The Theory of Business Enterprise/Chapter 9
So far as regards the non-mechanical factors of culture, such
as religion, politics, and even business enterprise, the present
is in a very large degree comparable with the scheme of things
that prevailed on the Continent of Europe in the seventeenth
century. And so far as the working of these cultural factors is
undisturbed by forces that were not present in the older days,
they should logically again work out in such a situation as came
to prevail in Central Europe in the course of the eighteenth
century. The modern situation, of course, is drawn on a larger
scale; but that is due to the intrusion of a new technology, a
different "state of the industrial arts," and not to a
substantially altered range of religious, political, or business
conceptions. The pitch of squalor that characterized vulgar life
in the busier Continental countries at the close of the great era
of politics could probably not be reached again, but that again,
is due, not to these spiritual factors of cultural growth, but to
the altered state of the industrial arts. The factor in the
modern situation that is alien to the ancient regime is the
machine technology, with its many and wide ramifications.

Business conceptions and business methods were present in
vigorous growth in Central Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, as they had been in South Europe from a
slightly earlier date; although the large sweep of business
enterprise is not had until a later date, being conditioned by
the machine technology. Business methods and the apparatus of
business traffic develop very promptly whenever and wherever the
situation calls for them; such is the teaching of economic
history.(1*) There is nothing recondite about them, little that
has to be acquired by a protracted, cumulative experience running
over many generations, such as is involved in technological
development. This business development in earlier modern times,
together with the accumulations of funded wealth that came of
this business enterprise, ran their course to a finish in
Continental Europe, leaving no basis for a new start. The new
start from which the current situation takes its rise, in Europe
and elsewhere, was given to the Continental peoples by the
English, ready-made, in the so-called Industrial Revolution. The
natural-rights metaphysics, to which the eventual breakdown of
the old Continental system owed its specific character, came also
from the English.(2*)

In point of blood and cultural descent the population of
Great Britain did not differ materially from their neighbors
across the Channel or across the North Sea.(3*) But from the
beginning of the modern cultural era Great Britain stood outside
of the general European situation, by force of its physical
isolation. So that during the modern era, down to the close of
the eighteenth century, the British community was in the position
of an interested third party rather than a participant in the
political concert of Europe. The era of "statemaking," so called,
is an era in which England interferes, but is, on the whole, not
greatly interfered with, so far as her own home affairs are
concerned. England, and presently Great Britain, being reduced to
law and order under one crown and living in a condition of
isolation and (relatively) of internal peace, the cultural growth
of that country took a relatively peaceable direction. The
dominant note of everyday life was industry and trade, not
dynastic politics and war. This national experience gave as its
outcome constitutional government and the modern industrial
technology, together with the animus and the point of view of the
modern materialistic science. The point of departure for the more
recent, current situation, therefore, is a twofold one: (1) the
British peaceable variant of the Western culture has contributed
constitutional methods and natural rights, together with the
machine technology brought in under the head of the "industrial
revolution"; and (2) there are the patriotic ideals and
animosities left as a residue of the warlike political traffic in
Continental Europe.

Since the new departure, made on the basis of natural rights
and modern industrial and scientific methods, the complex of
nations and of international relations is a single, not a twofold
one. The stage over which affairs, political, industrial and
cultural, run their course is no longer Continental or British,
but cosmopolitan, comprising all civilized communities and all
civilized interests. So that there is not now, as there was in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an isolation hospital
for technology, science, and civil rights, set apart from the
general current of cultural development. Whatever the forces at
work in the modern situation may eventually bring to pass,
therefore, the outcome must touch all communities in the same way
and in approximately the same degree. If the outcome is dynastic
politics and armament again played to a finish in popular
squalor, aristocratic virtues, and universal bankruptcy, there
will be no peaceable community of matter-of-fact mechanics and
shopkeepers left in reserve from which to make a new cultural and
industrial start. The modern technology has, in a manner, cut
away the ground out of which it first grew and from which it
gathered force to reshape the course of history. It has made it
impossible for any community to stand peaceably outside of the
great complex of nations.

But within the comprehensive situation of to-day there is
this new factor, the machine process. In an earlier chapter (II)
the technological character of this machine process has been set
forth at some length. The machine process pervades the modern
life and dominates it in a mechanical sense. Its dominance is
seen in the enforcement of precise mechanical measurements and
adjustment and the reduction of all manner of things, purposes
and acts, necessities, conveniences, and amenities of life, to
standard units. The bearing of this sweeping mechanical
standardization upon business traffic is a large part of the
subject-matter of the foregoing chapters. The point of immediate
interest here is the further bearing of the machine process upon
the growth of culture, - the disciplinary effect which this
movement for standardization and mechanical equivalence has upon
the human material.

This discipline falls more immediately on the workmen engaged
in the mechanical industries, and only less immediately on the
rest of the community which lives in contact with this sweeping
machine process. Wherever the machine process extends, it sets
the pace for the workmen, great and small. The pace is set, not
wholly by the particular processes in the details of which the
given workman is immediately engaged, but in some degree by the
more comprehensive process at large into which the given detail
process fits. It is no longer simply that the individual workman
makes use of one or more mechanical contrivances for effecting
certain results. Such used to be his office in the earlier phases
of the use of machines, and the work which he now has in hand
still has much of that character. But such a characterization of
the workman's part in industry misses the peculiarly modern
feature of the case. He now does this work as a factor involved
in a mechanical process whose movement controls his motions. It
remains true, of course, as it always has been true, that he is
the intelligent agent concerned in the process, while the
machine, furnace, roadway, or retort are inanimate structures
devised by man and subject to the workman's supervision. But the
process comprises him and his intelligent motions, and it is by
virtue of his necessarily taking an intelligent part in what is
going forward that the mechanical process has its chief effect
upon him. The process standardizes his supervision and guidance
of the machine. Mechanically speaking, the machine is not his to
do with it as his fancy may suggest. His place is to take thought
of the machine and its work in terms given him by the process
that is going forward. His thinking in the premises is reduced to
standard units of gauge and grade. If he fails of the precise
measure, by more or less, the exigencies of the process check the
aberration and drive home the absolute need of conformity.

There results a standardization of the workman's intellectual
life in terms of mechanical process, which is more unmitigated
and precise the more comprehensive and consummate the industrial
process in which he plays a part. This must not be taken to mean
that such work need lower the degree of intelligence of the
workman. No doubt the contrary is nearer the truth. He is a more
efficient workman the more intelligent he is, and the discipline
of the machine process ordinarily increases his efficiency even
for work in a different line from that by which the discipline is
given. But the intelligence required and inculcated in the
machine industry is of a peculiar character. The machine process
is a severe and insistent disciplinarian in point of
intelligence. It requires close and unremitting thought, but it
is thought which runs in standard terms of quantitative
precision. Broadly, other intelligence on the part of the workman
is useless; or it is even worse than useless, for a habit of
thinking in other than quantitative terms blurs the workman's
quantitative apprehension of the facts with which he has to
do.(4*)

In so far as he is a rightly gifted and fully disciplined
workman, the final term of his habitual thinking is mechanical
efficiency, understanding "mechanical" in the sense in which it
is used above. But mechanical efficiency is a matter of precisely
adjusted cause and effect. What the discipline of the machine
industry inculcates, therefore, in the habits of life and of
thought of the workman, is regularity of sequence and mechanical
precision; and the intellectual outcome is an habitual resort to
terms of measurable cause and effect, together with a relative
neglect and disparagement of such exercise of the intellectual
faculties as does not run on these lines.

Of course, in no case and with no class does the discipline
of the machine process mould the habits of life and of thought
fully into its own image. There is present in the human nature of
all classes too large a residue of the propensities and aptitudes
carried over from the past and working to a different result. The
machine's regime has been of too short duration, strict as its
discipline may be, and the body of inherited traits and
traditions is too comprehensive and consistent to admit of
anything more than a remote approach to such a consummation.

The machine process compels a more or less unremitting
attention to phenomena of an impersonal character and to
sequences and correlations not dependent for their force upon
human predilection nor created by habit and custom. The machine
throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It compels the
adaptation of the workman to his work, rather than the adaptation
of the work to the workman. The machine technology rests on a
knowledge of impersonal, material cause and effect, not on the
dexterity, diligence, or personal force of the workman, still
less on the habits and propensities of the workman's superiors.
Within the range of this machine-guided work, and within the
range of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine
process, the course of things is given mechanically,
impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the
handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect. It inculcates
thinking in terms of opaque, impersonal cause and effect, to the
neglect of those norms of validity that rest on usage and on the
conventional standards handed down by usage. Usage counts for
little in shaping the processes of work of this kind or in
shaping the modes of thought induced by work of this kind.

The machine process gives no insight into questions of good
and evil, merit and demerit, except in point of material
causation, nor into the foundations or the constraining force of
law and order, except such mechanically enforced law and order as
may be stated in terms of pressure, temperature, velocity,
tensile strength, etc.(5*) The machine technology takes no
cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence; it
knows neither manners nor breeding and can make no use of any of
the attributes of worth. Its scheme of knowledge and of inference
is based on the laws of material causation, not on those of
immemorial custom, authenticity, or authoritative enactment. Its
metaphysical basis is the law of cause and effect, which in the
thinking of its adepts has displaced even the law of sufficient
reason.(6*)

The range of conventional truths, or of institutional
legacies, which it traverses is very comprehensive, being,
indeed, all-inclusive. It is but little more in accord with the
newer, eighteenth century conventional truths of natural rights,
natural liberty, natural law, or natural religion, than with the
older norms of the true, the beautiful, and the good which these
displaced. Anthropomorphism, under whatever disguise, is of no
use and of no force here.

The discipline exercised by the mechanical occupations, in so
far as it is in question here, is a discipline of the habits of
thought. It is, therefore, as processes of thought, methods of
apperception, and sequences of reasoning, that these occupations
are of interest for the present purpose; it is as such that they
have whatever cultural value belongs to them. They have such a
value, therefore, somewhat in proportion as they tax the mental
faculties of those employed; and the largest effects are to be
looked for among those industrial classes who are required to
comprehend and guide the processes, rather than among those who
serve merely as mechanical auxiliaries of the machine process.
Not that the latter are exempt from the machine's discipline, but
it falls upon them blindly and enforces an uncritical acceptance
of opaque results, rather than a theoretical insight into the
causal sequences which make up the machine process. The higher
degree of training in such matter-of-fact habits of thought is
accordingly to be looked for among the higher ranks of skied
mechanics, and perhaps still more decisively among those who
stand in an engineering or supervisory relation to the processes.
It counts more forcibly and farthest among those who are required
to exercise what may be called a mechanical discretion in the
guidance of the industrial processes, who, as one might say, are
required to administer the laws of causal sequence that run
through material phenomena, who therefore must learn to think in
the terms in which the machine processes work.(7*) The
metaphysical ground, the assumptions, on which such thinking
proceeds must be such as will hold good for the sequence of
material phenomena; that is to say, it is the metaphysical
assumptions of modern material science, - the law of cause and
effect, cumulative causation, conservation of energy, persistence
of quantity, or whatever phrase be chosen to cover the concept.
The men occupied with the modern material sciences are,
accordingly, for the purpose in hand, in somewhat the same case
as the higher ranks of those employed in mechanical industry.(8*)

Leaving aside the archaic vocations of war, politics,
fashion, and religion, the employments in which men are engaged
may be distinguished as pecuniary or business employments on the
one hand, and industrial or mechanical employments on the other
hand.(9*) In earlier times, and indeed until an uncertain point
in the nineteenth century, such a distinction between employments
would not to any great extent have coincided with a difference
between occupations. But gradually, as time has passed and
production for a market has come to be the rule in industry,
there has Supervened a differentiation of occupations, or a
division of labor, whereby one class of men have taken over the
work of purchase and sale and of husbanding a store of
accumulated values. Concomitantly, of course, the rest, who may,
for lack of means or of pecuniary aptitude, have been less well
fitted for pecuniary pursuits, have been relieved of the cares of
business and have with increasing specialization given their
attention to the mechanical processes involved in this production
for a market. In this way the distinction between pecuniary and
industrial activities or employments has come to coincide more
and more nearly with a difference between occupations. Not that
the specialization has even yet gone so far as to exempt any
class from all pecuniary care;(10*) for even those whose daily
occupation is mechanical work still habitually bargain with their
employers for their wages and with others for their supplies. So
that none of the active classes in modern life is fully exempt
from pecuniary work.

But the need of attention to pecuniary matters is less and
less exacting, even in the matter of wages and supplies. The
scale of wages, for instance, is, for the body of workmen, and
also for what may be called the engineering force, becoming more
and more a matter of routine, thereby lessening at least the
constancy with which occasions for detail bargaining in this
respect recur. So also as regards the purchase of consumable
goods. In the cities and industrial towns, particularly, the
supplying of the means of subsistence has, in great part, become
a matter of routine. Retail prices are in an increasing degree
fixed by the seller, and in great measure fixed in an impersonal
way. This occurs in a particularly evident and instructive way in
the practice of the department stores, where the seller fixes the
price, and comes in contact with the buyer only through the
intervention of a salesman who has no discretion as to the terms
of sale. The change that has taken place and that is still going
on in this respect is sufficiently striking on comparison with
the past in any industrial community, or with the present in any
of those communities which we are in the habit of calling
"industrially backward."

Conversely, as regards the men in the pecuniary occupations,
the business men. Their exemption from taking thought of
mechanical facts and processes is likewise only relative. Even
those business men whose business is in a peculiar degree remote
from the handling of tools or goods, and from the oversight of
mechanical processes, as, for example, bankers, lawyers, brokers,
and the like, have still, at the best, to take some cognizance of
the mechanical apparatus of everyday life; they are at least
compelled to take some thought of what may be called the
mechanics of consumption. Whereas those business men whose
business is more immediately concerned with industry commonly
have some knowledge and take some thought of the processes of
industry; to some appreciable extent they habitually think in
mechanical terms. Their cogitations may habitually run to
pecuniary conclusions, and the test to which the force and
validity of their reasoning is brought may habitually be the
pecuniary outcome; the beginning and end of their more serious
thinking is of a pecuniary kind, but it always takes in some
general features of the mechanical process along the way. Their
exemption from mechanical thinking, from thinking in terms of
cause and effect, is, therefore, materially qualified.

But after all qualifications have been made, the fact still
is apparent that the everyday life of those classes which are
engaged in business differs materially in the respect cited from
the life of the classes engaged in industry proper. There is an
appreciable and widening difference between the habits of life of
the two classes; and this carries with it a widening difference
in the discipline to which the two classes are subjected. It
induces a difference in the habits of thought and the habitual
grounds and methods of reasoning resorted to by each class. There
results a difference in the point of view, in the facts dwelt
upon, in the methods of argument, in the grounds of validity
appealed to; and this difference gains in magnitude and
consistency as the differentiation of occupations goes on. So
that the two classes come to have an increasing difficulty in
understanding one another and appreciating one another' s
convictions, ideals, capacities, and shortcomings.

The ultimate ground of validity for the thinking of the
business classes is the natural-rights ground of property, - a
conventional, anthropomorphic fact having an institutional
validity, rather than a matter-of-fact validity such as can be
formulated in terms of material cause and effect; while the
classes engaged in the machine industry are habitually occupied
with matters of causal sequence, which do not lend themselves to
statement in anthropomorphic terms of natural rights and which
afford no guidance in questions of institutional right and wrong,
or of conventional reason and consequence. Arguments which
proceed on material cause and effect cannot be met with arguments
from conventional precedent or dialectically sufficient reason,
and conversely.

The thinking required by the pecuniary occupations proceeds
on grounds of conventionality, whereas that involved in the
industrial occupations runs, in the main, on grounds of
mechanical sequence or causation, to the neglect of
conventionality. The institution (habit of thought) of ownership
or property is a conventional fact; and the logic of pecuniary
thinking- that is to say, of thinking on matters of ownership -
is a working out of the implications of this postulate, this
concept of ownership or property. The characteristic habits of
thought given by such work are habits of recourse to conventional
grounds of finality or validity, to anthropomorphism, to
explanations of phenomena in terms of human relation, discretion,
authenticity, and choice. The final ground of certainty in
inquiries on this natural-rights plane is always a ground of
authenticity, of precedent, or accepted decision. The argument is
an argument de jure, not de facto, and the training given lends
facility and certainty in the pursuit of de jure distinctions and
generalizations, rather than in the pursuit or the assimilation
of a de facto knowledge of impersonal phenomena. The end of such
reasoning is the interpretation of new facts in terms of
accredited precedents, rather than a revision of the knowledge
drawn from past experience in the matter-of-fact light of new
phenomena. The endeavor is to make facts conform to law, not to
make the law or general rule conform to facts. The bent so given
favors the acceptance of the general, abstract, custom-made rule
as something real with a reality superior to the reality of
impersonal, non-conventional facts. Such training gives reach and
subtlety in metaphysical argument and in what is known as the
"practical" management of affairs; it gives executive or
administrative efficiency, so-called, as distinguished from
mechanical work. "Practical" efficiency means the ability to turn
facts to account for the purposes of the accepted conventions, to
give a large effect to the situation in terms of the pecuniary
conventions in force.(11*)

The spiritual attitude given by this training in reasoning de
jure, from pecuniary premises to pecuniary conclusions, is
necessarily conservative. This species of reasoning assumes the
validity of the conventionally established postulates, and is
consequently unable to take a sceptical attitude toward these
postulates or toward the institutions in which these postulates
are embodied. It may lead to scepticism touching other, older,
institutions that are at variance with its own (natural-rights)
postulates, but its scepticism cannot touch the natural-rights
ground on which it rests its own case. In the same manner, of
course, the thinking which runs in material causal sequence
cannot take a sceptical attitude toward its fundamental
postulate, the law of cause and effect; but since reasoning on
this materialistic basis does not visibly go to uphold the
received institutions, the attitude given by the discipline of
the machine technology cannot, for the present, be called a
conservative attitude.

The business classes are conservative, on the whole, but such
a conservative bent is, of course, not peculiar to them. These
occupations are not the only ones whose reasoning prevailingly
moves on a conventional plane. Indeed, the intellectual activity
of other classes, such as soldiers, politicians, the clergy, and
men of fashion, moves on a plane of still older conventions; so
that if the training given by business employments is to be
characterized as conservative, that given by these other, more
archaic employments should be called reactionary.(12*) Extreme
conventionalization means extreme conservatism. Conservatism
means the maintenance of conventions already in force. On this
head, therefore, the discipline of modern business life may be
said simply to retain something of the complexion which marks the
life of the higher barbarian culture, at the same time that it
has not retained the disciplinary force of the barbarian culture
in so high a state of preservation as some of the other
occupations just named.

The discipline of the modern industrial employments is
relatively free from the bias of conventionality, but the
difference between the mechanical and the business occupations in
this respect is a difference of degree. It is not simply that
conventional standards of certainty fall into abeyance for lack
of exercise, among the industrial classes. The positive
discipline exercised by their work in good part runs counter to
the habit of thinking in conventional, anthropomorphic terms,
whether the conventionality is that of natural rights or any
other. And in respect of this positive training away from
conventional norms, there is a large divergence between the
several lines of industrial employment. In proportion as a given
line of employment has more of the character of a machine process
and less of the character of handicraft, the matter-of-fact
training which it gives is more pronounced. In a sense more
intimate than the inventors of the phrase seem to have
appreciated, the machine has become the master of the man who
works with it and an arbiter in the cultural fortunes of the
community into whose life it has entered.

The intellectual and spiritual training of the machine in
modern life, therefore, is very far-reaching. It leaves but a
small proportion of the community untouched; but while its
constraint is ramified throughout the body of the population, and
constrains virtually all classes at some points in their daily
life, it falls with the most direct, intimate, and unmitigated
impact upon the skilled mechanical classes, for these have no
respite from its mastery, whether they are at work or at play.
The ubiquitous presence of the machine, with its spiritual
concomitant - workday ideals and scepticism of what is only
conventionally valid is the unequivocal mark of the Western
culture of to-day as contrasted with the culture of other times
and places. It pervades all classes and strata in a varying
degree, but on an average in a greater degree than at any time in
the past, and most potently in the advanced industrial
communities and in the classes immediately in contact with the
mechanical occupations.(13*) As the comprehensive mechanical
organization of the material side of life has gone on, a
heightening of this cultural effect throughout the community has
also supervened, and with a farther and faster movement in the
same direction a farther accentuation of this "modern" complexion
of culture is fairly to be looked for, unless some remedy be
found. And as the concomitant differentiation and specialization
of occupations goes on, a still more unmitigated discipline falls
upon ever widening classes of the population, resulting in an
ever weakening sense of conviction, allegiance, or piety toward
the received institutions.

It is a matter of common notoriety that the modern industrial
populations are improvident in a high degree and are apparently
incapable of taking care of the pecuniary details of their own
life. This applies, not only to factory hands, but also to the
general class of highly skilled mechanics, inventors,
technological experts. The rule does not hold in any hard and
fast way, but it holds with such generality as may fairly be
looked for. The present factory population may be compared in
this respect with the class of handicraftsmen whom they have
displaced, as also with the farming population of the present
time, especially the class of small proprietary farmers. The
failure of the modern industrial classes on this head is not due
to scantier opportunities for saving, whether they are compared
with the earlier handicraftsmen or with the modern farmer or
peasant; nor is it due to a lack of general intelligence, for a
comparison in point of intelligence falls out in favor of the
modern industrial workmen. This improvidence is commonly
discussed in terms of deprecation, and there is much preaching of
thrift and steady habits. But the preaching has no appreciable
effect. The trouble seems to be of the nature of habit rather
than of reasoned conviction. Other causes may partially explain
this improvidence, but the inquiry is at least pertinent how far
the absence of property and thrift among them may be traceable to
the relative absence of pecuniary training and to the presence of
a discipline which is at variance with habits of thrift.

Mere exemption from pecuniary training is not competent alone
to explain the patent thriftlessness of modern workmen; the more
so since this exemption is but partial and relative. Also, the
thriftless classes commonly have an envious appreciation of
pecuniary advantages. It is rather the composite effect of
exemption from pecuniary training and certain positive
requirements of modern life. Among these positive requirements is
what has been called the canon of conspicuous waste. Under modern
conditions a free expenditure in consumable goods is a condition
requisite to good repute.(14*) This conduces to immediate
consumption rather than to saving. What is perhaps still more
decisive against thrift on the part of workmen is the fact that
the modern large organization of industry requires a high degree
of mobility on the part of employees. It requires, in fact, that
the labor force and the labor units be mobile, interchangeable,
distributable, after the same impersonal fashion as the
mechanical contrivances engaged are movable and distributable.
The working population is required to be standardized, movable,
and interchangeable in much the same impersonal manner as the raw
or halfwrought materials of industry. From which it follows that
the modern workman cannot advantageously own a home. By force of
this latter feature of the case he is discouraged from investing
his savings in real property, or, indeed, in any of the
impediments of living. And the savings-bank account, it may be
added, offers no adequate substitute, as an incentive to thrift,
in the place of such property as a dwelling-place, which is
tangibly and usefully under the owner's hand and persistently
requires maintenance and improvement.

The conditions of life imposed upon the working population by
the machine industry discourage thrift. But after allowance has
been made for this almost physical restraint upon the aquisition
of property by the working classes, something is apparently left
over, to be ascribed to the moral effect of the machine
technology. The industrial classes appear to be losing the
instinct of individual ownership. The acquisition of property is
ceasing to appeal to them as a natural, self-evident source of
comfort and strength. The natural right of property no longer
means so much to them as it once did.

A like weakening of the natural-rights animus is visible at
another point in the current frame of mind of these classes. The
growth of trade-unionism and of what is called the trade-union
spirit is a concomitant of industry organized after the manner of
a machine process. Historically this growth begins, virtually,
with the industrial revolution, coming in sporadically, loosely,
tentatively, with no precise assignable date, very much as the
revolution does. England is the land of its genesis, its "area of
characterization," and the place where it has reached its fullest
degree of specification and its largest force; just as England is
the country in which the modern machine industry took its rise
and in which it has had the longest and most consistent life and
growth. In this matter other countries are followers of the
British lead and apparently borrowers of British precedents and
working concepts. Still, the history of the trade-union movement
in other countries seems to say that the working classes
elsewhere have not advisedly borrowed ideals and methods of
organization from their British congeners so much as they have
been pushed into the same general attitude and line of conduct by
the same general line of exigencies and experiences.
Particularly, experience seems to say that it is not feasible to
introduce the trade-union spirit or the trade-union rules into
any community until the machine industry has had time extensively
to standardize the scheme of work and of life for the working
classes on mechanical lines. Workmen do not take to full-blown
trade-union ideals abruptly on the introduction of those modern
business methods which make trade-union action advisable for the
working class. A certain interval elapses between the time when
business conditions first make trade-union action feasible, as a
business proposition, and the time when the body of workmen are
ready to act in the spirit of trade-unionism and along the lines
which the union animus presently accepts as normal for men in the
mechanically organized industries. An interval of discipline in
the ways of the mechanically standardized industry, more or less
protracted and severe, seems necessary to bring such a proportion
of the workmen into line as will give a consensus of sentiment
and opinion favorable to trade-union action.

The pervading characteristic of the trade-union animus is the
denial of the received natural-rights dogmas wherever the
mechanical standardization of modern industry traverses the
working of these received natural rights. Recent court decisions
in America, as well as decisions in analogous cases in England at
that earlier period when the British development was at about the
same stage of maturity as the current American situation, testify
unequivocally that the common run of trade-union action is at
variance with the natural-rights foundation of the common law.
Trade-unionism denies individual freedom of contract to the
workman, as well as free discretion to the employer to carry on
his business as may suit his own ends. Many pious phrases have
been invented to disguise this iconoclastic trend of trade-union
aims and endeavors; but the courts, standing on a secure and
familiar natural-rights footing, have commonly made short work of
the shifty sophistications which trade-union advocates have
offered for their consideration. They have struck at the root of
the matter in declaring trade-union regulations inimical to the
natural rights of workman and employer alike, in that they hamper
individual liberty and act in restraint of trade. The
regulations, therefore, violate that system of law and order
which rests on natural rights, although they may be enforced by
that de facto law and order which is embodied in the mechanical
standardization of the industrial processes.

Trade-unionism is an outgrowth of relatively late industrial
conditions and has come on gradually as an adaptation of old
methods and working arrangements carried over from the days of
handicraft and petty trade. It is a movement to adapt, construe,
recast, earlier working arrangements with as little lesion to
received preconceptions as the new exigencies and the habits of
thought bred by them will permit. It is, on its face, an endeavor
of compromise between received notions of what "naturally" ought
to be in matters of industrial business, on the one hand, and
what the new exigencies of industry demand and what the new
animus of the workman will tolerate, on the other hand.
Trade-unionism is therefore to be taken as a somewhat mitigated
expression of what the mechanical standardization of industry
inculcates. Hitherto the movement has shown a fairly
uninterrupted growth, not only in the numbers of its membership,
but in the range and scope of its aims as well; and hitherto it
has reached no halting-place in its tentative, shifty, but ever
widening crusade of iconoclasm against the received body of
natural rights. The latest, maturest expressions of
trade-unionism are, on the whole, the most extreme, in so far as
they are directed against the natural rights of property and
pecuniary contract.

The nature of the compromise offered by trade-unionism is
shown by a schedule of its demands: collective bargaining for
wages and employment; arbitration of differences between owners
and workmen; standard rates of wages; normal working day, with
penalized regulation of hours for men, women, and children;
penalized regulation of sanitary and safety appliances; mutual
insurance of workmen, to cover accident, disability, and
unemployment. In all of this the aim of unionism seldom goes the
length of overtly disputing the merits of any given article of
natural-rights dogma. It only endeavors to cut into these
articles, in point of fact, at points where the dogmas patently
traverse the conditions of life imposed on the workmen by the
modern industrial system or where they traverse the consensus of
sentiment that is coming to prevail among these workmen.

When unionism takes an attitude of overt hostility to the
natural-rights institutions of property and free contract, it
ceases to be unionism simply and passes over into something else,
which may be called socialism for want of a better term. Such an
extreme iconoclastic position, which would overtly assert the
mechanical standardization of industry as against the common-law
standardization of business, seems to be the logical outcome to
which the trade-union animus tends, and to which some approach
has latterly been made by more than one trade-unionist body, but
which is, on the whole, yet in the future, if, indeed, it is to
be reached at all. On the whole, the later expressions go farther
in this direction than the earlier; and the animus of the
leaders, as well as of the more wide-awake body of unionist
workmen, appears to go farther than their official utterances.

A detail of trade-union history may be cited in illustration
of their attitude toward the natural-rights principles that
underlie modern business relations. As is well known,
trade-unions have somewhat consistently avoided pecuniary
responsibility for the actions of their members or officials.
They avoid incorporation. Practically an employer has had no
recourse in case he suffers from a failure on the part of his
union workmen to live up to the terms of an agreement made with
the union. In English practice this exemption from pecuniary
responsibility has acquired much of the force of law, and indeed
was supposed to have gained the countenance of statutory
enactment, until, within the past few months, the so-called Taff
Vale decision of the House of Lords reversed the views which had
come to prevail on this head. This decision, by the most
conservative tribunal of the British nation, is too recent to
permit its consequences for trade-unionism to be appreciated. But
it seems fair to expect that the question which the decision
brings home to the unions will be, How is this court-made
pecuniary responsibility to be evaded? not, How is it to be lived
up to? Patently,(15*) the decision is unexceptionable under
common law rules; but, also patently,(16*) it broadly traverses
trade-union practice and is wholly alien to the attitude of the
trade-unionists.(17*)

The animus shown by the trade-unionists in this shirking of
pecuniary responsibility is characteristic of their attitude
toward common law rules. The unions and their methods of work are
essentially extra-legal. It is only reluctantly, as defendants if
at all, that unions are accustomed to appear in court. When they
make a move for statutory enactment, as for the enforcement of a
normal day or of sanitary and safeguarding regulations, it is
prevailingly to criminal law that they turn.

To all this it might, of course, be said that the workmen who
make up the trade-union element take the course indicated simply
because their selfish interest urges them to this course; that
their common necessities and common weakness constrains them to
stand together and to act collectively in dealing with their
employers; while the fact that their demands have no standing in
court constrains them to seek their ends by extra-legal means of
coercion. But this objection is little else than another way of
saying that the exigencies forced upon the workmen by the
mechanically standardized industrial system are extra-legal
exigencies - exigencies which do not run in business terms and
therefore are not amenable to the natural-rights principles of
property and contract that underlie business relations; that they
can therefore not be met on common law ground; and that they
therefore compel the workmen to see them from another point of
view and seek to dispose of them by an appeal to other principles
than those afforded by the common law standpoint. That is to say,
in other words, these exigencies which compel the trade-unionists
to take thought of their case in other terms than those afforded
by existing legal institutions are the means whereby the
discipline of the machine industry is enforced and made effective
for recasting the habits of thought of the workmen. The harsh
discipline of these exigencies of livelihood drives home the new
point of view and holds the workmen consistently to it. But that
is not all that the mechanical standardization of industry does
in the case; it also furnishes the new terms in which the revised
scheme of economic life takes form. The revision of the scheme
aimed at by trade-union action runs, not in terms of natural
liberty, individual property rights, individual discretion, but
in terms of standardized livelihood and mechanical necessity, -
it is formulated, not in terms of business expediency, but in
terms of industrial, technological standard units and standard
relations.

The above presentation of the case of trade-unionism is of
course somewhat schematic, as such a meagre, incidental
discussion necessarily must be. It takes account only of those
features of trade-unionism which characteristically mark it off
from that business scheme of things with which it Comes in
conflict. There are, of course, many survivals, pecuniary and
others, in the current body of trade-union demands, and much of
the trade-union argument is carried on in business terms. The
crudities and iniquities of the trade-union campaign are
sufficiently many and notorious to require no rehearsal here.
These crudities and iniquities commonly bulk large in the eyes of
critics who pass an opinion on trade-unionism from the
natural-rights point of view; and, indeed, they may deserve all
the disparaging attention that is given them. Trade-unionism does
not fit into the natural-rights scheme of right and honest
living; but therein, in great part, lies its cultural
significance. It is of the essence of the case that the new aims,
ideals, and expedients do not fit into the received institutional
structure; and that the classes who move in trade-unions are,
however crudely and blindly, endeavoring, under the compulsion of
the machine process, to construct an institutional scheme on the
lines imposed by the new exigencies given by the machine process.

The point primarily had in view in entering on this
characterization of trade-unionism was that under the discipline
of the mechanically standardized industry certain natural rights,
particularly, those of property and free contract, are in a
degree falling into abeyance among those classes who are most
immediately subjected to this discipline. It may be added that
other classes also, to an uncertain extent, sympathize with the
trade-unionists and are affected with a similar (mild and
equivocal) distrust of the principles of natural liberty. When
distrust of business principles rises to such a pitch as to
become intolerant of all pecuniary institutions, and leads to a
demand for the abrogation of property rights rather than a
limitation of them, it is spoken of as "socialism" or
"anarchism." This socialistic disaffection is widespread among
the advanced industrial peoples. No other cultural phenomenon is
so threatening to the received economic and political structure;
none is so unprecedented or so perplexing for practical men of
affairs to deal with. The immediate point of danger in the
socialistic disaffection is a growing disloyalty to the
natural-rights institution of property, but this is backed by a
similar failure of regard for other articles of the institutional
furniture handed down from the past. The classes affected with
socialistic vagaries protest against the existing economic
organization, but they are not necessarily averse to a somewhat
rigorous economic organization on new lines of their own
choosing. They demand an Organization on industrial as contrasted
with business lines. Their sense of economic solidarity does not
seem to be defective, indeed it seems to many of their critics to
be unnecessarily pronounced; but it runs on lines of industrial
coherence and mechanical constraint, not on lines given by
pecuniary conjunctures and conventional principles of economic
right and wrong.

There is little agreement among socialists as to a programme
for the future. Their constructive proposals are ill-defined and
inconsistent and almost entirely negative. The negative character
of the socialistic propaganda has been made a point of
disparagement by its critics, perhaps justly. But their
predilection for shifty iconoclasm, as well as the vagueness and
inconsistency of their constructive proposals, are in the present
connection to be taken as evidence that the attitude of the
socialists cannot be expressed in positive terms given by the
institutions at present in force. It may also be evidence of the
untenability of the socialistic ideals; but the merits of the
socialist contentions do not concern the present inquiry. The
question here is as to the nature and causes of the socialist
disaffection; it does not concern the profounder and more
delicate point, as to the validity of the socialist contentions.
Current socialism is an animus of dissent from received
traditions. The degree and the direction of this dissent varies
greatly, but it is, within the socialist scheme of thought,
agreed that the institutional forms of the past are unfit for the
work of the future.(18*)

The socialistic disaffection has been set down to envy, class
hatred, discontent with their own lot by comparison with that of
others, and to a mistaken view of their own interests. This
criticism may be well enough as far as it goes, but it does not
touch socialism in those respects in which it differs from other
movements into which this range of motives enters; that is to
say, it touches, not the specific traits of socialism, but the
common features of popular discontent. History shows many such
movements of discontent, pushed on by real or fancied privation
and iniquity; and past experience recorded in history should lead
us to expect that, under the guidance of such motives and such
reasoning as is currently imputed to the socialists by their
conservative critics, the malcontents would demand a
redistribution of property, a reorganization of ownership on such
new lines as would favor the discontented classes. But such is
not the trend of socialistic thinking. It looks to the
disappearance of property rights rather than their
redistribution. The entire range of doctrines covered by the
theory of distribution in the received economics is essentially
(and characteristically) neglected by the modern socialist
speculations.(19*)

The perplexity of those who protest against a supposedly
imminent socialistic subversion of property rights is of a
twofold kind: (1) The absence of proprietary rights is
incomprehensible, and a living together in society without
defined ownership of the means of living is held to be
impracticable; ownership of goods, in the apprehension of the
conservative critics, is involved in the presence of goods. (2)
Ownership of the means of living is an inalienable right of man,
ethically inevitable; the cancelment of property rights is felt
to violate a fundamental principle of morals. All this, of
course, proceeds on the assumption that the institution of
ownership cannot be abrogated, as being an elemental function of
human nature and an integral factor in the order of things in
which human life belongs.

To the modern socialist all this is coming to be less and
less convincing. In this respect there is a fairly well marked
progressive change in the attitude of the professed socialists.
Their position is progressively less capable of being formulated
as a business proposition; their demands are progressively more
difficult to state in the form of a pecuniary claim. The claim to
the full product of labor, which once filled a large place in
socialistic clamors and had a great carrying force during the
earlier three-quarters of the nineteenth century, has gradually
fallen into abeyance, both with the agitators and the adherents
of the propaganda, during the last generation. To-day this claim
is an afterthought in the advocate's presentation of socialism,
more frequently than it is a point of departure for the argument,
and it is made more of by the proselytes, who have carried the
metaphysics of it over from the current common sense of the
business community, than by the socialists of confirmed standing.
The claim to the full product is an article of natural-rights
dogma, and as such it is a reminiscence of the institutional
situation from which socialism departs, rather than a feature of
the prospective situation to which socialistic sentiment looks.

The like obsolescence of the sense of equity in ownership is
visible in the attitude taken by strikers in the large,
mechanically organized industries, outside of the ranks of avowed
socialism. These strikers are less and less deterred by
considerations of vested rights, property rights, owner's
interests, and the like. The principle that a man may do what he
will with his own is losing its binding force with large classes
in the community, apparently because the spiritual ground on
which rests the notion of "his own" is being cut away by the
latter-day experience of these classes. Abridgment of proprietary
discretion, confiscation of proprietary rights, is growing
gradually less repugnant to the industrial populace; and the
question of indemnity for eventual loss is more and more falling
into neglect. With the socialistic element the question is not,
what shall be done in the way of readjustment of property claims,
but what is to be done to abolish them.(20*)

The question of equity or inequity in the distribution of
wealth presumes the validity of ownership rights on some basis or
other, or at least it presumes the validity of some basis on
which the claims of ownership may be discussed. Ownership is the
major premise of any argument as to the equity of distribution,
and it is this major premise that is being forgotten by the
classes among whom socialistic sentiment is gaining. Equity in
this connection seems not to belong in the repertory of socialist
concepts. It is at this point - the point of a common ground of
argument- that the discrepancy occurs which stands in the way,
not only of an eventual agreement between the socialists and
their conservative critics, but even of their meeting one
another's reasoning with any substantial effect. In the equipment
of common-sense ideas on the basis of which the conservatives
reason on this matter, there is included the conventional article
of ownership, as a prime fact; in the common-sense basis of
socialistic thinking this conventional premise has no secure
place. There is, therefore, a discrepancy in respect of the
metaphysics underlying the knowledge and reasoning of the two
parties to the controversy, and the outlook for a common
understanding is accordingly vain. No substantial agreement upon
a point of knowledge or conviction is possible between persons
who proceed from disparate preconceptions.

Still the conservative reformers and the iconoclasts have a
good deal in common. The prevalent habit of mind of both classes
is a hybrid product of conventional principles and matter-of-fact
insight. But these two contrasted grounds of opinion and
aspiration are present in unequal degrees in the two contrasted
classes; in the conservatives the conventional grounds of
finality dominate and bear down the matter-of-fact knowledge of
things, while the converse is true of the iconoclasts. Contrasted
with earlier times and other cultural regions the consensus, the
general drift, of the modern Western culture as a whole is of an
iconoclastic character; while the class contrast here in question
lies only within the range of this Western cultural consensus. As
one or the other of the two contrasted proclivities - recourse to
conventional precedents and recourse to matter-of-fact insight -
gains and overbalances the other, the general cultural movement
will drift toward a more conservative (archaic), conventional
position or toward a more iconoclastic, materialistic position.
During modern times the cultural drift has set in the latter
direction. With due but not large exceptions, the effective body
of the modern population has been growing more matter-of-fact in
their thinking, less romantic, less idealistic in their
aspirations, less bound by metaphysical considerations in their
view of human relations, less mannerly, less devout.

The discrepancy between the conservatives and the iconoclasts
need not be taken to mean that the two contrasted classes are
moving in opposite directions, nor even in widely divergent
directions. Neither class can properly be said to be
reactionary.(21*) Taken generally, both wings have been moving in
the direction of a more impersonal, more matter-of-fact, less
conventional point of view. In this composite cultural growth the
matter-of-fact habit of mind has on the whole been gaining at the
expense of the conventional, and the conventional premises that
have been retained have also come to bear more of a
matter-of-fact character, - as, e.g., in the supersession of
feudalistic or theocratic principles of law by natural rights. So
that the position for which the effective body of conservatives
now stand is not in substance a very archaic one. It is a more
matter-of-fact position, less closely bound by authentic
conventions, than the position effectively occupied by the
iconoclastic wing a hundred years ago.

Throughout the mod ern cultural complex there is a somewhat
variable, scattering shifting of ground to a more matter-of-fact
basis. The direction of spiritual growth or change is much the
same throughout the general body of the population; but the rate
of change, the rate at which matter-of-fact ideals are
superseding ideals of conventional authenticity, is not the same
for all classes. Hence the class discrepancy here spoken of. The
coefficient of change is so much larger in the vulgar, industrial
classes as progressively to widen the cultural interval between
them and the conservatives in the respect which is here in
question. And the resulting discrepancy of institutional aims and
ideals may have none the less serious consequences for being due
to a differential rate of movement rather than to a divergent
cultural trend.

In this differential rate of movement the departure from the
ancient landmarks has now gone so far (or is reaching such a
point) among the socialistic vulgar as to place their th inking
substantially on a plane of material matter of fact, particularly
as regards economic institutions. Whereas in the conservative
classes the change is not yet large enough to take them off the
plane of received conventional truth, particularly as regards
economic institutions and such social questions as are of an
economic complexion. In the case of the former this change in
habit of mind has been so considerable as, in effect, to
constitute a change in kind; crude matter of fact has come to be
the dominant note of their attitude, and conventional
authenticity has been relegated to a subsidiary place; that is to
say, the change is of a revolutionary character. In the case of
the conservative classes, so far as touches the institutional
notions here under inquiry, the corresponding change has not yet
gone so far as to amount to a change in kind; it is not of a
revolutionary nature. The views current among the respectable
classes on these matters still, in effect, run on the ancient
levels on which were built up the pecuniary institutions about
which the controversy circles. For the present there need be no
apprehension that the more respectable classes will reach a
mature revolutionary frame of mind. The discipline of their daily
life does not, on the whole, favor such a result.

This, in substance, is also the view taken by the socialistic
revolutionaries, particularly by those that are of Marxian
antecedents. It is a point of conviction with them, though not
wholly of reasoned conviction, that the socialistic movement is,
in the nature of the case, a proletarian movement, in which the
respectable, that is to say the pecuniarily competent, classes
can have no organic part even if they try. It is held, in effect,
that the well-to-do are, by force of their economic
circumstances, incapable of assimilating the socialist ideas. The
argument here set forth may serve to enforce this view, but with
a difference. Instead of contrasting the well-to-do with the
indigent, the line of demarcation between those available for the
socialist propaganda and those not so available is rather to be
drawn between the classes employed in the industrial and those
employed in the pecuniary occupations. It is a question not so
much of possessions as of employments; not of relative wealth,
but of work. It is a question of work because it is a question of
habits of thought, and work shapes the habits of thought. The
socialists themselves construe the distinction to be a
distinction in respect of habits of thought; and habits of
thought are made by habits of life rather than by a legal
relation to accumulated goods. This legal relation may count
materially in shaping the animus of the several economic classes;
but it appears not to be competent of itself to explain the
limitations observable in the spread of socialistic sentiment.

The socialistic disaffection shows a curious tendency to
overrun certain classes and to miss certain others. The men in
the skilled mechanical trades are peculiarly liable to it, while
at the extreme of immunity is probably the profession of the law.
Bankers and other like classes of business men, together with
clergymen and politicians, are also to be held free of serious
aspersion; similarly, the great body of the rural population are
immune, including the population of the country towns, and in an
eminent degree the small farmers of the remoter country
districts;(22*) so also the delinquent classes of the cities and
the populace of half-civilized and barbarous countries. The body
of unskilled laborers, especially those not associated with the
men in the skilled mechanical trades, are not seriously affected.
The centres of socialistic disaffection are the more important
industrial towns, and the effective nucleus of the socialistic
malcontents is made up of the more intelligent body of workmen in
the highly organized and specialized industries. Not that
socialism does not spread in virulent form outside this narrow
range, but at a farther remove from the centre of dispersion it
appears rather sporadically and uncertainly, while within this
field it is fairly endemic. As regards the educated classes,
socialistic views are particularly likely to crop out among the
men in the material sciences.

The advocates of the new creed have made little headway among
the rural classes of Europe, whether peasant farmers or farm
laborers. The rural proletariat has hitherto proved virtually
impermeable.(23*) The discipline of their daily life leaves their
spirit undisturbed on the plane of conventionality and
anthropomorphism, and the changes to which they aspire lie within
the scope of the conventionalities which have grown out of these
circumstances of their life and which express the habit of mind
enforced by these circumstances.

Without claiming that this explanation is competent to cover
the case of socialism in all its bearings, it may be pointed out
that this socialistic bias has effectively spread among the
people only within the last quarter of a century, which is also
approximately the period since which the machine process and the
mechanical standardization of industry has reached its fuller
development, both as regards the extent of its field and as
regards the extent of its technological requirements; that it is
found in vigorous growth only in those communities and
particularly among those classes whose life is closely regulated
by the machine technology; and that the discipline of this
machine technology is peculiarly designed to inculcate such
iconoclastic habits of thought as come to a head in the
socialistic bias. Socialism, in so far as the term means the
subversion of the economic foundations of modern culture, occurs
only sporadically and dubiously outside the limits, in time and
space, of the discipline of the machine technology. While among
those classes whose everyday life schools them to do their
habitual serious thinking in terms of material cause and effect,
the preconceptions of ownership are apparently becoming
obsolescent through disuse and through supersession by other
methods of apprehending things.(24*)
But the machine technology not only trains the work men into
materialistic iconoclasm, it has also a selective effect. Persons
endowed with propensities and aptitudes of a materialistic,
matter-of-fact kind are drafted into the mechanical employments,
and such are also peculiarly available socialistic material.
Aptitude for the matter-of-fact work of the machine technology
means, in a general way, ineptitude for an uncritical acceptance
of institutional truths, It is probable, therefore, that the
apparent facility with which the mechanical employments (and the
material sciences) induce a socialistic or iconoclastic bent is
to be set down in part to the fact that the human material in
these employments is picked material, peculiarly amenable to this
discipline. There is a sifting of the working classes, whereby
the socialistic and mechanically capable are roughly segregated
out from the rest and subjected to the iconoclastic discipline of
the mechanical employments and matter-of-fact thinking; while the
residue, which is on the whole made up of the persons that are
relatively least capable of revolutionary socialism, is at the
same time less exposed to the discipline that might fit them for
the socialistic movement. This sifting is, of course, a rough
one, and leaves many exceptions both ways.

In the light of this consideration, then, it is to be noted:
(1) that the dominance of the machine process in modern industry
is not so potent a factor for the inculcation of socialistic
notions - it does not so irresistibly shape men's habit of mind
in the socialistic sense - as the first survey of the facts would
suggest; and (2) that the differentiation of occupations involved
in modern industrial methods selectively bunches the socialistic
elements together, and so heightens their sense of class
solidarity and acts to accentuate their bias, gives consistency
to their ideals, and induces that boldness of conviction and
action which is to be had only in a compact body of men.

But in either case, whether the visible outcome is chiefly
due to their selective or to their disciplinary effect, the
bearing of the industrial occupations upon the growth of
socialism seems equally close and undeniable. The two modes of
influence seem to converge to the outcome indicated above, and
for the purpose of the present inquiry a detailed tracing out of
the two strands of sequence in the case neither can nor need be
undertaken.(25*)

With such generality as commonly holds in statements of this
kind, it may be said that the modern socialistic disaffection is
loosely bound up with the machine industry - spreading where this
industry spreads and flourishing where this industry gives the
dominant note of life. The correlation between the two phenomena
is of such a kind as to leave no doubt that they are causally
connected; which means either that the machine industry, directly
or indirectly, gives rise to socialism, or that the two are
expressions of the same complex of causes. The former statement
probably expresses the truth of the case in great part, but the
latter need not therefore be false. Wherever and in so far as the
increase and diffusion of knowledge has made the machine process
and the mechanical technology the tone-giving factor in men's
scheme of thought, there modern socialistic iconoclasm follows by
easy consequence.

The socialistic bias primarily touches economic institutions
proper. But that is not the whole of it. When the term is used
without modifying phrase it carries a certain implication
touching other than primarily economic matters. The political
bias of this unmitigated socialism is always radically
democratic, to the extent that these socialists are in a high
degree intolerant of any monarchical, aristocratic, or other
prescriptive government. The state is doomed in the socialistic
view.(26*) The socialist antagonism to the state takes various
forms and goes to varying degrees of intemperance, but it is
consistently negative. Except in their destructively hostile
attitude to existing political organizations, the socialists have
nothing consistent to offer on the head of political
institutions, less, indeed, latterly than in the earlier days of
the propaganda. There seems to be a growing shiftlessness of
opinion on this head; one gets the impression that the sense of
the socialist malcontents, as near as it may be permissible to
use that word in this connection, is that the community can best
get along without political institutions.

There is a like departure from the ancient norms touching
domestic relations. This is not confined to those portions of the
community that avowedly affect socialistic views, although it
has, on the whole, gone farthest among the classes among whom the
socialistic views prevail. There is a visible weakening of the
family ties, a disintegration of the conventions of household
life, throughout large classes. The defection is even felt, by
sensitive and solicitous persons, to be of such grave proportions
as to threaten the foundations of domestic life and morality.
This disintegration of the family ties shows itself most
alarmingly among the socialistic classes, with whom it all wears
such an air of unconcern as argues that in this respect they are
incorrigible. To these the conventional form of the household has
in good part ceased to appeal as something sacred. It is no
longer one of their secure spiritual assets.

What appears to be in jeopardy, should this socialistic
defection gain ground, is the headship of the male in the
household economy. The family, as it has come down from the
medieval past, under the shelter of the church, is of a
patriarchal constitution, at least in theory. The man has been
vested with discretionary control in domestic affairs. In the
earlier days his discretion was very direct and full, comprising
corporal coercion. Utterly, after and so far as mastery and
servitude have passed off the field and natural rights have come
to rule, this direct coercive control has been superseded by a
pecuniary discretion; so that the male head of the household is
alone competent to exercise a proprietary control of household
affairs. This latter-day conventional headship of the man is now
in its turn beginning to lose the respect of a good share of the
populace. The disintegration of the patriarchal tradition has
gone farthest among those industrial classes who are at the same
time inclined to socialistic views.

At this point in the institutional structure, as well as at
other points where the industrial classes are giving evidence of
a loss of spiritual ground, there is little indication of a
constructive movement toward any specific arrangement to take the
place of the institution whose existence is threatened. There is
a loosening of the bonds, a weakening of conviction as to the
full truth and beauty of the received domestic institutions,
without much of a consensus as to what is to be done about it, if
anything. In this, as at other junctures of a similar kind, the
mechanically employed classes, trained to matter-of-fact habits
of thought, show a notable lack of spontaneity in the
construction of new myths or conventions as well as in the
reconstruction of the old.

All this disintegration of the spiritual foundations of our
domestic institutions spreads with the most telling effect,
because most heedlessly, among the population of the industrial
towns. But it spreads also outside the limits of the industrial
classes; for the habits of life and of thought inculcated by the
machine technology are not limited to them, even if these classes
are the ones who suffer most and most severely from the machine
discipline. The disintegration shows itself, in varying degree,
in all modern industrial communities, and it is visible somewhat
in proportion as the community is modern and industrial. The
machine is a leveller, a vulgarizer, whose end seems to be the
extirpation of all that is respectable, noble, and dignified in
human intercourse and ideals.

What happens within the narrow range of the institutions of
domestic life repeats itself in substance in the larger field of
national life and ideals. Fealty to a superior installed by law
or custom suffers under the discipline of a life which, as
regards its most formative exigencies, is not guided by
conventional grounds of validity. And the transmuted form of
fealty called patriotism is in much the same insecure case. The
new ground of class solidarity and antagonism, for which these
extreme spokesmen of the industrial regime stand, is neither
ecclesiastic, dynastic, territorial, nor linguistic; it is
industrial and materialistic. But in their attitude of
heedlessness toward the dynastic and national conventions the
socialists are merely the extreme exponents of the spirit of the
age in the modern industrial communities.

So, again, as regards the religious life. Men trained by the
mechanical occupations to materialistic, industrial habits of
thought are beset with a growing inability to appreciate, or even
to apprehend, the meaning of religious appeals that proceed on
the old-fashioned grounds of metaphysical validity. The
consolations of a personal relation (of subservience) to a
supernatural master do not appeal to men whose habit of life is
shaped by a familiarity with the relations of impersonal cause
and effect, rather than by relations of personal dominance and
fealty. It does not come as a matter of course for such men to
give the catechism's answer to the question, What is the chief
end of man? Nor do they instinctively feel themselves to be
sinners by virtue of a congenital, hereditary taint or obliquity.
Indeed, they can only with great difficulty be seriously
persuaded that they are sinners at all. They are in danger of
losing the point of view of sin. The relation of status or fealty
involved in the concept of sin is becoming alien to their habit
of mind. They are therefore slow to realize that their past life
has violated such a relation of fealty, on the one hand, and that
it is of vital consequence to reestablish such a relation of
status by a work of salvation or redemption. The kindly
ministrations of the church and the clergy grate on the
sensibilities of men so trained, as being so much ado about
nothing. The machine, their master, is no respecter of persons
and knows neither morality nor dignity nor prescriptive right,
divine or human; its teaching is training them into insensibility
of the whole range of concepts on which these ministrations
proceed.(27*)

Not alone in the direction of growth given to vulgar
sentiment and to the vulgar insight into facts is the
matter-of-fact discipline of the machine technology apparent, but
also in the scope and method of that scientific knowledge that
has had the vogue since the advent of the machine industry.
Scientific inquiry is directed to a different end and carried out
under the guidance of a different range of principles or
preconceptions in the modern industrial communities than in
earlier days or in cultural centres lying outside the machine's
dominion. Modern science is single-minded in its pursuit of
impersonal relations of causal sequence in the phenomena with
which it is occupied.

The line of descent of this matter-of-fact modern science is
essentially British, as is that of the machine technology and of
the characteristically modern civil and political institutions.
It is true, beginnings of the modern scientific movement were
made in Italy in the days of the Renaissance, and Central Europe
had its share in the enlightenment; but these early modern
risings of the scientific spirit presently ran into the sand,
when war, politics, and religion reasserted their sway in the
south of Europe. Similar tentative stirrings of matter-of-fact
thought were had in Spain and France before and during the early
phases of the state-making era; but here, again, war and politics
rendered these onsets nearly nugatory, so that the intellectual
output was more speculation than science. In the Low Countries
something similar holds true, with a larger qualification. The
British community made a later and slower start, coming out of
barbarism at a later date and with a heavier handicap of physical
obstructions. But being, relatively, sheltered from war and
politics, the British were able to take up the fund of scientific
gains made by the South-European men of workday insight, to turn
it to account and to carry it over the era of state-making and so
prepare the way for the modern scientific, technological era.

Of course, nothing but the most meagre and sketchiest outline
of this matter is practicable in this place, and even that only
in its relation to the machine industry during the past one
hundred years or so. What is said above of the British lead in
modern science may perhaps be questioned, and it is not necessary
for the present purpose to insist on its truth; but so much seems
beyond hazard as that the lead in the material sciences lay with
the British through the early machine age, and that the
provenance of this modern scientific research to-day does not
extend, in any pronounced degree, beyond those communities that
lie within the area of the modern machine industry.

In time and space the prevalence of the modern materialistic
science is roughly extensive with that of the machine process. It
is, no doubt, related to it both as cause and as effect; but that
its relation to modern industry is more that of effect than cause
seems at least broadly suggested by the decay which presently
overtook scientific research, e.g., in the south of Europe when
those peoples turned their attention from material to spiritual
and political affairs.(28*)

What is of immediate interest is the change that has come
over the scope and method of scientific research since the
dominance of the machine process, in comparison with what
preceded the coming of the machine age. The beginnings of modern
science are older than the industrial revolution; the principles
of scientific research (causal explanation and exact measurement)
antedate the regime of the machine process. But a change has
taken place in the postulates and animus of scientific research
since modern science first began, and this change in the
postulates of scientific knowledge is related to the growth of
the machine technology.

It is unnecessary here to hark back to that scholastic
science or philosophy that served as an intellectual expression
of the ecclesiastical and political culture of the Middle Ages.
Its character, as compared with later science, is sufficiently
notorious. By the change from scholastic knowledge to modern
science, to the extent to which the change was carried through,
the principle (habit of mind) of adequate cause was substituted
for that of sufficient reason. The law of causation as it is
found at work, in the maturer science of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, comprises two distinguishable postulates:
(1) equality (quantitative equivalence) of cause and effect; and
(2) similarity (qualitative equivalence) of cause and effect. The
former may, without forcing it, be referred to commercial
accountancy as its analogue in practical life and as the probable
cultural ground out of which the habit of insisting on an
inviolable quantitative equivalence gathered consistency. The
ascendancy of the latter seems in a similar manner to be
referable to the prevalence of handicraft as its cultural ground.
Stated negatively, it asserts that nothing appears in the effect
but what was contained in the cause, in a manner which suggests
the rule that nothing appears in the product of handicraft but
what was present in the skill of the artificer. "Natural causes,"
which are made much of in this middle period of modern science,
are conceived to work according to certain "natural laws." These
natural laws, laws of the "normal course" of things, are felt to
tend to a rational end and to have something of a coercive force.
So that Nature makes no mistakes, Nature does nothing in vain,
Nature takes the most economical course to its end, Nature makes
no jumps, etc. Under this law of natural causation every effect
must have a cause which resembles it in the particular respect
which claims the inquirer's attention. Among other consequences
of this view it follows that, since the details as well as the
whole of the material universe are construed to show adaptation
to a preconceived end, this "natural order" of things must be the
outcome of preexistent design residing in the "first cause,"
which is postulated by virtue of this imputed design and is
designated the "Great Artificer." There is an element of conation
in this original modern postulate of cause and effect. The shadow
of the artificer, with his intelligence and manual skill, is
forever in the background of the concepts of natural law. The
"cause" dealt with in a given case is not thought of as an
effect; and the effect is treated as a finality, not as a phase
of a complex sequence of causation. When such a sequence is under
inquiry; as in the earlier, pre-Darwinian theories of evolution,
it is not handled as a cumulative sequence whose character may
blindly change from better to worse, or conversely, at any point;
but rather as an unfolding of a certain prime cause in which is
contained, implicitly, all that presently appears in explicit
form.

In the conception of the causal relation as it may be seen at
work a hundred years ago, cause and effect are felt to stand over
against one another, so that the cause controls, determines the
effect by transmitting its own character to it. The cause is the
producer, the effect the product. Relatively little emphasis or
interest falls upon the process out of which the product emerges;
the interest being centred upon the latter and its relation to
the efficient cause out of which it has come. The theories
constructed under the guidance of this conception are
generalizations as to an equivalence between the producing cause
and the effect-product. The cause "makes" the effect, in much the
same sense as the craftsman is apprehended to make the article on
which he is engaged. There is a felt distinction between the
cause and the environing circumstances, much as there is between
the workman on the one hand and his tools and materials on the
other hand. The intervening process is simply the manner of
functioning of the efficient cause, much as the workman's work is
the functioning of the workman in the interval between the
inception and the completion of the product. The effect is
subsequent to the cause, as the workman's product is subsequent
to and consequent upon his putting forth his productive
efficiency. It is a relation of before and after, in which the
process comes in for attention as covering and accounting for the
time interval which, in analogy with workmanlike endeavor, is
required for the functioning of the efficient cause.(29*)

But as time passes and habituation to the exigencies of the
machine technology gains in range and consistency, the
quasi-personal, handicraft conception of causation decays, -
first and most notably in those material, inorganic sciences that
stand in the closest relation to the mechanical technology, but
presently also in the organic sciences, and even in the moral
sciences. The machine technology is a mechanical or material
process, and requires the attention to be centred upon this
process and the exigencies of the process. In such a process no
one factor stands out as unequivocally the efficient cause in the
case, whose personal character, so to speak, is transfused into
the product, and to whose workings the rest of the complex of
causes are related only as subsidiary or conditioning
circumstances. To the technologist the process comes necessarily
to count, not simply as the interval of functioning of an initial
efficient cause, but as the substantial fact that engages his
attention. He learns to think in terms of the process, rather
than in terms of a productive cause and a product between which
the process intervenes in such a manner as to afford a transition
from one to the other. The process is always complex; always a
delicately balanced interplay of forces that work blindly,
insensibly, heedlessly; in which any appreciable deviation may
forthwith count in a cumulative manner, the further consequences
of which stand in no organic relation to the purpose for which
the process has been set going. The prime efficient cause falls,
relatively, into the background and yields precedence to the
process as the point of technological interest.

This machine technology, with its accompanying discipline in
mechanical adaptations and object-lessons, came on gradually and
rose to a dominating place in the cultural environment during the
closing years of the eighteenth and the course of the nineteenth
century; and as fast as men learned to think in terms of
technological process, they went on at an. accelerated pace in
the further invention of mechanical processes, so that from that
time the progress of inventions has been of a cumulative
character and has cumulatively heightened the disciplinary force
of the machine process. This early technological advance, of
course, took place in the British community, where the machine
process first gained headway and where the discipline of a
prevalent machine industry inculcated thinking in terms of the
machine process. So also it was in the British community that
modern science fell into the lines marked out by technological
thinking and began to formulate its theories in terms of process
rather than in terms of prime causes and the like. While
something of this kind is noticeable relatively early in some of
the inorganic sciences, as, e.g., Geology, the striking and
decisive move in this direction was taken toward the middle of
the century by Darwin and his contemporaries.(30*) Without much
preliminary exposition and without feeing himself to be out of
touch with his contemporaries, Darwin set to work to explain
species in terms of the process out of which they have arisen,
rather than out of the prime cause to which the distinction
between them may be due.(31*) Denying nothing as to the
substantial services of the Great Artificer in the development of
species, he simply and naively left Him out of the scheme,
because, as being a personal factor, He could not be stated and
handled in terms of process. So Darwin offered a tentative
account of the descent of man, without recourse to divine or
human directive endeavor and without inquiry as to whence man
ultimately came and why, or as to what fortune would ultimately
overtake him. His inquiry characteristically confines itself to
the process of cumulative change. His results, as well as his
specific determination of the factors at work in this process of
cumulative change, have been questioned; perhaps they are open to
all the criticisms levelled against them as well as to a few more
not yet thought of; but the scope and method given to scientific
inquiry by Darwin and the generation whose spokesman he is has
substantially not been questioned, except by that diminishing
contingent of the faithful who by force of special training or by
native gift are not amenable to the discipline of the machine
process. The characteristically modern science does not inquire
about prime causes, design in nature, desirability of effects,
ultimate results, or eschatological consequences.

Of the two postulates of earlier modern science, - the
quantitative equivalence and the qualitative equivalence of cause
and effect, - the former has come practically to signify the
balanced articulation of the process of cumulative change; the
endeavor of the Positivists to erect this canon of quantitative
equivalence into the sole canon of scientific truth, and so to
reduce scientific theory to a system of accountancy, having
failed. The latter thesis, that like causes produce like effects,
or that the effect is, in some sense, of the same character as
the cause, has fallen into decay as holding true only in such
tenuously general terms as to leave it without particular force.
The scientists are learning more and more consistently to think
in the opaque, impersonal terms of strains, mechanical
structures, displacement, and the like; terms which are
convertible into the working drawings and specifications of the
mechanical engineer.

The older preconceptions are, of course, not wholly
eliminated from the intellectual apparatus of scientific research
and generalization. The cultural situation whose discipline gives
the outcome is made up of inherited traditional notions at least
as much as of the notions brought in by the machine process. Even
among the scientific adepts there has been no complete break with
the past; necessarily not, since they are, after all, creatures
of their own generation. Many of them, but more especially those
who are engaged in upholding the authentic results of scientific
research, are somewhat prone to make much of the definitive
results achieved, rather than of the process of research in which
these results are provisional appliances of work. And many of
these, together. with the great part of those well-meaning
persons who exploit the sciences for purposes of edification,
such as clergymen and naturalistic myth-makers, still personify
the process of cause and effect and find in it a well-advised
meliorative trend. But that work of research which effectually
extends the borders of scientific knowledge is nearly all done
under the guidance of highly impersonal, mechanical, morally and
aesthetically colorless conceptions of causal sequence. And this
scientific work is carried out only in those communities which
are in due contact with the modern mechanically organized
industrial system, - only under the shadow of the machine
technology.

In the nature of the case the cultural growth dominated by
the machine industry is of a sceptical, matter-of-fact
complexion, materialistic, unmoral, unpatriotic, undevout. The
growth of habits of thought, in the industrial regions and
centres particularly, runs in this direction; but hitherto there
has enough of the ancient norms of Western Christendom remained
intact to make a very respectable protest against that
deterioration of the cultural tissues which the ferment of the
machine industry unremittingly pushes on. The machine discipline.
however, touches wider and wider circles of the population, and
touches them in an increasingly intimate and coercive manner. In
the nature of the case, therefore, the resistance opposed to this
cultural trend given by the machine discipline on grounds of
received conventions weakens with the passage of time. The spread
of materialistic, matter-of-fact preconceptions takes place at a
cumulatively accelerating rate, except in so far as some other
cultural factor, alien to the machine discipline, comes in to
inhibit its spread and keep its disintegrating influence within
bounds.

NOTES:

1. The perfected system of business principles rests on the
historical basis of free institutions, and so presumes a
protracted historical growth of these institutions; but a highly
efficient, though less perfect, business system was worked out in
a relatively short time by the South and Central European peoples
in early modern times on the basis of a less consummate system of
rights. - Cf. Ehrenberg, Zeitalter der Fugger; Sombart,
Kapitalismus, vol. II. ch. VIII, XIV, XV.

2. See Chapter IV, above.

3. Cf. Keane, Man, Past and Present, ch. XIV; W.Z. Ripley, Races
of Europe; Lapouge, L'Aryen; Montelius, Les temps prehistoriques
en Bubde, etc.; Andreas Hansen, Menneskesloegtens Aelde.

4. If, e.g., he takes to myth making and personifies the machine
or the process and imputes and benevolence to the mechanical
applications, after the manner of current nursery tales and
pulpit oratory, he is sure to go wrong.

5. Such expressions as "good and ill," "merit and demerit," "law
and order," when applied to technological facts or to the outcome
of material seience, are evidently only metaphorical expressions,
borrowed from older usage and serviceable only as figures of
speech. 

6. Tarde, Psychologic Economique, vol. I. pp. 122-131, offers a
characterization of the psychology of modern work, contrasting,
among other things, the work of the machine workman with that of
the handicraftsman in respect of its psychological requirements
and effects. It may be taken as a temperate formulation of the
cent commonplaces on this topic, and seems to be fairly wide of
the mark.

7. For something more than a hundred years past this change in
the habits of thought of the workman has been commonly spoken of
as a deterioration or numbing of his intelligence. But that seems
too sweeping a characterization of the change brought on by
habituation to machine work. It is safe to say that such
habituation brings a change in the workman's habits of thought, -
in the direction, method, and content of his thinking, -
heightening his intelligence for some purposes and lowering it
for certain others. No doubt, on the whole, the machine's
discipline lowers the intelligence of the workman for such
purposes as were rated high as marks of intelligence before the
coming of the machine, but it appears likewise to heighten his
intelligence for such purposes as have been brought to the front
by the machine. If he is by nature scantily endowed with the
aptitudes that would make him think effectively in terms of the
machine process, if he has intellectual capacity for other things
and not for this, then the mining of the machine may fairly be
said to lower his intelligence, since it hiders the full
development of the only capacities of which he is possessed. The
resulting difference in intellectual training is a difference in
kind and direction, not necessarily in degree. Cf. Schmoller,
Grundriss der Volkswirtschaftslehre, vol. I. secs. 85-86, 132;
Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism, ch. IX. secs. 4 and 5;
Cooke Taylor, Modern Factory System, pp. 434-435; Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democrocy, e.g. pp. 327 et seq.; K. Th.
Reinhold, Arbeit und Werkzeug, ch. X. (particularly pp. 190-198)
and ch. XI (particularly pp. 221-240).

8. Cf. J.C. Sutherland, "The Engineering Mind" Popular Science
Monthly, January 1903, pp. 254-256.

9. Cf. "Industrial and Pecuniary Employments" especially pp.
198-218.

10. As G.F. Steffen has described it: "Those who hire out their
labor power or their capital or their land to the entrepreneurs
are as a rule not absolutely passive as seen from the point of
view of business enterprise. They are not simply inanimate
implements in the hands of the entrepreneurs. They are,
enterprising implements, (foretagaade verktyg) who surrender
their undertaking functions only to the extent designated in the
contract with the entrepreneur." - Ekonomisk Tidskrift, vol. V.
p. 256.

11. Cf., on the other hand, Reinhold, Arbeit und Werkzeug, ch.
XII and XIV, where double dealing is confused with workmanship,
very much after the manner familiar to readers of expositions of
the "wages of superintendence," but more broadly and ingeniously
than usual.

12. Individual exceptions are, of course, to be found in all
classes, but there is, after all, a more or less consistent,
prevalent class attitude. As is well known, clergymen, lawyers,
soldiers, civil servants, and the like, are popularly held to be
of a conservative, if not reactionary temper. This vulgar
apprehension may be faulty in detail, and especially it may be
too sweeping in its generalizations; but there are, after all,
few persons not belonging to these classes who will not
immediately recognize that this vulgar appraisement of them rests
on substantial grounds, even though the appraisement may need
qualification. So, also, a conservative animus is seen to pervade
all classes more generally in earlier times or on more archaic
levels of culture than our own. At the same time, in those early
days and in the more archaic cultural regions, the structure of
conventionally accepted truths and the body of accredited
spiritual or extra-material facts are more comprehensive and
rigid, and the thinking on all topics is more consistently held
to tests of authenticity as contrasted with tests of sense
perception. On the whole, the number and variety of things that
are fundamentally and eternally true and good increase as one
goes outward from the modern West-European cultural centres into
the earlier barbarian past or into the remoter barbarian present.

13. See Chapter II above.

14. Cf. Theory of the Leisure Class, especially ch. IV and V.

15. As, e.g., Mr W.G.S. Adams cogently points out in a recent
number of the Journal of Political Ecomnomy (December 1902).

16. As Mr. Webb shows (Industrial Democracy, 1902, pp.
xxivxxxvi).

17. The historical explanation of this House of Lords reversal of
trade-union practice is probably to be found in the conservative,
or rather reactionary, trend given to British sentiment by the
imperialist policy of the last two or three decades, accentuated
by the experiences of the Boer War. The Boer War seems to mark a
turning-point in the growth of sentiment and institutions. Since
the seventies the imperialist interest, that is to say, the
dynastic interest, has been coming into the foreground among the
interests that engage the attention of the British community. It
seems now to have definitively gained the first place, and may be
expected in the immediate future to dominate British policy both
at home and abroad. Concomitantly, it may be remarked, the
British community has been slowing down, if not losing ground, in
industrial animus, technological efficiency, and scientific
spirit. Cf. Hobson, Imperialism, part II ch. I and III.

18. All this applies to anarchism as well as to socialism;
similarly to several minor categories of dissentients. In their
negative proposals the socialists and anarchists are fairly
agreed. It is in the metaphysical postulates of their protest and
in their constructive aims that they part company. Of the two,
the socialists are more widely out of touch with the established
order. They are also more hopelessly negative and destructive in
their ideals, as seen from the standpoint of the established
order. This applies to the later socialists rather than to the
earlier, and it applies, of course, only to the lower-class,
"democratic" socialists, not to the so-called state and Christian
socialists.

Anarchism proceeds on natural-rights ground, and is
accordingly in touch with the postulates of the existing property
arrangements to that extent. It is a more unmitigated working out
of the same postulates. It is a system of "natural liberty"
unqualified to the extent even of not admitting prescriptive
ownership. Its basis is a (divinely instituted) order of nature,
the keynote of which is an inalienable freedom and equality of
the individual, quite in the eighteenth-century spirit. It is in
this sense an offshoot of the Romantic school of thought.
Anarchism is a de jure seheme, which takes no account of
mechanical exigencies but rests its case altogether on
anthropomorphic postulates of natural rights. It is, from the
natural-rights standpoint, substantially sound, though
senselessly extreme. 

What may be called the normal socialism, socialism of the
later, more dangerous, and more perplexing, kind, does not build
on the received metaphysical basis of the "natural order." It
demands a reconstruction of the social fabric, but it does not
know on what lines the reconstruction is to be carried out. The
natural rights of the individual are not accepted as the standard
(except by certain large bodies of neophytes, especially rural
American, who are carrying under socialist mottoes the burden of
animosities and preconceptions that once made populism), but
nothing definite is put in the place of this outworn standard.
The socialists of the line, in so far as there is any consensus
among them, profess that the mechanical exigencies of the
industrial system must decide what the social structure is to be,
but beyond this vague generality they have little to offer. And
this mechanical standardization can manifestly afford no basis
for legislation on civil rights. Indeed, it is difficult to see
how any scheme of civil rights, much or little, can find a place
in a socialistic reorganization. 

19. The "scientific socialism" of Marx and Engels as promulgated
during the third quarter of the nineteenth century was not of
this negative character. It was a product of Hegelianism blended
with the conceptions of natural rights, its chief count being the
"claim to the full product of labor." This socialism never made
serious inroads among the working classes outside of Germany -
the home of Hegelianism. Even in that country the most vigorous
growth of socialistic sentiment came after Hegelianism had begun
to yield to Darwinian methods of thought, and this later growth
has been progressively less Marxian and less positive. Marxism is
now little more than a pro forma confession of faith. Avowed
socialism is practically taking on the character described above,
except so far as it has grown opportunist and has sought
affiliation with the liberal democratic movement and the
reformers.

20. Where members of the well-to-do classes avow socialistic
sentiments and ideals it commonly turns out to be a merely
humanitarian aspiration for a more "equitable" redistribution of
wealth, a readjustment of the seheme of ownership with some
improved safeguarding of the "reasonable" property claims of all
members of the community. What "socialist" reform commonly means
to this contingent of well-to-do irregulars is some seheme of
equal rights of ownership for all. Whereas to socialists of the
line equal rights of ownership is as idle a proposition as an
equal right of citizens to sell their votes. Instead of a reform
of ownership the socialists contemplate the traceless
disappearance of ownership. 

21. Unless it be in the latest extremes of conservatism, such as
is shown in the recent of dynastic politics in Germany, Tory
policy in England, and predatory political ideals in America.

22. Socialistic notions are apprently making some inroads among
the rural population of the American prairie region, where a
mechanically organized and standardized method of farming
prevails, with a large use of mechanical appliances.

23. So striking has been the failure of the German socialists,
for instance, in their attempts upon the integrity of the farming
community, that they have latterly changed their tactics, and
instead of attempting to convert the peasants to a full
socialistic programme, they have turned to measures of
compromise, in which the characteristic and revolutionary
features of the socialistic programme are softened beyond
recognition, if not suppressed. The habits of life, and therefore
the habits of thought, of the peasant farmers move on the ancient
leveis of handicraft, pecuniary management, personal consequence,
and prescriptive custom. 

24. If this account of the class limitation of the socialist bias
is accepted, it has an immediate bearing upon a question which is
latterly engaging the attention of the advocates of socialism.
The question is as to the part played by propertyless office
employees and by the business men whom the modern consolidations
of business reduce to the position of salaried managers and
superintendents. With a faith prompted by their own hopes rather
than by observed facts or by the logic of events, the spokesmen
for socialism are strongly inclined to claim this "business
proletariat" as a contingent which the course of economic
development is bound to throw into the socialist camp. The facts
do not in any appreciable degree countenance such an expectation.
The unpropertied classes employed in business do not take to
socialistic vagaries with such alacrity as should inspire a
confident hope in the advocates of socialism or a serious
apprehension in those who stand for law and order. Tbis
pecuniarily disfranchised business population, in its revulsion
against unassimilated facts, turns rather to some excursion into
pragmatic romance, such as Social Settlements, Prohibition, Clean
Politics, Single Tax, Arts and Crafts, Neighborhood Guilds,
Institutional Church, Christian Science, New Thought, or some
such cultural thimblerig. The work of the captain of industry in
curtailing the range of individual discretion in business and in
reducing the lesser undertakers to the rank of clerks and
subalterns need not be looked upon as unavoidably furthering the
spread of the socialistic bias, except in so far as the change
results in throwing the men affected by it out of the pecuniary
or business occupations and subjecting them to the discipline of
the mechanical industry. At the most, apparently, the change from
an independent to a dependent business life serves to weaken the
men's interest in the question of property; it does not appear
that it throws them into an attitude of substantial distrust or
iconoclasm. Their interest in this particular institution
slackens through the loss of that emulative motive on which
pecuniary endeavor proceeds, but their faith in its intrinsic
fitness is not thereby shaken, nor are they thrown into the tanks
of the chronic dissentients. The training given by their life
continues prevailingly to run on conventional grounds; that is to
say, on grounds of legal relation, solvency, and the like.
Accountants and office employees are nearly as couservative as
clergymen and lawyers, and their being so is apparently due to
the fact that their experience runs on much the same ground of
conventional finality.

25. Connected with this apparent selective action which the modern
specialization of occupations exerts, there is a further, and at
first sight more singular, point of disparity between the
socialists and the conservatives; and this difference has also a
curious correlation with the distribution of the machine
industry. In a degree, - slight and uncertain, perhaps, but
searcely to be mistaken, - the socialists and the conservatives
are apparently of different racial antecedents. It has been seen
above that the propaganda is most vital and widespread in the
industrial towns, as contrasted with the agricultural country.
But if the researches of such students as Ammon, Ripley, Lapouge,
Closson, and others that might be named, are taken at their face
value, it appears that the towns differ perceptibly from the open
country in point of race; and that the migration from the country
into the industrial towns has a selective effect of such a kind
that a larger proportion of one racial stock than of another
resorts to the towns. The towns, in those countries where data
are available, show a larger admixture of the dolicho-blond stock
than the open country. This seems to argue that the dolicho-blond
stock, or the racial mixture of the towns in which there is a
relatively large admixture of the dolicho-blond, is perceptibly
more efficient in the machine industries, more readily inclined
to think in materialistic terms, more given to radical
innovation, less bound by convention and prescription. This
generalization is strengthened by the fact that the more
dolicho-blond regions are also, on the whole, more socialistic
than those in which this element is less in evidence. At the same
time they are industrially in advance of the latter in the matter
of machine industry; and they are also Protestant (irreligious)
rather than Catholic.

26. This, of course, does not hold for the inoffensive
pseudo-socialistic diversions set afoot by various well-meaning
politicians and clergmen, known by various qualifying
designations, such as "State," "Christian," "Catholic," etc., and
desired to act as correctives of the socialistic distemper.

27. The cultural era of Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and
Natural Religion reduced God to the rank of a "Great Artificer,"
and the machine technology is, in turn, relegating Him to that
fringe of minor employments and those outlying industrial regions
to which the handicraftsmen have been retired. 

28. There is a similar suggestion in the relative (slight but
perceptible) decline of scientific animus in England since the
English community has turned its attention and aspirations to
imperialistic feats of prowess more than to industrial matters.

29. Compare, however, Sombart, Kapitalismus, especially vol. I.
ch. VIII and XV. Sombart finds the modern scientific concept of
cause and effect to be essentially an outcome of the discipline
of accountancy enforced by business traffic. So that he makes
business enterprise rather than mechanical industry accountable
for the rise of modern science and for the matter-of-fact
character which distinguishes this science. In this view there
is, no doubt, a large and valuable element of truth. To the end
of a mathematical formulation of causal phenomena as well as a
tenacious grasp of the principle of quantitative equivalence, the
accountancy enfoxed by the petty trade of early modern times, as
well as by commercial traffic proper, appears to have given the
most effective training. In so far as this element of
quantitative equivalence, simply, has dominated the growth of
science, it has given, as its most perfect product, Positivism.
Positivism flourished at its best and freest in France, where the
modern economic culture was commercial rather than mechanical.
And when the machine discipline seriously invaded France,
Positivism languished and died. But modern seience is not a
calculus simply. It deals not with calculations of quantitative
equivalence only, but with efficient causes, active relations,
creative foxes. The concept of efficient cause is not a
derivative of accountancy, nor is it formed in the image of
accountancy. But this generic concept of efficient cause, the
kinetic concept, antedates Positivism and has outlived it. In its
earlier (eighteenth-century) phase this concept shows close
relationship with the notion of workmanship, in its later
(nineteenth-century) use it has much in common with the notion of
mechanical efficiency.

30. Darwin, of course, does not stand alone. He is the great
exponent of a mass movement which involves a shifting of the
point of view and of the point of interest in scientific research
and speculation.

31. This is the substance of Darwin's advance over Lamarck, for
instance.