. POST- 
 INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 ARTHUR J. PENTY
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 ON -S1TY OP 
 
 CALIFORNIA 
 SAN 
 
 
 J 
 
 > N3QOO "X 'O
 
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM
 
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR J. PENTY 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY 
 G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 
 RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i
 
 First published in 1922 
 
 (All righfs reserved)
 
 " I don't see no sense in always grumblin'," Crass pro- 
 ceeded, " these things can't be altered ; you can't expect 
 there can be plenty of work for everyone with all this 'ere 
 labour-savin' machinery what's been invented." 
 
 " Of course," said Harlow, " the people what used to be 
 employed on the work what's now done by machinery has 
 to find something else to do. Some of 'em goes to our trade, 
 for instance. The result is there's too many at it, and there 
 ain't enough work to keep 'em all goin'." 
 
 " Yes," cried Crass, eagerly, " that's just what I say. 
 Machinery is the real cause of all the poverty. That's what 
 I said the other day." 
 
 " Machinery is undoubtedly the cause of unemployment," 
 replied Owen, " but it's not the cause of poverty ; that's 
 another matter altogether." 
 
 The others laughed derisively. 
 
 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 
 
 by ROBERT TRESSALL.
 
 MR. CHESTERTON'S PREFACE 
 
 MR. PENTY, the author of this book, is one of 
 the two or three truly original minds of the modern 
 world. In the very first chapter he proceeds to 
 do what is always done by minds that are 'original ; 
 he goes back to origins. For this reason the men 
 whose minds are narrowed by contemporary con- 
 ventions always accuse any such thinker of being 
 a sort of romantic reactionary. An absurd legend 
 has been manufactured among the critics who have 
 reviewed Mr. Penty's remarkable books (and who 
 have in some cases even read them), to the effect 
 that he regards the medieval period as a golden 
 age of human perfection, and wishes the modern 
 world to make a careful copy of it. His critics 
 talk for all the world as if he had merely recom- 
 mended us to wear jpointed shoes or to practise 
 archery. So far is this from being true that his 
 historical studies of medievalism, which are really 
 historical, condemn many medieval things which 
 it is comparatively common to admire ; such as 
 the cult of the Roman Law. But this book is not 
 a study of medieval, but of modern conditions. 
 And from modern conditions alone we could deduce 
 the absurdity of this attempt to silence anybody 
 with a charge of sentimentalism, merely because 
 he wishes for a reasonable restoration of certain 
 things which were lost by accident or by anarchy. 
 At the very time that such journalists are flinging
 
 8 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 about the charge of reaction, they are filling their 
 newspapers with the necessity for reconstruction. 
 When people wish to rebuild the villages that 
 were burned in Belgium, we do not describe them 
 as dreamers so deluded as to think that Belgium 
 before the war Was a paradise of perfect human 
 happiness. When people hope to re-establish pre- 
 war conditions of normal production or exchange, 
 we do not charge them with thinking that the pre- 
 war period was a golden age. We merely recognize 
 the fact that certain things normal to the nations 
 have been destroyed by an abnormal disaster, and 
 that we must reconstruct them as well as we can. 
 Now, it is Mr. Penty's thesis that the recent 
 rush of commercialism and industrialism, in the 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have led us to 
 an abnormal disaster ; and that it remains for us 
 to recur to the more stable social ideal, recognized 
 not only in the Middle Ages, but in some degree 
 in most ages, and by the great mass of mankind. 
 That is the thesis, so far as medievalism is con- 
 cerned ; it is the business of the critics to refute the 
 thesis ; and it will require a very different sort 
 of criticism to refute it. 
 
 But the general power to return to origins is 
 an even greater matter ; and what it needs is 
 intellectual independence. Indeed, there is an un- 
 conscious truth in the phrase of shallow people 
 who talk of a man like Mr. Penty as if he were 
 behind the times. In one sense he is behind the 
 times ; as we speak of a man being behind the 
 scenes. The man behind the scenes is at the back 
 of things and the beginning of things. He knows 
 where the actors come from, and how the whole 
 performance began . He has seen all the machinery,
 
 PREFACE BY MR. CHESTERTON 9 
 
 and can consider the play as a play, and not as 
 a temporary illusion. Mr. Penty has seen the 
 machinery of the modern world and does not think 
 much of it ; he has seen the illusion of progress 
 and prosperity which it produced on the crowd, at 
 least to some extent and for a time, and he knows 
 it is an illusion. That is to say, he is what so 
 few modern people can be, he is outside the modern 
 world, and in a sense surrounds it. He can 
 judge it freely, not merely by comparison with a 
 real past, but by comparison with a possible future. 
 And, as a matter of fact, that future is becoming 
 more and more possible. It is the present that is 
 becoming impossible. Those who blame Mr. Penty 
 for looking to the past for an alternative to indus- 
 trialism, do not realize that industrialism itself shows 
 many signs of soon becoming a thing of the past. 
 What is called industrial unrest might more truly 
 be described as industrial collapse ; and the things 
 that are not collapsing are exactly the old things 
 that it was the fashion to regard as decaying, 
 such as the ancient peasantries of Christendom. 
 It is these modernists who are behind the times ; 
 it is these materialists who have tied their fortunes 
 to a failure ; and it is the modern industrial city 
 that has become a home of lost causes. These 
 people do not understand the meaning of the 
 Bolshevisk concession to the peasantry, of the 
 revival of Italy, of the new power of France, of 
 the successful revolution in Ireland. 
 
 What is wanted In this transition is a practical 
 policy for England ; and Mr. Penty propounds his 
 practical policy. As he points out, it is really far 
 more practical, in the sense of adaptable to existing 
 conditions, than the alternative schemes of a more
 
 10 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 elaborate and systematized Guild Socialism, let 
 alone the elaborate and systematized schemes of 
 the Fabians, the Marxians, or the Douglasites. 
 But the special thesis of this book, as distant from 
 the author's other books, is set out much too clearly 
 to need any anticipatory amplification. From the 
 first discovery of the error of Socialism about its 
 own origin, to the final forecast of a real recon- 
 struction analogous to the real reconstructions of 
 the past, the reader can follow the argument in 
 detail, and differ or agree as the case may be ; but 
 if he is intelligent he will certainly not dismiss it 
 as a fad or fable about the good old times. I 
 am content here to express something of the grati- 
 tude felt by all thinking people to the author, and 
 to leave the book to speak for itself. 
 
 G. K. CHESTERTON.
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 AMONG the changes in thought that have come 
 about as a result of the war, the most significant 
 is the changed attitude towards Industrialism. 
 Before the war it Was taken for granted by most 
 people as a thing of permanence and stability, 
 while it was everywhere assumed that whatever evils 
 were associated with it were incidental, and would 
 disappear before the march of progress. 
 
 Nowadays all that is changed. It is generally 
 admitted that the progress on which we prided 
 ourselves before the war was for the most jpart 
 illusory. Our comfortable optimism could not stand 
 the shock of four years of war. The fact that the 
 mechanical triumphs of our civilization so readily 
 lent themselves to the purposes of destruction has 
 destroyed, once and for ever, that hypnotic belief 
 in the ultimate beneficence of science and machinery 
 that was the faith of our generation, while the 
 anticipated discovery of some method of liberating 
 the stores of sub-atomic energy is looked upon 
 with real apprehension by those who recognize its 
 potentialities for evil, since, unless the moral de- 
 velopment of man can keep step with his technical 
 discoveries, it may well prove to be the most 
 disastrous thing that has happened in the history 
 of mankind. 
 
 Simultaneously with this alarm in regard to the 
 
 discoveries of science, the unrestricted use of 
 
 11
 
 12 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 machinery is being interrogated. Before the war 
 protests against the .abuse of machinery were 
 mainly of two kinds : economic and aesthetic. 
 There was the economic objection of those who 
 found their labour displaced by some new inven- 
 tion, and the aesthetic objection of the followers 
 of Ruskin and Morris. But neither of them were 
 taken very seriously. The complaints of those who 
 found their labour displaced were not listened to 
 because such inconveniences were supposed to be 
 inevitable to a time of transition, while the aesthetic 
 objection was treated by most men with something 
 approaching contempt. Nowadays, however, all 
 this is changing. It is becoming apparent to an 
 ever-increasing number of thinking people that 
 there is a definite connection between the economic 
 deadlock that has overtaken society and our 
 mechanical methods of production, since, apart from 
 such methods, it is obvious that the problem on 
 such a gigantic scale could never have come into 
 existence. Educationalists are becoming interested, 
 for they see all their work being undone the moment 
 a boy leaves school for the factory, while the recent 
 publication of Dr. Austin Freeman's Social Decay 
 and Regeneration, of which Dr. Inge, in reviewing 
 it, 1 said that the chapters in which he girds up his 
 loins for an attack on machinery might have been 
 the exhortation which persuaded Samuel Butler's 
 Erewhonians to destroy all their machines, is sig- 
 nificant primarily as a book on eugenics. So long 
 as people thought that apart from incidental un- 
 employment, which called for organization, the only 
 objection to machinery was aesthetic, they might 
 dismiss it as a fad. They might even, in their 
 1 Edinburgh Review, July 1921.
 
 18 
 
 ignorance, feel a certain superiority in dismissing 
 such an objection. They could even say X as I 
 have heard people say), that excellence in the arts 
 was the mark of a lower state of social evolution. 
 But when they learn from an eminent scientist that 
 the unrestricted use of machinery is not only fatal 
 to the arts, but to man himself, spelling finally 
 race suicide, inasmuch as it is followed everywhere 
 by a decline in physical and mental efficiency, even 
 the British Philistine begins to think. For scientists 
 are the high priests of the modern wtorld, and when 
 they speak they are listened to. 
 
 The present volume carries the attack into the 
 realm of economic theory. It had always seemed 
 to me that the problem of machinery was central 
 in the social problem, for I could never see how 
 economic warfare could be brought to an end until 
 machinery was controlled. But what was so plain 
 to me was, unfortunately, not so apparent to others, 
 yet it was not until lately, when I had the good 
 fortune to read Mr. Beer's History of British 
 Socialism, that I could see how this truth could 
 be demonstrated. I could not see how to get 
 behind the popular Socialist notion that no such 
 problem existed, or the position of those who, while 
 admitting that a problem existed, nevertheless main- 
 tained it was subordinate to the problem of 
 capitalism, and that to raise it was to raise a 
 false issue. But when I read Mir. Beer's history 
 I made the interesting discovery, not only that the 
 Socialist Movement had its origin in an attempt 
 to solve the problem of men and machines, but 
 that the problem of machinery occupied a central 
 position in Socialist thought from the days of Owen 
 to Marx. This discovery removed what had
 
 14 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 hitherto been an unsurmountable obstacle, and 
 makes it possible to state the problem in the terms 
 of the thought of to-day. 
 
 A word about the title of the book. From one 
 point of view, Post Industrialism connotes Medi- 
 evalism, from another it could be defined as 
 " inverted Marxism." But in any case it means 
 the state of society that will follow 1 the break-up of 
 Industrialism, and might therefore be used to cover 
 the speculations of all who recognize Industrialism 
 is doomed. The need of some such term sufficiently 
 inclusive to cover the ideas of those who, while 
 sympathizing with the ideals of Socialists, yet 
 differed with them in their attitude towards 
 Industrialism has long been felt, and the term 
 Post -Industrialism, which I owe to Dr. A. K. 
 Coomaraswamy, seems to me well suited to supply 
 this want. 
 
 It remains to add that this book is complementary 
 to my Guilds, Trade and Agriculture, which analyses 
 the post-war problem from the point of view of 
 exchange. 
 
 A. J. P. 
 
 66, STRAND-ON-GREEN, 
 December, 1921.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE OF THE SOCIALIST 
 
 MOVEMENT 17 
 
 II. THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES CONCERNING 
 
 MACHINERY 34 
 
 III. MACHINERY AND THE SUBDIVISION OF LABOUR 52 
 
 IV. MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY ... 70 
 
 V. MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS ... 84 
 
 VI. INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 100 
 
 VII. DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION .... 124 
 
 VIII. THE RETURN TO THE PAST 137
 
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE OF THE 
 SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 
 
 IT is a recurring tragedy in the history of ideas 
 and movements that proposals originally advanced 
 as means to ends come to be looked upon as ends 
 in themselves, while the original purpose which 
 they were intended to serve becomes obscured and 
 forgotten. Some such fate appears to have over- 
 taken the Socialist Movement, and is the secret 
 alike of its intellectual confusion and its practical 
 impotence. Thus, the nationalization of land, 
 capital, and the means of production and exchange, 
 which, in spite of its modification by Guild theory, 
 is still the substance of Socialist faith, has come 
 to be regarded as the final aim and purpose of 
 Socialist activity, while the problem of machinery, 
 which this proposal was originally intended to solve, 
 has not merely been forgotten, but its very existence 
 is denied. An inquiry into the history o*f Socialist 
 thought will demonstrate this beyond a shadow 
 of doubt. 
 
 From a sociological point of view, the period 
 from 1760 to 1825, in which the foundation of 
 modern political and reform activity was laid, 
 exhibits four phases, " The first was purely parlia- 
 
 2 17
 
 18 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 mentary and constitutional ; its protagonists, Wilkes 
 and ' Junius,' fought against the oligarchy and the 
 remnants of personal monarchy. The second phase 
 was mainly agrarian ; the effect of the rapid rate 
 of enclosing farms and commons, as well as of the 
 improvements in agriculture, turned the attention 
 of revolutionaries towards agrarian reform ; its 
 writers were Spence, Ogilvie and Paine. The third 
 phase was caused by the enthusiasm for the French 
 Revolution on the part of the English intellectuals 
 and London artisans, whose minds had been pre- 
 pared by the theories which were current in the 
 antecedent two phases ; its writers were William 
 Godwin, the youthful Coleridge, Southey, Words- 
 worth, and John Thelwall. The fourth phase was 
 that of the industrial revolution proper, the first 
 critical writer of which was Charles Hall, followed 
 by Robert Owen and his school, and the anti- 
 capitalist critics, Ravenstone, Hodgskin, and several 
 anonymous writers : the poet of this phase was 
 Shelley." ' 
 
 Each of these phases contributed something to 
 the stock of ideas and ferment of reform activity 
 that opened in the second decade of the nineteenth 
 century, and which gradually gathered strength until 
 the defeat of the Chartist Movement in 1848. But 
 it was the last phase that gave birth to the Socialist 
 Movement. The introduction of machinery had 
 been accompanied by the growth of prosperity a 
 prosperity in which the working-class shared, for 
 wages were high and employment was plentiful. 
 But about the year 1806 its unrestricted use resulted 
 in supply outstripping demand, and the displace- 
 ment and depreciation of labour by machinery 
 
 1 A History of British Socialism, by M. Beer, vol. i, p 101.
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE 19 
 
 began, and reformers began to turn their attention 
 to industrial problems. By 1811 the problem had 
 become acute, and widespread unemployment gave 
 rise to the Luddite riots. The infuriated workmen 
 rose and destroyed the machinery. The riots began 
 in Nottingham' with the destruction of stocking 
 and lace frames, and spread into Yorkshire and 
 Lancashire. The situation was met by the enact- 
 ment of Draconian laws that made the wilful 
 destruction of machinery a crime, punishable by 
 death, and in January, 1813, eighteen workmen 
 died on the gallows at York. Still the problem 
 remained. The number of unemployed increased 
 at an alarming rate, public opinion became agitated, 
 meetings were called and committees appointed to 
 investigate the cause of the distress and find a 
 remedy for it. But no remedy was forthcoming. 
 And this for the simple reason that, in the terms 
 in which the public were accustomed to think, 
 there was no solution. The unrestricted use of 
 machinery challenged the existing order of society 
 by upsetting the wage system that is, the system 
 of distributing purchasing power by means of pay- 
 ment for work done and so they were faced with 
 the alternatives of abolishing or curtailing the use 
 of machinery, or of reconstructing society on some 
 new basis that could be harmonized with its un- 
 restricted use. Both of these alternatives were for 
 them apparently unthinkable, if, indeed, they ever 
 gave a moment's thought to the latter. 
 
 It was at this time, when society was perplexed 
 by the social problems that the use of machinery 
 presented, that Robert Owen was first led to pursue 
 those ^peculations which laid the foundation of 
 Socialist thought. The facilities for the production
 
 20 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 of wealth, which the new machinery afforded, had 
 made a tremendous impression upon his imagina- 
 tion, and any idea of abolishing or curtailing its 
 use he never appears to have entertained. Yet 
 he saw that it challenged the existing order of 
 society. He was of the opinion that machinery, 
 tended by a comparatively small number of manual 
 workers, would soon be capable of supplying the 
 needs of mankind. What, in such circumstances, 
 was to become of the working-class? Were they 
 to die of starvation in the midst of plenty, or 
 were they to live upon doles? for if existing social 
 arrangements were to be maintained there was no 
 other alternative. 
 
 " The demands of the poor for parish relief 
 increased to such an extent that the House of 
 Commons appointed a Committee on Poor Laws. 
 Robert Owen, having found it impossible to explain 
 his views upon the matter to a committee appointed 
 by a meeting of the leading men of London, wrote 
 a report for the Parliamentary Committee on Poor 
 Laws, March, 1817. A year later he further 
 elaborated his reforms on behalf of the working 
 class in a memorial to the Allied Powers assembled 
 in Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, and in 1 8 1 9 he 
 caused one of his literary friends, probably George 
 Mudie (editor of the Economist, 18212), to write 
 a number of open letters to Ricardo on the same 
 subject. The gist of these pamphlets was that 
 machinery had facilitated production to such a 
 degree that the world was becoming saturated with 
 wealth. As long as manual labour was the main 
 source of wealth, demand and supply balanced. 
 Production and population were to each other as 
 I to I. In the years 1792 to 1817 the proportion
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE 21 
 
 changed enormously. Production to population 
 were now as 12 to I . As machinery worked 
 cheaper than manual labour, the latter was being 
 depreciated or displaced. The total wage bill of 
 the country diminished ; the working-class lost, 
 therefore, much of the fund from which they 
 satisfied their needs, the home market contracted, 
 and the produced commodities remained unsold in 
 the barns and warehouses. When the invention 
 of the steam engine and other engines was made, 
 either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse 
 was bestowed upon society. At present, the latter 
 prevailed, and a considerable portion of the British 
 population was doomed to pauperism. It was in 
 vain for manual labour to contend, under the present 
 conditions, with the sinews of mechanism. On 
 the other hand, if it were possible to make con- 
 sumption keep pace with production, labour and 
 capital would be beneficially employed, and distress 
 would be unknown. But this could not be the case 
 so long as private gain, and not social welfare, 
 ruled economic life. As things stood now, produc- 
 tion would more and more outstrip consumption, 
 for the export trade must gradually decrease, and 
 the home market contract, and therefore unemploy- 
 ment and insecurity of existence increase, until the 
 working-classes, finding their remuneration either 
 gone or reduced below the means of subsistence, 
 would be goaded into fury and despair, and suddenly 
 overwhelm our noble and beneficent institutions 
 and lay them in ruins. ' We resemble individuals 
 standing on the narrow causeway of a surrounding 
 abyss.' All this happened because the human mind, 
 after countless ages of struggle with poverty and 
 ignorance, finally succeeded in unlocking the sources
 
 22 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 of wealth ; in multiplying the production forces; 
 in rendering the production of goods easy. It \vas 
 abundance that brought upon us misery 1 Large 
 masses of producers were thrown upon the Poor 
 Laws because they had produced too much wealth ! 
 How paradoxical it all looked ! What was the 
 remedy? Some said Poor Law Reform ; others 
 advised emigration. But all remedies of that kind 
 were no good, for they did not touch the problem. 
 The real cure lay in arrangements that would 
 enlarge consumption and make it tally with pro- 
 duction. Such arrangements were conditioned upon 
 combined labour and expenditure, or communism." ' 
 
 We see, then, that there is a definite connection 
 between the problems of machinery and the rise of 
 Socialist thought. The introduction of machinery 
 had upset the wage system, yet Owen saw that 
 if consumption was to be made to tally with pro- 
 duction, wages would have to be increased, and 
 as this was impossible so long as machinery was 
 in private hands, our competitive system, based 
 upon the private ownership of machinery and 
 capital, would have to be abolished and replaced 
 by some form of co-operative or communist organi- 
 zation of society. Then machinery, instead of being 
 a curse, would become a blessing, inasmuch as 
 under such arrangements the wealth of the com- 
 munity would be equitably distributed, since no 
 one would starve through lack of work. 
 
 The change Owen advocated was to be primarily 
 social rather than political. It gave rise to the 
 term " Socialist," which came into use among the 
 discussions of the Owenites. Owen's idea of how 
 to effect the transformation of society from an 
 * A History of British Socialism, vol. i, pp. 168-70.
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE 23 
 
 individualist and competitive basis to a co-operative 
 and communist one was by organizing colonies or 
 groups of workers on a communist basis. Several 
 of these were organized by Owen and his followers. 
 But they all, from one cause or another, ended in 
 failure, and their promoters lost heavily in money 
 over them. The central current of Owen's thought 
 was completely communist without any admixture 
 of private property institutions, though from 1820 
 onwards he began to disseminate the view that not 
 only competition, but currency problems, were also 
 at the root of the social misery. 
 
 The Co-operative Movement, with which in these 
 days his name is associated, was not initiated by 
 O'wen personally. On the contrary, it was founded 
 by leaders of the working-men who were in favour 
 of Owenism and political Radicalism, during an 
 absence of Owen in America. They met together 
 and opened co-operative shops, the Rochdale 
 Pioneers taking the lead. " When Owen returned 
 from America and saw the co-operative under- 
 takings, he disapproved of them, and contemp- 
 tuously called them Trading Associations, frankly 
 declaring that buying and selling had nothing in 
 common with his co-operative commonwealth. But 
 when he found that numerous members of these 
 unions were inclined to support many of his views, 
 he entered into relations with them and took a keen 
 interest in their deliberations." * 
 
 A report of one of their early meetings is 
 interesting as illustrating that the fundamental ideas 
 of the movement were Owenite. A debate was 
 opened on the subject : " Machinery under competi- 
 tion and under co-operation." Among the speakers 
 1 A History of British Socialism, vol. i, p. 300.
 
 24 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 were Hetherington, Lovett, Cleave and Watson, all 
 of them subsequently leaders of Chartism, and their 
 speeches resounded with the theme that machinery 
 is a curse under the system of capital, since all 
 the advantages of mechanical progress fell to the 
 share of the capitalists : machinery, on the other 
 hand, will become a blessing under a system of 
 co-operation, since in this way the acquirements of 
 the human mind will benefit the whole of society. 1 
 Organized labour never accepted complete 
 Owenism. It adhered to the Radical movement 
 for Parliamentary reform, trade unionism, co-opera- 
 tion, and such other parts of his teaching as were 
 capable of being assimilated to these purposes. 
 From 1825 onwards the currents of thought, 
 generated by Owen and his followers and their 
 anti-capitalist criticism, reached the thinking portion 
 of the working-class and created Chartism. This 
 movement, which gradually assumed national pro- 
 portions, and was in full swing in the second quarter 
 of the nineteenth century was nominally, as its name 
 implies, a movement for democratic parliamentary 
 reform. But the name was a misnomer, for in 
 reality it was an elemental class war, and constituted 
 a series of revolutionary attempts to re-organize 
 society on a Socialist and Labour basis. A bound- 
 less optimism pervaded the whole movement, and 
 it filled its adherents with the unshakeable belief 
 that the conversion of the nation to the ideals of 
 Socialism was at hand, for they were of opinion 
 that the introduction of machinery had so com- 
 pletely dislocated society that the collapse of society 
 was inevitable. " Of the unfulfilled prophecies," 
 says Beer, " concerning the downfall of capitalism 
 1 A History of British Socialism,~vo\. i, p. 301.
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE 25 
 
 there is no end." Yet, with them, its imminence 
 was unquestionable, and the re-organization of 
 society on Socialist and Labour lines a foregone 
 conclusion. 
 
 Yet they were mistaken. After 1848 the long 
 period of economic crisis came to an end. 
 Prosperity returned, not because the problem of 
 the relation of men to machines had been faced, 
 but because two outside factors came to the rescue, 
 which, by stimulating activity in every direction, 
 enabled our society to put off the evil day. The 
 first of these was the growth of the export trade, 
 which, during the whole of the nineteenth century, 
 kept on increasing. And the second was the de- 
 velopment of railway building, which created an 
 enormous demand for labour. It was, moreover, 
 followed by a great shifting of the centres of popu- 
 lation from villages to small towns, and from small 
 towns to large ones, which not only created an 
 enormous demand for building, but effected, within 
 certain limits, a decentralization of wealth that 
 brought about a distributed initiative which stimu- 
 lated trade. Railway building, for the most part, 
 came to an end in the 'seventies, but the boom in 
 building that followed the shifting of the centres 
 of population continued until the outbreak of war. 
 
 These developments contradicted the prognosti- 
 cations of Owen that the export trade must 
 gradually decrease and the home market contract. 
 Yet the failure of Chartism is not to be ascribed 
 to their falsification. On the contrary, Chartism 
 fell from internal rather than external causes. Its 
 central weakness was that it never had one mind, 
 and to state its faith at one period of its history 
 is not to state it at another. The central aim of
 
 26 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 Chartism throughout the greater part of its history 
 was the conquest of political power ; with this was 
 merged a vague notion of transforming Great 
 Britain into an aggregation of communist colonies 
 on O'wenite lines. In the midst of these there came 
 the gospel of the .Class War and the General Strike . 
 These conflicting ideas could not be reconciled 1 , 
 and Chartism in turn was Parliamentarian, 
 Syndicalist, and Owenite. Emphasis was given to 
 one or other of these aspects as circumstances 
 dictated. Disappointment with the Reform Bill 
 of 1832 led to a reaction against parliamen- 
 tarianism, which lasted for a decade. In 1842 
 the General Strike was tried and failed. After 
 1839 Owenism, as a social system, showed signs 
 of falling to pieces, and in 1845, with the disastrous 
 break-up of Queenswood, the last of the Owenite 
 colonies, it collapsed. Thus Chartism was left 
 without a social faith, and this, by undermining its 
 driving power, paved the way for its ultimate 
 failure. Chartism, as a popular movement, ended 
 in the fiasco of 1848, leaving behind it only a 
 few stragglers, who refused to believe that 
 Chartism was extinct. What was left of its 
 theories and traditions was either taken up by the 
 Co-operators and Trade Unionists, who now with- 
 drew from political activity, or became in turn 
 the starting-point for new political and economic 
 speculations. m 
 
 Karl Marx was the heir of the Chartist move- 
 ment. With the failure of Chartism and the return 
 of prosperity that followed the growth of foreign 
 trade and the development of railway building, 
 people began to think that the difficulties of the 
 first half of the nineteenth century were merely
 
 27 
 
 incidental to the transition from hand to machine 
 production, and it was not long before the problem 
 of machinery was obscured and forgotten so far as 
 most people were concerned. But Marx, at any 
 rate, had no illusions. He saw clearly that the 
 problem remained exactly where it was, in that a 
 return of prosperity had not been effected by facing 
 and overcoming the economic difficulties that the 
 employment of machinery brought with it, but by 
 external events. The crisis had been postponed 
 by enlarging the area of the problem. It was no 
 longer national, but international. It had been 
 postponed, but it could not be postponed in- 
 definitely, for a time would come when international 
 trade would reach its limit of expansion, and when 
 that limit was reached, the unemployed problem 
 would return with an increased intensity, because 
 it would be insoluble apart from a fundamental 
 change in the basis of society. In anticipation 
 of that return, Marx set to work to develop a 
 theory of society that would provide a firmer base 
 for Socialist activity than had been provided by 
 the fragmentary and contradictory theories of 
 Chartism. 
 
 It is evident that Marx had anticipated the 
 failure of Chartism, for in 1847 he had, with 
 Engels, published the Communist Manifesto, which 
 contains the gist of his teaching. Das Capital is 
 but an expansion and theoretical justification of 
 the views contained in it. In them he throws over 
 the Utopian ideas of Owen as visionary and im- 
 practicable, and searches for the dynamic law of 
 society, which he discovers in the Materialist Con- 
 ception of History. According to this conception, 
 society is not, as Christians would assert, the ex-
 
 28 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 pression or manifestation of ideas and morals, but 
 of the forces of production ; or, in other words, 
 the motive force of society is not generated by the 
 founders of religion, philosophers, law-givers and 
 artists, but by inventors, engineers, discoverers and 
 labourers. It is only the latter who finally count, 
 inasmuch as the ideas of the former are but the 
 intellectual reactions from material conditions. Or, 
 in other words, " In response to the stimuli of 
 the productive forces, man builds up the social 
 order, government, religion, morality, art, philoso- 
 phy and science. The material production is the 
 substructure or the groundwork, while the corres- 
 ponding political, religious, moral, philosophical and 
 scientific systems are the superstructure, the upper 
 storeys of society. The substructure is material, the 
 superstructure is the psychical reflex and effect." ' 
 This is the central idea of Marx. Applied to 
 the world of to-day, it means that Marx considers 
 machinery as the central creative force of the age. 
 He agreed with Owen and the Chartists that 
 machinery, as it is used in a competitive system, 
 will break up existing society, but he goes further 
 and asserts that not only will machinery break up 
 the existing social order, but it is the appointed 
 agent for the creation of a new one. This idea 
 is central in his interpretation of the evolution of 
 capitalism. According to Marx, it is not the evolu- 
 tion of capitalism that determines the evolution 
 of machinery, but the evolution of machinery that 
 determines the evolution of capitalism. The various 
 phases through which the capitalistic organization 
 of society passes are consequent upon the unre- 
 stricted use of machinery, and are not to be 
 ' A History of British Socialism, vol. ii, p. 203.
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE 29 
 
 separated from it. Thus the tendency of capitalism 
 towards centralization is dependent upon the de- 
 velopment of railways and telegraphs, which enable 
 a central control to be exercised. While again 
 the development of the class-war the idea of which 
 he inherited from the Chartists and Continental 
 Socialists is the rebellion of the masses against 
 the injustices consequent upon the concentration 
 of wealth. The end of it will be that the balance of 
 production and consumption will be permanently 
 upset, and economic paralysis result. This last 
 stage of development will be marked by the appear- 
 ance of a permanent army of unemployed. Society 
 will become sharply divided between the irreconcil- 
 able camps of capitalism and the proletariat. The 
 workers, goaded by increasing misery, will then 
 rise and take possession of land, capital, and the 
 means of production and exchange, and will pro- 
 ceed to organize society for the benefit of all instead 
 of for the few. At this point, where the real 
 difficulties begin, the thinking of Marx comes 
 suddenly to an end. He leaves us contemplating 
 the communist society which lies at the end of the 
 process of industrial evolution, but about the struc- 
 ture of it he has next to nothing to say. Its forms, 
 apparently, can be left to the productive forces 
 themselves to determine. There is no need to think 
 further ahead. For, he argues, just as the forces 
 of production in the past found their own suitable 
 form of expression and created traditions of social 
 order, government, law, economics, art and other 
 arrangements, so they can safely be relied upon to 
 fill in the details of the future, for, as he tells us, 
 " every new social system develops its embryo 
 within the womb of the old system."
 
 80 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 The defeat of Chartism,, as I have pointed out, 
 was followed by a revival of trade. Prosperity 
 returned. The development of mechanism, which 
 hitherto had appeared as the enemy of the labouring 
 classes, now, through the boom of railway building, 
 began to wear the guise of their liberator. The 
 working classes became increasingly committed to 
 machine production, and opposition to its use be- 
 came confined to such minorities of handicraftsmen 
 as from time to time found themselves displaced 
 by new inventions, and amid the increasing material 
 prosperity, the existence of any problem of 
 machinery was forgotten. People began to think 
 that machinery was destined to become the liberator 
 of mankind. And in this opinion they were con- 
 firmed by the theory of social evolution enunciated 
 by Herbert Spencer. It was a comfortable belief, 
 especially for the capitalists and the middle class, 
 who, by means of it, were becoming so prosperous. 
 The protests of Ruskin and the warning of Matthew 
 Arnold, that faith in machinery ws our besetting 
 sin, were brushed aside as the irresponsible utter- 
 ances of idealists and cranks, who were engaged 
 in the vain and impossible task of stemming the 
 tide of progress and evolution. 
 
 It was into this atmosphere of satisfaction with 
 the achievements of industrialism, that the Socialist 
 Movement was reborn. For ten years after the 
 failure of Chartism there was a slump in social 
 agitation. The working-class seemed to have 
 abandoned politics altogether, and turned their 
 attention to trade unionism and co-operation. All 
 efforts to interest them in politics and the general 
 social problem proved ineffectual, and it was not 
 until the 'eighties that interest in Socialism began
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE 81 
 
 to re-awaken. John Stuart Mill had created a 
 certain interest in the question of land reform, 
 which prepared the way for Henry George, whose 
 Progress and Poverty (1879) had a large and 
 immediate sale. In 1882, when his book had 
 attained a circulation of 100,000 copies in the 
 United Kingdom, he came over from America and 
 lectured in London and Ireland. The effect of his 
 propaganda was to stimulate interest 'in economics 
 among the younger generation of intellectuals and 
 working-men. In 1884 the Social Democratic 
 Federation and the Fabian Society were in exist- 
 ence. The former was avowedly Marxian. The 
 Fabian Society, on the contrary, broke away from 
 the Marxian tradition, and gave a new development 
 to Socialist thought, which we must now consider. 
 Superficially considered, the difference between 
 Marx and the Fabians was that, whereas Marx 
 pinned his faith to revolution, the Fabians substi- 
 tuted evolution for revolution as the watchword 
 of reform. But the real difference was that, 
 whereas Marx knew that the problem of machinery 
 was central in the social problem, however erroneous 
 many of his conclusions might be, the Fabians 
 never realized that any such problem existed. On 
 the contrary, they accepted the comfortable 
 optimism of Herbert Spencer, which identified the 
 spread of mechanical production with the cause of 
 progress, while differing with him in demanding 
 that society should be organized on a co-operative 
 instead of a competitive basis. Thus it came about 
 that they were led to deny any catastrophic ending 
 of the industrial system such as Marx predicted, 
 and to postulate that industrial expansion had no 
 limits. Living at a time when industrial conditions
 
 82 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 had attained to some stability, they mistook the 
 temporary immunity from economic troubles for a 
 condition of permanence. They failed to realize 
 that the problem of the relation of men and 
 machines had not been solved, but was obscured 
 and overlaid by the development of foreign trade 
 and the shifting of the centres of population, and 
 would reappear, when the expansion of markets 
 had reached their limit, if existing tendencies were 
 to proceed unchecked. Therefore, though Marx 
 might be wrong in assuming that the Socialist State 
 could suddenly emerge from the debris of a ruined 
 civilization, he was not wrong in seeing that the 
 progressive application of machinery would result 
 in the later phases of capitalism being marked by 
 the appearance of a large and ever-increasing army 
 of unemployed. Thus it came about that, having 
 ruled out the great primary issue of industrial 
 civilization as a matter of no account, the Fabians 
 fell back on secondary issues, and the nationaliza- 
 tion of land, capital, and the means of production 
 and exchange, which had been originally advanced 
 as a means of effecting the abolition of the wage 
 system a necessity if machinery was to be allowed 
 to displace labour was advanced as an end in 
 itself, while " the abolition of the wage system " 
 was discarded as a meaningless phrase which could 
 only mislead the public as to the aims of Social- 
 ism. And Socialism, from being a movement that 
 faced the central facts of civilization, degenerated 
 into the issue of private and public ownership, 
 and lost its way in a maze of Blue Books, statistics 
 and detailed considerations ; gas and water 
 socialism, Poor Law, Housing Reform, etc., on 
 the one hand, and political labourism on the other.
 
 THE FORGOTTEN PURPOSE 33 
 
 The inadequacy of Fabianism had all along been 
 felt by many Socialists, yet it was not until the 
 year 1908 that a reaction set in against it, which 
 developed out of disappointment with the perform- 
 ances of the Labour Party in the House of 
 Commons. This reaction took two forms. Among 
 the intellectuals it took the form of rebellion against 
 the bureaucratic ideal, taking eventually the form 
 of Guild Socialism, which, in a vague kind of way, 
 has penetrated a great part of the working-class 
 movement, while simultaneously there was a reac- 
 tion against Fabian policy among the extreme 
 elements of the Socialist Movement, which took 
 the form of a revival of the ideas of Class War 4 
 and Marx modified by Syndicalist ideas imported 
 from France. Both these movements have nowa- 
 days, in spite of certain appearances to the contrary, 
 spent their force, and if the whole Socialist Move- 
 ment does not suffer the same eclipse that followed 
 the failure of Chartism, it is because the chaos of 
 Europe and the magnitude of the unemployed 
 problem will not allow men to forget that a social 
 problem exists. 
 
 Whether the Socialist Movement has a future, 
 or whether it will slowly disintegrate, remains to 
 be seen. But that some solution must be found 
 for the social problem, and found quickly, if civili- 
 zation is not to perish admits of no question. 
 Meanwhile the reflection is forced upon us, that this 
 unemployed problem is the problem that Marx 
 foresaw ; it is the problem that confronted the 
 Luddite rioters, and which our modern Socialists 
 in their blindness deny. 
 
 3
 
 II 
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES CONCERN- 
 ING MACHINERY 
 
 WE have seen that the Socialist ideal of recon- 
 structing society on some co-operative or com- 
 munal basis had its origin in the fact that the 
 unrestricted use of machinery was found to be 
 incompatible with a competitive society ; that the 
 problems growing out of machine production 
 found a central position in Socialist theory from the 
 days of Owen to Marx, but were lost sight of and 
 forgotten by the Fabians, who came to advocate 
 the nationalization of land, capital, and the means 
 of production and exchange as the sole end of 
 Socialist activity instead of being merely a means 
 to an end, as they were regarded by the early 
 nineteenth-century Socialist thinkers ; the end, of 
 course, being the adaptation of society to the 
 changed conditions brought about by large-scale 
 mechanical production. 
 
 This is the first cause of confusion that has 
 overtaken the Socialist Movement. So far from 
 being able to find a solution for the problems of 
 society, the movement has forgotten what is the 
 problem it originally set out to solve. In these 
 circumstances, the first step towards extricating 
 society from the chaos into which it has fallen is 
 to restore the problem of the relation of men to 
 
 34
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 35 
 
 machines to the central position that it occupied in 
 social theory before the Fabian Society came along. 
 This is a necessity of clear thinking and an issue 
 quite apart from the question as to what our 
 particular attitude towards the problem of 
 machinery may be. The fact that the problems of 
 machinery occupy a central position in the social 
 theories of both Ruskin and Marx should give us 
 pause to think. That two great thinkers, who 
 came to diametrically opposed conclusions about 
 almost everything, should yet be agreed that in 
 any analysis of modern society the problem of 
 machinery should be given priority to all others, 
 suggests that it should not be lightly dismissed, 
 while the fact that modern thinkers who have 
 chosen to ignore it find themselves not only entirely 
 impotent to effect a change, but bankrupt of ideas 
 as well, suggests that their premises are insuffi- 
 cient. In some way or other they hold their ideas 
 in a false perspective, and though they may protest 
 against any reintroduction of the problem of 
 machinery as being merely an addition to the 
 difficulty, yet I am persuaded that it will in the 
 end turn out to be a simplification, in the same 
 way that the introduction of a fresh term to an 
 intricate irreducible mathematical expression will 
 at times bring it to unity. 
 
 If then we may be agreed that the problem 
 of machinery is fundamental, let us pass on to 
 consider what our attitude towards machinery 
 should be, and in this connection it will be con- 
 venient to begin by considering the prophecies of 
 Marx to what extent they have been fulfilled and 
 to what extent they have been falsified by experi- 
 ence. For Marx, in his whole-hearted belief in
 
 36 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the ultimate beneficence of machinery, is close to 
 the modern mind. 
 
 In the magnitude of the unemployed problem 
 to-day we may see at the same time the disproof 
 of the Fabian notion of indefinite industrial expan- 
 sion and the fulfilment of the prophecy of Marx 
 that the last phase of capitalism would be 
 marked by the appearance of a large and increasing 
 army of unemployed. As the Fabians denied that 
 such a thing could happen, we recognize that Marx 
 had a grip of something fundamental that the 
 Fabians had not. That something is the depen- 
 dence of finance on machinery. Marx saw clearly 
 that under a system of competitive enterprise 
 machinery is inevitably used more and more, and 
 that development upon such lines placed finance 
 entirely at the mercy of machinery the progressive 
 application of which would determine the various 
 phases of industrial development through which 
 society would pass until the climax was reached. 
 The truth of this interpretation is confirmed by 
 the situation developed in Germany before the war. 
 It is customary to attribute this situation to the 
 failure of Germany's system of credit banks to the 
 fact that she had built up her industrial system on 
 borrowed money. But the great fact behind the 
 financial situation is that in the fifteen years before 
 the war Germany had quadrupled her output. The 
 ratio of productivity in Germany due to never 
 slackening energy, technique and scientific develop- 
 ment was far outstripping the ratio of demand. 
 Production was no longer controlled by demand 
 but by plant, and the increased pressure of com- 
 petition had so increased the overhead expenses 
 that no furnace could be damped down and no
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 37 
 
 machine stopped ; for the overhead expenses 
 would then eat up the profits and the whole 
 industrial organization come crashing down, bring- 
 ing with it national bankruptcy. 1 
 
 We miss the lesson that the war should teach 
 us if we fail to recognize that it was finally brought 
 about by the desperate economic condition to which 
 Germany had been reduced by her whole-hearted 
 pursuit of science and mechanism pursued as 
 ends in themselves. Such a climax was inevitable 
 from the day that industry embarked on un- 
 regulated machine production, for it inevitably 
 leads to the problem of over-production (or 
 under-consumption as some people prefer to call 
 it). The ideal of the early nineteenth-century 
 economists, that Britain might become the work- 
 shop of the world, was a romantic illusion ; for 
 no nation can afford to be the consumer of the 
 machine-made goods of other countries indefinitely. 
 The suction would drain its economic resources. 
 Each nation in turn is driven to adopt machine 
 production in self-defence. Hence it has happened 
 that one after another of the nations who were once 
 our customers have taken to machine production 
 and have been drawn into the whirlpool of indus- 
 trial production. And in proportion as this came 
 about, we were driven further and further afield in 
 search of markets, and it was inevitable that a 
 time would come when there were no new markets 
 left to exploit. When that point was reached, 
 the fundamental falsity of the whole system 
 revealed itself in the economic paradox that drove 
 Germany to war. 
 
 1 See Germany's Commercial Grip on the World, by Pro- 
 fessor Hauser of Dijon (Evelyn Nash).
 
 88 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 Now Marx saw clearly that unregulated machine 
 production would reach a climax, in that some 
 day a point would be reached when industry could 
 expand no further. But he failed to see that the 
 pressure of competition would, by stimulating 
 international jealousies, result in war. On the 
 contrary, in the Communist Manifesto he says : 
 44 National differences and antagonisms are to-day 
 vanishing ever more and more with the develop- 
 ment of the bourgeoisie, free trade, the world 
 market, the uniformity of industrial production and 
 the conditions of life corresponding thereto." And 
 this is important, because the war has given the 
 lie to Marx as it has done to Herbert Spencer, 
 for it has revealed industrialism as a destructive 
 rather than a constructive force. Before the war 
 it was customary to regard industrialism and 
 militarism as opposed principles ; one making for 
 peace, the other for war. Yet reflection suggests 
 that militarism and industrialism as they exist in 
 the world to-day are but two aspects of the same 
 thing, inasmuch as both are expressions of the 
 worship of wealth and the bent given to the human 
 mind by the cult of mechanism. From an early 
 date they have given each other mutual support. 
 The war has been well called a war of machines. 
 For that is what it was. War on such a 
 tremendous scale was impossible in the past. It 
 needed the whole industrial apparatus to make it 
 possible. Mechanical transport, telegraphs, tinned 
 foods, etc. were just as necessary as armaments 
 for war on such a prodigious scale, while the fact 
 must not be overlooked that in the production of 
 armaments the mechanical arts reach their highest 
 point of perfection. The Dreadnought is just as
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 39 
 
 much a symbol of the modern world as the 
 Cathedral is of the Middle Ages. 1 
 
 But this is not the worst. Bad as the war was, 
 it seems that worse is to follow. The reactions 
 of the war have been such as to precipitate 
 economic chaos everywhere. Wars in the past 
 were not so destructive to society, not only 
 because they were on a smaller scale but because 
 the social structure, being simple, recovered after 
 a time from the shock of war. But the un- 
 restricted use of machinery has resulted in making 
 our society so complex that it can only be main- 
 tained by an intricate system of exchanges. The 
 war has wrecked the exchanges, and this is produc- 
 ing economic deadlocks everywhere. And there 
 seems little prospect of society ever extricating 
 itself from the confusion, for its complexity is such 
 as to be beyond the comprehension of even the 
 greatest minds. 
 
 Though Marx did not foresee the war, he did 
 see that a fundamental antagonism existed between 
 mechanical production and established traditions of 
 social order and culture. He saw that the un- 
 restricted use of machinery would end in their 
 destruction, but he prophesied that as a result of 
 the changed social conditions new social and 
 cultural standards would arise as a consequence 
 of the reflex action of machine production. This 
 prediction I submit has been entirely falsified by 
 experience. There is no evidence whatsoever that 
 machinery by any reflex action is in the way of 
 creating any new traditions to replace the ones 
 it has destroyed. On the contrary all that follows 
 
 1 In From the Human End, by Dr. L. P. Jacks, there is 
 an interesting chapter on " Militarism and Industrialism."
 
 40 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 in the wake of the machine is chaos and con- 
 fusion. 1 
 
 The failure of sociologists to formulate any theory 
 of society that would permit the unrestricted use 
 of machinery was some years ago frankly admitted 
 by Mr. H. G. Wells, who in his belief absolute 
 in the ultimate beneficence of machinery and in 
 his perception that the problem of machinery is 
 central in modern society is the true successor of 
 Marx. Thus in the introductory essay to The 
 Great State he says : ' We have, in fact, to invent 
 the Great State if we are to suppose any Great 
 State at all, an economic method without any 
 
 A masterly analysis of the effect of machinery on civiliza- 
 tion is to be found in Social Decay and Regeneration, by 
 Dr. R. Austin Freeman (Constable, 1921). His whole indict- 
 ment against machinery is summed up in these words : 
 " Mechanism by its reactions on man and his environment 
 is antagonistic to human welfare. It has destroyed industry 
 and replaced it by mere labour ; it has degraded and 
 vulgarized the works of man ; it has destroyed social unity 
 and replaced it by social disintegration and class antagonism 
 to an extent which directly threatens civilization ; it has 
 injuriously affected the structural type of society by develop- 
 ing its organization at the expense of the individual ; it 
 has endowed the inferior man with political power which 
 he employs to the common disadvantage by creating political 
 institutions of a socially destructive type ; and finally, by 
 its reactions on the activities of war, it constitutes an agent 
 for the wholesale destruction of man and his works and the 
 extinction of human culture. It is thus strictly analogous 
 to those anti-bodies by which the existence of aggregates 
 of the lower organisms is brought to an end." 
 
 Equally interesting is an article entitled " The Dilemma 
 of Civilizatioif," by Dr. Inge (Edinburgh Review, July 1921), 
 in which the book is reviewed. Though here and there the 
 observations of both author and reviewer are marred by 
 class prejudice, yet the indictment as a whole stands.
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 41 
 
 specific labour class. If we cannot do so we had 
 better throw ourselves in with the conservators 
 forthwith, for they are right and we are absurd. 
 . . . Our contemporary economics is, however, 
 still a foolish pretentious pseudo -science, a fester- 
 ing mass of assumptions, about buying and selling 
 and wages -pay ing, and one would as soon consult 
 Bradshaw or the works of Dumas as our orthodox 
 professors of economics for any light upon this 
 fundamental matter." l 
 
 What Mr. Wells says about modernist economics 
 is as true to-day as it was twelve years ago when 
 Mr. Wells wrote these words. There is a con- 
 spiracy of silence everywhere about the central 
 problem the relation of men to machines. 2 Mr. 
 Wells' subsequent career is a striking testimony 
 to the failure of modernists to build any social 
 theory around the unrestricted use of machinery. 
 Alone among modernists Mr. Wells perceives the 
 machine problem to be the central issue, and he 
 has made valiant efforts to solve it. He has 
 failed because I believe he has attempted the 
 impossible. Yet he is too fascinated by machinery 
 to admit it, and so he circles round and round in 
 a vain hope that the problem will yield some- 
 where. He seems to be conscious of the fact 
 that he cannot go forward and he lacks the courage 
 to go back. 
 
 * The Great State. A collection of essays by various 
 writers, with an introduction by H. G. Wells, pp. 37-39. 
 
 * If there is an exception to this rule it is Mr. C. H. 
 Douglas' credit scheme. Mr. Douglas does recognize that 
 the wage system is breaking down. But his efforts to 
 put something in its place does not encourage in us the 
 belief that the problem will be solved on modernist lines.
 
 42 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 What is true of attempts to reconcile social 
 theory with the unrestricted use of machinery is 
 true of the arts. Many have been the attempts 
 to reconcile the arts with the fact of machine 
 production. But they have all failed. Let no 
 one suppose that the hostility of the Arts and 
 Crafts Movement towards machinery is based upon 
 some incurable prejudice. On the contrary, it is 
 a conclusion to which men are reluctantly driven 
 by experience. There have always been as many 
 artists who were ready to affirm that the claims 
 of art and machinery could be reconciled as those 
 who denied the possibility. But the interesting fact 
 is that those who were most ready to affirm it are 
 those whose work does not come into collision with 
 machinery and that the new ideas of art came from 
 those who went back to the basis of art in handi- 
 craft and not from those who exalted the machine, 
 while any good work that has been produced by. 
 machines has merely imitated as best it could the 
 work done by hand. That is the truth of the 
 matter. The machine is imitative ; it is in no 
 sense creative. But while it imitates, it can only 
 imitate certain things. There is always something 
 omitted, some quality that does not lend itself 
 to reproduction by machinery. That quality is 
 temperament. There is no temperament about 
 machine work. It can reproduce things of good 
 proportion, of pleasing colour and design. But 
 the temperament will be missing. It eludes the 
 machine. 
 
 Meanwhile no new forms of art make their 
 appearance in response to the stimulus of the 
 machine. The Design and Industries Association 
 has made great efforts to reconcile machinery and
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 43 
 
 art. Recognizing that the Arts and Crafts Move- 
 ment had failed to influence industry as a whole, it 
 preached the gospel that the only way of reviving 
 the arts was to come to terms with machinery. 
 But it has failed as miserably as the Arts and 
 Crafts Movement to exercise a widespread influence 
 on industrial production, while it is to be observed 
 its ideas are entirely parasitic on the work of the 
 craftsmen. And this is not surprising when we 
 remember that new developments in science have 
 their roots in the experimental use of material ; 
 for what, after all, is experimental science but the 
 counterpart of experimental handicraft? And if 
 science cannot progress apart from such an experi- 
 mental base, why should it be supposed that the 
 arts can? The truth is that in seeking to revive 
 the arts upon a basis of experimental handicraft 
 artists are really adopting the method of science. 
 But there is no opposition between experimental 
 science and machinery, why then should there be 
 opposition between the handicrafts and machinery? 
 The answer is that it arises because the mechanical 
 standard of production which satisfies science lends 
 itself to quantitative production, while the aesthetic 
 standards of craftsmanship do not, because the 
 latter is impossible apart from the liberty of the 
 craftsman. All the outfit of capitalism, its quanti- 
 tative standard, its large organizations, its speed 
 and complexity are antipathetic to the spirit of 
 art and craftsmanship. They collide at a thousand 
 points and all efforts to reconcile them fail in 
 the end. 
 
 But there is a deeper reason for this antagonism. 
 They serve different ends. Art serves spiritual 
 ends ; machinery and commercialism serve material
 
 44 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 ends. Up to a certain point these two may 
 develop side by side and no antagonism is felt. 
 The spiritual and material aspects of life go hand 
 in hand. But beyond a certain point this is no 
 longer the case. Separation begins. Henceforth 
 further development of one side can only be at 
 the expense of the other. It is not a case of any- 
 one definitely willing this separation. It simply 
 happens as a loss of balance consequent upon an 
 undue concentration upon the problems appertain- 
 ing to one side of life. It is a question of 
 proportion. As in chemistry, we know the elements 
 composing any compound substance will combine 
 with others in a certain definite and fixed pro- 
 portion, and in no other, so we may say that the 
 material and spiritual elements will only combine 
 organically in society when they co -exist in a 
 certain definite proportion. To translate this idea 
 into the terms of our immediate problem we may 
 say that mechanism is one element ; art is another. 
 They will combine organically as they did in 
 the past when they co-existed in certain propor- 
 tions. But not to-day when mechanism is 
 abnormally developed. The fallacy of supposing 
 that mechanism may some day issue in art has its 
 origin in a failure to recognize that, as they are 
 in their nature separate elements, one cannot be 
 transmuted into the other. It is so easy to enjoy 
 the illusion that there is no incompatibility between 
 art and mechanism if one has never made any 
 practical attempt to reconcile the two, but so 
 impossible when one has. The aesthetic and 
 mechanical standards are as different as are those 
 of poetry and logic. And we have no more reason 
 to expect that art will emerge at the end of the
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 45 
 
 mechanical process than that poetry would result 
 from the pursuit of logic. 
 
 There is no branch of art that in one way or 
 another is not threatened with extinction at the 
 hands of mechanical production, and nothing 
 appears to take its place. The problem of 
 architecture, it may be said, is too complex to be 
 capable of any simple generalization. But it may 
 be said that it is attacked on all sides by a com- 
 bination of influences against which the architect 
 is apt to struggle in vain, most of which are 
 directly or indirectly the consequence of un- 
 regulated machine production. For a long time 
 the only serious difficulty which the competent 
 architect had to face was the difficulty of getting 
 decent bricks and tiles to build with. But of late 
 years he has got buried under a perfect avalanche 
 of artificial materials, asbestos tiles, concrete 
 blocks, standardized window frames, doors and 
 other abominations which cut at the very base of 
 any possible architectural treatment. Only on the 
 more expensive work, which is a rapidly declining 
 quantity, can he escape from the necessity of 
 using such things. To believe that any new 
 style of architecture can arise out of such 
 conditions is to take refuge in a faith that 
 has no relation to reality. No one in archi- 
 tecture really believes it, though there are some 
 who try. 
 
 Other arts are being extinguished by the com- 
 petition of mechanical processes of one kind or 
 another. The market for painting has been ruined 
 by cheap reproductions ; music has to compete with 
 the gramophone ; the stage with the cinema ; 
 while the taste for good literature is corrupted by
 
 46 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the deluge of thoughtless rubbish that issues from 
 cheap periodicals. 
 
 Though inventions and machine production 
 have damaged all the arts, apart from those that 
 have their basis in handicraft, they are being extin- 
 guished less by any direct use of machinery than 
 by the corruption of demand. This corruption is 
 the natural consequence of the misuse of machinery 
 with its monotonous grind, its ever-accelerating 
 speed, and its indiscriminating advance which 
 mushes things together in amorphous conglomera- 
 tions of bewildering complexity. Reasonable 
 pleasure has its basis in reasonable work. The 
 corruption of work reacts therefore to corrupt the 
 leisure that accompanies it. For if men are turned 
 into machines, or are engaged in occupations that 
 bring them no pleasure or satisfaction, their life 
 is corrupted at its roots. It matters little if the 
 hours of labour be reduced to six or four hours 
 a day, the corruption will be there all the same. 
 Under such conditions men cease to be normal. 
 A feeling of restlessness overtakes them which, in 
 its reactions, vitiates all natural instincts. They 
 crave excitement, and so long as they are strong 
 and virile, it will tend to take the form of gambling, 
 drink and vice. But when, owing to the fatigue 
 of industrial conditions, a generation loses its 
 vitality, all it desires is to be amused, and so finally 
 it takes to cinemas which make the least demand 
 on the intelligence of any form of amusement. 
 Thus we see that in the long run mechanical labour 
 produces a demand for mechanical amusements. 
 And this is natural, for culture cannot exist finally 
 apart from life. The great cultures of the past 
 were organically a part of a man's everyday work.
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 47 
 
 They came to a man at his work and this formed 
 in his mind a temper that responded to the higher 
 forms of culture. Such cultures were human things 
 to the extent that they were capable of binding 
 king and peasant, priest and craftsman together 
 in a common bond of sympathy and understanding. 
 But such understanding between different classes 
 in society is impossible if the mass of men are 
 degraded in their work, for it is obviously imposs- 
 ible to build up by means of education what the 
 day's work is for ever breaking down. Hence 
 there arises an impossible barrier between the many 
 and the few. The links which bound culture and 
 life are broken, and they cannot be repaired so 
 long as man remains a slave of the machine. And 
 so all art and culture disappear from life, for it 
 cannot be kept alive by the few. All must share it 
 or none. If any art is to revive, it must be an 
 art that is the common possession of the whole 
 people, and such an art cannot be grafted on a 
 machine society. On the contrary, the arts (if we 
 may so call them) that a machine population 
 can share, are the arts of the cinemas and the 
 gramophone, and the only culture is the culture 
 of mechanism, whether it be motor-cars or 
 aeroplanes. For these are the only cultures that 
 are a part of the lives men live. If this is the 
 art and culture that Marx meant when he predicted 
 that a new art and culture would arise in response 
 to the stimuli of the machine, then in this limited 
 sphere his prediction has been fulfilled. But they 
 are not the arts and culture which I, at any rate, 
 associate with the idea of the millennium, for in no 
 sense can they be regarded as communal arts. On 
 the contrary they are the arts of a plutocracy.
 
 48 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 Just in the same way that machine production 
 has created an atmosphere inimical to the arts, it 
 has created an atmosphere antipathic to religion. 
 The really practical challenge to Christian morals 
 does not come from the materialist philosophy but 
 from the machine. The old rationalists denied the 
 supernatural character of Christianity, but they did 
 not challenge its moral code. That challenge, it 
 is to be observed, came from those whose ultimate 
 belief was in the beneficence of machinery, who 
 in some vague way imagined that machinery had 
 rendered Christianity obsolete much in the same 
 way that it was rendering the handicraft obsolete. 
 Foremost among those who so believed was Marx, 
 for the new morality that he postulates is some- 
 thing that is to arise as a consequence of the 
 dissolution of the fabric of existing society by the 
 machine, and remembering how the factory system 
 tends to break up family life there is no doubt a 
 connection between the two. Such an antagonism 
 is felt by men who have lived under happier con- 
 ditions in the East. Let me quote the words of a 
 Hindoo, Rab Bharati, on this question. He 
 says : 
 
 " What is this civilization anyway? I have lived 
 in four of its chief centres for about five years. 
 During that time I have studied this civilization 
 with the little light with which my Brahmin birth 
 has blessed me. And I must confess that I have 
 been deeply pained by the facts that study has 
 revealed to me. This vaunted civilization has 
 raised selfishness to a religious creed. Mammon 
 to the throne of God, adulteration to a science, 
 falsehood to a fine art. . . . It has created 
 artificial wants for man, and made him a slave of
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 49 
 
 work to satisfy them ; it has made him ever rest- 
 less within and without, robbed him of leisure 
 the only friend of high thought. He knows no 
 peace, hence he knows not himself nor his real 
 object in life. It has made him a breathing, 
 moving, hustling, fighting, spinning machine ever 
 working, never resting, never knowing even the 
 refreshing rest of a sound sleep. It has made him 
 a bag of live nerves ever stretched to high tension. 
 It has sapped the foundation of home life and, 
 its trunk separated from its roots, its roof -tree 
 threatens to fall, shaken by each passing breeze. 
 Its vulgar haste and love of sensation are invading 
 even the realm of religion, which is being classed 
 with fads and crazes. Its boasted scientific inven- 
 tions have done more harm than good to humanity's 
 best and permanent interests ; they serve only the 
 surface of life which alone its votaries live and 
 know." ' 
 
 Sufficient has now been said to show that the 
 prophecies of Marx and Herbert Spencer as to the 
 glorious future that would follow the unrestricted 
 use of machinery, which the modern world has 
 more or less tacitly accepted, have not only not 
 been fulfilled but show no signs of it, for all avail- 
 able evidence points in the opposite direction. 
 Marx saw that in his day it was not men who 
 were using machines, but that the machines were 
 using men, and he therefore came to the con- 
 clusion that the productive forces have at all times 
 been the mainspring of social development. But 
 this does not follow. It is easy to understand why 
 a society that refuses to regulate machinery should 
 
 1 In The Light of Asia, quoted in The Fallacy of Speed, 
 by Thomas F. Taylor, pp. 23-24. 
 
 4
 
 50 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 find itself at the mercy of its machines. But it 
 does not follow that before the invention of 
 machinery society was at the mercy of the tools 
 of the handicraftsmen, for in the pre -machine days 
 change was too slow for the productive forces to 
 dominate the mind of men or affect in any way the 
 social development. Still, it has been true since 
 the days of the industrial revolution, and therefore, 
 though we cannot accept the attempt of Marx to 
 deduce from the social and economic phenomenon 
 of the nineteenth century a universal law of history, 
 we can yet recognize that so far as the industrial 
 era is concerned, he was right in affirming that the 
 progressive application of machinery has been the 
 central driving force in social and economic 
 development. But we deny that such development 
 leads to the millennium, since all evidence points 
 to the conclusion that the use of unrestricted 
 machinery is rapidly disintegrating the whole fabric 
 of civilization, while nothing arises to take its 
 place. We can agree with Marx that unrestricted 
 machinery is destructive of old social traditions, 
 but not that it will create new ones to replace them. 
 And if this is so, what becomes of the Socialist 
 theory of society? Remember the central idea of 
 the Socialist gospel was that unrestricted machinery 
 would prove itself a creative force. What be- 
 comes of that gospel if we find it is merely 
 destructive? The Socialist ideal of a common or 
 corporate life may remain. But their theory of 
 social development is disproved by the facts 
 and can have no further validity for us. For 
 remember, it is impossible to escape the dilemma 
 by saying that the Socialist Movement makes 
 capital rather than machinery the point of attack,
 
 THE UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES 51 
 
 since the two are so inextricably bound together 
 that a change of attitude towards one involves 
 a change towards the other. If machinery is 
 destructive, then capitalism is destructive, and 
 therefore its organization cannot form the basis of 
 the Socialist State. Capital in the sense that it 
 represents property and power we may still 
 recognize as the enemy. But our conception of 
 its nature will have so completely changed as to 
 necessitate a new valuation.
 
 Ill 
 
 MACHINERY AND THE SUBDIVISION OF 
 LABOUR 
 
 WE have seen that the Socialist theory of 
 social evolution, based upon the assumption that 
 machinery is a creative force, has been entirely 
 falsified by experience, since so far from new 
 forms of social order and new traditions arising 
 in response to the stimuli of the machine as Marx 
 predicted, the unrestricted use of machinery has 
 proved to be purely destructive. In these cir- 
 cumstances it is urgent that the Socialist Move- 
 ment should reconsider its position, for what is 
 the use of preaching economic theories which 
 depend on the assumption that its evolutionary 
 doctrine is true, when that doctrine has been 
 entirely disproved by the facts? 
 
 It is true, of course, that for some time 
 Socialists have been a little chary about social 
 evolution. But they hesitate to make the de- 
 duction which a recognition of the failure of their 
 central doctrine demands. If there is no evidence 
 of a continuous social improvement, then we should 
 recognize that society is constantly losing its way 
 and that it may actually be reversing progress. 
 And if it be true that society does go astray, then 
 it is urgent that we should seek to return to the 
 point at which we lost our way. In daily life 
 
 63
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 53 
 
 we pursue this policy, but in the big fundamental 
 things we do nothing of the kind. We answer 
 those who affirm that we are on the wrong track 
 with the assertion that we cannot put the clock 
 back and commit one political folly after another, 
 vainly imagining that the social confusion conse- 
 quent upon economic injustices in the past may 
 be used as a foundation on which to build the 
 millennium of the future. Yet the evidence that 
 industrialism is a blind alley from which we must 
 retrace our steps or perish becomes more conclusive 
 every day. Whatever excuse there may be for 
 the mistaken judgments of Owen and Marx, there 
 is simply no excuse for Socialists to-day, for " the 
 cancer of industrialism has begun to mortify and 
 its end is in sight," while "in a thousand ways 
 the lineaments of the old world are reappearing 
 through the dissipating smoke." 
 
 Once we recognize these things, we begin to 
 understand the significance of Medievalism. Its 
 roots are not to be found in any idealization of 
 the past, as our critits ignorantly suppose, but 
 in frankly facing the facts of the present, for 
 once the human mind finds itself unable to con- 
 template the future of industrialism with equanimity, 
 it inevitably turns to the past. Such being the 
 case, Medievalism is not romanticism, but the last 
 word in utilitarianism as all must sooner or later 
 find out. Its value as an ideal is that it provides 
 a convenient rallying-point from 1 which the root 
 fallacies of our civilization may be attacked. It 
 challenges the conception of progress with its 
 indiscriminating industrial advance by exalting an 
 age which, whatever may have been its defects 
 (and they are not to be denied), was at any rate
 
 54 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 free from the defects of the present, and thus it 
 provides something concrete and tangible around 
 which our thinking may crystallize. In so 
 far as the modern world is not interested in 
 Medievalism, it is not because it is realistic, but 
 because it is superficial and romantic, because it 
 lives on phrases and disregards things, because 
 it is satisfied with words like progress, emancipa- 
 tion, liberty, which can be twisted to mean anything ; 
 because it hates definiteness and dogmas which are 
 the necessary foundation of all clear thinking ; 
 because it thinks it can eat its cake and have it, 
 and is not interested in fundamental things. For 
 an interest in fundamental things inevitably creates 
 an interest in Medievalism ; for in it the beginnings 
 and the origin of things that exist to-day are to 
 be found. Hence some familiarity with the 
 Middle Ages is necessary to see the modern world 
 in its proper perspective, to enable us to distin- 
 guish clearly between primary and secondary ideas. 
 And when we do learn so to distinguish, we begin 
 to understand why the modern world must retrace 
 its steps as it will do before long. For if it 
 can no longer look forward with confidence, the 
 time is not far distant when it will begin to look 
 back. When that happens, the day of salvation 
 will be in sight, for we shall be in possession 
 of a vision that will co-ordinate our manifold 
 activities. 
 
 The choice, as I see it, is not between whether 
 we are to go forward or to go back, but whether 
 we are to continue drifting towards an inevitable 
 social destruction or resolutely retrace our steps 
 until we rest again on a firm foundation. 
 Modernists who devise this scheme and that to
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 55 
 
 cure our social ills lose sight of the fact that 
 modern society is in such a state of unstable 
 equilibrium that it cannot stand still. It must 
 either move forward or move back. Now that 
 we are all agreed that we cannot with safety move 
 any further forward, wisdom suggests that the 
 only rational thing to do is to go back. That 
 the modern world should hesitate to make such 
 a choice is not surprising, for the implications 
 are enormous, while it is so much easier to swim 
 with the current than against it ; therefore, unless 
 people are very clear in their minds they shrink 
 from such a decision. Yet come to it finally they 
 must ; if not by choice, then by pain and suffering, 
 for there is no third alternative. It is quite 
 useless to attempt to reform secondary things 
 whilst ignoring primary and fundamental ones. 
 It is only playing at reform. If there is no 
 public interest in these questions, it is our business 
 to create an interest, and not to wait until it is 
 too late. 
 
 But, as a matter of fact, there is a public 
 interest in these questions, but unfortunately not 
 in reformist circles, whose members live in a 
 world of economic abstractions. The Socialist 
 Movement began, as we have shown, in an attempt 
 to find a remedy for the problems which followed 
 the introduction of machinery, and to that problem 
 it will return before long, because nowadays, when 
 there are no new markets left to exploit, every 
 new machine must result in the displacement of 
 labour. This fact must force the question to the 
 front. The subject has to be created. It would 
 be no use beginning with any cut and dried scheme 
 as to what requires to be done until people are
 
 5 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 familiar with the facts. For the present, all that 
 can be demanded is that before any new machine 
 is permitted to be used it shall be made the 
 subject of a public inquiry, which shall take 
 evidence as to its effect upon conditions of labour, 
 upon employment, upon the crafts and arts, and 
 all other social and economic implications. Only 
 when the Commission was satisfied that its applica- 
 tion would be beneficial should its use be allowed. 
 If labour were displaced, those who pro.fited by 
 the new invention should be made responsible for 
 the maintenance of those whose livelihood they 
 took away. This demand that the use of 
 machinery be regulated rests finally on precisely 
 the same grounds as any other kind of regulation. 
 Firstly, to restrain those whose motives are bad 
 from injuring society by their actions, and secondly, 
 to prevent those who with the best of motives do 
 things through ignorance which are harmful in their 
 results. 
 
 If such a law could be enacted our victory 
 would be won, for the evidence that only evil 
 follows the unrestricted use of machinery is simply 
 overwhelming, as all who have taken the trouble 
 to inquire are well aware. Facts would be 
 revealed that would set people thinking about the 
 question of regulating machinery, and the need 
 of setting to work to re-create the traditions of 
 civilization that we have so thoughtlessly allowed 
 to be destroyed. Once attention was turned in 
 this direction a current of thought would be 
 created that would grapple with the realities of 
 the situation, for it would break the spell of 
 that mechanical hypnotism that lures us to our 
 destruction.
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 57 
 
 The problem of machinery has then a positive 
 and a negative aspect. Its negative aspect is to 
 prevent the further destruction of the traditions 
 of civilization, and its positive is the re-creation 
 of such traditions as the misuse of machinery in 
 the past has destroyed. But when we come to 
 think of things in this way, we begin to see that 
 though machinery has been the more active agent 
 in the destruction of our traditions, yet it is by 
 no means the only agent, and that it would not 
 have been anything like so destructive had it not 
 been introduced into a society whose traditions 
 had already been partly undermined by the sub- 
 division of labour, itself a consequence of the 
 defeat of the Guilds, which defeat handed over 
 industry into the hands of the exploiting 
 capitalist. 
 
 Our criticism of the use of machinery has not 
 been directed against machinery as such, but 
 against its unrestricted use and the deliberate 
 ignoring of its social and economic consequences. 
 But with the subdivision of labour which lies 
 behind the misapplication of machinery it is 
 different, since it appears to us to be an entirely 
 indefensible and degrading institution, and as such 
 it should be entirely abolished. To explain what 
 I mean in this connection it will be necessary 
 to differentiate between the division of labour, 
 which is a natural and normal thing, and the 
 subdivision of labour, which is both unnatural 
 and abnormal. 
 
 The division of labour is a necessity of any 
 civilized society since, as it is obvious that a man 
 cannot supply all his own needs, the labour of 
 the community must be divided between different
 
 58 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 occupations. To some extent a man is inevitably 
 dependent on others. Hence it was that no 
 sooner did civilization begin to develop than men 
 tended to become specialized in different trades 
 and occupations. One man became a potter, 
 another a weaver, a third a carpenter, and so 
 forth. Up to this point the division of labour 
 is justified, not merely because it is a necessity 
 of civilization, but because it enlarges the life 
 of the individual and his opportunities for self- 
 expression. In the seventeenth century, however, 
 under the impulse of profit-making, a further 
 development took place. Measures were taken to 
 increase the output and decrease the costs of 
 production by the subdivision of trades into a 
 great number of separate processes. The classical 
 example of the subdivision of labour is that 
 eulogized by Adam Smith in the Wealth of 
 Nations, namely, pin-making, in which industry it 
 takes twenty men to make a pin, each man being 
 specialized for a lifetime upon a single process. 
 Scientific management, about which we hear so 
 much in these days, carries this system to its 
 logical conclusion, and as such it completes the 
 factory process. The subdivision of labour 
 attacks the craft and it reacts upon the man. 
 Scientific management, however, attacks the man 
 direct, its acknowledged aim being to increase out- 
 put further by the elimination of all motions of 
 the arms, fingers and body that do not contribute 
 directly to the fashioning of the article under 
 process of manufacture. 
 
 The subdivision of labour and its recent 
 development into scientific management are the 
 curses of industrial civilization, for by reducing
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 59 
 
 men to the level of automatons, they reduce them 
 to the position of mere fragments of men ; they 
 undermine their spiritual, moral and physical life, 
 and disintegrate their personality, while by giving 
 rise to gluts in the market they lead inevitably to 
 sweating and economic insecurity. Together with 
 these evils, they are responsible for a progressive 
 functional atrophy of the aptitudes of man. Dr. 
 Austin Freeman, in a book to which I have already 
 referred, draws attention to the evidence of the 
 degeneracy of the British " sub -man," as he calls 
 the victims of this system. " Compared with the 
 African negro," he says, " the British sub -man is in 
 several respects markedly inferior. He tends to 
 be dull : he is usually quite helpless and unhandy ; 
 he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handi- 
 craft, or indeed knowledge of any kind. The 
 negro, on the contrary, is usually sprightly and 
 humorous. He is generally well-informed as to 
 the flora and fauna of his region, and nearly 
 always knows the principal constellations. He has 
 some traditional knowledge of religion, myths and 
 folklore, and some acquaintance with music. He 
 is handy and self -helpful ; he can usually build 
 a house, thatch a roof, obtain and prepare food, 
 make a fire without matches, spin yarn, and can 
 often weave cotton and make and mend simple 
 implements. Physically he is robust, active, 
 hardy and energetic." * Yet in a boot factory 
 there is not a man who can make a pair of 
 boots, while the factory hands are, as a rule, of 
 very poor physique : they are small and stunted, 
 with bad teeth, and suffer much from pulmonary 
 
 1 Social Decay and Regeneration, by R. Austin Freeman 
 (Constable, 1921).
 
 60 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 and digestive troubles. Such are the fruits of 
 progress to which we conveniently turned a blind 
 eye so long as there was money in it. 
 
 Of course, this system cannot last. To use 
 Dr. Freeman's language, " its own activities have 
 generated toxins which are poisoning it." For 
 while on the one hand it is giving rise to whole- 
 sale incompetence, on the other, by destroying all 
 charm in work and turning it into hated toil, it has 
 generated a spirit of class hatred that expresses itself 
 in revolt. Moreover, it uses up our natural resources 
 at such an alarming rate that, apart from any other 
 consideration, the life of the industrial system is 
 seen to be very limited. Most people, on first 
 acquaintance with the subdivision of labour and 
 scientific management, feel an instinctive repulsion 
 towards it. They feel it is wrong, yet cannot say 
 exactly why. They cannot find an answer to the 
 arguments by which it is defended. And, indeed, 
 there is no answer, if we accepted the quantitative 
 standard of capitalism as the final test of Tightness 
 in industry ; for there can be no doubt what- 
 soever that this system does increase the volume 
 of output. To challenge this system successfully 
 it must be approached from the human end, from 
 the point of view of quality rather than quantity, 
 of the producer rather than the consumer. Only 
 when we affirm that human values shall take 
 precedence over commercial values do we see the 
 system is cruel and inhuman, destructive alike of 
 personality and happiness, since by forcing the 
 individual into a narrow groove it thwarts the 
 creative impulse which is inherent in man, and 
 as constructive instincts when suppressed become 
 destructive, it comes about that men to-day,
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 61 
 
 suffering from the tyranny of our industrial 
 conditions, are everywhere sub -consciously seeking 
 the destruction of the system that thwarts them. 
 How much of the labour unrest has its roots in 
 the denial of pleasure in work it is impossibLe 
 to say ; but that there is an intimate connection 
 between the twoj and that the impulse of labour 
 to-day is destructive, cannot easily be denied. 
 
 But it is not only the impulse of labour that 
 is destructive. The same anarchist impulse 
 penetrates every class. It is at work in, every 
 department of life. Over-specialization is the 
 bane of the modern world, and it affects the 
 intellectual worker, not perhaps in the same 
 degree, but with consequences that are as potent 
 for evil as those which are to be deplored in 
 the world of labour. For just as the machine 
 tender becomes atrophied in, certain directions, so 
 the intellectual specialist, by developing one side 
 of his mind at the expense of the other sides, 
 tends to lose balance and his judgments are apt 
 to be anything but reliable. In the Middle 
 Ages the cultural idea was that of unity, but with 
 the Renaissance universality took the place of 
 unity as the aim of education. The consequence 
 of this change of direction was that, as it is 
 impossible for any single individual to be 
 universal, the growth of the idea of universality 
 was accompanied by the growth of specialization, 
 and the field of thought became divided among 1 
 many specialists. These again have been divided 
 and subdivided until any sense of a central and 
 co-ordinating idea has for the most part dis- 
 appeared from among modern intellectual workers. 
 It is said that in Germany specialization had before
 
 62 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the war reached such a degree of development 
 that each individual became a monomaniac on his 
 own subject and was largely ignorant of every 
 other, to the detriment of general culture. This 
 was the Kultur that gave to the Germans their 
 sense of superiority over other peoples, and was 
 a contributory cause of the war. Specialization 
 up to a certain point we must have if civilization 
 is to exist at all. But a limit must be placed 
 somewhere if men are not to disintegrate morally, 
 intellectually and spiritually. This intellectual 
 specialism is the counterpart of the subdivision 
 of labour, and they act and react upon each other 
 to render society increasingly unstable. There is 
 an intimate connection between the convulsions 
 that have overtaken society and this over-specializa- 
 tion, which in one direction tends towards hysteria 
 and in the other towards the dissolution of such 
 social and intellectual traditions as are capable 
 of binding men together in a common bond of 
 sympathy and understanding. 
 
 I said that to the development of specialization 
 a limit must be placed somewhere. In the in- 
 tellectual world no line can be drawn and the 
 only remedy is to exalt the idea of a cultural 
 unity. But in industry it is different. There a 
 line can and should be arbitrarily drawn, and I 
 submit it should be placed at the point craft 
 development had reached before the subdivision 
 of labour replaced the division of labour. To 
 suffer specialization to proceed further is, to use an 
 engineering term, to trespass on the margin of 
 safety. A stable society is one that permits a 
 wide margin of safety. The far-seeing statesman 
 might recognize that wealth could be increased
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 63 
 
 by the organization of industry upon the basis 
 of the subdivision of labour. But he would also 
 recognize that there was another side to the 
 question, in that an increase of wealth secured 
 by means of the subdivision of labour imperilled 
 the stability of society by trespassing on the 
 margin of social, psychological and economic 
 safety. It was the recognition of this danger 
 that led the Tudors and the Stuarts to assume 
 a conservative attitude towards industrial develop- 
 ments, and is the reason why their ideas and 
 measures were not appreciated by commercial men, 
 who are invariably blind to everything except 
 immediate advantages. But experience has proved 
 that their suspicions were more than justified, for 
 every day evidence accumulates that we only 
 proceed further along the road we are travelling 
 at our peril. Hence the conclusion becomes 
 inevitable that the qualitative standard will have 
 to replace the quantitative one before it will be 
 possible to stabilize society. In other words, if 
 society is to be reconstructed on a basis that allows 
 for a margin of safety, scientific management and 
 the subdivision of labour must be abolished, and 
 a return be made to handicraft as the basis of 
 production, using machinery only in an accessory 
 way. If this were done, machinery might become 
 a blessing instead of the curse it is to-day. It is 
 because the development of machinery has for the 
 most part followed along the lines laid down by 
 the subdivision of labour that it has been so 
 grossly misapplied. 
 
 The principle, then, for which we contend is 
 that if machinery is not to be a curse we must, 
 in our use of it, never lose sight of the fact that
 
 64 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 human values come first. At all costs the 
 traditional normal human relationships that are to 
 be found at the centre of a normal society must 
 be restored and the use of machinery be limited 
 in such a way as not to interfere with them. If 
 this principle had been always kept in the fore- 
 front, then the subdivision of labour would never 
 have come into existence, nor would machinery 
 have been so misapplied. But, unfortunately, 
 instead of taking their stand on this principle as 
 final and irrevocable, a few are tempted by the 
 prospect of immediate gain to depart from it ; 
 while the many allow themselves to be cajoled 
 into acquiescence in such abuses by the inference 
 that in objecting to such a method of work they 
 are ignorant and narrow-minded people who are 
 engaged in the impossible task of stemming the 
 tide of progress. Yet nowadays, when the evils 
 consequent upon this development have become too 
 glaring to be concealed any longer, when the 
 prophecies of those who opposed the introduction 
 of machinery have been entirely fulfilled, pro- 
 gressive-minded people are still unwilling to admit 
 the system to be finally and fundamentally wrong, 
 and they hope to restore the creative impulse 
 which this system has destroyed by shifting the 
 worker from one process to another. As some 
 mitigation of the deadly routine to which the factory 
 worker is condemned, there may be something to 
 be said for the proposal, but that it touches in any 
 way the fundamental difficulty is to be denied, 
 for the creative impulse in man can be no more 
 liberated by such means than he would be liberated 
 from a prison because he enjoyed the privilege of 
 being moved from one cell to another. It is not
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 65 
 
 true, as advocates of this reform maintain, that 
 " the creative effort is not necessarily an individual 
 matter." How groups of people are to associate 
 together " with a single creative purpose and en- 
 deavour " I am entirely at a loss to understand. Yet 
 to affirm that such a thing is possible is the desperate 
 position into which those who maintain that our 
 industrial system has a future are finally driven. 1 
 
 The truth is, of course, that all creative work 
 is finally personal. It originates in one mind, 
 though the assistance of others may be used to 
 carry it into effect. Thus the production of this 
 book is a work of co-operation. I write it, the 
 compositor arranges the type, the bookbinder 
 binds it and provides the cover. We co-operate 
 it is true, but we co-operate as a hierarchical 
 order, not as a democracy. Even if the views 
 expressed were the views of a committee instead 
 of being my own, the committee would not write 
 the book. It would need to delegate one of its 
 members to give them expression. So again in 
 respect to building. The architect is responsible 
 for the general design ; he may embody the 
 suggestions of others. Yet finally the general 
 design is the work of one man. In the Middle 
 Ages it was the custom for each craft to supply 
 its own details and ornaments. Yet the general 
 arrangement of each building was the work of 
 one man. We speak of the architecture of the 
 Middle Ages being democratic, and it was demo- 
 cratic in the sense that the individual worker 
 enjoyed a liberty in respect to the details of his 
 work that is impossible to-day, and might rise to 
 
 1 See The Creative Impulse in Industry, by Helen Marot. 
 . P. Button & Co., New York. 
 
 5
 
 66 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the position of master builder who exercised the 
 function that the architect exercises to-day. Yet 
 it was hierarchical at the same time. No building 
 was the work of a committee, but of an individual 
 who knew how to avail himself of the creative 
 capacity of his subordinates. Such co-operation 
 was possible in the Middle Ages because all 
 shared in a communal tradition of art. It is 
 impossible to-day because no such communal 
 traditions exist. 
 
 It is to this Medieval system that we must get 
 back. It is not incompatible with the use of a 
 certain amount of machinery for doing the rougher 
 and heavier work that lies at the base of industry, 
 but it is incompatible with the subdivision of 
 labour, for that cuts at the roots of the creative 
 impulse, and therefore it must be abolished. As to 
 the practical application of such principles, there 
 is no difficulty at all in knowing what is meant by 
 the abolition of the subdivision of labour, but 
 when we demand that the use of machinery be 
 limited many people suppose there is a difficulty 
 about drawing the line. And, of course, there 
 is a difficulty until we are clear in our minds as 
 to why it should be regulated. But if we were 
 firm in our belief that the creative impulse is 
 natural to man, we are in possession of a principle 
 that would guide us. There would be no difficulty 
 in knowing where the use of machinery should be 
 prohibited. Anyone of aesthetic sensibility with 
 any practical experience of craft production would 
 know instinctively where the line should be drawn, 
 and the public could easily find out if they meant 
 business. Their difficulties are really imaginary, 
 since if they were persuaded of the necessity or
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 67 
 
 desirability of regulating machinery, they would 
 trust the judgment of men with experience of 
 craft production to give effect to their wishes as 
 they do in other matters where expert knowledge 
 is required. 
 
 If the principles I have enunciated were 
 followed, the volume of machinery would be 
 reduced enormously in bulk. We should not 
 require a tithe of the machinery that we use to-day. 
 But we should be better off, since for a long 
 time we have not benefited by our increased 
 capacity for production. In the early days of 
 industrialism the increased use of machinery did 
 confer material benefits, but for a long time new 
 machinery has done little more than increase 
 competitive waste. More cotton and woollen 
 goods are produced, but the quality is lowered 
 to preserve the balance between demand and 
 supply. As costs of production have decreased, 
 selling costs have increased by reason of the 
 ever increasing expenditure on touts, salesmen, 
 advertising, and the growth of cross distribution. 
 Further, the growth of artificial conditions of life 
 that has followed our excessive use of machinery 
 makes living ever more costly and more unsupport- 
 able. An increasing proportion of our income is 
 spent on train fares, 'bus fares, postage, rent, 
 taxes, etc., which all tend to go up. Meanwhile 
 the growing disproportion between industrial and 
 agricultural life tends to increase the cost of living. 
 Thus our earnings run to waste, and though inflated 
 prices are falling, yet the factors which tend 
 towards a steady rise of the cost of living are 
 permanent. 
 
 But it will be said : These things may be so,
 
 68 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 yet it is hopeless to attempt to abolish the division 
 of labour or to limit the use of machinery. The 
 workers at the time of the Chartist agitation 
 hated the factory system which fell upon them 
 with such cruel force, and might be rallied to the 
 support of a movement that would keep mechanical 
 production within bounds. But it is different now. 
 The worker of to-day has little of this spirit in 
 him. He has no experience of the handicrafts, 
 and so he accepts the system into which he was 
 born as a part of the natural order of things. 
 He has become too much a part of the system 
 to rebel against it. To which I answer, that while 
 not denying the truth in such scepticism, yet the 
 question is not finally how I or anybody else is 
 going to change the industrial system, but how 
 the capitalists and their apathetic multitudes are 
 going to preserve it from destruction. This 
 problem becomes every day more pressing. Now 
 that the markets are no longer expanding, every 
 new machine introduced displaces labour, and unem- 
 ployment is becoming as chronic as it was in the 
 Chartist period, and this will lead men to think 
 again about the machine problem as they did 
 then. Already men are beginning to talk about 
 the displacement of labour by machinery. I have 
 heard more people talk about it during this last 
 six months than during the whole of my life. 
 Let us wait a little, and what the few who are 
 directly affected are saying will soon be in every- 
 body's mouth. The newspapers have not got hold 
 of it yet, but maybe the day is not far distant 
 when the Spectator will begin to think as it 
 thought in the forties and reprint the article which 1 
 it then headed -' More factories more pauper-
 
 MACHINERY AND LABOUR 69 
 
 ism." Anyway, we are back in the Chartist period 
 with this difference. That as neither railway 
 building nor the expansion of foreign markets 
 offer us a path of escape, and there is no other 
 way out that we can see, the industrial problem 
 must remain insoluble until its central problem 
 the relation of men to machines is faced.
 
 IV 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 
 
 THE existing system of society has to-day but 
 few whole-hearted adherents. Those who still 
 defend it are people of the conservative and un- 
 imaginative type, who are always prepared to 
 defend an established fact because they lack the 
 imagination to conceive of any other. But with 
 all thinking people the present system is regarded 
 as entirely indefensible. They are, however, 
 divided into two opposed and contradictory schools 
 of thought. Socialists demand the abolition of all 
 private property, apart from personal possessions, 
 while Distributivists, as their name implies, demand 
 a redistribution of property their ideal being that 
 of a nation of small property owners. 
 
 Now, on first acquaintance these two schools of 
 thought appear to be entirely irreconcilable. Yet 
 both are at bottom conditioned by their attitude 
 towards machinery. The Socialist attitude, as we 
 saw, had its origin in the fact that after 1806 
 machinery began to displace labour. Owen saw 
 that if society was to remain stable, an increase of 
 production must be accompanied by an increase in 
 consumption. Yet machinery, by reason of the 
 fact that it displaced labour, tended to undermine 
 consumption. It was manifest that the wage 
 
 system the system of distributing purchasing 
 
 TO
 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 71 
 
 power by means of payment for work done was 
 breaking down. What, then, was to become of 
 the working-class under such conditions? If 
 society was to continue on the existing in- 
 dividualistic competitive basis, he concluded, the 
 workers must perish. Hence he demanded the 
 substitution of a communal or co-operative organi- 
 zation of society in place of the competitive one, 
 and this involved the abolition of all private 
 property. We see, therefore, that the Socialist 
 demand for the abolition of private property was 
 necessitated by the need of guarding society against 
 the evils which accompanied the unrestricted use of 
 machinery. It is true that the idea is much older, 
 and is to be traced back to the Medieval Com- 
 munists, who maintained that the existence of 
 private property was contrary to the teaching of 
 Christ. But the idea made little or no headway 
 until machinery threatened the stability of the old 
 order, and though the motive that led the early 
 Socialists to this conclusion has been lost sight of, 
 yet there can be no doubt that the sense of 
 insecurity that has followed the spread of machine 
 production has led to the widespread acceptance 
 of the idea of abolishing private property. 
 
 But it is no easy matter to abolish an institution 
 so deep-rooted as that of private property. It is 
 now a century since the idea was first promulgated, 
 and yet, in spite of the fact that it is widely 
 believed in, and many thinkers have worked out 
 schemes for the transfer of property from private 
 to public ownership, we are as far from its realiza- 
 tion as ever. Meanwhile a suspicion gains ground 
 that it is not only impracticable but undesirable. 
 Guild Socialists dealt it a telling blow by attacking
 
 72 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the organization of society on a bureaucratic basis 
 which it involved, while Distributivists challenged 
 the idea direct. They maintained that the evil 
 did not reside in the institution of property as such, 
 but in the fact that at the present time the idea 
 of responsibility attaching to property had broken 
 down while so very few people possessed any 
 property at all ; that the possession of property 
 guaranteed a man independence ; and that it was 
 indispensable to the performance of active function. 
 It must not be abolished, for to do so would be to 
 make every one servile pensioners of the State. 
 This theory, whose principal advocates were 
 Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton, found many 
 supporters, but the difficulty of basing any 
 practical activity upon it was equal to that of 
 the opposed theory of the nationalization of 
 property, for it was evident that it had no 
 relevance to the existing situation apart from the 
 dissolution of industrialism and the restriction of 
 the use of machinery, for it is impossible to solve 
 the problem of industrial capitalism on this basis. 
 Mr. Tawney 1 attempts the discovery of a via 
 media. He holds that opposing theorists have 
 usually been discussing different things. The 
 Socialist is primarily concerned with the problem 
 of industrial capital, while the Distributivist thinks 
 primarily of an agricultural community in the 
 future. He attempts therefore a reconciliation of 
 these opposed theories by means of a careful dis- 
 crimination between different kinds of property, 
 which, as he says, is the most ambiguous of 
 categories. He distinguishes between two kinds 
 of property : that which accompanies the perform- 
 1 The Acquisitive Society, by R. H. Tawney.
 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 73 
 
 ance of function and that in which ownership is 
 divorced from use, and while he proposed to retain 
 the institution of property in so far as it is 
 accessory to function, he proposes to abolish all 
 types of property in return for which no function 
 is performed, thus effecting a return to the 
 Medieval principle of reciprocal rights and duties. 
 Or to put it another way, he proposes that the 
 Distributivist position be accepted in so far as it 
 can be applied. But with regard to industrial 
 enterprises where it cannot be applied, he would 
 vest the ownership and control in the hands of 
 professional organizations of the workers, i.e. 
 Guilds. Though Mr. Tawney has by his analysis 
 done a great deal to clarify the issues, his position 
 seems to me to be weak to the extent that he 
 assumes our industrial system to be a thing of 
 permanence, for though he criticizes industrialism, 
 he yet does not regard the unrestricted use of 
 machinery on a basis of the subdivision of labour 
 as its essence. On the contrary he maintains that 
 its evils arise entirely from a state of consciousness 
 a particular estimate of the importance of 
 industry which treats industrial activities as an end 
 in themselves rather than as a means to an end. 
 But surely such an explanation is inadequate, for 
 it is impossible to suppose that such a state of 
 consciousness could ever have come to dominate 
 society in the way it does apart from the existence 
 of our mechanical means of production. It is 
 equally impossible to suppose that such a state 
 of consciousness can ever be expelled from society 
 so long as the subdivision of labour and the un- 
 restricted use of machinery is permitted, since so 
 long as such methods of production obtain, other
 
 74 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 interests will be crowded out of life. To attack in- 
 dustrialism as a state of consciousness and to refuse 
 to attack it as a method of production appears to 
 me to be as futile and illogical as it would be for 
 an anti -militarist to concentrate the whole of his 
 attack on the mentality of jingoes, while denying 
 that the limitation of armaments was germane to 
 the issue. It may be true that the peril of 
 militarism is not to be found finally in armaments, 
 but in the mentality of the military caste, yet we 
 are all aware that their potentiality for evil bears 
 a definite ratio to the armaments in their possession. 
 When we turn from a consideration of the 
 problems of property to those of currency, which 
 have attracted so much attention of late, we find 
 that the fact that the unrestricted use of machinery 
 is taken for granted is finally at the root of the 
 perplexity in which the subject is involved ; since 
 apart from such an assumption there would not be 
 so much discussion at cross purposes, and the 
 issues would resolve themselves into those of morals 
 and organization. The truth about currency is 
 simplicity itself. It is that money used as a 
 medium of exchange only operates to the public 
 advantage when it is at the same time used as a 
 common measure of valae^ or in other words, when 
 it stands in a close and definite relationship to the 
 real values it is supposed to represent. All the 
 supposed problems of currency which often lead 
 people to believe in the existence of a kind of 
 economic witchcraft arise from the fact that people 
 who are interested in finance have no intention of 
 using money as a common measure of value. On 
 the contrary, they want to use it for the purpose of 
 making more money, and this is where the trouble
 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 75 
 
 begins. In the Middle Ages this clear, moral issue 
 was recognized, but in our day it is obscured by 
 the fact that the restriction of money to its 
 legitimate use as a common measure of value is. 
 incompatible with the idea of industrial expansion. 
 Most people take it for granted that such expansion 
 is a natural and normal thing to which there are 
 no limits, instead of being what it really is, a very 
 abnormal thing, due to the unrestricted use of 
 machinery on a basis of the subdivision of labour, 
 and that the limits of such expansion have now 
 been reached. In consequence, they reject the 
 simple truth that the only legitimate use of money 
 is as a common measure of value as entirely 
 irrelevant, even when as Socialists they have no 
 financial ambitions themselves. The trouble is that 
 the average man to-day, being divorced alike from 
 religion and art, can only think in terms of 
 quantities. The idea of progress to him is a 
 quantitative conception, and he therefore rejects 
 all ideas that involve the abandonment of the quan- 
 titative standard, though if he could only see, it is 
 precisely because such ideas do challenge the quan- 
 titative standard that they should be followed, since 
 only the replacement of the quantitative standard 
 by a qualitative one can emancipate society 
 from the tyranny of circumstance in which it is 
 enmeshed. There can be no doubt whatsoever that 
 industry will never move in the direction of a 
 qualitative standard until a boundary has been put 
 to the quantitative one. 
 
 It always happens that when the simple truth of 
 things is rejected a subject becomes involved in 
 contradictions, and so it has come about that 
 students of currency, having rejected the idea that
 
 76 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 money should be used as a common measure of 
 value, oscillate between a belief in the efficacy of 
 the gold standard and of paper currency. The 
 faith of the commercial world is on the whole in 
 favour of the maintenance of the gold standard, 
 while currency reformers are invariably advocates 
 of a paper currency. The theories of the advocates 
 of Free Banking to-day bear a remarkable likeness 
 to those of the currency reformer, Thomas Attwood, 
 who a century ago advocated the same measures 
 to meet the same problem. They are agreed that 
 the gold standard is the root of the trouble, and 
 demand its abolition. The employment of labour 
 and the production of wealth are only rendered 
 possible through the agency of the circulating 
 medium. Hence it follows that every increase of 
 trade should be accompanied by a corresponding 
 increase in the volume of currency in circulation, 
 or a currency becomes unequal to its duties, and 
 booms in trade are automatically and abruptly 
 brought to an end. But such expansion of the 
 currency is impossible so long as currency remains 
 on a basis of gold, because as the supply of gold 
 is limited, a currency based upon the gold standard 
 is incapable of expanding with the expansion of 
 trade. Hence they demand the removal of all 
 restrictions on the issue of paper money, for on 
 such a basis a currency can expand indefinitely. 
 The answer of those who defend the maintenance 
 of the gold standard is that if no artificial check 
 exists to the issue of currency, money soon loses 
 touch with the real values it is supposed to repre- 
 sent ; for the wholesale issue of money results 
 in a depreciation of the currency, which, under such 
 conditions, tends to fall and fall until the value
 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 77 
 
 of notes is worth no more than the value of the 
 paper on which they are printed, as has happened 
 in Russia, Poland and other parts of the Continent. 
 While again, if there was no restriction of the issue 
 of credit there would be nothing to ensure that 
 goods produced would bear any relationship to 
 demand, inasmuch as if credit were made available 
 in unlimited quantities there would be no check on 
 the production of unwanted articles. 
 
 But if the upholders of the gold standard can 
 successfully refute the arguments of the Free 
 Bankers, they can finally only do so by arguments 
 that can be turned against themselves. For if it 
 be true that an artificial check on the issue of 
 currency and credit is necessary to prevent, on the 
 one hand, money losing touch with the real values 
 it is supposed to represent, and on the other to 
 ensure that the actual production of goods shall be 
 such as is in demand, it demonstrates the impossi- 
 bility of industry ever getting on a stable basis so 
 long as speculation remains the driving force in 
 industry. But if speculation is to be eliminated 
 from the conduct of industry, it can only be on the 
 assumption that money be restricted to its legiti- 
 mate use as a common measure of value, and if it be 
 so restricted, what becomes of industrial expansion? 
 
 Without doubt my efforts to connect the 
 problems of currency with that of the unrestricted 
 use of machinery will sound to many of my readers 
 like special pleading. Yet I am not really so 
 heterodox as I appear, for it so happens that 
 the City Editor of The Times, 1 in answering 
 
 1 The Times Trade Supplement, April 16, 1921. The 
 article is included in Unemployment : A Remedy, by Arthur 
 Kitson (Cecil Palmer).
 
 78 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 Mr. Kitson's articles on Unemployment in which he 
 develops the ideas of Free Banking, found he could 
 only refute him by assuming what is substantially 
 the same position, for he says : " The solution 
 of the unemployment problem lies not in the 
 manufacture of money but in the regulation of 
 complementary production." Such an admission 
 coming from such an orthodox quarter is not 
 without significance, for if it does not mean that 
 machinery should be regulated and speculation 
 suppressed then I can only ask What does it mean? 
 We see then that on its present basis the subject 
 of currency is a vicious circle from which there is 
 no escape apart from a change in outlook. So 
 long as currency reformers accept the exigencies 
 of the industrial situation as the starting-point of 
 their analysis, they must inevitably arrive at the 
 contradictory conclusions already described, while 
 the utmost that they can possibly achieve is to 
 devise some means of perpetuating the existing 
 system of industry ; they cannot hope to lay the 
 foundations of a new one ; since any new system 
 must not only be based upon the principles of 
 justice and equity, but upon the assumption that 
 in any new society machinery will be controlled and 
 the subdivision of labour abolished, and if such 
 measures were taken, nothing apart from moral 
 perversity could stand in the way of a return to the 
 Medieval idea that currency should not only be a 
 medium of exchange but a common measure of 
 value, and the only way of ensuring such a 
 desideratum is to fix the price of everything, since 
 so long as prices are left to be determined by the 
 higgling of the market, the merchants and middle- 
 men, because they specialize in market conditions,
 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 79 
 
 will remain in a position to exploit the community 
 by speculating in values. 
 
 But how can fixed prices be maintained? Con- 
 ventional critics are apt to dismiss the idea as 
 altogether unpractical, maintaining that in times of 
 crisis fixed prices have been resorted to time after 
 time as a remedy for the evil of profiteering and 
 that they have invariably failed. It is not necessary 
 to dispute such facts, but to point out that the 
 failures to fix prices of which history affords many 
 examples were due to the fact that such attempts 
 were of the nature of panic legislation rather than 
 part of a methodical plan. The attempt to fix 
 prices during the French Revolution is a case in 
 point. It failed because there were no organiza- 
 tions in existence to give effect to the decision of 
 the Convention. But such critics appear to be 
 unaware that under the Medieval Guilds fixed prices 
 were maintained for several hundreds of years. 
 Indeed it was to perform this very task, to guard 
 society against the evils consequent upon specula- 
 tion in prices that the Guilds first assumed 
 economic functions. Prior to the eleventh century 
 when this new development took place, Guilds were 
 already in existence. Any group of men who had 
 any common interest organized themselves into 
 Guilds. There were Guilds for social and religious 
 purposes, for mutual aid, for defence, for common 
 aid in legal matters, for fishing and hunting, for 
 repairing the highways and bridges, etc. Such 
 Guilds would be very much like the voluntary 
 associations that exist to-day for all kinds of 
 purposes. But in the eleventh century, when order 
 was restored after the barbarian invasions, which 
 in the ninth and tenth centuries had involved
 
 80 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 Europe in chaos, there began a great moving of 
 the stagnant waters. Trade began to develop, 
 markets were established and towns began to come 
 into existence. It soon became apparent that 
 such commercial development was not an unmixed 
 blessing, and to meet the new danger that 
 threatened society, the Church came to insist upon 
 two doctrines that wares should be sold at a Just 
 Price, and that usury was sinful and enforced 
 obedience from the pulpit, in the confessional and 
 in the ecclesiastical courts. So effectually were 
 these two doctrines impressed upon the consciences 
 of men that their principles found their way into 
 all the secular legislation of the period whether of 
 Parliament, Guild or Municipality. 
 
 The differing fortune which followed legislative 
 attempts to secure obedience to the principle of 
 the Just Price is instructive, for it demonstrates 
 beyond doubt the superiority of the Guild as an 
 instrument for the performance of economic func- 
 tions. Parliament could do nothing more than 
 enact laws for the prevention of profiteering in its 
 various forms of forestalling, regrating, engross- 
 ing and adulteration, and as such it was negative 
 and finally ineffective. The Guilds, on the contrary, 
 were positive. They sought to give effect to the 
 principle of the Just Price by making it at the 
 same time a Fixed Price. And around this central 
 idea they gradually built up the wonderful system 
 of corporate life of the cities. Thus in order to 
 perform their economic functions, the Guilds 
 had to be privileged bodies, having a complete 
 monopoly of their trades over the area of a par- 
 ticular town or city ; for only through the exercise 
 of authority over its individual members could the
 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 81 
 
 Guild enforce a discipline. Profiteering and other 
 trade abuses it ruthlessly suppressed : for the first 
 offence a member was fined ; the most severe 
 penalty was expulsion from the Guild, which meant 
 that a man lost the privilege of following 1 his 
 trade or craft in his native city. 
 
 But a Just and Fixed Price cannot be maintained 
 by moral action alone. If prices are to be fixed 
 throughout industry, it can only be done on the 
 assumption that a standard of quality can be 
 upheld. As a standard of quality cannot be 
 defined in the terms of law, it is necessary for the 
 maintenance of a standard, to place authority in 
 the hands of craftmasters, a consensus of whose 
 opinion constitutes the final court of appeal. In 
 order to ensure a supply of masters it is necessary 
 to train apprentices, to regulate the size of the 
 workshop, the hours of labour, the volume of 
 production and so forth ; for only when attention 
 is given to such matters is it possible " to ensure 
 the permanency of practice and continuity of 
 tradition, whereby alone the regulation of the Guild 
 for honourable dealing and sound workmanship can 
 be carried on from generation to generation," and 
 conditions created favourable to the production of 
 masters. Thus we see all the regulations as 
 indeed the whole hierarchy of the Guild arising 
 out of the primary object of maintaining the Just 
 Price. 
 
 But it will be said : If the Medieval Guilds were 
 such excellent institutions, why have they dis- 
 appeared? The immediate cause was that they 
 were not co -extensive with society. They existed 
 in the towns, but they never came into existence 
 in the rural areas. That was the weak place in 
 
 6
 
 82 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the Medieval economic armour ; for it is obvious 
 that if a fixed price was finally to be maintained 
 anywhere it would have to be maintained every- 
 where, both in town and country. That Guilds 
 were never organized in the rural areas is to be 
 explained immediately by the fact that in the 
 eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Guilds were 
 organized in the towns, the agricultural population 
 was organized under Feudalism and money was 
 only beginning to be used, so the problem was not 
 so pressing. But the ultimate reason is to be 
 found in the fact that the impossibility of main- 
 taining, in the long run, a Just Price that was not 
 a fixed price was not at the time appreciated by 
 the Church, which appears to have been blind to 
 the need of Guild organization for its maintenance. 
 It thought, as religious people are apt to think 
 to-day, that the world can be regenerated by moral 
 action alone, never realizing that a high standard 
 of commercial morality can only be maintained if 
 organizations exist to suppress a lower one. Hence 
 it came about that when in the thirteenth century 
 the validity of the Just Price came to be challenged 
 by the lawyers, who maintained the right of every 
 man to make the best bargain he could for himself, 
 basing their authority upon the Justinian Code, 
 belief in the infallibility of which had accompanied 
 the revival of Roman law, the moral sanction on 
 which the maintenance of the Just Price ultimately 
 rested came to be undermined. It lost its hold on 
 the country population, and the Guild regulations 
 came to be regarded as unnecessary restrictions 
 on the freedom of the individual. Thus a way 
 was opened in rural areas for the growth of 
 capitalism and speculation, and this reacted to make
 
 MACHINERY AND ECONOMIC THEORY 83 
 
 it increasingly difficult for the Guilds to maintain 
 fixed prices in the towns, until at last, in the 
 sixteenth century, the whole system broke down 
 amid the economic chaos that followed the suppres- 
 sion of the monasteries and the wholesale importa- 
 tion of gold from South America, which doubled 
 prices all over Europe. Since then, capitalism has 
 carried all before it.
 
 V 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 
 
 ONCE it is realized that the Medieval Guilds were 
 organizations that existed primarily for the main- 
 tenance of economic justice and equity, and that 
 they broke down, not from any defect inherent in 
 their constitution, but because they were never co- 
 extensive with society, we begin to understand that 
 one of the conditions of getting capitalism into 
 subjection is to make Guild organization co-exten- 
 sive with society. Yet when we suggest this 
 approach, we are told that any such return to an 
 old method of organization is impossible, inasmuch 
 as the old form of Guild organization is not adapted 
 to the circumstances of modern industry with its 
 vast machinery and large organizations, and we 
 are admonished by sundry critics to abandon our 
 project of restoring the Medieval Guilds, and to 
 work for the establishment of National Guilds, 
 which they tell us are more adapted to the modern 
 conditions. 
 
 Now, such advice sounds very plausible, so 
 plausible, in fact, that to most people it must 
 appear as if nothing but sheer personal perversity 
 prevents us from accepting it. Yet this is not the 
 case, since Medieval and National Guilds are not 
 opposed ideas, as is popularly supposed, but com- 
 plementary ones ; while the success of the National 
 
 84
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 85 
 
 Guild Movement in no way excludes or militates 
 against a revival of Guilds of the Medieval type, 
 as will become evident when the position is clearly 
 understood. They are concerned with different 
 things. National Guilds are concerned with the 
 problem of the large modern industry, and it would 
 tend towards the elucidation of the subject if they 
 were called Industrial Guilds rather than National 
 Guilds, which is a misnomer. The advocates of 
 Medieval Guilds, on the contrary, are primarily 
 interested in the crafts, small industries and agri- 
 culture, and they are as much concerned to discover 
 how such activities may be restored to their former 
 integrity as they are in bringing them under Guild 
 control. Such being the case, the relative im- 
 portance which we attach to these two branches 
 of Guild activity depends entirely upon our opinion 
 as to what will be the future of Industrialism. If 
 it is believed, as National Guildsmen did believe, 
 when their theory was first launched, that the future 
 is entirely with the large industry, before whose 
 advance the crafts must eventually disappear, then 
 Medieval Guildsmen will appear as anachronisms. 
 But if, on the contrary, we recognize, as Medieval 
 Guildsmen all along have recognized, and as 
 National Guildsmen have recently come to believe, 
 that our industrial system is a thing altogether 
 abnormal, carrying within itself the seeds of its 
 own destruction, and is even now on the verge 
 of collapse, then the subject begins to wear a 
 different complexion. The Medieval Guildsman will 
 no longer appear as an anachronism, but as a 
 Futurist in the best sense of the word, inasmuch 
 as he is not content to ^build his house on the 
 sands of the seashore. Such a view of the fate
 
 86 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 of industrialism in general is not incompatible with 
 the frank recognition of the fact that certain aspects 
 of the system may survive, while, if we do not 
 come to the conclusion that National Guilds have 
 no validity in the future, we at any rate may 
 recognize that in any normal society the area of 
 their activities will be very much circumscribed. 
 
 But there is another path of approach. We may 
 approach Medieval Guilds from the point of view 
 of craft organization, or from the point of view 
 of the moral and economic principles that they 
 existed to uphold. If we look at them from the 
 former point of view, their picturesqueness may 
 interest us, though their possible application will 
 appear circumscribed. But if we look at them 
 from the point of view of the moral and economic 
 principles they existed to uphold, we shall come 
 to recognize them as the type and exemplar of 
 all true institutions, inasmuch as they stood for 
 something that has universal validity, and is in 
 no way limited by the details of their organization. 
 From this point of view, the issue between Medieval 
 and National Guilds is not one of drawing a line 
 of demarcation, of defining their respective spheres 
 of influence, nor finally, between the rival claims 
 of centralized and federated or local organization, 
 but between two different conceptions of the 
 purpose of a Guild. Thus the essence of the 
 National Guild idea is the conception of the organi- 
 zation of industry on an entirely self-governing 
 basis, without any admixture of private interests ; 
 while the essence of the Medieval Guild idea is 
 that of a court of appeal, whose primary function is 
 that of maintaining a discipline among the members 
 of a particular industry. For remember, the
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 87 
 
 Medieval Guilds did not seek to organize industry, 
 but to control it. They did not seek to supplant 
 the private individual producer by any system of 
 co-operative production. On the contrary, they 
 frankly accepted the principle of the private 
 management of industry, and sought only to super- 
 impose over each industry an organization to 
 regulate it in the same way that professional 
 societies enforce a discipline among their members 
 to-day, with the difference that in addition to up- 
 holding a standard of professional conduct the 
 Medieval Guilds were, at their best period, con- 
 cerned to promote a certain measure of economic 
 equality between their members, in the same way 
 that Trade Unions are to-day. They insisted that 
 all who engaged in any industry should conform 
 to the regulations of the Guild, which fixed prices 
 and rates of wages, regulated apprenticeship and 
 enforced a standard of quality in production, pre- 
 venting adulteration and bad workmanship, and 
 ordered all other matters appertaining to the con- 
 duct of an industry and the personal welfare of its 
 individual members. 
 
 Now, what is there to stand in the way of the 
 application of such principles to-day? Though the 
 circumstances of modern industry differ from the 
 circumstances of Medieval industry, yet there is 
 no technical difficulty that stands in the way of 
 the establishment of such control over industry, for 
 the principles to be applied are finally nothing more 
 than the enforcement 'of moral standards. The only 
 difference between their application under the 
 Medieval Guilds and under our supposed modern 
 Guilds, which aim at the same purpose, would be 
 that, whereas the former exercised control over
 
 88 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 employers and workers engaged in small workshops 
 owned by small masters, the latter would exercise 
 control over employers and workers engaged in 
 large and small factories and workshops owned by 
 private individuals, limited liability companies and 
 self-governing groups of workers. To make such 
 control effective, it would be necessary to depart 
 from the rules of the Medieval Guilds to the extent 
 that authority would be vested in the whole body 
 of members employers and workers instead of 
 being exclusively in the hands of the masters, as 
 was the case in the Middle Ages. For the typical 
 employer to-day is not a master of his craft, who 
 is jealous of its honour, as was the Medieval 
 employer, but a financier, who is only interested 
 in the profit and loss account, and therefore could 
 not be trusted with final authority. This considera- 
 tion enforces the conclusion that if any standards of 
 honesty and fair dealing are to be upheld, prices 
 fixed, machinery and other matters necessary to the 
 proper conduct of industry to be regulated, the 
 final authority would have to be vested in the 
 trade as a whole, for only those who suffer from 
 the growth of abuses can be relied on to take 
 measures to suppress them. , 
 
 In support of this contention, that the obstacle 
 in the path of a restoration of Guilds of the 
 Medieval type is moral rather than technical, atten- 
 tion should be directed to the activities of the 
 Industrial Council of the Building Industry, 1 better 
 
 ' The scheme of the Whitley Councils was modelled upon 
 that of the Industrial Council of the Building Industry, 
 with the difference that whereas the latter frankly accepted 
 the co-operation of the Trade Unions the former refused them 
 recognition in the workshops. Hence the opposition of Labour 
 to the Whitley Councils.
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 89 
 
 known as the Building Trades Parliament, since 
 there are invaluable lessons -to be learnt from its 
 experience. This body, which consists of repre- 
 sentatives of all Building Trade Employers Federa- 
 tions, and the Trade Unions of England and Scot- 
 land, and whose deliberations are watched with 
 close attention by economic students all over the 
 world, had its origin in an attempt to bring dis- 
 putes in the building trades to an end by removing 
 the causes of suspicion and distrust existing between 
 the employers and the workers. The employers 
 objected to any increase of wages apart from an 
 increase of output, to which the workers in their 
 turn objected. Subsequent negotiations revealed 
 the fact that there were four main factors tending 
 towards a restriction of output. They were (a) 
 Fear of unemployment ; (#) Expressed disinclina- 
 tion of many of the operatives to make unrestricted 
 profit for private employers ; (c) Lack of interest 
 in the industry evidenced by operatives owing to 
 their non-participation in control ; (d) Inefficiency, 
 both managerial and operative. 
 
 These obstacles revealed themselves as the crux 
 of the whole difficulty, and frankly facing the 
 situation, the joint committee of employers and 
 operatives set themselves the task of finding ways 
 and means of overcoming them by the promotion 
 of what they rather aptly termed " the team spirit 
 in industry." It resulted in a proposal to organize 
 the Building Industry on a basis of public service. 
 After working for four years on the problem, 
 Majority and Minority Reports were submitted by 
 members of the Management and Costs Committee 
 to the Council at a Conference held in London 
 on November 11 and 12, 1921. The former,
 
 90 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 which is our immediate concern, divided its 
 proposals into three parts. The first was a 
 scheme with proposals for the regularization 
 of demand, the decasualization of labour, un- 
 employment and holiday pay, superannuation and 
 a minimum system of accountancy and costing. 
 It was recommended for immediate inclusion in the 
 working agreements between the affiliated associa- 
 tion of Employers and Trade Unions, without 
 prejudice to the further consideration and discus- 
 sion of the great question of industrial control, 
 which lies at the centre of the problem of efficient 
 service, and with which the second and third part 
 of the Report deals. 
 
 In respect of industrial control, the second part 
 of the Report advanced the proposal that employers 
 and operatives should submit themselves to the 
 control of an organization that would, on the one 
 hand, retain the principle of private management 
 of industry, and on the other hand eliminate entirely 
 the element of profit-making from industry. The 
 means by which this end was to be attained was 
 by guaranteeing salaries to owners, managers, and 
 managing staffs, commensurate with their ability, 
 while allowing a regular rate of interest for the 
 hire of capital, which should be not less favourable 
 than the prevailing rate yielded by debentures in 
 other industries, and by guaranteeing to the 
 operatives standard rates of pay that would ensure 
 a real and satisfactory standard of comfort. The 
 last part of the Majority Report advanced a pro- 
 posal which was frankly admitted to be an ideal. 
 It was for the organization of a National Guild of 
 Builders, a complete scheme of democratic control, 
 based upon the whole of the personnel of the
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 91 
 
 National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, 
 and other approved organizations of building trade 
 workers, whether administrative, technical, clerical or 
 operative, much on the lines of the Building Guilds. 
 
 The Minority Report, which represented the views 
 of a majority of the employers, objected to these 
 proposals for two reasons. Firstly because, as they 
 said, the proposed scheme was a system of which 
 the world has no recorded experience of its having 
 been successfully applied, and therefore they pre- 
 ferred to stand by the present system, because it 
 had persisted in all ages and all countries, and 
 was therefore to be considered as normal ; and 
 secondly, because the scheme involved a change 
 in the motive of industry, which they contended 
 was impossible, inasmuch as only the love of gain 
 was capable of supplying a sufficient incentive to 
 industrial undertakings, and therefore industry 
 would suffer demoralization if this motive were 
 removed. 
 
 It can occasion no surprise that opposition was 
 forthcoming. Ideas so revolutionary can only be- 
 come really practical after the lapse of time, after 
 a long propaganda has been undertaken on their 
 behalf, when they have become common property 
 and familiarity brings consent. Hence it was that 
 at the Conference already referred to, a resolution 
 was carried which threw the responsibility for the 
 main decision on the national adherent bodies, while 
 the Management and Costs Committee was asked 
 further to consider and report on the less contro- 
 versial details. To make a long story short, the 
 matter has been shelved, and it is likely to remain 
 so for an indefinite period, for there can be no 
 doubt as to the fundamental character of the
 
 92 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 opposition. It first found expression in the debate 
 on the Interim Report (August, 1919), at which I 
 was present, and it was certainly a most instructive 
 debate. It was not a debate between employers 
 and operatives as such, but between two rival con- 
 ceptions of industry production for service versus 
 production for gain. The operatives, with a 
 minority of employers on the one side, fighting a 
 majority of employers on the other. The latter 
 group maintained that the only incentive to in- 
 dustrial efficiency is love of gain, and that all 
 classes of the community will be best served by 
 maintaining unhampered our present competitive 
 system of enterprise and industry. The other group 
 as obstinately maintained that the real incentive 
 is the joy of service, and not the love of gain 
 the creative impulse, not the possessive one. The 
 debate, having taken this turn, was no longer con- 
 cerned with the details of the scheme. It became 
 a debate on morals, in which appeals were made 
 to the authority of Christianity and Ruskin. I 
 never realized before how far the influence of 
 Ruskin had penetrated. Everybody, employers and 
 operatives alike, appeared to be familiar with his 
 teachings, and he was accepted apparently by both 
 sides as a final court of appeal, though how it 
 came about that employers, who maintained that 
 only the motive of gain could be a sufficient stimulus 
 to industrial efficiency, reconciled their ideas with 
 Ruskin and Christianity is a mystery I will not 
 attempt to explain. 
 
 Now, what bearing has all this on the issue of 
 Medieval and National Guilds? Just this : that 
 when representatives of employers and operatives 
 began to consider practical ways and means of
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 93 
 
 organizing a great industry for public service, un- 
 hampered by a priori theories of class antagonism, 
 they instinctively proceed along Medieval lines as 
 the line of least resistance, since, apart from the 
 proposal to form a National Guild of Builders on 
 the lines of the Building Guild, which was included 
 in the report as an ideal rather than as a practical 
 measure, the Report is Medieval through and 
 through, inasmuch as the practical proposals ad- 
 vanced frankly accept the principle of the private 
 management of industry, while seeking to super- 
 impose over such private businesses an organization 
 that would regulate it so as to eliminate entirely 
 the motive of profit-making. This is all the more 
 remarkable because the original source of inspira- 
 tion was more a product of the National Guild 
 than the Medieval Guild propaganda, as is evidenced 
 by the fact in the Majority Report the National 
 Guild, rather than the Medieval Guild, was postu- 
 lated as an ideal. 1 
 
 This, I feel, was a pity ; not only because the 
 great monuments of Gothic architecture were pro- 
 duced by the Medieval Guilds, but because a frank 
 
 i I am not sure whether this can be said of Mr. Thomas 
 Foster, the Chairman of the Management and Costs Committee, 
 for in a pamphlet entitled Masters and Men, which had 
 something to do with the organization of the Building Trades 
 Parliament, he draws a comparison between the chaotic condi- 
 tions existing in the building trades to-day, with those that 
 existed in the Middle Ages, while he recommends that the 
 building trades should be organized on some such co-operative 
 basis. He qualifies himself only to the extent of adding, 
 " The methods of the old Craft Guilds cannot be applied 
 in their entirety to the conditions of present-day industry, 
 but the suggested application of the principle of Craft co- 
 operation cannot be lightly dismissed."
 
 94 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 acceptation of the Medieval Guilds as an ideal 
 would have given the reformers a perfectly con- 
 sistent position, inasmuch as Parts I and II of the 
 Report, which were recommended for immediate 
 adoption, were defensible as steps towards the re- 
 storation of Medieval Guilds, but not as steps 
 towards a National Guild, which appears in the 
 Report as an anti-climax. By maintaining a con- 
 sistent position, they could have put up a much 
 stronger defence against the opposition. For the 
 majority of employers could not then have opposed 
 the scheme on the grounds that it proposed to 
 establish over the building trades a system of 
 organization of which the world has no recorded 
 experience of its having been successfully applied. 
 The great monuments of Medieval architecture could 
 have been cited as proving the contrary, and these, 
 it could have been urged, were just as much the 
 counterpart of the economic order, that obtained 
 under the Medieval Guilds, as the chaotic archi- 
 tecture of to-day is the counterpart of the economic 
 chaos that follows economic individualism. 
 
 And there is another lesson that we may learn 
 from the experience of the Building Trades Parlia- 
 ment. It is that behind the problem of organization 
 there is to be found the problem of morals, for men 
 take sides ultimately on moral issues. Economic 
 theories may be the occasion that divides them. 
 But it is the moral issue that finally divides merj, 
 for, as we saw, the difference of opinion over the 
 practicability of the proposals of the Building 
 Trades Parliament resolved itself finally into a ques- 
 tion of morals : the question as to whether any 
 other motive but that of gain could ever promote 
 industrial efficiency. And here again it is to be
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 95 
 
 observed that a frank acceptance of the Medieval 
 Guilds as an ideal would have strengthened the 
 hands of the reformers, for the issue would no 
 longer have been one of opinion, but of fact. 
 
 The moral issue, then, is fundamental. It not 
 only separates those who uphold the present com- 
 petitive order of society from those who demand' the 
 reorganization of society on some corporate or 
 communal basis, but it also underlies the division 
 of opinion among reformers themselves. The 
 scheme of the Building Trades Parliament de- 
 veloped along the lines it did because it was based 
 upon the assumption that the goodwill necessary 
 to put it into operation would be forthcoming. 
 But when such hopes were disappointed, and it 
 became evident that the scheme would not be 
 acceptable to a majority of the employers, a new 
 development took place. The Manchester section 
 of the Operatives Federation seized the opportunity 
 that the housing shortage provided, by setting up 
 a Building Guild Committee, and made an offer 
 to the City Council (Feb., 1920), to build two 
 thousand houses. This action led to the organiza- 
 tion of Building Guilds in various parts of the 
 country, of which upwards of a hundred are now- 
 adays (Dec., 1921) in existence, and which we 
 must now proceed to consider. 
 
 Now, this new development did not proceed along 
 the lines of the Medieval Guild, but of the National 
 Guild, and this followed naturally from the fact 
 that, as a result of the refusal of the employers 
 to co-operate, their organization had to be based 
 upon the personnel of the local Federations of 
 Building Trade Operatives rather than upon the 
 building industry as a whole. In providing an
 
 96 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 answer to the contention of the majority employers 
 of the Building Trades Parliament, that only the 
 motive of gain can supply a motive power to 
 industry, the Building Guilds have more than justi- 
 fied their existence, for they have demonstrated 
 beyond a shadow of doubt that an organization in 
 which the workers participate in control promotes 
 efficiency by securing their loyalty and goodwill. 
 But there is no reason to suppose that they 
 will be any more successful than the Building 
 Trades Parliament in effecting the guildization of 
 the building trades as a whole, for their position is 
 precarious in the extreme. They came into exist- 
 ence to execute the Housing schemes of various 
 municipalities, and it is possible that with their 
 completion they may disappear, for there is no 
 denying they are very much at the mercy of circum- 
 stances. They are at the mercy of the Government's 
 housing policy, and they may be strangled by the 
 Anti-Waste campaign, while, as it so happens that 
 financial and industrial activities have in every 
 direction reached a deadlock and a deadlock that 
 will remain until the facts underlying it are frankly 
 faced the prospects of getting hold of a sufficient 
 quantity of private work to enable them to carry 
 on is doubtful. 
 
 If, then, there is no prospect of the Building 
 Guilds being able to effect the guildization of the 
 building trades, there is still less of this principle 
 being able to effect the guildization of our industrial 
 activities as a whole, for no other large industry 
 is as fortunately placed as the building industry 
 for embarking on such an experiment. The 
 Building Guilds were possible because of circum- 
 stances peculiar to the building trades. There was,
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 97 
 
 in the first place, the housing shortage, which pro- 
 vided the immediate opportunity. There were 
 labour-controlled municipal councils that were in 
 a position to give them work, while there was the 
 further consideration that the element of fixed 
 capital, so important in other large industries, is, 
 in the building trades, unimportant compared with 
 the charges connected with each particular job, 
 material and labour entailing almost the whole costs 
 in the building. These circumstances made the 
 principle of industrial self-government a fairly 
 simple proposition for the building trade operatives, 
 but it obviously supplies no more precedent for 
 the guildization of other large industries where 
 immense fixed capital is required, and where the 
 market cannot be localized, than the municipal gas 
 and water of Collectivists provided a basis for 
 the nationalization of all industry. 
 
 Nevertheless, the influence of the Building Guilds 
 is not going to be ephemeral. If they provide 
 no precedent for the guildization of other large 
 industries, they do apparently for small industries, 
 for a whole crop of small Guilds are coming into 
 existence. There is a Furnishing Guild, a Clothiers 
 Guild, and an Agricultural Guild already in exist- 
 ence ; while news reaches us of a Dairy Guild, a 
 Blacksmith's and Farrier's Guild, a Fruit Grower's 
 Guild, a Packing Case Guild and a Commercial 
 Vehicle Maker's Guild that are in process of forma- 
 tion. Whether any of these Guilds will be able 
 to establish themselves permanently is extremely 
 doubtful, for they are being launched amid adverse 
 economic conditions. Should they fail, as they 
 may, it can be safely predicted that their failure 
 will be followed by some disillusionment of many 
 
 7
 
 98 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 who are nowadays so hopeful, while it is a certainty 
 that the failure will be used by opponents to dis- 
 credit the Guild Movement. But Medievalists must 
 attempt to assess these experiments at their true 
 valuation. Their failure will not discourage them, 
 for they have always been somewhat sceptical about 
 National Guild policy. They have always main- 
 tained that our industrial system was not a thing 
 of permanence and stability, and doubted the possi- 
 bility of successfully superimposing Guilds over its 
 activities. So while I should welcome the success 
 of these experiments as removing an obstacle from 
 our path, yet such success is not guaranteed, for 
 behind the economic problem is the problem of 
 men and machines, and the unwillingness of 
 reformers to face this fact places us at the mercy 
 of forces we cannot control. 
 
 Whatever may eventually prove to be the fate 
 of these Guilds their organization has been more 
 than justified, for they have cleared up for us 
 many issues, while providing us with invaluable 
 data that will pave the way towards a more in- 
 telligent discussion of the subject. But even if 
 they should survive the present economic crisis, 
 it would be a mistake to expect that any national 
 system of Guilds could follow* a mere extension of 
 their activities. For one insuperable obstacle 
 stands in the way of any such development the 
 tendency for all such activities to become choked 
 by a multiplicity of committees. To guard against 
 this evil, such self-governing bodies must be local 
 and small. The units of their organization must 
 be as small as is consonant with the function 
 they are required to perform. And if for such 
 purposes as those of finance and the buying of
 
 MEDIEVAL AND NATIONAL GUILDS 99 
 
 material a larger unit is found desirable, then the 
 larger unit must consist of federated groups, while 
 the functions of such federated groups should be 
 limited to those that can be performed properly 
 in no other way. Hence any national organization 
 must be independent of such bodies. The National 
 Guild will be of the Medieval type on the lines 
 foreshadowed by the Report of the Building Trades 
 Parliament ; because seeking to regulate industry 
 rather than to organize it, the issues with which 
 it would have to deal would be few. Such an 
 organization would not suffer from too great a 
 multiplicity of committees. Under the control of 
 such national organizations of the Medieval Guild 
 type, Guilds of the Building Guild type would find 
 a place side by side with privately conducted 
 businesses.
 
 VI 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 
 
 IN a recent article in the Labour Monthly, 1 Mr. 
 ,W. Mellor criticizes National Guildsmen, saying 
 that " they began as compromisers and they have 
 been compromising ever since." The criticism is 
 valid ; National Guild theory was a compromise. 
 It was a compromise between Medievalism and 
 Industrialism, and the movement has been com- 
 promising ever since, because it was committed 
 to a theory that attempted to reconcile irreconcili- 
 ables. 
 
 The truth of this can best be demonstrated by 
 following the fortunes of the National Guild 
 League, into whose hands the development of 
 National Guild theory passed, once its organization 
 was formed. The National Guilds League, though 
 it borrowed Medieval principles, was modern in 
 that it did not question the permanence and 
 stability of our Industrial system. But having been 
 born of a compromise it was unstable and found 
 itself at the mercy of circumstances. The choice 
 before the movement was whether it would become 
 more modern or more Medieval. But upon this 
 vital issue it could never make up its mind, and 
 so it happened that it came to travel in opposite 
 
 1 A Critique of Guild Socialism, by W. Mellor, Labour 
 
 Monthly, November, 1921. 
 
 100
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 101 
 
 directions. Its theory became more Medieval and 
 its policy more modernist and revolutionary. Let 
 me explain. 
 
 As originally formulated, the National Guild 
 theory was that of a number of highly -central- 
 ized Guilds working in conjunction with the State. 
 Nowadays National Guilds are not interpreted by 
 the League as highly-centralized Guilds, but as 
 a federation of local Guilds, while the idea of 
 the sovereignty of the State has so far disappeared 
 that it no longer finds a place in the basis of the 
 League. Thus when the League was founded its 
 objects were stated to be : 
 
 4 The abolition of the Wage System and 
 the establishment of self-government in industry 
 through a system of National Guilds working in 
 conjunction with the State." 
 
 Nowadays its objects are declared to be : 
 
 " The abolition of the Wage System and the 
 establishment by the workers of self-government in 
 industry through a democratic system of National 
 Guilds, working in conjunction with other functional 
 organizations in the Community." 
 
 As explained by Mr. Cole at the Conference 
 when the change was made, this new basis was 
 recommended as a formula which would allow 
 members who held different opinions as to the 
 position of the State in a future society to remain 
 in the League and work together for immediate 
 practical ends. Those who believed that the State 
 should be abolished entirely, and those who 
 believed that the State, instead of being the all- 
 powerful Leviathan it is to-day, would in the future 
 be stripped of its illegitimate functions and be 
 reduced to the position of one power among a
 
 102 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 plurality of powers, were both allowed to interpret 
 the basis in their own way. No one apparently 
 believed any longer in the State's absolute 
 sovereignty. 
 
 These changes are significant. But the greatest 
 change of all is in the attitude of the League 
 towards Industrialism, which, from being regarded 
 as a thing of permanence and stability, is 
 nowadays looked upon as being on the verge of 
 collapse. When we remember that the reason 
 which led the movement to reject the idea of 
 restoring the Medieval type of Guilds in favour 
 of the idea of establishing National Guilds turned 
 on this very issue ; the advocates of Medieval 
 Guilds, affirming that Industrialism was doomed 
 to dissolution and decay, while the advocates of 
 National Guilds denied it, we begin to feel that 
 there is not much left of the National Guild 
 position, and the fact that every departure from 
 the original position has been in the direction of 
 a return to the principles of Medieval social 
 organization is a striking testimony to their truth 
 and universality. 
 
 Though, as I have shown, the transformation 
 of thought that took place within the National 
 Guild Movement was in a Medievalist direction, 
 it was, unfortunately, not consciously Medieval, but 
 came about as a consequence of the pressure of 
 events. But a time came when another group 
 of forces of a very different character began to 
 exercise an influence over it, and it was then that 
 the central weakness of the movement came into 
 the light of day, for it was then seen that 
 the movement stood for nothing sufficiently 
 fundamental to enable it to steer its course sue-
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 103 
 
 cessfully between the Scylla and Charybdis of 
 modern politics. By the end of 1919 dissatis- 
 faction was being freely expressed with the policy 
 of encroaching control, which hitherto had been 
 the policy of the movement. This dissatisfaction 
 coincided with the spread of Communist propa- 
 ganda in this country, which turned the thought 
 of the more ardent spirits in the movement 
 from a belief in reform by constitutional means to 
 a belief in force. Thus it came about that the 
 trend of the movement towards Medievalism was 
 brought abruptly to an end, and the movement 
 became a house divided against itself, in which 
 state of mind it has remained ever since, for 
 neither the Revolutionaries nor the Medievalists 
 within the League are in a sufficiently strong 
 position to force a decision, while the centre was 
 too hesitant to throw its weight in either one 
 direction or the other, failing to understand that no 
 compromise was possible between opposed beliefs. 
 Since then the League has been waning in power, 
 though owing to the successful organization of 
 the Building Guilds the Guild idea has been 
 booming in the country, and Guild literature and 
 speakers have been in greater demand than ever. 
 Now the underlying cause of this failure 
 of the National Guild Movement is that it 
 has never been honest with itself over the 
 question of Industrialism. When at the be- 
 ginning of its career it believed Industrialism to 
 be a thing of permanence and stability, it was in' 
 a more or less defensible position. But when it 
 came to the conclusion that our Industrial System' 
 was breaking up, the justification of its general 
 policy disappeared, for what could be the use of
 
 104 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 * 
 
 seeking to superimpose Guilds over present-day 
 Industrial activities if those activities did not 
 possess within themselves the elements of stability? 
 Clearly this crisis could have been met in only 
 one way, by broadening the basis on which the 
 movement rested, by frankly recognizing that the 
 problem of restoring Guilds is only one among 
 many problems that will have to be faced before 
 the social problem can be solved. Yet on this 
 more general fundamental problem of society the 
 National Guild Movement has absolutely nothing 
 to say. On the contrary, it continues the Socialist 
 tradition of thought of assuming that the only 
 social problems are finally those of organization 
 and ownership. For Guildsmen, when they speak 
 of changing the system, mean little more than 
 changing the ownership of the system. Hence, 
 the real issue with them is finally the problem 
 of how power may be attained. But it is obvious 
 that the attainment of power and a capacity to 
 use it for the public advantage are two entirely 
 different things, and what reason is there to 
 suppose that if the Labour or the Communist Party 
 succeeded to power, they would not be just as much 
 at the mercy of economic forces of society as 
 capitalists are to-day? Frankly I can see none, 
 for neither Socialists, Communists or Labourites 
 recognize the existence of the problem of men and 
 machines that lies at the centre of the economic 
 problem. And because they do not recognize 
 this problem, it is a certainty that they would 
 be at its mercy. They would be as impotent 
 in the face of the present economic morass 
 as the present Government, differing with them 
 only to the extent that they would at least
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 105 
 
 attempt to be more generous and equitable in their 
 attitude towards the workers. 
 
 If we compare Socialist thought to-day with the 
 Socialist thought that penetrated the Chartist Move- 
 ment, we may say that while current thought is 
 of a far more practical order, with more precision 
 in detail, there is not the same grasp of the main 
 essentials of the problem that confronts society 
 as in Chartist times. To explain my meaning, 
 let us consider the different meanings attached to 
 the proposal to abolish the Wage System in 
 Chartist times and in our own, for it is our link 
 with the past. As expounded by the National 
 Guild Movement, the Wage System is defined as 
 being a state of things in which labour is bought 
 and sold as a commodity in the same way as 
 other commodities are bought and sold, and its 
 abolition is the demand that labour no longer be 
 bought and sold in this way. As such it is really 
 a demand for the regularization, stabilization and 
 moralization of the wage relationship and for 
 industrial maintenance during times of unemploy- 
 ment. But when Socialists of Chartist times 
 demanded the abolition of the Wage System they 
 meant what they said. They meant that the 
 system of distributing purchasing power by means 
 of payment for work done was incompatible with 
 the unrestricted use of machinery. They saw that 
 if machinery is to reduce labour to a minimum 
 then it follows that some other system of dis- 
 tributing purchasing power must be substituted for 
 the present one of payment for work done. For 
 the Wage System breaks down entirely when 
 machinery becomes automatic. Hence it was they 
 demanded that purchasing power should no longer
 
 106 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 be dependent on the receipt of wages, and it was 
 as a means of creating 1 a new social order, in which 
 it would be possible to distribute purchasing power 
 independent of payment for work done, that they 
 came to demand the abolition of the private owner- 
 ship of land and capital, and the means of produc- 
 tion and exchange. The one was the necessary 
 corollary of the other. 
 
 But Socialists and Guildsmen to-day have not 
 that same intellectual grip of the general situation 
 as had their predecessors of Chartist times. Their 
 ideas are not organically related to any central 
 idea. On the contrary, they believe in a number 
 of separate ideas, more or less loosely related, 
 but which are not part of an organic whole. In 
 the Report on Fabian Policy, the abolition of the 
 Wage System is rejected as an impracticable 
 proposal, which in the sense in which it was 
 understood by the Chartists is perfectly true. It 
 is impracticable. But apparently Fabians had no 
 suspicion whatsoever that the idea was logically 
 related to the problem of machinery, which was 
 the reason for the Chartist advocacy of the doctrine 
 (equally impracticable) of the abolition of private 
 property in land, capital, and the means of pro- 
 duction and exchange, which doctrine the Fabians 
 retained, in sublime unconsciousness of its origin, 
 basing their propaganda on an accessory idea, and 
 rejecting the proposal which gave it at least a 
 logical validity. Guildsmen, like the Fabians, were 
 so completely unaware that there was any con- 
 nection between the Chartist demand for the 
 abolition of the Wage System and the problem of 
 machinery, that when they revived the phrase they 
 came to interpret it as meaning the regulariza-
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 107 
 
 tion, stabilization and moralization of the wage 
 relationship, entirely unaware of the fact that such 
 a policy is impossible so long as the unrestricted 
 use of machinery is permitted. But when truth 
 is turned out of the front door, it has a way of 
 coming in at the back, and the incompatibility 
 of the wage relationship with the prevailing system 
 of industry, which the early Socialists rightly 
 connected with the unrestricted use of machinery, 
 has in these latter days come to be connected with 
 the problem of credit, and in connection with the 
 Douglas -New Age Scheme, the demand is made 
 for " dividends for all " on the assumption that the 
 dividend is to be considered the successor of the 
 wage. 
 
 Now this idea is sufficiently plausible to gain 
 converts among people who do not see clearly 
 what such a suggestion involves. Such people 
 object to the idea of wages for several reasons. 
 In the first place, because the receiving of wages 
 seems to imply a servile status ; in the next 
 because on the wage basis, artists and poets, 
 scholars and others who do not do work that is of 
 immediate economic value get left out in the cold ; 
 and lastly, because the distribution of purchasing 
 power on the basis of payment for work done 
 does not suggest to many minds a sense of the 
 corporate responsibility of society for the welfare 
 of its individual members. 
 
 Now when we come to examine these objections 
 we find they are based upon a confusion of thought. 
 Wages, it is true, are apt nowadays to connote a 
 servile condition, but this is not because a system 
 of payment for work done necessarily involves any 
 degradation, but because under modern conditions
 
 108 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 it so happens that most people who do any useful 
 work are in a servile condition. Under the 
 Medieval Guild system, the journeymen and 
 apprentices received what were, technically speak- 
 ing, wages ; but we do not associate such 
 payments as they received with the evils of the 
 iWage System because, though wages existed under 
 the Guilds, they did not imply the brutal and in- 
 human relationship which wages do to-day, for 
 labour was not then a commodity, the price of 
 which was determined by the competition of 
 the markets, but was paid for at a fixed rate 
 determined by the Guilds, of which both masters 
 and men were alike members. Moreover, the 
 journeyman only remained a wage -earner during 
 the earlier part of his life. He could look forward 
 to a day when, as a matter of course, he would 
 set up in business on his own account, for as 
 there was a limit placed to the number of 
 assistants any master could employ, opportunities 
 for advancement were open to all who desired 
 to use them. The Wage System therefore did 
 not in those days present itself as an evil in the 
 way it does to-day. On the contrary, it is the 
 growth of large organizations, on a basis of 
 the subdivision of labour and the unrestricted use of 
 machinery, that has created the evils which we 
 associate with the Wage System to-day ; for under 
 such conditions, those personal relationships which 
 humanize life tend to disappear, and their place 
 is taken by a cash -nexus divorced from all 
 sentiment and personal regard. It is such con- 
 ditions that make the Wage System to-day so 
 brutal, but if the use of machinery were restricted 
 and the subdivision of labour abolished as we
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 10 
 
 demand, that disturbing element which makes 
 wages at once so uncertain, brutal and servile 
 would be removed. 
 
 The Medieval Guilds accepted payment for work 
 done as being the normal thing in society, but 
 that did not preclude them from giving aid to the 
 sick and unfortunate or of treating exceptional 
 circumstances in exceptional ways. But owing to 
 the fact that under industrialism all the normal 
 human relationships have become degraded, people 
 are always seeking to make the exception into the 
 rule. Thus because under our existing economic 
 system work that is of no immediate economic 
 value cannot command proper remuneration, they 
 repudiate the normal thing that payment should 
 be for work done, in order that some provision 
 shall be made for the exceptional. But surely 
 this is irrational, for there is no reason why a 
 system of payment should be uniform. It was in 
 the past frankly recognized that certain kinds of 
 activities depended upon patronage, and this should 
 be recognized to-day. But again there is the 
 same prejudice against patronage as against wages, 
 because like all right and human things, it lends 
 itself to abuse. The Church and Guilds in the 
 Middle Ages were the patrons of learning and the 
 arts, and if restored they would become such again 
 in the future. It is because of the decline of 
 the one and the disappearance of the other that 
 learning and the arts are in such difficulties, but 
 it is vain to suppose that people can ever be led to 
 make the exception into the rule. For if they have 
 not sufficient interest in these things as to be willing 
 to act as their patrons, there is no prospect what- 
 soever that they could be induced to turn the
 
 110 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 economic system upside down in order that such 
 exceptional activities may be provided for. 
 
 And the instinct of the people would be right, 
 for if payment in the future is not to be on a 
 basis of work done, then we must have industrial 
 conscription, for how otherwise is the necessary 
 work of the community to get done? And 1 I don't 
 see how the artist or poet is going to fare 
 advantageously under such conditions. The Church 
 and Guilds might be persuaded to discriminate in 
 their favour, but I cannot see it happening under 
 a national system of industrial conscription. 
 
 Further, it is necessary to consider how such 
 a proposition as " dividends for all " would in 
 practice be applied. Reformers may have visions 
 of a wonderful system of industry under which 
 all existing evils would be abolished and each 
 individual have complete and absolute liberty, but 
 in practice the popularization of such an idea could 
 have no other effect than to create a popular vested 
 interest in the maintenance of the existing system 
 of industry with all its abuses. For you cannot 
 abolish the Black Country and draw dividends on 
 it, since the two ideas are mutually exclusive. 
 
 But is there anything practical at all in this 
 proposal of " dividends for all? " It is obvious 
 that it can only be theoretically justified on the 
 assumption that the present system has within itself 
 the elements of permanence and stability. If the 
 wage system were the only thing that was breaking 
 down, then the plea that purchasing power must 
 in the future be distributed by means of dividends 
 rather than wages would at any rate be plausible,. 
 But the fact is that simultaneously with the break- 
 down of the wage system, there is going on the
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 111 
 
 breakdown of every other institution in modern 
 society. Politics, religion, art, industry, technical 
 skill, the institution of the family, and all other 
 social traditions are in a state of disintegration. 
 As it is apparent that all these problems are 
 organically related to each other, it is evidently 
 impossible to effect change or reform in any 
 one of them apart from dealing with the problem 
 of machinery that lies behind them all. Thus, to 
 go no further, " dividends for all " is only possible 
 on the assumption that our financial and industrial 
 system can be preserved. 
 
 This brings me to the central idea of the 
 Douglas -New Age Scheme which we must now 
 proceed to consider. Mr. Douglas sees, as most 
 people who think do, that the deadlock that has 
 overtaken industry is no ordinary trade depression 
 that will gradually disappear before the normal 
 operations of demand and supply as previous 
 depressions have done. On the contrary, he 
 maintains that the present situation is the logical 
 outcome of the pursuit of the policy of Maximum 
 Production on a basis of bank credit. Our system 
 of credit, he says, upsets the balance between 
 supply and demand by reason of the fact that 
 whereas credits are given for increasing produc- 
 tion, they are not given for increasing consump- 
 tion. That Mr. Douglas has put his finger on 
 the immediate cause of the present deadlock, apart 
 from the economic confusion resulting from the 
 war and the stupidities of the Peace Treaty, is 
 not, I think, to be denied. There can be no 
 doubt that the wholesale issue of credit by the 
 banks to individuals, on the basis of "to him 
 that hath shall be given " is the immediate cause
 
 112 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 of the present financial deadlock, for it is 
 impossible in the long run to offer facilities 
 for the increase of production without giving 
 corresponding opportunities for the increase of 
 consumption without upsetting the balance between 
 demand and supply. But while we may agree 
 that the wholesale issue of credit is the immediate 
 cause of the deadlock, it is clearly not the ultimate 
 cause, as we shall find out later. But meanwhile 
 Mr. Douglas proposes to correct this discrepancy 
 between demand and supply by selling goods 
 below cost, the selling price of any commodity 
 bearing the same ratio to its actual cost as the 
 total National Consumption of all descriptions of 
 commodities does to the National Production of 
 Credit, while the Government is called upon to 
 reimburse to the producers of any commodity the 
 difference between their total cost incurred and 
 their total price received by means of treasury 
 notes, such notes being debited, as now, to the 
 National Credit Account. 
 
 Now the first and most obvious objection to this 
 Scheme is that such a wholesale issue of paper 
 money would depreciate the currency. But 
 Douglasites are unwilling to admit this. They 
 urge that the fixation of prices which finds a place 
 in the Scheme would be a sufficient safeguard 
 against this. And when we object that to make 
 such a measure effective it would be necessary to 
 fix prices simultaneously in all industries, since if 
 the Scheme were applied gradually and prices fixed 
 below cost in one industry and not in the others, 
 the prices of commodities that were unfixed would 
 rise to restore the balance, they reply that the 
 rise of prices in non-regulated industries would
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 118 
 
 rapidly force on the application of the scheme to 
 other industries. But it won't do. All economic 
 theories based upon the theory of enlightened 
 selfishness promise such results. The adoption of 
 Free Trade by this country, it used to be argued, 
 would force its adoption on other countries, while 
 the theory of unfettered individualism was justified 
 on the grounds that while as producer the 
 individual might suffer, he would nevertheless 
 benefit by the cheapening of all he had to buy. 
 But somehow or other all prophecies based upon 
 theories of enlightened selfishness produce results 
 the very contrary of what was intended. And 
 this theory would certainly be no exception to the 
 rule, for in these days of international markets 
 the unit to be considered is not this country but the 
 world. Under such circumstances the proposition 
 is unthinkable. Those who believe in it only find 
 it thinkable because they love to live in a world 
 of abstractions divorced from reality. The only 
 remedy for such mental states is to translate 
 economic abstractions into concrete terms and to 
 think always in the terms of actual wealth of 
 bread, clothes, buildings, ships, fuel, furniture, etc. 
 Tested in this way, such abstractions as produc- 
 tion and consumption will appear as the most 
 ambiguous of categories that conceal essential 
 differences. Thus they will include everything 
 from food to armaments, things that support life 
 and things that destroy it, and yet we are asked 
 to believe that the economic balance of produc- 
 tion can at any time be restored by selling goods 
 below cost. But what if there are things which 
 people do not want at any price armaments for 
 instance? How would selling below cost help the 
 
 8
 
 114 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 situation? The whole thing is absurd ; it is an 
 illusion that owes its origin to a fatal habit of 
 divorcing the problem of money from the problem 
 of things. It is the reductio ad absurdum of our 
 financial system. 
 
 I said that the problem of credit might, apart 
 from the economic consequences of the War and 
 the Peace, be regarded as the immediate cause 
 of the present deadlock, but that it was not the 
 ultimate cause. In support of this contention I 
 would draw attention to the fact that the present 
 deadlock was foreseen by Marx. It finds a place 
 in the Communist Manifesto (1847). And yet, 
 though Marx foresaw this deadlock, there is not 
 in the whole of his writings anything about the 
 problems of credit and high finance (which is not 
 surprising, for the problem is largely the creation 
 of the Limited Liability Companies Act of 1862). 
 On the contrary, he foresaw it as the logical out- 
 come of the investment and reinvestment of surplus 
 wealth for further increase (theory of surplus 
 value). If, therefore, Marx foresaw this deadlock 
 seventy-five years ago, long before this problem 
 of credit had made its appearance, does it not 
 prove that the problem is much more fundamental 
 than the problem of credit? Nay, does not the 
 problem of credit begin to appear as an effect, 
 as a symptom of the disease rather than its cause, 
 and will it not therefore be necessary to dig deeper 
 than Mr. Douglas has done if a solution is to 
 be found? 
 
 But while Marx saw that the investment and 
 reinvestment of surplus wealth for further increase 
 would in the long run produce an economic dead- 
 lock, he did not regard this practice as the ultimate
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 115 
 
 cause, for he saw that behind the problem of 
 finance was the problem of machinery. He saw 
 that the capitalists were not masters of their own 
 house, inasmuch as they were at the mercy of 
 their machines. The progress of invention was 
 driving capitalism along the road it was travelling, 
 and would in the end spell its destruction. So far 
 I can go with him. But beyond this point we part 
 company, for there was something he did not see. 
 He did not see that the process of industrial 
 development that he traced was not only destruc- 
 tive of capitalism, but of the very fabric of society, 
 while in the long run the unrestricted use of 
 machinery and capitalist development would bring 
 into existence a civilization so complex that the 
 human mind would be unable to comprehend all 
 its multitudinous interconnections. And because of 
 this, because modern civilization makes demands 
 on our alertness and many-sidedness with which 
 our wits and sympathies cannot cope, it tends to 
 degenerate into anarchy. This consideration, apart 
 from any other, should be sufficient to convince us 
 that there is no solution of our problems apart 
 from a return to simpler conditions of life, such 
 as would reduce the complexity of our relation- 
 ships to terms commensuiate with the human 
 understanding. 
 
 Looking at the problem from this point of 
 view, our industrial system no longer appears as 
 the foundation upon which a more highly developed 
 civilization can be superimposed, but as a blind 
 alley, from which we must retrace our steps or 
 perish. But how may this be done? This is the 
 sphinx riddle that confronts us, and it is by no 
 means easy to answer. Perhaps it cannot be
 
 116 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 answered completely by any individual. But of 
 this much we can be certain ; that any change 
 in the direction of our activities must be preceded 
 by a change in the heart and mind of the people. 
 That such a change is actually taking place I 
 think is undoubted. But it has not yet proceeded 
 sufficiently far to become practical. The popular 
 mind is thoroughly disillusionized over the idea 
 of progress, but it is still largely under the spell 
 of machinery, and not until that spell is broken 
 will our minds be sufficiently liberated to think 
 and act clearly. The first step, therefore, is to 
 break this spell by means of propaganda. If we 
 could do this, we should be able to see clearer, 
 for the popularization and acceptance of an idea 
 will, if there is any truth in it, tend to create the 
 circumstances necessary to its transformation into 
 the terms of practical politics. 
 
 It is a philosophical truth that no synthesis is 
 ever complete, since in every synthesis there is 
 always something left over that becomes the 
 starting-point of the next synthesis. To translate 
 this idea into the terms of the social problem, 
 we may say that the army of unemployed is 
 the something left over from the industrial 
 synthesis, and therefore in our efforts to recon- 
 struct society we must begin with it. Marx 
 recognized this, and he proposed to use them for 
 the purpose of overthrowing the capitalist system 
 by a proletarian revolution. But recognizing, as 
 we do, that our industrial system is in a state of 
 disintegration, the problem that presents itself to 
 us is not how the industrial and capitalist system 
 can be captured or overthrown, but how a new 
 civilization can be built out of its ruins, and there-
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 117 
 
 fore we shall attempt to deal with the unemployed 
 as individual men rather than in the mass. Accept- 
 ing the position that our industrial system is 
 doomed, we should set to work to turn them into 
 agriculturists and handicraftsmen. There should 
 be no more difficulty about this, if it were under- 
 taken in a public way, than there was about turning 
 civilians into soldiers during the war. It is entirely 
 a question of will and determination. Hitherto 
 our efforts to do anything with the unemployed 
 have been the last word in futility, but that is 
 because the only idea behind the various schemes 
 for dealing with them has been to make work, to 
 mark time, as it were, until trade revived. Such 
 an aim inspires nobody. The unemployed them- 
 selves are conscious of the futility of the work on 
 which they are employed, and this sense of futility 
 is demoralizing in the last degree. But if the 
 fact that our industrial system is doomed was 
 frankly faced, and men were given a craft or 
 agricultural training to enable them to take their 
 place in the new social order, their work would 
 come to have meaning for them, and this would 
 make all the difference in the world, for men can 
 only do their best when they are dominated by 
 a real motive. 
 
 By such means a new society could be built 
 within the existing one, and as our industrial 
 civilization falls to pieces, this new society would 
 gradually take its place. There should be no 
 difficulty about this, if the principle were frankly 
 recognized that at every stage in its development 
 the new society should be protected. The founda- 
 tions of such a new society would rest, as all 
 stable societies rest, upon agriculture, and to effect
 
 118 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 such a revival as we anticipate, agriculture would 
 need to be protected from any foreign competition, 
 and prices and wages would have to be fixed., 
 There would, moreover, have to be a complete 
 overhauling of our land system, the reform of 
 which, it is to be presumed, will become practical 
 politics as the situation tends to become desperate. 
 Upon this base of agriculture the new industries 
 in which the subdivision of labour was abolished 
 and machinery controlled would rest. Such 
 industries would need, in the first instance, to be 
 protected against the competition of industries in 
 which the existing abuses were retained, which 
 could be done by putting a tax upon machinery 
 and the subdivision of labour. After a time, as 
 this new society began to develop an organized 
 life of its own, it would no longer stand in need 
 of protection from outside industries, for the saving 
 of cost that would be effected by the elimination 
 of cross -distribution and of overhead charges would 
 more than compensate for the increased cost of its 
 production. Still, prices and wages should remain 
 fixed, and every industry be under the regulation 
 of Guilds to prevent capitalism growing up again 
 within the new society, which it certainly would 
 if freedom of bargaining were permitted. There 
 would be no practical difficulty about reconstruc- 
 tion upon such lines, once the idea was popularly 
 understood. It is impossible to graft the prin- 
 ciples we stand for on to modern society if taken 
 separately. But handled together, as part of a 
 large and comprehensive scheme, and nursed in 
 the early stages, there is no reason why they should 
 not be acted upon. We may not be able to return 
 to simpler conditions of society individually, but
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 119 
 
 there is no reason why we should not do so 
 collectively. 
 
 Meanwhile external conditions are co-operating 
 to force upon us an agricultural policy. The 
 conclusion becomes irresistible that the days of 
 our industrial supremacy are over. It was an 
 accidental and temporary and not a permanent 
 circumstance that gave colour to the theory, so 
 popular in the first half of the last century, that 
 we were destined to become the workshop of the 
 world. This economic myth owed its origin to the 
 fact that this country was the first to embark upon 
 an industrial career in the modern sense. We 
 had certain natural advantages, an abundance of 
 mineral wealth, and an unrivalled geographical 
 position, which naturally constituted us a centre 
 for trade and commerce, while securing us from the 
 fear of invasion. But the great fact, compared 
 with which all others pale into insignificance, was 
 that we were the first to use steam-power and 
 machinery. It was this fact that enabled our goods 
 to penetrate into every part of our world, which 
 built up huge credits in every country abroad, and 
 led to the enormous expansion of our mercantile 
 marine, while constituting us the merchants and 
 bankers of the world. 
 
 But it is apparent that this virtual monopoly 
 could not last indefinitely. It could last no longer 
 than we retained our monopoly ef machinery, since, 
 other things being equal, it would always be 
 cheaper to produce goods near the markets and 
 where raw material is found, than at a distance 
 from them, and therefore it has happened that 
 one by one other nations adopted machine produc- 
 tion and our monopoly came to be challenged.
 
 120 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 Before the war we were holding our own with 
 difficulty. Lancashire was losing her cotton 
 markets, because of the competition of America, 
 India, Japan and Brazil. Australia had begun to 
 produce her own woollen goods, while in many 
 markets, for all kinds of goods, we suffered from 
 the competition of Germany, Japan and America. 
 But it was the war that completed the change 
 for us by transforming the world conditions. It 
 shattered the fabric of our commerce, industry and 
 finance. Deprived of their accustomed supplies 
 from us, many of our former customers were 
 driven to begin producing all kinds of things for 
 themselves, and as these new manufactures are 
 carried on near to where the raw materials are 
 found or produced, it is manifest that these 
 markets must gradually slip from our hands. We 
 cannot hope in the future to export such large 
 quantities of manufactured goods to Australia, 
 Canada, South America and elsewhere as hitherto, 
 while the tendency is for other nations to carry 
 their own goods in their own ships. Meanwhile, 
 in order to finance the war, we were compelled to 
 dispose of most of our foreign investments. Thus, 
 in one way or other, there is not the money coming 
 into this country that there was before the war, 
 and our industries will not be able to provide work 
 for such numbers as hitherto. Not being able to 
 sell goods to the food -producing nations, we shall 
 soon be without the money to pay for the food 
 we must import to keep our population alive a 
 fact that is brought home to us by the constant 
 falling of the rate of exchange with food- 
 producing nations. 
 
 That is the immediate practical problem that
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS Itl 
 
 confronts us to-day. If anything could demon- 
 strate the folly of a nation allowing itself to become 
 dependent upon other nations for its supply of 
 food, and building up national industries which 
 were dependent upon foreign supplies of raw 
 material, the situation in which we find ourselves 
 to-day should do so. We have allowed ourselves 
 to drift into an impossible situation, and things 
 must steadily go from bad to worse until 
 agriculture is revived, for as the countries upon 
 which we have been accustomed to rely for a 
 supply of food are beginning to produce their 
 own industrial wares, it follows that our exports 
 to them will tend to become a steadily diminishing 
 quantity, and therefore the only way to meet the 
 situation is for us to take measures to produce 
 as much food as possible for ourselves by the 
 revival of agriculture. 
 
 Whether or not sufficient food can be produced 
 in these islands to satisfy our requirements is a 
 debatable question. But supposing it cannot, then 
 it follows that if our foreign trade shrinks to the 
 point at which we cannot sell sufficient goods to 
 food -producing nations to buy the food required 
 to support our surplus population, there can be no 
 remedy apart from emigration, for no tinkering 
 with the machinery of distribution can distribute 
 more food than we can grow and import. 1 
 
 Thus it comes about that the trend of events 
 is forcing upon us the Medieval policy which 
 sought to make each country as self-contained as 
 possible. Though at the moment the loss of our 
 markets is an inconvenience which it is impossible 
 
 1 See my Guilds, Trade and Agriculture, where this subject 
 is discussed.
 
 122 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 to exaggerate and adds to our perplexity, yet I 
 am persuaded that in the long run it will prove 
 to be a blessing, for so long as our industries were 
 dependent upon foreign markets it was impossible 
 to initiate really drastic reform, for under such 
 circumstances the factors that really governed the 
 problem were outside of our control. The modifi- 
 cation of a tariff, or a war, the discovery of some 
 new raw material or some other such event in 
 some remote corner of the world, would dislocate 
 the labour of millions at home, while all the time 
 our fortunes remained in the hands of capitalist 
 adventurers, for they alone could find markets for 
 our surplus produce. To break with this tradition 
 has hitherto been the great obstacle in the path 
 of reform, for it was hopeless to attempt to bring 
 order into an economic system that ramified out 
 into every quarter of the globe. But the obstacle 
 that refused to yield to reason is being removed 
 by the force of circumstances, and a situation is 
 being created in which the social problem may 
 be solved if we have the will and the energy. For 
 with a revived agriculture, with the people back 
 again on the land, a foundation will be laid which 
 will enable a social fabric to be rebuilt that will 
 be permanent and stable. 
 
 If it be laid down as a maxim that the first 
 principle of a normal civilization is that it be as 
 self-contained as possible, the second undoubtedly 
 is that it should in no sense be living on capital, 
 but arrange its production in such a way as largely 
 to reproduce itself. Before the age of machines, 
 the inroads made by man on irreplaceable material 
 were moderate and offered no menace to posterity, 
 the store of mineral wealth in the world remained
 
 INDUSTRIALISM AND GUILDS 123 
 
 almost intact. But our industrial methods of 
 production use up material at an alarming pace. 
 The machine has an insatiable appetite for fuel 
 and minerals of all kinds, the supply of which is 
 limited. The easily accessible sources of supply 
 of raw materials are becoming exhausted, and the 
 necessity of getting hold of new sources of supply 
 was one of the causes of the wart. These con- 
 siderations, together with the steady and progres- 
 sive decline in the quality of production, the decay 
 of technical skill, the atrophy of the individual and 
 the social and economic chaos that has followed 
 everywhere in the wake of the machine, lead us 
 inevitably to the conclusion that reaction must 
 come, for it is simply impossible for civilization 
 to continue on the road it is travelling. Such a 
 reaction, by leading to the revival of pre -mechanical 
 standards of thought and industry, will remove the 
 greatest obstacle of all to the solution of our 
 problems.
 
 VII 
 DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION 
 
 ONE immediate practical difficulty that stands in 
 the way of the reorganization of society on a 
 corporate and democratic basis is the tendency of 
 modern collective activity to be choked by a multi- 
 plicity of committees. It matters not what the 
 nature of the activity may be ; whether it be 
 cultural or political, official or unofficial, democratic 
 or otherwise, the same fate overtakes all people 
 at the present day whenever they attempt to act 
 together, and this in spite of the fact that the evil 
 is almost everywhere recognized. 
 
 If we reflect on this phenomenon, there are only 
 two deductions to be made from it. One of these 
 is that democracy is an impossible ideal ; the other 
 is that our conception of democracy is a false one. 
 The latter I believe to be the true explanation. 
 Society was more democratic in the Middle Ages 
 than it has been at any time since civilization 
 began. Until the thirteenth century the law was 
 supreme. The King was just as much subject 
 to it as any of his subjects, for " he did not make 
 laws by his own authority, but required the- consent 
 and advice of his wise men, and in some more 
 or less vague sense of the whole nation." ' The 
 
 1 Medieval Political Theory in the West, by R. W. and 
 A. I. Carlyle, vol. i, p. 238. 
 
 124
 
 DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION 125 
 
 government was democratic, but not in the sense 
 in which we are accustomed to use the word to-day, 
 for it was government by consent rather than by 
 election. Government was judged by its results, 
 not by its machinery. Thus the democratic ideal 
 of the Middle Ages might be defined as something 
 proceeding to the people, as contrasted with the 
 democratic ideal of the present day, which is under- 
 stood as meaning a system of government pro- 
 ceeding from the people ; or, in other words, 
 democracy to-day is identified with the idea of 
 majority rule. The exaggeration of this idea leads 
 to the trouble, since, apart from the issue whether 
 any government can act with wisdom that is subject 
 to such a principle, there is no denying that it is a 
 principle that is only practicable within certain very 
 narrow limits ; inasmuch as when men come to 
 believe that there is something sacrosanct about 
 majority rule, they waste such an amount of time 
 in discussing points of procedure and all kinds of 
 inconsequential things, that no time is left to discuss 
 the things that really matter, with the result that 
 majority rule defeats its own ends. And it comes 
 about this way. The waste of time in a general 
 committee, resulting from attempts to realize an 
 impossible principle, leads to the appointment of 
 sub -committees to deal with details ; while any 
 simultaneous extension of activities tends to multiply 
 the business to such an extent that the average 
 committee man gets lost amid the complexity of 
 details, until at length a time comes when only 
 the permanent officials understand the business in 
 hand. When that point is reached, substantial 
 power tends to pass into their hands entirely. They 
 decide most of the issues among themselves, and
 
 126 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 there is little left for committees to do but to 
 confirm their decisions. The democratic form is 
 retained, but its reality goes. This is the inevitable 
 ending of all democratic bodies as at present con- 
 stituted. They get things done, but not in the 
 way that any one particularly desires they should 
 be done ; and this in turn provokes reaction, which 
 invariably takes the form of a reassertion of demo- 
 cratic principles it being assumed by all such 
 rebels that we suffer because we have too little 
 democracy, whereas the truth is we suffer at the 
 same time from too much and too little too much 
 in the sense that we have too much democratic 
 machinery, and too little because we have too little 
 really democratic spirit. 
 
 Meanwhile it is to be observed that the tendency 
 for the democratic ideal to run to extremes is 
 intimately connected with the failure of our political 
 leaders ; for rightly interpreted, the rebellion 
 against leaders is not a rebellion against leader- 
 ship as such, but a rebellion against leaders who 
 do not lead. They do not lead because they have 
 lost all sense of direction ; and the dilemma in 
 which they find themselves is due to the fact that 
 they have never realized the incompatibility between 
 democracy and industrialism, and have lost sight 
 entirely of the problem of men and machines. The 
 consequence has been that, instead of relating all 
 their specific proposals for reforming society to 
 the central problem of machinery, they have ignored 
 this issue entirely, with the result that nowadays, 
 when our industrial system is seen to be crumbling 
 to pieces, they are entirely at a loss to understand 
 how such a thing could possibly happen, and waste 
 all their time in seeking to keep afloat a ship that
 
 DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION 127 
 
 is manifestly sinking, and this in spite of the fact 
 that the break-up of industrialism will remove the 
 great and insuperable obstacle to the organization 
 of society on a democratic and corporate basis. 
 
 I said that democracy was incompatible with 
 industrialism. Failure to recognize this fact is, I 
 am persuaded, responsible for the false conception 
 of democracy which obtains to-day, because indus- 
 trialism, in divorcing ownership from function, 
 introduces a complication into the problem. The 
 truth of this will become apparent when we contrast 
 the democracy of the Medieval City with attempts 
 to realize the ideal of democracy to-day. The 
 realization of the ideal of democracy in the Medieval 
 City was a comparatively simple proposition ; for 
 the instruments of production were such that they 
 interposed no obstacle to the organization of society 
 on a democratic basis. For when the only instru- 
 ments of production were the tools of the craftsman, 
 it was easy to subordinate the material problem 
 to the human one. The problem of the organization 
 of industry was a purely moral one. It was the 
 problem of superimposing over the activities of 
 individuals, an organization that would compel them 
 to obey the moral law in the sphere of economics, 
 preventing them from abusing their position, and 
 obliging them to make wares of a good quality 
 and sell them at a Just Price, deal honourably 
 with their assistants, paying them a Just Wage ; 
 and which, in turn, would support and succour 
 them and their families in sickness or distress. 
 But since industrialism has come along with its 
 vast machinery and large organization, the terms 
 of the problem have been changed. The moral 
 problem becomes complicated by the problem of
 
 128 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the ownership of the means of production ; for 
 if anything approaching to economic equality is 
 to obtain, there must be a certain measure of the 
 common ownership of the means of production, 
 and this is incompatible with the existence of the 
 private management of industry. Hence it is all 
 efforts to democratize industry, since industrialism 
 came along, take the form of the organization of 
 self-governing workshops ; for the Building Guilds 
 are really a development of this principle. But, 
 as I pointed out in an earlier chapter, it is a 
 principle that cannot be applied to other large 
 industries. And so the problem of how the workers 
 can share in the earnings of industrialism remains 
 just where it was. Organization on this basis has, 
 nevertheless, validity within certain limits, and may 
 survive in the future as small local groups in the 
 simpler kinds of industry, or in the form of work- 
 shop committees co-operating with the management 
 in such industrial activities as may possibly survive 
 the general wreck of industrialism. But the ulti.i:ate 
 reason why I feel it is a principle incapable of 
 universal application is that it involves too many 
 committees and subcommittees, and therefore can 
 never supplant the private management of industry, 
 which seems to me to be the normal and natural 
 way of doing things. Hence the dilemma inherent 
 in industrialism and the prospect of a solution of 
 the difficulty, now that industrialism is break.ng up. 
 But this incompatibility between industrialism and 
 democracy is not the whole of the trouble ; for 
 there is a sense in which the whole modern concep- 
 tion of democracy is at fault. Our democratic 
 ideas come from the French Revolution, which, in 
 turn, inherited them from Rousseau, though, as a
 
 DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION 129 
 
 matter of fact, Rousseau did not advocate democracy 
 at all in the sense in which it is understood to-day ; 
 for to him it was a means to an end, not an 
 end in itself, the end being government by the 
 wise. There can be no doubt whatsoever that it 
 was because he thought democratic institutions 
 would have this effect that he was led to advocate 
 democracy. Thus, in the Social Contract, he says : 
 " It is the best and most natural order of things, 
 that the wise should govern the multitude, when 
 we are sure that they will govern it for its ad- 
 vantage, and not for their own." Moreover, it 
 was because monarchical institutions gave no 
 guarantee of such a desideratum that he took excep- 
 tion to them, for he says : " The one essential and 
 inevitable defect which will render a monarchical 
 government inferior to a republican one is that 
 in the latter the public voice hardly ever raises to 
 the highest posts any but enlightened and capable 
 men, who fill them honourably ; whereas those who 
 succeed in monarchies are most frequently only 
 petty mischief-makers, petty knaves, petty intriguers, 
 whose petty talents, which enable them to obtain 
 high posts in court, only serve to show the public 
 their ineptitude as soon as they have attained to 
 them. The people are much less mistaken about 
 their choice than the prince is ; and a man of real 
 merit is almost as rare in a royal ministry as a 
 fool at the head of a republican government. 
 Therefore, when by some fortunate chance one of 
 these born rulers takes the helm 1 of affairs in a 
 monarchy almost wrecked by such a fine set of 
 ministers, it is quite astonishing what resources 
 he finds, and his accession to power forms an epoch 
 in the country." 
 
 9
 
 130 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 Reading these words in the light of a century 
 of democracy of a kind, there is something rather 
 naive about this simple faith, since the whole trouble 
 of the world from one point of view is precisely 
 that the best and wisest do not come automatically 
 to the top under democracy any more than they do 
 under any other form of government. On the 
 contrary, it is the clever rather than the wise who 
 do, and unfortunately, the wise are rarely clever, 
 nor are the clever usually wise. The fact that the 
 clever rather than the wise succeed under democracy 
 to-day may be explained in many ways. But the 
 most obvious explanation is that a capacity for 
 public speaking is the one indispensable qualifica- 
 tion for success under democracy to-day, and it 
 does not follow that the man with this gift is 
 wiser or more trustworthy than his fellows. Of 
 course he may be, but unfortunately there is no 
 necessary connection between the two. 
 
 At any time, and under any circumstances, this 
 is one of the difficulties of democracy, but it is a 
 difficulty that has been enormously exaggerated, 
 since industrialism came along by the abnormal 
 growth of towns. In Unforeseen Tendencies of 
 Democracy, Mr. E. L. Godkin shows how the 
 decline of the ideals of American democracy coin- 
 cided with the growth of large towns and the 
 increase of the electorate. In the early days of 
 the American Republic, when voters were few, men 
 of wisdom and character, he says, were personally 
 known to the communities in which they lived, and 
 they became the public representatives because of 
 their prominence. But with the rapid increase of 
 emigration, the members of society ceased to be 
 well known to each other, and then the trouble
 
 DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION 131 
 
 began. A capacity for public speaking, rather than 
 personal character, became the primary qualifica- 
 tion for public life, because only good speakers 
 could make themselves known to the electorates. 
 With this change there came a deterioration in the 
 type of the public representative, and following 
 this decline, there came the growth of the power 
 of the political machine which could automatically 
 produce majorities in favour of any candidate it 
 chose to support. There followed political corrup- 
 tion and jobbery, and the defeat of everything that 
 the ideal of democracy exists to promote. 
 
 Rousseau himself was not blind to such dangers, 
 for, though at times he talks as if democracy could 
 do no wrong, at other times he recognized there 
 are dangers, while it is to be presumed that his 
 advocacy of small states and small property was 
 not unconnected with his apprehension of danger 
 in large ones. Truth to tell, Rousseau qualified his 
 position in so many ways, that it is finally difficult 
 to convict him of anything except the more general 
 charge that he had an over-confidence in the results 
 that would follow a mere change of social 
 machinery ; though, even here, it is possible to 
 quote passages from his writings against such an 
 assumption. Of course, social machinery we must 
 have ; and there are evils that can be checked by 
 the provision of suitable social machinery. Yet 
 they are secondary ones. For no social machinery 
 can finally ensure the desideratum of Rousseau, 
 that the wise will come to the top ; for the simple 
 reason that a precedent condition is that the few 
 and the many shall share a common spiritual and 
 cultural tradition, since, in the absence of such 
 a common tradition, the wise cannot be known to
 
 132 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 the people, for no common bond of sympathy and 
 understanding exists between them. But it is just 
 this common and shared tradition which, in the past, 
 operated as a cement to bind different types and 
 classes of people together that is absent from the 
 modern world. It existed in the Middle Ages, 
 where king and peasant, priest and craftsman, were 
 bound together by a common religious tradition 
 which, however much they might disagree, was 
 stronger than their differences. But, since the 
 Renaissance, it has gradually disappeared. This 
 has come about as the result of a variety of causes, 
 legal, aesthetic, scientific and literary, which have 
 combined to separate the logical or intellectual 
 part of man from the emotional and instinctive, 
 and to give it a locus standi of its own, and has 
 resulted in creating a gulf between cultured and 
 uncultured people such as never existed in the 
 past. As a consequence, the wise are no longer 
 understood of the people, and they tend to drift 
 apart because they do not readily discover points 
 of contact. In this light the problem of democracy 
 is seen to be dependent upon our capacity to re- 
 create a culture in which every member of the 
 community can share. For " Men cannot unite 
 immediately among one another ; they unite in 
 things, in common values, in the pursuit of common 
 ends." 
 
 When we understand these things, we begin to 
 see that the whole error of Humanism, from the 
 Renaissance onwards, may be found in the fact of 
 its having forgotten that spiritual and cultural values 
 come first, and having forgotten it, the resulting 
 activities end in promoting not unity, but discord. 
 1 Authority, Liberty and Function, by Ramiro de Maeztu.
 
 DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION 133 
 
 To affirm that spiritual and cultural values come 
 first is to reaffirm the central truth of Christianity. 
 When, in answer to a lawyer who asked what was 
 the great commandment of the law, Jesus said, 
 ' Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and 
 with all thy strength : and the next is like unto it, 
 Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," he 
 affirmed this primacy of spiritual values (for love 
 of God will bear such an interpretation), and he 
 affirmed it because on no other basis can man live 
 a common or corporate life. Let me quote in this 
 connection, from the words of Mr. de Maeztu, " The 
 commandment," he says, " which compels me to 
 love my neighbour as myself, does not tell me how 
 to love my neighbour, for it does not tell me how 
 I ought to love myself. There are happy moments 
 when I love for myself truth, justice, and the tragic 
 and supreme beauty of sacrifice. There are other 
 moments when I love for myself flattery, although 
 it may be false ; power, although it may be stolen ; 
 and pleasure, although it may degrade both my 
 body and mind. And if I love my neighbour as 
 myself, why should I not also love for my neigh- 
 bour false flattery, usurped power, and degrading 
 pleasures? And this supposition is not merely 
 imaginative. The altruistic drunkard wants his 
 neighbours to get drunk ; and the voluptuary is 
 usually an altruist in the sense that he wants the 
 greatest possible diffusion of his vices. . . . 
 
 " Love of one's neighbour does not acquire a 
 positive value except when it depends upon the 
 first and great commandment, which is the love of 
 God. Non-religious persons may reply that they 
 do not know what is being asked of them, when
 
 134 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 they are told to love God. . . . What we assert 
 is that love of cultural values is love of the Divine 
 Substance, and therefore love of God. 
 
 " But to the first and great commandment Jesus 
 added the second, ' Love thy neighbour as thyself,' 
 and it was necessary to add this, for the men who 
 have come to love God in his Substance, or in His 
 Person, have known the temptation of feeling a 
 certain repugnance towards their neighbour and 
 towards themselves. He who loves the good, easily 
 falls into the sin of not loving man ; for man is 
 a sinner ; he who loves truth feels more pity than 
 love for this poor human reason, whose limitations 
 are as familiar to him as they are painful. And 
 he who loves the power that preserves and increases 
 goodness and truth, easily yields to the temptation 
 of despising his own weakness and the weakness 
 of his neighbour. And yet we must love man, for 
 the love of man is necessary for the preservation 
 of truth in the world. With all his limitations, we 
 hope that man is carrying out some function in 
 the world ; for otherwise we could find no meaning 
 in his existence. The man who loves God, must be 
 commanded to love his neighbour and himself ; 
 for he is the one who realizes better the faults of 
 human kind. . . . If a human society is a partner- 
 ship in cultural values, its constitution is desirable, 
 and then the fellowship of its members must be 
 added to it to make it prosper." ' 
 
 Perhaps now we may begin to understand where 
 the weakness of democracy to-day is to be found. 
 It is based upon love of one's neighbour, while 
 it ignores the love of God or cultural values ; or 
 if that is not entirely true, it gives to cultural 
 1 New Age, February 1917.
 
 DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZATION 185 
 
 values a secondary place. Love of one's neighbour 
 comes before the love of God. The consequence 
 is that while democracy attempts to do the right 
 things, it invariably does them in a wrong way, and 
 disappointment with results leads to never-ending 
 discord. So it works out in practice that when 
 men begin with the love of their neighbour rather 
 than the love of God, they not infrequently end in 
 hating their neighbour, because in their activities 
 there is no unifying principle. Moreover, such a 
 reversal of the natural order removes the possibility 
 of any co-operation between the people and their 
 "natural leaders, because the wise always give first 
 place to spiritual values, and this fact leads them' 
 to see everything in a different way from the 
 majority*, who give them a secondary place. And 
 because spiritual values are given a secondary 
 place, democratic activities tend to concentrate on 
 secondary issues, and to ignore the primary ones ; 
 and because they ignore primary issues, and con- 
 centrate on secondary ones, all their activities tend 
 to become over-complicated, and end in a wild 
 confusion of committees. 
 
 But, it will be said, if such is the case, how does 
 it come about that educational activities, which' 
 are presumably interested in cultural values, suffer 
 from the same evil of committees? The answer 
 is, because they also have got things upside down ; 
 for they do not put cultural interests first. On 
 the contrary, it is not the discovery of truth, but 
 the education of the people, which is their primary 
 concern, which is, of course, love of one's neighbour. 
 This assertion is demonstrated by the fact that 
 educationalists to-day dislike dogmas, unmindful of 
 the fact that all spiritual truth rests finally en
 
 136 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 dogmas, and that all great teachers have been 
 dogmatic. And so it has come about that, in their 
 anxiety to raise the general level of education they 
 have, by exalting the institution, undermined the 
 liberty of the teacher, who is the ultimate source 
 of education. How completely that liberty has 
 been destroyed becomes apparent when we compare 
 the conditions surrounding education to-day to those 
 which obtained in the twelfth century when, as Dr. 
 Poole observes, " the school followed the teacher, 
 not the teacher the school. Where a master lived, 
 there he taught ; and thither in proportion to 
 his renown, students assembled from whatever 
 quarter. . . . The tie was a personal one, and 
 was generally severed by the master's death. A 
 succession of great teachers in one place was a 
 rare exception." * 
 
 We see, then, that the age of great teachers was 
 not an age of committees ; and may it not be that 
 this is necessarily so? Since just in proportion as 
 educationalists put the need of popular education 
 (love of one's neighbour) before the love of spiritual 
 and cultural values, they inevitably lose sight of 
 that unifying principle which alone can give educa- 
 tion its meaning. 
 
 1 Illustration of the History of Medieval Thought and 
 Learning, by Reginald Lane Poole, p. 95.
 
 VIII 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 
 
 ONE of the consequences of giving to spiritual 
 values the foremost place is that we inevitably 
 put the past before the present, because the great 
 traditions of culture come from the past. Hence 
 it has been that all great movements of human 
 origin in history good and bad have had their 
 beginning in a study of the past. All the move- 
 ments in the Middle Ages began with a desire to 
 recover the culture and art of the Pagan world. 
 The activities of the Schoolmen and the lawyers 
 had their origin in such an attempt. Gothic 
 architecture likewise had its origin in an attempt 
 to revive the old Roman architecture, the ruins 
 of which covered the Empire. The Renaissance 
 merely continued the same tradition of looking 
 back. But what made the Renaissance so deadly 
 was not the fact that it looked back, but the 
 things it looked back for. The Medieval school- 
 men looked back to recover lost truths to enable 
 them 1 to bring light and understanding to men. 
 But the men of the Renaissance were prompted by 
 a different motive. There were elements of pride 
 and egotism associated with their desire to revive 
 antiquity. The motive that inspired their passion 
 for learning was not a communal but an in- 
 dividualist one. It was not the salvation of 
 
 13T
 
 138 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 society, but the development of the individual. It 
 was less the substance of Pagan thought than the 
 language or style, the way a thing was said, that 
 interested them. It was a movement of externals, 
 and so it degenerated into pedantry. It became 
 destructive. But this failure does not prove the 
 futility of revivals. What it does prove is the 
 insufficiency of the motives that prompted the men 
 of the Renaissance. It will at all times be 
 necessary to look back if we are anxious to see 
 life in its proper perspective, for in the develop- 
 ment of civilization the basic and fundamental 
 things have a way of getting overlaid, obscured 
 and forgotten, and it is only by searching in history 
 that they may be recovered. 
 
 Fortunately in our day the truth of this 
 principle that the future may only be discovered 
 in the past has been strikingly demonstrated by 
 the success that has attended the Sinn Fein move- 
 ment in Ireland. To the average Englishman 
 Sinn Fein is nothing more than a rebellion like 
 the Fenian rebellion against the overlordship of 
 England. Yet it is only necessary to have a 
 slight acquaintance with the movement to know 
 it is more than this, since if such had been the 
 case it would in all probability have ended in much 
 the same way, degenerating into a secret physical 
 force movement ending in another Fenian fiasco. 
 If Ireland was saved from repeating this experience, 
 it was because Sinn Fein dug deep down intp 
 the depths of human nature, because along with 
 its political and revolutionary activities, it main- 
 tained other overt activities that kept the people 
 together. The foundations of the movement were 
 laid by the Gaelic League which, established in
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 189 
 
 1893, came with intellectual illumination to safe- 
 guard the practical progress that was be,ing made 
 towards putting the Irish farmer on his feet by 
 the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, the 
 Congested Districts Board, and the Department 
 of Agriculture from degenerating into materialism. 
 Its activities were consequent upon the labours of 
 Dr. Douglas Hyde. " If," says Mr. de Blacam, 
 " Ireland to-day is not the Ireland of Carlelon, 
 Lover and Lever the stage Ireland of drunkenness 
 and brawling, ignorance and snobbery but the 
 Ireland of the Gaelic tradition, heroic, imaginative, 
 daring Dr. Hyde's scholarly labours are the 
 source of the change. His Literary History of 
 Ireland, a gigantic, ill-proportioned book, over- 
 flowing, gossiping, absorbing volume, suggesting 
 the rapid talk of an enthusiast, bubbling over with 
 more news than he can tell of great discoveries 
 this was the book that revealed a wealth of cultural 
 possessions -that nine hundred and ninety-nine 
 Irishmen were as ignorant of as they were of the 
 writings of Krasinski and Mickiewicz. It threw 
 a new light on Irish history, under which the 
 figures and places of the past seemed to take 
 on a bright and splendid life. His pen was like 
 a wand that turned Ireland from a hovel to a 
 palace of faery grandeur in her sons' eyes. The 
 Gaelic tongue, subtle, musical, elaborate, yet 
 regarded with a slave's shame since Dan O'Connell 
 decried it, became now a fountain of intellectual 
 life ; and Anglo-Irish literature, catching the 
 reflected light of Gaelic inspiration, shone with 
 the names of Yeats, Synge, Gregory, Colum, 
 O'Grady, Russell, Milligan. . . . A national drama 
 rose ; and Dublin, putting off its down -at -heels
 
 140 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 gentility, became an artistic centre, and an 
 absorbingly interesting place to live in. So 
 vigorous was the new cultural movement that men 
 of the aristocrat caste or Protestant creed, men 
 who formerly regarded Ireland as a place best 
 out of, men who in earlier years became Bernard 
 Shaws, now found in Ireland their most appreciative 
 audience. 
 
 " The early passion of the Gaelic revival was 
 almost apostolic, religious, accompanied by signs 
 and wonders, and none of us will ever forget 
 his first Feis, marching through the green hills 
 to the skirl of the pipes, or singing the memory- 
 haunted Gaelic songs at the mossy shrines of 
 heroes. Though it was scarce suspected then, 
 we can now all see implicit in those early 
 functions the developments that have since come 
 to pass, and Sinn Fein, Republicanism, and Social 
 Gaelicism were inevitable out-flowerings of the seed 
 then sown. All we knew then was that our feet 
 were upon a mounting road with something, 
 splendid, though still cloud -shrouded, as the 
 goal." * 
 
 So writes Mr. de Blacam of the literary move- 
 ment that preceded the organization of Sinn Fein, 
 " The uprise of a fine rural economy, accompanied 
 by the growth of a literary production and an 
 impassioned recourse to rich, forgotten fields of 
 cultural inspiration, could not fail to issue in some 
 energetic political movement, particularly when the 
 existing political order was so repugnant to the 
 new ideals." 2 Hence, in due course, there came 
 the Sinn Fein policy of political abstention which 
 
 * What Sinn Fein Stands For, by A. de Blacam (Chapman 
 & Dodd), pp. 42-43. Ibid., p. 44.
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 141 
 
 owed its origin to Mr. Arthur Griffiths, who in 
 1902 described in the United Irishman the tactics 
 of abstention from the Austrian Parliament, which 
 preceded Francis Joseph's recognition of Hungarian 
 independence under the Dual Crown, urging the 
 adoption of the same policy. Instead of going 1 
 to Westminster, let the Irish members form a 
 National Council in Dublin and let the people 
 obey its measures voluntarily. A State would 
 thus be built up in opposition to the intruding 
 State. The Imperial Parliament would find its 
 machinery unworkable, and would be obliged to 
 recognize the de facto State created by the nation's 
 self-determination. At a later date there came 
 P. H. Pearse, who gave the spark necessary to 
 fire the train that Arthur Griffiths had laid. He 
 taught a gospel of blood and sacrifice which 
 transformed Sinn Fein into a militant party. To 
 these names should be added that of James 
 Connolly, who in the 'nineties founded the Irish 
 Socialist Republican Party, which gave to the 
 movement a Socialist bias which eventually turned 
 in the direction of a revival of Medieval economic 
 teaching as being more in accord with the actual 
 circumstances to be met. 1 
 
 Now is there anything that we can learn from 
 this experience of the Sinn Fein movement? I 
 think there is. It should in the first place teach 
 us that political and economic activity, pursued 
 apart from a new ideal of life as expressed in 
 spiritual values, is for the most part a vain 
 delusion ; inasmuch as apart from such values 
 which give meaning to our activities, politics tend 
 to lose touch with reality and degenerate either 
 ' What Sinn Fein Stands For, pp. 44-66.
 
 142 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 into mere political opportunism or into a secret, 
 physical force movement. Next, it should teach 
 us that if a movement is to grow in strength, it 
 must not be based upon a nebulous anticipation 
 of the future, but upon an effort to recover a 
 forgotten and neglected past. For it is a paradox, 
 but nevertheless true, that we can only go forward 
 to a Golden Age in the future on the assumption 
 that we appeal to a Golden Age in the past. The 
 future is featureless, and to make it therefore the 
 final court of appeal is to deny experience and to 
 place ourselves inevitably at the mercy of every 
 charlatan who comes along. For there can be 
 no way of exposing the fallacies involved in a new 
 heresy, except by reference to some standard or 
 experience of the past. The charlatan, therefore, 
 in appealing to the future while denying the past 
 discounts beforehand any possible criticism of his 
 position, and cajoles the public into acquiescing in 
 things which as often as not they know to be 
 wrong. Failure to perceive the truth of these 
 principles is at the root of the futility of Socialist 
 and Labour politics, for it divorces them from 
 all reality, leading them to suppose that there is 
 such a thing as solving the social problem 
 entirely in the terms of economics unmindful of 
 the fact that the economic evils of our society 
 are finally nothing more than the obstrusive 
 symptoms of an inward spiritual disease that has 
 followed the separation of man from religion, art 
 and nature, and which has changed the substance 
 of our lives and activities. 
 
 But, it will be said, granted that the principles 
 followed by Sinn Fein are true, we cannot follow 
 their example. This movement was possible in
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 148 
 
 Ireland because the literary past of Ireland was 
 a forgotten past, while such a revival provided 
 something that could be posited against the 
 dominance of English politics and culture, and 
 therefore could be used to give the Irish people 
 a belief in their own culture and destiny. But 
 our circumstances are different. We have no for- 
 gotten literary past, nor do we suffer from a 
 foreign yoke. How then can we proceed along 
 Sinn Fein lines? In the literal sense, of course, 
 we cannot. Yet though we proceed along different 
 lines, we may acknowledge the same principle. If 
 it is not open to us to revive a forgotten literary 
 past, it is open to us to revive our own historic 
 past ; our social and industrial past, when there 
 was a peasantry on the soil and craftsmen in the 
 workshop, when things produced were beautiful 
 and when, organized in Guilds, men lived a 
 corporate life, when, in short, England was truly 
 Merrie England. This past could be revived, and 
 if it could not be posited against a foreign enemy, 
 it could be posited against the enemy within our 
 gates, against that industrial progress, " whose 
 motive is money and whose method is machinery." 
 The foundations of such a revival have already 
 been laid by our various reform activities, and it 
 needs but a frank acceptance of the principle of 
 reversion to unite together in one revolutionary 
 current for a common purpose activities which, 
 pursued separately and without such a common 
 objective, accomplish nothing. Hitherto what has 
 stood in the way of such a desideratum has been 
 the popular belief that industrialism was a thing 
 of permanence and stability, but nowadays when 
 it is becoming widely recognized that this belief
 
 144 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 is a delusion, a path should before long be opened 
 to us ; for when men can no longer look forward 
 with equanimity, they will inevitably come to look 
 back. When this change-over is a fait accompli, 
 activities which the modern world has regarded 
 as anachronisms will wear a different aspect. The 
 activities of our agricultural organization societies 
 and movements to restore the crafts and arts will 
 appear full of significance as intelligent anticipations 
 of the future. 
 
 With the agricultural aspect of this question 
 I do not propose to deal, as I have dealt with it 
 elsewhere, 1 but will pass on to a consideration 
 of the Arts and Crafts movement, which more than 
 any other movement of our day is anti -industrial. 
 Its activities were consequent upon the teachings 
 of Ruskin and the experiments of William Morris 
 in the revival of handicraft. Immediately, its aim 
 was to unite the artist and craftsman, who under 
 our mechanical system of production had become 
 fatally divided to the detriment alike of art and 
 craft. But the movement could not stop there ; 
 for the idea had social and economic implications. 
 It became inevitably anti-industrial ; for it is 
 apparent that if social evolution, as we call it, 
 had separated the artist and craftsman, further 
 progress along present lines could only separate 
 them still further. Hence the effort to unite the 
 artist and craftsman involve the challenge of in- 
 dustrialism. This fact was frankly recognized by 
 the leading members of the movement. Thus, 
 writing on the aims of the movement, the late 
 Mr. Walter Crane said, " The movement indeed 
 represents, in some sense, a revolt against the hard 
 1 Guilds, Trade and Agriculture (Allen & Unwin, 53.).
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 145 
 
 mechanical life and its insensibility to beauty 
 (quite another thing to ornament). It is a protest 
 against that so-called industrial progress which 
 produces shoddy wares, the cheapness of which 
 is paid for by the lives of their producers and the 
 degradation of their users. It is a protest against 
 turning men into machines, against artificial dis- 
 tinctions in art, and against making the immediate 
 market value, or possibility of profit, the chief 
 test of artistic merit. It also advances the claim 
 of all and each to the common possession of beauty 
 in things common and familiar, and would awaken 
 the sense of this beauty, deadened and depressed 
 as it now too often is, either on the one hand 
 by luxurious superfluities, or on the other by the 
 absence of the commonest necessities and the 
 gnawing anxiety for the means of livelihood ; not 
 to speak of the everyday ugliness to which we 
 have accustomed our eyes, confused by the flood 
 of false taste or darkened by the hurried life of 
 modern towns in which huge aggregates of 
 humanity exist, equally removed from both art 
 and nature, and their kindly and refining influences. 
 "It asserts, moreover, the value of the practice 
 of handicraft as a good training for the faculties, 
 and as a most valuable counteraction to that over- 
 straining of purely mental effort under the fierce 
 competitive conditions of the day ; apart from the 
 very wholesome and real pleasure in the fashioning 
 of a thing with claims to art and beauty, the 
 struggle with and triumph over technical necessities 
 which refuse to be gainsaid. And, finally, thus 
 claiming for man this primitive and common 
 delight in things made beautiful, it makes, through 
 art, the great socializer for a common and kindred 
 
 10
 
 146 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 life, for sympathetic and healthy fellowship, and 
 demands conditions under which your artist and 
 craftsman shall be free. 
 
 " ' See how great a matter a little fire kindleth.' 
 Some may think this is an extensive programme 
 a remote ideal for a purely artistic movement to 
 touch. Yet if the revival of art and handicraft 
 is not a mere theatrical and imitative impulse ; 
 if it is not merely to gratify a passing whim of 
 fashion, or demand of commerce ; if it has reality 
 and roots of its own ; if it is not merely a little 
 colour at the end of a sombre day it can hardly 
 mean less than what I have written. It must 
 mean either the sunset or the dawn." l 
 
 It seems a long way from this early war-cry 
 to the Arts and Crafts movement of to-day. Yet 
 it is not so far as it looks, for the Guild move- 
 ment had its origin in the economic failure of the 
 Arts and Crafts. Do not let us forget that the 
 Guild movement was in the first instance floated 
 upon the Arts and Crafts movement, and that in 
 its early days the revival of handicraft was an 
 integral part of the movement. But when the 
 Guild idea spread outside of the sphere of the Arts 
 and Crafts and was adopted by Socialists, this 
 aspect of the movement was dropped, not being 
 considered by National Guildsmen as a vital issue. 
 That from the point of view of propaganda, on 
 the principle of one thing at a time, there was 
 something to be said for separating the socio- 
 logical from the craft ideas of the movement is 
 not to be denied ; for the principle of the Guild 
 
 1 Arts and Crafts Essays. A collection of essays by members 
 of the Arts and Crafts Society. " The Revival of Handi- 
 craft," by Walter Crane.
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 147 
 
 has applicability outside of the sphere of craftsman- 
 ship. But that the change has not all been gain 
 is equally demonstrable ; for in abandoning the 
 revival of handicraft as a remote and incon- 
 sequential issue, the movement lost that grip on 
 reality that it formerly possessed. It lost sight 
 of the problems of machinery and the subdivision 
 of labour, which, as I have endeavoured to show, 
 is the central economic issue ; and as a consequence 
 it no longer challenges Industrialism, which is the 
 enemy, but only the financial aspect of it, which we 
 designate as capitalism. So it has come about 
 that while the movement has met with widespread 
 success, we must recognize that it is after all only 
 one of those half-successes that leads to ultimate 
 impotence, as the present position of the National 
 Guild movement bears witness. 
 
 Under these circumstances it becomes apparent 
 that the time has now come to reassert the more 
 fundamental principles that were formerly asso- 
 ciated with the Guild movement. Recognizing 
 that the central problems of our age are those of 
 machinery and the subdivision of labour, we must 
 demand on the one hand that the use of machinery 
 be regulated and the subdivision of labour 
 abolished, and on the other hand we must set 
 to work to rebuild what they have destroyed or 
 are destroying. Foremost among these is the 
 revival of handicraft, for to revive handicraft is 
 to challenge all forms of mechanical production. 
 And in this endeavour, circumstances should come 
 to our aid ; since as the days of industrial 
 expansion are over and unemployment and short 
 time have become the order of the day, it ought 
 to be possible to secure popular support for the
 
 148 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 movement which has been impossible hitherto. 
 Why should not those who are unemployed be 
 trained in agriculture, and those on short time in 
 handicraft? Thus there might be brought into 
 existence a new economic system within the existing 
 industrial system in the same way that Sinn Fein 
 brought into existence a State within the State. 
 But, it will be said, if such a policy is practicable, 
 why should the Arts and Crafts movement have 
 failed in its larger aims? The answer is because 
 the Arts and Crafts movement was never organized 
 except for exhibition purposes. It was a move- 
 ment of pioneers, whose primary aim was to recover 
 the traditions of design and handicraft. As such 
 it was individualistic. The individual craftsman 
 was left to fend for himself as best he could, and 
 this was no easy matter, because he generally 
 found it impossible to borrow capital because 
 craftsmanship was not considered good security, 
 while he had to organize his own market because 
 for a variety of reasons he could not avail himself 
 of the ordinary channels of distribution. Unless, 
 therefore, he were a many-sided person, very 
 fortunately placed, with good social connections, 
 had money, or could get friends to back him, he 
 had little or no chance of success ; for experience 
 has proved that exhibitions are rarely followed by 
 sales. Further, these difficulties are responsible 
 for side-tracking the movement, for the more 
 utilitarian a craft is, the larger must be the capital 
 in these days. Hence it has been that, left to 
 their own resources, the craftsmen were for the 
 most part unable to concentrate on the utilitarian 
 crafts which required large capital, and specialized 
 on the decorative ones where little was required,
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 149 
 
 and hence it has come about that the Arts and 
 Crafts movement from being, among other things, 
 a protest against the dependence of art on luxury, 
 has become one of its feeders. 
 
 Such being the case, it is evident that a wide- 
 spread revival of handicraft will not follow any 
 mere extension of activities on the lines of the 
 Arts and Crafts movement. On the contrary, the 
 first thing to do is to create a popular belief in the 
 ideals of craftsmanship by means of propaganda. 
 Following that, there must be organization of the 
 market and the provision of credits for craftsmen, 
 who should be under the discipline of a Guild. 
 If this were undertaken on a large scale as part 
 of a national movement that sought to establish 
 Guilds, fix prices, regulate machinery, and abolish 
 the subdivision of labour, then it would be a 
 practical proposition, but as an isolated issue 
 attempted on a small scale it is beset with 
 difficulties, because in these days the market 
 cannot be localized. 
 
 Though the Arts and Crafts movement failed 
 in its wider aim, I think it can be claimed that it 
 succeeded in restoring traditions of handicraft and 
 design in the sense that it brought into existence 
 a number of craftsmen who knew what they were 
 about, and has thus paved the way for the revival 
 of craftsmanship on a larger scale, since *the 
 experimental work has now been done. There is 
 no greater illusion than that harboured by 
 modernists that the emancipation of the people 
 from economic servitude would be followed by a 
 spontaneous democratic revival of the arts, for that 
 is not the way things come about. On the 
 contrary, not only the history of art in the past
 
 150 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 but the progress that has been in the direction 
 of its revival at the present day demonstrate 
 beyond possibility of doubt that any awakening 
 proceeds from the few to the many, by the 
 gradual widening of the circle of those who know 
 what they are about. And the recognition of this 
 principle is not incompatible with an equal 
 recognition of the principle that the art of the 
 future shall be a democratic art. For when we 
 speak of a democratic art, of an art that shall 
 be the common possession of the whole people, 
 we do not mean that we expect that in some 
 mysterious way art will spontaneously arise up 
 among the people when they are liberated from 
 economic servitude, but that we are anxious to 
 promote a particular kind of art in which the 
 people may eventually share, and it is because 
 Medieval art I was in this sense democratic that 
 we believe it must form the basis of any revival 
 of art in the future. Greek, Roman and Renais- 
 sance art, on the contrary, are autocratic and 
 servile. This is necessarily the case, because they 
 are based upon conceptions of abstract form ; and 
 abstract form is just as incapable of forming a 
 basis for popular art, as logic would be capable 
 of forming the basis of a popular literature. 
 Hence, when such an ideal of art is exalted, the 
 mass of workers inevitably work under the dicta- 
 tion of a few. But with Medieval art it was 
 different. In it there was a place for all. The 
 
 1 By Medieval art I must be understood to refer not only 
 to Romanesque Byzantine and Gothic art, but to the 
 vernacular architecture and craftsmanship of the Renaissance 
 in which the Medieval spirit survives in a word, to all 
 European art that rests on a basis of experimental handicraft.
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 151 
 
 master of abstract form found scope for his talents 
 in the more generalized conceptions of Medieval 
 art. But there was also a place for the individual 
 craftsman who was permitted to exercise his 
 imagination on the details. That is what we mean 
 by a democratic art, an art in which every one 
 would find a place and could share, not an art 
 that is to be created by Tom; Dick and Harry, 
 who have never given a moment's thought to the 
 subject as some people suppose. 
 
 I said that any widespread revival of art will 
 follow the gradual widening of the circle of those 
 who know what they are about. Any widening 
 of this circle depends upon two things : the re- 
 moval of economic obstacles, and the cultivation 
 of a certain temper or receptive attitude of minid 
 on the part of the mass of the people. It is 
 with the second only of these that we are 
 immediately concerned, for the difficulty which at 
 the moment restricts such influences within com- 
 paratively narrow limits is the attitude which the 
 majority of people adopt towards anybody who 
 happens to know more than they do. People are 
 apt to be very sensitive on matters of taste, 
 especially if they have just a little of it, for a 
 little taste, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous 
 thing. It so often leads them to resent criticism. 
 They resent the dogmatism of the artist as some- 
 thing which, if not resisted, would crush them. 
 Yet this is not the case, for if they only knew it, 
 submission would liberate the creative impulse 
 within them. To learn in the arts as in other 
 subjects depends on a certain humility of temper 
 which will allow a man to subordinate himself 
 to anyone whom he feels knows more about the
 
 152 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 thing than he does himself. If a man is willing 
 to do this for a period, a time comes when he 
 grows out of his pupilage and begins to feel his 
 own feet. But there are very few who will do 
 this. Their pride seems to stand in the way. 
 Yet everything depends upon the cultivation of 
 such a temper. Well did the Medieval Church 
 rank pride as chief of deadly sins. It is the 
 most deadly because it prevents a man from 
 learning, compelling him to live on himself. 
 
 While, therefore, we may recognize that the 
 solution of the economic problem is a precedent 
 condition of the triumph of art in the world, let 
 us not lose sight of the fact that a more immediate 
 enemy is personal pettiness, since even under 
 existing economic conditions there is no reason, 
 apart from this personal pettiness, why things 
 should be anything like as bad as they are. Hence 
 the cultivation of a different temper to the 
 prevailing one is a precedent condition of any 
 widespread revival ; for with any revival of art 
 there must go a certain respect for mastership 
 a capacity for subordinating oneself to a master 
 while it is frustrated by the prevailing temper of 
 self-assertion both among artists whose pride leads 
 them to desire to be thought original, 1 and the 
 man -in -the -street who " knows what he likes " and 
 
 1 The fact must not be lost sight of that this individualist 
 and anarchist development in art has economic as well as 
 personal roots. To become successful the artist must in 
 these days attract attention, which fact militates against 
 the growth of a consecutive tradition of art, by encouraging 
 stunts. For this evil there is finally no remedy apart from 
 a more intelligent patronage which would remove the economic 
 cause of this development.
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 153 
 
 is unwilling to learn. The truth is that all great 
 masters have been willing learners, and their 
 dogmatism does not arise from pride or egotism, 
 but from the self-confidence that follows patient 
 study the sure knowledge that they understand 
 certain things and their anxiety to share it with 
 others. The great artist always begins by sub- 
 ordinating himself to the needs of a communal 
 tradition, and he ends by transcending it. The 
 minor artist will not do this. He will not submit 
 himself to such a discipline. He is so anxious 
 to preserve his own individuality that he fails to 
 achieve distinction in anything, coming finally to 
 suffer from that most dreadful of human in- 
 firmities that combination of small conceit and 
 minor achievement which is associated with the 
 " artistic temperament." 
 
 I said that a great artist subordinates himself 
 to the needs of a great tradition. As such his 
 spirit is democratic, for the true democratic spirit 
 is not the one that merely seeks to give the public 
 what they want, like the Northcliffe Press, but one 
 that can subordinate itself to what the public needs. 
 Two very different things ; for the time-server 
 is the first ; the great teacher is the second. In 
 the world to-day, however, there is no established 
 communal tradition of art. To what then does 
 the great artist subordinate himself? The answer 
 is to the communal traditions of the past. He 
 chooses from among those great traditions a 
 vehicle of expression, seeking always to transcend 
 it. There is a great deal of nonsense talked among 
 modernists about revivals who, in their anxiety to 
 empty life of its last remaining contents, deprecate 
 any study of the past as something that militates
 
 154 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 against the discovery of the future. But the truth 
 is that it is impossible to discover the future apart 
 from an understanding of the past, as the fact 
 that modernists are invariably taken by surprise 
 bears witness. 
 
 Immediately the Arts and Crafts Movement 
 sought to revive traditions of handicraft by re- 
 uniting the artist and the craftsman ; by implica- 
 tion it was anti-industrial, ultimately it was 
 Medieval, for it was a part of that wider Medieval 
 Movement which, throughout the nineteenth century, 
 sought to reverse the decision of the Renaissance 
 in so many branches of activity. Many influences 
 combined at the beginning of last century to turn 
 men's minds in the direction of the Middle Ages. 
 There was, in the first place, a growing recognition 
 of the fact that the influence of the Renaissance 
 and the Reformation had been to empty life of 
 its contents. Religion had become dry and 
 superficial, learning had become pedantic, art a 
 dilettante pose, architecture a lifeless formula, 
 while politically and economically society found 
 itself in the throes of convulsions. The French 
 Revolution, upon which so many hopes were 
 founded, had ended in disappointment, while the 
 Industrial Revolution was " grinding the faces of 
 the poor." The result of it all was that the 
 need was widely felt for a deeper philosophy than 
 current ideas afforded, and that need was not 
 altogether unconnected with the literary influence 
 of Sir Walter Scott, who struck the first telling 
 blow for Medievalism. Within the course of half 
 a century Scottish life had undergone as complete 
 a transformation as England had done in several 
 hundred years ; the destruction of the power of
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 155 
 
 the Highland chiefs after the insurrection of 1745 
 having been followed by a rapid growth of com- 
 mercial conditions of life and society. Scott had 
 witnessed this sunset of Medievalism in his country, 
 and he sought to preserve in prose and in verse 
 some memory of a life that was disappearing 
 around him. Of his influence on his age, Newman 
 says in the Apologia, " The general need of 
 something deeper and more attractive than what 
 had offered itself elsewhere, may be considered 
 to have led to his popularity ; and by means of 
 his popularity he reacted on his readers, stimulating 
 their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting 
 before them visions, which, when once seen, are 
 not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating 
 them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards 
 be appealed to as first principles." 
 
 Contemporary with Scott were Coleridge, 
 Southey, and Wordsworth, who each in their own 
 way carried their readers forward in the same 
 direction. Their initial impulse came from dis- 
 appointment with the course of the . French 
 Revolution and their hatred of industrialism and 
 the pseudo-classicalism of the eighteenth century. 
 The leading spirit of this group was Coleridge, 
 who visiting Germany had come under the influence 
 of the Romantic Movement there. Though he has 
 left no book which gives an adequate summary 
 of his teachings, which for the most part consisted 
 of religio -philosophical aphorisms, yet his personal 
 influence was enormous. He was the most brilliant 
 conversationalist of his age ; and after about 
 1820 the same date, it is interesting to observe, 
 when Owen's communist schemes and anti -capitalist 
 economics began to find adherents the young
 
 156 POST-INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 generation began to turn to him for guidance. 
 Newman, Disraeli, Maurice, Kingsley, and Ruskin 
 among others were all either directly or indirectly 
 influenced by him. The impulse thus given 
 /exercised a powerful influence on the thought of 
 the age. Leading men's minds back to pre- 
 individualistic times, when society was organized 
 in corporate bodies with special responsibilities 
 towards their members, it eventually crystallized 
 itself into three movements the Oxford Movement 
 in the Church of England, the Pre-Raphaelite 
 movement in painting, and the Gothic Revival in 
 architecture. These three movements, though 
 differing in their primary aims and differing still 
 more in their individual exponents, were never- 
 theless closely interwoven. They had one thing 
 in common. The eyes of all were turned back 
 on the Middle Ages as a common source of 
 inspiration. To these movements are to be added 
 the Arts and Crafts movement and the Guild 
 movement, for though beginning in our day they 
 continue the same tradition. 
 
 It is important that this page of history should 
 be known. For in directing this our attack 
 upon machinery and the subdivision of labour we 
 are conscious, not only of the fact that we are 
 challenging the last defences of the existing system, 
 but that we are carrying to its logical conclusion 
 a tradition of thought and activity with a century 
 of history behind it. It is thus we are strengthened 
 by the knowledge that we are part of a great 
 tradition a tradition from which whatever is vital 
 and healthy in the thought and life of to-day 
 derives. For it has in turn exercised a rejuvenating 
 influence upon religion, art, and economics ; and
 
 THE RETURN TO THE PAST 157 
 
 if after a century of effort these activities to-day 
 falter, it is not because those who preceded us, 
 were mistaken in their aims, but that the time had' 
 not arrived when the citadel of the enemy could 
 be successfully attacked. Before that was possible 
 much spade work had to be done. The surrounding 
 forts had one by one to be reduced. Nowadays 
 this work has been done, and there remains for 
 us but one thing left to do to concentrate our 
 attack upon the subdivision of labour and the un- 
 restricted use of machinery which are carrying 
 our civilization to its destruction.
 
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