The way the world is going

Our modern world runs on fuel. It burns its way through the years. The ancient civilizations made no such use of combustion. A few sticks kept the pot boiling, and a bag of charcoal served the purposes of the smith. Torches and oil lamps were convenient but not indispensable. Man set fire to his world seriously only 200 years ago.

The tradition is, therefore, that coal and oil are commodities like marble or leather, to be bought and sold in the same fashion, chaffered over, refused, or withheld. Quite insidiously they have become fundamental necessities for our social and economic order, but the old ways of dealing remain. We still treat them as incidental commodities. Perhaps the old methods have hung about too long. We may be on the road to very profound changes in our dealings with oil and coal.

In America the more prominent issue is oil. Both here in England and in America, “Oil,” Mr. Upton Sinclair’s book, in spite of his peculiar methods of advertisement, has crept insidiously and surely to a success. I find quite a number of my friends reading it. I see strangers reading it in the train. Evidently people want ideas about oil. In Britain the more urgent aspect of the fuel question is the coal-mining issue. The General Strike, following the coal lock-out of 1926, settled nothing. In the Labour débâcle that ensued the miners lost most of the points they had fought for; they had to accept longer hours and a lower standard of living, and the industry readjusted itself to the conditions of a declining industry. It has continued to decline. There remain great numbers of miners unemployed, and profits are unsatisfactory. Coal trouble is becoming the chronic ailment of Great Britain.

There was a phase in the British coal drama when coal production was subsidized. I believe that for the effective, permanent re-establishment of British prosperity there must be a return to subsidized coal. It is the only way of reconciling two otherwise incompatible needs, an abundant cheap supply of the various sorts of coal needed for British shipping, transport, and industrial activities, and a decent standard of life for the body of men needed to win the coal.

No doubt, to those who hold to the old-fashioned way of regarding coal as something you can do without and still play your part in life it is shocking to think of the community paying for coal to be sold again at a loss, for that is what the subsidy amounts to, but to any one who grasps its altered status as a social necessity it will be no more shocking than the abolition of toll-gates and the provision of high-roads at the common expense.

Suppose the coal supply firmly established on a subsidized basis and the subsidy counterbalanced by a countervailing duty on the export of coal—because there is no reason whatever why the British taxpayer should pay in part for the coal consumed by the foreign industrialist—what would be the effect upon the community as a whole? Manifestly there would be a cheapening of transport, a stimulation of the metallurgical industries, a cheapening of the cost of power, and either a reduction of wages or an elevation of the standard of life of the ordinary worker, enabling him to spend the money he would save on coal on manufactured goods. I cannot imagine anything but a general stimulation of the entire economic life of the community. Cheaper transport and cost of production would invigorate the country’s competitive export of manufactured goods and in its turn react upon the coal industry with an enlarged demand for coal.

Naturally a subsidized undertaking will mean a controlled industry; there is not the slightest benefit to the community if either coal owners or coal merchants are allowed to intercept and absorb the subsidy. A subsidy means compounded royalties, restricted profits, and scientific direction. And as naturally the recognition of coal-mining as a public service will change the status of the miner.

The present condition of the mining worker has been the result of slow developments, and like most social arrangements that have grown up slowly, it is a thoroughly bad complex of laws, customs, and tolerated conventions. Only usage blinds us to the absurdity of a system by which a man who has specialized in coal-winning, and who is ready and willing to go into the mine and win his stint of coal for the community, should not have every facility given him to discharge his task. It should be possible to calculate the cost to the community of a miner from his birth to his death; it should be possible to charge up to him his schooling, housing, keep, holidays, recreations, police protection, medical attendance, funeral, grave, and everything else he requires and consumes. Against this it should be possible to set as an equivalent so many tons of this or that sort of coal. If he wins less than that he is a parasite; if more, he is robbed. And equally it should be possible to make his stint of coal-winning easy and convenient for him, instead of leaving it as laborious, uncertain, vexatious, and humiliating as it is now.

It is the business of a civilized community to determine that equivalent between coal and consumption, and arrange for the miner to justify his existence as a consumer as easily and pleasantly as possible, slowly or quickly as he chooses. If he sees fit to work like the devil, long spells and all the year around, and get it over and be assured of all his elemental needs thereafter for the rest of his life, while he meditates, goes or walks, paints pictures or writes poetry, he ought to be able to do so without making existence intolerable for a fellow-miner with a more leisurely conception of his life-work. A modern civilized community ought to be able to cater for its labourers on such flexible terms. It ought to command sufficient intelligence to estimate ahead what it will want in the way of coal, and enlist its miners on long-term agreements for a definite amount of work that will make them as safe in their jobs as civil servants.

We are so used to the scrambling quality of life, as we know it, to the desperate grabbing and holding of scraps of property, to strikes and lock-outs, to unemployment, fluctuating prices, speculative cunning, uncertainty, servitude, and frustration, that few of us succeed in realizing that these things are not now necessary. However unavoidable they may have been for mankind in the past, they are not now unavoidable. The chancy and disagreeably adventurous way we live is not the only possible nor the best way of living. It is a phase out of which our race may pass.

The reason why our community cannot figure out what the life task of a coal-miner should be is simply because it does not know enough about things that can be quite effectively known. It cannot figure out even its broad staple needs and supplies and be certain of them as yet, even within quite wide limits. So we have to guess and gamble our way through life, to overcharge and underpay and “keep on the safe side.” We hoard if we can. We think ourselves lucky if we can saddle the world with a debt for the loan of our hoarded accumulations. We cannot imagine freedom and independence except in the rôle of a well-secured creditor. Again, we have to fall back on the gold standard for monetary purposes because we have not the necessary facts for a regulated currency, although theoretically a regulated currency is a far more desirable thing than a currency resting finally for its sanctions on a brute quantity of gold. We not only live in anxieties that could be dispelled; by virtue of this same ignorance, we sicken and die of diseases which might have been prevented or cured. We are still as much the prey of chance as any other animals. All our lives are worried, shadowed, belittled, and laid waste by the preoccupations arising out of the lack of that comprehensive knowledge without which the sane and comprehensive direction of human affairs is impossible.

Now what I am writing here of life, its present uncertainty and disorder, is to be found in the lamentations of the preacher and in the pessimistic literature of the Egypt of five thousand years ago. The reader of Breasted’s “Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt” will find passages about human life that say exactly what my last paragraph repeats. But what is new, what we have clear in our minds to-day, is the growth of a body of knowledge charged with the promise of order and assurance to replace these ancient distresses. Then, indeed, the world was limitless and dreams of control absurd. Now, in the last three centuries, we have begun the surveying and mapping of the whole planet. After contours and topography follow geological surveys, biological exploration, climatology, economic appraisal. As the surveyor advances the prospector disappears. We are bringing all the material basis of human life into the sphere of the calculable. We are numbering the people, always an annoying process to the ancient gods. In quite a few years we shall know within quite small limits the population of the world and its rate of increase; we shall know, within the limits of a few hundred tons, its annual requirements of wheat and rice, steel and coal, cotton and wool. We shall know how and where to get these and all other staple commodities. We shall be able to work out the whole processes of getting and distributing the material requirements of human life upon lines not of commercial adventure, but clear certitude. We shall have a grip upon disease, of which our present attempts at public and world hygiene are only the faintest first intimations. And the little scattered band of meteorologists who now observe and guess about the weather will have been reinforced and developed into a big, competent, world organization, which may even forecast our crops and anticipate our shortages within a continually closer margin of accuracy years ahead.

Do not the achievements of science in the past two centuries fully justify what I have written here? And if this is so, and if there is this clear prospect of a world in which we can plan out the general activities of mankind on estimates, trustworthy to within a very small fraction of the total amount, is it conceivable that any of the main disputes of our present economic world-scramble will survive? You may call me a dreamer in these matters, but it is not I who dream, it is you, who are not properly awake to what man has done and what man can hope to do.

I wish my wakefulness was more contagious than it seems to be. Britain the Sleeper mutters “Muddle through” in its sleep, and will not open its eyes to the facts that are in the same room with it. The heavy industries of the old country grow heavier and heavier. Unless those drowsy eyelids can be lifted, unless Britain can rouse itself—within a very brief term of years—to meet the irksome demand for more knowledge, more science, and more imaginative courage, it must sink into a permanently inferior position to the United States of America and to a renascent Central Europe. Leadership is for those who will lead, and the direction in which the world has to be led is manifestly towards the systematic control and stimulation of the production of basic substances in the common interest. Production primarily for profit in raw materials and basic substances, like the mere commercialization of the transport services, works out in the crippling of the higher types of industrial life. The movement for the conservation of forests and other national resources from the recklessness of unbridled private enterprise in America, with which President Roosevelt identified himself, was merely one early recognition of what is now becoming a widely recognized truth. With the development of material civilization and the accumulation of exact knowledge, the concern of the commonweal spreads into fields that were once left quite legitimately to adventurous exploitation. For Great Britain, in respect to fuel, the issue is now a vital one. Either she must prepare to subsidize and then nationalize her coal supply, or she must face the clear prospect of retrocession from her position of leadership in the world.

30 October, 1927.