For the rest, the idea, otherwise very laudable, of associating workmen with employers tends to this communistic conclusion, evidently false in its premises: The last word of machinery is to make man rich and happy without the necessity of labor on his part.Since, then, natural agencies must do everything for us, machinery ought to belong to the State, and the goal of progress is communism.
I shall examine the communistic theory in its place.
But I believe that I ought to immediately warn the partisans of this utopia that the hope with which they flatter themselves in relation to machinery is only an illusion of the economists, something like perpetual motion, which is always sought and never found, because asked of a power which cannot give it.Machines do not go all alone: to keep them in motion it is necessary to organize an immense service around them; so that in the end, man creating for himself an amount of work proportional to the number of instruments with which he surrounds himself, the principal consideration in the matter of machinery is much less to divide its products than to see that it is fed, -- that is, to continually renew the motive power.
Now, this motive power is not air, water, steam, electricity; it is labor, -- that is, the market.
A railroad suppresses all along its line conveyances, stages, harness-
makers, saddlers, wheelwrights, inn-keepers: I take facts as they are just after the establishment of the road.Suppose the State, as a measure of preservation or in obedience to the principle of indemnity, should make the laborers displaced by the railroad its proprietors or operators: the transportation rates, let us suppose, being reduced by twenty-five per cent.(otherwise of what use is the railroad?), the income of all these laborers united will be diminished by a like amount, -- which is to say that a fourth of the persons formerly living by conveyances will find themselves literally without resources, in spite of the munificence of the State.
To meet their deficit they have but one hope, -- that the mass of transportation effected over the line may be increased by twenty-five per cent, or else that they may find employment in other lines of industry, -- which seems at first impossible, since, by the hypothesis and in fact, places are everywhere filled, proportion is maintained everywhere, and the supply is sufficient for the demand.
Moreover it is very necessary, if it be desired to increase the mass of transportation, that a fresh impetus be given to labor in other industries.
Now, admitting that the laborers displaced by this over-production find employment, and that their distribution among the various kinds of labor proves as easy in practice as in theory, the difficulty is still far from settled.For the number of those engaged in circulation being to the number of those engaged in production as one hundred to one thousand, in order to obtain, with a circulation one-fourth less expensive, -- in other words, one- fourth more powerful, -- the same revenue as before, it will be necessary to strengthen production also by one-fourth, -- that is, to add to the agricultural and industrial army, not twenty-five, -- the figure which indicates the proportionality of the carrying industry, -- but two hundred and fifty.But, to arrive at this result, it will be necessary to create machines, -- what is worse, to create men: which continually brings the question back to the same point.Thus contradiction upon contradiction:
now not only is labor, in consequence of machinery, lacking to men, but also men, in consequence of their numerical weakness and the insufficiency of their consumption, are lacking to machinery: so that, pending the establishment of equilibrium, there is at once a lack of work and a lack of arms, a lack of products and a lack of markets.And what we say of the railroad is true of all industries: always the man and the machine pursue each other, the former never attaining rest, the latter never attaining satisfaction.
Whatever the pace of mechanical progress; though machines should be invented a hundred times more marvellous than the mule-jenny, the knitting-
machine, or the cylinder press; though forces should be discovered a hundred times more powerful than steam, -- very far from freeing humanity, securing its leisure, and making the production of everything gratuitous, these things would have no other effect than to multiply labor, induce an increase of population, make the chains of serfdom heavier, render life more and more expensive, and deepen the abyss which separates the class that commands and enjoys from the class that obeys and suffers.
Suppose now all these difficulties overcome; suppose the laborers made available by the railroad adequate to the increase of service demanded for the support of the locomotive, -- compensation being effected without pain, nobody will suffer; on the contrary, the well-being of each will be increased by a fraction of the profit realized by the substitution of the railway for the stage-coach.What then, I shall be asked, prevents these things from taking place with such regularity and precision? And what is easier than for an intelligent government to so manage all industrial transitions?
