when the public spirit of the purveyors of the household is sufficiently developed for men to grapple with them. No discerning mind can watch the silent warfare which is proceeding between the various holders of private power, in oil, or shipping, or meat, or other indispensable elements in the household economy, without realising that mankind is here faced with a problem which is likely to involve it in another world-war unless public power and public spirit are brought in to control, and eventually to supersede, private power and ambitions. The more I see of modern industrial tendencies and the closer I have come to an insight into modern international troubles, wrote that frank and far-sighted American, the late Mr Franklin K. Lane, while still Secretary of the Interior in Mr Wilson's administration, in his foreword to 'The Strategy of Minerals,'* 'the more convinced I am that there will be no end to wars and threats of war, to many so-called racial and national conflicts, until the nations of the world regard themselves more really as the trustees of their resources, not merely for those of the same nationality but for the world at large.' The peace of the world is being endangered by the private warfare of industrial barons, a warfare continued, as Mr Lane must have seen at Washington, as others saw it in London, during the Great War itself. On this at least M. Delaisi's instructive little book,† onesided perhaps in its general presentation, may be trusted. But, when one turns to such remedies as those proposed or adumbrated by Mr Culbertson ‡-the setting up of an International Commission to deal with disputes arising out of tariffs and other matters of commercial policy and ultimately to work out a code of manners for the foreign trader, on the lines of medieval Venice, similar to the code of honour among doctors-one is bound to confess that not only most business men themselves, but also the governments and public opinion behind them, are not yet alive to the nature of the grave international problems involved or to the need of a complete transformation of existing habits of mind in regard to economic questions. It will be a race between *Edited by George O. Smith. New York, 1919. † 'Le Petrole.' Paris, 1921. 'Commercial Policy in War-time and After.' New York, 1919. the awakening intelligence and the march of events, between the prophets and the profiteers, to decide this issue. Unless public opinion in the leading industrial countries can be brought to regard the world as a single household, and to shape its commercial policies accordingly, another war is inevitable, and the downfall of civilisation may be consummated. There are men enough in London, Washington, Paris, Berlin, and, no doubt, in Tokyo who realise this and say it in private. Would that they were able to proclaim it from the housetops! Nevertheless, the endeavour must be made to indicate some regulative principle, even for an art in embryo; for it is only by keeping the mind fixed on the true aim and methods of economic activity that the fallacies and limitations of the many contending philosophies of negation and protest become clear. The true leaders of economic idealism in the 19th century were not Marx or any of the economic theorists who preceded or the propagandists who followed him in his limited track, but Mazzini and Ruskin. It is one of the misfortunes of history that the great working-class movement which replaced liberalism as a 'progressive' force during the two generations preceding the war should not have been ranged beneath their banner. The fundamental axiom of economics has never been better stated than by Ruskin in a passage which should be quoted and requoted until it has become commonplace by the adoption of its precept: "The fact is that people have never had clearly explained to them the true functions of a merchant. Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessaries of life, have hitherto existed-three exist necessarily-in every civilised nation: "The Soldier's profession is to defend it, The Pastor's, to teach it. The Physician's, to keep it in health, We may pack Ruskin's thought, together with what is the household compatible with a good life for its servants.' In other words, where the provision of a commodity or of a service inflicts injury upon those who provide it, either the system of production must be modified or the consumer most learn to do without. The needs and desires of the consumer are not an ultimate. They must bow, as they bowed during the war, before major considerations of human welfare. But, where these are not involved, the aim of the economic process is to satisfy demand. What is involved in this recognition of the claim of a ' good life' for the producer? More than can be summed up in a brief discussion; but the most important element can be stated in a single word-Freedom. The main ground of criticism against the modern industrial system, and, let it at once be added, against many of its suggested alternatives, is their denial of individual freedom. By freedom is not meant democracy or representative government, or anything political at all; still less anything metaphysical. Much confusion has been caused by the use of 'freedom' in constitutional discussions, where the word 'responsibility' or 'self-government' would be more in place. In the task of giving precision to the terms used in the common field of philosophical and political discussion, freedom is best allocated to the subjective, rather than the objective sphere. We should learn to think of it, not as something enshrined or guaranteed in a political document, but as a quality or possession of the soul. A free country, a modern wit has said, using the word in its true sense, 'is a country in which any man can tell any other man to go to the devil.' Prof. Wallas has supplied an even briefer, if less homely, definition: 'Freedom is a continuous possibility of initiative.' Freedom, in this sense, is the mainspring of human life; it is the salt which gives it its zest and savour, the air which expands the lungs and braces the limbs. It is a mistaken diagnosis when men fix on poverty or insecurity as the root of the discontents in our modern society. St Francis was poor and yet radiantly happy; and the Founder of Christianity knew not where to lay his head from day to day. The cry for security and, still more, the craving for riches are substitutes, made by an inarticulate slave-mind, for a more vital demand. No true man who has tried both would prefer slavery, cushioned by a bank balance, in a gilded cage, to liberty and all that liberty brings with it in the life of thought and feeling. If the denial or diminution of liberty be really the canker of our age, it is important to bear in mind that the malady is not confined to the working-class only but infects our whole social system. Judged by this subjective test, the 'salariat' is almost as much enslaved as the proletariat; and the managing director, chained to his office desk for eight or ten hours a day, leading a life which in the expressive American definition is 'just one blessed thing after another,' is not in much better case. From the moment indeed that we have fixed a criterion of good housekeeping which includes a good life,' or the possibility of a good life, for the producer, we are involved, not, like Marx and his followers, in a criticism of the modern industrial system, but, like Ruskin and Morris, in a criticism of modern life as a whole. For it is not merely the capitalist and the 'master-class' who are implicated, but the consumer and all those in the modern community committed, by their current modes of living and thinking, to the philosophy, or the custom, that sets more value upon individual property than upon happiness, and assesses the civilisation and the 'greatness' of countries in terms of material wealth and power rather than of their achievements in the region of the spirit. There is a vital issue to be found here which had better at once be stated. Ruskin and Morris looked out over the large-scale organisation of the modern world, with men and women fixed or revolving like cogs in an all-powerful mechanism, and declared that true freedom and happiness were not attainable under such conditions -that the remedy lay in a return to mediæval standards both in production and consumption. There is a large and important school of present-day industrialists and social thinkers who share their pessimism but draw a different conclusion. Accepting a joyless drudgery at mechanical tasks as an unalterable condition of modern civilisation for the majority of men and women, and being prepared to pay the price for the comforts and conveniences that it involves, this school sees in leisure, and in leisure alone, the only possibility of freedom and happiness for the normal modern producer. In other words, they are prepared to acquiesce in the servile State. Men and women are to be chained like slaves to a dehumanising employment for the greater part of their day, and to be set free, after shortened hours, to seek the true expression of their personality in domesticity, recreation, and amusement. For this school of opinion the question of securing a good life for the producer does not exist. The problem has been given up as insoluble. Between them and those who desire to humanise industry there is a straight issue-straighter perhaps than any of those round which so many wordy battles have raged between 'capitalist' and 'socialist.' But the advocates of leisure, realistic enough in their vision of industry, have not generally been realistic in their vision of the recreations in which the worker reacts against the deadening drudgery of his day. If they studied the evolution and course of modern commercialised systems of amusement in the urban centres of Europe and America, they might be less confident in their thesis that 'a noble use of leisure' is a natural, or even a possible, sequel to a dehumanising day. Man becomes the image and reflexion of that which he does; and, just as the sailor bears the open sea and the ostler the dumb companionship of the stable upon their speaking faces, so the machine-minder and the mill-girl carry into their choice of enjoyments, and even into their applause, the swift mechanical motions and the vacuous stare of the monsters to whom they make obeisance day by day. Too tired, or too dissipated, in the literal sense of that word, to love or to hate, to experience sorrow or pathos or any real thrill of feeling at all, they sit passive and inert, like the dead things they feed, and suffer themselves to be touched and tickled and played upon by the skilled entertainers on the stage or film, machine-minders like themselves. Refusing, then, in the face of its inevitable dehumanising consequences, to acquiesce in the social philosophy implicit in 'scientific' thinkers of this type, we are brought back to the main problem which Ruskin and Morris sought to solve by an impracticable mediævalism-how to make modern large-scale industrialism |