HKB
ideas they have conceived as to the nature of industrial activity, which education can do something to remove, but which, if not removed, must be over-ruled in the public interest.
Sec. 3. It must not, however, be supposed that the most thorough transparency of industry, any more than the removal of the political barriers which prevent Free Trade, would tend to bring about the desirable adjustment between the healthy social organism and the environment of machine-production. Full free trade would supply, quicken, and facilitate the operation of those large economic forces which we have seen at work: the tendency of capital to gravitate into larger and fewer masses, localised where labour can be maintained upon the most economical terms: a correspondent but slower and less complete organisation of labour in large masses: the flow of labouring population into towns, together with a larger utilisation of women and (where permitted) children for industrial work: a growing keenness of antagonism as the mass of the business-unit is larger, and an increased expenditure of productive power upon aggressive commercial warfare: the growth of monopolies springing from natural, social, or economic sources, conferring upon individuals or classes the power to consume without producing, and by their consumption to direct the quantity and character of large masses of labour.
The complete realisation of full free trade in all directions has no power whatever to abate the activity of these forces, and would only serve to bring their operation into more signal and startling prominence.
For the waste of periodic over-production visible in trade depression, for the sufferings caused by ever larger oscillations in prices and greater irregularity of employment of capital and labour, for the specific evils of long hours or excessive intensity of labour, dangerous and unwholesome conditions of employment, increased employment of women and children, and growth of large-city life, freedom of trade conjoined with publicity of business operations can furnish no remedies.
It has been seen that these injuries to individuals and groups of individuals, and through them to society, arise naturally and necessarily from the unfettered operation of the enlightened self-interest of individuals and groups of individuals engaged in obtaining for themselves, by the freest use of industrial means available, the largest quantity of money.
So far as these evils are in form or in magnitude the peculiar products of the last two centuries, they are in large measure traceable to methods of production controlled by machinery, and to the social estimate of machine-products which gives machinery this controlling power.
If this is so, such progress as shall abate these evils and secure for humanity the uses of machinery without the abuses will lie in two directions, each of which deserves consideration: (i) an adequate social control over machine-production; (2) an education in the arts of consumption such as may assign proper limits to the sphere of machine-production.
Sec. 4. That machinery subject to the unrestricted guidance of the commercial interests of an individual or a class cannot be safely trusted to work for the general welfare, is already conceded by all who admit the desirability or necessity of the restrictive legislation of Factory Acts, Mines Regulation Acts, and the large growth of public provisions for guarding against economic, hygienic, and other injuries arising from the conditions of modern industrial life.
These provisions, whether designed directly to secure the interests of a class of employees, as in the case of Factory Acts, or to protect the consuming public, as in the case of Adulteration Acts, must be regarded as involving an admission of a genuine antagonism between the apparent interests of individuals and of the whole community, which it is the business of society to guard against.