CHAPTER III

THE MAN OF BUSINESS

Whatever changes may take place in the organisation of society during the present century, we may regard it as certain that the folk who

"Rise up to buy and sell again"

will be always with us. The man of business will possess many conveniences denied to the city man of to-day. It is, for instance, to be supposed that the inordinate defects of even the best telephone systems will be eliminated. When wireless communication of ideas has been perfected, of course the telephone exchange will disappear. Differential "tuning"--the process by which any wireless telephone will be able to be brought, as transmitter, into correspondence with any other wireless telephone, as receiver--will enable every merchant to "call up" every other merchant. Instead of, as at present, looking up his associate's number in the directory, and getting connected by the clumsy junction of wires at an exchange office, the merchant will look up the tuning-formula, adjust his own telephone to it, and ring a bell, or otherwise employ means for attracting the attention of the man he wants to speak to. As a great proportion of all the business transacted will be done by telephones the frequent occurrence of disputes as to what has or has not been said in a given conversation will have rendered safeguards necessary. Consequently, every telephone will be attached to an instrument, developed from the phonograph, which will record whatever is said at both ends of the line. Precautions will have to be devised against eavesdropping. After communication is established, probably both parties to a conversation will retune their instruments to a fresh pitch, which, in cases requiring special secrecy, could be privately agreed upon beforehand.

The form which the records above suggested will ultimately assume must be a matter of conjecture. It is quite possible that the written word may in all departments of life lose some of its present vital importance. We may imagine, if we choose, that instead of creating records which can be read, we may find it advisable to create records that can be listened to: and some of the apparent inconveniences of this substitution may easily be supposed to be dispensed with. The handiness of a written memorandum is largely a matter of habit. A practised eye can "skim" a long document, and either through the use of black-type headlines, or by pure skill, alight upon exactly the passage required; and if it were necessary, in order to find a given passage, to listen to the whole document being read over by the recording phonograph, no doubt much time would be lost. We shall not be so extremely intolerant of loss of time, perhaps, in the new age, as some people imagine: but in any case, if the speed of the phonograph be imagined as adjustable, it will be perceived that we could then make it gabble parrotwise over the inessential, and let it linger with more deliberation over what we wanted to assure ourselves of. We could even "skip" useless portions--one can do this with phonographs already in use. Probably such aural records may be made capable of acceptance in courts of law, and the maxim verbum auditum manet will take the place of a well-known proverb of our day. Very likely business letters may some day take the form of conveniently-shaped tablets, made of some plastic material, and capable of being utilised by means of a talking machine.

Or if these changes seem too chimerical, we may essay the more difficult task of conceiving a means by which the spoken word may be directly translatable into print or typewriting. The waste of time and energy entailed by the present plan of dictating what we want to say to a stenographer or into a phonograph, for subsequent transcription, renders some sort of improvement urgently needful; nor are these wastes the only grievance, as the introduction of a second personality into the operation of recording speech introduces a simultaneous possibility of error, and an outrageous waste of time is caused by the necessity of reading over what one has dictated laboriously to a stenographer or into a phonograph, to make sure that it is correctly transcribed. It is obviously a much more difficult matter to translate speech directly into printed words than to translate it into something which may again produce the sounds of speech. The first step would be the invention of something which would print a phonetic representation of speech--as, for instance, shorthand of the kind invented by Sir Isaac Pitman. Even this requires us to imagine machinery of a kind whose very rudiments do not at present exist. Indeed, we can only conceive such an instrument by the use of the supposition that some entirely new manipulation of sound-waves will be discovered; and if we conceive that, there is no particular reason why we should hesitate before the notion of speech directly translated into print such as we use in everyday life. If we are going to limit the possibilities of the future by the actual achievements of the present, we shall certainly fall short of any adequate notion of what a hundred years' accelerated progress may be capable of: and I do not see wherein the direct reproduction suggested is any more inconceivable than, for example, telephony, or even photography, must have been to a man of a hundred years ago. The greatest danger attending our attempt to preconceive the amenities of the next century is that we may limit our expectations too narrowly.

On this ground, perhaps, I may be thought too cautious in assuming that the present form of alphabetical writing and printing will survive at all. But there are two things which seem likely to give it permanence. The first, of course, is literature. If we adopt an entirely new form of writing and printing for general use, we must either set to work to translate all our literature into it, thereby probably losing some formal beauties which the culture of the world will not consent to sacrifice; or we must make up our minds to use (as the Japanese do at present) two kinds of writing concurrently; and the difficulty of overcoming the vast inertia of the human mind (which alone still suffices to exclude from English commerce so obviously convenient an innovation as decimal coinage) will probably negative this. This inertia is the second consideration likely to give permanence to our present form of English alphabetical writing.

However this may be, the convenience of direct wireless telephony will certainly, when supplemented by records of whatever kind, greatly facilitate commerce. The tedious process of writing a letter, posting it, and awaiting the reply, at present persisted in chiefly because it is so necessary to have some sort of documentary evidence of what has passed, will be largely dispensed with when we can secure an automatic record of what we say. Nearly everything will be done by word of mouth.

The great inconvenience, apart from the absence of record, which attaches to transactions or negotiations by telephone at the present day, is that a telephonic conversation is not nearly so satisfactory as a personal interview face to face. Gesture, attitude, the language of face and eyes, all do so much to elucidate communication in the latter way, that we lose a great deal when we meet an associate at the other end of a telephone wire. Well, the telephone of the new age will remove this drawback, or rather it will be supplemented by something which will do so. This invention, not at all difficult to imagine, I will call provisionally the teleautoscope. It will no doubt have some name equally barbarous. The teleautoscope can be explained in a single sentence. It will be an instrument for seeing by electricity. Whatever is before the transmitting teleautoscope will be visible before the receiving teleautoscope wirelessly en rapport with the former. Thus by telephone, by phonograph, and by teleautoscope, a wireless conversation will combine all the advantages of a personal interview and a written correspondence.

No doubt the post-office system of this country, despite occasional lapses, is as nearly perfect as any human institution, in the present state of society, can be reasonably expected to be. But it is equally certain that in so far as postal communication is required at all in the new age it will have to be vastly improved both as to speed and precision, compared with what we now, sometimes rather thanklessly, enjoy. For instance, that impatient age will certainly not tolerate the inconvenience of having to send out to post its letters and parcels, or the tardiness of having these articles sorted and passed on for delivery only at intervals of half an hour or so. We may take it for granted that every well-equipped business office will be in direct communication, by means of large-calibred pneumatic tubes, with the nearest post-office. And however rapidly and however frequently the trains or airships of the period may travel, the process of making up van loads of mail matter for despatch to remote centres, and redistribution there, is far too clumsy for what commerce will demand a hundred years hence. No doubt the soil of every civilised country will be permeated by vast networks of pneumatic tubes: and all letters and parcels will be thus distributed at a speed hardly credible to-day.

Already every bank of any importance probably uses calculating machines. It is not likely that the fatiguing and uncertain process of having arithmetical calculations of any sort performed in the brains of clerks will survive the improvements of which these machines are capable. Account books, invoices, and all similar documents will doubtless be written by a convenient and compendious form of combined calculating machine and typewriter, which we may suppose to be called the numeroscriptor. It will, of course, be capable of writing anywhere--on a book or on a loose sheet, on a flat surface or on an irregular one. It will make any kind of calculation required. Even such operations as the weighing and measurement of goods will all be done by automatic machinery, [4] capable of recording without any possibility of error the quantity and values of goods submitted to its operation.

Naturally transport will be the subject of something like a renascence. So far as inland communication goes, the chief difficulties to be overcome already call loudly for amendment. We cannot for more than a decade or so make do with the present railway tracks, and either (as already hinted) by means of some invention to enable trains to run one above another, or by some entirely new carrying device such as I will now try to suggest, the new age will certainly supersede or supplement the transport of to-day.

The device most likely to be adopted, in the near future at all events, is something in the nature of elevated trottoirs roulants for goods. If we can conceive all the cities of a country to be linked-up by a system of great overways, we have at all events a feasible solution of the difficulty. There could be a double row of tall, massive pillars, between which could run a wide track, always in motion at considerable speed. It need not be a lightning speed. Most of the tardiness of railway transportation does not, in this country at all events, arise from slowness of trains, but from congestion at goods stations, and this in turn is due, partly to insufficiency of rolling stock, but much more to insufficiency of permanent way. The latter evil is very difficult to cope with. But the system of moving ways, providing a rolling stock equal in length to the line itself, will be a great saving. Returning upon itself the endless track will continuously transport merchandise in both directions. Elevators, suitably placed, will give access to it wherever needed. Probably the motive power will be electrical: and we may confidently anticipate entirely new sources of electricity. It is obviously clumsy to create power in the first instance, convert power into electricity (I use popular language), and then convert electricity back again into power. Much more hopeful than any idea of developing that method would be the conception of new ways of creating and applying motive-power directly. But, almost certainly, electricity, obtained in some new way, will do the work of the world for many generations yet--until, in fact, we devise or discover something more convenient.

It will have been perceived that nearly every improvement and innovation above sketched out involves, and will be indeed designed to effect, great saving of labour. With such economies, and an increased population, there is evidently going to be a difficulty about employment.

Moreover, the great facilities enjoyed by commerce will tend to make commerce extremely powerful. Already great organisers of business begin to evade competition by combining in vast "trusts," whose tendency is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. There is a further cause for the aggrandisement of the large trader and manufacturer at the expense of the petty retail dealer. More and more every year the unprogressive methods of small shopkeepers foster the success of large multiple retailers. But it is likely that retail businesses, whether great or small, will ultimately tend to be eliminated. Manufacturers and trust companies will supply the public directly. What, then, will be the solution of the great social difficulties about to be created?

The answer is, that these difficulties, and especially the developments above confidently predicted for a future comparatively near, are probably transient in their nature. It is not yet the time to discuss political questions: but the problem here directly raised demands a few words of reassurance from the professed optimist.

There can be no doubt of the great social and political dangers involved in so enormous an aggrandisement of the commercial and manufacturing class as we shall most of us live to witness. What is called the problem of the unemployed grows every year more difficult and less obviously hopeful. Moreover, the concentration of great wealth in a few hands is in itself a political danger, even apart from the fact that it implies widespread impoverishment. There are dangers of corrupt legislation, for instance, and other dangers too.

But there will be another great force at work in which may be foreseen the solution of many difficulties beside this. When public education becomes rationalised; when it is employed chiefly as a means of character-making; when the universal education of mankind has the effect of turning out men and women capable of thinking, and not merely of remembering, the teeming population of the working class will begin to exercise an intelligent influence on the legislature--which at present it certainly cannot be said to do. And one thing which the intelligently-elected Parliaments of the new age will assuredly discover is this principle: that it is not good for the State that any one man, or any one associated body of men, should possess an inordinate amount of wealth. [5]

Once this principle is discovered and acted upon; once it is illegal for any person or corporation to be seised of more than a certain fixed capital; the dangers of inconvenient aggrandisement will vanish. Nor is this principle in any way unprogressive or injurious to the commonwealth. It is, in fact, not even injurious to the individuals affected. No reasonably-enlightened being can pretend that a sensible hardship would be inflicted on millionaires by being forbidden to pile Pelion upon Ossa in their present insane manner. A very rich man, compelled to desist from the accumulation of wealth, and consequently driven to the task of finding out how to enjoy it intelligently, would be almost infinitely better off for this constraint. The effect of the ordinance for the limitation of wealth will be to remove all temptation to concentrate manufactures in a few hands. It will open the doors shut by trust companies on competition. It will multiply factories of moderate and convenient size: and one other effect of it will be to improve many manufacturing processes in themselves. There are a great many things which can be cheaply turned out in uniform batches, every article exactly the counterpart of every other, hideous in economical uniformity, because they all emanate from one or two great factories, which, if the manufacture of them were distributed over a number of small factories, would, from this circumstance alone, and from the stress of wholesome competition, be greatly improved. Probably many industries, desirable in themselves, but driven out of successful being by our present system of concentrated manufacturing, would revive. Crafts of what we call regretfully the good old kinds would spring up, rejuvenated: cheap uniformity would cease to be the principal ideal of manufacture. The people would be able to afford agreeable furniture, utensils, decorations, and household goods of all kinds, where they now have to put up with horrible but cheap makeshifts. For one great advantage of the ordinance just predicted must not be lost sight of. When you restrain the rich from becoming inordinately richer, you concurrently save the poor from being made proportionately poorer. This ideal, it should be remarked, is in no sense socialistic. It is, on the contrary, the natural development of individualism.

Hardly less certain is it that before the beginning of the twenty-first century all manufactures and all commerce will be co-operative, the workers in every industry being paid, not by fixed wages, but by a share in the produce of their labour. Instead of the profit of all trade and manufacture being secured to the managers and owners of lands, machinery, transport and other commercial utilities; while labour, the equally necessary and indeed the preponderant element of production, is reckoned as a mere element of cost, in the form of wages; the profit will be shared all round. The more prosperous the enterprise, the more money the workers will receive. No man will be able to grow rich by sweating his workmen. Neither will the present degrading temptation for every workman to perform his task as perfunctorily and as lazily as he can, so long as he does not get dismissed from work altogether, survive this reform. On the contrary, it will be directly worth every man's while to do his work as well as he possibly can. The dignity of labour--a phrase now justly mocked--will become an elevating and delightful practicality. A great many articles of everyday use will be better made than it is possible to get them made to-day. The spectacle of the producers of wealth herding in squalid cabins, clothed in the rags of cast-off clothing, eating garbage, enjoying nothing but intoxication, will give way to a more wholesome and natural state of affairs. Nor will the owners of machinery, of factories and the like long oppose this development. What are called labour-troubles will cease to exist when the interest of employer and employed is identical. The problem of the unemployed will solve itself. Leisure, and an opportunity to employ leisure wisely, will have been bestowed upon the poor as well as we have seen that it will be bestowed upon the rich. A man will have no need to spend practically all the unfatigued hours of every day at the bench, the loom, or the lathe. He will want recreation. While one batch of men is seeking this there will be an opportunity for other batches to work. And work itself, once it is work for an intelligent objective, once it is work that there is a comprehensible reason for trying to execute as well as it can possibly be executed, will lose much of its irksomeness--to the vast improvement alike of the product and the producer.