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HUMAN WORK
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Women and Economics, ‘Concerning
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HUMAN WORK
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McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
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CHAPTER
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
Man As A Factor 1n Soctat EvoLuTion
CONCEPT AND CONDUCT
Some Fatsrt Concepts
Tue Nature or Socrety (I)
Tue Natvre or Society (II) . :
Tue Soctat Sour : x ;
Tue Socrat Bopy
Tue Nature or Work (I) .
Tue Nature or Work (II)
SPECIALISATION . , : ;
PRODUCTION
DisTRIBUTION
Consumption (1)
Consumption (IT)
Our Position To-pay . : : °
Tue True Position . ; A
bitnd x Z t }
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125
157
179
203
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249
275
299
321
341
367
HUMAN WORK
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EINTRODUCTORY
Summary
Common facts hard to understand. Social phenom-
ena most important to modern life, yet least under-
stood. Complexity no obstacle if system is known.
Practical knowledge of sociology quite possible. Co-
existence does not prove true association. Social rudi-
ments cause pain. Human pam always conspicuous.
“The Star of Suffering.” Religions rest on concep-
tion of essential pain. Suicide a human specialty.
Pain a social condition, remediable and preventable.
Physical environment largely mastered, present difficul-
ties social. Past societies died of internal diseases.
Social indigestion. Human nature progressive. Lan-
guage retarded by ignorance and superstitions. Civilt-
sation retarded by same things. Economic difficulties
our principal ones to-day. “The root of all evil.” In-
nutrition, over-nutrition, mal-nutrition, wrong action
im body politic. Difficulty lies m false ideas. Effect
of woman labour and slave labour. Consciousness proof
of power. Modern society increasingly conscious.
Pain most conspicuous, pathology precedes physiology.
Errors of early therapeutics, personal and social. Need
of scientific social physiology, as base of treatment.
Must understand works to mend watch, or society.
Knowledge enough to begin. This book a study of the
economic processes of Society
i
INTRODUCTORY
THE most familiar facts are often hardest to under-
stand. This is described by Ward as “ the illusion of
the near.” Because of nearness we get no perspective;
because of continual presence we become used to one
view and fail to perceive others.
To the consideration of new facts we come with com-
paratively open minds, impressed by each item and its
relation to the rest; but facts long known are supposed
to be understood, and we resent the slight offered to our
intelligence in the proposal to reconsider. Yet the most
revolutionary discoveries have been made among pre-
cisely the most familiar facts; as in the nature and use
of steam, or the endless potentialities of coal tar.
We had, and used, and supposed we knew, our own
bodies, through long centuries of living and dying, yet
our late-learned physiology was able to show us facts
most vitally important which we had never dreamed of.
Social phenomena have been going on about us since
we began to be human; they are as familiar as physical
or physiological phenomena, but even less understood.
Yet the interaction of social forces and social condi-
tions form increasingly prominent factors in human
life.
Primitive man was most affected by physical condi-
5
6 HUMAN WORK
tions, he had to adjust himself mainly to the exigencies
of climate, of the soil, of animal competitors. Modern
man has to adjust himself mainly to social conditions;
he is most affected by governments, religions, economic
systems, education, general customs. Yet the study of
this especially pressing and important environment is
but little advanced. The smooth-worn commonplace
facts slip through our fingers, and we fail to see the
meaning of our most important surroundings simply
because we have always had them. Also we allow our-
selves to be discouraged by the extent and complexity
of social conditions. This is quite needless.
Grass may be studied in any patch, regardless of the
acreage of our prairies, or the height of the plumes of
the Pampas. of such postulates as these. As a con-
sequence, normal brain action on such lines ceased.
Abnormal brain action developed freely, its extreme
being what we call fanaticism. Those who attended
to the maintenance of ancient concepts soon found that
any increase of mental activity led to the unsettling of
their supposed truth; and so, with the best of inten-
_ tions, used every possible means to discourage such ac-
tivity. |
And as the average mind found itself forbidden to
think on certain of the most important lines in life,
and unable to think logically on such bases as were —
allowed, it simply accepted them as ** unthinkable ” and
** make sense’
CHAPTER THREE 47
so admitted in the common stock of ideas these discon-
nected heaps of arbitrary statement. Our natural tend-
ency to relate and connect our percepts and concepts
in logical sequence, so as to form a rational collection
agreeing with itself and with our behaviour, has been
not only neglected but prevented; and this arbitrary
disconnection of mental processes has been so thorough
and universal that we have grown to expect what we
> in human action.
call * inconsistency ”
- Yet consistency is one of the brain’s most essential
laws. We expect things to be consistent, we demand it.
Talk disconnectedly to the most ordinary person and he
soon cries, ‘‘ What on earth are you talking about? I
don’t see what that has to do with it!” And we all
know how busy our brains are, trying to make out to
ourselves that our own conduct is consistent. We are
naturally consistent, but the unbroken centuries of vio-
lent insertion and compulsory retention of irreconcil-
able statements in the young brain have perverted
natural action and trained us in an artificial incon-
sistency.
This enforced maintenance of older concepts has for
its result this: At any given period in history the ideas
of the common mind are found to antedate the facts.
The facts of the twentieth century are approached with
the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth. And as
our conscious acts are modified by those ancient con-
cepts, our acts are necessarily behind the times. Chang-
ing conditions constantly demand revision of the con-
duct of society, but if that conduct—so far as it is
48 HUMAN WORK
consciously ours—is based on unchanging ideas, there
must be conflict. ‘There has been, always. ‘Take some
well-known historic instance, as the French Revolu-
tion.
Here was a long-established social relation, that of
feudalism, lineal descendant of still remoter patriarchal
grouping, producing in the conscious mind a highly
developed concept or group of concepts, described in
the phrase, “l’ancien régime.” Meanwhile the condi-
tions which made feudalism an advantageous form of
social relation changed intrinsically. The natural
basis in fact was gone, but the idea remained firmly in-
trenched in the mind. Acting under the idea, feudalism
was maintained, but the change in conditions proceeded
irresistibly.
Some few there were whose minds consciously per-
ceived the change in conditions, formed new concepts,
and sought to transmit those concepts. But this effort
was on the one hand too limited in range, and on the
other too vague and varied in form, to really bring
about the change, or wisely guide it. The action of
the cruel facts on a no longer normal social relation,
resulted in a vast reaction, quite uncontrollable by the
newer ideals.
The endeavour to reconstruct society on the theory
of the “ social contract,” or any other then advanced,
naturally failed, as the endeavour to maintain an out-
worn system failed, and the carnage and confusion, the
partial reaction to the old basis, the slow, irregular,
fumbling progress toward a better state were the re-
CHAPTER THREE 49
sults, as we have seen. ‘That conduct which led to the
improvement of the social system in France was re-
sultant from conditions. and not from concepts.
In our own recent experience with the system of
human slavery we have another marked instance, both
in the irresistible trend of progressive conditions which
brought the change and in the splendid effort to alter
those governing concepts on which the system rested in
the minds of men. In the abolition movement we have
the conscious human effort to alter conscious conduct.
The physical extension of our national boundaries and
the mechanical extension of economic processes was the
unconscious pressure of conditions which also modi-
fied conduct. And against both stood the vast weight
of brain inertia, and the unending array of false con-
cepts, dating back to the historic period when slavery
was a useful relation, and buttressing itself with
the crudest quotations from ancient religions.
The power of the freely developing brain to keep
pace with new social relations and proclaim newly
perceived truth. is offset by the tremendous undertow of
the undeveloped brain and its power to compel ac-
ceptance of ancient errors.
In a long-range view of social progress it would seem
that in early times the conscious mind had a very small
share in our development, and that conditions did
almost all, even while man fondly thought that he did;
but as society grows and the brain grows in spite of
itself, the balance of power swings steadily toward
conscious conduct. A broader religion and a fuller edu-
50 HUMAN WORK
cation make the formation and transmission of ideas
continually easier; and personal freedom so accustoms
us to handle our own conduct that the power of hu-
manity to consciously improve its world is now a large
and growing factor in social evolution.
This carries its visible proof in the increasing ac-
tivity of our interest in social phenomena, and of our
efforts to alleviate the distress of humanity and better
those conditions within our reach. We have the power
and the desire to help, and the main obstacle to a swift
and orderly improvement is in the brain; both in its
passive ignorance and prejudice and its active main-
tenance of mistaken or long-outgrown ideas.
The position here taken, that the human brain has
not kept pace with the development of society, and has
acted as a deterrent rather than an assistant to our
growth, may be questioned from the point of view of
the evolutionist. Natural selection, he will assert, de-
velops in each animal a brain capacity suited to his
needs, and speedily removes him from the field of con-
test if he does not manifest it; man in the struggle for
existence must similarly develop the kind and amount
of brain that is necessary to him, and if he does not he
will perish. Therefore the human brain to-day is all
that can be expected, and it is useless to talk of any
wholesale and sudden improvement in social conditions
from that source.
This would be true if man were a creature whose’
existence was conditioned upon his own individual
activities. While the human animal remained at that
CHAPTER THREE 51
stage of development where he was directly reached
by the consequences of his own personal conduct, his
brain power was cultivated in this simple way; if he
was not smart enough to live, he died, and was well
out of the procession.
But so soon as any social relation was established,
when our gains and losses were fused in collective
action, this method of brain culture was no longer
reliable. Once firmly established as a living species
through the process of agriculture, the degree of intel-
ligence necessary to the maintenance of this process
was sufficient to sustain life, while the further develop-
ment of intelligence rested on other activities less in-
stantly important to the life process, and not so sharply
brought home in personal consequences.
The individual hunter, if he failed to show the grade
of ability necessary to supply his wants, promptly died
of his own inferiority, but man, in social relation, is —
maintained by the collective effort, prospering or suf-
fering with his society, and his pooling of abilities
is so far-reaching and hopelessly intermixed that it is
impossible to pick out the consequences of one man’s
action and pile them neatly on his own head. Naturally,
selection acts on the society rather than the man, and
must needs act slowly and with an appearance of in-
justice. Incipient errors are not met by the sharp
reproof of individual consequence, and wide ranges of
eccentricity are possible, so that they do not touch
those basic economic processes of society on which all
our lives rest.
52 HUMAN WORK
Gross mistakes in agriculture would be soon punished
by the extinction of the mistaken society, or errors in
mechanics, in navigation, in any part of our work
which deals with the primal necessities of life, but errors —
in astronomy, in religion, or education do not result in
such immediate destruction.
Thus the human intellect on the lower stages shows
a certain solid average ability, built up by natural selec-
tion acting on societies as it acts on individuals, but
the human intellect in its higher grades is painfully
irregular and defective, making our higher social mani-
festations as questionable, uncertain, and often mis-
chievous as our lower ones are clearly good.
Man has stayed alive because he knew enough to
plough and sow, to kill wolves and steer a ship, but in
later social development he has been as open to de-
struction as any poor beast below him. In the long
lesson of history we may see him again and again killed
down to the level of his intelligence. Nations have
been conquered, civilisations destroyed, kings decapi-
tated, but the peasant survived. |
The problems we have really solved do not have to be
done over again; the downfall of past societies is but
the wiping off the slate of a mass of elaborate failures.
“Rule it all out down to that first line and begin
again!” says the teacher.
We are quite clever at simple examples in units, but
very weak on fractions. We could see how one man
affected another in the short radius of a limited early
group, but the long-range effects of our widening inter-
CHAPTER THREE 53
human activities have been beyond us, and we are slowly
working out in heavy centuries those problems of
liberty and justice, of honesty and love, the mastery
of which is as essential to our further progress as was
the early mastery of metallurgy and mechanics.
A mistake in short and simple addition is easily seen,
but as the examples grow more complex the errors are
more difficult to trace.
They spread wider and last longer, and by the time
a society begins to meet the punishment due to the
behaviour of its misguided constituents, those worthies
have long since died in the odour of sanctity and a new
generation is piously producing the incipient errors
which will destroy its grandchildren. The vigour of
our basic life processes sustains us through wide
reaches of experiments and mistakes.
A flourishing society can maintain more fools than
any savage period could afford.
We have to do in this book with several of the basic
errors in our common concepts as to economics. We
shall see how different are the facts of our economic life
to-day from that inner world of concepts we carry in
the brain and always take for facts while they remain
there. The world is, to us, the sutn of our concepts
concerning it; and while the real facts relentlessly
affect us, our supposed facts are of deadly importance
because they modify our conduct.
In the field of economics we maintain to this day
some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most
2 HUMAN WORK
radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas @
brain can hold. They do not fit the facts; they are
not provable as true, but very promptly provable as
false; they do not agree with such true ideas as we
have, nor even with each other; but all this gives no
uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering
organ has been trained for more thousands of years
than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning
patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large
active lies.
In the face of every century’s accumulating facts
of organic social relation we have peacefully main-
tained our original animal theory of individualism—
the Ego concept. If bees had brains like ours, and
the exquisitely organised modern bee could consciously
maintain the state of mind of her remote prototype,
the solitary bee, we might have some parallel to com-
fort our lonely height of foolishness. Well did the
Greeks call an “idiot” the man who behaved as a
separate individual and considered his personal ad-
vantage first. Consider the ruin and disorder of the
hive if bees were “idiots.” That type of industry,
of harmony, of peaceful wealth, could never have
arisen under such misconception. |
We have many more root concepts, some basic, some
collateral and derivative; all working, discordantly
enough, against social progress. Several will be
touched upon here; those most patently connected with
the subject of the book, our Human Work. In pur-
suance of which subject it is necessary to lay down
CHAPTER THREE 55
some of the facts as to the nature of society, its struc-
ture and functions; and to show how perverse, how
inadequate, how deadly mischievous are the ancient
theories which still stand in our minds in place of those
facts.
IV: SOME FALSE CONCEPTS
Summary
The ego concept, based on pre-human status. Our
separate consciousness not human. Human conscious-
ness collective. “We” human, “I” animal. Ab-
surdity of individualism m organism. Pleasure m
impression theory. Animal basis. Pleasure through
motory nerves as well as sensory, and in us far greater.
Pay Concept, animal basis, logical extremes in Heaven
and Hell. Other forces also operative. Woman labour.
Slave labour. Shame and agony resultant in concepts
of eternal torture. Wage labour. Want theory.
Self-interest theory. Self-preservation not nature’s
first law. Race-preservation. Pain concept: “ Sweet
uses of adversity.” Action and reaction equal.
“Good to be born poor.” Pain only a message, always
indicative of wrong. Defensive torture. Hazing.
Evils of poverty. Abraham Lincoln. Illegitimate
wealth. Dumbbells not dinner. Contempt for work,
how derived. Veblen. Paradox of “independence.”
Law of demand and supply.
TRV
SOME FALSE CONCEPTS
As we shall frequently have to refer to certain major
errors in popular thought, it will be as well to clearly
enumerate and describe those selected. The field is
wide,—each of those mentioned connects with many
others,—and there may be serious question as to which
antedates which; but difference on that point will not
invalidate the actuality of their influence on conduct.
The group mentioned in this chapter will be further
described and elaborated later; this is merely to intro-
duce them in some order for reference.
The first, and here assumed to be the basic error in
the human mind, the parent of almost all the others,
is the Ego concept. This is the universal assumption,
based on a pre-human status when it was true, that
human beings are separate entities, like the lower
animals.
As animals we are separate, and, when we first began
to think, the animal life was so enormously preponder-
ant, and the human life so weak, so vague, so intermit-
tently realised, that it was quite natural we should
carry over the sense of personal entity into the social
entity. That we have a separate personal conscious-
ness is not denied, but it is not humanity. The human
consciousness is collective, as we shall see later,
59
60 HUMAN WORK
Our mistake has been, not in retaining the Ego con-
cept, which is as necessary in its place as the concept
of a leg or a liver, but in failing to grasp the larger
inclusive Social concept. All the complex organic
phenomena of social life we have continually tried to
construe in terms of the individual. The distinctive
features of human life are invariably social. No one
trait or power of our great race but what must be
accounted for in its development and understood in its
use as a social factor.
“ We” are human, “I” am an animal, save as “ I,”
being part of Society, embody and represent it. ‘The
discord and mischief which would be wrought in a phys-
ical organism by any absurd pretence of individual life ©
and interest on the part of its organs, is precisely the
discord and misery wrought in our social organism by
the persistence of this archaic idea.
Another error, most deeply basic in its logical rela-
tion, though perhaps not so early recognised by the
conscious mind, is our general belief that pleasure lies”
wholly—or even mainly—in impression. Like the first, ©
it dates from a pre-social status, is the governing
theory of personal animal life, and has not been re-
moved and replaced by truer views as social life is
developed.
The individual animal having no functions but those
of maintenance, reproduction, and improvement, and
accomplishing his improvement only along lines of per-
sonal heredity, acted only toward those ends, and re-
mained at rest when those ends were served. Pleasure —
CHAPTER FOUR 61
led and pain drove him to the attainment of the means
to these ends of this fulfilment, so he early learned to
associate pleasure with getting what he wanted,—pain
with the lack of it,—a perfectly true concept as far as
it went. But as the individual animal’s activities are
promptly reactionary, and not matters of conscious
judgment and volition, he never took into account the
pleasure inherent in action, in the discharge of energy,
and the pain equally inherent in the prevention of such
discharge.
The nerves bring to us sense of pain and pleasure:
certain currents feel good to them, certain others bad.
An inflow of warmth is a pleasure; increase the vibra-
tion, make it heat, it becomes pain, agony, torture.
The sensory nerves bring to us their burden of impres-
sion, the consciousness we call enjoyment or dislike ; but
have the motory nerves no burden? Are the currents
of energy going out not as perceptible as those coming
in? ‘To the individual animal they are not; he does
not “ feel himself work ” particularly. His conscious-
ness is in his income, not in his output.
But the social creature comes under different condi-
tions. His range of activity increases, both in com-
plexity and power; he has an enlarging fund of energy
to discharge and a thousand complicated avenues to
discharge it through. Moreover, this discharge is no
longer a personal affair of his own arms and legs, but
_ Involves concurrent action of many others.
To adjust rightly this intricate mutual activity
requires consciousness, and consciousness involves pleas-
62 HUMAN WORK
ure and pain. The whole field of distinctively human
activities is under this law. We have a vast fund of
energy, a vast field of exercise, and a constantly in-
creasing consciousness of this exercise. Meanwhile the
income of man, as a separate animal, remains the same.
He has, as before, the pleasure of the intake, the at-
tainment of the means to his separate welfare. He
has, beyond that, his share of pleasure in the larger
collective intake also, the gratification of his social
desires; but he has, pre-eminently, the pleasure of
action; of the conscious expression of energy.
This is the largest field of human delight, but has
not been so recognised. We still commonly associate ©
pleasure with impression, with things we are to get, to —
have. Whereas, in fact, our pleasure depends far
more largely upon what we do.
Closely derived from this basic assumption is our
general theory of return as an incentive; what we may
call the Pay concept. This was one of man’s earliest
generalisations. He observed the excito-motory action
of the individual beast; under the influence of hunger
or fear he acts; not influenced, he does not act, sleeps
in the sun, and accumulates energy for the next jump.
The beast, seeing his dinner running before him, ran
after it; having caught his dinner, he ceased to run.
Seeing his enemy running behind him, he ran away
from it; having escaped from his enemy, he ceased
to run.
“Aha!” cries that astute observer, Early Man,
**Exertion depends on pleasure before you or pain
CHAPTER FOUR 63
behind you!” and he forthwith produced his grand
primeval generalisation of Reward and Punishment.
This is still exclusively held by almost all of us. We
have used it to account for all human actions, with the
bitter conclusion that ‘* every man has his price.” We
have spread and lengthened and deepened it to cover
our waxing field of action, till out of its logical ex-
tremes we have built both Heaven and Hell.
It was a tremendous concept for the early brain to
- achieve, and it was true—as far as it went. These
two forces do modify action. They were very strong
upon individual animals, and they act upon us yet—
to a degree. That is, there are still some of us so near
the plane of individualism as to be readily and strongly
influenced by these agents.
The error of early man lay in not observing other
forces even then operative; and the error of modern
man lies in not observing that these others have grown
continually, and the primal ones have dwindled in pro-
portion.
Right beside our rashly generalising ancestor
laboured the primeval squaw, working patiently, work-
ing eagerly, working most efficiently, out of the over-
flowing energy of the mother instinct, with the power
of recreative love. Not because of anything to gain
or anything to fear, but because energy must have ex-
pression; and the expression is in proportion to the
energy, not in proportion to the return. Later, in
the fall of the matriarchate and the inception of our
dramatic androcentric period, the woman was made a
64 HUMAN WORK
slave and her labour became slave labour, not to its
improvement. Later again men were made slaves;
their activity was coerced by these two primitive stimuli,
the fear of punishment, the hope of reward; mainly
the former.
In that first period of co-ordinate oe among
men, the irreconcilable male energy was. forced into
service by the immediate pressure of pain and fear.
Slavery was one step short of slaughter, as such ac-
cepted, as such hated. All that deep-rooted aversion
to labour—sense of scorn for it, shame in it, honour
in being free of it—was superimposed upon humanity
at this period, and has never been fully outgrown.
This terrible period, its wrong, its shame, its agony, its
hopelessness, deeply impressed the growing brain of
man, and, as this period was of great duration, it made
possible to our minds the prodigious concepts of eternal
torture.
Later, in the second stage of coerced action, that of
wage-labour, we have the reward used instead of the
penalty. We will not whip the man if he does not
work, but we will not feed him unless he does.
Our governing concept being that action is produced
only by these means, we must needs use one or the other.
Since we believe that if the slave were not in fear of
punishment he would not work, or that if the employee
were not in hope of pay he would not work, we act upon
our belief consistently enough. We have outgrown
the period where we believed we had a right to enforce
labour by inflicting punishment; but we have not out-
CHAPTER FOUR 65
grown the only less primitive belief that we have a
right to enforce it by withholding the reward. We do
not yet, to any extent, recognise the other forces under
which human beings act.
Closely allied to the Pay concept and following it, a
more concrete expression of the same general thought
as applied to industrial activity, comes our universal
economic fallacy, the Want Theory. 3
This is repeatedly defined and opposed in later chap-
ters, and here need only be stated as that basic propo-
sition in Political Economy in which it is assumed that
man works to gratify wants, and that if his wants are
otherwise gratified he will not work. This fundamental
theory of economics rests, as will be readily seen, on the
foregoing, on the Ego concept and the Pay concept.
Part of it, more generally applied, is our general Self-
interest theory, usually expressed in solemn tones:
** Self-preservation is the first law of Nature.’”? Men
say this as if it were so, and other people believe it
simply because it is said to them so solemnly. Our
brains, trained for all time to bow to authority, have
a treacherous trick of believing whatever is advanced
by those in authority or even by the scribes. The
present scribe asks no such gulp, but that the reader
use his own active thinking power on the propositions
here advanced. Now, this self-preservation theory is
contradicted on its own doorstep by the fact of the
race-preservation instinct, the individual counting for
nothing, absolutely nothing, in the unbroken stream of
racial life of which he forms so small a part.
66 HUMAN WORK
If we were solemnly taught ‘ Race-preservation is the
first law of Nature,’ we should be nearer the truth.
Even in the purely individual animals the good of the
race is paramount to that of the member, and in the
collective animals the social instinct is so highly devel-
oped that self-preservation is not even thought of.
Break an ant-heap, and watch “the first law of
Nature ”! Immediate, instinctive, unquestioning, they
rush to save the eggs and young, to guard the queen,
to preserve the group—not the individual.
“Nature” develops whatever faculties are required
in a given form of life, and if the life-form is collective
the collective instincts appear in force. Now “ Self-
interest ” as a motive does act upon the human being,
but it does not compare in weight and value with the
larger later motives of social interest. We assume that
the visibly social processes we see going on about us
are best governed by self-interest in the parties con-
cerned; that efficient service is best commanded under
this pressure. We are wrong.
Social processes were initiated primarily along lines
of self-interest, in orderly development, from existing
instincts to higher ones, but the further developed are
these processes the less useful is the early motive, the
more needed is the later motive of social interest. Self-
interest, preserved too long in social growth, becomes
a deterrent force. The more wide and complex the
process, the greater the distance between producer and
consumer, the more injurious is the action of that essen-
tially limited force. This is why in small, early societies
CHAPTER FOUR 67
there is more honest and efficient service under this
motive; and in large, modern societies, unless the social
instincts of duty, honour, and the like are operative,
we find such infinitely ramified dishonesty and in-
efficiency.
Another stumbling-block of progress is an extremely
ancient belief of ours, not derived from the preceding
five, but in flat contradiction to some of them, which the
popular and poetic saying calls “ the sweet uses of
adversity.” We very generally believe that pain and
difficulty are good for us, and the logical consequence
of this belief—so far as practical life allows such an
absurdity to have any consequence—is of course that
we do nothing to remove pain and difficulty. The
further logical consequence, that we should deliberately
add pain and difficulty to our lives in order to improve
them, is seldom allowed; it is too ridiculous even for
our brains.
Now what is the fraction of truth in this peculiar
piece of idiocy? At its very base lies the law of
physics: ** action and reaction are equal.” As hard as
you push against a wall does the wall push against
you. Following this comes the early observation of
the effect of environment. Where the channel is nar-
rowest the stream is deepest; where it is widest the
stream is shallowest; and if you dam the stream the
water rises to the height of the dam. »
So in the action of the human forces we observe that,
if you hinder and obstruct a man, he resists your pres-
sure and rises against it—sometimes! Sometimes he
68 HUMAN WORK
does no such thing, but is crushed instead. However,
we perceived numbers of cases where opposition called |
forth resisting energy where action and reaction were
equal, and we made our easy generalisation as to the
beneficent effects of difficulties.
Applied to human life, in the concrete environment
which we call good and bad according to our lights, we
observed further that this law seemed to work back-
ward; that where a person had no difficulties, where all
was made easy for him, he did not manifest energy.
Then we felt sure we were right. We produced a lot
of popular expressions of this general thought, a re-
ligious phase of it being “ whom the Lord loveth he
chasteneth ”; its application in education leading us to
believe that it is good to make the child labour and
struggle in learning—bad to “ make it too easy for
him”; and in economics we apply it in our sad com-
ments on the disadvantages of wealth, our cheerful
assertion that “it is good for a man to be born poor.”
Of course no one ever thinks of staying poor because
of its benefits; no one foregoes being rich, or trying
to be rich because convinced of its evils; above all, we
do not seek to work out this theory on our children.
Its main mischief is in preventing us from trying to
remove the obstacles to human progress in general. So
long as we even partially believe that obstacles promote
to progress, that the hurdles add to the speed of the
racer—why, if we do not really give extra hurdles to
aid the man we want to win, we at least do nothing to
clear the track.
CHAPTER FOUR 69
Now where does the essential error lie in this loosely
_hung together bunch of foolishness? In the first place
“pain” from difficulty. Pain is merely a
separate
message; it is a telegram to headquarters to say that
something is wrong. It always means that. Normal
action does not hurt. It may be “ good,” as the sen-
tinel is good who gives the alarm so that you may save
yourself ; but his alarm is a warning of evil. It may
accompany a ‘
‘ good” process, like that of resuscitat-
ing the drowning; but that is not a normal process, the
pain is conditioned upon water in the lungs.
If a person is so situated that he must bear pain,
then it is good to get used to it, if possible. On this
basis the early savage used self-torture to help him
bear the incidental miseries of life, and from that prac-
tice dated our views on the subject.
The most unblushing survival of this gross savagery
is seen in our practice of hazing, calmly defended by its
perpetrators as ° 99 <6
it makes boys manly,” “it develops
character.” The savage had at least the grace to do
it to himself, and it was not practised upon children.
Our imperfectly educated children maintain in this the
customs of the lowest savages, in a rudimentary form.
There are times in life when pain has to be borne
for a greater good, but that does not make the pain
good.
As to the other and a little more legitimate branch—
difficulty. Here we feel more assurance. We do see
the poor boy making tremendous struggles, and rising
above his difficulties hardened, bruised, belated, but tri-
70 HUMAN WORK
umphant. We do see the rich boy making no struggle
at all, and rising above nothing. Hence—but wait a
bit. Do all poor boys thus struggle and rise?
Do the slums produce the best citizens? Is a well-
bred, well-fed, well-educated boy so hopelessly handi-
capped in life by those advantages? Is our ceaseless
attempt to provide for our children the best advantages
all folly? We may not be logical, but have horse sense
enough to know better than that.
We know that poverty coarsens, weakens, stunts,
degrades; that under its evil influence ‘‘ the dregs of
society *” are steadily and inevitably produced. We
know that where one person of phenomenal capacity
can rise im spite of it, thousands of ordinary capacity
are ruined because of it. |
Abraham Lincoln was a rail-splitter. Yes. Were
there no others? ‘There were and are many poor boys
splitting rails, and yet the crop of Abraham Lincolns
remains limited to one.
Our error is a very simple one. We confuse a co-
incidence with a cause. Most people are poor. There-
fore most great people have risen from poverty. How
many more great people we might have had under
better conditions we shall never know.
As for the effect of wealth, great wealth in private
hands is not an advantage; it, too, is a morbid condi-
tion, and under its evil influence the scum of society
is steadily and increasingly produced. It is perhaps
as hard for a great nature to overcome the difficulties
of our illegitimate wealth as those of our illegitimate
CHAPTER FOUR 71
poverty. Still some do it. We have but to study the
biographical dictionary to find that the proportion of
great men to rich and poor is about the same as the
proportion of those two classes, that is all.
Meanwhile the healthy truth under this is the physio-
logical law that exercise develops function. Whatever
power you have is increased by exercise to a certain
extent. But you must first have your power. A
punching bag helps develop your muscles if rightly
used, but it does not make them. Your daily food is
the prime factor.
To get the best results from people they must first
be born in good condition—starved mothers and ex-
hausted fathers are not advantageous; then kept in
good condition ;—good air, good food, good clothing.
Does anyone wish to claim that poor air or poor food
or poor clothing is advantageous? When you have
good stock, and give it all the advantages of true edu-
cation, bringing out and correlating all its powers, then
the strong and active creature can maintain and de-
velop those powers by exercise. But dumbbells in place
of dinner do not strengthen.
One more very common attitude of mind with regard
to work, not as fundamental as the foregoing, and
not founded on any law whatever, but on arbitrary and
evil conditions, is our general contempt for it.
Regarding it, as we must under the Want theory,
as done only to gratify a want; regarding it, as we
must under the Ego concept, as done by the individual
for the individual, it does seem a poor thing enough.
G2 HUMAN WORK
Why should we honour and approve the never-so-in-
genious efforts of a person to keep himself alive, so
scornfully described in a poem of Robert Buchanan:
“Struggle, speculate, dig, and bleed,
Reap the whirlwind of Venus’ seed,
O senseless, impotent human breed!”
But beyond the legitimate scorn of a social creature
for what he estimates as an individual activity, comes
our illegitimate scorn based on lamentable, evil con-
ditions.
The work of the free mother in the matriarchal period
was never despised ; when men enslaved women their work
became contemptible. So when the despised captive
was made to labour, his work also was held contempt-
ible. And then, as Veblen shows so irrefutably, this
primitive attitude was retained through all the cen-
turies in the stagnant pool of leisure-class life, that
singular medium wherein the active modern world may
find preserved a sedimentary deposit of most ancient
times. ‘This class and its customs and habits of mind,
being revered by us, we have made permanent and con-
stantly reinforced the scorn of work which else would
have been contradicted long since by every fact of
progressing civilisation. |
With this mixed foundation the feeling remains in
full force. It serves to check the normal activities of
those who “do not have to work,” and to belittle the
importance of those who do. It shows, for one result,
this pretty paradox: a human creature absolutely help-
CHAPTER FOUR 73
less, doing nothing whatever to maintain himself or
anyone else, depending for the meanest service as for
the greatest, on the assistance of others; and then
calling himself ‘ independent,” and believing that he
“‘ supports ” those who keep him alive, by “ furnishing
them employment ”! And—still more paradoxical—
the active and valuable persons who so laboriously main-
tain this ornament believe it, too.
A minor fallacy in our popular economics, but one
doing much mischief, is that familiar phrase “ the law
of demand and supply.” It is in part a logical deriv-
ative of the want theory; in part based on a true
natural law, and for the rest weakened and confounded
by the conditions of our own artificial ‘* market.”
Spencer refers to this with great solemnity in “* The
Man vs. The State ”; showing how smoothly and beauti-
fully great London is provided for by the working of
this “law.” He points out the immense numbers of
people to be supplied daily, and the immense amount
of materials brought in daily, by ship, by rail, by
horse and cart, under the wise guidance of individual
self-interest and this governing “law of demand and
supply.” It sounds very attractive! and when stated
by so great a thinker it seems as if it were so. But is
it? Are the millions of inhabitants in London thus ac-
curately provided for? Do none starve and freeze?
Do none dwindle and sicken, and become hopeless crip-
ples and invalids for lack of proper supplies? Or
again, do none waste and spoil, receiving far more than
they need? Are the demands of the human body, of the
74 HUMAN WORK
human mind, of the human heart, really supplied in
London, or anywhere else, by this alleged law?
What do the words really mean, if they mean any-
thing? For “ demand” read “ purchasing power ”
“the law of supply and purchasing power.” What
does * supply ” mean? It means the product of human
industry. The product of human industry is equal to
the purchasing power. This does not sound so smooth,
but is more accurate. And what does it mean now?
That those who have purchasing power can get what
they want. Can they—always?
Why, yes—f there is any. But if all the cuecuatees
power in the world should happen to demand a few more
of the works of Phidias—they would not be forthcom-
ing. There is frequent complaint even among the
very rich of their inability to get some things they
want; such as ideal servants. This is a very common de-
mand, and the air is filled with protest because, at any
price, the supply does not equal the demand. This
law is a common vagrant—* having no visible means of
support.” All it amounts to is that if you demand a
thing—and can pay for it—and there is any such
thing—the previous owner will sell it to you—if he
wants to.
On the other hand, nothing is more frequent than
our upsetting this supposed equilibrium by what we call
‘“‘ overproduction.” If the supply were equal to the
demand the demand is certainly not alleged to be equal
to the supply. “It’s a poor rule that doesn’t work
both ways.”
CHAPTER FOUR 75
What does govern the supply, if demand does not?
66 Supply 39
social energies. If it can be called * equal” to any-
thing, it is equal to the combined action of heredity and
is human production—the output of our
environment, modified by our volition. The product of
a race depends on its stock, its inherited characteris-
tics; on its education, physical and mental, on its nu-
trition and stimulus, on its governing concepts.
To make such and such a product forthcoming you
must have such and such a producer; he must have the
capacity and the wish to produce such a “ supply.” If
he has not the capacity, no power on earth—he it a re-
ward of the princess and half the kingdom, or a pen-
alty of thumbscrews and boiling oil—can get it out of
him.
Turn your “supply ” round and apply it to the
producer. Supply him with all the necessary conditions
for rich production. ‘Then we might say in a general
way ‘“‘ the supply is equal to the supply.” But “ de-
mand” is not a producing agent. It does not make
people create, invent, or discover. It does not make
them sell unless they want to—see Ahab demanding
Naboth’s vineyard—or Frederic and his Miller of Sans
Souci. It does not make them work even, unless they
are able and willing. Demand what you please of the
tramp and pauper—he cannot produce it.
A natural law is a series of observed phenomena.
Such things always happen, so we say it is a law. The
observed phenomena in this case are those of a past
stage of economic development; and at no time
76 HUMAN WORK
“natural” but purely arbitrary. A parallel may be
drawn from similar observed phenomena in the system
of slave labour. The “ supply ” then was the work of
the slave. ‘The “demand” was a command, and was
enforced by the whip; no whip no work, more whip
more work, and behold “ a law ” ! The work equals the
whip! So it did, in most cases—granting the man was
a slave. But it was no law of social economics; it was
a law of slavery. Neither is this theory of ours that
*¢ The work equals the pay ” a law of social economics—
it is only a law of wagery.
Among free men, the whip would not produce work
but merely a fight. Among independent gentlemen an
offer of pay does not produce service of any sort—it
is regarded as an insult. The crucial condition of the
work-and-whip law is that you shall hold the whip and
have power to use it; in the work-and-pay law, that
you shall hold the pay and have a right to withhold it.
These are the root errors most especially discussed in
this book :
1. The Ego Concept.
2. The Pleasure-in-Impression Theory.
. The Pay Concept.
. The Want Theory.
. The Self-Interest Theory.
The Pain Concept.
- The Law of Supply and Demand;
with the derivative scorn for work; here only enu-
merated and briefly set forth for convenience in
reference.
ED ow 0
V¥V: THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (I)
Summary
Idea of social organism, not new. Proposition stated.
Proof advanced on three main lines. First, nutritive
processes of collective and organic society. Men do
not support themselves. World-wide production and
distribution of food. Individual could not become
baker or tailor, they are social functionaries. Organic -
evolution along line of modification to food supply.
Man the only creature who has mastered his food sup-
ply, he makes that which makes him, he produces food.
Production of food a collective function, never found
_ in individual animals. Physical conditions of agricul-
ture essential to social progress, agricultural unit a
village. Second, specialised activities of society col-
lective and organic. Social evolution of trades, arts,
businesses. Increasing interdependence. Instance of
teacher. Evolution of social functions. Third, the
brain a collective organ, a social organ, thought a
social function. Effect of isolation on human brain,
partial or complete. Difficulty of retaining mental
stimulus. Individual animal’s brain im relation to his .
own activities. Human brain in relation to common
activities.
V
THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (1)
THE concept that society is an organic form of life is
not new to the world.
The popular mind, confronted with many conspic-
uous proofs of human solidarity, admitted the idea to
one of those thought-tight compartments in which we
keep such concepts as we are unable or unwilling to
think through and hold in logical relation to our others.
There it has remained, enlarging somewhat in course of
time and loud events, and tending to modify such con-
duct as came its way to the social benefit. But since
a much larger brain era was governed by the egoistic
concept, and vital affairs far more directed by it, we
still consciously act as individualists, and still construe
Human life in terms of the individual. Let us now use
the temporary power of the brain to think in defiance
of its own previously held ideas; and study the organic
nature of Society.
The proposition is that Society is the whole and we
are the parts: that that degree of organic development
known as human life is never found in isolated indi-
viduals, and that it progresses to higher development in
proportion to the evolution of the social relation;
that a man is, individually, a complete animal, with
sufficient ability to attain the necessities of an animal
79
80 HUMAN WORK
existence; but that as a human being he is but a
minute fraction of a great entity, the necessities of
whose existence are only to be attained by the com-
plex interdependent activities of many men.
That this relation is strictly organic, involving the
high specialisation of the individual man to the social
service in activities which are of no possible benefit to
his separate animal life—(as the activities of a dentist
or a teacher); but which are of visible benefit to his
community, his community in turn supporting him.
That these common and composite activities have de-
veloped a life-form quite above and beyond that of its
constituent men; with a structure and functions outside
of and including theirs. That whereas the life-proc-
esses of the constituent individuals must of course be
insured and improved by the higher life inclosing them; |
yet that a greater or less sacrifice of individual interests
may at any time be necessary—and is naturally made—
the greater including the less. |
That this Social Organisation tends to make safe
and happy its constituent organisms in their separate
animal lives, yet their greatest happiness lies in their
recognition and fulfilment of the social life.
That an increasing social consciousness and social
activity is the most healthful and happy growth for
the human race; and further, that “the riddle of
human life ”’ is made quite simple by this purely natural
and evolutionary position.
In proof and illustration let us consider certain facts,
most of them commonly known to us all, but not com-
CHAPTER FIVE 81
monly considered in this connection. We will observe in
turn the organic nature of Society as shown in its nu-
tritive processes, in its high and personally sacrificial
specialisations, and in its patently collective mental
life.
First, and most visible, come the physical life-proc-
esses; those daily activities in which our energies find
expression, by the products of which our lives are
maintained. Among facts suitable for nursery educa-
tion is the glaring one that in plainest economic rela-
tion * no man liveth to himself nor dieth to himself.”
Each man does not support himself by his own ef-
forts, as an individual animal does, but pools his
efforts with those of others and shares in the common
good as a collective animal does; as the bee or ant.
This does not refer to any consciously advocated plan
of collectivism; but to the present fact that our cof-
fee comes from one country and our tea from another;
that the Californian gives us oranges and the Kansan
beef; that the carpenter and mason build our houses
and the tailor makes our coats.
The daily necessities of one man are met by the ac-
tivities of countless other men. If they were gone, the
one man could not supply himself with any of these
things; but would, if he lived, sink to the level of the
savage hunter,—who is indeed “ self-supporting.” We
have, it is true, a system of exchange in which it is
endeavoured to make each man’s share in the common
product proportionate to his personal efforts; but even
if this system worked successfully it would not alter the
82 HUMAN WORK
fact that the supplies are really made by the others—
and the one—alone—could not make them.
Lay aside for the moment the confusion of idea
naturally arising from our system of interpersonal ex-
change and its convenient medium, money.
Suppose that money were entirely out of the world;
or that we were so flooded with it that it lost its value
as a medium of exchange. Great confusion as to how
much of anything should be demanded for something
else would of course ensue; but the most conspicuous
result would be the unavoidable perception that it was
the thing we needed to live on—not the money.
The purchasing power of money varies continually,
but the nourishing power of wheat or the heat-retain-
ing power of wool does not vary. We eat the bread
and are kept warm by the coat; and the wheat and wool
are prepared for us by many strangers. It may be for
a moment supposed that an individual man could, if he
chose, make his own bread and coat from his own wheat
and wool, but follow back the evolution of these proc-
esses and see if he ever did.
The more nearly alone you find a man—as the Bush-
men—the more nearly naked he is, the more absolutely
a hunter and an eater of raw food. To raise wheat and
bake bread requires a stationary group of long stand-
ing. It is a social process. So with the coat—the man —
who lives really alone wears at most the skin of another
animal.
To keep sheep, to shear, and card, and spin, and
weave, and cut, and sew—all these processes require a
CHAPTER FIVE’ 83
stationary group of still longer standing; they are
social processes. A man alone can catch another
animal, can * eat his fat and wear his hair”; but the
baker and the tailor are slowly evolved social function-
aries. Everywhere we see the present proof that the
wants of man are not supplied by his own efforts and
cannot be; that his life processes are essentially col-
lective.
Now let us approach these facts from behind, watch
their inception and growth, and see how unavoidable is
the conclusion. |
The life of any creature is primarily dependent on
the regular renewal of its constituent particles. The
process of living uses up the materials lived in. Living
involves dying, and to postpone the dying the struc-
ture is continually supplied with fresh materials. This
continuous supply of fresh materials we call nutrition.
It is an increasingly elaborate process, with “ many a
ship ’twixt the cup and the lip ”; and the main line of
organic evolution is in development of these nutritive
processes.
Conditions of the environment modify a creature, as
in hide and hair; conditions of inter-animal competition
modify him, as in horns and stings ; conditions of repro-
duction modify him, developing an elaborate physical
mechanism and a more elaborate scheme of decoration;
but the most distinctive modification of a creature is
that produced by its nutritive conditions. ‘ Order
Mammalia,” with all its towering superiority, is
founded merely on a new way of feeding the baby. The
84 ‘HUMAN WORK
food supply of the world is subject to fluctuating in-
fluences—climatic, geographic, and other; and as we
watch the widening panorama of animal forms chang-
ing and growing up the ages, we see the whole proces-
sion to be moving always in one line—in pursuit of its
dinner. We think of our dinners as a pleasing series of
events, but we do not appreciate their awful importance.
The life of any creature absolutely depends on get-
ting together a certain group of chemical constituents
and keeping them reinforced. While those constituents,
massed in certain proportions, are cunningly poured
through a certain small orifice called a mouth, the crea-
ture lives. A procession of dinners passing a given
point—that is the physical condition of life. We are
the given point. If the procession goes another way—
or stops awhile—“ we ” cease to live.
And since there is no law of nature calling on the
proper constituents to arise, to detach themselves from
their undesirable comrades, to form into rightly pro-
portioned groups, appear at proper intervals and to
enter the “ given point,’”—therefore the principal ma-
chinery of every living form is developed to discover,
pursue, seize, and gather in these constituents. To ob-
tain what we want from the air, gills and lungs are in-
vented; that supply is so instantly imperative and so
plentiful and easy of access, that an unconscious or-
ganic motion sucks it in. If food were as simple and
common as oxygen we should be spared much exertion.
But food is anything but this. In its crude forms it
is thinly scattered in the water, and small early beast-
CHAPTER FIVE 85
lets float around and grab it as they can. ‘“ You get
food when it drops and you die when at stops—you help-
less free agent of sorrow! ”
Food in vegetable forms is also widespread and thin.
The creatures that live on grass have had to develop
the most cumbrous and involved of alimentary canals;
huge barrels filled with many stomachs, supported by
sturdy legs, as of tables, to hold the eating machine up,
and carry it eternally about after its plentiful but
highly diluted dinner. A concentrated vegetable food,
like the fruit, brings out quite other qualities; as seen
in all light swift arboreal animals, as the monkey; and
between ground and tree rises the long neck of the
giraffe—stretching, ever stretching, after his ascending
dinner. |
The humming-bird has slowly acquired a very special
tongue to get his dinner, so has the butterfly ; the tooth
of the squirrel is necessitated by the stubborn nut; and
the poor thirsting camel has his private portable food-
and-water supply to meet the demands of life between
far-scattered oases.
But when it appeared that food in predigested ready-
to-eat packages was specially desirable; when the car-
nivorous habit was developed, then indeed we find a wild
variety of adaptation to one’s dinner. Food in this
form was not only widely scattered and difficult of
access, but actively reluctant, sometimes even conten-
tious. But means were found to encompass it. Was it
small and hidden like the ant, yet numerous enough to
pay for eating? Lo! the ant-eater’s slender snout and
86 HUMAN WORK
slenderer tongue pursue and capture it. Is it a fat
grub, deep boring in the bark? The ingenious Javan
monkey develops a special finger for his extradition.
Does the insect fly waveringly from flower to flower?
The bird flies more accurately and swiftly from insect
to insect, and the hawk swoops still more efficiently
from bird to bird.
Whatever form the dinner took, wherever the dinner
went, there followed the fluent, ever-changing animal or-
ganism, producing tooth or claw, tongue or proboscis,
seven stomachs or a private fish-pole—whatever was
necessary to lure, catch, hold, inclose, and assimilate,
this ever-receding and sometimes actively resisting, but
always indispensable dinner. The evolution of animal
organisms is conditioned mainly upon the food supply.
How does humanity figure in this transformation
scene?
Man alone, of the whole animal kingdom, has at-
tained a complete new stage in this imperative process
of nutrition. Where the most primitive ameboid cell
can but receive food; where the whole machinery of
later organisms can but seize food; man, and man alone,
produces food. Through all the ages, through every
conceivable modification of structure and function, the
animal has pursued its dinner. Man has caught it.
Man alone has permanently mastered his food sup-
ply; instead of an endless chase it is a closed circle—he
makes that which makes him. That is why physical
evolution stops with man—and psychical evolution be-
gins. No longer at the mercy of thin grass, man makes
CHAPTER FIVE 87
the fat-grained corn; no longer endlessly chasing the
buffalo, he raises the big steer. His prairie in the
garden, his prey in the barnyard, the animal can rest at
last, and man can grow. By what strange new power is
this immense step taken, which has enabled this one out
- of all created forms to apply productive force, instead
of mere destructive force, to his food supply? By the
power of organisation. By entering upon that new
life, the social life, which raises us above all lower:
forms.
The cell groups with others into the organ, the or-
gans group again and form organisms; the organisms,
once more combined, form an organisation. Society is
the fourth power of the cell.
A low and limited form of social life began with the
temporary union of hunters; loose fluctuating hordes,
like those of wild dogs or wolves.
When cattle were kept instead of killed, were milked
and sheared and bred with care and forecast, there
arose a higher group-form, the family. With an in-
sured food supply at hand man sat quiet, watching his
cattle; and with food to spare and time to spare, he
began to grow. The family, our physical nucleus,
grew too; grew as it had never grown before.
The limits of cattle-fed life were sharp and clear.
There was no permanent home, no village, no extra-
familiar intercourse, only warfare over pasture and
water between tribe and tribe. But the hour came
when corn was planted and eaten; and then our human
life was indeed established,
88 HUMAN WORK
The conditions of permanent physical juxtaposition,
so essential to social growth, were met for the first |
time. The Hunter, requiring forty square miles of land
per capita to chase at hazard his laborious prey, had no
chance for social growth. Any other man on his forty
miles was a competitor and reduced the supply of food,
so he killed him if possible; and this habit also did not
conduce to social growth. Families, too, were small
when each man “ did his own work ” as these did. When
came the Shepherd and his plenteous food, came larger
families; but there was still a need of some five square
miles per capita to feed the beasts; as the family grew
the miles increased; and on the “ free land ” with its
“equal opportunities ” the families met at the edges
and warred with one another as competitors. This,
again, was not conducive to social growth.
But the Farmer, with far more food on far less land,
food more richly and rapidly reproductive, and taking
far less time to mature; with the family growing faster
than ever, but taking up less room for its food supply ;
the Farmer is the base of the true social structure. Sur- —
plus nutrition and surplus time meant accumulated
energy and frequent opportunity which, with the per-
manent home, allowed the birth and nurture of the indus-
tries and arts. The physical nearness of the people—
acres instead of miles for their nutritive base—allowed
of larger growth of language; and so in and with and
following these conditions the social life became pos-
sible.
Note the absolute collectivity of this productive food
CHAPTER FIVE 89
process. The lowest food-producing unit is a village;
not a separate man, or even a family. Agriculture is
not found below a certain human group form. Social
life is born with agriculture. The distinctive food proc-
esses of humanity are collective.
A second field of proof of our organic relation, and
one as patent as the first, is the complex specialisation of
humanity.
If you find a lump of protoplasm you cannot tell
whether it is a whole or a part; if you divide it, its parts
make wholes and prosper as before. Very low life-forms
may be cut into fragments, and each develops whatever
it lacks and makes a new whole. There is little differen-
tiation here. But if you find an eye, a tooth, a claw,
you are at no loss as to whether it is a whole or a part.
If it were a whole, it would be able to maintain and
reproduce itself. Being a part, it can do neither. The
eye is a remote, highly developed special organ, of no
use to itself; able only to serve the complex organism
of which it is a part; and nourished and maintained
only by that organism. This condition is absolute
proof of organic life as distinguished from individual.
Apply this proof to society. Society consists of
numbers of interrelated and highly specialised functions,
the functionaries being individual human animals. So-
ciety develops them—they could never have been evolved
in solitude. As easily conceive of independent eyes,
rolling around and doing business by themselves, as of
independent teachers, carpenters, dentists. Society
maintains them, as the body does the eye; intricate
90 HUMAN WORK
labours of many others feeding, warming, housing, pro-
tecting the teacher, while he teaches.
Alone he might hunt, and “ support himself” as a
separate animal; as if, conceivably, the eye could re-
turn to a protoplasmic condition and soak up a living
somehow ; but as an eye it would cease to exist; and he
would cease to exist as a teacher. The teacher, teach-
ing, cannot support himself. His time, his strength,
his enormously specialised skill, are spent in teaching,
and the society which made him and which needs him,
necessarily supports him. ‘Teaching as an activity is
not predicable of individuals. It is a power to transmit
the social gain in intelligence and knowledge among
the social constituents. No solitary individual could
have attained this knowledge and experience; and, if he
had it, he could not teach it to himself. Teaching is a
social function; a very elaborate and long-developed
social function. ‘The teacher is an extreme instance of
the social functionary. Other than as a social func-
tionary he does not exist.
This test may be applied far and wide, in every trade,
art, science, or business; no human occupation escapes
it. Whatever a man can do separately for himself, an
ape can imitate. Whatever a man does which is worth
calling human is done collectively and for others, it
is a social function. He may work alone at his business,
but the tools he works with are the fruit of slow social
evolution, and the work he does is done for others. He
may retire to the forest and think alone, but he thinks
on the problems of human life; no personal affairs can
CHAPTER FIVE sj!
occupy the energies of a human brain; and the brain
he thinks with is a slow social product too.
The evolution of the interdependence of social func-
tion is as clear as that of the interdependent physical
functions of our separate bodies. As early animal
forms have few and simple functions, gradually
evolving those more delicate and complicated, so do
early societies have few and simple arts or trades,
and similarly evolve them. As society progresses
the trades flow wider, dividing and subdividing as
they go, until we have the exquisitely sublimated
special skill of the modern worker; and at each
step of the process the organic relation tightens as
well as widens; the specialist is less able to “ take
care of himself,’’ and the others are less able to do with-
out the specialist.
‘“¢ Every man to his trade ” voices our popular recog-
nition of this law, and ** Jack-of-all-trades and master
4
of none” shows the true merit of the “ all-around-
man.”
We now come to a third, and in itself a fully suffi-
cient proof of the organic nature of society—not of
the social organism as a useful figure, an illustration,
an analogy, but as a literal biological fact. Here are
a number of separate animal bodies. Each is a group
of interactive organs, each does business for itself with
no need of combination with another, save in the tem-
porary union of sex with sex, and of mother with child.
These creatures are individuals. Here again is a
number of apparently separate animal bodies. But
92 HUMAN WORK
each has in his head an organ which cannot perform its
functions alone; an organ which for its healthful use
requires contact and exchange with similar organs
lodged in other bodies. |
This organ is the brain. That degree of brain de-
velopment which we call “ human” is only found in
creatures socially related; it is not individual brain
power, but social. The human brain, for health and
usefulness, for its normal life, requires a number of
human beings with whom to feel, think, and act. We
can, it is true, physically isolate a human animal, and
maintain his animal life; but his human life—. ¢., social
life; his “ feelings” and “ thoughts,” the whole field
of brain activity—is injured.
The human brain is the social organ; it is our medium
of contact and exchange. Set a man in absolute solli-
tude and his brain is affected at once. Cut off from
the contact which enables it to freely receive and dis-
charge its supply of social energy, its action becomes
increasingly morbid. In proportion to the complete-
ness and duration of the isolation the brain is injured,
and ultimately ruined.
We know the effect of solitary imprisonment, or of
being cast away alone on some remote island. Short
of this we know the progressive effect of degrees
of isolation. The lighthouse keeper knows—they put
two men in lighthouses most removed from social
touch; and even that is a dangerously “ short circuit ”
for the social organ to act in. The solitary shepherd
knows, on the wide waste plains of Australia or Texas.
CHAPTER FIVE 93
The hermit or recluse of any age, the separate dwellers
in old houses in the country, any human creature who
lives alone, is injuriously affected in brain action.
This is not saying that mere privacy is harmful—
that is a necessity for the social brain; such tempo-
rary solitude as shall enable it to work out its special
contribution to our common thought, and to rest from
the forceful social currents. But however solitary the
student or author, the product of his labour is for
others, and must reach them; his brain must connect with
the others, though at long range.
In this is another side of the proof of our mental
collectivity. The poet feels for humanity, the student
studies for humanity; the discoverer, inventor, all work
for humanity. (This does not refer to the pay they
expect, and their attitude toward it, but to the work
itself.) All through our history we see the great-
brained men who thought for the world, moved by a
quenchless impulse to transmit this thought to the
others, to pour out into the common stock the product
of their brains. This they did because they must—
even when loss and injury, ostracism or martyrdom
followed. It is the compelling functional necessity of
the brain to discharge into other brains, as well as to
seek from them its vast and varied stimulus.
In more immediate and commonplace instances we see
the same law. The difficulty of “ keeping a secret,”
z. €., of voluntarily retaining stimulus; the necessity of
* relieving one’s mind ”—a perfectly fit phrase, as much
so as its familiar physiological analogue; the value of
94 HUMAN WORK
the confessional; and, commonest of all, the vivid in-
terest of each human brain in the affairs of the others;
all these show the collective nature of that organ.
The most ordinary woman, gossiping with her neigh-
bours, manifests this social necessity for contact and
exchange, however low. ‘*‘ Mind your own business!”
we cry, and cry in vain. No brain advanced enough to
be called human can possibly find full use and exercise
in contemplation of one person’s business. It must con-
cern itself in the business of the others, their common
business.
The human brain is a social organ. Human thought
is a social function.
Approach this fact along lines of evolution. The
brain, like all other organs, is called for by conditions
and developed by exercise. Simple conditions, simple
exertions—low brain. Enlarge and elaborate the con-
ditions—increase the exercises—and the brain develops.
Observe here, within human history, how we have de-
veloped the brain of the dog by such change of condi-
tion and action.
In every form of animal life you find an exact re-
lation between the range of activities of the creature
and his degree of brain development. This is neces-
sarily so, as the increase of activities is what produced
that degree of development. The simple activities of
the clam need no brain, and have none. The complex
activities of the fox need a complex brain, and have it.
Everywhere this exact proportion is found until you
reach the human animal.
CHAPTER FIVE 95
There is no relation whatever between the individual
human being’s bram and his dividual activities. But
there is the same inexorable law of development by
which alone to account for this highest of all brains,
and the same relation is plainly to be seen between the
social brain and its social activities. No conceivable
activities of one biped, through however many genera-
tions, could have developed the brain of the architect,
for instance. He has the power to think a church. He
cannot build a church—never could—never could have
even wanted one!
The growth of many men, for many ages, brought
their common needs, their power of common action, and
their brain power to co-ordinate it. You need no power
of co-ordination to run one individual animal; the need
for social activities developed the social brain. The
single human animal could have only needed a single
shelter; could have so only built a single shelter, and so
have only thought a single shelter. The power of one
man to think for many men to do, is a distinctly human
power, and evolvable only by the common doing.
In our collective relation we have developed a capac-
ity to think, focussed perforce in some individual brain,
for the working point of Society is the individual; to
think, to the advantage of thousands of people for
thousands of years.. This organic capacity cannot be
accounted for on an individual basis. |
The laws of natural evolution work to develop in
each organism the powers which it most needs; steadily
raising the efficient type. The human animal mani-
96 HUMAN WORK
fests powers of no earthly use to himself, relatable in
no way to his personal needs, inexplicable on any indi-
vidual hypothesis, but plainly useful to Society, relat-
able to the Social needs, perfectly explicable by the
Social hypothesis.
Veet NATURE OF SOCIETY (If)
Summary
Social organism a natural life-form. Confusion from
arbitrary and superficial distinctions. Social functions
not physically hereditary. Village type. Earth-limits.
Social life m Individual. Natural law under “ imperial-
ism.” Mistakes of social functionaries. Why society
was developed. Tendency to revert. Wider conscious-
ness and actwity of Society. Social Soul. Race-
memory. Joy a social quality. Size of social feelings
and actions. Early decoration. Fund of power.
Social consciousness in young persons. Happiness of
right social relation. Social nourishment, rest, exer-
cise. What are limits of social organism. No material
really solid. Human connections. Detachment of
human individual only temporary. Apparent para-
doxes. Ea-man. Smaller human relations. Family,
Church, Army, City, Nation. Appearance of world-
consciousness. Order of importance of function.
Change in relative value. Ethics the physics of social
relation. Egoism right for individual. No basis for
ethics in individualism. Collectwism of Christian-
ity. Social life immortal.
Vien
THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (II)
Tue Social Organism is as natural a life-form as fish,
flesh, or fowl. It has been naturally evolved, its proc-
esses and appearances are as natural as those of any
other part of creation. We do not recognise it because
of the interference of that ancestral brain; and we are
further confused in looking at it by our arbitrary clas-
sification, resting on old and false ideas.
As physical geography is confused to a child’s mind
by the demarcations and contrasted colours of the map
of political geography; so is the natural organic rela-
tion of Society confused in our minds by our superficial
and artificial ‘‘ social distinctions.” We have estab-
lished social distinctions and relations on lines of phys-
ical connection, such as birth; whereas physical rela-
tionship has no similitude with social relationship; or
of political connection, as nation or party; whereas,
again, there is no resemblance; or on even more fantas-
tic lines of sex, of caste, of creed, or of the amount of
money possessed.
These arbitrary distinctions are no more social and
legitimately organic than Indiana is yellow and Ohio
blue. Legitimate social relationship is functional. It
is that relation in which we serve each other. Its classi-
fication is on lines of industrial evolution, together with
99
100 HUMAN WORK
the gradual development of those later functions of
government, education, art, and science which follow
the industrial. In the evolution of government the king
was a normal functionary; his kingship being his
power to act as general chairman of his assemblage of
people, and, in very early days, as leader in battle. To
make kingship hereditary was an arbitrary classifica-
tion ; social functions not developing in lines of physical
“a line of kings ”
heredity. You can no more make
than a line of poets or surgeons. If you do it, arbi-
trarily, you injure society by inferior service. That
was the conspicuous result in the king line. |
In pre-social times there was merely the protoplas-
mic mass of undifferentiated human stock. Arising
from this we have first the sporadic growth of: villages,
resting on their common food activities, and then the
appearance of larger groups, and more and more di-
verse functions, elaborating in mutual dependence.
The natural limits of an organic social relation are
the limits of its essential functions. ‘These were once
quite narrow—each little community being self-sup-
porting. To-day we are rapidly approaching a social
organism limited only by the earth. Our interdepend-
ent functions are now international; and natural de-
velopment on those lines is only prevented by our false
classification on unnatural lines, with the resultant en-
deavour to maintain the self-supporting independence
of the smaller unit.
The more highly organised a society, the more range
and force have its component individuals. America is
CHAPTER SIX 101
in the American. Athens was in the Athenian. Where
else? A member of some tiny social unit on a remote
island does not carry the same amount of social effi-
ciency as a member of a larger unit. This is the under-
lying natural law which makes for general human
unity, but which finds its misguided and injurious
expression in our doctrine of ‘* imperialism.”
The normal line of enlargement is simply an exten-
sion of functional exchange, a sharing of the highly
specialised activities and advantages of the larger so-
ciety by the smaller. Every step of this really benefi-
cent process has been accompanied throughout history
with the utmost injury to all parties, by conquest and
carnage, by insane pride and cruelty; because we did
not understand the process in which we were the actors,
but governed our conduct from ideals of egoism, lo-
calism, and rapacity. This is especially plain in our
time, because of the enormous growth of industrial
functions, and their inevitable spread around the world.
The process is natural and in itself means increasing
benefit to all society; but, being grossly misunderstood
by the highly specialised individuals who carry out
these processes, the beneficent results are mingled with
terrible evils. The social functionary who is evolved to
distribute some food, oil, or other necessity to a larger
radius of consumers than ever before, takes advantage
of his position to sequestrate a larger share for himself
than was ever before possible. The “ master minds ”
who are able to manage these giant industries are so-
cial products, called for and produced to meet the larger
102 HUMAN WORK
social needs of our times, but they are still governed
by economic theories suitable to a South Sea Islander,
and so we have that ‘“‘ malfeasance in office,” in social
office, which so shamefully blackens the face of nations
to-day. |
It is a fair inquiry to demand of the organic theory
of Society a reason for its development. Why should
independent individuals have been led into a combina-
tion which inevitably involves some personal loss and
injury, and has been made to involve such an enormous
amount?
How are we to account for this higher life-form, in
the iron economy of nature? Many have seen the vis-
ible benefit to individuals which comes of the Social re-
lation. The fact that we help one another is plain
enough; but even that sum of benefit does not seem suf-
ficient to justify the social sacrifice; the loss of indi-
vidual liberty, the life-long labour at one thing; the
growing distance between social man and the free,
simple, contented individual animal.
“T think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so
placid and self-contained.
“IT stand and look at them long and long.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
“They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
“They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
“Not one is dissatisfied; not one is demented with the mania
for owning things.
“ Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived a thou-
sand years ago.
“Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.”
—WHITMAN.
CHAPTER SIX 103
This reversionary tendency is strong in us all, the
easy backsliding to the physical freedom and _ inde-
pendence of the hunter and fisher. The immediate
stimulus, the immediate action, the supply of one’s own
needs by one’s own efforts,—this is a delight to almost
all of us; and some are constantly straggling and drop-
ping behind the procession, to revert to the wood life of
primitive man and his pre-primitive forbears, to “ turn
and live with the animals.” Current literature is full of
this social reversion to-day, this “ call of the wild,” this
tempting invitation to give it all up and go back to the
beginning.
It is so much harder to pour your life’s energies a
life long into the Social pool, and perhaps get very little
out—and then not what you want. What deep inevi-
table gain has been at work for which relentless nature
has slowly driven us up the path of Social Evolution—
' a steeper, bloodier, more agonising road than any
other creature has had to tread?
The gain is this (and observe that it is precisely of
the same nature as that which has driven the contented
annelid up to all the excitement, difficulties, and perils of
the higher mammalian) : the Social Organism manifests
a wider range of consciousness and activity than any
other life-form. 'The human animal, alone, is but a
beast; and has but the narrow egoistic range of con-
sciousness and activity. As part of Society the human
animal becomes the organ of a consciousness and an
activity so vast that in its limitless expansion we have
been able to conceive of Life, Death, and Immortality,
104 HUMAN WORK
of Time and Eternity, of Humanity, of Liberty, Jus-
tice, and Love. What we call the human soul is de-
veloped in the social relation. It is Human indeed, i. e.,
Social. It is Ours.
In the organic division of labour of a physical body,
the life processes are so developed that more exertion
can be made and more sensation received, than in the
same amount of living matter in lower forms. A hand,
taken separately, would have a certain contractile
power; but as connected with the arm it has far more,
as connected with the general nervous system more yet.
In that transmission of energy which seems to be the
business of the universe an increasing complexity of
mechanism is evidently called for because it has been
produced and maintained. Society is the most complex
mechanism of all. It can receive, store, and discharge
more energy than could its constituents in equal number,
but unorganised.
The social consciousness is the widest and most sen-
sitive receiver and transmitter so far produced. ‘*‘ We
look before and after, and pine for what is not.” This
is a social quality. As man grouped and grew together
came that development of race memory which gives to
family, to nation, to Humanity itself, its dignity and
power. It is “Our” past, “ Our” present, “ Our”
future. The life of Humanity is one, and it is that life
which we as individuals feel; which makes us able to
suffer more, enjoy more, and do more than any other
kind of living thing.
In failing to recognise the real nature of society
CHAPTER SIX 105
and put ourselves in right relation to it, we have largely
checked the flow of social energy and perverted the
social instincts and social processes; therefore, to our
morbid egos, social relation often seems to bring us
more pain than pleasure. We admit that we cannot
live out of it—the sufferings of the hermit are greater
than those of the misplaced social constituent; but we
live in it blindly, in cramped and distorted positions,
rendering our social service under the crushing pres-
sure of the egoistic concept, and getting but a faint
and occasional sense of the potent joy of true social
relation.
The transcendent happiness possible to Humanity,
to all humanity, by virtue of its humanness, is a thing
of which we practically know nothing. Consider the
range of sensation in an individual animal. This is
most strictly limited to his physical activities and such
psychic impressions and expressions as pertain to his
narrow field of being. The female animal has the joy
of the maternal function, that great first step beyond
the Ego consciousness; a pleasure and a pride partly
physical and partly psychic, but limited forever to the
individual young. The male animal sometimes shares
a fraction of this parental feeling. In certain creatures
which live in groups or herds there seems to be a very
vivid common consciousness on some lines, as shown
by the instantaneous nervous transmission in a stam-
pede; and in the highly socialised bee and ant there
appears as highly developed a collective sensorium.
But, though collective, it is on a low plane; the im-
106 HUMAN WORK
pressions it receives and the expressions resultant all
pertain to the physical wants of the individual con-
stituents, however elaborately these wants are met.
With us, in our social relation, there is an enlarge-
ment of the sensorium past any measurement we can
yet make. The size of our sensations increases as more
and more individuals are tuned to respond to the same
stimulus. ‘There is room in what we call “‘ the human
heart ” for a passionate exaltation of feeling that finds
no parallel below us. This immense influx of stimulus
prompts us, yes, forces us, to a commensurate expres-
sion; and if this expression be true, it puts in concrete
form the intense feeling and then continually transmits
it to as many people as are sensitive to that form of
expression. ,
Take an illustration on a very early and simple plane.
A happy, primeval squaw, not hungry, not cold, not
afraid, and feeling in her already growing social con-
sciousness both the pleasant memory of these conditions
and the pleasant assurance of more, has more stimulus
coming in than her body can sit quiet under. No
human being can ever be as stationarily contented as a
ruminating cow, his income of sensation is too great.
That small, perfect circle of life of the individual
beast,—hunger, effort, gratification, rest,—is changed
to an endless upreaching spiral in our social relation.
It is not only that our hunger is greater because one
can hunger for all; because no human being can be
really satisfied till all are satisfied; but that our stim-
ulus is greater, and calls for endless discharge. So
CHAPTER SIX 107
our happy squaw is moved to transmit her press of
feeling; she must discharge it in action; and she does
so in some decoration of her jar or basket. This
decoration is an embodied joy, and, being fixed in
visible form, it then transmits that joy to as many as
behold it. It is a little fountain of social energy.
A society, from its inception, multiplies the range
and depth of sensation, and commensurately, the work-
ing expression of its members. From age to age, as
this great common fund increases, is the power to feel
and the power to do increased. More and more people
thrill to a common impression ; the rising wave of force
prompts to ever greater expression, reaching more and
more people.
Thus, in a normal society, the individual life in-
creases in sensation, in power, and in joy in an ascend-
ing line that as yet suggests no limit. In pain and
degradation also, the pessimist will protest. Of course,
as an accompanying possibilty. But’not as an essen-
tial condition. Such as exists is merely owing to our
wholly unnecessary and mistaken action. The pain is
a transient and needless thing; the immense joy is in
the real nature of society.
The young human creature, as he begins to grow
from the individual animal period into social life, feels
this intense current of force, the vast and varied desires,
the vaster energies ; but he does not know what it is, nor
do his teachers. Ego-bound systems have cradled and
nurtured him, an egoistic family, an egoistic economy,
an egoistic religion cut off every avenue of growth;
108 HUMAN WORK
and the stimulus of the whole world throbs and beats in
vain, forced finally into some dog-trot routine, wherein
he thinks to “ earn his own living,” to ‘
4
‘support his
own family,” to “save his own soul.”
The tremendous thirst for happiness which the young
human being feels is perfectly natural. Young indi-
vidual animals show no signs of such disproportionate
desires. ‘The tremendous ambitions of young people
are equally natural. Human life is in them the mul-
tiplied and accumulated life of all humanity for all
time, and all it needs for the same peace and poise
which is the portion of ‘‘ the lower animals” is free
expression.
The nature of Society is no mystery. Our relation
to it is no mystery. It is simple, orderly, healthy, and
in its largest manifestations either peacefully uncon-
scious or sublimely happy. Every person who has by
blessed chance found his right place in social service,
who has the range of contact with his kind which he
needs, and the range of activity which he needs, may
be as calmly happy as any browsing cow, as ecstat-
ically happy as any soaring lark.
What does any creature need for right growth?—
nourishment, rest, exercise. Society needs these too.
We, in social relation as social beings, need the social
nourishment, rest, and exercise. Social nourishment
comes through contact with the world’s supplies, perma-
nent and current. We need to “stock up” in our
common heritage of information, of beauty and use
and power. Whatever we need which lower animals —
CHAPTER SIX 109
do not need is social nourishment. The desire to know
of the healthy young mind, the desire to travel, the
desire to see people, these are forms of our undying
hunger for that which belongs to us as human beings.
When all of us, from our youth up, are put in easy
connection with the unlimited supplies of Society, we
shall all be socially nourished. Observe that these
things are not consumed while they nourish, but remain
continually refreshing as many as can partake of them.
Every member of Society should have free access to
all social products: art, music, literature, facilities of
travel, and education ; and would so absorb his preferred
nourishment as unerringly as do the cells of the body
from the whirling profusion offered by the blood.
Social rest is another imperative need of human
beings, in proportion to their humanness. The more
highly specialised and intense the service of the indi-
vidual the more he needs to break off the connection and
rest; rest from being social; go back and be animal
awhile; find in pure ease and relaxation, in irrelative
physical exercise, and in the beautiful family relation
(one of the safest and loveliest life-forms sheltered by
society ), that complete rest which will enable him to
return to his social relation with renewed vigour.
Vacations of all sorts—the country home, the hunt-
ing trip—tell of this need, and the nervous collapse of
highly socialised types when denied it is a common
occurrence. Simple and primitive trades, if not ex-
cessive in hours of labour, are far less exhausting.
Breathing goes on continuously, digesting with regular
110 HUMAN WORK
frequency, but thinking has to rest. A healthy social
life will allow for the natural periods of rest for all
its members.
Social exercise is but the use of our best and highest
faculties to the largest end. A Gladstone confined to
directing envelopes would not be exercising his social
faculties to their full extent. Napoleon as a chauffeur
might have killed quite a number of people, but would
not have been really satisfied. Exercise is life’s first
law, and full exercise is required for full development.
This is where in our imperfect degree of socialisa-
tion we suffer most, for lack of this full use of our
social powers, especially women. We are frequently
overworked as‘ individuals while underworked socially,
another condition accounting for morbid, nervous
states. A man with capacity for managing a high-
grade department store would lack exercise to a most
injurious degree if he were kept as a country grocer’s
clerk, though he might ruin his eyes with bookkeeping
and his back with lifting barrels. The full use of our
largest faculties in the largest relation—that is social
exercise.
Another thing which prevents us from recognising
_ the nature of Society is our almost unavoidable mental
limitation to the perception of the stage of development
represented by the animal organism.
“If Society is an organism,” we say, “ where are
its feet and hands, its eyes, nose, and mouth? Where
is its skin? Where does it begin and leave off?” And
not seeing any large beast stuffed with persons like
CHAPTER SIX 111
the Trojan horse, or some vast man-filled man like the
wicker-built sacrificial cage of the Druids, we deny the
~ existence of the alleged organism.
Organic life is not limited to existing forms. As it
has developed so far, it has been in the line of increas-
ing freedom and fluency of relation. The constituent
cells of vegetable matter are held together less rigidly
than in the pre-organic mineral formation. In animal
matter the relation is more fluent yet. And in social
matter, so to speak, it is yet more free and movable.
Yet, if you look down upon the earth as one with some
vast microscope studying the life of mould, or monads,
you will find that the human particles are connected
inexorably. Remember that even in minerals—if you
can see largely enough—the atoms whirl alone. They
are held in relation by laws of attraction and repulsion,
and that relation is close enough to form to our senses
a solid body.
Human beings are not webbed together like frogs’
eggs, but they are held together in definite relation
by laws of attraction and repulsion, like the constitu-
ents of any other material body. The stuff that
Society is made of is thickest in great cities, and as it
develops these dense and throbbing social ganglia
grow and grow. In wide, rural areas the stuff is thin
—very thin. But watch the lines of connection form
and grow, ever thicker and faster as the Society pro-
gresses. The trail, the path, the road, the railroad,
the telegraph wire, the trolley car; from monthly
journeys to remote post-offices to the daily rural de-
112 HUMAN WORK
livery; thus Society is held together. Save for the
wilful hermit losing himself in the wilderness, every
man has his lines of connection with the others; the
psychic connection, such as “ family ties,” ‘¢ the bonds
of affection,” and physical connection in the path from
his doorstep to the Capital city.
The social organism does not walk about on legs.
It spreads and flows over the surface of the earth, its
members walking in apparent freedom, yet bound in-
dissolubly together and thrilling in response to social
stimulus and impulse.
Before Society grew at all we were but human ani-
mals, maintaining and reproducing ourselves like any
other animals, but with no connection, no common life.
They were of no faintest use to one another, but quite
the contrary, being legitimate competitors for a free
supply, and so naturally hating and destroying one
another. As Society grows the connection between its
members grows and thickens and differentiates. Men
are of increasing use to one another, no longer com-
petitors in any legitimate sense, but combiners in com-
mon production and distribution, and so naturally
helping and loving one another. Those who still com-
pete and destroy are but survivals from the earlier
period, mischievous relics and back-numbers. All Social
evolution is the story of the development and improve-
ment of the connective tissues of Society, from lan-
guage, the great psychic medium, to steel rail and wire,
the infinitely multiplying physical medium. This con-
nection and interaction of the human animals is the.
CHAPTER SIX 113
most conspicuous fact about them, and that connection
is by every test organic.
Another and similar reason for our denial of the social
organism is the fact of the temporary detachableness
of the individual human being. Men visibly walk about
on their own feet, going apparently where they will,
and no examination discloses a Siamese band between
one man and his brother man. So when the sociolo-
gist says there is no such thing as a separate human
creature,—that a solitary human creature is a contra-
diction in terms,—the average individualist replies,
**See Robinson Crusoe!” This answer shows great
lack of biological knowledge. The splendid growth of
education in our day, which is beginning to teach our
children dynamics as well as statics, laws as well as
facts, will soon remove this ignorance.
If I say, ‘‘ There is no such thing as a tree without
roots,” it might be replied, “ But there is! See my
Christmas tree?” Yes, it is there for a little, but it is
not really a tree, it is timber; it cannot last, nor grow,
nor reproduce its kind.
I may say, “ There is no such thing as a man with-
out a head,” and someone reply, “ But there is! See
this gentleman on the dissecting table and his head on
the tray yonder.” That is not a man, it is a corpse.
I may say, “ There is no such thing as a finger without
a hand,” and it be replied, “‘ See this one here in alco-
hol!” That again is not a finger, it is but a corpse.
If you join a severed finger quickly enough, it will grow
on again. If you return a severed man to his society
114 HUMAN WORK
soon enough, he will grow on again. So in this per-
fectly true statement, “There is no such thing as a
solitary human creature; it is a contradiction in
terms”; the presentation of a man on an island or in
a prison cell is no answer.
Though cut off like the finger, he does not instantly
deliquesce and disappear. His connection with the
society which evolved him being severed, he may con-
tinue to live as an animal, but is in process of decay
as a human being; he is an ex-man. Our connection
is so subtle, so fluent, each human brain being so large
a storage battery of social energy, that we can separate
for a time with no loss. But make the separation com-
plete and the humanness dies.
We have been deterred also from seeing the larger
and more vital human relation by the smaller and
more arbitrary. Perhaps the most conspicuous of
these is the Family, often called the Unit of the State.
Now the family is not a distinctively human relation
at all; many varieties of animals, especially among
the higher carnivora, have families, with monogamic
union, too, where devoted parents strive and suffer to
provide for and protect their young. A _ perfectly
normal and necessary group is the family, and one
proved best for successful reproduction of the species,
but not a social unit at all. The individual is the social
unit, combining to develop the structure and functions
of Society.
Families never combine, they can’t. Families take
no part in social relation. Each family has its own
CHAPTER SIX 115
structure and functions, its own interests, its own pur-
poses, and these are frequently in direct opposition to
the social good. Just as Society offers a surer, safer,
higher life to the individual, and thus makes possible
that inordinate egoism which is so serious a danger; so
it gives the same opportunity to the family and allows
of a wider, deeper, and more intense familism than is
possible among sub-social animals.
It is most interesting to watch the slow struggle of
the true social relation to establish and extend itself
against these natural obstacles, as in the successive
overthrow of Patriarchism and Feudalism by the State.
The City as a social group has much easier recognition
with us than larger entities. Civic consciousness began
early and found its splendid flower and fruit, as well
as its iron limitations, in Greece. National conscious-
ness is now quite well established, having the same ad-
vantages and disadvantages as the Civic, only on larger
scale. To-day we are beginning to feel the largest
consciousness of all, the truly Human, in whose un-
bounded growth and beautifully progressive develop-
ment the petty limitations of all earlier forms are
slowly disappearing. ‘“‘ What are your national dis-
tinctions? ” an inquiring Englishman asked me. ‘ The
time is past for national distinctions,” I replied. ‘* The
time is coming for the people of the world, and Ameri-
cans are the first of them.” |
Then, too, we have been so occupied in the specific
local function of Society as to miss that general
grouping and balancing which made them all possible.
116 HUMAN WORK
Take that vast and varying social function the
Church,—organised religion,—appearing very early in
the dominance of savage priestcraft, finding its height
in the resistless Hierarchies of Egypt and Palestine,
and struggling ever since to hold its failing sway.
Take the Army, another very early, very strong, and
very hard-dying social form. It is still with us, brilliant
and loud, an increasing evil in the fast-growing indus-
trial life of to-day. See the Soldier scorning the
Merchant in the Middle Ages. See the Merchant
directing the Soldier to-day. His time of pre-eminence
is past.
So in course of social evolution one and another
organic group has been developed, each tending to
excess by the law of inertia (and social inertia is the
most long-winded we know), yet all inevitably sinking
into place in the smooth, complex interaction toward
which we are moving. Men, specialised to the social
service, in their several lines, yet knowing not what
they served, have limited their enthusiasm to their spe-
cialty, and striven to make the Church, the Army, the
Law, Art, or what they call Business, their supreme
end.
The real social organism includes them all, and
relates them all in order of importance. This order
of importance may as well be laid down here, as quite
essential to an understanding of the nature of Society.
The standard of measurement used is that of evolu-
tion, “ lower” or “ higher ” being marked in that line
of progress which leads always from the less to the
CHAPTER SIX 117
greater, from the simple to the complex. Relative im-
portance may perhaps be measured downwards: a
stomach is more important than an eye, because you
cannot live without it. But the eye is “ higher ” than
the stomach, a later developed and more specialised
organ.
So in social evolution agriculture is more important
than literature, because we cannot live without it; but
literature is higher than agriculture as being later
developed and more highly specialised. The social
organism has followed in its evolution the same path
as earlier life-forms, developing first the simpler and
more immediately vital processes, and later those more
delicate and finer organs which are needed to fulfil the
uses of its progressive life. And as, in physical evolu-
tion, we find now one and now another function of
dominant importance to the creature, so in social
evolution we can trace the varying value of social
functions, the military and religious processes of early
societies gradually giving way in importance to the
industrial and educational processes of our own times.
Most valuable of all, to our so long religiously
moulded minds, is the effect of this recognition of the
nature of society upon Ethics. Vague indeed, com-
plicated, mystical, difficult to understand, have been our
gropings after this great science. Ethics is the Science
of Social Relation; it could never be understood by
individualists.
There is no ethics for an individual except to main-
tain, improve, and reproduce himself. A consistent
118 HUMAN WORK
and remorseless egoism is right for the individual
animal; through it he fulfils the law of his being; —
through it he improves his race. So we, wishing to
improve a breed of cattle, consistently and remorselessly
select and train and breed from preferred individuals,
neglecting or destroying the inferior ones. So do mis-
taken men, not appreciating the nature of society, urge
a similar stern stirpiculture upon us, and would have
us neglect or destroy our defective members and breed .
only from the best.
But when we have a social animal to deal with, as
the bee, different laws operate, or, rather, the same
laws on a larger scale, a higher plane. It is the best
swarm now to be selected; and the value of the swarm
depends not so much upon the size and vigour of its
individual constituents as on how they work together.
There is ethics in a hive, laws of collective behaviour.
There is ethics in Society, because it is a collective unit.
Ethics, to Society, is what physics is to matter;
ethics is the physics of social relation. Physical law
holds material constituents together in those combina-
tions and relations which make the material bodies
we know... Ethical law holds social constituents together
in those relations which make the social bodies we know.
But we, not knowing the social body, could not
know its laws. We have striven in vain to predicate
ethics of individuals. You “ ought” to do so? Why
“ought” I? Because it is “right.” What is
“right ” ? Whatever God said. And what did God
say? What these ancient gentlemen have written in
CHAPTER SIX 119
their ancient times. And if I do not believe what the
ancient gentlemen wrote? There is no answer to this
except the somewhat fatuous one of ‘so much the
worse for you!”
The writings of the ancient gentlemen were not sus-
ceptible of proof.
Then came Christ, talking sense. He grasped the
nature of Society and preached its laws. Ye are all
members of one body and of one another. You shall
love your neighbour as yourself; that is, recognise him
as really part of what you are part of—all one self ;
and the love of self becomes mutual love as we see what
Self is to a Human Creature—Our Self. Christ saw
and said all this, and did it, which is more; lived,—as
far as one individual could,—true to his social relation,
faithfully fulfilling his function to that great living
thing, though its immediately surrounding constituents
very naturally killed him.
That great Christian concept of mutual love and
service is good ethics; it is scientific; its truth and value
can be proved; it works. Had we grasped and applied
it a good many painful centuries might have been
saved us.
But we, our minds still darkened by the beast-concept
of Egoism, trying to personally own the human soul
and save our piece to all eternity without caring what
became of the rest of it; we, with our personal God
and his personal Son, and our personal damnation or
salvation to consider, have very generally ignored the
theory and practice of Christ, and made of him merely
120 HUMAN WORK
an article of faith by which to maintain our precious
Egos forever and ever. And this in the face of his
*“* Whoso saveth his life shall lose it; but whoso loseth
his life for my sake [man’s sake, the sake of the whole |
shall find it!”
When we realise the nature of society we shall come
nearer to understanding the teachings of Christ than
we have done in twenty centuries of sublimated self-
seeking. In recognising it we rise at one step from
the dark and narrow limits of the personal life, that
poor animal existence, with its common animal wants
and their fulfilment; with its animal loves and hates,
hopes and fears, pains and pleasures; with its brief
period of animal life, cut up into changeful patches
of infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, and age, and
take our true place in social life, which is immortal.
Whether it dies off the earth in a million years or so
we do not know yet; since it was born it has not died,
but grown and grown continually. This wide, rich,
glowing field of consciousness includes the animal life
and maintains it in a higher and better condition than
ever before, but its real distinctive range of feeling is
far beyond that.
All noble and beautiful emotions we call ‘*‘ Human ”
are social and immortal. All the distinguishing
abilities, the power and skill and ingenuity that we call
‘* Human,” are social and immortal. ‘“ I” am born,
grow up, and die. “I” am a transient piece of meat,
enjoying food and sleep and mating, hunting and
fighting.
CHAPTER SIX 121
But “ We” are more than that. We together con-
stitute another “* I,” which is Human Life. That was
born gradually, many long ages back, and is now
slowly growing up. In that human life, that common,
mutual, social life, are all things that make us human.
When we enter consciously into that great life we are
indeed immortal, ‘* saved,” indeed, from primeval lim-
itations of the animal ego.
VII: THE SOCIAL SOUL
Swmmary
Our “common sensorium” the “human heart.” All
human feelings common. Action and reaction between
body and spirit. Cat and Sheep. Mob spirit, civic
spirit, etc. Effect of mstitutions. Effect of imdus-
tries. Confusion from Ego Concept. Prominence of
paimful processes. Widening social consciousness.
Collective pleasure greatest. Team-work. Effect of
position of women. Sea-combat in industry. Altru-
ism and Omniism. “Self” an extensible term. Or-
ganic relation. Progressive injury of egoism. Effect
of special industries on altruism. Sailor, farmer,
miner. Household labour. Men more altruistic than
women. Religion has not understood altruism, which is
a natural social mstinct. Man with tail. Nature of
“charity,” transfusion of blood. Selfishness and
socialness. My soul, our soul. Social needs. Ineffi-
ciency of personal gratification. Longitudinal eaxten-
sion of the soul’s life not satisfactory. Must widen
our life, our soul. The Social Passion. Names do not
affect facts. Social life evolves social love. Social
imstinct im duty, in work. Social ascetics. Human
nature Social nature.
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VII
THE SOCIAL SOUL
Some deny the organic concept of society on the ground
that we human beings have no ‘
But we have. The most conspicuous and distinctive
fact in our psychology is precisely that common sen-
sorium. We call it in ordinary speech “ the human
heart,” or “the human spirit,” or “ soul,” and quite
correctly. It is human, and “ human ” is “ social ”; it
‘common sensorium.”
is the social soul.
The individual feels it, inasmuch as the brain, our
medium of sensation, is lodged in an individual head;
but what he feels is a common feeling, not a personal
one. He has of course his purely individual range of
sensations, emotions, promptings to action; but these
are felt also by any other animal, they are not
** human.”
All our distinctive human feelings are in common,
are transmissible, belong to us collectively, not individ-
ually. So markedly true is this that we have labelled
our most visibly collective feelings “humane.” Com-
mon feeling is human feeling, and that great sum of
higher consciousness we call the soul is the human
soul.
Psychological terms are all vague and slippery to
handle; but we can clearly observe in any living thing
125
126 HUMAN WORK
these two departments—the spirit and the body. While
they are together the thing lives, works, goes; when
divided the body gradually disintegrates.
We observe, too, that once a specific allotment of
spirit makes to itself such and such a form, that the
form continually reacts upon the spirit and modifies it.
Each animal as we know it has a spirit exactly suited
to his body, evidently the result of long lodgment in it.
The sheep has a spirit suited to his body, the cat has
a spirit suited to his body. Each can do what he wants
to and wants to do what he can.
If we can imagine the two transformed and trans-
spirited,—the spirit of a cat in the body of a sheep
and the spirit of a sheep in the body of a cat,—it is
plain to see how grievous would be the condition of
that beast. It would want to do what it could not,
and could not do what it wanted to. Spirit must fit
body, or body fit spirit, or the two disband and that
creature is dead.
This relation holds in the life of Society; but as
that life is large, complex, enduring, and comprises
within it not only the lives of its constituent individuals,
but the lives of its constituent institutions, the facts are
not so easy to follow. Taken historically it may be
observed thus: from the small, early social forms of
the tribe and its villages up to the nation and its cities
we see this relation of body and spirit. ‘ A body of
men” of any kind that lives, 7. ¢., works, must have
a common spirit or it cannot so live and work.
The loosest mob must have some transient but com-
CHAPTER SEVEN 127
pelling spirit to hold it together, else no mob. The
smallest village has its common spirit; and the largest
city—the largest nation—must have its common spirit,
to live, to grow, to work. We are familiar with some
terms of these facts; we know, appreciate, and con-
demn the absence of ‘the civic spirit.” We admire
and reward ‘ public spirit.” We have to deal with
the facts of Society’s organic life, even while those
graveyard brains of ours are still crowded with the
monuments of dead concepts.
In popular literature and oratory we freely handle
“animated by a common spirit,” ‘* the
such terms as
national spirit,’ the “spirit of our institutions,”
“Vesprit de corps’’; but we have not set our minds
to work to grasp and relate these terms in their full
meaning. We are familiar also with the reactive
modification of social forms on the social spirit; seeing
men of all characters enter some definite institution and
come out all more or less altered to one distinctive char-
acter, the academic, the military, or whatever; and to
us the largest, newest, most gratifying proof of this
is the effect of our American institutions on the people
of all nations. In organising this nation we embodied
the best spirit of the time in a certain form of gov-
ernment and invited all men to come and enter the new
national body. They did, and a more marked and
rapid modification of spirit by form history has never
shown. Come from wheresoever they may, their chil-
dren enter our educational, their parents our industrial
and political institutions; and they forthwith become
128 HUMAN WORK
Americans, manifesting our virtues—and our faults—
with startling rapidity. The effect is strongest on the
young and composite races, and weakest on the older
established stocks, as the Chinese and Hebrew, but it
is perceptible in all.
In smaller instance we all know the effect of a given
school or college on those entering it,—either teacher
or learner, but especially the learner, as more young
and impressible,—as shown in ‘‘ the Harvard spirit,”
or that of Oxford, or of Yale. When fighting was
the dominant activity we had the natural growth of
fighting bodies, elaborately organised, and of a com-
mon fighting spirit which completely overmasters the
individual spirit of its constituents. If specific re-
ligious practices are pursued we have the appearance
of a religious body and its accompanying spirit.
Once more, a small and literal instance: if a charitable
body is founded,—an “ institution” in that limited
and unlovely sense,—in the “ inmates,” both officials and
beneficiaries, speedily appears the spirit of that body,
and a very disagreeable one it is. Wherever inter-
dependent functions are established appears organic
life; a common body to perform these functions, a
common spirit to co-relate them.
The social spirit is a common consciousness developed
by common activities, and appearing in us in propor-
tion to the extent and interrelation of those activities.
To share in it demands of the individual, male or
female, a share in the collective activities which con-
stitute human life.
CHAPTER SEVEN , 129
Activities performed by one’s self alone, for one’s self
alone, or one’s immediate physical relatives, are not
distinctively human, and do not develop the human
spirit.
An agricultural population manifests certain traits
in common the world over. Distinctions of blood and
of religion are in abeyance before the unifying force of
a common industry as a modifier of character. Fisher-
men, or sailors, or miners, or traders invariably show
marked traits in common, however otherwise differen-
tiated.
If all men followed one industry we should have one
principal character; but fortunately our social proc-
esses are increasingly varied. There does arise, how-
ever, a steadily widening field of common character as
the traits demanded by all industries alike increase
among us. All industries require peace and self-con-
trol; a regard for law and for organisation; and these
tendencies steadily improve the social spirit as we leave
savagery farther and farther behind.
Commerce requires honesty and accuracy, and stead-
ily develops them, though commerce is more open to
certain retroactive influences than the directly product-
ive processes. Productive industry, being the eco-
nomic necessity which brings us together, is the source
of our social spirit, and that spirit is constantly mod-
ified by changes in the forms of industry.
Our social consciousness is of slow and partial de-
velopment, as is easily explicable. The highly devel-
oped personal consciousness which the most primitive
130 HUMAN WORK
savage brought with him into social relation, and which
occupies the same field of sensation as the wider social
consciousness, has operated to prevent easy recognition
of the latter. The social pleasures and the social pains
we took to be personal and sought or avoided them
as such. Even the most sublimated and morbidly
acute social consciousness, as shown in a passionate
philanthropy, is still diagnosed by some as a form of
self-gratification, so persistent is the dominance of the
egoistic concept.
Another reason is that as our external activities, re-
quiring’ conscious cerebration, are more perceptible
than our internal ones, so we were far more easily im-
pressed by the external activities of Society than by its
deep-seated organic processes; these external ones were
more telic, partook more of the nature of personal
actions, and were readily thought to be such.
A third and very strong force operating against our
recognition of social consciousness is that it so gen-
erally hurts. So long as our organic social processes
went on normally they were unconscious. Individual
man, well fed, well guarded, reproducing the race in
peace and comfort, sported in the sea of social well-
being and failed to observe that there was such a thing.
But let any industry become inflamed, or paralysed,
or arrested, and the pain is felt far and wide. .No one
likes to be hurt. The more socially we felt our pain
the more it hurt, of course, being bigger. To be
hungry one’s self is one thing—to feel a famine is an-
other. People with the most social consciousness suf-
CHAPTER SEVEN 131
fered most, so long as social processes were not healthy ;
and, therefore, our effort has been to resist the in-
crease of social consciousness.
We say “ mind your own business ”—** don’t concern
yourself about other people,” ‘let the other man
walk.” We try not to feel the famine in India, the flood
in China, the ignorance in Russia, the cruelty in Ar-
menia, the crimes and casualties, the deformities and
diseases of our own great cities. But in spite of our
natural reluctance to a widening of the sensorium that
thrills most to pain, it is widening in spite of us.
More and more every year we are feeling common
evils, and seeking to remove them. It is not that “I”
am seeking to relieve “‘ my ” distress and improve “* my ”
conditions, but that “ we,” in institute and associa-
tion, club, congress, and convention, are rousing more
and more to a consciousness of ‘‘ our” distress, and
seeking methods by which “ we” may improve “ our ”
conditions. This marks the growth of social conscious-
ness. A pleasant thought here is that as fast as social
conditions improve so fast does social consciousness be-
come an avenue of pleasure instead of pain, and so we
shall encourage instead of oppose it; thus the improve-
ment will widen more and more rapidly.
Something we see already of the larger joy obtain-
able in social conscioysness, in our pleasure in one an-
other’s work. I do not mean in personal consumption
of it, so to speak, but in our satisfaction in the achieve-
ments of “ our ” business men, “ our ” “ scientific men,”
* our ” inventors, mechanics, artists, discoverers, teach-
132 HUMAN WORK
ers, and the like. ‘“‘ We” take pleasure and pride in
what “ we ” do—requiring social consciousness.
Children’s games show the natural development of
this feeling in the human being. are those most
dustry, and those least ‘ humane’
primitive in industry, down to the savage who has
only the rudiments of either industry or humanity.
Altruism is recognised by religion as a virtue and
urged upon us, but it appears in us only in propor-
tion to our social progress in interrelated service. Our
own principal religion, Christianity, is altruism incar-
nate—but it is not altruism understood. It preaches
altruism as a virtue and a duty, but it does not show
altruism to be a natural product of certain industrial
relations and urge upon its followers their entering
upon those relations as the chief means of developing
altruism.
Religion has not showed us the naturalness of altru-
ism. It has taught that it was natural for man to be
142 HUMAN WORK
selfish, and that to be unselfish was a continual struggle,
needing the grace of God to attain it. When we learn
at last that the social instincts are as natural as the
personal, that they are evolved under the same biologi-
cal laws, that our failure to manifest them in due pro-
portion is due to unnecessary social conditions quite
within our power to change—the burden on man’s con-
science will be lifted forever.
We shall learn to lay no false stress on altruism as a
lofty and difficult virtue, but see it to be the spirit of
civilisation; and the lack of it, the uncivilised egoism
still so prominent and evilly active, we shall perceive to
be merely an anachronism, which needs only to be recog-
nised to be despised, and only to be despised to be out-
grown.
A man still maintaining a visible egoism in a period
of dominant altruism. would feel as uncomfortable as
aman with a tail. and those broad divisions Hate, Fear,
tender passion,’
Envy, Remorse, Ambition, Grief, Revenge. Also some
special gust of intensity in minor lines of feeling is
distinguished by the same word, ‘‘ a passion of grati-
”» “a passion of re-
tude,” ‘*‘a passion of loneliness,
bellion,” or of avarice.
Our words climb slowly along the facts, changing
as our perception changes, and always behind. Heat
as a fact we observed and used long before we knew
what to call it, if, indeed, what we call it now is any
more true than it was before. But, whether “ a fluid ”
named Caloric, or ‘‘a force’? named Heat, the fact
which we all know and use remains the same. It did
its work in the world as fully before we came as after;
before we named it at all as after. But to us, to our
consciousness, the thing does not exist until we see it, —
and, seeing’, name.
“The maternal passion” is as strong a force in
mother-wasp and mother-whale as in the most sophis-
ticated and analytic mother-human. These passions are
simply accumulations of stored energy along certain
much-used lines, and serve to keep up a steady flow of
the desired energy when there is no immediate stimulus
CHAPTER SEVEN 149
to call for it. In the maternal passion, for instance,
long ages of iron experience have developed a certain
average of watchfulness and care even when the young
are visibly safe, and a surprising fund of power and
fury in defence of the young even when the exciting
cause is comparatively small. It keeps up a safer
average of care and defence than if the feeling were
merely reactionary, and has therefore been developed in
surviving species.
Society, the vast and varied organism in which we
live, calls for a devotion more single and fearless than
that even of the mother; for a steady average of
service and a sudden fund of fury in defence, a love and
care and courage higher than any heretofore required ;
and as it needs such a feeling it gets it. Those societies
having it most highly developed survive. We have
called it many names; let us now give it another, the
Social Passion.
We are most familiar with its branches, minor and
local, and with its blazing heights of expression; but
the governing line of feeling is as simple as the animal
mother’s. She, for the sake of race-preservation,
must feed and guard and teach the young, therefore
she manifests the maternal passion. We, for the sake
of race-preservation, must feed and guard and teach
each other, therefore we manifest the social passion.
One common form is what we call “the sense of
duty.” A single animal has no “ duty,” he acts and
reacts under direct stimuli, and so in large measure does
the savage. But social maintenance requires a steady
150 HUMAN WORK
service without immediate and apparent cause; an even
standard of merit in the work done; a reliability in the
fulfilment of the allotted task, and, at times, a tremen-
dous fervour of exertion and heroism. The “ feeling ”
in us which urges to these acts is as deep and unreason-
able as any other “ feeling ’”’; it is a genuine passion.
The irritation of a mother at any criticism of her
child, however plainly merited, is perfectly paralleled by
the irritation of the citizen at any criticism of his coun-
try. The instant rush to the rescue of an injured “ fel-
low creature,” co-creature, member of the same great
body, is as blind and instinctive as the mother’s rush
to save the child. It finds its most familiar and acute
form in the soldier “ dying for his country.” Devo-
tion to “‘ a cause” of any sort, a class, a club, a corps,
a union, the intense ‘“ co-ability ” of the human
creature, this is but manifestation of the social passion.
The hero, the statesman, the patriot, the public
saviour and servant of any sort are conspicuous
examples of this feeling at its height; the reformer and
religious leader, from the most mistaken enthusiasts to
the greatest prophets and teachers, are all exponents
of this mightiest of forces, the social passion. A
blind, deep, instinctive pressure, a must in the very
blood, a feeling bred of centuries of social contact and
interdependence, this is what kindles the great hearts
who live or die to serve the world. |
Where it touches the present subject is in its relation
to Work, of which indeed it is the immediate conscious
cause.
Lae ee
CHAPTER SEVEN 151
The maternal passion does not manifest itself merely
in bursts of wild self-sacrifice, but speaks plainest in
the patient, steady labour with which it serves the
young. So the social passion, while most conspicuous
in Horatius at the bridge, is as valuable in the engineer
at the lever, or the steersman at the helm.
The Love of Work is one great manifestation of the
Social Passion. ‘The maternal function urging to ex-
pression, this gives the rich joy of nursing one’s child,
and that almost inconceivable torment of the black
past where the starving baby cried before the chained
mother’s bursting breasts. The social function urging
to expression, this gives the rich joy of work accom-
plished and the aching, quenchless misery of work
denied. Fulfilment of function, that is Work, and,
forbidden, the poor functionary aches like a tied leg.
We may trace this suffering from work denied
through all the uneasy contortions of “ the leisure
class” to the final surrender to that social paralysis,
ennut. Healthy physical impulses, checked in nat-
ural expression, twitch and cramp the unused member.
Healthy social impulses, checked in natural expression,
twitch and cramp in similar agony and distortion.
Always the impulse to do—the human instinct, the
social passion. ‘Then the inhibition from mistaken
theories and false ideas, the individual checking his
healthy social impulses as perversely as the religious
ascetic checks his healthy physical impulses.
And as the ascetic, bottling his life up, froths off
in wild visions and fanatical activity, so the social
152 HUMAN WORK
ascetic lives in a whirling rush of useless exertion and
excitement, always seeking in what he calls “ society ”
that true social contact and social action which he
never finds. And as the body of the ascetic wastes
and dwarfs and deforms under the unnatural life his
gross delusions bring him to, so does society suffer under
the diseased conditions engendered by this fatuous
mistake.
More firmly and reassuringly we can trace the social
passion in its true expression. Clear and strong it
has left its mark on every age, and rises steadily with
our rising socialisation. The co-consciousness with
its beautiful result in love; “ a fellow-feeling makes us
wondrous kind’; one touch of nature makes the
whole world kin”; the co-activity and its resultant
virtues and abilities; the need for expression of those
* co-abilities ”; the urge toward exertion, ultimately
seen to be in the social interest, but pushing from within
as a passion; this feeling it is which made Palissy the
Potter break up his furniture to insure his glaze; which
drove Galileo to his studies in defiance of the Church;
which fed the fire with prohibited books and gave up
martyrs by the score to die because they would let out
what was in them; they must. f
We see it clearest in the arts and sciences, in the
inventor, the explorer, the teacher of new truth. But
what drives these conspicuously specialised social serv-
ants to their work is the same force which holds the
steersman to his wheel, the engineer to his lever, the
sentry to his post: the power of functional expression ;
CHAPTER SEVEN 153
stronger in us than any other force, as our social
nature is stronger in us than the nature of the beast.
If we would recognise our “ human nature” to be
our * social nature,” and that what we have so scorned
and pitied as “ poor human nature” is not human at
all, but merely animal,—ego-nature,—it would alter
our whole range of thought on this vital matter.
The social spirit is not “ poor,’”’ but bounteously rich
and strong. It rises grandly to meet great emergen-
cies, but is felt most continually in our impulse to work,
to do what we are made for, what we are together for;
that which constitutes the primal condition and line of
development for human life.
Meus THE SOCIAL BODY
Summary
Likeness between spirit and form, mutual modification.
Love modified by form. The soul human. The body
of society our manufactured thmgs. Bones of dead
societies. The thing made. Animal’s things all grow
on him. Society secretes its material form. The thing
marks the age. Axe-man, swords-man, pen-man, etc.
Value of detachability of tools. Potentiality of human
body. Value of exchangeability of tools. Vehicle of
common use. Reaction of thing made on user. Body
a machine we have to learn. Thing promotes further
action. Growth in work. Cloth. Effect on life.
Value and effect of machines. Pleasure of transmit-
ting energy. Mistaken objection to machinery. Re-
version to “hand work” foolish. Social progress con-
ditioned by mechanical. We are now capable of far
better living and have the means for it. American ad-
vance. Machine does for society what the cerebellum
does for the body. Our power to facilitate social prog-
ress. “Truth m art” and “ better housing.” Re-
strictions due to false concepts, not to conditions.
VDL
THE SOCIAL BODY
WE have seen that in every living creature there is a
close and vivid likeness between its spirit and its form,
between body and soul. Given such a spirit and it
tends to evolve such a form. Given such a form and
it tends to evolve such a spirit. The form must limit
and modify the spirit.
Fortunately forms can change; and spirit, to grow,
continually discards old forms and makes new. If
anything succeeds in fixing a given form unchanged,
so is the spirit within it imprisoned and checked in
growth forever. It is for this reason doubtless that
the primal force has been so busy making its endless
procession of forms. First we have the universe set
whirling with great suns and their spattering planets ;
then the planet flames, crackles, cools, crusts over, and
so fringes out in all manner of soft green, and follow-
ing these we have life cut looser, freer, in animal forms;
lastly the social.
Imagine the sun as loving; it can but shine and glow
to express that love. The dog loves, and can but leap
and lick and wag his tail, fetch and carry, watch and
fight to show it. The man loves, and in the manifold
activities made possible by his form, by the special de-
velopment of the brain, he can express that principal
157
158 HUMAN WORK
force more deeply, widely, fully. The spirit of every
living thing is expressed through its form and limited
‘by it. 7
Humanity, if a living creature, has a soul and a
body. The soul we all know; we call it rightly the
human soul. Where is the body of that soul? Not in
our little bundle of arms and legs—we had that in full
career before the human soul was possible. That is the
body of an animal, capable of expressing as much
spirit as any animal, perhaps a little more than a large
ape. If we had no medium of expression but these
physical bodies there could be no Society, no Humanity,
and no social soul.
That last and best expression of creative force finds
its material form in the things we make in the manu-
factured world. Take from a society its body, the
structure of brick, stone, and iron, wood, cloth, leather,
glass, paper,—all that elaborate compound of materials
in which we live,—reduce it to a mere congregation of
naked animals, and what would ensue? ‘Those animals —
would either rebuild in desperate haste the material
forms in which alone Society exists, or they would relapse
into individual savagery. If too small a group, or too”
highly specialised to reproduce the social body to live
in, they would be unable even to revert to savagery and
would simply die. ‘The Social Soul we have seen to be
a common consciousness developed by common activ-
ities. The Social Body is a common material form, also
developed by common activities. Both appear in propor-
tion to the extent and development of those activities.
CHAPTER EIGHT 159
As house and vehicle for the spirit of an animal has
been slowly evolved the cunning mechanism of bone
and muscle, with all its constituent organs, in which a
man lives. It is but a combination of chemicals and
minerals, and when the soul is out of it they disintegrate
and revert to lower combinations. As house and
vehicle for the spirit of society has been slowly
evolved the more cunning and elaborate mechanism of
wood and cloth, brick, stone, metal—in which Hu-
manity lives. It too is but a combination of chemicals
and minerals, and when its inhabiting humanity is gone,
it too disintegrates and reverts, though more slowly.
The bones of dead societies remain to us in stone
and glass and pottery, as do the bones of extinct ani-
mals.
An animal life, once started in the germ, goes on
growing, 7. ¢., making to itself a body suitable to its
soul. If you arrest the growth of the body,—if, for
instance, a baby’s head were cased in iron,—you would
arrest the growth of the soul. It would have one,
potentially ; that is, it would if its brain had room for
it, but actually you would have checked it. So the
social life, once started, goes on assimilating material
particles and recombining them in mechanical form,
enlarging its functions as it enlarges the structure
through which alone they become possible. Society
builds its body for good or ill.
A piece of human creation—a manufactured article
—is the record, the physical manifestation of our
humanness. By these things, reading backward, does
160 HUMAN WORK
the ethnologist reconstruct the vanished races as the
paleontologist reconstructs a vanished beast from fos-
sil bones. A bead, a knife, a needle, some torque or
bracelet, a broken jar,—and the lost people rise be-
fore us.
Man, to be such and such, requires such and such
things, and evolves them as naturally as the sea-beast
makes its shell. It grows from him—so do our manu-
factures grow from us. Society secretes, as it were,
the manufactured article. We need clothes, for in-
stance, a purely social need. The individual animal
does not need clothes. He carries his wardrobe on his
back. Never a solitary creature in clothes. Clothes
are for other people more than the wearer. Other
people are required to make them. Even in a one-
generation-reversion, as of some hunting hermit of
modern times,—back he goes to buckskin! He cannot
shear and card, weave and spin, bleach and dye, cut and
sew. Back he goes to borrow some other animal’s
skin; and, if he stayed a hunting hermit for enough
generations, back would he go to his own skin and its
natural growth of hair.
But the increasing social faculties and desires—
the love of ornament, the sense of decency, the need
of concealment, the demand for a more fluent and
delicate expression of personality—these call for
clothes, and society evolves them through a thousand
trades.
A trade is a social function, and clothing is a social
product as hair is a product of the individual body.
CHAPTER EIGHT 161
In the thing made lies our social history so fully that,
had we a full line of specimens, we should need no
other monument of progress.
The progress of each age rests on its things: the
unchipped flint and the polished; the bronze knife and
the steel; the wonder-working wheel (how much of
social progress goes ‘on wheels”!); the bow and
arrow, the sword, the axe, the spade,—small things for
separate use at first,—and then the marvellous, monster
engines of to-day; they are at once the means and the
record of progress. There is a phase of thought which
66
despises “‘ material things,” and prattles ardently of
our “ spiritual nature.” But in steady-marching ages
of coincidence man’s spiritual nature manifests itself
through material things, and grows by means of them.
The ships of Tyre made possible that Pheenician civili-
sation which has so affected the Grecian and all that
follow. The roads of Rome knit and fastened her
Empire to the ends of the earth.
Axe-man, bow-man, swords-man, plough-man, boat-
man, pen-man,—there is a steady likeness between man’s
things and man. As there is the same likeness between
the spirit and the body of each animal, so man, having
the new, wide, aspiring, endless, social soul, manifests
its growth in ceaseless progression of manufacture, in
developing this vast body of Society. The human
soul is greater than the animal’s because it has a
greater body to live in—complex, universal.
One marvellous power that is ours by virtue of these
things is that whereas they do not grow on us per-
162 HUMAN WORK
sonally, we remain somewhat free of their inexorable
reaction.
A beast depending mainly on digging for his liveli-
hood, as the mole, is relentlessly modified to claws.
Paw, arm and shoulder, neck and head, the body, the
fur, the eyes,—he is a digger, and the spirit within
him is a contented digger, too—needs must.
Once in a permanent form the spirit accepts it and
stops growing.
Man digs mightily, but spade and pick do not grow
on him. He takes them up, he lays them down; he
substitutes the axe, the scythe, the flail. And so he
does not become hopelessly the spade-holder. Too
much of one kind of tool, and we have the “ Man with
the Hoe.”
With this rich fluency of attach- and detachability
we have sped up the ages of social evolution with an
ease and swiftness inconceivable of any other animal
whose machinery is so inalienably attached to his spirit
that it takes slow centuries to change him. This is
what gives the subtle beauty to the human body, its
measureless potentiality. Every other animal’s body
is a perfect representation of its blended activities,
greater or less. The hound, the cat, the stag, the
horse, the swan, each speaks to us of its activities, each
form is an embodied motion. But each in its degree is
final; being that motion or those motions, it cannot
be others; its personal perfection is its limit. Man’s
body is an almost limitless possibility. He is the
handle of innumerable tools. The upright, balanced
CHAPTER EIGHT 163
trunk leaves the legs free for all possible movement ;
the high-hung, wide-reaching arms with branching
fingers are ten-fold elephant trunks; he can perform
more kinds of actions than any other creature.
But the distinctive power of these actions involves
always the thing made. A collection of human bodies
pure and simple would tell you little of their social
stage. But a collection of the tools and weapons of
the man would tell you what he was and where.
With the detachability comes the great characteristic
of exchangeability, the ‘ ” of human things;
the social body is necessarily usable by all. There is
* our-ness
no vexed question of possession with the beast. His
teeth and claws are his indeed; he cannot lend or give,
and none can rob him. His “ dogness” is a little
bundle all his own, but our ‘
wide-flung tools of ours, made by one, used by another,
profited in by all. *
This is again our infinite advantage. If the protean
change of characteristics made possible to us by tool-
‘“man-ness ”’ lies in these
chest and armory were possible to any other creature
we should not hold our easy supremacy. The dying
leader of the wolf-pack cannot hand his superior teeth
to the next one, or produce sudden wings and lend them
to his followers. The distributability of our tools
gives us the limitless flux of power which is human.
One man makes swords. for a thousand, and each sword
spreads the sword-power far and wide. The needle,
the pen, al! individual tools, may be used by many in
turn, to the advantage of all.
164 HUMAN WORK
Even more do we see this advantage in anything
which may be used by many at once. Here indeed is
humanness made manifest. Men, separate men, may
swim as well as some animals, or ride a log, perhaps a
hollowed one. But man, the human creature, man
socialised, make for themself the ship, a swimming
body for the social soul, and in that one material prod-
uct of humanity les unmeasured share of our real
growth and greatness.
Only men together can make it, with ages of gradual
evolution and relentless elimination of the unfit, with
elaborate specialisation and co-ordination of effort;
only man together and in similar complex relation can
use it. And because of this larger range of usability is
its larger value. More persons can use it, and for a
longer time; it is a large and lasting piece of the social
structure. So of the road, the bridge, the hall,—
whatever is open to the largest use by the most people
for the longest time, this is of the largest value to
society ; as statue, picture, music, book. In direct prac-
tical result these common products for our common use
minimise effort and maximise gain, and in the living
miracle of their use they steadily react upon the user
and make him something nearer to the power that made
them. The shiny-bladed knife in the hand of the eager
boy cries to him to cut, to carve, to do a thousand
things; and as he uses it, skill, the human skill bred
by long ages of knife-using, is born anew in him.
Ward has shown this—achievement embodied in object.
The pillared temple, visible product of the human
CHAPTER EIGHT 165
soul in purest, proudest aspiration, reacts always on
those who come within, lifting their spirits to its plane,
to each according to his power of receiving. In our
made things lies that much of our humanness, and as
we use them we grow by that much more human; in
this reactive power lies the desirability of the Thing,
and its importance. The power of “ mind over mat-
ter” is commonly observed, but the effect of matter
upon mind, the reaction of the body upon the spirit,
is not so clear to us. We see the human spirit laying
violent hands on clay and wood and iron, and building
for itself a visible, tangible form. We do not see so
well this visible form steadily and inexorably reacting
upon the imprisoned spirit.
The made thing is the vehicle, record, and monument
of human progress. The things we make are nearer to
the human soul than is the physical body. That body
is but a machine in which our nerve currents have run
so long and intimately that the act is unconscious, and
we say “I did this,” not “ my hand did it.”
If a baby could express his relation to his body in
plain words, we should find him getting acquainted with
it, “ learning it” as one learns a bicycle or a sewing-
machine. He can make it work, but he has to learn
how, as he would have to learn how to row or shoot.
Moreover, It has its tendencies and habits with which
he has to respectfully acquaint himself that he may
promote or check or change them; the tendencies and
habits of a long-established animal mechanism, in which
the human soul is quartered. The tools and imple-
166 HUMAN WORK
ments in the use of which les our humanness are
scarcely more foreign to us than his hands and feet
were to the baby, or than some new combination of
muscular action is to the adult. We have to learn to
act through sword and spear, spade and plough, knife
and axe, as we had to learn to act through muscle, cord,
and bone, and they become as automatically natural to
us in due time.
The physical body is not an end but a means. Life
is the end, action; the body is what you do it with. So
these material forms we make are not ends, but means. —
Human life is the end, and these things are what we do
it with. The expression of force through higher
forms, that is life’s line of progress.
Our creations are all to do something in, or with, or
from. Even the most perfect form of art stands as
an inspiration to other human beings, is a means to
better action, better living for us all. Every human
product is an instrument, in using which we can more
fully express the divine spirit. A house is: not a final
end. We do not build a house as a crowning achieve-
ment and then sit and wait upon it for the rest of life—
or at least we should not! We build a house to live in,
that we may work. Human life is not a means of pro-
moting house-building; house-building is a means of
promoting human life.
Book, picture, statue, these are our fruit, our prod-
uct, evolved through us as a means of further growth.
Our “ civilised” life to-day, the consciousness of an
“educated,” “cultivated” person, is developed by
Se SEE
CHAPTER EIGHT 167
contact with the things in which previous human beings
expressed their measure of life and passed it on to us.
Some brain is born with new cellular development
which enables it to receive impressions from mountain
scenery, which scenery had hitherto. failed to impress
the less developed brain. The brain impressed must
express the force received, must transmit it in a ma-
terial form. According to its capacity it works to
do this, producing picture or poem or prose descrip-
tion. That material form continues to transmit the
impression received to those whose brains are developed
in comparative similarity, and the race is gradually
opened to the stimulus of this aspect of nature, and
by so much is greater, wiser, able to do more.
Human work, all of it, is a means to further ex-
pression. If we ask “to what end,” we can only
reply that as far as our lit circle of perception goes
life has no end. But its direction is plain, and its
method; to receive more and more of the forces of life
as the brain becomes more widely and delicately sus-
ceptible, to express more and more of the forces of life
in our work, and so further to develop that brain,—that
is the process. The savage has not brain development
enough to “ see God” with even as much as we, or as
little; he is but dimly and narrowly affected by the
currents of divine force. But such energy as he does
receive prompts him to work, and as he works he de-
velops further brain power. In working is human
growth, and in its visible forms is the permanence and
transmissibility of each advance.
168 HUMAN WORK
Take cloth, for instance, as an illustration of the
value of the thing made. Imagine it out of human
life. See its relation to the human skin, both in
clothing and cleanliness—fancy man with neither shirt,
towel, nor handkerchief! We revert at once to leather
and foul habits. No carpets, no hangings, no banners
and flags, no sheeted beds, no daintiness in eating, no
subtle play of feeling in our dress—down would go
human history backward, ravelling out to first prin-
ciples. Cloth is a social tissue which enables us to
come close and slip smoothly in our complex inter-
action. Leather means solitude and living out of
doors. Civilisation is inwoven with the twisted threads ;
textile manufacture is a social function.
These material forms which humanity makes are not
gross and ignoble, as the blind asceticism of the past
supposed; they are humanity’s living body, and should
be lovingly and reverently regarded, most honourably
and gladly constructed, as the intimate avenues of
spiritual growth for us all. Human production is
marked plainly higher than that of lower animals be-
cause it is in common. One makes alone for many to
use; or, as we progress still further, many make to-
gether for still more to use. .
Beyond even that, we construct the complex imple-
ments of further construction, and make machines.
Man’s first step up was in the detachable tool, though
but a stick or stone. From the hand-thrown stone to
the far-flung lyddite shell is a clear line of mechanical
evolution, in which each thing made held the thought
CHAPTER EIGHT 169
which made it and suggested further possibility. From
the twirling spindle to the many-loomed mill; from the
stylus to the press,—this is familiar ground in fact,
but all untrodden in its rich significance.
Nowhere have we more misused, misunderstood, and
blasphemed the laws of human life than in our attitude
toward machinery. Measured by any standard you
will, as low as that of individual physical comfort, as
high as that of the widest social service, human prog-
ress, lying in the same line as all evolution, involves
the constant adaptation of means to ends with con-
servation of energy. Most energy is spent with small-
est result at the level where the mole digs, each for
himself, with his tools growing on him. The spade is
higher than the claw, and the modern earth-devouring
excavator is higher than the spade. Some digging is
necessary for the maintenance of our physical lives.
The more human energy we spend in digging the less
remains for further development. To dig is not our
purpose here, but to grow. Therefore social evolu-
tion quietly relegates digging to the lower automatic
functions, making the mechanical organs by which the
most digging can be done by the least men, that more
and more of us may leave the level of the mole.
Of all things made, the things we make things with
are most vitally and distinctively human. Something
of the truth of this may be seen in the larger and deeper
pleasure given by the use of the higher tool, and, even
more clearly, in the higher kind of man developed by
the higher tool. The digger with the attached claws
170 HUMAN WORK
is but a mole. The digger with the detachable spade
is but an “ unskilled labourer,”
that spade but a simple smith. The digger with the
great excavator is an engineer, and its maker a skilled
and even the maker of
machinist and inventor. ‘The ox-driver is not to be
compared with the engine-driver or the bargeman with
the admiral.
Now the mole, or the unskilled labourer, may be as
“happy,” as an individual, as the skilled machinist.
But the measure of their value is in this. The mole is
incapable of further combinations. The unskilled la-
bourer is capable only of a low order of combinations.
The more specialised brain of the inventor is capable
of higher combinations. Of such as he a democracy can
be built; he is raised far along the line of social evolu-
tion. The childish, primitive pride in a “* hand-made ”
individual product is most ignoble compared to the
modern pride in a common product through complex
means.
The brain to make and to use a complex machine is
the brain to make and to use a complex social order;
and in that growing social order lies our line of duty
as a human race. In the inexorable working of our
own machines we learn law newly; as in our works of
art we learn beauty newly. Kipling has treated of this
in “* MacAndrews’ Hymn.”
The relation of our complex mechanical products
with our minds and hearts is as clear as the relation
between any animal’s spirit and body. ‘The increasing
pleasure is as clear as the increasing use. ‘* Man loves
CHAPTER EIGHT | i kygi
power.” Of course. He loves to transmit energy, to
feel it pouring through. He loves it well in his own
physical exertions: to swim is a pleasure, to row alone
is a pleasure, but to row in a racing eight is a greater
pleasure. To sail a catboat is a pleasure, to command
the flagship a greater pleasure. The captain loves his
ship, and loves to work her, to feel the complex mechan-
ism move in answer to his thought and will, and the
prompt co-ordination of all the men whose combined
efforts move the great machine. And the kind of man
who can be a good captain or a good sailor is a higher
social constituent than a South Sea Islander, though
the latter could outswim him.
Our general feeling of condemnation for machinery
is a kind of social asceticism, a reaction from our mis-
use of the social body, just as the personal asceticism
of earlier times was a reaction against misuse of the
personal body. In our blind ignorance of the real
social life and its laws, in our persistent maintenance of
a rudimentary egoism, we have claimed private owner-
ship in these exquisitely social products, and have
striven to restrict their mighty multiplication of wealth
to private consumption. Such sublime treason has
roused instinctive reaction in the public consciousness,
and we blindly include the machine in our hatred of its
vile abuse, as did the early Christian in his condemna-
tion of the body. Partly owing to this, and partly
owing to our cruel form of specialisation, we asso-
ciate evil with machinery, and, with our usual help-
less reversionary tendency, look back fondly to
172 HUMAN WORK
the time when each man or woman worked alone “ by
hand.”
These theorists should be set down in some wilderness
for a while with only their hands to help them, as a
lesson in social chronology. The hand is at its best in
the early Paleolithic period, or even back of that, when
it could do duty as a foot on occasion. As the hand
made and mastered the tool, society has grown. As the
tool became the machine, society has grown better. In
the vast machine, moved by tireless natural forces, and
guided by the specialised brain and hand, we find the
highest expression of nature’s steady tendency to
minimise effort and maximise results.
When we appreciate the true use and nature of all
this machinery, realising that by means of its measure-
less service we can now apply almost all our power to
the conscious development of society, we shall find it to
be an unmixed blessing, of value beyond our dreams.
Seeing that the social soul needs such and such a body,
and is developed with it, and that we have at last the
means of evolving that body at a speed hitherto impos-
sible, we can now utilise these unlimited forces to facili-
tate our growth with results that will make previous
historic progress seem stationary. It is not as if
we were required to force long cycles of evolution,
to hasten the steps of nature, and hurry mankind
over slow steps of necessary ascent,—we are there
now !
Society being an organic whole, social progress
being ours in common and exquisitely transmissible, the
CHAPTER EIGHT 173
material forms of that progress and vehicles of trans-
mission being ready to hand, we can, by our present |
means of rapid production and distribution of these
material forms, open the way to such swift advance
of civilisation as the world has never seen. The spirit
of modern society is capable of a plane of life far
beyond the present conditions wherein we find that
spirit gagged and blinded by the fossil Ego concept,
that body inconceivably dwarfed and twisted by the
efforts of each ego to occupy it all himself.
The right relation of spirit and body in the animal
gives health and beauty and power, and in our human
life the right relation of the social spirit and body is
as important. A healthy, growing, social life con-
stantly re-creates its body as does the physical life, and
_ our American civilisation shows this beyond all others
in its rapid adoption of new material forms and proc-
esses. The constant demand for easier and swifter
mechanism is as natural and healthful in society as it
is in a physical body, and physical evolution has moved
on that line continually.
The passing over of individual effort to the auto-
matic action of machinery is analogous to the con-
stant passing over of conscious cerebral action to the
less expensive automatic management of lower brain
centres—the development of “ habit.”” The body is
not the man, and brick and mortar are not Society ; but
their connection is as intimate and vital. And as the
soul of a man is grievously injured or equally benefited
by the condition and use of his body, so is Society
174 HUMAN WORK
affected for good or ill by the mechanica! forms in which
it lives, their condition and their use.
Recognising as the first quality distinguishing the
social body from the physical, that it is made by com- |
mon action and open to common use, and recognising
that the proper use of the body has a reactive effect in
developing the soul, we have here a means of promoting
social growth so prodigious in its scope and speed as
to be fairly dizzying. We have, as usual, felt this
great social truth, even though not understanding it,
and our groping efforts in its pursuance are seen in
two main lines: that which urges to “ truth in art ” in
our common crafts; to making things beautiful, true,
good, that all may be improved by them, and in our
blind but earnest effort to provide “‘ better housing for
the poor,” with all that that implies.
We have seen that the slum tends to make the crim-
inal, and that the school, bath, playground, museum,
library, art gallery, free access to the best products of
society, tend to make the better citizen; but we have
not seen the large and simple principle involved.
Each thing made is an embodiment of social energy,
and transmits it to the user, be it a fork or a fiddle. A
noble and beautiful work ennobles and beautifies the
beholder, listener, reader, occupant,—the user. All
especially general social structures, or those glorious
deposits of energy known as works of art, as well as
all the materials of knowledge, are valuable in pro-
portion to their free and public use.
The more people circulate in their great social body
CHAPTER EIGHT 175
the more socialised they become. This we are doing
much to promote in our free schools, libraries, museums,
etc., but we do not begin to appreciate the possibilities
involved, being impeded, as usual, by our prior con-
cepts, Want theory and Pay concept in particular.
The increased facilities of travel of our time, for in-
stance, which should be enlarging the mind of the
public as well as increasing its wealth, are greatly re-
stricted in application by these errors. The people
who administer our railroads are allowed by popular
consent to “
their property as bound in the first instance to “ pay ”
own”? them, and as owners, regarding
them, they maintain as high a list of charges as “ the
traffic will bear.” When we recognise locomotion as
a prime social necessity, these ribbons of steel and their
_ rolling-stock as part of the social body, and traffic and
travel as social advantages rather than individual,—
yes, social necessities,—then we shall encourage the
widest possible use of these facilities.
We have but to recognise the vital connection be-
tween the growing social body and the growing social
soul, and that the soul not only makes the body, but is
made by it, to apply our immense material gain to our
whole people. ‘The results will be what our discouraged
and patient minds are apt to call “* too good to be true.”
Peete NATURE OF WORK (I)
Summary
Familiarity of Work confusing to true thoughts, our
general attitude due to false concepts. Veblen’s
theory. Theory of Hebrew religion. Occasional dim
perception of value of work. Effect of ego concept
and pay concept. Effect of organic concept. Effect
of Want Theory. Main thesis of author on Work.
Physical organic action. Heart, as _ illustration.
Social organic action. Individual consciousness no
obstacle. Social circulation. Men not self-support-
ing. Waste, parasitism, disease. Evolution of Work.
Universal transmission of energy. Appearance of
consciousness. Feeling and action. Pleasure in sen-
sation and action. Society the greatest life-form,
greatest action, greatest pleasure. Social nourishment
for worker, and true adjustment. Accumulation of
social energy. Limitation of individual animal. Geo-
metrical increase m social efficiency up to the sixth
power. Increase of stimulus. Increase of terest.
Storage and transmission of society energy. Work of
art. Devotion to country. Bee and Ant. Proper hu-
man relation and action. Child’s instinct to work. Re-
sistless working instinct of great specialist. Radium.
The teacher, scientific discoverer, etc. Our workers
not supplied with social energy. Extinction of London
labourer. Want Theory again. Our dinner. Social
nutrition collective. Discharge of surplus energy not
an exertion. |
IX
THE NATURE OF WORK (If)
Worx is the most prominent feature of human life.
So large a majority of human beings spend most of
their lives at work that the few diseased and defective
members of society who do not need scarcely be con-
sidered. As usual, the prominence and constant insist-
ence on the facts about work have prevented our think-
ing much about it, and, when we did think, our mistaken
basic concepts made us think wrong. Our general atti-
tude toward work varies somewhat in accordance with
race, place, and time, but is traceable, easily enough,
to certain general root ideas.
One line of racial feeling on this subject has been
most fully and ably treated by Veblen in his * Theory
of the Leisure Class.”” He shows how labour, being
first performed by women and then by conquered oppo-
nents made slaves, was despised by the early mind, and
how, further, the ability not to work, involving power
to make others work for you, soon became an ingrained
principle of pride; further, how the leisure class, an
aborted part of the body politic, has preserved these
errors of the early mind and added heavily to them by
the increment of tradition and long association. This
accounts satisfactorily enough for a large share of the
popular feeling about work.
179
180 HUMAN WORK
It is perhaps as part of this feeling that the ancient
Hebrew religion, postulated by a people of pastoral
ideals and Oriental temperament, takes the extreme
ground that work is a curse, a punishment, visited upon
man for his sins; and that Eden behind us or Heaven
before us has its main attraction in ceaseless idleness.
This mischievous error, incorporated in so important
a religion, and forced upon the human mind for so
many centuries, has done incalculable harm. In vain
have later and wiser religionists protested that “ labour
is prayer,” a divine curse is not to be whiffled away by
any such pretty phrase as that. It is not enough to
receive a new truth, you must discharge the old lie, if
your mind is to work straight.
- Our attitude toward Work rests also, however, upon
other errors than these, the most fundamental of which
are the Ego concept and the Pay concept. Under the
first we relate our ideas and sentiments about work to
the individual, in which position no understanding is
possible; we might as well try to understand mastica-
tion in relation to a tooth. Under the second, we think
only of the “ reward of labour ”; and have carried this
absurdity to its logical height in classing the indus-
tries of the world under the phrase of “ getting a liv-
ing,” as if the maintenance of the worker were the
object of the work. This again is as absurd as if we
believed that chewing was done in order to maintain
teeth.
When we accept the organic nature of society, the
whole proposition changes, we then see all varieties of
CHAPTER NINE Lin a
work to be social functions, performed in the interests
of the whole; and that the maintenance of the indi-
vidual normally depends, not on a reward for the value
or amount of the work he does, but on the general
health of the social body and his having proper access
to its currents of nutrition. Yet even this perception
will not wholly free us while we are still muddled by
the pay theory, still holding that a man or a so-
ciety only works in order to get something, and that,
in justice, there must be a return for the effort ex-
pended.
This common assumption is accepted as basic by our
political economists, and their further theories, sys-
tems, and alleged laws all rest on it. It is called the
Want Theory. Fully and fairly stated the common
definition of work, based on the want theory, is this:
Work is an expenditure of energy by the individual in
order to obtain the means to gratify a desire. This is
almost universally believed. We accept it so fully that
one of the steps taken by missionaries to arouse in-
dustrial energy in savages is to make them want things.
As further manifestation of our belief in it we hold
that if people were supplied with anything they did not
work for, did not previously expend energy to get, they
would, of course, cease to work. On this ground,
honestly and logically held, every step toward free
public provision for popular need has been opposed.
Before going further in discussion of our common
errors, Jet us lay down the main thesis of this book, ad-
vanced as the true theory of work.
182 HUMAN WORK
It is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by
Society in the fulfilment of its organic functions. It is
performed by highly specialised individuals under press
of social energy, and is to them an end in itself, a con-
dition of their existence and their highest joy and duty.
The difference between the two positions is best seen in
studying organic action in lower forms. Consider, for
instance, the action of the heart in our bodies. Here is
a small muscular machine, which keeps up a violent and
continuous activity for some seventy years. Why?
and How? Why should this organ work so hard and so
incessantly? My stomach gets some rest—my legs get
more—but this member is always at work. What want
does he gratify by it? Is he any better paid than leg
or stomach?
If the heart were an individual, and were pulsating
for pay, he might conceivably stop when he got what
he wanted. ‘‘ Why continue to beat?” he might nat-
urally ask. ‘ I have what I was beating for!” And if,
further, you supplied this independent creature with all
it wanted, free, it would quite naturally cease beating
altogether.
But as an Organ, which is quite a different thing
from an Individual, the heart does not act on any such
basis. It has been slowly developed through long ages
of physical evolution, to perform a function of no use
to itself, but of primal use to the body to which it be-
longs, the body which made it, the body without which
there would be no such thing as a heart. This func-
tion being so absolutely essential, the heart is fitted to
CHAPTER NINE 183
beat steadily on from birth to death; when it ceases
beating the body goes out of business altogether.
Now a separate animal the size of a heart could not
keep up any such long-continued regular exercise, it
could not furnish sufficient energy; but the large body
which needs a heart can run one, it has a supply of
energy on which all its organs draw. The work of a
living organ is not at cost of its own energy, but of
the energy of the entire organism. Society, as an or-
ganism, has a vast, a practically unlimited supply of
energy, and the human being, as a member of that
society, is supplied with it.
The discharge of this energy is so far from costing
the individual anything that, on the contrary, any pre-
vention of his normal work causes him acute suffering.
And as in the physical body, each special organ, in
order that it may devote its entire life to the physical
service, is by the circulation of nutrition saved any ne-
cessity for caring for itself ; so in the social body, each
man, in order that he may devote his entire life to the
social service, is similarly provided for by the distri-
bution of economic products; our social nutrition.
Here we are at once met by existing beliefs, loud-
voiced. ‘* Men are not ‘ organs,’ they are conscious in-
dividuals. Men are not—oh! palpably not—provided
for by any such beneficial process of social distribution
of nourishment; each man must take care of himself or
starve!”
The individual consciousness of men is not denied,
it is that, misconstrued, which has made these common
184 HUMAN WORK
social functions work so ill, and hurt so in the working.
To that same individual consciousness this book is di-
rected, urging reconsideration of the facts, readjust-
ment of the industrial activities. But however con-
‘“‘ organs,” their labours
scious, men are none the less
serve our common ends; not their own. It is not that
each man has some exact analogue in physiological
type, like the heart, but that each industry holds or-
ganic relations with all other industries, and that the
use and purpose of each depend on the others. The
need to be supplied is a social need, the growth to be
attained is a social growth, of no more value to an
individual, detached, than beating would be to a heart,
detached. Work is an organic function, incontro-
vertibly. 7
As to the lack of social provision of nourishment, this
again is but an error. The provision is there, the
whole of society contributing to it; the circulation is
there, our food and other goods flowing merrily across
land and sea; but there is some trouble with the final
distribution of this nourishment to the workers, which
will be considered later. Admitting the imperfections,
it remains true that the social circulation is now in
action—the shoemaker of Massachusetts eating the
beef of Nebraska, and the beef-raiser of Nebraska
wearing the shoes of Massachusetts.
No man could work, which is a social function, if he
had at the same time to “ take care of himself,” which
is an individual function. As a worker in society. he is
taken care of, but he does not do it himself. To repeat
CHAPTER NINE 185
our definition—normal human work is a discharge
of social energy along lines of special development.
The social organism lives in the fulfilment of its or-
ganic functions, that fulfilment is work; to work is to
take part in the vital processes of Society, to be so-
cially alive; not to work, not to take part in these vital
processes, is to be one of three things: First, mere dead
matter, Waste; second, a Parasite, active as a thief,
passive as a pauper; or third, a Disease, of which in
time Society must die.
With the waste products of society we are painfully
familiar, the great army of defectives, people who
cannot work, yet whom, as part of ourself, we must
support, a drag upon the Social resources. The active
parasite we know in his crude form, as the little thief,
and are beginning to detect in his highly developed form
as the big thief. ‘The passive parasite we know also in
his crude form as the idle poor, and are beginning to
suspect in the idle rich. But the disease is still be-
yond our diagnosis, though many Societies have died
of it, those morbid processes engendered by the presence
in the social body of any matter not alive and healthily
active.
These features of the abnormal working of Society
come later. Let us now study the evolution of Work.
The Universe as we know it is occupied in transmit-
ting energy. ‘The amount seems inexhaustible and in-
destructible. It rolls on interminably, discharging
warmth and light into blank spaces; and, whenever
worlds have formed, getting tangled up in a thousand
186 HUMAN WORK
shapes and sputtering mightly as it finds its compli-
cated way out through them.
A living creature has an elaborate system of receiv-
ing and discharging energy, more elaborate as the life-
form grows higher.
Force in inorganic matter has a simple channel, vary-
ing the monotony by occasional explosions. Force in
the vegetable world is freer and learns new tricks—
building tall trees and flaming out in blossoms. Force
in the animal kingdom has wider range; these life-
forms can do more things. ‘They have more ways to
express energy, and more ways to receive it. With
special senses tuned to catch various vibrations, they
respond to light, heat, and sound, to touch, taste, and
smell; their impressions are varied and their expres-
sions equally so.
Here enters Consciousness, with its extremes of
Pleasure and Pain; the director of action, but not its
cause. This complex engine, receiving so many im-
pressions, transmitting so many expressions, must feel,
because it acts; must act, because it feels. An Action
is a consciously directed expression of energy. A Sen-
sation is a consciously recorded impression of energy.
Both sensation and action, if normal, are pleasurable—
the conscious transmission of energy is joy.
The pleasure in sensation increases in proportion to
the extent and delicacy of the sensorium. The pleasure
in action increases in proportion to the extent and deli-
cacy of the executive mechanism. Pain, of course, is
proportionate to pleasure at any stage; meaning only
CHAPTER NINE 187
abnormal use of the same nerves, but the higher the de-
velopment of the organism the greater its ability to
avoid pain. |
The course of evolution has been to develop more and
more complicated instruments for the transmission of
energy. Society, as the highest life-form, is the most
exquisitely complex of all; it has a sensorium far
larger, and more subtly sensitive, and an executive ap-
paratus commensurate; it has a degree of consciousness
highest of all, and a proportional capacity for joy and
ability to avoid pain.
This social transmission of energy is Work. ‘The
forces of the universe flowing through humanity come
in by all our highly cultivated powers of perception,
and come out in our beautiful profusion of creative ac-
tivities—in work. The conscious transmission of
energy reaches in us a transcendent height of pleasure
by virtue of our co-ordinate action. There is larger joy
in “team work” than in the individual play. The
pleasure of dancing in companies, or the rhythmic mo-
tions of a drill, is not confined to those particular activi-
ties ; but, in normal conditions, inheres in all smoothly
co-operate exercise. The reasons why we do not feel
it in those exercises we call work are not inherent, but
purely associative; or else due to accompanying condi-
tions of a painful nature.
Normal conditions of human work require, first, that
the worker shall be well nourished physically and so-
cially, well educated to his fullest height of ability, and
well placed in the work he likes best and does best—
188 HUMAN WORK
(these two being identical). A worker, so placed, is in
no way overtaxing his own energy, but is merely giving
expression to the social energy, and finds in that
process an exhaustless joy. We are so used to con-
sider work as a drain upon the strength of the: indi-
vidual—and indeed in our artificial conditions it so
often is—that we may not at first appreciate the nature
of this fund of social energy.
Let us observe its development, comparing the power
at the disposal of a member of society with that of an
individual animal. An individual animal is a mecha-
nism adapted to the performance of certain activities,
urged thereto by certain stimuli, and governed therein
by certain instincts, and, perhaps, concepts. The
activities of the animal are limited, of course, by his
executive machinery; he has only the tools that grow
on him.
These are ingenious and reasonably effective, but
their development is slow, requiring many generations
of heartless ‘ elimination of the unfit” to gradually
evolve the fit. If his claws are not good enough, he
dies, those having somewhat better claws survive; slowly
the claws improve. He cannot in one lifetime invent
and manufacture better claws, but has to be tediously
and expensively “ selected,” the whole beast sacrificed
to the defective claw.
Further, his excellence is checked by the interaction
of parts,—all his tools being part of him, and modi-
fying each other. The more things he can do, the less
perfectly he does them; the more perfectly he does a
CHAPTER NINE 189
thing, the fewer things he can do. The beaver, for
instance, is a highly developed builder, but he cannot
run well, or climb trees. Where you find the most per-
fect specialisation of an animal’s machinery to a par-
ticular function, you find the creature practically help-
less otherwise—as the ant-eater. So we find the execu-
tive capacity of an individual animal limited, first, by
his body and its slow methods of adaptation.
His stimuli are also limited. This small machine is
kept going by its own supply of nervous energy, re-
plenished by food, sleep, air, and water. It will run —
so long, and then must rest and be “ fired up.” Special
excitants of fear, pain, or unusual hunger may tem-
porarily accelerate his activity, but he has then to rest
the longer. His executive capacity is thus limited,
second, by his small nervous energy and narrow range
of stimulus.
It is further confined, thirdly, by the narrow circle
of his instincts, desires, or ideas, if he has them. 'The
governing impulse is simple race-preservation, mingled
with the self-preserving instincts; egoism and familism
cover his range of interests. Hope, fear, desire,—all
are for self or family.
So we find in the individual animal, his efficiency is
limited by (a) his personal mechanism, (b) his personal
nerve force, and (c) his personal interests. For such an
agent work—continuous expression of energy—would
indeed be difficult. But now examine the position of
the human being.
Man’s tools do not grow on him. He has been able
190 HUMAN WORK
to evolve improved tools without sacrificing a thousand
slow generations to breed them. He adds to his executive
ability, (a) the power of numbers, and of the “ relay
race” (wild dogs have this), (b) the power of division
of labour, (ants and bees have this), (¢) the tool, de-
tachable and exchangeable.
In this comes at once an enormous saving of energy.
Where the mole has to spend not only his immediate
strength in digging, but his whole racial tendency in
being modified to digging, the man with a spade can do
far more work in proportion to his strength, and still
be able to do other things. The executive efficiency of
the man is multiplied, first, by association, again by
division of labour, and again by the tool. The tool
being not a personal adjunct like the claw, but a sepa-
rate thing, usable by many, the efficiency is again in-
creased by the exchange of tools. It is multiplied,
fourth, by the development of the tool into the ma-
chine, and fifth, by the application to the machine of
extra-personal power, of the forces of nature direct.
Thus where one man alone as a separate naked animal
could accomplish something equal to, say 5: as a mem-
ber of society his efficiency is squared by associa-
tion=25; cubed by the division of labour=125; raised
to the fourth power by the tool=625; to the fifth, by
the machine=3125; and to the sixth, by the use of
natural forces=15,625.
In view of even this much of our human efficiency,
the exertion requisite for a human creature to do his
share of our human work is so slight in proportion to
CHAPTER NINE 191
our wealth of power that it is exquisitely absurd for
us to speak of it as an expense of energy. Where an
individual animal has to pour out his full stock of
strength in hunting his prey, or, if graminivorous, in
wandering over great areas after grass; man, collect-
ive, can produce and distribute food for a thousand
by the specialised services of ten men with machinery.
The executive efficiency of humanity is raised to such
an enormous height that the spectacle of human beings
still spending their personal energy at long hours of
exhausting labour is an incredible paradox.
As far as power goes, one human being should be
easily able to “ pay for his keep” for life in a year’s
work or less. But we are by no means done with the
increase of efficiency. This five-times multiplied en-
ginery of ours would still be comparatively futile, if
the governing agent, man, had only the stimuli of the
beast. The separate animal has his own supply of
cerebral energy. It is something. It enables him to
co-ordinate his forces; such as they are, and to under-
take extreme exertion when he has to, such as it is.
He maintains this energy by breathing, eating, and
sleeping. Men can do these things too. Men, as sep-
arate animals, have each his own supply of cerebral
energy. But Man has more.
Social energy is quite a different thing from indi-
vidual energy. By as much as the dynamic force of an
elephant is greater than that of the elephant’s bulk in
monads, so is the dynamic force of a society greater
than that of the mere sum of its individual con-
192 HUMAN WORK
stituents,—and more. Social energy has been ac-
cumulating in humanity from its birth. It is not
only that co-ordinate action allows the transmission
of wider waves of force than individual action, but
that society in its organic function continually stores
force in material products, and so establishes an ever
enlarging magazine of power. This is where the social
body so aids and furthers the action of the social soul.
Each material object, so that it be a normal product,
embodies and continually transmits the force that
made it.
We are supplied, by virtue of our social relation, with
a large complex brain ‘area; the organ of social life.
That great life we partake of in using the social body,
in the immediately effective tools, utensils, and ma-
chines, and necessary material conveniences of life;
but even more as we have access to the great social
battery, the work of art. A human brain has not only
the existent sum of social energy to draw on, but the
stored energy of all the past.
The Artist, highly specialised receiver and trans-
mitter, gathers immense waves of force, concentrates
and embodies them, and those around and coming after
have permanent access to the power that moved him.
This is perhaps clearest in the art of literature; where
the thought and feeling of all time stand bottled on
our shelves, always feeding, never exhausted. In music
and painting and sculpture—in all arts—we have forms
of the same beautiful social process. |
Thus the human brain receives as stimulus such focte
CHAPTER NINE 193
of force, such soundless seas of force, that it is practi-
cally unlimited. The measure of social stimulus has yet
to be found. It passed the using point long ago, and
has never stopped growing. The human brain, rightly
supplied with social stimulus, is so fed, so fired, so
thrilled and filled with energy, that it suffers agony if
denied free discharge. That free discharge is social
service, the splendid variety and complexity of achieve-
ment in which all may find full exercise of this tremen-
dous power, and in that exercise find pride, peace, and
joy, express love, satisfy ambition, realise human life.
Thus with our endless multiplication of executive
efficiency comes a similarly endless multiplication of
stimulus—yet still we hear this prehistoric claim that a
man will not exert himself—unless he has to! The point
is, that he does have to—by virtue of being human;
that it is not so much “ exertion ” as it is relief. To dis-
charge an overpressure of energy is not ‘ exertion ”
exactly.
Further yet: the beast, behind his little foot-power
engine, with the force furnished by gobbled rabbit or
patch of grass, had no governing scheme of life where-
with to direct his small activities, save the basic animal
instincts of self-preservation and reproduction—egoism
and familism. Man,—Citizen, Patriot, Hero,—man has
for governing plan of action, the distinctive instincts
of humanity,—the social. The animal will do much
for its own life, the mother will do much for her own
young ; but man will do more for his City, his State, his
Country, and his World.
194 HUMAN WORK
This is not a sentimental claim for what he might do,
but a plain historic reference to what he has done.
Athenian, Roman, Carthaginian, Frenchman, German,
or Englishman—latest of all, American. True, our
recognition of social duty has been narrow; consisting
principally in “ dying for one’s country ”; but that we
have done with splendid heights of heroism, and no
beast can do so much.
The bee and ant? Yes, of course, they too are
social animals, of very high intelligence. And they,
be it noted, have not this shameful fallacy that no
one will exert himself “ unless he has to,” unless he
“wants” something. With much of the same col-
lectivism, though sharply limited as we have seen by
the predominant femininity, with much of the same
specialisation, with a better developed sense of common
interest than we have, the ant and bee are types of con-
tented and ceaseless industry. Yet they have to do it
all “‘ by hand,” they have no extra-personal tools and
machinery, they have no horse-power, wind- or water-
power, steam power, or electric power. They have no
great reservoir of energy in Literature and Art. And
they have no wider scheme of life than a sublimated
ultra-organised motherhood—everything else is subsid-
iary to that function.
If humanity were perfectly healthy; if our mechani-
cal efficiency were rightly placed and fully used; if our
social energy were accessible to all, and our social in-
stincts freely developed, we should see each young
human being coming eagerly forward to do his share of
CHAPTER NINE 195
the world’s work, not under the action of personal de-
sire—or fear of penalty—but simply to relieve the
pressure! So irresistible is our growth in this direc-
tion that even under all our artificial hindrances,
against the combined resistance of religion, tradition,
superstition, habit, custom, education, and condition,
still the normal child does want to work, tries to work,
and in some cases bursts through the whole cordon of
opposition and does the work he is made for, though it
cost him his life.
We see this conspicuously in the latest and most
highly specialised forms of work, as the arts, sciences,
and most developed professions. Naturally the more
delicately special an organ is the more imperative is its
doing its own kind of work, and no other. So we have
seen again and again the people we call “ great,” they
having more social energy at command than others,
pushing forward over all obstacles to do their particu-
lar kind of work, not only without regard to the pay,
which they did not get, but without regard to the pun-
ishment, which they did get. We have tried to ac-
count for this by assuming that the “ desire”? which
actuated them was a desire for fame. We are so sure
that it must be a desire of some sort! Why is it so
difficult to admit the presence of radiating energy in a
live creature? We can see it plainly enough in “ mere
matter.”
Radium does not necessarily want something be-
cause it so continually does something.
To feel a lack—to see a desired supply—to exert
196 HUMAN WORK
one’s energy to obtain the supply and so cease to lack,
is a natural process of action, but not the only one.
Organic action differs here from individual action.
The Teacher is an exquisitely developed social func-
tionary, wholly a transmitter, using various arts
and sciences to help him, but his own art involving the
subtlest psychological skill. When this temperament
is charged with most radical truths, when the teaching
is a religion,—then we have the great souls who have
appeared again and again in history, so charged with
social energy that nothing, not difficulty, danger, death
itself, could stop them. They would teach and they
did teach, to the immense benefit of the society whose_
unconscious laws evolved them, whose conscious laws
destroyed them. The scientific discoverer has too fre-
quently shared the same fate; the inventor, the pioneer
in any change, has a hard time. ‘‘ The Push” in So-
ciety is a place of honour, but not an easy one.
Even in the more ordinary kinds of work we oc-
casionally see the strong, clear urgency of a spe-
cialised worker toward his special work, and his pleas-
ure in it; an urgency and a pleasure not related to -
honour or payment, but to the work itself. The reason
we see less of the natural impulse to work in the main
fields of labour is partly because we have piled our
ignorant contempt most particularly on the kind of
work we most needed, and partly because we have added
to our contempt the heaviest practical difficulties by
careful cutting off the general worker from his full
share of social nutrition. The rank and file of hu-
CHAPTER NINE 197
manity, as a result of our misconceptions about work,
are so drained of nervous energy from generation to
generation by being overtaxed in labour, and so de-
frauded of social nourishment by our system of “ pay-
ment ” based on those misconceptions, that it is mar-
vellous indeed to see the work they do under these con-
ditions, and not marvellous at all to see their steady
tendency toward pauperism, criminalism, and all disease.
Of London it is stated that when the labourer from
the country comes into the city to work, the second
generation of his line is inferior in health, strength,
and ability, the third generation much crippled and
diseased, and there is no fourth.
Under social conditions like these it is not to be ex-
pected that we shall find much evidence of man’s natural
desire to work, either general or special. As well look
for willing industry in a hospital. On the contrary, it
is to be expected that this body of people shall be unwill-
ing and largely unable to work, that they shall seek
continually to avoid work and as continually seek to
enlarge their supply of social nourishment so cruelly
cut off. It will take several generations of right living
to reimburse this part of our social stock and bring
them up to the level of social energy required to enjoy
work. But when the swift recuperative forces of
physiology have rebuilt the individual animal, and the
far swifter forces of Sociology have refilled them with
their share of our vast resources of strength and in-
spiration, and their share of the social interest, pride,
and love which mark the fully human creature, then
198 HUMAN WORK
we shall find our assumption, “no man will exert him-
self unless to gratify desire,” to lack even its present
justification.
There is no pain, no waste, no loss to normal work; it
is a free discharge of abundant social energy, either un-
conscious or accompanied by sensations of keenest
pleasure.
Let us consider this Want theory a little further.
A solitary animal cannot get his dinner without
exerting himself. If he could, he would not exert him-
self. This we observe, and then, considering man as
an animal like the others, we assume similarly: A man
cannot get his dinner without exerting himself; if he
could, he would not exert himself. Why we are so
anxious to see to it that every man shall exert himself,
a thing which evidently cannot concern the public if
he is merely getting his own dinner, is a bit puzzling.
But on perceiving that unless he exerts himself we do
not get owr dinner, our interest is excused.
Let us restate the proposition. Mankind cannot get
its dinner without exerting itself. If it could, it would
not exert itself.
Granted at once. If agriculture, manufacture, and
commerce were not essential to social life, they would
not have been evolved. But there is an immediate
difference introduced in the “ exertion” involved and
its causes. Our social nutritive processes being com-
plex and collective, require the elaborate activities of
many individuals in lines which bear no relation what-
ever to their own dinners.
CHAPTER NINE 199
Social evolution, wiser and more practical than we,
has met the necessities of the case by developing those
organic tendencies in man which urge him to his social
activities, and that always-increasing fund of social
nutrition and social energy which enables him to do his
work. The difference between an architect dreaming
great buildings and eager to build them and an animal
struggling for his food, is as the difference between the
action of the heart and the action of a hungry fox.
The fox exerts himself to supply his wants, the heart
exerts itself as a functional activity it cannot help and
without any reference to its wants.
Its wants are supplied, to be sure, but not in meas-
ured dole related to its activities. The exertions of
the heart bear relation to the need of the organism to
which it belongs, not to its own appetite. If you have
to run, your heart works harder; i¢ had no need of
extra work, but you had, and, being an organ, it per-
formed the work.
Man’s work is called for by the social demands.
Society needs Commerce, and Commerce is developed.
Society needs Art, and Art is developed. But man,
being a self-conscious individual, had to be convinced
from without as well as urged from within, else he
stoutly refused to perform his social service. ‘* Why
should I,” he asks, * if it does not benefit me? A man
works only to get something.” Before he had got
even this far in formulating his objection to work, he
was forced to it, as we have seen, by the slave system
and effectually coerced. To meet this later attitude
200 HUMAN WORK
of refusal he was forced to it by the wage system, and
effectually coerced as before. In the first case the
anti-social results of that form of labour have led to
its being discarded, and in the second case we are
rapidly approaching the same conclusion. Social
service performed under the persuasion of self-interest
is accompanied by so many deleterious and anti-social
phenomena that it is high time we adopted a wiser
system.
When exertion is recognised as a racial necessity and
a high individual pleasure, there is no longer any
weight to the first clause of the Want theory. When
it is shown that our desires are gratified by the exertion
of others exclusively, there is no longer any weight
to the second. And when it is shown that the required
** exertion ” is not an exertion at all, but a relief, a
mere letting off of the social steam pressure, the Want
theory begins to need a historian to explain it. The
only really confusing element lies in the system of
exchange now in use, the wage system, and will be taken
up in the chapter on Distribution.
Peete NACE URE OF WORK (11)
Summary
Life a verb. Vegetable life processes, animal and
social. Work is human life. A sick society. Trans-
mission of energy, pleasure in collective sensation.
Pleasure in specific function. Pain of malposition and
malnutrition. Recapitulation. Work is making, not
taking. Squaw and hunter. Maternal energy. Bee.
The motherised male. Short circuit of idividual
action. Production of food. Common defence. The
social base and ensuing variation. Attendant evils,
Personal consequences and social. Social treason.
Sim of common carriers. Contrast between effect of
industry and war. Agriculture and peace. Commerce
and honesty and justice. Work is altruistic. Steps of
development. Female origin of Work. True Human
Work has no sex connotation. Male belligerence in in-
dustry. The world and the home. Thief and pauper.
Production collective. The Social traitor. Work is giv-
mg out, not taking in. Slavery an essential transition
system, also wagery. Master, Employer, Co-operator.
Shame of work based on slavery and self-interest. So-
cial productivity has allowed disease. American atti-
tude toward work. Conservation of energy. Work
must not waste force, organic action does not. Accu-
mulated energy must be discharged. Social energy
enormous. Normal work an easy discharge. Ab-
normal work injurious. Social evolution in ease and
happiness. Effect of false concepts. Child’s delight
m work. Organic action agreeable or unconscious.
Conditions of normal work.
xX
THE NATURE OF WORK (IT)
Lire is a verb, not a noun. Life is living, living is
doing, life is that which is done by the organism.
The living of a tree consists in the action of the
roots in obtaining food; of the leaves in obtaining air;
of the sap in circulating, distributing these goods; and
in the processes of reproduction. The life of an
animal is more complex. He has a somewhat similar
internal mechanism; he breathes, circulates, and repro-
duces; but with him the fumbling root-tip has become
a paw, a mouth, a whole group of related members
wherewith to meet his needs; he has more to do to find
his food than just to poke in the dark. Living, for
an animal, involves many interesting activities, and
those activities are his life.
The life of, Society is higher and wider yet. Here
are the separate animal constituents whose life proc-
esses must be kept going, and here are the wholly new
social life processes to be carried on. Human life
involves the performance of the complex social life
processes. The plant has poking, absorbing, circu-
lating, breathing, and reproducing to do. That is
plant life. The animal similarly circulates, breathes, and
reproduces, but he “ pokes ” in a much more elaborate
manner, developing also new methods of offence and
203
204 HUMAN WORK
defence in maintaining these essential functions. That
is animal life. Man, as an animal, breathes, circulates,
and reproduces in humble pursuance of previous
methods, but as a social being not only has his nu-
tritive process become of enormous organic complexity,
but there have appeared also vast and subtle develop-
ments of special functions hitherto unknown: industry,
trade, commerce, art, science, education, government,
—all that we call Work.
In this development is human life. I do not mean
that it is essential to human life, it is human life. If
the gathering and circulating of nutrition, the absorp-
tion of air, the blossoming and fruition of a tree are
‘essential to the tree’s life,” pray, what remains as
“the life” of the tree to which they are essential?
You may truly say that breathing, circulating, and
* essential ” to an animal’s life; that
reproducing are
life, as distinct from other lives, being the more spe-
cial activities he has developed. So with the human
creature. It is essential to his animal life that he
breathe, circulate, and reproduce; it is essential to his
human life also that he perform enough varied physical
activity to keep him in good form; but it és his human
life to be “ doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” or what-
ever is his department in the social economy.
Work is human life.
Thus, as health, happiness, and beauty are found
in lower forms in perfect performance of their simpler
life processes, so in Society we find health, happiness,
and beauty in proportion to our performance of these
CHAPTER TEN 205
our life processes; a greater, far greater health, happi-
ness, and beauty in the magnificent spread and range
_ of these processes ; a far more terrible record of disease,
misery, and horrid ugliness as we fail of fulfilment.
A defective, sick, or dead plant is an unpleasant sight.
A defective, sick, or dead animal is a more unpleasant
sight. But the depth and ramifications of misery and
horror in a defective, sick, or dead society,—this is what
has made us call this fair world “a vale of tears.”
Such a pity, too! When it could be just as healthy
as a plant or animal! It is far more fun to be an
animal than a plant, more exertion and so more pleas-
ure. And it is far more fun to be a human being than
a mere individual animal, far more complicated exer-
tion and so more pleasure. With our vastly increased
capacity for happiness our misery must be accounted
for by “ failure to connect ” with the universal energy
in one or both ways. We are denied our share of
stimulus, we lack social nourishment, or, worse, we are
denied our right discharge, are not rightly placed in the
field of social action, are not doing the work which be-
longs to us.
It should be noted here that the happiness of social
action as beyond that of individual action increases in
_ proportion to its collectivity. There is a larger joy
in perfect ‘ team-work ” than in the best individual
play. Connected as we are, the sensation that thrills
through the whole audience is stronger far than what
is felt by one man alone, like King Ludwig of Bavaria
in the empty auditorium.
206 HUMAN WORK
If a man is rightly placed in the world’s work, doing
what he is best fitted for to the height of his best
powers, and if he clearly sees that by so doing he fills
his place in the universal economy perfectly, then,
granting of course that he is properly nourished phys-
ically and socially, he is happy. But if he is ill-nour-
ished he is unhappy, not power enough flowing in; if
he is ill-placed in social service he is unhappy, lacking
right lines of discharge, his energy banking up and
pushing against right doors that don’t open, and
moving very slack through wrong doors that do.
Moreover, though well-nourished and well-placed, if he
is hag-ridden by some ancient lie about work being a
curse, a disgrace, or some such idiocy, then he is un-
happy because his own mind, clogged and twisted, turns
on cross-currents of pressure that spoil the smooth
flow of energy.
To recapitulate:
Life is action.
Action is conscious discharge of energy.
Discharge of energy is pleasure in proportion to
amount, complexity, and freedom of delivery.
Social action involves greatest amount and com-
plexity, and so, with free delivery, greatest pleasure.
Our free delivery is checked by wrong conditions and
wrong concepts.
By altering the concepts we can alter conditions and
so make social action normal.
Work is social action.
It is the expression of social energy for social use.
CHAPTER TEN 207
It is essentially collective, and we find work most
highly developed among most collective creatures, as
the ant, the bee, the man.
It involves a higher degree of intelligence than the
preceding processes. All the efforts of animals to take
food are excito-motory, and either egoistic or, at most,
familistic. They are hungry, they desire something,
and they go to get it, performing whatever actions
have become necessary in the pursuit. But work is the
process of making, not of taking. It is not excito-
motory, but the result of cerebral action.
The humble squaw who drops corn in her stick-
ploughed field is actuated by a concept, a knowledge
of how in time there will be fruit for her children.
There is no present stimulus, she pushes herself, urged
by the accumulating nerve force of the larger brain.
Her lord, the noble Red-man, gallantly pursuing the
buffalo, is acting merely as an animal, under direct stim-
ulus of hunger and the visible beast before him. Being
hungry, he hunts. Being fed, he does nothing. He can
only act in the lower circuit of excito-motory nerves.
But she, not hungry, makes the corn grow. She makes
the tent. She makes the moccasins and leggings and
beaded belt. She makes the dish and basket. She, first
on earth, works, and she works for others.
First, it was only this mother energy, producing for
its young; the same power which finds its apotheosis in
the sublime matriarchate of the bee. Work was pri-
marily an extension of the maternal function; and,
carried to excess, results in that ultra-perfection of
208 HUMAN WORK
specialised maternity, the ever-bearing queen-mother,
the ever-toiling worker-mother, and the contemptible,
well-nigh useless, barely tolerated, and soon slaughtered
drone-father. But human work was saved this hope-
less limitation of maternity by being forced upon the
male, and by him specialised and distributed. To work
and save is feminine, tending to the swollen hive, the
sacrificed male. We still see this tendency among us in
that long-aborted social rudiment, the home. But man,
assuming the industrial function, applied to it his dis-
seminating energy, spread, scattered, specialised, and
so made possible our social life. If the bees had been led
to our great economic maneuvre, the motherising of the
male, they might be more than hymenoptera to-day.
Work, as an ever-elaborating discharge of energy,
tends to develop under laws of inertia, like all natural
processes. The “tendency to vary” in action is
checked in the short circuit of individual animal activ-
ities by the immediate consequence of his own variation
to the individual. This wonderful new step of ours, the
production of food, gave us a new base for variation.
A low grade of effort, by a few persons, kept us fed,
alive. Our early specialisation in social defence kept
us protected, alive. Being thus assured of life, though
not on the basis of individual exertion, we acquired
time to manifest new activities.
Here is one of the great keys to “ the mystery of
> no more a mystery than any of nature’s
human life,’
laws, when you know it. A social life is assured by
the basic industry, agriculture, and some degree of
CHAPTER TEN 209
trade and commerce. ‘Then the energy no longer re-
quired by each man for each day’s living can be given
to invention, discovery, experiment. So follows all the
immensity of our growth.
The social base being absolutely firm, and requiring
less and less social energy as our agricultural and
commercial processes improve, we grow in arithmetical *
progression—or in geometrical rather—as our in-
crease in production and distribution multiplies our
ability and our increase in ability multiples our
production and distribution. ‘This assured base and
wide room for variation is necessary to society in de-
veloping its higher functions. We can afford to feed
and guard for several generations the slow-maturing
genius, which, when it reaches the productive point, will
richly benefit us all. We'can give more rest and free-
dom to our members than any self-fed and self-guarded
beast could dream of.
A thousand delicate and beautiful specialties are al-
lowed to grow by our broad sure social base of sup-
plies. So far we have seen this in conscious action
only where a government has encouraged certain arts
or sciences, or where an established church or endowed
university has bred its kind of specialty, or again
where some individual has contrived to enlarge his own
“social base” enormously, and “ varies” as he will,
but we see its converse commonly enough where the in-
dividual is not allowed any hold on the social base, but
kept at the self-feeding stage in development, thus ef-
feetually checking his “ tendency to vary.”
210 HUMAN WORK
Every advantage has its possible attendant evils, and
Society offers a wide field for such. Im the point we
are treating, the evils are painfully prominent. As
soon as we left the self-supplying stage, a man’s sins
were no longer visited immediately on his own head.
An animal gains or loses by his own behaviour. A man
gains or loses by his society’s behaviour. In his as-
sured position as a member of society a man can be
wickeder and more foolish than is possible in any self-
supported life, and he has taken advantage of his
opportunities with great facility and zeal.
The peculiar treason involved in a social being’s
offences we have not yet grown to recognise. It is
as if your own teeth turned and gnawed you. Only
a beneficent society could allow the growth of these
powerful beings, and with that social power they sin
against society.
As conspicuous an instance as can be given of this
kind of sin is in the action of our misguided common
carriers. Here is a function so glaringly social that
one marvels at the power of the human brain in forcibly
regarding it as a private business. On public land
granted by the public, with rights and franchises
granted by the public, with money subscribed by the
public, and with elaborately co-ordinated labour per-
formed by the public, this form of public service is
established. Then one man, or group of men, is
allowed to “‘ own” this great piece of social machinery,
and proceeds to administer it, not with regard to the
public advantage, but with regard to the advantage
CHAPTER TEN 211
of this managing group and of that small minority of
the public who furnished the money for the enterprise.
Of course this could not be done if the social body
as a whole recognised the organic character of its own
processes, but, owing to the prevalence of our ancient
ego concept and its derivatives, the poor social body
says, “ Of course; why should the arteries carry blood
except to feed themselves, it is their business!”
Against this evil comes the growing altruism of work,
founded in mother love, in the anti-selfish instinct of
reproduction; work, which, as it develops, carries with
it an ever-developing good will.
Watch this in history. See the two forces as they
affect society. See the primitive labour of the squaw
holding the village together, the village which is the
tiny seed of the state, while against it push the bellig-
erent rivalries of the male. See the instinct to fight
and to take, finding larger expression in organised
warfare, constantly destroying the young societies
which industry was building up, both in warring with
one another and in the internal effects of the same
misplaced instincts.
Here is productive industry steadily adding to the
wealth of the world and developing distributive in-
dustry as inevitably as an overflowing spring makes
a stream. And here are these destructive tendencies,
with the primitive desire to get for one’s self, to get
away from someone else, not only refusing to assist
in industry, not only dishonourably living on its prod-
ucts, but so scorning and maltreating the real agents
212 HUMAN WORK
of social growth as to repeatedly destroy the societies
that harboured them.
In the development of industry have grown the
altruistic tendencies of mankind. Working together
bred the social consciousness*as surely as our physical
organic relation bred our bodily consciousness. Peace,
good will, mutual helpfulness are part and parcel of
normal industrial growth. It is somewhat difficult to
disentangle one current of social phenomena from the
many crossing ones, some combining and some con-
flicting, but whenever any one trade can be studied in
its effect on a group, certain associative psychic qual-
ities are always found with it, and the general indus-
trial progress of the world is accompanied by as gen-
eral progress in social consciousness and the social
virtues.
Agriculture brings us at least peace, an. essential
condition of its continuance. Trade brought the con-
cept of justice, the market-place and its customs and
its disputes evoking the early prototypes of our great
courts of law, and extended peace. Commerce widened
both still further.
The evils we commonly attribute to business life be-
long to the continued survival in it of anti-industrial
instincts, not to the industrial ones at all. Where an
individual enters the generous, munificent, kindly field
of human industry with the equipment of a beast or
savage, merely to get for himself all that he can, great
evil results; but the same evil is found unbroken in pre-
industrial times.
CHAPTER TEN 213
Of its own nature work is altruistic. ‘The more gen-
erally industrial a society is the more we find the higher
social feelings developed. But the instincts of the
pre-human beast, the powerful and ingenious self-
feeder, still find expression, and the more so as society
becomes more finely organised. Thief catches thief
very promptly where all are thieves by profession and
there is little to steal! But a large, sensitive, finely
organised society offers splendid opportunities to these
mischievous left-overs of ancient times.
The first step is mother labour, the next, slave la-
bour, so up through serfdom to contract, to our present
system of wage labour. The last step, one we are
but just learning, most of us, though some entered
upon it long ago, is man working for mankind; not
under any primitive coercion, but from the action of
social forces as natural as breathing. For whom
should he work? What “ market ” is worth his highly
specialised ability but this? Can he make bricks or
compose dramas solely for his own family?
To associate in the complex discharge of our vast
energies, and to be amply nourished by their countless
products, is Social Life. It is true that work is essen-
tially feminine in its origin, but not permanently. As
it develops it frees itself wholly from sex limitations
and becomes a social function in which men and women
take part as members of society. ‘*‘ Women’s work ”
in one stage of our life meant every kind of work.
*Man’s work” is now generally supposed to include
the harder and rougher, the higher and more difficult.
214 HUMAN WORK
There is no real foundation for either term. Either
sex can do either kind. Work, modern work, has no
sex-connotation whatever. Moreover, modern science
has shown that the female, instead of being inferior, is,
if anything, the more important of the sexes.
In no way need the association of women with work
degrade either. A highly entertaining contortion of
popular thought is seen in our local and temporary
idea that women ought not to work! We have bred in
certain classes a sort of parasitic female, most pain-
fully aborted. It is more agonising and more ridic-
ulous for a woman not to work than for a man, be-
cause of her initial sex-tendency and her historic
habits; but we have bred this pitiful enormity and
admire it as a Chinaman admires the “ golden lilies ” on
his wife’s shrunk shanks. But this absurdity is al-
ready passing.
One of the effects of sex-distinction, falsely and
needlessly associated with work, is seen in the general
fighting attitude of the male towards labour. In
current literature and current life we continually hear
man’s economic activities described as a struggle—a
battle—with some vague opponent called ‘the
world.” He is described as “ going out” (“ out ”
meaning elsewhere than at home, the assumption being
that he would prefer to be “in” all the time!) “to
battle with the world for his wife and little ones.”
Katherine, the reformed shrew, makes an eloquent
description of this prowess of the husband. ‘This is
held to be a noble effort on his part, and quite his
CHAPTER TEN — Q15
place as a man, while if she, owing to loss of male
provider, is obliged to go “ out” to “battle” sim-
ilarly, that is held to be unfeminine and a real mis-
fortune.
The word “ out” in this connection we should dis-
miss completely from our foggy minds. We are in the
world once and for all. We are not planted in a lot
of private holes, with the rest of the broad earth for
a mere battle-field, a place to sally forth into and grab
something. Can you conceive of a world of human
beings contentedly staying at home all the time if
their supposititious booty could be handed in at the
door without “battle”? We don’t go “ out,” we go
‘in ” to the world for our natural and necessary ac-
tivities, without which we should cease to be human.
What we do in the world is not, or should not be,
fighting. ‘Those who insist on fighting instead of
working should be promptly locked up and taught
better; they disturb the peace, interfere with legitimate
industry, and dishonestly run off with the products of
other people’s labour.
An oversexed male, full of belligerence, actuated
by his primitive masculine tendency to scatter and
destroy instead of the later-developed, feminine-based
race-tendency to construct, goes forth like a savage to
hunt and fight. He finds what he wants, someone else
has made it, and he seeks to get it away from that
person by exercising the same traits as those used by
any hunting animal, force or fraud. We have an
immense number of predatory individual animals, both
216 HUMAN WORK
male and female, all included and maintained by the
social organism, yet merely feeding on its tissues; we
have a still greater number, indeed the vast majority
of our workers, who, though in reality engaged in pro-
ductive labour, imagine that their business is to get
something from other people, and so strive to restrict
their output and enlarge their intake as far as pos-
sible.
The plain thief and pauper we recognise as social
parasites, active and passive, and seek to remove; but |
our frank, general attitude of parasitism and pre-
dacity we do not recognise as an evil, the evil which
necessarily tends to these ultimate forms. An indi-
vidual animal has no productive power and skill, he
simply takes what he wants when he finds it, if he can,
and cheats, fights, or kills to get it. The collective
animal produces wealth by co-ordinate labour. There
is no faintest element of combat involved in the eco-
nomic processes of society. The only ‘ competition ”
legitimate in social life is the beneficent competition
between constantly improving methods of service. For
any collective animal to take advantage of his safe
place in the broad-based social life, and from that
vantage-point to take what he can from the social
product without himself producing anything, is a
treason so colossal as quite to paralyse our moral
judgment.
Our little egoistic scheme of ethics, while it is big
enough to grasp and blame an interpersonal fraud or
theft, is incapable of comprehending this great field of
CHAPTER TEN 217
social injury; and, if the social traitor keeps up the
personal ethical standards we are acquainted with, we
do not condemn his larger sin,—we don’t know how.
Here it is simply indicated that the initial error lies
in looking at the world as a place to go out to and
get things from by any necessary means, whereas in
plain fact it is a place to go into and give things to—
to labour in, to create in, to produce and distribute in,
to exercise those social faculties which constitute our
human life.
To work is to make something or distribute some-
thing; it has nothing to do with taking or fighting.
The fighting and grabbing attitude comes from primi-
tive animal egoism, a low rudimentary condition, and
the morbid overplus of sex-energy in the male. The
association of shame with work on account of the slave
will pass when we see the orderly progression of human
association and the place held in it by that early social
functionary.
The Social organism requires a close and permanent
connection between its myriad constituents. These
constituents first began to combine sporadically, on
lines of natural attraction, as in the family, and
through the woman’s industry. For men to be drawn
into the social relationn—men, whose whole nature was
individual and combative, whose whole idea of exertion
was to fight something,—required force. Only on pain
of death, as the unkilled captive, did the slave learn
to work, to apply his energy to the service of others.
Most of the conscious associations of slavery were un-
218 HUMAN WORK
pleasant, slavery and work were held as identical, and
the slave hates work as he hates slavery. But they
are not identical. Slavery is a transient, superficial
relation, one of our telic processes, useful in its place,
but soon outgrown. Work is a permanent, essential
relation, a genetic social process increasing with our
growth.
Men were first held together in exchange of labour
by the force of the slave system as they are now held
together in exchange of labour by the force of the
contract system, an equally transient and superficial
device. The real economic process going on is the
gradual evolution of highly specialised and smoothly |
interrelated workers, with an abundant, easy circula-
tion of their products, and the more arbitrary methods
of developing this condition came first as more ar-
bitrary political methods came first. The Owner
was a primitive despot, the Employer is a constitu-
tional monarch, and democracy is now working out a
higher, subtler, freer relation—that of the true Co-
operator—in economics as in politics.
The shame feeling, based on woman and slave, grew,
rather than relaxed, in the period of serfdom. In
fatuous ignorance of the source of their wealth and
power, the fighting and governing class despised the
hand that fed them, and the ancestral accumulation of
this ungrateful idiocy gives us our ingrained contempt
for “ labour,” “ trade,” ‘* the working classes.”
The workers themselves, equally ignorant, though
more excusably, accepted this feeling as correct, and
CHAPTER TEN 219
strove to escape singly from the only honourable posi-
tion on earth, that of Maker, Doer, Giver, to the sup-
posed dignity of a Social Parasite. ‘The Theory of
the Leisure Class ” has been most luminously expounded
by Veblen, but there is room for much more study in
‘the theory of the working class,” the glorious, irre-
sistible, upward pressure of which, by its accumulating
superfluity of rich product, has, besides all its good
effects, made possible the morbid secretions and dele-
terious growths of society, the indolent ulcer of idle
wealth, the waste of tissue in extreme poverty, the wide
range of diseases, disgusting and terrible, with which
Society is hampered in its economic processes.
This feeling of contempt for work, shame in work,
once recognised as one of our evil inheritances from the
black past, we should set ourselves to check and dismiss
it as rapidly as possible. Inthe individual by con-
sciously rebutting the old feeling and cultivating its
opposite one of honour and pride, and in the race by
an instant and thorough change in the education of
children, through home, school, and church, book,
picture, and story. It is gratifying to note that
America is already far ahead of any other nation in
its honour of work, and that even the woman-parasite,
as well as the leisure-class parasite, is feeling it in this
livest of societies.
Our aversion to work as being an expense of energy
is quite right. Human work, as we have seen in the
last chapter, should not constitute a draught on indi-
vidual energy. When it does so there is something
220 HUMAN WORK
wrong. As in our constant analogy, the physical or-
ganism, we may be sure that when it is an effort to
breathe something is wrong with one’s lungs.
Our personal fund of energy is strictly limited, and
nature’s processes tend to save it—the law of conserva-
tion of energy. Very slowly and gradually has been
accumulated in us our private storage battery of nerve
force, with its stock of arrested energy and its power
to turn it on when necessary to modify action. This
supply of energy is limited. ‘This we must not waste,
it is the hoarded wealth of all organic time.
This is the precious capital which nature subtly
saves by rapidly making each action into a function,
passing it over from the class requiring cerebral force,
volition, to the class of unconscious, habitual action,
where the energy of the universe flows through the
smoothly attuned organism and costs it nothing. Any
new conscious action costs us an expense of our own
personal and private supply of energy, and that ex-
pense is what we instinctively recognise as wrong. The
organism feels that it is being robbed of its most
precious store, and resents it with every conscious atom.
This is what makes us hate to work, at the same time
defining work as “ what you don’t like to do.”
Against this we clearly see the passive pleasure of a
long-accustomed activity, the well-nigh unconscious
discharge of energy along well-worn lines; and the
active pleasure, the delight of doing what one likes
to do.
Detach from work the false ideas which make it
CHAPTER TEN 221
distasteful to us and there remains but one thing to
blind us to its joy and glory: the waste of cerebral
energy with which it is but too generally accompanied.
We have already seen that the accumulation and
discharge of energy is precisely what an organism is
for; it is an elaborate instrument slowly developed for
that purpose, as a steam engine is made to “ get up ”
and “let off” steam. A steam engine fired up and
superheated, but doing nothing, must let off steam or
burst. So a human engine, fired with all our splendid
fund of social energy, must either work it off, let it off
in mere fizz and whistle, or burst. Our leisure class—
most copiously fired and fed and stoutly refusing to
work—fill all the air about them with futile sizzlings
and noises. They have to, or burst. |
Normal work, 7. e., that special social function for
which the individual is specially fitted, requires but little
energy to learn to do, because he likes to do it, and,
once learned, runs easily for life, the pleasure steadily
increasing with the power and skill. Abnormal work,
for which the individual is not fitted, is a suicidal waste
of energy, and we are right to hate it. It costs im-
mense draughts on one’s vitality to learn to do what
one does not like, an unremitting pressure of cerebral
energy, a veritable hemorrhage of what is as much life
as blood is; and even when the relief of habit is at-
tained it does not grow into joy, for the creature is
crippled in the dreadful process. A man may learn to
walk on his hands and feed himself with his toes, but
he will not enjoy it much.
222 HUMAN WORK
The advantage of organic life is in its specialisation.
Specialisation to one thing involves lack of power to
do others. We do not ask a tooth to see, or an eye to
grind corn. So the whole majestic advantage of
human life lies in its organic relation, in its specialised,
interdependent service, each for all and all for each.
This is attained by means of a subtle differentiation
of individuals, developing from generation to genera-
tion a rising fund of power, of skill, of joy in execu-
tion. In this differentiation comes at once the most
benefit to society through the product and the most
benefit to the individual through the process of making
it—the work. Without it, in any arbitrary forcing
of individuals to do this or that for which they are not
fitted, which, therefore, they do not like, we find the
main condition of social waste and individual suffering.
The laws of social evolution, acting unconsciously
through us, tend to evolve a highly specialised, in-
tricate, organic life-form, rich, powerful, boundlessly
happy. Our conscious external laws and customs,
our government by ‘‘ the dead hand,” our insane rev-
erence for mummies, tend to check, thwart, and pervert
this orderly growth. We try to preserve the “ all-
around man,” which is as if we tried to preserve active
monads in our bodily structure.
We try to force people to do what they do not like,
we boast of our paleozoic educational system that it
trains the child to do what he does not like, as if to like
one’s work were criminal! Blinded and confused by
inherited falsehoods; kept back in specialisation by
CHAPTER TEN 223
our mistaken education; arbitrarily misplaced by
superficial conditions; and driven, on pain of death,
by our system of artificially distributed nutrition (not
merely “no work, no pay,” but ‘ This kind of work
whether you like it or not, or no pay!” ), the majority
‘of human beings are not doing normal work. What
they do hurts them; they do it under pressure of neces-
sity ; and they are quite right in assuming that without
that pressure they would not work—that way! But
this theory falls to the ground when the false condi-
tions are removed. A free discharge of energy—the
limitless energy of the universe through our intricate
machine—is pleasure, not pain. -It does not overdraw
on our little store, but rather augments it. We are
stronger instead of weaker for right exercise of power.
Every healthy child delights in work, to watch it,
imitate it, take part in it. Every healthily placed
man delights in his work, the man who is doing what he
is particularly built to do—what we call a “born
doctor ”
fit °—yes, and operator as well as poeta.
or a “born engineer.” “ Poeta nascitur, non
Social evolution is natural, and natural organic
processes are easy and agreeable, unconscious if they
require no cerebral attention, and, if they do, attended
with sensations of pleasure. Granting, as we have
done, that waste of energy is an evil, and any over-
draught on our reserve fund of cerebral energy is
naturally resented by the organism, it is still main-
tained that normal human work does not involve any
waste of energy or any draught on the cerebral reserve
224 HUMAN WORK
more than is pleasant to expend, and results in increase
rather than diminishing of that store.
The conditions of normal work are these: First, the
individual should be well stocked. A sick man cannot
enjoy work, a crippled, deformed person is not fitted
to work, and a congenital pauper, one born without
that inheritance of nervous energy which should in-
crease with each generation, is unable to work with
pleasure. But given, first, a normal individual, he
should, second, work at what he likes best. This means
social specialisation, and requires for its right develop-
ment such education and opportunity as shall bring out
all possible differentiation of faculty. So widely lack-
ing are these conditions, so hampered is our choice of
work, and so undeveloped our power of choosing, that
we look with honest envy at the man who does love his
work and can do the work he loves, like Agassiz or Lord
Kelvin.
In normal social conditions every man would do the
work he loved and love the work he did, so life and hap-
piness would become synonymous. |
XI: SPECIALISATION
7
Summary
Organisation means specialisation. Military organisa-
tion, trades-unions, and trusts. Guerilla bands m
mdustrial organisation. Unspecialised primitive life,
the higher the life-form the more specialisation. The
* all-around”’ savage. Injury of our present speciali-
sation under false conditions. Waste of energy. Man
of thirty who died of old age. Canoe-and steamer.
Effect of errors. Normal conditions of specialisation:
shorter hours, variety of work, wide education. Owner-
ship m collective production. Specialisation should
imcrease product and decrease effort; it does, but the
advantage is misplaced. Hours of labour m propor-
tion to mterest. Especial cruelty im our, conditions
of specialisation. Specialisation proves collectivity.
Absurdity of “ self-support” idea. Our progress due
to such social distribution as we have, not to “ selfssup-
port.” Society feeding on itself. The Social sacrifice.
“ Unskilled labour” a product of high social develop-
ment. Our mistaken attitude toward it. The real
nature of it. Serf and noble. Savage's exciting
monologue. Unskilled labour does not require inferior
men. Line of social growth. Highly specialised
work involves extremely simple details. Our misuse of
above fact owing to false concepts. Unskilled labour
is high social service. We punish imstead of paying,
or promotmg. Height of ingratitude.
XI
SPECIALISATION
Human work being an organic process, it must of
course specialise. Those who cry out against speciali-
sation and seek to uphold a mythical “ all-around man ”
are ignorant of the nature of social functions. The
very first condition of organic life is division of labour,
and as the organism develops the complexity of that
division develops with it. The strength and efficiency
of any organism depends not so much on its bulk and
weight as on the prompt and perfect co-ordination of
its parts.
This is a truism in military organisation, which is
an old game with us, but we do not seem to understand
it in industrial organisation, which is a new one. In
the military body we have long ago learned to consider
the whole before the part and the purpose of that whole
as a measure of action for each part, but in the eco-
nomic body we are yet a mob of savages. The ego
concept is perforce set aside in military life; jn eco-
nomic life it still rules. In military ethics one never
hears that ‘“self-preservation is the first law of
nature ”’; no soldier thinks of justifying rank cowardice
and insubordination with the plea that “a man must
live!*” Neither is there any objection to the widest
specialisation, to careful grading of officers, to the
227
228 HUMAN WORK
complete separation of surgeon and chaplain, engineer
and commissary. No one seeks to maintain the “ all-
around man ” in the army.
Military organisation is our oldest and so best de-
veloped form. Its purpose is crude and easy of per-
ception; its impulses are inherent in the masculine
nature; its methods, like those of old-established
churches, appeal to the primitive instincts. The gor-
geous ritual of military form has much to do with our
allegiance to it. But in the now far more important
co-ordination of industrial forces no such progress is
made. In place of splendid uniforms we have the
soiled and soul-depressing garments of our miscel-
laneous workers. Instead of “esprit du corps” we
have the beautiful spirit of “ every man for himself,
and the devil take the hindmost.”
Instead of “* glory ” we have before us only “* booty ”
instead of ‘* honour ” we have the incessant struggle of
the civil law to check the ceaseless manceuvring of dis-
honesty. And in place of one resistless organisation
we have at best the progress of the trades-unions and
at worst those guerilla bands, the small, fierce hordes
of warring trusts, fighting each other and preying on
all of us.
The inevitable increase of specialisation has gone
on, but under the disadvantage of this crude position
it has carried with it a wholly unnecessary burden of
evil. Specialisation in labour starts at the very be-
ginning of our growth, at first being only an arrange-
ment of whole men, each man making a whole thing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN 229
To this stage of social evolution some are now wishing
to revert—a sad waste of wishing! We might as well
wish to be invertebrates again as to sigh for past
periods of social development.
The lower the creature the less its organic specialisa-
tion. ‘There are some so indeterminate and undivided
that they do not know their heads from their tails; cut
them in two and they promptly produce a new head
and a new tail and go about their business as before.
This beast is a fine example for the * all-around man.”
The higher the creature the more specialised. The
more worthily a part fulfils one function the less
worthily it can fulfil others. When the paw becomes a
hand it ceases to be a paw. The more fit the hand
for a hand’s use the less fit for a foot’s use. It would
in no way benefit the body to have a set of loose, inter-
changeable organs capable of doing a little of every-
thing and nothing very well. An “ all-around ” organ
would not be as valuable as any single-hearted servant
that gives its one regular contribution to the body’s
good.
So in the social organism, our line of progress has
been from the “ all-around” savage to the absolutely
one-sided activity of the specialised workman who con-
tributes his best efforts to one line of service. ‘To
learn to do one thing and do it well” is what makes the
great artist, the great scientist, the great preacher,
the great mechanic, the great electrician. Social ser-
vice requires the steadily increasing specialisation of its
constituents.
230 HUMAN WORK
When you want a dentist you want to find him in his
office, with the accumulated skill of long study and
constant practice; you do not want to wait for him
to come in from the plough and wash his hands. All
this we know well enough, and yet we recognise the
injurious effects to the individual of the kind of spe-
cialisation we see about us, and have not yet been able
to reconcile the two.
If the individual is injured there must be evil some-
where, that is quite true. No society can prosper at
the expense of its constituents. If the individual is
reduced in physical strength and health, in personal
happiness, or in the best social usefulness by his work,
the process he is engaged in must be abnormal. Now
let us see whether the evils so conspicuous in the lives
of our highly specialised workers to-day are inherent
in their degree of specialisation, or whether they are
coincident rather than consequent and due to quite
other causes.
What is it that injures the man who turns a crank
all day? It is an evil both of omission and commission,
involving a waste of cerebral energy in compelling the
attention of the human brain to a point of execution
so narrow and uninteresting, and also the lack of de-
velopment involved in doing nothing else. To forcibly
focus the attention on a detail for a long time is
a ruinous expense of nerve force, and it is this which
makes the employment of children in such work so
doubly damnable. ‘To concentrate and hold attention
is not natural to childhood; that is why they fail to do
CHAPTER ELEVEN 231
it and are so frequently killed and injured by their
machines. Accidents to working children happen
mostly toward the end of the day’s work, as they grow
more unequal to the unnatural strain.
And when the child does prematurely muster all his
powers and display as a child the concentration of a
man, he is thereby ruined for life, prematurely aged, a
wasted and broken thing before he is grown. In the
work of the Chicago Settlements a case was found
where an honest, industrious man of thirty broke down
and died, and the doctor’s verdict was that he died of
old age; every part of him was used up by excessive
labour from early childhood. It is bad enough for the
adult. The paralysing effects of twelve hours’ repeti-
tion of some one small mechanical effort is painfully
clear to any observer.
Does it follow, therefore, that we must discontinue
the machine and go back to the period where “ one man
makes one thing,” the ideal of our well-meaning re-
versionists? Is it so much more noble for one man to
make one canoe than for a thousand mén to make an
ocean steamer? Must we go without the ocean steamer
and go back to the canoe period of civilisation because
it is better to be an all-around savage than a man who
makes rivets by machinery? Is there no way of saving
the individual life of the rivet-maker without “ giving
up the ship”?
Assuredly there is. The evil effects of this complex,
modern work do not lie in its complexity, or its delicate
mechanical accuracy, but.may be traced straight to the’
232 HUMAN WORK
door of our existing economic fallacies and errors; to
the overwork and underpay and general evil conditions
based on those errors.
Approach the blissful savage making his own canoe
and hire him at a minimum wage to make canoes for
you all day and every day for the weary years of a
short, worn-out life; the fact that he made a whole
thing would not suffice to make him happy or develop
that so desirable globularity. If the riveter took the
same interest in his steamer that the savage did in his
canoe, and worked no longer at his riveting than the
savage at his cutting and sewing, his fractional pro-
duction of. an enormous common engine for common
good would give him more pleasure than the savage’s
unitary production of a tiny private engine for private
good.
The natural conditions of social specialisation are
these: In proportion to the degree of specialisation
the time of work should be shortened and ‘the interest
of the worker extended.
It does not hurt the human mind—a strong,
healthy, well-developed mind—to make rivets for a
little while.
“Ah, but,” you will reply, “if the riveter only
worked a little while he could not earn enough to
live on.”
Here is where our economic fallacies come in. The
-man with the machine can turn out as many rivets in
an hour as the man working by hand could in a day.
Therefore his hour’s work is equal to what was a day’s
CHAPTER ELEVEN 233
work. That is the value of machinery. It gives more
wealth for less effort, the maximum product with the
minimum expense of nerve force and of time. Every
step of our elaborate mechanical specialisation should
have relieved the worker of more and more hours of
labour and set that much time and strength free for
other use.
The infinite multiplication of wealth by machinery
meets its own problem of overspecialisation. Here
are a hundred men, making cloth alone on a hundred
hand looms, and earning thereby a dollar a day each—
one hundred dollars. Here are these hundred men or-
ganised, specialised; ten of them run machine looms,
turning out cloth tenfold, equal to a thousand dollars
aday. Other ten, specialised, run the mill and its busi-
ness; twenty of them with machines earning ten times
what the hundred did, or forty of them working half
a day each, or eighty of them working quarter of a
day.
The earning: power of the man plus the machine is so
enormously multiplied that he is richly able to take
the needed rest and variety of exercise which will enable
him to do his wearing work without injury, and at the
same time give society the benefit of the extreme spe-
cialisation.
** But—but,” cries the offended reader, “ the man
does not own the machine! he did own the loom. It
takes capital to run a mill, and capital has to be
paid!”
The question of property rights comes in later, in
234 HUMAN WORK
Chapter XV. This is all a question of men, of human
beings, and how they best work together, doing the
most for Society with the least injury to themselves.
This chapter is not taking up the question of capital
nor of property, but simply seeking to show that spe-
cialisation, as such, need not injure the worker, because
the very nature of specialisation is to reduce man’s
work. Why we have also made it reduce man’s pay
is not so easily explained. That the greatest multi-
plier of wealth should impoverish the producer surely
indicates some defect in our methods.
Specialisation perfects and multiplies production,
and reduces effort. This inevitably increases wealth
and leisure. If the wealth and leisure are monopolised
in one quarter and the contributary specialist is sacri-
ficed in the process, it does not prove the specialisation
to be wrong, but the distribution of result; and that
we will take up in the chapter on Distribution. Mean-
while the law of specialisation goes on and gives us
social servants more and more exquisitely adapted to
some one function. With normal economic conditions
they would take full share in the resultant social gain,
and be quite free to combat the possible ill effects of
their position.
The shortening of hours allows of another quite
simple and natural effect. Where work is so broad and
general as to require a whole man’s whole working time,
as of the teacher, artist, or large manager in any in-
dustry, it is thereby so interesting that a man can give
his whole time to it without belittling effects. (‘ Whole
CHAPTER ELEVEN 235
working time ” need not be more than four to six hours,
even at our stage of mechanical evolution. )
Where work is so narrow and fractional as not to
interest a man for his whole time, it is therefore so
specialised that he need not give his whole time to it.
The simple turning of a crank for an hour wearies
the brain equal to larger effort, but does not forbid
that brain some other labour. If the specialty is one
of exquisite subtlety of particular skill, as with those
girls in the Treasury who test banknotes by touch, no
other labour should be entered upon which would tend
to blur or weaken that skill, only rest and recreation.
A properly educated human creature, in full touch
with the whole great working world, can support his
or her own concentrated effort by virtue of conscious
connection with the whole, can see the ship in the rivet.
Well nourished socially, keenly alive to our gain, our
progress, and to the relative value of his own depart-
ment of service and his own share in it, not looking at
the work as his, done for his pay, but as ours and done
for our benefit, the normal human being can not only
sustain extreme specialisation, but glory in it.
Our especial cruelty in this regard is that we con-
demn to exhausting hours of extreme specialisation the
very people least fitted to bear it, the ill-nourished
physically and socially, the uneducated, the dull and
dark of mind. Or, conversely, we deprive our ex-
tremely specialised social servants of exactly those
things by which alone they can sustain the demands of
that service.
236 HUMAN WORK
A man with wide-spread, active social consciousness,
in full contact and exchange with all parts of the great
body to which he belongs, will not suffer from its con-
centrated and exclusive service, but will take glad part
in forming an “
all-round ” Society.
One would think that specialisation in labour ought
to have forced upon every observer long ages since the
fact that human work is something done for others.
The shepherd and fisherman, first stage above sav-
agery, may live upon the fruit of their labours; and
so, in part, may the farmer, first stage of really
civilised growth. They exchange the surplus, but they
do directly consume part of what passes through their
hands. }
But the specialised workman, whether he carry a
spade or a hod, swing an axe or hold a lever, is so
obviously doing it for thousands of unknown other
people that his position under the ego concept becomes
miraculously difficult. He holds it, though, and, what
is perhaps even more miraculous, so do we! So does
the general consumer, whose life is maintained by the
service of thousands of fellow beings,—who is housed
by them, clothed by them, carried by them, guarded by
them, taught by them,—still have the incredible face to
maintain that these people who keep him alive are
working for themselves!
Harder than steel must be the cell walls of the brain
that can live in such complex social relation as ours
to-day and maintain that he or anyone: else “ takes
care of himself.”” The error dates back in essence to
CHAPTER ELEVEN 237
the ego concept; but it becomes a thousand-fold more -
erroneous when first the machine, and then the use of
“natural forces ” applied to machinery, made possible
our vast increase in specialisation.
That one man must give his life to the art of weav-
ing did not so narrow his mental area, or so cut him
off from appreciation of other branches of human
work, as this later development where a man wears out
two sets of oak planks in one spot, standing still all
his life, making nails! It seems “ a far cry” from the
fractional construction of nails to the social conscious-
ness, and yet, in the true order of industrial develop-
ment, it brings it nearer. The more extreme the spe-
cialisation the more extreme the interdependence, and
that universal interdependence is the condition which
calls for, and which develops, social consciousness.
In the true order—but that order has been grievously
interfered with by our own mistakes. Acting under
the ego concept, and the system of competition which
rests upon it, the increasing specialisation which is so
normal a condition of social growth has been made to
carry increasing evil consequences to the specialised
worker. A just and rational position on the part of
Society! As fast as its members specialise in compli-
ance with the demands of social benefit, so fast does the
benefited society stunt and degrade its benefactors!
That there has been improvement in the rank and file
of society is not denied, but it is due to our partial
and grudging distribution of the social good along
normal lines of public provision, such as free schools
238 HUMAN WORK
and libraries, and not to our idiotic ideas of individual
work and pay.
Where there is no such public provision our eco-
nomic concepts act to crush and degrade the worker.
That increasing specialisation with its mechanical ad-
juncts, which should make it possible for a man to dis-
charge his social obligations in an hour and then be
free to contribute to progress by larger growth, we
have taken advantage of to compel an amount and
grade of labour alike ruinous to the individual in his
immediate sacrifice and to the society composed of such
sacrificed individuals. Men dying of thirst have been
known to bite madly into their own flesh and suck the
blood, but for a prosperous, growing society, rich,
powerful, safe, intelligent, to make a steady diet of
its own meat, is unreasonable.
““The social sacrifice” is a very real and noble
thing. It sometimes requires the lives of some of its
members to preserve the life of the whole body. This
sacrifice is always cheerfully made in war. It also
requires the surrender of individual freedom of action
to that complex interaction and unswerving duty which
makes up the social service. But this sacrifice is more
than compensated by the advantages given the indi-
vidual in the life of the whole. A member of a big,
complex society has not only a far better and happier
personal life than his freely individual savage ancestor,
but he has also share in the large, glorious, common life
of that society.
That is, he should have these things. As it is—owing
CHAPTER ELEVEN 239
to our antediluvian errors—he has to make the sacrifice,
and in return he is reduced to an individual life far less
gratifying than that of a healthy savage, yet knows no
more of the splendid social consciousness belonging to his
position than if he were that savage still.
There is one feature in social specialisation so promi-
nent and so important as to call for more detailed ex-
planation. ‘This is the relation of what we call “ un-
skilled labour” to social evolution. Our ideas of jus-
tice in payment, of the necessary ‘* cheapness ” of cer-
tain low grades of work, our patient tenderness or im-
patient contempt for this immense class of humanity,
rest on the assumption that human beings are widely
unequal in ability; that most of them are of this low
and cheap order, and that social progress lies in the
advance of superior individuals, assisted in a humble
way by the inferior.
For these we must “furnish employment” of a
simple character suited to their powers, and pay them
with a modesty equal to their other limitations. Be-
cause there are so many of them, their competition for
the humble tasks allotted keeps the price of unskilled
labour very low indeed. Through organisation they
have forced the price up a little, but most of us con-
sider this as unjustifiable in strict economic law.
If it is shown that low wages for low labour keeps
that labour always low, and indeed makes it lower; that
out of the impoverished environment we inevitably breed
defectives and degenerates, diseases and crimes; and
that farther, because a hard and unfavourable environ-
240 HUMAN WORK
ment promotes fecundity, therefore this low rate of
wages tends to increase the birth-rate of the lowest
people, thus making a vicious circle of social stagna-—
tion and deterioration—if these things are proved to
us, we say it cannot be helped—it is a condition of
human nature. ‘These inferior people are the bulk of
humanity; they cannot do high-grade labour; it would
not be fair to pay the plentiful ‘“ cheap labour” as
much as the scarce and therefore more expensive kind,
so there you are! As a way of escape from this posi-
tion “the brotherhood of man” tries to uplift the
lowly, but the majority do not accept this brotherhood
theory. Or they say, ‘ Brother or not, these are such
hopelessly inferior brothers that we will not consent
to any levelling which would reduce us to their grade,
and they cannot be raised to ours.”
Now here is the true position. ‘* Unskilled labour ”
is a product of social evolution. Among savages there
is no unskilled labour. Each man must be skilled in
several lines to keep himself alive. In his pre-social con-
dition ‘of individualism, his life depending immediately
upon his own exertions, he necessarily develops skill in
his essential activities. No heavy-eyed, slow-witted,
hod-carrying grade of efficiency could maintain itself
in a status of individual savagery. The “man with
the hoe”? comes Jater—much later. He is produced,
developed, maintained, by a highly differentiated so-
ciety. The nobleman evolves the serf—they are parts
of one fighting organisation. The mill-owner and his
‘hands ” are part of one working organisation.
CHAPTER ELEVEN 241
The individual savage is swift, alert, vigorous, senti-
nelled by the keenest of senses, served by prompt and
varied abilities of many sorts. But his action, though
more perfect, is on a lower grade in industrial evolu-
tion. He would not be capable, though under never so
dreaded penalties, of working, his hfe long, in one
fractional line of social service.
The more society develops the more widely differen-
tiated become its labours. In its differentiation there
comes to be an immense proportion of very simple
things to do; simple because they are tiny parts of
something extremely complex. The savage’s life is
anything but “simple.” His elaborate and exciting
monologue requires of him the whole gamut of indi-
vidual capacity in constant shock and change. But in
the peace and power of a great civilisation, in the or-
ganic* spread of social functions, there are more and
more kinds of labour which are so infinitely simplified
that a dolt can do them.
It does not follow that a dolt must do them! It does
not follow that we should hunt out all our inferior
persons to do these unelevating things, and so remain
inferior. It does not follow that we should keep the in-
ferior person so long at his unelevating task as to
further lower his inferiority; that we should pay him
so little as to prevent any development from outside
advantages ; or that, worst of all, we should so condemn
his children to their subminimum share of his “ mini-
mum wage” as to make them lower yet.
In our ignorance of the nature of society, and the
Q42 HUMAN WORK
nature of work; in our cheerful blindness to the les-
sons of history; with our poor choked and twisted
brains, so crammed with the follies of our ancestors,
and so weakened by what we have called education that
they cannot think; we have taken for granted that so-
ciety had to have about so much “ unskilled labour ” to
provide for, and could only provide for it by “ furnish-
ing employment ” suited to its powers.
If we can once recognise the facts in the case, we
will change our behaviour fast enough. Observe the
line of social growth. Here is a nascent society of a
vague group of savages, feebly held together by the
pressure of a common danger; feebly drawn together by
the attraction of a common need. So held and drawn
the same forces which grouped the cells and started the
growth of physical organisms worked upon them, and
they began to differentiate in function.
Follow one line of work, such as the clothing of so-
ciety. The individual savage took a skin off another
animal and put it on himself; that was the beginning.
It required in him, and in his squaw, the highly ex-
citing and agreeable exercise of the rudiments of many
trades. He hunted, fought, killed, and skinned the
beast. She tanned and dressed, cut and sewed, with
elaborate decoration. All very interesting.
Now comes the evolution of that industry on in-
evitable lines. First, the division of trades; one hunted,
another tanned, another sewed, and so on. ‘Then, as
society increased, as skill increased, as productivity in-
creased, as commerce increased, we find these trades in-
CHAPTER ELEVEN 243
creasing in importance, in bulk, and in complexity ;
until now we have one garment going through a thou-
sand hands between the wool or cotton fibre, and the
wearer of the dress.
In this process, a perfectly healthy social process, the
fractional details of the work become extremely small
and simple, and our mechanical ingenuity has made
them smaller and simpler yet; till no more skill or judg-
ment is required than a factory child or poor dull
> can apply.
In these familiar facts see the real principle in-
sweated ‘* garment worker ’
volved. Social progress has so differentiated labour as
to make infinitely short, easy, and simple to a thousand
co-workers what was once long, difficult, and complhi-
cated for one. These beneficently simple processes make
possible the use of ‘ unskilled labour ”; make it pos-
sible for society to maintain in its service individual
working capacity lower than that of a savage, lower
almost than the beast.
But here is our great error. Unskilled labour does
not require the unskilled labourer. Unskilled labour
can be performed equally well by skilled labourers of
the highest sort, as mere play, as rest from these more
exacting functions. In proportion to its simplicity and
ease, its extreme mechanical perfection of adjustment,
is, or should be, the saving of time involved.
Here is a world, all shod, at the. expense of a large
amount of individual labour, every man making his
own shoes. Here is a world, all shod, at far less ex-
pense of labour, when the shoemaker gives his special-
Q44 HUMAN WORK
ised skill to the business. Here is the world, all shod,
at infinitely less expense of labour; when the shoe man-
- ufactory, with specialised labour and machinery, pro-
duces a thousand-fold more swiftly and easily; and a
developed commerce distributes around the world. Now,
if the shoes of the world are made socially, with a
thousandth part the time and labour required to make
them individually, how does it happen that the makers
of shoes are working harder and longer than ever?
Save indeed as the trades-union, in ceaseless and costly
combat, has in some degree shortened the time and
raised the wages.
It is because of our familiar group of delusions in
economics. It is because we so wholly fail to see the
organic nature of the process, and what is really the
line of social advantage in it. We see the heavy, awk-
ward, dirty, ignorant men digging in our streets, and
say, ‘** Poor fellows! Such as they can do no other
work! Stern nature has made them inferior, and it is
fortunate for them that there is this plain, simple work,
which they are able to do.”
What we do not see is that the plain, simple work is
part of a highly complex social process. Your nimble
savage has no ditch to dig; no road to build; no sewer
to clean. This is social service; not of the lowest, but
of the highest. The more advanced the society, the
more simplified the minute subdivisions of its great and
complex processes. Your nimble savage does not have
to do one thing, one fraction of a fraction of a thing,
for twelve hours a day—or ten—or even eight. If he
CHAPTER ELEVEN 245
did—if we did—we who look over the fence at the rude
gnomes who labour in the trenches in our vivisected city
to-day—we should become as they.
Unskilled labour is high social service, and social
sacrifice. It is not so interesting and developing to
the individual as the activities of savagery, but it is
more essential to the country’s good, to the power and
peace of the world. ‘This noble service could be ren-
dered without its present awful penalty. I do not speak
of its low wages, but of its heavy punishment.
Here is work done for the service of humanity; not
for any low and primitive service either, but to main-
tain our highest social grade of development. This
work, subtle, elaborate, important, only simple in its
extreme subdivision, we have chosen in our ignorance
to consider ‘‘ low.” The people who do it we first com-
pelled by force; we now compel on pain of starvation;
they are “ low” too, and cannot help themselves.
When we understand the real grades of labour, we
shall see this to be of the highest, and as such, to have
its limits and dangers. Such highly specialised work
cannot be followed for long hours, that is a cruel in-
jury; and never needs to be followed for long hours,
because the very law of its development is the saving
of time and energy. Society, as a whole, loses the
major part of the advantage of its specialised develop-
ment, by ruthlessly degrading and defrauding the very
functionary through whom that development is at-
tained.
Mie wODVCTION
Summary
Work is production and distribution. Joy of pro-
duction. Transmission again. Pleasure in expression
more than impression. Social stimulus. Arrested dis-
tribution. Increase in production. Shoes. Collective
pride. ““Owned’’ machinery. Effect of false con-
cepts. George Eliot’s “ Stradivarius.” Art recognised
as world service. The “ Pot-boiler.” “ Saving” and
“ serving” one’s country. Traitor and coward. Line
of evolution in a productive industry. Effect of errors.
“ Duty to employer,” etc. Payment not the right in-
centive. Reactive effect of production. ‘“* Greeking.”
Effect of great work on society. Physical heredity,
social heredity and transmission. Bicycle. Benefit of
making, of using. We “exhaust the soil” of hu-
manity by denying it right use of its product. Want
theory. Degraded press. Object of production. False
production. Individual is society—feels and represents
it. Social consciousness mistaken for self-conscious-
ness. “Self-expression”’ and social service. “* The
songs of a people.” Position of the artist. Ewapres-
sion is also transmission. “ Poor Jones!” Art a so-
cial function. Depravity in highly specialised func-
tion. The presumptuous eye. Art for humanity’s
sake.
XII
PRODUCTION
Work is in two main lines, Production and Distribu-
tion; to make something, or to hand it about, is human
industry.
To create is an intense satisfaction; to combine ele-
ments and produce new results, whether it be a bridge,
a basket, or a loaf of bread—to make is in itself a joy.
But so is it a joy to give something to somebody,
whether at first-hand, or in a combination with many;
to spread, to disseminate, to feel the current of human
good flow through you; both functions are happy.
The universe is an everlasting production, force
taking form, energy embodied, disembodied, re-em-
bodied—this is the game of living. Our little mid-sta-
tion of consciousness feels the pressure of natural forces
on both sides, pushing in through the sensory nerves;
pushing out through the motor nerves. Owing to our
early mistake about the superior pleasure of impres-
sion, and our perverse insistence that expression is only
a guarded outlay of limited force, by which to secure
desired impressions, we have never understood the na-
ture of human production. |
The pleasure of right impression is not to be denied.
Every sensory nerve should have its proper stimulus.
And man, with his immense collective sensorium, with
249
250 HUMAN WORK
his highly developed personal sensations, due to so-
cial evolution, and his power. of feeling with and for
other people, has enormous capacity for the reception
of pleasure. But what is all this pleasurable stimulus
for? The brain is not merely a reservoir for stored
sensation. A sensation is a certain amount of energy
going into the human battery. Once in, it must be
discharged in commensurate activity.
Most interesting experiments in psychology are being
made to-day, proving this, even in some immediate re-
sult of a strong mental impression in unconscious
bodily motion; as shown in studies among school chil-
dren. As the brain develops it has increasing capac-
ity to receive impressions, to retain and to arrange
impressions; but nevertheless sometime that mass of
impressions must come out in commensurate action, else
disease ensues. The human brain, socially developed,
and socially stimulated, has great power of expression ;
that expression is in work, and work is in Production
and Distribution. The productivity of the human race,
even with its past and present checks and perversions,
is the wonder of the ages. Guaranteed the swift and
easy satisfaction of those ‘* wants ” our economists build
so much on, the steady increase of impressed energy has
resulted in as steady an increase of expressed energy,
necessarily.
Man receives stimulus from a thousand sources.
Since we made mental impressions permanent and ex-
changeable “‘in book form,” knowledge and emotion
bottled, preserved, and distributed broadcast; there is
CHAPTER TWELVE 251
practically no limit to human stimuli; and, since with
this increasing stimulus we have steadily reduced the
difficulties of execution, our real problem is, how to
provide right outlets for the productive energy of hu-
manity. ‘This normal increase of power and execu-
tion we have managed to check, however, quite ma-
terially. We have gravely interfered with the natural
distribution of stimulus up to the present time; but now
our rapid multiplication of free school and free li-
brary, with similar tendencies in other educational
and recreative lines, is producing its natural result in
increased energy.
Even with what stimulus was open to us, our produc-
tion should have been very great; but we have interfered
with that also, in more ways than one. The principal
obstacle here is the basic error of the Want theory.
Holding that man works only to satisfy desire,—i. e.,
produces merely to consume,—we prostitute our share of
the social energy to a factitious personal advantage;
and try to govern the productive processes of society by
the dictates of self-interest. Here you have a factory
in which a hundred men turn out ten hundred pairs of
shoes a day. What for? Why, for the feet of ten
hundred people, of course—to shoe the world. ‘ Not
so,” they protest. ‘‘ We are making these shoes for
ourselves.” ‘* But you cannot wear ten pairs of shoes
a day,my man!” ‘No, but I only do this work for the
pay—and I can easily consume the pay for ten pair of
shoes a day.”
This poor man never understands his position as a
252 HUMAN WORK
social functionary with all its honour and pleasure.
The Ego concept and the Want theory becloud his.
mind. Even his personal pride in his personal work has
lowered since the machine made his work collective, and
his mind failed to keep pace with the machine, and make
his joy and pride collective too. His pleasure is only
in what he gets back from society in return for his —
labours, and he gets very little. As part of this same
ancient misconception of what work is, we find the in-
credibly multiplied machinery of production ‘‘ owned ”
by individuals; and manipulated by them under the
same befogging ideas that lead the workman to “ limit
his output.” |
Never were any of the gross and childish supersti-
tions of remotest savagery more injurious—or more
ridiculous—than these rudimentary errors under which
our economic development so blindly labours. We have
our alleged ‘“ overproduction”? on the one hand—
though a full supply of the good things of life is ob-
tained by scarce one-tenth of the population of the
world; and we have the ensuing and even more colossal
absurdity of the restricted output—whether of the
man who stints his day’s labour, or the group of finan-
ciers who “ corner ” some social product, and say how
much the world shall have.
These muddy follies of our common mind—for if we
did not all, or nearly all, believe in these principles of
action, we would not for a moment allow such economic
treason and misrule—together with allied fallacies of
a similar nature, most seriously interfere with produc-
CHAPTER TWELVE 253
tion. Nevertheless, as the laws of nature are somewhat
stronger than our evanescent misconceptions, we do see
the tremendous increase in our productivity; and, in
favoured instances, its grandeur and delight. As good
an expression of this feeling as I know in literature is
in George Eliot’s poem of ‘* Stradivarius.”
Here is a man, developing an extremely specialised
line of production, and clear of brain enough to see the
joy and dignity of it.
“ Antonio Stradivari has an eye
That winces at false work and loves the true,
With hand and arm that play upon the tool,
As willingly as any singing bird
Sets him to sing his morning roundelay
Because he likes to sing and likes the song.”
Our best known instances of normal or nearly normal
production are found in art and science. Here you have
a product which the world recognises as its own—not
that of the individual maker. ‘‘ He has given to the
world” such and such a picture, or statue; discovery
in science or composition in music; to this world-service
we give some, though an imperfect, honour; and we
pity and even blame the man who “ prostitutes his
art ** to the level of ‘‘ the pot-boiler.” Art is world-
service, truly, but so is manufacture or commerce. A
’ man should no more prostitute his “ trade” than his
“art.” It is as base to make a “ pot-boiler” of your
day’s work as of a book or a picture. No soldier is more
actually “* serving his country ” in his occasional fight-
ing, than is the workman in his continual working.
254 HUMAN WORK
“ saved ”? in sudden
emergency, at considerable cost of immediate exertion
One’s country sometimes has to be
and sacrifice; but one’s country has to be kept alive all
the time, at considerable cost of unceasing labour and
some sacrifice too. Our patriotism, which rushes madly
forward to “save the country ” when it is in visible
danger, and, having saved it, proceeds to exploit it for
personal advantage all the rest of the time, is on a
par with love for one’s family, which would risk life
to “ save” it, from flood, or fire, or injurious attack,
and then mercilessly cheat it, starve it, keep it cold and
dirty and ignorant and sick and vicious—when not “ in
danger.” The danger to our country from our general
neglect and misuse, and our frequent positive injury, is
far greater than that of occasional war. We need a
patriotism that will operate all the time.
The human worker, whether a captain cf industry or
in the ranks, who puts his personal safety and advan-
tage before that of his country is exactly the same
traitor and coward that the officer or private in the
army would be who did the same thing. He does not
know it, we do not know it, therefore no odium attaches
to these public offenders. But the mischief they do is
apparent in every branch of our economic processes.
We have seen that human production is checked in
amount by our lack of knowledge. It is injured in kind
from the same cause. Normal production has an evo-
- lution of its own. Follow the development of any one
trade, and you will see as natural a growth as in a
physical organ, marred of course by our errors, but
CHAPTER TWELVE 255
there under all. Take the building trades as an ex-
ample. At the beginning we find primitive man en-
larging a cave somewhat, or, lacking that retreat, put-
ting up some shelter of boughs to screen him from the
wind and rain, or spreading a hide for the same pur-
pose. The act, repeated, develops skill, and the mind,
dwelling over and over on the same problem, develops
too, and sees better ways of accomplishment. The
shelter of hide becomes the teepee or wigwam, and,
cloth superseding leather, the tent in all its forms; but
its growth is limited by mechanical conditions. The
shelter of boughs is more open to improvement; and
evolves slowly into hut, cabin, house. The materials
used depending on the environment, the Eskimo builds
of ice, the Chaldean of clay, and, slowly, by proof of
superiority, stone was used wherever found. The prin-
ciple of specialisation acting steadily upon this widen-
ing current of functional ability, we have now that
group of allied trades required to construct for modern
man the material form in which he lives and works—
without which he cannot live and work.
A genealogical tree could be made, showing just
where each branch diverged, the workers in wood, clay,
and stone dividing early; the gradual appearance of
the system of pipes and conduits which vitalise a
house; the development of windows in all forms, of
doors and their particular line of improvement, of in-
terior finish, from daubed mud to artistic decoration ;
and so on and so on, until we have now the house which
stands knit to the city by waste pipe, water pipe, gas
256 HUMAN WORK
pipe, and electric wire; a house which represents the
slow fruition of a thousand centuries, the contributed
intelligence and skill of a million men. The evolution
of this “ social form” is as natural and orderly as the
evolution of any physical form. To the men through
whom it grew the whole course should have been a
pleasure and a pride, and in large measure it has been,
in spite of all our misbeliefs.
To feel within one’s self the tendency toward a cer-
tain line of production, to “ learn the trade,” 7. e., sub-
mit the brain to the accumulated stimulus of that line of
production—to feel the racial skill begin to flow through
one’s fingers—to do the thing well—better—best !—and .
then, still unsatisfied, to relieve the pressure by new in-
vention of ways even better than the best—that is the
natural sensation of the producer. Against this have
operated at every step the weight and darkness of our
leaden lies. The child is not so watched and trained as
to develop the fine sense of special ‘ calling” which
shows the best path in life. Only the extreme case, the
boy who would be a sailor, or a mechanic, or whatever
he was meant to be, has the advantage of being where
he belongs in the world’s work. But the average boy,
with no special aptitude or pleasure in his trade, is put
to work under the dominant idea, drilled in from in-
fancy, that he is to work only because he has to—he
has to in order to get the pay. The whole outlook of
his position is lost. He has his head in a bag. All he
sees is the week’s wage, and the work is. merely to be
gotten through in order to get the wage.
CHAPTER TWELVE 257
We have known all along that this was a wrong at-
titude, and have tried to inculcate upon the worker a
sense of ‘ the nobility of labour,” of ‘* duty to his em-
ployer,” of the “ common interest of capital and la-
bour.”
It does not ennoble the labourer to enlarge his self-
ishness to the size of his employer’s. The employer
is in exactly the same boat. He has no more sense of
what his work is for than the “ hand” has. He too is
looking only at his wages,—salary, income, profits,
rent,—looking only at what he is to get from society,
instead of what he is to do for it. The common interest
_ of employer and employee, which is merely an interest
in their common income, does not lift the cloud from
labour. No interest is large enough to satisfy the
human mind, except the social interest; the thrilling
glory of working with and for the whole world at the
trade you love best, and can do best.
The workman should have such education as shall
give him for a background the full knowledge of social
evolution; and the special place of his own trade in
that evolution. He should know just where it first ap-
peared, how it grew, and why, the importance of its
place to-day—and here there would, no doubt, be warm
differences of opinion, debates and competition. The
payment for his service should no more be the point of
ambition with the workman, than with the penman,
paintman, or rifleman. The producer is entitled to feel
the full power and pride of production; and, in spite of
our errors, this power and pride is felt by the well-placed
258 HUMAN WORK
workman, whose life is better than his belief—as human
life always is.
One of the most important features of this great so-
cial function is the reactive effect on the functionary.
The maker is inexorably modified by the thing made.
If the thing made develops along normal lines, the
maker develops with it. If it does not—if it is
checked or perverted in its growth, so is the worker.
Working is humanity’s growing. In the act of work-
ing the individual is modified, and by the work accom-
plished humanity is modified. Also the accomplished
work remains, like coral, the record of the height of
those who did it.
In the case of those who do not work, who consume
copiously, and produce nothing, they have no chance of
normal development, add no step to human progress.
See in conspicuous instance the Grecian marbles and
literature. Those who gave the work were themselves
developed by doing it; the society which received the
work was developed by using it; and by the work as it
remains to us, we know and judge Greece. But the pos-
session of these works does not make us Greeks. 'To be
able to do them was to be Greek. Many causes com-
bined to make the Greek; and the Greek blossomed into
that kind of work—he was, so to speak, merely Greek-
ing in the doing of it. We have the result as we have
fossil bones. From it we may learn what the Greek
was, but not how to make him.
A person, or a race, 27s something, owing to ante-
tecedent conditions. Then they do something by virtue
CHAPTER TWELVE 259
of being what they are, as an apple tree bears apples.
(“* By their fruits ye shall know them.”’)
The thing done does have some reactive effect, how-
ever—else we should have no power to modify each
other, and this is one of humanity’s chief advantages.
The modifying effect of the work accomplished is in-
dead large, it is no wonder we so long to create the
things whereby we can thus progressively serve each
other. See, for instance, the endless effect upon so-
ciety of such work as Plato’s, Angelo’s, Stevenson’s,
Edison’s; all work counts in both ways; in the doing
it affects the doer; when done it affects the user.
But it is more blessed to give than to receive. In
animals the modification of species is effected only in
the direct line of heredity. A change of condition
modifies his action—the change in action modifies him—
and the modification is transmitted in his single line.
But there is no means of widening the effect—it has to
be filtered down through direct heredity. With man, in
his organic connection, there is a race modification
through our transmission of energy in work, which
multiplies his progress million-fold. Some local change
of condition modifies the action of one person, the
change in action modifies him, and the modification is
transmitted in his single line. Thus far we are even
with the animals. Then we pass them; man’s action is
work ; it is not mere putting something in his mouth; it
is making something. And the thing made holds and
transmits his energy, passing it on forever to all who
use it, making the growth of one the growth of all.
260 HUMAN WORK
One man, or some few men, make a steam engine.
They personally are by so much developed as makers,
and their children after them. That is so much gain.
But if we had waited for our inventors to modify the
race through physical heredity, we should be still in
the Bronze Age. The engine, being made, becomes part
of the social structure, and proceeds to modify the so-
ciety it serves.
The bicycle is perhaps a better instance. The effect
of the making is not materially different from the effect
of making watches. But the thing made has modified
society by the reactive effects of its use. It has modi-
fied the dress, the activity, and so the physique and
character of women, to their great improvement. It
has modified roads—to the great material benefit of
the regions affected. It has modified inn-keeping, livery-
stabling, tailoring, the relative distance of residence—
the effects of the bicycle on society are great, even upon
the most superficial survey. But this is no reason why
the maker of bicycles should be a better man than the
maker of chronometers, or that either of them should —
be paid more than the maker of pianos, or less than the
maker of poems.
The first effect of work, its result, return, or pay-
ment, is to the maker in the quality and quantity of
his effort. No one can measure his pay or deny it.
The second is to the user in the fulness of his use. This,
alas! can be measured and denied, and has been, to our
racial injury. No tyranny was ever able to prevent
the steady development of man through the work he
CHAPTER TWELVE 261
did. If he laboured faithfully and generously, he grew
in the outputting of his strength, and his growth ulti-
mately overthrew the tyranny. But tyranny of va-
rious sorts has withheld from the workers the reactive
benefits of using the product of their work; and so
hindered race development.
The builders of beautiful houses, working well, are
necessarily benefited by their own working; but if they
are forced to live in poor, ugly, unhealthy houses, they
are not benefited by the results of the work. This is a
grave limitation of a man’s income; and if his income
is checked, his output is checked also. As an unwise
farmer exhausts his soil in greedy harvesting without
due fertilisation, so we have drawn upon the creative
energies of humanity and denied the rich replenishment
which would have made the product so much more
prolific.
Here the mischievous effect of our Want theory
comes in plainly. The man who is working merely for
pay must cater to the purchaser. He must please ex-
isting tastes. Looking at his product, not as an end, to
benefit society, but as a means to benefit himself, he
must so produce as to secure a buyer. ‘This is the “ pot-
boiler” again. The artist who paints to suit his
patrons and get their money is not the true artist, and
through him art does not grow. The maker of coats
or hats or houses or dishes submits to this degrading
pressure, and the result is seen in our debased and vul-
gar forms of manufacture everywhere.
The evil effects to the consumer are more manifest in
262 HUMAN WORK
some trades than in others, as, for instance, in the
liquor trade. Here we have human beings producing
what they know people will buy; and then, not content
with the existing demand, using all possible means to
excite and maintain a further demand—simply that
they may make money.
Again, in our degraded press, we have a most con-
spicuous instance of this prostitution of a great social
function to private ends. Under the mistaken idea
that the distribution of news is a process for feeding
owners of papers, and thus being led to arrange their
news so as to please the most buyers, they rapidly de-
scend along lines of least resistance to a wholesale
catering to the worst tastes of the most people;
and supplement that by elaborate efforts to foment
and spread the low appetites they so obsequiously
serve.
Naturally there is no growth and grandeur in a
trade like this. To spread knowledge, sympathy, in-
stant information of the world’s movements good and
bad, is to take part in one of society’s chief functions ;
in the general nervous system of the world. But to
ascertain that society enjoys certain sensations, and to
force the general presentation of news into a special ar-
rangement to give those desired sensations, is to turn
healthy action into a loathsome disease. In any form
of human production, the object is to serve the consumer
by the best development of the product, not to use the
consumer as a means of profit for the producer. The
producer must, of course, be provided for; as must the
CHAPTER TWELVE 263
soldier, artist, physician; but self-interest is not the ob-
ject of the work.
In the production of shoes, again, the object should
be a constant improvement in material, shape, wearing
quality, and general utility and beauty. Deliberately to
change the shape and size, the proportion and make of
human footwear, merely to cater to low tastes, is the
degrading “ pot-boiler ”; the prostituting of a social
function to a private end.
All forms of cheap and dishonest production, of
adulteration, of an artificially forced market, are di-
rectly traceable to our Want theory; to our per-
sistent superstition which still crudely imagines this
vast and intricate world of interservice to be a pri-
meval forest, where beast and savage hunt for prey.
The mistake in object degrades the product, and the
degraded product degrades the man. Thus our im-
mense field of production is not only checked in output
and arrested in distribution, but weakened through and
through by adulteration and bad workmanship; with
evils in result, unending. The natural trend toward
a wider, fuller, easier, and ever better production,
accompanied at every step by growing pride and
power and pleasure in the producer, is hindered and
perverted to large degree by our prevalent economic
fallacies.
Another conspicuous point where our errors touch
production is seen in the arts especially ; the particular
mistake here being in the persistence of the ego concept ;
our confusion of self-expression with social service.
264 HUMAN WORK
The social consciousness, unrecognised, presents itself to
our minds as a huger self-consciousness.
We have often wondered at the inordinate selfish-
ness of man, compared to which the innocent egoism of
the beasts is angelic. This tremendous range and depth
of selfishness is because of that essential enlargement of
self which comes with socialisation—the individual of a
given society is that society—feels it as a “ self.” The
Roman, to the limits of his capacity, is Rome. The so-
cialised individual carries in him the enlargement of
his society. He has a wider soul, perforce, that is our
human quality. This larger self, a thing frankly es-
sential to social existence, enabling the individual to
so think, feel, and act with and for his society, comes
into action long before it is recognised by the “ local
office *—the mind of the individual. The mind has to
learn its own contents as well as its outside environment.
Our traditional labelling of those contents is no more
correct than our primitive misconceptions of geography
or physics.
What we personally call a quality does not affect its
nature, but does affect our own conscious behaviour.
The ability we display to mistake and miscall our own
qualities and those of other people, is apparently im-
measurable. So we feel this social soul, this larger
aliveness; a power of caring for millions, of wanting
for millions, and of doing for millions; and, since we
ourselves feel it in ourselves, we call it self-conscious
ness.
A man, joining a regiment of old and splendid fame,
CHAPTER TWELVE 265
comes to feel and act strongly from the regimental
consciousness. He feels it with his own mental ma-
chinery; but it is not an enlargement of his personal
self-consciousness—that is forever limited to his per-
sonality. This larger self—society, and its accompany-
ing social consciousness—we calmly appropriate as a
personal quality, and proceed to act on it. Having the
capacity to think, feel, act for a thousand, we proceed
to think, feel, and act a thousand times more for our-
selves. Therefore we are naturally appalled at the
limitlessness of ** human selfishness.”
The whole mistake is natural enough—the conscious
mind always lagging behind our unconscious growth;
but to-day the social consciousness is finally forcing
itself on the perception of the individual; and that
which we have called selfishness, and which is really
socialness misused, will be lifted from vice to virtue as
we re-name it. Once properly recognised, we have quite
ability enough to measure the man who uses a public
power for a private end; to measure and condemn.
But while this misconception still exists we have a minor
confusion as to “ self-expression ” and “ social service.”
The artist feels this more perhaps than other
workers. He feels it because his feelings are more
prominent, and more often handled, than those of the
workman in the more mechanical trades. A man may
make tremendous engines or run them; and never “ feel
himself work ” so much as the maker of very incon-
siderable poems. This is because the poet is so highly
socialised a product. His power to be a poet is a
266 HUMAN WORK
social power. What he feels is the heart of his people,
and he, poor man! thinks it is his own. He thinks
his heart is far more exquisitely sensitive than theirs,
whereas it is their hearts he is feeling! His capacity
for pain and for pleasure is their capacity ; it is greater
because he is more people, or at least is the specialised
point of sensation and expression for more people.
** Let me write the songs of a people and let who
will make their laws.”
The songs of a people—not his songs forced down
upon them, but their songs forced up through him.
“The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred until
his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has
absorbed it.”
Artists, of all men, are most exquisitely specialised
to the social service. Their work, of all men’s, is least
valuable to themselves, most valuable to others. They
are absolutely for other people to so extreme a degree
as nearly always to warp and injure their personal
relations, even under the fairest conditions. They
must do the work for which they are built, cost what it
may, and this compelling power, this insistent force
from within which will out through whatever medium
is at hand, this they call ‘ self-expression”! An
artist, they say, must not consider social service in the
least; he must express himself.
It is a true recognition of the kind of work he must
do; he must indeed express that whick is good in him
quite regardless of whether the people around him want
it or not; will pay him for it or not; will kill him for
CHAPTER TWELVE 267
it or not. But that unfaltering expression is his social
service, his true function, what he was built for. And
it is not “ himself ” that he is expressing, it is ‘* them-
self.” He is, of that people and that time, a voice,
an eye, an ear, a hand to do. Holland made the Dutch
painters, not they Holland. They in return in their
accomplished work made Holland Hollander, so to
speak, but the lives of many generations of Dutchmen
and Dutchwomen went to form those painters first.
There is no necessary conflict between the two con-
ceptions of the artist’s duty—to express himself, or
to serve society—as far as the special performance goes:
‘but the misconception carries wide error and evil with
it none the less. It makes the artist morbid in what he
fancies a vast self-consciousness, whereas he might
remain as free and unassuming personally as any child,
once he recognised that it was not he who was doing
all this, but they. It would save him too from the com-
mon mistake of applying his splendid range of social
sensitiveness to his own personal affairs as he too com-
monly does. Had Carlyle, for instance, seen truly what
was the nature of his place and power, he would have
been less haughty and less irritable—also less lonely.
The individual must needs suffer under the isolation
of his strange overdevelopment, unless he is able to
detach himself from it, and be a person among other
persons freely. The power to separate the man from
the office, to come down from the throne and play ball,
is a healthy one. On the other hand, much true artis-
tic service is lost to the world through this misconcep-
268 HUMAN WORK
tion about “ self-expression’ when the power is not
overwhelmingly great, and the individuals are strong
in their sense of duty as they see it. This is especially
true among women. To such, the inner impulse demand-
ing’ expression is considered “ selfish,” and a thing to
resist ; and their energies are forced into other lines be-
cause thereby they imagine they are best serving. If
they recognised this inward propulsion as the call for
social expression—not self’s—it would stand differ-
ently in their scale of duty.
A question rises here of large importance, and not
easy of answer. Suppose the social expression actuat-
ing the individual be a bad one—visibly a bad one—re- '
sultant from wrong conditions and tending to pro-
mote others as wrong—should such a tendency be fol-
lowed? Is that the social service? How far may the in-
dividual judgment give check to such social tendency ?
As, for instance, certain wrong economic conditions,
say in France, before the Revolution, tended to produce
many social phenomena, including a tendency to de-
based literature and art. Should the artist, in such
case, say to himself, “ Why, dear me! This is a vicious
and reactionary social impulse. I am out-Heroding
Herod—this stuff shows how bad we have been, and
doesn’t help us to be any better. Now I will not in-
dulge my inclination to paint these torture-chamber
scenes, or these subtle indecencies. I like to—but what
of that? It is a social tendency, but society is not al-
ways right, she goes backward and sideways by spells;
it will not do her any good to let out this stuff. No,
CHAPTER TWELVE 269
I'll choke it off, and, if I can’t paint better things, I'll
take to pottery or weaving.”
Whether this is best, or whether it is the artist’s duty
humbly to voice that which is in him—saying, “ Well,
this is the way you feel, is it? Better let it out then.
Perhaps you’ll change quicker if you see your badness,”
this is a very large question.
Perhaps the truly morbid and vicious tendencies, thus
recognised by the artist, would cause him as much shame
as if he had unfortunately inherited some scrofulous
disease, and he would be unable to proceed. This, at
least, should be held steadily in mind, that human work
is not mere expression, of self or of society, but is
transmission, and therefore to be watched.
If speech were merely a relief to one’s own feelings,
poured forth into empty air and earless waste places,
then foulness and profanity would be merely indications
of how the speaker felt, and hurt no one. But where
speech goes to other ears, it must be measured, not
merely by the speaker’s emotions, but by theirs. So the
artist is not merely an unconscious spring bubbling over
with fair water, or foul, according to its hidden sources,
but is a conduit, taking the water to something as well
as from something. And as a conscious intelligence
bound to act “ up to his lights,” if he judges the water
to be bad in its effects, he has no right to convey it to
others. This would leave an easy alternative to the
artist. Let him, if he must, write his decadent litera-
ture, paint his decadent pictures ; and then, having so re-
lieved himself of these foul secretions, let him decently
270 HUMAN WORK
destroy the product, lest it prove contagious. Some
friend, having seen, would say compassionately—* Poor
Jones! He has to write about so much of it in a year—
he cannot help it, it is better to come out, I suppose.
But don’t look as if you knew—he is very sensitive
about it.”
In a more advanced civilisation we may have Public
Health ordinances as to these expressions, like the signs
in our street cars. “The assumption of the artist that
his form of production is beyond all social responsi-
bility or control, that ‘‘ there is no ethics in art,” is a
very interesting instance of the eg? concept at its most
insane height.
If ever there was a “ social function,” it is art. As
a civilisation advances, there is more and more develop-
ment of art; as we look back along the path of social
progress, there is less and less of it. In its inception it
was more or less common to all workers, a little of it;
as it grew, it demanded more wholly the work of a
whole life. No ultra-specialised social servant is more
removed from self-support than the artist, whose work
is of no faintest possible use to him as an individual.
He must absolutely depend on the advanced society
which made him, which feeds, clothes, shelters, and de-
fends him, and whose highest needs it is his duty to
serve.
Higher than kings or captains, higher even than the
giant producers and distributers of wealth, comes this
delicate, sensitive, exquisitely specialised organ of so-
ciety. For true service he deserves all the love and
CHAPTER TWELVE 271
honour society can give, as well as the support due all
of us—nothing can overestimate his value. For true
service,—but what service does he give?
The more highly developed the organ, the more open
to disease. No feature in human production is marked
with worse depravity than is found in art. Because of
the extreme pleasure found in the transmission of his pe-
culiar power, because of the special sensitiveness involved
in his form of service, we too often find the artist sunken
in a sublimated selfishness and arrogant to a degree
beyond comparison. It is as though an eye should
plume itself loftily on its power of sight. ‘* You poor,
blind body! You cannot see, but I can! I only can see,
and I like to see. It gives me pleasure. I will see only
what gives me pleasure. It is my pleasure to see things
pink—all things pink. And round—all things are
round.” ‘The poor blind body cannot deny that things
are pink—if the eyes say so; but it has hands at least,
to tell it that some things are flat and others sharp; so
it works on, sadly misled by its servant.
And if we reason with the servant, saying: “‘ Are you
so sure that things are pink? It does not seem reason-
able—it does not seem right,”—the servant, loftily and
unapproachably replies: “ The Eye does not reason!
There is no right or wrong to the Eye! I am an Eye,
and I see as I like. If you differ with me, go blind! ”
When we recognise production as a social process, for
the social good, all work will change its standard of
measurement. The worker, artist or scientist, in-
ventor or teacher, must often differ with the purchas-
QTR HUMAN WORK
ing public; must modify his work by his own reason and
conscience, not by that of the other people; but the pur-
pose to which he modifies it is social service. It may cost
him his life at the time; he may have to set himself and
his views against those of the past and present; but he
should do so with unfaltering devotion to what he be-
lieves the social good; not in this lunatic position that
he and his work are unique in the universe—that he
owes no responsibility to anything—that “ art is for
art’s sake.”
When we are alive to the nature of our social proc-
esses, when we see that production is both duty and
pleasure, personal good and social advantage, we
shall bend our tremendous powers to develop and edu-
cate the productive energy in all our children, and pro-
vide the best conditions for its free exercise.
ea ees TRB UT T ON
Summary
Distribution the field of most social disorders. Ad-
vantages of Distribution. Physical Avenues of Distri-
bution. Mechanical means of Distribution. Social
nourishment flowing around the world. Evils of local
production and consumption. Social wmstincts de-
veloped by common interests. Love rests on service.
International dependence means mternational peace.
Long circuit, wide base, gives room for larger develop-
ment. Present system of Distribution does not properly
supply the world. Mysterious coagulations. False
concepts again. Ego concept. Want theory. Work-
ing and eating, which comes first? Parent not compe-
tent to provide for child in society. Social parentage.
Public education. Making and taking. How to supply
social energy. Pay concept. Patent failure in appli-
cation. Selling kerosene as a social service. No true
relation between work and pay. Pay idea wrong.
Nourishment first, work after. Heirlooms in our heads.
The Bear. Competition and survival not useful among
our vital organs. Our improvement mutual, collective,
organic. How to raise the productive value of society.
No ratio between want and work. Reductio ad ab-
surdum of Want theory. Not “ pay,” but investment.
A man’s work is his payment to society for value re-
ceed. Slave labour could not conceive of wage labour;
wage labour fails to conceive of free labour. The
normal ‘‘ incentive’ is pressure of social energy. See
effect of false concepts on distribution of wheat. How
it should be. Real “ business sense” for society.
XIII
DES TRIBUTION
WueEn we come to the subject of Distribution, we are
facing what may be called the main field of our social
disorders. Under this head, and that of the next chap-
ter, Consumption, come all questions of property rights,
with the vast structures of the civil law ensuing; the
whole money question—laboriously complex; the de-
mands of the labour movement; the protests of the
“leisure class”—we are on the great battlefield of
modern thought.
Let us approach it simply and naturally along the
lines laid down in preceding chapters.
Distribution is a natural corollary of production.
Society produces through its individual members in
ever-growing surplus, and must distribute that surplus
among its members to the best social advantage. What
that advantage is needs no abstruse exposition; it is
simply to have all the members of society supplied with
what they need in order that they may so continue to
serve society.
As social functions develop, the rate of production in-
creases, as well as the relative distance of the con-
sumers; and with them increases the necessity for an
ever wider, swifter, and easier distribution of product.
The circulation of our social supplies is as essential to
275
276 HUMAN WORK
social growth as the circulation of blood is to the
growth of the body. ‘This is seen plainly in the course
of history. In the earliest times the young civilisations
depend on great waterways for their life and prosperity
as the easiest means of transportation ; and water trans-
portation remains one of our most important avenues
of distribution. But seacoast and river bank were not
enough for us, land transportation must develop too,
and it has done so, wonderfully.
At first the mother-of-all-industries, the savage
woman, was the only beast of burden. Then stronger
animals were pressed into the service, and reached their
height of usefulness in the age of caravan traffic. The
drag, the sled, and final triumph—the wheel, were in-
vented, and the world rolled on more and more swiftly.
With the wheel grew the road, and civilisation leaped
forward. The road became a railroad, tireless mechani-
cal forces superseded the quadruped, and the distribu-
tion of social products to-day is truly marvellous.
The goods of the round world are gathered into local
distributing centres, carried across continent and ocean,
and scattered in tiny parcels to the millions upon mil-
lions of remote consumers. Each section contributes its
particular wealth. The ice goes south, the oranges go
north, the coffee goes west, the tobacco goes east, the
manufactures go everywhere.
If we could watch a little globe in action and see the
coal pouring slowly up out of little holes, and flowing
off in black streaks across land and sea; the oil going
with it, but farther and faster; the wheat yellowing
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Q77
whole provinces, heaped up in golden mountains, carried
off in thick yellow streams in train-loads and _ ship-
loads; the gloves of France on the hands of Americans,
the tools of Americans in the hands of Russians; the
whole flux and swing of our social circulation wherein
one man’s life is fed and strengthened by the fruit of
thousands of far-born foreigners,—if we could get this
clearly in mind, the organic relation of society would be
plainer.
On what line of race-advantage has this tremendous
evolution come to pass? Why distribute so widely?
Why is it not better to produce and consume locally,
each man for himself, as Tolstoi would have us?
The advantage is easily demonstrated if we accept
the working plan of organic evolution. If the develop-
ment of Society is in the universal line of march; if it is,
if not an “ object,” at least an observed tendency, for
the loose scarce-human proto-social stuff to move on
steadily toward an always-increasing degree of common
intelligence, common activity, common enjoyment, com-
mon peace, and power, and love,—then every process
which promotes this movement is advantageous.
Since the development of a society requires common
service, and that common service requires for its wise
direction a common consciousness, therefore every modi-
fication of human activity which develops common con-
sciousness is advantageous. Since the line of advance
in socialisation is from a state of self-supporting indi-
vidualism toward a state of collectively supporting so-
cialism, therefore every extension of our economic proc-
278 HUMAN WORK
esses along that line is advantageous. Self-support de-
velops only egoism. Mutual support develops mutu-
alism. The more general the base of our maintenance,
the more general our advance toward omniism—toward
that degree of common consciousness which shall best
protect, supply, and develop everyone. |
When each man took care of himself, he had no in-
terest in, or love for his neighbour; when their small
‘spheres of influence ” touched, there was a combat.
In such conditions no Society was possible. When small
communities or large are self-supporting, they have no
interest in, or love for each other; this stage of develop-
ment is the stage of war. Their “ spheres of influence ”
touch, and there is combat. When the economic proc-
esses of the world are in commcn—and they are already
beginning to be so—we have the sure basis for common
consciousness, for international peace, and all high de-
velopment; only hindered by the preserved ghosts of
previous national, local, and personal “ states of mind.”
That mutual love which Tolstoi and his kind would
see established depends primarily on the widest exten-
sion of our common interest, the widest distribution of
our specialised production. The law of organic ad-
vantage in such relation is clear. Self-support is a
very short range of life. Any trifling accident may
break the circuit, and the individual is.lost. The wider
the circuit of distribution the safer the component in-
dividual. With the universal insurance of Society’s
whole working bast, there is the largest wealth possible;
the largest safety, the smallest risk from any source.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 279
There is also, still more importantly, a gain in de-
velopment.
In a large well-running organism there is room for
rest, for the accumulating of energy to apply to special
needs. Too prolonged disuse will ultimately eliminate
the neglected part, to be sure; but for the time being, a
well-organised society can support in idleness those
whose service is no less valuable for being intermittent
and irregular. The basic “ vital organs ” work all the
time. The later “ special organs ”
b]
not only may but
must rest. Our “ special senses,” our delicate nervous
system, the dominating brain, are easily injured by use
which is perfectly normal to heart or lung. By wide
distribution society is enabled to support all its parts,
whether active or passive, and so preserve a greater sum
of usefulness. We approximate the same idea in any
mutual benefit or insurance society.
It is to broaden the base of supplies and extend the
time of payment—a sort of physical credit system. A
society where the widest possible range of produc-
tivity is maintained, with the largest margin for emer-
gencies, is richer and stronger than one which has “ all
its eggs in one basket.” So the underlying laws of
social advantage have worked upon the human race, de-
veloping transportation facilities, physical, mechanical,
and psychical (meaning here those purely mental agree-
ments and hypotheses by which we facilitate commerce),
until we have a system of distribution which would seem,
at first sight, quite equal to the needs of the world.
But well we know that it is not! Bitterly and deeply
280 HUMAN WORK
we know that it is not. Some malign force is working at
cross-purposes to clog and check and divert this social
circulation, and produce the morbid conditions we know
so well—the congestion of supplies in some quarters,
with the ensuing train of social diseases, and the lack
of supplies in other quarters, with another train of dis-
eases consequent. 3
If there is one conspicuous fact in social economics,
it is this peculiar perversion of our distribution system.
Those streams of coal and wheat and oil are myste-
riously checked at various points, they accumulate
where they are not wanted, they filter, slow and scant, in
insufficient driblets where there is most need. ‘They are
violently pumped out in sudden jerks, they sullenly re-
treat and coagulate for long, slow periods. What is it
that ails our all-important processes of distribution?
Merely the human mind. Only our _ superstitions.
Simply the action of false concepts upon conduct again,
our old enemies, the Ego concept and the Want theory,
gaining headway in these vast currents of modern in-
dustry, and doing in large conspicuous ways the same
evil they always did, less visibly. From the very begin-
ning, the men through whom these great processes must
needs be carried on, have been labouring under a delu-
sion. ‘They supposed that all this commerce and ex-
change was due to their individual exertions, and that
the purpose of it all was to pay them. Better proof of
the elastic capacity of the human brain could hardly be
asked.
That a man carrying a pack on his back should say,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 281
“T do it,” is natural; that he should still say, “‘ I do
_it,”? when he puts the pack upon a mule and drives the
beast unwillingly along, is still natural. But that this
**T ” should swell and swell from mule train to train of
cars, from canoe to Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, is
marvellous. Now that such a myriad “ we” do all this
work for such a myriad “ us,” it would seem as if the
various component “ I’s”’ might have been lost in the
shuffle before now. Not a bit.
Acting under the Ego concept, with a sense of jus-
tice and of ownership dating from the Ego period, we
have arduously bent our minds to the development of a
system of laws more elaborately ramified than the twigs
of a tree; to follow and preserve the individual rights
along every broadening branch of social growth. Gov-
erned by the Want theory and its derivatives, we have
planted an arbitrary system of inter-individual ex-
change, like a set of interlocking toll-gates, along every
inch of these great roads of progress.
Let us analyse again this group of allied errors, the
Want theory. ‘‘ Work is an expenditure of energy
by an individual man whereby to obtain something for
the gratification of his wants.” This rests on the as-
sumption that what the man needs to gratify his wants
is to be had only by his working. As we know that he
does not himself manufacture the articles needed to
gratify his wants, but that these articles all and several
are made by other people; we assume further that each
man owns what he makes, and will not give it up to
another without value received—“ If a man will not
282 HUMAN WORK
work, neither shall he eat.” And as the supplies of the
world are assumed to belong to the existing inhabitants
in private ownership, each newcomer, unless inheriting
a share in the privately owned world, is expected to
*“‘ work ” before he receives anything.
Confronted by the glaring fact that a new human
creature cannot work before he receives anything, but
must be supplied with many social products for many
years before he can produce in return, we then fall back
on the parent and say, “‘ the new human being shall
receive nothing from Society except so much as his
99
father is able to earn,” i. e., pay for in work. That
system of supplying the young by the unaided activities
of the parent, which we find among animals, we assume
to be the best for the human race, and so the final dis-
tribution of social products is filtered through, not the
consuming capacity, but the “ earning” capacity of
individuals.
If the man with ten children is but a low-grade work-
man, his earning capacity being but $1.50 a day at our
rating, his children receive from Society less than fif-
teen cents’ worth of supplies each. Their consuming
capacity is naturally much greater, but under our as-
sumption that the father represents the family as an
economic unit, and that the family shall be restricted
in consumption within his power of production, the
children are thus supplied with the equivalent of one-
tenth an individual’s output.
In some ways we have recognised the mischievous
results of this method of distribution, and have begun
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 283
to supply some of the necessities of life on a wiser
plan, as in our system of public education, where we
frankly reverse the position. We therein say: ‘ Chil-
dren are members of Society. The maintenance and
progress of Society require that its members be edu-
cated to some degree. ‘This degree of common educa-
tion the individual earning power of the parent cannot
provide, but the collective funds of the community can.”
So we publicly distribute education, and even enforce
it—or try to—on the clear ground that the output of
the future citizen depends on his income in youth, and
that Society cannot afford to leave that income to be
measured by a fraction of a low-grade worker’s output.
Some strictly logical and scientific-minded thinkers do
indeed object to this free public education, maintaining
that since effort is only made to satisfy wants, there-
fore, if you satisfy any of man’s wants, you decrease
by so much his efforts, you lower the output of Society.
The advocates of free public education, though still
clinging to their idols in other departments of life,
maintain that education is a different matter, and point
with honest pride to the results, showing that a publicly
educated community does produce more and behave
better than one wherein each man must provide as he
can for his children. But in spite of this patent proof
they still refuse to fairly admit the new principle in-
volved, and to fairly give up their fallacious old one.
The Want theory assumes that a man has a supply
of energy which he may or may not discharge, but that
he will not discharge it unless forced to by necessity.
284 HUMAN WORK
If you supply his needs he will discharge no energy
whatever, he will not work. ‘This does apply, fairly
enough, to an animal’s effort to take things, but does
not apply to man’s effort to make things. The fact is
that a man has energy according to (a) his physical
well-being, and (b) his access to social stimulus; and
that, having it, he must discharge it or suffer in the
forced retention. The practical question before exist-
ing Society is how to supply the most energy to its
members and direct it to the most use. ;
In free education we do supply the young social
factor with both energy and direction, so that he grows
up better able to work and to work rightly than if left
‘to the degrading influence of this pitiful theory, that
the way to make a man work is not to give him anything
until he does.
The real process of distribution is to circulate our
stores of social nourishment as widely and freely as
possible, that we may be always more and more able to
work. We are quite consistent in this Pay theory of
ours. We carry it out even in regulating the amount
of our payment. We hold that not only shall a man
have nothing unless he works, but that he shall in no
case have more than the equivalent of his work, that
no person shall receive anything unless he has “ earned ”
it, given a full equivalent. We are forced to admit
that in the life about us this principle is a conspicuous
failure; we see those who work the most getting the
least ; we see those who have the most working the least ;
and we seek to explain this anomaly by a modification
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 285
of the Pay concept to this effect: that a man should
be paid not only in regard to the amount, but to the
value of his work.
With this idea we thought we had reached the height
of justice, yet we are forced to admit that this does
not serve, either: that the men who do the most valuable
work for Society are precisely those least paid, some-
times most punished, and that the men receiving the
largest rewards are often the most ordinary func-
tionaries and sometimes rascals. Does anyone presume
to claim that selling kerosene oil is so precious a service
to Society that the head pedlar should have more money
than anybody on earth? Is the maker of steel rails or
huge cannon a nobler servant than the maker of bread
or the teacher of children? All these are forms of
social service truly, but are they fairly paid? The
facts do not bear out our theory at all, and we only
attribute it to other malign influences, never dreaming
that our basic idea is wrong. In sociological law there
is no relation whatever, either in amount or quality,
between normal human work and any possible “* pay,”
any more than there is between the work of an eye and a
leg and the amount of blood they get. Normal human
work is organic action. It is a result of previous good
received, not an effort to obtain goods withheld.
That under the system of slave labour-a man will
work under fear of pain is true. That under the sys-
tem of wage labour a man will work under hope of a
reward is true. But both these systems are transient,
superficial, soon outgrown by any live society; neither
286 HUMAN WORK
of them affects in the least the underlying organic law
of human work. Our conscious minds have not kept
pace with social growth. We are trying to administer
the processes of an advanced society on lines of pre-
social theories. If anyone seeks to point out these
great sociological facts, we cry, ‘“‘ These are Utopian
dreams, millennial visions; you are a thousand years
ahead of your times!”
Whereas it is we—we, the general public, with all
these hereditary heirlooms in our heads in place of
facts—that are ten thousand years behind them! We
try to explain and assist the highly developed and abso-
lutely interdependent social processes by arguments
from a long-outgrown era of individualism. ‘Theories
of individual effort, incentive, reward, competition,
and “survival of the fittest,” we apply to our own
organic functions. If they do not fit, so much the
worse for the functions!
If we were individuals, like the beasts, it would all
hang together well enough, thus: Here is a Bear.
His business is the same old series, maintenance, repro-
duction, and improvement; to be, to re-be, and to be
better. All of these ends he serves by the exercise of
his own personal abilities. These abilities, being purely
personal, are only called into exercise by personal wants
or impulses. If the Bear found his food on a plate
before his cave every day he would indeed suffer from
fatty degeneration; his powers would decay, he would
become less and less Bear because he did less and less
Bear-ing. |
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 287
And conversely, if suitable difficulties (not too great)
intervene between him and his food, he develops the
faculties to meet the difficulties, and improves. If he
is not a smart or strong Bear, and cannot get much
for himself and the little Bears, why, let them die;
better Bears will survive them, and the race improve
by their absence. If too much survival of the fittest
left too much food for the survivors, so that they be-
came less fit, why up would pop others less fit also to
compete for the food, and thus a beautiful level of
Bearishness is maintained. This method of evolution
we see plainly and admire, perhaps unduly, as a “ nat-
ural law.” All laws are natural. If not natural—they
are not laws; we only thought they were.
The essential difference between us and the Bears is
in our organic relation. 'The Bears have no common
interests, common functions, common good; we have.
A perfect balance of highly superior Humans, muscular
and ferocious, with just food supply enough to keep
up the fighting, and just fighting enough to keep down
the food supply, is scarcely a social ideal. The social
organism alters the matter completely. The human
race improves through production and exchange of
products—Work. The work of the human race im-
proves under laws of organic evolution, of increasing
specialisation and interdependence. As society ad-
vances a man profits less and less by what he does for
himself, more and more by what others do for him.
The improvement of a human being is not in his own
hands, but in the hands of other human beings. Our
288 HUMAN WORK
line of racial advance is in serving one another, like any
other group of organs. This common profit in a com-
mon product leads us to wish to improve that product.
The product of human beings is improved by supplying
the needed energy, stimulus, direction; by putting into
the individual in order that we may get out of him the
pay first, the work afterwards.
~~ 'This reverses the whole proposition. It is no longer
a matter of the individual workman seeking to satisfy
his wants @ la Bear. It is Society seeking to raise the
productive value of its integers by carefully supplying
those forces which produce more and better work.
Quite without knowing it Society does this to a consid-
erable extent, hence the working value of a member of
an advanced society is greater than that of a member
of a low society; but because we have not known the
real laws of human production, we have continued to
interpret the whole field of social activity in terms of
individual competition.
The supply of a man’s needs we have tried to limit
strictly to his earning power, refusing to observe that
there was no ratio whatever between what a man needs
and what he can do—unless, indeed, an inverse one.
The fact that a man, well started in lines of work suited
to him, will produce continuously long after all his
needs are supplied we have tried to account for by
assuming new needs as the necessary incentives. Noth-
ing could be clearer—to our view. If a man works
only in order to supply his needs, then a given man
who does work worth a thousand times as much as
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 289
another man’s must of course need a thousand times
as much. He must, because there is no other reason
for his working. And if the working power of the
average man shows large and general increase, it is
only to be accounted for by shining ranks of hitherto
undreamed-of needs, which were evolved to lead him on!
So the missionary, acting on this theory, tries to
rouse the contented savage to want things, holding that
attitude to be a productive one; and the economist,
satisfied with his theory, never looks to see if there is
any observable connection between want and work, in
race, class, or individual. In reductio ad absurdum the
Want theory comes to this. Man works to supply
wants. ’As the act of working does not supply wants,
this involves another clause; man works to get wealth
to supply wants. And this, if a real law of nature,
involves some inevitable connection between the clauses:
work must produce wealth and wealth must supply
want. Also, if a real law, there must be some propor-
tion between these clauses, the less the want the less the
work, the greater the want the greater the work, with
the same proportion in the “ wealth ” which is the inter-
mediate factor understood.
This would make the proposition: A given amount
of want urges to an equal amount of work which secures
the desired wealth; or, Want equals Work and Work
equals Wealth.
If this be so we shall find in society those who want
the most do the most work, and those who do the most
work have the most wealth. Poverty would be a healthy
290 HUMAN WORK
state, inevitably developing into wealth. Is this the
fact? Hardly. What is the fact? This: that man
does the most work who is best able to do it, and likes
it most.
The way to make people work is to make them able
and willing, strong, skilful, ambitious, enthusiastic.
When we wish to develop horses to work more and better
than previous horses, we do not seek to attain that end
by cutting off their oats. The power to work comes
from the energy already supplied, not the hypothetic
energy of a future reward.
The “ pay ” comes first; not as payment, but as in-
vestment. A man’s work is his payment to Society for
value received, and he has to receive it before’ he can
return it. The conscious attitude of the worker should
be that of gratitude, of a proud and lavish return for
the rich supply received from infancy; his unconscious
attitude one of irresistible pressure, discharge of
energy. Each of us owes the world our best, because
to it we are indebted for all we are and have. In per-
sonal intercourse we all know the difference between
services done for love, or from a sense of honourable ©
obligation, and services done merely for pay. We
know the dignity and honour of the first attitude, the
meanness of the second. And yet we prefer to have the
whole world’s vital processes degraded and minimised
to the level of that hireling service, rather than elevated
and multiplied as the limitless outpouring of richly
developed members of society.
To which the Want theorist replies: * It is not what
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 291
we prefer, but what is,” to which again I answer—It
is not. The facts of sociology do not bear out the
Want theory. The true place of that theory is in the
stage next to primitive slavery. The first compulsion
to co-ordinate effort was force and fear and pain.
Only the slave in danger of death could be made to
work. The next compulsion to the still unsocialised
ego was that of hireling self-restraint, of withheld
food. Observe that this is a purely arbitrary and
social condition, involving the ownership of that food
by someone else. Primitive man ate without working
for many thousands of years, and does yet in many a
favoured isle.
He simply picks his food off trees, or hunts and fishes
for it, even fights for it. But he does not work for it
at that stage of social evolution, much preferring
starvation. Later on, being no longer a free agent,
the food being forcibly detained until he worked, why,
work he did, under the action of such pressure as he
could then feel. In that period of evolution when only
cruel slavery made men work, the thought that they
would ever work in the comparative freedom of the con-
tract system would have been scouted as wildly visionary
and Utopian. We can see something of this among
our own freedmen, members of a much earlier social
status, forcibly incorporated with our advanced body
and failing to respond at once to the same stimuli.
Under compulsion they worked. Free, and under no
compulsicn save self-interest, they do not work as in-
dustriously as further advanced races. This does not
292 HUMAN WORK
prove that self-interest is less powerful than compul-
sion, or that slave labour is better than wage labour,
but merely that the negro race is less socialised than
the Anglo-Saxon. And we, in order to aid in his social
development, are learning to supply him with the social
stimuli he needs. Wage labour was a useful stage in
economic evolution, just as slave labour was, but the |
incentive of self-interest is no more final than that of
compulsion. .
A man will work if you make him, but also, being
further developed, he will work if you do not make him,
but merely pay him. A man will work if you pay him,
but also, being further developed, he will work if you do
not pay him; that is, if he is not “ paid” individually,
through personal advantage, but collectively, through
social advantage. We must remember that in the way
of relating effort to result coliective man must “ work
for his living” as actually as individual. But it is
their living which they work for; the effort and the
result are in common, and to the individual is supplied
the great organic energy to work with. The normal
goal to labour for, in a highly socialised race, is the
common interest, a far stronger attraction than the
personal interest.
See how our misbeliefs affect the course of a single
industrial process. Here is the wheat crop, for instance,
one of the world’s most important products. The
human race, collectively, produces an enormous amount
of wheat. The same number of workers, without the
support of a large organised society, could not produce
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 293
that crop, or in any way distribute it. This amount
of wheat, produced collectively, is for our collective
consumption. ‘The individual producer raises a large
surplus beyond his own needs for the social needs. The
line of economic advantage is plain: To produce the
most wheat with the least expense of social energy, and
to distribute the most wheat with the least expense of
social energy to the largest number of consumers. The
social advantage lies in the food-value of the wheat, in
the ensuing increase in the productivity of the race.
Now see how our wrong ideas work against this ad-
vantage. The individual producer, shutting his eyes
to the collectivity of the process, considers that he
** owns ” the wheat, and that he “ raised it himself.’’
Therefore, instead of facilitating its distribution with
the least expense of social energy, he seeks to obstruct
it by demanding as much social energy as he can get,—
i. é., the price,—the first step in the exchange. Of
course, being largely isolated, he does not succeed in
getting much, and, equally of course, he is at present
not supplied with his fair share of social energy before-
hand; but admitting these facts, it remains true that
his mental attitude is the same as that of the larger
dealer: he looks on the world’s wheat as a source of
profit to him to any extent that he can reach.
Then come the great army of transporters. Thanks
to the high organisation of this social function, the
distribution of the wheat goes on with great facility
and dispatch as far as mechanical convenience is con-
cerned, and, by the concentration of the business in a
294 HUMAN WORK
few hands, much of the dribbling man-to-man subtrac-
tion is saved; but alas—the little subtractions of many
small private carriers are only exchanged for the enor-
mous subtractions of the few great public carriers.
Even at this extremely developed stage of evolution
in the social process, even in a business so public as to
require public grants of land and privilege, and des-
‘*a common carrier,” in the very face of
ignated as
these flaring facts, this weird survival of a remote past,
this prehistoric Ego, with its Want theory, sits gob-
bling in the stream of social distribution, like some
dinotherium mysteriously preserved to do mischief.
This Common Carrier, managed by a few men, seriously
believes the distribution of the world’s wheat to be in-
tended for the private aggrandisement of the Carrier,
and sucks from that life-giving stream as large a
supply of racial nourishment as “ the traffic will bear ”
—sometimes more! Of course the Carrier must be pro-
vided with his share of social nutrition in order that he
may carry, but why he should claim this vastly dispro-
portionate amount is not so clear. It is not clear, that
is, in the light of social laws to-day, but it is clear
enough as a logical deduction from the antique premisses
so devoutly believed in.
The stream of wheat, robbed of much of its value,
pours on and reaches the final stationary points of
distribution, and there again the dealers, wholesale and
retail, imagine that this mass of food was brought
across the world for their benefit, and. proceed to ex-
tract from it as much as they are able. Thus the food
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 295
reaches fewer people in smaller quantities, and those
who get it are obliged to give back a laige proportion
of its nourishing power in payment. The circulation
of the world is very seriously interfered with by this
morbid action.
Conceive now for a moment of wheat as a means of
promoting the social good. Of a Bureau of Agricul-
ture carefully posting from year to year the amount
needed in different localities. Of a Bureau of Trans-
portation carefully arranging from year to year for
the most prompt and easy transfer to those localities.
And of a Bureau of Local Distribution seeing to it that
the wheat was as promptly and easily spread among the
consumers.
That would mean the greatest gain and the least
waste and expense. That would be business sense on
the part of the world. To reduce the outlay of effort
and increase the income of nourishment, with a com-
mensurate increase in social productivity,—that is the
line of economic advantage for the Society of our
time, as it was in the physical economy of the Individual
of the Paleolithic Past.
But this Paleolithic Individual with his pre-Paleo-
lithic ideas is a great nuisance to-day.
helve: “CONS UMP TION’ (5)
Summary
Previous propositions. Alleged selfishness. Social in-
stincts as natural as individual. Root error on Con-
sumption shown in Heaven, Utopia, etc. Honour im
acting. Contentment theory. Limit of happiness in
getting, limited; in doing, unlimited. Pleasure in eating,
result of idea. Effect of this concept on Society. Im-
pression merely incentive to expression. Transmitters,
not vats. Collecting mania. Nature of ownership.
Right of property. Social relations psychic. Mov-
able rights. Law of property rights. Consumption
means to production. Consumption must precede pro-
duction. Natural limits of Consumption. Cause of
excesses. Ill effect of morbid Consumption on pro-
ducer. Must produce more than consume. Ten houses.
List of propositions. Existing economic concepts. In-
fluence of position of women. Women natural pro-
ducers. Men natural destroyers. Men have monopolised
production. Women made purely consumers. Women’s
powers, confined to family, breed selfishness. Gen-
erosity bred outside home. Feminine consumption be-
come morbid. Vampire. Parasite. Hired matrimony.
Woman as excessive consumer cause of “ Society.”
A disease not. a “function.” “Society columns,”
medical bullets. Effect on consumption.
XIV
CONSUMPTION (TI)
We have laid down certain propositions in the pre-
ceding chapters, namely, that men are part of a great
Social Organism; that as parts of it they are continually
supplied with its stimulus and nourishment; that as
parts of it so nourished and so stimulated, they must
discharge the swelling current of social energy in social
action, which is Work; and that the business of a con-
scious and intelligent Society is so to produce and dis-
tribute social wealth as to maintain and increase this
flood of energy, the discharge of which in our highly
specialised industries is supreme delight. Against these
propositions will be at once erected that common bul-
wark of ancient superstition, man’s selfishness. We
generally believe, and as generally act on the belief, that
the individual selfishness of man is such that nothing
would induce him to act for the good of society, even
though that good plainly included himself.
This theory of our selfishness is not borne out either
by the scientific facts of our sociological position or
the everyday facts of life about us.
The theory dates from a time when men were still
mainly individual animals, when it was true. Being
imbedded in that heavy, slow-going, ancient brain, and
hammered in by each subsequent generation, it has re-
299
300 HUMAN WORK
mained with us until to-day. What we need to realise
is that social development has brought with it other
feelings, quite the opposite of selfishness, but equally
natural, which are found in us all in varying degree;
which we see at work about us, and yet which we refuse
to admit into our “‘ minds ” as facts. On the contrary,
we sturdily maintain in our minds the false ideas and
act upon them, working much evil thereby.
The organic connection of human beings develops
among them those social instincts which are necessary
to promote their common good, a class which we, seeing
their pre-eminent value, have classed as “ virtues,” call-
ing the disproportionate action of more primitive indi-
vidual instincts ‘ vices.” Neither term is true. Ego-
ism was a virtue in the individual status; altruism, or
rather, omniism, is a virtue in the social status; both
are natural. Our misinterpretation and false naming
have prevented our easy assumption of the new qualities,
that is all, the past concept being more potent to our
minds than the present fact.
Among the group of root errors still retarding our
development, none is more mischievous than that wherein
we assume pleasure to lie mainly in impression rather
than expression. We believe that what we get makes
us happy rather than what we do, and therefore con-
sider our doing as a means of getting. Perhaps this
idea antedates even the Want theory; but it is need-
less to grope too critically among the errors of the
remote past, they are all old enough.
The utmost extreme of this early error of ours is
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 301
found in our general scheme of Heaven or even of an
earthly Utopia. When we give free rein to fancy in
seeking to portray happiness we arrange that an
individual may have everything he wants, and be
provided with some eternal miracle in the way of ap-
petite, it is to be hoped, that he may keep on want-
ing it!
The Happy Hunting Grounds of our American
savages and the old Norse Walhalla had some action in
them, probably because the savage believers knew of
no other way to procure food save by hunting for it.
With the red man and the brawny slayer of Scan-
dinavia, action was so intimately connected with gratifi-
cation and with honour that their future state had
something doing as well as eternal banqueting. But
observe the more sophisticated Mohammedan Paradise,
with its ecstatic debauchery, and our own Hebrew
Heaven, with its music and jewelry and the chorused
adoration of an oriental court,—no action is predi-
cated of these, save that necessary to get there. We
postulate rest, peace, plenty, rich and beautiful sur-
roundings, things to have for eternal joy, not things
to do.
Some of our seers and philosophers have often per-
ceived the fallacy of this belief, and have preached in
various voices to the effect that man should “ Act well
his part—there all the honour lies.”
Moreover, most of us practically find that there is
more pleasure in doing what we are best fitted for than
in having anything whatever; but still the dominant
302 HUMAN WORK
governing theory of humanity holds that a man’s real
business is to get such and such good and that “ he won’t
be happy till he gets it”! I heard this theory well
expressed in passing by two men in the street recently ;
well-dressed, important-looking, elderly men:
** Yes,” said one of them, shaking a handsome cane,
“they get their money all over the world and come here
to spend it, to live! ”
A better expression of this dominant belief it would
be hard to find. The immense world-wide activities of
the business men alluded to were defined merely as “ get-
ting money,” and the spending of that money, the ob-
taining all manner of materials for consumption, was
defined as “ living.”” Acting under this belief we see
the majority of mankind using continual effort to get
things for themselves and their families, and, when the
things they desired are attained, yet no resultant satis-
faction follows, they merely transfer the ideal and seek
to get more, other, and different things. Against this
tendency a minor line of philosophy has been levelled,
preaching contentment, but this philosophy is still on
the wrong basis, for it is still the things we are told
to be contented with—those we have instead of those
we have not, that’s all.
In practical truth the happiness of man in what he
gets is limited, extremely limited, but the happiness of
man in what he does is unlimited. The receiving
capacity of our nervous system is soon exhausted, but
the discharging capacity has no limit but that of
natural periods of rest. The pleasure in expression
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 303
increases with use, the pleasure in impression decreases
with use.
It is interesting, pathetic, and absurd, to see the
spasmodic contortion of nature under the effort to
enjoy having things. We enjoy food, naturally. The
use of food is, plainly, to enable us to do things, and if
we do enough we always enjoy food. But the foolish
person ignores doing things and seeks to enjoy food as
an end in itself. The enjoyment soon palling, and even
decreasing as the natural appetite decreases, the foolish
person then pushes on in a line of artificial enhance-
ments of this natural function, bringing in an elaborate
convocation of other senses, with various luxuries and
arts, so as to prolong and increase his enjoyment. The
enjoyment receding vaguely before him, he adds eccen-
tricities to his luxuries, runs the gamut of elaborate
changes, and plays Hob with his internal organs, all
in the persistent endeavour to hold on to the enjoyment
of eating.
In this particular field of enjoyment no animal alive
has attained such subtle, exquisite, and long-drawn pain
as we have achieved withal. Our array of alimentary
diseases is really instructive, yet does not seem really to
instruct us. We still persist in putting the cart before
the horse and looking for pleasure in what we get. In
the field of economic action, this fallacy exerts: a con-.
stant evil influence not only by checking the output, but
by degrading and distorting that output to suit the
growing vitiation of taste which always results from
this belief.
304 HUMAN WORK
The governing concepts of any society at any period
tend inevitably to such and such results, but their effect
is modified by interaction and by many external circum-
stances. As the society grows and circumstances change
we may see one and another root-thought working to its
special result; checked by this, modified by that, but
always tending to its own end. So this one thought,
acting with all our others, right and wrong, may be
followed in the ever-present social tendency to luxury
and excess. |
If you believe that happiness lies in the impressions
you receive, you naturally modify your action to the
purpose of securing the desired impression. Seeing the
impressions fail to produce the expected happiness, but
still believing in the theory, you simply strive to secure
further impressions. Finding, as jaded emperors have
found, that to have everything in the world you want
does not make you happy, you still hold on to the
theory and merely sigh for new worlds to conquer; or,
if your religion is also built on this theory, look for-
ward to an eternity of having things to make you
happy.
The demand for happiness is perfectly healthy and
right, but we are mistaken as to the means. Every
possible impression receivable by the human sensorium
is merely an incentive to expression. We are trans-
mitters of energy, not vats for storage. Our capacity
for storage is merely to give us wider and longer range
in our discharge. The living force of the Universe is
pushing through man, and as that force is greater than
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 305
he, so is the joy of doing greater than the joy of
having. ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Of course!
Let us study some of the practical results of this
false concept of ours. One of the most exquisitely
sublimated extremes of its action is seen in our dis-
tinctively human practice of what is called “ collect-
ing.” It is bewildering at first. That a squirrel
should collect nuts, and, on the same line, that Pharaoh
should collect wheat, or that the housewife should col-
lect food in advance, is all “ natural.” That anyone
should collect that “ greatest common denominator,”
money, is the same tendency as above. But that a
human creature should collect a vast supply of objects
which he does not use, never intends to use, and could
not use if he wanted to, is truly remarkable.
The objects may be of use to other people—if they
had them—as in innumerable pieces of china, but of
no use to him; or they may be of no use to anybody, like
defaced postage-stamps—but that does not affect the
collecting instinct. This depraved appetite, seeking to
acquire for personal ‘ ownership ” without even the
excuse of consumption, frankly waiving the pleasure
of using the things and affixing that pleasure solely to
the getting and having of them, is as morbid a process
as could well be imagined. It is ‘* the mania for own-
ing things ” in full delirium.
What is the normal law of ownership? It is simple,
like all natural laws.
Social processes are served through the social body,
306 HUMAN WORK
through a great number of detached mechanical struc-
tures. The social functionaries, in order to carry on
their functions, must have a certain extra-physical
environment. The family and the individuals therein
must have homes, the body must have its clothes, the
worker of all sorts must have his tools, his shop, all that
is necessary for his work. Society requires of the in-
dividual the performance of certain functions. That
performance requires the continuous use of certain
mechanical adjuncts. Society must guarantee to the
individual the continuous possession of those adjuncts,
of the things necessary for him to do his work. That
is the social “‘ right of property.”
All property is a social product, evolved in the course
of social development, needed by society for the social
service. Any social factor, a carpenter, for instance,
is a working agent consisting of a human animal spe-
cially skilled and specially tooled. Without the skill
and the tools he is not a carpenter. Society having
evolved the skill and the tools, certain members of So-
ciety then become carpenters. Since their skill is essen-
tial to the social service, Society must educate them;
since their tools are essential to the social service, So-
ciety must secure the tools to the man. 'This is owner-
ship, a social right, quite just, and perfectly natural.
Social relations are psychic. Property rights are
psychic relations. We agree that such men shall own
such things, and they do. We deny that such men own
such things, and they don’t! Men once owned slaves—
everywhere. This “right” was gradually withdrawn
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 307
by the givers, until it-now only exists in certain locali-
ties of low social development. Parents once “ owned ”
their children, could kill or sell them. This right has
been withdrawn.
There is no ultimate basis for human rights but the
best interests of Society, and our conscious recognition
of human right depends on our knowledge of those in-
terests. Thus our rights change from age to age, as
Society changes, and our laws and customs slowly fol-
low the new developments in social consciousness. In
our time we are in the active throes of change on two
great subjects, the rights of women and the rights of
property.
On the latter head this formula is advanced as a
safe one: The individual has a right to those things
necessary for him to best serve Society. That is, the
carpenter has a right to his tools, and the musician to
his instrument, both to their special education, and they
and all men to the food, shelter, clothing, and other
things necessary to their best social service.
Not a return equivalent to, as we try to arrange our
system of payment, but a supply necessary to, in ad-
vance. If a man is to write books for humanity he
has a right to his pen, ink, and paper; and to such
other conditions as are essential to his best productivity ;
but because one man’s books are worth ten times as
much as another’s, is no reason why he should have ten
times as much pen, ink, and paper.
Consumption is a means to production—impression
is of value as it conduces to expression. The pleasure
308 HUMAN WORK
and the duty are in Doing. Having is merely contribu-
tory.
Our mistake about consumption is what our pay-
ment system rests on; we work merely to obtain some-
thing; and that something is rigorously measured ac-
cording to our previous labour. In changing the
ground of our thought, we shall recognise that produc-
tion is the main issue of life; that consumption is essen-
tial to it; that each social factor has a right to such
supplies as shall best promote his productivity, and
that they shall be provided him in advance.
“The mill will never grind with the water that ”—
hasn’t come!
If this position be reluctantly admitted, there follows
the alarmed demand: ‘ But if the consumption of the
individual is not measured by his previous output, how
shall we measure it—how shall we prevent him from an
inordinate, a disproportionate, socially wasteful con-
sumption? ”
How do you measure the dinner for your family and
friends? What prevents them from eating a bushel
apiece? The natural limit of consumption is capac-
ity, the natural measure is necessity and appetite. A
constant and sufficient supply of anything does not pro-
voke inordinate consumption—quite the contrary. A
refined and moderate selection is the result of full and
adequate provision. Inordinate consumption is the
result of a deranged supply. People who customarily
do not have certain things cannot develop taste and
judgment in selecting them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 309
People who generally have too little, are quite apt to
take too much when occasion offers. Knowing that the
supply is uncertain leads to taking more than is wanted,
so as to store for future use; and the “* pecuniary canons
of taste,”’ so ably described by Veblen (‘* Theory of the
Leisure Class ”), lead to that meretricious display and
cultivated wastefulness which form another phase of
our abnormal consumption.
Natural production tends to fill the world with con-
stantly improving supplies. Natural distribution tends
to place those supplies where they will do the most good.
Natural consumption tends to appropriate all that is
good and beneficial, and thereby promotes production—
a spiral of social progress.
We have seen how production and distributron are
injuriously affected by our misbeliefs, notably by the
attitude of the obsequious caterer to the desires of the
purchaser. The reason these desires are so deteriorating
to the world’s production is in our false attitude to-
ward consumption. The combined effect of our popular
economic superstitions reaches a considerable height of
injury to society. |
Here is the producer limiting his output, as far as
possible, to something well within his income, each man
striving to get out of the world more than he puts in:
whereas all our wealth and progress is conditioned upon
our putting in more than we take out—and thanks to
the marvellous productivity of the race, we do, we must,
so put in, in spite of our ego-centric struggles. Here
is the producer, again, guiding the kind and quality of
310 HUMAN WORK
his output, not by real human needs, or by the laws of
improvement inherent in the product, but by the weak-
nesses and artificially fomented tastes, as well as by the
purchasing power of “ the market.”
If “‘ the market ” has a small purchasing power, that
means, under our economic system, that the human
beings composing it are low-grade stock, cannot pro-
duce much themselves. Under sociological law it would
follow that they be supplied with the best things, in
order to improve their productive power, in order,
again, so to add to the social wealth. But in our
method, measuring what a man shall have by what he
can do, we give the least to those who need the most!
Surely anyone can see how stupid this is—to limit con-
sumption to the value of previous output, and so
steadily to maintain a low output. Conversely, by seek-
ing to increase consumption in proportion to out-
put, we again do evil; for consumption has its own
inexorable limits, bearing no relation whatever to
output, after the needs of the producer are really
sup plied.
Surely, this too, is plain.
So much fertiliser to the acre will increase the crop—
but not indefinitely. So much fuel to the fire will in-
crease the steam pressure—but not indefinitely. So
much oats to the horse will increase his speed—but not
indefinitely. And so much of our great stock of social
goods will increase a man’s social value, his health, hap-
piness, and working power—but not indefinitely. Be-
cause I am the better worker for a house suited to my
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 311
needs, I am not therefore ten times the better worker
for ten houses suited to my needs.
Food, clothing, education, painting, literature, music,
entertainment,—a certain amount is good for a man,
improves a man, belongs to a man; but the indefinite
multiplication of that amount merely injures the man.
Now suppose we change our minds about consump-
tion. Suppose we do fairly recognise these plain,
natural facts:
(a) Man lives by virtue of social relation.
(b) Social relation consists in specialised inter-
service.
(c) That interservice consists in the production and
distribution of all our human goods—from potatoes to
poetry.
(d) The advantage to Society lies in the constant
development of its processes, a better and easier pro-
duction and distribution.
(e) The duty of the individual lies in his best service
to Society in these vital processes; and the duty of So-
ciety lies in supplying to the child the best conditions
for full growth and genuine education, and in continu-
ing to provide to the adult those conditions essential to
his full, free, and most efficient service.
(f) All that we produce is intended for the main-
tenance and development of Society.
(g) All that we consume is intended to promote our
productivity and general social value.
(h) The advantage of the individual lying abso-
lutely in the hands of Society, it is the obvious busi-
312 HUMAN WORK
ness of the individual to see to it that Society performs
its duty to him—to all of him—and, as obviously, to
perform his full duty to it—which is merely all of him.
With this economic creed we should see each indi-
vidual doing his best work, and Society eagerly hasten-
ing to supply to each individual all that he needed to do
his best work. As against this consummation devoutly
to be wished stand our existing economic concepts:
(a) Men live by virtue of their own work.
(6) Men have to work in order to satisfy wants.
(c) The satisfaction of wants is the purpose of life.
(d) The advantage to the individual lies in his get-
ting as much as he can, and doing as little as he can—in
“* buying cheap and selling dear.”
(e) The improvement of the individual] les in So-
ciety’s not giving him anything till he has shown that
he has it already—or its equivalent in labour. Thus the
less ability he has, the less of anything he gets—which
improves him.
(f) All that a man produces is his own, and he has a
right to consume it all himself, or destroy it—in any
case, to withhold it from those who want it till they give
him as much as he can get for it.
(gz) All that a man consumes is pure advantage—the
advantage of life. To have everything we want, to ac-
cumulate more than we want, to invent new wants with
infinite pains and supply and oversupply them—this
is happiness. And since we find practically that the few
who do it are not happy, and that the many who cannot
do it are not happy either, we assume an eternal ap-
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 313
petite, and an eternal gratification in another
world!
(Singular thing—the unsatisfied desires of Man!
Trying to put a quart measure in a pint cup through
an india-rubber eternity !)
(h) The advantage of the individual lying abso-
lutely in his own hands, it is his obvious business to
take care of himself; and since the pressure of social
relation cannot be ignored, we assume that the business
of society is simply to preserve “a fair field and no
favour ” for individuals to struggle in!
“That government is best which governs least.”
“Give us natural opportunities and freedom.”
‘** A man has a right to do anything he pleases that
does not interfere with the rights of others.”
Fortunately for us the working of natural law is that
of the first creed; and our personally misguided con-
duct of affairs cannot wholly crush back the social
growth belonging to our time.
In this connection it is important to note the influence
of women, in their artificially restricted position, upon
the world’s consumption, not only in economic fact, but
in our inherited feeling and education on that subject.
Women, as we have repeatedly seen, were the first pro-
ducers. Creative industry is theirs by the deepest laws
of nature. The female is the original reproductive
stream of life; and in the higher stages of her develop-
ment she still manifests the larger range of race-activi-
ties. In the human species for by far the longest period
of our life, the proto-social, she was the main—almost
314 HUMAN WORK
the sole—producer, men being mostly destroyers. But
for the most of our historic period, all the time that is
best known to us, women have been prevented from tak-
ing part in progressive human production and re-
stricted to the duties of a house servant.
What tendency to specialised social service they
might manifest was promptly banned as “ unwomanly,”
belonging only to men. The man elected himself to be
sole producer, in the large social sense; and the woman
was to be only a consumer, to depend on him for her
maintenance and take what he gave her.
The position is acutely abnormal—quite opposite to
the inherent nature of the female. It is her instinct to
give—not to take; ably to do, not feebly to be done for.
This unnatural attitude was forced upon her, how-
ever, with two results, inevitable results, as regards con-
sumption.
One is that all her flood of power and patience and
infinite service being confined to her one master and their
children, she has developed in them inordinate appetites
and morbid tastes. The productive force that should —
flow broad and smooth in Society at large, being bot-
tled up at home, with no consumer but the family, neces-
sarily accustomed the family to receiving more than
was good for it; thus maintaining in the world the an-
cient selfishness of the primitive individual, which real
social life tends steadily to reduce. The social instincts,
those large and outflowing feelings we call generosity,
justice, altruism, are bred in the mutual service of spe-
cialised social industry ; but the individual instincts, once
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 315
virtues, now become vices if too prominent, are nursed
and fed continually in that hotbed of all personal in-
dulgence, the wife-served home.
Thus the position of woman promotes the tendency
to inordinate and morbid consumption in man and
child.
But it has also a direct influence on her. She is born
and reared in this same atmosphere; she inherits from
father as well as mother; the habits of many genera-
tions have a gradual effect upon her, and all old civili-
sations show one monstrous sight, the bottomless greed
of the artificially bred women.
As Cleopatra outdid Antony in
sumption ”—swallowing a dissolved pearl worth more
than all his gobbled delicacies; as Nana destroyed ex-
pensive furnishings just to amuse herself; so have these
horse-leech’s daughters outdone any sons that estimable
sucker may have had, in the cry of Give! Give!
Burne-Jones’ picture of “ The Vampire” typifies
well man’s opinion of this horror which he has so care-
fully made. Our instinctive dislike of greed in a woman
** conspicuous con-
is based on its unnaturalness, it is essentially foreign to
her sex. But the fact remains that women, in their
false position, have become greedy beyond description.
The bountiful producer, aborted, has become a destruc-
tive parasite.
The boundless pouring love, compressed to primitive
limits, becomes morbid and works evil; and the habit
of always taking, and never doing, has produced its un-
avoidable result, and given us the woman we all know,
316 HUMAN WORK
who takes, greedily, from a childhood of wheedling,
through a youth of coquetry, and a lifetime of hired
matrimony. When it is not matrimony, language fails
to express our horror; but when it is, the commercial
basis discolours the relation; and the plump and beauti-
ful creature in the costly surroundings she never
thought of giving a return for, is in the same category
as a consumer with her less respectable but no less
plump and expensively surrounded sister.
To find the pleasure of life in getting and having, to
feel no honourable impulse to do, to give, to work, to
return to labouring humanity your quota of service,—
this is the degraded position into which we have forced
our women, and which expresses itself not only in them,
but in their children, who are all the world.
Such women play the game we call “* Society,” whose
trivial performances are celebrated so respectfully in
our newspapers in their record of dinners and dresses
and dances, as if where these people ate, or what they
wore, or how they hopped about, was of any earthly im-
portance. The seriousness with which this class of
people who have cut themselves off from human life by
refusing to take part in its active processes, who neither
produce nor distribute, but consume in ever-increasing
ratio, take upon themselves the distinctive name of “ So-
ciety ” is one of the most paralysing jokes of history.
They even designate their pitiful amusements as “ social
functions,” a misnomer as consummately absurd as
** Christian Science.”
For a lot of richly caparisoned human animals to get
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 317
together and eat, or embrace one another and caper
about to the sound of music, has no more relation to a
social function than St. Vitus’s dance has to chopping
wood. A disease is not a function. This fatty degen-
eration of the social tissues is a sad and important fact,
deserving careful study; but its importance lies in its
danger to the rest of the body Po not in any in-
herent dignity.
If we take our “ Society Columns
tins, they have some value perhaps; but vulgarly to
enlarge on our forms of disease is at least bad taste.
What we commonly call ‘‘ Society ” is a morbid growth
in the real social structure, developed to meet the arti-
ficial needs of these misplaced women; and such a so-
ciety, influencing as it does, through widening ranks of
imitators, the markets of the world, has a most evil
effect on our habits of consumption.
If we saw clearly on these lines, recognising produc-
tion as a law of Human, 2. e., Social Nature, then our
women, as our men, would take part in the healthy proc-
esses of real social life. If we saw that this constantly
increasing expression of a constantly increasing fund of
social energy was limitless happiness, we should turn
our competition another way, cease this painful effort
to show who can get the most, and begin to run races to
show who shall do the most, with the result that there
will be more for everyone to have.
Meanwhile, under the action of this special delusion
about consumption, we continue to fill the world with
false products, and to spend strenuous lives trying to
*? as medical bulle-
318 HUMAN WORK
get them away from one another. Can we not recognise
this one thing, that consumption is but a means to an
end; that production, Work, is the end to which a legiti-
mate consumption is a necessary means, and that the
only natural and practical measure of consumption is
the need of the consumer.
SV GONSUMPTION (IT)
Summary
Resistance of false concepts to true. Spread of litera-
ture. Use of imagination. Hypothesis as to natural
laws m consumption—free clothing—Veblen. An un-
natural market. Commodity money a check to distri-
bution and production. Real conditions. Enormous
producing power of civilised man. Legitymate con-
sumption. T'ruffies. Free transportation. Free pro-
vision reduces demand and increases productivity.
Property rights and personal ownership. Evolution of
ownership, ownership a psychic relation, a social condi-
tion, based on social needs. True law of ownership:
“Society must msure to the individual those things
which are essential to his social service.” Decrease of
self-interest. Success of our surviving savages. “ Mak-
ing money.” Normal wealth must circulate. Belief
in polygamy. Natural relation not Communism.
Legitimate personal property is in goods consumed—
not m goods produced. Normal ownership inheres in
normal consumption. Production belongs to Society.
Man does not consume his own product, but that of So-
ciety. Human rights social—essential conditions of
true social relation. Previous position, based on Ego
concept and Want theory, does not work well. Com-
pulsory production not normal. Owner and Employer.
* Iron law of wages.” Want not a productive force,—
tends only to consumption. Organic action of Society.
America’s productivity does not show commensurate
greed, but fuller supply of social nourishment and stim-
ulus. Parent’s relation to child, and Society’s. Social
duty.
XV
CONSUMPTION (ITI)
Ovr minds are so thoroughly accustomed to thinking
along false lines in economics that true and natural
social processes, when described to them, seem but fan-
tastic dreams.
This is only according to the brain’s working habits ;
it takes time to change it, and we need much paticnce
with ourselves and one another while changing. Fortu-
nately for the age we live in, there has been so much
change in so many lines that further progress is easy,
compared to what it was a few centuries ago. Fortu-
nately in especial for the country we live in, its national
attitude is that of welcome to the new, suspicion of the
old. | )
In the wonderful spread of the great art, Literature,
and particularly the branch art, Fiction, as distributed
so universally among us by our libraries, our periodi-
cals, and the daily press, we have far more general use
of the imagination—our brains will stretch. This
faculty of imagination is no mere factor in telling
fairy-tales; it is that power of seeing over and under
and around and through, of foreseeing, of construct-
ing hypotheses, by which science and invention profit as
much as art. Distance, perspective, proportion, these
are obtained, in our consideration of facts, by use of the
321
322 HUMAN WORK
imagination. The rocks and stars confronted the
savage as they did the beast, and with little more result ;
they were visible facts, that is all. He could not
imagine any further content in his observation. We
observe, similarly unmoved, the facts in economics.
Now let us use this common faculty of imagination ;
and, judging by man’s behaviour in conditions we do
know, try to measure what it would be in other condi-
tions. Let us take one concrete instance in this process
of consumption, a perfectly conceivable hypothesis,
and see for ourselves how it would work out.
We will now assume that clothing was free to all.
This does not mean that it was dropped from the sky;
we are still to produce and distribute it; but the final
absorption by the individual is unchecked. What would
be the consequence? At first there would be a rushing
seizure by the people who have never been satisfied in
clothing—they would take and take again—greedily—
inordinately—sacking the shops and stuffing their
houses. But suppose the supply is maintained, steadily.
They would soon find it was inconvenient to stuff their
houses, if the stores remained always to draw from. The
hoarding instinct does not spring from continued
plenty, and becomes foolish in the face of it.
Then, though not carrying off so much, they would
perhaps choose the most beautiful and expensive
fabrics. Finding that all wore the same, these distinc-
tions would cease to distinguish; if everybody was wear-
ing velvet at will, the result would be that those who did
not really like it would leave it off. If everybody was
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 323
wearing lace, they would find it was too frail for outing
costumes. If there was no artificial glamour on one
stuff more than another; if the supply was steady and
e==free; then, slowly, gradually, timidly, would appear
for the first time among us true personal choice!
People would at least know what they personally pre-
ferred and have it; clothing would be adapted to genu-
ine need and genuine taste.
Our habits of consumption are so complicated by long
deprivation on the one hand, and by “ the pecuniary
canons of taste”? (Veblen) on the other, that most of
us live and die without ever knowing what we really
want. ‘The Market” for which our producers com-
petitively cater is an unnatural one. What we call
“the demand ” is not a healthy, legitimate demand; it
is uncertain, capricious, subject to strange fluctua-
tions and reactions; and in endeavouring to “ supply ”
it, the most experienced and far-sighted producer often
fails.
What is legitimate consumption? Is there any meas-
ure by which the world’s market could be regulated?
No measure is needed. Our mistake here is due to con-
tinually seeking to govern production by an arbitrary
system of payment. On the theory that a man will not
work except for pay, it follows that his work will be
strictly adjusted to the pay; and thus the tendency
to a constantly increased productivity is held rig-
idly in check by our existing means of payment.
Commodity money adds the last straw to this heap
of folly.
324 HUMAN WORK
Men will work only for pay.
Pay must be money.
Money must be gold.
So the amount of human productivity must be
measured not by the muscular power, brain power, and
machine power of society; nor even by the amount of
corn and wool, wine and oil, wood and stone, and other
necessaries ; but by the amount of one particular metal.
It is fortunate we have not elected to measure human
production by radium!
It was bad enough to try to check our vast output
by an arbitrary equivalent in goods; but it is so much
worse to squeeze and strain it through this tiny gauge
that it does seem as if we might have seen our foolish-
ness long since. But that is where the power of a con-
cept is so much greater than that of a fact. As a mat-
ter of fact, the bulk of the world’s business is done on
credit ; and its material vehicle is paper—a mere matter
of record of transaction; but in our minds we still deal
only in gold; and every once in a while we must inter-
rupt the course of production and distribution to see if
all accounts can be balanced in gold. As the business is
necessarily in advance of the gold—always and al-
ways—we have to exert ourselves to get more gold—
even if we must go to war for it.
Try the imagination again—see the consequence if
gold suddenly grew common as dirt—and lost its sup-
posed “ purchasing power.” Talk of “ fiat money ”—
never was any fiat more purely arbitrary than this
solemn assumption of ours that a hungry world can-
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 325
not eat—a strong world cannot work—a vast and in-
tricate organism in full swing of vigorous life cannot
perform its functions—without every act of mutual
service being measured in gold. The vital facts in the
case have no more connection with gold than with
wampum. Production and consumption go on as con-
ditions of our organic life; distribution facilitates both;
and we, governed by this Punch and Judy troupe of
primitive ideas, check and pervert all these great func-
tions.
What are the facts in true social economics as con-
cerning this question? ‘They are these. The earth
furnishes us with the raw materials for living. Civi-
lised man is able to combine those materials in consum-
able form, and to distribute them to all, with increasing
facility. Even under all our obstructions, the rate of
production and distribution increases with rapid strides ;
if free—it is impossible to estimate the gain.
Put it something like this:
A primitive man can obtain the necessities of life by
giving all his time to it. A civilised man of our day can
produce his share of all the necessities of life, in say one-
tenth of his time. In the other nine-tenths he can pro-
duce comforts, luxuries, all the higher products of hu-
man life. Under right conditions, civilised man could
produce the necessities in a hundredth part of his time,
and could so grow and improve as to lift all the higher
products to a far more advanced stage. Fully supplied
with all he needs of this social wealth, the producing
power of civilised man is far beyond his needs. “ His
326 HUMAN WORK
needs ”’ brings us again to the question, ‘* What is legiti-
mate consumption? ”
We assume that, unless rigidly kept down by arbi-
trary forces, man would riotously consume in un-
ending profusion; that he could not possibly supply
enough for general consumption; and that since the
supply is limited, it should be rigidly confined to those
who can pay for it. This is an unwarranted claim.
Normal consumption does not increase in any such wild
way.
The normal demands of the whole human race for
food can be met by the materials at hand. Observe that
they are in some measure met now; our millions do live,
do eat, even under present conditions. They might live
better, have a more improving diet, under better condi-
tions. But if, like Mr. Bounderby, we assume that
everyone will wish “ to be fed on turtle soup with a gold
spoon ”—we are wrong. ‘“ Have some truffles!” urges
Mr. Newrich. ‘I don’t care for any,” answers Mr.
Bornrich. ‘* Not care for truffles? ” cries Mr. New-
rich; ** why, they cost five dollars!” ‘ What of that? ”
says Mr. Bornrich; ‘‘ I don’t like *em!” ‘* Conspicuous
consumption ” is a feature of leisure-class culture, of
illegitimate wealth founded on illegitimate poverty.
With consumption on a natural basis, there would be no.
great demand for nightingales’ tongues.
Observe the existing facts in any department of so-
cial supply we have made free to all. Our highroads
are free—but we do not therefore run continually up
and down on them, just because we can. We travel as we
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 327
have need of it, that is all. Free roads facilitate normal
traffic and promote civilisation. Yet, when it is urged
that free railroad travel is a necessity to-day, there is a
horrified dissent. ‘* What? let people travel on the rail-
road without paying for it? Why, they would travel
all the time!” You see we do use our imaginations a
good deal. These objectors imagine that mankind
would desert both business and pleasure, forego the
joys of home and the attractions of both city and
country, to spend their days in the discomforts of a
railroad train, and their nights in those culture tubes
of all bacilli, the sleeping cars,—just because travel
was free!
Have we never seen the plain and common fact that
free provision of anything reduces the demand to the
> are not wanted,
normal at once? Things “ common ’
unless they are really wanted. All artificial demand
drops off. There is no pride, no element of “* conspicu-
ous waste ” in having what everyone can have, in doing
what everyone can do. But the normal demand goes on,
and the world is enriched, all progress is promoted, by
the gratification of that need.
Sometimes people do things merely because they cost
money,—to show financial superiority,—but they do not
_do things merely because they do not cost money. Free
consumption would not increase any legitimate human
demand, but it would increase our power, and skill, and
so our wealth. Recognising that human production is
conditioned upon previous supply, upon right inherit-
ance, right education, right environment of all sorts, it
328 - HUMAN WORK ,
follows that the more fully and freely we supply that
environment, the more we produce.
Against this clear sequence stand, like a range of
mountains, our theories of property rights—of personal
ownership. Personal ownership, private property; we
believe in these things as we believe in God,—and a good
deal more so. These we hold to be basic principles, they
underlie all else, nothing can shake them. Whoso ques-
tions or criticises them “ strikes at the foundations of
Society.”
It is not the first time that Society has been challenged
in what it held to be foundation principles, has been led
to change those principles—and has still survived.
Cautiously, and gently, not to jar or strain our un-
used brain areas too much, let us draw near this mighty
pile and see on what it rests. Bear steadily in mind the
history of human life—and of all life behind it. See all
the ages of pre-human evolution going on in their ma-
jestic work without any dream of such a thing as prop-
erty, or ownership. See humanity in its slow beginning,
developing the extra-personal medium of life, the gar-
ment, shelter, tool. See how these things, detached, yet
essential, exchangeable because human, yet had to be
connected with the holder for his personal good ae
social efficiency.
Here, as we have shown in the preceding chapter,
arises the true law of ownership, and ownership as nat-
ural as that of the beast of his teeth and claws, a true
social law. It has no individual basis. Individuals
carry their property on their bodies, it grows there. So-
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 329
ciety evolves detachable material adjuncts, the made
things, the social medium. So far as this social medium
is usable by all, it should be free to all. So far as it is
peculiar to the specialised social functionary, it must be
guaranteed to him. Society must guarantee to the in-
dividual those things which are essential to his social
service. The civilised man has given up his power of
caring for himself in order the better to serve Society.
Society, to profit by this service, must insure right pro-
vision for the individual. In a clumsy, unjust, ill-
managed way, it already does so, has always done
so, it could not live else. But it has not done so
fairly, or well, and, therefore, it is ill served, it
suffers and sickens, and in repeated instances has
died.
Again and again in history we may see the process:
the nascent society developing, growing more and more
specialised and interdependent, that development re-
ducing the power of individual constituents to take care
of themselves, self-interest weakening in the mass as
social interest became increasingly necessary ; and then
the most primitive members of Society, those still most
actuated by pre-social instincts, the surviving savages in
civilisation, taking advantage of the immense social
productivity, and claiming for themselves the social
wealth.
They are not the world’s best servants. Their power
is not the power of highly specialised talent or genius.
It is a truism that the more ability a man has to serve
Society in its advanced needs, as in the arts and
330 HUMAN WORK
** make money,” as
we call the process of individual absorption.
The gold miners and the mint “‘ make money,” all pro-
ductive labour makes wealth; but those who secure the
most of it for themselves are of quite another class.
The verb “‘ to make ” and the verb “ to take” have not
the same root.
This illegitimate development of ownership is in-
jurious to Society. Wealth, in normal circulation, is
sciences, the less ability he has to
productive, is a social advantage. Wealth, in abnormal
secretion, is not only unproductive of good, but abso-
lutely evil in its influence. Yet, the whole process, with
all its mischievous results, is conditioned upon our false
concept as to personal property and the right of owner-
ship. Its glaring heights of evil are most conspicuous ;
but the mischief lies not in the special extreme instance,
but in the general condition.
See the effect of a belief in unchecked polygamy.
Under economic pressure, the mass of the people have
but one wife, and so are saved the worst effects. But.
the crowded harems of the great show most shameful
results—sensuality, cruelty, idleness, physical deteriora-
tion, conspiracy, murder. Are we then to blame the
polygamist in proportion to the number of his wives;
or merely to recognise the principle as wrong,—and the
one-wived believer as much in error as Solomon? It is
our common concept of ownership that is to blame, not
Carnegie and Rockefeller.
See how the true principle would work out. Society
is a unit, we are but parts. Social life develops
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 331
the power to make things—the things which are
essential to social life. Increase in these things is in-
crease in social wealth and social power—a ceaseless
line of development. The good of Society requires the
best development of all its parts—that they may so
produce more. The best development of all the parts
requires the full supply of social goods.
The social goods belong to Society, are made by So-
ciety, for Society ; and should be distributed to Society
as widely, swiftly, and freely as possible; so adding to
the social good. Now this line of talk, to the general
mind, means a wallowing sea of communism. We see
visions of a flat and uniform world, of no ambition, no
distinction, no privacy, no private property, and there-
fore no life worth having. This is because we do not
know what private property really is.
Legitimate private property includes all that the in-
dividual needs to consume. All the food he needs, all the
clothes he needs, all the education he needs, all the tools
he needs ; to each person what he separately needs, and to
each group what they separately need of the great fund
of social advantages. Is not that property enough? All
that a man can legitimately consume is his own, but
not what he produces. That is his return to Society.
What he produces is of no use to him, his dentistry, or
surgery, or masonry, his teaching or acting, his manu-
facturing or transporting,—this belongs to Society.
We have erred in attaching the claim of ownership to
the goods produced. It belongs only to the goods con-
sumed. The property rights of the individual to his
332 HUMAN WORK
own food, his own shelter, his own clothing, his own
tools of production,—be they paint brushes, books, or
chisels,—need never be questioned. So fast as produc-
tion becomes collective, the means of production become
collective. Where a separate weaver had a right to
own the separate loom with which he produced cloth,
now the group of operators, from “ hand ” to “ head,”
have a right to own the mill with which they produce
cloth, but not the cloth.
To whom then does the cloth belong, if not the
maker? To the wearer, of course. Cloth, as we have
shown before, is a social tissue, it is evolved for social
advantage. It has to be worn by members of Society.
We recognise this so clearly as to have laws command-
ing people to wear clothes, punishing them if they do
not. Such laws might be justly applied to silkworms,
but hardly to human beings, unless their clothes are also
provided. No doubt a position like this seems impos-
sible to our minds, so used are we to the other, to the
present belief that a man owns what he produces, and no
one has a right to it; but that he has no right whatever
to the necessities of life—to the means of production.
Let us think fairly and courageously about it. Here
is aman born. This product of his is yet potential, he
cannot produce until he is grown. What he produces
when he is grown, in kind and quantity, depends on what
he consumes as a baby, boy, and youth. Now since So-
ciety needs his product,—not he, mind you, he has no
use for the bricks or the books he will make,—since So-
ciety needs his product, and since that product is con-
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 333
ditioned upon his previous consumption of previous
product, Society, in its own interests, must see that he
is supplied with all proper provision,—he has a right
to it.
“A right” means an essential condition. Human
rights are all social, conferred by social consent, and
resting upon the social good. The right to individual
liberty, the right to justice, any right of any time rests
on the general acceptance of social benefit involved in
those rights. We have seen long ago that the good of
Society rested on the best human productivity ; but be-
cause we believed that productivity to be conditioned
upon subsequent reward, instead of previous Mache we
defined our rights accordingly.
Our position was like this: Society needs our best
product. Man will not produce, except to gratify his
own wants. What he produces is his own, because it is
essential to the gratification of his wants.- Therefore,
Society must guarantee to each man the product of his
own labour.
The effect of the position is this: Conceiving our-
selves to be independent units, conceiving our end to be
the gratification of our wants, conceiving our product
to be a personal possession, and only produced in order
to gratify wants—we necessarily seek to limit the out-
put of our work to the measure of our wants. The con-
suming capacity of the man is made the measure of his
production, and under such a standard we see no way to
increase production, except by increasing the consuming
capacity, the wants. This is held by our existing econo-
334 HUMAN WORK
mists to work well, but they overlook certain essential
elements in the position.
The free production of the world is ob oad not that
of the persons who want the most or who get the most.
No one can show that a man’s social value depends
on his greediness. To want all things, to want them
intensely, to want them continually, to want them to be
of the best,—this does not add to a man’s industry, or
intelligence, to his skill, ability, talent, or genius. The
best and most work comes from those who have the most
ability and inclination to work, though they may be,
and often are, the most modest of consumers. But—_
and here is the neglected element in the case—if pro-
duction is not free—if productive labour is under any
compulsion, then truly those who want the most will, if
they have the power, compel other men to work the most.
That is, if you do not make things, but merely take
them, it is obvious that the more you want the more you
will take.
To recur to the status of slave labour. In this
system productivity is under direct compulsion. It is
proportioned to punishment. The owner of the slave
labour, if he wanted things, took from the slaves the
product of their labour, and the more he wanted the
more he took. In this case the greediness of the owner
is productive, his slaves produce more because he wants
more. But if their labour were really free, his wants
would not affect their productivity.
Again, in wage labour, we have the employer and the
employee. What is an employer? He is one who
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 335
“ owns ” what other men want. They cannot get what
they want unless he gives it to them. Since these
things which they want are the necessities of life, they
must work for pay, they are not free.
The employer, if he wants things, takes from the
employee the product of his labour; and, as before,
the more he wants the more he takes. Since he must,
in order to gratify his wants, keep these men alive and
productive, he must return them something; but the
action of his wants upon their labour tends to keep
their share at a minimum. This we call the “ iron law
of wages.” We hold that it stands to reason that a
man will give as little as he can to get what he wants.
This is quite true, want does not promote productivity.
But these employees are not free. If they were in-
dependent of the employer, he could not make them
work to gratify his wants. Personal desire does not
add to personal power, neither does it add to other
people’s power. Desire, want, hunger, may direct
action ; but it is not a productive force, it is a tendency
to segregate and consume, not to produce and distribute.
Now see the effect of the position here laid down.
Consumption is but a means to production. Pro-
duction is a natural function of Society—organic, inter-
dependent, instinctive. Production is promoted by in-
creasing social energy and social consciousness, besides
the self-evident condition of maintenance.
The organic action of Society necessarily involves a
common nourishment, as it is even now seen to involve
a common defence, and beyond that it requires a pro-
336 HUMAN WORK
gressive increase in social stimulus. Our increased
consumpticn is an accompanying condition of our in-
creased activity, as the hard worker should eat more
than the idle; but it is the well-distributed nourishment
that promotes the activity, activity does not nourish.
Now since the life and progress of Society depend on
our best production, it is the natural duty of Society
to so distribute nourishment and stimulus as to promote
that production. A rich, strong, free, intelligent,
thoroughly educated society will produce far more than
a poor, weak, foolish, uneducated society.
The tremendous productivity of America does not
result from our wanting more than other people, as is
popularly supposed, but from our having more. Not
only the great natural advantages of the country, not
only the independence which left men more free to work,
but our public institutions for wide distribution of
social advantages, such as free education,—these have
combined to make the American not a greedier, but an
abler man. Note in small instance the difference be-
tween our custom of free service of ice-water in the
theatres, of programmes and the like, of toilet con-
veniences in the great stores, and all such matters, as
compared with the twopence or fivepence you have to
pay extra for so much as a napkin in an eating house
in England.
** But,” says the Englishman, ‘ you have to pay in
the end.” We are willing to pay in the end. Any
decent man is willing to pay for what he has had. It
is the difference between the “ European plan” and
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 337
the “ American plan.” So soon as a more enlightened
society provides more and more fully and freely for the
needs of its citizens, so much the more cheerfully will
they be willing to pay for it.
Our personal work in the specialised service of the
great social body which maintains us is our payment
for goods received. The slave works to avoid the whip.
His labour might be termed whip-dodging. The em-—
ployee works to obtain bread withheld. His labour is
called ‘‘ bread-winning.”” ‘The free and socially con-
scious human being works because he likes to, because
he can’t help it, because it is his honourable return in
small degree for the immeasurable benefits he has re-
ceived from infancy from his supporting society. We
have established a very binding sense of ‘duty to
parents ” because we believed that the father by his
unaided arm supported the child; the mother by hers
reared and trained it. The parents unquestionably
give the child its physical and mental endowment. But
if we proportioned our duty to parents to the value of
our inherited constitutions and temperaments, some
parents would get short shrift.
Beyond the gifts of birth, the mother’s breast, and
the tendency to benefit of parental love, what else the
child receives is from Society. Parents were parents
and did what they could in savage and pre-savage eras.
That parents are wiser and tenderer is due to our
progress in Socialisation. That they are richer and
more powerful is not due to parenthood, but to Society.
The heaped-up increment of all the years, the highly
338 HUMAN WORK
developed products of our industry and skill, the dis-
coveries in science, the masterpieces of art,—these are
all social products not parental.
The child needs to be supplied with all that he can
healthfully consume of this his social inheritance, his
birthright as a human being. Some children have
more of the social products than others because their
parents have an arbitrary and unnatural “ ownership ”
of these products; but as a normal condition of sociol-
ogy, all children have this claim upon their great social
entail, with no “right of primogeniture” or other
usurpation to interfere. So supplied, and so taught
to recognise the true supplier, it will be as easy to rear
our children in a sense of duty‘to Society as it is now to
duty to parents, and more so, because this later, larger
claim is so indisputably true. With the full productive
power of the race finally set free and pouring out on
normal lines, there will be no lack of social benefit
for all. |
We have seen the economic advantage of wage
labour over slave labour; can we not see the even
greater economic advantage of free labour over wage
labour?
Sve tOUR POSLEDION TO-DAY
Summary
Fact and delusion. American advantages and possi-
bilities. Possible consciousness. Perverted Press.
Falsely maintamed position. Grade A and grade G.
Soul paradoxes. Old Adam. Arbitrarily opposed
“ Leisure Class” and “ Working Class.” Parasitism
actual and potential. Dead matter in live body. Sour
grapes. Charity an evil. Helplessness of rich man
trying to establish right relation. Furnishmg employ-
ment, t. ¢., furnishing payment. Unhealthy secretions
resultant from over-consumption. Law of private
servants. Doctor with a herald. Degraded art.
Human value m work. Painful result of social dis-
connection im leisure class. Working Class suffers dif-
ferently. Higher social position of Working Class.
All human labour collective. False classification.
Economic relation of sexes, result. Effect on child.
What he should be taught. The round man i the
square hole. Extended ill effect of malposition in
social organism. Waste of energy, inferior workman-
ship, deterioration of social tissue. Progressive mal-
nutrition. Genius.
DAY a
OUR POSITION TO-DAY
Tue difference between our real position in social de-
velopment, and that maintained in our minds, is very
great. It is as if a strong, capable, rich man suffered
from mania, had a delusion that he was a puny, feeble,
evil-minded wretch, and acted like one. Could the
delusion be removed, he would act like what he really
was and be happy.
Taking our own country as a type of social prog-
ress, what do we find to be its real conditions? In the
first place, it has every material requisite for health
and growth. It occupies a piece of the earth’s surface
big enough and varied enough to supply all the phys-
ical elements of triumphant advance. It has, second,
not only a base of the best human stock, but a large
and steady influx of all human stocks; it represents
the blended blood of all races, a world-people truly,
prototype of that cosmopolitan race which will ulti-
mately cover the globe. This gives a chance for all
possible development in stock and manifests it. It
allows also all religions to contribute their best, all arts,
all sciences; every line of special usefulness known to
man is known to us.
There is already sufficient intelligence to administer
world-interests competently, as shown in clear-headed
341
342 HUMAN WORK
captains of industry. There is already sufficient
*“ social instinct ’—. e., human love—to make elab-
orate and costly provision for our defectives and de-
generates, to push-earnestly for reforms and improve-
ments in every direction. Yes, there are quite enough
ardent ‘ homophiles,” warm lovers of the kind, already
in the field to do all of that sort of work we really
need. The reason they do not accomplish it all is
partly the lack of intelligent recognition on the part
of the rest of us, and partly limitations and errors of
their own minds. They care enough, but do not know
enough. So here we are, in plain fact, rich, strong,
intelligent, loving, quite able to live in magnificent
wealth, peace, and happiness. :
In equally plain fact we are living quite other-
wise.
We should manifest perfect physical health and
beauty. We are, on the contrary, nearly all sub-well,
very many sick, and very few beautiful. When we look
at the possibilities of the human body, as shown in
ancient Greece, and then at the kind of cattle we are
content to be now, it does no credit to our intelligence.
We should manifest a common grade of education which
would give to each mind an area of thought including
the earth and sky, plants, animals, and minerals, the
wonders of science, the powers of manufacture, the
whole history of the human race. This would be pos-
sible to practically all of us with right use of our edu-
cational advantages. We do manifest, on the con-
trary, a universal ignorance, even in this comparatively
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 343
well-educated country, a feeble, purblind, sticky little
brain stiff with prejudice, shackled with habits, blinded
with superstitions, and narrow, narrow to the paltry
limits of one human animal’s own family!
Of course most of us know in a vague way that there
are other peoples, that there were other times; but these
knowledges hang in the background of our minds like
faded wall-paper, lie far from us, disused and un-
familiar. The occupied area of the brain, the part we
think in and feel in all the time, is the tiny spot of ego-
consciousness. It is as though a man owned the Wal-
dorf-Astoria and was content to live in a bushel-basket.
It is quite possible for the average mind, properly edu-
cated, to waken each morning to a consciousness as
wide as the world, full of light and air, with the facts
of life seen in true distance and proportion. This does
not necessitate accurate, special knowledge of all
branches of human achievement, but a general knowl-
edge that there are branches, and how they branch. A
rightly spent youth should easily give this to every nor-
mal child.
But we, on the contrary, waken each morning to the
cramped, overtrodden field of our immediate personal
consciousness only. The affairs of the world, our
world, loom vague and distorted about us, while our
own, forced upon us by night and day, are so absurdly
magnified by being held too near that they easily shut
out the world. Our press, which should give to each
mind each day its world-view of current progress, is so
perverted in its function by the cramped minds of its
344 HUMAN WORK
egoistic functionaries, that it gives instead a weird
kinetoscope of what it thinks will interest us! As if
a general, waiting for dispatches from the field, should
be entertained by competing orderlies with funny
anecdotes! As if those anxiously waiting for bulletins
from the sick room should be provided with impression-
ist pictures of the patient’s relatives!
We do not occupy a hundredth part of our mind-
space, no, nor a thousandth. And in this darkness,
this cramping limitation, with but a partial and re-
stricted education and the false world-views of our mis-
guided press to relieve it, we blunderingly creep about
in the great world-functions we must serve, each of us
imagining that he is taking care of himself. The
difference between our real position and our false and
artificially maintained one is like this: If, for instance,
certain marked improvements in telegraphy have been
invented, raising our social efficiency in that line of
distribution to grade G, that is our legitimate condi-
tion; but if these improvements are destroyed by mis-
guided workmen, bought up and suppressed by mis-
guided property-owners, keeping our telegraphic effi-
ciency back in grade A, that is an illegitimate social
condition. We are really in grade G, but artificially in
grade A.
If, again, the machinery of democratic government
is open to all, our legitimate condition is that of full
democracy; if a large proportion of persons fail to
exercise their political functions, preferring to remain
in a lower grade, or if an entire sex is forcibly pre-
CHAPTER SIXTEEN B45
vented from exercising them, that is an illegitimate con-
dition.
The economic conditions of society to-day are con-
fessedly paradoxical. The gain in facility and speed
of execution is million-fold, and yet men are required
to work almost as many hours as before their improve-
ment. The expressed wealth of the world is enormous,
and the power to multiply it not nearly used, yet a vast
proportion of our members are not fully supplied with
the necessaries of life. In ways too commonly known
to need enumeration here we may observe this strange
difference between our real period of social evolution,
with its beneficent results, and the existing state of
Society.
The persistent survival of lower social forms, becom-
ing more injurious with each advancing age, is one
conspicuous feature in the case. That we, the foremost
industrial nation, should have preserved that early
status of labour, chattel slavery, past the middle of the
nineteenth century is a historic anomaly; that we still
preserve the yet lower status of female domestic labour
is a worse one. That we should maintain side by side,
in the same age, a democracy for men and a patri-
archate for women is a brain-splitting anachronism.
Taken generally, the confusion and irregularity of
social progress furnish some ground, at least appar-
ently, to those who assume it to be extra-natural, and
who postulate direct interference by Spirits of Good
and Evii to account for the peculiar facts. We need
no such childish hypothesis, the facts in the case are
346 HUMAN WORK
quite sufficient. Our painful and irregular social de-
velopment is due merely to the presence in a highly
organised body of the artificially maintained egoism of
a previous unorganised condition. ‘The “ old Adam ”
in us is simply the individualistic animal, still protesting
that he is an individual in the face of centuries upon
centuries of socialisation.
Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of our position
to-day is that of the strangely distinguished ‘‘ Leisure
Class ” and * Working Class.” Here is a social body
whose existence requires mutual service. Here is that
service performed by that majority of mankind known
as the “ Working Class.” The Working Class is the
world. However he prospers, the man who works is he
who keeps the world going. His labours are the social
processes, he is Society. The Leisure Class deliberately
cuts itself off from Society, refuses to take part in its
processes, yet continues to live on its products.
This is parasitism, pure and simple. That it is not
so pure nor so simple as would render it easy to handle,
or as would warrant us in ruthless excision of a diseased
mass, is due to the resistless law of social relation which
holds us still connected even when we think ourselves
separate. Your wealthy social traitor, refusing social
duty and absorbing social gain, is no more to blame than
the workman, who would do the same thing if he had
the chance, because he believes in the same false prin-
ciples of economics. But as they stand the leisure
class is doing incomparably more harm.
The mere extra drain on our material wealth as rich
CHAPTER SIXTEEN BAT
a social body as ours could easily stand. The mere
malingering, the refusal to work, we could stand; the
social energy is so abundant, there are so many to serve
the world. But the position of the overconsuming
non-producing class is not merely negative and cannot
be. Withdrawing from normal social processes, the
leisure class forthwith becomes the seat of abnormal
social processes, which affect the whole body most in-
juriously. Every recognised folly and vice of these
conspicuous ex-members of society spreads its corrupt-
ing influence around in the healthy structure which sup-
ports them. A live body cannot maintain dead material
in its substance without injury.
Much deeper than the recognised follies and vices,
though they alone have blackened history, lies the in-
fluence of the falsehoods on which the leisure class
rests its position. Let no live member of the body
politic make the mistake of blaming a disease. If any
part of Society works wrong, it should be studied, not
hated; cured, not punished. In our great organic
union any common error works out its natural result,
varying in accordance with the part affected. The cal-
losities and deformities of our social body, its sudden
illnesses and slow, wasting: diseases, call for our utmost
wisdom and for a change of conduct, but they do not
call for childish rage.
This mischievous by-product called the leisure class
can be eliminated by healthy action on the part of the
real social body. It has no existence except as we make
and uphold it. Like the criminal class and the pauper
348 HUMAN WORK
class it is an inevitable result of our imperfect social
action, and that imperfect social action springs from
errors in all our minds, not merely in the minds of the
diseased portion. The attitude of the non-productive
consumer is the legitimate result of our general eco-
nomic fallacies; logically, if conditions allowed, we
would all cheerfully join their ranks. As it is, we all,
or nearly all, try to, and the successful, knowing this
full well, are naturally not much moved by the criticisms
of unsuccessful competitors. The flavour of sour
grapes is clearly perceptible in most of our animadver-
sion against the rich. |
Moreover, when a human being of our day, coming
into some share of the social consciousness proper to
the time, feels that he has no right to this mass of other
men’s labour in money form, he can find no way out of
his position on any basis of strict political economy.
Charity we know to be evil, though we still fool our-
selves by organising it and putting great numbers of
intermediaries between giver and givee.
The currents of human production, as forcibly modi-
fied by our laws resting on false economics, do accumu-
late masses of capital; given individuals find themselves
on top of the heaps, and they cannot get off! If they
flatly’ abdicate it is only to let some other eager
aspirant mount after them. There is something genu-
inely pathetic in a modern rich man or woman, striving
to readjust what he recognises as a disproportionate
provision and absolutely unable to do so. Every step
he would take is cut off by some traditional error.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 349
“TI too will go to work!” cries the uneasy Creesus.
“I will not sit here and live on the wealth made by
others!” But all cry out against him. ‘“ Stop! Go
back! You ‘do not have to work’! Work is only to
get money, and you have got it; be satisfied and leave
the field to us! If you work for nothing you lower the
scale of wages! If you work at ‘ union rates’ you rob
some poor man of the job!”
Hemmed in by these theories there is nothing for the
rich man to do but to keep on working for even more
money, which is commonly allowed to be excusable if
not commendable, or to go and play. ‘The true
** Leisure Class”? only plays. Their playthings cost
much money, but as this money goes back to those who
make the plaything they justify themselves by the
* furnishing employment ” theory. This is a very old
fallacy, and impossible to refute while we believe that
work is a thing done to get wealth, and that wealth
may be legitimately ‘‘ owned” to an indefinite amount
by individuals.
As Society increases in productivity wealth increases,
and by our arbitrary apportionment it increases in the
hands of individuals—it has to. These individuals
holding all the goods and other people needing the
goods, yet the Pay theory—no goods except for pre-
vious work—acting sharply here, the only legitimate
method of distributing these individual congestions of
wealth is by “ employing ” as many as possible. And
as we do not consider the work as the important part
of the exchange, but the pay, so we do not care at
350 HUMAN WORK
what the beneficiary is employed, so long as he is
paid.
What we call “ furnishing employment” we really
esteem as “‘ furnishing Payment,”—looking at the good,
the real good in question, to be the holder of many
things, making it possible for the worker to also get
things,—the “ Pleasure-in-Impression ” theory acting
with the Want theory and the Pay theory.
So every developing society raises its specially rich
individuals who do not produce. ‘They, in the increase
of their inordinate consumption, demand more and more
service from their fellows, till, instead of one healthy
human creature easily producing more wealth than he
can consume, we have this spot of local disease con-
suming more and more of the labour of other people,
thus depraving more and more of the substance of
Society. All these caterers to abnormal appetites cease
to be producers in a healthy sense; they do not add to
the well-being of Society by legitimate products for
social distribution, but add to the ill-being of Society
by unhealthy secretions centered in one spot.
If the production of this mass of workers abnormally
localised is in itself legitimate; that is, if the “ em-
ployer,” @ ¢., the consumer, consumes only useful and
beautiful things, even so the effect is injurious if he
consumes too much; it is still local congestion, though
of healthy blood; but that position is intrinsically un-
tenable. No leisure class ever contented itself with
really useful and beautiful things. You do not make a
Vitellius on wholesome food. Consumption, pursued as
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 351
an end, naturally develops into morbid excess, and the
caterers to it must produce unhealthfully. This is the
hole in the “ furnishing employment ” theory.
It is not being employed that benefits a man. If I
pay a man a hundred dollars a day to sit in one spot
and twirl his thumbs, or to climb up and down one post
continually, I am not benefiting him, I am injuring him.
If I subtract a human being from social service and
add him to my private service I degrade him, unless I
do more work by virtue of his service. Here is the law
of private service:
A human being is entitled to as many servants as
he can do the work of better.
That is, if two men, working separately, can produce
to a certain amount each, but if the two, combining, one
serving the other, can then produce through the one
served more than the previous amount of the product
of both, that is a legitimate social relation. For the
doctor to have a helper to take care of and drive his
horse enables him to do more and better doctoring; he
can justify his having a servant. But for the doctor
to “employ ” a driver, a footman, a page, two out-
riders, and a herald, would not add to his efficiency as a
doctor; that would be an illegitimate relation.
The overconsuming rich do mischief first in with-
holding from the social circulation an undue amount
of social products, as a mere miser—social congestion ;
second, by withdrawing from the social service an undue
amount of labour for their own aggrandisement—a
social excrescence; and third, by perverting the product
352 HUMAN WORK
of their private commando of workers, generating un-
healthy secretions in the body politic—a social disease.
The miser merely robs society to a certain degree, the
employer of much labour for his own gratification robs
it by so much more, and beyond that comes the steady
deterioration of an illegitimately directed product, a
true poison, with the progressive breakdown of the tis-
sues ensuing.
This effect on Art is quite plain in history. The
artist doing great work for the public grows and serves
the world. The artist catering to an employer does
not grow, but deteriorates. The work is not only with-
held from Society, to which it belongs, but is lowered in
kind. Art is always corrupted and lowered by the
patronage of luxurious wealth. So is manufacture.
No plea of ‘* furnishing employment ” to the artist can
cover this injury to the world.
The artist should be working for the world which
made him instead of putting his social product in one
man’s hands, and the work he does should be noble and
should improve, as it cannot in that position of per-
sonal dependence. The value of an artist to the world
is that he shall do as good work as he can for as many
people as he can reach; it is of no use to the world that
he be “ employed” on other lines, nor is it good for
him.
Every worker stands in this same social relation.
The value of a workman to the world is that he do the
best work for the most people, not that he be “ em-
ployed ” to make clothes for dogs, or to wear an osten-
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 353
tatious livery behind a mutilated horse. Every human
being is to be measured by his value to society, and the
value is in his work, not in his being “ employed ”—or
paid.
Our non-productive consumer, therefore, is unable to
return to a healthy place in the world. He cannot
work because he “ does not have to,” and his efforts to
re-distribute the wealth for his own gratification form
merely a “vicious circle” of futile and injurious
activity.
Now see the pitiful results. Cut off from normal
connection with the living world by failure to produce,
and only generating disease in his efforts to consume,
the unfortunate ex-human begins to die. He may, if
sufficiently wise and self-restrained, keep his body alive;
members of the leisure class frequently live to a great
age; but this well-preserved animal existence only allows
more time to suffer from the unnatural exile. He is
not part of the living world, and so falls victim to
various hideous abnormalities. He dwindles and
shrivels in social usefulness till, instead of a vigorous,
valuable man or woman, you have the futile, inadequate
creature which cannot even wait upon its own wants;
or, keeping up animal health by caring for the body,
he shows the deformity of his position in furious and
senseless activities.
The most conspicuous feature of our leisure class is
the elaborate round of purely arbitrary and unnatural
activities in which they ceaselessly whirl. The only nat-
ural activities open to them, the physical, become abused
354 HUMAN WORK
and perverted in vicious excesses, and their other activ-
ities are a series of arduous games and sports, changing
from age to age and year to year, the purposeless and
hopeless spasms of social energy misused.
The working class, on the other hand, suffer dif-
ferently. That they are underpaid is plain, that they
are overworked is plain; we hear much of this of late
years; what we do not hear so much of is that they
suffer most from the same misunderstanding of what
work is. Looking always at the Pay as the end, the
Work only as a means, they labour drearily on like a
blind horse in a treadmill, never seeing their real posi-
tion in Society, their real duties, nor their real power.
That the unproductive consumer should believe the
absurdities on which his absurd position rests is com-
prehensible; but that the producer, not properly sup-
pled with social nourishment, and overtaxed in the
production of the very supplies he does not get enough
of, should accept the basic fallacies which hold him in
his even more absurd position,—this is not so compre-
hensible. san
Perhaps what does account for it is this: that with
all his labour and suffering the worker after all ts
Society ; he is in the main performing great service; he
has a right to be more contented than the ex-man who
does not work. He is in the more normal position,
though he does not know it; and the sociological laws
are always stronger in their action than our notions.
As a matter of fact the working class, which does not
mean merely the “labouring class” of our present
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 355
terminology, but which includes all workers with hand
and brain, is the world. They are the acting factors
in those processes which constitute social life.
Through all these centuries of unbelief and misbelief
they have done the things which kept the world alive.
They have clothed the world, fed the world, housed the
world, taught the world, beautified and improved the
world; yes, and have lifted it from savagery to its
present level. To-day in our democracy they need only
enlightenment to see a further duty to the world in a
better organisation of its economic processes. Thrilled
as they are by the swiftly growing current of social
consciousness, conscious as they are that things are
wrong, anxious as they are to set things right, they are
still hindered by these economic errors of us all.
Under the Ego concept they speak of ‘* every man’s
> a sociological
right to the product of his own labour,’
absurdity. In the first place no member of Society
has any “ own” labour, our labour is all collective and
co-ordinate. In the second place it is not the product
of his fraction of our labour that a man wants, but the
product of the labour of many other persons, of all
times and places. In the third place it is not even
“the equivalent ” of his fraction of our labour that
a man wants, it is a previous supply of the social prod-
uct bearing no relation to his subsequent output ex-
cept that of nourishment and stimulus.
In short, there is no true class-distinction in accept-
ance of those deep-seated errors which together modify
the conduct of mankind so injuriously. The false
356 HUMAN WORK
classification we are treating is the product of those
errors. With right economic belief and action there
would be no division of Producer and Consumer, no
Leisure Class, no Working Class, no serried ranks of
Capital and Labour. All would produce, all would con-
sume; all would work and all would have leisure; all
would share in the social capital and the social labour,
-——both elements of social advantage.
The economic relation of the sexes is of enormous
importance in our present-day problems, as I have en-
deavored to point out in my previous book, “* Women
and Economics.” The economic dependence of the
female on the male, her food being obtained, not in
industrial relation with society, but in the sex relation
with the individual male, affects the race not only
through the ensuing overdevelopment of sex, but
through an artificial maintenance of primitive ideas and
feelings in economics. The woman’s artless attitude of
taking all that is given her and frequently asking for
more, without ever entertaining the idea of return in
kind, of paying for her keep, maintains in the race, as we
have previously shown, the tendency to inordinate con-
sumption, the quenchless appetite of a parasite. This
parasitic appetite is the invariable result of economic
dependence. We need not wonder at the evolution of
a parasitic class when we maintain, or seek to maintain,
a parasitic sex.
As we have seen in an earlier chapter, another effect
of this condition is, by its resultant exaggeration of
the sex nature of the male, to maintain in him the bel-
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 357
ligerent and destructive tendencies which belong to a
remote period of race improvement through sex compe-
tition, a period of animal individualism, and which work
much evil in a period of constructive and co-ordinate
industry. Where wealth and progress depend on the
cordial intelligent interdependence of the group, it is
most deteriorating to have maintained this primitive at-
titude of sex combat. Again, the male, being obliged
to provide goods for several persons besides himself, and
yet being limited in goods to the amount he can himself
produce, the natural desires of the individual are aug-
mented by the accumulated desires of the whole family,
yet gratified only through him; and each man faces the
world, with the output of one, yet requiring the income
to support six—or whatever number he represents!
According to the Want theory this is a beautiful pro-
vision of nature for augmenting the man’s output. In
the light of fact it does nothing of the kind. It simply
augments his desire to get—in no way adding to his
power to give. That moving mirror of life, our litera-
ture, is one long picture of the effects of this incarnate
appetite at home, dragging ever at the man’s purse
strings, and pushing hard against social honour, social
duty, all the high traits of citizenship.
The child, most important of all, reared in this at-
mosphere of continual demand, seeing his father looking
on the world as a place to hunt for prey for his mate
and young, seeing his mother do nothing whatever but
minister to the family needs, inevitably grows up to look
at life in the same way. To his growing soul, the world
358 HUMAN WORK
appears to be a number of houses with families in them.
The business of life appears to be to keep house for
these families. ‘The mother does this in a life of per-
sonal service. The father does it in mulcting “ the
world ” as far as he is able.
If, on the contrary, a young human being grew up to
see his father regarding his work for humanity as the
chief duty in life, his mother with the same attitude,
both regarding the consumption of goods as but a
means to further and better work, and those goods al-
ways explained to him to come, not from the individual
exertions of his father “‘ wrestling with the world,” but
from the combined exertions of that world—that great,
rich, kind, ever-fruitful, and generous world of willing
workers which feeds all its children so well,—but I stray
into consideration of future conditions instead of
present.
At present we have for the common lot of humanity
that painful exhibition known as “the round man in
the square hole.” Of all human troubles, none is so
universal as this—a man’s work does not fit him. His
income is insufficient, his output is insufficient, and he
does not healthfully enjoy the process of living. A
general condition of misadaptation, with necessary re-
sults of malnutrition and malproduction,—that is the
prominent and visible symptom of our deep-lying psy-
chological errors.
Consider the life of a typical average man.
He is misborn, misfed, mistaught, misclothed, mis-
governed, to a varying degree. Instead of having a
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 359
clear view of the social life and his place in it, he has a
false and distorted view of his personal life, and only
sees the social action as it infringes on him. He is sur-
rounded from infancy with poor workmanship, the
grudging product of those unhappy, misplaced men in
square holes. The education which should be his intro-
duction to the great and beautiful facts and laws of
life, is too often a ** bread-winning ”’ process, practised
by celibate women, as being more respectable than other
work, and introducing him merely to a mass of unre-
lated facts and old ideas. The higher the field of social
service, the less does ‘* whip-dodging ” or “ bread-win-
ning ” help, and none is higher than teaching.
Thus mishandled, the boy grows up without the aid
of that subtle discernment and delicately applied special
training which would have brought out his best facul-
ties. He is a blurred, indeterminate, self-contradicting
group of faculties, he has no unerring organic prefer-
ence to lead him to his work. He is the nearest approach
we can make to that “ all-round man ” we hear so much
_of; but the intricate duties of social service do not
furnish us with one-sized cylindrical holes for our ma-
chine-made pegs. Into some hole he must go, we will
not feed him else; so in he pops, and “ settles down for
life.”
That is our common phrase for a permanent establish-
ment in the active service of Society, otherwise known as |
*¢ self-support,” ‘‘ earning one’s living,” “ maintaining
a family.” Our average man is not expected to love his
work, to enjoy it, to grow continually through it. He
360 HUMAN WORK
does all this sometimes, but too rarely. Our methods of
education have been specially esteemed, not because they
taught the child to like what he did, but taught him to
do what he did not like. We take it for granted that he
will not like his life work, and so seek to fit him for con-
tinued application to distasteful service.
In such work as this, there is a continuous waste of
nerve force. Compelled attention, and action that is
not led by interest and fed by the natural discharge of
energy along preferred lines, are suicidally wasteful.
In Nature’s effort to reduce this steady leakage of life
force, she transfers the action to the domain of habit as
rapidly as possible; and the sufferer experiences that
much relief. Dislike, the exhausting effort of enforced
attention, and the plunging and kicking of more normal
impulses toward other activities, give way at length to a
dull contentment, a patient submission to monotonous
routine, and some pale pleasure in its monotony.
There are three large distinct evils to Society in such
an artificial misplacement of its members. First, the
work done is not as good nor as plentiful as if it were
done on lines of true organic relation, by the men spe-
cialised in power and preference for that work. In the
second place, the man is weakened and worn out prema-
turely by the unnatural effort to do what he does not
like, what he is not fitted for, what is not his own special
work; thus further reducing the output. And in the
third place, the overtaxed and unhappy worker requires
all manner of extra inducements and palliations to keep
him at his unsuitable task. He has to have rest, more
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 361
and more vacations and changes, or breaks down sooner.
He has to have various fictitious excitements in his
work—making it a game, a race, or a fight; to make up
for its lack of normal interest.
And he has to have “‘ amusement ” and “ recreation ”
also of an unnatural, morbid kind—heavy doses of
social stimulus coarsened and concentrated to suit his ex-
hausted nerves. All this beyond the prominent well-
known evil of the resort to physical stimulant and solace,
such as alcohol and tobacco. These last rapidly deter-
riorate the physical stock of the race; again injuring So-
ciety in the stuff it is made of ; but the degraded and ex-
cessive amusements injure the very soul of Society;
lowering every kind of art which caters to them, and so
demoralising the highest lines of advancement.
A thousand minor lines of injury may be traced, such
as the increase in defective children, owing to exhausted
parents, and its accompanying tax upon Society’s re-
sources; but these main lines stand forth clearly: The
limitation and degradation of the social output, and the
deterioration of tissue in the constituent members of
Society.
The deterioration of human stock is twofold; partly
due to the strained, unnatural position of the worker;
and partly due to the effect of inferior supplies furnished
by his degraded product. In the more directly useful
human products there is less injury: than in the higher
forms. In food and clothing and carpenter work it is
easier to detect fault and falsehood, and there is less of
it; though even in these departments our adulterated
362 HUMAN WORK
food, shoddy clothing, and jerry-built houses do harm
enough; but in the more advanced professions, the evil
is enormous. The faults and falsehoods in product, in
literature, art, religion, government, and education,
that spring, first, from their being done by the round
man in the square hole, and second, from their being
done for the unhealthy demands of the other round men
in square holes,—these work incalculable harm.
Here is the girl who is trained to be a teacher because
it is reputable, and who accepts her square hole and does
her unsatisfying work as patiently and dutifully as
she can. It is excellence we want in work, not a patient
and dutiful inferiority. This inferior quality of teach-
ing is further lowered by the unwise demands of the mis-
placed people who pay the teacher, and so a continuous
morbid action is generated. It would be a hard task to
show one human grief, one human sin, that does not find
part of its cause and maintenance in this so general con-
dition of our life to-day. See the comparative result in
our physical organism if we set fingers to serving as
toes, eyes as ears, lungs as livers. If any such misplace-
ment were conceivable, it would involve so low a degree
of development in the various parts that it was possible
to exchange services, and none of them could do good
service. |
In the social organism such high specialism and effi-
ciency as we have is due to the progressive force of our
economic development, calling forth such positive pref-
erence in some men that they will do the work they like
best. All the world’s great servants and helpers have
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 363
been thus driven from within, by the rising flood of
social energy, specialised to one burning focal point of
expression. Such men work without reward, and re-
gardless of opposition; work their lives long, often live
and die poor and unhonoured, simply because they were
true to their fundamental duty as human beings—to
serve Society in the function for which they were evolved.
In spite of their neglect, abuse, and injury, they are not
to be pitied; for, on the one hand, they had the enor-
mous joy of serving humanity; and on the other—even
if they were not aware of that high pleasure—they had
the intense functional satisfaction of doing the work
they were made for.
We are sc used to “ the dull level a mediocrity,” and
the labour whose noblest height is conscientious effort,
that when we do find a strongly specialised individual so
highly fitted to perform one service that he can do no
other
working in these
pour of social energy through a natural channel—that
we have put the cart before the horse as usual, and de-
we call him a genius. So great is the power of
66
geniuses ”—the happy lavish out-
fined genius as “ the capacity for hard work.” There
are a thousand hard workers for one genius, but a fact
like that does not worry our shallow generalisers. Un-
fortunately, owing to our lack of true education and the
crushing weight of the false, only the exceptional
genius now and then succeeds in forcing his way to his
true place, and he does it by breaking through the poor,
blundering, reward-and-penalty system with which we
obstruct social development, and by letting out what is
364 HUMAN WORK |
in him, producing his natural fruitage of work, quite
irrespective of pay or punishment.
Thanks to this quenchless functional vigour of So-
ciety we are never without some natural work; and
thanks to our vast facility of transmission we all share
in the products of genius to a greater or less’ extent.
Yet it is but a painful and niggard harvest compared to
the universal crop we might enjoy if we would let it
grow. Happiness to the individual is in fulfilment of
function, it is as much in farming as in fiddling, if you
like it—* every man to his taste.” And the benefit to
society lies in every man’s working “ to his taste”; as
beautiful and desirable a combination as need be
imagined.
This does not mear that all would manifest trans-
cendent genius, but that each, in his place and degree,
would have that strong instinctive tendency, that vivid
delight in fulfilment of function which should accom-
pany human work in every department.
XVII: THE TRUE POSITION
Summary
Duty of improvement for individual and race. Effect
of Ego concept. Collective nature of Christianity—
“* our’ daily bread.” Unity of man. “ Kingdom of
Heaven.” First human duty to assume right functional
relation to Society. Right social relation tends to de-
velop all virtues, to eliminate all sms. Want Theory
and theft corollary. Normal distribution prevents ab-
normal acquisition. Sims against property and person.
Thieving produced by clot of wealth. Right organic
relation. End of “the wolf,” of “ our” sins, of un-
necessary diseases. Twofold duty—to change con-
cepts and conditions. Public school and library. So-
cial debt to the worker. Malthusian doctrine. T'rue
law of increase in population. Natural selection among
individuals. Difference mm organic development. Arti-
ficial selection. Stirpiculture. Superior methods of so-
cial improvement. Poverty increases number of births,
but decreases quality. “ Individuation is in inverse pro-
portion to reproduction.” Splendid opportunities.
Two roads to health. Right condition—right action.
General cause of local evil. The home, effect on so-
cial consciousness. Better housmg. Way to growth.
Human nature. Happiness.
XVII
Pe eRe ROS LP LON
To be—to re-be—and to be better, none can deny this
order of duties; and the last is the highest.
To become better as individuals has long been
preached to us; to become better as a race is no un-
natural proposition. Heretofore, the Ego concept rul-
ing, we have supposed that this was only to be done by
improving as many individuals as possible. And as in-
dividual conduct, ego-guided, consisted in each doing
things for his own benefit, here and hereafter; our im-
provement has been somewhat hesitant and tortuous,
both in person and in race. It is really singular to see
how the Ego concept has held us from understanding
what was best in our religion. The one great advantage
of Christianity over Buddhism, or Mohammedanism, is
in its radical collectivity. As far as a pure monotheism
goes—the constant worship and service of God, the
Mohammedan is beyond us. As far as a pure morality
goes—an exalted sinlessness, the Buddhist is beyond us.
But none of them prays: “ Give ws each day our daily
bread.”” Now is it not, truly, a strange thing that we
should have been taught that prayer for two thousand
years, and yet every man Jack of us goes forth stoutly,
to get his own private and personal daily bread as
rapidly as possible?
3 367
368 HUMAN WORK
The strongly enthroned Ego concept of more ancient
times; buttressed hugely by the dark savagery and
sordid barter of as ancient religions, has successfully
evaded the recognition of Christianity’s great central
truth, that man is one. Not only that God is one—Jew
and Mohammedan know that ; but that man is one—that
we are inextricably interconnected, and cannot be con-
sidered separately. ‘‘ No man liveth to himself, nor
dieth to himself.”? ‘*‘ He that seeketh his life shall lose it.
and he that loseth his life for my sake [man’s] shall find
it.” ‘* Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least
of these, ye have done it unto me.”
Resting on the firm basis of natural law, and af-
firmed insistently by our prevailing religion, is the fact
of human solidarity.
The improvement of human life does not consist in
withdrawing as many individual souls as possible for
a “reward” (that everlasting payment theory!) in
Heaven; but in a diligent bringing about of what that
same principal prayer of ours sets clearly before us—
the Kingdom come, and the will done, right here. ‘This,
too, we have intellectually admitted to be desirable; but
have united in transferring the occasion to a remote and
uncertain period, known as the millennium.
Now, what, in the light of truth as at present open to
us, is the best way to improve the human race, and there-
fore our highest duty? Recognising the organic re-
lation of Society; that our very life, to say nothing of
our improvement, rests on our becoming properly re-
lated to each other in the specialised service which con-
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 369
stitutes a human life; and to perform that service ever
better—the first duty of a human being stands promi-
nently forth. It is this:
To assume right functional relation to Society, to
one another. Not charity, not philanthropy, not
benevolence, not self-immolation or self-sacrifice or self
anything; but simply to find and hold our proper place
in the Work in which and by which we all live.
To do one’s right work involves all the virtues.
Our virtues are always matters of interrelation ; they
concern our attitude toward each other, our treatment
of each other. An individual man, alone, can manifest
no virtues beyond those of a clean beast. Human life
is interrelative, and all its virtues, 7. e., distinctive quali-
ties, are interrelative. Once accept this basic duty in
fulfilment of specialised service, and all those virtues,
we, as individuals, have been so fatuously striving for,
appear in us, as natural corollary of that right rela-
tion. Conversely our “ sins,” namely, our various forms
of social disease, manifest in the bewildered individual,
will of themselves go out as naturally as the virtues
come in.
Classify our sins. One enormous mass we call sins
against property; all forms of theft, robbery, and the
larger and subtler kind of dishonest appropriation.
This class is the natural result of our perverted distri-
bution of social products. Iteis one of the many weak
spots of the Want theory that an absence of the es-
sentials of life, instead of promoting industry, often
produces more direct and injurious methods of trans-
370 HUMAN WORK
fer. Quite the larger part of our legal machinery is
devoted to the maintenance of the local congestion of
wealth on the one hand, and to the prevention of the
breaking-down of the social tissues under pressure of
that congestion on the other. Given a surplus of
wealth in some places and a deficit in others, and the
fabric of human nature breaks down in a given propor-
tion.
Want makes men steal quite as naturally as it makes
them work, indeed more so, as being the earlier custom.
Our political economics founded on the Want theory
should give half their pages to a study of the propor-
tionate relation between Want, Theft, and Wealth,
after the learned discussion of Want, Work, and
Wealth. One is as legitimate a fact in economics as
the other. |
That normal distribution of social products which |
would provide the growing individual with all that he
needed to bring out his best powers, and which would
teach him clearly where and how to use those powers in
return, would drop out of the world completely this
class of sins. The supply coming first, the child grow-
ing up to measure his conduct as a return for what has
been given him; taught from infancy to see in the
world, behind and around him, the endless Giver, and
himself as the product of it all and owing his output
to those now alive, and more especially those to come—
that child, that man, will have no comprehension of
theft, major or minor. In a word: All illegitimate ac-
quisition of property rests on the illegitimate retention
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 371
of property. Remove the cause, and you remove the ef-
fect.
What remains? Sins against the person. Part of
these are based on property also,—all murder and
> or in revenge
violence done ‘‘ with interested motives,’
for previous injury to property, or denial of property.
A large majority of the sins against the person would
go, too, when we establish right distribution.
There remain the sins based on the sex relation. The
right economic position for women will remove the
greater part of these. When women no longer make
their living out of their loving, the prostitute, and that
more successful specialist, the mercenary wife, will leave
the world. The reduction of sex-attraction from its
present fever-height to a normal level, and the perfect
freedom for true marriage resultant upon right dis-
tribution of property, will take away the cruder and
more violent forms of sexual sin, and gives us pure mo-
nogamy at last.
I do not say that all sin would leave the world upon
our assuming right economic relations; nor even that
this great mass would disappear in a night; but the
cause of the disease being removed, the healthy social
currents would flow calmly on and we should soon out-
grow these evils too long endured. Social disease will
eliminate itself by right living as does physical disease.
** Sins ” are always phenomena of defective social re-
lation—they are not individual matters at all, an indi-
vidual can no more do wrong than he can do right. The
beasts have no morals because they have no Society.
372 HUMAN WORK
Human conduct is all interrelative; and right or wrong
as it affects the others. Given any wrong relation in
Society, and a certain proportion of sin works out |
among its members, now here, now there, according to
the nature of the diseased relation.
The despot breeds the sycophant, the liar, the assas-
sin; the rich man breeds the thief ; the woman who makes
her living by marriage, the prostitute. And these sins
cannot be checked in the point of expression, the indi-
vidual, any more than you can cure scarlet fever with
salve.
We are good, or We are bad,—with remarkable dis-
connection of personal circumstance. The'thieving pro-
duced by the clot of wealth may not break out in.the
immediately surrounding tissue if that is pretty healthy,
but creeps along the line of least resistance, and appears
through the brain least able to resist it. |
No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself,
again. |
If, then, this great field of evil, and a thousand as
evil concomitants, may be cleared off the world by the
adoption of more healthy social processes; if those
healthy social processes consist in each person’s being
in his right place, and doing his right work in Society ;
if, too, it clearly appears that to the individual con-
sciousness this right place and right work represent
Happiness,—Happiness such as we have never been
able to conceive in our little ego-stunted brains; then
human duty looms up large and clear.
To find your right place, to do your right work, here
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 373
is the basis of all virtue, joy, and growth. Here is a
steady improvement of every human product, things
better and more beautiful, things made more easily
and more plentifully; and every human being, better
nourished physically and socially, pouring forth the
ever-rising tide in harmonious social growth through
work. It means a lifting from the heart of man, first,
of Care. All that life-long terror of the Wolf, the .
dragging weight that follows from the young father’s
anxiety over his first-born—can he provide for it?—to
the dying man’s anxiety over his growing children and
wife left behind—can he provide for them? This crip-
pling terror—(which we have solemnly affirmed was an
incentive to labour!)—being remgved for ever by the
mutual insurance of a civilised society; man can lift his
head and work with a light heart and a free hand.
It means lifting from the heart of man, second, Sin.
Just to see that Sin is Owrs, not mine and thine, means
instant relief and illumination. Then to see where it
comes from, to remove its causes, to watch its shadow
recede slowly from the glad, bright face of man, like
the passing of an eclipse; that will leave us free to work
indeed.
It means lifting from the body of man nearly all his
load of disease ; his diseases being as clearly traceable to
social disorder as his sins. There is no difference, save
that one is manifested in physical relations, and the
other in social. That the human animal should not be
as clean and healthy as other animals is due to his false
social relations. When they are right, he maintains all
374 HUMAN WORK
the animal’s physical purity and vigour, and adds to it
the yet unsounded depths of social vigour.
With a prospect like this before us, what prevents
a sweeping and instant change? Nothing prevents a
sweeping and instant change in the minds of some of
us; a recognition of the nature of human life and human
work which sees it all natural, all healthful, all good,
_in itself; and the bad only an evanescent mistake, easily
to be avoided in future; but to spread that recognition
in the minds of all of us means time and effort, and can-
not become general at once.
Meanwhile, it is open to us, without waiting for all
to see alike these patent truths, to go to work on such
changes in economic condition as shall soonest check the
decay in social tissues so dangerously apparent at both
ends of our present “* Society,” and to bring up, as soon
as may be, those whose growth has been arrested for
ages.
The world is full of aborted people, aborted by the
crushing pressure of these old lies in economics; people
crippled in mind, people crippled in body, people swollen
and distorted from being oversupplied and underworked ;
people shrunken and distorted from being overworked
and undersupplied. 'These can be helped at once by
those of us who see the wisdom of improving the race
without waiting for them to understand and accept
the principles on which the change in condition rests.
We did not wait for all the citizens of America to be-
lieve in the principles involved, before giving them the
public school and public library. Many do not, when
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 375
questioned, even now believe in those principles. But
they are not reluctant to avail themselves of the pro-
vision made; and the advantageous results of that pro-
vision are apparent in our citizens, whether they under-
stand why or not.
There are some most comforting facts, meanwhile, in
our social relationship, which enable us to attack the
concrete problems of our time with courage and pa-
tience. Seeing that our gain is social, and not indi-
vidual, and that it is rapidly transmissible as far as the
brain is open to transmission, we have but to develop the
brain of our laggard members to bring them into pos-
session of the whole great field of social advance. The
wealth of Society, steadily augmented as it is by the
very individuals who need so much more social return
than they have ever had, is quite equal to any drain
which may be necessary to pay up our arrears of debt
to the worker. A conscientious and aroused society,
seeing how unjustly neglected have been its most val-
uable constituents, cannot do too much to bring to
them, and to their children, all the social nourishment
they can absorb; i. ¢., to provide the best possible edu-
cational environment for the children who need it most.
Here arises a question, based on previous social
studies and conclusions. If Society provides generously
for its most needy members, will not that injure the
world by multiplying the least desirable class? Will it
not put a premium on deficiency, instead of efficiency?
This idea rests not only on the Want theory and the
Ego concept, but on the Malthusian doctrine. It is
376 HUMAN WORK
believed that human beings tend to multiply in a certain
ratio; that the advantage to the race lies in the de-
velopment of better individuals, not in mere numbers;
and that better individuals are developed by personal
competition, by the “ struggle for existence” and “ the
survival of the fittest.”
As soon as we see the organic unity of Society, this
** struggle for existence ”
idea must change its terms.
What we are now concerned with is the development of
ever better social organs and functions, and that de-
velopment does not take place in a direct combat be-
tween individuals, but in a superior process supplanting
an inferior process, with no essential injury to the con-
stituents.
The introduction of machinery, for instance, was a
legitimate social progress. The injury to working men
which we allowed to accompany it, was not in any way
essential to social progress, but militated against it.
Interdependent organs do not fight with one another.
Their change in form and value is gradual, and in-
volves no immediate destruction to constituent cells.
Society improves by the development of its component
parts, not by a destructive conflict of parts. If you are -
seeking to improve a family of children or a breed of
fowls, you do not do it by pitting them against one an-
other and cheerfully retaining the “ survivors ” as the
‘most fit.” The egg-laying capacity of the hen, the
milk-giving capacity of the cow, is not developed by
combat between hens, or between cows (or their re-
spective cocks and bulls)! To this it will be eagerly
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 377
replied, “‘ Ah, yes, but we do it by selection—by care-
fully choosing the ones best suited, and breeding from
them. They do not survive from natural selection, but
from artificial selection. Now if we were free to prac-
tice that on Society, if we could choose the best types
and breed from them only, then we could indeed improve
the race.”
That this is one process of improvement is not de-
nied. But it is not the only, nor by any means the
most valuable process in the social organism. The
swiftest and broadest medium of social improvement
lies in that great common sensorium of ours, the brain.
By social contact and example, by social transmission,
the more advanced members of Society can lift the less
advanced at a rate immeasurably faster than the slow
current of heredity. We have all seen this in families
of very low-grade people, obtaining sudden access to
social advantages by present methods, and changing in
mind and body to a marked degree, even in one genera-
tion. This gain is of course incorporated in the family.
through heredity, but the effect of ten years’ access to
the social stores of knowledge, culture, and refinement
changes an individual to a very great degree. This im-
mense power of education, using the word in its very
widest sense, can be turned on to every child of the race,
if we so choose, with a speedy result of race improve-
ment which would laugh to scorn the fumbling, waste-
ful processes of natural selection, and the one-step-better
methods cf artificial selection. It is by transmission
that we raise the social level most rapidly; a free and
878 HUMAN WORK
general transmission of the product of the special
worker to the hands and minds of all.
For Society to bestow the same care and provision
on all its children that the wisest parent now seeks to
bestow on his would develop the race faster than any-
thing conceivable. That this method would at once im-
prove the individual, the race, and the productivity of
both, is clear. That it would “ pauperise”’ has been
shown to be an erroneous deduction from the Want
theory; under which we are indeed all potential, and
some actual, paupers. The further claim that it would
tend to a too rapid increase of population, especially
among the least fit, should be carefully examined.
The Malthusian error is in assuming that a given
rate of reproduction is fixed and final. If Malthus had
studied the subject more deeply, he would have found
that the rate of reproduction varies widely, not only in
the “‘ animal kingdom” but the man. This variation
is relative to other conditions ; and has been thus formu-
lated by Spencer, ‘‘ Reproduction is in inverse propor-
tion to individuation.” 'The lower the efficiency of the
individual, the more young ones it has.
Progressive specialisation, bringing a higher degree
of individual efficiency, carries with it a decrease in the
rate of reproduction. The myriad eggs of the fish or
insect are followed as species develop by the lesser litters
of high-grade quadrupeds, till we reach one at a birth.
A fish that only laid one egg at a time would not have
a very tall family tree. In man we have the general
rule of one at a time; but we have it more times in some
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 879
cases than in others. The human birth rate varies
widely, too; and the action of the same law, a higher
development of the individual, higher specialisation,
leads to a lower birth rate.
There are also artificial variants, as so painfully
shown in the dwindling of France’s population; but
quite apart from any morbid processes of stirpiculture
lies this broad and beautiful law,—the higher specialisa-
tion of the individual tends to reduce the birth rate.
This is shown with clearness through all the turbid cross-
currents of our mistaken behaviour; the most de-
veloped kind of people have the least children, and the
least developed kind of people have the most children.
Even in folk lore we see it indicated—* there was once
a King and a Queen who were perfectly happy, except
that they had no children,” and on the other hand,
**’'The poor man hath his quiver full.”
The capacity of the world to support humanity in
health and comfort has a limit; it is not near enough to
frighten us, but it is there. If human beings are left
to struggle on alone in unnatural individualism, their
arrested development fills up the world, too, with nu-
merous, but inefficient people. But as a conscious and
intelligent society hastens to spread its gains among all
its parts; to make the progress of the race the rich
possession of all its members; so fully to educate and
develop every child as to promote the higher specialisa-
tion of the individual, at a rate unconscious natural
processes never dreamed of, then we see a_ steady
diminution of this threatening birth rate. By this means
380 HUMAN WORK
we work steadily toward a far higher average of social
efficiency, with a permanent balance of birth and death,
involving no arbitrary personal tampering with natural
processes, but a recognition of the working of natural
law.
It would seem needless to say that the individuation
of woman is the most prominent necessity here, as her
rate of fecundity is the determining, factor in the case,
not the man’s; yet there are still some who ignore even
so patent a fact as this. )
See, then, how swiftly and surely an awakened so-
ciety can right its wrongs, cure and outgrow its dis-
eases, understand, pity, and leave far behind its sins.
The highest human duty for the individual is to enter
upon his or her special work in the world—that is vital,
that is first, that underlies all. There is no right life for
any human creature who is not taking part in the or-
ganic processes of Society. And if, in our present
blurred and jumbled condition, we have not the sure
66 b)
guide of a “ calling,” a special inborn preference and
power; why, that only leaves us freer to take hold any-
where of the thousand things that need doing; paid, or
unpaid—that is immaterial. The point is to do the
work and to do it for the service of Society. No matter
for the past account, for arrears of social pampering
or social neglect ; we are all responsible for both. No
malicious crowd of despots, masters, owners, and em-
ployers has conspired to injuriously deprive the an-
gelic workingman of his rights. We have all believed
in these economic falsehoods, the inevitable action of
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 381
which was to produce the conditions we now suffer from.
We must all lay them aside; wasting no time or energy
on remorse, and simply set to work to make things right.
From that class of people who “do not have to
work ”—that is, who have been paid and overpaid in
advance—there is an overwhelming debt of honour due
the world. In that great field of action where there is
no pay, nor even thanks as yet; in the efforts necessary
to teach the right things, and to provide the right
things for the world’s little children, there is ample
room for the most helplessly rich. Also in the work of
spreading the social supplies where they belong—among
the whole people—there is work there, much work, not
only unpaid and unthanked, but heartily resisted.
There was never a time in history when more splendid
opportunities were open to those who would serve so-
ciety. Thousands of us are at it already, organised and
unorganised ; a rising flood of love and service, toiling
manfully, and womanfully, at the mighty task. But
the economic darkness makes it blind work at best.
Most of our conscious “ social service ” to-day is di-
rected, naturally enough, to ministering to the social
diseases. Now, if a man is sick, there are two ways to
re-establish his health—both necessary. One is to re-
store normal conditions to his body, trusting that a
normal body will urge to normal action, and so keep
him well. The other is to induce normal action, trust-
ing to that to restore right conditions in the body.
Each is a good thing, each tends to produce the desired
result; but both are incomparably better than either.
382 HUMAN WORK
Our sick Society needs this double treatment. The first
condition of normal action we have here reviewed at
length; consciously to assume true place in the organic
industries of human life. If all of us do that, the cur-
rents of right action will assuredly build us a healthy
social body. But we can greatly hasten that good end
by rearranging the social body too. Here the law of
interaction between spirit and form comes to our aid,
and makes possible an incredible rate of progress.
Take, for instance, an advanced case in social pathol-
ogy—a city slum. Now there are two ways for a con-
scious society to focus its forces on the diseased part
and regenerate it. One is by dealing with the spirit of
the slum, the people themselves; by so educating the
children, so stimulating the adult, so providing proper
opportunity for right social service for all, that the
people will change in character, and, reacting, soon
make the slum a fair, clean, healthful part of the
city.
The other is to deal with the body of the slum, the
houses, streets, and shops; and so to reconstruct them
that they shall steadily react on the people and change
their character. Both can be done, both are being done,
but so feebly and partially, in such tiny spots of change,
under such heavy opposition and heavier indifference,
that the gain is heart-breakingly slow. While one play-
ground is being made, while one new method of educa-
tion is being introduced, a thousand babies die, a thou-
sand children become criminals, a thousand wretched men
and women sink to the hopeless grade, are lost to so-
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 383
ciety, become diseased tissue, and are miserably sloughed
off through asylum, prison, and hospital.
The cause of the delay is this: We are treating social
disease by local application. We find, as it were, a
tubercle or boil upon the body politic, we apply all
manner of treatment—the poultice, the counter-irritant,
the excising knife of capital punishment ; but we forget,
or do not know, that this local trouble, however poig-
nantly conspicuous, is on a living body, and is caused
and maintained by diseased conditions in that body, far
beyond the material boundaries of that location.
We must, of course, use prompt and strong measures
in these most painful spots; but the treatment necessary
to prevent the formation of these conspicuously evil
places must be applied to all of us. It is as necessary
for the right education and stimulus to be applied to
the rich and well-to-do as to the poor, to the isolated
farmer in the field as well as the crowded sweater in the
shop; and not only those methods touching the people’s
character, but the other, the prompter ones, touching
their physical conditions.
There are certain physical conditions in the social
body, brick and mortar conditions, which are affecting
us all for evil, and which can be readily changed.
There are, also, certain economic relations in that body,
affecting us all for evil, that can equally be changed.
We need to see these in their true importance; as affect-
ing not only the immediate individuals concerned, but
as so affecting the whole structure of Society as to in-
exorably produce the conspicuous evils with which we are
384 HUMAN WORK
so painfully familiar. Once recognised, our duty is
clear—a glad, swift, forward movement bringing joy
and gain to all.
What are these general conditions?
One is the economic position of woman, which in-
volves false sex relations, including all forms of prosti-
tution; maintains primitive individual instincts and
checks social ones, and is largely responsible for the
morbid action of social economics. Another is the main-
tenance of domestic industry ; which, as I have shown in
another book, prevents the development of the home, the
progress of woman, the right education of the child, and
the normal progress of man.
Combined, these two conditions find material form in
that hotbed of primitive egoism, the cumbrous, ex-
pensive, inadequate dwelling house of our time, or
rather, of past time, of the most remote and barbarous
time, most injuriously preserved in this. It is true that
each human being needs a wholly private and personal
room to rest in; that solitude, pure individual solitude,
is a social necessity. It is also true that the great
primal group, the family, needs its group of rooms, its
private home. But the point of divergence is in the
Work involved.
Work is social, it does not belong to the person nor,
in any advanced degree, to the family. That so much
human work is at present performed in and for the
separate family is an enormous condition of social evil.
It maintains, beyond all the efforts of religion and
- science to combat, the selfishness of the primeval Pig.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 385
Social consciousness and its great currents of love
and enthusiasm, of power and pride, cannot find room
in brains continually cramped by application to the
most ignominiously personal concerns. |
It is not only that the family could have a far
simpler, purer, and more private life if they would but
take advantage of our immense social facilities, but so
could the individual men and women; born and reared in
_ families, to be sure, but born and reared as members
of Society, active and responsible factors in social prog-
ress.
These men and women, if the families they grew
up in were in true social relation, instead of each one
keeping up a little down-drawing whirlpool of ante-
diluvian individualism, would be a thousand times more
valuable citizens. While the minds of our women are
exercised only, or mainly, in impression and expression
of a purely personal nature, they and their stunted
children and heavily handicapped men cannot properly
receive and discharge the vivifying currents of social
consciousness.
That consciousness forces itself out here and there
through specially sensitive individuals, usually at great
personal sacrifice. These special individuals, heavily
charged with the social spirit, push and struggle, work
and fight, suffer and die, trying to stir to equal life the
great ego-bound mass of unawakened Society. Much
work has been accomplished, great good has been done,
the world is incomparably better off for the presence of
these better developed members, but our gain is as
386 - HUMAN WORK
nothing to what it would be if the progress was shared
by all. : |
If we were still savages, still beasts, still mere indi-
viduals, this book and its many brothers might as well
wait for weary thousands of years more, but we are not.
We are, in patent fact, highly specialised members of
a highly advanced Society ; but our eyes are holden, our
minds are darkened by piously preserved collections of
old concepts long found false. We can lay aside these
erroneous ideas at a moment’s recognition of the true.
We can incorporate the true into the make-up of our
minds by acting upon them. We can put ourselves in
touch with the heart of the world, sharing its splendid
pulses, its tireless energy, its flood of common human
love, by simply doing our right work. We can break
up forever the old false tendencies of thought and feel-
ing by rearranging our material conditions in line with
true social forces.
‘“* Better housing for the poor” is necessary, but
so it is for the rich, for all of us. Truer housing;
housing suitable to the age we live in; housing proper
to the human soul. We build “ the house of God,”
bringing to it the highest love and power and aspira-
tion; and that house uplifts the soul of the beholder.
What prevents our building the houses of Man with
that high love and power and aspiration—that splendid
beauty, ennobling space, and tender ornament? Only
that ancient, shrivelled, artificially preserved mummy,
the Ego concept, prevents. 7
You cannot build right houses for modern humanity
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 387
on the basis of a kitchen, on the service of the belly of
a beast. Rightly to nourish all people makes the feed-
ing of humanity as noble a form of work as any other
work broad and beautiful and true, to be devoutly en-
tered upon and grandly fulfilled; to cater only to the
bodily desires of one’s own family is proper to the level
of meanest savagery.
A rearrangement of ideas and their consequent feel-
ings, from the process false to the process true, is
possible to any sane mind, is the duty of every last one
of us. A rearrangement of the external conditions
follows logically and helps materially. This we can
do in the mind at once, in the body not so promptly,
but still swiftly in our age of mechanical wonders.
And why should we? What will it mean to us? We
should, for underlying cause, because it is in the line of
social evolution; a race duty. Because in doing it we
further the divine purpose, we fulfil ultimate law. But
if the so-long-stunted soul demands its pay, there is
reason more than enough.
Are men so happy now, each trying to take care of
himself and his family, that they should dread the peace
and ease given by society’s vast resources in full cir-
culation? Are women so happy now, either the squaw
or the parasite, that they should dread becoming full
human beings, active, conscious members of society?
What this change will mean to us no one can fully
measure, but those who know anything of the real heart
of humanity, those who can interpret the gleams of
light that break through all religions, those who ever
388 HUMAN WORK
felt the soul lift and light and swell with power and
joy, under the influence of music, or painting, or
speech, or any form of human work, can tell us some-
thing of it.
We have been taught, in tattered remnants of worn-
out faiths, to despise human nature. We, forsooth,
mere worms and weaklings, ‘‘ as prone to evil as the
sparks are to fly upward,” we were born in iniquity,
conceived in sin, doomed to suffer here, and likely to
suffer forever, important worms that we were!
We have been taught in later days, by half-seeing
students of science, that we were but beasts, and must
fight it out as they did, our progress lying in the slow
and painful process of survival.
What a change in thought, in feeling, in action, when
we see that we are the crowning form of created life,
we, collectively, though never so much “ worms ” taken
personally. That Humanity is the one fact we should
realise, and that in it we find free scope and full satis-
faction for all the vague aspirations which have haunted
the individual. That in that organic social life we are
all held together by our mutual service, by our work,
and that in our work and only in our work lies growth,
lies peace, lies the highest human duty, lies happiness.
Happiness, for a human being, is in full, true, con-
scious, social relation:
To feel the world’s life, unbroken in its steady pour,
from the inchoate nebule, through age on age of
changing orders, into the spreading growth of an or-
ganised democracy. To feel our own historic family,
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 389
the immense racial pride of the long ascent, the conquest
of elements, of plants, of animals, the unquenchable fire
of progress, the vast and rapid increase of the race:
To feel the extending light of common consciousness
as Society comes alive !—the tingling “I” that reaches
wider and wider in every age, that is sweeping through
the world to-day like an electric current, that lifts and
lights and enlarges the human soul in kindling majesty:
To feel the power! the endless power! Not only the
ceaseless stream of the universal Godness, but our in-
terminable array of batteries, full charged; the stored
energy of all time embodied in poem and story, in pic-
ture and statue, in music and architecture, in every tool,
utensil, and giant machine wherein the human brain
and the human hand have made force incarnate:
And, so feeling, to Do:
' To Do, as only Human beings can; not in the paltry
processes of the individual, mere servant of his stomach,
but in the fascinating complexity and rhythmic splen-
dour of the march of social activities; to take part in
that huge, thrilling, organic life in which the individual
thrives unconscious—of which the soul is lodged in each
of us:
And in the ceaseless development of that measureless
vitality, this vast, ever-increasing Social Life, to feel,
now and again,—always oftener,—the distant music
of the universe grow clearer—that is Happiness.
_ THE END
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