CHAPTER XVIII
ORGANIZATION
It has already been remarked in these pages that quite inadequate numbers of persons are engaged in the production of many useful articles. This would be true even if all the individuals enumerated as producers in the census returns were fully employed upon existing plant and under their existing managers. As a matter of fact, they are not fully employed. Unemployment or short time always exists in greater or less degree. Between inadequate numbers and inadequate employment of those numbers the quantity of _ponderable commodities_ produced in the United Kingdom is so small, as we have seen, that only a small fraction of our people are well housed or well clothed. A great multitude craves for satisfaction of elementary needs, while a host of shopkeepers wait hungrily for customers who cannot buy.
In the nineteenth century enormous strides were made in the invention of machinery and labour-saving appliances and methods, and now, at the opening of the twentieth century, we possess means more than ample for the satisfaction of all. If invention now came to a standstill, we could, with such science as we now command, produce, or obtain by exchange for our production, far more food, houses, clothes, furniture and other commodities than we actually need, and this while our population enjoyed ample leisure in which to develop their higher faculties.
What, then, is at fault? Not only do the majority of our men work arduously, but an immense army of women and young children are also engaged in production and distribution. Of the population of England and Wales between the ages of 20 and 55 only 179,946 males and 823,135 unmarried females figured in the Census of 1901 as "without specific occupations." What is the explanation, then, of an insufficient and ill-distributed production? The answer can be given in a few words. It is want of organization which leads to such poor results from so much hard labour. _A poor stream of ponderable commodities filters through thousands of unnecessary channels, and becomes the subject of many strange services, each of which claims and gets some sort of reward. By the enumeration of each of these services the total income which we examined at the beginning of this book is made up. The Error of Distribution of the national income connotes a wasteful and inadequate production._
Waste in actual production is still exceedingly great. In only a minority of cases are factories equipped with the best plant and appliances. Model factories, in which the most economical production is attained, are still exceptional. There are tens of thousands of small employers who lack the capital properly to equip their establishments, and who perforce waste labour.
That is to speak of production as a whole, without reference to the nature of the goods produced, but when we come to analyse the product, waste is everywhere apparent. Labour, to be economically employed, should produce only genuine articles, capable of application for a considerable period to the purpose which they are designed to serve. As we know only too well, a very great part of our manufacturing output is of articles which make-believe, and it is only a small fraction of production in any branch of industry which is the best of its kind. Our competitive system is largely an endeavour to make profits out of the sale of trashy articles, the production of which wastes alike the labour engaged in making them and the labour for which they are exchanged. It is difficult to say which is more pitiable, the waste of labour upon rubbish designed for the consumption of the poor, or the waste of labour upon luxuries designed for the consumption of the rich.
Upon the waste connected with the trades and services of luxury I have already dwelt at some length. Here it is only necessary to remind the reader that it is of two kinds. There is the multiplication of servants and attendants upon rich men and their houses and animals,[54] and there is the employment of nominally useful workmen in the manufacture and repair of the instruments of luxury.
Turning to the marketing and distribution of commodities we have many forms of waste of labour to study. Each manufacturer in a trade, selling his goods in competition with others, sends out his agent or agents to assert, not always truly, that his wares are the best and the cheapest, and to secure orders for them. Thus a large number of able-bodied men are divorced from production and made a quite unnecessary factor in distribution. At the Census of 1901, 64,322 commercial travellers were enumerated in England and Wales, as against 44,055 in 1891! These men are usually of an exceedingly capable type, whose work, better directed, might be of great service in useful production.
Each factory, however small, must have its separate clerical staff, and to thousands of men wasted as travellers we have to add tens of thousands wasted as clerks. In the United Kingdom, in 1901, there were 439,972 commercial or business clerks, as against 300,615 in 1891.
The commodities produced by the wasteful competitive factories are often, too often, dealt with by wholesale middlemen, agents, brokers, factors, merchants, who, with their staffs of clerks and warehousemen account for an uncertain but considerable number of the working community. Our imports of food, which in an organized community could so easily be handled by a single staff at each port, are scrambled for by a great host of merchants, factors and commission agents.
A most conspicuous waste in distribution is in advertising, one of the most unnecessary of all trades. In the game of competition, those often win, not who supply the best goods, but who say that they supply the best goods. As a result there has sprung up an enormous industry with many branches which is engaged in pushing the sale of a few good and many worthless articles. It "employs" thousands of male and female clerks and canvassers, and directly and indirectly lays many nominally useful trades under contribution. Printers, authors and journalists, enamellers, carpenters, bill-stickers, paper-makers and others are engaged to furnish the materials of the advertisements. Altogether it is probable that some 80,000 people find a "living" in connexion with advertising, when they should be doing useful work. Some part of the stream of useful commodities is directed to them, and in return they give nothing. Individually, they may be honest, industrious people, doing the work they are employed to do to the best of their ability. From a national point of view they are wasting their time. It may be added that when they are pushing the sale of "patent" medicines, whiskies and complexion creams they are doing something worse than waste time.
Chiefly arising out of our commercial system of distribution and the crimes and misdemeanours which it creates, the various branches of the legal profession absorb a considerable number of able-bodied men who contribute nothing to the wealth of the nation but who are rewarded by a large share of the national income. At the Census of 1901 as many as 27,184 barristers and solicitors and 42,339 law clerks were recorded.[55] These 69,523 individuals with their dependents, probably numbering nearly 300,000 in all, help to attenuate the thin stream of ponderable commodities which flow from the places where people labour to useful ends.
We pass to the work of the hundreds of thousands of retail shopkeepers and their servants, and here again we find a vast amount of wasted labour. In each trade in each district there are a quite unnecessary number of tradesmen hunting for profits. It is not uncommon to find half-a-dozen butchers' men calling for orders upon the householders of a single street.
It is sometimes represented to shopkeepers that any movement towards collectivism threatens their livelihood. Shopkeepers will do well to remember that it is unrestrained individualism which is their worst enemy. In almost every branch of retail distribution the multiple shop principle is eliminating the independent shopkeeper and substituting badly paid shop "managers." Apologists of individualism boast of the economy which is thus being achieved. Thus M. Leroy Beaulieu in his "Collectivism" (which is an attack on collectivism) writes, "The tendency of civilization, where freedom exists, appears to be towards a reduction in the number of persons who live entirely by commerce, owing to the gradual substitution of large for small industries that is now in progress. Would it be possible for collectivism to act more rapidly or efficiently?" M. Leroy Beaulieu forgets that the crushing of the small shopkeeper by private monopolists accentuates the error of distribution, while collectivism economizes labour for the general good.
What I have written does not apply, of course, to all fields of labour. It has long been recognized that certain services can only be effectually and efficiently performed under one management. Railways, tramways, water-service, lighting, and so forth have come to be looked upon as "natural monopolies." Even Mr Henry George, who thought that "Socialism tended towards Atheism" and who considered that "limitation of working hours and of the labour of women and children" could only be enforced by methods which "multiply officials, interfere with personal liberty, tend to corruption and are liable to abuse,"[56] admitted the existence of "necessary monopolies" which might be treated as functions of the State. Indeed, it is apparent to the most unthinking that between two points A and B there can only be one best route for a railway, and that, therefore, railway service between points A and B should be a monopoly. Similarly it would be an obvious absurdity to construct two sewers in one road, competing with each other for the removal of refuse, or for two or more gas managements to run mains in the same streets. In these and many other cases it is clearly recognized that economy of labour is consistent with monopoly alone, and the only question that remains to decide is whether the necessary monopoly should be in public or private hands. I do not purpose here to discuss that question, for at this date it is scarcely an open one. An overwhelming weight of opinion has decided that public ownership must go with monopoly, wherever monopoly is shown to be necessary.
It is not so generally recognized that proper economy of labour and a proper distribution of the products of labour can only be secured by:
(1) The conversion of all common services into monopolies, and
(2) The ownership of those monopolies by the public.
Nevertheless, the waste arising from hundreds or thousands of unnecessary centres of production and distribution is becoming better understood, and in the United Kingdom, as in America and Germany, big fish are increasingly eager to swallow the little fish. Combination in the field of production is no less common than the unification of control of stores and shops in the field of ultimate distribution. Organization is in the air, and organization, commenced by individuals for individual gain, can only end in the erection of monopolies, which, for its own safety and health, the public, sooner or later, will find itself compelled to control.
In the foregoing pages we have considered the proper use of area and the healthy housing of the people as questions urgently calling for collective action. The colonization of British land by the revival of agriculture and the redistribution of industries is ultimately bound up with the development of Transport and Power Distribution. The former is now a problem of private monopoly which we have allowed to arise. The latter will become one if we do not at once realize the possibilities of power distribution and determine that they are of so far-reaching a character as to demand public ownership from the beginning.
If we are successfully to take our industries and people out of congested centres and spread them out over a considerable area we need cheap and rapid transport and cheap and easily handled power. The transport and power transmission of the future will be electrical. It is upon record that in the early days of the steamship a Royal Commission "sat upon" the then vexed question of "Steam versus Sails," and unanimously decided that sails were the only practical wear for the Royal Navy. One is reminded of this fact when one contemplates the slow progress made by electric traction in this country, and the marked reluctance to experiment on the part of those types of private and injurious monopolists—our great railway companies. After much thought and with the assistance of a pushful American citizen our London "Underground" is, as I write, electrified, many years after electric traction was known in Darkest Africa, but so far as the greater part of our transport system is concerned we are at a standstill. The field of experiment is resigned to the Americans and the Germans.
The production and distribution of light, heat and power simply mean the production and distribution of energy in the form we call electricity, and since transport is simply motion we see that the future of lighting, heating, transport and power is the future of electricity.
In the matter of transport there is perhaps something to be said for the statesmen who, without the slightest conception of the possibilities of steam power, allowed our railways and canals to be made sources of profit for private speculators. They erred in ignorance of the magnitude and importance of the subject. There will be no such excuse if we allow the production and distribution of electrical power to become the sport of private monopolists. If there is blindness in this matter it will be wilful blindness. For each district there can be but one power supply consistently with economy, and so much hangs upon the wise distribution of power that it is most important the public should be made to realize the nature of the interests which are at stake.
The adoption of the mysterious word "Electricity" is a most unfortunate thing. If the public understood that electricity is Energy and that it is transmutable at will into Power or Light or Heat, they would better realize the possibilities of the future in town and country, and all that the proper organization and control of Energy means to them. They would at once resolve that the power of government must not be divorced from the Power which will run in the electrical mains of the future, and by the aid of which we can transform the face of our land.
Let me drop the word Electricity and use the simple term Energy. Energy will be produced at a central power station and distributed over a considerable area. The energy mains will carry the means of lighting, the means of motion (transport), the means of heating, the means of manufacturing in large, the means of manufacturing in small, the means of cooking, the means of cleaning, to every person in that area. Energy will be at the disposal of every factory, of every workshop,—and of every private house. No building will be without its motors, large or small. Smoke and all the waste and dirt of smoke will disappear.
I am not speaking of a remote future, but of possibilities which can forthwith be realized. How important it is, then, that this Energy supply, which is already entering and will increasingly enter into our everyday lives, should be publicly owned from the first. Given private ownership, the monopolists of Energy will run their mains where most profit is quickly to be garnered instead of seeking, as we should seek, first profits in the thinning out of towns and the restoration of the health of our people. If we part with the control of power, it is Power indeed which we part with. We should part, also, it is important to add, with a magnificent source of public revenue, which will amount, in the time to come, to much more than the revenue of our railways. It is only by securing the distribution of such profits by public ownership that we can make any impression upon the melancholy facts treated in the first part of this volume.
As I have already said, it is commonly recognized that such a function as a tramway or water supply must of necessity be a monopoly, public or private, if its working is to be economical. It is not difficult to show that the control of the production and distribution of all articles of common use must be unified if labour is not to be wasted. Just as one water main and one alone is needed for the service of a row of houses, so, to use a familiar illustration, one vehicle and one alone is needed to supply the same row of houses with milk. If a number of milk-sellers are competing for the custom of one small neighbourhood, as is usually the case, a quite considerable number of able-bodied men, boys and animals are engaged in unnecessarily traversing the same streets, one after the other, to do the work which could be performed with much more ease, certainty and expedition by a fraction of their number. Each of the small tradesmen has to keep a set of accounts demanding his own attention or that of his wife or clerk. Each milk dealer, again, has his separate supply of milk from the railway station, sent by some farmer at a distance. Each of these doses of milk is the subject of a separate transaction, wasting labour at both ends of the journey and in transit. From first to last, the process is clumsy and tedious, wasting labour at every stage. The waste is precisely of the same nature as would occur if several water companies supplied a certain street with water and had their mains running side by side. There would be just as much absurdity, and no more, in serving my road by four water-mains as in serving it by the four milk chariots which now pay it such frequent visits.
And to pursue this useful illustration a little further there is another analogy between a water supply and a milk supply which should not be forgotten. The importance of pure milk is not less than the importance of pure water. The milk supply of towns is derived from a thousand tainted sources, the precise nature of which is unknown both to the consumers and to the milk dealers. I fear we should drink less milk if we could see the handling of it—the literal handling of it—from the start. I have a lively recollection of the last milking operation I witnessed. Suffice it to say that I agreed, afterwards, that the butter made on the farm looked to be very fine butter, and that I was entirely satisfied with an ocular demonstration of its many virtues. As is pointed out by Dr G. F. McCleary, the Battersea Medical Officer of Health,[57] "if large towns want clean milk they must not look to outside authorities to get it for them." The ordinary milk farmer is a conservative creature who does not appreciate the "faddist" with his demands for a clean milker and a clean cow. A dirty person draws milk from a dirty animal into a dirty receptacle, and tons of manure come to London with the morning milk. Dr Leslie Mackenzie, Medical Officer of the Local Government Board for Scotland,[58] thus describes the process:
"To watch the milking of cows is to watch a process of unscientific inoculation of a pure (or almost pure) medium with unknown quantities of unspecified germs.... Whoever knows the meaning of aseptic surgery must feel his blood run cold when he watches, even in imagination, the thousand chances of germ inoculation. From cow to cow the milker goes, taking with her (or him) the stale epithelium of the last cow, the particles of dirt caught from the floor, the hairs, the dust, and the germs that adhere to them.... Everywhere, throughout the whole process of milking, the perishable, superbly nutrient liquid receives its repeated sowings of germinal and non-germinal dirt. In an hour or two its population of triumphant lives is a thing imagination boggles at. And this in good dairies! What must it be where cows are never groomed, where hands are only accidentally washed, where heads are only occasionally cleaned, where spittings (tobacco or other) are not infrequent, where the milker may be a chance-comer from some filthy slum—where, in a word, the various dirts of the civilized human, are at every hand reinforced by the inevitable dirts of the domesticated cow? Are these exaggerations? They are not. I could name many admirable byres where these conditions are, in a greater or less degree, normal."
There is but one way to obtain clean and pure milk and at the same time to secure economy of labour in its production and distribution coupled with adequate remuneration of the labour so economized, and that is the way of public ownership. The municipality should conduct the entire operation of milk supply. By so doing it would prolong the lives of its citizens, save the lives of many infants, and add to its revenue.
A public milk supply, even in relation to the food of adults, is an urgent need. When considered in relation to infantile mortality the question is seen to be a vital one. All medical officers of health are at one on the point. We must have municipal milk depots if the children are to be saved, and if we supply milk for children and nursing mothers we may as well enlarge our basis of operations and make the milk service, like the water service, a complete municipal monopoly.
Thus organized, another great service would be lifted out of the sphere of bargaining and chicanery and adulteration. In another industry the waste of labour would cease. In another trade men would work with intent to serve, and cease to hunt profits at the cost of their bodies and souls.
The case for the municipalization of the milk supply is a very forcible one, but it is not more so than that for the public ownership of other common services. The point as to waste of labour in production or distribution largely affects them all. The dangers of adulteration and dirt touch not milk alone, but the manufacture and distribution of every commodity. Commercialism has undermined honesty. Sham, shoddy and make-believe—these are erected in the form of houses, sewn up in the form of suits, packed in tins to mock children as food, made the sole occupation of millions of quite honest people. If honesty of production is to be regained, the great services must pass, one by one, under public control, and as each passes another opportunity for the amassing of private fortunes will pass away and another factor in the Error of Distribution will be cancelled. The best services at low charges for the public will be accompanied by ample but not excessive remuneration of management, a proper reward and short hours for the privates of industry, and the accumulation of just so much profit in the public treasury as may be deemed necessary to provide for new capital, contingencies, or for public non-revenue services. Thus, and thus alone, can we raise the status of the mass of the people and prevent the congestion of wealth in a few hands. There can be no proper diffusion of wealth until we have ended the system by which good and bad employers use the lives of the multitude for their profit and pleasure, now working them arduously in exchange for a payment which is an unfair remuneration of the service, and anon refusing them even the opportunity to do hard labour.
The remarkable success of municipal trading, so far, may be measured by the bitterness of the attacks which have been made upon it by private capitalists. The recent complaints of the railway companies as to the competition of municipal tramways entirely dispose of the theory that private enterprise alone can ensure economical management and an efficient production. It is argued that public bodies cannot obtain faithful service from their employees, and that businesses managed by them are bound to fail because the men in command do not understand the interests they seek to control or the methods of industry. Capital, it is represented, is bound to be wasted, and the tax-payer certain to suffer in pocket as part proprietor of an unsuccessful business, even as he suffers also as a consumer of his own poor product. In reply it is only necessary to point out that there is nothing which can be urged against a trading municipality which cannot also be urged against a limited liability company. In the latter case, as in the former, the shareholders know nothing of the details of the business they own. In each there is a governing body which in its turn usually knows little of the technicalities of the business undertaken. Thus the chairman of a well-known steel company is a solicitor. The boards of directors of the majority of our leading limited companies are composed of men who are strangers to the businesses they "direct." In practice management devolves upon the Managing Director, who is usually a man well versed in his trade or profession. We see, therefore, that a limited liability company, after all, is in precisely the same position as a municipality. The private monopolists are compelled to find a practical man to manage their business and make profits for them. That is precisely what the municipality does. As a matter of fact, some of the cleverest men in the United Kingdom are serving municipalities as advising and managing engineers, instead of hiring themselves out to some board of directors.
What do railway directors, for example, know of railway management? Do they travel on their own line, note its deficiencies, and repair them? Do they take a practical hand in its affairs? No. The practical management is in the hands of certain paid servants, goods managers, general managers, locomotive superintendents, and so forth. Is it seriously argued that an individual engineer, as locomotive superintendent of a private railway company, is more efficient than he would be in the service of say the London County Council? If so, how does it come about that the railway companies are losing trade while the L.C.C. trams are crowded? If so, how is it that to travel on the South Eastern Railway is a martyrdom, while to travel on a L.C.C. tram is a pleasure?
It will be seen on reflection that the only difference between the company and the municipality is this. In the case of the company the qualification of the directors is merely the owning of stock or shares in the undertaking, and the perfunctory votes of a few shareholders. In the case of the municipality the "director" has to secure the suffrages of a great body of his fellow-citizens. As for nepotism, it is far more common in private trade than in public life in this country. In nearly every private business some inefficient son or cousin or nephew is "provided for," to the loss of the undertaking. Competitive industry is full of square men carefully planted in round holes by their friends and relatives.[59] In the municipal service there are fewer wasters than are to be found connected with great limited liability companies. As for waste of capital, it is common in private business, and its loss is as real to the community, from an economic point of view, as the loss of capital by a municipality. As for negligence and theft, these are common in all kinds of business undertakings, but as a general rule audit and control are stricter in municipal trading than in the case of private companies. As for cheerful service, the reader has but to compare the servants of municipal tramways with those of any private omnibus company. My own experience is that it is the municipal servant who is the more civil and obliging. Perhaps it is because the municipality gives him better wages, shorter hours, and a decent coat. As for the product of the machine, the London County Council gives the public longer rides for the same fares while paying its men better. Thus the share of the product which once went to swell private fortunes is distributed, and by so much the Error of Distribution is reduced.
What we have lost through the private ownership of our railways may be gauged by the experience of Belgium. The Belgian State Railways sell tickets which enable one to travel continuously, if desired, for the time specified thereon, within the limits of the country. For instance a five-day ticket will cost 16s. 6d. second class, or 9s. 6d. third class. During the life of one of these tickets it serves as a pass, and it is only necessary to show it upon request. The total length of the railways is nearly 3,000 miles. All that is required to obtain the circular tickets is to present at the office an unmounted photograph of small size, which is attached to the ticket as a means of identification. When the ticket is purchased an extra 4s. is demanded for the safe return of the ticket after its term of usefulness expires. On the morning after the expiration of the ticket it can be delivered at any ticket office along the line, and the 4s. extra will be returned. This system enables one to travel at a minimum expense. One would like to know why, if private trading produces the best results, that travel is cheap in Belgium and dear in England. Why cannot a Briton, favoured as he is with all the alleged virtues of private enterprise in railway management, obtain a circular ticket to travel in the United Kingdom? The benefits of the Belgian railways are conspicuous in the matter of the housing question. Cheap workmen's tickets are issued at rates so low that men are enabled to live at considerable distances from their work. How low the fares are may be gathered from the following figures:
WORKMEN'S TICKETS ON BELGIAN STATE RAILWAYS
For one Journey daily Distance. to and fro. Six Days' Ticket. Miles. _s._ _d._ 3 0 9¼ 6 1 0 12 1 2½ 24 1 7¼ 31 1 9¾ 62 2 6¼
Thus the daily return fare for 31 miles is less than 3¾d.!
The special workmen's tariff has existed in Belgium since 1870, and was at first simply introduced to give Belgian manufacturers the command of plenty of cheap labour. But the Minister builded bigger than he knew, for the cheap fares have caused a profound revolution in the position of Belgian workmen. In 1870, 14,223 tickets were issued; in 1890, 1,188,415; in 1901, 4,412,723! As a result it is estimated that 100,000 industrial workers, out of a total number of 900,000, although employed in the towns, continue to live in the country, own a patch of ground, and, with the higher wages of the town, enjoy the inestimable advantages of country life.
It is only through the nationalization of our railways that we can secure (1) for the travelling public the speed, safety and comfort which science has taught us how to command, (2) for the railway servants safety and a just share of the product of their labour, and (3) for the goods service rapid and economical transport. It is nothing less than national shame that our railway men receive an average wage of only 25s. per week. It is nothing less than national folly that our lives are placed at the mercy of underpaid and overworked signalmen.
A striking illustration of national treatment as compared with the existing private exploitation of our national wealth is to be found in the coal trade. Upon coal is built the wealth and commerce of the United Kingdom. To it we owe our pre-eminence in manufactures and our world-wide shipping and commerce. Without it the United Kingdom would quickly sink to the position of a third-rate power. It might be assumed _a priori_, therefore, that the production and use of coal would be regarded by the British Government as a matter of national concern. As a matter of incredible fact, so little do we regard coal production that we even allow our rare supplies of naval coal to remain in private hands and to be sold freely to foreigners. The tradition of "liberty" could surely no further go.
From first to last private coal production and private coal distribution are wasteful of life, material, and labour. Of our output of 260,000,000 tons of coal less than 10,000,000 tons are mined by machinery! In nine-tenths of our coal-mines coal-cutting machines are unknown! Thus a vast amount of unnecessary hand labour is used in a degrading and dangerous occupation. From a national point of view it is undesirable that a single unnecessary man should descend the mines. Under private exploitation coal-mining employment reads thus (I quote from the Census of Production Report, 1907):
UNITED KINGDOM COAL-MINES, 1907
------------+------------------------+------------------------+------- | MALES. | FEMALES. | Total +--------+-------+-------+--------+-------+-------+ both |Under 16|Over 16|Total. |Under 16|Over 16|Total. | sexes. | years. | years.| | years. | years.| | ------------+--------+-------+-------+--------+-------+-------+------- Below Ground| 43,862 |625,773|669,635| | | |669,635 Above Ground| 15,623 |135,985|151,608| 643 | 4,681 | 5,324 |156,932 ------------+--------+-------+-------+--------+-------+-------+------- Total | 59,485 |761,758|821,243| 643 | 4,681| 5,324 |826,567 ------------+--------+-------+-------+--------+-------+ ------+-------
With coal-mining organized with due regard to national welfare, there would be no boys, fewer men, and more machines in the depths of our mines, while the employment of girls and women even in surface work would be unthinkable. It is true that private capital may not now, as it did in the 'forties, employ young girls and boys under ten in its "dens of darkness." But it deliberately sacrifices hundreds of lives every year by using inefficient plant and by the use of explosives, and still we permit boys to go down the pits. In the holocaust in the Rhondda in 1905 many children perished. Not infrequently three generations of a single family may be found working in the same colliery. Few people out of the industry know that 44,000 boys work in our coal-pits.
With our collieries in our own hands we should not only keep boys out of the mines, but use every possible mechanical appliance to reduce the number of men required to get the coal. We should seek for new appliances to displace labour from such an unhealthy and dangerous calling. To the same end we should seek to prevent the waste of coal in every direction. Shot-firing would of course go, and after undercutting the coal by electrical or hydraulic machinery we should bring it down by hydraulic pressure.
Having secured an economical production, in which we should no longer commit the crime of killing a thousand miners every year, we should distribute the coal cheaply to our local authorities, who would act as distributing agents. The army of coal merchants and their clerks and the thousand and one artful dodges of the retail coal trade would disappear, and the public would secure their coal economically.
What is the alternative to public ownership of common services? The alternative is the rule of the "combine" or "trust," for it cannot be too clearly realized that the organization of production and distribution must proceed. But organization by private hands,—the combination of industrial units into great trusts economizing management, production and distribution,—cannot safely be tolerated. It means the wielding of the chief power in the State by monopolists who will use their power for private ends. The era of private competition is closing. On every hand capital is combining with capital in restraint of competition. Such combinations threaten the public welfare in several directions. They can make it practically impossible for new capital to enter an industry. They can, while economizing labour, keep the profits arising from economy in their own hands, and build up gigantic fortunes while increasing unemployment. They can offer such opposition to trades unionism as to wield untrammelled power over their employees. They can accentuate that Error of Distribution which it should be our chief purpose to modify and remove.
Finally, the organization of services under public control is the only remedy for unemployment, for unemployment is but a phase of poverty. Underpaid or not paid at all, wrongfully employed or unemployed, overworked or underworked, these conditions are the inevitable accompaniment of a state of society in which individuals make bargains with individuals with a view not to service but to profit. To the individual the unemployed workman is a pitiable object—that is all. To the nation the unemployed workman is something more than pitiable; he is a dead loss. Unless physically or mentally unfit, and therefore entitled to gratuitous service, he should be employed in the scheme of the nation's work. The community needs the service of all its members; there is none superfluous, none. While yet one uncomfortable house rears its head, while yet one person goes ill-clad, while yet one rod of area remains unused, there is work to do, but to utilize the work of every man economically and wisely in the performance of necessary work is only possible through organization. We may delude ourselves how we will with palliatives; we shall find no remedy for unemployment short of the control by the community of the _essential_ work of the community. While we leave the direction of labour in the hands of a few rich men there will ever be a surplus of labour left for our hapless "government" to deal with wastefully. While the community resigns its right to decide its own destinies by submitting to the rule of the rich, there will remain the problem of poverty of which unemployment is not the worst part.
Let it be clearly understood that, as things are, there is only one real form of government that matters, and that is the rule of the employed by the employer. The real arbiters of our destinies are not the King's Ministers, but the few men who have power of life and death over their fellows through the giving or withholding of employment. The majesty of the law decides what a man shall _not_ do. The majesty of the employer decides what a man shall do. The time has come when we must govern ourselves, not negatively by way of restraint, but positively by way of action. It is time that we determined where our roads should run and in what fashion and in what employments we should engage ourselves. It is time that we took stock of the lives and the homes of our people and resolved to abolish their poverty by organizing their labour.
[Footnote 54: It it a melancholy fact that those employed in the service of waste are often better paid than those engaged in useful production. In a recent action brought by a cloak-room attendant at a fashionable restaurant it came to light that in two cloak-rooms each of four attendants drew as his share of the "tips" over £3 per week.]
[Footnote 55: I hope that no manual workman who reads these lines will deduce from what I have written that, as things are now, his labour is necessarily more useful than that of the clerk, the lawyer or the shopkeeper. For every unnecessary distributing agent referred to above several producing agents could be named whose work is useless or harmful in the national economy. This I endeavoured to make clear in Chapter 11.]
[Footnote 56: "Condition of Labour," page 90.]
[Footnote 57: "Infantile Mortality," by Dr G. F. McCleary.]
[Footnote 58: "The Hygienics of Milk," "Edinburgh Medical Journal," 1898.]
[Footnote 59: In a speech delivered to the students of the Crystal Palace Company's School of Practical Engineering in 1905 the following advice was given. I quote from the newspaper report: "Students should cultivate the art of making friends through life. Wherever they were they should try to make good friends, for such friends were always useful when one wanted to obtain employment. Half the battle was won in applying for a situation if the applicant had a friend on the board."
Excellent! "Be artful, sweet youth, and let who will be clever."]