“The deeper cause of the oppression of the factory operative and of the terrible degradation and pauperisation of the agricultural labourer, was not the mere fact that machines were invented which multiplied the efficiency of labour, but the previous monopolisation, in the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, of the land and of education. The great change then took place in the current philosophy of life, which made the whole of the governing classes of England, with exceptions practically negligible, accept with avidity the idea merely more clearly formulated by political economists, that the highest duty of man was to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market.”

I

THE saying that “man shall not live by bread alone” has been in familiar circulation so long and on authority so good that it is remarkable how slightly it has affected the general conduct of life. Bread and the things symbolised by bread in the saying are and must remain the first care of men, but they are first only in the sense of being preliminary, the necessary conditions of the main and supreme business of life. Yet modern civilisation as a whole has shown no manifest sign of a conception of life which requires that the chief interest and energy of men should be directed to ends of a higher order than that of maintaining physical existence. This fact is to some extent obscured from us by the elaborate development of commercial organisation, so that multitudes of men are engaged in enterprises and vocations apparently so removed from the actual business of clothing, feeding and housing other men that they are not aware of being connected with it at all. Yet the entire structure of commerce rests upon the requirement that certain primary physical needs of men must be met. That men shall be fed, clothed, sheltered, provided with heat and light,—here is the source of commerce. Around these primary needs certain other demands have gathered—for elaboration in food and clothing, comfort in the home, and the like; and a multitude of commercial activities of a secondary kind have been set afoot and added to the sufficiently complex business of providing society with the first necessities of life. This secondary life of commerce is mainly parasitical and feeds upon the other, and its vitality depends as much upon the success with which demands are ingeniously created as upon the power to produce the supply profitably. Added to this vast business of production is an enormous machinery of distribution; and in these or in financial operations, originally derived from them but now largely controlling them, we are all more or less directly engaged. There are a few professional occupations which remain outside this classification, which (to use Carlyle’s phrase) “are boarded and lodged on the industry” of the community to which they belong,—the doctor, the clergyman, the lawyer, the teacher, the actor, the artist, the journalist; yet so strong and imperious is the commercial tradition that the non-productive vocations are required to justify their existence by providing the inspiration, the health, the recreation and the knowledge necessary to the effectual and prosperous working of the economic machine. Society seems (outside the “leisure class”) feverishly engaged in keeping itself alive.

Yet if its only purpose were to keep itself alive, it would not need to be so busy. But to the first impulse of production and exchange has been added another interest, that of making profit and accumulating wealth. In the process of exchange the opportunity was found of securing a margin of personal advantage; and gradually this margin of personal advantage has become the chief incentive to commercial enterprise. It does not belong to our purpose to trace the history of this change; it is enough that we should observe the fact that the profit-seeking motive has become the real driving force of modern commerce, and that historical circumstances, such as the introduction of large scale processes, the world-wide ramifications of commerce through improved facilities of travel and transportation, the invention of the telephone and the telegraph, the growth of trusts, combines, and monopolies have made possible fabulous increments and accumulations of profit.^[12]

The effect of this upon a generation habituated to the profit-making temper has been to set up the multi-millionaire as the type of perfection toward which aspiring youth should be encouraged to strive. We go into business not to feed and clothe each other, but to make money; and since from the nature of the case only comparatively few of us have the capacity and the opportunity to become commercial supermen, the rest of us remain in business to feed and clothe ourselves, or (as we say) to “make a living.” Commerce, which owes its origin to social need, has almost wholly lost the social motive. If we are not making money ourselves, we hire ourselves out as the money-making tools of others; and while some of us aim at larger profits, the rest of us hope for larger wages. The economic motive is universal, and it expresses itself exclusively in the pecuniary standard. “The Almighty Dollar” is more than a gratuitous exercise in satire, it describes the spirit of an age.

Much has been heard since the war began of the profiteer, on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the quarrel. But the profiteer is not a phenomenon peculiar to war-time. Like the poor, he is always with us; the war has but served to reveal him more vividly in his proper character. His peculiar crime is that he makes the extremity of his country the opportunity of private gain. But what he does in time of war, he does no less sedulously in time of peace. His sin takes a deeper dye in war-time because the national need is greater, and his opportunity is much enlarged. Yet the story of how “big business” has endeavoured, and has largely succeeded in the endeavour to control the legislative machinery of the nations in its own interests in normal times, is a very deplorable and shameful chapter in modern history. It is, of course, no new thing that legislatures should show themselves tender to economic interests; there is even yet no legislature in the world which is not more careful of the rights of property than of the welfare of men—except, perhaps, in Russia. By a curious paradox, those who most jealously guarded the sanctities of property, were once the implacable critics of commercial enterprise, but that phase has passed away. Landed aristocracies, no less than bourgeois manufacturers, have been so seduced by the lure of large and swift gain that the old line of demarcation has disappeared; and the doctrine of property rights has been invoked to secure the sanctity of the capitalist system of industry. The “governing classes” in Europe and America, who to-day are the economically powerful, have become an unholy alliance which exploits the state in the interests of trade. It is not the English brewers and publicans only who say, “our trade, our politics,” though these particular people may be the only ones who have the effrontery to say so in public. It is always the profiteer’s cry; and whenever in the past a piece of social legislation has been introduced in England, he raises the scare cry that “capital will leave the country,” which simply means that he esteems his profits more highly than he does his country. He is the author of the inspiring doctrine that “trade follows the flag”; which prostitutes national idealism to the sordid business of profiteering; and so deeply has this poison entered into our life that Christian missions to the non-Christian world are frequently commended on the ground that they do pioneering work for the trader.

All this is, of course, trite and commonplace; and ever since the early part of the nineteenth century there has been a continuous and increasing note of protest against the modern commercial doctrine of competitive profit-making. It must, however, be admitted that the protest has not gained much headway against the evil; on the contrary the evil has, during this same period, grown by leaps and bounds, so that the earlier twentieth century witnessed its supreme achievements. Mr. John D. Rockefeller is the tragical culmination of the process in our generation; and there is no reason to suppose that he is the last, or greatest figure of the line of Croesus. Nor will the subordination of life to the business of pecuniary gain be effectually stayed until we seriously take in hand the profiteering ideology which governs all our thought and conduct. The main ingredient in the social heredity of this generation is the profit-making impulse; that is the atmosphere which it has breathed and which constitutes its habitual universe of discourse. Art and religion alike have been infected with the spirit; the current repute of an artist is fixed by the prices which his pictures command; and the prosperity of a Christian congregation is judged by its statistical returns. It is required of education that it shall minister primarily to commercial efficiency; and the outcry against the study of the classics, and the demand for a more exclusively scientific and technical education reflect the essentially commercial orientation of our educational outlook. It is, perhaps, the most deplorable aspect of this latter tendency that it so often becomes vocal in persons whose academic training should have provided them with a more discriminating view of life. Even in the universities, which should be the impregnable citadels of spiritual idealism, there is an inclination to capitulate to the monstrous and deadly doctrine that the end of national life is commercial supremacy.

Commerce originated in social need and should be a social service; nor indeed has its perversion to profit-making prevented it from rendering substantial services to society. Apart from its provision of the necessities of life, many of its inventions have added much to the wealth of life independently of their immediate purposes. The unique facilities for travel which we moderns enjoy owe their origins in the first instance to the demand for better commercial transport. Stephenson’s first locomotive was intended to haul coal trucks. The increasing socialisation of life in our time owes much to the economic motive that has popularised the telegraph and the telephone; and the supreme achievement of Mr. Henry Ford is not a miracle of standardised production, but the contribution which his car has made to the socialisation of the farmer’s life. Our knowledge of the earth’s surface and its peoples, and through this, one of the foundations of the coming internationalism, we owe greatly to the enterprise of the trader. For a hundred great services beyond its ministry to the elementary human needs of food and clothing, we are debtors to commerce and to those merchant venturers in many ages who laid its broad modern foundations. Yet just because we acknowledge a manifest debt even to profiteering commercial enterprise, it is the more necessary that we should assail its modern ascendency over life, and its own perversion to individual aims, and point out the havoc which its more modern developments have wrought. It would be foolish and undiscriminating to say that it is the sole source of our social confusion, but it is simple truth to say that it has become its chief direct occasion; and the result is to be traced to the circumstances which have changed commerce from its essential function as a great social service to a scramble for private gain. The restoration of commerce to its own proper place and office is bound up with a recovery of a true view of life as a whole, with a new understanding of those things other and greater than bread by which it is ordained that men shall live.

II

The paramountcy of the economic motive is no modern phenomenon, and it would be a mistake to identify it exclusively with the modern commercial civilisation. Its modern beginnings are no doubt to be found in the appearance of the small merchant class in the era of craftsmanship; and the difference between him and the merchant prince of the twentieth century is mainly a difference of scale—this difference being chiefly due to the high mobility of property when it assumes the form of money, and the increased facilities for mobilising it through the development of the credit system and the improvement in the means of communication. The fundamental impulses and instincts which determine the social order are broadly identical throughout history. That is why Marx’ economic interpretation of history is probably the most luminous and fruitful clue to the course of human affairs that historical study has yet yielded to us. We are not justified in assuming (as some have done) that it is the only valid clue; still less are those disciples of Marx justified who have developed his theory of historical interpretation into the metaphysical dogma of economic determinism. That economic factors have controlled the general drift of human affairs in the past does not necessarily mean that they are predestined to do so in perpetuity.

Yet even those who most vehemently denounce the existing profit-making organisation of society are still obsessed by the notion that social transformation is chiefly an affair of economic revolution. Their thought appears to run wholly within the economic circle. It is in some respects the strangest paradox of modern times that the Russian people with their long and unique tradition of spirituality should have been so completely captured (to all appearance) by the doctrinaire materialism of the Marxian school and have accepted the view that the Kingdom of Heaven comes by a proletarian capture of economic power. The circumstance is, of course, capable of explanation, for in Russia, as elsewhere, political power has gone with economic power; and the Russian revolutionary knew what the Frenchman of 1789 did not know, namely, that no political revolution could be complete or permanent which was not an economic revolution at the same time. That, therefore, the Russian revolution should have been primarily economic is not strange—since Marx had lived and written in the interval between 1789 and 1917; but it remains a somewhat singular fact that the spiritual idealism of Feodor Dostoievsky and Lyof Tolstoi have been so little manifest during these last surprising months. This preoccupation with economic change is characteristic of the attitude of those everywhere who are most urgent in their endeavour after social transformation. The advocates of the National Guild Movement are never weary of reiterating that political power belongs to those who wield economic power, and of urging that the workers should make themselves masters of the economic resources of society as the necessary preliminary of laying hold of the political power.^[13] This may be a sound counsel of immediate strategy; but it is full of disaster if it is treated as a permanent principle of social practice. For it leaves us still within the vicious circle where the purely economic interests are paramount. Whensoever we consent to the statement that the one thing needful to society is a more equitable distribution of the wealth which its industry produces, we are still within the same hopeless universe of discourse. A more equitable distribution of wealth is needed; so much is obvious. But having secured it, what then? Will the City of God then come down from heaven? Or are we content with the hope of a redeemed society which goes no farther than a vision of a community of healthy and contented animals? It is certain that, so long as our thought of social regeneration moves chiefly within the existing framework of wealth production and wealth distribution, our effort will create a range of new social problems of an acute and probably less soluble kind. That we should labour to humanise and to socialise the existing commercial and industrial organisation goes without saying; but there is no certainty that after we have done so, the same economic pre-occupation will not still fill our minds. It is not enough to work for change that only transfers the power to produce and to enjoy wealth from the hands of a small minority to those of the great majority. That is indeed only change, and not necessarily progress. There will be fewer people with more butter on their bread than they need; and fewer people with less than they need; and that will be something gained. But it does not necessarily follow that we will not still be chiefly concerned about bread and butter, and whatever elaborations upon that simple theme that our enlarged resources may tempt us to seek.

This is not in any sense an argument for spending less energy upon the urgent task of accomplishing the radical economic changes which social well-being plainly requires; it is rather a renewed plea that we should ask ourselves whether we are moving conformably with a vision of man and life as a whole. Whether we rank as reformists or revolutionists we should endeavour to see the evils we hate and the manner and matter of the remedy in the light of a philosophy of comprehensive and coherent human good. The scheme of social insurance established in Great Britain before the war was a response to a definite social need; but it is now no longer open to question, that both in respect of its content, and the method of its institution, its promoters failed to appreciate the precise nature and conditions of the need; and the final solution of the problem which evoked the measure has been confused and retarded. And generally, so long as we think exclusively of social advance in economic terms, out of relation to their context in life, we are subordinating the greater thing to the lesser, and are in continual danger of postponing the greater thing into an impossible future. We become and remain virtual opportunists (even though we call ourselves revolutionaries!), only moving spasmodically and incoherently within the very circle of institutions and tendencies which have wrought our present confusion, until we have gained that social perspective in which the economic requirements of life take their proper place.

Properly understood, this place is a relatively humble one. In our analysis of personality in the previous chapter, four major instincts were defined. The first, the instinct of self-preservation has to do with the maintenance of physical life; the second, the third and the fourth, as they appear in their full development, are mainly concerned with the spiritual expression of life. The first is the necessary basis of the other three—the foundation, as it were, upon which they build; but the real significance and joy of life are associated predominantly with the impulses of creativeness, sociability, and reflection. Now, the economic business of life has to do almost exclusively with the instinct of self-preservation; its function ends with the provision of the conditions and materials of a wholesome physical existence. Yet to-day, the economic interests absorb virtually the whole of life; the ultimate interests of life—that range of things which we may broadly call spiritual, if they are not subordinated to and absorbed in the economic motive, are consigned to the odds and ends of time which we are able to spare from the sovereign business of making a fortune or making a living. The distinctive human interests of religion, thought, art, and recreation are no more than occasional alternatives which enable us to some extent to repair the wear and tear of the ceaseless economic drive. The real revolution we need is the general conviction that to put it roughly—as the kitchen is to the home, so the economic interest is to the rest of life. The kitchen is indispensable to the home; and there are exceptional persons to whom it is the most important part of the home. Yet it is no more than a strictly subordinate part of the home. When we have finished with the business of procuring and eating bread, then the real business of life begins. It is indeed necessary that the kitchen should be in tune with home, and that the work of producing and distributing the primary necessities of life should be organised so as to be consistent with the spiritual realisation of life. We can, of course, no longer admit a dualism of material and spiritual; for the spiritual may and must infuse the material and subordinate it to its own ends. To-day the material has made the spiritual ancillary to itself; and the soul is the drudge of the body. The radical problem of the future is how to reverse this position and to enthrone the spiritual.

What the spiritual realisation of life implies we can no more than dimly guess. We may speak of love and art; but the potentialities of social and creative achievement in human nature have yet to be explored. A material civilisation has largely kept mankind in a state of arrested development on every side save that which has to do with the conditions of its physical life. Psychology is busily, though not yet very successfully, explaining that hidden world of life which lies beyond the frontiers of consciousness; there are (and this is virtually all we can say) vast possibilities and powers latent within us of which we have only occasional and indistinct intimations. We have tested the power and the range of those endowments of which we are already aware; and the triumphs of art and science show how nobly and richly our nature is equipped. Nevertheless, all that art and science have yet accomplished are but the promise of that glory that is still to be. But the full release of all our powers—known and unknown—is contingent upon a social setting more richly human, that is to say, more spiritual in temper, and outlook, than mankind has hitherto known. This social setting will come when we make up our minds to break the tyranny of the economic motive and to deliver life from the infamous despotism of things. No man knows to what heights of creative achievement and personal self-realisation we may not attain when once the economic preoccupation which swallows our best energies is dissipated, and we are free to become all that we have it in us to be, when powers of fellowship and creation now inert and unknown are awakened in us, and we press on to those peaks of attainment of which prophets have spoken and which angels have desired to see.

III

The task before us, therefore, is the deliverance of life from the ascendency of the economic motive; and at bottom this means the redemption of commerce from the obsession of profit-making. In other words, commerce must be conceived and conducted as a social service. It is true that in the early days of modern commercialism, the principle of competition was regarded as the heaven-sent panacea for human ills. Men became dithyrambic about laissez-faire, and though they perforce admitted that the growth of the commercial system had caused certain glaring evils, yet they maintained that these were no more than the inevitable accidents of a process of readjustment. Let the system only work out its inherent logic to the end, and there will be a golden age for everybody. The system has had a fair trial; and so far from achieving the results confidently predicted by its advocates, it has failed hopelessly to provide even a tolerably secure and sufficient subsistence for the great mass of men. It is indeed difficult to see how it could be otherwise or how those who uphold it could have expected a different result. There is no doubt that the system has stimulated the production of wealth; and this its protagonists accurately foresaw; but they apparently supposed that the distribution of wealth would look after itself. It had indeed done so, in a fashion which has deprived the mass of toilers of that security of physical subsistence which is a necessary condition of liberty and of the liberation of the spiritual impulses. So far from adequately fulfilling the elementary services of providing men with a steady and reasonable supply of the necessities of life, it has made life itself insecure and precarious.

How this situation has come about may be stated summarily in a few words: (a) The pursuit of profit tends to lower the cost of production, while it raises the price of the product. Chief among the costs of production is the payment of labour,—that is to say, wages. The result of this tendency is to depress the income of the worker and at the same time to raise his expenditure and since there is no limit fixed at either end the standard of life is in constant danger of being lowered beneath the point of reasonable subsistence. It often happens that wages show an increase over given periods of time; but it is an increase of money-wages and not of real wages; since the period of wage-increase is generally also a period of a disproportionate increase in the price of commodities. Some check has been placed upon the decrease of wages by Trade Union action; but this is offset by the partial elimination of competition in the markets through the growth of Trusts and Combines, and the consequent upward tendency of prices.

(b) This insecurity is accentuated by the fact that the maintenance of profits frequently require a check upon productivity in order to tighten the market by reducing the supply of commodities. It is estimated that in America this interference with production has kept productivity down anywhere between twenty-five and fifty per cent. below its possible maximum. This obstruction is effected by such devices as the diminution of working hours, dismissal of workmen, and periodic stoppages of work.

(c) A further element of insecurity is to be found in the circumstance that labour is itself treated as a commodity, subject to market fluctuations, its price governed by the relation of supply to demand, like any other commodity. In order to prevent an undue rise in the price of labour, the industrial system has evolved a reserve of labour, commonly called unemployment. In normal times, there is in every trade a chronic margin—varying in amount—of unemployed men; and no man knows when his turn may come to fall into the reserve. It naturally happens that the less efficient man goes first—the man least equipped to face the demoralising effects of unemployment. The result is that he degenerates into an unemployable and swells the volume of the human driftwood of our social order.

(d) Insecurity arises also from the unquestioned and unchallenged authority of the owners or representatives of the invested capital, against whose verdicts there is no appeal. The worker is at the absolute mercy of the master or the foreman; and he can usually find work only at the sacrifice of his freedom. Should he display any signs of restiveness and be dismissed, the growth of Trusts and Employers’ Associations has made it possible to deny him employment within the area over which such bodies exercise control.

This takes no account of the dehumanising and despiritualising effects of the machine industry under the conditions of the profit system. That is an aggravation of the situation which must be considered in another connection. Here we are concerned to note the failure of commerce under a profit system to provide the conditions of security of life for the mass of men. And not the least disastrous consequence of this failure is the deep social schism it has engendered. It has created the criminal antithesis of great wealth and great poverty in great cities, and the virtually open warfare between capital and labour. The investor and the employer are bent on larger dividends upon the outlay of capital; the worker is seeking a larger return upon his outlay of labour. In the struggle the worker is at a disadvantage. For while capital and labour, the producers, are fighting, the casualties of the struggle are chiefly among the consumers. But the consumers are mostly composed of the labourer and the tenement-dweller, that is to say, the working-class itself. So that the worker in the struggle is divided against himself. If he is successful in his struggle for higher wages, the advantage is lost through the increased price of commodities; for the employer pays the higher wages out of higher prices. In the issue, the worker is caught in the vicious circle of a continuous struggle against himself, which to dependence and insecurity adds an unending confusion.

No question is here raised as to the legitimacy of profit; we are concerned only to point out the consequences of a system which permits an unlimited expansion of profits; and it should be clear that the redemption of commerce and its restoration to the status of the social service it should be, are to be wrought first by imposing a limit upon profit-making.

This requires two measures:

First, the production and distribution of the necessities of life should be definitely placed outside the sphere of competition. The British Labour Party in its memorandum on reconstruction, proposes that the coal-supply shall be so organised that the ordinary householder shall be able to have his coal delivered at his door, at a uniform price all over the country and all through the year—just as he buys postage stamps. But the principle should be extended to all the essential commodities. Flour, milk, coal, meat, wool, cotton and their immediate derivatives should be withdrawn from the circle of competitive commerce, and be no more subject to the fluctuations of a market manipulated in the interest of profit-making than the water-supply is. There is no reason why the supply of these primary articles should not be so regulated as to bear a reasonably constant proportion to the demand. For those who argue that this would dislocate the customary economic processes, a two-fold answer may be returned. First, that the customary economic processes deserve to be dislocated; and second, that the only possible justification of the customary economic processes is derived from an economic theory which is no longer relevant to the facts of life. In point of actual fact, the standardisation of prices has become in recent years increasingly common—the elimination of competition by the formation of trusts and combines has had the result of fixing prices with a considerable rigidity; and during the war, it has been done on a very large scale. In neither case is it suggested by any one that it has had a deleterious effect upon commerce. In this proposal for the standardisation of prices, there is nothing new; it is simply a revival of the mediÆval custom of the justum pretium—according to which buyers and sellers and market authorities together determined a price for each commodity which should be equally fair to the producer and the consumer; and a return to this practice—with such modifications as modern conditions require—is opposed only by those who still hold to the curious illusion that Adam Smith spoke the last word upon this subject.^[14]

Second: A limit should be placed upon profits, dividends, incomes and fortunes. This may be done by taxation, inheritance duties and other devices already familiar to the managers of public finance. We should agree to make it cease to be worth anyone’s while to exploit the public, by fixing rigid bounds to the accumulation of private wealth; and this we may do with a good conscience. For all wealth is socially produced; and the society which produces it has the first claim upon it. This is a position which can be challenged only by those who still hold that the possession of property confers upon its possessors a “divine right” to take the lion’s share of the wealth produced by the industry of the whole community.

It will be maintained that measures of this kind will take away the incentive to industry and commercial progress. But it may be pointed out in reply that the economic end of British life so far from being disastrously undermined by wholesale interference with economic laws during the war, seems to have been in a rather healthier condition than it had ever known previously. Profits were limited; prices were standardised; the old competitive basis was largely suspended. Virtually all those incentives of self-regard and gain which we have been told were essential to economic development were put out of business. Yet production reached an unprecedented point, both in quality and in amount. Another incentive was indeed operative; but this incentive was not of the personal kind. The peril of the nation in the great hazard of war evoked a social solidarity which proved a more powerful incentive to industry than the self-regarding instincts ever provided. This is our sufficient answer to those who still hold to the cynical superstition that the only motives on which we can rely in dealing with human nature are those of selfishness. What is needed to stimulate effort and devotion is the sense of direct participation in a great social task; and there is no reason to suppose that the systematic education of a couple of generations may not make this same social idealism the normal driving force of national effort. It is no doubt true that, as things are, only such a challenge to patriotic feeling as war brings, could achieve such a result; but it is our business to discover the stimuli which will make this same intensity of devotion a permanent fact.

But, it may be said, the economic conditions of wartime are abnormal, and economic “laws” must be disregarded in the stress of national crisis. This is, of course, partly true and partly untrue. So far as production is concerned, the only change that war requires is greater speed and greater volume; the difference is one of degree and not at all of kind. It is only in the region of finance that war-time conditions work havoc with economic “laws”; and the experience of war-time has taught us the useful lesson that these “laws” have no permanent character. They are on the contrary contingent and derivative affairs, being no more than general statements concerning economic tendencies which are set afoot and sustained by the ways in which men habitually act. If men could be induced to act differently, then we should require to formulate a new set of “laws.” The greatest revelation of the war in many respects is the tremendous achievement of industrial production in Great Britain under the influence of a social emotion, and without any of the common incentives of personal advantage. It may be conceded that this social emotion was to some extent stimulated by a group antagonism, but in the main it was the love of and the desire to preserve—in spite of its faults—that particular social synthesis described as British that lay behind this great performance. And once more let it be repeated that the peril of war is not the only organ of social vision.

It is not pretended that commerce will be redeemed automatically by placing a limitation upon the profit-motive; but without such a limitation, it cannot be redeemed at all. It must enter into our scheme to provide means of kindling the social vision which will transform commerce into a social service; and this implies certain changes of temper and method in the system of education. There is no reason why we should not come to regard the business of feeding and clothing the people as much a department of the public service as that of educating or that of providing them with water or the time of day, or of transmitting their correspondence; and there is no reason for supposing that a right education will not provide in time as effectual a spur to patriotism as the peril of war.

IV

It is, however, not enough to standardise the cost of living and to impose a limit upon profits; for we have still no adequate guarantee against a lowering of the standard of life. It does not necessarily follow that the surplus profits will go to the raising of wages, or that standardised prices will make for a sufficient living. It is necessary to define a minimum standard of life. The demand for a minimum wage is a beginning in this direction, but under the profit system, the minimum wage defined as a money-wage is something of a snare. For so long as prices tend to fly upward, no minimum wage can effectually prevent a depression of the standard of life. It is only as we succeed in fixing a minimum “real wage” which takes account of the cost of living that we approach a satisfactory estimate. But, again, under the present system—the relation of supply to demand in the labour market will render even a minimum “real wage” exceedingly precarious.

The only satisfactory solution of this difficulty is to dissolve the connection between work and wages. The assumption that men will not work unless they must is not true; but it is the truth that while men are compelled to work by the coercion of fear—whether of hunger or of punishment—they will not do the most or the best work of which they are capable. That workmen nowadays are apt to do as little as they can for as much as they can get is not to be disputed; and organised labour combines with its demand for larger wages another demand for fewer working hours, and under certain conditions imposes restrictions on output. But this is simply the answer in kind which labour returns to capital. It is the vicious sequel of a vicious system. Capital buys in the cheapest and sells in the dearest market; and labour having been brought up in the same school does the same thing. If capital tries to extort as much as it can out of labour, it is not to be wondered at that labour should take a hand in the game.

We have to recognise that the best workmanship requires two conditions; first—that the worker shall have a direct interest in the thing he produces, second, that he shall enjoy the freedom which comes from a sense of guaranteed security. To the former we shall have to return at a later stage in the argument. Concerning the latter, we have seen how the present system exposes the worker to a grave and vexatious insecurity. It is stupid to suppose that men will habitually put their best into their work under such conditions as these. The whole system is intrinsically demoralising to all whom it touches. It is demoralising to the employer because he comes to regard the worker as a mere “hand,” a tool; and that is a frame of mind which saps his own manhood. It is demoralising to the worker because it treats his physical energy as a thing to be bought and sold at a price, the highest price he can extort; and since a man’s labour is actually inseparable from his person, it reduces him to a condition of servility, which, within a certain limit, is as real as that of a chattel slave. He has neither independence nor security. Over against this state of things, we must affirm that a man’s subsistence shall be guaranteed to him as a customary practice, in good weather and in bad, in sickness and in health, in work or unemployment. The British Labour Party’s proposal of a national minimum standard of life universally enforced is certainly one of the cornerstones of a wholesome social order. The cynic will probably say that this will be the paradise of the slacker; and no doubt there would be some persons base enough to evade their share of productive labour. But we can count upon the public opinion of a society in which freedom has created a new sense of social obligation and a new quality of fellowship, to make a slacker’s life not worth living. It may very fairly be doubted whether at the worst the slacker who remained incorrigible would constitute so great a tragedy—either in number or in kind—or constitute so clear evidence of the bankruptcy of a system as do the innumerable and increasing derelicts of the present industrial order.

These three measures, the standardisation of the cost of living, the limitation of profits, the institution of a minimum standard of life are necessary to the redemption of commerce. For to redeem commerce, we must in the first instance, take away from it the power and the opportunity of exploiting life for the ends of private gain. But this process secures another result. It ensures for the mass of the people a reasonable security and sufficiency of physical subsistence, so that the pre-occupation with self-preservation need no longer arrest their spiritual development. We establish the foundations of freedom—freedom from fear, from anxiety, from the autocracy of the employer or his agent—and confer upon the ordinary man a new status, in which we may with good hope expect to find him susceptible to a social vision powerful to evoke his devotion and to bring his will into captivity to its obedience. Commerce and industry will then no longer be a vast scramble of competition and exploitation, but a generous social co-operation.