This book has concerned itself with things material — with the supply of the material wants of humanity. Man, through the ages, has sought health, wealth, and happiness. Health does not of itself bring wealth, and happiness does not necessarily follow the obtaining of either health or wealth, or both of them. Happiness is something for the individual, but, whatever happiness may or may not be, surely it is more apt to grow out of health and wealth than out of illness and poverty.
There is a fairly general agreement that if civilization means anything at all it should mean the opportunity to every man, woman, and child on earth to have at least decent shelter, food, and clothing, with as much over as individual merit may warrant. Unless that much be accomplished, we may say that civilization is a failure. It matters not what books may be written, what buildings put up, what works of art created — nothing matters, if the opportunity be not given for any one who wills to live as befits a human being.
The world has been baffled by poverty. Sometimes it has been so baffled that is has made a virtue of poverty, and men have set up that they were proud to be poor. The only escape for poverty was held out by religion promising Heaven as a surcease from sorrow, or by various ill-thought-out or half-thought-out communistic theories, which, while not promising wealth, could promise an equality of misery. Trained thought has avoided the one big question of the world. Indeed, anything that had to do with the actual provision of goods — with the making easier of the lot of what was called the “common man” — had been charged with having the taint of commercialism. It was noble enough to talk about alleviation of poverty, but quite ignoble to do anything about it in a concrete way.
Only now are we beginning to realize that any study which has not as its end the welfare of the common man is not worthwhile. Take science, philosophy, and religion. It is idle to say that one deals with reality more than the other. They all deal with realities. Facts are not all on one plane. Science is not limitedly material. Religion is not limitedly spiritual. Matter and spirit are terms we use to make distinctions which perhaps do not exist. Yet science and philosophy entirely, and religion to a degree, have largely kept aloof from any materialism which had to do with anything so commonplace as bread and butter.
The coming of the industrial era, although it rapidly increased actual wealth, made a new problem in its distribution, and while it made the rich richer, at first it made the poor still poorer. The production by power and machinery was far greater than by hand, but the industrialists had no conception that power and machinery were destined to make a new world. They thought in the old terms of hand production, and many of them still think in those terms. Even reformers thought in the same terms. We had the golden age of oratory — smothering with words the cruelties of exploitation. Most of our economic and social conceptions date from this age. There was much talk of “good employers” and “bad employers,” and the disposition of the employer had a deal to do with the welfare of his employees. No one thought of the employer as other than a man who “gave” jobs. For a long time, it did not occur to any one that the employee was quite as necessary to the employer as was the employer to the employee — that the relation was not sentimental. A manufacturer who ventured to correct the worst evils incident to production was set down as a “philanthropist” — that word having come to designate a slightly senile and eccentric old gentleman who went about distributing unmerited aid to people lacking the self-respect to refuse it.
Men talked of democracy and associated it with liberty, but whenever they obtained self-government — which was supposed somehow to be the same as democracy and liberty — immediately they sought autocracy under some other name. They wanted the state to regulate under the conception that it could take the place of individual leadership and that industry, being a new thing, needed regulation, when the truth was that industry had not found its function and needed freedom to find itself. The multitude of laws which we have today — a wilderness of statutes and ordinances — does not indicate an increase in men’s rights and liberties. Doubtless, mankind’s liberties will be greatly expanded by growth of character and by recognition of the need for economic liberty (not freedom from economic law, but liberty within economic life). But we are being daily made aware that while anybody can make a statute, it takes a wise man to make one that roots in basic rights. Very often a statute hinders progress because progress itself will cause some readjustment, and people are naturally averse to readjustment even for progress.
And then, curiously, legislation seems capable, in whatever form it may be cast, of working oppositely from the intention which commanded the best support for it. The tariff began in an effort to protect jobs of workingman and render the country self-dependent; it ended in the disgraceful spectacle of non-competitive trusts. From a fence to keep out harm, the tariff became a stockade which kept out the benefits of fair competition. The principle had elements which commended it to honest intelligence, but the administration of it became an oppression.
One could fill a volume with the legislation which has passed because of its good promise, but which once passed has been manipulated for private advantage against the public rights.
But all this time, while we were floundering and it was being truly said that government had failed, the men who put work before talk were working, and they were working with such large results that they have discovered the real meaning of power and machinery — that it was brought into this world to free man, not to enslave him, and that there is a new morality which is active and not merely passive.
A man can make a soap, or a phonograph, or a car, or a gas, or a magazine, and he can say, “I want to make the best article I can, of equal quality all the time, easily procurable always, and always so satisfactory that people will never want anything but my product.”
Would you say that he was showing morality? No, you would say that he was just showing sound business sense. But that is morality.
If the man had said, “I want to make a soap that will cheat and injure every purchaser,” we should not stop to consider his morality. We should know that he was insane.
Morality is doing the sound thing in the best way; it is the larger view and the longer view applied to life. For what we are doing is not making this or that: we are making life, and the opportunity of life, and the conditions of life; and the measure of our morality is the measure of our wisdom — how well are we doing it?
Let us say of life at least what we say of soap: “We want to create for everybody the best life conditions possible, a high level of opportunity — a life that people will be glad to live.” Then we are applying sound sense to life.
The advantage of what we call moral is that it is natural; it represents the way that life must go if it is to go at all. The good is natural. Morality is a part of good management. The good manager may resent the word as applied to his work, he may retort that it is only common sense. But that is morality — the plain, practical development of life according to its nature.
The social effect of this morality finds expression in devoting business to the service of the whole people instead of to service of the few. The expression, “spirit of service,” sounds idealistic. The spirit of service is just a knowledge that no man can survive, no industry can survive, no government can survive, no system of civilization can survive which does not continually give service to the greatest possible number. The only interest one can have in anything is the service one gets from it or gives to it. As normal, creative individuals, we are satisfied only with the service we render in our work; as members of civilization or government, we are satisfied only with the measure of service they render us.
And this service does not demand altruism. It only demands that enlightenment replace unenlightenment. Altruism clogs progress; it blocks the way of the presently possible by insisting on the presently impossible. For instance, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions make unemployment and destitution in old age more probable by charging the daily product with an extra load which limits consumption and therefore limits production to a scale which prevents the advantages to be had from large uninterrupted production.
But let this be made clear. There is no way out from poverty except through work. The world has tried everything but work. And the hardest of all work must come in the management. Most of the so-called “economic” problems would be completely solved if industries were managed by men who know industry. The experts, research men, and easy-chair philosophers are making economic mysteries out of nothing. There would be no economic mystery in a ditch-digger failing as a surgeon. The same kind of nonsense exists when mere money-brokers endeavour to manage productive business.
The majority of “labour troubles” are caused by managers who have no first-hand knowledge of labour. They are “boss troubles,” usually, and can be permanently settled by a new kind of manager — one who knows the job so well that no walking delegate, or any one else, can tell him how it should be done. A man who must be told his own business by someone outside of it will render his best service by quickly getting out of business.
Not only labour troubles, but the difficulty of industry in keeping pace with possible improvements and increase of service, come from this cause. Industry exists to make things that people use. But when managed by men who know nothing of the factory, whose interest in confined to the balance sheet, its principal product becomes dividends. That leads to those economic situations about which whole libraries are written. They are not economic at all. There is nothing in business itself that necessitates failure; but men who enter business unprepared by training in its special points take failure with them. Business never fails; only men do that. The way into business is through the door of work.
I am sometimes asked whether it is better to go into business for oneself, or take employment. Employment as a career competes with private business in a way which few realize. Employment now offers a career such as men sought in their own business and often failed to attain. The very growth of business has tended to give employment a status which even business ownership did not have fifty years ago. A great deal of nonsense had been written about the freedom of the workman under the old system. The old-time guild system held nothing of the ideal. The union rules and repressive tradition of that system weighed heavily alike upon master and man, and led to little satisfaction for the individual and to no prosperity for society.
The urge to create has never been so heartily encouraged nor its field so widely extended, as in modern industrial employment. Take the world of design, as only one example: the best the past has left us in industry is its designs, but the world of design has expanded illimitably since the arrival of industry with its extension of service and its encouragement of individual effort. Where there was one designer set free to do his natural work, there are now hundreds. And even if some modern designs are not good, it does not follow that all the old designs were good. Some of them were very bad. And even if all our modern designs were bad, it would still be better to have our own designs than slavishly and uncreatively to follow designs of a previous generation.
What we are achieving today is a greater freedom than was ever before possible — we know that we can make the possession of the mere necessities of life an incident. In our own factories we find that five days a week are enough to give our production — that we can get more production in five days of eight hours each than we could get in a six- or seven-day week of ten hours a day. That extra day of leisure is going to bring large results, for the people will learn more about living, will have time to expand their sense of need, and therefore will increase their consumption.
The world can have what it wants of goods if the spirit of service — the wage motive — prevails. But we shall have to have a change in spirit. The day of dead conservatism or wild radicalism has passed. We need a new conservatism in government which will not promise that any one can live without work, or that all shall have castles, and which will not hold the man who does better than his fellows as a menace. Its menaces will be the groups that encourage waste, inefficiency, limitation of production, limitation of wages, limitation of opportunity, limitation of development in industrial processes, limitation of competition, or any other system founded on class selfishness. It will apply itself equally to the man who withholds a day’s work and the man who evades competition under tariff protection.
The new conservatism will understand that legislation of itself can bring no good economic condition into existence — it can only clear the way. The people are no longer fooled by the promise that laws can bring prosperity. All that the law can do is to give legal standing and recognition to the people’s conviction that fair play ought to rule everywhere.
We are not living in an age of industrial expansion; the very expression shows a lack of grasp of what is going on. We are living in an age when for the first time it is possible to supply a fair part of the needs of all peoples if they really want their needs supplied.
We are not living in a machine age. We are living in an age when it is possible to use power and machinery in the public service — and at a private profit.
But what of the future? Shall we not have over-production? Shall we not some day reach a point where the machine becomes all powerful and the man of no consequence?
No man can say anything of the future. We need not bother about it. The future has always cared for itself in spite of our wellmeant efforts to hamper it. If today we do the task we can best do, then we are doing all that we can do.
Perhaps we may overproduce, but that is impossible until the whole world has all it desires. And if that should happen, then surely we ought to be content.