CHAPTER ELEVENTH.

THE SCIENCE AND ECONOMY OF MANUFACTURES

THEORY.

as of

THE

§ 210. The progress of the industrial state, every other organized society, and indeed of organic life as a whole, is in the transition from the simple to the complex, from the state in which the parts resemble each other and the whole organism, to that in which the difference between the parts, and between the whole and the parts, is as great as possible. "As we see in existing barbarous tribes, society in its first and lowest forms is a homogeneous aggregation of individuals, having like powers and like functions; the only marked difference of function being that which accompanies the difference of sex. Every man is warrior, hunter, fisherman, toolmaker, builder; every woman performs the same drudgeries; every family is self-sufficing, and save for purposes of aggression and defence, might as well live apart from the rest" (Herbert Spencer).

With the advance of society, this uniformity disappears. From being "Jack of all trades and master of none," each member of the community confines his attention to a single pursuit, and does that one thing better and more effectively. Methods of work improve; a smaller number of workers and a less amount of labor is required to raise food for the whole community. The rest are gradually set free for other employments, some to tan skins into leather and make shoes; others to turn wool into cloth and make clothes; others to dig up iron and smelt it for tools, agricultural implements and articles of household use; others to mould clay into pottery or bricks, or quarry stone for houses; others to cut down trees and fashion them into furniture and other wood-work. Each of these trades, as the numbers of society and the consequent demand for their productions increase, is capable of continued subdivision of labor. The tanner ceases to make shoes, the carpenter to cut down

timber, the weaver to spin his yarn or to fashion his cloth into garments. And at every subdivision of function, the efficiency of the workman and the skill demanded of him are increased. Arkwright, the Lancashire barber, may or may not have invented the spinning-jenny, but he stamped his name on the history of industry when he devised the first factory, and taught the North of England weavers and capitalists to substitute coöperation as regular as clock-work for desultory and wasteful work. § 211. Every change of this sort is a real gain to society at large and to each member of it. The members of the nation who had before no need or less need of each other, become more helpful and useful to each other. The farmer finds, with the artisan within reach, a ready market for his produce. He can buy with its price plenty of clothing, utensils and furniture,plenty of the things that add to life's comfort and take away its sordidness. He can purchase improved implements that make his work easier and more fruitful. He is more closely associated with his fellow-citizens than before; every wise purchase or sale that he makes is an interchange of services, by which both parties are benefited. There is a real and growing harmony of interests between all classes; the advance of either in wealth enables the others to find a better market for what they would sell; and as wealth leads to the expenditure of larger capital and thus to more productive work, the prosperity of each enables the other to buy of it to better advantage.

§ 212. The growth of the power of association is, at the same time, growth in individual freedom. The more closely men are thus united, the more free each one is to give full play to the bent of his own character. He is not forced to make his living by an employment for which he may have no taste, and in which he can therefore never use his natural gifts to the best advantage. He can consult his liking. And men's employments and daily industries react powerfully upon general character; variety of work produces and cherishes individuality. The parts of the body politic grow in diversity from each other. and from the whole body; the societary type rises with that

THE NATURAL GROWTH OF INDUSTRIES.

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growth. The unity of the parts in the whole becomes all the stronger for the difference. The body is "fitly joined together by that which every part supplieth," when no part can say to another: "I have no need of thee."

All history illustrates this growth in social unity, through growth in individuality. Spain proscribed individuality and freedom; her only philosophers were, like St. Theresa and Ignatius Loyola, those who taught the absorption and annihilation of the man in the corporation; the consequence has been a growing lack of vital cohesion and unity in a monarchy that once aspired to universal empire. Germany was riven into fragments by feudalism, but her individualistic philosophy, whose first word is "I am I," has gone hand in hand with her industrial progress, in binding her into a compact and vigorous empire.

See Prof. F. D. Maurice's Lectures on Social Morality.

§ 213. This industrial growth is the natural course of all progressive societies. They grow more diversified in their work, if the constitution and course of their nature be not interfered with. Were there no possibility of interference, the whole process might be left to nature, except so far as legislation is needed to restrain those who are unwilling to give justice to the rest.

Interferences, however, do arise; some from within, some from without. Unjust laws, artificial panics, badly imposed or excessive taxes, unwise economy of labor, restrictions on home trade, the currency of doubtful money and false theories, the absence of general education and intelligence, and many other things already adverted to, prevent the industrial community. from going forward as it might. To remove all such restrictions must be among the first duties of the statesman as an economist.

§ 214. But interferences come from without also. Sometimes these grow out of wars and conquests, as when the Philistines would not allow the Israelites to carry on the trade of the smith, lest they "should make them swords or spears," and he who needed a smith's help had to go down to Philistia. At others they grow out of the state of dependence in which one country

stands to another. Colonies have been continually cramped and held back, that they might contribute to the profits of industry in the mother country, rather than develop a native industry of their own. In 1827 Mr. Huskisson of the British ministry told our Minister "that it was the intention of the British government to consider the intercourse of the British colonies as being exclusively under its control, and any relaxation from the colonial system as an indulgence, to be granted on such terms as might suit the policy of Great Britain at the time it was granted."

§ 215. But without the employment of either military force or political domination, it is possible and not unusual for one country to keep another in a state of industrial dependence and check its growth. Were all countries equal at the start and sure to remain so, this could not happen. If they had all the same command of capital, had they all equal skill and intelligence, were they all subject to the same taxation, then any aggression could be but temporary and would be punished by equal loss in some other direction. But this is by no means the actual state even of the nations called civilized. No two of them have reached the same point in industrial development, some are far ahead, because of an earlier use of natural advantages; others lag far behind, though they are striving with all energy to come up.

Suppose, now, that two nations that differ thus should establish full and free commercial intercourse between each other, what will be the necessary effect? At first sight it might seem that the rich nation would be conferring benefits upon the poorer one, which the other could but feebly return; that the difference between them would be gradually and steadily diminished through the poorer nation coming forward in industrial development, and taking an ever higher place, and that more rapidly than before.

But experience shows that just the reverse of this is the case. The rich nation becomes, for a time at least, richer by the exchange; the poor nation permanently poorer. The former, through its command of cheap capital, and, by consequence, its

DOCTRINAIRE OBJECTIONS.

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greater division and efficiency of labor, can continually undersell the latter in whatever it chooses to export to it, for it can send it manufactured goods at prices with which the manufacturers of the other cannot compete. The process of accumulating capital in the poorer country is decisively checked; its people are reduced from what variety of industry and mutual exchange of services they had possessed, to a uniformity of employment in which no man needs or helps his neighbor. Their power of association is destroyed; money, the instrument of association, is drained out of the country. Nothing is left them but the production of such raw materials as the richer nation chooses to buy, and how unprofitable a commerce of that sort is, we have already seen (§ 206). The country steadily declines in all the elements of productive power, even in the character of the single home industry that is left it (§ 92). "From him that hath not" is "taken away that which he seemeth to have."

§ 216. Here a sweeping objection meets us. A number of theorists tell us that "even if this be the result of unrestricted trade between two such countries, the weaker has no lawful power to put a stop to it. The sphere and duties of government do not extend to the direction and regulation of industry. It might as well undertake to tell its people what they are to believe, as to tell them what they must make, and where they must buy. The right to exchange one's property wherever one pleases, is a part of the right of property itself. It is robbery of the individual citizen, therefore, to say that he shall so manage his buying and selling as to foster a native rather than a foreign industry." "I assume," says Prof. Thorold Rogers, "that there are such rights as are called natural, and that these are the inalienable conditions under which individuals take part in social life. No one questions the natural right of free exchange."

This notion rests on the old exploded fiction that men passed out of a state of nature into the social state by a social contract, in which so much of their natural rights as were necessary to the being of society were given up, and all others were