. In the first of these aspects we shall see man as a maker, an inventor, an artist; in the second as a subject or a citizen, a slave or a free man, in the Industrial Commonwealth.

Man as a maker or producer carries us back to the dawn of history. Man is a tool-using animal and the early stages of human history are a record of the elaboration of tools. The flint axes in our museums are the earliest monuments of the activity of the human spirit. We do not know what the cave men of the Old Stone Age said or thought, or indeed whether they did anything that we should call speaking or thinking at all; but we know what they made. Centuries and millenniums elapsed between them and the first peoples of whom we have any more intimate record—centuries during which the foundations of our existing industrial knowledge and practice were being steadily laid. 'One may say in general,' says Mr. Marvin,[69]

that most of the fruitful practical devices of mankind had their origin in prehistoric times, many of them existing then with little essential difference. Any one of them affords a lesson in the gradual elaboration of the simple. A step minute in itself leads on and on, and so all the practical arts are built up, a readier and more observant mind imitating and adapting the work of predecessors, as we imagined the first man making his first flint axe. The history of the plough goes back to the elongation of a bent stick. The wheel would arise from cutting out the middle of a trunk used as a roller. House architecture is the imitation with logs and mud of the natural sheltersof the rocks, and begins its great development when men have learnt to make square corners instead of a rough circle. And so on with all the arts of life or pleasure, including clothing, cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting.

How did this gradual progress come about? Mr. Marvin himself supplies the answer. Through the action of the 'readier and more observant minds'—in other words, through specialization and the division of labour. As far back as we can go in history we find a recognition that men are not all alike, that some have one gift and some another, and that it is to the advantage of society to let each use his own gift in the public service. Among primitive peoples there has indeed often been a belief that men are compensated for physical weakness and disability by peculiar excellence in some sphere of their own. Hephaestos among the Greek gods was lame: so he becomes a blacksmith and uses his arms. Homer is blind: so instead of fighting he sings of war. They would not go so far as to maintain that all lame men must be good blacksmiths or all blind men good poets: but at least they recognized that there was room in the community for special types and that the blacksmith and the poet were as useful as the ordinary run of cultivators and fighting men. The Greek word for craftsman—δημιουργός—'worker for the people,' shows how the Greeks felt on this point. To them poetry and craftsmanship were as much honourable occupations or, as we should say, professional activities as fighting and tilling. Whether Homer took to poetry because he could not fight or because he had an overwhelming poetic gift, he had justified his place in the community.

Specialization is the foundation of all craftsmanship and therefore the source of all industrial progress. We recognize this, of course, in common speech. 'Practice makes perfect,' 'Genius is an infinite capacity fortaking pains,' are only different ways of saying that it is not enough to be 'ready' and 'observant', but that continued activity and concentration are necessary. A perfect industrial community would not be a community where everybody was doing the same thing: nor would it be a community where every one was doing just what he liked at the moment: it would be a community where every one was putting all his strength into the work which he was by nature best qualified to do—where, in the words of Kipling:

No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as They Are.

Progress in industry, then, on this side, consists in increasing specialization and in the perfection of the relationship between the workman and his work. Man in this world is destined to labour, and labour is often described as the curse of Adam. But in reality, as every one knows who has tried it, or observed the habits of those who have, idleness is far more of a curse than labour. Few men—at any rate in the temperate zone—can be consistently idle and remain happy. The born idler is almost as rare as the born poet. Most men, and, it must be added, most women, are happier working. If holidays were the rule and work the exception the world would be a much less cheerful place than it is even to-day. Purposeful activity is as natural to man as playing is to a kitten. From a purely natural point of view, no one has ever given a better definition of happiness than Aristotle when he defined it asan activity of the soul in the direction of excellence in an unhampered life. By excellence, of course, in this famous definition, Aristotle does not mean simplyvirtue: he means excellence in work. It is impossible, as we all know, to be good in the abstract. We must be good in some particular directions,atsome particular thing. And the particular thing that we are good at isourwork, our craft, our art—or, to use our less aesthetic English word, for which there is no equivalent in Greek, our duty. If happiness is to be found in doing one's duty, it does not result from doing that duty badly, but from doing it well—turning out, as we say, a thoroughly good piece of work, whether a day's work or a life work. There is a lingering idea, still held in some quarters, that the more unpleasant an activity is the more virtuous it is. This is a mere barbarous survival from the days of what Nietzsche called slave-morality. We are each of us born with special individual gifts and capacities. There is, if we only knew it, some particular kind or piece of work which we are pre-eminently fitted to do—some particular activity or profession, be it held in high or in low repute in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady happiness of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that it ministers to human progress and to the glory of God deliberately to bury our talent out of sight and to seek rather work which, because it is irksome and unpleasant to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or really well? No one who knows anything of education or of the training of the young, no one, indeed, who has any love for children, would dare to say that we should. Our State educational system, miserably defective though it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering to the special gifts of its pupils—of trying by scholarships, by Care Committees, by the institution of schools with a special 'bias', to meet the needs of different kinds of young people and to set them in the path on which they are best fitted to travel.

In doing this the modern State is only trying to carryout the principle laid down in the greatest book ever written on education—Plato'sRepublic. Plato's object was to train every citizen to fill the one position where he could lead the best life for the good of the State. His aim was not to make his citizens happy but to promote goodness; but he had enough faith in human nature—and who can be an educational thinker without having faith in human nature?—to be convinced that to enable men to 'do their bit', as we say to-day, was to assure them of the truest happiness. We of this generation know how abundantly that faith has been confirmed. And indeed we can appeal in this matter not only to the common sense of Education Authorities or to the philosophy of the ancients, but to the principles of the Christian religion. The late Professor Smart, who was not only a good economist but a good man; has some very pertinent words on this subject. 'If for some reason that we know not of,' he remarks,[70]

this present is merely the first stage in being; if we are all at school, and not merely pitched into the world by chance to pick up our living as best we can ... it seems to me that we have reason enough to complain of the existing economic system.... I imagine that many of our churchgoing people, if they ever get to the heaven they sing about, will find themselves most uncomfortable, if it be a place for which they have made no preparation but in the 'business' in which they have earned their living.... A man's daily work is a far greater thing towards the development of the God that is in him than his wealth. And, however revolutionary the idea is, I must say that all our accumulations of wealth are little to the purpose of life if they do not tend towards the giving to all men the opportunity of such work as will have its rewardin the doing.

And of his own particular life-work, teaching, he remarks, in words that testify to his own inner peaceand 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 suchpersons 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 generalimpression 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. Notbecause 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 ora 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 thewar 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 notdependent 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 treesis 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 ...

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 treesis 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 ...

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

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