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As has been shown above, in its beginnings the machine technology took over the working concepts of handicraft, and it has gradually shifted from the ground of manual operation so afforded to the ground of impersonal mechanical process; but this shifting of base in respect of the elementary technological preconceptions has not hitherto been complete, much of the personal attitude of craftsmanship toward mechanical forces and structures being still visible in the work of modern technologists. In like manner, and concomitant with the transition to the machine industry, there has gone forward a like shifting in respect of the point of view and the elementary preconceptions of science. This has taken effect most largely and gone farthest in the material sciences, as should be expected from the close connection that subsists between these sciences and the technology of the machine industry; but here again the elimination of craftsmanlike conceptions has hitherto not been complete. And, what is more instructive as to the part played by technological discipline in the growth of science, the character of this change in scientific scope, method and preconceptions is somewhat obviously such as wouldbe given by habituation to the working of the machine process. Where later scientific inquiry has departed from or overpassed the limitations imposed by the habits of thought peculiar to craftsmanship the movement has taken the direction enforced by the machine technology.
So,e. g., while the elements made use of by the machine technology, and characteristic of its work, are conceptions of mass, velocity, pressure, stress, vibration, displacement, and the like, these elements are made use of only under the rule that action in any of these bearings takes effect only by impact, by contact directly or through a continuum. The mathematical computations and elucidations that are one main instrumentality employed by the technologist do not and can not include this underlying postulate of contact, since it is an assumption extraneous to those magnitudes of quantity in terms of which this technology does its work. How far this preconception that action can take place only by contact is to be rated as an elementary concept carried over from handicraft, where it is obviously at home and fundamental in all work of manipulation, may perhaps be an idle question. In any case the machine technology is at one with craftsmanship on this head, even though there are many features in modern industrial processes that do not involve action by contact in any such obvious fashion as to suggest its necessary assumption, as,e. g., in processes involving the use of light, heat or electricity. Yet it remains true that, by and large, the technology of the machine process is a technology of action by contact; and, apparently under stress of this wide though not necessarily universal application of the principle, the trained technologist does not rest contentuntil he has in some tenable fashion construed any apparent exception as a special instance under the rule.
So also in modern scientific inquiry. The conceptual elements with which the scientist is content to work are precisely those that have commended themselves as competent in their technological use. Since action by contact is, on the whole, the working principle in the machine process, it is also accepted as the prime postulate in the formulation of all exact knowledge of impersonal facts. There is, of course, no inclination here to criticise or take exception to this characteristic habit of thought that pervades modern scientific inquiry. It has done good service, and to this generation, trained in the enexorably efficient ways of the machine process, the fact that it works is conclusive of its truth.148Yet the further fact is not to be overlooked that adherence to this principle is not due to unsophisticated observation simply. It is a principle, a habit of thought, not a fact of simple observation. Doubtless it is a fact of observation, direct and unambiguous, in respect of our own manual operations; and doubtless also it is a matter of such ready inference in respect of many external phenomena as to do duty as a fact of observation in good faith; but doubtless also there are many of these external phenomena that have to be somewhat painstakingly construed to bring them under the rule. Conceivably, even if such a habit of thought had not been handed down from the experience of handicraft it might have been induced by the discipline of the machine process, and might even have been ingrained in men exposed to this disciplinein sufficiently rigorous fashion to serve as a prime postulate of scientific inquiry; the machine process doubtless bears out such a principle in the main, and very rigorously. But in point of historical fact it is quite unnecessary to suppose this principle of action by contact to be a productde novoof the discipline of the machine, since it is older than the advent of the machine industry and is also quite consonant with the habits of work enforced by the technology of handicraft, more so indeed than with the technology of the machine industry. It appears fairly indubitable that this principle is a legacy taken over from the experience of life in the days of craftsmanship. And it may even be an open question whether the machine technology would not today be of an appreciably different complexion if it had, as it conceivably might have, developed without the hard and fast limitations imposed by this postulate. Doubtless, scientific inquiry, and the theoretical formulations reached by such inquiry, would differ somewhat notably from what they currently are if the scientists had gone to their work without such a postulate, or holding it in a qualified sense, as a principle of limited scope, as applying only within a limited range of phenomena, only so far as empirical evidence might enforce it in detail.
If, as seems at least presumably true, this principle of action by contact owes its origin to habits induced by manipulation, it will be seen to be of an anthropomorphic derivation. And if it further owes its acceptance as a principle universally applicable to material phenomena to the protracted discipline of life under the technology of handicraft, its universality must also take rank as ananthropomorphic imputation enforced by long habit. It is of the nature of habit, and moreover of workmanlike habit. Casting back into the past history of civilisation and into the contemporary lower cultures, it will appear that the principle (habit of thought) in question is prevalent everywhere and presumably through all human time; as it should be if it is traceable to so ubiquitous an experience as manipulation. But it will also appear that, except within the bounds, in time and space, of the high tide of craftsmanship and the machine technology, this principle does not arrogate to itself universal mandatory authority in the domain of external phenomena. Not only are the tenets of magic and theology at variance with the proposition that action can take place only by mechanical contact; but in the naïve thinking of commonplace humanity outside this machine-made Western civilisation, action at a distance is patently neither imbecile nor incomprehensible as a familiar trait of external objects in their everyday behaviour.
Nor is it by any means a grateful work of spontaneous predilection, all this mechanistic mutilation of objective reality into mere inert dimensions and resistance to pressure; as witness the widely prevalent revulsion, chronic or intermittent, against its acceptance as a final term of knowledge. Laymen seek respite in the fog of occult and esoteric faiths and cults, and so fall back on the will to believe things of which the senses transmit no evidence; while the learned and studious are, by stress of the same “aching void,” drawn into speculative tenets of ostensible knowledge that purport to go nearer to the heart of reality, and that elude all mechanisticproof or disproof. This revulsion against thinking in uncoloured mechanistic terms alone runs suggestively parallel with that other revulsion, already spoken of, against the geometrically adjusted routine of conduct imposed on modern life by the machine process; the two are in great part coincident, or concomitant, both in point of the class of persons affected by each and in point of the uncertain measure of finality attending the move so made in either case. Neither the manner of life imposed by the machine process, nor the manner of thought inculcated by habituation to its logic, will fall in with the free movement of the human spirit, born, as it is, to fit the conditions of savage life. So there comes an irrepressible—in a sense, congenital—recrudescence of magic, occult science, telepathy, spiritualism, vitalism, pragmatism.149
It was noted above that action by contact is not included, except by subsumption, in the mathematical formulations of technology or science. It should nowbe added that in all the concomitance and sequence with which the mathematical formulations of mechanical phenomena are occupied, the assumption of concomitance or sequence at a distance will fill the requirements of the formulæ quite as convincingly and commonly more simply than the assumption of concomitance by contact only. To realise the difficulties which beset this postulate of action by mechanical continuity solely, as well as theprima facieimbecility of the principle itself, it is only necessary to call to mind the tortuous theories of gravitation designed to keep it intact, and the prodigy of incongruous intangibilities known as the ether,—a rigid and imponderable fluid.
Associated with the principle of action by mechanical continuity alone is a second metaphysical postulate of science,—the conservation of energy, or persistence of quantity. Like its fellow it does not admit of empirical proof; yet it is likewise held to be of universal application. This principle, that the quantity of matter or of energy does not increase or diminish, or, perhaps better, that the quantity of mechanical fact at large is invariable, has a better presumptive claim to rank as a by-product of the machine technology; although such a claim could doubtless be allowed only with broad qualifications.Not that the principle was not known or not formally accepted prior to the machine age; long ago the Roman scholar and the scholastic philosophers after him declaredex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti. But throughout the era of handicraft there continued also to be devoutly held the postulate that the material universe had a beginning in an act of creation, as also that it would some day come to an end, a quantitative collapse. As the era of handicraft advanced and, apparently, as the discipline of life under that technology enforced the habitual acceptance of the proposition that the quantity of material fact is constant, much ingenuity and much ambiguous speech was spent in an endeavour to reconcile the mechanical efficiency of the creative fiat with the dictum,ex nihilo nihil fit. But down to the close of that era it remains true that, by and large, the peoples of Christendom continued to believe in the mechanically creative efficiency of the Great Artificer; although, it must be admitted, with an ever growing apprehension that in this tenet of the faith they were face to face with a divine mystery. The eighteenth-century scientists, and many even in the nineteenth century, continued to profess belief in a creative origin of material things, as well as also in a providential guidance of material events,—which latter must have been conceived to be exerted by some other means than action through mechanical contact, since one term of the relation was conceived not to be of a mechanical nature.
It is not until the machine age is well under way and the machine technology has come to occupy the land, that faith in the theorem of the conservation of energy has grown robust enough to let the scientists lose interestin all questions of creation. The tenet has died by neglect, not by confutation. That it has done so among the adepts of the material sciences, and that it is doing so among the lay population at large in the modern industrial communities, is probably to be credited to the discipline of the machine process and the technological conceptions to which that discipline conduces. It conduces to this outcome in more than one way. This modern technology is a technology of mechanical process; it looks to and takes care of a sequence of mechanical action, rather than to the conditions of its inception or the sequel of its conclusion. A mind imbued with the logic of this machine process does not by habitual proclivity or with incisive effect attend to these alien matters that have no meaning within the horizon of that logic. The creative augmentation of material objects is a matter lying without the scope of the machine’s logic.
As has already been remarked, the principle (habit of thought) that the quantity of material fact is constant is necessarily of ancient derivation and long growth. Taken in a presumptive sense, and held loosely as a commonplace of experience, it must have come up and attained some force very early in the workmanlike experience of the race. And the closer the application to the work in hand, the more consistently would this principle of common sense approve itself; so that it should, as indeed is sufficiently evident, be well at home among the habitual generalisations current in the days of handicraft; although it does not seem to have been generally accepted at that time as a principle necessarily having a universal application,—as witness the readycredence then given to theological dogmas of creation and the like. The habits of accountancy that came on under the price system, as the scope of the market grew larger with the growth and diversification of handicraft, seem to have had a great effect in extending and confirming the habitual acceptance of such a theorem. A strict balance, a running equilibrium of the quantitative items involved, is the central fact of the accountant’s occupation. And this habit of scrutiny and balancing of quantities, and a meticulous tracing out and accounting for any apparent excess or deficiency in the sums handled, pervades the community at large, though in a less pronounced fashion, as well as that fraction of the population employed in trade. The discipline of the handicraft system in this respect gains incontinently in scope and vigour as the growth of that technological system, with its characteristic business management, goes forward.
When presently the machine technology comes forward this habitual preconception touching the invariability of material quantity finds new applications and new refinements of application, with the outcome that its guidance of men’s thinking grows ever more inclusive and more peremptory. But it is not until half a century after the Industrial Revolution that the principle may be said finally to have gained unquestioning acceptance as a theorem universally binding on material phenomena. By that time—about the second quarter of the nineteenth century—the unqualified validity of this theorem had become so unmitigated a matter of course as to have fairly shifted from the ground of empirical generalisation to that of metaphysical thesis. Men of science then quite ingenuously set about proving the law of the Conservationof Energy by appeal to experiments and reasoning that proceeded with absolute naïveté on the tacit assumption of the theorem to be proven.
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In its bearing on the growth of institutions the machine technology has yet scarcely had time to make its mark. Such institutional factors as, e. g., the common law are necessarily of slow growth. A system of civil rights is not only a balanced scheme of habitual responses to those stimuli at whose impact they take effect; it is at the same time a scheme which has the sanction of avowed common consent, such as will express itself in rating these institutional elements as facts of immemorial usage or as integrally inherent in the nature of things from the beginning. Such civil institutions take shape as prescriptive custom, and matters of habit which so are supported by broad grounds of authenticity and correlation with other elements of a prescriptive scheme of things will adapt themselves only tardily to any change in the situation or to any new bias in the drift of discipline. What happened in the matter of civil rights under the system of handicraft is an illustration in point. There need be little question but the eighteenth century scheme of Natural Rights was an outcome of the protracted discipline characteristic of the era of handicraft, and an adaptation to the exigencies of daily life under that system.
The scheme of Natural Rights, with its principles of Natural Liberty and its insistence on individual self-help, was well adapted to the requirements of handicraft and the petty trade, whose spirit it reflects with admirable faithfulness. But it was of slow growth, as anyscheme of institutions must be, in the nature of things. So much so that handicraft and the petty trade had been in effectual operation some half-a-dozen centuries, in ever increasing force, before the corresponding system of civil rights and moral obligations made good its pretensions to rule the economic affairs of the community. Indeed, it is only by the latter half of the eighteenth century that the system of Natural Rights came to passable maturity and finally took rank as a secure principle of enlightened common sense; and by that time the handicraft system was giving way to the machine industry. And even then this result was reached only in the most advanced industrial community of Europe, where the discipline of handicraft and trade had had the freest scope to work out its natural bent, with the least hindrance from other dominant interests at variance with its schooling.150
So it has come about that while the system of Natural Rights is an institutional by-product of workmanship under the handicraft system and is adapted to the exigencies of craftsmanship and the petty trade, it never fully took effect in the shaping of institutions until that phase of economic life was substantially past, or untilthe new era, of the machine industry and the large business brought on by the new technology, had come to rule the economic situation. So that hitherto the work of the machine industry has been organised and conducted under a code of legal rights and business principles adapted to the state of the industrial arts which the machine industry has displaced. Latterly, it is true, the requirements of the machine technology, in the way of large-scale organisation, continuity of operation, and interstitial balance of the industrial system, have begun to show themselves so patently at variance with these business principles engendered by the era of handicraft as to throw a shadow of doubt on the adequacy of these “Natural” metaphysics of natural liberty, self-help, free competition, individual initiative, and the like. But, harsh as has been the discrepancy between the received system of economic institutions on the one side and the working of the machine technology on the other, its effect in reshaping current habits of thought in these premises has hitherto come to nothing more definitive than an uneasy conviction that “Something will have to be done about it.” Indeed, so far is the machine process from having yet recast the principles of industrial management, as distinct from technological procedure, that the efforts inspired in responsible public officials and public-spirited citizens by this patent discrepancy have hitherto been directed wholly to regulating industry into consonance with the antiquated scheme of business principles, rather than to take thought of how best to conduct industrial affairs and the distribution of livelihood in consonance with the technological requirements of the machine industry.
It is true, among the workmen, and particularly among those skilled workmen who have been trained in the machine technology and are exposed to the full impact of the machine’s discipline, uncritical habitual faith in this institutional scheme is beginning to crumble, so far as regards that principle of Natural Rights that vests unlimited discretion in the owner of property, and so far as regards property in the material equipment of industry. But this is about as broad a proposition of such a kind as current facts of opinion and agitation will bear out, and this inchoate break with the received habitual views touching the dues and obligations of discretion in industrial matters is extremely vague and almost wholly negative. Even in those members of the community who are most directly and rigorously exposed to its discipline the machine process has hitherto wrought no such definite bias, no such positive habitual attitude of workmanlike initiative towards the conventions of industrial management as to result in a constructive deviation from the received principles.151
On the other hand the business principles engendered by the habit of mind that gave rise to the system of Natural Rights has had grave consequences for workmanship under the conditions imposed by the machine industry. As has been shown in some detail in the foregoing chapter, the individualistic organisation of the work, coupled with the personal incidence of the handicraft technology, and the stress thrown on price rating and self-help by the ever increasing recourse to bargain and sale (“free contract”) under that system, led inthe end to the habitual rating of workmanship in terms of the price it would bring. Then as always workmanlike efficiency commanded the approval of thoughtful men, as being serviceable to the common good and as a substantial manifestation of human excellence; and at the same time, then as ever, efficient work was a source of comfort and complacency to the workman. But under the teaching of the price system efficiency came to be rated in terms of the pecuniary gain.
With the advent of the machine industry this pecuniary rating of efficiency gained a new impetus and brought new consequences for technology as well as for business enterprise. Typically, the machine industry runs on a large scale, as contrasted with handicraft, and it involves a relatively wide and exacting division of labour between workmanship and salesmanship. Under the conditions of large ownership implied in this modern industrial system the workmen no longer have, or can have, the responsibility of the pecuniary management of the industrial concern; on the other hand the same conditions of large ownership and extensive business connections require the businessmen in charge to delegate the immediate oversight of the plant and its technological processes to other hands, and to devote their own energies to the pecuniary management of the concern and its transactions. Hence it follows that as the machine system and the highly specialised business enterprise that goes with it reach a larger scale and a higher degree of elaboration the businessmen in charge are, by training and by progressive limitation of interest, less and less competent to take care of the technological exigencies of the machine system. But at the sametime the discretion in technological matters still rests in their hands by force of their ownership. So that, while the responsibility of technological discretion still rests on them, and cannot be fully delegated to other hands, the exigencies of business enterprise and of the training which it involves will no longer permit them to meet this responsibility in a competent fashion.
The businessmen in control of large industrial enterprises are beginning to appreciate something of their own unfitness to direct or oversee, or even to control, technological matters, and so they have, in a tentative way, taken to employing experts to do the work for them. Such experts are known colloquially as “efficiency engineers” and are presumed to combine the qualifications of technologist and accountant. In point of fact it is as accountants, capable of applying the tests of accountancy in a new field, that these experts commend themselves to the businessmen in control, and the “efficiency” which they look to is an efficiency counted in terms of net pecuniary gain. “Efficiency” in these premises means pecuniary efficiency, and only incidentally or in a subsidiary sense does it mean industrial efficiency,—only in so far as industrial efficiency conduces to the largest net pecuniary gain. All the while the businessmen retain the decisive superior discretion in their own incompetent hands, since all the while the whole matter remains a business proposition. The “staff organisation,” in which vests the superior control of these technological affairs, consistently remains an organisation of worldly wisdom, business enterprise—not of technological proficiency,—a state of things notto be remedied so long as industry is carried on for business profits.
Meantime the workmen of all kinds and grades—labourers, mechanics, operatives, engineers, experts—all imbued with the same pecuniary principles of efficiency, go about their work with more than half an eye to the pecuniary advantage of what they have in hand. The attitude of the trades-unions towards their work and towards the industrial concerns in whose employ their work is done illustrates something of the habitual frame of mind of these men, who are avowed experts in the matter of workmanship.
Latterly many inconveniences have beset the community at large as well as particular sections and classes of the industrial community, due in the main to a consistent adherence to these business principles in the management of industrial affairs. The capitalist-employers, on the one hand, have gone on the full powers with which the modern institution of ownership and its broad implications has vested them; with the result that the public at large, investors, consumers of industrial products, users of “public utility” agencies serving such needs as light, fuel, transportation, communication, amusement, etc., feel very much aggrieved; as do also and more particularly the workmen with whom the capitalist-employers do business on the lines laid down by the authentic business principles involved in the discretionary ownership of the industrial plant and resources. On the other hand the workmen, resting their case on the same common-sense view that the individual is a self-sufficient economic unit who owes nothing to the community at large beyond what he may freely undertake“for a good and valuable consideration in hand paid,”—the workmen stand likewise on the full powers given them by the current institutions of ownership and contractual discretion, and so work what mischief they can to their employers and to the public at large, always blamelessly within the rules of the game as laid down of old on the pecuniary principles of business discretion, and in the light of such sense as their training has given them with regard to efficiency in the industries that have fallen into their hands. And then the “money power” comes in as a third pecuniarily trained factor, with ever increasing force and incisiveness, to muddle the whole situation mysteriously and irretrievably by looking after their own pecuniary interests in a fashion even more soberly legitimate and authentic, if possible, than the workmen’s management of their own affairs.
Of course, all this working at cross purposes is not altogether due to trained incapacity on the part of the several contestants to appreciate the large and general requirements of the industrial situation; perhaps it is not even chiefly due to such inability, but rather to an habitual, and conventionally rightful, disregard of other than pecuniary considerations. It would doubtless appear that a trained inability to apprehend any other than the immediate pecuniary bearing of their manœuvres accounts for a larger share in the conduct of the businessmen who control industrial affairs than it does in that of their workmen, since the habitual employment of the former holds them more rigorously and consistently to the pecuniary valuation of whatever passes under their hands; and the like should be true only in a higher degree of those who have to do exclusively with thefinancial side of business. The state of the industrial arts requires that these several factors should coöperate intelligently and without reservation, with an eye single to the exigencies of this modern wide-sweeping technological system; but their habitual addiction to pecuniary rather than technological standards and considerations leaves them working at cross purposes. So also their (pecuniary) interests are at cross purposes; and since these interests necessarily rule in any pecuniary culture, they must decide the line of conduct for each of the several factors engaged.
These discrepancies, obstructive tactics and disserviceable practices are commonly deplored and are presumably deplorable, and they doubtless merit extensive discussion on these grounds, but their merits in this bearing do not properly come into consideration here. The matter has been brought in here not with any view of defence, denunciation or remedy, but because it is a matter of grave consequence as regards the training given by business experience to these men in whose hands the current scheme of institutions has placed the technological fortunes of the community. And whether these pecuniary tactics and practices that fill so large a place in the attention and sentiments of this generation come chiefly of a lack of insight into current technological exigencies, or of a deliberate choice of evils enforced by the pecuniary necessities of the case, still their disciplinary value as bearing on the sense of workmanship taken in its larger scope will be much the same in either case. Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate)the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equipment and products come to be rated on a scale of money values, which has only a circuitous and often only a putative relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their serviceability. Those occupations and those aptitudes that yield good returns in terms of price are reputed valuable and commendable,—the accepted test of success, and even of serviceability, being the gains acquired. Workmanship comes to be confused with salesmanship, until tact, effrontery and prevarication have come to serve as a standard of efficiency, and unearned gain is accepted as the measure of productiveness.
Efficiency conduces to the common good, and is also a meritorious and commendable trait in the person who exercises it. But under the canons of self-help and pecuniary valuation the test of efficiency in economic matters has come to be, not technological mastery and productive effect, but proficiency in pecuniary management and the acquisition of wealth. Both in his own estimation and in the eyes of his fellows, the man who gains much does well; he is conceived to do well both as a matter of personal efficiency and in point of serviceability to the common good. To “do well” in modern phrase means to engross something appreciably more of the community’s wealth than falls to the common run. But since gains, and hence efficiency, are conceived in terms of price, it follows that the man, workman or businessman, who can induce his fellows to pay him well for his services or his goods is accounted efficient and serviceable; from which it follows that under this canon of pecuniary efficiency men are conceived to serve the common good somewhat in proportion as they are ableto induce the community to pay more for their services than they are worth.
The businessman who gains much at little cost, who gets something for nothing, is rated, in his own as well as in his neighbours’ esteem, as a public benefactor indispensable to the community’s welfare, and as contributing to the common good in direct proportion to the amount which he has been able to draw out of the aggregate product. It is perhaps needless to call to mind that of this character are the main facts in the history of all the great fortunes;152although the current accounts of their accumulation, being governed by pecuniary standards of efficiency and serviceability, dwell mainly on the services that have inured to the community from the traffic with which the great captains have interfered in their quest of gain. The prevalence of salesmanship, that is to say of business enterprise, and the consequent high repute of the salesmanlike activities and aptitudes in any community that is organised on a price system, is perhaps the most serious obstacle which the pecuniary culture opposes to the advance in workmanship. It intrudes into the most intimate and secret workings of the human spirit and contaminates the sense of workmanship in its initial move, and sets both the proclivity to efficient work and the penchant for serviceability at cross purposes with the common good.
But under the conditions engendered by the machine technology the scope of this pecuniary standard of workmanship has been greatly enlarged. On the whole themachine industry calls for a large-scale organisation, increasingly so as time has passed and the machine process has come more fully to dominate the industrial situation. By the same move initiative and discretion have come to vest in those who can claim ownership of the large material equipment so required, and the exercise of such initiative and discretion by these owners is loosely proportioned to the magnitude of their holdings. Smaller owners have the same freedom of initiative and discretion, in point of legal and conventional competency,—such freedom and equality between persons being of the essence of Natural Rights; but in point of practical fact, as determined by technological and business exigencies, there is but small discretion left such smaller holders. Initiative and discretion in modern industrial matters vest in the owners of the industrial plant, or in such moneyed concerns as may stand in an underwriting relation to the owners of the plant; such discretion is exercised through pecuniary transactions; and these pecuniary transactions whereby the conduct of industry is guided and controlled are entered into with a view to gain in terms of price. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that such transactions, which govern the course of industry, are carried out with an eye single to pecuniary gain,—the industrial consequences, and their bearing on the community’s welfare, being matters incidental to the transaction of business. In every-day phrase, under the rule of the current technology and business principles, industry is managed by businessmen for business ends, not by technological experts or for the material advantage of the community. And in this control of industrial affairs the smaller businessmenare in great part subject to the discretion of the larger.153
By ancient habit, handed down from the days of handicraft and petty trade, this pecuniary management is conventionally conceived to be directed to the production of goods and services, and the businessman is still conventionally rated as a producer and his gains accepted as a measure of his productive efficiency. In conventional speech “producer” means the owner of industrial plant, not the workmen employed nor the mechanical apparatus about which they are employed.154The “producers,” “manufacturers,” “captains of industry,” whose interests are safeguarded by current legislation and by the guardians of law and order are the businessmen who have a pecuniary interest in industrial affairs; and it is their pecuniary interests that are so safeguarded, in the naïve faith that the material interests of the community at large coincide with the opportunities for gain so secured to the businessmen.
It has already been spoken of above that the processes of industry are bound in a comprehensive system of give and take, in such a manner that no considerable fraction of this industrial system functions independently of the rest. The industrial system at large may be conceivedas a comprehensive machine process, the several sub-processes of which technologically inosculate and ramify in what may be conceived as a network of elements working in a moving equilibrium, none of which can go on at its full productive efficiency except in duly balanced correlation with all the rest. This characterisation will strictly apply only so far as the machine technology has taken over the various branches of industry, but it applies in a loose though by no means idle fashion also as regards those elements of the industrial system in which the machine technology has not yet become dominant. In so far as the industrial system is of this character it will also hold that the business management of any one branch or line or parcel of industries will have its effect on the rest, primarily and proximately on those other branches or lines with which the given parcel stands in immediate relations of give and take, through the market or more directly through technological correlation,—as, e. g., in the transportation system. Business management which affects a large section of this balanced system will necessarily have a wide-reaching effect on the working of the system at large. Such business control of industry, as has just been remarked above, is exercised with a view to pecuniary gain; but pecuniary gain in these premises comes from changes, and apprehended changes, in the efficiency of the various industrial processes that are touched by such control, rather than from the workday functioning of the several items of equipment involved. The changes which so bring gain to these larger businessmen may be favourable to the effective working of industry, but they may also be unfavourable; and the opportunities for gain which theyafford the larger businessmen may be equally profitable whether the disturbance in question is favourable or unfavourable to industrial efficiency. The gains to be derived from such disturbance are proportioned to the magnitude of the disturbance rather than to its industrial productiveness. It should follow, of course, that if the machine technology should come so to dominate the industrial situation as to bind all industry in a rigorously comprehensive balanced process, the material fortunes of the community would come to rest unreservedly and in all details in the hands of those larger businessmen who hold the final pecuniary discretion.
In qualification of this broad proposition it is to be noted that, while the gains of the superior rank of businessmen accrue in the manner indicated,—by means of disturbances which may indifferently be favourable or unfavourable to industry,—yet in the long run it is necessarily true that the gains which so inure to the pecuniary magnates must be derived from the net product of industry and will in the long run be larger in the aggregate the more productive the community’s industry is. What makes business profitable to the businessmen is, after all, their usufruct of the community’s industrial efficiency. In the long run nothing can accrue as income to the pecuniary magnates more than the surplus product of industry above the subsistence of the industrial community at large. But so long as the magnates have not come to a working arrangement on this basis and “pooled their interests” the proposition as formulated above appears to be adequate to the facts,—that the gains of these larger businessmen are a function of the magnitudeof the disturbances which they create rather than of their productive effect.
It should also follow, and so far as the above characterisation holds it does follow, that the current pecuniary organisation of industry vests the usufruct of the community’s industrial proficiency in the owners of the industrial equipment. Proximately this usufruct of the industrial community’s technological knowledge and working capacity vests in the detail owners of the equipment, but only proximately. At the further remove it vests only in the businessmen whose command of large means enables them to create and control those pecuniary conjunctures of industry that bring about changes in the market value and ownership of the equipment.