[1] Reprinted inThe Industrial Council for the Building Industry.
[2]Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, Vol. I, p. 2506.
What form of management should replace the administration of industry by the agents of shareholders? What is most likely to hold it to its main purpose, and to be least at the mercy of predatory interests and functionless supernumeraries, and of the alternations of sullen dissatisfaction and spasmodic revolt which at present distract it? Whatever the system upon which industry is administered, one thing is certain. Its economic processes and results must be public, because only if they are public can it be known whether the service of industry is vigilant, effective and honorable, whether its purpose is being realized and its function carried out. The defense of secrecy in business resembles the defense of adulteration on the ground that it is a legitimate weapon of competition; indeed it has even less justification than that famous doctrine, for the condition of effective competition is publicity, and one motive for secrecy is to prevent it.
Those who conduct industry at the present time and who are most emphatic that, as the Duke of Wellington said of the unreformed House of Commons, they "have never read or heard of any measure up to the present moment which can in any degree satisfy the mind" that the method of conducting it can in any way be improved, are also those apparently who, with somehonorable exceptions, are most reluctant that the full facts about it should be known. And it is crucial that they should be known. It is crucial not only because, in the present ignorance of the real economic situation, all industrial disagreements tend inevitably to be battles in the dark, in which "ignorant armies clash by night," but because, unless there is complete publicity as to profits and costs, it is impossible to form any judgment either of the reasonableness of the prices which are charged or of the claims to remuneration of the different parties engaged in production. For balance sheets, with their opportunities for concealing profits, give no clear light upon the first, and no light at all upon the second. And so, when the facts come out, the public is aghast at revelations which show that industry is conducted with bewildering financial extravagance. If the full facts had been published, as they should have been, quarter by quarter, these revelations would probably not have been made at all, because publicity itself would have been an antiseptic and there would have been nothing sensational to reveal.
The events of the last few years are a lesson which should need no repetition. The Government, surprised at the price charged for making shells at a time when its soldiers were ordered by Headquarters not to fire more than a few rounds per day, whatever the need for retaliation, because there were not more than a few to fire, establishes a costing department to analyze the estimates submitted by manufacturers and to compare them, item by item, with the costs in its own factories. It finds that, through the mere pooling of knowledge,"some of the reductions made in the price of shells and similar munitions," as the Chartered Accountant employed by the Department tells us, "have been as high as 50% of the original price." The household consumer grumbles at the price of coal. For once in a way, amid a storm of indignation from influential persons engaged in the industry, the facts are published. And what do they show? That, after 2/6 has been added to the already high price of coal because the poorer mines are alleged not to be paying their way, 21% of the output examined by the Commission was produced at a profit of 1/- to 3/- per ton, 32% at a profit of 3/- to 5/-, 13% at a profit of 5/- to 7/-, and 14% at a profit of 7/- per ton and over, while the profits of distributors in London alone amount in the aggregate to over $3,200,000, and the co-operative movement, which aims not at profit, but at service, distributes household coal at a cost of from 2/- to 4/- less per ton than is charged by the coal trade![1]
"But these are exceptions." They may be. It is possible that in the industries, in which, as the recent Committee on Trusts has told us, "powerful Combinations or Consolidations of one kind or another are in a position effectively to control output and prices," not only costs are cut to the bare minimum but profits are inconsiderable. But then why insist on this humiliating tradition of secrecy with regard to them, when every one who uses their products, and every one who renders honest service to production, stands to gain by publicity? If industry is to become a profession, whatever itsmanagement, the first of its professional rules should be, as Sir John Mann told the Coal Commission, that "all cards should be placed on the table." If it were the duty of a Public Department to publish quarterly exact returns as to costs of production and profits in all the firms throughout an industry, the gain in mere productive efficiency, which should appeal to our enthusiasts for output, would be considerable; for the organization whose costs were least would become the standard with which all other types of organization would be compared. The gain inmorale, which is also, absurd though it may seem, a condition of efficiency, would be incalculable. For industry would be conducted in the light of day. Its costs, necessary or unnecessary, the distribution of the return to it, reasonable or capricious, would be a matter of common knowledge. It would be held to its purpose by the mere impossibility of persuading those who make its products or those who consume them to acquiesce, as they acquiesce now, in expenditure which is meaningless because it has contributed nothing to the service which the industry exists to perform.
The organization of industry as a profession does not involve only the abolition of functionless property, and the maintenance of publicity as the indispensable condition of a standard of professional honor. It implies also that those who perform its work should undertake that its work is performed effectively. It means that they should not merely be held to the service of the public by fear of personal inconvenience or penalties, but that they should treat the discharge of professionalresponsibilities as an obligation attaching not only to a smalléliteof intellectuals, managers or "bosses," who perform the technical work of "business management," but as implied by the mere entry into the industry and as resting on the corporate consent and initiative of the rank and file of workers. It is precisely, indeed, in the degree to which that obligation is interpreted as attaching to all workers, and not merely to a select class, that the difference between the existing industrial order, collectivism and the organization of industry as a profession resides. The first involves the utilization of human beings for the purpose of private gain; the second their utilization for the purpose of public service; the third the association in the service of the public of their professional pride, solidarity and organization.
The difference in administrative machinery between the second and third might not be considerable. Both involve the drastic limitation or transference to the public of the proprietary rights of the existing owners of industrial capital. Both would necessitate machinery for bringing the opinion of the consumers to bear upon the service supplied them by the industry. The difference consists in the manner in which the obligations of the producer to the public are conceived. He may either be the executant of orders transmitted to him by its agents; or he may, through his organization, himself take a positive part in determining what those orders should be. In the former case he is responsible for his own work, but not for anything else. If he hews his stint of coal, it is no business of his whether the pit is afailure; if he puts in the normal number of rivets, he disclaims all further interest in the price or the sea-worthiness of the ship. In the latter his function embraces something more than the performance of the specialized piece of work allotted to him. It includes also a responsibility for the success of the undertaking as a whole. And since responsibility is impossible without power, his position would involve at least so much power as is needed to secure that he can affect in practice the conduct of the industry. It is this collective liability for the maintenance of a certain quality of service which is, indeed, the distinguishing feature of a profession. It is compatible with several different kinds of government, or indeed, when the unit of production is not a group, but an individual, with hardly any government at all. What it does involve is that the individual, merely by entering the profession should have committed himself to certain obligations in respect of its conduct, and that the professional organization, whatever it may be, should have sufficient power to enable it to maintain them.
The demand for the participation of the workers in the control of industry is usually advanced in the name of the producer, as a plea for economic freedom or industrial democracy. "Political freedom," writes the Final Report of the United States Commission of Industrial Relations, which was presented in 1916, "can exist only where there is industrial freedom.... There are now within the body of our Republic industrial communities which are virtually Principalities, oppressive to those dependent upon them for a livelihoodand a dreadful menace to the peace and welfare of the nation." The vanity of Englishmen may soften the shadows and heighten the lights. But the concentration of authority is too deeply rooted in the very essence of Capitalism for differences in the degree of the arbitrariness with which it is exercised to be other than trivial. The control of a large works does, in fact, confer a kind of private jurisdiction in matters concerning the life and livelihood of the workers, which, as the United States' Commission suggests, may properly be described as "industrial feudalism." It is not easy to understand how the traditional liberties of Englishmen are compatible with an organization of industry which, except in so far as it has been qualified by law or trade unionism, permits populations almost as large as those of some famous cities of the past to be controlled in their rising up and lying down, in their work, economic opportunities, and social life by the decisions of a Committee of half-a-dozen Directors.
The most conservative thinkers recognize that the present organization of industry is intolerable in the sacrifice of liberty which it entails upon the producer. But each effort which he makes to emancipate himself is met by a protest that if the existing system is incompatible with freedom, it at least secures efficient service, and that efficient service is threatened by movements which aim at placing a greater measure of industrial control in the hands of the workers. The attempt to drive a wedge between the producer and the consumer is obviously the cue of all the interests which are conscious that by themselves they are unable to hold backthe flood. It is natural, therefore, that during the last few months they should have concentrated their efforts upon representing that every advance in the demands and in the power of any particular group of workers is a new imposition upon the general body of the public. Eminent persons, who are not obviously producing more than they consume, explain to the working classes that unless they produce more they must consume less. Highly syndicated combinations warn the public against the menace of predatory syndicalism. The owners of mines and minerals, in their new role as protectors of the poor, lament the "selfishness" of the miners, as though nothing but pure philanthropy had hitherto caused profits and royalties to be reluctantly accepted by themselves.
The assumption upon which this body of argument rests is simple. It is that the existing organization of industry is the safeguard of productive efficiency, and that from every attempt to alter it the workers themselves lose more as consumers than they can gain as producers. The world has been drained of its wealth and demands abundance of goods. The workers demand a larger income, greater leisure, and a more secure and dignified status. These two demands, it is argued, are contradictory. For how can the consumer be supplied with cheap goods, if, as a worker, he insists on higher wages and shorter hours? And how can the worker secure these conditions, if as a consumer, he demands cheap goods? So industry, it is thought, moves in a vicious circle of shorter hours and higher wages and less production, which in time must meanlonger hours and lower wages; and every one receives less, because every one demands more.
The picture is plausible, but it is fallacious. It is fallacious not merely in its crude assumption that a rise in wages necessarily involves an increase in costs, but for another and more fundamental reason. In reality the cause of economic confusion is not that the demands of producer and consumer meet in blunt opposition; for, if they did, their incompatibility, when they were incompatible, would be obvious, and neither could deny his responsibility to the other, however much he might seek to evade it. It is that they do not, but that, as industry is organized to-day, what the worker foregoes the general body of consumers does not necessarily gain, and what the consumer pays the general body of workers does not necessarily receive. If the circle is vicious, its vice is not that it is closed, but that it is always half open, so that part of production leaks away in consumption which adds nothing to productive energies, and that the producer, because he knows this, does not fully use even the productive energy which he commands.
It is the consciousness of this leak which sets every one at cross purposes. No conceivable system of industrial organization can secure industrial peace, if by "peace" is meant a complete absence of disagreement. What could be secured would be that disagreements should not flare up into a beacon of class warfare. If every member of a group puts something into a common pool on condition of taking something out, they may still quarrel about the size of the shares, as children quarrelover cake; but if the total is known and the claims admitted, that is all they can quarrel about, and, since they all stand on the same footing, any one who holds out for more than his fellows must show some good reason why he should get it. But in industry the claims are not all admitted, for those who put nothing in demand to take something out; both the total to be divided and the proportion in which the division takes place are sedulously concealed; and those who preside over the distribution of the pool and control what is paid out of it have a direct interest in securing as large a share as possible for themselves and in allotting as small a share as possible to others. If one contributor takes less, so far from it being evident that the gain will go to some one who has put something in and has as good a right as himself, it may go to some one who has put in nothing and has no right at all. If another claims more, he may secure it, without plundering a fellow-worker, at the expense of a sleeping partner who is believed to plunder both. In practice, since there is no clear principle determining what they ought to take, both take all that they can get.
In such circumstances denunciations of the producer for exploiting the consumer miss the mark. They are inevitably regarded as an economic version of the military device used by armies which advance behind a screen of women and children, and then protest at the brutality of the enemy in shooting non-combatants. They are interpreted as evidence, not that a section of the producers are exploiting the remainder, but that a minority of property-owners, which is in opposition toboth, can use its economic power to make efforts directed against those who consume much and produce little rebound on those who consume little and produce much. And the grievance, of which the Press makes so much, that some workers may be taking too large a share compared with others, is masked by the much greater grievance, of which it says nothing whatever, that some idlers take any share at all. The abolition of payments which are made without any corresponding economic service is thus one of the indispensable conditions both of economic efficiency and industrial peace, because their existence prevents different classes of workers from restraining each other, by uniting them all against the common enemy. Either the principle of industry is that of function, in which case slack work is only less immoral than no work at all; or it is that of grab, in which case there is no morality in the matter. But it cannot be both. And it is useless either for property-owners or for Governments to lament the mote in the eye of the trade unions as long as, by insisting on the maintenance of functionless property, they decline to remove the beam in their own.
The truth is that only workers can prevent the abuse of power by workers, because only workers are recognized as possessing any title to have their claims considered. And the first step to preventing the exploitation of the consumer by the producer is simple. It is to turn all men into producers, and thus to remove the temptation for particular groups of workers to force their claims at the expense of the public, by removing the valid excuse that such gains as they may get aretaken from those who at present have no right to them, because they are disproportionate to service or obtained for no service at all. Indeed, if work were the only title to payment, the danger of the community being exploited by highly organized groups of producers would largely disappear. For, when no payments were made to non-producers, there would be no debatable ground for which to struggle, and it would become evident that if any one group of producers took more, another must put up with less.
Under such conditions a body of workers who used their strong strategic position to extort extravagant terms for themselves at the expense of their fellow-workers might properly be described as exploiting the community. But at present such a statement is meaningless. It is meaningless because before the community can be exploited the community must exist, and its existence in the sphere of economics is to-day not a fact but only an aspiration. The procedure by which, whenever any section of workers advance demands which are regarded as inconvenient by their masters, they are denounced as a band of anarchists who are preying on the public may be a convenient weapon in an emergency, but, once it is submitted to analysis, it is logically self-destructive. It has been applied within recent years, to the postmen, to the engineers, to the policemen, to the miners and to the railway men, a population with their dependents, of some eight million persons; and in the case of the last two the whole body of organized labor made common cause with those of whose exorbitant demands it was alleged to be the victim. But when theseworkers and their sympathizers are deducted, what is "the community" which remains? It is a naïve arithmetic which produces a total by subtracting one by one all the items which compose it; and the art which discovers the public interest by eliminating the interests of successive sections of the public smacks of the rhetorician rather than of the statesman.
The truth is that at present it is idle to seek to resist the demands of any group of workers by appeals to "the interests of society," because to-day, as long as the economic plane alone is considered, there is not one society but two, which dwell together in uneasy juxtaposition, like Sinbad and the Old Man of the Sea, but which in spirit, in ideals, and in economic interest, are worlds asunder. There is the society of those who live by labor, whatever their craft or profession, and the society of those who live on it. All the latter cannot command the sacrifices or the loyalty which are due to the former, for they have no title which will bear inspection. The instinct to ignore that tragic division instead of ending it is amiable, and sometimes generous. But it is a sentimentality which is like the morbid optimism of the consumptive who dares not admit even to himself the virulence of his disease. As long as the division exists, the general body of workers, while it may suffer from the struggles of any one group within it, nevertheless supports them by its sympathy, because all are interested in the results of the contest carried on by each. Different sections of workers will exercise mutual restraint only when the termination of thestruggle leaves them face to face with each other, and not as now, with the common enemy. The ideal of a united society in which no one group uses its power to encroach upon the standards of another is, in short, unattainable, except through the preliminary abolition of functionless property.
Those to whom a leisure class is part of an immutable order without which civilization is inconceivable, dare not admit, even to themselves, that the world is poorer, not richer, because of its existence. So, when, as now it is important that productive energy should be fully used, they stamp and cry, and write toThe Timesabout the necessity for increased production, though all the time they themselves, their way of life and expenditure, and their very existence as a leisure class, are among the causes why production is not increased. In all their economic plans they make one reservation, that, however necessitous the world may be, it shall still support them. But men who work do not make that reservation, nor is there any reason why they should; and appeals to them to produce more wealth because the public needs it usually fall upon deaf ears, even when such appeals are not involved in the ignorance and misapprehensions which often characterize them.
For the workman is not the servant of the consumer, for whose sake greater production is demanded, but of shareholders, whose primary aim is dividends, and to whom all production, however futile or frivolous, so long as it yields dividends, is the same. It is useless to urge that he should produce more wealth for thecommunity, unless at the same time he is assured that it is the community which will benefit in proportion as more wealth is produced. If every unnecessary charge upon coal-getting had been eliminated, it would be reasonable that the miners should set a much needed example by refusing to extort better terms for themselves at the expense of the public. But there is no reason why they should work for lower wages or longer hours as long as those who are to-day responsible for the management of the industry conduct it with "the extravagance and waste" stigmatized by the most eminent official witness before the Coal Commission, or why the consumer should grumble at the rapacity of the miner as long as he allows himself to be mulcted by swollen profits, the costs of an ineffective organization, and unnecessary payments to superfluous middlemen.
If to-day the miner or any other workman produces more, he has no guarantee that the result will be lower prices rather than higher dividends and larger royalties, any more than, as a workman, he can determine the quality of the wares which his employer supplies to customers, or the price at which they are sold. Nor, as long as he is directly the servant of a profit-making company, and only indirectly the servant of the community, can any such guarantee be offered him. It can be offered only in so far as he stands in an immediate and direct relation to the public for whom industry is carried on, so that, when all costs have been met, any surplus will pass to it, and not to private individuals. It will be accepted only in so far as the workers in each industry are not merely servants executing orders, butthemselves have a collective responsibility for the character of the service, and can use their organizations not merely to protect themselves against exploitation, but to make positive contributions to the administration and development of their industry.
[1]Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 9261-9.
Thus it is not only for the sake of the producers, on whom the old industrial order weighed most heavily, that a new industrial order is needed. It is needed for the sake of the consumers, because the ability on which the old industrial order prided itself most and which is flaunted most as an argument against change, the ability to serve them effectively, is itself visibly breaking down. It is breaking down at what was always its most vulnerable point, the control of the human beings whom, with characteristic indifference to all but their economic significance, it distilled for its own purposes into an abstraction called "Labor." The first symptom of its collapse is what the first symptom of economic collapses has usually been in the past—the failure of customary stimuli to evoke their customary response in human effort.
Till that failure is recognized and industry reorganized so that new stimuli may have free play, the collapse will not correct itself, but, doubtless with spasmodic revivals and flickerings of energy, will continue and accelerate. The cause of it is simple. It is that those whose business it is to direct economic activity are increasingly incapable of directing the men upon whom economic activity depends. The fault is not that of individuals, but of a system, of Industrialism itself.During the greater part of the nineteenth century industry was driven by two forces, hunger and fear, and the employer commanded them both. He could grant or withhold employment as he pleased. If men revolted against his terms he could dismiss them, and if they were dismissed what confronted them was starvation or the workhouse. Authority was centralized; its instruments were passive; the one thing which they dreaded was unemployment. And since they could neither prevent its occurrence nor do more than a little to mitigate its horrors when it occurred, they submitted to a discipline which they could not resist, and industry pursued its course through their passive acquiescence in a power which could crush them individually if they attempted to oppose it.
That system might be lauded as efficient or denounced as inhuman. But, at least, as its admirers were never tired of pointing out, it worked. And, like the Prussian State, which alike in its virtues and deficiencies it not a little resembled, as long as it worked it survived denunciations of its methods, as a strong man will throw off a disease. But to-day it is ceasing to have even the qualities of its defects. It is ceasing to be efficient. It no longer secures the ever-increasing output of wealth which it offered in its golden prime, and which enabled it to silence criticism by an imposing spectacle of material success. Though it still works, it works unevenly, amid constant friction and jolts and stoppages, without the confidence of the public and without full confidence even in itself, a tyrant who must intrigue and cajole where formerly he commanded, a gaoler who, if not yetdeprived of whip, dare only administer moderate chastisement, and who, though he still protests that he alone can keep the treadmill moving and get the corn ground, is compelled to surrender so much of his authority as to make it questionable whether he is worth his keep. For the instruments through which Capitalism exercised discipline are one by one being taken from it. It cannot pay what wages it likes or work what hours it likes. In well-organized industries the power of arbitrary dismissal, the very center of its authority, is being shaken, because men will no longer tolerate a system which makes their livelihood dependent on the caprices of an individual. In all industries alike the time is not far distant when the dread of starvation can no longer be used to cow dissatisfied workers into submission, because the public will no longer allow involuntary unemployment to result in starvation.
And if Capitalism is losing its control of men's bodies, still more has it lost its command of their minds. The product of a civilization which regarded "the poor" as instruments, at worst of the luxuries, at best of the virtues, of the rich, its psychological foundation fifty years ago was an ignorance in the mass of mankind which led them to reverence as wisdom the very follies of their masters, and an almost animal incapacity for responsibility. Education and experience have destroyed the passivity which was the condition of the perpetuation of industrial government in the hands of an oligarchy of private capitalists. The workman of to-day has as little belief in the intellectual superiority of many of those who direct industry as he has in the morality ofthe system. It appears to him to be not only oppressive, but wasteful, unintelligent and inefficient. In the light of his own experience in the factory and the mine, he regards the claim of the capitalist to be the self-appointed guardian of public interests as a piece of sanctimonious hypocrisy. For he sees every day that efficiency is sacrificed to shortsighted financial interests; and while as a man he is outraged by the inhumanity of the industrial order, as a professional who knows the difference between good work and bad he has a growing contempt at once for its misplaced parsimony and its misplaced extravagance, for the whole apparatus of adulteration, advertisement and quackery which seems inseparable from the pursuit of profit as the main standard of industrial success.
So Capitalism no longer secures strenuous work by fear, for it is ceasing to be formidable. And it cannot secure it by respect, for it has ceased to be respected. And the very victories by which it seeks to reassert its waning prestige are more disastrous than defeats. Employers may congratulate themselves that they have maintained intact their right to freedom of management, or opposed successfully a demand for public ownership, or broken a movement for higher wages and shorter hours. But what is success in a trade dispute or in a political struggle is often a defeat in the workshop: the workmen may have lost, but it does not follow that their employers, still less that the public, which is principally composed of workmen, have won. For the object of industry is to produce goods, and to produce them at the lowest cost in human effort.But there is no alchemy which will secure efficient production from the resentment or distrust of men who feel contempt for the order under which they work. It is a commonplace that credit is the foundation of industry. But credit is a matter of psychology, and the workman has his psychology as well as the capitalist. If confidence is necessary to the investment of capital, confidence is not less necessary to the effective performance of labor by men whose sole livelihood depends upon it. If they are not yet strong enough to impose their will, they are strong enough to resist when their masters would impose theirs. They may work rather than strike. But they will work to escape dismissal, not for the greater glory of a system in which they do not believe; and, if they are dismissed, those who take their place will do the same.
That this is one cause of a low output has been stated both by employers and workers in the building industry, and by the representatives of the miners before the Coal Commission. It was reiterated with impressive emphasis by Mr. Justice Sankey. Nor is it seriously contested by employers themselves. What else, indeed, do their repeated denunciations of "restriction of output" mean except that they have failed to organize industry so as to secure the efficient service which it is their special function to provide? Nor is it appropriate to the situation to indulge in full-blooded denunciations of the "selfishness" of the working classes. "To draw an indictment against a whole nation" is a procedure which is as impossible in industry as it is in politics. Institutions must be adapted to human nature, nothuman nature to institutions. If the effect of the industrial system is such that a large and increasing number of ordinary men and women find that it offers them no adequate motive for economic effort, it is mere pedantry to denounce men and women instead of amending the system.
Thus the time has come when absolutism in industry may still win its battles, but loses the campaign, and loses it on the very ground of economic efficiency which was of its own selection. In the period of transition, while economic activity is distracted by the struggle between those who have the name and habit of power, but no longer the full reality of it, and those who are daily winning more of the reality of power but are not yet its recognized repositories, it is the consumer who suffers. He has neither the service of docile obedience, nor the service of intelligent co-operation. For slavery will work—as long as the slaves will let it; and freedom will work when men have learned to be free; but what will not work is a combination of the two. So the public goes short of coal not only because of the technical deficiencies of the system under which it is raised and distributed, but because the system itself has lost its driving force—because the coal owners can no longer persuade the miners into producing more dividends for them and more royalties for the owners of minerals, while the public cannot appeal to them to put their whole power into serving itself, because it has chosen that they should be the servants, not of itself, but of shareholders.
And, this dilemma is not, as some suppose, temporary,the aftermath of war, or peculiar to the coal industry, as though the miners alone were the children of sin which in the last few months they have been described to be. It is permanent; it has spread far; and, as sleeping spirits are stirred into life by education and one industry after another develops a strong corporate consciousness, it will spread further. Nor will it be resolved by lamentations or menaces or denunciations of leaders whose only significance is that they say openly what plain men feel privately. For the matter at bottom is one of psychology. What has happened is that the motives on which the industrial system relied for several generations to secure efficiency, secure it no longer. And it is as impossible to restore them, to revive by mere exhortation the complex of hopes and fears and ignorance and patient credulity and passive acquiescence, which together made men, fifty years ago, plastic instruments in the hands of industrialism, as to restore innocence to any others of those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge.
The ideal of some intelligent and respectable business men, the restoration of the golden sixties, when workmen were docile and confiding, and trade unions were still half illegal, and foreign competition meant English competition in foreign countries, and prices were rising a little and not rising too much, is the one Utopia which can never be realized. The King may walk naked as long as his courtiers protest that he is clad; but when a child or a fool has broken the spell a tailor is more important than all their admiration. If the public, which suffers from the slackening of economic activity,desires to end itsmalaise, it will not laud as admirable and all-sufficient the operation of motives which are plainly ceasing to move. It will seek to liberate new motives and to enlist them in its service. It will endeavor to find an alternative to incentives which were always degrading, to those who used them as much as to those upon whom they were used, and which now are adequate incentives no longer. And the alternative to the discipline which Capitalism exercised through its instruments of unemployment and starvation is the self-discipline of responsibility and professional pride.
So the demand which aims at stronger organization, fuller responsibility, larger powers for the sake of the producer as a condition of economic liberty, the demand for freedom, is not antithetic to the demand for more effective work and increased output which is being made in the interests of the consumer. It is complementary to it, as the insistence by a body of professional men, whether doctors or university teachers, on the maintenance of their professional independence and dignity against attempts to cheapen the service is not hostile to an efficient service, but, in the long run, a condition of it. The course of wisdom for the consumer would be to hasten, so far as he can, the transition. For, as at present conducted, industry is working against the grain. It is compassing sea and land in its efforts to overcome, by ingenious financial and technical expedients, obstacles which should never have existed. It is trying to produce its results by conquering professional feeling instead of using it. It is carrying not only its inevitable economic burdens, but an ever increasingload of ill will and skepticism. It has in fact "shot the bird which caused the wind to blow" and goes about its business with the corpse round its neck. Compared with that psychological incubus, the technical deficiencies of industry, serious though they often are, are a bagatelle, and the business men who preach the gospel of production without offering any plan for dealing with what is now the central fact in the economic situation, resemble a Christian apologist who should avoid disturbing the equanimity of his audience by carefully omitting all reference either to the fall of man or the scheme of salvation. If it is desired to increase the output of wealth, it is not a paradox, but the statement of an elementary economic truism to say that active and constructive co-operation on the part of the rank and file of workers would do more to contribute to that result than the discovery of a new coal-field or a generation of scientific invention.
The first condition of enlisting on the side of constructive work the professional feeling which is now apathetic, or even hostile to it, is to secure that when it is given its results accrue to the public, not to the owner of property in capital, in land, or in other resources. For this reason the attenuation of the rights at present involved in the private ownership of industrial capital, or their complete abolition, is not the demand of idealogues, but an indispensable element in a policy of economic efficiency, since it is the condition of the most effective functioning of the human beings upon whom, though, like other truisms, it is often forgotten,economic efficiency ultimately depends. But it is only one element. Co-operation may range from mere acquiescence to a vigilant and zealous initiative. The criterion of an effective system of administration is that it should succeed in enlisting in the conduct of industry the latent forces of professional pride to which the present industrial order makes little appeal, and which, indeed, Capitalism, in its war upon trade union organization, endeavored for many years to stamp out altogether.
Nor does the efficacy of such an appeal repose upon the assumption of that "change in human nature," which is the triumphantreductio ad absurdumadvanced by those who are least satisfied with the working of human nature as it is. What it does involve is that certain elementary facts should be taken into account, instead of, as at present, being ignored. That all work is distasteful and that "every man desires to secure the largest income with the least effort" may be as axiomatic as it is assumed to be. But in practice it makes all the difference to the attitude of the individual whether the collective sentiment of the group to which he belongs is on the side of effort or against it, and what standard of effort it sets. That, as employers complain, the public opinion of considerable groups of workers is against an intensification of effort as long as part of its result is increased dividends for shareholders, is no doubt, as far as mere efficiency is concerned, the gravest indictment of the existing industrial order. But, even when public ownership has taken the place of private capitalism, its ability to commandeffective service will depend ultimately upon its success in securing not merely that professional feeling is no longer an opposing force, but that it is actively enlisted upon the side of maintaining the highest possible standard of efficiency which can reasonably be demanded.
To put the matter concretely, while the existing ownership of mines is a positive inducement to inefficient work, public ownership administered by a bureaucracy, if it would remove the technical deficiencies emphasized by Sir Richard Redmayne as inseparable from the separate administration of 3,000 pits by 1,500 different companies, would be only too likely to miss a capital advantage which a different type of administration would secure. It would lose both the assistance to be derived from the technical knowledge of practical men who know by daily experience the points at which the details of administration can be improved, and the stimulus to efficiency springing from the corporate pride of a profession which is responsible for maintaining and improving the character of its service. Professional spirit is a force like gravitation, which in itself is neither good nor bad, but which the engineer uses, when he can, to do his work for him. If it is foolish to idealize it, it is equally shortsighted to neglect it. In what are describedpar excellenceas "the services" it has always been recognized thatesprit de corpsis the foundation of efficiency, and all means, some wise and some mischievous, are used to encourage it: in practice, indeed, the power upon which the country relied as its main safeguard in an emergency was the professional zeal of the navy and nothing else. Nor isthat spirit peculiar to the professions which are concerned with war. It is a matter of common training, common responsibilities, and common dangers. In all cases where difficult and disagreeable work is to be done, the force which elicits it is normally not merely money, but the public opinion and tradition of the little society in which the individual moves, and in the esteem of which he finds that which men value in success.
To ignore that most powerful of stimuli as it is ignored to-day, and then to lament that the efforts which it produces are not forthcoming, is the climax of perversity. To aim at eliminating from industry the growth and action of corporate feeling, for fear lest an organized body of producers should exploit the public, is a plausible policy. But it is short-sighted. It is "to pour away the baby with the bath," and to lower the quality of the service in an attempt to safeguard it. A wise system of administration would recognize that professional solidarity can do much of its work for it more effectively than it can do it itself, because the spirit of his profession is part of the individual and not a force outside him, and would make it its object to enlist that temper in the public service. It is only by that policy, indeed, that the elaboration of cumbrous regulations to prevent men doing what they should not, with the incidental result of sometimes preventing them from doing what they should—it is only by that policy that what is mechanical and obstructive in bureaucracy can be averted. For industry cannot run without laws. It must either control itself by professional standards, or it must be controlled by officials who are not of thecraft and who, however zealous and well-meaning, can hardly have the feel of it in their fingers. Public control and criticism are indispensable. But they should not be too detailed, or they defeat themselves. It would be better that, once fair standards have been established, the professional organization should check offenses against prices and quality than that it should be necessary for the State to do so. The alternative to minute external supervision is supervision from within by men who become imbued with the public obligations of their trade in the very process of learning it. It is, in short, professional in industry.
For this reason collectivism by itself is too simple a solution. Its failure is likely to be that of other rationalist systems.
"Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band."
If industrial reorganization is to be a living reality, and not merely a plan upon paper, its aim must be to secure not only that industry is carried on for the service of the public, but that it shall be carried on with the active co-operation of the organizations of producers. But co-operation involves responsibility, and responsibility involves power. It is idle to expect that men will give their best to any system which they do not trust, or that they will trust any system in the control of which they do not share. Their ability to carry professional obligations depends upon the power which they possess to remove the obstacles which prevent those obligations from being discharged, and upon their willingness, when they possess the power, to use it.