CHAPTER V. FLAWS IN THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF MODERN INDUSTRY. § 1. Detection of flaws in the structure of industrial science. § 2. Growing acceptance of Mr. Ruskin's teaching of the economy of high wages. § 3. Over-specialisation as a malady of modern industry. § 4. The need of good work for all. § 5. Consumption the industrial goal-Detection of the fallacy of unlimited saving. § 6. "Demand for commodities not a demand for labour" refuted. § 7. Currency based on intrinsic values - No credit. § 1. In the last two chapters we have examined the vital differences in scope and nature between the Political Economy of Mr. Ruskin and the current Mercantile Economy. But Mr. Ruskin by no means confined himself to a general repudiation of the claims of the latter. Much of his closest analysis and his choicest ridicule are devoted to exposing specific flaws in the structure of commercial science, which he further charges with offering support to the immorality of business conducted for individual profit. Perhaps the most caustic summary of his position is contained in the following words: "While I admit there is such a thing as mercantile economy, distinguished from social, I have always said also that neither Mill, Fawcett, nor Bastiat knew the contemptible science they professed to teach." 1 1 Note by Mr. Ruskin to "A Disciple of Plato," by Mr. William Smart. Such scornful language, applied to able and honest specialists, has done much to prevent Mr. Ruskin's arguments from receiving the attention they deserve. But the undue depreciation and the captious criticism in which he sometimes indulged must not deter us from recognising the acuteness of many of the points he presses. The inherent difficulties which arise in every department of social science from the complexity and shifting character of its phenomena, the few opportunities of scientific experiment, the difficulties of securing just and reliable terminology, attach, as we have seen, in no ordinary measure to Commercial Economy; while the conditions of its late and comparatively obscure growth have prevented it from receiving an adequate share of the attention of the keenest and most farsighted intelligences of our century. The result has been a too facile establishment of dogmas enrolled in specious phraseology and sustained by the authority of a few able men who have been prematurely accredited as the builders of a complete science of industry, whereas they are only entitled to be regarded as pioneers groping in the obscure beginnings of a science. When a man with Mr. Ruskin's mental equipment approached the text-books of this commercial economy he could hardly fail to detect considerable flaws. The unconscious pressure of class interests and prejudices, flowing often through honest and efficient channels, is always operative in the intellectual world, framing hypotheses, moulding theories, driving home conclusions to support the intellectual or material vested interests of the educated classes. This is not the judgment of a cynic. No one who faithfully follows out the progress of any science, medicine, law, theology, philosophy, geology, politics, can fail to see the innumerable subtle ways in which the dry light of the intellect is humidised by passion and class interest. Just in proportion as the science is applicable for the guidance of an individual or a nation in matters where self-interest weighs heavily, is this injurious influence operative. In the selection and rejection of ideas and phrases, the formation of theories, the admission and the valuation of different kinds of evidence, even in the basic processes of observation, bias creeps in. The study of industrial facts and laws among a people, passionately devoted to the pursuit of industrial gains, is subject to these falsifying forces in no ordinary measure. Free competition of individuals upon the basis of existing distribution of property was at once the passion and the intellectual conviction of the hard-headed men who, during the first half of this century, had in their hands the making of Commercial Economy. It was not, indeed, their conscious design to make a science which should yield an intellectual, or a moral, support to the existing industrial order; but any one who closely follows the growth of the study from Adam Smith to Jevons can see that it was in fact made to yield such support. Though much valuable work was done in the collection of industrial facts, and much acuteness was evinced in the deductive reasoning from economic principles, these principles themselves, the corner-stones of the scientific edifice, were often exceedingly defective both in substance and in wording, and each of these defects were serviceable for the maintenance of the industrial power of "the classes." Moreover, these defects lay thickest in those parts of economic theory which had particular relation to the distribution of wealth among the different sections of the industrial community. A full justification of this imputation is not here possible; but its validity may be briefly evidenced by asking what has now become of the maxims, "Industry is limited by capital," "Labour receives advances from a wage-fund," "A demand for commodities is not a demand for labour," "Value depends upon cost of production," "Rent of land stands by itself as a surplus, not paid out of the product of labour, and forming no element in price." Is there any one of these central dogmas of the Political Economy of 1860, which commands the general allegiance of modern teachers of commercial science? Several of them, notably the wage-fund doctrine, and the cost theory of value, may be said to have almost disappeared, while the others, so far as they survive, present a strangely battered or transformed appearance. Now, though academic reformers of industrial science give small attention and less credit to John Ruskin, it is none the less true that his criticism in "Unto this Last," "Munera Pulveris," and "Fors Clavigera" furnishes, in several important instances, the first clear and effective refutation of the mortal errors of the above-named doctrines. § 2. Let us take in order the leading heads of Mr. Ruskin's criticism. Commercial economists sought to sustain the credit of this system by representing the laws of this economy as "natural," and therefore "inevitable" in their operation. This character was particularly claimed for the Law of Supply and Demand as a necessary determinant of wages. From the earliest beginning of "economic systems" the working classes and their sympathisers had been bluffed by the show of some such natural law. The bare subsistence wage of the French artisan was represented as natural by the Physiocrats, "Il ne gagne que sa vie;" Adam Smith saw forces which tended inevitably to keep the wages of common labour at a minimum; his successors fortified their wage-fund theory by the cheerful doctrines of Malthus, teaching that "natural law" prevented wages from remaining above subsistence level, owing to the stimulus given by higher wages to an increase of the labouring population, which, by flooding the labour market, must speedily bring down any temporary rise. The wage-fund doctrine, whether supported by the Law of Population or not, represented wages as fixed in quantity at any given time by natural causes affecting the growth of capital, upon which no action of the workers themselves exercised any influence. Supported by a Law of Rent that professed to stand upon a basis of fixed physical conditions, and an equally rigid law of the tendency of profits to a minimum by the competition of capital, the whole structure, especially upon its distribution side, laid bold claim to a "natural and necessary character. Mr. Ruskin's general attack upon this claim was a double one. He asserted, and proved by an appeal to facts, that these laws obtained their natural and necessary appearance by false abstraction. Taking wages in particular, he showed that they were not universally or even generally determined by the exclusive action of competition, but that custom, good feeling, and other considerations did actually enter |