36
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
YOU now see how it is that the nation cannot depend on private capital because there are so many vitally necessary things, from town drainage to lighthouses, which it will not provide at all, and how what it does provide it provides in the wrong order, refusing to make a harbor until it has made as many distilleries as the trade will hold, and building five luxurious houses for one rich person whilst a shocking proportion of the nation’s children is dying of overcrowding in slums.
In short, the private capitalists, instead of doing the most desirable work first, begin at the wrong end. All that can be said for this policy is that if you begin at the wrong end you may be driven towards the right end when you have done your worst and can get no further in the wrong direction; and this is in fact the position into which our most respectable capitalists have been forced by circumstances. When the poor have bought all the strong drink they can afford to pay for, and the rich their racing stables and all the pearls they can find room for on their wives’ necks, the capitalists are forced to apply their next year’s accumulations of capital to the production of more necessary things.
Before the hungry can be set to work building mills and making machinery to equip them, somebody, possibly a woman, must invent the machinery. The capitalists buy her invention. If she is good at business, which very few inventors are, she makes them pay her enough to become a capitalist herself; but in most cases she makes a very poor bargain, because she has to sell the lion’s share in her invention for a few pounds to enable her to pay for the necessary models and trials. It is only in modern Big Business that inventiveness in method and organization superadded to mechanical ingenuity has a chance against capital. If you have that talent the Big Business people will not trouble to buy your patents: they will buy you at a handsome price, and take you into the concern. But the simpleminded mechanical inventor has no such luck. In any case, the capitalists have made a communist law nationalizing all inventions after fourteen years, when the capitalists can use them without paying the inventor anything. They soon persuade themselves, or at least try to persuade others, that they invented the machines themselves, and deserve their riches for their ingenuity. Quite a number of people believe them.
Thus equipped with mechanical devices which are quite beyond the means of small producers, the big capitalists begin to wipe the small producers off the face of the earth. They seize on the work done by the handloom weaver in his cottage, and do it much more cheaply in great mills full of expensive machine looms driven by steam. They take the work of the oldtime miller with his windmill or waterwheel, and do it in vast buildings with steel rollers and powerful engines. They set up against the blacksmith a Nasmyth hammer that a thousand Vulcans could not handle, and scissors that snip sheet steel and bite off heavy bars more easily than he could open a tin of condensed milk. They launch huge steel ships, driven by machinery which the shipwrights who built for Columbus would have called devil’s work. They raise houses in skyscraping piles of a hundred dwellings one on top of another, in steel and concrete, so that in place of one horizontal street you have bunches of perpendicular ones. They make lace by machinery, more of it in a day than ten thousand women could make by hand. They make boots by machinery, clocks by machinery, pins and needles by machinery. They sell you machines to use yourself in your own house, such as vacuum cleaners, to replace your old sweeping brush and tea leaves. They lay on the electric power and hydraulic power that they use in their factories to your house like water or gas; so that you can light and heat your house with it, and have yourself carried in a lift from the basement to the attic and back again without the trouble of climbing the stairs. You can boil your kettle and cook your dinner with it. You could even make toast with it (they sell you a little oven for the purpose) if it were not that you always forget to take the toast out before it is burnt to a cinder.
Bad as the machine-made goods are at first compared to hand-made goods, they end by being sometimes better, sometimes as good, sometimes as well worth buying at the lower price, and always in the long run the only goods you can get. For at last we forget how to make things by hand, and become dependent on the bigger machine industries in spite of the little groups of artists who try to keep the old handicrafts alive. When William Morris, a great artist and craftsman, invented a story about the handle coming off a rake in a village, and nobody knowing how to put it on again, so that they had to get a big machine and eight engineers down from London to do it, his tale was not at all so improbable as it would have been in the days of Queen Anne. Our consolation is that if machinery makes rakes so cheap that it is not worth while mending them instead of throwing them away and going on with new ones, the loss is greater than the gain. And if the people who work the machines have a better life of it than the old handy people, then the change is for the better.
Mind: I do not say that these advantages are always gained at present. Most of us are using cheap and nasty articles, and living a cheap and nasty life; but this is not the fault of the machines and the great factories, nor of the application of spare money to construct them: it is the fault of the unequal distribution of the product and of the leisure gained by their saving of labor.
Now this misdistribution need not have occurred if the spare money had not been in private hands. If it had been in the hands of national and municipal banks controlling its use in the interest of all of us the capitalization of industry on a large scale would have been an unmixed blessing, instead of being, as it is at present, a blessing so mixed with curses of one kind or another that in Samuel Butler’s famous Utopia, called Erewhon, the making and even the possession of machinery is punished as a crime.
Some of our cleverest anti-Socialists advocate a return to the life of the early eighteenth century, before the machines and factories came in. But that would mean going back to the small population of that time, as the old methods would not produce enough for our fortytwo millions. High capitalization of industry, in which a million of spare money is spent to provide us with fourpenny reels of cotton, has come to stay; but if Socialism prevails, the million will be public and not private property, and the reels will cost considerably less than twopence. To put it shortly, capitalization is one thing, and Capitalism quite another. Capitalization does not hurt us as long as capital is our servant and not our master. Capitalism inevitably makes it our master instead of our servant. Instead of public servants we are private slaves.
Note that the great change from cottage handicraft to factories and machine industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is called by economists and historians The Industrial Revolution.