If, however, increased security of life and livelihood could be obtained for the people, with such improvement of our educational system as provided adequate opportunities for enabling the children of the poorer classes to enter all grades of the public services, the beginnings of a great change in the spirit of those services might be attained.For, if the wide gaps of dignity and of emoluments, which divide at present the higher from the lower grades, could be reduced, while at the same time effective publicity and criticism could be brought to bear upon all departments of public work, the 'bureaucratic state' might be transformed into something more nearly approaching a self-governing society.
§3.The cool practical business men will, however, probably insist that none of these devices for improving education and for stimulating public spirit will enable a public department to get out of its employees so large an output of productive energy as can be secured by the stimuli of private profit-seeking enterprise.And this may possibly be true.But those who have accepted the general lines of our analysis will recognise that such an admission is not fatal to the case for salaried employment and public service.For the private business is primarily concerned with one side of the human equation, the product, and is able in large measure to ignore the human costs involved in getting it.But the State, as representing the human welfare of its members, must take the costs into account as well.
An intelligent Society would regard it as a foolish policy to attempt to get out of its employees the amount of daily toil imposed under the conditions of most profit-making businesses.While, therefore, it is true that a public service, run upon an adequate basis of fixed salary and short work-day, would stand condemned, if the output of effective energy per man fell greatly below that furnished under the drive of ordinary capitalism, a slight reduction of that output might be welcomed as involving an actual gain in human welfare.
The diminished utility of the product might be more than compensated in terms of human welfare by the diminished human cost of the productive process.
It is not, therefore, incumbent upon the advocates of a new industrial order, based upon a closer application of the organic law, to show that such an order will yield at least as large an output of economic energy and economic product as can be got out of the mixed competition and combination which prevail at present.Applying this standard of human valuation, they are entitled to set off against any reduction of purely economic stimuli that may ensue from their reforms, not only the relief in human costs which accompanies such reduction but the enlargement of other human gains.
For, though in this endeavour to value industrial activities and products in terms of human welfare, we have for the most part confined ourselves to the human costs and utilities directly connected with the processes of economic production and consumption, we cannot ignore the wider meaning of these processes.Man lives not by bread, or economic goods, alone, but by 'admiration, hope and love.' Though the various non-economic goods and activities do not directly enter into our human valuation of industry, we cannot neglect the interactions between the economic and the other human interests involved in the organic nature of man and of society.
§4.The wider problem of human economy, the employment of all human powers for human welfare, must in fact involve a continual readjustment between the respective claims of the economic and the non-economic activities upon our lives.Most thoughtful critics of our age complain that this adjustment is defective in that business bulks too largely in our lives.They consider that our modern command over the resources of nature for the satisfaction of our wants ought to issue not so much in the larger supply of old, and the constant addition of new economic wants, as in the increased liberation of human powers for other modes of energy and satisfaction.There exist whole countries even in our time, such as China, where population lies so thick upon the earth, and where the arts of industry remain so primitive, that virtually the whole vital energy of the people must be absorbed in the economic processes.This is not our case.With our improving arts of industry and our dwindling growth of population, we can afford to give an increasing share of our interests and energies to the cultivation and enjoyment of intellectual and moral goods.The gradual realisation of this human economy is the best measure of our civilisation.Our greatest impediment in this progress is the superstitious and excessive value put by all classes of our people upon industry and property.This is almost identical with a charge of materialism, for economic values centre round material forms of property.'Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.' This is a literal statement of our bad economy.Until we can, as a nation, throw off the dominion of the economic spirit, we cannot win the spiritual liberty needed for the ascent of man.So long as we stand, for full six-sevenths of our time and more, with hands and eyes, intelligence and will, dedicated to the service of industrialism, we cannot see, much less realise, better ideals of humanity.Absorbed in earning a livelihood, we have no time or energy to live.
