Fields, Factories and Workshops

Chapter Ix. Conclusion 410

APPENDIX.

A. BRITISH INVESTMENTS ABROAD 421

B. FRENCH IMPORTS 422

C. GROWTH OF INDUSTRY IN RUSSIA 423

D. IRON INDUSTRY IN GERMANY 423

E. MACHINERY IN GERMANY 424

F. COTTON INDUSTRY IN GERMANY 425

G. MINING AND TEXTILES IN AUSTRIA 427

H. COTTON MANUFACTURE IN INDIA 428

I. THE COTTON INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES 430

J. MR. GIFFEN’S AND MR. FLUX’S FIGURES CONCERNING THE POSITION OF THE UNITED KINGDOM IN INTERNATIONAL TRADE 432

K. MARKET-GARDENING IN BELGIUM 434

L. THE CHANNEL ISLANDS--THE SCILLY ISLANDS 435

M. IRRIGATED MEADOWS IN ITALY 444

N. PLANTED WHEAT; THE ROTHAMSTED CHALLENGE 444

O. REPLANTED WHEAT 445

P. IMPORTS OF VEGETABLES TO THE UNITED KINGDOM 447

Q. FRUIT CULTURE IN BELGIUM 449

R. CULTURE UNDER GLASS IN HOLLAND 450

S. PRICES OBTAINED IN LONDON FOR DESSERT GRAPES CULTIVATED UNDER GLASS 451

T. THE USE OF ELECTRICITY IN AGRICULTURE 452

U. PETTY TRADES IN THE LYONS REGION 454

V. SMALL INDUSTRIES AT PARIS 460

W. RESULTS OF THE CENSUS OF THE FRENCH INDUSTRIES IN 1896 462

X. THE SMALL INDUSTRIES IN GERMANY 468

Y. THE DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES IN SWITZERLAND 475

FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND WORKSHOPS.

CHAPTER I.. The Decentralisation of Industries.

THE DECENTRALISATION OF INDUSTRIES.

Division of labour and integration--The spread of industrial skill--Each nation its own producer of manufactured goods--The United Kingdom--France--Germany--Russia--“German competition.”

Who does not remember the remarkable chapter by which Adam Smith opens his inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations? Even those of our contemporary economists who seldom revert to the works of the father of political economy, and often forget the ideas which inspired them, know that chapter almost by heart, so often has it been copied and recopied since. It has become an article of faith; and the economical history of the century which has elapsed since Adam Smith wrote has been, so to speak, an actual commentary upon it.

“Division of labour” was its watchword. And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India. We have, first, the broad division into producers and consumers: little-consuming producers on the one hand, little-producing consumers on the other hand. Then, amidst the former, a series of further subdivisions: the manual worker and the intellectual worker, sharply separated from one another to the detriment of both; the agricultural labourers and the workers in the manufacture; and, amidst the mass of the latter, numberless subdivisions again--so minute, indeed, that the modern ideal of a workman seems to be a man or a woman, or even a girl or a boy, without the knowledge of any handicraft, without any conception whatever of the industry he or she is employed in, who is only capable of making all day long and for a whole life the same infinitesimal part of something: who from the age of thirteen to that of sixty pushes the coal cart at a given spot of the mine or makes the spring of a penknife, or “the eighteenth part of a pin.” Mere servants to some machine of a given description; mere flesh-and-bone parts of some immense machinery; having no idea how and why the machinery performs its rhythmical movements.

Skilled artisanship is being swept away as a survival of a past condemned to disappear. The artist who formerly found æsthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands is substituted by the human slave of an iron slave. Nay, even the agricultural labourer, who formerly used to find a relief from the hardships of his life in the home of his ancestors--the future home of his children--in his love of the field and in a keen intercourse with nature, even he has been doomed to disappear for the sake of division of labour. He is an anachronism, we are told; he must be substituted, in a Bonanza farm, by an occasional servant hired for the summer, and discharged as the autumn comes: a tramp who will never again see the field he has harvested once in his life. “An affair of a few years,” the economists say, “to reform agriculture in accordance with the true principles of division of labour and modern industrial organisation.”

Dazzled with the results obtained by a century of marvellous inventions, especially in England, our economists and political men went still farther in their dreams of division of labour. They proclaimed the necessity of dividing the whole of humanity into national workshops having each of them its own speciality. We were taught, for instance, that Hungary and Russia are predestined by nature to grow corn in order to feed the manufacturing countries; that Britain had to provide the world-market with cottons, iron goods, and coal; Belgium with woollen cloth; and so on. Nay, within each nation, each region had to have its own speciality. So it has been for some time since; so it ought to remain. Fortunes have been made in this way, and will continue to be made in the same way. It being proclaimed that the wealth of nations is measured by the amount of profits made by the few, and that the largest profits are made by means of a specialisation of labour, the question was not conceived to exist as to whether human beings would always submit to such a specialisation; whether nations could be specialised like isolated workmen. The theory was good for to-day--why should we care for to-morrow? To-morrow might bring its own theory!

And so it did. The narrow conception of life which consisted in thinking that profits are the only leading motive of human society, and the stubborn view which supposes that what has existed yesterday would last for ever, proved in disaccordance with the tendencies of human life; and life took another direction. Nobody will deny the high pitch of production which may be attained by specialisation. But, precisely in proportion as the work required from the individual in modern production becomes simpler and easier to be learned, and, therefore, also more monotonous and wearisome--the requirements of the individual for varying his work, for exercising all his capacities, become more and more prominent. Humanity perceives that there is no advantage for the community in riveting a human being for all his life to a given spot, in a workshop or a mine; no gain in depriving him of such work as would bring him into free intercourse with nature, make of him a conscious part of the grand whole, a partner in the highest enjoyments of science and art, of free work and creation.

Nations, too, refuse to be specialised. Each nation is a compound aggregate of tastes and inclinations, of wants and resources, of capacities and inventive powers. The territory occupied by each nation is in its turn a most varied texture of soils and climates, of hills and valleys, of slopes leading to a still greater variety of territories and races. Variety is the distinctive feature, both of the territory and its inhabitants; and that variety implies a variety of occupations. Agriculture calls manufactures into existence, and manufactures support agriculture. Both are inseparable; and the combination, the integration of both brings about the grandest results. In proportion as technical knowledge becomes everybody’s virtual domain, in proportion as it becomes international, and can be concealed no longer, each nation acquires the possibility of applying the whole variety of her energies to the whole variety of industrial and agricultural pursuits. Knowledge ignores artificial political boundaries. So also do the industries; and the present tendency of humanity is to have the greatest possible variety of industries gathered in each country, in each separate region, side by side with agriculture. The needs of human agglomerations correspond thus to the needs of the individual; and while a temporary division of functions remains the surest guarantee of success in each separate undertaking, the permanent division is doomed to disappear, and to be substituted by a variety of pursuits--intellectual, industrial, and agricultural--corresponding to the different capacities of the individual, as well as to the variety of capacities within every human aggregate.

When we thus revert from the scholastics of our text-books, and examine human life as a whole, we soon discover that, while all the benefits of a temporary division of labour must be maintained, it is high time to claim those of the integration of labour. Political economy has hitherto insisted chiefly upon division. We proclaim integration; and we maintain that the ideal of society--that is, the state towards which society is already marching--is a society of integrated, combined labour. A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work; where each able-bodied human being is a worker, and where each worker works both in the field and the industrial workshop; where every aggregation of individuals, large enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural resources--it may be a nation, or rather a region--produces and itself consumes most of its own agricultural and manufactured produce.

Of course, as long as society remains organised so as to permit the owners of the land and capital to appropriate for themselves, under the protection of the State and historical rights, the yearly surplus of human production, no such change can be thoroughly accomplished. But the present industrial system, based upon a permanent specialisation of functions, already bears in itself the germs of its proper ruin. The industrial crises, which grow more acute and protracted, and are rendered still worse and still more acute by the armaments and wars implied by the present system, are rendering its maintenance more and more difficult. Moreover, the workers plainly manifest their intention to support no longer patiently the misery occasioned by each crisis. And each crisis accelerates the day when the present institutions of individual property and production will be shaken to their foundations with such internal struggles as will depend upon the more or less good sense of the now privileged classes.

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