CHAPTER VI.

ORGANISATION OF INDUSTRY.

In the last two chapters I have had mainly in view the question, how to prevent the proletaire from propagating his kind. In the fourth chapter an answer has been framed in terms of the one aspect of the ethical idea, that it is the duty of the weak to yield to the strong. In the fifth chapter the other aspect of the ethical idea has been kept in view, that it is the duty of the strong, by incarnating itself through sympathy, to unite itself with the weak, so as to make the weak strong, the unfit fit to live. Now I have to seek what means can be found for preventing the well-doing from sinking into the proletariat.

Everybody is puzzled to know what can be the cause or causes of the mysterious depression in trade, which, like a black cloud fraught with evil, has been covering all lands; and any wind of doctrine would be welcomed that would give promise to blow it away. Many opinions have

been formed and expressed about it. One man thinks it is all by reason of the disturbance of the relative value of gold and silver, and that if we could only so couple these as to put a stop to their vagaries, industry would revive, markets would resume their busy cheerful faces, and the heart of the diligent rejoice. Another thinks that selfish capitalists, in their mad pursuit of wealth, have manufactured so many commodities to meet the wants of other people, that the world has got a surfeit, and needs to go for a while to some health resort, like other gourmands, to rid itself of its rheumatic gout by plain fare and a simple natural life. But it is not all the world that suffers from rheumatic gout. Down in the alleys there is a world of men and women, and, alas! little children, who show more symptoms of anæmia than of gout. Their pale lips and wasted forms are a melancholy contradiction to the belief that our great capitalists have driven their machinery too hard, and gorged the human stomach with too many good things; for while their stocks are rotting and moth-eaten in their stores, bare-backed human beings are starving. Another will tell you that it is all owing to the fact that people have turned a deaf ear to the teaching of Malthus.

Little children pop into the world like Paul Pry, with an inarticulate translation of his favourite expression, "Just popped in, hope we don't intrude." Grumpy people think them a very serious intrusion indeed when they come in such numbers, and they wonder, I daresay, that Mr Bradlaugh has never moved in the House of Commons, as a necessary measure of economy, the instant stoppage of the Queen's gift to any mother who so far offends against the interests of society as to present the world with triplets. Let the grumpy ones, and all are grumpy who do not brighten up at the advent of little children, take comfort from the assurance of Mr Giffen, that in England, at least at the present time, children are not to us as a plague of locusts coming to devour. If wealth increases at the rate of 3 per cent., and population only at the rate of 13 per cent., the Malthusian checks, positive or preventive, must be working satisfactorily. We must either, in some way or other, be killing off as many of our fellow-citizens as the sternest economist can desire, or the crop of young citizens must be keeping well within the world's feeding capacities. Perhaps the whole truth has not been attained yet, Malthus notwithstanding. The Malthusian doctrine is of course impregnable in

the abstract. But there may be much question about its adequacy to explain the phenomenon of unequal distribution. If all men were economically equal, and animal instinct prevailed, undoubtedly population would increase more rapidly than any conceivable improvement in the means of increasing food supplies. In that case all would suffer about equally, and there would be no escape from the misery of the positive checks. But Malthus cannot tell us why it is that, with seemingly a fair use of the preventive checks, there is yet so much misery alongside of so much wealth, and a periodical recurrence of industrial crises as little determined by any known law as is the recurrence of an earthquake. John Stuart Mill, with all his acuteness, had a belief in the tendency of profits to a minimum in a progressive society, which he supported by arguments not a little inconsistent with his absolute faith in Malthus. That profits do tend to a minimum, and interest too, is a patent fact which escapes the observation of neither business men nor investors. Yet how in the world, when, notwithstanding low profits, the accumulation of capital is going on at such a rate, outstripping the growth of population, the labouring poor are not getting the benefit, seems to be a thing which

no economist can understand. The economists are as helpless before the problem as Lord Dundreary at the wicket. Malthus, we fear, must be taken with a modification.* Evidently, if numbers increase more rapidly than food supplies, all must suffer equally, or some in an exceptional degree,—such is the natural tendency throughout the animal world. But it does not follow that, if population is kept within due limits, there must be a general diffusion of comfort. There may be ample comfort of some coincident with great privation among others. The world is not a see-saw between capital and labour, so that labour is sure to get a good lift from the corpulence of capital, and capital an agreeable hoist to its profit from the overgrowth of labour. That was a pregnant remark of Hegel, that truth cannot be compressed within the limits of a single proposition. No, nor within a chapter either, or a book, or all the books of any single man. The lamented Matthew Arnold told us of a "not ourselves" greater than we, that makes for righteousness. There is another not ourselves greater than we, that makes for truth. It incarnates itself from time to time, just as the other did, and men with

* "No general principle, no abstract reflection, can be adequate to the content of what is individual," i.e., of reality (Bosanquet's Logic, vol. i. p. 3).