Chapter VII: The Machine Industry (3)

[63] These considerations may of course imply nothing, directly, as to the size of the political organisation or of the national territory or population; though national boundaries are likely both to affect and to be affected by such changes in the industrial system. A community may be small, relatively to the industrial system in and by which it lives, and may yet, if conditions of peace permit it, stand in such a relation of complement or supplement to a larger complex of industrial groups as to make it in effect an integral part of a larger community, so far as regards its technology. So, for instance, Switzerland and Denmark are an integral part of the cultural and industrial community of the Western civilisation as effectually as they might be with an area and population equal to those of the United Kingdom or the German Empire, and they are doubtless each a more essential part in this community than Russia. At the same time, as things go within this Western culture, national boundaries have a very considerable obstructive effect in industrial affairs and in the growth of technology. It will probably be conceded on the one hand that any appreciable decline in the aggregate population of Christendom would result in some curtailment or retardation of the technological advance in which these peoples are jointly and severally engaged; and it is likewise to be conceded on the other hand that the like effect would follow on any marked degree of success from the efforts of those patriotic and dynastic statesmen who are endeavouring to set these peoples asunder in an armed estrangement and neutrality.

[64] Cf., as an extreme case, Matilda C. Stevenson, “The Sia,” _Report Bur. Eth._, xi (1889–1890).

The like decline is known to have occurred in many parts of Europe consequent on the decline of population due to the Black Death and the Plague.

[65] On such native differences between the leading races of Europe, cf., e. g., G. V. de Lapouge, _Les Sélections Sociales_; and _l’Aryen_; O. Ammon, _Die Gesellschaftsordnung_; G. Sergi, _Arii e Italici_.

[66] For instance, the Japanese and the Ainu, the Polynesians and the Melanesians, the Cinghalese and the Veddas. On the last named, cf. Seligmann, _The Veddas_.

[67] Cf. W. Z. Ripley, _The Races of Europe_; G. Sergi, _The Mediterranean Race_; V. de Lapouge, _L’Aryen_; cf. also, J. Deniker, _Les races européennes_, and “Les six races composant la population de l’Europe,” _Journal Anthropological Institute_, vol. 34.

[68] The available evidence indicates that the dolicho-blond race of northern Europe probably originated in a mutation (from the Mediterranean as its parent stock?) during the early neolithic period, that is to say about at the beginning of the neolithic in western Europe. There is less secure ground for conjecture as to the date and circumstances under which any one of the other European races originated, but the date and place of their origin seems to lie outside of Europe and earlier than the European neolithic period. Unfortunately there has been little direct or succinct discussion of this matter among anthropologists hitherto.--Cf. “The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race,” _Journal of Race Development_, April, 1913.

[69] The Melanesians may be contrasted with the Baltic peoples in this respect, though the comparison is perhaps rather suggestive than convincing. The Melanesians are apparently endowed with a very respectable capacity for workmanship, as regards both insight and application, and with a relatively high sense of economic expediency. They are also possessed of an alert and enduring group solidarity. But they apparently lack that reasonable degree of “humanity” and congenital tolerance that has on the whole kept the peoples of the Baltic region from fatal extravagances of cruelty and sustained hatred between groups. Not that any excess of humanity has marked the course of culture in North Europe. But it seems at least admissible to say that mutual hatred, distrust and disparagement falls more readily into abeyance among these peoples than among the Melanesians; particularly when and in so far as the material interest of the several groups visibly suffers from a continued free run of extravagant animosity. The difference in point of native propensity may not be very marked, but such degree of it as there is has apparently thrown the balance in such a way that the Baltic peoples have, technologically, had the advantage of a wide and relatively easy contact and communication; whereas the Melanesians have during an equally protracted experience spent themselves largely on interstitial animosities--Cf. Codrington, _The Melanesians_; Seligmann, _The Melanesians of British New Guinea_.

[70] These considerations apparently apply with peculiar force to the blond race, in that the evidence of early times goes to argue that this stock never lived in isolation from other, rival stocks. It began presumably as a small minority in a community made up chiefly of a different racial type, its parent stock, and in an environment at large in which at least one rival stock was present in force from near the outset; so that race competition, that is to say competition in terms of births and deaths, was instant and unremitting. And this competition the given conditions enforced in terms of group subsistence.

[71] Cf., e. g., Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Stenalderen.”

[72] It has not commonly been noted, though it will scarcely be questioned, that fighting capacity and the propensity to fight have rarely, if ever, been successful in the struggle between races and peoples when brought into competition with a diligent growing of crops and children, if success be counted in terms of race survival.

[73] It is apparently an open question whether these spiritual traits are properly to be ascribed to the dolicho-blond as traits of that type taken by itself, rather than traits characteristic of the hybrid offspring of the blond stock crossed on one or other of the racial stocks associated with it in the populations of Europe. The evidence at large seems rather to bear out the view that any hybrid population is likely to be endowed with an exceptional degree of that restlessness and discontent that go to make up what is spoken of as a “spirit of enterprise” in the race.

[74] As, e. g., the inhabitants of many Polynesian islands at the time of their discovery. See, also, Codrington, _The Melanesians_.

[75] Not an unusual state of things among the Melanesians and Micronesians, and in a degree among the Australians.

[76] See note, p. 120.

[77] E. g., some Australian natives and some of the lower Malay cultures.

[78] E. g., the Pueblo and the Eskimo.

[79] Indeed, such as very suggestively to recall the ritual objects and observances of the Pueblo Indians.

[80] For an extreme case of this among living communities, see Skeat and Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_, vol. i, pp. 242–250, where the generalisation is set down (p. 248) that “the rudimentary stage of culture through which these tribes have passed, and in some cases are still passing, may perhaps be more accurately described as a wood and bone age than as an age of stone,” in as much as the evidence goes to show that before they began to get metals from the Malays their only implements of a more durable material were “the anvil and hammer (unwrought) ..., the whetstone, chips or flakes used as knives, and cooking stones.” From the different character of their environment this recourse to wood and bone could scarcely have been carried to such an extreme by the savages of the Baltic region.

[81] Cf. Pumpelly, _Explorations in Turkestan_.

[82] A casual visit to the Scandinavian museums will scarcely convey this impression. To meet the prepossessions of the public, and perhaps of the experts, the weapons are made much of in the showcases, as is to be expected; but they are relatively scarce in the store-rooms, where the tools on the other hand are rather to be estimated by the cubic yard than counted by the piece.

[83] Seen, e. g., in the observance and sanction of tabu in many of the lower cultures.

[84] The Eskimo are placed in circumstances that are in some respects similar to those presumed to have conditioned the life of the blond race and its hybrids during the early phases of its life-history, and among the traits that have made for the survival of the Eskimo is undoubtedly to be counted the somewhat genial good-fellowship of that race, coupled as it is with a notable disinclination to hostilities. So also the Indians of the North-West Coast, whose situation perhaps parallels that of the neolithic Baltic culture more closely even than the Eskimo, are not among the notably warlike peoples of the earth, although they undoubtedly show more of a predatory animus than their northern neighbours. In this case it is probably safe to say that their technological achievements have in no degree been furthered by such warlike enterprise as they have shown, and that their comfort and success as a race would have been even more marked if they had been gifted with less of the warlike spirit and had kept the peace more consistently throughout their habitat than they have done.--Cf. Franz Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” _Bureau of American Ethnology_, Report, 1884–1885; The same, “The Secret Societies and Social Organisation of the Kwakiutl Indians,” _Report, National Museum_, 1895; A. P. Niblack, “Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia,” _ibid_, 1888.

[85] Such loss by neglect of technological elements that have been superseded may have serious consequences in case a people of somewhat advanced attainments suffers a material set-back either in its industrial circumstances or in its cultural situation more at large,--as happened, e. g., in the Dark Ages of Europe. In such case it is likely to result that the community will be unable to fall back on a state of the industrial arts suited to the reduced circumstances into which it finds itself thrown, having lost the use of many of the technological elements familiar to earlier generations that lived under similar circumstances, and so the industrial community finds itself in many respects driven to make a virtually new beginning, from a more rudimentary starting point than the situation might otherwise call for. This in turn acts to throw the people back to a more archaic phase of technology and of institutions than the initial cultural loss sustained by the community would of itself appear to warrant.

[86] Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Stenalderen,” sec. iii, “Tidsforhold i den ældre Stenalder;” O. Montelius, _Les temps préhistoriques en Suède_, ch. i, p. 20.

[87] Compare the case of the Indians of the North-West Coast, who have occupied a region comparable to the neolithic Baltic area in the distribution of land and water as well as in the abundance of good timber.

[88] Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Bronzealderen,” secs. xiii, xiv; Montelius, _Les temps préhistoriques en Suède_, ch. ii.

[89] Cf., e. g., C. A. Haddon, _Evolution in Art_, section on “Magic and Religion.”

[90] Except for species that habitually breed by parthenogenesis.

[91] The caution is perhaps unnecessary that it is not hereby intended to suggest a doubt of Mr. Galton’s researches or to question the proposals of the Eugenicals, whose labours are no doubt to be taken for all they are worth.

[92] See, e. g., Skeat and Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_, vol. ii, part ii; _Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1884–1885_, F. Boas, “The Central Eskimo.”

[93] Cf. Basil Thomson, _The Diversions of a Prime Minister_, and _The Figians_.

[94] The extent of this “quasi-personal fringe” of objects of intimate use varies considerably from one culture to another. It may often be inferred from the range of articles buried or destroyed with the dead among peoples on this level of culture.

[95] A doubt may suggest itself in this connection touching such cultures and peoples as the pagan races of the Malay peninsula, the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands, or (possibly) the Negritos of Luzon, but these conceivable exceptions to the rule evidently do not lessen its force.

[96] It may be pertinent to take note of the bearing of these considerations on certain dogmatic concepts that have played a part in the theoretical and controversial speculations of the last century. Much importance has been given by economists of one school and another to the “productivity of labour,” particularly as affording a basis for a just and equitable distribution of the product; one school of controversialists having gone so far against the current of received economic doctrine as to allege that labour is the sole productive factor in industry and that the Labourer is on this ground entitled, in equity, to “the full product of his labor.” It is of course not conceived that the considerations here set forth will dispose of these doctrinal contentions; but they make it at least appear that the productivity of labor, or of any other conceivable factor in industry, is an imputed productivity--imputed on grounds of convention afforded by institutions that have grown up in the course of technological development and that have consequently only such validity as attaches to habits of thought induced by any given phase of collective life. These habits of thought (institutions and principles) are themselves the indirect product of the technological scheme. The controversy as to the productivity of labor should accordingly shift its ground from “the nature of things” to the exigencies of ingrained preconceptions, principles and expediencies as seen in the light of current technological requirements and the current drift of habituation.

[97] See Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Stenalderen,” and _Aarböger for nordisk Oldkyndighed_, 1906.

[98] Cf. W. G. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters_.

[99] See, e. g., Basil Thomson, _The Figians_, especially ch. iv, xiv, xxviii, xxxi.

[100] The Pueblos offer a curious exception to this common rule of a parasitic priesthood. While they are much given to religious observances and have an extensive priestly organisation, comprising divers orders and sub-orders, this priesthood appears commonly to derive no income, or even appreciable perquisites, from their office.

[101] The difference in importance and powers between the war chief of the peaceable Pueblos on the one hand and of the predatory Aztecs on the other hand shows how such an official’s status may change _de facto_ without a notable change _de jure_.--Cf. also Basil Thomson, _The Figians_, ch. iv, xxxi, on “Constitution of Society,” and “The Tenure of Land,” where the growth of custom is shown to throw pecuniary prerogative and control into the hands of the successful war chief.

[102] For instance, somewhat generally in the island states of Polynesia. Something suggestively reminiscent of such a condition of things is visible in early feudal Europe, where feudal holdings changed hands with a change in the status of their holders in a way that suggests that ownership was in great measure a corollary following from the tenure of certain civil powers. So, also, in ecclesiastical holdings of the same period and later. And, again, in the doubtful and changing status of the servile classes of feudal Europe, where the distinction between mastery and ownership often seems something of a legal fiction or a distinction without a difference. Feudal Japan affords evidence to much the same effect.

[103] Cf. J. G. Frazer, _Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship_. The drift of evidence for the North-European cultures of pagan antiquity appears to set strongly in this direction, though the term “priestly,” as applied to these pagan kings, is likely to convey too broad an implication of solemnity and vicariously divine power.

[104] Witness the alleged dealings of Jahve with his chosen people and the laudation bestowed on Him by His priests for “conduct unbecoming a gentleman.”

[105] As witness Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Peru, Babylon, Assyria, Israel under Solomon and his nearer successors.

[106] See F. B. Jevons, _Introduction to the History of Religion_, ch. x.

[107] Cf., e. g., Basil Thomson, _The Figians_, ch. iv.

[108] As shown, for instance, by the pottery and baskets made for trade by the American Indians where they come in trade contact with civilised men.

[109] For a more detailed discussion of these secondary consequences of the institution of ownership, the irksomeness of labour and the conspicuous waste of goods, which cannot be pursued here, see _The Theory of the Leisure Class_, ch. ii-vi.

[110] For some further analysis of the relation between ownership, earnings and the material equipment see _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, August, 1908, “On the Nature of Capital;” as also a paper by H. J. Davenport in the same Journal for November, 1910, on “Social Productivity versus Private Acquisition.”

[111] For a more detailed discussion of this disciplinary disparity between business and industrial occupations, cf. _The Theory of Business Enterprise_, ch. iv, viii and ix.

[112] Cf., e. g., Harrington Emerson, _Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages_, ch. i, iv.

[113] Such is tacitly assumed to be the nature of modern economic life in the current theoretical formulations of the economists, who make the theory of exchange value the central and controlling doctrine in their theoretical systems, and who with easy conviction trace this value back to an individualistic ground in the doctrines of differential utility--“marginal utility.”

[114] Apart from scattered and progressively inconsequential manifestations of this canon of pecuniary equity in the European community at large, there occurs a quaint and well-defined application of it in the practice of “_hólmgangr_” in late pagan and early Christian times among the Scandinavian peoples. The “wager of battle” is probably of the same derivation, at least in part.

[115] Cf. Frederic Barnard Hawley, _Enterprise and the Productive Process_, for an extreme, mature and consistent development of this tenet.

[116] See _The Theory of Business Enterprise_, ch. iv, vi, vii, for a more detailed discussion of this business traffic and the working principles which govern it. See also H. J. Davenport, _The Economics of Enterprise_ (New York, 1913).

[117] Cf., e. g., Ehrenberg, _Das Zeitalter der Fugger_; Sombart, _Der Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i.

[118] Cf. _The Theory of the Leisure Class_, ch. iv, v, vi.

[119] Cf. Harrington Emerson, _Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages_.

[120] Cf., e. g., Karl Bücher, _Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_, (3d ed.), ch. iv, “Die gewerblichen Betriebssysteme,” ch. v. “Der Niedergang des Handwerks;” W. J. Ashley, _English Economic History and Theory_, part ii, ch. i, sec. 25, ch. iii, especially sec. 44; W. Cunningham, _The Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, vol. ii, Introduction; Werner Sombart, _Der Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i, especially ch. iv-xii.

[121] To complete the sketch at this point, even in outline, it would be necessary to go extensively into the relations of ownership and control (largely indirect) in which the owners of land and natural resources, the Landed Interest, had stood to the industrial community of craftsmen before this transition to the business era got under way, as also into the further mutual relations subsisting between the landed interest, the craftsmen and the business community during this transition to a business régime. In the most summary terms the pertinent circumstances appear to have been that from the beginning of its technological era the handicraft community, with its workmanship and its technological attainments, was in an uncertain measure at the discretionary call of the landed interest, largely in an impersonal way through channels of trade and on the whole with decreasingly exacting effect as time went on; and the industrial community at large had by no means emancipated themselves from this control when the era of business enterprise set in; for the landed interest continued to draw its livelihood from the mixed agricultural and handicraft community, and the products of handicraft still continued to go chiefly as supplies to the landed interest in return for the means of subsistence controlled by the latter; and long after the businessmen had taken over the direction of industry the claims of the landed interest still continued paramount in the economic situation, and industry still continued to be carried on largely with a view to meeting the requirements of the landed interest.

[122] “Handwerk (im engeren Sinne) ist diejenige Wirtschaftsform, die hervorwächst aus dem streben eines gewerblichen Arbeiters seine zwischen Kunst und gewöhnlicher Handarbeit die Mitte haltende Fertigkeit zur Herrichtung oder Bearbeitung gewerblicher Gebrauchsgegenstände in der Weise zu vertreten, dass er sich durch Austausch seiner Leistungen oder Erzeugnisse gegen entsprechende Äquivalente seinen Lebensunterhalt verschafft.”--Sombart, _Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i, ch. iv.

[123] Cf. Sombart, _Der Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i; W. J. Ashley, _English Economic History and Theory_, bk. i, especially ch. iii; Karl Bücher, _die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_, ch. iv, v.

[124] A classic passage of Adam Smith shows this handicraft conception of the mechanics of industry: “The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes....” “But this proportion [of the produce to the consumers] must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances; first, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied; and, secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed.”--_Wealth of Nations_, Introduction, p. 1.

Adam Smith consistently speaks of industry in terms of manual workmanship, as the traditions and the continued habitual outlook of that generation unavoidably led him to do; and the sweeping way in which his interpretation of economic life finds acceptance with his contemporaries shows that in so doing he is speaking in full consonance with the prevailing conceptions of his time. He writes during the opening passages of the machine era, but he speaks in terms of the past industrial era, from which his outlook on the economic situation and his conception of normal economic relations had been derived. It may be added that his conception of natural liberty in economic matters is similarly derived from the traditional situation, whose discipline during the later phases of the handicraft era inculcated freedom of ownership as applied to the workman’s product and freedom of bargain and sale as touches the traffic of the typical petty trader. And so thoroughly had this manner of conceiving industry and the economic situation been worked into the texture of men’s thinking, that the same line of interpretation continues to satisfy economic theory for a hundred years after Adam Smith had formulated this canon of economic doctrine, and after the situation to which it would apply had been put out by the machine industry and large business management.

[125] The case of the treadle applied to the production of rotary motion is typical of what happens to a technological element of the general class here under discussion. Such a new technological expedient appears at the outset to be apprehended in terms of manual workmanship; but presently it comes, through habitual use, to take its place as a mechanical functioning of the tools in whose use it takes effect,--to be associated in current apprehension with the mechanical appliances employed in its production and, by so much, dissociated from the person of the workman. In a measure, therefore, it falls into the category of impersonal facts that are available as technological raw material with which to go about the work in hand. With further use, and particularly with the interjection of further mechanical expedients between the workman and this given technological element, it will be conceived in progressively more objective fashion, as a fact of the mechanics of brute matter rather than an extension of the workman’s manual reach; until it passes finally into the category of mechanical fact simply, obvious and commonplace through routine use; in which there remains but a vanishing residue of imputed personality, such as attaches to all conceptions of action. The given technological element in this way may be said to pass by degrees out of the workman’s “quasi-personal fringe” of manual effects, into the domain of raw material available for use in workmanship; where it will, in apprehension, be possessed of only such imputed quasi-personal or anthropomorphic characteristics as are necessarily imputed to external facts at large.

Concretely, the concept of the treadle seems in its beginnings to be a variant of the same conception that leads to the use of the bow-drill. Both inventions comprise at least two distinct forms. In each the simpler and presumably more primitive form converts a reciprocating longitudinal motion into a reciprocating rotary motion; and it is apparently only after an interval of familiarity and externalisation of this mechanical achievement that the next move takes place in the direction of the perfected treadle, which converts a reciprocating longitudinal into a continuous rotary motion.

[126] Cf. Sombart, _Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i, Exkurs zu Kapitel 7, bk. ii, ch. xv.

[127] The adventures of Charles I and James II sufficiently illustrate this insular temper of the industrial and commercial community as contrasted with the crown and the court party.

[128] See ch. ii and iii, above.

[129] The imputation of the feminine in this personification of Nature is probably nothing more than a carrying over of the Latin gender of the word, but there is commonly involved in this quasi-personal conception of Nature a notable imputation of kindliness and gentle solicitude that well comports with her putative womanhood. By extraordinarily easy gradation _Natura naturans_ passes over into Mother Nature. The contrast in this respect, simply on its sentimental side, between the conception of Nature, say in the eighteenth century, on the one hand, and the patriarchal Heavenly King, remote and austere, of the Mediæval cult on the other hand is striking enough. In point of sentimental content this conception of Nature is more nearly in touch with the mediæval Mother of God than with the Heavenly King.

[130] This, of course, does not overlook the fact that in the course of scientific inquiry there has been an increasing use of statistical methods and results, and that this recourse to statistics has been of an increasingly objective character, both in its methods and in the items handled. It is also to be noted that from time to time serious and consequential attempts have been made to reduce scientific argument at large to similarly objective terms of quantity, quantivalence and concomitance. Karl Pearson’s _Grammar of Science_, for instance is a shrewd and somewhat popularly known endeavour of this kind. So, again, the philosophical views associated with the names of Leibnitz and of Berkely are of this nature, and there is not a little of the same line of scepticism in the speculations of Hume. But it is equally to be noted that except on the remote plane of generality that belongs to philosophical speculation, and except in the works of pure mathematics, this method of handling facts has not proved available for scientific ends. The “idle curiosity” which finds employment in scientific inquiry is not content with the vacant relation of concomitance alone among the facts which it seeks and systematises. In scientific theory no headway has been made hitherto without the use of this indispensable imputation of causality.--In this connection cf. a paper on “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View,” _University of California Chronicle_, November, 1908, especially footnote, p. 396.

[131] In this connection it is worth noting, for what it may be worth, that there is a similarly rough concomitance between the diffusion of the blond racial stock in Europe and the modern forms of protestantism and religious heresy. Whether this fact strengthens or weakens any argument that may be drawn from the concomitance of heresy and industry cited above may perhaps best be left an open question.

[132] See chapter v, above.

[133] Cf. Ashley, _English Economic History and Theory_, bk. i, ch. i; Karl Bücher, _Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_, ch. iii.

[134] Cf. R. Ehrenberg, _Das Zeitalter der Fugger_.

[135] Seen, as indicated above, in the matter-of-course resort of the scientists to the conception of efficient cause as a solvent of problems touching material phenomena, as well as in the theologians’ and philosophers’ resistless drift toward creative efficiency as the ultimate term of their speculations.

[136] Cf. Locke, _Of Civil Government_, ch. v, “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”

[137] Illustrative instances of such a customary code of “natural” rights and obligations are numerous in the late literature of ethnology. Good illustrations are afforded by various papers in the _Reports of the Am. Bureau of Ethnology_, on the culture of the Pueblos, Eskimo, and the Indians of the North-West Coast; so also in Skeat and Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_, or in Seligmann, _The Veddas_.

[138] Cf., e. g., C. Beard, _The Industrial Revolution_, ch. ii; Spencer Walpole, _History of England from 1815_, vol. i; C. W. Taylor, _The Modern Factory System_, ch. i, ii.

[139] In a general way, the relation in which the skilled workman in the large industries stands to the machine process is analogous to that in which the primitive herdsman, shepherd or dairymaid stand to the domestic animals under their care, rather than to the relation of the craftsman to his tools. It is a work of attendance, furtherance and skilled interference rather than a forceful and dexterous use of an implement.

[140] It follows also, among other secondary consequences, that the effective industrial life of the skilled workman will, in order to the best average effect, begin at an appreciably more advanced age, and will therefore be shortened by that much. The period of preparation becomes more protracted, more exacting and more costly, and the effective life cycle of the workman grows shorter. Although it does not, perhaps, belong in precisely this connection, it may not be out of place to recall that the increasingly exacting requirements of the machine industry, particularly in the way of accurate, alert and facile conformity to the requirements of the machine process, interrupt the industrial life of the skilled workman at an earlier point in the course of senile decay. So that the industrial life-cycle of the workman is shortened both at its beginning and at its close, at the same time that the commonplace preparation for work grows more costly and exacting.

Child labour, which once may, industrially speaking, have been an economical method of consuming the available human material, is no longer compatible with the highest industrial efficiency, even apart from any question of hardship or deterioration incident to an excessive or abusive recourse to child labour; it is incompatible with the community’s material interests. Therefore the business community--the body of businessmen at large--for whose behoof the industries of the country are carried on, have a direct interest not only in extending the age of exemption from industrial employment but also in procuring an adequate schooling of the incoming generation of workmen. The business community is evidently coming to appreciate this state of the case, at least in some degree, as is evidenced by their inclination to favour instruction in the “practical” branches in the public schools, at the public expense, as well as by the wide-reaching movement that aims to equip private and state schools that shall prepare the youth for work in the various lines of industrial employment.

[141] _Cf._, _e. g._, Adam Smith’s reflections on the uses of an accurate watch, _Theory of the Moral Sentiments_, part iv, ch. 2.

[142] On the other hand the aphorism often cited, that “Necessity is the Mother of Invention,” appears to be nothing better than a fragment of uncritical rationalism. It offers a rationalised, _ex post facto_ account of changes that take place, and reflects that ancient preconception by help of which the spokesmen of edification were enabled to interpret all change as an improvement due to the achievement of some definitely foreknown end. It appears also to be consistently untrue, except so far as “invention” is to be taken as a euphemistic synonym for “prevarication.” Doubtless, the felt need of ways and means has brought on many changes in technology, but doubtless also the ulterior consequences of any one of the greater mechanical inventions have in the main been neither foreseen nor intended in the designing of them. The more serious consequences, especially such as have an institutional bearing, have been enforced by the inventions rather than designed by the inventors.

[143] See pp. 18–21, above.

[144] Cf., however, what has been said above (pp. 21–23) of the variability and adaptability of a hybrid population and the possible selective establishment of a hybrid type more suitable to current conditions of life than any one of the racial stocks out of which the hybrid population is made up.

[145] So, _e. g._, the modern technology has, directly and indirectly, brought on the growth of large cities and industrial towns, as well as an increasing density of population at large. This modern state of the industrial arts is a creation of the European community of nations, with the blond-hybrid populations leading. The population of these countries is drifting into these machine-made cities and towns, and this drift affects the blond-hybrids in a more pronounced degree than any other similarly distinguishable element in the population. At the same time the birth-rate is lower and the death-rate higher in these modern urban communities than in the open country, in spite of the fact that more attention is given to preventive sanitation in the urban than in the rural communities, and it is in the urban communities that medical attendance is most available at the same time that its most efficient practitioners congregate there. This accelerated death-rate strikes the blond-hybrids of the towns in an eminent degree; and infant mortality in the towns, particularly, runs at such a figure as to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension. In its summary effects on the viability of the modern peoples this modern technology appears to be as untoward as would their removal to an unsuitable climate. Indeed the hygienic measures that are taken or advocated as a remedy for these machine-made conditions of urban life are of much the same character and require much the same degree of meticulous attention to details that are required to preserve the life of Europeans under the precarious climatic conditions of the low latitudes. So that, for these Europeans at least, the hygienic situation created by their own technology has much of that character of a comprehensive clinic that attaches to the British occupation of India or the later European occupation of West Africa or the Philippines.

[146] The statisticians of a hundred years ago, _e. g._, were content to work in round percentages where their latterday successors are doubtfully content with three-place decimals.

[147] An eminently illustrative instance of the mechanistic bias in the moral sciences is afforded by the hedonistic conceptions of the early nineteenth century; and the deistic theology of that period and earlier is no less characteristic a symptom of the same animus.

_Cf._ also, for a view running to a conclusion opposed to that spoken for above, H. Bergson, _Creative Evolution_ (translation by Arthur Mitchell, New York, 1911), ch. i, especially pp. 16–23; where the mechanistic conception is construed as an instinctive metaphysical norm and contrasted with the deliverances of reason and experience, which are then held to inculcate an anthropomorphic interpretation of the same facts.

[148] “Pragmatism” is the term that has been elected to cover this metaphysical postulate of efficiency conceived as the bench mark of actuality.

[149] Of all these latterday revulsionary schemes of surcease from the void and irritation of the mechanistic conception, that spoken for by M. H. Bergson is doubtless the most felicitous, at the same time that it is, in its elements, the most engagingly naïve. Apart from, and without prejudice to, the (doubtless very substantial) merits of this system of speculative tenets, the vogue which it has achieved appears to be due in good part to its consonance with this archaic bent of civilised human nature, already spoken of. The immanent, or rather intrinsically dominant, creative bent inherent in matter and not objectively distinguishable from it, is sufficiently suggestive of that praeter-mechanical efficacy that seems so easy of comprehension to many of the peoples on the lower levels of culture, and that affords the substantial ground of magical practices and finds untroubled expression in the more naïve of their theoretical speculations. It would be a work of extreme difficulty, e. g., to set up a consistently tenable distinction between M. Bergson’s _élan de la vie_, on the one hand, and the _mana_ of the Melanesians (_Cf._ Codrington, _The Melanesians_, esp. ch. vii and xii), the _wakonda_ of the Sioux (_Cf._ A. C. Fletcher and F. la Flesche, “The Omaha Tribe,” _Bureau of Ethnology, Report xxvii_ (1905–1906), esp. pp. 597–599), or even the _hamingia_ of Scandinavian paganism, on the other hand.

In fact, the point of departure and support for M. Bergson’s speculations appears to be nothing else than a projection, into objective reality, of the same human trait that has here been spoken of as the instinct of workmanship; this norm of initiative and efficiency which so is imposed on objective facts being then worked out with great subtlety and sympathetic insight, to make a comprehensive, cosmological scheme. The like projection of workmanlike initiative and efficiency, and its imputation to objective reality, both at large--as with M. Bergson--and in concrete detail, with more or less of personalisation, is one of the main, though frequently misunderstood, factors in the cosmologies that do duty as a body of science and philosophy among savages and the lower barbarians.

That the roots of this speculative scheme of “creative evolution” should reach so far into the background of human culture and draw on sources so close to the undisciplined prime-movers of human nature is, of course, in no degree derogatory to this system of theory; nor does it raise any presumption of unsoundness in the tenets that so are, in the course of elaboration, built up out of this metaphysical postulate. In point of fact, the characterisation here offered places M. Bergson’s thesis, and therefore his system, precisely where he has been at pains to explain that he wishes to take his initial position in advocating his view,--at an even break with the mechanistic conception; the merits of which, as contrasted with his own thesis, will then be made to appear in the course of the further argument that is to decide between their rival claims to primacy. In point of formal and provisional legitimation, such an imputation of workmanlike efficacy at large rests on ground precisely even with that on which the mechanistic conception also rests,--viz. imputation by force of metaphysical necessity, that is to say by force of an instinctive impulse. The main theorem of causation, as well as its several mechanistic corollaries, are, in the last resort, putative traits of matter only, not facts of observation; and the like is true--in M. Bergson’s argument admittedly so--of the _élan de la vie_ as well. So far, therefore, as regards the formally determinable antecedent probability of the two rival conceptions, the one is as good as the other; but M. Bergson’s argument, running on ground of circumstantial evidence in the main, makes out at least a cogently attractive likelihood that the conception for which he speaks is to be accepted as the more fundamental, underlying the mechanistic conception, conditioning it and on occasion overruling its findings in matters that lie beyond its ascertained competence. Which would come, in a different phrasing, to saying that the imputation of creatively workmanlike efficiency rests on instinctive ground more indefeasibly intrinsic to human nature; presumably in virtue of its embodying the functioning of an instinctive proclivity less sophisticated and narrowed by special habituation, such special habituation, e. g., as that exercised by the technology of handicraft and the machine process in recent times.

[150] All this, of course, neither ignores nor denies the substantial part which the _jus gentium_ and the _jus naturale_ of the Roman jurists and their commentators have played in the formulation of the system of Natural Rights. In point of pedigree the line of derivation of these legal principles is doubtless substantially as set forth authentically by the jurists who have spent their competent endeavors on that matter. So far as regards the English-speaking communities this pedigree runs back to Locke, and through Locke to the line of jurists and philosophers on whom that great scholar has drawn; while for the promulgation of the like system of principles more at large the names of Grotius, Pufendorf, Althusius doubtless have all the significance commonly assigned them. See pp. 290–293 above.

[151] Unless the “Syndicalist” movement is to be taken as something sufficiently definite in its principles to make it an exception to the rule.

[152] Cf., e. g., Anna Youngman, _The Economic Causes of Great Fortunes_, especially ch. vi; R. Ehrenburg, _Grosse Vermögen_; Ida Tarbell, _History of the Standard Oil Company_.

[153] Cf. a paper “On the Nature of Capital” in the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, November, 1908.

[154] As late as Adam Smith’s time “manufacturer” still retained its etymological value and designated the workman who made the goods. But from about that time, that is to say since the machine process and the business control of industry have thoroughly taken effect, the term no longer has a technological connotation but has taken on a pecuniary (business) signification wholly; so that the term now designates a businessman who stands in none but a pecuniary relation to the processes of industry.

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It is the purpose of this inquiry to discuss the place and value of the leisure class as an economic factor in modern life, but it has been found impracticable to confine the discussion strictly within the limits so marked out. Some attention is perforce given to the origin and the line of derivation of the institution, as well as to features of social life that are not commonly classed as economic.

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