So Capitalism no longer secures strenuous work by fear, for it is ceasing to be formidable. And it cannot secure it by respect, for it has ceased to be respected. And the very victories by which it seeks to reassert its waning prestige are more disastrous than defeats. Employers may congratulate themselves that they have maintained intact their right to freedom of management, or opposed successfully a demand for public ownership, or broken a movement for higher wages and shorter hours. But what is success in a trade dispute or in a political struggle is often a defeat in the workshop: the workmen may have lost, but it does not follow that their employers, still less that the public, which is principally composed of workmen, have won. For the object of industry is to produce goods, and to produce them at the lowest cost in human effort. But there is no alchemy which will secure efficient production from the resentment or distrust of men who feel contempt for the order under which they work. It is a commonplace that credit is the foundation of industry. But credit is a matter of psychology, and the workman has his psychology as well as the capitalist. If confidence is necessary to the investment of capital, confidence is not less necessary to the effective performance of labor by men whose sole livelihood depends upon it. If they are not yet strong enough to impose their will, they are strong enough to resist when their masters would impose theirs. They may work rather than strike. But they will work to escape dismissal, not for the greater glory of a system in which they do not believe; and, if they are dismissed, those who take their place will do the same.
That this is one cause of a low output has been stated both by employers and workers in the building industry, and by the representatives of the miners before the Coal Commission. It was reiterated with impressive emphasis by Mr. Justice Sankey. Nor is it seriously contested by employers themselves. What else, indeed, do their repeated denunciations of “restriction of output” mean except that they have failed to organize industry so as to secure the efficient service which it is their special function to provide? Nor is it appropriate to the situation to indulge in full-blooded denunciations of the “selfishness” of the working classes. “To draw an indictment against a whole nation” is a procedure which is as impossible in industry as it is in politics. Institutions must be adapted to human nature, not human nature to institutions. If the effect of the industrial system is such that a large and increasing number of ordinary men and women find that it offers them no adequate motive for economic effort, it is mere pedantry to denounce men and women instead of amending the system.
Thus the time has come when absolutism in industry may still win its battles, but loses the campaign, and loses it on the very ground of economic efficiency which was of its own selection. In the period of transition, while economic activity is distracted by the struggle between those who have the name and habit of power, but no longer the full reality of it, and those who are daily winning more of the reality of power but are not yet its recognized repositories, it is the consumer who suffers. He has neither the service of docile obedience, nor the service of intelligent cooperation. For slavery will work—as long as the slaves will let it; and freedom will work when men have learned to be free; but what will not work is a combination of the two. So the public goes short of coal not only because of the technical deficiencies of the system under which it is raised and distributed, but because the system itself has lost its driving force—because the coal owners can no longer persuade the miners into producing more dividends for them and more royalties for the owners of minerals, while the public cannot appeal to them to put their whole power into serving itself, because it has chosen that they should be the servants, not of itself, but of shareholders.
And, this dilemma is not, as some suppose, temporary, the aftermath of war, or peculiar to the coal industry, as though the miners alone were the children of sin which in the last few months they have been described to be. It is permanent; it has spread far; and, as sleeping spirits are stirred into life by education and one industry after another develops a strong corporate consciousness, it will spread further. Nor will it be resolved by lamentations or menaces or denunciations of leaders whose only significance is that they say openly what plain men feel privately. For the matter at bottom is one of psychology.
