Ouroboros; or, the mechanical extension of mankind

By Garet Garrett

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Title: Ouroboros; or, the mechanical extension of mankind

Author: Garet Garrett

Release date: February 19, 2025 [eBook #75418]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1926

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUROBOROS; OR, THE MECHANICAL EXTENSION OF MANKIND ***





  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_
  Bold text displayed as: =bold=




OUROBOROS




  TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

  _For the Contents of this Series see the end of
  the Book_




  OUROBOROS

  OR

  THE MECHANICAL
  EXTENSION OF MANKIND


  BY
  GARET GARRETT


  LONDON:
  KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
  NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.


_Ouroboros was a fabulous snake, the encircling serpent, that swallowed
its own tail. It represented an infantile thought of the human mind for
wish-fulfilment by magical means. Man’s heroic business was to conquer
the reptile. As he did this he seized the object he most desired. He
might even wish himself into solid gold._


Made and Printed in Great Britain by M. F. Robinson & Co. Ltd. at the
Library Press, Lowest




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

  I THE QUEST SINCE ADAM                                               7

  II THE MACHINE AS IF                                                23

  III THE LAW OF MACHINES                                             31

  IV WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE                                          42

  V THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS                                            58

  VI IN PERIL OF TRADE                                                72

  VII DIM VISTAS NEW                                                  84




OUROBOROS




I

THE QUEST SINCE ADAM


One story of us is continuous. It is the story of our struggle to
recapture the Garden of Eden, meaning by that a state of existence free
from the doom of toil.

So long as the character of our economic life was agricultural, as it
almost wholly was until a very recent time, the attack was naïve. In
the file of prayers, if one is kept, the thickest, dustiest bundle is
that of our supplications for plenty—miraculous plenty without worry or
price. We were loth to believe that the second arrangement between God
and Adam made at the gate of exit:

    Cursed is the ground for thy sake;
    In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread

was forever; and for a long time afterward local weather conditions
were wistfully misunderstood, as a chastisement when they were bad and
a sign of relenting when they were good. It was forever. Nature’s ring
was closed, never again to open for any darling fructuary.

That is to say, man’s taking from the soil is an arbitrary wage. He
may increase the gross of it a little by exerting himself more: the
scale he cannot alter. If tilth for the individual has been made easier
somewhat and more productive by the use of wheeled implements, power
tools and now airplanes to dust the orchard with insecticide, these,
you must remember, represent a tremendous increase of effort by mankind
at large upon the principle of limited fecundity that governs the earth.

When at length the realistic mind perceived that here was a natural
fact upon which prayers, thanksgiving, sacrifice, idolatry, and the
pretentions of magic were all alike wasted, the spiritual part of us no
doubt had been willing to accept the sentence. Not so the earthy and
lusty part. The curse was heavy. There was never a risk man would not
take, no kind of heroic exertion he would spare himself, to escape the
evil, the boredom, the drudgery of repetitious toil.

From such puerile motivation came the Age of Discovery, then physical
science, purposeful mechanical invention, the industrial era, and
all the artificial marvels of the modern world. These effects are
historically traceable; and, if it should occur to you to wonder
why they are so much more vivid and astonishing in the West than in
the East, that is easily explained. The European mind went on with
the phantasy of an earthly paradise of plenty and leisure after the
Oriental mind in weariness of wisdom had given it up.

Until four hundred years ago the Europeans believed that somewhere in
the world was a fabulous land whose inhabitants lived as in dreams,
eating and drinking from golden vessels, wearing priceless jewels like
common beads, sated with ease and luxury. King, courts, astronomers
and navigators believed this. The vulgar fancy was for a place such as
Cockaigne of the medieval ballads, where all features of the landscape
were good to eat or drink and nobody ever was obliged to work. In quest
of this mythical region the pioneer feats of circumnavigation were
performed.

What a disparity between the character of the motive and the shape of
the dead!—or is it that men do not know their motives?

The earth was explored. It was found to be round and full of labour.
This, of course, was a terrible disappointment.

The ceaseless mind then turned to alchemy with the idea that base
metals were changeable into gold; from this came chemistry and the
study of matter and physical phenomena in a new way, taking nothing for
granted. This was the beginning of true Science. As to what might come
of it practically there was at first only the rudest kind of notion.
Dimly it was understood that exact knowledge must somehow increase
man’s power, give him control of the elementary circumstance, enable
him perhaps to command that which hitherto he had got by hazard. When
a great body of fact-knowledge had been accumulated, men began to see
little by little how it might be dynamically applied. Then the epoch of
Mechanical Invention.

The idea of machines was not new. Long before the beginning of the
Christian era the ancients had produced many wonderful automatic
devices; but mechanical knowledge with them was a department of magic.
The use of machines was to mystify the multitude. Brazen figures were
made to move, dragons to hiss, temple doors to open and close, trees
to emit musical sounds, and lamps to trim themselves perpetually by
means of floats, cogwheels, cylinders, valves, and pistons—all acting
on sound principles of pneumatics and hydraulics. Much of this ancient
technology was lost or forgotten. The European mind rediscovered it
gradually in a spirit of scientific curiosity, with no clear economic
intention. And, but for a simple practical idea, one that was very slow
to come through, the machine no doubt would still be what it anciently
was—an object of superstition, the toy of wonder, an accessory of
priestcraft.

And what an obvious idea it was!—merely to exploit the machine’s slave
value. Merely to see an engine as a beast of burden and the loom as a
projection of the hand, both instruments of magnified production, to
spare the labour of mankind.

That moment in which the use of mechanical energy came to be so
conceived was one of elemental significance. All the chances of human
life were altered, though not as anyone supposed or as they were meant
to be.

The course of internal evolution requires to be imagined. It is slow
beyond perception. It may not be a fact; or, for aught we know, it may
be finished in the species. Suddenly man begins to augment himself by
an external process. His natural powers become extensible to a degree
that makes them original in kind. To his given structure—the weakest
among animal structures in proportion to its bulk—he adds an automatic,
artificial member, responsive only to his contact, answerable only to
his will, uncontrolled by nature, fabulous in its possibilities of
strength, variation, and cunning.

His use of it in three generations has changed the design of
civilization out of recognition. That change alone which sets our time
off abruptly from all time before is the fact of potential plenty. We
take this for granted as if it were a natural fact, whereas, instead,
all the circumstances have been invented.

We who are born to the view cannot see it. We cannot imagine what it
was like to live in a world where famine was a frequent visitation and
all things were scarce. Yet never until now has the human race known
what plenty was. Immemorially the word has signified food.

 See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has
 blessed. God give thee of the dew of the heaven and the fatness of the
 earth and plenty of wine and corn.

The cornucopia, horn of plenty, never contained a fabricated thing—only
the fruits of the earth.

That old meaning of the word has been recently lost. Modernly we speak
of ‘goods’; we talk of the standard of living, which is understood
of course to include proper quantities of food, and to mean, besides
food, an endless number of artificial things which people increasingly
require for their comfort and well-being.

Mechanical energy does not produce food. Nor has the principle of
limited fecundity that governs the earth been suspended. Yet the
machine has enormously increased the food-supply in two ways: first,
agriculture is equipped with power—tools, so that one man now may
perform the labour of many; second, transportation has made all the
food-producing areas of the world accessible, so that grain from the
middle of the North American continent and grain from Argentina are
mingled unawares in the European loaf.

This use of the machine to distribute food swiftly over the whole world
from where there is a surplus to where that surplus is needed has
had profound political, economic, and social consequences, beginning
with an increase of the human species vastly beyond any number that
had at any time previously existed or could ever before have been
sustained upon the earth. That is the one most awesome phenomenon of
the industrial era. The North American continent has been peopled from
European stock. Its present population is equal to that of all Europe
in 1800. This drain of emigration notwithstanding, the population of
Europe in the same time has trebled.

And still there is plenty.

Where it is not actual, it is potential. Who have not plenty are either
too inert or too ignorant to put forth the modern effort. What people
may use, enjoy, and consume now is an _x_ quantity, determined neither
by the rhythms of nature nor any biological principle, but simply by
the free total of their own exertions.

Faster than the race has multiplied the powers of the machine have
increased. One of these is the power of transportation, whereby the
food product of the whole earth is made uniformly available. The other
power is represented by a divisible product of artificial things
tending to exceed the sum of effective human desire.

To wishful desire there is no limit whatever; but there is a point at
which the effort necessary to obtain the object—that is, the toil—will
be weighed against the desire to possess it, and only when and if the
object is deemed worth the effort is desire effective in the economic
sense.

From the paradox mentioned—that tendency of the machine’s divisible
product to overwhelm the sum of effective desire—we get a series
of complex phenomena of which there is nowhere yet a complete
understanding.

This now is a buyer’s world where formerly it was the seller’s.
Business no longer sits in Asiatic dignity waiting for its customers;
it must up and seek them. The buyer is pursued.

As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float through my window.
They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday
a motor-truck stopped at his house and unloaded a self-playing piano. I
saw it and noticed that it got slightly damaged squeezing through the
tiny doorway.

What does this mean? First, it means that the day before yesterday a
salesman from the city went through this road selling self-playing
pianos for a nominal cash sum down and the balance on monthly
instalments. He sold one there, another in the next house but one, and
a third further on. How many he sold to the end of the road I do not
know.

But what does it mean that the city sends a man through a country road
in southern New Jersey to sell pianos in this beguiling manner to
people who cannot afford them? Those who bought them I know were all
in debt for other things bought on the instalment plan. It means there
is a necessity to sell this industrial product. It is the necessity of
a factory that has overtaken the normal demand for self-playing pianos
and must force the sale of its surplus. It is the necessity of all who
work in that factory and live thereby. It is the necessity of industry
in general, governed as it is by a principle it did not invent.

The principle is that the divisible product of the machine is cheap in
proportion to the quantity. Remember that principle. We shall meet it
again.

As with player-pianos and radio-sets in my country road, so with all
manner of artificial things, with the whole divisible product of the
machine, in every road, every street, every market of the world. How
to produce enough is no longer any problem at all. How to sell what
is increasingly produced—that is the problem. Evidence thereof is the
commonest thing we see. It is painted in the landscape. It illuminates
the cities at night. It is in our marginal vision when we read. There
is no lifting one’s eyes to heaven, no casting them down in shame, no
seeing whatever without seeing it.

Each day a forest is cut down and consumed for wood-pulp to make the
paper on which producers advertize their wares. The use of advertizing
is to stimulate in people a sense of wanting. Selling is a high
profession to which men are trained in special schools. To exchange
goods for money over a counter, to higgle with the individual
buyer—that is not selling. Clerks and peddlers do that. Selling is
to create new ways of wanting, new habits of comfort and luxury, new
customs of having. This is done by agitating the mass-imagination
with the suggestive power of advertizing. Business reserves its most
dazzling rewards for one who can think of a way to make thousands,
millions, whole races of people want that thing to-day which they knew
not the lack of yesterday.

Why is this so? Because there is never enough wanting.

And why is there never enough wanting? Because the divisible product of
the machine tends to increase faster than wanting.

What advertizing cannot accomplish governments may undertake. There are
backward, inert, idle races that do not want much. They are content
to do with little. It becomes therefore the diplomatic and military
business of the powerful industrial governments to change the ways of
such races. They must be brought forward, modernized, electrified,
taught how to want more. Why? In order that they shall be able to
consume their quota of the machine’s divisible product. Plenty shall be
put upon them.

There is no limit to that blessing. Those who have it are anxious to
share it, must share it in fact, in order to keep it for themselves,
under the principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to
the quantity produced. The more the cheaper; the fewer the dearer.

Are you beginning to suppose that man has found what he sought? Since
in this extraordinary manner he appears to have provided himself with
plenty, shall that dusty bundle of prayers be recalled or sent to the
furnace?

As to his prayers, they were never frank. Perhaps for that reason he
should wish he had them back. He prayed for plenty; what he secretly
associated with the thought of plenty was leisure—freedom from toil.
And once more he is disappointed, thwarted by his own inventions.
Plenty he has achieved. Toil he has not escaped.

The machine that was to have been a labour-saving device becomes an
engine of production that must be served. It is as if you could not
save labour at all—as if you could make it only more productive,
thereby achieving an abundance of things with no effect whatever upon
the necessity to perform monotonous labour. All this labour-saving
machinery we live with notwithstanding, never were people more
complaining of their tasks. That might mean only that they were
increasingly conscious of an abating evil; but there is no certainty
that the abatement even where it is noticeable is permanent. The signs
are otherwise.

In all material respects people are better off than ever before. Their
bodies are more comfortable, their minds are free from the terror
of hunger, they have much more to enjoy and consume and hope for,
because their labour is more richly rewarded in things. See the amazing
quantity and variety of things such as only the rich could once afford
now circulating at the base of the human pyramid. Not necessaries only.
Silks, watches, ornaments, shoes like those of queens and ladies,
plated ware, upholstered furniture, soft beds, besides things that were
formerly non-existent and therefore beyond the reach of kings, sultans
and nabobs, such as electric lights, plumbing, motor-cars. In the
United States a motor-car to every six persons! And still no sign that
the curve of human contentment is rising; no sign that the curse of
toil will ever be got rid of.

Instead of saving labour the machine has multiplied it. True, the hours
of industrial labour are fewer than they were, e.g. now eight where
they were ten and twelve a day; but this is merely to compare worse
with better where better is, and that is not everywhere. For a proper
contrast compare the industrial with the idyllic task. Even eight
hours of labour a day continuously performed by the industrial worker
represents a much greater sum of annual effort than his ancestor put
into the soil. Consider also how the machine, directly or indirectly,
has laid new work upon races hitherto naively existing in a state of
nature.

The riddle is that industrial civilization, having created to its
unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a
contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome
than ever. As toil it is more productive—there is more to consume. Life
has been expanded. It is safer. Physically it is inconceivably richer.
Was that the goal? What else is gained?

You would think that when man had found a way to provide himself with
artificial things in unlimited plenty and a way at the same time to
spread the food supply evenly over the face of the earth, the gift
of universal peace might follow. Never was the peace more frail; and
this, as we shall see—the frailty of the peace—is also a product of the
machine.

What force is this by fumbling found that man has put in motion? Its
pulsations he controls; its consequences so far have controlled him,
and modern life has become so involved in a mechanical spiral that we
cannot say for certain whether it is that we produce for the sake of
consumption or consume for the sake of production.




II

THE MACHINE AS IF


Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able
to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of
life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow. We know it to be
the exterior reality of our own ideas. Thus we are very familiar with
it, as with our arms and legs, and see it in much the same way—that is
to say, imperfectly and in some aspects not at all. Certainly it would
look very different if for a moment we could see it from an original
point of view with the eye of new wonder.

Fancy yourself a planetary tourist come visiting here, knowing
beforehand neither God nor man, unable therefore to distinguish
intuitively between their works.

Would you not think the machine that spins silk threads by the ton
from cellulose more wonderful than the silkworm similarly converting
the mulberry leaf in precious quantities, or a steel ship more amazing
than a whale? What of the mechanical beast with a colorless fluid in
its tail and a flame in its nose that runs sixty miles an hour without
weariness? Would it not seem superior in many ways to the horse that
goes forty miles in a day and falls down?

Suppose, moreover, that you know the tongue of men and are able to ask
them questions. You ask particularly about the automobile, which you
have mentally compared with the horse; whereupon they take you to the
factories in Detroit to see the automobile in process of becoming,
under conditions of mass-production, two or three taking life with a
snort every minute. In this factory, they tell you, they make only one
hundred a day, very fine ones; but in another they make five hundred,
and in another five thousand a day.

You ask them who makes the horse.

They do not know. They teach their children to say God makes it. The
horse is a natural thing.

Then the automobile is an unnatural thing?

They say no, smiling a little. Not an unnatural thing. The automobile
is a mechanical thing because they make it themselves.

You ask them why they say they make it.

At this they are distressed. There has been some slip of understanding
in the use of language. They explain it carefully. The horse is born.
There is no horse-factory. The automobile is made, as you have seen, in
factories.

Still it is not explained. You argue it with them. What is it they do
in the factory? They perform certain acts in relation to automobiles.
These, of course, are necessary, vital acts. If they were not
performed, automobiles could not be. And yet, how does this prove they
make automobiles? You ask them.

They ask you to say what else it could prove.

You may say it proves only that they are fathers of automobiles; and,
since they seem mystified greatly by this answer, you remind them that
in relation to their own children also they perform certain vital acts,
essential to beget them and without which children could not be, yet
they are never heard to say they make children. They say children are
born.

This has to be left as it is. Further explanations lead to worse
confusion.

You ask them certain other questions. How long have they been on the
earth—themselves? How long have they had machines? What did they do
before they had machines?

By their replies certain facts are established in your mind, and from
these facts you make certain deductions, all clear enough to you but
incomprehensible to them.

The facts are as follows: People have been here on the earth a very
long time, millions of years they think. Machines they have had
for only a very short time, or, as you now see them, for only two
generations. Before they had machines nearly everyone tilled the soil.
There was no industry save handicraft. In the space of one hundred
years these conditions have so remarkably changed that now only half
the people are required to till the soil; the other half live by
industry. This does not mean what you thought at first; it does not
mean that half the fields have been abandoned so that half the people
might go into industry. You are careful to get this straight, for
it is very important. On the contrary, since machines appeared whole
new continents of land have been opened to cultivation. This was
necessary in order to feed the industrial workers who live in cities,
far off from fields, and buy their food, whereas formerly everyone
generally speaking produced his own food, even the people of what once
were called cities going forth seasonally to till and reap the earth.
Actually, the number of people engaged in agriculture has greatly
increased; yet it is only half the population where before it was the
whole of it. What does this mean? It means that since the advent of
machines the human race has enormously increased in number; it has so
increased that the half of it which now is agricultural is greater
than the whole of it was before. The new, non-agricultural half is the
industrial part: it is the part that serves machines.

This fact is so astonishing that you wish to verify it. You ask them
what would happen if all the machines in the world should vanish
suddenly away. Their answer is that half the people living would perish
in a week. And that is what you thought.

What may you deduce from these facts?

First, you will be amused that people are so naïve as to think they
make machines. Then you may say there are two kinds of people here,
agricultural and industrial. The earth makes one kind; machines make
the other. And you will feel as sure of this as if you had proved it
to your senses when you have looked at a typical industrial city where
people live densely in compacted habitations with no visible errand on
earth but to run to and fro tending the machines that hum night and
day in the factories. Those tall, cylindrical, erupting forms called
smokestacks will appear to you as generative symbols. If they were not
there, neither would the people be there. Not only would the people
not be there. They would be nowhere. They could never have existed. If
the smokestacks disappeared, so would all these people, the industrial
part of the population, leaving only the agricultural part—the part
belonging to the soil—as it was before.

As a planetary tourist, you may be at least as certain these thoughts
are true as men are that they are untrue; and even if they were true
that would make no difference really. The problems are practical. We
must think of machines as machines act, logically.

One difficulty is that whereas the machine is automatically, unerringly
logical, and nothing else, man has only a little logic; he has,
besides, emotions, sentiments, instincts. In his unlogical character he
has often opposed himself to the machine, meaning to destroy it. At the
opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first railroad in
Great Britain and the first in the world, the anti-machine feeling of
British craftsmen was dramatically symbolized by a lone weaver seated
at a loom on a high hill. England was the industrial machine’s first
habitat on earth. There fanatical men led mobs against it.

Frail and clumsy as it was at first, its life was indestructible. And
now man would not dare destroy it if he could. His own life is bound
up with it. Steadily it has grown more powerful, more productive, more
ominous. It has powers of reproduction and variation which, if not
inherent, are yet as if governed by an active biological principle.
Machines produce machines. Besides those from which we get the
divisible product of artificial things, there are machines to make
machines, and both kinds—(both the machines that make machines and
those that transform raw materials into things of use and desire)—obey
some law of evolution.

Compare any kind of machine you may happen to think of with what its
ancestor was only twenty-five years ago. Its efficiency has doubled,
trebled; its shape has changed; and, as it is in the animal kingdom so
too with machines, suddenly a new species appears, a sport, a freak,
with no visible ancestor.

Man’s sense of material power within his environment has increased
proportionately. It is colossal. Benefits such as formerly he would
have thought beyond supernatural agency if he could have imagined
them at all he now confers upon himself. More without end presents
only technical difficulties. No physical circumstance forbids him.
Nevertheless the fact, and only the more strange it is, that for
reasons which he names economic or political he seems powerless to
inform the augmenting body of machine phenomena with a rational or
benign spirit.




III

THE LAW OF MACHINES


No longer do we speak of machines. They are too numerous and too
different. We speak of industrial equipment, which means machine-power
in general.

As you may know, the industrial equipment of the world is increasing by
terrific momentum. The machine is spreading over the face of the earth
like an idea new truth. And this is so notwithstanding the fact that
the industrial equipment already existing in the world is so great that
if for one year it were worked at ideal capacity the product could not
be sold for enough to pay the wages of labour, to say nothing of the
cost of material, overhead charges, or profit. Markets would be glutted
with goods. Producers would be ruined.

It follows that the pressing anxiety of industry is how to regulate and
limit production in order not to overwhelm its markets. Its chronic
nightmare is overproduction, meaning a quantity of divisible products
in excess of the immediate sum of effective desire. Hence combines,
pools, rings, cartels, committees, and associations of manufacturers,
which the courts are powerless to prevent even where they are forbidden
by law. These are a vital measure of mutual preservation. Yet they are
but protocols of truce. They very soon break down and have to be made
all over again.

Control of production, save here and there for a little while, is
a myth. It could be managed only in case there was a monopoly of
machine-power. Once there was. There is no longer, and never will
be again. Industrial production, taking it broadly, increases in an
uncontrollable manner.

The evidence is notorious, first in the efforts of national industry to
increase the sale of goods in its own country, and then in the strife
among industrial nations for access to foreign markets.

A steam calliope jamming its way through the crowded street of New York
City to advertize a new model of a popular motor-car at a reduced price
is a spectacle to bear reflection. It is a symptom of saturation in
the home market. When Henry Ford was making only a thousand cars a day,
he did not advertize. There was a ready cash-demand for the whole of
his product. When his output passed five thousand cars a day, he began
to advertize on billboards and to sell on the instalment plan.

As the natural cash-demand for a thing is overtaken, it begins to be
pressed for sale on credit. At this point finance steps in. Credit
companies with millions of capital are formed expressly for the purpose
of lending buyers the money with which to buy. Desire shall be made
effective. Selling on credit in this manner has latterly and suddenly
assumed such proportions as to represent in the affair of business a
new pattern. Some old-fashioned minds have been debating it as an evil.
They attack it on the ground that it betrays the virtue of thrift. But
thrift has ceased to be a virtue. To consume—to consume more and more
progressively—to be able to say in the evening “I have consumed more
to-day than I consumed yesterday”, this now is a duty the individual
owes to industrial society.

For see what would happen if people all over the world should return of
a sudden to the former ways of thrift—to the habit of doing without?
There would be depression in industry. Machines would stop. Millions
who tend them would be disemployed. Nothing would be safe, not even
your own money, for there would be panic on the exchange and trouble at
the bank.

One is not speaking of the United States alone. The multiplication of
things is greater here than anywhere else because we make machines
faster and work them harder; but you will find the same necessity
acting also in France, the very cradle of thrift, where now cheap
motors are sold on credit: anyone who will buy may borrow the money to
buy with. Why is this in France? To stimulate the motor habit? To serve
a private profit-motive? The habit will follow; the profit may. But
there is another reason, touching foreign trade, which we are coming to
elucidate.

In order to sell abroad, an industrial nation must be able to produce
cheaply. To produce cheaply, it must produce in large quantities by
a multiple method called mass-production. And you can safely manage
this mass-production only provided you have a fairly large and constant
base of domestic demand. So the sale of French motor-cars in France,
though it be on credit, must be large enough to support the method
of mass-production, for otherwise France would be unable to meet the
competition of Ford, who now exports motor-cars to Europe—even builds
them there. Then the British manufacturers, to meet the competition of
both France and Ford, also undertake against their genius to produce
motor-cars by the quantity method, and, having achieved the method,
their next dilemma is what to do with the product. They advertize at
home to create a popular motor-car habit and at the same time press
their cars for sale in foreign markets, even in France and Germany, as
these countries press theirs for sale in Great Britain.

Competition among industrial nations to exploit one another’s internal
markets is but one profile of all that dangerous activity taking place
in the name of foreign trade. The industrial powers holding their feet
in China’s doorway and France fighting the native in Morocco are other
aspects of the same thing. China so long as possible shall be an open
market for the surplus product of western machines; there shall be more
wanting in Morocco.

The industrial equipment of the world meanwhile goes on increasing,
though it is already so great that its capacity cannot be fully
utilized. In the United States alone there is probably enough surplus
machine-capacity to satisfy the whole demand of Great Britain’s
foreign customers for staple merchandise, such as textiles, iron and
steel manufacturers, rubber tires, motor-cars, electrical apparatus,
machinery, glass, garments, shoes, cutlery, and so on. Great Britain
not only has a surplus of machine-power; she has besides an excess of
man-power represented by say one and one-quarter millions unemployed.
She could easily take on the entire foreign trade of France; but in
France also there is a surplus of machine-power. Both Great Britain
and France dread the competition of Germany, whose production of goods
with her existing equipment could be increased, under incentive, nobody
knows how much.

The exterior facts do not make sense. They represent industry to be
witless, in that, while dreading surplus as the evil that devoureth
profit, it is at the same time bent to push supply to a point beyond
saturation. Industry does not do this. Necessity does it. There is an
interior fact. The tendency of the divisible product of machines to
exceed the sum of effective desire is the last thing that industry
wishes for. It is owing to a principle hitherto mentioned, namely, the
principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to the quantity
produced. Which now is to be explained.

It is the economic function of the machine to cheapen production. There
is otherwise no point to it. But, if we say things are more cheaply
made by machine than by hand, we speak very loosely. What we mean is
that a quantity of things is more cheaply made by machine than by hand.

For example, the cost of a single yard of cloth produced by machine is
hundreds of times greater than the cost of a single yard of it produced
by hand. Obviously, the power-loom is a very costly piece of machinery
to build, and so is the engine that drives it. If you produced on
a power-loom only the amount of cloth a weaver could make by hand,
nobody could afford to buy it. But when you produce on the power-loom a
quantity of cloth one hundred times greater than a weaver can make by
hand, then, of course it is much cheaper. And the more you produce the
cheaper it is. So with anything. The greater the quantity, the lower
the cost. Hence the terms quantity, or mass-production, meaning, first,
to standardize the product, as to make it all black, all one texture,
all one width or shape, and then to bring a chain of machine-power
continuously to bear upon its multiple production.

Observe the working of this principle. Take watches. At one time they
were made by hand, slowly, laboriously, in stances being not uncommon
of a craftsman spending half his lifetime to make a very fine one.
Under these conditions watches are rare and costly. Only the very
rich can buy them. Suddenly they began to be made by machines. A very
good watch can be made for fifty dollars. There are a million people
who want watches at that price. This is an original demand, a kind of
vacuum, represented by a million people who have never had watches
and now for the first time may possess them. Watches cannot be made
fast enough to meet this want. The industry, for that reason, expands
very fast. Then all at once the demand is satisfied. The million have
watches. The vacuum has been filled. Hereafter the demand will tend
to be static: it will increase slowly as the population increases or
as people in general grow richer, little by little. The watch-making
industry, therefore, is depressed. It has to limit production. Now
comes someone with the idea that by carrying the machine method further
a watch can be made for ten dollars. There are twenty million people
who can afford to buy watches at that price. The ten-dollar watch
appears. The demand again is like a vacuum, twenty times greater than
the first. For a while ten-dollar watches cannot be made fast enough.
The makers of fifty-dollar watches throw away their old machines,
install new ones, increase their production, reduce their costs,
and not only make what was a fifty dollar watch for twenty-five but
contribute also, in a competitive manner, to the supply of ten-dollar
watches. Suddenly what happened before happens again. The twenty
million have watches. The vacuum is filled. Then someone says: “But
there are one hundred million who would buy watches at two dollars”.
So the process is repeated, still lower in the pyramid. The two-dollar
watch is not a fine watch, but it will keep time; and as you would
know, with the improvement that has taken place in machine practice the
cost of making any kind of watch, even the finest, has been greatly
reduced. A watch ceases to be a luxury or a token of caste. It is a
necessary part of man’s personal equipment, all the way down to the
base of the pyramid.

There you have the cycle. The use of the machine is to cheapen the
cost of production. The sign is quantity. When the supply at a given
price has overtaken the effective demand you have either to idle your
machinery, in which case your cost of production will rise, or open a
wider demand at a lower price. To lower the price and keep a profit you
have to cheapen the cost of production still more. This you can do only
by increasing the quantity, which again overtakes the demand, creating
again the same necessity to cheapen the cost by increasing the quantity
in order to be able to make a lower price for greater demand. Thus
supply pursues demand, downward through the social structure.

There is at last a base to the pyramid—its very widest point. When that
is reached—what? Well, then you need bazaars in a foreign sun, heathen
races of your own to train up in the way of wanting the products of
your machines, new worlds of demand. You turn to foreign trade. And
if you are an aggressive country that has come late to this business,
as Germany was, and find that most of the promising heathen races are
already adopted and that all the best bazaar-sites are taken, you may
easily work yourself into a panic of fear and become a menace to the
peace.




IV

WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE


What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the
surplus product of your machines? That industry will be unable to make
a profit?

No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into
existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born—at
least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are
gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their
machines artificial things that are exchanged for food. It is usually
the case, too, that they have to buy the raw materials on which
their machines act, as Great Britain buys raw cotton from the United
States and Egypt, and wool from Australia, to feed her great textile
industries; having manufactured this material, she sends it forth again
as cloth, to be exchanged for wheat in Canada or beef in South America.

As you begin with machines your population divides. It becomes part
rural and part industrial, and so long as the rural part of it
can feed the industrial part there is no trouble. But a time soon
comes when the need of the industrial workers for sustenance is
greater than the native production of food. This time inevitably
comes because the machines call up people so rapidly. Then you
have to look abroad for food. That means you have to go into other
countries—peasant-countries—where there is a surplus of meat and grain,
and exchange there your manufactured goods for food. And you begin to
think and speak of your economic necessity.

There is no such necessity really. To assert it is to say a
preposterous thing, namely, that when your industrial population has
increased beyond the native food-supply, to a point at which you are
out of balance, you are obliged to import food so that your industrial
population may continue to increase and your cities to grow and your
necessity to become greater and greater in an endless spiral.

It cannot be endless. One of two things will determine the sequel.
Either presently the resources of those peasant-nations that produce a
surplus of food will be exhausted or they will in time think to become
industrial nations, too, and eat their own surplus. There is no lucid
reason why a population should not disperse as it begins to exceed the
native food-supply—that is to say, migrate to the sources of food.

In this new political dogma of an absolute economic necessity to
import food and raw materials in exchange for manufactures the ancient
myth-wish reappears. The machine does not abolish the curse of toil. It
was not the escape men sought. But it does create a preferred task.

Traditionally, the peasant-task has been despised: it bore the curse
direct. And, when the machine made it possible for many to embrace
instead what was deemed the lesser affliction of industrial labour
gregariously performed in cities, the impulse thereto was headlong.

Hence the rise of that angular phenomenon called the industrial
nation—a nation able to buy its food, therefore delivered from the fate
of peasantry and for that reason entitled to consider itself of higher
caste than agricultural nations.

Hence the tumescent city as one of the most alarming appearances of
our time.

Hence, also, that idea of economic necessity, which, getting control
of the political mind of Europe, inevitably involved the world in a
machine-war. What made that war so terrifying, so destructive, so
extensive, was the power of the machine—an inconceivable power except
as it disclosed itself from day to day. No one beholding the event from
a firmamental point of view could have supposed it was a war between
races of men. Man in contrast with the machines he served was pitifully
insignificant.

In Germany the task of bending the country’s industrial equipment to
the uses of war was assigned to a man who possessed one of the very
brilliant Jewish minds in the world. In him were combined the three
high characteristics of his race, which are loyalty, intellectual
realism, and dreaming imagination. His practical job was more complex
than that of the Chief of Staff. Yet his mind was not wholly occupied
with this care. His critical faculties and his imagination were always
free.

Reflecting on the economic meaning of the war, he was led to examine
the essential character of international trade, and so perceived
clearly how wasteful, preposterous, and dangerous a great deal of it
was—Germany pressing the surplus product of her machines for sale in
Great Britain, the British doing likewise in Germany, both competing
at home and abroad with the industrial surplus of the United States,
ships passing on the seas with cargoes of similar goods endlessly
duplicated, and all the machine-craft nations seeking peasant-nations
to be exploited for food in exchange for manufactures. It was true in
this way the world had been growing richer in things, and yet the cost
was frightful. The resort to force was a confession that international
trade was bankrupt in reason and understanding.

He was competent to reach a conclusion standing himself at the head of
one of Europe’s great industries. And he made a dream. It was that,
when the war had come to an end and people were themselves again, they
would see the vital importance to civilization of dividing among them
the work of the world agreeably to their special aptitudes and the
facts of environment—those to produce a surplus of whatever it was
they had a genius for making and the materials ready; these others
another kind of thing in which their skill and situation gave them an
advantage; and so on through the whole series of natural and artificial
things with which human wants are satisfied. Thus duplication and
strife would be eliminated. Not only would there be enough of
everything: from the elimination of senseless waste in private and
public war there would be a saving of power and capital sufficient to
water all the deserts of the earth and recreate man’s vistas here.

As a dream, it was most alluring. As a plan it was worthless, for it
contained two fatal assumptions, namely, that you could always find a
Solomon to administer it and that people would submit to the benevolent
tyranny of his wisdom. He himself was destined by his end to illustrate
how people really behave. Shortly after the close of the war he was
murdered in the name of fanatic nationalism.

It was a sign.

The war released a flood of repressed passions in nationalism.
Great and small groups of submerged people asserted rights of
self-determination and clothed themselves with frontiers and
nationhood. Nearly all of these, together also with old countries
whose character until then had been agricultural, were concurrently
seized with the thought of economic independence—that is to say, with
the thought of having machines and industries of their own, for they
had seen a new thing. Industrial nations and none other were powerful
in the world. Nations without machines were helpless, subject, in fact,
to those that had them.

Enormously stimulated in its function of reproduction by the onset of
this human idea, the machine broke bounds. No one now has any control
of it.

Only a few years ago Great Britain alone controlled it. She had a
monopoly of its power and use by right of having been the first to
develop it, and she was for a while the only nation having a large
surplus of manufactures to sell in foreign countries. Then came
Germany, France, and Belgium. Of these Germany was Great Britain’s most
aggressive rival, making nearly all of the same things and most of them
cheaper. After 1870 the United States developed industry very fast
but for twenty years more her exports were principally agricultural
because she herself consumed the entire product of her machines,
besides importing manufactured goods from Europe in exchange for meat
and grain and raw cotton. It was not until about 1890 that American
machine-products began to invade the markets of the world in a large
way. And at about the same time Japan appeared as an industrial nation,
having in a few years equipped herself with Western machines and
trained her imitative hand to mind them.

Such, roughly, was the economic state of the world at the outbreak of
the War. The powerfully industrialized nations were four in Europe,
counting little Belgium; one in the West; and one in the East—six
altogether, representing hardly more than one-fifth of the world’s
total population.

If we regard only the countries where the industrial population had so
outrun the native food-supply that the sale of manufactures in foreign
lands to pay for food had either become, or was believed to be, a vital
transaction, then we count out the United States. This country is still
self-nourished. That leaves only five, and the competition among these
five for markets, for colonies, and heathen tribes to be instructed
in wanting, for private pathways by land and sea to the sources of
food, for access to the raw materials required by their machines, was
already desperate and dangerous. Between two of them it was deadly.

Even then it was so. Since then the machine has multiplied tremendously
where its habitat was and has gone migrating, besides, all over the
earth.

In those six countries that were already intensively industrialized
what appears? Their machine equipment has greatly increased. During the
War it increased for obvious reasons. God was on the side of the most
machines. Since the War it has continued to increase for other reasons.
One reason was peculiar to Germany. There the building of furnaces,
factories, and machine-works by a dynastic method, as the pyramids were
built, without credit or gold, simply by command of the industrialists
over labour and material, was a way of baffling the Allied creditors.
Another reason was peculiar to France. Restoring the industries of the
devastated regions meant building them a second time, since they had
been already once reproduced elsewhere in France during the War. But
the reason over all lay in that fixed idea of economic necessity, not
changed in the least by anything that had happened, only now more
desperate than ever, owing both to the intensified competition of the
older countries among themselves and to the spread of the machine into
other countries.

How the competition among themselves has been intensified may
be illustrated in the case of textiles as between Great Britain
and France. Before the War both imported raw cotton and exported
fabrications of cotton; but, whereas Great Britain exported principally
the cotton cloth of universal commerce, France exported special
products representing her genius for style and artistry. Now, however,
having made large additions to her general textile equipment, France
feels obliged to compete directly with Great Britain in cotton-cloth of
common commerce. To do this she must extend her foreign trade parallel
to Great Britain’s and divide the markets hitherto dominated by the
British. As with cotton-cloth, so with other manufactures, particularly
those of iron and steel, wherein France proposes to compete and is
equipped to compete with both Germany and Great Britain as never
before. Each step she takes in this direction augments her economic
necessity, for now almost the last thing you would expect to see in
France is taking place. The native population as a whole is static, but
its character is changing. The industrial part of it is growing; the
agricultural part is waning. People are deserting the fields to embrace
industrial life—to mind machines. In every city there is a housing
problem; public credit is employed to build small dwellings for the
wage-earners; yet in the country, two hours from Paris, you will see
houses empty and going to ruin, whole rural villages in the way to be
abandoned, vineyards perishing for want of care, fields going to grass
instead of grain. Their industrial power is rising; their agricultural
power is falling. Before the War they were, or might have been,
self-nourishing on their own soil like the people of the United States.
That precious security they cast away. In place of it they take on the
anxieties of empire. They must impose upon Morocco the blessings of
European civilization in order to have an outlet there for the surplus
of their machines.

Dramatic are the migrations of the machine and not unlike the
migrations of natural species, men and beasts, in search of food.
The machine seeks either cheaper raw material or people to mind its
processes.

There is Italy, with a population greater than that of France, growing
half-a-million a year. It is the most fecund race in Europe. Suddenly
the Italians wake up and are resolved upon an industrial career.
Before the War this thought was dim among them. In the crisis it took
shape. Since the War it has become an enthusiasm, and now smoke-towers
are rising very fast. Definitely they have turned their minds from
agriculture to industry, not merely in order that they may become
self-supplied with manufactures instead of buying them from other
countries with lemons and olive oil, but in order to grow rich and
powerful in foreign trade. They propose hereafter and progressively to
exchange machine-wares for food. Italy will be a formidable rival for
Great Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium, who are already beginning
to feel it.

Poland perceives her destiny to be industrial: she has already a large
surplus of manufactured goods to sell. Likewise Czechoslovakia.
These are instances of new countries. Spain and Greece are importing
machinery, and Spain is so anxious to develop industry that she
considers paying a bounty out of the public treasury on exports of
textiles. India, whose historic economic function had been to send
raw cotton to Great Britain and buy cotton cloth from Manchester,
now consumes half her own raw cotton in her native mills; she not
only satisfies three-quarters of her own want for cotton cloth but
is beginning actually to export that commodity, even to the United
States. This will seem very wasteful, indeed, when you pause to set
it against the historical background of the United States. For a long
time we exported raw cotton and imported cotton cloth. That was to have
been the pattern of our economic life as a British colony; we were to
produce only raw materials, ship them to Great Britain and buy from
her the surplus of her machines. We were forbidden, in fact, to weave
cloth for sale or to have iron mills. Now we are an industrial nation;
we consume more and more of our own raw cotton and export enormous
quantities of cotton cloth. Ultimately we shall have no raw cotton at
all to sell; our mills will require the whole of our annual crop; we
shall have nothing but cotton cloth to sell. To whom shall we sell it?
Not to the Indians; they wish to make their own. Probably not to the
Egyptians. The Japanese manufacturers of cotton goods have recently
invaded the Egyptian market that was formerly Great Britain’s own, and
are underselling the British there. You would think China would be
Japan’s natural outlet for cotton goods. So it is. The difficulty is
that Japan must be looking further because China is beginning to supply
herself.

The Chinese instance is poignant. A few years ago—until the War, in
fact—China exported food and raw materials and imported manufactured
goods—nothing else to speak of either way. This was as the Western
industrial nations wished it to be. So anxious were they to have it
so that they bound China by treaty not to put tariff barriers against
the goods they wished to sell in the Chinese markets, except by mutual
consent—that is to say, with their consent.

The War suspended this thraldom. The Chinese imported machines and
began to make their own things, especially cloth. Power-looms appeared
as by magic. And after the War, they continued to appear. During
three years after the War the number trebled, and in 1922, the table
of Chinese imports and exports presented a strange face. Among her
imports were machines and machine-parts; also semimanufactured goods to
be finished in Chinese factories. And one-fifth of her total exports
consisted of manufactured goods. China an exporter of machine products!

And so up and down the earth. In Brazil, where there was hardly any
visible production of artificial things before 1914, the whole outlook
has changed. That country is now able from her own machines to meet
the whole of her want for matches, textiles, footgear, wallpaper,
phonograph-discs, hardware, hats, and playing cards, and will soon be
self-supplied with practically everything she needs.

The Colonial System that was to have answered forever Great Britain’s
need for raw materials and food in exchange for machine-products will
not hold in that character. In India the revolt is political; elsewhere
it is peaceably economic. Canada is already powerfully machined; she
is exporting motor-cars. Australia, going in the same direction,
is beginning to export shoes. The Union of South Africa takes steps
to subsidize local industry. Ireland no sooner gains control of her
economic life than she puts a tariff-wall around herself to limit the
sale of foreign goods, meaning British goods as well, thinking thereby
to foster infant industries.

Well, everyone now is doing that. The old industrial countries, too,
are protecting themselves against one another’s goods, the last to
come to it being Great Britain herself. For more than half-a-century
she was the protagonist of free trade, abhoring tariffs, because she
was paramount in machine-craft and could beat her rivals both in their
own markets and in her own. That advantage having departed from her,
she is driven to tariff-protection: she puts up barriers against other
people’s goods if they are too cheap, because they are too cheap, and
calls it Safeguarding Home Industries.




V

THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS


What does it mean? Can there be too many desirable and useful things?
Can things be too cheap? You would say No. Surely, so long as any human
want remains unsatisfied, things cannot be either too plentiful or too
cheap? But there is another dimension.

Everything that is not still or dead must exist in a state of rhythmic
tension. It is true of the plant, it is true of the animal, it is true
of each race of plants and each race of animals, it is true of the
kingdom of plants against the kingdom of animals. It is true of people,
as individuals, as races, as a species. And it is true, also, of the
machine.

In the living organism growth of tissue at a normal rate consonant
with the rhythm is vital. A wild growth of that same tissue will be
fatal. In the aggregate of life there is equilibrium among millions
of different forms, each form striving but never succeeding and is
possessing every other form and taking the world. The oyster, if
unhindered, would displace every other living thing on the earth in
maybe ten generations, and then, of course, perish for want of space in
which to contain itself. What hinders the oyster and at the same time
preserves it is that principle of tension in nature, without which it
would be impossible for innumerable forms and varieties of life, the
relations of which to one another are reciprocal, neutral, hostile,
anonymous, to exist together all in one great taut pattern.

Now regard the third kingdom, artificial, implanted with mechanical
beasts, that contains civilization. Life in this environment is
economic. Its characteristic behaviour is a progressive differentiation
of labour. Tasks are divided and subdivided until, at length, there are
countless separate groups of people, each one performing a singular
function to which it is trained and tending to become unable to perform
any other. The subdivisions are beyond enumeration. They multiply so
fast that the book of the census cannot keep up with them.

The shoe-industry, for example, does not consist in shoemakers. You
might search it in vain for a shoemaker—that is, one who should know
how to raise a pair of shoes from flat leather. In the shoe factory the
material passes through a train of machines. Each machine is minded by
an operative who performs one little specialized part of the work in
endless repetition. The product is shoes by thousands of gross.

But who determines what kinds of shoe and how many shoes shall be made?
What becomes of them when they are made? Who knows they can be sold?
What if they are not saleable?

If you address these questions to one of the operatives minding a
machine you will find him dumb. He knows only his own function.

It is very complicated. There are two industries here. One is the
shoe-industry; the other is the shoe-machine industry. One could not
exist without the other, yet they are separate and very unlike. The
shoe-industry itself, that has dispensed with shoemakers, will have
a finance department, an economic department, a buying department, a
department of production science, a style and designing department, a
chemical department, a department of distribution, a sales department,
an advertizing department, and others we do not think of. It is all
about shoes. These are all shoe people. They agglomerate in shoe towns.
They think shoes. The world is a foot. The more it can be shod the
better. They live by shoes.

But to do this they must be able to exchange shoes for the things
they want. Shoes, therefore, must have a relation of value to every
other thing in the economic world. It follows that, in order to have
this exchange-value, shoes must have also a relation of quantity to
all other things. If for any reason the production of shoes becomes
suddenly abnormal that exchange-value is lost. It is like one kind
of tissue growing wild in the organism. Shoes are necessary; but an
excessive quantity cannot be absorbed by the economic body. There will
be in that case a morbid pathology in the shoe-industry, unemployment
in the shoe town, despair among the shoe people, many of whom have
never learned to do anything else. Left to themselves, without shoes to
make, they might even starve.

It may be in the same way a soap town, a textile town, a garment town,
an iron town, a motor town like Detroit, a rubber-tire town like Akron,
a furniture town like Grand Rapids. It may be all of these—that is to
say, industry as a whole, increasing its output at an abnormal rate. As
you project the thought you begin to see, first, the vital importance
of rhythm, equilibrium, tension, in the realm of industry, and then the
inverse meaning of a sudden competitive increase in the machine-power
of the world.

Ask the Italians what it means. They are an old people coming to
it with a fresh mind. The conversation that follows took place in
February, 1925. Talking are, on one side, the Italian Minister of
Finance, and on the other, a visiting journalist:

“The industrial idea is new in Italy. It is since the War. You had a
clean slate. You could have done anything you had the imagination to
do. First you might have made a scientific survey of Italy’s latent
genius and resources, and then you might have thought of producing
goods that should be uniquely Italian and therefore non-competitive.
But what have you done? You have gone in for the great staples of
world commerce, such as cotton and woollen textiles, artificial silk,
and motor-cars. Don’t you see that in doing this you take on the
competition of Great Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, the United
States?”

“Yes, we see that.”

“Those countries have the field and the experience and better access
than Italy to sources of raw material.”

“That we know, also.”

“Then how can you hope successfully to compete with them? What have you
that they have not? What advantage against theirs?”

“One you haven’t thought of.”

“What is it?”

“A man can live on less in Italy than anywhere else. We don’t know why
that is. It may be the way the sun shines on him. But it is a fact.
That is our advantage. With that we shall succeed.”

“Do you realize what that means? You are saying that Italy proposes to
found an industrial career on the lowest terms of human existence. Your
people will not accept it.”

“But they will.”

“How do you know they will?”

“Because they will do anything sooner than starve.”

What a finish for the morning hope of the machine-age!—if it were.
Monotonous tending of the machine on the lowest standard of living;
alternative, starvation.

Suppose it were true. Suppose the Italian people did accept the terms
and acquired the knack and skill. Then Italian manufactures, being
cheaper than any other, would sweep the markets of the world. The older
industrial nations—Great Britain, Germany, France, the United States,
_et al._—could protect their domestic markets by tariff-barriers,
but they would find themselves losing their foreign markets to the
Italians. For such industrial countries as are obliged to exchange a
machine-surplus abroad for food the loss of foreign markets would be
fatal. They would have to meet the Italian competition. They would
have to say, as the Italians now are saying: “It is that or starve.”
They would have to let down the standard of living to meet Italy’s
wage-cost. This would oblige Italy to make her standard lower still,
and thus, in a cycle, until all of them were sunk in misery.

And this is by no means an impossible progression of events. It has
once taken place on a lesser scale. Beginning about 1870, there was
a sudden and uncontrollable increase in the output of industry from
two principal causes. One was the rapid rise of competitive industry
in Germany and the United States; the other—much more potent—was the
discovery of a new and cheaper way of making steel. This one discovery
transformed the aspect of industry by increasing its potential power as
much, perhaps, as one-hundred fold. Until then people spoke of the iron
age; after that it was the steel age. For a quarter of a century prices
fell continuously, while solemn economic bodies sat pondering the
phenomenon. In that time all the capital employed in industry was lost
at least once, probably twice or three times. The producer’s only hope
was to improve his machines and increase production, for as he did that
his cost per unit fell and for a little while he could undersell his
competitor. In methods of production and in the efficiency of machines
there was necessarily amazing progress; nevertheless, when all other
means of reducing costs had failed, it had to be taken out of labour.
In the United States it was not so bad because here the domestic
demand for manufactures was unlimited, and a tariff-wall protected
industry from foreign competition. In Germany it was very bad.

Germany then was where Italy now is. Her advantage was that the
German people would work harder and longer for less money than the
British. The competition was between these two. The British Government,
disturbed by her new rival’s success in foreign trade, made a study of
labour conditions in Germany. It found Sunday labour very prevalent in
the factories. “Only the hours of divine service are excluded”, said a
report from Saxony.

Commenting, _The_ (London) _Economist_ said: “The question of Sunday
labour is one of considerable interest for England, for it is
unquestionable that among the causes of Germany’s ability to compete
with England as a mercantile and industrial country the fact that here
more hours are worked for less money is not the least important. The
prohibition of Sunday labour would, of course, mean increased cost of
production, and every increase in the cost of production will render it
more difficult for Germany to outrival older manufacturing countries
in the markets of the world.”

What might have happened does not detain us. What did happen was very
fortunate.

First, the food-supply from free virgin land in North and South
America increased at the same time in a prodigious manner, so that,
notwithstanding the wild energy of the machine, the equilibrium between
agriculture and industry was fairly well maintained.

Second, there was still room in the world for colonial development on
a vast scale. This occurred, and the outlets thereby created for the
surplus product of machines were most timely.

Third—and this is very important—finance, to save itself from deluge,
got control of industry. It was unable to buy industry out. All the
banks in the world had not money enough to do that. This apparently
insuperable difficulty it solved in a simple manner. It formed industry
by groups into great joint-stock corporations and sold the stock to
the public. And, although generally finance did not keep control
in a literal sense, it did so centre it as to make the management
responsive thereafter to financial counsel. The classic instance in the
United States was the formation of the Steel Trust, which was in very
earnest a measure of desperation. The steel-making machine had become a
demon whose pastime was panic. By this feat of finance, which occurred
in all industrial countries, a new rhythm was established. It was most
imperfect: absolute control of production was impossible. But panics
from overproduction were thereafter episodic, not continuous, and this
was a great improvement.

And now a second time the machine has got away. But how much more
powerful it is and widely planted than before. The industrial capacity
of the United States alone is greater than that of all Europe
twenty-five years ago. There are no more such virgin continents as
North and South America to be exploited for food; and, besides,
countries that were then content to play an agricultural part,
exchanging meat and grain and raw materials for machine-made wares,
now are resolved to have industries of their own—nay! more, to have an
industrial surplus for sale abroad, engaging in that game themselves.
Colonies are no longer docile. And as to finance, there is little
probability that it will be able again to lay its hand upon the
throttle. There are several reasons why.

The significance of industry has changed. Formerly it was a private
affair in which the State was but dimly concerned, and so concerned
only in a social sense, whereas now the idea of industry is basically
political. It associates with thoughts of security independence in
all circumstances, national welfare, power, and grandeur. A factory
is like a ship to be privately enjoyed in time of peace, subject to
mobilization for war. The War did that. Great Britain now subsidizes
so-called key-industries as before she subsidized ships under the eye
of the Admiralty if they were so built as to be easily converted into
cruisers. All this is beyond the control of finance.

For another reason, there are signs that industry in the future is more
likely to command finance than finance is to dominate industry.

By finance it shall be understood that we mean organized influence—in
short, banking. Its occult authority has been seriously impaired. The
high day of its priestcraft is gone.

Formerly it was consulted in war. You could not manage a war without a
gold-chest: it was the banker who said whether that could be filled or
not. Now one of the first steps you take in case of war is to suspend
the bank, declare a moratorium, and print paper money to pass from hand
to hand.

When the World-War started it was the opinion of finance that it could
not last above ninety days: it could not be financed beyond that limit.
It lasted four years and did not stop then for want of money.

After the War international finance was morally powerless to prevent
the colossal mark swindle, Germany printing and selling all over the
earth billions of paper marks that were to be flatly repudiated. Nor
was it able to visit the slightest penalty upon the authors of this
financial enormity, for immediately afterwards it was obliged, on
political grounds, to float a large gold loan for Germany and thereby
restore her to solvency and credit. In Germany finance was unable
to prevent the industrial dynasts from appropriating to themselves
all the middle-class wealth that was invested in bonds, mortgages,
annuities, and savings banks: they simply borrowed it and then paid it
back in worthless paper money.

It is very significant this humiliation of finance. In situations where
the political will is dominant and in those where economic forces act
alone the omens are the same. Henry Ford is the extraordinary instance
of an industrialist who proceeds without benefit of finance. He creates
his capital as he goes along; what he does not create he commands. He
does not borrow.




VI

IN PERIL OF TRADE


So now what will happen? From the excessive power already existing
to produce industrial commodities, from the continued increase of
that power nevertheless for political and national reasons, from the
raising of trade-barriers by one nation against another because every
one fears the effect upon its own industries of receiving cheap goods
from another, from this running of people out of the fields to tend
more machines, from the amazing growth of urban tissue in the economic
body—from all of this what follows?

The Italians suggest a bitter competition in terms of living, those
to survive who will accept most patiently and at the lowest wage the
drudgery of minding machines. That might go rather far; ultimately it
comes to absurdity. To whom at last should they sell their goods? Not
to the impoverished workers of other industrial countries, defeated
in the struggle. To whom else? To the agricultural countries? But
these, for the reasons we have seen, are tending as such to disappear.
They are buying machines. Italy brings nothing to the solution. She is
merely coming tardily to do what others have done to excess.

A brilliant Belgian economist suggests that only the most efficient
equipment will survive, and only enough of that to satisfy the natural
demand for goods. All the rest must be abandoned because there will
be no profit in working it. Well, it remains to be seen if people
will abandon their machines without a struggle, purely for rational
reasons. Much more is it likely that the higher cost of working the
less efficient equipment will be compensated by a lower wage-rate,
unemployment being the workers’ alternative. Moreover, if all the
inefficient and unnecessary machines were scrapped that would mean only
postponement of the sequel. The competition would begin all over again.

There are those who suggest that we are facing toward the mercantile
system of the Middle Ages, when it was the custom for each nation
jealously to protect its home-market from the competitive handicrafts
of other nations, and to prohibit or punitively tax the exportation
of raw material to rival countries. So we are. To say it is merely to
indicate the rock upon which, if nothing happens, the ship of trade is
bound to wreck herself.

A growing light on the actions of trade as it is organized by the
industrial powers now impels nations hitherto agricultural to found
industries of their own. As producers of foodstuffs and raw materials
to be exchanged for machine-products they came to have a sense of
being exploited. In academic theory this was an exchange by which the
industrial nation satisfied its food wants and the agricultural nation
its industrial wants, to mutual advantage. But how came the industrial
nation also to acquire wealth by the transaction? Performing the
preferred industrial task, it got not only its food but a profit over.
What else could it mean but that after a series of years the industrial
nation should come to have large interest-bearing investments in the
agricultural country, owning its railroads, tramways, water works, and
banks? What else could it mean but that the richest country in foreign
investments was the one that had been for the longest time engaged in
exchanging the surplus product of its machines for the food and raw
materials of other countries? How was it that those other countries,
after having served her for many years with food and raw materials,
invariably owed her a great deal of money? Or, if you approach it
from the other point of view, you find in the economic literature of
industrial nations a certain finished doctrine, which is that the
exchange of manufactured goods for food and raw materials is a business
that pays. It is not primarily a vital transaction. It becomes vital
by extension—that is to say, when in the course of time the industrial
population has increased beyond the native food supply. But in the
beginning the motive is gain. Nakedly, it is an exchange of skilled
labour for unskilled labour, to the enrichment of the former; it is a
division of labour among nations on a kind of caste plan.

There is much to be said for it. In no other way could civilization
have been spread so fast; by no other method could the world have
become so rich in a few years. There was much to be said, also, for
piracy. It diffused, manners, customs, and wealth; it made peoples
acquainted with one another; it made a flat world round and laid the
foundations of modern commerce. In the modern case all difficulty
begins when the peoples to whom the less profitable tasks have been
allotted become intelligently dissatisfied and resolve to change their
status, as the American colonists did, as the Japanese did, as now all
lusty nations are doing, last of all the Chinese.

Modern trade evolved from piracy. There was a time when all transfer of
goods between nations was by joyous might. It is pleasant to believe
that the cause of the decline of piracy was a rise in the moral sense
of mankind. It is more likely to have been the other way—that as piracy
declined for rational reasons rules to govern commercial conduct became
necessary. To enforce the rules became everyone’s duty. To break them
was punishable. From this would germinate a moral sense. Piracy was
bound to fail. On a large scale, continuous and competitive, it simply
was not feasible. Competition ruined it.

There was a marginal time in which one was either pirate or trader,
agreeably to circumstance. The early Greek in his dangerous ship never
knew which he was; nor did anyone else. He took when the taking was
good; when it was not, he bartered. The Romans finally abolished piracy
in the Mediterranean, but on the high seas it was the great romantic
enterprize down to a very recent time. Some of its heroes are venerated
as daring navigators, pathbreakers of empire. It takes some effort to
remember that trees are still standing that were already old when the
world was a place where finding was keeping. If what you found was in
the possession of savages or heathens, you exchanged for it the hope of
civilization, maybe a few glass beads. Toward the end, this wonderful
business began to be hedged about with restrictions. You had to be
careful not to take anything forcibly from people who had treaties of
amity with your own country, for if you did they made trouble for you
at home, diplomatically, and you might even be hanged at the end of an
otherwise glorious voyage.

But if you swindled them in trade, that was all right. Naturally, the
first theory of trade was to give the least and get the most. There
was else no point to it.

The significance of trade has fundamentally changed in our time. What
was a private adventure has become a national necessity, vital to the
existing form of the principal industrial states of the world. And yet
that first rude theory of it, representing the step from piracy to
commerce, universally survives. This, at last, is the crucial fact.

It has been impossible to part with the notion that there must be gain
in trade—a profit on one side beyond the mutual satisfaction of unlike
wants with unlike goods. Hence the term, balance of trade, meaning
the balance in your favour, or against you, from the transactions of
commerce. The rule is that the industrial nations come out each year
with a balance in their favour. The countries with whom they have been
exchanging machine-made goods for food and raw materials owe them
money. This simply means that the industrial nations charge more for
what they sell than they pay for what they buy. Hence the gain. That is
how they get rich. It is more than a rule: it is the very principle of
trade; and if you say there is any other principle the commercial mind
becomes instantly stark. What would activate trade if not the hope of
gain?

Nevertheless, trade on that principle is bound to fail, as piracy
failed, and for the same practical reason. On a vast scale, with
unlimited participation, it is not continuously feasible. Every nation
cannot have a favourable trade-balance. So long as three or four
nations had a monopoly of machines and machine-craft, it could be
managed; it could even assume such colossal proportions as to create
the illusion of being permanent as the way of the world. That monopoly
is broken. The machine is increasingly a common possession. Its power
is dispersed, and there is much new and unbidden ecstasy in the
exercise of it. And whereas it was that a few nations exploited many,
what now opens to view is the prospect of all nations simultaneously
engaged in the effort to exploit one another. Every frontier a trade
wall. Each nation forbidding others to do unto it that which it is
bent upon doing to them. So we return to the middle of the sixteenth
century, no wiser than the British were when the Parliament voted _An
Act Avoiding Divers Foreign Wares Made by Handicraftsmen Beyond the
Seas_ (_5 Eliz. c. 7, Statutes of the Realm, Vol. IV, Part I, pp.
428-429), 1562_. It reads:

 Whereas heretofore the artificers of this realm of England (as well
 within the city of London as within other cities, towns, and boroughs
 of the same real) that is to wit, girdlers, cutlers, saddlers,
 glovers, point-makers, and such like handicraftsmen, have been in the
 said faculties greatly wrought, and greatly set on work, as well for
 the sustentation of themselves, their wives, and families, as for a
 good education of a great part of the youth of this realm in good art
 and laudible exercise:

 Yet notwithstanding so now it is, that by reason of the abundance of
 foreign wares brought into this realm from the parts of beyond the
 seas, the said artificers are not only less occupied, and thereby
 utterly impoverished, the youth not trained in the said sciences and
 exercises, and thereby the said faculties and the exquisite knowledges
 thereof like in short time within this realm to decay; but also divers
 cities and towns within this realm of England much thereby impaired,
 the whole realm greatly endamaged and other countries greatly enriched.

 For reformation whereof, be it enacted by our sovereign lady the
 Queen’s Highness, and by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the
 Commons of this present parliament assembled and by the authority of
 the same, that no person or persons whatsoever, from or after the
 feast of the Nativity of St John Baptist now next ensuing, shall bring
 or cause to be brought into this realm of England from the parts of
 beyond the seas, any girdles, harness for girdles, rapiers, daggers,
 knives, hilts, pummels, lockets, chapes, dagger-blades, handles,
 scabbards, and sheaths for knives, saddles, horseharness, stirrups,
 bits, gloves, points, leather laces, or pins, being ready made or
 wrought in any parts of beyond the seas, to be sold, bartered, or
 exchanged within this realm of England or Wales; upon pain to forfeit
 all such wares so to be brought contrary to the true meaning of this
 act, in whose hands soever they or any of them shall be found, on the
 very value thereof.

Shall it be either this again, or from a universal war of
machine-competition the survival of one titanic industrial nation
with a monopoly of foreign trade and the might to force its surplus
goods on other people’s markets? That nation would fall in time and
not altogether from its own weight. It would, of course, abuse its
power; but, moreover, it would be unable to collect its favourable
trade-balances from all the rest of the world.

Logical extremes are fictions of thought. It is always another thing
that happens. The one impossibility is for trade to wear in its present
character. It has come to the end of its theory, witness the dread with
which European statesmen, economists, and industrialists regard the
payment of German reparations. How shall Germany pay? In goods. There
is no other way. She cannot pay in gold. There is not that much gold
in the whole world. The Allied creditors actually lend her a little
gold in order that she may recover from her amazing act of bankruptcy
and get back to the way of producing exportable wealth. But to whom
shall she deliver her goods, or sell them? Great Britain does not want
them. Her anxiety is how to keep her own factories going. They make
the same goods. France does not wish them, nor Belgium, nor Italy, nor
the United States, and all for the same reason. They have a potential
surplus of industrial commodities from their own machines. Then shall
Germany sell her goods in other markets and turn the money proceeds
over to Great Britain, France, _et al_? But they themselves need those
other markets on which to sell their own industrial products. German
competition is not wanted there. Thus an _impasse_.

If, in desperation, the Allied creditors forgave Germany her reparation
debt, or so much of it as she should be obliged to pay in competitive
goods, that would be still worse. For Germany would then compete in
those other markets on her own initiative and keep the profit. And all
the time those other markets, in Asia, Africa, South America, tend to
become less and less exploitable because they belong to people who
have begun to found industries of their own and are in the way to be
natively supplied with manufactures.




VII

DIM VISTAS NEW


It must occur to you that what the world requires to find is a new
conception of commerce among nations—one that shall be free of the
predatory impulse, above the exploiting motive, competitive in some
nobler sense. It need not be magnanimous or unselfish—not yet; but only
enlightened enough to comprehend the latter meaning of events.

For a superseding principle the perfect pattern is represented in
nature, where you see dissimilar organisms existing together in a state
of symbiosis, one sustaining the other, vitally interdependent, yet
neither exploiting the other.

There is no accrual of advantage to one side, no gain, no favourable
balance of trade. One gives exactly as much as it receives and two
wants are equally satisfied, with nothing to boot either way.

This is very different from parasitism, which is one-sided, for gain
only. And there is a very curious suggestion that organisms now
existing together in a state of permanent symbiotic union were once
parasitic and learned better.

It cannot be supposed that nations will ever deliberately substitute a
principle of mutualism for the principle of gain in trade. They could
not if they would. Those that have the advantage must fight for it to
the end. Commerce itself, if you look to it, is a complex structure
of growth for which there is nowhere any original accountability. It
cannot change its philosophy, any more than a tree, for it has none. It
has instead a vital instinct for opportunity and a flexible way with
necessity and circumstance. There is no hope of its being reformed
ideally by mass intelligence. The conglomerate mind is irresponsibly,
impersonally selfish; it cannot act without experience. There is no
experience of peoples sustaining one another on a sympathetic plan,
each willing to give as much as it takes, with no balance favourable or
unfavourable to be settled in gold or debt. This has never happened.
It is an idea only.

But if now we move our point of view from the centre to the
circumference, we shall see already taking place, with the force
of natural events, momentous alterations in the scheme of economic
life—one of decay and one of revaluation.

We witness almost unawares the ruin of that classic enterprise of
empire which is founded upon the theory of a balance of trade and a
division of labour whereby the colonies, the dominions, the subject and
mandated peoples are hewers, drawers, and food-bringers, serving those
who live in cities, practise machine-craft, and think themselves wholly
benevolent.

The machine has betrayed it. Nothing more unexpected has occurred
since the discovery of a simple chemical reaction that was to destroy
the privileged warrior-caste among mankind. When a splendid knight in
armour was powerless against the peasant with a musket and a knight
with a musket no better than a peasant, the romantic profession of arms
was doomed. Gunpowder ended the age of chivalry. Ultimate military
power passed to the people.

And now for hundreds of millions of people hitherto inferior in
status the machine is a symbol of liberation, freedom, independence,
recognition, racial power. Japan is the thrilling example in Asia. Did
it not deliver her from a thraldom imposed by the Western Powers in
the interest of their own trade? Did it not make her in one generation
their equal, a nation to be feared? Certainly for these reasons use and
possession of the machine will increase in the world beyond any natural
economic ratio, and both the power and profit of empire will cease.

The other alteration, already beginning to be visible though not yet
adequately understood, is a change in the value of food. Three causes
henceforth will be operating together to make food dear. First, as
cities continue to grow and the industrial population of the earth
continues to augment faster than the agricultural population, the need
to import food will be always greater; second, the exportable surplus
of food will be always less because as the agricultural and low-craft
nations progress toward their ideal of industrial independence they
will consume more and more of their own food products; and third, the
supply of those industrial commodities that are exchanged for food will
enormously increase.

In the language of the economist, the agricultural index will rise and
the industrial index will fall. It will require a greater quantity of
manufactures to buy a bushel of wheat; fewer bushels of wheat to buy
a manufactured article. This will not be for one year or two. It will
be lasting. It will affect the status of great groups and classes of
people. In the cities and industrial centres the cost of living will
move in a vertical manner.

The difficulties of food-importing countries may, almost certainly
will, become desperate. The people of Great Britain, for example,
will pay dearly for the wealth they have amassed by industry in the
last seventy-five years. If the value of food, priced in British
machine-wares, should double, then for the same quantity of food as
before they would have to give twice the quantity of manufactured
goods, which would mean twice as much labour and no more to eat. The
same difficulties will beset all countries not self-contained in food.
They will exhort their people to return to the fields, which the people
will be loth to do, having tasted cities. They will expect their
governments to make food cheaper by edict, or to buy it out of taxation
and distribute it gratis. Moreover, in some countries, taking again the
case of Great Britain as notable, there may not be enough land. The
people perhaps could not feed themselves no matter how intensively they
worked their fields, industry having multiplied the population beyond
the utmost potentiality of a native food supply. Obviously indicated is
a movement of dispersal together with a limitation upon the increase
of industrial population. More power will pass to countries, like the
United States, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, that have the advantage
of enormous food-reserves. Their problems will be internal.

None of this can happen without much blind and violent resistance.
But, of course, it will not happen all at once, not all in one place,
nor in every case with a clear meaning. And it is not certain that any
amount of experience, however painful, will bring nations to adopt what
we have called a symbiotic principle of commerce with one another.
There is at first the danger that agriculture in its turn will exploit
industry as industry has exploited peasantry and that those who possess
or control resources of food and raw materials will hold them too dear,
thereby taking the industrial nations into their debt or provoking them
to insane measures.

Thus the opportunity to go forward might be lost in passion. The fate
of retrogression is possible. This has happened many times. It is much
less probable than ever before, however, for many reasons that seem
permanent. When knowledge was a precious torch borne aloft by a few
hands through storm and stress, it was easily quenched. Then darkness.
You can hardly imagine destruction of the existing body of science,
technology, and fact-knowledge. The mass of it is too great to be lost.

That, of course, has nothing to do with wisdom. By knowledge alone man
might extinguish himself utterly. But to suppose that he will not find
a new way to go on with, that he will either move the old struggle to
new ground or return to medievalism, is to believe there is no law of
human progress.

The probability is that he will find the way unknowingly, by groping,
and will be well upon it before he has had time to formulate any clear
idea or theory of what he is doing. He will have found little by little
that it pays, better than any other way, not as he once understood
profit, but in terms of enduring satisfactions, which may include
peace. Critical understanding of it will come later with reflection,
and as it comes he will rid his mind of the phantasy in pursuit of
which he has made the world so much richer in things than in happiness.

Seeing now only how relentlessly the curse pursued him still and how
the affliction of monotonous toil if it be lifted in one place is made
heavier in another, he is torn with a sense of frustration. But the
view is wrong—false to his first nature. He forgets the truth of his
own myth. Somewhere down the ages it got turned upside down. Once he
dwelt in the Garden of Eden, or supposed he did, and cared not for it.
He was bored there and beguiled to his fall. The figure at the gate
forbidding his return is a symbol of self-knowledge; it was set there
by his own forethought, lest he should be tempted to go back.

If the machine with which he has believed himself to be storming a
childish wish ever brought him to a state of effortless ease on earth,
that would be his last.

It may be a power he is yet morally unprepared to exercise. How strange
at least that with an incentive so trivial and naïve in itself he
should have been able to perform an absolute feat of creation!

The machine was not. He reached his mind into emptiness and seized it.
Even yet he cannot realize what he has done. Out of the free elemental
stuff of the universe, visible and invisible, some of it imponderable,
such as lightning, he has invented a class of typhonic, mindless
organisms, exempt from the will of nature.

We have no understanding of creation, its process or meaning. The
machine is the externalized image of man’s thoughts. It is furthermore
an extension of his life, for we perceive as an economic fact that
human existence in its present phase, on its present scale, could not
continue in its absence. And what are we ourselves, life to begin
with, if not an image of thought? Perhaps it is true as a principle of
creation that the image and its creator must co-exist, inseparably.

In any light, man’s further task is Jovian. That is to learn how best
to live with these powerful creatures of his mind, how to give their
fecundity a law and their functions a rhythm, how not to employ them in
error against himself—since he cannot live without them.




  _Each, pott 8vo, 2/6 net_      _Occasionally illustrated_

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW


This series of books, by some of the most distinguished English
thinkers, scientists, philosophers, doctors, critics, and artists, was
at once recognized as a noteworthy event. Written from various points
of view, one book frequently opposing the argument of another, they
provide the reader with a stimulating survey of the most modern thought
in many departments of life. Several volumes are devoted to the future
trend of Civilization, conceived as a whole; while others deal with
particular provinces, and cover the future of Woman, War, Population,
Clothes, Wireless, Morals, Drama, Poetry, Art, Sex, Law, etc.

It is interesting to see in these neat little volumes, issued at a low
price, the revival of a form of literature, the Pamphlet, which has
been in disuse for 200 years.


  _Published by_
  KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
  Broadway House: 68-74 Carter Lane, London, E.C.4




TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW


_VOLUMES READY_

 =Daedalus=, or Science and the Future. By J. B. S. HALDANE, Reader in
 Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. _Sixth impression._

“A fascinating and daring little book.”—_Westminster Gazette._
“The essay is brilliant, sparkling with wit and bristling with
challenges.”—_British Medical Journal._

“Predicts the most startling changes.”—_Morning Post._

 =Callinicus=, a Defence of Chemical Warfare. By J. B. S. HALDANE.
 _Second impression._

“Mr. Haldane’s brilliant study.”—_Times Leading Article._ “A book to be
read by every intelligent adult.”—_Spectator._ “This brilliant little
monograph.”—_Daily News._

 =Icarus=, or the Future of Science. By BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S.
 _Fourth impression._

“Utter pessimism.”—_Observer._ “Mr. Russell refuses to believe that
the progress of Science must be a boon to mankind.”—_Morning Post._
“A stimulating book, that leaves one not at all discouraged.”—_Daily
Herald._

 =What I Believe.= By BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S. _Second impression._

“One of the most brilliant and thought-stimulating little books I
have read—a better book even than _Icarus_.”—_Nation._ “Simply and
brilliantly written.”—_Nature._ “In stabbing sentences he punctures
the bubble of cruelty, envy, narrowness, and ill-will which those in
authority call their morals.”—_New Leader._

 =Tantalus=, or the Future of Man. By F. C. S. SCHILLER, D.Sc., Fellow
 of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. _Second impression._

“They are all (_Daedalus_, _Icarus_, and _Tantalus_) brilliantly
clever, and they supplement or correct one another.”—_Dean Inge_, in
_Morning Post_. “Immensely valuable and infinitely readable.”—_Daily
News._ “The book of the week.”—_Spectator._

 =Cassandra=, or the Future of the British Empire. By F. C. S.
 SCHILLER, D.Sc.

“We commend it to the complacent of all parties.”—_Saturday Review._
“The book is small, but very, very weighty; brilliantly written,
it ought to be read by all shades of politicians and students of
politics.”—_Yorkshire Post._ “Yet another addition to that bright
constellation of pamphlets.”—_Spectator._

 =Quo Vadimus?= Glimpses of the Future. By E. E. FOURNIER D’ALBE,
 D.Sc., author of “Selenium, the Moon Element,” etc.

“A wonderful vision of the future. A book that will be talked
about.”—_Daily Graphic._ “A remarkable contribution to a remarkable
series.”—_Manchester Dispatch._ “Interesting and singularly
plausible.”—_Daily Telegraph._

 =Hephaestus=, the Soul of the Machine. By E. E. FOURNIER D’ALBE, D.Sc.

“A worthy contribution to this interesting series. A delightful and
thought-provoking essay.”—_Birmingham Post._ “There is a special
pleasure in meeting with a book like _Hephaestus_. The author has the
merit of really understanding what he is talking about.”—_Engineering._

 =Lysistrata=, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman. By ANTHONY M.
 LUDOVICI, author of “A Defence of Aristocracy”, etc.

“A stimulating book. Volumes would be needed to deal, in the fullness
his work provokes, with all the problems raised.”—_Sunday Times._
“Pro-feminine, but anti-feministic.”— _Scotsman._ “Full of brilliant
common-sense.”—_Observer._

 =Hypatia=, or Woman and Knowledge. By MRS BERTRAND RUSSELL. With a
 frontispiece. _Second impression._

An answer to _Lysistrata_. “A passionate vindication of the rights of
women.”—_Manchester Guardian._ “Says a number of things that sensible
women have been wanting publicly said for a long time.”—_Daily Herald._
“Everyone who cares at all about these things should read it.”—_Weekly
Westminster._

 =Thrasymachus=, the Future of Morals. By C. E. M. JOAD, author of
 “Common-Sense Ethics,” etc.

“His provocative book.”—_Graphic._ “Written in a style of deliberate
brilliance.”—_Times Literary Supplement._ “As outspoken and unequivocal
a contribution as could well be imagined. Even those readers who
dissent will be forced to recognize the admirable clarity with which he
states his case. A book that will startle.”—_Daily Chronicle._

 =The Passing of the Phantoms=: a Study of Evolutionary Psychology and
 Morals. By C. J. PATTEN, Professor of Anatomy, Sheffield University.
 With 4 Plates.

“Readers of _Daedalus_, _Icarus_ and _Tantalus_, will be grateful for
an excellent presentation of yet another point of view.”—_Yorkshire
Post._ “This bright and bracing little book.”— _Literary Guide._
“Interesting and original.”—_Medical Times._

 =The Mongol in our Midst=: a Study of Man and his Three Faces. By
 F. G. CROOKSHANK, M.D., F.R.C.P. With 28 Plates. _Second Edition,
 revised._

“A brilliant piece of speculative induction.”—_Saturday Review._
“An extremely interesting and suggestive book, which will reward
careful reading.”—_Sunday Times._ “The pictures carry fearful
conviction.”—_Daily Herald._

 =The Conquest of Cancer.= By H. W. S. WRIGHT, M.S., F.R.C.S.
 Introduction by F. G. CROOKSHANK, M.D.

“Eminently suitable for general reading. The problem is fairly and
lucidly presented. One merit of Mr. Wright’s plan is that he tells
people what, in his judgment, they can best do, _here and now_.”—From
the _Introduction_.

 =Pygmalion=, or the Doctor of the Future. By R. MCNAIR WILSON, M.D.

“Dr Wilson has added a brilliant essay to this series.”—_Times Literary
Supplement._ “This is a very little book, but there is much wisdom in
it.”—_Evening Standard._ “No doctor worth his salt would venture to say
that Dr Wilson was wrong.”—_Daily Herald._

 =Prometheus=, or Biology and the Advancement of Man. By H. S.
 JENNINGS, Professor of Zoology, Johns Hopkins University.

“This volume is one of the most remarkable that has yet appeared in
this series. Certainly the information it contains will be due to
most educated laymen. It is essentially a discussion of ... heredity
and environment, and it clearly establishes the fact that the current
use of these terms has no scientific justification.”—_Times Literary
Supplement._ “An exceedingly brilliant book.”—_New Leader._

 =Narcissus=: an Anatomy of Clothes. By GERALD HEARD. With 19
 illustrations.

“A most suggestive book.”—_Nation._ “Irresistible. Reading it is
like a switchback journey. Starting from prehistoric times we
rocket down the ages.”—_Daily News._ “Interesting, provocative, and
entertaining.”—_Queen._

 =Thamyris=, or Is There a Future for Poetry? By R. C. TREVELYAN.

“Learned, sensible, and very well-written.”—_Affable Hawk_, in _New
Statesman_. “Very suggestive.”—_J. C. Squire_, in _Observer_. “A very
charming piece of work. I agree with all, or at any rate, almost all
its conclusions.”—_J. St. Loe Strachey_, in _Spectator_.

 =Proteus=, or the Future of Intelligence. By VERNON LEE, author of
 “Satan the Waster,” etc.

“We should like to follow the author’s suggestions as to the effect of
intelligence on the future of Ethics, Aesthetics, and Manners. Her book
is profoundly stimulating and should be read by everyone.”—_Outlook._
“A concise, suggestive piece of work.”—_Saturday Review._

 =Timotheus=, the Future of the Theatre. By BONAMY DOBRÉE, author of
 “Restoration Drama,” etc.

“A witty, mischievous little book, to be read with delight.”—_Times
Literary Supplement._ “This is a delightfully witty book.”—_Scotsman._
“In a subtly satirical vein he visualizes various kinds of
theatres in 200 years time. His gay little book makes delightful
reading.”—_Nation._

 =Paris=, or the Future of War. By Captain B. H. LIDDELL HART.

A companion volume to _Callinicus_. “A gem of close thinking and
deduction.”—_Observer._ “A noteworthy contribution to a problem of
concern to every citizen in this country.”—_Daily Chronicle._ “There is
some lively thinking about the future of war in _Paris_, just added to
this set of live-wire pamphlets on big subjects.”—_Manchester Guardian._

 =Wireless Possibilities.= By Professor A. M. LOW. With 4 diagrams.

“As might be expected from an inventor who is always so fresh, he has
many interesting things to say.”—_Evening Standard._ “The mantle of
Blake has fallen upon the physicists. To them we look for visions, and
we find them in this book.”—_New Statesman._

 =Perseus=: of Dragons. By H. F. SCOTT STOKES. With 2 illustrations.

“A diverting little book, chock-full of ideas. Mr. Stokes’ dragon-lore
is both quaint and various.”—_Morning Post._ “Very amusingly written,
and a mine of curious knowledge for which the discerning reader will
find many uses.”—_Glasgow Herald._

 =Lycurgus=, or the Future of Law. By E. S. P. HAYNES, author of
 “Concerning Solicitors,” etc.

“An interesting and concisely written book.”—_Yorkshire Post._ “He
roundly declares that English criminal law is a blend of barbaric
violence, medieval prejudices, and modern fallacies.... A humane
and conscientious investigation.”—_T.P.’s Weekly._ “A thoughtful
book—deserves careful reading.”—_Law Times._

 =Euterpe=, or the Future of Art. By LIONEL R. MCCOLVIN, author of “The
 Theory of Book-Selection.”

“Discusses briefly, but very suggestively, the problem of the future of
art in relation to the public.”—_Saturday Review._ “Another indictment
of machinery as a soul-destroyer ... a gloomy prospect, but Mr. Colvin
has the courage to suggest solutions.”—_Westminster Gazette._ “This is
altogether a much-needed book.”—_New Leader._

 =Birth Control and the State=: a Plea and a Forecast. By C. P.
 BLACKER, _M.C._, M.A., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

Just published. A discussion of the arguments for and against Birth
Control, considered from the personal, social, and international
aspects, and in its bearings upon the future. Summing up in its favour,
the author contends that the only adequate solution rests in the hands
of the medical profession throughout the world.

 =Atlantis=, or America and the Future. By Colonel J. F. C. FULLER.

“Many hard things have been said about America, but few quite so
bitter and caustic as these.”—_Daily Sketch._ “The whole of America
as his subject. He can conjure up possibilities of a new Atlantis,
controlled by the gods; but he requires a few centuries for the
communication.”—_Clarion._

 =Midas=, or the United States and the Future. By C. H. BRETHERTON,
 author of “The Real Ireland,” etc.

A companion volume to _Atlantis_. “Full of astute observations and
acute reflections ... this wise and witty pamphlet, a provocation to
the thought that is creative.”—_Morning Post._ “Packs a punch in every
paragraph. One could hardly ask for more ‘meat’.”—_Spectator._

 =Nuntius=, or the Future of Advertising. By GILBERT RUSSELL.

“Another booklet which looks wisely on the world of to-morrow. The
future of advertising is very sanely considered here. We are heartily
in agreement with the main thesis.”—_Spectator._ “A thoughtful little
book.”—_Daily Sketch._

 =Pegasus=, or Problems of Transport. By Colonel J. F. C. FULLER,
 author of “The Reformation of War,” etc. With 8 Plates.

“The foremost military prophet of the day propounds a solution for
industrial and unemployment problems. It is a bold essay ... and calls
for the attention of all concerned with imperial problems.”—_Daily
Telegraph._ “With a broad imaginative grasp he finds the solution [of
unemployment] in ‘tracked’ vehicles.”—_Westminster Gazette._

“Right up to the high standard of the rest of this series.”—_Clarion._


_READY SHORTLY_

 =Artifex=, or the Future of Craftsmanship. By JOHN GLOAG, author of
 “Time, Taste, and Furniture.”

After a suggestive sketch of the history of craftsmanship, the
author examines the possibilities in the use of machinery to extend
craftsmanship and make beautiful articles of commerce.

 =Plato’s American Republic.= By J. D. WOODRUFF.

A series of witty dialogues in the Platonic manner dealing with aspects
of American life and manners.

 =Sybilla=, or the Future of Prophecy. By C. A. MACE, University of St.
 Andrew’s.

An examination of the possibilities of scientific forecasting, with
special reference to certain volumes in this series.

 =Orpheus=, or the Future of Music. By W. J. TURNER, author of “Music
 and Life.”


_IN PREPARATION_

 =Ouroboros=, or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind. By GARET GARRETT.

Machine civilization has filled the world with its products. What will
happen when markets are over-flooded?

 =Gallio=, or the Tyranny of Science. By J. W. N. SULLIVAN, author of
 “A History of Mathematics.”

An attack on the values which science is so successfully imposing upon
civilization.

 =Mercurius=, or the World on Wings. By C. THOMPSON WALKER.

A brilliant picture of the world as it will be when inevitable
developments in aircraft take place.

 =The Future of the English Language.= By BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT, author
 of “The English Secret,” etc.

An analysis of the present condition of the English language and the
paths along which it is progressing.

 =The Future of Architecture.= By CHRISTIAN BARMAN, editor of “The
 Architects’ Journal.”

A survey of the condition of architecture and developments to be
expected in the future.

 =Delphos=, or the Future of International Language. By E. SYLVIA
 PANKHURST.

 =Caliban=, or the Future of Industrial Capitalism. By HILAIRE BELLOC.

 =The Future of Futurism.= By JOHN RODKER.

 =The Future of Films.= By FRANCIS BETTS.




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 33 Changed: It is a sympton of saturation
             to: It is a symptom of saturation

  pg 37 Changed: costly piece of machinary to build
             to: costly piece of machinery to build

  pg 58 Changed: It is true of people, as indivuals
             to: It is true of people, as individuals

  pg 59 Changed: never succeeding ind is possessing
             to: never succeeding and is possessing

  pg 65 Changed: For a quarter of a century prices feel continuously
             to: For a quarter of a century prices fell continuously

  pg 65 Changed: while solemn ecomomic bodies
             to: while solemn economic bodies

  pg 65 Changed: economic bodies sat pondering the phenomenom
             to: economic bodies sat pondering the phenomenon

  pg 76 Changed: To enforce the rules bcame everyone’s duty
             to: To enforce the rules became everyone’s duty

  pg 76 Changed: From this would germinate a moral sensel.
             to: From this would germinate a moral sense.

  pg 81 Changed: whose hards soever they or any of them shall be found
             to: whose hands soever they or any of them shall be found

  pg 83 Changed: much of it as she she should be obliged
             to: much of it as she should be obliged

  pg 8 Changed: requires a few centuries for the communation
            to: requires a few centuries for the communication





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