CHAPTER I. The Industrial Revolution

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

It is a leading thought in modern philosophy that in its process of development, each institution tends to cancel itself. The special function is born out of social necessities; its progress is determined by attractions or repulsions which arise in society, producing a certain effect which tends to negate the original function.—WILLIAM CLARKE.

If we view the physical aspects of existence in relation to happiness, it is obvious that the satisfaction of desires for food, clothing and shelter stands first in order of urgency in the life of nations.

That modern nationalities are very far from the attainment of this satisfaction of primary wants is lamentably evident to the eye of observers who examine the conditions in which the great majority of their members live. Food to the mass of the people is excessively dear. In order to buy it for his family, a workman has often to spend two-thirds of his weekly wage, leaving one-third only to meet the cost of shelter and clothing, and nothing at all for recreation and instruction.

If we add to this difficulty of satisfying the primary needs of a family on average wages, the frequent lack of employment with the consequent lack of any weekly income at all, and the prevalence of low wages, rightly termed starvation-wages, we have before us a picture of the utter inadequacy of our present industrial system to subserve general well-being.

It is necessary to understand something of our present industrial system, its foundations and evolution in the past, if we are to forecast the changes that will occur in the immediate future, when the fast-growing recognition of its manifold failings must inevitably bring about a different order of industry. Private property in land and in other essentials for the production of food, shelter, clothing, etc., lies at the basis of the present system; and since the direct object of private proprietors is not to satisfy the primary needs of the people, but to create individual profits, we cannot wonder that a system thus motived by selfishness works out in a miserable and wholly imperfect manner.

The industrial class may be broadly divided into two sections, employers and employed, while a few highly skilled workers, members of the professions of law, medicine, arts, letters, and science stand in a measure outside this category. Landlords and shareholders as such are an idle section of the community. They absorb the labour of a multitude of workers, while giving no personal service in return. Quite truly has it been said: “The modern form of private property is simply a legal claim to take year by year a share of the produce of the national industry without working for it.” (Fabian Essays, page 26).

In comparing past forms with the present forms of industry, a distinguishing feature of the latter is the number of great factories where workers toil long hours, usually in the tending of machines, to turn out for the private profit of their employers, vast quantities of goods destined for retail distribution all over the world. The large organizations of industry, so familiar to us, are of quite recent growth, and already show signs of a coming change as sweeping in its scope as any changes that have occurred in the past. Yet to listen to the expression of opinions that prevail in literary and upper class circles, one would suppose we had reached finality in our social system, and that the conventional tributes paid to proprietors of land and capital in the shape of rent and interest would, as a matter of course, remain legal to the end of time.

Now let us glance at the history of the past. For two centuries after the Norman conquest, intestine war and feudal oppressions embittered the life of the British labourer. He might be called from the plough at any moment to take up arms in his master’s quarrel, and if he sowed seed and saw his fields ripen, the harvest of his hopes might still be cut down by the sword of the forager, or trodden by the hoof of the war-horse. He was bondsman and slave, defenceless in the hands of the lords of the soil, who at best, protected him only in the barest necessities of a scanty livelihood—a hut without a chimney, its furniture a great brass pot and a bed valued at a few shillings. (Wade’s History of the Working Classes.) A change for the better came after the plague of 1348, and, when by perpetual warfare with France, men had become more valuable through diminution of their number.

King Edward the Third freed the bondsmen to recruit his armies, and enforced villeinry service was exchanged for service paid by wages—these, however, were ordinarily fixed by statute. In the middle of the eighteenth century wages stood at the ratio of about a bushel and a half of wheat for one week’s labour; by the middle of the nineteenth century they had fallen to what could only purchase one bushel of wheat. (Threading my Way, R. D. Owen, p. 220.) The cause of this change was that meanwhile, two clever men—Arkwright and Watt—had made discoveries which gave an impetus to industry beyond all previous experience. Mechanical aids to production were invented, and the consequent cheapening of products created more and more demand. Machinery and human labour side by side were under stress and strain to meet the call of new desires. Cotton and wool and flax were woven into fabrics and poured out of Great Britain to every quarter of the globe; capital was amassed, and wealthy capitalists bid against each other for more labour still. Agriculturists flocked into towns, factories sprang up in all directions, population rapidly increased, and children were sucked into the industrial maelstrom, for health and happiness were in no way considered when remunerative work was offered.

Outwardly the British world had altered. Internal warfare had passed away, and the war-horse was no longer visible in harvest-fields. The scene now presents a resemblance to a huge hive of bees industriously secreting and amassing honey for future use. Great Britain has assumed beyond her own shores a foremost place among civilized nations. The resources of her newly-created wealth seem boundless, and everywhere her power is felt. She can thin the ranks of her population, and swell her army to conquer and suppress the tyrant Napoleon, while keeping at work the enormous leviathan of her own trade and commerce by the deft fingers of her little children. Summer and winter find her tiny bees—infants of seven or eight—at labour in the factories from six a.m. to noon. One hour for dinner is allowed, and they toil on once more till eight o’clock at night.

Were these, then, the “good old times” of which we are proud? At all events they were the times in which England’s greatness was established and vast fortunes were built up, founded upon the industry of young children sweating in factories for thirteen hours a day.

“It was not in exceptional cases,” wrote Robert Dale Owen, when on a tour of inspection of factories with his father in 1815, “but as a rule, that we found children of ten years old worked regularly fourteen hours a day, with but half an hour’s interval for the midday meal, eaten in the factory.” In the fine yarn cotton mills, the “temperature usually exceeded 75 degrees,” and in all factories the atmosphere was more or less injurious to the lungs. In some cases “greed of gain had impelled mill-owners to still greater extremes of inhumanity, utterly disgraceful to a civilized nation.” Their mills were run fifteen, sometimes sixteen, hours a day, and children were employed even under the age of eight. “In some large factories, from one-fourth to one-fifth of the children were cripples or otherwise deformed. Most of the overseers openly carried stout leather thongs, and frequently we saw even the youngest children severely beaten.” (Threading my Way, p. 102.) At that period Robert Owen the elder expressed himself thus to the Earl of Liverpool: “It would be clearly unjust to blame manufacturers for practices with which they have been familiar from childhood, or to suppose that they have less humanity than any other class of men.” The system was what Robert Owen condemned, and he strained every nerve to bring about some alterations in the system. He wrote and spoke and agitated for the protection of children by law, and for their compulsory education, and he publicly exposed the ghastly evils that spring from competition unchecked by law, while left free to regulate itself at any amount of cost to life, health, and happiness.

After the lapse of about four years, the first point aimed at by Robert Owen was gained, and infants became protected by statute from gross oppression. His second point was gained in 1870, when the Government Bill for National Education was passed. And ever since the period of that noble, unselfish life, minds have everywhere been awakening to the truth of his third point, viz., that frightful evils inalienably belong to free industrial competition.

Owen proved that in the year 1816, the machine-saved labour in producing English fabrics—cotton, woollen, flax, and silk—exceeded the work which two hundred million of operatives could have turned out previous to the year 1760. (Threading my Way, p. 218.) The world was richer then to the extent of all this enormous producing power—a power, he thought, surely sent down from Heaven to set man free from the ancient curse that in the sweat of his brow should he eat bread. But what were the actual facts? There was no respite from toil for the workers, no freedom from the curse! Throughout the old and new world, senseless machinery competed with the living sons of toil, or, as Robert Owen expressed it, “a contest goes on between wood and iron on the one hand, human thews and sinews on the other—a dreadful contest, at which humanity shudders, and reason turns astonished away.” (Threading my Way, p. 218.) The problem presented was this: A recent rapid growth of wealth had enriched the few and left many in misery; nay more, it had lowered and pressed down the many to depths of degradation previously unknown. Were there no means by which mankind could unitedly work for the benefit of all, and all be made happy as the world grew richer? Political Economy suggested none, and Robert Owen turned from its futile study to that of the facts themselves. He was a manufacturer, in sympathy with employers as well as with employed. He had every opportunity for a practical understanding of the interests involved, and he gave years to the study of this question in a spirit of keen inquiry and ardent devotion to the cause. His ultimate conclusion was that in some form of socialism alone could a remedy for the existent evils of industrial life be found.

Henceforth he laboured to give to the world an object lesson in socialism. He embarked his fortune in bold experiments, which proved—as in the case of New Harmony—financial failures. Into the details of these failures I cannot now enter, nor have we to deal just yet with socialism as a remedy. My present purpose is to show the origin and reality of the evils inherent in the individualistic system of industry—evils on which the argument for socialism is based. And I must reiterate the statement made by John Stuart Mill in 1869, that the fundamental questions relating to property, and to the best methods of production and distribution—questions involved in socialism—require to be thoroughly investigated. Mr. Mill’s opinion regarding socialism was that in some future time communistic production might prove well-adapted to the wants and the nature of man, but a high standard of moral and intellectual education would first be necessary, and the passage to that state could only be slow.

Meanwhile the sufferings of the proletariat are as intense as in the days of Robert Owen. The problem which absorbed his energies and wrecked his fortunes remains as yet unsolved, and we, who live when a twentieth century has been entered upon, are daily surrounded by a mass of workers tied hand and foot by poverty and often weighed down by despair. And this is the case, notwithstanding the lapse of a long intermediate period of national prosperity; in spite, also, of the powers of science to enlighten manual labour, the intellectual efforts to advance education, and a boundless benevolence and sympathy ready to embrace all mankind, and give happiness to all, were only the right means devised wherewith to accomplish that end.

Footnote 1:

In the Scotsman of March 16, 1897, this paragraph occurs: “At the meeting of Edinburgh Parish Council yesterday, it was stated that pauperism is increasing, and pointed out that for the month ending 15th ult. there was an increase of 114 applications for individuals for relief, compared with the corresponding period last year!”

It was stated by Mr. Rowntree (whose investigations of this subject are widely known and respected) that one-fourth of the population of Great Britain lives in poverty, either primary or secondary; while 52 per cent. of the cases of primary poverty are due to the principal wage-earner receiving too low a wage to maintain his family in physical efficiency. (Evening News Report, March 22, 1903.)

Individual benevolence has failed, and that as completely as Robert Owen’s socialism, to cope with general poverty, and the method of Poor Laws has accomplished almost nothing.

In Robert Owen’s day the evils described in factory life belonged specially to Great Britain. That is not the limit, however, now. I need only refer my reader to Henry George’s picture of poverty dogging the footsteps of progress in America and to Professor Goldwin Smith’s corroborative words: “It is a melancholy fact, that everywhere in America we are looking forward to the necessity of a public provision for the poor.” And again: “There will in time be an educated proletariat of a very miserable and perhaps dangerous kind, for nothing can be more wretched and explosive than destitution with the social humiliation which attends it, in men whose sensibilities have been quickened and whose ambition has been aroused.”

The problem respecting appalling poverty in the midst of wealth (it is a poverty marring the happiness of the rich as well as the poor) cries out for solution. It forces itself upon public attention in the old world as in the new. There is no escape from it. The problem must be grappled with by educated reason, and solved by means of the patient exercise of a cold calculation of natural forces. Happily it is recognized in its evolutional aspects by many thinkers all over the world. Twenty years ago Charles Letourneau in his Sociology wrote: “In every country which enjoys the European system of civilization, the right of property has ever been in a state of evolution, always tending to give a greater degree of independence to the individual owner; in other words, the evolution is always worked in favour of individual egotism. Who can say that the evolution is now complete, or that we have yet realized the highest ideal system in the disposition of our property? A progressive evolution is, for every society, one of the conditions of existence. The right of proprietorship cannot, therefore, remain stationary.” The period that has elapsed since that passage was written has witnessed a widespread and strong growth of opinion upon these lines.

In the Contemporary Review of February, 1902, Mr. J. A. Hobson thus writes: “... The idea of natural individual rights as the basis of democracy disappears. A clear grasp of society as an economic organism completely explodes the notion of property as an inherent individual right, for it shows that no individual can make or appropriate anything of value without the direct continuous assistance of society.”

The right of proprietorship in land is the first principle to examine. The relation between land and life in its simpler aspects is clear and definite. All classes of land animals—man included—are immediately dependent for subsistence upon the produce of land, and when man emerges from slavery, another element, namely, labour, enters into the conditions of his life and becomes, with land, essential to his existence. Of food, fitted for the nourishment of man, uncultivated land produces little save some wild fruits and edible roots, and many wild animals, which he may eat if in hunting them down they do not eat him. But land placed under the additional forces of man’s physical and intellectual energies produces an immense variety of objects—a perfect wealth of raw material, vegetable, animal, mineral—which, yielding to further elaboration through his efforts and genius, all help to create for him a civilized life. This raw material, in short, supplied man with food, shelter, clothing, with the comforts and luxuries his developing nature demands, and with all necessaries to the existence of literature, science, and art.

Passing over the primitive forms of associated life—the nomad and pastoral—we come to the agricultural stage, when labourers on the land are manifestly the all-important social units. They sow, till, and reap the fields. They tend domestic animals, whose skins and wool are made into garments by other members of the group. But the latter depend for food and the raw materials of their industry on the cultivators, who are, if I may so express it, the foundation stones of the simple social structure. To whom does the land belong? To the whole group, and an annual division amongst the families for purposes of cultivation takes place, whilst weapons, fishing-boats, tools and other movables are the property of individuals.

Now observe, a change gradually occurs, a change from the communal possession of land to a system of the individual possession of land, and force is the sole cause of this change. External aggression has initiated militant activity, while, in the process of frequent resistance to invasion, and frequent aggression upon others, there is produced the class inequalities which distinguish a militant type of society and a system allowing of individual land-ownership. Land becomes private property in the hands of the bold and crafty, who compel the cultivation of the soil by the landless men of the group, and by prisoners of war spared on condition that they perform hard labour. The institution of slavery thus becomes established, and it is a leading factor in the promotion of civilization. Lords of the soil spend their energies in warlike activities, whilst protecting their slaves and serfs at labour. The produce of that labour is appropriated by the dominant class, and used for its own particular benefit. Its requirements extend much beyond the mere necessaries of existence that it yields to the workers, and slowly there uprises a new form of labour and a large class of labourers, producing a variety of commodities to gratify the desires of pomp-loving, barbaric chiefs.

Now this class, the labour of which is wholly absorbed by the chiefs, must be fed from the produce of the land. How is this accomplished? The chiefs, while exacting hard labour from the slaves and serfs, yield them only a bare living. But the proceeds of their labour, over and above the bare living of the producers, is very considerable. There is therefore a large surplus, which, appropriated by the chiefs as rent, is the source of their power. With it they support a large class of landless men engaged in ministering to their own specific wants. Moreover, this class groups itself around the castle of the chiefs, which are filled with military retainers, and here we have the beginnings of towns.

The town population increases steadily with the increase of the surplus produce from land under better conditions of cultivation. Markets and stores are instituted, and a commercial system is introduced. Barter gives way to the use of money, and the entire social organism expands and becomes more complex.

Anon, slavery disappears. But workers on the land—always the most necessary social units—remain poor as before. Competitors for work, in danger of starving, drive no hard bargain with masters who are in full possession of the soil, and able to forbid their growing even the simple fruits and grain required for a meagre living. For food enough to live, they readily pledge the labour of their whole lives, and since nature’s recompense for labour is liberal, there is an abundant surplus produce for landowners to grasp and employ as they choose. Into the towns it is sent, and there it stimulates progress—mental and material—and creates new departures in social life.

Class inequalities among town workers increase, and labour becomes organized. The mentally stronger dominate the weaker in the new fields of industry. They direct and control the production of commodities for the use of the dominant class, and succeed in acquiring a greater reward for their work than a meagre living. Out of the surplus produce of the land they become able to secure from their lords a portion which forms the foundation of wealth in a new social class—a class of landless capitalists who, possessing brain power and later money-power, become the supreme factors in altering social conditions. These men promote manufacture and commerce by action similar to the landholders’ methods of promoting agriculture. They press down their workers to a bare living, and take as profits all that competition permits of the results of the joint labour. These profits they apply to the satisfaction of their personal desires and the carrying out of their schemes of manufacturing and commercial enterprise. Finally, they indulge in luxurious living and emulate landholders in the purchase of valuable commodities, thus stimulating certain trades.

Meanwhile, through the intercourse of urban life, mental activity rapidly augments. Education is initiated, aptitude and skill are more and more prized and rewarded. Invention profoundly modifies the primitive modes of production, and genius aspires to understand and govern the forces of nature. One direction taken by mental activity eventuates in an important social force, viz., the Church, or religious organization. Many of the best minds in early ages were allied with the priesthood, and the Church’s desire for stately temples, gorgeous shrines, and decorative worship have enormously aided the outward development of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music, and the inward growth of aesthetic capacity. But priests and all whose labour is absorbed by the requirements of religious worship and the constructing of temples, must be fed on the produce of the land. The priesthood is maintained in leisure by rents, tithes, or the voluntary offerings of the people. It is freed from the necessity of industrial labour and military activity, and members within this large class have devoted their leisure to literature, history, philosophy, and art, thereby greatly advancing civilization.

Under increased stability of governments the organization becomes of a mainly industrial type. Nations now possess enormous wealth in the form of material commodities, wealth in the form of intellectual literature and the educational institutions that promote knowledge; wealth in the form of ornament—all that embellishes and makes beautiful the surroundings of human life; and all this wealth has come into existence through the natural action of evolutionary forces—an action creative, step by step, of a system of social interdependence and regulation. The prominent features of the system are: First, private property in land; second, great social inequality; third, poverty of manual labourers; fourth, a large town population, and a small or minimum peasant population. Its less prominent but no less decisive feature is the complete social subjugation of the poor by the rich.

The supports of the system through the whole process of its growth have been labourers on the land, and these labourers have scarcely at all partaken of the national wealth. The food they reaped formed the motor force vitalizing and energizing the evolving social organism. Food was the ruling power deciding the growth and extent of economic life, as well as the form of its development. But food-producers have never determined the destination of the surplus food, and in this fact lies the key to a great social problem which students of social science are bound to comprehend. The landholders—and these as a rule have not been workers on the land—have decided the destination of the surplus produce. Up to the present-day landlords—including the proprietors of coal, iron and other mines, capitalist employers of labour, the churches of the nation, and hereditary rulers—are at the fountainhead of modern civilization. It is through their action—caused mainly by selfishness, tyranny, pride, greed—that cultivators and operatives have been kept at maximum toil and been limited in number, while at the same time the land’s resources have developed and improved until land and labour united serve to support an enormous mass of population—individuals of entirely distinctive character, activities, social position and social worth, all alike in this one particular—they are daily and hourly consumers of the produce of the land.

A good harvest that is general over the world sends activity like an electric current through the economic system. A bad harvest, if universal, would cause universal depression; not agriculture alone must suffer, but manufacture, commerce, science, art, literature, education, recreation—for on the production of food depends the buying power of the whole trading world. It is true that modern countries are not maintained from their own food resources alone. Also, it is true that the machinery of exchange—money and our vast credit system—enter into the phenomena and confuse the student’s mind. Nevertheless, an all-important fact discloses itself on close investigation, viz., this—the relation of landlordism to modern civilization is not accidental, it is essential and causal.

As already shown, the general drift of the produce of the land has been into the towns; and thither also have migrated the labourers. Machinery and science applied to land cultivation lowered the amount of peasant labour required, but it did not lower the birth-rate. Surplus peasants have been driven by necessity from their homes to the centres of manufacturing industry, and, competing for work there with the operative class, have kept wages low and facilitated the enriching of capitalist employers. These men, actuated by personal desires, selfish ambition, and a tendency to mercantile speculation, use their wealth in extending the production of objects that minister to a life of luxury and refinement.

The older political economists mistakenly taught that “all capital, with a trifling exception, was originally the result of saving.” (J. S. Mill’s Political Economy, book 1, chap. 5.) Attention to the history of social evolution, however, proves the fact to be otherwise. Not individual saving, but social seizure, created capital. Its origin, as we have shown, was the surplus produce taken from producers and disposed of by a dominant class. It originated through the selfish quality of rapacity and not through the respectable virtue of prudence, as some capitalists would have us believe. The growth of capital has been enormous since the beginning of the industrial revolution; and at the present moment the riches of a comparatively small number of the owners of our land and capital are colossal and increasing. At the same time, there is no diminution of poverty among workers. Thirty per cent. of the five million inhabitants of London are inadequately supplied with the bare necessaries of life, and about a fourth of the entire community become paupers at sixty-five. I refer my reader to Sidney Webb’s pamphlet, The Difficulties of Individualism.

The supersession of the small by the great industry has given the main fruits of invention and the new power over nature to a small proprietary class, upon whom the mass of the people are dependent for leave to earn their living. The rent and interest claimed by that class absorbs, on an average, one-third of the product of labour. The remaining 8d. of the 1s. is then shared between the various classes co-operating in the production, but in such a way that at least 4d. goes to a set of educated workers numbering less than one-fifth of the whole, leaving four-fifths to divide less than 4d. out of the 1s. between them. “The consequence is the social condition we see around us.” (Ibid.)

Thus four out of five of the whole population—the weekly wage-earners—toil perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate product of labour, at an annual wage averaging at most £40 per adult, and are hurried into early graves by the severity of their lives, dying, as regards at least one-third of them, destitute, or actually in receipt of poor law relief.

In town and country, the operatives and peasants, who, united, form one large class engaged in manual labour, resemble Sinbad the Sailor, on whose shoulders rides the Old Man of the Sea. It is they who maintain our leisured classes. The proletariat carries on its back all the rich and their innumerable dependents, more than 300,000 soldiers, an immense navy, a million of paupers, a number of State pensioners, a multitude of criminals, His Majesty and the Royal Family, all Government officials and ecclesiastics—a vast host of unproductive consumers throughout society.

Slavery of the many for the comfort and enjoyment of the few! That is all man has attained to, so far, in the evolution of society. And no one who studies the facts of life can deny this impeachment of civilization: “All over the world the beauty, glory, and grace of civilization rests on human lives crushed into misery and distortion.” (Henry George.)

The extremity of contrast between rich and poor has no ethical justification. Under purely ethical conditions, every child born into a nation should have equal chances of life, comforts, and luxuries, with every other child. But, as we know, one British babe may be born to an income of £100,000 a year, and another to no income, but to a constant struggle for bare subsistence and a pauper’s grave at last. The system permitting this is ethically odious. Nevertheless, we have to recognize that, under non-ethical conditions, development has taken place, and we must accept the process as the natural, inevitable result of all prior conditions.

Man’s ethical nature itself is the product of a slow evolution, not yet so advanced as to require and create purely ethical social conditions. Changes in the future will proceed on lines of natural growth, as in the past, but with this supreme difference—the issues will be favourable to general happiness, the advance infinitely more rapid, because aided by conscious human effort.

All schemes of social reform that are revolutionary are widely chimerical to the thoughtful evolutionist, for were we suddenly to deprive our richer classes of property, privilege, and power, we should simply create a general abasement of our national civilization. Our upper classes, rendered effeminate by ill-spent leisure and all the artificial pleasures of a voluptuous and inane life, are incapable of directing civilization to the highest and noblest ends. Yet it is out of their midst that springs the demand for commodities ministering to all the amenities and refinements of a civilized life. It is refinement alone that demands refinement, culture that demands culture; and were the control of human labour to pass suddenly from the hands of the upper into those of the lower classes, which are still, in the mass, degraded and unenlightened, there would be no effective demand for these commodities, and the science and art implicated in their production would inevitably, though gradually, disappear.

Progressive evolution culminates in social justice, and the principle of private property in land, which implies an injurious monopoly in what is essential to human life (and is therefore socially unjust), is certain to be consciously relinquished at a given stage of the nation’s intellectual and moral advance.

Having traced the evolution of the individualistic system of industry, and seen that the inherent evils of the system have their source in the private ownership of land and capital, which “necessarily involves the complete exclusion of the mere worker, as such, from most of the economic advantages of the soil on which he is born, and the buildings, machinery, and railways he finds around him” (Sidney Webb), let me now sum up and state the paramount evils that have to be overcome. For the workers these are—low wages, long hours of toil, difficulty of obtaining work, and, when it is obtained, uncertainty of being permitted to retain it. For the community generally there are further evils, viz., first, the mal-production of commodities made manifest in food adulteration and in a perpetual output of objects that, instead of promoting and conserving civilization, debase and corrupt public taste and morals; and, second, the mal-production of human life, for poverty is a social force that directly tends to racial degeneration. A population born and bred in our city slums becomes physically, mentally, and morally unfit.

The facts of poverty and the unemployed are impossible to deny. Frederick Harrison’s picture is accurate; ninety per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home they can call their own beyond the end of the week, have no bit of soil or so much as a room that belongs to them, have nothing of any kind except so much of old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism. This is the normal state of the average workman in town or country. (Report of Ind. Ref. Congress, 1886.)

As regards the children of these workmen, fifty per cent. die before they reach five years of age, while eighteen per cent. only of upper class children die at the same age. The industrial evolution of the last 150 years, with its labour-saving machinery and highly organized masses of wage-workers, has done nothing at all to lessen poverty. Poverty has steadily kept pace with the increase of population.

But observe in the present day there is one significant feature that forces itself upon public attention—a feature revealing to the social student our approach to that stage of evolution spoken of by William Clarke in the passage I quote as motto to this chapter: “Each institution tends to cancel itself.... Its special function and progress produce effects tending to negate the original function.”

If we look minutely into the latest developments of large businesses, we find that the diminution in the number of competitors does not as a rule lead to an easing of the competitive struggle. As Mr. J. A. Hobson observes and demonstrates: “It is precisely in those trades which are most highly organized, provided with the most advanced machinery, and composed of the largest units of capital, that the fiercest and most unscrupulous competition has shown itself.” (Evolution of Capital, p. 120.) There is an increase, in short, of the elements destined to destroy competition. The anxiety, arduousness, and wastefulness of strife among the rival competitors, becomes so intolerable that a mutual truce and amalgamation is sought after as a release. When fully realized, the amalgamation becomes a monopoly, and competition, that much vaunted check to counteract the natural rapacity of private capitalists, ceases altogether. Let industrial monopoly be fairly established, and behold! competition, with all its merits, real or assumed, is abrogated.

But industrial monopoly in private hands becomes intolerable to the public, so that invariably, in the long run, the community either puts a forcible stop to the monopoly, or assumes it, and administers it as a State function.

We may confidently assert that as large industries approach to the stage of absorption into monopolies of federated groups of wealthy capitalists, the more general and widespread grows dissatisfaction and resentment on the part of the dispossessed smaller capitalists who have been beaten out of the field.

Now, the trend of movement to-day, through the whole fields of production and distribution, is from business on a small scale to business on a large scale, and the formation of limited companies, rings, trusts, etc. By purchasing raw material in greater quantities an immense saving is effected, and the same occurs in the advertising of goods and in organizing numerous workers instead of a few. These savings make it possible to lower the price of the finished commodity to the public. Hence the change from smaller to larger commercial enterprises is favourable to public interests up to a certain point. But the moment monopoly point is reached, the position straightway becomes reversed. Henceforward the public have no protection from a sudden raising of prices, for, the competitive check having been withdrawn, monopolists dominate their respective fields of production and distribution, and the individually selfish forces alone hold sway.

This tendency, then, to larger and larger industrial organization, with its wasteful warfare and other attendant evils, implies a certain advance. It indicates competition working out to its last expression and final breakdown. It points to the supersession of the individualistic industrial system by a collectivist industrial system requiring democratic state-ownership of land and the means of production and distribution of all commodities.

In process of civilizing man has made himself acquainted with many laws of nature, and has learnt so to handle matter as to direct its forces into channels carrying benefit to himself. He has thus become the controller of natural forces in as far as they lie within reach of his mental comprehension and physical activities. It is by this method, and no other, that our advance along the line of material civilization has been accomplished, and all further extension of the comforts and amenities of economic and social life is certain to be obtained through persistence in this available and satisfactory course.

Now, throughout the domain of non-material civilization, man has never constituted himself controller of natural forces, although, in orders of life inferior to his own, he has guided many vital forces. For instance, there are vegetable and animal forces—all subject to natural law—that he has enlisted in his service and made submissive to his dominion. The forms of vegetable life around us to-day—cereals, fruit-trees, plants, and flowers of infinitely varied tint—bear witness to the art and skill of man; and the animal kingdom, ruled by mysterious biological laws, has provided him with faithful servants obedient to his will, in a life which to dogs and horses is largely artificial.

In the order of his own social life man’s position is wholly different. What we behold, if we take an objective view of a so-called civilized society, is a marvellous variety of complicated movements. These are the outcome of forces pursuing an unbridled course; and that course is always the path of least resistance. As yet there is no intervening force of a collective, mental nature to adapt that course to an ultimate definite aim and purpose, or to harmonize broadly those lines of least resistance with the line of permanent and universal advantage to mankind. As Professor Lester F. Ward expresses it, “Man has made the winds, the waters, fire, steam and electricity do his bidding. All nature, both animate and inanimate, has been reduced to his service.... One class of natural forces still remains the play of chance, and from it, instead of aid, he is constantly receiving the most serious checks. This field is that of society itself, these unreclaimed forces are the social forces of whose nature man seems to possess no knowledge, whose very existence he persistently ignores, and which he consequently is powerless to control.” (Dynamic Sociology, vol. I. p. 35.) These unreclaimed social forces—selfishness, rapacity, pride—give activity to the competitive system, and run riot on the basis of private property in land and the means of production. But the present condition of things cannot much longer persist, and a new industrial system, the outcome of far more elevated social forces, is shaping itself rapidly in many minds throughout Europe, America, and the whole civilized world; that system of co-operative industry we have now to consider.