§ 17. One necessary condition of this progressive life cannot be ignored. Human life itself must become more qualitative, not only in its functional activities, but in its physical basis. The greatness and worth of a community must be seen more clearly to consist not in the numbers, but in the character of its members. If the number of individuals in a society continually increases, no reform in methods of consumption can prevent the constant increase in the proportion of human energy which must be put into the production of the prime material necessaries of physical life which are, and in spite of all improved methods of treating nature will remain, ultimately subject to a law of diminishing returns: so, less and less energy can be spared for the life of varied and delicate consumption, high individuality and intellectual and moral growth. Professor Geddes has well expressed the importance of this truth: "The remedy lies in higher and higher individuation—i.e., if we would repress excessive multiplication, we must develop the average individual standard throughout society. Population not merely tends to out-run the means of subsistence, but to degenerate below the level of subsistence, so that without steadily directing more and more of our industry from the production of those forms of wealthwhich merely support life to those which evoke it, from the increase of the fundamental necessities of animal life to that of the highest appliances of human culture, degeneration must go on."[293]
§ 18. One final consideration remains. Modern large-scale industry has enlarged and made more distinct an unnatural and injurious separation of the arts of production and the arts of consumption. Work has become more and more differentiated from enjoyment, and in a twofold way. Modern machine-industry has in the first place sharpened the distinction between the "working classes," whose name indicates that their primary function is to labour and not to live, and the comfortable classes, whose primary function is to live and not to labour, which private enterprise in machine-industry has greatly enlarged. The extremes of these large classes present the divorcement of labour and life in startling prominence. But since work and enjoyment are both human functions, they must be organically related in the life of every individual in a healthy community. It must be recognised to be as essential to the consumer to produce as for the producer to consume. The attempt on the part of an individual or a class to escape the physical and moral law which requires the output of personal exertion as the condition of wholesome consumption can never be successful. On the plane of physical health, Dr. Arlidge, in his book uponThe Diseases of Occupations, points the inevitable lesson in the high rate of disease and mortality of the "unoccupied class" in that period of their life when they have slaked their zest for volunteer exertion and assume the idle life which their economic power renders possible. The man of "independent means" cannot on the average keep his life in his body nearly so long as the half-starved, ill-housed agricultural labourer, from whose labour he draws the rents which keep him in idleness. The same law applies in the intellectual world. The dilettante person who tries to extract unceasing increments of intellectual or æsthetic enjoyment from books or pictures or travel, without the contribution of steady, painful intellectual effort, fails towin an intellectual life, for the mere automatic process of collecting the knowledge of others for personal consumption without striving to enlarge the general stock, congests and debilitates the mind and prevents the wholesome digestion and assimilation.
The same necessary evil arises from the sharp separation of the processes of production and consumption in the individual life of the worker. Industry which is purely monotonous, burdensome, uninteresting, uneducative, which contains within itself no elements of enjoyment, cannot be fully compensated by alternate periods of consumption or relaxation. The painful effort involved in all labour or exertion should have linked with it certain sustaining elements of related interest and pleasure. It is the absence of this which condemns machine-tending from the human standpoint, it is the presence of this which distinguishes every art. Hence in a progressive society we must look to see not the abolition of machinery, but the diminution of machine-tending which attends the growing perfection of machinery, in order that the arts may be able to absorb a larger share of human exertion.
The arts of production and consumption will, in the evolution of a wholesome industrial society, be found inseparable: not merely will they be seen to be organically related, but rather will appear as two aspects of the same fact, the concave and the convex of life. For the justly ordered life brings the identification of life, a continuous orderly intake and output of wholesome energy. This judgment, not of "sentimentalism" but of science, finds powerful but literally accurate expression in the saying of a great living thinker, "Life without work is guilt, work without art is brutality." Just in proportion as the truth of the latter phrase finds recognition the conditions which make "life without work" possible will disappear. Everything in human progress will be found to depend upon a progressive realisation of the nature of good "consumption." Just in proportion as our tastes become so qualitative that we require to put our own spontaneity, our sense of beauty and fitness, our vital force, into whatever work we do, and likewise require the same elements of spontaneity and individuality in all we enjoy, the economic conditions of a perfect society will be attained.
§ 19. This forecast of the social and industrial goal seems justified by a thoughtful interpretation of the tendencies visible in the development of modern industry. How fast may be the progress towards such an ideal, or how far such progress may be frustrated or impaired by the appearance of new or the strengthening of old antagonistic forces, lies beyond the powers of legitimate speculation. The endeavour to test industrial evolution by reference to the wider movements of human life brings into prominence two great tendencies whose operations, attested not dimly by modern history, are in close accord with the general trend of the development of social and individual life and the relations subsisting between the two.
As modern industrial societies develop they disclose certain material wants which are common to all or most members, and are less subject to fluctuations in quantity or quality of demand than others. These routine wants, representing that part of consumption which is common, can be supplied most economically by highly organised machinery and highly concentrated methods of production. But so long as the machinery for the satisfaction of the common wants remains outside the common control, and is worked for the benefit of sections of the community whose interests conflict, both with one another and with the general interest, an immense amount of waste and danger arises from the working of the machinery, and grave social maladies are engendered. These maladies evoke in the best ordered and most intelligent communities an increasing pressure of public control. This public control is strengthened and extended in proportion as the highly evolved structure of the industry enables its administrators to exercise powers of monopoly either in relation to the treatment of its employees, or in relation to the price or quality of the commodities it supplies to the public. Such industries as develop these economic powers of monopoly in the highest degree, and in relation to the supply of prime necessaries or comforts of common life, pass gradually into the condition of public industries organised for the public good. It seems likely that all the important machine industries engaged in satisfying common routine wants will gradually develop the monopolic characteristics which accrue to large production, and will pass by degrees through thedifferent phases of public control until they become merged in public industry.
This so-called socialistic movement in industry represents the growing cohesiveness of modern societies. At all times there is a strong natural tendency to supply common wants by common efforts. So long as the common wants in their wider significance only extend to protection of the person and of certain forms of personal property, state-work is confined within these protective limits, and the work of producing common wealth, so far as it exists, is left to village communities or other small units of social organisation. As the elements of steady common consumption grow in number, the common organisation of activity to supply them will grow, and where the supply has at first been left to private enterprise, the abuse of power and growing inconvenience of competition will drive them into public industry. But since the veryraison d'êtreof this increased social cohesiveness is to economise and enrich the individual life, and to enable the play of individual energy to assume higher forms out of which more individual satisfaction may accrue more and more human effort will take shape in industries which will be left to individual initiative and control, the arts in which the freedom of personal spontaneity will find scope in the expression of physical or moral beauty and fitness and the attainment of intellectual truth. The infinite variety which these forms of artistic expression may assume, fraught with the individuality of the artist, will prevent them from ever passing into "routine" or "common" industries, though even in the fine arts there will be certain elements which, as they become part of the common possession, will become relatively void of individual interest, and will thus pass into a condition of routine activity. The idea of continuity in human progress demands this admission. But since each encroachment of routine into the "finer arts" is motived by a prior shifting of the interest of the consumer into forms of higher refinement, there will be a net gain and not a loss in the capacity of individual exercise in artistic work. In every form of human activity the progress of routine industry will be the necessary condition of the expansion of individual freedom of expression. But while the choice and control of each higher form of "industry" will remainindividualistic, in proportion as the moral bonds of society obtain fuller conscious recognition, the work of the "artist" likewise will be dedicated more and more to the service of his fellow-men. Thus will the balance of the social and individual work in the satisfaction of human wants be preserved, while the number of those wants increase and assume different values with the progress of the social and individual life.
[289]Wealth of Nations, p. 110.
[289]Wealth of Nations, p. 110.
[290]Spencer,Contemporary Review, March 1884.
[290]Spencer,Contemporary Review, March 1884.
[291]Professor Jevons' work upon this branch of Economics was marred by an attempt to treat it purely mathematically, that is to reduce qualitative to quantitative differences—an impossibility. Among recent writers, Professor Patten, of Pennsylvania University, has made by far the most important contributions towards a systematic treatment of the economics of consumption.
[291]Professor Jevons' work upon this branch of Economics was marred by an attempt to treat it purely mathematically, that is to reduce qualitative to quantitative differences—an impossibility. Among recent writers, Professor Patten, of Pennsylvania University, has made by far the most important contributions towards a systematic treatment of the economics of consumption.
[292]Patten'sPremises of Political Economy, chap. iv.
[292]Patten'sPremises of Political Economy, chap. iv.
[293]Professor Patrick Geddes,Claims of Labour. Cf.The Evolution of Sex, chap, xx. (Contemporary Science Series: Walter Scott).
[293]Professor Patrick Geddes,Claims of Labour. Cf.The Evolution of Sex, chap, xx. (Contemporary Science Series: Walter Scott).