An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation
Chapter 7: Peace and the Price System
Thorsten Veblen
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Evidently the conception of peace on which its various spokesmen are proceeding is by no means the same for all of them. In the current German conception, e. g., as seen in the utterances of its many and urgent spokesmen, peace appears to be of the general nature of a truce between nations, whose God-given destiny it is, in time, to adjust a claim to precedence by wager of battle. They will sometimes speak of it, euphemistically, with a view to conciliation, as "assurance of the national future," in which the national future is taken to mean an opportunity for the extension of the national dominion at the expense of some other national establishment. In the same connection one may recall the many eloquent passages on the State and its paramount place and value in the human economy. The State is useful for disturbing the peace. This German notion may confidently be set down as the lowest of the current conceptions of peace; or perhaps rather as the notion of peace reduced to the lowest terms at which it continues to be recognisable as such. Next beyond in that direction lies the notion of armistice; which differs from this conception of peace chiefly in connoting specifically a definite and relatively short interval between warlike operations.
The conception of peace as being a period of preparation for war has many adherents outside the Fatherland,
(300) of course. Indeed, it has probably a wider vogue and a readier acceptance among men who interest themselves in questions of peace and war than any other. It goes hand in hand with that militant nationalism that is taken for granted, conventionally, as the common ground of those international relations that play a part in diplomatic intercourse. It is the diplomatist's métier to talk war in parables of peace. This conception of peace as a precarious interval of preparation has come down to the present out of the feudal age and is, of course, best at home where the feudal range of preconceptions has suffered least dilapidation; and it carries the feudalistic presumption that all national establishments are competitors for dominion, after the scheme of Macchiavelli. The peace which is had on this footing, within the realm, is a peace of subjection, more or less pronounced according as the given national establishment is more or less on the militant order; a warlike organisation being necessarily of a servile character, in the same measure in which it is warlike.
In much the same measure and with much the same limitations as the modern democratic nations have departed from the feudal system of civil relations and from the peculiar range of conceptions which characterise that system, they have also come in for a new or revised conception of peace. Instead of its being valued chiefly as a space of time in which to prepare for war, offensive or defensive, among these democratic and provisionally pacific nations it has come to stand in the common estimation as the normal and stable manner of life, good and commendable in its own right. These modern, pacific, commonwealths stand on the defensive, habitually. They are still pugnaciously national, but they have unlearned so much of the feudal preconceptions as to leave them in
(301) a defensive attitude, under the watch-word: Peace with honor. Their quasi-feudalistic national prestige is not to be trifled with, though it has lost so much of its fascination as ordinarily not to serve the purposes of an aggressive enterprise, at least not without some shrewd sophistication at the hands of militant politicians and their diplomatic agents. Of course, an exuberant patriotism may now and again take on the ancient barbarian vehemence and lead such a provisionally pacific nation into an aggressive raid against a helpless neighbor; but it remains characteristically true, after all, that these peoples look on the country's peace as the normal and ordinary course of things, which each nation is to take care of for itself and by its own force.
The ideal of the nineteenth-century statesmen was to keep the peace by a balance of power; an unstable equilibrium of rivalries, in which it was recognised that eternal vigilance was the price of peace by equilibration. Since then, by force of the object-lesson of the twentieth-century wars, it has become evident that eternal vigilance will no longer keep the peace by equilibration, and the balance of power has become obsolete. At the same time things have so turned that an effective majority of the civilised nations now see their advantage in peace, without further opportunity to seek further dominion. These nations have also been falling into the shape of commonwealths, and so have lost something of their national spirit.
With much reluctant hesitation and many misgivings, the statesmen of these pacific nations are accordingly busying themselves with schemes for keeping the peace on the unfamiliar footing of a stable equilibrium; the method preferred on the whole being an equilibration of make-believe, in imitation of the obsolete balance of power.
(302) There is a meticulous regard for national jealousies and discriminations, which it is thought necessary to keep intact. Of course, on any one of these slightly diversified plans of keeping the peace on a stable footing of copartnery among the pacific nations, national jealousies and national integrity no longer have any substantial meaning. But statesmen think and plan in terms of precedent; which comes to thinking and planning in terms of make-believe, when altered circumstances have made the precedents obsolete. So one comes to the singular proposal of the statesmen, that the peace is to be kept in concert among these pacific nations by a provision of force with which to break it at will. The peace that is to be kept on this footing of national discriminations and national armaments will necessarily be of a precarious kind; being, in effect, a statesmanlike imitation of the peace as it was once kept even more precariously by the pacific nations in severalty.
Hitherto the movement toward peace has not gone beyond this conception of it, as a collusive safeguarding of national discrepancies by force of arms. Such a peace is necessarily precarious, partly because armed force is useful for breaking the peace, partly because the national discrepancies, by which these current peace-makers set such store, are a constant source of embroilment. What the peace-makers might logically be expected to concern themselves about would be the elimination of these discrepancies that make for embroilment. But what they actually seem concerned about is their preservation. A peace by collusive neglect of those remnants of feudalistic make-believe that still serve to divide the pacific nations has hitherto not seriously come under advisement.
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Evidently, hitherto, and for the calculable future, peace is a relative matter, a matter of more or less, whichever of the several working conceptions spoken of above may rule the case. Evidently, too, a peace designed to strengthen the national establishment against eventual war, will count to a different effect from a collusive peace of a defensive kind among the pacific peoples, designed by its projectors to conserve those national discrepancies on which patriotic statesmen like to dwell. Different from both would be the value of a peace by neglect of such useless national discriminations as now make for embroilment. A protracted season of peace should logically have a somewhat different cultural value according to the character of the public policy to be pursued under its cover. So that a safe and sane conservation of the received law and order should presumably best be effected under cover of a collusive peace of the defensive kind, which is designed to retain those national discrepancies intact that count for so much in the national life of today, both as a focus of patriotic sentiment and as an outlet for national expenditures. This plan would involve the least derangement of the received order among the democratic peoples, although the plan might itself undergo some change in the course of time.
Among the singularities of the latterday situation, in this connection, and brought out by the experiences of the great war, is a close resemblance between latterday warlike operations and the ordinary processes of industry. Modern warfare and modern industry alike are carried on by technological processes subject to surveillance and direction by mechanical engineers, or perhaps rather experts in engineering science of the mechanistic kind.
(304) War is not now a matter of the stout heart and strong arm. Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science, industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked before, it is no longer a gentlemen's war, and the gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played.
Certain consequences follow from this state of the case. Technology and industrial experience, in large volume and at a high proficiency, are indispensable to the conduct of war on the modern plan, as well as a large, efficient and up-to-date industrial community and industrial plant to supply the necessary material of this warfare. At the same time the discipline of the campaign, as it impinges on the rank and file as well as on the very numerous body of officers and technicians, is not at cross purposes with the ordinary industrial employments of peace, or not in the same degree as has been the case in the past, even in the recent past. The experience of the campaign does not greatly unfit the men who survive for industrial uses; nor does it come in as a sheer interruption of their industrial training, or break the continuity of that range of habits of thought which modern industry of the technological order induces; not in the same degree as was the case under the conditions of war as carried on in the nineteenth century. The cultural, and particularly the technological, incidence of this modern warfare should evidently be appreciably different from what has been experienced in the past, and from what this past experience has induced students of these matters to look for among the psychological effects of warlike experience.
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It remains true that the discipline of the campaign, however impersonal it may tend to become, still inculcates personal subordination and unquestioning obedience; and yet the modern tactics and methods of fighting bear somewhat more on the individual's initiative, discretion, sagacity and self-possession than once would have been true. Doubtless the men who come out of this great war, the common men, will bring home an accentuated and acrimonious patriotism, a venomous hatred of the enemies whom they have missed killing; but it may reasonably be doubted if they come away with a correspondingly heightened admiration and affection for their betters who have failed to make good as foremen in charge of this teamwork in killing. The years of the war have been trying to the reputation of officials and officers, who have had to meet uncharted exigencies with not much better chance of guessing the way through than their subalterns have had.
By and large, it is perhaps not to be doubted that the populace now under arms will return from the experience of the war with some net gain in loyalty to the nation's honor and in allegiance to their masters; particularly the German subjects,-the like is scarcely true for the British; but a doubt will present itself as to the magnitude of this net gain in subordination, or this net loss in self-possession. A doubt may be permitted as to whether the common man in the countries of the Imperial coalition, e. g., will, as the net outcome of this war experience, be in a perceptibly more pliable frame of mind as touches his obligations toward his betters and subservience to the irresponsible authority exercised by the various governmental agencies, than he was at the outbreak of the war. At that time, there is reason to believe, there was an ominous, though scarcely threatening, murmur of dis-
(306) -content beginning to be heard among the working classes of the industrial towns. It is fair to presume, however, that the servile discipline of the service and the vindictive patriotism bred of the fight should combine to render the populace of the Fatherland more amenable to the irresponsible rule of the Imperial dynasty and its subaltern royal establishments, in spite of any slight effect of a contrary character exercised by the training in technological methods and in self-reliance, with which this discipline of the service has been accompanied. As to the case of the British population, under arms or under compulsion of necessity at home, something has already been said in an earlier passage; and much will apparently depend, in their case, on the further duration of the war. The case of the other nationalities involved, both neutrals and belligerents, is even more obscure in this bearing, but it is also of less immediate consequence for the present argument.
The essentially feudal virtues of loyalty and bellicose patriotism would appear to have gained their great ascendency over all men's spirit within the Western civilisation by force of the peculiarly consistent character of the discipline of life under feudal conditions, whether in war or peace; and to the same uniformity of these force that shaped the workday. habits of thought among the feudal nations is apparently due that profound institutionalisation of the preconceptions of patriotism and loyality by force of which these preconceptions still hold the modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come down from
(307) the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday experience of these peoples has not seriously worked at cross purposes with the patriotic spirit and its bias of national animosity; and what discrepancy there has effectively been between the discipline of workday- life and the received institutional preconceptions on this head, has hitherto been overborne by the unremitting inculcation of these virtues by interested politicians, priests and publicists, who speak habitually for the received order of things.
That order of things which is known on its political and civil side as the feudal system together with that era of the dynastic States which succeeds the feudal age technically so called, was, on its industrial or technological side, a system of trained man-power organised on a plan of subordination of man to man. On the whole, the scheme logic of that life, whether in its political (warlike) or its industrial doings, whether in war or peace, runs on terms of personal capacity, proficiency and relations. The organisation of the forces engaged and the constraining rules according to which this organisation worked, were of the nature of personal relations, and the impersonal factors in the case were taken for granted. Politics and war were a field for personal valor, force and cunning, in practical effect a field for personal force and fraud. Industry was a field in which the routine of life, and its outcome, turned on "the skill, dexterity and judgment of the individual workman," in the words of Adam Smith.
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The feudal age passed, being done to death by handicraft industry, commercial traffic, gunpowder, and the state-making politicians. But the political States of the statemakers, the dynastic States as they may well be called, continued the conduct of political life on the personal plane of rivalry and jealously between dynasties and between their States; and in spite of gunpowder and the new military engineering, warfare continued also to be, in the main and characteristically, a field in which manpower and personal qualities decided the outcome, by virtue of personal "skill, dexterity and judgment." Meantime industry and its technology by insensible degrees underwent a change in the direction of impersonalisation, particularly in those countries in which statemaking and its warlike enterprise had ceased, or were ceasing, to be the chief interests and the controlling preconception of the people.
The logic of the new, mechanical industry which has supplanted handicraft in these countries, is a mechanistic logic, which proceeds in terms of matter-of-fact strains, masses, velocities, and the like, instead of the "skill, dexterity and judgment" of personal agents. The new industry does not dispense with the personal agencies, nor can it even be said to minimise the need of skill, dexterity and judgment in the personal agents employed, but it does take them and their attributes for granted as in some sort a foregone premise to its main argriment.(sic) The logic of the handicraft system tool. the impersonal agencies for granted; the machine industry takes the skill, dexterity and judgment of the workmen for granted. The processes of thought, and therefore the consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the personal agents engaged, and of the personal relations of discretion, control and
(309) subordination necessary to the work; whereas the mechanistic logic of the modern technology, more and more consistently, runs in terms of the impersonal forces engaged, and inculcates an habitual predilection for matter-of-fact statement, and an habitual preconception that the findings of material science alone are conclusive.
In those nations that have made up the advance guard of Western civilisation in its movement out of feudalism, the disintegrating effect of this matter-of-fact animus inculcated by the later state of the industrial arts has apparently acted effectively, in some degree, to discredit those preconceptions of personal discrimination on which dynastic rule is founded. But in no case has the discipline of this mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a definitive conclusion. Meantime war and politics have on the whole continued on the ancient plane; it may perhaps be fair to say that politics has so continued because warlike enterprise has continued still to be a matter of such personal forces as skill, dexterity and judgment, valor and cunning, personal force and fraud. Latterly, gradually, but increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the industrial arts.
What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political strategy and the political pre preconceptions of the new century, is a question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a ready answer. It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful, undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues
(310) would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the ancient discipline to which men have been subjected. So much, however, would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their increasing disserviceability, -as would be done, e. g., or at least sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a state of mutual envy and distrust.
Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise in dominion.
As has been noted above, modern warfare not only makes use of, and indeed depends on, the modern industrial technology at every turn of the operations in the field, but it draws on the ordinary industrial resources of the countries at war in a degree and with an urgency never equalled. No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much less to make headway in warlike
(311) enterprise, without the most thoroughgoing exploitation of the modern industrial arts. Which signifies for the purpose in hand that any Power that harbors an imperial ambition must take measures to let its underlying population acquire the ways and means of the modern machine industry, without reservation; which in turn signifies that popular education must be taken care of to such an extent as may be serviceable in this manner of industry and in the manner of life which this industrial system necessarily imposes; which signifies, of course, that only the thoroughly trained and thoroughly educated nations have a chance of holding their place as formidable Powers in this latterday phase of civilisation. What is needed is the training and education that go to make proficiency in the modern fashion of technology and in those material sciences that conduce to technological proficiency of this modern order. It is a matter of course that in these premises any appreciable illiteracy is an intolerable handicap. So is also any training which discourages habitual self-reliance and initiative, or which acts as a check on skepticism; for the skeptical frame of mind is a necessary part of the intellectual equipment that makes for advance, invention and understanding in the field of technological proficiency.
But these requirements, imperatively necessary as a condition of warlike success, are at cross purposes with that unquestioning respect of persons and that spirit of abnegation that alone can hold a people to the political institutions of the old order and make them a willing instrument in the hands of the dynastic statesmen. The dynastic State is apparently caught in a dilemma. The necessary preparation for warlike enterprise on the modern plan can apparently be counted on, in the long run, to disintegrate the
(312) foundations of the dynastic State. But it is only in the long run that this effect can be counted on; and it is perhaps not securely to be counted on even in a moderately long run of things as they have run hitherto, if due precautions are taken by the interested statesmen,-as would seem to be indicated by the successful conservation of archaic traits in the German peoples during the past half century under the archaising rule of the Hohenzollern. It is a matter of habituation, which takes time, and which can at the same time be neutralised in some degree by indoctrination.
Still, when all is told, it will probably have to be conceded that, e. g., such a nation as Russia will fall under this rule of inherent disability imposed by the necessary use of the modern industrial arts. Without a fairly full and free command of these modern industrial methods on the part of the Russian people, together with the virtual disappearance of illiteracy, and with the facile and far-reaching system of communication which it all involves, the Russian Imperial establishment would not be a formidable power or a serious menace to the pacific nations; and it is not easy to imagine how the Imperial establishment could retain its hold and its character under the conditions indicated.
The case of Japan, taken by itself, rests on somewhat similar lines as these others. In time, and in this case the time-allowance should presumably not be anything very large, the Japanese people are likely to get an adequate command of the modern technology; which would, here as elsewhere, involve the virtual disappearance of the present high illiteracy, and the loss, in some passable measure, of the current superstitiously crass nationalism of that people. There are indications that something of
(313) that kind, and of quite disquieting dimensions, is already under way; though with no indication that any consequent disintegrating habits of thought have yet invaded the sacred close of Japanese patriotic devotion.
Again, it is a question of time and habituation. With time and habituation the emperor may insensibly cease to be of divine pedigree, and the syndicate of statesmen who are doing business under his signature may consequently find their measures of Imperial expansion questioned by the people who pay the bills. But so long as the Imperial syndicate enjoy their present immunity from outside obstruction, and can accordingly carry on an uninterrupted campaign of cumulative predation in Korea, China and Manchuria, the patriotic infatuation is less likely to fall off, and by so much the decay of Japanese loyalty will be retarded. Yet, even if allowed anything that may seem at all probable in the way of a free hand for aggression against their hapless neighbours, the skepticism and insubordination to personal rule that seems inseparable in the long run from addiction to the modern industrial arts should be expected presently to overtake the Japanese spirit of loyal servitude. And the opportunity of Imperial Japan lies in the interval. So also does the menace of Imperial Japan as a presumptive disturber of the peace at large.
At the cost of some unavoidable tedium, the argument as regards these and similar instances may- be summarised. It appears, in the (possibly doubtful) light of the history of democratic institutions and of modern technology hitherto, as also from the logical character of this technology and its underlying material sciences, that consistent addiction to the peculiar habits of thought involved in its
(314) carrying on will presently induce a decay of those preconceptions in which dynastic government and national ambitions have their ground. Continued addiction to this modern scheme of industrial life should in time eventuate in a decay of militant nationalism, with a consequent lapse of warlike enterprise. At the same time, popular proficiency in the modern industrial arts, with all that that implies in the way of intelligence and information, is indispensable as a means to any successful warlike enterprise on the modern plan. The menace of warlike aggression from such dynastic States, e. g., as Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan is due to their having acquired a competent use of this modern technology, while they have not yet had time to lose that spirit of dynastic loyalty which they have carried over from an archaic order of things, out of which they have emerged at a very appreciably later period (last half of the nineteenth century) than those democratic peoples whose peace they now menace. As has been said, they have taken over this modern state of the industrial arts without having yet come in for the defects of its qualities. This modern technology, with its underlying material sciences, is a novel factor in the history of human culture, in that addiction to its use conduces to the decay of militant patriotism, at the same time that its employment so greatly enhances the warlike efficiency of even a pacific people, at need, that they can not be seriously molested by any other peoples, however valorous and numerous, who have not a competent use of this technology. A peace at large among the civilised nations, by loss of the militant temper through addiction to this manner of arts of peace, therefore, carries no risk of interruption by an inroad of warlike barbarians,-always provided that those existing archaic peoples who might pass
(315) muster as barbarians are brought into line with the pacific nations on a footing of peace and equality. The disparity in point of outlook as between the resulting peace at large by neglect of bootless animosities, on the one hand, and those historic instances of a peaceable civilisation that have been overwhelmed by warlike barbarian invasions, on the other hand, should be evident.
It is always possible, indeed it would scarcely be surprising to find, that the projected league of neutrals or of nations bent on peace can not be brought to realisation at this juncture; perhaps not for a long time yet. But it should at the same time seem reasonable to expect that the drift toward a peaceable settlement of national discrepancies such as has been visible in history for some appreciable time past will, in the absence of unforeseen hindrances, work out to some such effect in the course of further experience under modern conditions. And whether the projected peace compact at its inception takes one form or another, provided it succeeds in its main purpose, the long-term drift of things under its rule should logically set toward some ulterior settlement of the general character of what has here been spoken of as a peace by neglect or by neutralisation of discrepancies.
It should do so, in the absence of unforeseen contingencies; more particularly if there were no effectual factor of dissension included in the fabric of institutions within the nation. But there should also, P. g.. he no difficulty in assenting to the forecast that when and it national peace and security are achieved and settled beyond recall, the discrepancy in fact between those who own the country's wealth and those who do not is presently due to come to an issue. Any attempt to forecast the form which this
(316) issue is to take, or the manner, incidents, adjuncts and sequelae of its determination, would be a bolder and a more ambiguous, undertaking. Hitherto attempts to bring this question to an issue have run aground on the real or fancied jeopardy to paramount national interests. How, if at all, this issue might affect national interests and international relations, would obviously depend in the first instance on the state of the given national establishment and the character of the international engagements entered into in the formation of this projected pacific league. It is always conceivable that the transactions involving so ubiquitous an issue might come to take on an international character and that they might touch the actual or fanciful interests of these diverse nations with such divergent effect as to bring on a rupture of the common understanding between them and of the peace-compact in which the common understanding is embodied.
In the beginning, that is to say in the beginnings out of which this modern era of the Western civilisation has arisen, with its scheme of law and custom, there grew into the scheme of law and custom, by settled usage, a right of ownership and of contract in disposal of ownership,-which may or may not have been a salutary institutional arrangement on the whole, under the circumstances of the early days. With the later growth of handicraft and the petty trade -in Western Europe this right of ownership anal contract cane to be insisted on, standardised under legal specifications, and secured against molestation by the governmental interests; more particularly and scrupulously among those peoples that have taken the lead in working out that system of free or popular institutions that marks the modern civilised nations. So it
(317) has come to be embodied in the common law of the modern world as an inviolable natural right. It has all the prescriptive force of legally authenticated immemorial custom.
Under the system of handicraft and petty trade this right of property and free contract served the interest of the common man, at least in much of its incidence, and acted in its degree to shelter industrious and economical persons from hardship and indignity at the hands of their betters. There seems reason to believe, as is commonly believed, that so long as that relatively direct and simple scheme of industry and trade lasted, the right of ownership and contract was a salutary custom, in its bearing on the fortunes of the common man. It appears also, on the whole, to have been favorable to the fuller development of the handicraft technology, as well as to its eventual outgrowth into the new line of technological expedients and contrivancies that presently gave rise to the machine industry and the large-scale business enterprise.
The standard theories of economic science have assumed the rights of property and contract as axiomatic premises and ultimate terms of analysis; and their theories are commonly drawn in such a form as would fit the circumstances of the handicraft industry and the petty trade, and such as can be extended to any other economic situation by shrewd interpretation. These theories, as they run from Adam Smith down through the nineteenth century and later, appear tenable, on the whole, when taken to apply to the economic situation of that earlier time, in virtually all that they have to say on questions of wages, capital, savings, and the economy and efficiency of management and production by the methods of private enterprise resting on these rights of ownership and contract and
(318) governed by the pursuit of private gain. It is when these standard theories are sought to be applied to the later situation, which has outgrown the conditions of handicraft, that they appear nugatory or meretricious. The "competitive system" which these standard theories assume as a necessary condition of their own validity, and about which they are designed to form a defensive hedge, would, under those earlier conditions of small-scale enterprise and personal contact, appear to have been both a passably valid assumption as a premise and a passably expedient scheme of economic relations and traffic. At that period of its life-history it can not be said consistently to have worked hardship to the common man; rather the reverse. And the common man in that tune appears to have had no misgivings about the excellence of the scheme or of that article of Natural Rights that underlies it.
This complexion of things, as touches the effectual bearing of the institution of property and the ancient customary rights of ownership, has changed substantially since the time of Adam Smith. The "competitive system," which he looked to as the economic working-out of that "simple and obvious system of natural liberty'"' that always engaged his best affections, has in great measure ceased to operate as a routine of natural liberty, in fact; particularly in so far as touches the fortunes of the common man, the impecunious mass of the people. De jure, of course, the competitive system and its inviolable rights of ownership are a citadel of Natural Liberty; but de facto the common man is now, and has for some time been, feeling the pinch of it. It is law, and doubtless it is good law, grounded in immemorial usage and authenticated with statute and precedent. But circumstances have so chang-
(319) -ed that this good old plan has in a degree become archaic, perhaps unprofitable, or even mischievous, on the whole, and especially as touches the conditions of life for the common man. At least, so the common man in these modern democratic and commercial countries is beginning to apprehend the matter.
Some slight and summary characterisation of these changing circumstances that have affected the incidence of the rights of property during modern times may, therefore, not be out of place; with a view to seeing how far and why these rights may be due to come under advisement and possible revision, in case a state of settled peace should leave men's attention free to turn to these internal, as contrasted with national interests.
Under that order of handicraft and petty trade that led to the standardisation of these rights of ownership in the accentuated form which belongs to them in modern law and custom, the common man had a practicable chance of free initiative and self-direction in his choice and pursuit of an occupation and a livelihood, in so far as rights of ownership bore on his case. At that period the workman was the main factor in industry and, in the main and characteristically, the question of his employment was a question of what he would do. The material equipment of industry-the "plant," as it has come to be called-was subject of ownership, then as now; but it was then a secondary factor and, notoriously, subsidiary to the immaterial equipment of skill, dexterity and judgment embodied in the person of the craftsman. The body of information, or general knowledge, requisite to a workmanlike proficiency as handicraftsman was sufficiently slight and simple to fall within the ordinary reach of the working class, without special schooling; and the material
(320) equipment necessary to the work, in the way of tools and appliances, was also slight enough, ordinarily, to bring it within the reach of the common man. The stress fell on the acquirement of that special personal skill, dexterity and judgment that would constitute the workman a master of his craft. Given a reasonable measure of pertinacity, the common man would be able to compass the material equipment needful to the pursuit of his craft, and so could make his way to a livelihood; and the inviolable right of ownership would then serve to secure him the product of his own industry, in provision for his own old-age and for a fair start in behalf of his children. At least in the popular conception, and presumably in some degree also in fact, the right of property so served as a guarantee of personal liberty and a basis of equality. And so its apologists still look on the institution.
In a very appreciable degree this complexion of things and of popular conceptions has changed since then; although, as would be expected, the change in popular conceptions has not kept pace with the changing circumstances. In all the characteristic and controlling lines of industry the modern machine technology calls for a very considerable material equipment; so large an equipment, indeed, that this plant, as it is called, always represents a formidable amount of invested wealth; and also so large that it will, typically, employ a considerable number of workmen per unit of plant. On the transition to the machine technology the plant became the unit of operation, instead of the workman, as had previously been the case; and with the further development of this modern technology, during the past hundred and fifty years or so, the unit of operation and control has increasingly come to be not the individual or isolated plant but rather an artic-
(321) -ulated group of such plants working together as a balanced system and keeping pace in common, under a collective business management; and coincidently the individual workman has been falling into the position of an auxiliary factor, nearly into that of an article of supply, to be charged up as an item of operating expenses. Under this later and current system, discretion and intitative vest not in the workman but in the owners of the plant, if anywhere. So that at this point the right of ownership has ceased to be, in fact, a guarantee of personal liberty to the common man, and has come to be, or is coming to be, a guarantee of dependence. All of which engenders a feeling of unrest and insecurity, such as to instill a doubt in the mind of the common man as to the continued expediency of this arrangement and of . the prescriptive rights of property on which the arrangement rests.
There is also an insidious suggestion, carrying a sinister note of discredit, that comes in from ethnological science at this point; which is adapted still further to derange the common man's faith in this received institution of ownership and its control of the material equipment of industry. To students interested in human culture it is a matter of course that this material equipment is a means of utilising the state of the industrial arts; that it is useful in industry and profitable to its owners only because and in so far as it is a creation of the current technological knowledge and enables its owner to appropriate the Usufruct of the current industrial arts. It is likewise a matter of course that this technological knowledge, that so enables the material equipment to serve the purposes of production and of private gain, is a free gift of the community at large to the owners of industrial plant;
(322) and, under latterday conditions, to them exclusively. The state of the industrial arts is a joint heritage of the community at large, but where, as in the modern countries, the work to be done by this technology requires a large material equipment, the usufruct of this joint heritage passes, in effect, into the hands of the owners of this large material equipment.
These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology, the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no class or condition of men in the modern community-with the possible exception of politicians and the clergy-can conceivably contribute less to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to production being managed for private gain, it happens that these investors are not only not given to the increase end diffusion of technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in retarding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail. Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.
Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations de-
(323) signed to supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts, and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the market.
The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing of private ownership in the pursuit of.`` private gain, by persons who can show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage-refusal to let production go on except it affords them an unearned income-the expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic establishments.
This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ; nor does the question here turn on its adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with privation and
(324)insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered. How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame of mind of that unblest mass of the population who will have opportunity to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.
At the risk of what may seem an excessively wide digression, there is something further to be said of the capitalistic sabotage spoken of above. The word has by usage come to have an altogether ungraceful air of disapproval. Yet it signifies nothing more vicious than a deliberate obstruction or retardation of industry, usually by legitimate means, for the sake of some personal or partisan advantage. This morally colorless meaning is all that is intended in its use here. It is extremely common in all industry that is designed to supply merchantable goods for the market. It is, in fact, the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all expedients in business enterprise that has to do with supplying the market, being always present in the business man's necessary calculations; being not only a usual and convenient recourse but quite indispensable as an habitual measure of business sagacity. So that no personal blame can attach to its employment by any given business man or business concern. It is only when measures
(325) of this nature are resorted to by employees, to gain some end of their own, that such conduct becomes (technically) reprehensible.
Any businesslike management of industry is carried on for gain, which is to be got only on condition of meeting the terms of the market. The price system under which industrial business is carried on will not tolerate production in excess of the market demand, or without due regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust its operations, by due acceleration, retardation or stoppage, to the market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry; which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management, and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.
To anyone who is inclined to see these matters of usage in the light of their history and to appraise them as phenomena of habituation, adaptation and supersession in the sequence of cultural proliferation, there should be no difficulty in appreciating that this institution of ownership
(326) that makes the core of the modern institutional structure is a precipitate of custom, like any other item of use and wont; and that, like any other article of institutional furniture, it is subject to the contingencies of supersession and obsolescence. If prevalent habits of thought, enforced by the prevalent exigencies of life and livelihood, come to change in such a way as to make life under the rule imposed by this institution seem irksome, or intolerable, to the mass of the population; and if at the same time things turn in such a way as to leave no other and more urgent interest or exigency to take precedence of this one and hinder its being pushed to an issue; then it should reasonably follow that contention is due to arise between the unblest mass on whose life it is a burden and the classes who live by it. But it is, of course, impossible to state beforehand what will be the precise line of cleavage or what form the division between the two parties in interest will take. Yet it is contained in the premises that, barring unforeseen contingencies of a formidable magnitude, such a cleavage is due to follow as a logical sequel of an enduring peace at large. And it is also well within the possibilities of the case that this issue may work into an interruption or disruption of the peace between the nations.
In this connection it may be called to mind that the existing governmental establishments in these pacific nations :are, in all cases, in the hands of the beneficiary, or kept classes,-beneficiaries in the sense in which a distinction to that effect comes into the premises of the case at this point. The responsible officials and their chief administrative officers,-so much as may at all reasonably be called the "Government" or the "Administration,"-are quite invariably and characteristically drawn from these
(327) beneficiary classes; nobles, gentlemen, or business men, which all comes to the same thing for the purpose in hand; the point of it all being that the common man does not come within these precincts and does not share in these counsels that assume to guide the destiny of the nations.
Of course, sporadically and ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office for any of its responsible officials, even for those of a very scant responsibility, fall to the level of the habitual livelihood of the undistinguished populace, or indeed to fall below what is esteemed to be a seemly income for a gentleman. Should such an impecunious one be thrown up into a place of discretion in the government, he will forthwith cease to be a common man and will be inducted into the rank of gentleman,-so far as that feat can be achieved by taking thought or by assigning him an income adequate to a reputably expensive manner of life. So obvious is the antagonism between a vulgar station in life and a position of official trust, that many a "selfmade man" has advisedly taken recourse to governmental position, often at some appreciable cost, from no apparent motive other than its known efficacy as a Levitical corrective for a humble origin. And in point of fact, neither here nor there have the underbred majority hitherto learned to trust one of their own kind with governmental discretion; which has never yet, in the popular conviction, ceased to be a perquisite of the gently-bred and the well-to-do.
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Let it be presumed that this state of things will continue without substantial alteration, so far as regards the complexion of the governmental establishments of these pacific nations, and with such allowance for overstatement in the above characterisation as may seem called for. These governmental establishments are, by official position and by the character of their personnel, committed more or less consistently to the maintenance of the existing law and order. And should no substantial change overtake them as an effect of the war experience, the pacific league under discussion would be entered into by and between governments of this complexion. Should difficulties then arise between those who own and those who do not, in any one of these countries, it would become a nice question whether the compact to maintain the peace and national integrity of the several nations comprised in the league should be held to cover the case of internal dissensions and possible disorders partaking of the character of revolt against the established authorities or against the established provisions of law. A strike of the scope and character of the one recently threatened, and narrowly averted, on the American railroads, e. g., might easily give rise to disturbances sufficiently formidable to raise a question of the peace league's jurisdiction; particularly if such a disturbance should arise in a less orderly and less isolated country than the American republic; so as unavoidably to carry the effects of the disturbance across the national frontiers along the lines of industrial and commercial intercourse and correlation. It is always conceivable that a national government standing on a somewhat conservative maintenance of the received law and order might feel itself bound by its conception of the peace to make common cause with the keepers of estab-
(329) -lished rights in neighboring states, particularly if the similar interests of their own nation were thought to be placed in jeopardy by the course of events.
Antecedently it seems highly probable that the received, rights of ownership and disposal of property, particularly of investment, will come up for advisement and revision so soon as a settled state of peace is achieved. And there should seem to be little doubt but this revision would go toward, or at least aim at the curtailment or abrogation of these rights; very much after the fashion in which the analogous vested rights of feudalism and the dynastic monarchy have been revised and in great part curtailed or abrogated in the advanced democratic countries. Not much can confidently be said as to the details of such a prospective revision of legal rights, but the analogy of that procedure by which these other vested rights have been reduced to a manageable disability, suggests that the method in the present case also would be by way of curtailment, abrogation and elimination. Here again, as in analogous movements of disuse and disestablishment, there would doubtless be much conservative apprehension as to the procuring of a competent substitute for the supplanted methods of doing what is no longer desirable to be done; but here as elsewhere, in a like conjuncture, the practicable way out would presumably be found to lie along the line of simple disuse and disallowance of class prerogative. Taken at its face value, without unavoidable prejudice out of the past, this question of a substitute to replace the current exploitation of the industrial arts for private gain by capitalistic sabotage is not altogether above a suspicion of drollery.
Yet it is not to be overlooked that private enterprise on the basis of private ownership is the familiar and ac-
(330) -cepted method of conducting industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency of life and death in the apprehension of the kept classes. It should accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away international dissension, that the division of classes would come on in a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit. And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division of opinion on these matters might presently shift back to the old familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic, or conservative, peoples to safeguard the institutions of the received law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.
In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook is that of a return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation, certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security. National integrity and autonomy are to he preserved on the received lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of diplomacy without after-thought, whatever that might conceivably mean.
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There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently, in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of class and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in the first instance.
Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of human culture, how the common man is to fare under this régime of law and order,-the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted a5 a matter of course that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisation of archaic institutions, the measure of archaism varying from one to another.
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With due stabilisation and with a sagacious administration of the established scheme of law and order, the common man should find himself working under conditions and to results of the familiar kind; but with the difference that, while legal usage and legal precedent remain unchanged, the state of the industrial arts can confidently be expected to continue its advance in the same general direction as before, while the population increases after the familiar fashion, and the investing business community pursues its accustomed quest of competitive gain and competitive spending in the familiar spirit and with cumulatively augmented means. Stabilisation of the received law and order will not touch these matters; and for the present it is assumed that these matters will not derange the received law and order. The assumption may seem a violent one to the students of human culture, but it is a simple matter of course to the statesmen.
To this piping time of peace the nearest analogues in history would seem to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature. The scheme of law and order, indeed, appears in neither instance to have changed so far as the altered circumstances would seem to have called for. To the common man the Roman peace appears to have been a peace by submission, not widely different from what the case of China has latterly brought to the appreciation of students. The Victorian peace, which can be appreciated more in detail, was of a more genial character, as regards the fortunes of the common man. It started from a reasonably low level of hardship
(333) and de facto iniquity, and was occupied with many prudent endeavours to improve the lot of the unblest majority ; but it is to be admitted that these prudent endeavours never caught up with the march of circumstances. Not that these prudent measures of amelioration were nugatory, but it is clear that they were not an altogether effectual corrective of the changes going on; they were, in effect, systematically so far in arrears as always to leave an uncovered margin of discontent with current conditions. It is a fact of history that very appreciable sections of the populace were approaching an attitude of revolt against what they considered to be intolerable conditions when that era closed. Much of what kept them within bounds, that is to say within legal bounds, was their continued loyalty to the nation; which was greatly, and for the purpose needfully, reenforced by a lively fear of warlike aggression from without. Now, under the projected pax orbis terrarum all fear of invasion, it is hopefully believed, will be removed; and with the disappearance of this fear should also disappear the drag of national loyalty on the counsels of the underbred.
If this British peace of the nineteenth century is to be taken as a significant indication of what may be looked for under a régime of peace at large, with due allowance for what is obviously necessary to be allowed for, then what is held in promise would appear to be an era of unexampled commercial prosperity, of investment and business enterprise on a scale hitherto not experienced. These developments will bring their necessary consequences affecting the life of the community, and some of the consequences it should be possible to foresee. The circumstances conditioning this prospective era of peace and prosperity will necessarily differ from the corresponding
(334) circumstances that conditioned the Victorian peace, and many of these points of difference it is also possible to forecast in outline with a fair degree of confidence. It is in the main these economic factors going to condition the civilisation of the promised future that will have to be depended on to give the cue to any student interested in the prospective unfolding of events.
The scheme of law and order governing all modern nations, both in the conduct of their domestic affairs and in their national policies, is in its controlling- elements the scheme worked out through British (and French) experience in the eighteenth century and earlier, as revised an-l further accommodated in the nineteenth century. Other peoples, particularly the Dutch, have of course had their part in the derivation and development of this modern scheme of institutional principles, but it has after all been a minor part; so that the scheme at large would not differ very materially, if indeed it should differ sensibly, from what it is, even if the contribution of these others had not been had. The backward nations, as e. g., Germany, Russia, Spain, etc., have of course contributed substantially nothing but retardation and maladjustment to this modern scheme of civil life; whatever may be due to students resident in those countries, in the way of scholarly formulation. This nineteenth century scheme it is proposed to carry over into the new era; and the responsible spokesmen of the projected new order appear to contemplate no provision touching this scheme of law anal order, beyond the keeping of it intact in all substantial respects.
When and in so far as the projected peace at large takes effect, international interests will necessarily fall somewhat into the background, as being no longer a matter of
(335) precarious equilibration, with heavy penalties in the balance; and diplomacy will consequently become even more of a make-believe than today-something after the fashion of a game of bluff played with irredeemable "chips." Commercial, that is to say business, enterprise will consequently come in for a more undivided attention and be carried on under conditions of grcater security and of more comprehensive trade relations. The population of the pacified world may be expected to go on increasing somewhat as in the recent past; in which connection it is to be remarked that not more than one-half, presumably something less than one-half, of the available agricultural resources have been turned to account for the civilised world hitherto. The state of the industrial arts, including means of transport and communication, may be expected to develop farther in the same general direction as before, assuming always that peace conditions continue to hold. Popular intelligence, as it is called,-more properly popular education,-may be expected to suffer a further advance; necessarily so, since it is a necessary condition of any effectual advance in the industrial arts,-every appreciable technological advance presumes, as a requisite to its working-out in industry, an augmented state of information and of logical facility in the workmen under whose hands it is to take effect.
Of the prescriptive rights carried over into the new era, under the received law and order, the rights of ownership alone may be expected to have any material significance for the routine of workday life, the other personal rights that once seemed urgent will for everyday purposes have passed into a state of half-forgotten matter-of-course. As now, but in an accentuated degree, the rights of ownership will, in effect, coincide and coalesce with the
(336) rights of investment and business management. The market-that is to say the rule of the price-system in all matters of production and livelihood-may be expected to gain in volume and inclusiveness; so that virtually all matters of industry and livelihood will turn on questions of market price, even beyond the degree in which that proposition holds today. The progressive extension and consolidation of investments, corporate solidarity, and business management may be expected to go forward on the accustomed lines, as illustrated by the course of things during the past few decades. Market conditions should accordingly, in a progressively increased degree, fall under the legitimate discretionary control of businessmen, or syndicates of businessmen, who have the disposal of large blocks of invested wealth, -- "big business," as it is called, should reasonably be expected to grow bigger and to exercise an increasingly more unhampered control of market conditions, including the money market and the labor market.
With such improvements in the industrial arts as may fairly be expected to come forward, and with the possible enhancement of industrial efficiency which should follow from a larger scale of organisation, a wider reach of transport and communication, and an increased population,-with these increasing advantages on the side of productive industry, the per-capita product as well as the total prodduct should be increased in a notable degree, and the conditions of life should possibly become notably easier and more attractive, or at least more conducive to efficiency and personal comfort, for all concerned. Such would be the first and unguarded inference to be drawn from the premises of the case as they offer themselves in the large; and something of that kind is apparently what
(337) floats before the prophetic vision of the advocates of a league of nations for the maintenance of peace, at large. These premises, and the inferences so drawn from them, may be further fortified and amplified in the same sense on considering that certain very material economies also become practicable, and should take effect "in the absence of disturbing causes," on the establishment of such a peace at large. It will of course occur to all thoughtful persons that armaments must be reduced, perhaps to a minimum, and that the cost of these things, in point of expenditures as well as of man-power spent in the service, would consequently fall off in a corresponding measure. So also, as slight further reflection will show, would the cost of the civil service presumably fall off very appreciably ; more particularly the cost of this service per unit of service rendered. Some such climax of felicities might be looked for by hopeful persons, in the absence of disturbing causes.
Under the new dispensation the standard of living, that is to say the standard of expenditure, would reasonably be expected to advance in a very appreciable degree, at least among the wealthy and well-to-do; and by pre ;sure of imitative necessity a like effect would doubtless also be had among the undistinguished mass. It is not a question of the standard of living considered as a matter of the subsistence minimum, or even a standard of habitually prevalent creature comfort, particularly not among the wealthy and well to do. These latter classes have long since left all question of material comfort behind in their accepted standards of living and in the continued advance of these standards. For these classes who are often spoken of euphemistically as being "in easy circumstances," it is altogether a question of a standard of re-
(338) -putable expenditure, to be observed on pain of lost self-respect and of lost reputation at large. As has been remarked in an earlier passage, wants of this kind are indefinitely extensible. So that some doubt may well be entertained as to whether the higher productive efficiency spoken of will necessarily make the way of life easier, in view of this need of a higher standard of expenditure, even when due account is taken of the many economies which the new dispensation is expected to make practicable.
One of the effects to be looked for would apparently be an increased pressure on the part of aspiring men to get into some line of business enterprise; since it is only in business, as contrasted with the industrial occupations, that anyone can hope to find the relatively large income required for such an expensive manner of life as will bring any degree of content to aspirants for pecuniary good repute. So it should follow that the number of businessmen and business concerns would increase up to the limit of what the traffic could support, and that the competition between these rival, and in a sense overnumerous, concerns would push the costs of competition to the like limit. In this respect the situation would be of much the same character as what it now is, with the difference that the limit of competitive expenditures would be rather higher than at present, to answer to the greater available margin of product that could be devoted to this use; and that the competing concerns would be somewhat more numerous, or at least that the aggregate expenditure on competitive enterprise would be somewhat larger; as, e. g., costs of advertising, salesmanship, strategic litigation, procuration of legislative and municipal grants and connivance, and the like.
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It is always conceivable, though it may scarcely seem probable, that these incidents of increased pressure of competition in business traffic might eventually take up all the slack, and leave no net margin of product over what is available under the less favorable conditions of industry that prevail today; more particularly when this increased competition for business gains is backed by an increased pressure of competitive spending for purposes of a reputable appearance. All this applies in retail trade and in such lines of industry and public service as partakes of the nature of retail trade, in the respect that salesmanship and the costs of salesmanship enter into their case in an appreciable measure; this is an extensive field, it is true, and incontinently growing more extensive with the later changes in the customary methods of marketing products; but it is by no means anything like the whole domain of industrial business, and by no means a field in which business is carried on without interference of a higher control from outside its own immediate limits.
All this generously large and highly expensive and profitable field of trade and of trade-like industry, in which the businessmen in charge deal somewhat directly with a large body of customers, is always subject to limitations imposed by the condition of the market; and the condition of the market is in part not under the control of these businessmen, but is also in part controlled by large concerns in the background; which in their turn are after all also not precisely free agents; in fact not much more so than their cousins in the retail trade, being confined in all their motions by the constraint of the price-system that dominates the whole and gathers them all in its impersonal and inexorable net.
(340) There is a colloquial saying among businessmen, that they are not doing business for their health; which being interpreted means that they are doing business for a price. It is out of a discrepancy in price, between purchase and sale, or between transactions which come to the same result as purchase and sale, that the gains of business are drawn ; and it is in terms of price that these gains are rated, amassed and funded. It is necessary, for a business concern to achieve a favorable balance in terms of price; and the larger the balance in terms of price the more successful the enterprise. Such a balance can not be achieved except by due regard to the conditions of the market, to the effect that dealings must not go on beyond what will yield a favorable balance in terms of price between income and outgo. As has already been remarked above, the prescriptive and indispensable recourse in all this conduct of business is sabotage, limitation of supply to bring a remunerative price result.
The new dispensation offers two new factors bearing on this businesslike need of a sagacious sabotage, or rather it brings a change of coefficients in two factors already familiar in business management: a greater need, for gainful business, of resorting to such limitation of traffic; and a greater facility of ways and means for enforcing the needed restriction. So, it is confidently to be expected that in the prospective piping time of peace tile advance in the industrial arts will continue at an accelerated rate; which may confidently be expected to affect the practicable increased production of merchantable goods; from which it follows that it will act to depress the prices of these goods; from which it follows that if a profitable business is to be done in the conduct
(341) of productive industry a greater degree of continence than before will have to be exercised in order not to let prices fall to an unprofitable figure ; that is to say, the permissible, output must be held short of the productive capacity of such industry by a wirier margin than before. On the other hand, it is well known out of the experience of the past few decades that a larger coalition of invested capital, controlling a larger proportion of the output, can more effectually limit the supply to a salutary maximum, such as will afford reasonable profits. And with the new dispensation affording a freer scope for business enterprise on conditions of greater security, larger coalitions than before are due to come into bearing. So that the means will be at hand competently to meet this more urgent need of a stricter limitation of the output, in spite of any increased productive capacity conferred on the industrial community by any conceivable advance in the industrial arts. The outcome to be looked for should apparently be such an effectual recourse to capitalistic sabotage as will neutralise any added advantage that might otherwise accrue to the community from its continued improvements in technology.
In spite of this singularly untoward conjuncture of circumstances to be looked for, there need be no serious apprehension that capitalistic sabotage, with a view to maintaining prices and the rate of profits, will go all the way to the result indicated, at least not on the grounds so indicated alone. There is in the modern development of technology, and confidently to be counted on, a continued flow of new contrivance's and expedients designed to supersede the old; and these are in fact successful, in greater or less measure, in finding, their way into profitable use, on such terms as to displace older appliances,
(342) underbid them in the market, and render them obsolete or subject to recapitalisation on a lowered earning-capacity. So far as this unremitting flow of innovations has its effect, that is to say so far as it can not be hindered from having an effect, it acts to lower the effectual cost of products to the consumer. This effect is but a partial and somewhat uncertain one, but it is always to be counted in as a persistent factor, of uncertain magnitude, that will affect the results in the long run.
As has just been spoken of above, large coalitions of invested wealth are more competent to maintain, or if need be to advance, prices than smaller coalitions acting in severalty, or even when acting in collusion. This state of the case has been well illustrated by the very successful conduct of such large business organisations during the past few decades; successful, that is, in earning large returns on the investments engaged. Under the new dispensation, as has already been remarked, coalitions should reasonably be expected to grow to a larger size and achieve a greater efficiency for the same purpose.
The large gains of the large corporate coalitions are commonly ascribed by their promoters, and by sympathetic theoreticians of the ancient line, to economies of production made practicable by a larger scale of production; an explanation which is disingenuous only so far as it needs be. What is more visibly true on looking into the workings of these coalitions in detail is that they are enabled to maintain prices at a profitable, indeed at a strikingly profitable, level by such a control of the output as would be called sabotage if it were put in practice by interested workmen with a view to maintain wages. The effects of this sagacious sabotage become visible in the large earnings of these investments and the large gains
(343) which, now and again, accrue to their managers. Large fortunes commonly are of this derivation.
In cases where no recapitalisation has been effected for a considerable series of years the yearly earnings of such businesslike coalitions have been known to approach fifty percent on the capitalised value. Commonly, however, when earnings rise to a striking figure, the business will be recapitalised on the basis of its earning-capacity, by issue of a stock dividend, by reincorporation in a new combination with an increased capitalisation, and the like. Such augmentation of capital not unusually has been spoken of by theoretical writers and publicists as an increase of the community's wealth, due to savings; an analysis of any given case is likely to show that its increased capital value represents an increasingly profitable procedure for securing a high price above cost, by stopping the available output short of the productive capacity of the industries involved. Loosely speaking, and within the limits of what the traffic will bear, the gains in such a case are proportioned to the deficiency by which the production or supply under control falls short of productive capacity. So that the capitalisation in the case comes to bear a rough proportion to the material loss which this organisation of sabotage is enabled to inflict on the community at large; and instead of its being a capitalisation of serviceable means of production it may, now and again, come to little else than a capitalisation of chartered sabotage.
Under the new dispensation of peace and security at large this manner of capitalisation and business enterprise might reasonably be expected to gain something in scope and security of operation. Indeed, there are few things within the range of human interest on which an opinion
(344) may more confidently be formed beforehand. If the rights of property, in their extent and amplitude, are maintained intact as they are before the law today, the hold which business enterprise on the large scale now has on the affairs and fortunes of the community at large is bound to grow firmer and to be used more unreservedly for private advantage under the new conditions contemplated.
The logical result should be an accelerated rate of accumulation of the country's wealth in the hands of a relatively very small class of wealthy owners, with a relatively inconsiderable semi-dependent middle class of tile well-to-do, and with the mass of the population even more nearly destitute than they are today. At the saint time it is scarcely to be avoided that this wholly dependent and impecunious mass of the population must b° given an appreciably better education than they have today. The argument will return to the difficulties that are liable to arise out of this conjuncture of facts, in the way of discontent and possible disturbance.
Meantime, looking to the promise of the pacific future in the light of the pacific past, certain further consequences, particularly consequences of the economic order, that may reasonably be expected to follow will also merit attention. The experience of the Victorian peace is almost as pointed in its suggestion on this head as if it had been an experiment made ad hoc; but with the reservation that the scale of economic life, after all, was small in the Victorian era, and its pace was slack, compared with what the twentieth century should have to offer under suitable conditions of peace and pecuniary security. In the light of this most instructive modern instance,
(345) there should appear to be in prospect a growth of well-bred families resting on invested wealth and so living on unearned incomes; larger incomes and consequently a more imposingly well-bred body of gentlefolk, sustained and vouched for by a more munificent expenditure on superfluities, than the modern world has , witnessed hitherto. Doubtless the resulting growth of gentlemen and gentlewomen would be as perfect after their kind as these unexampled opportunities of gentle breeding might be expected to engender; so that even their British precursors on the trail of respectability would fall somewhat into insignificance by comparison, whether in respect of gentlemanly qualities or in point of cost per unit.
The moral, and even more particularly the aesthetic, value of such a line of gentlefolk, and of the culture which they may be expected to place on view,-this cultural side of the case, of course, is what one would prefer to dwell on, and on the spiritual gains that might be expected to accrue to humanity at large from the steady contemplation of this meritorious respectability so displayed at such a cost.
But the prosaic necessity of the argument turns back to the economic and civil bearing of this prospective development, this virtual bifurcation of the pacified nation into a small number of gentlemen who own the community's wealth and consume its net product in the pursuit of gentility, on the one hand, and an unblest mass of the populace who do the community's work on a meager livelihood tapering down toward the subsistence minimum, on the other hand. Evidently, this prospective posture of affairs may seem "fraught with danger to the common weal," as a public spirited citizen might phrase it. Or, as it would be expressed in less eloquent words, it
(346) appears to comprise elements that should make for a change. At the same time it should be recalled, and the statement will command assent on slight reflection, that there is no avoiding substantially such a posture of affairs under the promised régime of peace and security, provided only that the price-system stands over intact, and the current rights of property continue to be held inviolate. If the known principles of competitive gain and competitive spending should need enforcement to that effect by an illustrative instance, the familiar history of the Victorian peace is sufficient to quiet all doubts.
Of course, the resulting articulation of classes in the community will not be expected to fall into such simple lines of sheer contrast as this scheme would indicate. The class of gentlefolk, the legally constituted wasters, as they would be rated from the economic point of view, can not be expected personally to take care of so large a, consumption of superfluities as this posture of affairs requires at their hands. They would, as the Victorian peace teaches, necessarily have the assistance of a trained corps of experts in unproductive consumption, the first and most immediate of whom would be those whom the genial phrasing of Adam Smith designates "menial servants." Beyond these would come the purveyors of superfluities, properly speaking, and the large, indeed redundant, class of tradespeople of high and low degree, dependent in fact but with an illusion of semi-dependence; and farther out again the legal and other professional classes of the order of stewards, whose duty it will be to administer the sources of income and receive, apportion and disburse the revenues so devoted to a traceless extinguishment.
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There would, in other words, be something of a "substantial middle class," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-class illusion that they are of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-class population would engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to believe, in some passable fashion, that they touch the substance of things at something nearer than the second remove. They would in great part appear to be people of "independent means," and more particularly would they continue in the hope of so appearing and of some time making good the appearance. Hence their fancied, and therefore their sentimental, interest would fall out on the side of the established law and order; and they would accordingly be an element of stability in the commonwealth, and would throw in their weight, and their voice, to safeguard that private property and that fabric of prices and credit through which the "income stream" flows to the owners of preponderant invested wealth.
Judged on the state of the situation as it runs in our time, and allowing for the heightened efficiency of largescale investment and consolidated management under the prospective conditions of added pecuniary security, it is to be expected that the middle-class population with "independent means" should come in for a somewhat meager livelihood, provided that they work faithfully at their business of managing pecuniary traffic to the advantage of their pecuniary betters,-meager, that is to say, when allowance is made for the conventionally large expenditure on reputable appearances which is necessarily to be included in their standard of living. It lies in the nature
(348) of this system of large-scale investment and enterprise that the (pecuniarily) minor agencies engaged on a footing of ostensible independence will come in for only such a share in the aggregate gains of the community as it is expedient for the greater business interests to allow them as an incentive to go on with their work as purveyors of traffic to these greater business interests.
The current, and still more this prospective, case of the quasi-self-directing middle class may fairly be illustrated by the case of the American farmers, of the past and present. The American farmer rejoices to be called "The Independent Farmer." He once was independent, in a meager and toil-worn fashion, in the days before the price-system had brought him and all his works into the compass of the market; but that was some time ago. He now works for the market, ordinarily at something like what is called a "living wage," provided he has "independent means" enough to enable him by steady application to earn a living wage; and of course, the market being controlled by the paramount investment interests in the background, his work, in effect, inures to their benefit; except so much as it may seem necessary to allow him as incentive to go on. Also of course, these paramount investment interests are in turn controlled in all their manoeuvres by the impersonal exigencies of the price-system, which permits no vagaries in violation of the rule that all traffic must show a balance of profit in terms of price.
The Independent Farmer still continues to believe that in some occult sense he still is independent in what he will do and what not; or perhaps rather that he can by shrewd management retain or regain a tolerable measure of such independence, after the fashion of what is held to have
(349) been the posture of affairs in the days before the coming of corporation finance; or at least he believes that he ought to have, or to regain or reclaim, some appreciable measure of such independence; which ought then, by help of the "independent means" which he still treasures, to procure him an honest and assured livelihood in return for an honest year's work. Latterly he, that is the common run of the farmers, has been taking note of the fact that he is, as he apprehends it, at a disadvantage in the market; and he is now taking recourse to concerted action for the purpose of what might be called "rigging the market" to his own advantage. In this he overlooks the impregnable position which the party of the second part, the great investment interests, occupy; in fact, he is counting without his host. Hitherto he has not been convinced of his own helplessness. And with a fine fancy he still imagines that his own interest is on the side of the propertied and privileged classes; so that the farmer constituency is the chief pillar of conservative law and order, particularly in all that touches the inviolable rights of property and at every juncture where a division comes on between those who live by investment and those who live by work. In pecuniary effect, the ordinary American farmer, who legally owns a moderate farm of the common sort, belongs among those who work for a livelihood; such a livelihood as the investment interests find it worth while to allow him under the rule of what the traffic will bear; but in point of sentiment and class consciousness he clings to a belated stand on the side of those who draw a profit from his work.
So it is also with the menial servants and the middleclass people of "independent means," who are, however, in a position to see more clearly their dependence on the
(350) owners of predominant wealth. And such, with a further accentuation of the anomaly, may reasonably be expected to be the further run of these relations under the promised régime of peace and security. The class of well-kept gentlefolk will scarcely be called on to stand alone, in case of a division between those who live by investment and those who live by work; inasmuch as, for the calculable future, it should seem a reasonable expectation that this very considerable fringe of dependents and pseudo-independents will abide by their time-tried principles of right and honest living, through good days and evil, and cast in their lot unreservedly with that reputable body to whom the control of trade and industry by investment assigns the usufruct of the community's productive powers.
Something has already been said of the prospective breeding of pedigreed gentlefolk under the projected regime of peace. Pedigree, for the purpose in hand, is a pecuniary attribute and is, of course, a product of funded wealth, more or less ancient. Virtually ancient pedigree can be procured by well-advised expenditure on the conspicuous amenities; that is to say pedigree effectually competent as a background of current gentility. Gentlefolk of such syncopated pedigree may have to walk circumspectly, of course; but their being in this manner put on their good behavior should tend to heighten their effectual serviceability as gentlefolk, by inducing a single-mindedness of gentility beyond what can fairly be expected of those who are already secure in their tenure.
Except conventionally, there is no hereditary difference between the standard gentlefolk and, say, their "menial servants," or the general population of the farms
(351) and the industrial towns. This is a well-established commonplace among ethnological students; which has. of course, nothing to say with respect to the conventionally distinct lines of descent of the "Best Families." These Best Families are nowise distinguishable from the common run in point of hereditary traits; the difference that makes the gentleman and the gentlewoman being wholly a matter of habituation during the individual's lifetime. It is something of a distasteful necessity to call attention to this total absence of native difference between the wellborn and the common, but it is a necessity of the argument in hand, and the recalling of it may, therefore, be overlooked for once in a way. There is no harm and no annoyance intended. The point of it all is that, on the premises which this state of the case affords, the body of gentlefolk created by such an accumulation of invested wealth will have no less of an effectual cultural value than they would have had if their virtually ancient pedigree had been actual.
At this point, again, the experience of the Victorian peace and the functioning of its gentlefolk come in to indicate what may fairly be hoped for in this way under this prospective regime of peace at large. But with the difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class-and there is neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase-should be patterned on the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. The characteristic feature to which attention naturally turns at this suggestion is the tranquility
(352) that has marked that body of gentlefolk and their code of clean and honest living. Another word than "tranquility" might be hit upon to designate this characteristic animus, but any other word that should at all adequately serve the turn would carry a less felicitous suggestion of those upper-class virtues that have constituted the substantial worth of the Victorian gentleman. The conscious worth of these gentlefolk has been a beautifully complete achievement. It has been an achievement of "faith without works," of course; but, needless to say, that is as it should be, also of course. The place of gentlefolk in the economy of Nature is tracelessly to consume the community's net product, and in doing so to set a standard of decent expenditure for the others emulatively to work up to as near as may be. It is scarcely conceivable that this could have been done in a more unobtrustively efficient, manner or with a more austerely virtuous conviction of well-doing, than by the gentlefolk bred of the Victorian peace. So also, in turn, it is not to be believed that the prospective breed of gentlefolk derivable from the net product of the pacific nations under the promised régime of peace at large will prove in any degree less effective for the like ends. More will be required of them in the way of a traceless consumption of superfluities and an unexampled expensive standard of living. But this situation that so faces them may be construed as a larger opportunity, quite as well as a more difficult task.
A theoretical exposition of the place anal cultural value of a leisure class in modern life would scarcely be in place here; and it has also been set out in some detail elsewhere.[1] For the purpose in hand it may be sufficient to
(353) recall that the canons of taste and the standards of valuation worked out and inculcated by leisure-class life have in all ages run, with unbroken consistency, to pecuniary waste and personal futility. In its economic bearing, and particularly in its immediate bearing on the material well-being of the community at large, the leadership of the leisure class can. scarcely be called by a less derogatory epithet than "untoward." But that is not the whole of the case, and the other side should be heard. The leisure-class life of tranquility, running detached as it does above the turmoil out of which the material of their sustenance is derived, enables a growth of all those virtues that mark, or make, the gentleman; and that affect the life of the underlying community throughout, pervasively, by imitation; leading to a standarisation of the everyday proprieties on a, presumably, higher level of urbanity and integrity than might be expected to result in the absence of this prescriptive model.
Integer vitae scelerisque purus, the gentleman of assured station turns a placid countenance to all those petty vexations of breadwinning that touch him not. Serenely and with an impassive fortitude he faces those common vicissitudes of life that are impotent to make or mar his material fortunes and that can neither impair his creature comforts nor put a slur on his good repute. So that without afterthought he deals fairly in all everyday conjunctures of give and take; for they are at the most inconsequential episodes to him, although the like might spell irremediable disaster to his impecunious counterfoil among the common men who have the community's work to do. In short, he is a gentleman, in the best acceptation of the word,-unavoidably, by force of circumstance. As such his example is of invaluable consequence to the
(354) underlying community of common folk, in that it keeps before their eyes an object-lesson in habitual fortitude and visible integrity such as could scarcely have been created except under such shelter from those disturbances that would go to mar habitual fortitude and integrity. There can be little doubt but the high example of the Victorian gentlefolk has had much to do with stabilising the animus of the British common man on lines of integrity and fair play. .What else and more in the way of habitual preconceptions he may, by competitive imitation, owe to the same high source is not immediately in question here.
Recalling once more that the canon of life whereby folk are gentlefolk sums itself up in the requirements of pecuniary waste and personal futility, and that these requirements are indefinitely extensible, at the same time that the management of the community's industry by investment for a profit enables the owners of invested wealth to divert to their own use the community's net product, wherewith to meet these requirements, it follows that the community at large which provides this output of product will be allowed so much as is required by their necessary standard of living,-with an unstable margin of error in the adjustment. This margin of error should tend continually to grow narrower as the businesslike management of industry grows more efficient with experience ; but it will also continually be disturbed iii the contrary sense by innovations of a technological nature that require continual readjustment. This margin is probably not to be got rid of, though it may be expected to become less considerable under more settled conditions.
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It should also not be overlooked that the standard of living here spoken of as necessarily to be allowed the working population by no means coincides with the "physical subsistence minimum," from which in fact it always departs by something appreciable. The necessary standard of living of the working community is in fact made up of two distinguishable factors: the subsistence minimum, and the requirements of decorously wasteful consumption-the "decencies of life." These decencies are no less requisite than the physical necessaries, in point of workday urgency, and their amount is a matter of use and wont. This composite standard of living is a practical minimum, below which consumption will not fall, except by a fluctuating margin of error; the effect being the same, in point of necessary consumption, as if it were all of the nature of a_ physical subsistence minimum.
Loosely speaking, the arrangement should leave nothing appreciable over, after the requirements of genteel waste and of the workday standard of consumption have been met. From which in turn it should follow that the rest of what is comprised under the general caption of "culture" will find a place only in the interstices of leisure-class expenditure and only at the hands of aberrant members of the class of the gently-bred. The working population should have no effectual margin of time, energy or means for other pursuits than the day's work in the service of the price-system; so that aberrant individuals in this class, who might by native propensity incline, e. g., to pursue the sciences or the fine arts, should have (virtually) no chance to make good. It would be a virtual suppression of such native gifts among the common folk, not a definitive and all-inclusive suppression. The state of
(356) the case under the Victorian peace may, again, be taken in illustration of the point; although under the presumably more effectual control to be looked for in the pacific future the margin might reasonably be expected to run somewhat narrower, so that this virtual suppression of cultural talent among the common men should come nearer a complete suppression.
The working of that free initiative that makes the advance of civilisation, and also the greater part of its conservation, would in effect be allowed only in the erratic members of the kept classes; where at the same time it would have to work against the side-draught of conventional usage, which discountenances any pursuit that is not visibly futile according to some accepted manner of futility. Now under the prospective perfect working of the price-system, bearers of the banners of civilisation could effectually be drawn only from the kept classes, the gentlefolk who alone would have the disposal of such free income as is required for work that has no pecuniary value. And numerically the gentlefolk are an inconsiderable fraction of the population. The supply of competently gifted bearers of the community's culture would accordingly be limited to such as could be drawn by self-selection from among this inconsiderable proportion of the community at large.
It may be recalled that in point of heredity, and therefore in point of native fitness for the maintenance and advance of civilization, there is no difference between the gentlefolk and the populace at large; or at least there is no difference of such a nature as to count in abatement of the proposition set down above. Some slight, but after all inconsequential, difference there may be, but such difference as there is, if any, rather counts against the
(357) gentlefolk as keepers of the cultural advance. The gentlefolk are derived from business; the gentleman represents a filial generation of the businessman; and if the class typically is gifted with any peculiar hereditary traits, therefore, they should presumably be such as typically mark the successful businessman-astute, prehensile, unscrupulous. For a generation or two, perhaps to the scriptural third and fourth generation, it is possible that a diluted rapacity and cunning may continue to mark the businessman's well-born descendants; but these are not serviceable traits for the conservation and advancement of the community's cultural heritage. So that no consideration of special hereditary fitness in the wellborn need be entertained in this connection.
As to the limitation imposed by the price-system on the supply of candidates suited by native gift for the human work of civilisation; it would no doubt, be putting the figure extravagantly high to say that the gentlefolk, properly speaking, comprise as much as ten percent of the total population; perhaps something less than one-half of that percentage would still seem a gross overstatement. But, to cover loose ends and vagrant cases, the gentlefolk may for the purpose be credited with so high a percentage of the total population. If ten percent be allowed, as an outside figure, it follows that the community's scientists, artists, scholars, and the like individuals given over to the workday pursuits of the human spirit, are by conventional restriction to be drawn from one-tenth of the current supply of persons suited by native gift for these pursuits. Or as it may also be expressed, in so far as the projected scheme takes effect it should result in the suppression of nine (or more) out of every ten persons available for the constructive work of civilisa
(358) -tion. The cultural consequences to be looked for, therefore, should be quite markedly of the conservative order.
Of course, in actual effect, the retardation or repression of civilisation by this means, as calculated on these premises, should reasonably be expected to count up to something appreciably more than nine-tenths of the gains that might presumably be achieved in the conceivable absence of the price-system and the régime of investment. All work of this kind has much of the character of teamwork; so that the efforts of isolated individuals count for little, and a few working in more or less of concert and understanding will count for proportionally much less than many working in concert. The endeavours of the individuals engaged count cumulatively, to such effect that doubling their forces will more than double the aggregate efficiency; and conversely, reducing the number will reduce the effectiveness of their work by something more than the simple numerical proportion. Indeed, an undue reduction of numbers in such a case may lead to the total defeat of the few that are left, and the best endeavours of a dwindling remnant may be wholly nugatory. There is needed a sense of community and solidarity, without which the assurance necessary to the work is bound to falter and dwindle out; and there is also needed a degree of popular countenance, not to be had by isolated individuals engaged in an unconventional pursuit of things that are neither to be classed as spendthrift decorum nor as merchantable goods. In this connection an isolated one does not count for one, and more than the critical minimum will count for several per capita. It is a case where the "minimal dose" is wholly inoperative.
There is not a little reason to believe that consequent upon the installation of the projected régime of peace
(359) at large and secure investment the critical point in the repression of talent will very shortly be reached and passed, so that the principle of the "minimal dose" will come to apply. The point may readily be illustrated by the case of many British and American towns and neighbourhoods during the past few decades; where the dominant price-system and its commercial standards of truth and beauty have over-ruled all inclination to cultural sanity and put it definitively in abeyance. The cultural, or perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is not, properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character, conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the American colleges and universities, where business principles have supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the same lines that have led so many of the country towns effectually outside the cultural pale. The American university or college is coming to be an outlier of the price-system, in point of aims, standards and personnel; hitherto the tradition of learning as a trait of civilisation, as distinct from business, has not been fully displaced, although it is now coming to face the passage of the minimal dose. The like, in a degree, is apparently true latterly for many English, and still more evidently for many German schools.
In these various instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a positive infection of a maligant sort, so much as to a failure of the active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point
(360) of efficacy; perhaps through an unintended refusal of a livelihood to persons given over to cultivating the elements of civilisation; perhaps through the conventional disallowance of the pursuit of any other ends than competitive gain and competitive spending. Evidently it is something much more comprehensive in this nature that is reasonably to be looked for under the prospective regime of peace, in case the price-system gains that farther impetus and warrant which it should come in for if the rights of ownership and investment stand over intact, and so come to enjoy the benefit of a further improved state of the industrial arts and a further enlarged scale of operation and enhanced rate of turnover.
To turn back to the point from which this excursion branched off. It has been presumed all the while that the technological equipment, or the state of the industrial arts, must continue to advance under the conditions offered by this régime of peace at large. But the last few paragraphs will doubtless suggest that such a single-minded addiction to competitive gain and competitive spending as the stabilised and amplified price-system would enjoin, must lead to an effectual retardation, perhaps to a decline, of those material sciences on which modern technology draws; and that the state of the industrial arts should therefore cease to advance, if only the scheme of investment and businesslike sabotage can be made sufficiently secure. That such may be the outcome is a contingency which the argument will have to meet and to allow for; but it is after all a contingency that need not be expected to derange the sequence of events, except in the way of retardation. Even without further advance in technological expedients or in the
(361) relevant material sciences, there will still necessarily ensue an effectual advance in the industrial arts, in the sense that further organisation and enlargement of the material equipment and industrial processes on lines already securely known and not to be forgotten must bring an effectually enhanced efficiency of the industrial process as a whole.
In illustration, it is scarcely to be assumed even as a tentative hypothesis that the system of transport and communication will not undergo extension and improvement on the lines already familiar, even in the absence of new technological contrivances. At the same time a continued increase of population is to be counted on; which has, for the purpose in hand, much the same effect as an advance in the industrial arts. Human contact and mutual understanding will necessarily grow wider and closer, and will have its effect on the habits of thought prevalent in the communities that are to live under the promised régime of peace. The system of transport and communication having to handle a more voluminous and exacting traffic, in the service of a larger and more compact population, will have to be organised and administered on mechanically drawn schedules of time, place, volume, velocity, and price, of a still more exacting accuracy than hitherto. The like will necessarily apply throughout the industrial occupations that employ extensive plant or processes, or that articulate with industrial processes of that nature; which will necessarily comprise a larger proportion of the industrial process at large than hitherto.
As has already been remarked more than once in the course of the argument, a population that lives and does its work, and such play as is allowed it, in and by an exactingly articulate mechanical system of-this kind will
(362) necessarily be an "intelligent" people, in the colloquial sense of the word; that is to say it will necessarily be a people that uses printed matter freely and that has some familiarity with the elements of those material sciences that underlie this mechanically organised system of appliances and processes. Such a population lives by and within the framework of the mechanistic logic, and is in a fair way to lose faith in any proposition that can not be stated convincingly in terms of this mechanistic logic. Superstitions are liable to lapse by neglect or disuse in such a community ; that is to say propositions of a nonmechanistic complexion are liable to insensible disestablishment in such a case; "superstition" in these premises coming to signify whatever is not of this mechanistic, or "materialistic" character. An exception to this broad characterisation of non-mechanistic propositions as "superstition" would be matters that are of the nature of an immediate deliverance of the senses or of the aesthetic sensibilities.
By a simile it might be said that what so falls under the caption of "superstition" in such a case is subject to decay by inanition. It should not be difficult to conceive the general course of such a decay of superstitions under this unremitting discipline of mechanistic habits of life. The recent past offers an illustration, in the unemotional progress of decay that has overtaken religious beliefs in the more civilised countries, and more particularly among the intellectually trained workmen of the mechanical industries. The elimination of such non-mechanistic propositions of the faith has been visibly going on, but it has not worked out on any uniform plan, nor has it overtaken any large or compact body of people consistently or abruptly, being of the nature of obsolescence rather
(363) than of set repudiation. But in a slack and unreflecting fashion the divestment has gone on until the aggregate effect is unmistakable.
A similar divestment of superstitions is reasonably to be looked for also in that domain of preconceptions that lies between the supernatural and the mechanistic. Chief among these time-warped preconceptions-or superstitions-that so stand over out of the alien past among these democratic peoples is the institution of property. As is true of preconceptions touching the supernatural verities, so here too the article of use and wont in question will not bear formulation in mechanistic terms and is not congruous with that mechanistic logic that is incontinently bending the habits of thought of the common man more and more consistently to its own bent. There is, of course, the difference that while no class-apart from 'she servants of the church-have a material interest in the continued integrity of the articles of the supernatural faith, there is a strong and stubborn material interest bound up with the maintenance of this article of the pecuniary faith; and the class in whom this material interest vests are also, in effect, invested with the coercive powers of the law.
The law, and the popular preconceptions that give the law its binding force, go to uphold the established usage and the established prerogatives on this head; and the disestablishment of the rights of property and investment therefore is not a simple matter of obsolescence through neglect. It may confidently he counted on that all the apparatus of the law and all the coercive agencies of law and order, will be brought in requisition to uphold the ancient rights of ownership, whenever any move is made toward their disallowance or restriction. But then,
(364) on the other hand, the movement to disallow or diminish the prerogatives of ownership is also not to take the innocuous shape of unstudied neglect. So soon, or rather so far, as the common man comes to realise that these rights of ownership and investment uniformly work to his material detriment, at the same time that he has lost the "will to believe" in any argument that does not run in terms of the mechanistic logic, it is reasonable to expect that he will take a stand on this matter; and it is more than likely that the stand taken will be of an uncompromising kind,-presumably something in the nature of the stand once taken by recalcitrant Englishmen in protest against the irresponsible rule of the Stuart sovereign. It is also not likely that the beneficiaries under these proprietary rights will yield their ground at all amicably; all the more since they are patently within their authentic rights in insisting on full discretion in the disposal of their own possessions; very much as Charles I or James Il once were within their prescriptive right,-which had little to say in the outcome.
Even apart from "time immemorial" and the patent authenticity of the institution, there were and are many cogent arguments to be alleged in favor of the position for which the Stuart sovereigns and their spokesmen contended. So there are and will be many, perhaps more, cogent reasons to be alleged for the maintenance of the established law and order in respect of the rights of ownership and investment. Not least urgent. nor least real, among these arguments is the puzzling question of what to put in the place of these rights and of the methods of control based on them, very much as the analogous question puzzled the public-spirited men of the Stuart times. All of which goes to argue that there may
(365) be expected to arise a conjuncture of perplexities and complications, as well as a division of interests and claims. To which should be added that the division is likely to come to a head so soon as the balance of forces between the two parties in interest becomes doubtful, so that either party comes to surmise that the success of its own aims may depend on its own efforts. And as happens where two antagonistic parties are each convinced of the justice of its cause, and in the absence of an umpire, the logical recourse is the wager of battle.
Granting the premises, there should be no reasonable doubt as to this eventual cleavage between those who own and those who do not; and of the premises the only item that is not already an accomplished fact is the installation of peace at large. The rest of what goes into the argument is the well-known modern state of the industrial arts, and the equally well-known price-system; which, in combination, give its character -fb the modern state of business enterprise. It is only an unusually broad instance of an institutional arrangement which has in the course of time and changing conditions come to work at cross purposes with that underlying ground of institutional arrangements that takes form in the commonplace aphorism, Live and let live. With change setting in the direction familiar to all men today, it is only a question of limited time when the discrepancy will reach a critical pass, and the installation of peace may be counted on to hasten this course of things.
That a decision will be sought b5 recourse to forcible measures, is also scarcely open to question; since the established law and order provides for a resort to coercion in the enforcement of these prescriptive rights, and since both parties in interest, in this as in other cases, are
(366) persuaded of the justice of their claims. A decision either way is an intolerable iniquity in the eyes of the losing side. History teaches that in such a quarrel the recourse has always been to force.
History teaches also, but with an inflection of doubt, that the outworn institution in such a conjuncture faces disestablishment. At least, so men like to believe. What the experience of history does not leave in doubt is the grave damage, discomfort and shame incident to the displacement of such an institutional discrepancy by such recourse to force. What further appears to be clear in the premises, at least to the point of a strong presumption, is that in the present case the decision, or the choice, lies between two alternatives: either the price-system and its attendant business enterprise will yield and pass out; or the pacific nations will conserve their pecuniary scheme of law and order at the cost of returning to a war footing and letting their owners preserve the rights of ownership by force of arms.
The reflection obviously suggests itself that this prospect of consequences to follow from the installation of peace at large might well be taken into account beforehand by those who are aiming to work out an enduring peace. It has appeared in the course of the argument that the preservation of the present pecuniary law and order, with all its incidents of ownership and investment, is incompatible with an unwarlike state of peace and security. This current scheme of investment, business, anal sabotage, should have an appreciably better chance of survival in the long run if the present conditions of warlike preparation and national insecurity were maintained, or if the projected peace were left in a somewhat problematical state, sufficiently precarious to keep national animosi-
(367) -ties alert, and thereby to the neglect of domestic interests, particularly of such interests as touch the popular well-being. On the other hand, it has also appeared that the cause of peace and its prepetuation might be materially advanced if precautions were taken beforehand to put out of the way as much as may be of those discrepancies of interest and sentiment between nations and between classes which make for dissension and eventual hostilities.
So, if the projectors of this peace at large are in any degree inclined to seek concessive terms on which the peace might hopefully be made enduring, it should evidently be part of their endeavours from the outset to put events in train for the present abatement and eventual abrogation of the rights of ownership and of the price-system in which these rights take effect. A hopeful beginning along this line would manifestly be the neutralisation of all pecuniary rights of citizenship, as has been indicated in an earlier passage. On the other hand, if peace is not desired at the cost of relinquishing the scheme of competitive gain and competitive spending, the promoters of peace should logically observe due precaution and move only so far in the direction of a peaceable settlement as would result in a sufficiently unstable equilibrium of mutual jealousies; such as might expeditiously be upset whenever discontent with pecuniary affairs should come to threaten this established scheme of pecuniary prerogatives.
