LOAN STACK

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARCOUBT, BRACE ft WORLD, INC. COPYRIGHT RENEWED, 1948, BY R. H. TAWNBY

AU righto reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form,

G.3.62

R. H. TAWNEY was born in 1880 in Calcutta, India. The son of a British official, he was educated at Rugby and at Balliol College, Oxford. During his career he has been associated with Glasgow, Oxford, and London Universities, and at present holds a chair of Economic History at the London School of Economics. Tawney's three best-known works, The Acquisitive Society (1920), "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), and Equality (1931), along with numerous other books, have gained him an international reputation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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The author desires to express his acknowledgments to the Editor of the Hibbert Journal for permission to reprint an article which appeared in it.

INTRODUCTORY

It is a commonplace that the characteristic virtue of Englishmen is their power of sustained practical activity, and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity hy reference to principles. They are incurious as to theory, take fundamentals for granted, and are more interested in the state of the roads than in their place on the map. And it might fairly be argued that in ordinary times that combination of intellectual tameness with practical energy is sufficiently serviceable to explain, if not to justify, the equanimity "with which its possessors bear the criticism of more mentally adventurous nations. It is the mood of those / who have made their bargain with fate and are content to take what it offers without re-opening the deal. It leaves the mind free to'concentrate undisturbed upon profitable activities, because it is not distracted by a i taste for unprofitable speculations. Most generations, it might be said, walk in a path which they neither make, nor discover, but accept; the main thing is that they should march. The blinkers worn by Englishmen enable them to trot all the more steadily along the beaten

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road, without being disturbed by curiosity as to thei* destination.

But if the medicine of the constitution ought not ti be made its daily food, neither can its daily food W made its medicine. There are times which are not ord» nary, and in such times it is not enough to follow tbj road. It is necessary to know where it leads, and, U it leads nowhere, to follow another. The search fo| another involves reflection, which is uncongenial to th| bustling people who describe themselves as practical^ because they take things as they are and leave them & m they are. But the practical thing for a traveler who is uncertain of his path is not to proceed with the utmost rapidity in the wrong direction: it is to consider how-to find the right one. And the practical thing for a* nation which has stumbled upon one of the turning* points of history is not to behave as though nothing very | important were involved, as if it did not matter whether \ it turned to the right or to the left, went up hill of down dale, provided that it continued doing with a little more enepgy what it has done hitherto; but to consider whether what it has done hitherto is wise, and* if it is not wise, to alter it. When the broken ends ofii its industry, its politics, its social organization, have Xof be pieced together after a catastrophe, it must make M decision; for it makes a decision even if it refuses tai decide. If it is to make a decision which will wear, \% must travel beyond the philosophy momentarily in favo^ with the proprietors of its newspapers. Unless it is t« move with the energetic futility of a squirrel in a revolve ing cage, it must have a clear apprehension both of the

i eij deficiency of what is, and of the character of what ought

to be. And to obtain this apprehension it must appeal

: tsto some standard more stable than the momentary exi-

Igencies of its commerce or industry or social life, and

ri judge them by it It must, in short, have recourse to

tk Principles.

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ft Such considerations are, perhaps, not altogether ir-

titelevant at a time when facts have forced upon English-admen the reconsideration of their social institutions Which no appeal to theory could induce them to undertake. An appeal to principles is the condition of any ^considerable reconstruction of society, because social institutions are the visible expression of the scale of moral Values which rules the minds of individuals, and it is ^impossible to alter institutions without altering that rmoral valuation. Parliament, industrial organizations, tthe whole complex machinery through which society expresses itself, is a mill which grinds only what is put into it, and when nothing is put into it grinds air. tThere are many, of course, who desire no alteration, and whriio, when it is attempted, will oppose it. They have Gfound the existing economic order profitable in the past. tThey desire only such changes as will insure that it is Squally profitable in the future. Quand le Roi avait bu, tfa Pologne etait ivre. They are genuinely unable to Understand why their countrymen cannot bask happily roby the fire which warms themselves, and ask, like the French farmer-general:—" When everything goes so rtiappily, why trouble to change it ? " Such persons are tKo be pitied, for they lack the social quality which is

proper to man. But they do not need argument; f< Heaven has denied them one of the faculties required 1 apprehend it.

There are others, however, who are conscious of tl desire for a new social order, but who yet do not gras the implications of their own desire. Men may ge: uinely sympathize with the demand for a radic change. They may be conscious of social evils and si cerely anxious to remove them. They may set up new department, and appoint new officials, and inve a new name to express their resolution to effect som thing more drastic than reform, and less disturbii than revolution. But unless they will take the pain not only to act, but to reflect, they end by effectii nothing. For they deliver themselves bound to tho* who think they are practical, because they take thei philosophy so much for granted as to be unconsciot of its implications, and directly they try to act, thi philosophy re-asserts itself, and serves as an ove ruling force which presses their action more deeply inl the old channels. " Unhappy man that I am; wl shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " Wh« they desire to place their economic life on a better foui dation, they repeat, like parrots, the word " Produ tivity," because that is the word that rises first in the minds; regardless of the fact that productivity is tl foundation on which it is based already, that increase productivity is the one characteristic achievement of tl age before the war, as religion was of the Middle Ag or art of classical Athens, and that it is precisely in tl century which has seen the greatest increase in produ

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fa tivity since the fall of the Roman Empire that economic [ I discontent has been most acute. When they are touched by social compunction, they can think of nothing more tb: original than the diminution of poverty, because pov-as erty, being the opposite of the riches which they value re most, seems to them the most terrible of human af-iciflictions. They do not understand that poverty is a sin symptom and a consequence of social disorder, while the p [disorder itself is something at once more fundamental reitnd more incorrigible, and that the quality in their unsocial life which causes it to demoralize a few by excea-)iimve riches, is also the quality which causes it to de-limmoralize many by excessive poverty. t» " But increased production is important." Of course K»it is! That plenty is good and scarcity evil—it needs iemo ghost from the graves of the past five years to tell of us that. But plenty depends upon co-operative effort, hand co-operation upon moral principles. And moral ® principles are what the prophets of this dispensation h despise. So the world "continues in scarcity," because it is too grasping and too short-sighted to seek ^that " which maketb men to be of one mind in a house." ^ The well-intentioned schemes for social reorganization Kput forward by its commercial teachers are abortive, because they endeavor to combine incompatibles, and, if kthey disturb everything, settle nothing. They are like a &«man who, when he finds that his shoddy boots wear :Mbadly, orders a pair two sizes larger instead of a pair $of good leather, or who makes up for putting a bad tkiixpence in the plate on Sunday by putting in a bad shilling the next. And when their fit of feverish energy

has spent itself, and there is nothing to show for ii except disillusionment, they cry that reform is imprac ticable, and blame human nature, when what they ough to blame is themselves.

Yet all the time the principles upon which industr; should be based are simple, however difficult it may b to apply them; and if they are overlooked it is not be cause they are difficult, but because they are elementary They are simple because industry is simple. An in dustry, when all is said, is, in its essence, nothing mon mysterious than a body of men associated, in various degrees of competition and co-operation, to win theu living by providing the community with some servic* which it requires. Organize it as you will, let it be t group of craftsmen laboring with hammer and chisel or peasants plowing their own fields, or armies oi mechanics of a hundred different trades constructing ships which are miracles <rf complexity with machines which are the climax of centuries of invention, its fun<? tion is service, its method is association. Because its function is service, an industry as a whole has rights and duties towards the community, the abrogation ol which involves privilege. Because its method is asso ciation, the different parties within it have rights anc duties towards each other; and the neglect or perversioi of these involves oppression.

The conditions of a right organization of industr; are, therefore, permanent, unchanging, and capable o being apprehended by the most elementary intelligence provided it will read the nature of its countrymen in tb large outlines of history, not in the bloodless abstra*

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>r i tions of experts. The first is that it should be subordi-mj nated to the community in such a way as to render the flg best service technically possible, that those who render ; no service should not be paid at all, because it is of isfcj the essence of a function that it should find its mean-y I ing in the satisfaction, not of itself, but of the end which t k it serves. The second is that its direction and govern-tHtment should be in the hands of persons who are re-i Sponsible to those who are directed and governed, be-tnof cause it is the condition of economic freedom that men rio#should not be ruled by an authority which they cannot tMcontrol. The industrial problem, in fact, is a problem •wof right, not merely of material misery, and because it k*is a problem of right it is most acute among those insertions of the working classes whose material misery ( is least. It is a question, first of Function, and sec-/ i> ondly of Freedom.

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TWO

RIGHTS AND FUNCTIONS

A functioist may be defined as an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose. The essence of it is that the agent does not perform it merely for personal gain or to gratify himself, but recognizes that he is responsible for its discharge to some higher authority. The purpose of industry is obvious. It is to supply man with things which are necessary, useful or beautiful, and thus to bring life to body or spirit. In so far as it is governed by this end, it is among the most important of human activities. In so far as it is diverted from it, it may be harmless, amusing, or even exhilarating to those who carry it on, but it possesses no more social significance than the orderly business of ants and bees, the strutting of peacocks, or the struggles of carnivorous animals over carrion.

Men have normally appreciated this fact, however unwilling or unable they may have been to act upon it; and therefore from time to time, in so far as they have been able to control the forces of violence and greed, they have adopted various expedients for emphasizing the social quality of economic activity. It is not easy, however, to emphasize it effectively, because to do so requires a constant effort of will, against which egotistical instincts are in rebellion, and because, if that

will is to prevail, it must be embodied in some social

and political organization, which may itself become so arbitrary, tyrannical and corrupt as to thwart the performance of function instead of promoting it. When this process of degeneration has gone far, as in most European countries it had by the middle of the eighteenth century, the indispensable thing is to break the fD1 dead organization up and to clear the ground. In the ^ course of doing so, the individual is emancipated and e j- his rights are enlarged; but the idea of social purpose is # discredited by the discredit justly attaching to the obso-k lete order in which it is embodied.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the new indus-£ trial societies which arose on the ruins of the old regime r j, the dominant note should have been the insistence upon t ], individual rights, irrespective of any social purpose to t :, which their exercise contributed. The economic ex-ve pansion which concentrated population on the coal-meas-._ ures was, in essence, an immense movement of coloniza-; c tion drifting from the south and east to the north and r ] e west; and it was natural that in those regions of England, as in the American settlements, the characteristic philosophy should be that of the pioneer and the mining -. camp. The change of social quality was profound. But in England, at least, it was gradual, and the " industrial revolution," though catastrophic in its effects, was only the visible climax of generations of subtle moral change. ' The rise of modern economic relations, which may be * dated in England from the latter half of the seventeenth century, was coincident with the growth of a political , theory which replaced the conception of purpose by that . of mechanism. During a great part of history men had

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found the significance of their social order in its relation to the universal purposes of religion. It stood as one rung in a ladder which stretched from hell to Paradise, and the classes who composed it were the hands, the feet, the head of a corporate hody which was itself a microcosm imperfectly reflecting a larger universe. When the Reformation made the Church a department of the secular government, it undermined the already enfeebled spiritual forces which had erected that sublime, but too much elaborated, synthesis. But its influence remained for nearly a century after the roots which fed it had been severed. It was the atmosphere into which men were born, and from which, however practical, or even Machiavellian, they could not easily disengage their spirits. Nor was it inconvenient for the new statecraft to see the weight of a traditional religious sanction added to its own concern in the subordination of all classes and interests to the common end, of which it conceived itself, and during the greater part of the sixteenth century was commonly conceived, to be the guardian. The lines of the social structure were no longer supposed to reproduce in miniature the plan of a universal order. But common habits, common traditions and beliefs, common pressure from above gave them a unity of direction, which restrained the forces of individual variation and lateral expansion; and the center towards which they converged, formerly a Church possessing some of the characteristics of a State, was now a State that had clothed itself with many of the attributes of a Church.

The difference between the England of Shakespeare,

still visited by the ghosts of the Middle Ages, and the England which merged in 1700 from the fierce polemics of the last two generations, was a difference of social and political theory even more than of constitutional and political arrangements. Not only the facts, but the minds which appraised them, were profoundly modified. The essence of the change was the disappearance of the idea that social institutions and economic activities were related to common ends, which gave them their significance and which served as their criterion. In the eighteenth century both the State and the Church had abdicated that part of the sphere which had consisted in the maintenance of a common body of social ethics; what was left of it <was repression of a class, not the discipline of a nation. Opinion ceased to regard social institutions and economic activity as amenable, like personal conduct, to moral criteria, because it was no longer influenced by the spectacle of institutions which, arbitrary, capricious, and often corrupt in their practical operation, had been the outward symbol and expression of the subordination of life to purposes transcending private interests. That part of government which had been concerned with social administration, if it did not end, became at least obsolescent. For such democracy as had existed in the Middle Ages was dead, and the democracy of the Revolution was not yet born, so that government passed into the lethargic hand of classes who wielded the power of the State in the interests of an irresponsible aristocracy. And the Church was even more remote from the daily life of mankind than the State. Philanthropy abounded; but religion,

once the greatest social force, had become a thing as private and individual as the estate of the squire or the working clothes of the laborer. There were special dispensations and occasional interventions, like the acts of a monarch who reprieved a criminal or signed an order for his execution. But what was familiar, and human and lovable—what was Christian in Christianity had largely disappeared. God had been thrust into the frigid altitudes of infinite space. There was a limited monarchy in Heaven, as well as upon earth. Providence was the spectator of the curious machine which it had constructed and set in motion, but the operation of which it was neither able nor willing to control. Like the occasional intervention <xf the Crown in the proceedings of Parliament, its wisdom was revealed in the inf requency of its interference.

The natural consequence of the abdication of authorities which had stood, however imperfectly, for a common purpose in social organization, was the gradual disappearance from social thought of the idea of purpose itself. Its place in the eighteenth century was taken by the idea of mechanism. The conception of men as united to each other, and of all mankind as united to God, by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end, which vaguely conceived and imperfectly realized, had been the keystone holding together the social fabric, ceased to be impressed upon men's minds, when Church and State withdrew from the center of social life to its circumference. What remained when the keystone of the arch was removed, was private rights and private interests, the materials of a society rather

than a society itself. These rights and interests were the natural order which had been distorted by the ambt* tions of kings and priests, and which emerged when the artificial super-structure disappeared, because they were the creation, not of man, but of Nature herself. They liad been regarded in the past as relative to some public end, whether religion or national welfare- Henceforward they were thought to be absolute and indefeasible, stnd to stand by their own virtue. They were the ultimate political and social reality; and since they wers ithe ultimate reality, they were not subordinate to other inspects of society, but other aspects of society were ^subordinate to them.

t The State could not encroach upon these rights, for fcthe State existed for their maintenance. They determined the relation of classes, for the most obvious and ^fundamental of all rights was property—property absolute and unconditioned—and those who possessed it E> were regarded as the natural governors of those who did t-aiot. Society arose from their exercise, through the contacts of individual with individual. It fulfilled its isobject in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, toit secured full scope for their unfettered exercise. It availed in so far as, like the French monarchy, it over-<r-rode them by the use of an arbitrary authority. Thus ermeeived, society assumed something of the appearance I'sflf a great joint-stock company, in which political power ei*ad the receipt of dividends were justly assigned tt erfthose who held the most numerous shares. The currents itfi social activity did not converge upon common ends, eM were dispersed through a multitude of channels,

created by the private interests of the individuals wl composed society. But in their very variety and spoi taneity, in the very absence of any attempt to relat them to a larger purpose than that of the individual, la] the best security of its attainment. There is a mysti^ cism of reason as well as of emotion, and the eighteentl century found, in the beneficence of natural instincts a substitute for the God whom it had expelled from contact with society, and did not hesitate identify them.

" Thus God and nature planned the general frame And bade self-love and social be the same/'

The result of such ideas in the world of practice was a society which was ruled by law, not by the capria of Governments, but which recognized no moral limit** tion on the pursuit by individuals of their economic self-interest. In the world of thought, it was a political philosophy which made rights the foundation of tl social order, and which considered the discharge of oblu gations, when it considered it at all, as emerging by ai inevitable process from their free exercise. The firs famous exponent of this philosophy was Locke, in whoi the dominant conception is the indefeasibility of private rights, not the pre-ordained harmony between private rights and public welfare. In the great French write! who prepared the way for the Revolution, while belief ing that they were the servants of an enlightened al solutism, there is an almost equal emphasis upon tl sanctity of rights and upon the infallibility of tl

llchemy by which the pursuit of private ends is transmuted into the attainment of public good. Though their writings reveal the influence of the conception of society as a self-adjusting mechanism, which afterwards became the most characteristic note of the English in-lividualism, what the French Revolution burned into fehe mind of Europe was the former not the latter. In England the idea of right had been negative and defensive, a barrier to the encroachment of Governments, the French leapt to the attack from trenches which the English had been content to defend, and in France the idea became affirmative and militant, not a weapon of defense, but a principle of social organization. The attempt to refound society upon rights, and rights ^Springing not from musty charters, but from the very mature of man himself, was at once the triumph and the imitation of the Revolution. It gave it the enthusiasm slnd infectious power of religion. i: What happened in England might seem at first tMght to have been precisely the reverse. English practical men, whose thoughts were pitched in a lower key, r irere a little shocked by the pomp and brilliance of that 6*emendous creed. They had scanty sympathy with the lflttsolute affirmations of France. What captured their pagination was not the right to liberty, which made rtto appeal to their commercial instincts, but the expedi-telncy of liberty, which did; and when the Revolution had [i^evealed the explosive power of the idea of natural right, ^hey sought some less menacing formula. It had been ttfered them first by Adam Smith and his precursors, #ho showed how the mechanism of economic life con*

verted " as with an invisible hand," the exercise of in* dividual rights into the instrument of public good. Bentham, who despised metaphysical subtleties, and thought the Declaration of the Eights of Man as absurd as any other dogmatic religion, completed the nei orientation by supplying the final criterion of political institutions in the principle of Utility. Henceforward emphasis was transferred from the right of the indi vidual to exercise his freedom as he pleased to the es pediency of an undisturbed exercise of freedom U society.

The change is significant. It is the difference be tween the universal and equal citizenship of France with its five million peasant proprietors, and the organ ized inequality of England established solidly upon clas traditions and class institutions; the descent from hop to resignation, from the fire and passion of an age o illimitable vistas to the monotonous beat of the factor engine, from Turgot and Condorcet to the melanchol; mathematical creed of Bentham and Bicardo and Jame Mill. Mankind has, at least, this superiority over il philosophers, that great movements spring from the heai and embody a faith, not the nice adjustments of th hedonistic calculus. So in the name of the rights c property France abolished in three years a great mat of property rights which, under the old regime ha robbed the peasant of part of the produce of his laboi and the social transformation survived a whole worl of political changes. In England the glad tidings c democracy were broken too discreetly to reach the eai of the hind in the furrow or the shepherd on the hifl

; there were political changes without a social transformation. The doctrine of Utility, though trenchant in the sphere of politics, involved no considerable interference with the fundamentals of the social fabric. Its exponents were principally concerned with the removal of political abuses and legal anomalies. They attacked sinecures and pensions and the criminal code and the procedure of the law courts. But they touched only ^the surface of social institutions. They thought it a monstrous injustice that the citizen should pay one-tenth of his income in taxation to an idle Government, but ^uite reasonable that he should pay one-fifth of it in 'vent to an idle landlord.

- The difference, neverthelesss, was one of emphasis i%nd expression, not of principle. It mattered very little ~*in practice whether private property and unfettered eco-'■ foomic freedom were stated, as in France, to be natural : trights, or whether, as in England, they were merely i ussumed once for all to be expedient. In either case ctoey were taken for granted as the fundamentals upon ' *which social organization was to be based, and about etohich no further argument was admissible. Though tftentham argued that rights were derived from utility, s hot from nature, he did not push his analysis so far as n*o argue that any particular right was relative to any hparticular function, and thus endorsed indiscrimi-ibfiately rights which were not accompanied by service o*s well as rights which were. While eschewing, in pMiort, the phraseology of natural rights, the English eUtilitarians retained something not unlike the substance hflrf them. Eor they assumed that private property in

land, and the private ownership of capital, were natural) institutions, and gave them, indeed, a new lease of life, by proving to their own satisfaction that social well-being must result from their continued exercise. Their negative was as important as their positive teaching. It was a conductor which diverted the lightning. Behind their political theory, behind the practical conduct, which as always, continues to express theory long after! it has been discredited in the world of thought, lay tha acceptance of absolute rights to property and to economic freedom as the unquestioned center of social organization.

The result of that attitude was momentous. The motive and inspiration of the Liberal Movement of the eighteenth century had been the attack on Privilege. But the creed which had exorcised the specter of agrarian feudalism haunting village and chateau in France, was impotent to disarm the new ogre oi industrialism which was stretching its limbs in the north of England. When, shorn of its splendors an! illusions, liberalism triumphed in England in 1832, it carried without criticism into the new world of capitalist industry categories of private property and freedom of contract which had been forged in the simj pier economic environment of the pre-industrial eraj In England these categories are being bent and twistel till they are no longer recognizable, and will, in time, be made harmless. In America, where necessity com pelled the crystallization of principles in a constitution, they have the rigidity of an iron jacket. Th magnificent formulae in which a society of fanners

and master craftsmen enshrined its philosophy of freedom are in danger of becoming fetters used by an Anglo-Saxon business aristocracy to bind insurgent movements on the part of an immigrant and semi-servile proletariat.

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THREE

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

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This doctrine has been qualified in practice by par-^

ticular limitations to avert particular evils and to meet^ exceptional emergencies. But it is limited in special cases precisely because its general validity is regarde as beyond controversy, and, up to the eve of the presen war, it was the working faith of modern economi civilization. What it implies is, that the foundatio; of society is found, not in functions, but in rights that rights are not deducible from the discharge a functions, so that the acquisition of wealth and th enjoyment of property are contingent upon the pe formances of services, but that the individual ente the world equipped with rights to the free dispos of his property and the pursuit of his economic seli^ interest, and that these rights are anterior to, and inl § dependent of, any service which he may render. Tru4u the service of society will, in fact, it is assumed, suit from their exercise. But it is not the primail,-motive and criterion of industry, but a secondary co sequence, which emerges incidentally through the e ercise of rights, a consequence which is attained, i deed, in practice, but which is attained without bei sought. It is not the end at which economic activi aims, or the standard by which it is judged, but by-product, as coal-tar is a by-product of the man

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tture of gas; whether that by-product appears or Ft, it is not proposed that the rights themselves should

* abdicated. For they are regarded, not as a con-tional trust, but as a property, which may, indeed, *e way to the special exigencies of extraordinary fcergencies, but which resumes its sway when the %ergency is over, and in normal times is above dis-""ssion.

•'That conception is written large over the history : * the nineteenth century, both in England and in *%erica. The doctrine which it inherited was that ^perty was held by an absolute right on an in-rj tidual basis, and to this fundamental it added an-i: 4er, which can be traced in principle far back into «ory, but which grew to its full stature only after

* rise of capitalist industry, that societies act both fairly and unwisely when they limit opportunities 'economic enterprise. Hence every attempt to im-*e obligations as a condition of the tenure of propyl or of the exercise of economic activity has been t by uncompromising resistance. The story of the aggie between humanitarian sentiment and the the-' of property transmitted from the eighteenth cen-y is familiar. No one has forgotten the opposi-a offered in the name of the rights of property to tory legislation, to housing reform, to interference fch the adulteration of goods, even to the compulsory litation of private houses. " May I not do what I te with my own ?" was the answer to the proposal Require a minimum standard of safety and sanita-ta from the owners of mills and houses. Even to

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

this day, while an English urban landlord can cram; or distort the development of a whole city by wi holding land except at fancy prices, English munid palities are without adequate powers of compulso purchase, and must either pay through the nose see thousands of their members overcrowded. Th^ whole body of procedure by which they may acqui land, or indeed new powers of any kind, has carefully designed by lawyers to protect owners property against the possibility that their priva rights may be subordinated to the public intere because their rights are thought to be prim and absolute and public interests secondary a contingent.

No one needs to be reminded, again, of the influeni of the same doctrine in the sphere of taxation. Th the income tax was excused as a temporary measu because the normal society was conceived to be o in which the individual spent his whole income i himself and owed no obligations to society on acco of it. The death duties were denounced as robbe because they implied that the right to benefit by i heritance was conditional upon a social sanction. T Budget of 1909 created a storm, not because the t tion of land was heavy—in amount the land-taxes we^= trifling—but because it was felt to involve the d trine that property is not an absolute right, but t it may properly be accompanied by special obligatio: a doctrine which, if carried to its logical conclusi would destroy its sanctity by making ownership longer absolute but conditional.

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pSuch an implication seems intolerable to an influ-Utial body of public opinion, because it has been ac-hstomed to regard the free disposal of property and ^e unlimited exploitation of economic opportunities, to rights which are absolute and unconditioned. On he whole, until recently, this opinion had few antagonists who could not be ignored. As a consequence he maintenance of property rights has not been seriously threatened even in those cases in which it is frident that no service is discharged, directly or in-irectly, by their exercise. No one supposes, that the Jroer of urban land, performs qua owner, any func-lon. He has a Tight of private taxation; that is all. hit the private ownership of urban land is as secure Way as it was a century ago; and Lord Hugh Cecil, I his interesting little book on Conservatism, declares kt whether private property is mischievous or not, teiety cannot interfere with it, because to interfere Sth it is theft, and theft is wicked. No one sup-tees that it is for the public good that large areas ' land should be used for parks and game. But our Untry gentlemen are still settled heavily upon their ilages and still slay their thousands. No one can gue that a monopolist is impelled by " an invisible tnd " to serve the public interest. But over a con-ierable field of industry competition, as the recent eport on Trusts shows, has been replaced by corn-nation, and combinations are allowed the same un-ttered freedom as individuals in the exploitation of gnomic opportunities. No one really believes that ie production of coal depends upon the payment of

mining royalties or that ships will not go to and unless ship-owners can earn fifty per cent, upon tbi capital. But coal mines, or rather the coal miner, pay royalties, and ship-owners still make fortunes are made Peers.

At the very moment when everybody is talking a the importance of increasing the output of wealth, tl last question, apparently, which it occurs to any stai man to ask is why wealth should he squandered futile activities, and in expenditure which is eit disproportionate to service or made for no service all. So inveterate, indeed, has become the praci of payment in virtue of property rights, without e the pretense of any service being rendered, that wh in a national emergency, it is proposed to extract from the ground, the Government actually propoi that every gallon shall pay a tax to landowners never even suspected its existence, and the ingenw proprietors are full of pained astonishment at any questioning whether the nation is under moral obli tion to endow them further. Such rights are, stri speaking, privileges. For the definition of a p ilege is a right to which no corresponding function attached.

The enjoyment of property and the direction of i dustry are considered, in short, to require no s justification, because they are regarded as rights w stand by their own virtue, not functions to be jud by the success with which they contribute to a s purpose. To-day that doctrine, if intellectually credited, is still the practical foundation of social

janization. How slowly it yields even to the most insistent demonstration of its inadequacy is shown by the attitude which the heads of the business world iave adopted to the restrictions imposed on economic activity during the war. The control of railways, mines and shipping, the distribution of raw materials through a public department instead of through competing merchants, the regulation of prices, the attempts !o check " profiteering "—the detailed application of hese measures may have been effective or ineffective, rise or injudicious. It is evident, indeed, that some f them have been foolish, like the restriction of im-orts when the world has five years' destruction to jpair, and that others, if sound in conception, have ?en questionable in their execution. If they were tacked on the ground that they obstruct the efficient irformance of function—if the leaders of industry me forward and said generally, as some, to their >nor, have:—"We accept your policy, but we will lprove its execution; we desire payment for service id service only and will help the state to see that

pays for nothing else"—there might be controversy , to the facts, but there could be none as to the prin-ple.

In reality, however, the gravamen of the charges 'ought against these restrictions appears generally to > precisely the opposite. They are denounced by ost of their critics not because they limit the oppor-inity of service, but because they diminish the op-)rtunity for gain, not because they prevent the trader iriching the community, but because they make it

more difficult for him to enrich himself; not, in shorty

because they have failed to convert economic activity

into a social function, but because they have come too

near succeeding. If the financial adviser to the Coajj

Controller may be trusted, the shareholders in coal

mines would appear to have done fairly well during

the war. But the proposal to limit their profits tq

1/2 per ton is described by Lord Gainford as " shee^

robbery and confiscation." With some honorably

exceptions, what is demanded is that in the future

as in the past the directors of industry should be fi

to handle it as an enterprise conducted for their oi

convenience or advancement, instead of being coi

pelled, as they have been partially compelled durii

the war, to subordinate it to a social purpose. For t^

admit that the criterion of commerce and indusl

is its success in discharging a social purpose is a{

once to turn property and economic activity froi

rights which are absolute into rights which are coi

tingent and derivative, because it is to affirm that thej

are relative to functions and that they may justly

revoked when the functions are not performed. It if

in short, to imply that property and economic activit

exist to promote the ends of society, whereas hithei

society has been regarded in the world of busines

as existing to promote them. To those who hold thei|

position, not as functionaries, but by virtue of thei|

success in making industry contribute to their own|n

wealth and social influence, such a reversal of mean(

and ends appears little less than a revolution. For ij

means that they must justify before a social tribum

ights which they have hitherto taken for granted as »rt of an order which is above criticism.

During the greater part of the nineteenth century iie significance of the opposition between the two principles of individual rights and social functions was nasked by the doctrine of the inevitable harmony between private interests and public good. Competition, I was argued, was an effective substitute for hon-fcty. To-day that subsidiary doctrine has fallen to |fieces under criticism; few now would profess adher-toce to the compound of economic optimism and moral hnkruptcy which led a nineteenth century economist 0 say: " Greed is held in check by greed, and the esire for gain sets limits to itself." The disposi-on to regard individual rights as the center and pivot ' society is still, however, the most powerful element

political thought and the practical foundation of dustrial organization. The laborious refutation of e doctrine that private and public interests are Occident, and that man's self-love is God's Providence, lich was the excuse of the last century for its wor-ip of economic egotism, has achieved, in fact, sur-isingly small results. Economic egotism is still wor-iped; and it is worshiped because that doctrine as not really the center of the position. It was an itwork, not the citadel, and now that the outwork is been captured, the citadel is still to win.

What gives its special quality and character, its ugliness and cohesion, to the industrial system built p in the last century and a half, is not its exploded teory of economic harmonies. It is the doctrine that

economic rights are anterior to, and independent oi economic functions, that they stand by their own vi» tue, and need adduce no higher credentials. The practical result of it is that economic rights rema whether economic functions are performed or not. Tl remain to-day in a more menacing form than in age of early industrialism. For those who control dustry no longer compete but combine, and the riv between property in capital and property in land long since ended. The basis of the New Conservatii appears to be a determination so to organize soci both by political and economic action, as to make secure against every attempt to extinguish payme: which are made, not for service, but because the c ers possess a right to extract income without it. H the fusion of the two traditional parties, the prop " strengthening " of the second chamber, the return protection, the swift conversion of rival industri to the advantages of monopoly, and the attempts to off with concessions the more influential section of working classes. Revolutions, as a long and bitter perience Teveals, are apt to take their color from regime which they overthrow. Is it any wonder the creed which affirms the absolute rights of pro should sometimes be met with a counter-affirmation the absolute rights of labor, less anti-social, indeed, inhuman, but ahnomst as dogmatic, almost as into! ant and thoughtless as itself?

A society which aimed at making the acquisition wealth contingent upon the discharge of social oblij

fttions, which sought to proportion remuneration to service and denied it to those by whom no service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but *what they can make or create or achieve, might be Stalled a Functional Society, because in such a society tte main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not fctist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world, Ihough something like it has hung, an unrealized the-fey, before men's minds in the past. Modern societies him at protecting economic rights, while leaving economic functions, except in moments of abnormal emergency, to fulfil themselves* The motive which gives iolor and quality to their public institutions, to their tolicy and political thought, is not the attempt to fecure the fulfilment of tasks undertaken for the pubic service, but to increase the opportunities open to ndividuals of attaining the objects which they conceive o be advantageous to themselves. If asked the end or nriterion of social organization, they would give an an* iwer reminiscent of the formula the greatest happiness >f the greatest number. But to say that the end of tocial institutions is happiness, is to say that they lave no common end at all. For happiness is in-iividual, and to make happiness the object of society m to resolve society itself into the ambitions of numberless individuals, each directed towards the attainment of some personal purpose.

Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The

appeal of this conception must be powerful, for it had laid the whole modern world under its spell. Sincq England first revealed the possibilities of industrial^ ism, it has gone from strength to strength, and as in* dustrial civilization invades countries hitherto remotq from it, as Russia and Japan and India and Chin* are drawn into its orbit, each decade sees a fresh exaj tension of its influence. The secret of its triump is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use the po ers with which they have been endowed by nature society, by skill or energy or relentless egotism or me good fortune, without inquiring whether there is an; principle by which their exercise should be limite It assumes the social organization which determine^ the opportunities which different classes shall in fa possess, and concentrates attention upon the right those who possess or can acquire power to make t fullest use of it for their own self-advancement, fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of soci obligations, which restricts their energy, because it d fines the goal to which it should be directed, but up the exercise of the right to pursue their own se interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisitioi of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of t most powerful of human instincts. To the strong i promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of thei strength; to the weak the hope that they too one d may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends golden prize, which not all can attain, but for whi each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite pansion. It assures men that there are no ends ot

in their ends, no law other than their desires, no lit other than that which they think advisable. Thus makes the individual the center of his own universe, d dissolves moral principles into a choice of exigences. And it immensely simplifies the problems social life in complex communities. For it relieves an of the necessity of discriminating between dif-mt types of economic activity and different sources wealth, between enterprise and avarice, energy and scrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and >perty which is theft, the just enjoyment of the its of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or for-e, because it treats all economic activities as stand-

upon the same level, and suggests that excess or ect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious ef-; of the social will to avert them, but are corrected ost automatically by the mechanical play of eco-lic forces.

Jnder the impulse of such ideas men do not bete religious or wise or artistic; for religion and iom and art imply the acceptance of limitations. ; they become powerful and rich. They inherit the th and change the face of nature, if they do not sess their own souls; and they have that appear-e of freedom which consists in the absence of ob-des between opportunities for self-advancement and se whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune

placed in a position to seize them. It is not diffi-t either for individuals or for societies to achieve ir object, if that object be sufficiently limited and mediate, and if they are not distracted from its

pursuit by other considerations. The temper whi dedicates itself to the cultivation of opportunities, a leaves obligations to take care of themselves, is set up< an object which is at once simple and practicable. 71 eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth cento has very largely attained it Or, if it has not attain it, it has at least grasped the possibilities of its atta ment The national output of wealth per head population is estimated to have been approximately fl in 1914. Unless mankind chooses to continue the s ' rifice of prosperity to the ambitions and terrors nationalism, it is possible that by the year 2000 it m m be doubled. J* 1

Z*

>~

FOUR

THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM

rcH happiness is not remote from achievement. In 2 course of achieving it, however, the world has been nfronted by a group of unexpected consequences, rich are the cause of its malaise, as the obstruction

economic opportunity was the cause of social malaise

the eighteenth century. And these consequences are >t, as is often suggested, accidental mal-adjustments, t flow naturally from its dominant principle: so that ere is a sense in which the cause of its perplexity

not its failure, but the quality of its success, and \ light itself a kind of darkness. The will to economic wer, if it is sufficiently single-minded, brings riches. at if it is single-minded it destroys the moral re-raints which ought to condition the pursuit of riches, id therefore also makes the pursuit of riches mean-gless. For what gives meaning to economic activity,

to any other activity is, as we have said, the pur->se to which it is directed. But the faith upon which ir economic civilization reposes, the faith that riches e not a means but an end, implies that all economic itivity is equally estimable, whether it is subordinated

a social purpose or not. Hence it divorces gain from

rvice, and justifies rewards for which no function is

jrformed, or which are out of all proportion to it

health in modern societies is distributed according to

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

ti

opportunity; and while opportunity depends pa: upon talent and energy, it depends still more u birth, social position, access to education and inherit wealth; in a word, upon property. For talent a energy can create opportunity. But property need oi wait for it. It is the sleeping partner who draws tlilt dividends which the firm produces, the residuary legAni tee who always claims his share in the estate. Itj Because rewards are divorced from services, so tM4 what is prized most is not riches obtained in return for labor but riches the economic origin of which, heimk regarded as sordid, is concealed, two results follot|^ The first is the creation of a class of pensioners u industry, who levy toll upon its product, but contrib nothing to its increase, and who are not merely t erated, but applauded and admired and protected wi assiduous care, as though the secret of prosperity sided in them. They are admired because in the al sence of any principle of discrimination between comes which are payment for functions and incom which are not, all incomes, merely because they resent wealth, stand on the same level of appreciati and are estimated solely by their magnitude, so t in all societies which have accepted industrialism the is an upper layer which claims the enjoyment of soci life, while it repudiates its responsibilities. The r< tier and his ways, how familiar they were in Engla: before the war! A public school and then club li in Oxford and Cambridge, and then another club town; London in June, when London is pleasant, moors in August, and pheasants in October, Cannes

■

c c

THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 35

icember and hunting in February and March; and whole world of rising bourgeoisie eager to imitate am, sedulous to make their expensive watches keep Qe with this preposterous calendar! The second consequence is the degradation of those 10 labor, but who do not by their labor command ge rewards; that is of the great majority of man-id. And this degradation follows inevitably from * refusal of men to give the purpose of industry » first place in their thought about it When they

that, when their minds are set upon the fact that » meaning of industry is the service of man, all who >or appear to them honorable, because all who labor rve, and the distinction which separates those who rve from those who merely spend is so crucial and ndamental as to obliterate all minor distinctions Bed on differences of income. But when the cri-rion of function is forgotten, the only criterion which mains is that of wealth, and an Acquisitive Society Terences the possession of wealth, as a Functional K»iety would honor, even in the person of the hum-&st and most laborious craftsman, the arts of eation.

So wealth becomes the foundation of public esteem, id the mass of men who labor, but who do not ac-lire wealth, are thought to be vulgar and meaning-fes and insignificant compared with the few who ac-aire wealth by good fortune, or by the skilful use of tonomic opportunities. They come to be regarded, it as the ends for which alone it is worth while to toduce wealth at all, but as the instruments of its

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

acquisition by a world that declines to be soiled by tact with what is thought to be the dull and s< business of labor. They are not happy, for the rei of all but the very mean is not merely money, but esteem of their fellow-men, and they know they are esteemed, as soldiers, for example, are esteemed, the it is because they give their lives to making civilii tion that there is a civilization which it is worth for soldiers to defend. They are not esteemed, cause the admiration of society is directed tows those who get, not towards those who give; and workmen give much they get little. And the rent* whom they support are not happy; for in discardi the idea of function, which sets a limit to the a< tion of riches, they have also discarded the princi] which alone give riches their meaning. Hence m they can persuade themselves that to be rich is in self meritorious, they may bask in social admiral but they are unable to esteem themselves. For have abolished the principle which makes activity nificant, and therefore estimable. They are, rad< more truly pitiable than some of those who envy tl For like the spirits in the Inferno, they are pnni by the attainment of their desires.

A society ruled by these notions is necessarily victim of an irrational inequality. To escape such equality it is necessary to recognize that there is s< principle which ought to limit the gains of partici classes and particular individuals, because gains drai from certain sources or exceeding certain amounts illegitimate. But such a limitation implies a *1

THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 87

hi of discrimination, which is inconsistent with the sumption that each man has a Tight to what he can it, irrespective of any service rendered for it* Thus rivilege, which was to have been exorcised by the gofi-i of 1789, returns in a new guise, the creature no ager of unequal legal rights thwarting the natural zeroise of equal powers of hand and brain, but of leqnal powers springing from the exercise of equal £hts in a world where property and inherited wealth id the apparatus of class institutions have made op-artunities unequal* Inequality, again, leads to the indirection of production, For, since the demand of fee income of £50,000 is as powerful a magnet as the mand of 500 incomes of £100, it diverts energy from ^b creation of wealth to the multiplication of luxuries, ► that, for example, while one-tenth of the people of ngland are overcrowded, a considerable part of them he engaged, not in supplying that deficiency, but in «king rich men's hotels, luxurious yachts, and motorics like that used by the Secretary of State for Wat, ^rith an interior inlaid with silver in quartered ma-bgtny, and upholstered in fawn suede and morocco," ihich was recently bought by a suburban capitalist, by Bay of encouraging useful industries and rebuking pub* Ife extravagance with an example of private economy, N* the trifling sum of 3,550 guineas, r Thus part of the goods which are annually produced, ltd which are called wealth, is, strictly speaking, waste, Ibcause it consists of articles which, though reckoned I part of the income of the nation, either should not ^ve been produced until other articles had already

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

been produced in sufficient abundance, or should have been produced at all. And some part of the poj lation is employed in making goods which no man make with happiness, or indeed without loss of respect, because he knows that they had much bet not be made, and that his life is wasted in making tl Everybody recognizes that the army contractor w\ in time of war, set several hundred navvies to dig artificial lake in his grounds, was not adding to, subtracting from, the wealth of the nation. But time of peace many hundred thousand workmen, if are not digging ponds, are doing work which is eqm foolish and wasteful; though, in peace, as in war, is important work, which is waiting to be done, which is neglected. It is neglected because, while effective demand of the mass of men is only too si there is a small class which wears several men's clot eats several men's dinners, occupies several famil houses, and lives several men's lives. As long minority has so large an income that part of it, if s] at all, must be spent on trivialties, so long will of the human energy and mechanical equipment of nation be diverted from serious work, which enric it, to making trivialities, which impoverishes it, sii they can only be made at the cost of not making ot things. And if the peers and millionaires who are n<| preaching the duty of production to miners and dc laborers desire that more wealth, not more waste, shot be produced, the simplest way in which they can achic their aim is to transfer to the public their whole comes over (say) £1,000 a year, in order that it

THE NEMESIS OP INDUSTRIALISM 39

spent in setting to work, not gardeners, chauffeurs, nestic servants and shopkeepers in the West End of adon, but builders, mechanics and teachers. 3o to those who clamor, as many now do, " Produce! oduce! " one simple question may be addressed:— :*roduce what?" Food, clothing, house-room, art, Dwledge? By all means! But if the nation is ntily furnished with these things had it not better p producing a good many others which fill shop ndows in Regent Street? If it desires to re-equip industries with machinery and its railways with gons, had it not better refrain from holding ex* sitions designed to encourage rich men to re-equip imselves with motor-cars? What can be more child-1 than to urge the necessity that productive power onld be increased, if part of the productive power lich exists already is misapplied? Is not less pro-tction of futilities as important as, indeed a condign of, more production of things of moment ? Would ►t " Spend less on private luxuries" be as wise a y as " produce more " ? Yet this result of inequal-y, again, is a phenomenon which cannot be prevented, k checked, or even recognized by a society which exudes the idea of purpose from its social arrange-«nts and industrial activity. For to recognize it is > admit that there is a principle superior to the Mechanical play of economic forces, which ought to btermine the relative importance of different occu-ktions, and thus to abandon the view that all riches, bwever composed, are an end, and that all economic fctivity is equally justifiable.

c

40 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

The rejection of the idea of purpose involves 8 * other consequence which every one laments, but whh« no one can prevent, except by abandoning the beli * that the free exercise of rights is the main interest i E society and the discharge of obligations a secondhand incidental consequence which may be left to ta! -care of itself. It is that social life is turned into ! scene of fierce antagonisms and that a considerable pi : of industry is carried on in the intervals of a disgui» -social war. The idea that industrial peace can secured merely by the exercise of tact and forbel* ance is based on the idea that there is a fundament • identity of interest between the different groups e gaged in it, which is occasionally interrupted by J grettable misunderstandings. Both the one idea a the other are an illusion. The disputes which mat! are not caused by a misunderstanding of identity interests, but by a better understanding of diversi of interests. Though a formal declaration of war an episode, the conditions which issue in a declarati of war are permanent; and what makes them p manent is the conception of industry which also mak inequality and functionless incomes permanent. It the denial that industry has any end or purpose otbj than the satisfaction of those engaged in it.

That motive produces industrial warfare, not as regrettable incident, but as an inevitable result produces industrial war, because its teaching is tM each individual or group has a right to what they cd get, and denies that there is any principle, other tM the mechanism of the market, which determines wm

THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 41

they ought to get. For, since the income available for iistribution is limited, and since, therefore, when certain limits have been passed, what one group gains another group must lose, it is evident that if the relative incomes of different groups are not to be determined by their functions, there is no method other than mutual self-assertion which is left to determine them. Self-interest, indeed, may cause them to refrain from using their full strength to enforce their claims, and, in so far as this happens, peace is secured in industry, as men have attempted to secure it in international affairs, by a balance of power. But the maintenance of such a peace is contingent upon the estimate of the parties to it that they have more to lose than to gain by an overt struggle, and is not the result of their acceptance of any standard of remuneration as an equitable settlement of their claims. Hence it is precarious, insincere and short. It is without finality, because there can be no finality in the mere addition of increments of income, any more than in the gratification of any other desire for material goods. When demands are conceded the old struggle recommences upon a new level, and will always recommence as long as men seek to end it merely by increasing remuneration, not by finding a principle upon which all remuneration, whether large or small, should be based.

Such a principle is offered by the idea of function, because its application would eliminate the surpluses which are the subject of contention, and would make it evident that remuneration is based upon service,

not upon chance or privilege or the power to use op* portunities to drive a hard bargain. But the idea of function is incompatible with the doctrine that every person and organization have an unlimited right to exploit their economic opportunities as fully as they please, which is the working faith of modern industry; and, since it is not accepted, men resign themselves to the settlement of the issue by force, or propose that the State should supersede the force of private associations by the use of its force, as though the absence of a principle could be compensated by a new kind of machinery. Yet all the time the true cause of industrial warfare is as simple as the true cause of inter national warfare. It is that if men recognize no law superior to their desires, then they must fight when their desires collide. For though groups or nations which are at issue with each other may be willing to submit to a principle which is superior to them both, there is no reason why they should submit to each other.

Hence the idea, which is popular with rich men, that industrial disputes would disappear if only the output of wealth were doubled, and every one were twice as well off, not only is refuted by all practical experience, but is in its very nature founded upon an illusion. For the question is one not of amounts but of proportions; and men will fight to be paid £30 a week, instead of £20, as readily as they will fight to be paid £5 instead of £4, as long as there is no reason why they should be paid £20 instead of £30, and as long as other men who do not work are paid anything

THE NEMESIS OP INDUSTRIALISM 43

t all. If miners demanded higher wages when every uperfluous charge upon coal-getting had been elimi-L&ted, there would be a principle with which to meet heir claim, the principle that one group of workers light not to encroach upon the livelihood of others. Jut as long as mineral owners extract royalties, and xceptionally productive mines pay thirty per cent, to .bsentee shareholders, there is no valid answer to a de-nand for higher wages. For if the community pays mything at all to those who do not work, it can afford © pay more to those who do. The naive complaint, that workmen are never satisfied, is, therefore, strictly true. It is true, not only of workmen, but of all classes in l society which conducts its affairs on the principle hat wealth, instead of being proportioned to func-ion, belongs to those who can get it. They are never satisfied, nor can they be satisfied. For as long as hey make that principle the guide of their individual ives and of their social order, nothing short of in-inity could bring them satisfaction.

So here, again, the prevalent insistence upon rights, ind prevalent neglect of functions, brings men into i vicious circle which they cannot escape, without escaping from the false philosophy which dominates them. But it does something more. It makes that philosophy ■tself seem plausible and exhilarating, and a rule not only for industry, in which it had its birth, but for politics and culture and religion and the whole compass of social life. The possibility that one aspect of human life may be so exaggerated as to overshadow.

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

and in time to atrophy, every other, has been mac familiar to Englishmen by the example of " Prussii militarism." Militarism is the characteristic, not an army, but of a society. Its essence is not any pi ticular quality or scale of military preparation, bi a state of mind, which, in its concentration on one pt ticular element in social life, ends finally by exaltii it until it becomes the arbiter of all the rest. Tl purpose for which military forces exist is forgottei They are thought to stand by their own right ad to need no justification. Instead of being regard* as an instrument which is necessary in an imperfc world, they are elevated into an object of superstitioi veneration, as though the world would be a poor sipid place without them, so that political institutioi and social arrangements and intellect and morality ai religion are crushed into a mold made to fit one activil which in a sane society is a subordinate activity, li the police, or the maintenance of prisons, or the cleai ing of sewers, but which in a militarist state is a kid of mystical epitome of society itself.

Militarism, as Englishmen see plainly enough, fetich worship. It is the prostration of men's soi before, and the laceration of their bodies to appeas an idol. What they do not see is that their reverence) for economic activity and industry and what is call* business is also fetich worship, and that in their devc tion to that idol they torture themselves as needlesslj and indulge in the same meaningless antics as the Pros sians did in their worship of militarism. For what thft military tradition and spirit have done for Pi

TflE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 45

fc, with the result of creating militarism, the com-lercial tradition and spirit have done for England, ith the result of creating industrialism. Industrially is no more a necessary characteristic of an econom-sally developed society than militarism is a necessary fcaracteristic of a nation which maintains military fcrces. It is no more the result of applying science to tdustry than militarism is the result of the applica-on of science to war, and the idea that it is some-aing inevitable in a community which uses coal and ron and machinery, so far from being the truth, is :«elf a product of the perversion of mind which in-oistrialism produces. Men may use what mechanical instruments they please and be none the worse for their see. What kills their souls is when they allow their ostruments to use them. The essence of industrial-am, in short, is not any particular method of indus-ry, but a particular estimate of the importance of fedustry, which results in it being thought the only king that is important at all, 90 that it is elevated bom the subordinate place which it should occupy ftnong human interests and activities into being the fe&dard by which all other interests and activities are Fudged.

When a Cabinet Minister declares that the greatness of this country depends upon the volume of its ttports, so that France, with exports comparatively lit-fle> and Elizabethan England, which exported next to toothing, are presumably to be pitied as altogether interior civilizations, that is Industrialism. It is the feonfusion of one minor department of life with the

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

whole of life. When manufacturers cry and cut th selves with knives, because it is proposed that boys girls of fourteen shall attend school for eight hours week, and the President of the Board of Education \ so gravely impressed by their apprehensions, that at once allows the hours to be reduced to seven, is Industrialism. It is fetich worship. When the Go 1 ernment obtains money for a war, which costs £7,000, 000 a day, by closing the Museums, which cost £20^ 000 a year, that is Industrialism. It is a contem for all interests which do not contribute obvio to economic activity. When the Press clamors t the one thing needed to make this island an Arc is productivity, and more productivity, and yet moi productivity, that is Industrialism. It is the confusi of means with ends.

Men will always confuse means with ends if are without any clear conception that it is the em not the means, which matter—if they allow their mini to slip from the fact that it is the social purpose industry which gives it meaning and makes it wo while to carry it on at all. And when they do th they will turn their whole world upside down, beca they do not see the poles upon which it ought tc movi So when, like England, they are thoroughly industri ized, they behave like Germany, which was thoroug] militarized. They talk as though man existed for i dustry, instead of industry existing for man, as Prussians talked of man existing for war. They sent any activity which is not colored by the predo: inant interest, because it seems a rival to it. So th

THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 47

rtroy religion and art and morality, which cannot .st unless they are disinterested; and having de-oyed these, which are the end, for the sake of in-stry, which is a means, they make their industry elf what they make their cities, a desert of unnat-al dreariness, which only forgetfulness can make en-xable, and which only excitement can enable them

forget.

Iotr by suspicions and recriminations, avid of ver, and oblivious of duties, desiring peace, but un-le to " seek peace and ensue it," because unwilling

surrender the creed which is the cause of war, to *at can one compare such a society but to the inter-tional world, which also has been called a society l«1 which also is social in nothing but name? And e comparison is more than a play upon words. It

an analogy which has its roots in the facts of his-ry. It is not a chance that the last two centuries, hich saw the new growth of a new system of indus-y, saw also the growth of the system of international clitics which came to a climax in the period from B70 to 1914. Both the one and the other are the Epression of the same spirit and move in obedience * similar laws. The essence of the former was the *pudiation of any authority superior to the individual iason. It left men free to follow their own inter-its or ambitions or appetites, untrammeled by subor- / •nation to any common center of allegiance. The es-*nce of the latter was the repudiation of any au-lority superior to the sovereign state, which again was ^ceived as a compact self-contained unit—a unit

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

which would lose its very essence if it lost its pendence of other states. Just as the one emancipa economic activity from a mesh of antiquated tions, so the other emancipated nations from arbit subordination to alien races or Governments, and them into nationalities with a right to work out ti own destiny.

Nationalism is, in fact, the counterpart among tions of what individualism is within them. It similar origins and tendencies, similar triumphs defects. For nationalism, like individualism, lays emphasis on the rights of separate units, not on subordination to common obligations, though its are races or nations, not individual men. Like indi ualism it appeals to the self-assertive instincts, to w it promises opportunities of unlimited expansion. Li individualism it is a force of immense explosive po the just claims of which must be conceded before is possible to invoke any alternative principle to trol its operations. For one cannot impose a su national authority upon irritated or discontented oppressed nationalities any more than one can su dinate economic motives to the control of society, unl society has recognized that there is a sphere w they may legitimately occupy. And, like individ ism, if pushed to its logical conclusion, it is self-des tive. For as nationalism, in its brilliant youth, gins as a claim that nations, because they are spiri beings, shall determine themselves, and passes too o: into a claim that they shall dominate others, so dividualism begins by asserting the right of men

THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 49

anake of their own lives what they can, and ends by Condoning the subjection of the majority of men to the few whom good fortune or special opportunity or privilege have enabled most successfully to use their rights* They rose together. It is probable that, if ever they decline, they will decline together. For Life cannot be cut in compartments. In the long run the world reaps in war what it sows in peace. And bo expect that international rivalry can be exorcised as long as the industrial order within each nation is such cis to give success to those whose existence is a struggle for self-aggrandizement is a dream which has not even the merit of being beautifuL

So the perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as I the perversion of individualism is industrialism. And €he perversion comes, not through any flaw or vice in Iranian nature, but by the force of the idea, because "the principle is defective and reveals its defects as At reveals its power. For it asserts that the rights of nations and individuals are absolute, which is false, instead of asserting that they are absolute in their »own sphere, but that their sphere itself is contingent *upon the part which they play in the community of ^nations and individuals, which is true. Thus it constrains them to a career of indefinite expansion, in *which they devour continents and oceans, law, molality and religion, and last of all their own souls, in *an attempt to attain infinity by the addition to them-pelves of all that is finite. In the meantime their rivals, *and their subjects, and they themselves are conscious ^of the danger of opposing forces, and seek to pur-

chase security and to avoid a collision by organizing a ^ balance of power. But the balance, whether in inter!r national politics or in industry, is unstable, becausef 1 it reposes not on the common recognition of a principle by which the claims of nations and individuals are limited, but on an attempt to find an equipoise which may avoid a conflict without adjuring the as-f^ sertion of unlimited claims. No such equipoise can found, because, in a world where the possibilities o increasing military or industrial power are illimitable, 1 no such equipoise can exist

Thus, as long as men move on this plane, there i no solution. They can obtain peace only by surren dering the claim to the unfettered exercise of thei rights, which is the cause of war. What we have bee witnessing, in short, during the past five years, both in international affairs and in industry, is the break down of the organization of society on the basis o rights divorced from obligations. Sooner or later the collapse was inevitable, because the basis was too narrow. For a right is simply a power which is secured by legal sanctions, " a capacity," as the lawyers define it, " residing in one man, of controlling, with the assistance of the State, the action of others/' and a right should not be absolute for the same reason thaF a power should not be absolute. No doubt it is better that individuals should have absolute rights than that the State or the Government should have them; and it was the reaction against the abuses of absolute power by the State which led in the eighteenth century to the declaration of the absolute rights of individuals.

THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 51

Che most obvious defense against the assertion of one extreme was the assertion of the other. Because Governments and the relics of feudalism had encroached ipon the property of individuals it was affirmed that lie right of property was absolute; because they had Wrangled enterprise, it was affirmed that every man tad a natural right to conduct his business as he pleased. c3ut, in reality, both the one assertion and the other iTe false, and, if applied to practice, must lead to lisaster. The State has no absolute rights; they are imited by its commission. The individual has no absolute rights; they are relative to the function which txe performs in the community of which he is a member, because, unless they are so limited, the consequences must be something in the nature of private War. All rights, in short, are conditional and derivative, because all power should be conditional and derivative. They are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist. They are conditional on being used to contribute to the attainment : of that end, not to thwart it. And this means in practice that, if society is to be healthy, men must Regard themselves not as the owners of rights, but as f [trustees for the discharge of functions and the instru- ( •Jnents of a social purpose.

ti 1 a:

f

FIVE

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK

The application of the principle that society sho be organized upon the basis of functions, is not reeoi dite, but simple and direct. It offers in the first plai a standard for discriminating between those types private property which are legitimate and those whi are not During the last century and a half, politi thought has oscillated between two conceptions of pro] erty, both of which, in their different ways, are travagant. On the one hand, the practical foun tion of social organization has been the doctrine the particular forms of private property which at any moment are a thing sacred and inviolable, anything may properly become the object of proi erty rights, and that, when it does, the title to it i absolute and unconditioned. The modern industri system took shape in an age when this theory of pro erty was triumphant. The American Constitution the French Declaration of the Bights of Man bo treated property as one of the fundamental right which Governments exist to protect. The English Rev-olution of 1688, undogmatic and reticent though i was, had in effect done the same. The great indivi ualists from Locke to Turgot, Adam Smith and Bei tham all repeated, in different language, a similar co: ception. Though what gave the Revolution its di

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 53

3lical character in the eyes of the English upper jBisses was its treatment of property, the dogma of &e sanctity of private property was maintained as tena-wmsly by French Jacobins as by English Tories; and a« theory that property is an absolute, which is held y many modern Conservatives, is identical, if only Imey knew it, with that not only of the men of 1789, tat of the Convention itself.

On the other hand, the attack has been almost as ^discriminating as the defense. " Private property " sis been the central position against which the social Movement of the last hundred years has directed its Dices. The criticism of it has ranged from an im-^inative communism in the most elementary and perianal of necessaries, to prosaic and partially realized Proposals to transfer certain kinds of property from ctivate to public ownership, or to limit their exploita-feon by restrictions imposed by the State. But, howler varying in emphasis and in method, the general Vote of what may conveniently be called the Socialist ^iticism of property is what the word Socialism itself a&plies. Its essence is the statement that the economic **ils of society are primarily due to the unregulated iteration, under modern conditions of industrial organisation, of the institution of private property. I The divergence of opinion is natural, since in most hKscussions of property the opposing theorists have usually been discussing different things. Property is the Bust ambiguous of categories. It covers a multitude d rights which have nothing in common except that &7 are exercised by persons and enforced by the State.

Apart from these formal characteristics, they vary ii Jefinitely in economic character, in social effect, ai in moral justification. They may be conditional lil the grant of patent rights, or absolute like the o\ ership of ground rents, terminable like copyright, permanent like a freehold, as comprehensive as soi ereignty or as restricted as an easement, as intimat and personal as the ownership of clothes and books, as remote and intangible as shares in a gold mine rubber plantation. It is idle, therefore, to present case for or against private property without specif] ing the particular forms of property to which refc ence is made, and the journalist who says that "pij| vate property is the foundation of civilization " agre with Proudhon, who said it was theft, in this res] at least that, without further definition, the words both are meaningless. Arguments which support demolish certain kinds of property may have no applij cation to others; considerations which are conclusive in one stage of economic organization may be alnu irrelevant in the next The course of wisdom is neither to attack private property in general nor to defend it in general; for things are not similar in quality] merely because they are identical in name. It is discriminate between the various concrete embodiment of what, in itself, is, after all, little more than an afy straction. <

The origin and development of different kinds ol proprietary rights is not material to this discussion Whatever may have been the historical process bj| which they have been established and recognized, tfc

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 55

Handle of private property traditional in England is it which sees in it the security that each man will ip where he has sown. u If I despair of enjoying 5 fruits of labor," said Bentham, repeating what were all essentials the arguments of Locke, " I shall only 'c from day to day; I shall not undertake labors kich will only benefit my enemies." Property, it is a^ied, is a moral right, and not merely a legal right, cause it insures that the producer will not be delved by violence of the result of his efforts. The mod from which that doctrine was inherited differed Dm our own in three obvious, but significant, respects, roperty in land and in the simple capital used in ast industries was widely distributed. Before the rise capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, the rnership, or at any rate the secure and effective occu* rtion, of land and tools by those who used them, was condition precedent to effective work in the field in the workshop. The forces which threatened prop-ty were the fiscal policy of Governments and in some tintries, for example France, the decaying relics of tidalism. The interference both of the one and of -« other involved the sacrifice of those who carried t useful labor to those who did not. To resist them 3te to protect not only property but industry, which Is indissolubly connected with it. Too often, indeed, distance was ineffective. Accustomed to the misery s'the rural proprietor in France, Voltaire remarked sUth astonishment that in England the peasant may 3 * rich, and " does not fear to increase the number , * Ms beasts or to cover his roof with tiles." And

the English Parliamentarians and the French losophers who made the inviolability of property i the center of their political theory, when they defi those who owned, were incidentally, if sometimes tentionally, defending those who labored. They protecting the yeoman or the master craftsman c merchant from seeing the fruits of his toil squan by the hangers-on at St. James or the courtly pax of Versailles.

In such circumstances the doctrine which four justification of private property in the fact tl enabled the industrious man to reap where he sown, was not a paradox, but, as far as the m* the population was concerned, almost a truism, erty was defended as the most sacred of rights, it was defended as a right which was not only v exercised, but which was indispensable to the formance of the active function of providing foo< clothing. Eor it consisted predominantly of oi two types, land or tools which were used by the < for the purpose of production, and personal p sions which were the necessities or amenities of ized existence. The former had its rationale h fact that the land of the peasant or the tools o craftsman were the condition of his rendering th< nomic services which society required; the latt€ cause furniture and clothes are indispensable to i of decency and comfort The proprietary rights-of course, they were numerous—which had their sc not in work, but in predatory force, were prot from criticism by the wide distribution of some

PROPEBTY AND CREATIVE WOHK 67

of property among the mass of the population, and in England, at least, the cruder of them were gradually whittled down. When property in land and what simple capital existed were generally diffused among all classes of society, when, in most parts of England, the typical workman was not a laborer but a peasant or small master, who could point to the strips which he had plowed or the cloth which he had woven, when the greater part of the wealth passing at death consisted of land, household furniture and a stock in trade which was hardly distinguishable from it, the moral justification of the title to property was self-evident. It was obviously, what theorists said that it was, and plain men knew it to be, the labor spent in producing, acquiring and administering it

Such property was not a burden upon society, but a condition of its health and efficiency, and indeed, of f , its continued existence. To protect it was to main-i: tain the organization through which public necessi-. ties were supplied. If, as in Tudor England, the peas-_ ant was evicted from his holding to make room for [ sheep, or crushed, as in eighteenth century France, by ■a arbitrary taxation and seignurial dues, land went out

A-

> of cultivation and the whole community was short of l^food. If the tools of the carpenter or smith were { i seized, plows were not repaired or horses shod. . Hence, before the rise of a commercial civilization, it j Was the mark of statesmanship, alike in the England « of the Tudors and in the France of Henry IV, to t cherish the small property-owner even to the point of i offending the great Popular sentiment idealized the

yeoman—" the Joseph of the country who keeps the poor from starving"—not merely because he owned property, but because he worked on it, denounced that " bringing of the livings of many into the hands of one," which capitalist societies regard with equanimity as an inevitable, and, apparently, a laudable result of economic development, cursed the usurer who took advantage of his neighbor's necessities to live without labor, was shocked by the callous indifference to public welfare shown by those who "not having before their eyes either God or the profit and advantage of the] realm, have enclosed with hedges and dykes towns and hamlets," and was sufficiently powerful to compel Governments to intervene to prevent the laying of field to field, and the engrossing of looms—to set limits, iirtj short, to the scale to which property might grow. « When Bacon, who commended Henry VII for pro-i tecting the tenant right of the small farmer, and pleaded* in the House of Commons for more drastic land legist lation, wrote "Wealth is like muck. It is not good* but if it be spread," he was expressing in an epigram< what was the commonplace of every writer on politics i from Fortescue at the end of the fifteenth century to< Harrington in the middle of the seventeenth. Tbe^ modern conservative, who is inclined to take au pied de la lettre the vigorous argument in which Lord Hugh Cecil denounces the doctrine that the maintenance of proprietary rights ought to be contingent upon the use to which they are put, may be reminded that Lord Hugh's own theory is of a kind to make his ancestors turn in their graves. Of the two members of th

PBOPEBTY AND CREATIVE WOBK 59

amily who achieved distinction before the nineteenth entury, the elder advised the Crown to prevent land->rds evicting tenants, and actually proposed to fix a ccuniary maximum to the property which different lasses might possess, while the younger attacked en* losing in Parliament, and carried legislation competing landlords to build cottages, to let them with small Loldings, and to plow up pasture.

William and Robert Cecil were sagacious and re-ponsible men, and their view that the protection of property should be accompanied by the enforcement of ^ligations upon its owners was shared by most of their sontemporaries. The idea that the institution of private property involves the right of the owner to use it, or refrain from using it, in such a way as he may please, rnd that its principal significance is to supply him with in income, irrespective of any duties which he may dis-sharge, would not have been understood by most public lien of that age, and, if understood, would have been repudiated with indignation by the more reputable imong them. They found the meaning of property a the public purposes to which it contributed, whether ibey were the production of food, as among the peas-ftntry, or the management of public affairs, as among jbe gentry, and hesitated neither to maintain those kinds rf property which met these obligations nor to repress Aose uses of it which appeared likely to conflict with item. Property was to be an aid to creative work, not & alternative to it. The patentee was secured promotion for a new invention, in order to secure him the *Uit8 of his own brain, but the monopolist who grew

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

fat on the industry of others was to be put down. Tl law of the village bound the peasant to use his land, m as he himself might find most profitable, but to grow corn the village needed. Long after political chai had made direct interference impracticable, even higher ranks of English landowners continued to charge, however capriciously and tyrannically, dutic which were vaguely felt to be the contribution whic they made to the public service in virtue of their estate When as in France, the obligations of ownership wei repudiated almost as completely as they have been the owner of to-day, nemesis came in an onslaught u] the position of a noblesse which had retained its rigfy and abdicated its functions. Property reposed, in shoi not merely upon convenience, or the appetite for gaii but on a moral principle. It was protected not for the sake of those who owned, but for the sake those who worked and of those for whom their woi provided. It was protected, because, without securit for property, wealth could not be produced or business of society carried on.

Whatever the future may contain, the past has shoi no more excellent social order than that in which mass of the people were the masters of the holdii which they plowed and of the tools with which the worked, and could boast, with the English freehold* that " it is a quietness to a man's mind to live u] his own and to know his heir certain." With this cc ception of property and its practical expression in soci institutions those who urge that society should be

PBOPEETY AND CREATIVE WOBK 61

ed on the basis of function have no quarrel. It is in £reement with their own doctrine, since it justifies roperty by reference to the services which it enabled b owner to perform. All that they need ask is that

should be carried to its logical conclusion.

For the argument has evidently more than one edge* E it justifies certain types of property, it condemns fchers; and in the conditions of modern industrial civi-*ation, what it justifies is less than what it condemns. *le truth is, indeed, that this theory of property and &e institutions in which it is embodied have survived ato an age in which the whole structure of society is •dically different from that in which it was formu-feted, and which made it a valid argument, if not for U, at least for the most common and characteristic finds of property. It is not merely that the ownership S any substantial share in the national wealth is con-•ntrated to-day in the hands of a few hundred thou-And families, and that at the end of an age which fcgan with an affirmation of the rights of property, proprietary rights are, in fact, far from being widely dis* tibuted. Nor is it merely that what makes property Asecure to-day is not the arbitrary taxation of uncon-litutional monarchies or the privileges of an idle Mlesse, but the insatiable expansion and aggregation £ property itself, which menaces with absorption all Roperty less than the greatest, the small master, the fctle shopkeeper, the country bank, and has turned ^ mass of mankind into a proletariat working under ^e agents and for the profit of those who own. The characteristic fact, which differentiates most

modern property from that of the pre-industrial and which turns against it the very reasoning by w formerly it was supported, is that in modern econ< conditions ownership is not active, but passive, tha most of those who own property to-day it is not a mi of work but an instrument for the acquisition of j or the exercise of power, and that there is no guara that gain bears any relation to service, or powe responsibility. For property which can be regarde a condition of the performance of function, like the of the craftsman, or the holding of the peasant, or personal possessions which contribute to a life of he and efficiency, forms an insignificant proportion, as as its value is concerned, of the property rights e ing at present. In modern industrial societies the £ mass of property consists, as the annual review of we passing at death reveals, neither of personal acquisit such as household furniture, nor of the owner's si in-trade, but of rights of various kinds, such as r< ties, ground-rents, and, above all, of course share industrial undertakings which yield an income spective of any personal service rendered by 1 owners. Ownership and use are normally divoi The greater part of modern property has been al uated to a pecuniary lien or bond on the produc industry which carries with it a right to payment, which is normally valued precisely because it reli the owner from any obligation to perform a positiv constructive function.

Such property may be called passive property, property for acquisition, for exploitation, or for poi

PBOPEETY AND CREATIVE WOBK 63

► distinguish it from the property which is actively sed by its owner for the conduct of his profession or *e upkeep of his household. To the lawyer the first & 3 of course, as fully property as the second. It is oestionable, however, whether economists shall call it

Property " at all, and not rather, as Mr. Hobson has Qggested, " Improperty," since it is not identical with tie rights which secure the owner the produce of his ail, but is opposite of them. A classification of pro-dietary rights based upon this difference would be in-tructive. If they were arranged according to the close-kss with which they approximate to one or other of •lese two extremes, it would be found that they were spread along a line stretching from property which is -%viously the payment for, and condition of, personal

*rvices, to property which is merely a right to payment from the services rendered by.others, in fact a f Private tax. The rough order which would emerge, if ? tl details and qualification were omitted, might be "4)mething as follows:—

* 1. Property in payments made for personal services.

^ 2. Property in personal possessions necessary to D lealth and comfort.

** 3. Property in land and tools used by their owners. K * 4. Property in copyright and patent rights owned by 1 tathors and inventors.

^ 5. Property in pure interest, including much agricultural rent.

6. Property in profits of luck and good fortune: quasi-rents."

8. Property in urban ground rents.

9. Property in royalties.

The first four kinds of property obviously accom] and in some sense condition, the performance of i The last four obviously do not Pure interest has affinities with both. It represents a necessary ecoi cost, the equivalent of which must be born, whateve legal arrangements under which property is held is thus unlike the property representd by profits ( than the equivalent of salaries and payment for i sary risk), urban ground-rents and royalties. ] lieves the recipient from personal services, and resembles them.

The crucial question for any society is, under i each of these two broad groups of categories the gi part (measured in value) of the proprietary ] which it maintains are at any given moment to be f< If they fall in the first group creative work wi encouraged and idleness will be depressed; if the^ in the second, the result will be the reverse. The vary widely from age to age and from country to try. Nor have they ever been fully revealed; fo lords of the jungle do not hunt by daylight, probable, at least, that in the England of 1550 to : a larger proportion of the existing property consist land and tools used by their owners than either ii temporary France, where feudal dues absorbed a siderable proportion of the peasants' income, or th the England of 1800 to 1850, where the new capi manufacturers made hundreds per cent while m workers were goaded by starvation into ineffectu

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 65

L It is probable that in the nineteenth century, oks to the Revolution, France and England changed ces, and that in this respect not only Ireland but the tish Dominions resemble the former rather than the er. The transformation can be studied best of all in United States, in parts of which the population of sant proprietors and small masters of the early nine-nth century were replaced in three generations by a pertyless proletariat and a capitalist plutocracy, e abolition of the economic privileges of agrarian dalism, which, under the name of equality, was the ving force of the French Revolution, and which has en place, in one form or another, in all countries iched by its influence, has been largely counter-anced since 1800 by the growth of the inequalities inging from Industrialism.

:n England the general effect of recent economic elopment has been to swell proprietary rights which tie the owners to payment without work, and to inish those which ',an properly be described as ztional. The expansion of the former, and the •ess by which the simpler forms of property have i merged in them, are movements the significance of eh it is hardly possible to over-estimate. There is, ourse, a considerable body of property which is still he older type. But though working landlords, and italists who manage their own businesses, are still he aggregate a numerous body, the organization for ch they stand is not that which is most representa-t of the modern economic world. The general tend-y for the ownership and administration of prop-

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

erty to be separated, the general refinement of propel into a claim on goods produced by an unknown worke is as unmistakable as the growth of capitalist indust and urban civilization themselves. Villages are turd into towns and property in land changes from the holi ing worked by a farmer or the estate administered byi landlord into " rents," which are advertised and boi and sold like any other investment. Mines are oped and the rights of the landowner are converted into tribute for every ton of coal which is brought to tl surface. As joint-stock companies take the place of individual enterprise which was typical of the earliJ years of the factory system, organization passes from employer who both owns and manages his business, ii the hands of salaried officials, and again the mass property-owners is swollen by the multiplication rentiers who put their wealth at the disposal of indt try, but who have no other connection with it, change is taking place in our day most conspicuous perhaps, through the displacement in retail trade of small shopkeeper by the multiple store, and the sul tution in manufacturing industry of combines and anu gamations for separate businesses conducted by com] ing employers. And, of course, it is not only by nomic development that such claims are created. " of the eater came forth meat, and out of the stroi came forth sweetness." It is probable that war, which barbarous ages used to be blamed as destructive property, has recently created more titles to propel than almost all other causes put together.

Infinitely diverse as are these proprietary rights,

\

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 67

tve the common characteristic of being so entirely sepa-:ted from the actual objects over which they are exer-aed, so rarified and generalized, as to be analogous ■nost to a form of currency rather than to the property bich is so closely united to its owner as to seem a *rt of him. Their isolation from the rough environ-(pnt of economic life, where the material objects of |iich they are the symbol are shaped and handled, is ueir charm. It is also their danger. The hold which a yss has upon the future depends on the function which ^performs. What nature demands is work: few work-4g aristocracies, however tyrannical, have fallen; few -|pctionless aristocracies have survived. In society, as %the world of organic life, atrophy is but one stage jnoved from death. In proportion as the landowner 4|Bomes a mere rentier and industry is conducted, not _| the rude energy of the competing employers who pninated its infancy, but by the salaried servants of ^reholders, the argument for private property which. 0 £oses on the impossibility of finding any organization z j supersede them loses its application, for they are ^eady superseded.

^Whatever may be the justification of these types of Y |pperty, it cannot be that which was given for the " (pperty of the peasant or the craftsman. It cannot be Jjt they are necessary in order to secure to each man Jp fruits of his own labor. For if a legal right which j^es £50,000 a year to a mineral owner in the North j England and to a ground landlord in London " selves the fruits of labor " at all, the fruits are the projector's and the labor that of some one else. Property

1JE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

has no more insidious enemies than those well-mei anarchists who, by defending all forms of it as equal valid, involve the institution in the discredit attachii to its extravagances. In reality, whatever conclusk may be drawn from the fact, the greater part of model property, whether, like mineral rights and url ground-rents, it is merely a form of private taxatk which the law allows certain persons to levy on industry of others, or whether, like property in capit it consists of rights to payment for instruments whi* the capitalist cannot himself use but puts at the disj of those who can, has as its essential feature that confers upon its owners income unaccompanied by sonal service. In this respect the ownership of h and the ownership of capital are normally simil though from other points of view their differences important. To the economist rent and interest are tinguished by the fact that the latter, though it is oi accompanied by surplus elements which are merged it in dividends, is the price of an instrument of pj duction which would not be forthcoming for industry) the price were not paid, while the former is a dif ential surplus which does not affect the supply. To business community and the solicitor land and capit are equally investments, between which, since they sess the common characteristic of yielding income vn\ out labor, it is inequitable to discriminate; and thoi their significance as economic categories may be ferent, their effect as social institutions is the same, is to separate property from creative ability, and divide society into two classes, of which one has

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK C9

edmary interest in passive ownership, while the other

mainly dependent upon active work.

Hence the real analogy to many kinds of modern ^operty is not the simple property of the small land-wner or the craftsman, still less the household goods ^d dear domestic amenities, which is what the word -Sggests to the guileless minds of clerks and shopkeepers, ^d which stampede them into displaying the ferocity ^ terrified sheep when the cry is raised that " Prepay " is threatened. It is the feudal dues which rohbed ; ~* French peasant of part of his produce till the Revo-*toon abolished them. How do royalties differ from Wntaines and lods et ventesf They are similar in their Bgin and similar in being a tax levied on each incre-kxit of wealth which labor produces. How do urban &und-rents differ from the payments which were made English sinecurists before the Reform Bill of 1832 ? ley are equally tribute paid by those who work to those lo do not. If the monopoly profits of the owner of Halites, whose tenant must grind corn at his mill and kke ^wine at his press, were an intolerable oppression, lat is the sanctity attaching to the monopoly profits the capitalists, who, as the Report of the Government *mmittee on trusts tells us, " in soap, tobacco, walloper, salt, cement and in the textile trades . . . are a position to control output and prices " or, in other *rds, can compel the consumer to buy from them, at e figure they fix, on pain of not buying at all ? All these rights—royalties, ground-rents, monopoly x>fits—are " Property." The criticism most fatal to em is not that of Socialists. It is contained in the

arguments by which property is usually defended. I if the meaning of the institution is to encourage indi try by securing that the worker shall receive the prodt of his toil, then precisely in proportion as it is imports to preserve the property which a man has in the resu of his own efforts, is it important to abolish that whi he has in the results of the efforts of some one else. 1 considerations which justify ownership as a function* those which condemn it as a tax. Property is not the but a good deal of theft becomes property. The owi of royalties who, when asked why he should be pi £50,000 a year from minerals which he has neitl discovered nor developed nor worked but only owni replies " But it's Property!" may feel all the a which his language suggests. But in reality he is 1 having like the snake which sinks into its backgrou by pretending that it is the dead branch of a tree, the lunatic who tried to catch rabbits by sitting behij a hedge and making a noise like a turnip. He is pH tising protective—and sometimes aggressive—mimicj His sentiments about property are those of the simj toiler who fears that what he has sown another ml reap. His claim is to be allowed to continue to rei what another has sown.

It is sometimes suggested that the less attractive ch( acteristics of our industrial civilization, its combinati of luxury and squalor, its class divisions and ell warfare, are accidental maladjustments which are J rooted in the center of its being, but are excrescen< which economic progress itself may in time be expect to correct. That agreeable optimism will not survive

xamination of the operation of the institution of pri-ete property in land and capital in industrialized communities. In countries where land is widely distributed, o France or in Ireland, its effect may be to produce general diffusion of wealth among a rural middle •ass who at once work and own. In countries where lie development of industrial organization has sepa-irted the ownership of property and the performance of *ork, the normal effect of private property is to trans-fr to functionless owners the surplus arising from the ^ tore fertile sites, the better machinery, the more elabo-Mrte organization. No clearer exemplifications of this ^law of rent" has been given than the figures supplied K t the Coal Industry Commission by Sir Arthur Lowes k lickenson, which showed that in a given quarter the F^ts per ton of producing coal varied from 12s. 6d. to *&s. Od. per ton, and the profits from nil to 16s. 6d. The : ^Btribution in dividends to shareholders of the surplus toruing from the working of richer and more acces-*le seams, from special opportunities and access to Jackets, from superior machinery, management and or-teization, involves the establishment of Privilege as a fcional institution, as much as the most arbitrary exacts of a feudal seigneur. It is the foundation of an tequality which is not accidental or temporary, but Pessary and permanent. And on this inequality is fected the whole apparatus of class institutions, which *ke not only the income, but the housing, education, ^alth and manners, indeed the very physical appear-k*e of different classes of Englishmen almost as dif-fccnt from each other as though the minority were

alien settlers established amid the rude civilization of race of impoverished aborigines.

So the justification of private property traditional i England, which saw in it the security that each mm would enjoy the fruits of his own labor, though largely applicable to the age in which it was formulated, W undergone the fate of most political theories. It M been refuted not by the doctrines of rival philosop but by the prosaic course of economic development far as the mass of mankind are concerned, the n which private property other than personal possessi does still often satisfy, though imperfectly and pr ously, is the need for security. To the small inveeto who are the majority of property-owners, though owni only an insignificant fraction of the property in ence, its meaning is simple. It is not wealth or po or even leisure from work. It is safety. They hard. They save a little money for old age, or for si ness, or for their children. They invest it, and interest stands between them and all that they d most. Their savings are of convenience to industry, income from them is convenient to themselvi " Why," they ask, " should we not reap in old age advantage of energy and thrift in youth ? " And hunger for security is so imperious that those who su most from the abuses of property, as well as those wl if they could profit by them, would be least inclined do so, will tolerate and even defend them, for fear 1 the knife which trims dead matter should cut into quick. They have seen too many men drown to be cri

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 73

$1 of dry land, though it be an inhospitable rock. They ire haunted by the nightmare of the future, and, if a burglar broke it, would welcome a burglar.

This need for security is fundamental, and almost the gravest indictment of our civilization is that the mass pf mankind are without it. Property is one way of paganizing it. It is quite comprehensible therefore, |hat the instrument should be confused with the end, pmd that any proposal to modify it should create dismay. ?n the past, human beings, roads, bridges and ferries, flvil, judicial and clerical offices, and commissions in Jhe army have all been private property. Whenever it ttas proposed to abolish the rights exercised over them, |t was protested that their removal would involve the destruction of an institution in which thrifty men had Hvested their savings, and on which they depended for frotection amid the chances of life and for comfort in Id age. In fact, however, property is not the only tethod of assuring the future, nor, when it is the way elected, is security dependent upon the maintenance of I the rights which are at present normally involved in Vnership. In so far as its psychological foundation is ie necessity for securing an income which is stable and »rtain, which is forthcoming when its recipient cannot ork, and which can be used to provide for those who tnnot provide for themselves, what is really demanded not the command over the fluctuating proceeds of some irticular undertaking, which accompanies the owner* lip of capital, but the security which is offered by an anility. Property is the instrument, security is the )ject, and when some alternative way is forthcoming

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

of providing the latter, it does not appear in practi that any loss of confidence, or freedom or independence is caused by the absence of the former.

Hence not only the manual workers, who since rise of capitalism, have rarely in England been abl to accumulate property sufficient to act as a guarant of income when their period of active earning is p but also the middle and professional classes, increai ingly seek security to-day, not in investment, but if 3 insurance against sickness and death, in the purcha of annuities, or in what is in effect the same thing, t accumulation of part of their salary towards a pensi which is paid when their salary ceases. The prof sional man may buy shares in the hope of making profit on the transaction. But when what he desires buy is security, the form which his investment takes usually one kind or another of insurance. The teach or nurse, or government servant looks forward to a p sion. Women, who fifty years ago would have been garded as dependent almost as completely as if fe ninity were an incurable disease with which they been born, and whose fathers, unless rich men, wo have been tormented with anxiety for fear lest should not save sufficient to provide for thsm, now ceive an education, support themselves in professio: and save in the same way. It is still only in compa tively few cases that this type of provision is mad almost all wage-earners outside government emplo; ment, and many in it, as well as large numbers professional men, have nothing to fall back upon sickness or old age. But that does not alter the i

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORE 75

hat, when it is made, it meets the need for security, rtrich, apart, of course, from personal possessions and household furniture, is the principal meaning of prop-prty to by far the largest element in the population, pad that it meets it more completely and certainly than ffoperty itself.

Nor, indeed, even when property is the instrument Jed to provide for the future, is such provision de-ttdent upon the maintenance in its entirety of the iole body of rights which accompany ownership to-day. roperty is not simple but complex. That of a man 10 has invested his savings as an ordinary shareholder mprises at least three rights, the right to interest, the jht to profits, the right to control. In so far as what

desired is the guarantee for the maintenance of a ible income, not the acquisition of additional wealth .thout labor—in so far as his motive is not gain but jurity—the need is met by interest on capital. It has ► necessary connection either with the right to resid-iry profits or the right to control the management of e undertaking from which the profits are derived, both

which are vested to-day in the shareholder. If all at were desired were to use property as an instrument r purchasing security, the obvious course—from the >int of view of the investor desiring to insure his iture the safest course—would be to assimilate his isition as far as possible to that of a debenture holder ' mortgagee, who obtains the stable income which is his otive for investment, but who neither incurs the risks >r receives the profits of the speculator. To insist that le elaborate apparatus of proprietary rights which dis-

tributes dividends of thirty per cent to the shareholdei in Coats, and several thousands a year to the owner c mineral royalties and ground-rents, and then alloti them to transmit the bulk of gains which they have no earned to descendants who in their turn will thus h relieved from the necessity of earning, must be main tained for the sake of the widow and the orphan, tb vast majority of whom have neither and would gladlj part with them all for a safe annuity if they had, is to say the least of it, extravagantly mdl-drpropos. It i like pitching a man into the water because he express a wish for a bath, or presenting a tiger cub to a house holder who is plagued with mice, on the ground tha tigers and cats both belong to the genus felis. The tigef hunts for itself not for itB masters, and when game i scarce will hunt them. The classes who own little or property may reverence it because it is security. B the classes who own much prize it for quite diffe reasons, and laugh in their sleeve at the innocence whii supposes that anything as vulgar as the savings of petite bourgeoisie have, except at elections, any inte for them. They prize it because it is the order whi quarters them on the community and which provides i the maintenance of a leisure class at the public expem " Possession," said the Egoist, " without obligation the object possessed, approaches felicity." Functionl property appears natural to those who believe that so( ciety should be organized for the acquisition of private wealth, and attacks upon it perverse or malicious, W cause the question which they ask of any institution is| " What does it yield $ " And such property yields mm

* those who own it. Those, however, who hold that *fcial unity and effective work are possible only if miety is organized and wealth distributed on the basis - function, will ask of an institution, not, " What tridends does it pay ? " but " What service does it per-«m ? " To them the fact that much property yields icome irrespective of any service which is performed ? obligation which is recognized by its owners will S>pear not a quality but a vice. They will see in the Rial confusion which it produces, payments dispropor-toate to service here, and payments without any serv-© at all there, and dissatisfaction everywhere, a con-bcing confirmation of their argument that to build on foundation of rights and of rights alone is to build on quicksand.

From the portentous exaggeration into an absolute of bat once was, and still might be, a sane and social in-ifcution most other social evils follow the power of fcose who do not work over those who do, the alternate fcbservience and rebelliousness of those who work to* *rds those who do not, the starving of science and bought and creative effort for fear that expenditure |*on them should impinge on the comfort of the slug-fcrd and the faineant, and the arrangement of society fc most of its subsidiary activities to suit the conven-feice not of those who work usefully but of those who ^nd gaily, so that the most hideous, desolate and par-ifcuonious places in the country are those in which the latest wealth is produced, the Clyde valley, or the &tton towns of Lancashire, or the mining villages of Gotland and Wales, and the gayest and most luxurious

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

those in which it is consumed. From the point of vie of social health and economic efficiency, society shoi obtain its material equipment at the cheapest price sible, and after providing for depreciation and exp« 3ion should distribute the whole product to its workq members and their dependents. What happens at pi ent, however, is that its workers are hired at the che est price which the market (as modified by organizatic allows, and that the surplus, somewhat diminished taxation, is distributed to the owners of propel Profits may vary in a given year from a loss to 100 cent. But wages are fixed at a level which will enal the marginal firm to continue producing one year another; and the surplus, even when due partly efficient management, goes neither to managers manual workers, but to shareholders. The meaning the process becomes startlingly apparent when, as Lancashire to-day, large blocks of capital change hai at a period of abnormal activity. The existing sb* holders receive the equivalent of the capitalized expt tion of future profits. The workers, as workers, do participate in the immense increment in value; when, in the future, they demand an advance in wa{ they will be met by the answer that profits, which befc the transaction would have been reckoned large, yic shareholders after it only a low rate of interest on investment.

The truth is that whereas in earlier ages the pi tection of property was normally the protection of woi the relationship between them has come in the courses the economic development of the last two centuries

rery nearly reversed. The two elements which com-* civilization are active effort and passive property, labor of human things and the tools which human igs use. Of these two elements those who supply first maintain and improve it, those who own the ►nd normally dictate its character, its development

its administration. Hence, though politically free, mass of mankind live in effect under rules imposed nrotect the interests of the small section among them >se primary concern is ownership. From this sub-ination of creative activity to passive property, the •ker who depends upon his brains, the organizer, in-tor, teacher or doctor suffers almost as much embar-sment as the craftsman. The real economic cleavage tot, as is often said, between employers and employed, . between all who do constructive work, from scientist aborer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon

other, irrespective of whether they contribute to con-active work or not.

tf, therefore, under the modern conditions which have icentrated any substantial share of property in the ads of a small minority of the population, the world to be governed for the advantages of those who own, is only incidentally and by accident that the result* 11 be agreeable to those who work. In practice there a constant collision between them. Turned into an-ler channel, half the wealth distributed in dividends functionless shareholders, could secure every child a od education up to 18, could re-endow English Uni-rsities, and (since more efficient production is im-

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

portant) could equip English industries for more ficient production. Half the ingenuity now applied the protection of property could have made most indi trial diseases as rare as smallpox, and most Engli cities into places of health and even of beauty, stands in the way is the doctrine that the rights of pi erty are absolute, irrespective of any social fiinctii which its owners may perform. So the laws which most stringently enforced are still the laws which pi tect property, though the protection of property is longer likely to be equivalent to the protection of woi and the interests which govern industry and predoi nate in public affairs are proprietary interests. A mi owner may poison or mangle a generation of operative but his brother magistrates will let him off with a tion or a nominal fine to poison and mangle the nei For he is an owner of property. A landowner mi draw rents from slums in which young children die the rate of 200 per 1000; but he will be none the le welcome in polite society. For property has no oblij tions and therefore can do no wrong. Urban land be held from the market on the outskirts of cities which human beings are living three to a room, rural land may be used for sport when villagers leaving it to overcrowd them still more. No publ authority intervenes, for both are property. To the who believe that institutions which repudiate all moi significance must sooner or later collapse, a socic which confuses the protection of property with the pi ervation of its functionless perversions will appear precarious as that which has left the memorials of

steless frivolity and more tasteless ostentation in the rdens of Versailles.

Do men love peace ? They will see the greatest enemy social unity in rights which involve no obligation co-operate for the service of society. Do they value nality ? Property rights which dispense their owners >m the common human necessity of labor make in-nality an institution permeating every corner of eiety, from the distribution of material wealth to the lining of intellect itself. Do they desire greater in-istrial efficiency ? There is no more fatal obstacle to iciency than the revelation that idleness has the same ivileges as industry, and that for every additional crw with the pick or hammer an additional profit ill be distributed among shareholders who wield sither.

Indeed, functionless property is the greatest enemy of gitimate property itself. It is the parasite which kills *e organism that produced it. Bad money drives out >od, and, as the history of the last two hundred years tows, when property for acquisition or power and prop-t:y for service or for use jostle each other freely in *e market, without restrictions such as some legal sys-ms have imposed on alienation and inheritance, the fcter tends normally to be absorbed by the former, be-t"use it has less resisting power. Thus functionless property grows, and as it grows it undermines the create energy which produced property and which in lorlier ages it protected. It cannot unite men, for iiat unites them is the bond of service to a common torpose, and that bond it repudiates, since its very

essence is the maintenance of rights irrespective service. It cannot create; it can only spend, so the number of scientists, inventors, artists or men letters who have sprung in the course of the last tury from hereditary riches can be numbered on hand. It values neither culture nor beauty, but o the power which belongs to wealth and the ostentati which is the symbol of it.

So those who dread these qualities, energy thought and the creative spirit—and they are many will not discriminate, as we have tried to discriminal between different types and kinds of property, in on that they may preserve those which are legitimate ai abolish those which are not. They will endeavor to pi serve all private property, even in its most degene forms. And those who value those things will try promote them by relieving property of its perversioi and thus enabling it to return to its true nature. T will not desire to establish any visionary communis for they will realize that the free disposal of a sufficie of personal possessions is the condition of a healthy a self-respecting life, and will seek to distribute m widely the property rights which make them to-day privilege of a minority. But they will refuse to subm to the naive philosophy which would treat all propri tary rights as equal in sanctity merely because they a identical in name. They will distinguish sharply 1 tween property which is used by its owner for the co duct of his profession or the upkeep of his househol and property which is merely a claim on wealth pi duced by another's labor. They will insist that pre

y is moral and healthy only when it is used as a con-Lon not of idleness but of activity, and when it in-ves the discharge of definite personal obligations. ey will endeavor, in short, to base it upon the prin-le of function.

SIX

THE FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY

-3

h

15

> The application to property and industry of the pq ciple of function is compatible with several diffen types of social organization, and is as unlikely as mi important revelations to be the secret of those who " Lo here! " and " Lo there! " The essential thing that men should fix their minds upon the idea of p pose, and give that idea pre-eminence over all subsidi issues. If, as is patent, the purpose of industry is provide the material foundation of a good social li then any measure which makes that provision more fective, so long as it does not conflict with some s more important purpose, is wise, and any institute which thwarts or encumbers it is foolish. It is foolii for example, to cripple education, as it is crippled England for the sake of industry; for one of the uses industry is to provide the wealth which may make sible better education. It is foolish to maintain pr erty rights for which no service is performed, for pa; ment without service is waste; and if it is true, statisticians affirm, that, even were income equally A vided, income per head would be small, then it is 1 > the more foolish, for sailors in a boat have no room i j first-class passengers, and it is all the more importa

that none of the small national income should be m .

■c

applied. It is foolish to leave the direction of indust

?]3 ?

i

84

\

2 tie liands of servants of private property-owners who lemselves know nothing about it but its balance sheets, •cause this is to divert it from the perfor mance of frWce to the acquisition of gain, and to subordinate tee who do creative work to those who do not. £he coarse of wisdom in the affairs of industry is, £r all, what it is in any other department of organ-I life. It is to consider the end for which economic vity is carried on and then to adapt economic or-ization to it. It is to pay for service and for rice only, and when capital is hired to make sore t it is hired at the cheapest possible price. It is to ce the responsibility for organizing industry on the vlders of those who work and use, not of those who a, because production is the business of the prober and the proper person to see that he discharges

business is the consumer for whom, and not for the tier of property, it ought to be carried on. Above all is to insist that all industries shall be conducted in nplete publicity as to costs and profits, because pub-ity ought to be the antiseptic both of economic and litical abuses, and no man can have confidence in his tghbor unless both work in the light. •As far as property is concerned, such a policy would Bsess two edges. On the one hand, it would aim at dishing those forms of property in which ownership

divorced from obligations. On the other hand, it >uld seek to encourage those forms of economic organi-"tion under which the worker, whether owner or not, is ^e to carry on his work without sharing its control or a profits with the mere rentier. Thus, if in certain

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

spheres it involved an extension of public ownership,! would in others foster an extension of private pr»« erty. For it is not private ownership, but private own! Pi ship divorced from work, which is corrupting to mk principle of industry; and the idea of some socialiflii that private property in land or capital is necessai mischievous is a piece of scholastic pedantry as absi as that of those conservatives who would invest all pi erty with some kind of mysterious sanctity. It all pends what sort of property it is and for what pur] it is used. Provided that the State retains its ei nent domain, and controls alienation, as it does \wl the Homestead laws of the Dominions, with suffieie stringency to prevent the creation of a class of fi tionless property-owners, there is no inconsistency tween encouraging simultaneously a multiplication peasant farmers and small masters who own their 01 farms or shops, and the abolition of private ownei in those industries, unfortunately to-day the most spicuous, in which the private owner is an absent shareholder.

Indeed, the second reform would help the first. In far as the community tolerates functionless property makes difficult, if not impossible, the restoration of small master in agriculture or in industry, who cai easily hold his own in a world dominated by gre estates or capitalist finance. In so far as it abolisl those kinds of property which are merely parasitic, facilitates the restoration of the small property-oi in those kinds of industry for which small ownership adapted. A socialistic policy towards the former is

Agonistic to the " distributive state/' but, in modern nomic conditions, a necessary preliminary to it, and by " Property " is meant the personal possessions ich the word suggests to nine-tenths of the populate the object of socialists is not to undermine prop* y but to protect and increase it. The boundary be-*en large scale and small scale production will always -uncertain and fluctuating, depending, as it does, on hnical conditions which cannot be foreseen: a cheap-ixig of electrical power, for example, might result in i decentralization of manufactures, as steam resulted

their concentration. The fundamental issue, how-«, is not between different scales of ownership, but bween ownership of different kinds, not between the ?fge farmer or master and the small, but between prop-cy which is used for work and property which yields Some without it. The Irish landlord was abolished, fc because he owned a large scale, but because he was i owner and nothing more; if, and when English land-rxiership has been equally attenuated, as in towns it r^ady has been, it will deserve to meet the same fate. tt.ce the issue of the character of ownership has been •rfcled, the question of the size of the economic unit can * left to settle itself.

TThe first step, then, towards the organization of eco-ftttxiic life for the performance of function is to abolish *Ose types of private property in return for which no auction is performed. The man who lives by owning A'thout working is necessarily supported by the indus-& of some one else, and is, therefore, too expensive a i^ury to be encouraged. Though he deserves to be

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

treated with the leniency which ought to be, and usul

is not, shown to those who have been brought up

infancy to any other disreputable trade, indulgei

individuals must not condone the institution of wl

both they and their neighbors are the victims. Juc

by this standard, certain kinds of property are obvioi

anti-social. The rights in virtue of which the owne

the surface is entitled to levy a tax, called a roya

on every ton of coal which the miner brings to

surface, to levy another tax, called a way-leave, on ei

ton of coal transported under the surface of his li

though its amenity and value may be quite unafle

to distort, if he pleases, the development of a wl

district by refusing access to the minerals except u|

Ids own terms, and to cause some 3,500 to 4,000 mi

tons to be wasted in barriers between different prof

ties, while he in the meantime contributes to a cho

of lamentation over the wickedness of the miners in

producing more tons of coal for the public and inck

tally more private taxes for himself—all this addsi

agreeable touch of humor to the drab quality of our I

dustrial civilization for which mineral owners dese perhaps some recognition, though not the £100,000

a year which is paid to each of the four leading pla] or the £6,000,000 a year which is distributed among crowd.

The alchemy by which a gentleman who has nq seen a coal mine distills the contents of that place? gloom into elegant chambers in London and a place the country is not the monopoly of royalty ownew. similar feat of presdigitation is performed by

iter of urban ground-rents. In rural districts some idlords, perhaps many landlords, are partners in the zardous and difficult business of agriculture, and, Dugh they may often exercise a power which is socially eessive, the position which they hold and the income lich they receive are, in part at last, a return for b functions which they perform. The ownership of *1>an land has been refined till of that crude ore only e pure gold is left. It is the perfect sinecure, for the Jy function it involves is that of collecting its profits, id in an age when the struggle of Liberalism against necures was still sufficiently recent to stir some chords ' memory, the last and greatest of liberal thinkers drew .e obvious deduction. " The reasons which form the ustification ... of property in land," wrote Mill in 348, " are valid only in so far as the proprietor of land its improver. . . . In no sound theory of private roperty was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of end should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it." r*rban ground-rents and royalties are, in fact, as the *rime Minister in his unregenerate days suggested, a *x which some persons are permitted by the law to levy pon the industry of others. They differ from public *xation only in that their amount increases in propor-Lon not to the nation's need of revenue but to its need f the coal and space on which they are levied, that their growth inures to private gain not to public benefit, and bat if the proceeds are wasted on frivolous expenditure to one has any right to complain, because the arrangement by which Lord Smith spends wealth produced by Hr. Brown on objects which do no good to either is part

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

of the system which, under the name of private pi erty, Mr. Brown as well as Lord Smith have learned regard as essential to the higher welfare of mankind. But if we accept the principle of function we si ask what is the purpose of this arrangement, and what end the inhabitants of, for example, London £16,000,000 a year to their ground landlords. And we find that it is for no purpose and no end, but tl these things are like the horseshoes and nails whil the City of London presents to] the Crown on account land in the Parish of St. Clement Danes, then we si not deal harshly with a quaint historical survival, neither shall we allow it to distract us from the bd ness of the present, as though there had been hist( but there were not history any longer. We shall clc these channels through which wealth leaks away by suming the ownership of minerals and of urban lai as some communities in the British Dominions and the Continent of Europe have resumed it already, shall secure that such large accumulations as remal change hands at least once in every generation, by ii creasing our taxes on inheritance till what passes to heir is little more than personal possessions, not \\ right to a tribute from industry which, though qual fied by death-duties, is what the son of a rich man \{ herits to-day. We shall treat mineral owners and lai owners, in short, as Plato would have treated the po< whom in their ability to make something out of not! ing and to bewitch mankind with words they a lit resemble, and crown them with flowers and usher the politely out of the State.

SEVEN

INDUSTRY AS A PROFESSION

3hts without functions are like the shades in Homer ich drank blood but scattered trembling at the voice a man. To extinguish royalties and urban ground-Lts is merely to explode a superstition. It needs as :le—and as much—resolution as to put one's hand xmgh any other ghost. In all industries except the finishing number in which the capitalist is himself * manager, property in capital is almost equally pas-«. Almost, but not quite. For, though the majority

its owners do not themselves exercise any positive action, they appoint those who do. It is true, of arse, that the question of how capital is to be owned distinct from the question of how it is to be admin-^red, and that the former can be settled without ejudice to the latter. To infer, because shareholders P3i capital which is indispensable to industry, that erefore industry is dependent upon the maintenance

capital in the hands of shareholders, to write, with tne economists, as though, if private property in capita were further attenuated or abolished altogether, the •istructive energy of the managers who may own capi-I or may not, but rarely, in the more important indus-ies, own more than a small fraction of it, must necessity be impaired, is to be guilty of a robust *n-8equitur and to ignore the most obvious facts of

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

contemporary industry. The less the mere capitf talks about the necessity for the consumer of an efficie organization of industry, the better; for, whatever future of industry may be, an efficient organization^ likely to have no room for him. But though si holders do not govern, they reign, at least to the exte of saying once a year " le toy le veult." If their ri{ are pared down or extinguished, the necessity for sol organ to exercise them will still remain. And the qi tion of the ownership of capital has this much in tnon with the question of industrial organization, the problem of the constitution under which indi is to be conducted is common to both.

That constitution must be sought by considering industry can be organized to express most perfectly \ principle of purpose* The application to industry the principle of purpose is simple, however difficult! may be to give effect to it. It is to turn it intb a Pi fession. A Profession may be defined most simply a trade which is organized, incompletely, no doubt, genuinely, foi* the performance of function. It iB simply a collection of individuals who get a living themselves by the same kind of work. Nor is it mei a group which is organized exclusively for the econoi protection of its members, though that is norms among its purposes. It is a body of men who carry their work in accordance with rules designed to enfoi certain standards both for the better protection of ij members and for the better service of the public, standards which it maintains may be high or low: professions have some rules which protect the intei

the coraraunity and others which are an imposition on

Its essence is that it assumes certain responsibilities ( r the competence of its members or the quality of its ires, and that it deliberately prohibits certain kinds '

conduct on the ground that, though they may be Dfitable to the individual, they are calculated to bring bo disrepute the organization to which he belongs. bile some of its rules are trade union regulations denned primarily to prevent the economic standards of b profession being lowered by unscrupulous competing others have as their main object to secure that no ember of the profession shall have any but a purely ofessional interest in his work, by excluding the in-■itive of speculative profit

The conception implied in the words " unprofessional ) nduct" is, therefore, the exact opposite of the theory id practice which assume that the service of the public

best secured by the unrestricted pursuit on the part ? rival traders of their pecuniary self-interest, within ich limits as the law allows. It is significant that at le time when the professional classes had deified free., fcmpetition as the arbiter of commerce and industry, ley did not dream of applying it to the occupations in •ihich they themselves were primarily interested, but laintained, and indeed, elaborated machinery through fhich a professional conscience might find expression-' *he rules themselves may sometimes appear to the lay-lan arbitrary and ill-conceived. But their object is lear. It is to impose on the profession itself the obliga-lon of maintaining the quality of the service, and to toevent its common purpose being frustrated through

the undue influence of the motive of pecuniary g^ upon the necessities or cupidity of the individual. I

The difference between industry as it exists to-dd and a profession is, then, simple and unmistakaN) The essence of the former is that its only criterion! the financial return which it offers to its shareholder The essence of the latter, is that, though men enter | for the sake of livelihood, the measure of their su is the service which they perform, not the gains whi they amass. They may, as in the case of a suecesi doctor, grow rich; but the meaning of their professi both for themselves and for the public, is not that make money but that they make health, or safety, knowledge, or good government or good law. Th^ depend on it for their income, but they do not considi that any conduct which increases their income is d that account good. And while a boot-manufacturer "A retires with half a million is counted to have achieve success, whether the boots which he made were (i leather or brown paper, a civil servant who did til same would be impeached. I

So, if they are doctors, they recognize that there fll certain kinds of conduct which cannot be praetisd however large the fee offered for them, because thl are unprofessional; if scholars and teachers, that it i wrong to make money by deliberately deceiving tl public, as is done by makers of patent medicines, hot ever much the public may clamor to be deceived;! judges or public servants, that they must not increal their incomes by selling justice for money; if soldid that the service comes first, and their private incliri

ms, even the reasonable preference of life to death, ?ond. Every country has its traitors, every army its serters, and every profession its blacklegs. To idealize & professional spirit would be very absurd; it has it9 rdid side, and, if it is to be fostered in industry, safe-»rds will be needed to check its excesses. But there all the difference between maintaining a standard xich is occasionally abandoned, and affirming as the Qtral truth of existence that there is no standard to Biintain. The meaning of a profession is that it makes e traitors the exception, not as they are in industry, ^ rule. It makes them the exception by upholding as © criterion of success the end for which the profession, batever it may be, is carried on, and subordinating the dination, appetites and ambitions of individuals to « rules of an organization which has as its object to remote the performance of function.

There is no sharp line between the professions and i« industries. A hundred years ago the trade of teach-ig, which to-day is on the whole an honorable public service, was rather a vulgar speculation upon public Sedulity; if Mr. Squeers was a caricature, the Oxford E Gibbon and Adam Smith was a solid port-fed reality; o local authority could have performed one-tenth of fee duties which are carried out by a modern municipal Enporation every day, because there was no body of fublic servants to perform them, and such as there were aok bribes. It is conceivable, at least, that some •anches of medicine might have developed on the lines < industrial capitalism, with hospitals as factories,

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

doctor hired at competitive wages as their "hands,] large dividends paid to shareholders by catering for rich, and the poor, who do not offer a profitable marke supplied with an inferior service or with no service all.

The idea that there is some mysterious different between making munitions of war and firing them, tween building schools and teaching in them when buil between providing food and providing health, whic makes it at once inevitable and laudable that the forme should be carried on with a single eye to pecuniary gain while the latter are conducted by professional men wl expect to be paid for service but who neither watch ft windfalls nor raise their fees merely because there ai more sick to be cured, more children to be taught, more enemies to be Resisted, is an illusion only k astonishing than that the leaders of industry shotil^ welcome the insult as an honor and wear their humilia tion as a kind of halo. The work of making boots oj building a house is in itself no more degrading tin that of curing the sick or teaching the ignorant. It as necessary and therefore as honorable. It should at least equally bound by rules which have as theij object to maintain the standards of professional sei ice. It should be at least equally free from vulgar subordination of moral standards to fiuancii interests.

If industry is to be organized as a profession, changes are requisite, one negative and one positi\ The first, is that it should cease to be conducted by tl agents of property-owners for the advantage of propel

aers, and should be carried on, instead, for the service the public. The second, is that, subject to rigorous blic supervision, the responsibility for the mainte-nce of the service should rest upon the shoulders of >se, from organizer and scientist to laborer, by whom, effect, the work is conducted.

The first change is necessary because the conduct of

lustry for the public advantage is impossible as long

the ultimate authority over its management is vested

those whose only connection with it, and interest in

is the pursuit of gain. As industry is at present ganized, its profits and its control belong by law to *t element in it which has least to do with its sue-is. Under the joint-stock organization which has 2ome normal in all the more important industries cept agriculture, it is managed by the salaried agents

those by whom the property is owned. It is success-1 if it returns largs sums to shareholders, and un-ccessful if it does not. If an opportunity presents i«lf to increase dividends by practices which deterio-te the service or degrade the workers, the officials who aninister industry act strictly within their duty if they ize it, for they are the servants of their employers, id their obligation to their employers is to provide Yidends not to provide service. But the owners of $ property are, qua property-owners functionless, not . the sense, of course, that the tools of which they are proprietors are not useful, but in the sense that since ork and ownership are increasingly separated, the ef-3ient use of the tools is not dependent on the main-pance of the proprietary rights exercised over them*

Of course there are many managing directors who own capital and administer the business. But it none the less the case that most shareholders in w large industries are normally shareholders and not more.

Nor is their economic interest identical, as is soi times assumed, with that of the general public society is rich when material goods, including capit are cheap, and human beings dear: indeed the wc u riches " has no other meaning. The interest of thj who own the property used in industry, though not, course, of the managers who administer industry who themselves are servants, and often very ill-servants at that, is that their capital should be de and human beings cheap. Hence, if the industry is si as to yield a considerable return, or if one unit in industry, owing to some special advantage, produc more cheaply than its neighbors, while selling at tjj same price, or if a revival of trade raises prices, oij supplies are controlled by one of the combines whi^ are now the rule in many of the more important ij dustries, the resulting surplus normally passes neither) the managers, nor to the other employees, nor to t| public, but to the shareholders. Such an arrangement! preposterous in the literal sense of being the reverse | that which would be established by considerations < equity and common sense, and gives rise (among oti| things) to what is called " the struggle between lali and capital." The phrase is apposite, since it is i absurd as the relations of which it is intended to be] description. To deplore " ill-feeling" or to advofll

barmony " between " labor and capital " is as rational "to lament the bitterness between carpenters and ham-e:rs or to promote a mission for restoring amity be-r ^en mankind and its boots. The only significance of ease cliches is that their repetition tends to muffle their sanity, even to the point of persuading sensible men **t capital " employs " labor, much as our pagan an-»tors imagined that the other pieces of wood and iron, fcaich they deified in their day, sent their crops and won feir battles. When men have gone so far as to talk

> though their idols have come to life, it is time that *a=ne one broke them. Labor consists of persons, capi-^ of things. The only use of things is to be applied

* the service of persons. The business of persons is

► see that they are there to use, and that no more than &cd be is paid for using them.

Thus the application to industry of the principle of Auction involves an alteration of proprietary rights, Realise those rights do not contribute, as they now are,

* the end which industry exists to serve. What gives ^ity to any activity, what alone can reconcile the con-icting claims of the different groups engaged in it, is ^e purpose for which it is carried on. If men have no \ Ommon goal it is no wonder that they should fall out 3r the way, nor are they likely to be reconciled by a ^distribution of their provisions. If they are not consult both to be servants, one or other must be master,

t fed it is idle to suppose that mastership can be held in ^ r state of suspense between the two. There can be a division of functions between different grades of i^rkers, or between worker and consumer, and each can

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

have in his own sphere the authority needed to ei him to £01 it. But there cannot be a division of ft tions between the worker and the owner who is o^ and nothing else, for what function does such an 01 perform ? The provision of capital ? Then pay him sum needed to secure the use of his capital, but neit pay him more nor admit him to a position of author over production for which merely as an owner he is qualified. For this reason, while an equilibrium tween worker and manager is possible, because both workers, that which it is sought to establish bet worker and owner is not. It is like the proposal of 1 Germans to negotiate with Belgium from Bros Their proposals may be excellent: but it is not evide why they are where they are, or how, since do not contribute to production, they come to be ting forward proposals at all. As long as they in territory where they have no business to their excellence as individuals will be overlooked annoyance at the system which puts them where are.

It is fortunate indeed, if nothing worse than happens. For one way of solving the problem of conflict of rights in industry is not to base rights functions, as we propose, but to base them on force, is to re-establish in some veiled and decorous form institution of slavery, by making labor compulsory, nearly all countries a concerted refusal to work has made at one time or another a criminal offense. Tl are to-day parts of the world in which European talists, unchecked by any public opinion or authoi

dependent of themselves, are free to impose almost tst terms they please upon workmen of ignorant and Ipless races. In those districts of America where capi-ism still retains its primitive lawlessness, the same *nlt appears to be produced upon immigrant workmen

the threat of violence. 3n such circumstances the conflict of rights which Kls expression in industrial warfare does not arise, cause the rights of one party have been extinguished, ae simplicity of the remedy is so attractive that it is rt surprising that the Governments of industrial na-*ns should coquet from time to time with the policy compulsory arbitration. After all, it is pleaded, it only analogous to the action of a supernational au-mrity which should use its common force to prevent *b outbreak of war. In reality, compulsory arbitrary is the opposite of any policy which such an author-y could pursue either with justice or with hope of Lccess. For it takes for granted the stability of exist-13? relationships and intervenes to adjust incidental dis-ates upon the assumption that their equity is recog-Lzed and their permanence desired. In industry, howler, the equity o£ existing relationships is precisely the saint at issue. A League of Nations which adjusted be-*een a subject race and its oppressors, between Slavs fed Magyars, or the inhabitants of what was once Irassian Poland and the Prussian Government, on the iramption that the subordination of Slavs to Magyars lid Poles to Prussians was part of an unchangeable ider, would rightly be resisted by all those who think Jterty more precious than peace. A State which, in the

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

name of peace, should make the concerted cessation] work a legal offense would be guilty of a similar trayal of freedom. It would be solving the conflict^ rights between those who own and those who work abolishing the rights of those who work.

So here again, unless we are prepared to re-estat some form of forced labor, we reach an impasse. it is an impasse only in so long as we regard the prietary rights of those who own the capital usedi industry as absolute and an end in themselves. If, stead of assuming that all property, merely becaus is property, is equally sacred, we ask what is the pose for which capital is used, what is its function, shall realize that it is not an end but a means to an ei and that its function is to serve and assist (as economists tell us) the labor of human beings, not function of human beings to serve those who happen] own it. And from this truth two consequences folic The first is that since capital is a thing, which oi to be used to help industry as a man may use a bicyf to get more quickly to his work, it ought, when it employed, to be employed on the cheapest terms sible. The second is that those who own it should more control production than a man who lets a hoi controls the meals which shall be cooked in the kitcbc or the man who lets a boat the speed at which rowers shall pull. In other words, capital should alwn be got at cost price, which means, unless the State it wise, as it very well may, to own the capital used certain industries, it should be paid the lowest int

AS A PROFESSION

which it can be obtained, bat sbcaild carry mo aer to residuary dhidmds or to the control of in-rtry.

Fhere are, in theory, fire wars by whkh the control industry by the agents of private property-owners can terminated. They may be expropriated without com-isation. They may voluntarily surrender h. They y be frozen oat by action on the part of the working *8<mnel, which itself undertakes such functions, if y, as they have performed, and makes them super-ous by conducting production without their assist-ce. Their proprietary interest may be limited or at-mated to such a degree that they become mere titers, who are guaranteed a fixed payment analogous

that of the debenture-holder, but who receive no ofits and bear no responsibility for the organization of dustry. They may be bought out. The first alterna-re is exemplified by the historical confiscations of the fit, such as, for instance, by the seizure of ecclesiastical bperty by the ruling classes of England, Scotland and bst other Protestant states. The second has rarely, if 'er, been tried—the nearest approach to it, perhaps, Is the famous abdication of August 4th, 1789. The Rrd is the method apparently contemplated by the Hiding guilds which are now in process of formation i Great Britain. The fourth method of treating the Ipitalist is followed by the co-operative movement. It I also that proposed by the committee of employers and bde-unionists in the building industry over which Mr. Wer presided, and which proposed that employers lould be paid a fixed salary, and a fixed rate of inter-

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

est on their capital, but that all surplus profits shot be pooled and administered by a central body rej senting employers and workers. The fifth has re] edly been practised by municipalities, and somewl less often by national governments.

Which of these alternative methods of removing dustry from the control of the property-owner is adoj is a matter of expediency to be decided in each part^j lar case. " Nationalization," therefore, which is soi times advanced as the only method of extinguishing prietary rights, is merely one species of a considers genus. It can be used, of course, to produce the desii result. But there are some industries, at any rate, which nationalization is not necessary in order to brifl z it about, and since it is at best a cumbrous process, wl other methods are possible, other methods should used. Nationalization is a means to an end, not an in itself. Properly conceived its object is not to est lish state management of industry, but to remove dead hand of private ownership, when the private a\ has ceased to perform any positive function. It is fortunate, therefore, that the abolition of obstruct^ property rights, which is indispensable, should been identified with a single formula, which may applied with advantage in the special circumstances \ some industries, but need not necessarily be applied all. Ownership is not a right, but a bundle of rigl and it is possible to strip them off piecemeal as welll to strike them off simultaneously. The ownership capital involves, as we have said, three main claims; right to interest as the price of capital, the rightly

rn>rsTBT as a raortssirT ire

t>fits, and the right xd camrriL in vlnut of "widch Onagers and •kjHuuct art liit servant of smrrehaiQeis. Mse rights in their fcHest octree bus mi lie icrarxaifte sompaniment of wamiiip , nor need ?iey necessarily -exist. The iBge»ninr «f ihumcias long «d devised ^thods of grading SLoek in such a wsy xhai lie owaer-S.p of some carries full cxmroL, widje xhax of ethos «s not, that some hear all lie risk and are emxrled to L the profits, while others are limited in respect to both. U are property, hot not all carry proprietary rights

the same degree.

As long as the private ownerdup of industrial capital zmains, the object of reformers should he to attenuate

3 influence by insisting that it shall he paid not more ban a rate of interest fixed in advance, and that it fcould carry with it no right of control. In such cir~ •instances the position of the ordinary shareholder «rald approximate to that of the owner of debentures; ie property in the industry would be converted into a ■ortgage on its profits, while the control of its admin-Htr&tion and all profits in excess of the minimum would Smain to be vested elsewhere. So, of course, would ie risks. But risks are of two kinds, those of the in* ividual business and those of the industry. The for* ler are much heavier than the latter, for though a coal line is a speculative investment, coal mining is not, and

4 long as each business is managed as a separate unity ie payments made to shareholders must cover both. If 4e ownership of capital in each industry were unified, (rich does not mean centralized, those risks which are teidental to individual competition would be elirai-

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

nated, and the credit of each unit would be that of whole.

Such a change in the character of ownership woi have three advantages. It would abolish the goven of industry by property. It would end the payments profits to functionless shareholders by turning them ii creditors paid a fixed rate of interest. It would the only possible foundations for industrial peace making it possible to convert industry into a profess carried on by all grades of workers for the service! the public, not for the gain of those who own capil The organization which it would produce will be scribed, of course, as impracticable. It is interestii therefore, to find it is that which experience has practical men to suggest as a remedy for the disord< of one of the most important of national industries, tl of building. The question before the Committee of ployers and workmen, which issued last August a Re] upon the Building Trade, was " Scientific Manageme and the Reduction of Costs." x These are not pirn which suggest an economic revolution; but it is soi thing little short of a revolution that the signatories the report propose. For, as soon as they came to gri| with the problem, they found that it was impossible handle it effectively without reconstituting the genei fabric of industrial relationships which is its settii Why is the service supplied by the industry ineffectii Partly because the workers do not give their full em gies to the performance of their part in productic

1 Reprinted in The Industrial Council for the Building duetry.

fcy do they not give their best energies t Becsoae of tie fear of unemployment, the dbmeHnatkai of die «ratives to make unlimited profit for private em-overs, the lack of interest evinced by ope t ali it a owing

their non-participation in control, ineSeieacy both raagerial and op erativ e." How are these psycho-gical obstacles to efficiency to be counteracted ! By •creased supervision and speeding up, by the allure-^nts of a premium bonus system, or the other devices p" which men who are too ingenious to bare imagina-on or moral insight would bully or cajole poor human *.ture into doing what—if only the systems they in-fent would let it!—it desires to do, simple duties ttd honest work? Not at alL By turning the build-feg of houses into what teaching now is, and Mr. Queers thought it could never be, an honorable profession.

"We believe," they write, "that the great task of tar Industrial Council is to develop an entirely new ystem of industrial control by the members of the in-^lstry itself—the actual producers, whether by hand or vain, and to bring them into co-operation with the State « the central representative of the community whom fcey are organized to serve." Instead of unlimited f+ofits, so " indispensable as an incentive to efficiency," ^ employer is to be paid a salary for his services as Manager, and a rate of interest on his capital which [ I to be both fixed and (unless he fails to earn it through Js own inefficiency) guaranteed; anything in excess of J, any " profits " in fact, which in other industries are totributed as dividends to shareholders, he is to sur

render to a central fund to be administered by ployers and workmen for the benefit of the industi a whole. Instead of the financial standing of firm being treated as an inscrutable mystery to public, with the result that it is sometimes a myi to itself, there is to be a system of public costing audit, on the basis of which the industry will assu collective liability for those firms which are sho* be competently managed. Instead of the workers 1 dismissed in slack times to struggle along as best can, they are to be maintained from a fund raised levy on employers and administered by the trade un There is to be publicity as to costs and profits, dealing and honest work and mutual helpfulness stead of the competition which the nineteenth cei regarded as an efficient substitute for them. " Capi is not to " employ labor." Labor, which includes n gerial labor, is to employ capital; and to employ the cheapest rate at which, in the circumstances o trade, it can be got. If it employs it so success that there is a surplus when it has been fairly pai its own services, then that surplus is not to be dv among shareholders, for, when they have been interest, they have been paid their due; it is to be to equip the industry to provide still more effe service in the future.

So here we have the majority of a body of pra< men, who care nothing for socialist theories, prop to establish " organized Public Service in the Bui" Industry," recommending, in short, that their ind jflhall be turned into a profession. And they do

INDUSTRY AS A PROFESSION llfr

*5U be obs erved , by jnt Hat ixneraocsZ uugjn ^mrirm Kst that oonvccBon of full proprietary rasias irsa & mortgage seemed (as fir a* f^ndiffm, inns aie «»-erned) on the industry as a wht&ie, just that trans-erence of the euninjl of prodnetkm from ike owner of Eipital to those whose Imiimej is prodndkm, which we aw is necessary if industry is to be oceaniaed for the *mri ormance of service, not for the pecuniary advan-Bge of those who hold proprietary rights. Their Report is of the fast importance as offering a policy or attenuating private property in capital in the important group of industries in which private ownership, in one form or another, is likely for some considerable time to amlinue, and a valuable serves would be rendered by any one who would work aut in detail the application of its principle to other erodes.

Not, of course, that this is the only way, or in highly Sapitalized industries the most feasible way, in which &he change can be brought about. Had the movement against the control of production by property taken place before the rise of limited companies, in which Ownership is separated from management, the transition •d the organization of industry as a profession might ilso have taken place, as the employers and workmen to the building trade propose that it should, by limit* kg the rights of private ownership without abolishing t But that is not what has actually happened, and therefore the proposals of the building trade are not of tliversal application. It is possible to retain private tonership in building and in industries like building,

while changing its character, precisely because in bo ing the employer is normally not merely an owner, something else as well. He is a manager; that is, I a workman. And because he is a workman, whose terests, and still more whose professional spirit i workman may often outweigh his interests and me financial spirit as an owner, he can form part of productive organization of the industry, after his ri as an owner have been trimmed and limited.

But that dual position is abnormal, and in the hi| organized industries is becoming more abnormal e year. In coal, in cotton, in ship-building, in m branches of engineering the owner of capital is not he is in building, an organizer or manager. His nection with the industry and interest in it is pu financial. He is an owner and nothing more. And cause his interest is merely financial, so that his • cern is dividends and production only as a mean dividends, he cannot be worked into an organizatioi industry which vests administration in a body re senting all grades of producers, or producers and sumers together, for he has no purpose in common i them; so that while joint councils between workers managers may succeed, joint councils between wor and owners or agents of owners, like most of the called Whitley Councils, will not, because tbe neces for the mere owner is itself one of the points in disp The master builder, who owns the capital used, cai included, not qua capitalist, but qua builder, if he renders some of the rights of ownership, as the Bi ing Industry Committee proposed that he should.

! the shareholder in a colliery or a shipyard abdicates le control and unlimited profits to which, qua capi-ilist, he is at present entitled, he abdicates everything lat makes him what he is, and has no other standing 1 the industry. He cannot share, like the master ailder, in its management, because he has no qualifi-itions which would enable him to do so. His object

profit; and if industry is to become, as employers id workers in the building trade propose, an " organ-?d public service," then its subordination to the share-Ider whose object is profit, is, as they clearly see, ecisely what must be eliminated. The master builders opose to give it up. They can do so because they have sir place in the industry in virtue of their function

workmen. But if the shareholder gave it up, he ►uld have no place at all.

Hence in coal mining, where ownership and manage-mt are sharply separated, the owners will not admit a bare possibility of any system in which the control

the administration of the mines is shared between a management and the miners. " I am authorized to Lte on behalf of the Mining Association," Lord Gain-rd, the chief witness on behalf of the mine-owners, formed the Coal Commission, " that if the owners are t to be left complete executive control they will dene to accept the responsibility for carrying on the dustry." x So the mine-owners blow away in a sendee the whole body of plausible make-believe which sts on the idea that, while private ownership remains

1 Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, Vol. I, p, 06.

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

name of peace, should make the concerted cessation work a legal offense would be guilty of a similar trayal of freedom. It would be solving the conflict rights between those who own and those who work abolishing the rights of those who work.

So here again, unless we are prepared to re-establ some form of forced labor, we reach an impasse. it is an impasse only in so long as we regard the p prietary rights of those who own the capital used industry as absolute and an end in themselves. If, stead of assuming that all property, merely because is property, is equally sacred, we ask what is the pose for which capital is used, what is its function, shall realize that it is not an end but a means to an em and that its function is to serve and assist (as economists tell us) the labor of human beings, not tl function of human beings to serve those who happen own it. And from this truth two consequences follfl The first is that since capital is a thing, which ou to be used to help industry as a man may use a bicy to get more quickly to his work, it ought, when it employed, to be employed on the cheapest terms sible. The second is that those who own it should more control production than a man who lets a ho controls the meals which shall be cooked in the kitch or the man who lets a boat the speed at which rowers shall pull. In other words, capital should alwa] be got at cost price, which means, unless the State it wise, as it very well may, to own the capital used certain industries, it should be paid the lowest in

r which it can be obtained, but should carry no right Iher to residuary dividends or to the control of in-istry.

There are, in theory, five ways by which the control !" industry by the agents of private property-owners can t terminated. They may be expropriated without com-snsation. They may voluntarily surrender it. They ay be frozen out by action on the part of the working zrsonnel, which itself undertakes such functions, if ay, as they have performed, and makes them super-hous by conducting production without their assist-ace. Their proprietary interest may be limited or at-tauated to such a degree that they become mere tntiers, who are guaranteed a fixed payment analogous I that of the debenture-holder, but who receive no lofits and bear no responsibility for the organization of Idustry. They may be bought out. The first alternate is exemplified by the historical confiscations of the kst, such as, for instance, by the seizure of ecclesiastical ♦operty by the ruling classes of England, Scotland and lost other Protestant states. The second has rarely, if Ver, been tried—the nearest approach to it, perhaps, hs the famous abdication of August 4th, 1789. The lird is the method apparently contemplated by the Gilding guilds which are now in process of formation i Great Britain. The fourth method of treating the ^pitalist is followed by the co-operative movement. It I also that proposed by the committee of employers and sde-unionists in the building industry over which Mr. Oster presided, and which proposed that employers ould be paid a fixed salary, and a fixed rate of inter-

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

est on their capital, but that all surplus profits shot be pooled and administered by a central body repi senting employers and workers. The fifth has rej edly been practised by municipalities, and somewl less often by national governments.

Which of these alternative methods of removing dustry from the control of the property-owner is adopU is a matter of expediency to be decided in each partic lar case. " Nationalization," therefore, which is soi times advanced as the only method of extinguishing pi prietary rights, is merely one species of a considerat genus. It can be used, of course, to produce the desii result. But there are some industries, at any rate, which nationalization is not necessary in order to brii it about, and since it is at best a cumbrous process, wl other methods are possible, other methods should used. Nationalization is a means to an end, not an ei in itself. Properly conceived its object is not to est lish state management of industry, but to remove dead hand of private ownership, when the private o\ has ceased to perform any positive function. It is fortunate, therefore, that the abolition of obstruct^ property rights, which is indispensable, should been identified with a single formula, which may applied with advantage in the special circumstances some industries, but need not necessarily be applied all. Ownership is not a right, but a bundle of rigll^ and it is possible to strip them off piecemeal as welll^ to strike them off simultaneously. The ownership!^ capital involves, as we have said, three main claims; right to interest as the price of capital, the right i

befits, and the right to control, in virtue of which managers and workmen are the servants of shareholders. *lese rights in their fullest degree are not the invariable Kcompaniment of ownership, nor need they necessarily ^-exist. The ingenuity of financiers long ago devised methods of grading stock in such a way that the owner-blip of some carries full control, while that of others oes not, that some bear all the risk and are entitled to U the profits, while others are limited in respect to both. Hdl are property, but not all carry proprietary rights 2f the same degree.

As long as the private ownership of industrial capital %mains, the object of reformers should be to attenuate %& influence by insisting that it shall be paid not more llan a rate of interest fixed in advance, and that it Aould carry with it no right of control. In such circumstances the position of the ordinary shareholder ♦ould approximate to that of the owner of debentures; ^ke property in the industry would be converted into a tortgage on its profits, while the control of its admin-itration and all profits in excess of the minimum would remain to be vested elsewhere. So, of course, would : ke risks. But risks are of two kinds, those of the individual business and those of the industry. The for-ier are much heavier than the latter, for though a coal Aine is a speculative investment, coal mining is not, and fe long as each business is managed as a separate unit, be payments made to shareholders must cover both. If *e ownership of capital in each industry were unified, hich does not mean centralized, those risks which are Usidental to individual competition would be elimi-

servants, trained, recruited and promoted as in existing state departments, or a new service maj created with a procedure and standards of its own. may be subject to Treasury control, or it may be ft cially autonomous. The problem is, in fact, o familiar, though difficult, order. It is one of consl tion-making.

It is commonly assumed by controversialists that organization and management of a nationalized dustry must, for some undefined reason, be simila that of the post-office. One might as reasonably sug that the pattern exemplar of private enterprise i be the Steel Corporation or the Imperial Tobacco C pany. The administrative systems obtaining in a ciety which has nationalized its foundation indusl will, in fact, be as various as in one that resigns t to private ownership; and to discuss their relative vantages without defining what particular type of < is the subject of reference is to-day as unhelpful a approach a modern political problem in terms of Aristotelian classification of constitutions. The hij abstract dialectics as to " enterprise," " initiati " bureaucracy," " red tape," " democratic conti " state management," which fill the press of count occupied with industrial problems, really belong to dark ages of economic thought. The first task of student, whatever his personal conclusions, is, it ma; suggested, to contribute what he can to the restora of sanity by insisting that instead of the argument b conducted with the counters of a highly inflated rapidly depreciating verbal currency, the exact situat

I* so far as is possible, shall be stated as it is; uncer-pnties (of which there are many) shall be treated as ^certain, and the precise meaning of alternative pro* psals shall be strictly defined. Not the least of the Merits of Mr. Justice Sankey's report was that, by stat-|g in great detail the type of organization which he scommended for the Coal Industry, he imparted a new Incision and reality into the whole discussion. Whether jp conclusions are accepted or not, it is from the basis I clearly defined proposals such as his that the future -jpcussion of these problems must proceed. It may not fi a solution. It will at least do something to create ^ temper in which alone a reasonable solution can be Jight.

-^Nationalization, then, is not an end, but a means to f ) end, and when the question of ownership has been rifled the question of administration remains for solu-jta. As a means it is likely to be indispensable in those (dustries in which the rights of private proprietors Htnot easily be modified without the action of the fcte, just as the purchase of land by county councils a necessary step to the establishment of small holders, len landowners will not voluntarily part with their Operty for the purpose. But the object in purchasing id is to establish small holders, not to set up farms dainistered by state officials; and the object of nasalizing mining or railways or the manufacture of ^1 should not be to establish any particular form of Lte management, but to release those who do construo-r e work from the control of those whose sole interest pecuniary gain, in order that they may be free to

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

apply their energies to the true purpose of indust which is the provision of service, not the provision i dividends. When the transference of property taken place, it will probably be found that the ne sary provision for the government of industry will volve not merely the freedom of the producers to duce, but the creation of machinery through which consumer, for whom he produces, can express his wis and criticize the way in which they are met, as at pi ent he normally cannot. But that is the second st in the process of reorganizing industry for the formance of function, not the first. The first is tc it from subordination to the pecuniary interests of owner of property, because they are the magnetic which sets all the compasses wrong, and which cai industry, however swiftly it may progress, to proj in the wrong direction.

Nor does this change in the character of prope^ involve a breach with the existing order so sharp as< be impracticable. The phraseology of political cont versy continues to reproduce the conventional antij eses of the early nineteenth century; "private ent prise" and "public ownership" are still contras with each other as light with darkness or darkness light. But, in reality, behind the formal shell of traditional legal system the elements of a new bodyj relationship have already been prepared, and find pic meal application through policies devised, not socialists, but by men who repeat the formulae of dividualism, at the very moment when they are un^ mining it. The Esch-Cummins Act in America,

*t establishing a Ministry of Transport in England, ^ Arthur Duckham's scheme for the organization of ^~% coal mines, the proposals with regard to the coal in-t fctry of the British Government itself, appear to have ^i common characteristic of retaining private owner-

fp in name, while attenuating it in fact, by placing ti operators under the supervision, accompanied some-.sftes by a financial guarantee, of a public authority, mes of this general character appear, indeed, to be first instinctive reaction produced by the discovery t^t private enterprise is no longer functioning effec-* kly ; it is probable that they possess certain merits of technical order analogous to those associated with the *algamation of competing firms into a single combina-b. It is questionable, however, whether the com-tanise which they represent is permanently tenable, bat, after all, it may be asked, are the advantages of vate ownership when it has been pared down to the tut which policies of this order propose? May not i " owner " whose rights they are designed to protect £ unreasonably reply to their authors, " Thank you :* nothing"? Individual enterprise has its merits: also, perhaps, has public ownership. But, by the time *se schemes have done with it, not much remains of ie simple and obvious system of natural liberty," tile their inventors are precluded from appealing to ^ motives which are emphasized by advocates of nasalization. It is one thing to be an entrepreneur th a world of adventure and unlimited profits—if fcy can be achieved—before one. It is quite another

"be a director of a railway company or coal corpora-

tion with a minimum rate of profit guaranteed bj State, and a maximum rate of profit which cannc exceeded. Hybrids are apt to be sterile. It ma; questioned whether, in drawing the teeth of pri capitalism, this type of compromise does not draw most of its virtues as well.

So, when a certain stage of economic developi has been reached, private ownership, by the admis of its defenders, can no longer be tolerated in the i form in which it is free to display the characteri and quite genuine, advantages for the sake of whic used to be defended. And, as step by step it is whii down by tacit concessions to the practical necessit protecting the consumer, or eliminating waste, or n ing the claims of the workers, public ownership becoi not only on social grounds, but for reasons of econc efficiency, the alternative to a type of private owner which appears to carry with it few rights of owners and to be singularly devoid of privacy. Inevitably unfortunately the change must be gradual. Bu should be continuous. When, as in the last few yc the State has acquired the ownership of great ma of industrial capital, it should retain it, instead of rendering it to private capitalists, who protest at i that it will be managed so inefficiently that it will pay and managed so efficiently that it will iinde them. When estates are being broken up and soli they are at present, public bodies should enter market and acquire them. Most important of all, ridiculous barrier, inherited from an age in w municipal corporations were corrupt oligarchies, w

1 1 present prevents England's Local Authorities from Quiring property in land and industrial capital, ex-% for purposes specified by Act of Parliament, should ?abolished, and they should be free to undertake such TVices as the citizens may desire. The objection to Jblic ownership, in so far as it is intelligent, is in Mity largely an objection to over-centralization. But b remedy for over-centralization, is not the mainte-Hce of functionless property in private hands, but the centralized ownership of public property, and when rmingham and Manchester and Leeds are the little mblics which they should be, there is no reason to ticipate that they will tremble at a whisper from bitehall.

These things should be done steadily and contin-asly quite apart from the special cases like that of the nes and railways, where the private ownership of pital is stated by the experts to have been responsible ? intolerable waste, or the manufacture of ornaments d alcoholic liquor, which are politically and socially i dangerous to be left in private hands. They should done not in order to establish a single form of bureau-atic management, but in order to release the industry Dm the domination of proprietary interests, which,' :iatever the form of management, are not merely Dublesome in detail but vicious in principle, because ey divert it from the performance of function to the jquisition of gain. If at the same time private owner-Lip is shaken, as recently it has been, by action on the *rt of particular groups of workers, so much the »tter. There are more ways of killing a cat than

drowning it in cream, and it is all the more likelj choose the cream if they are explained to it. But two methods are complementary, not alternative, the attempt to found rival schools on an imaginary compatibility between them is a bad case of the od socioiocjicum which afflicts reformers.

EIGHT

THE " VICIOUS CIRCLE "

a.t form of management should replace the admin-ition of industry by the agents of shareholders? it is most likely to hold it to its main purpose, and b least at the mercy of predatory interests and func-less supernumeraries, and of the alternations of 311 dissatisfaction and spasmodic revolt which at lent distract it? Whatever the system upon which istry is administered, one thing is certain. Its eco-tic processes and results must be public, because only bey are public can it be known whether the service ndustry is vigilant, effective and honorable, whether purpose is being realized and its function carried The defense of secrecy in business resembles the 2nse of adulteration on the ground that it is a legit-te weapon of competition; indeed it has even less tification than that famous doctrine, for the condition effective competition is publicity, and one motive for recy is to prevent it.

["hose who conduct industry at the present time and > are most emphatic that, as the Duke of Wellington 1 of the unreformed House of Commons, they " have er read or heard of any measure up to the present ment which can in any degree satisfy the mind " that method of conducting it can in any way be im-•ved, are also those apparently who, with some honor-

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

able exceptions, are most reluctant that the full h about it should be known. And it is crucial that should be known. It is crucial not only because, in present ignorance of the real economic situation, industrial disagreements tend inevitably to be battles; the dark, in which " ignorant armies clash by nig^ but because, unless there is complete publicity as profits and costs, it is impossible to form any judgmfl either of the reasonableness of the prices which charged or of the claims to remuneration of the differ parties engaged in production. For balance sheets, wj their opportunities for concealing profits, give no cle light upon the first, and no light at all upon the secoi And so, when the facts come out, the public is aghf at revelations which show that industry is conduct with bewildering financial extravagance. If the fi facts had been published, as they should have quarter by quarter, these revelations would probal not have been made at all, because publicity itself woi have been an antiseptic and there would have been not ing sensational to reveal.

The events of the last few years are a lesson whi^ should need no repetition. The Government, surpri^ at the price charged for making shells at a time wl its soldiers were ordered by Headquarters not to more than a few rounds per day, whatever the need retaliation, because there were not more than a few fire, establishes a costing department to analyze estimates submitted by manufacturers and to comp* them, item by item, with the costs in its own factory It finds that, through the mere pooling of knowlt

~* some of the reductions mad© in the price of shells and "fcnilar munitions," as the Chattered Accountant employed by the Department tells us, " have been as high lb 50% of the original price." The household con-tamer grumbles at the price of coal. For once in a ray, amid a storm of indignation from influential per* £>ns engaged in the industry, the facts are published. .lad what do they show? That, after 2/6 has been icted to the already high price of coal because the >orer mines are alleged not to be paying their way, L% of the output examined by the Commission was *odticed at a profit of 1/- to 3A per ton, 32% at a profit '■ 3/- to 5/-, 13% at a profit of 5/- to 7A> and 14% ; a profit of 7A per ton and over, while the profits of Btributors in London alone amount in the aggregate ► over £500,000, and the co-operative movement* Inch aims not at profit, but at service, distributes ousehold coal at a cost of from 2/* to 4/- less per ton aan is charged by the coal trade 1 1

" But these are exceptions." They may be* It is Ossible that in the industries, in which, as the recent Jommittee on Trusts has told us, " powerful Combina* ions or Consolidations of One kind or another are in a osition effectively to control output and prices," not nly costs are cut to the bare minimum but profits are ^considerable. But then why insist on this humiliating tradition of secrecy with regard to them, when every one *-ho uses their products, and every one who renders hon-^t service to production, stands to gain by publicity 3 -< industry is to become a profession, whatever its maft-

1 Coal Industry Commission, Minutes */ Evidence, pp. 0261-9.

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

agement, the first of its professional rules should be, Sir John Mann told the Coal Commission, that " cards should be placed on the table." If it were tl duty of a Public Department to publish quarterly exac returns as to costs of production and profits in all tl firms throughout an industry, the gain in mere prodt^ tive efficiency, which should appeal to our enthusiaa for output, would be considerable; for the organizatk whose costs were least would become the standard will which all other types of organization would be con pared. The gain in morale, which is also, absui though it may seem, a condition of efficiency, would incalculable. For industry would be conducted in light of day. Its costs, necessary or unnecessary, distribution of the return to it, reasonable or capricioi would be a matter of common knowledge. It would held to its purpose by the mere impossibility of per suading those who make its products or those who coi sume them to acquiesce, as they acquiesce now, in ex] penditure which is meaningless because it has contrit uted nothing to the service which the industry exis to perform.

The organization of industry as a profession does nc involve only the abolition of functionless property, ai the maintenance of publicity as the indispensable coi dition of a standard of professional honor. It implit also that those who perform its work should underti that its work is performed effectively. It means thaj they should not merely be held to the service of public by fear of personal inconvenience or penaltic but that they should treat the discharge of profession!

m

THE « VICIOUS CIBCLE » 127

isponsibilities as an obligation attaching not only to a nail elite of intellectuals, managers or " bosses/' who ^rform the technical work of " business management/' at as implied by the mere entry into the industry and » resting on the corporate consent and initiative of the ink and file of workers. It is precisely, indeed, in the sgree to which that obligation is interpreted as attach-ig to all workers, and not merely to a select class, that ie difference between the existing industrial order, >llectivism and the organization of industry as a pro-^ssion resides. The first involves the utilization of timan beings for the purpose of private gain; the tcond their utilization for the purpose of public Mrvice; the third the association in the service of the ublic of their professional pride, solidarity and or'gani-fction.

The difference in administrative machinery between xe second and third might not be considerable. Both evolve the drastic limitation or transference to the ublic of the proprietary rights of the existing owners f. industrial capital. Both would necessitate machinery or bringing the opinion of the consumers to bear upon be service supplied them by the industry. The differ-nce consists in the manner in which the obligations of he producer to the public are conceived. He may either *e the executant of orders transmitted to him by its ,gents; or he may, through his organization, himself ake a positive part in determining what those orders lould be. In the former case he is responsible for his ►wn work, but not for anything else. If he hews his •tint of coal, it is no business of his whether the pit is a

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

failure; if he puts in the normal number of rivets, disclaims all further interest in the price or the sei worthiness of the ship. In the latter his function e braces something more than the performance of tb specialized piece of work allotted to him. It includ also a responsibility for the success of the undertaki as a whole. And since responsibility* is impossible wi out power, his position would involve at least so muc! power as is needed to secure that he can affect in pra tice the conduct of the industry. It is this collective li bility for the maintenance of a certain quality of service which is, indeed, the distinguishing feature of profession. It is compatible with several different kirn of government, or indeed, when the unit of production! not a group, but an individual, with hardly any gove ment at all. What it does involve is that the individu merely by entering the profession should have co: mitted himself to certain obligations in respect of il conduct, and that the professional organization, wha ever it may be, should have sufficient power to enable il to maintain them.

The demand for the participation of the workers i the control of industry is usually advanced in the na of the producer, as a plea for economic freedom or i dustrial democracy. " Political freedom," writes Final Eeport of the United States Commission of dustrial Relations, which was presented in 1916, " exist only where there is industrial freedom. . There are now within the body of our Eepublic ind trial communities which are virtually Principaliti oppressive to those dependent upon them for a livelih

. a dreadful menace to the peace and welfare of the Lon." The vanity of Englishmen may soften the clows and heighten the lights. But the concentration authority is too deeply rooted in the very essence of >italism for differences in the degree of the arbitrari-3 with which it is exercised to be other than trivial. s control of a large works does, in fact, confer a kind private jurisdiction in matters concerning the life L livelihood of the workers, which, as the United tes' Commission suggests, may properly be described * industrial feudalism." It is not easy to understand ^ the traditional liberties of Englishmen are com-Ible with an organization of industry which, except so far as it has been qualified by law or trade unions i, permits populations almost as large as those of ae famous cities of the past to be controlled in their ing up and lying down, in their work, economic op-■tunities, and social life by the decisions of a Com-fetee of half-a-dozen Directors.

The most conservative thinkers recognize that the •sent organization of industry is intolerable in the rrifice of liberty which it entails upon the producer, tt each effort which he makes to emancipate himself met by a protest that if the existing system is incom-tible with freedom, it at least secures efficient service, d that efficient service is threatened by movements rich aim at placing a greater measure of industrial itrol in the hands of the workers. The attempt to ive a wedge between the producer and the consumer obviously the cue of all the interests which are con* ious that by themselves they are unable to hold back

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

%

the flood. It is natural, therefore, that during the few months they should have concentrated their efi^iN upon representing that every advance in the dem and in the power of any particular group of workei a new imposition upon the general body of the pul Eminent persons, who are not obviously producing than they consume, explain to the working classes unless they produce more they must consume Highly syndicated combinations warn the p against the menace of predatory syndicalism, owners of mines and minerals, in their new role as tectors of the poor, lament the " selfishness " of miners, as though nothing but pure philanthropy hitherto caused profits and royalties to be reluc accepted by themselves.

The assumption upon which this body of a rests is simple. It is that the existing organization industry is the safeguard of productive efficiency, that from every attempt to alter it the workers selves lose more as consumers than they can gain producers. The world has been drained of its wei and demands abundance of goods. The workers snand a larger income, greater leisure, and a more «ure and dignified status. These two demands, it|, argued, are contradictory. For how can the cons be supplied with cheap goods, if, as a worker, he i •on higher wages and shorter hours ? And how can worker secure these conditions, if as a consumer, .demands cheap goods? So industry, it is tho moves in a vicious circle of shorter hours and hi wages and less production, which in time must

ger hours and lower wages; and every one receive* 3, because every one demands more. l?he picture is plausible, but it is fallacious. It is* lacious not merely in its crude assumption that a & in wages necessarily involves an increase in costs, : for another and more fundamental reason. In real-the cause of economic confusion is not that the nands of producer and consumer meet in blunt op-tition; for, if they did, their incompatibility, when •y 'were incompatible, would be obvious, and neither *ld deny his responsibility to the other, however much

might seek to evade it. It is that they do not, but it, as industry is organized to-day, what the worker r«goes the general body of consumers does not neces-rily gain, and what the consumer pays the general Ely of workers does not necessarily receive. If the *cle is vicious, its vice is not that it is closed, but fet it is always half open, so that part of production lis away in consumption which adds nothing to pro-Lctive energies, and that the producer, because he lcws this, does not fully use even the productive energy *ich he commands.

Jt is the consciousness of this leak which sets every « at cross purposes. No conceivable system of indus-lal organization can secure industrial peace, if by f>eace " is meant a complete absence of disagreement. Tiat could be secured would be that disagreements feould not flare up into a beacon of class warfare. If *ery member of a group puts something into a common ^ol on condition of taking something out, they may still barrel about the size of the shares, as children quarrel

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

over cake; but if the total is known and the claims mitted, that is all they can quarrel about, and, si they all stand on the same footing, any one who k out for more than his fellows must show some reason why he should get it But in industry the cto are not all admitted, for those who put nothing in mand to take something out; both the total to be divid and the proportion in which the division takes place sedulously concealed; and those who preside over distribution of the pool and control what is paid ontj it have a direct interest in securing as large a sh possible for themselves and in allotting as small a as possible to others. If one contributor takes 1( far from it being evident that the gain will go to one who has put something in and has as good a as himself, it may go to some one who has put in not and has no right at all. If another claims more, may secure it, without plundering a fellow-worker, the expense of a sleeping partner who is believed plunder both. In practice, since there is no clear pi ciple determining what they ought to take, both takei that they can get.

In such circumstances denunciations of the prodt for exploiting the consumer miss the mark. They inevitably regarded as an economic version of the tary device used by armies which advance behii screen of women and children, and then protest at brutality of the enemy in shooting non-combat They are interpreted as evidence, not that a sectioi the producers are exploiting the remainder, but minority of property-owners, which is in oppositioi

>th, can use its economic power to make efforts di-»cted against those who consume much and produce fctle rebound on those who consume little and produce inch. And the grievance, of which the Press makes > much, that some workers may be taking too large a xare compared with others, is masked by the much reater grievance, of which it says nothing whatever, mat some idlers take any share at all. The abolition E payments which are made without any corresponding economic service is thus one of the indispensable renditions both of economic efficiency and industrial ^ace, because their existence prevents different classes f workers from restraining each other, by uniting them 11 against the common enemy. Either the principle of crdustry is that of function, in which case slack work ft only less immoral than no work at all; or it is that of Tab, in which case there is no morality in the matter, iut it cannot be both. And it is useless either for prop* **ty-owners or for Governments to lament the mote in k® eye of the trade unions as long as, by insisting on the maintenance of functionless property, they decline to remove the beam in their own*

The truth is that only workers can prevent the abuse ►f power by workers, because only workers are recog^ aized as possessing any titfe to have their claims considered. And the first step to preventing the exploita-don of the consumer by the producer is simple. It is 3*) turn all men into producers, and thus to remove the aemptation for particular groups of workers to force &eir claims at the expense of the public, by removing tie valid excuse that such gains as they may get are

taken from those who at present have no right to tb because they are disproportionate to service or obtai for no service at all. Indeed, if work were the c title to payment, the danger of the community being ploited by highly organized groups of producers w( largely disappear. For, when no payments were ir to non-producers, there would be no debatable gro for which to struggle, and it would become evident if any one group of producers took more, another i put up with less.

Under such conditions a body of workers who i their strong strategic position to extort extravaj terms for themselves at the expense of their fel workers might properly be described as exploiting community. But at present such a statement is m ingless. It is meaningless because before the corns ity can be exploited the community must exist, anc existence in the sphere of economics is to-day not a but only an aspiration. The procedure by which, w ever any section of workers advance demands which regarded as inconvenient by their masters, they are nounced as a band of anarchists who are preying on public may be a convenient weapon in an emerge but, once it is submitted to analysis, it is logically destructive. It has been applied within recent year the postmen, to the engineers, to the policemen, to miners and to the railway men, a population with t dependents, of some eight million persons; and in case of the last two the whole body of organized 1 made common cause with those of whose exorbitam mands it was alleged to be the victim. But when t

orkers and their sympathizers are deducted, what is the community " which remains ? It is a naive arith-Letic which produces a total by subtracting one by ne all the items which compose it; and the art -hich discovers the public interest by eliminating te interests of successive sections of the public oacks of the rhetorician rather than of the states-

The truth is that at present it is idle to seek to resist ie demands of any group of workers by appeals to the interests of society/ 9 because to-day, as long as ke economic plane alone is considered, there is not one *ciety but two, which dwell together in uneasy juxta-Dsition, like Sinbad and the Old Man of the Sea, but licit in spirit, in ideals, and in economic interest, are *<>rlds asunder. There is the society of those who live y labor, whatever their craft or profession, and the aciety of those who live on it. All the latter cannot 3mmand the sacrifices or the loyalty which are due to ae former, for they have no title which will bear infection. The instinct to ignore that tragic division astead of ending it is amiable, and sometimes generous, tut it is a sentimentality which is like the morbid (rtimism of the consumptive who dares not admit even D himself the virulence of his disease. As long as the division exists, the general body of workers, while it Day suffer from the struggles of any one group within t, nevertheless supports them by its sympathy, because Jl are interested in the results of the contest carried •ai by each. Different sections of workers will exercise tautual restraint only when the termination of the

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

struggle leaves them face to face with each other, al not as now, with the common enemy. The ideal oft 1 ! united society in which no one group uses its power fii encroach upon the standards of another is, in shoipr unattainable, except through the preliminary aboliti^f > of functionless property.

Those to whom a leisure class is part of an mutable order without which civilization is inconcei able, dare not admit, even to themselves, that the woi is poorer, not richer, because of its existence. So, whe as now it is important that productive energy should fully used, they stamp and cry, and write to The Tii about the necessity for increased production, though the time they themselves, their way of life and expend ture, and their very existence as a leisure class, among the causes why production is not increased, all their economic plans they make one reservation, however necessitous the world may be, it shall still si port them. But men who work do not make that res vation, nor is there any reason why they shod* and appeals to them to produce more wealth becai the public needs it usually fall upon deaf ears, ei when such appeals are not involved in the ranee and misapprehensions which often characterii them.

For the workman is not the servant of the consume for whose sake greater production is demanded, but shareholders, whose primary aim is dividends, and whom all production, however futile or frivolous, long as it yields dividends, is the same. It is useless urge that he should produce more wealth for the

nity, unless at the same time he is assured that it is community which will benefit in proportion as more altla is produced. If every unnecessary charge upon ^-getting had been eliminated, it would be reasonable it the miners should set a much needed example by using to extort better terms for themselves at the ex-ase of the public. But there is no reason why they luld work for lower wages or longer hours as long as ise who are to-day responsible for the management the industry conduct it with " the extravagance and ste " stigmatized by the most eminent official witness fore the Coal Commission, or why the consumer ould grumble at the rapacity of the miner as long as allows himself to be mulcted by swollen profits, the 3ts of an ineffective organization, and unnecessary yments to superfluous middlemen. If to-day the miner or any other workman produces ore, he has no guarantee that the result will be lower ices rather than higher dividends and larger royal-bs, any more than, as a workman, he can determine e quality of the wares which his employer supplies to istomers, or the price at which they are sold. Nor, i long as he is directly the servant of a profit-making mpany, and only indirectly the servant of the corn-unity, can any such guarantee be offered him. It can I offered only in so far as he stands in an immediate id direct relation to the public for whom industry is irried on, so that, when all costs have been met, any irplus will pass to it, and not to private individuals. ! will be accepted only in so far as the workers in each dustry are not merely servants executing orders, but

themselves have a collective responsibility for the acter of the service, and can use their organization merely to protect themselves against exploitation, to make positive contributions to the administratis development of their industry.

NINE

HE CONDITION OP EFFICIENCY

3 it is not only for the sake of the producers, on a the old industrial order weighed most heavily, a new industrial order is needed. It is needed for ake of the consumers, because the ability on which >ld industrial order prided itself most and which granted most as an argument against change, the ty to serve them effectively, is itself visibly break-iown. It is breaking down at what was always its

vulnerable point, the control of the human beings n, with characteristic indifference to all but their omic significance, it distilled for its own purposes an abstraction called " Labor." The first symptom :s collapse is what the first symptom of economic pses has usually been in the past—the failure of >mary stimuli to evoke their customary response in an effort ill that failure is recognized and industry reorgan-

so that new stimuli may have free play, the col-2 will not correct itself, but, doubtless with spas-ic revivals and flickerings of energy, will continue accelerate. The cause of it is simple. It is that b whose business it is to direct economic activity are jasingly incapable of directing the men upon whom omic activity depends. The fault is not that of in-iuals, but of a system, of Industrialism itself.

/

140

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

During the greater part of the nineteenth century dustry was driven by two forces, hunger and fear, the employer commanded them both. He could or withhold employment as he pleased. If men revol against his terms he could dismiss them, and if were dismissed what confronted them was starvat or the workhouse. Authority was centralized; its struments were passive; the one thing which dreaded was unemployment And since they neither prevent its occurrence nor do more than * li| to mitigate its horrors when it occurred, they submit to a discipline which they could not resist, and indi pursued its course through their passive acquit in a power which could crush them individually if attempted to oppose it.

That system might be lauded as efficient or denoi as inhuman. But, at least, as its admirers were tired of pointing out, it worked. And, like the Pi State, which alike in its virtues and deficiencies it a little resembled, as long as it worked it survived nunciations of its methods, as a strong man will off a disease. But to-day it is ceasing to have even qualities of its defects. It is ceasing to be efficient no longer secures the ever-increasing output of wei which it offered in its golden prime, and which enal it to silence criticism by an imposing spectacle of terial success. Though it still works, it works uneve amid constant friction and jolts and stoppages, wit the confidence of the public and without full confide even in itself, a tyrant who must intrigue and caj where formerly he commanded, a gaoler who, if not

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 141

L^prived of whip, dare only administer moderate chas-isement, and who, though he still protests that he Llone can keep the treadmill moving and get the corn p*ound, is compelled to surrender so much of his author-~£y as to make it questionable whether he is worth his ^eep. For the instruments through which Capitalism zeroised discipline are one by one being taken from .%. It cannot pay what wages it likes or work what :*ottrs it likes. In well-organized industries the power *f arbitrary dismissal, the very center of its authority, .* being shaken, because men will no longer tolerate a system which makes their livelihood dependent on the caprices of an individual. In all industries alike the bime is not far distant when the dread of starvation can Go longer be used to cow dissatisfied workers into submission, because the public will no longer allow involuntary unemployment to result in starvation.

And if Capitalism is losing ite control of men's bodies, «till more has it lost its command of their minds. The "product of a civilization which regarded " the poor " as instruments, at worst of the luxuries, at best of lie virtues, of the rich, its psychological foundation fifty years ago was an ignorance in the mass of mankind which led "them to reverence as wisdom the very follies of their tasters, and an almost animal incapacity for responsi* lility. Education and experience have destroyed the passivity which was the condition of the perpetuation of industrial government in the hands of an oligarchy Of private capitalists. The workman of to-dfiy has as ttttle belief in the intellectual superiority of many of those who direct industry as he has in the morality of

:i

14S THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

the system. It appears to him to be not only opprtb-sive, but wasteful, unintelligent and inefficient. In the light of his own experience in the factory and the mine, he regards the claim of the capitalist to be the self-appointed guardian of public interests as a piece of sanctimonious hypocrisy. For he sees every day that efficiency is sacrificed to shortsighted financial interests; <ird while as a man he is outraged by the inhumanity of the industrial order, as a professional who knows the difference between good work and bad he has a growing contempt at once for its misplaced parsimony and its! misplaced extravagance, for the whole apparatus o adulteration, advertisement and quackery which seems inseparable from the pursuit of profit as the main standard of industrial success.

So Capitalism no longer secures strenuous work by fear, for it is ceasing to be formidable. And it cannot secure it by respect, for it has ceased to be respected. And the very victories by which it seeks to reassert its waning prestige are more disastrous than defeats. Employers may congratulate themselves that they have maintained intact their right to freedom of management, or opposed successfully a demand for public ownership, or broken a movement for higher wages and shorter hours. But what is success in a trade dispute or in a political struggle is often a defeat in the workshop: the workmen may have lost, but it docs not follow that their employers, still less that the public, which is principally composed of workmen, have won. For the object of industry is to produce goods, ^ and to produce them at the lowest cost in human effort ^

It] *

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 143

fcut there is no alchemy which will secure efficient pro-action from the resentment or distrust of men who eel contempt for the order under which they work, t: is a commonplace that credit is the foundation of ndustry. But credit is a matter of psychology, and be workman has his psychology as well as the capitalist. ~d confidence is necessary to the investment of capital, confidence is not less necessary to the effective perform-L^ice of lahor by men whose sole livelihood depends upon fc. If they are not yet strong enough to impose their *rill, they are strong enough to resist when their masters would impose theirs. They may work rather than strike. But they will work to escape dismissal, not for the greater glory of a system in which they do not believe; and, if they are dismissed, those who take their place Brill do the same.

That this is one cause of a low output has been stated both by employers and workers in the building industry, and by the representatives of the miners before the Coal Commission. It was reiterated with impressive emphasis by Mr. Justice Sankey. Nor is it seriously con-"tested by employers themselves. What else, indeed, do "their repeated denunciations of " restriction of output " ^nean except that they have failed to organize industry «o as to secure the efficient service which it is their special function to provide? Nor is it appropriate to the situation to indulge in full-blooded denunciations <rf the " selfishness " of the working classes. " To draw *n indictment against a whole nation " is a procedure ^tich is as impossible in industry as it is in politics, restitutions must be adapted to human nature, not

human nature to institutions. If the effect of the ind trial system is such that a large and increasing num of ordinary men and women find that it offers them adequate motive for economic effort, it is mere pedan to denounce men and women instead of amending system.

Thus the time has come when absolutism in indus may still win its battles, but loses the campaign, i loses it on the very ground of economic efficiency wh was of its own selection. In the period of transiti while economic activity is distracted by the struggle tween those who have the name and habit of power, no longer the full reality of it, and those who are di winning more of the reality of power but are not its recognized repositories, it is the consumer t suffers. He has neither the service of docile obediei nor the service of intelligent co-operation. For sla? will work—as long as the slaves will let it; and f reec will work when men have learned to be free; but v> will not work is a combination of the two. So public goes short of coal not only because of the ted cal deficiencies of the system under which it is rai and distributed, but because the system itself has its driving force—because the coal owners can no loi persuade the miners into producing more dividends them and more royalties for the owners of minei while the public cannot appeal to them to put tl whole power into serving itself, because it has ch( that they should be the servants, not of itself, bu1 shareholders.

And, this dilemma is not, as some suppose, ten

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 145

r, the aftermath of war, or peculiar to the coal in-try, as though the miners alone were the children of which in the last few months they have been de-bed to be. It is permanent; it has spread far; and, leeping spirits are stirred into life by education and

industry after another develops a strong corporate 3ciousness, it will spread further. Nor will it be lived by lamentations or menaces or denunciations of lers whose only significance is that they say openly it plain men feel privately. For the matter at bot-l is one of psychology. What has happened is that

motives on which the industrial system relied for eral generations to secure efficiency, secure it no ger. And it is as impossible to restore them, to ive by mere exhortation the complex of hopes and rs and ignorance and patient credulity and passive uiescence, which together made men, fifty years t, plastic instruments in the hands of industrialism, to restore innocence to any others of those who have en of the tree of knowledge.

The ideal of some intelligent and respectable business m, the restoration of the golden sixties, when workmen re docile and confiding, and trade unions were still f illegal, and foreign competition meant English com-ition in foreign countries, and prices were rising a le and not rising too much, is the one Utopia which

never be realized. The King may walk naked as ; as his courtiers protest that he is clad; but when lild or a fool has broken the spell a tailor is more ortant than all their admiration. If the public, ch suffers from the slackening of economic activity,

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

desires to end its malaise, it will not laud as admii and all-sufficient the operation of motives which plainly ceasing to move. It will seek to liberate motives and to enlist them in its service. It will deavor to find an alternative to incentives which always degrading, to those who used them as much as those upon whom they were used, and which now adequate incentives no longer. And the alternat to the discipline which Capitalism exercised through instruments of unemployment and starvation is the discipline of responsibility and professional pride. So the demand which aims at stronger organizat fuller responsibility, larger powers for the sake of producer as a condition of economic liberty, the dei for freedom, is not antithetic to the demand for effective work and increased output which is being in the interests of the consumer. It is complement to it, as the insistence by a body of professional whether doctors or university teachers, on the main! nance of their professional independence and di{ against attempts to cheapen the service is not host to an efficient service, but, in the long run, a condit of it. The course of wisdom for the consumer woi be to hasten, so far as he can, the transition. For, at present conducted, industry is working against grain. It is compassing sea and land in its efforts overcome, by ingenious financial and technical e: ents, obstacles which should never have existed. It^ trying to produce its results by conquering professu feeling instead of using it. It is carrying not only inevitable economic burdens, but an ever increase

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 147

I of ill will and skepticism. It has in fact "shot Trird which caused the wind to blow " and goes about business with the corpse round its neck. Compared fc that psychological incubus, the technical deficien-fc of industry, serious though they often are, are a *»telle, and the business men who preach the gospel Production without offering any plan for dealing with at is now the central fact in the economic situation, amble a Christian apologist who should avoid disking the equanimity of his audience by carefullly itting all reference either to the fall of man or the feme of salvation. If it is desired to increase the out-fc. of wealth, it is not a paradox, but the statement of elementary economic truism to say that active and wtructive co-operation on the part of the rank and

* of workers would do more to contribute to that ■Tilt than the discovery of a new coal-field or a genera-m of scientific invention.

IThe first condition of enlisting on the side of conductive work the professional feeling which is now Jrthetic, or even hostile to it, is to secure that when is given its results accrue to the public, not to the Filer of property in capital, in land, or in other retirees. For this reason the attenuation of the rights ^present involved in the private ownership of indus-?il capital, or their complete abolition, is not the de-ffld of idealogues, but an indispensable element in a A'ey of economic efficiency, since it is the condition of

* Hiost effective functioning of the human beings upon bin, though, like other truisms, it is often forgotten,

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

economic! efficiency ultimately depends* But it is one element. Co-operation may range from mere! quiescence to a vigilant and zealous initiative, criterion of an effective system of administration is it should succeed in enlisting in the conduct of id try the latent forces of professional pride to which present industrial order makes little appeal, and wl indeed) Capitalism, in its war upon trade union orj zation, endeavored far many yeaia to stamp oat gether.

Nor does the efficacy of such an appeal repose the assumption of that "change in human naJ which is the triumphant wcbudio ad absurdum vanced by those who are least satisfied with the ing of human nature as it is* What it does involi that certain elementary facts should be taken into count> instead of, as at present, being ignored* all work is distasteful and that "every man desu secure the largest income with the least effort " ma] as axiomatic as it id assumed to be. But in practic makes all the difference to the attitude of the indivii whether the collective sentiment of the group to wl he belongs is on the side of effort or against it, what standard of effort it sets* That, as emptoj complain, the public opinion of considerable grou] workers is against an intensification of effort as as part of its result is increased dividends for s! holders, is no doubt, as far as mere efficiency is cerned, the gravest indictment of the existing indtu order. But, even when public ownership has taken place of private capitalism, its ability to command

THE CONDITION OP EFFICIENCY 1«

stive service will depend ultimately upon its success securing not merely that professional feeling is no Dger an opposing force, but that it is actively enlisted wn the side of maintaining the highest possible stand* id of efficiency which can reasonably be demanded. To put the matter concretely, while the existing own-ship of mines is a positive inducement to inefficient ork, public ownership administered by a bureaucracy, it would remove the technical deficiencies emphasized w Sir Richard Redmayne as inseparable from the sepa-0te administration of 3,000 pits by 1,500 different gnpanies, would be only too likely to miss a capital Ivantage which a different type of administration «>uld secure. It would lose both the assistance to be trived from the technical knowledge of practical men io know by daily experience the points at which the itails of administration can be improved, and the amulus to efficiency springing from the corporate pride f a profession which is responsible for maintaining and ^proving the character of its service. Professional jirit is a force like gravitation, which in itself is either good nor bad, but which the engineer uses, when • can, to do his work for him. If it is foolish to Realize it, it is equally shortsighted to neglect it. In "hat are described par excellence as " the services " it .is always been recognized that esprit de corps is the jundation of efficiency, and all means, some wise and Jme mischievous, are used to encourage it: in prac-be, indeed, the power upon which the country relied 1 its main safeguard in an emergency was the pro* Seional zeal of the navy and nothing else. Nor is

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

that spirit peculiar to the professions which are cerned with war. It is a matter of common trainii common responsibilities, and common dangers. In cases where difficult and disagreeable work is to be d( the force which elicits it is normally not merely moi but the public opinion and tradition of the little sock in which the individual moves, and in the esteem which he finds that which men value in success.

To ignore that most powerful of stimuli as it ignored to-day, and then to lament that the efforts wW it produces are not forthcoming, is the climax of versity. To aim at eliminating from industry growth and action of corporate feeling, for fear lest organized body of producers should exploit the public,^ a plausible policy. But it is short-sighted. It is tt \ pour away the baby with the bath," and to lower quality of the service in an attempt to safeguard A wise system of administration would recognize professional solidarity can do much of its work for more effectively than it can do it itself, because spirit of his profession is part of the individual and a force outside him, and would make it its object enlist that temper in the public service. It is only that policy, indeed, that the elaboration of cumbi regulations to prevent men doing what they should with the incidental result of sometimes preventing theftfo from doing what they should—it is only by that poli^ that what is mechanical and obstructive in bureauci can be averted. For industry cannot run without law It must either control itself by professional standard^ or it must be controlled by officials who are not of

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 151

m£t and who, however zealous and well-meaning, can *dly have the feel of it in their fingers. Public con-^1 and criticism are indispensable. But they should 4 be too detailed, or they defeat themselves. It wild be better that, once fair standards have been fca Wished, the professional organization should check Senses against prices and quality than that it should fc necessary for the State to do so. The alternative to inute external supervision is supervision from within ■s men who become imbued with the public obligations their trade in the very process of learning it. It is, «, short, professional in industry. .For this reason collectivism by itself is too simple a lution. Its failure is likely to be that of other ration-fst systems.

r ? " Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand, ^ Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band/'

j4 industrial reorganization is to be a living reality, and i H merely a plan upon paper, its aim must be to secure sfc only that industry is carried on for the service of e* public, but that it shall be carried on with the rAive co-operation of the organizations of producers, rkt co-operation involves responsibility, and responsi-Mty involves power. It is idle to expect that men will ^e their best to any system which they do not trust, ^ that they will trust any system in the control of ^ich they do not share. Their ability to carry pro-&%ional obligations depends upon the power which &y possess to remove the obstacles which prevent those ligations from being discharged, and upon their will-guess, when they possess the power, to use it.

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

Two causes appear to have hampered the commit which were established in connection with coal mil during the war to increase the output of coal. One the reluctance of some of them to discharge the invito task of imposing penalties for absenteeism on fellow-workmen. The other was the exclusion of fai of management from the control of many commit In some cases all went well till they demanded that,^ the miners were penalized for absenteeism which due to them, the management should be penalized larly when men who desired to work were sent k because, as a result of defective organization, there no work for them to do. Their demand was resisted " interference with the management," and the atte to enforce regularity of attendance broke down. Nor,| take another example from the same industry, is iU be expected that the weight of the miners' organizatk will be thrown on to the side of greater production, it has no power to insist on the removal of the defe of equipment and organization, the shortage of trai rails, tubs and timber, the "creaming" of the pits the working of easily got coal to their future detrime their wasteful layout caused by the vagaries of sep* ownership, by which at present the output is reduceij

The public cannot have it both ways. If it alio workmen to be treated as " hands " it cannot claim service of their wills and their brains. If it desil them to show the zeal of skilled professionals, it ml secure that they have sufficient power to allow of discharging professional responsibilities. In order workmen may abolish any restrictions on output wlil

THE CONDHlOff OF EFFICIENCY 153

j be imposed by them, they must be able to insist on • abolition of the restrictions, more mischievous be-ise more effective, which, as the Committee on Trusts b recently told us, are imposed by organizations of iployers. In order that the miners' leaders, instead rmerely bargaining as to wages, hours and working tiditions, may be able to appeal to their members to crease the supply of coal, they must be in a position (secure the removal of the causes of low output which h due to the deficiencies of the management, and Kch are to-day a far more serious obstacle than any tuctance on the part of the miner. If the workmen [ the building trade are to take combined action to feelerate production, they must as a body be consulted I to the purpose to which their energy is to be applied, Id must not be expected to build fashionable houses, ken what are required are six-roomed cottages to &8e families which are at present living with three toons to a room.

Ut is deplorable, indeed, that any human beings buld consent to degrade themselves by producing the a'cles which a considerable number of workmen turn ; to-day, boots which are partly brown paper, and tiiture which is not fit to use. The revenge of out-fcd humanity is certain, though it is not always ions; and the penalty paid by the consumer for 'rating an organization of industry which, in the tie of efficiency, destroyed the responsibility of the rkman, is that the service with which he is provided lot even efficient. He has always paid it, though he t not seen it, in quality. To-day he is beginning to

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

realize that he is likely to pay it in quantity as If the public is to get efficient service, it can get it from human beings, with the initiative and caprices] human beings. It will get it, in short, in so far treats industry as a responsible profession.

The collective responsibility of the workers for maintenance of the standards of their profession then, the alternative to the discipline which Capital exercised in the past, and which is now breaking doi It involves a fundamental change in the position of employers and of trade unions. As long as the dii tion of industry is in the hands of property-owners their agents, who are concerned to extract from it maximum profit for themselves, a trade union is m sarily a defensive organization. Absorbed, on the hand, in the struggle to resist the downward thrust Capitalism upon the workers' standard of life, and nounced, on the other, if it presumes, to " interfere management," even when management is most obvioi inefficient, it is an opposition which never become government and which has neither the will nor the poi to assume responsibility for the quality of the sei offered to the consumer. If the abolition of functioi property transferred the control of production to representing those who perform constructive work those who consume the goods produced, the relation the worker to the public would no longer be indii but immediate, and associations which are now pro defensive would be in a position not merely to critic and oppose but to advise, to initiate and to enforce uj their own members the obligations of the craft.

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 155

3t is obvious that in such circumstances the service 5ered the consumer, however carefully safeguarded by s representation on the authorities controlling each in-LStry, would depend primarily upon the success of ofessional organizations in finding a substitute for fe discipline exercised to-day by the agents of prop-fcy-owners. It would be necessary for them to main-tn by their own action the zeal, efficiency and profes-haal pride which, when the barbarous weapons of the iieteenth century have been discarded, would be the fly guarantee of a high level of production. Nor, once Ss new function has been made possible for profes-ktal organizations, is there any extravagance in ex-feting them to perform it with reasonable competence, few far economic motives are balked to-day and could > strengthened by a different type of industrial organisation, to what extent, and under what conditions, it is issible to enlist in the services of industry motives 4ich are not purely economic, can be ascertained only for a study of the psychology of work which has not fc been made. Such a study, to be of value, must bt by abandoning the conventional assumptions, popu-ized by economic textbooks and accepted as self-evi-W by practical men, that the motives to effort are iple and constant in character, like the pressure of *m in a boiler, that they are identical throughout all iges of economic activity, from the stock exchange the shunting of wagons or laying of bricks, and that y can be elicited and strengthened only by directly >nomic incentives. In so far as motives in industry ^e bpen Considered hitherto, it has usually been done

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

by writers who, like most exponents of scientific agement, have started by assuming that the categoi of business psychology could be offered with equal cess to all classes of workers and to all types of pre tive work. Those categories appear to be derived a simplified analysis of the mental processes of the pany promoter, financier or investor, and their vali( as an interpretation of the motives and habits wl determine the attitude to his work of the bricklaj the miner, the dock laborer or the engineer, is precis the point in question.

Clearly there are certain types of industry to wl they are only partially relevant. It can hardly be sumed, for example, that the degree of skill and en< brought to his work by a surgeon, a scientific inv< gator, a teacher, a medical officer of health, an Indii civil servant and a peasant proprietor are capable being expressed precisely and to the same degree terms of the economic advantage which those diffel occupations offer. Obviously those who pursue are influenced to some considerable, though uncerta extent by economic incentives. Obviously, again, precise character of each process or step in the exel of their respective avocations, the performance of operation, the carrying out of a piece of investigate the selection of a particular type of educational met the preparation of a report, the decision of a case or care of live stock, is not immediately dependent u( an exact calculation of pecuniary gain or loss, appears to be the case is that in certain walks of li while the occupation is chosen after a consideration

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 157

jb economic advantages, and while economic reasons sact the minimum degree of activity needed to avert ismissal from it or "failure," the actual level of iiergy or proficiency displayed depend largely upon ©nditions of a different order. Among them are the Jiaracter of the training received before and after altering the occupation, the customary standard of fort demanded by the public opinion of one's fellows, ke desire for the esteem of the small circle in which _^e individual moves and to be recognized as having made good" and not to have "failed," interest in pie's work, ranging from devotion to a determination p " do justice" to it, the pride of the craftsman, the ; tradition of the service."

, It would be foolish to suggest that any considerable jody of men are uninfluenced by economic considerations. But to represent them as amenable to such incentives only is to give a quite unreal and bookish pic-pre of the actual conditions under which the work of ibe world is carried on. How large a part such con-iderations play varies from one occupation to another, ^cording to the character of the work which it does *d the manner in which it is organized. In what is tiled par excellence industry, calculations of pecuniary tin and loss are more powerful than in most of the so-tiled professions, though even in industry they are «>re constantly present to the minds of the business ■ea who " direct" it, than to those of the managers and ichxticians, most of whom are paid fixed salaries, or to la rank and file of wage-workers. In the professions P teaching and medicine, in many branches of the pub-

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

lie service, the necessary qualities are secured, withe the intervention of the capitalist employer, partly pecuniary incentives, partly by training and educatk partly by the acceptance on the part of those enteri them of the traditional obligations of their professie as part of the normal framework of their working live But this difference is not constant and unalteral It springs from the manner in which different types occupation are organized, on the training which tl offer, and the morale which they cultivate among th« members. The psychology of a vocation can in fact changed; new motives can be elicited, provided steps ai taken to allow them free expression. It is as feasibl to turn building into an organized profession, with relatively high code of public honor, as it was to the same for medicine or teaching.

The truth is that we ought radically to revise presuppositions as to human motives on which currei presentations of economic theory are ordinarily founde and in terms of which the discussion of economic que tion is usually carried on. The assumption that tl stimulus of imminent .personal want is either the 01 spur, or a sufficient spur, to productive effort is a re! of a crude psychology which has little warrant eithc in past history or in present experience. It dern what plausibility it possesses from a confusion be1 work in the sense of the lowest quantum of activit needed to escape actual starvation, and the work whic is given, irrespective of the fact that elementary want may already have been satisfied, through the natural di position of ordinary men to maintain, and of extraoi

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY 159

-mry men to improve upon, the level of exertion ac-r apted as reasonable by the public opinion of the group

f which they are members. It is the old difference, r^rgotten by society as often as it is learned, between je labor of the free man and that of the slave. Economic fear may secure the minimum effort needed to

4cape economic penalties. What, however, has made -rogress possible in the past, and what, it may be sug-

-j&sted, matters to the world to-day, is not the bare -jinimum which is required to avoid actual want, but

^e capacity of men to bring to bear upon their tasks a rJtgree of energy, which, while it can be stimulated by -jonomic incentives, yields results far in excess of any

^hich are necessary merely to avoid the extremes of ? (anger or destitution.

That capacity is a matter of training, tradition and Jfibit, at least as much as of pecuniary stimulus, and the Aility of a professional association representing the toblic opinion of a group of workers to raise it is, herefore, considerable. Once industry has been lib-^ated from its subservience to the interests of the func- V 'Onless property-owner, it is in this sphere that trade tiions may be expected increasingly to find their func-on. Its importance both for the general interests of *© community and for the special interests of particular t*oups of workers can hardly be exaggerated. Techni-*1 knowledge and managerial skill are likely to be avail-ble as readily for a committee appointed by the workers ci an industry as for a committee appointed, as now, ^ the shareholders. But it is more and more evident >-day that the crux of the economic situation is not

the technical deficiencies of industrial organization, I the growing inability of those who direct industry command the active good will of the personnel. Tb co-operation is promised by the conversion of indus into a profession serving the public, and promised, far as can be judged, by that alone.

Nor is the assumption of the new and often disagi able obligations of internal discipline and public sponsibility one which trade unionism can afford, o the change is accomplished, to shirk, however alien t may be to its present traditions. For ultimately, if slow degrees, power follows the ability to wield authority goes with function. The workers cannot h it both ways. They must choose whether to assume responsibility for industrial discipline and become fi or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs. If, org ized as professional bodies, they can provide a m effective service than that which is now, with inert ing difficulty, extorted by the agents of capital, tl will have made good their hold upon the future, they cannot, they will remain among the less calcula instruments of production which many of them are day. The instinct of mankind warns it against acce ing at their face value spiritual demands which cam justify themselves by practical achievements. And road along which the organized workers, like any ot class, must climb to power, starts from the provision a more effective economic service than their masters, their grip upon industry becomes increasingly vacil ing and uncertain, are able to supply.

TEN

rHE POSITION OP THE BRAIN

WORKER

conversion of industry into a profession will in* at least as great a change in the position of the Element as in that of the manual workers. As ndustry is organized for the performance of funo» the employer will cease to be a profit maker and te what, in so far as he holds his position by a able title, he already is, one workman among s. In some industries, where the manager is a ilist as well, the alteration may take place through a limitation of his interest as a capitalist as it has proposed by employers and workers to introduce he building industry. In others, where the whole of administration rests on the shoulders of salaried gers, it has already in part been carried out. The mic conditions of this change have, indeed, been red by the separation of ownership from manage-, and by the growth of an intellectual proletariat om the scientific and managerial work of industry jreasingly intrusted. The concentration of busi-3, the elaboration of organization, and the develop-3 springing from the application of science to in-y have resulted in the multiplication of a body of trial brain workers who make the old classics into " employers and workmen," which is surrent in common speech, an absurdly mislead-

ing description of the industrial system as it e to-day.

To complete the transformation all that is need that this new class of officials, who fifty years ago almost unknown, should recognize that they, lik manual workers, are the victims of the dominati property, and that both professional pride and ecoi interest require that they should throw in their lot the rest of those who are engaged in constructive Their position to-day is often, indeed, very far being a happy one. Many of them, like some managers, are miserably paid. Their tenure of posts is sometimes highly insecure. Their oppoi ties for promotion may be few, and distributed n singular capriciousness. They see the prizes of i try awarded by favoritism, or by the nepotism ^ results in the head of a business unloading upon family of sons whom it would be economical to p keep out of it, and which, indignantly denounced o rare occasions on which it occurs in the public servi so much the rule in private industry that no one questions its propriety. During the war they found that, while the organized workers have se< advances, their own salaries have often remained al stationary, because they have been too genteel to part in trade unionism, and that to-day they are i times paid less than the men for whose work the] supposed to be responsible. Regarded by the worl as the hangers-on of the masters, and by their empl as one section among the rest of the " hands," they the odium of capitalism without its power or its pr

POSITION OF THE BHAIN WOBKEB 163

3?rom the conversion of industry into a profession ^3e who at present do its intellectual work have as ach to gain as the manual workers. For the principle • function, for which we have pleaded as the basis of ftustrial organization, supplies the only intelligible fcdard by which the powers and duties of the different raps engaged in industry can be determined. At the ssent time no such standard exists. The social order the pre-industrial era, of which faint traces have sur-r ed in the forms of academic organization, was irked by a careful grading of the successive stages in > progress from apprentice to master, each of which a distinguished by clearly defined rights and duties, rying from grade to grade and together forming a urarchy of functions. The industrial system which reloped in the course of the nineteenth century did t admit any principle of organization other than the ivenience of the individual, who by enterprise, skill, >d fortune, unscrupulous energy or mere nepotism, ppened at any moment to be in a position to wield >nomic authority. His powers were what he could srcise; his rights were what at any time he could *ert. The Lancashire mill-owner of the fifties was, :e the Cyclops, a law unto himself. Hence, since subornation and discipline are indispensable in any aaplex undertaking, the subordination which emerged

industry was that of servant to master, and the dis-pline such as economic strength could impose upon onomic weakness.

The alternative to the allocation of power by the Higgle of individuals for self-aggrandizement is its

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

allocation according to function, that each group in I complex process of production should wield so authority as, and no more authority than, is neede enable it to perform the special duties for which responsible. An organization of industry based on principle does not imply the merging of specialized nomio functions in an undifferentiated industrial dc racy, or the obliteration of the brain workers beneath! sheer mass of artisans and laborers. But it is inc patible with the unlimited exercise of economic by any class or individual. It would have as its fni mental rule that the only powers which a man can cise are those conferred upon him in virtue of his ol There would be subordination. But it would be foundly different from that which exists to-day. it would not be the subordination of one man to other, but of all men to the purpose for which indna is carried on. There would be authority. But it not be the authority of the individual who imj rules in virtue of his economic power for the atti of his economic advantage. It would be the authc springing from the necessity of combining difie duties to attain a common end. There would be cipline. But it would be the discipline involved pursuing that end, not the discipline enforced upon man for the convenience or profit of another. Ui such an organization of industry the brain mi might expect, as never before, to come to his own. would be estimated and promoted by his capacity, by his means. He would be less likely than at pi to find doors closed to him because of poverty.

POSITION OF THE BBAIN WOBKER 165

ge& would be his colleagues, not an owner of prop-r intent on dividends. He would not suffer from the version of values which rates the talent and energy which wealth is created lower than the possession of perty, which is at best their pensioner and at worst spend-thrift of what intelligence has produced. In 3ciety organized for the encouragement of creative vity those who are esteemed most highly will be se who create, as in a world organized for enjoyment y are those who own.

inch considerations are too general and abstract to ry conviction. Greater concreteness may be given m by comparing the present position of mine-man* rs with that which they would occupy were effect en to Mr. Justice Sankey's scheme for the nationals ion of the Coal Industry. A body of technicians who

weighing the probable effects of such a reorganiza-i will naturally consider them in relation both to ir own professional prospects and to the efficiency of

service of which they are the working heads. They 1 properly take into account questions of salaries, isions, security of status and promotion. At the same e they will wish to be satisfied as to points which, ugh not less important, are less easily defined, der which system, private or public ownership, will y have most personal discretion or authority over the duct of matters within their professional compe-ee ? Under which will they have the best guarantees t their special knowledge will carry due weight, and t, when handling matters of art, they will not be rridden or obstructed by amateurs ?

As far as the specific case of the Coal Industry is cerned the question of security and salaries need hai be discussed. The greatest admirer of the present tern would not argue that security of status is amc the advantages which it offers to its employees. It notorious that in some districts, at least, managers liable to be dismissed, however professionally compet they may be, if they express in public views which not approved by the directors of their company, deed, the criticism which is normally made on public services, and made not wholly without reason, that the security which they offer is excessive. On question of salaries rather more than one-half of colliery companies of Great Britain themselves supplie figures to the Coal Industry Commission. 1 If tl returns may be trusted, it would appear that mine-ms agers are paid, as a class, salaries the parsimony which is the more surprising in view of the emphi laid, and quite properly laid, by the mine-owners the managers' responsibilities. The service of the Stat does not normally offer, and ought not to offer, financii prizes comparable with those of private industry. Bi it is improbable, had the mines been its property di

iThe Coal Mines Departmenet supplied the following flj to the Coal Industry Commission (Vol. Ill, App. 66). relate to 57 per cent, of the colleries of the United Kingdom.

Salary, including bonus and Number of Manaf

value of house and coal 1913 1919

£100 or less 4 2

£101 to £200 134 3

£201 to £300 280 29

£301 to £400 161 251

£401 to £600 321 213

£501 to £600 57 146

£001 and over 50 152

POSITION OF THE BBAIN WOBKEB 167

Last ten years/ that more than one-half the managers Id have been in receipt of salaries of under £301 year, and of less than £500 in 1919, by which time ea had more than doubled, and the aggregate profits le mine-owners (of which the greater part was, how-, taken by the Stafe in taxation) had amounted in years to £160,000,000. It would be misleading to jest that the salaries paid to mine-managers are cal of private industry, nor need it be denied that probable effect of turning an industry into a public ice would be to reduce the size of the largest prizes resent offered. What is to be expected is that the >r and medium salaries would be raised, and the est somewhat diminished. It is hardly to be denied, ny rate, that the majority of brain workers in in-;ry have nothing to fear on financial grounds from i a change as is proposed by Mr. Justice Sankey. ler the normal organization of industry, profits, it not be too often insisted, do not go to them but to •eholders. There does not appear to be any reason uppose that the salaries of managers in the mines :ing more than 5/- profit a ton were any larger than le making under 3/%

'he financial aspect of the change is not, however, only point which a group of managers or technicians b to consider. They have also to weigh its effect on r professional status. Will they have as much free-i, initiative and authority in the service of the com-lity as under private ownership? How that ques-. is answered depends upon the form given to the linistrative system through which a public service is

conducted. It is possible to conceive an arrange! under which the life of a mine-manager would be i a burden to him by perpetual recalcitrance on the of the men at the pit for which he is responsible, possible to conceive one under which he would be 1 pered to the point of paralysis by irritating interfer from a bureaucracy at headquarters. In the past t managers of " co-operative workshops" suffered would seem, from the former: many officers of Emj ment Exchanges are the victims, unless common ro is misleading, of the latter. It is quite legitimate, deed it is indispensable, that these dangers shoul< emphasized. The problem of reorganizing industr as has been said above, a problem of constitution i ing. It is likely to be handled successfully only if defects to which different types of constitutional chinery are likely to be liable are pointed out in adva Once, however, these dangers are realized, to de precautions against them appears to be a comparati simple matter. If Mr. Justice Sankey's proposals taken as a concrete example of the position which w be occupied by the managers in a nationalized indus it will be seen that they do not involve either of the dangers which are pointed out above. The mam will, it is true, work with a Local Mining Council 01 committee, which is to " meet fortnightly, or often* need be, to advise the manager on all questions cone ing the direction and safety of the mine," and " if manager refuses to take the advice of the Local Mil Council on any question concerning the safety health of the mine, such question shall be referrei

District Mining Council/ 9 It is true also that, once b a Local Mining Council is formally established,

manager will find it necessary to win its confidence, ead by persuasion, not by mere driving, to establish, thort, the same relationships of comradeship and good L as ought to exist between the colleagues in any unon undertaking. But in all this there is nothing undermine his authority, unless "authority" be lerstood to mean an arbitrary power which no man fit to exercise, and which few men, in their sober rnents, would claim. The manager will be appointed

and responsible to, not the men whose work he super-es, but the District Mining Council, which controls

the pits in a district, and on that council he will be ►resented. Nor will he be at the mercy of a distant lerkocracy," overwhelming him with circulars and ferriding his expert knowledge with impracticable mdates devised in London. The very kernel of the lemes advanced both by Justice Sankey and by the Iners 9 Federation is decentralized administration thin the framework of a national system. There is no estion of " managing the industry from Whitehall." ie characteristics of different coal-fields vary so widely it reliance on local knowledge and experience are jential, and it is to local knowledge and experience at it is proposed to intrust the administration of the diistry. The constitution which is recommended is, in ort, not " Unitary " but " Federal." There will be a rision of functions and power between central authori-s and district authorities. The former will lay down neral rules as to those matters which must necessarily

be dealt with on a national basis. The latter will minister the industry within their own districts, and long as they comply with those rules and provide t quota of coal, will possess local autonomy and follow the method of working the pits which they tl best suited to local conditions.

Thus interpreted, public ownership does not appet confront the brain worker with the danger of unint gent interference with his special technique, of whiel ib, quite naturally, apprehensive. It offers him, ind far larger opportunities of professional development! are open to all but a favored few to-day, when the • siderations of productive efficiency, which it is his cial metier to promote, are liable to be overridden short-sighted financial interests operating through pressure of a Board of Directors who desire to shew immediate profit to their shareholders, and who, obtain it, will " cream " the pit, or work it in a } other than considerations of technical efficiency w( dictate. And the interest of the community in se ing that the manager's professional skill is liberated the service of the public, is as great as his own. the economic developments of the last thirty years 1 made the managerial and technical personnel of in* try the repositories of public responsibilities of quit* calculable importance, which, with the best will in world, they can hardly at present discharge. The i salient characteristic of modern industrial organiza is that production is carried on under the general rection of business men, who do not themselves ne sarily know anything of productive processes. " E

POSITION OF THE BRAIN WORKEB 171

3s " and " industry " tend to an increasing extent to rm two compartments, which, though united within

* same economic system, employ different types of rsonnel, evoke different qualities and recognize differ-t standards of efficiency and workmanship. The tech-;al and managerial staff of industry is, of course, amenable as other men to economic incentives. But ?ir special work is production, not finance; and, pro-led they are not smarting under a sense of economic xistice, they want, like most workmen, to " see the job tie properly." The business men who ultimately con-1 industry are concerned with the promotion and pitalization of companies, with competitive selling cl the advertisement of wares, the control of markets,

* securing of special advantages, and the arrangement pools, combines and monopolies. They are pre-

Mipied, in fact, with financial results, and are inter-cd in the actual making of goods only in so far as atncial results accrue from it.

The change in organization which has, to a consider-le degree, specialized the spheres of business and man-ement is comparable in its importance to that which parated business and labor a century and a half *>. It is specially momentous for the consumer, s long as the functions of manager, technician and gritalist were combined, as in the classical era of the ctory system, in the single person of " the employer," was not unreasonable to assume that profits and proactive efficiency ran similarly together. In such cir-mstances the ingenuity with which economists proved

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

that, in obedience to " the law of substitution," he m choose the most economical process, machine, or typei organization, wore a certain plausibility. True, the ployer might, even so, adulterate his goods or exploit labor of a helpless class of workers. But as long as person directing industry was himself primarily a ager, he could hardly have the training, ability or tin even if he had the inclination, to concentrate special tention on financial gains unconnected with, or op] to, progress in the arts of production, and there some justification for the conventional picture wl represented " the manufacturer " as the guardian of interests of the consumer. With the drawing apart the financial and technical departments of industi with the separation of " business " from " productio^ —the link which bound profits to productive efficiei is tending to be snapped. There are more ways formerly of securing the former without achieving latter; and when it is pleaded that the interests of captain of industry stimulate the adoption of the nrt " economical" methods and thus secure industrial pi ress, it is necessary to ask "economical for whom 1 Though the organization of industry which is most ficient, in the sense of offering the consumer the service at the lowest real cost, may be that which is profitable to the firm, it is also true that profits constantly made in ways which have nothing to do efficient production, and which sometimes, indeed, pede it.

The manner in which " business " may find that methods which pay itself best are those which a

POSITION OF THE BKAIN WORKER 173

ientific " management " would condemn may be illus-*«ted by three examples. In the first place, the whole Lass of profits which are obtained by the adroit capi-ilization of a new business, or the reconstruction of one Jhich already exists, have hardly any connection with roduction at all. When, for instance, a Lancashire >tton mill capitalized at £100,000 is bought by a ondon syndicate which re-floats it with a capital of 500,000—not at all an extravagant case—what exactly as happened? In many cases the equipment of the till for production remains, after the process, what it r as before it. It is, however, valued at a different gure, because it is anticipated that the product of the fcill will sell at a price which will pay a reasonable profit not only upon the lower, but upon the higher, apitalization. If the apparent state of the market and prospects of the industry are such that the public can be Dduced to believe this, the promoters of the reconstructs find it worth while to recapitalize the mill on the *>w basis. They make their profit not as manufacturers, but as financiers. They do not in any way add €> the productive efficiency of the firm, but they acquire bares which will entitle them to an increased return, formally, if the market is favorable, they part with the jreater number of them as soon as they are acquired. But, whether they do so or not, what has occurred is a Krocess by which the business element in industry obtains the right to a larger share of the product, without n any way increasing the efficiency of the service which & offered to the consumer. Other examples of the manner in which the control of

production by " business " cuts across the line of nomic progress are the wastes of competitive indust and the profits of monopoly. It is well known that t! price paid by the consumer includes marketing costs* t which to a varying, but to a large, extent are expense^ not of supplying the goods, but of supplying them und conditions involving the expenses of advertisement am competitive distribution. For the individual firm rack expenses, which enable it to absorb part of a rival'i trade, may be an economy: to the consumer of milk coal—to take two flagrant instances—they are p loss. Nor, as is sometimes assumed, are such wa confined to distribution. Technical reasons are stated by railway managers to make desirable a unification railway administration and by mining experts of mines. But, up to the war, business considerations maintained^ the expensive system under which each railway compan; was operated as a separate system, and still prevent lieries, even collieries in the same district, from being administered as parts of a single organization. Pits drowned out by water, because companies cannot agree to apportion between them the costs of a common draifr 4 age system; materials are bought, and products soli H separately, because collieries will not combine; small n coal is left in to the amount of millions of tons becausep the most economical and technically efficient working the seams is not necessarily that which yields the largest profit to the business men who control production. I» this instance the wide differences in economic strength which exist between different mines discourage the unification which is economically desirable; naturally the

POSITION OF THE BRAIN WORKER 175

xrectors of a company which owns " a good thing " do >t desire to merge interests with a company working >»1 that is poor in quality or expensive to mine. When, t increasingly happens in other industries, competi-ve wastes, or some of them, are eliminated by corn-nation, there is a genuine advance in technical ef-iiency, which must be set to the credit of business Lotives. In that event, however, the divergence be-^een business interests and those of the consumers is ^rely pushed one stage further forward; it arises, of >urse, over the question of prices. If any one is disused to think that this picture of the economic waste Tiich accompanies the domination of production by usiness interests is overdrawn, he may be invited to insider the criticisms upon the system passed by the efficiency engineers," who are increasingly being ^lled upon to advise as to industrial organization and quipment. " The higher officers of the corporation,"' writes Mr. H. L. Gantt of a Public Utility Company atablished in America during the war, " have all without exception been men of the i business ' type of mind, rho have made their success through financiering, buy-kig, selling, etc. ... As a matter of fact it is well mown that our industrial system has not measured up .s we had expected. . . . The reason for its falling iiort is undoubtedly that the men directing it had been rained in a business system operated for profits, and lid not understand one operated solely for production. this is no criticism of the men as individuals; they limply did not know the job, and, what is worse, they 3id not know that they did not know it."

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

n

1

11

In so far, then, as " Business " and " Management are separated, the latter being employed under the reetion of the former, it cannot be assumed that direction of industry is in the hands of persons wh primary concern is productive efficiency. That a coi siderable degree of efficiency mil result incidental! from the pursuit of business profits is not, of co denied. What seems to be true, however, is that main interest of those directing an industry which reached this stage of development is given to financi strategy and the control of markets, because the which these activities offer are normally so much la than those accruing from the mere improvement of processes of production. It is evident, however, that is precisely that improvement which is the main inte est of the consumer. He may tolerate large profits long as they are thought to be the symbol of effici production. But what he is concerned with is the supp of goods, not the value of shares, and when profits a pear to be made, not by efficient production, but skilful financiering or shrewd commercial tactics, they 11 no longer appear meritorious. If, in disgust at v? he has learned to call" profiteering," the consumer an alternative to a system under which product is coi trolled by " Business," he can hardly find it except b; making an ally of the managerial and technical pe sonnel of industry. They organize the service which requires; they are relatively little implicated, either material interest or by psychological bias, in the cial methods which he distrusts; they often find the trol of their professions by business men who are

<

POSITION OF THE BRAIN WORKER 177

Lilly financiers irritating in the obstruction which it fers to technical efficiency, as well as sharp and close-ted in the treatment of salaries. Both on public and ofessional grounds they belong to a group which ought "take the initiative in promoting a partnership between a producers and the public. They can offer the com-Jinity the scientific knowledge and specialized ability xich is the most important condition of progress in the ts of production. It can offer them a more secure and ajnified status, larger opportunities for the exercise of eir special talents, and the consciousness that they are c^ing the best of their work and their lives, not to niching a handful of uninspiring, if innocuous, share-lders, but to the service of the great body of their Llow-countrymen. If the last advantage be dismissed

a phrase—if medical officers of health, directors of 'Bcation, directors of the co-operative wholesale be as-3ned to be quite uninfluenced by any consciousness of eial service—the first two, at any rate, remain. And ^y are considerable.

It is this gradual disengagement of managerial tech-*jue from financial interests which would appear the "^obable line along which " the employer " of the future Lll develop. The substitution throughout industry of ced salaries for fluctuating profits would, in itself, derive his position of half the humiliating atmosphere of *edatory enterprise which embarrasses to-day any man r honor who finds himself, when he has been paid for 5 services, in possession of a surplus for which there

no assignable reason. Nor, once large incomes from tofits have been extinguished, need his salary be large,

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY

as incomes are reckoned to-day. It is said that ami

the barbarians, where wealth is still measured by cattl

great chiefs are described as hundred-cow men. manager of a great enterprise who is paid £10,000

year, might similarly be described as a hundred-fa

man, since he receives the income of a hundred fan

It is true that special talent is worth any price,

that a payment of £10,000 a year to the head of

business with a turnover of millions is economically

bagatelle. But economic considerations are not

only considerations. There is also " the point

honor." And the truth is that these hundred-fam

salaries are ungentlemanly.

When really important issues are at stake every oi

realizes that no decent man can stand out for his pri

A general does not haggle with his government for t

precise pecuniary equivalent of his contribution to

tory. A sentry who gives the alarm to a sleeping

talion does not spend next day collecting the capi

value of the lives he has saved; he is paid 1/- a day

is lucky if he gets it. The commander of a ship d

not cram himself and his belongings into the boats a:

leave the crew to scramble out of the wreck as best t

can; by the tradition of the service he is the last

to leave. There is no reason why the public sho

insult manufacturers and men of business by treati

them as though they were more thick-skinned than

erals and more extravagant than privates. To say

they are worth a good deal more than even the exor

tant salaries which a few of them get is often t

"But it is beside the point. No one has any business

POSITION OF THE BRAIN WORKER 179

>ect to be paid "what he is worth/ 9 for what he worth is a matter between his own soul and God. tat he has a right to demand, and what it concerns his low-men to see that he gets, is enough to enable him perform his work. When industry is organized on a is of function, that, and no more than that, is what will be paid. To do the managers of industry jus-*, this whining for more money is a vice to which y (as distinct from their shareholders) are not par-alarly prone. There is no reason why they should If a man has important work, and enough leisure 1 income to enable him to do it properly, he is in j ssession of as much happiness as is good for any of i children of Adam.

ELEVEN

PORRO UNUM NECESSARIUM

So the organization of society on the basis of functifl instead of on that of rights, implies three things, means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintain when they are accompanied by the performance of ae ice and abolished when they are not. It means, secoi that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to 1 community for whom production is carried on, so tl their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmisti able, not lost, as at present, through their immedi subordination to shareholders whose interest is not se ice but gain. It means, in the third place, that the ol gation for the maintenance of the service shall rest u] the professional organization of those who perform and that, subject to the supervision and criticism the consumer, those organizations shall exercise much voice in the government of industry as may needed to secure that the obligation is discharged is obvious, indeed, that no change of system or i chinery can avert those causes of social malaise wl consist in the egotism, greed, or quarrelsomeness human nature. What it can do is to create an envi ment in which those are not the qualities which are couraged. It cannot secure that men live up to tl principles. What it can do is to establish their so order upon principles to which, if they please, they

r e up and not live down. It cannot control their tions. It can offer them an end on which to fix their Lnds. And, as their minds are, so, in the long run cl with exceptions, their practical activity will be. The first condition of the right organization of indus-r is, then, the intellectual conversion which, in their atrust of principles, Englishmen are disposed to place rt or to omit altogether. It is that emphasis should transferred from the opportunities which it offers in-riduals to the social functions which it performs; that ey should be clear as to its end and should judge it - reference to that end, not by incidental consequences nich are foreign to it, however brilliant or alluring ose consequences may be. What gives its meaning to ty activity which is not purely automatic is its pur-Mse. It is because the purpose of industry, which is |T ^e conquest of nature for the service of man, is neither lequately expressed in its organization nor present ► the minds of those engaged in it, because it is not *garded as a function but as an opportunity for per-unal gain or advancement or display, that the economic :fe of modern societies is in a perpetual state'of morbid -ritation. If the conditions which produce that un-atural tension are to be removed, it can only be Bected by the growth of a habit of mind which will pproach questions of economic organization from the tandpoint of the purpose which it exists to serve, and thich will apply to it something of the spirit expressed iy Bacon when he said that the work of man ought to le carried on " for the glory of God and the relief of den's estate."

Viewed from that angle issues which are insolnt when treated on the basis of rights may be found mo susceptible of reasonable treatment For a purpose, in the first place a principle of limitation. It deti mines the end for which, and therefore the limits with which, an activity is to be carried on. It divided wl is worth doing from what is not, and settles the scs upon which what is worth doing ought to be done, is in the second place, a principle of unity, because supplies a common end to which efforts can be direct* and submits interests, which would otherwise confli to the judgment of an over-ruling object. It is, in t third place, a principle of apportionment or distril tion. It assigns to the different parties of groups« gaged in a common undertaking the place which tb are to occupy in carrying it out. Thus it establisl order, not upon chance or power, but upon a princip and bases remuneration not upon what men can wi good fortune snatch for themselves nor upon what, unlucky, they can be induced to accept, but upon wl is appropriate to their function, no more and no k so that those who perform no function receive no p ment, and those who contribute to the common end ceive honourable payment for honourable service.

Frate, la nostra volont& quieta

Virtxl di cariti, che fa volerne

Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta.

Si disiassimo esse pi4 superne,

Foran discordi li nostri disiri

Dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne.

:«c

Anzi & formale ad esto beato esse

Tenersi dentro alia divina vogli,

Per ch'una fansi nostre vogli e stesse.

• . * • • • • • ^

Chiaro mi fu allor com' ogni dove

In Cielo 6 paradiso, e si la grazia

Del sommo ben d'un modo non vi piove.

:me famous lines in which Piccarda explains to Dante e order of Paradise are a description of a complex l<1 multiform society which is united by overmaster-^ devotion to a common end. By that end all stations « assigned and all activities are valued. The parts rrive their quality from their place in the system, and « so permeated by the unity which they express that ^y themselves are glad to be forgotten, as the ribs of *. arch carry the eye from the floor from which they ►Ting to the vault in which they meet and interlace.

Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible *ly to a society which subordinates its activities to fc.e principle of purpose. For what that principle offers

not merely a standard for determining the relations E different classes and groups of producers, but a scale E moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic acuity itself its proper place as the servant, not the toaster, of society. The burden of our civilization is *)t merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or bs operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. 1; is that industry itself has come to hold a position of delusive predominance among human interests, which to single interest, and least of all the provision of the

material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Lik hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he begun to live, industrialized communities neglect very objects for which it is worth while to acquire ri( in their feverish preoccupation with the means by wl riches can be acquired.

That obsession by economic issues is as local transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To ful generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsess of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels app to-day; indeed, it is less rational, since the object i which it is concerned is less important. And it i poison which inflames every wound and turns ( trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will solve the particular problems of industry which al it, until that poison is expelled, and it has learns see industry itself in the right perspective. If it i do that, it must rearrange its scale of values. It r regard economic interests as one element in life, no the whole of life. It must persuade its member renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue wit] any corresponding service, because the struggle for t keeps the whole community in a fever. It mus organize industry that the instrumental charactei economic activity is emphasized by its subordinate the social purpose for which it is carried on.

on of private o

eeism, 152

te rights, 50-51

tism in industry, 144

itive societies, 20-32

istration, 115-116

ion of power, 163-164

an Constitution, 18-19,

ies, 74

ition, compulsory, 101

quoted, 58, 181

m, 16, 52, 55

workers, position of the,

171

i Coal Industry, reorgan-

on of, 166-171

lg Guilds, 103

lg Trade Report, 106-110

icracy, 116, 149

I ism, and production, 176; downward thrust of, in America, 101; losing rol, 141-142, 148 Lord Hugh, 23, 68 Robert, 59 William, 59 i and State, 10-13 ndustry Commission, 71, 137, 143; report of, 166-

[ines Committees, 152

lations, 125, 130

ttee on Trusts, 153

tition, 27

lsory arbitration, 101

ations, 103

vatism, the New, 28

aer, exploitation of the,

134

Co-operative Movement and cost of coal, 125

Dante, quoted, 182-183 Death Duties, 22 Democratic control, 116 Dickenson, Sir Arthur Lowes,

71 Directorate control, 129 Duckham, Sir Arthur, 119 Duke of Wellington, quoted,

123

Economic confusion, cause of,

131-132 Economic discontent, increase

of, 5 Economic egotism, 27, Economic expansion, 9 Efficiency, the condition of, 139-

160; through Esprit de

Corps, 149-150 Employer, waning power of the,

140 England, and natural right, 15-

16; and France contrasted,

16-17; Industrialism in, 44-

47; Liberal Movement in, 18;

over-crowding of population

in, 37; proprietary rights in,

64 et seq. English landlordism, 22-23 Englishmen, characteristics of,

1-3; vanity of, 129 English Revolution of 1688, 52 Esch-Cummins Act, 118 Expediency, rule of, 16

Feudalism, 18 Fixed salaries, 177-178 Forced labor, 102 France, social and industrial conditions in, 16-17; Feudal-

185

INDEX

ism in, 18; Revolution in, 15, 65, 69 French Revolution, 15, 65, 69 Function, definition of, 8; as a basis for remuneration, 41-42; as a basis of social reorganization, 180; Function and Freedom, 7 Functional Society, 29, 84-90 Function less property-owners, 79, 86; abolishment of, 87-88; an expensive luxury, 87

Gainford, Lord, quoted, 26, 111

Gantt, H. L., 175

Government control in war

time, 25-26 Ground-rents 89-90, 91

Hobson, Mr., 63

" Hundred-Family Man," 178

Imperial Tobacco Company, 116

Incomes, 41

Income Tax, 22

Income without service, 68

Individualism, 48-49

Individual rights, 9

Individual rights va. social functions, 27

Industrial problems, 7

Industrial reorganization, 151, 155

Industrial revolution, 9

Industrial societies, 9

Industrial warfare, cause of, and remedy for, 40-42

Industrialism, 18; a poison, 184; compared to Militarism, 44-46; exaggerated estimate of its importance, 45-46; failure of present system, 139-141; nemesis of, 33-51; spread of, 30; tendency of, 31-32

Industry, and a profession, 94, 97; as a profession, 91 et aeq. % 125-126; deficiencies of, 147; definition of, 6; how private control of may be terminated, 103-104; and the

advantages of such a c 106; Building Trades' for, 108, 111; motives i 159; nationalization o 114-118; present orj tion of intolerable, 129 pose of, 8, 46, 181; rig ganization of, 6-7; the not the end, 46-47

Inheritance taxes, 90

Insurance, 74

Joint control, 111-112 Joint-stock companies, 66 Joint-stock organizations

Labor, absolute rights c and capital, 98-100, compulsory, 100; conl breaking down, 139 ei degradation of, 35; 102

League of Nations, 101

Liberal Movement, 18

Locke, 14, 52, 55

Management divorced ownership, 112-113

Mann, Sir John, 126

Militarism, 44-45

Mill, quoted, 89

Mine managers, positii 162, 166-168

Mining royalties, 23-24, 9

Nationalism, 48-49 Nationalization, 114, 1

the Coal Industry, 11

168-169 Natural right in Franc

in England, 15-16; d

of, 21

Officials, position und<

present economic syste Old industrial order a :

139; its effect on tt

smner, 144 Organization, for public

instead of private gai Over-centralization, 121

187

ip, a new system of, 4

rs, 34

a symptom of social er, 5

enterprise and public ship, 118-120 ownership, 120; aboli->f, 147; of industrial I, 105-106

rights and public wei-4-15 !8, 24

•, obligation of the, 8; responsibility of,

on, increased, 5; large

and small scale, 87;

ection of, 37-30; why

creased, 136

vity, 4, 46

>nal Spirit, the, 149-

and production, 173-li vision of, 133 iat, 19, 65

■, absolute rights of, >; and creative work, aeq.; classification of, I; complexity of, 75; >nless, 76-77, 81; in 56-60; in rights and es, 62; minority owner-f, 79; most ambiguous egories, 53-54; passive ship of, 62; private, 70->rotection of, 78-79; 50-51; security in, 72-tcialist fallacy regard-J

a, 54

r of costs and profits, 3-124, 126, 132

le, Sir Richard, 149

tion the, 10-13; effect

;iety, 12-14

Bill of 1832, 69

, 10; changes in, 11-12

of the United States

Industrial Commission, 1916, 128-129

Riches, meaning of, 98

Rights of Man, French Declaration of, the, 16, 52

Rights, and Functions, 8-19; doctrine of, 21 et seq, 43-44; without functions, 61

Rights of the shareholder, 75

Royalties, 23-24, 62

Royalties, and property, 70; from coal mining properties, 88; a tax upon the industry of others, 89

Sankey, Justice, 115, 117, 143,

165, 167, 168, 169 Security of income, 73-75 Service as a basis of remuneration, 25, 41-42, 85, 133 Shareholders, 91-92 Shells, cost of making, 124-125 Smith, Adam, 15, 52, 95 Social inequality, 36-37 Social reorganizations, schemes

for, 5 Social war, 40 Socialism, 53

Society, duality of modern, 135 Society, functional organization of, 52 State management, 116, 117 Steel Corporation, 116 Supervision from within, 151 Syndicalism, 130

Taxation, 22

Trusts, Report on, 23

United States, transformation

in, 65 Utilitarians, the English, 17 Utility, 16-17

* Vicious Circle," the, 43, 123-

138 Voltaire, quoted, 55

Wages and costs, 131 Wages and profits, 78 Wealth, acquisition of, 20 et

INDEX

*eq.; as foundation tor public esteem, 35-36; distribution of on basis of function, 77; fallacy of increased, 42-45; now to increase out-

fut of, 147; inequality of, 37-8; limitation of, 36-37; output of, 37-38; production and consumption of—a contrast, 77-78; waste of, 37-39 Whitley Councils, 110

Women self-supporting, 7 Worker and Spender, 77-Workers, collective rei

bility of, 154 Workers' control, 128 Workmen, as " hands," present independence o 146; responsibility c stroyed, 153-154; serva shareholders, 136-137; ment of, 152-153

The Acquisitive Society is a classic analysis of the traditional theory of individual property rights. It shows how that theory, though appropriate to the simple economic situation for which it was formulated, has resulted in the twentieth century in waste, inequality, and a struggle between classes. This book suggests as an alternative that rights of property and industrial organization should be based upon a different principle—the principle of Function. Acceptance of this principle would have certain practical effects: it would abolish proprietary rights when they are not accompanied by a discharge of obligations to society, and it would organize industry as a profession directed to the service of the public.

The many changes which have taken place in the British economy since the original publication of this work can no doubt be traced in part to the effect of Tawney's analysis, the Acquisitive Society is the only book by a living author to be included in the University of Chicago's list of 72 Great Books of Western Civilization.

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