“Well, here we all are. I told my father you smoked cigars, Mr. Morcar, and he’s sent this box. I hope they’re all right.”
“It’s very kind of Colonel Oldroyd,” said Morcar stiffly.
“Cigarettes behind you, Matthew. Pipes for you and me, GB.”
The four men were sitting in the Scape Scar loom-chamber; Morcar in a spindle-back chair by the hearth, the two Mellors on the settle, David sprawling on the oak chest by the windows. The hour was dusk, the time was the spring of 1937; the lights down the Ire Valley sparkled agreeably.
“I shall now set the ball rolling and horrify all present,” continued David, “by stating my belief that Trades Unions and Employers’ Federations are a pair of horrible legacies from the nineteenth century. I say horrible advisedly. Bodies which exist to secure material advantages for themselves by imposing regulations on somebody else are in my opinion horrible. Trades Unions and Employers’ Federations both do that. I think an industry should be organised as a whole, with two objects. One: honourable service of the community by its products. Two: honourable living for all who produce the product.”
“Well, my dear David,” said GB in his pleasant reasonable tone: “You can have your organisation any time you want, if only enough of you vote for the Labour Party. Nationalisation is the answer to your problem.”
“You and my father, GB, on opposite sides, can always be relied on to toe the party line.”
“Russia,” began Matthew Mellor ardently.
“Aye,” cried Morcar, interrupting him: “And without seeing what they’re toeing. Sorry,” he added hastily, with a glance at the Mellors: “But I understand we are to handle this problem with the gloves off.”
“By all means,” agreed GB pleasantly. “Far better. The only way to any real progress. But come now, David, you know that Trades Unions were and are absolutely necessary to combat bad working conditions and secure proper rates of pay.”
“Oh, I daresay,” agreed David. “In past and present times I agree they may have been necessary. But I’m talking about the future. Wars have been necessary sometimes in the past, but I don’t like them, I want to get rid of them. In the same way, I hate this tearing of the textile trade into halves.”
“Well, you can blame capitalism for that,” said GB with a trace of acerbity.
“Yes, that’s true. As soon as a man has to weave on another man’s loom the interests of the two are different. How are we going to get those two interests together again?”
“He’s told you,” said Matthew in a loud peevish tone: “By nationalisation.”
“It’s the only thing, David,” said GB. “You may as well admit it. I suppose your idea is some kind of Guild Socialism?” he added politely.
“Guild Socialism has been tried once already in the textile trade,” said David.
“When? Of course you’re much better informed about textile history than any of the rest of us,” said his cousin.
“Oh, in York, in the middle ages,” said David. His tone was rueful as he went on: “Unfortunately it didn’t work—or rather, it worked too well. The innumerable regulations about payments, apprentices, numbers of looms, weights and dimensions of cloth and so on, kept the York clothiers too busy keeping them to make any cloth. The York trade just decayed and vanished, and the industry journeyed west, to the tough, hard-headed individualists of the West Riding.”
“There you are, you see,” said Morcar, delighted. “That’s just what I’ve always said. Individual talent and enterprise are what make progress. Over-organisation kills. Your whole argument is vitiated by your own showing. And so is yours,” he added, turning to the Mellors.
“If you look at Russia,” began Matthew, bristling angrily, while GB replied in his reasoning tone:
“No The York failure is only one of the facts which have to be remembered. There are others, you know, Mr. Morcar, such as low wages and bad conditions. Surely everybody nowadays would rather never wear cloth again, for instance, if it involved the awful child labour of the early nineteenth century. If we can’t have a certain product without exploiting the worker, then we must give up the product.”
“That’s understood,” said David.
“Of course it’s understood,” said Morcar angrily. “I don’t want to exploit the workers, good heavens. I want to pay them a good wage for reasonable hours. But there comes a point when wages are so high and output so low that the price of my product is too high for the overseas market to pay. Then what happens?”
“The industry as a whole should decide how to tackle that problem,” said David.
“The State should decide it,” said Matthew.
“Life or death, comfort or starvation, for the workers shouldn’t depend on a private person,” amplified his brother.
“My own comfort has always depended on me,” threw in Morcar. “But the point is—”
“Your life is fascinating, Mr. Morcar, but thoroughly antisocial,” GB told him with a smile.
“I don’t see that,” said Morcar, colouring. “I’ve made these charming cloths which weren’t made in bulk before. Millions of people—not by any means necessarily rich people—wear them with pleasure. The price is lower because I’ve popularised them and given them a bigger sale. I pay proper wages and give employment to hundreds of workers.”
“But it’s all done from the wrong motive,” smiled GB.
“You must excuse me for thinking that a cloth trade is a trade to make cloth,” said Morcar, getting hot, partly with anger, partly with the unaccustomed effort to express himself on abstract subjects. “Now look,” he went on: “There’s just two things I want to make quite clear. The first one is this: About the profit motive. I don’t give a damn for the profit motive really.”
“You don’t, Mr. Morcar!” exclaimed the younger Mellor, his brown eyes sparkling with polite and amused incredulity.
“Tell me another!” invited Matthew with derision.
“Of course I want to earn a decent living wage, the same as everybody else,” said Morcar. “I want to support my family, I want to be able to travel and do as I like. But I don’t really care about heaping up an immense fortune. If I had children of course, perhaps it might be different; I should want to give them the best that could be had—same as everybody else. But profit isn’t what I really work for—I do it for the fun of the thing.”
“He means he’d be perfectly willing to run his business not for private profit,” explained David, “provided that——”
“Provided I were free to run it as I liked,” said Morcar.
“If public money and public interest are concerned, no one person can be free to run anything as he likes,” said GB, frowning disapprovingly.
“That’s just what I’m saying,” argued Morcar. “All the fun goes in a controlled industry. I like there to be lots of separate units, doing as they like.”
“I expect the Saxon thanes in the Heptarchy said that when Alfred the Great wanted to unite and organise England,” remarked GB.
“I don’t know history as you do,” said Morcar impatiently. “I’m not a scholar, I haven’t had your advantages. But I do know the textile trade. I’ve worked in it since I was sixteen. I love wool, I love colours,” said Morcar, getting excited: “Designs are a real pleasure to me. And I love managing the finance and taking a bit of a risk, I love pulling off a good order. There’ll be no fun in industry if it’s all to be nationalised, regulated, if we can’t move a step without filling up five forms, if we can’t use our own originality and judgment. You can take the profit and I shan’t call out, but take the freedom and the fun’s all gone. Nay, if industry’s to be like that I shan’t be in it. I’d rather go to sea. And if you think you won’t miss me and my like, if we leave textiles, you’re wrong, for you will. Originality, individuality, that’s the mainspring of a trade like ours. I’ve got it. Will your nationalised manufacturers have it? I say they won’t, they can’t.”
“There’s a good deal in what you say, Mr. Morcar,” said GB judicially: “But you have to remember that industry is what you describe with such horror, already, for your workmen. It’s regimented as far as they are concerned. They have no scope for originality, individuality, enterprise, in minding a machine.”
“There’s not much fun in it for us!” supplemented Matthew emphatically.
“Then there ought to be; they ought to enjoy output as much as I do.”
“No, they can’t,” objected David.
“Nathan does.”
“It’s no use pretending that dull jobs aren’t dull,” said David.
“Nationalising won’t make ’em any brighter.”
“Yes, it will, because the motive for them will be different,” said GB.
“Serving the State,” said Matthew, turning his round blue eyes resentfully on Morcar, “instead of a private employer.”
“Besides, there’ll be a chance for the workers to rise to administrative positions. There isn’t now.”
“I rose all the way by my own efforts.”
“Not quite all the way,” said GB judicially. “You had a grammar school education and some small capital—or access to it.”
“There are never many jobs at the top, think on. I’m not saying the universe is arranged perfectly,” said Morcar with a good deal of heat. “I’m just saying what I feel. Lively intelligent chaps used to like to go into industry but now they don’t, they go into the professions if they can, because they’re so hampered in industry with these everlasting regulations.” It occurred to him that even the Mellors were an example of this; the lad with brains, GB, took scholarships and went to Oxford and would go off to teach or be a Trades Union official or something; Matthew was left to go into textiles because he wasn’t clever enough for anything else. “It’s a bit hard on the textile industry,” said Morcar with feeling, considering the pair on the settle. Fearing he had made his thoughts about them too clear, he went on rapidly: “And now for my second point. I’m sick and tired, and all employers are sick and tired, of always being the villain in the piece. Whatever the employer does nowadays is wrong. If he’s a bad employer, well naturally he’s blamed, but if he’s a good employer, he doesn’t get any credit. He’s accused of interfering with the workers’ private lives, trying to vitiate the principle of collective bargaining, make the workers betray their class, and all that sort of claptrap. The fact is, you Labour chaps don’t want good employers—you’d rather have bad ones that you can make a song and dance about. Tell us what you want employers to do. Go on, now. Tell me.”
“We don’t want any private employers at all. We want industry to belong to the State. We want a classless society,” said Matthew tensely.
“And where do I come in, eh? Men of my kind, I mean? The chaps with the ability and the enterprise?”
“Nowhere!” cried Matthew in a high fierce tone, his upper lip quivering. “Such as you ought to be liquidated.”
“Well, that’s candid, anyway,” said Morcar grimly. “Now we know where we are.”
“Come, come!” said GB soothingly. “You will manage a mill, of course, in the newly nationalised industry.”
“Thank you for nothing,” said Morcar angrily. “We’re going round in circles in this argument.”
“Yes—because that’s the crux of the problem, don’t you see,” urged David. “It’s the problem of the century. The relation of the individual to the community. How to keep freedom for the individual without hurting the community, and how to serve the community without hurting the individual. In totalitarian states the community exploits the individual. In capitalist states individuals are free to exploit each other. How are we to combine the two objects of industry? How are we to combine freedom and security? These are the real problems of the twentieth century.”
“I wish you joy of solving them,” said Morcar.
“Well, I mean to have a damn good try,” said David. “The textile trades in northern England were the first to be mechanised, the first to start the Industrial Revolution. I should like the wool textile trade to be the first to solve the problem in the new social industrial revolution.”
“You’re daft, lad,” said Morcar cheerfully.
“We agree on that, anyway,” said Matthew sourly.
“But it’s a nice kind of daftness,” said GB in his pleasant reasonable tone. “He means well.”
“We all mean well,” said Morcar.
“I’m not so sure of that,” growled Matthew.
“It depends whom we mean well to” said GB. He avoided looking at Morcar, while Matthew glared at him.
“Oh, to hell with them,” thought Morcar. But he felt uneasy when he saw that David too was avoiding his eyes, gazing down the Ire Valley with a grieved and thoughtful air.