CHAPTER IX

THE CULTURAL INCIDENCE OF THE MACHINE
PROCESS

So far as regards the non-mechanical factors of
culture, such as religion, politics, and even business
enterprise, the present is in a very large degree
comparable with the scheme of things that pre-
vailed on the Continent of Europe in the seven-
teenth century. And so far as the working of
these cultural factors is undisturbed by forces that
were not present in the older days, they should
logically again work out in such a situation as
came to prevail in Central Europe in the course of
the eighteenth century. The modern situation, of
course, is drawn on a larger scale; but that is due
to the intrusion of a new technology, a different
“state of the industrial arts,’ and not to a
substantially altered range of religious, political, or
business conceptions. The pitch of squalor that
characterized vulgar life in the busier Continental
countries at the close of the great era of politics
could probably not be reached again, but that
again, is due, not to these spiritual factors of cul-
tural growth, but to the altered state of the

302

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 303

industrial arts. The factor in the modern situation
that is alien to the ancient régime is the machine
technology, with its many and wide ramifications.

Business conceptions and business methods were
present in vigorous growth in Central Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they had
been in South Europe from a slightly earlier
date ; although the large sweep of business enter-
prise is not had until a later date, being conditioned
by the machine technology. Business methods
and the apparatus of business traffic develop very
promptly whenever and wherever the situation
calls for them; such is the teaching of economic
history.’ There is nothing recondite about them,
little that has to be acquired by a protracted, cumu-
lative experience running over many generations,
such as is involved im technological development.
This business development in earlier modern times,
together with the accumulations of funded wealth
that came of this business enterprise, ran their
course to a finish in Continental Europe, leaving no
basis for a new start. The new start from which
the current situation takes its rise, in Kurope and
elsewhere, was given to the Continental peoples by

1 The perfected system of business principles rests on the historical
basis of free institutions, and so presumes a protracted historical growth
of these institutions ; but a highly efficient, though less perfect, business
system was worked out in a relatively short time by the South and
Central European peoples in early modern times on the basis of a less
consummate system of rights. — Cf. Ehrenberg, Zeitalter der Fugger ;
Sombart, Kapitalismus, vol. Il. ch. VIII., XIV., XV.

304. THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

the English, ready-made, in the so-called Industrial
Revolution. The natural-rights metaphysics, to
which the eventual breakdown of the old Conti-
nental system owed its specific character, came also
from the English."

In point of blood and cultural descent the popu-
lation of Great Britain did not differ materially
from their neighbors across the Channel or across
the North Sea.’ But from the beginning of the
modern cultural era Great Britain stood outside of
the general European situation, by force of its
physical isolation. So that during the modern era,
down to the close of the eighteenth century, the
British community was in the position of an inter-
ested third party rather than a participant in the
political concert of Europe. The era of “ state-
making,” so called, is an era in which England
interferes, but is, on the whole, not greatly inter-
fered with, so far as her own home affairs are
concerned. Hngland, and presently Great Britain,
being reduced to law and order under one crown
and living in a condition of isolation and (rela-
tively) of internal peace, the cultural growth of
that country took a relatively peaceable direction.
The dominant note of everyday life was industry
and trade, not dynastic politics and war. This na-

1 See Chapter IV. above.

2 Cf. Keane, Man, Past and Present, ch. XIV. ; W. Z. Ripley, Races
of Kurope ; Lapouge, L’ Aryen ; Montelius, Les temps préhistoriques en
Suéde, etc. ; Andreas Hansen, Menneskeslegtens dilde.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 305

tional experience gave as its outcome constitutional
government and the modern industrial technology,
together with the animus and the point of view of
the modern materialistic science. The point of de-
parture for the more recent, current situation,
therefore, is a twofold one: (1) the British peace-
able variant of the Western culture has contributed
constitutional methods and natural rights, together
with the machine technology brought in under the
head of the “industrial revolution”; and (2) there are
the patriotic ideals and animosities left as a residue
of the warlike political traffic in Continental Europe.

Since the new departure, made on the basis of
natural rights and modern industrial and scientific
methods, the complex of nations and of interna-
tional relations is a single, not a twofold one.
The stage over which affairs, political, industrial
and cultural, run their course is no longer Conti-
nental or British, but cosmopolitan, comprising all
civilized communities and all civilized interests.
So that there is not now, as there was in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an isolation
hospital for technology, science, and civil rights,
set apart from the general current of cultural
development. Whatever the forces at work in the
modern situation may eventually bring to pass,
therefore, the outcome must touch all communities
in the same way and in approximately the same
degree. If the outcome is dynastic politics snd

806 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

armament again played to a finish in popular
squalor, aristocratic virtues, and universal bank-
ruptcy, there will be no peaceable community of
matter-of-fact mechanics and shopkeepers left in
reserve from which to make a new cultural and
industrial start. The modern technology has, in a
manner, cut away the ground out of which it first
grew and from which it gathered force to reshape
the course of history. It has made it impossible
for any community to stand peaceably outside of
the great complex of nations.

But within the comprehensive situation of to-day
there is this new factor, the machine process. In
an earlier chapter (II.) the technological character
of this machine process has been set forth at some
length. The machine process pervades the mod-
ern life and dominates it in a mechanical sense.
Its dominance is seen in the enforcement of precise
mechanical measurements and adjustment and the
reduction of all manner of things, purposes and
acts, necessities, conveniences, and amenities of life,
to standard units. The bearing of this sweeping
mechanical standardization upon business traffic is
a large part of the subject-matter of the foregoing
chapters. The point of immediate interest here is
the further bearing of the machine process upon
the growth of culture,— the disciplinary effect
which this movement for standardization and me-
chanical equivalence has upon the human material.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 307

This discipline falls more immediately on the
workmen engaged in the mechanical industries, and
only less immediately on the rest of the community
which lives in contact with this sweeping machine
process. Wherever the machine process extends, it
sets the pace for the workmen, great and small.
The pace isset, not wholly by the particular processes
in the details of which the given workman is im-
mediately engaged, but in some degree by the more
comprehensive process at large into which the
given detail process fits. It is no longer simply
that the individual workman makes use of one or
more mechanical contrivances for effecting certain
results. Such used to be his office in the earlier
phases of the use of machines, and the work which
he now has in hand still has much of that character.
But such a characterization of the workman’s part
in industry misses the peculiarly modern feature of
the case. He now does this work as a factor in-
volved in a mechanical process whose movement
controls his motions. It remains true, of course,
as it always has been true, that he is the intelligent
agent concerned in the process, while the machine,
furnace, roadway, or retort are inanimate structures
devised by man and subject to the workman’s
supervision. But the process comprises him and
his intelligent motions, and it is by virtue of his
necessarily taking an intelligent part in what is
going forward that the mechanical process has its

308 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

chief effect upon him. The process standardizes
his supervision and guidance of the machine.
Mechanically speaking, the machine is not his to
do with it as his fancy may suggest. His place is
to take thought of the machine and its work in
terms given him by the process that is going for-
ward. His thinking in the premises is reduced to
standard units of gauge and grade. If he fails of
the precise measure, by more or less, the exigencies
of the process check the aberration and drive home
the absolute need of conformity.

There results a standardization of the workman’s
intellectual life in terms of mechanical process, which
is more unmitigated and precise the more compre-
hensive and consummate the industrial process
in which he plays a part. This must not be taken
to mean that such work need lower the degree of
intelligence of the workman. No doubt the con-
trary is nearer the truth. He is a more efficient
workman the more intelligent he is, and the dis-
cipline of the machine process ordinarily increases
his efficiency even for work in a different line from
that by which the discipline is given. But the
intelligence required and inculcated in the machine
industry is of a peculiar character. The machine
process is a severe and insistent disciplinarian in
point of intelligence. It requires close and unre-
mitting thought, but it is thought which runs in
standard terms of quantitative precision. Broadly,

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 309

other intelligence on the part of the workman is
useless; or it is even worse than useless, for a
habit of thinking in other than quantitative terms
blurs the workman’s quantitative apprehension of
the facts with which he has to do.’

In so far as he is a rightly gifted and fully dis-
ciplined workman, the final term of his habitual
thinking is mechanical efficiency, understanding
“mechanical” in the sense in which it is used
above. But mechanical efficiency is a matter of
precisely adjusted cause and effect. What the dis-
cipline of the machine industry inculcates, there-
fore, in the habits of life and of thought of the
workman, is regularity of sequence and mechanical
precision ; and the intellectual outcome is an habit-
ual resort to terms of measurable cause and effect,
together with a relative neglect and disparagement
of such exercise of the intellectual faculties as does
not run on these lines.

Of course, in no case and with no class does the
discipline of the machine process mould the habits
of life and of thought fully imto its own image.
There is present in the human nature of all classes
too large a residue of the propensities and aptitudes
carried over from the past and working to a differ-
ent result. The machine’s régime has been of too

1 Tf, e.g., he takes to myth-making and personifies the machine or
the process and imputes purpose and benevolence to the mechanical
appliances, after the manner of current nursery tales and pulpit orator,
he is sure to go wrong.

310 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

short duration, strict as its discipline may be, and
the body of inherited traits and traditions is too com-
prehensive and consistent to admit of anything more
than a remote approach to such a consummation.
The machine process compels a more or less un-
remitting attention to phenomena of an impersonal
character and to sequences and correlations not
dependent for their force upon human predilection
nor created by habit and custom. The machine
throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It
compels the adaptation of the workman to his work,
rather than the adaptation of the work to the work-
man. The machine technology rests on a knowl-
edge of impersonal, material cause and effect, not
on the dexterity, diligence, or personal force of the
workman, still less on the habits and propensities
of the workman’s superiors. Within the range of
this machine-guided work, and within the range
of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine
process, the course of things is given mechanically,
impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a
discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for
mechanical effect. It inculcates thinking in terms
of opaque, impersonal cause and effect, to the
neglect of those norms of validity that rest on
usage and on the conventional standards handed
down by usage. Usage counts for little in shaping
the processes of work of this kind or in shaping the
modes of thought induced by work of this kind.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 311

The machine process gives no insight into ques-
tions of good and evil, merit and demerit, except
in point of material causation, nor into the founda-
tions or the constraining force of law and order,
except such mechanically enforced law and order
as may be stated in terms of pressure, temperature,
velocity, tensile strength, etc.'| The machine tech-
nology takes no cognizance of conventionally
established rules of precedence; it knows neither
manners nor breeding and can make no use of
any of the attributes of worth. Its scheme of
knowledge and of inference is based on the laws
of material causation, not on those of immemorial
custom, authenticity, or authoritative enactment.
Its metaphysical basis is the law of cause and
effect, which in the thinking of its adepts has dis-
placed even the law of sufficient reason.”

The range of conventional truths, or of institu-
tional legacies, which it traverses is very compre-
hensive, being, indeed, all-inclusive. It is but
little more in accord with the newer, eighteenth-
century conventional truths of natural rights,

1 Such expressions as ‘“‘ good and ill,” ‘‘merit and demerit,”’
‘law and order,’’ when applied to technological facts or to the out-
come of material science, are evidently only metaphorical expressions,
borrowed from older usage and serviceable only as figures of speech.

2 Tarde, Psychologic Economique, vol. I. pp. 122-131, offers a char-
acterization of the psychology of modern work, contrasting, among
other things, the work of the machine workman with that of the
handicraftsman in respect of its psychological requirements and effects.
It may be taken as a temperate formulation of the current common-
places on this topic, and seems to be fairly wide of the mark.

312 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

natural liberty, natural law, or natural religion,
than with the older norms of the true, the beauti-
ful, and the good which these displaced. Anthropo-
morphism, under whatever disguise, is of no use
and of no force here.

The discipline exercised by the mechanical occu-
pations, in so far as it is in question here, is a
discipline of the habits of thought. It is, there-
fore, as processes of thought, methods of apper-
ception, and sequences of reasoning, that these
occupations are of interest for the present purpose;
it is as such that they have whatever cultural
value belongs to them. They have such a value,
therefore, somewhat in proportion as they tax the
mental faculties of those employed; and the largest
effects are to be looked for among those industrial
classes who are required to comprehend and guide
the processes, rather than among those who serve
merely as mechanical auxiliaries of the machine
process. Not that the latter are exempt from the
machine’s discipline, but it falls upon them blindly
and enforces an uncritical acceptance of opaque
results, rather than a theoretical insight into the
causal sequences which make up the machine
process. The higher degree of training in such
matter-of-fact habits of thought is accordingly to
be looked for among the higher ranks of skilled
mechanics, and perhaps still more decisively

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 313

among those who stand in an engineering or
supervisory relation to the processes. It counts
more forcibly and farthest among those who
are required to exercise what may be called a
mechanical discretion in the guidance of the
industrial processes, who, as one might say, are
required to administer the laws of causal sequence
that run through material phenomena, who there-
fore must learn to think in the terms in which
the machine processes work.’ The metaphysical
ground, the assumptions, on which such thinking
proceeds must be such as will hold good for the
sequence of material phenomena; that is to say, it

1 For something more than a hundred years past this change in the
habits of thought of the workman has been commonly spoken of as a
deterioration or numbing of his intelligence. But that seems too
sweeping a characterization of the change brought on by habituation
to machine work. It is safe to say that such habituation brings a
change in the workman’s habits of thought, — in the direction, method,
and content of his thinking, — heightening his intelligence for some pur-
poses and lowering it for certain others. No doubt, on the whole, the
machine’s discipline lowers the intelligence of the workman for such
purposes as were rated high as marks of intelligence before the com-
ing of the machine, but it appears likewise to heighten his intelligence
for such purposes as have been brought to the front by the machine.
If he is by nature scantily endowed with the aptitudes that would make
him think effectively in terms of the machine process, if he has intel-
lectual capacity for other things and not for this, then the training of
the machine may fairly be said to lower his intelligence, since it hinders
the full development of the only capacities of which he is possessed,
The resulting difference in intellectual training is a difference in kind
and direction, not necessarily in degree. Cf. Schmoller, Grundriss
der Volkswirtschaftslehre, vol. I. secs. 85-86, 132 ; Hobson, Hvolution
of Modern Capitalism, ch. IX. secs. 4 and 5 ; Cooke Taylor, Modern
Factory System, pp. 434-435 ; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial
Democracy, e.g. pp. 827 et seg.; K. Th. Reinhold, Arbeit und Werkzeug,
ch. X. (particularly pp. 190-198) and ch. XI. (particularly pp. 221-240).

314 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

is the metaphysical assumptions of modern mate-
rial science, — the law of cause and effect, cumula-
tive causation, conservation of energy, persistence
of quantity, or whatever phrase be chosen to cover
the concept. The men occupied with the modern
material sciences are, accordingly, for the purpose
in hand, in somewhat the same case as the higher
ranks of those employed in mechanical industry.’

Leaving aside the archaic vocations of war, poli-
tics, fashion, and religion, the employments in
which men are engaged may be distinguished as
pecuniary or business employments on the one
hand, and industrial or mechanical employments
on the other hand.’ In earlier times, and indeed
until an uncertain point in the nineteenth century,
such a distinction between employments would not
to any great extent have coincided with a differ-
ence between occupations. But gradually, as time
has passed and production for a market has come
to be the rule in industry, there has supervened a
differentiation of occupations, or a division of
labor, whereby one class of men have taken over
the work of purchase and sale and of husbanding a
store of accumulated values. Concomitantly, of
course, the rest, who may, for lack of means or of

1Cf. J. C. Sutherland, ‘‘The Engineering Mind,’ Popular Science
Monthly, January 1903, pp. 254-256.

2 Cf. ‘(Industrial and Pecuniary Employments,”’ especially pp.
198-218.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 315

pecuniary aptitude, have been less well fitted for
pecuniary pursuits, have been relieved of the cares
of business and have with increasing specialization
given their attention to the mechanical processes
involved in this production for a market. In this
way the distinction between pecuniary and indus-
trial activities or employments has come to coin-
cide more and more nearly with a difference
between occupations. Not that the specialization
has even yet gone so far as to exempt any class
from all pecuniary care;' for even those whose
daily occupation is mechanical work still habitually
bargain with their employers for their wages and
with others for their supplies. So that none of the
active classes in modern life is fully exempt from
pecuniary work.

But the need of attention to pecuniary matters
is less and less exacting, even in the matter of
wages and supplies. The scale of wages, for in-
stance, is, for the body of workmen, and also for
what may be called the engineering force, becoming
more and more a matter of routine, thereby lessen-
ing at least the constancy with which occasions

1As G, F. Steffen has described it: ‘‘Those who hire out their
labor power or their capital or their land to the entrepreneurs are as a
rule not absolutely passive as seen from the point of view of business
enterprise. They are not simply inanimate implements in the hands
of the entrepreneurs. They are ‘enterprising implements’ (foreta-
gande verktyg) who surrender their undertaking functions only to the

extent designated in the contract with the entrepreneur.’’ — Hkono-
misk Tidskrift, vol. V. p. 256,

316 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

for detail bargaining in this respect recur. So also
as regards the purchase of consumable goods. In
the cities and industrial towns, particularly, the
supplying of the means of subsistence has, in
great part, become a matter of routine. Retail
prices are in an increasing degree fixed by the
seller, and in great measure fixed in an impersonal
way. This occurs in a particularly evident and
instructive way in the practice of the department
stores, where the seller fixes the price, and comes
in contact with the buyer only through the inter-
vention of a salesman who has no discretion as to
the terms of sale. The change that has taken
place and that is still going on in this respect is
sufficiently striking on comparison with the past
in any industrial community, or with the present
in any of those communities which we are in the
habit of calling “ industrially backward.”
Conversely, as regards the men in the pecuniary
occupations, the business men. Their exemption
from taking thought of mechanical facts and
processes is likewise only relative. Even those
business men whose business is in a peculiar de-
gree remote from the handling of tools or goods,
and from the oversight of mechanical processes, as,
for example, bankers, lawyers, brokers, and the
like, have still, at the best, to take some cognizance
of the mechanical apparatus of everyday life;
they are at least compelled to take some thought

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 317

of what may be called the mechanics of consump-
tion. Whereas those business men whose business
is more immediately concerned with industry com-
monly have some knowledge and take some
thought of the processes of industry; to some
appreciable extent they habitually think in me-
chanical terms. Their cogitations may habitually
run to pecuniary conclusions, and the test to
which the force and validity of their reasoning
is brought may habitually be the pecuniary out-
come; the beginning and end of their more seri-
ous thinking is of a pecuniary kind, but it always
takes in some general features of the mechanical
process along the way. Their exemption from
mechanical thinking, from thinking in terms of
cause and effect, is, therefore, materially qualified.

But after all qualifications have been made, the
fact still is apparent that the everyday life of
those classes which are engaged in business differs
materially in the respect cited from the life of the
classes engaged in industry proper. There is an
appreciable and widening difference between the
habits of life of the two classes; and this carries
with it a widening difference in the discipline to
which the two classes are subjected. It induces a
difference in the habits of thought and the habitual
grounds and methods of reasoning resorted to by
each class. There results a difference in the point
of view, in the facts dwelt upon, in the methods

318 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

of argument, in the grounds of validity appealed
to; and this difference gains in magnitude and
consistency as the differentiation of occupations
goes on. So that the two classes come to have an
increasing difficulty in understanding one another
and appreciating one another’s convictions, ideals,
capacities, and shortcomings.

The ultimate ground of validity for the thinking
of the business classes is the natural-rights ground
of property,—a conventional, anthropomorphic
fact having an institutional validity, rather than a
matter-of-fact validity such as can be formulated
in terms of material cause and effect; while the
classes engaged in the machine industry are
habitually occupied with matters of causal se-
quence, which do not lend themselves to statement
in anthropomorphic terms of natural rights and
which afford no guidance in questions of institu-
tional right and wrong, or of conventional reason
and consequence. Arguments which proceed on
material cause and effect cannot be met with
arguments from conventional precedent or dialec-
tically sufficient reason, and conversely.

The thinking required by the pecuniary occupa-
tions proceeds on grounds of conventionality,
whereas that involved in the industrial occupa-
tions runs, in the main, on grounds of mechanical
sequence or causation, to the neglect of conven-
tionality. The institution (habit of thought) of

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 319

Ownership or property is a conventional fact; and
the logic of pecuniary thinking— that is to say, of
thinking on matters of ownership —is a working
out of the implications of this postulate, this con-
cept of ownership or property. The characteristic
habits of thought given by such work are habits
of recourse to conventional grounds of finality or
validity, to anthropomorphism, to explanations
of phenomena in terms of human relation, discre-
tion, authenticity, and choice. The final ground of
certainty in inquiries on this natural-rights plane
is always a ground of authenticity, of precedent,
or accepted decision. The argument is an argu-
ment de jure, not de facto, and the training given
lends facility and certainty in the pursuit of de
jure distinctions and generalizations, rather than
in the pursuit or the assimilation of a de facto
knowledge of impersonal phenomena. The end of
such reasoning is the interpretation of new facts
in terms of accredited precedents, rather than a
revision of the knowledge drawn from past experi-
ence in the matter-of-fact light of new phenomena.
The endeavor is to make facts conform to law,
not to make the law or general rule conform to
facts. The bent so given favors the acceptance of
the general, abstract, custom-made rule as some-
thing real with a reality superior to the reality of
impersonal, non-conventional facts. Such training
gives reach and subtlety in metaphysical argu-

320 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

ment and in what is known as the “practical”
management of affairs; it gives executive or ad-
ministrative efficiency, so-called, as distinguished
from mechanical work. “Practical” efficiency
means the ability to turn facts to account for
the purposes of the accepted conventions, to give
a large effect to the situation in terms of the
pecuniary conventions in force.’

The spiritual attitude given by this training in rea-
soning de jure, from pecuniary premises to pecuniary
conclusions, is necessarily conservative. This species
of reasoning assumes the validity of the conven-
tionally established postulates, and is consequently
unable to take a sceptical attitude toward these
postulates or toward the institutions in which these
postulates are embodied. It may lead to scepticism
touching other, older, institutions that are at vari-
ance with its own (natural-rights) postulates, but its
scepticism cannot touch the natural-rights ground
on which it rests its own case. In the same man-
ner, of course, the thinking which runs in material
causal sequence cannot take a sceptical attitude
toward its fundamental postulate, the law of cause
and effect ; but since reasoning on this materialistic
basis does not visibly go to uphold the received

1 Cf,, on the other hand, Reinhold, Arbeit und Werkzeug, ch. XII.
and XIV., where double dealing is confused with workmanship, very

much after the manner familiar to readers of expositions of the

‘“wages of superintendence,’’ but more broadly and ingeniously than
usual,

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 321

institutions, the attitude given by the discipline of
the machine technology cannot, for the present, be
called a conservative attitude.

The business classes are conservative, on the
whole, but such a conservative bent is, of course,
not peculiar to them. These occupations are not
the only ones whose reasoning prevailingly moves
on a conventional plane. Indeed, the intellectual
activity of other classes, such as soldiers, politicians,
the clergy, and men of fashion, moves on a plane of
still older conventions; so that if the training
given by business employments is to be character-
ized as conservative, that given by these other,
more archaic employments should be called re-
actionary.. Extreme conventionalization means

1 Individual exceptions are, of course, to be found in all classes,
but there is, after all, a more or less consistent, prevalent class attitude.
As is well known, clergymen, lawyers, soldiers, civil servants, and
the like, are popularly held to be of a conservative, if not reactionary
temper. This vulgar apprehension may be faulty in detail, and espe-
cially it may be too sweeping in its generalizations; but there are,
after all, few persons not belonging to these classes who will not
immediately recognize that this vulgar appraisement of them rests on
substantial grounds, even though the appraisement may need qualifi-
cation. So, also, a conservative animus is seen to pervade all classes
more generally in earlier times or on more archaic levels of culture
than our own. At the same time, in those early days and in the
more archaic cultural regions, the structure of conventionally accepted
truths and the body of accredited spiritual or extra-material facts are
more comprehensive and rigid, and the thinking on all topics is more
consistently held to tests of authenticity as contrasted with tests of
sense perception. On the whole, the number and variety of things
that are fundamentally and eternally true and good increase as one
goes outward from the modern West-European cultural centres into
the earlier barbarian past or into the remoter barbarian present.

322 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

extreme conservatism. Conservatism means the
maintenance of conventions already in force. On
this head, therefore, the discipline of modern busi-
ness life may be said simply to retain something
of the complexion which marks the life of the
higher barbarian culture, at the same time that it
has not retained the disciplinary force of the bar-
barian culture in so high a state of preservation as
some of the other occupations just named.

The discipline of the modern industrial employ-
ments is relatively free from the bias of conven-
tionality, but the difference between the mechanical
and the business occupations in this respect is a dif-
ference of degree. It is not simply that conven-
tional standards of certainty fall into abeyance
for lack of exercise, among the industrial classes.
The positive discipline exercised by their work in
good part runs counter to the habit of thinking in
conventional, anthropomorphic terms, whether the
conventionality is that of natural rights or any
other. And in respect of this positive training
away from conventional norms, there is a large
divergence between the several lines of industrial
employment. In proportion as a given line of
employment has more of the character of a ma-
chine process and less of the character of handi-
craft, the matter-of-fact training which it gives
is more pronounced. In a sense more intimate
than the inventors of the phrase seem to have

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 323

appreciated, the machine has become the master
of the man who works with it and an arbiter in
the cultural fortunes of the community into whose
life it has entered.

The intellectual and spiritual training of the ma-
chine in modern life, therefore, is very far-reaching.
It leaves but a small proportion of the community
untouched; but while its constraint is ramified
throughout the body of the population, and con-
strams virtually all classes at some points in
their daily life, it falls with the most direct,
intimate, and unmitigated impact upon the skilled
mechanical classes, for these have no respite from
its mastery, whether they are at work or at play.

The ubiquitous presence of the machine, with
its spiritual concomitant — workday ideals and
scepticism of what is only conventionally valid —
is the unequivocal mark of the Western culture
of to-day as contrasted with the culture of other
times and places. It pervades all classes and
strata in a varying degree, but on an average in
a greater degree than at any time in the past, and
most potently in the advanced industrial commu-
nities and in the classes immediately in contact with
the mechanical occupations.’ As the comprehen-
sive mechanical organization of the material side
of life has gone on, a heightening of this cultural
effect throughout the community has also super-

1 See Chapter II. above,

324 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

vened, and with a farther and faster movement in
the same direction a farther accentuation of this
“modern” complexion of culture is fairly to be
looked for, unless some remedy be found. And
as the concomitant differentiation and specializa-
tion of occupations goes on, a still more unmiti-
gated discipline falls upon ever widening classes
of the population, resulting in an ever weakening
sense of conviction, allegiance, or piety toward the
received institutions.

It is a matter of common notoriety that the
modern industrial populations are improvident in
a high degree and are apparently incapable of
taking care of the pecuniary details of their own
life. This applies, not only to factory hands, but
also to the general class of highly skilled mechanics,
inventors, technological experts. The rule does
not hold in any hard and fast way, but it holds
with such generality as may fairly be looked for.
The present factory population may be compared
in this respect with the class of handicraftsmen
whom they have displaced, as also with the farm-
ing population of the present time, especially the
class of small proprietary farmers. The failure
of the modern industrial classes on this head is not
due to scantier opportunities for saving, whether
they are compared with the earlier handicraftsmen
or with the modern farmer or peasant; nor is it

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 325

due to a lack of general intelligence, for a com-
parison in point of intelligence falls out in favor
of the modern industrial workmen. This improvi-
dence is commonly discussed in terms of depreca-
tion, and there is much preaching of thrift and
steady habits. But the preaching has no appre-
ciable effect. The trouble seems to be of the
nature of habit rather than of reasoned conviction.
Other causes may partially explain this improvi-
dence, but the inquiry is at least pertinent how
far the absence of property and thrift among them
may be traceable to the relative absence of pe-
cuniary training and to the presence of a discipline
which is at variance with habits of thrift.

Mere exemption from pecuniary training is not
competent alone to explain the patent thriftless-
ness of modern workmen; the more so since this
exemption is but partial and relative. Also, the
thriftless classes commonly have an envious ap-
preciation of pecuniary advantages. It is rather
the composite effect of exemption from pecuniary
training and certain positive requirements of
modern life. Among these positive requirements
is what has been called the canon of conspicuous
waste. Under modern conditions a free expendi-
ture in consumable goods is a condition requisite
to good repute.’ This conduces to immediate con-
sumption rather than to saving. What is perhaps

1 Cf. Theory of the Leisure Class, especially ch. IV. and Y.

326 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

still more decisive against thrift on the part of
workmen is the fact that the modern large organi-
zation of industry requires a high degree of mo-
bility on the part of employees. It requires, in
fact, that the labor force and the labor units be
mobile, interchangeable, distributable, after the
same impersonal fashion as the mechanical con-
trivances engaged are movable and distributable.
The working population is required to be standard-
ized, movable, and interchangeable in much the
same impersonal manner as the raw or half-
wrought materials of industry. From which it
follows that the modern workman cannot advan-
tageously own a home. By force of this latter
feature of the case he is discouraged from invest-
ing his savings in real property, or, indeed, in any
of the impedimenta of living. And the savings-
bank account, it may be added, offers no adequate
substitute, as an incentive to thrift, in the place of
such property as a dwelling-place, which is tan-
gibly and usefully under the owner’s hand and
persistently requires maintenance and improve-
ment.

The conditions of life imposed upon the working
population by the machine industry discourage
thrift. But after allowance has been made for
this almost physical restraint upon the aquisition
of property by the working classes, something is
apparently left over, to be ascribed to the moral

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 327

effect of the machine technology. The industrial
classes appear to be losing the instinct of individual
ownership. The acquisition of property is ceasing
to appeal to them as a natural, self-evident source
of comfort and strength. The natural right of
property no longer means so much to them as it
once did.

A like weakening of the natural-rights animus is
visible at another point in the current frame of mind
of these classes. The growth of trade-unionism
and of what is called the trade-union spirit is a
concomitant of industry organized after the manner
of a machine process. Historically this growth
begins, virtually, with the industrial revolution,
coming in sporadically, loosely, tentatively, with
no precise assignable date, very much as the revo-
lution does. England is the land of its genesis, its
“area of characterization,’ and the place where it
has reached its fullest degree of specification and
its largest force ; just as England is the country in
which the modern machine industry took its rise and
in which it has had the longest and most consistent
life and growth. In this matter other countries
are followers of the British lead and apparently
borrowers of British precedents and working con-
cepts. Still, the history of the trade-union move-
ment in other countries seems to say that the
working classes elsewhere have not advisedly bor-
rowed ideals and methods of organization from

328 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

their British congeners so much as they have been
pushed into the same general attitude and line of
conduct by the same general line of exigencies and
experiences. Particularly, experience seems to say
that it is not feasible to introduce the trade-union
spirit or the trade-union rules into any community
until the machine industry has had time extensively
to standardize the scheme of work and of life for the
working classes on mechanical lines. Workmen
do not take to full-blown trade-union ideals abruptly
on the introduction of those modern business
methods which make trade-union action advisable
for the working class. A certain interval elapses
between the time when business conditions first
make trade-union action feasible, as a business
proposition, and the time when the body of work-
men are ready to act in the spirit of trade-unionism
and along the lines which the union animus
presently accepts as normal for men in the mechan-
ically organized industries. An interval of disci-
pline in the ways of the mechanically standardized
industry, more or less protracted and severe, seems
necessary to bring such a proportion of the work-
men into line as will give a consensus of sentiment
and opinion favorable to trade-union action.

The pervading characteristic of the trade-union
animus is the denial of the received natural-rights
dogmas wherever the mechanical standardization of
modern industry traverses the working of these

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 329

received natural rights. Recent court decisions in
America, as well as decisions in analogous cases
in England at that earlier period when the British
development was at about the same stage of ma-
turity as the current American situation, testify
unequivocally that the common run of trade-union
action is at variance with the natural-rights founda-
tion of the common law. Trade-unionism denies
individual freedom of contract to the workman, as
well as free discretion to the employer to carry on
his business as may suit hisownends. Many pious
phrases have been invented to disguise this icono-
clastic trend of trade-union aims and endeavors;
but the courts, standing on a secure and familiar
natural-rights footing, have commonly made short
work of the shifty sophistications which trade-union
advocates have offered for their consideration.
They have struck at the root of the matter in
declaring trade-union regulations inimical to the
natural rights of workman and employer alike, in
that they hamper individual liberty and act in
restraint of trade. The regulations, therefore, vio-
late that system of law and order which rests on
natural rights, although they may be enforced by
that de facto law and order which is embodied
in the mechanical standardization of the industrial
processes.

Trade-unionism is an outgrowth of relatively
late industrial conditions and has come on gradu-

330 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

ally as an adaptation of old methods and work-
ing arrangements carried over from the days of
handicraft and petty trade. It is a movement
to adapt, construe, recast, earlier working arrange-
ments with as little lesion to received preconcep-
tions as the new exigencies and the habits of
thought bred by them will permit. It is, on its
face, an endeavor of compromise between received
notions of what “naturally” ought to be in mat-
ters of industrial business, on the one hand, and
what the new exigencies of industry demand and
what the new animus of the workman will toler-
ate, on the other hand. Trade-unionism is therefore
to be taken as a somewhat mitigated expression
of what the mechanical standardization of industry
inculeates. Hitherto the movement has shown a
fairly uninterrupted growth, not only in the num-
bers of its membership, but in the range and scope
of its aims as well; and hitherto it has reached
no haltmg-place in its tentative, shifty, but ever
widening crusade of iconoclasm against the re-
ceived body of natural rights. The latest, maturest
expressions of trade-unionism are, on the whole,
the most extreme, in so far as they are directed
against the natural rights of property and pecun-
lary contract.

The nature of the compromise offered by trade-
unionism is shown by a schedule of its demands :
collective bargaining for wages and employment ;

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 331

arbitration of differences between owners and
workmen ; standard rates of wages; normal work-
ing day, with penalized regulation of hours for
men, women, and children; penalized regulation
of sanitary and safety appliances; mutual insur-
ance of workmen, to cover accident, disability, and
unemployment. In all of this the aim of union-
ism seldom goes the length of overtly disputing
the merits of any given article of natural-rights
dogma. It only endeavors to cut into these
articles, in point of fact, at points where the
dogmas patently traverse the conditions of life
imposed on the workmen by the modern industrial
system or where they traverse the consensus of
sentiment that is coming to prevail among these
workmen.

When unionism takes an attitude of overt hos-
tility to the natural-rights institutions of property
and free contract, it ceases to be unionism simply
and passes over into something else, which may be
called socialism for want of a better term. Such
an extreme iconoclastic position, which would
overtly assert the mechanical standardization of
industry as against the common-law standardiza-
tion of business, seems to be the logical outcome
to which the trade-union animus tends, and to
which some approach has latterly been made by
more than one trade-unionist body, but which is,
on the whole, yet in the future, if, indeed, it is to

332 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

be reached at all. On the whole, the later ex-
pressions go farther in this direction than the
earlier; and the animus of the leaders, as well
as of the more wide-awake body of unionist work-
men, appears to go farther than their official
utterances.

A detail of trade-union history may be cited in
illustration of their attitude toward the natural-
rights principles that underlie modern business
relations. As is well known, trade-unions have
somewhat consistently avoided pecuniary responsi-
bility for the actions of their members or officials.
They avoid incorporation. Practically an employer
has had no recourse in case he suffers from a failure
on the part of his union workmen to live up to the
terms of an agreement made with the union. In
English practice this exemption from pecuniary
responsibility has acquired much of the force of
law, and indeed was supposed to have gained the
countenance of statutory enactment, until, within
the past few months, the so-called Taff Vale
decision of the House of Lords reversed the views
which had come to prevail on this head. This
decision, by the most conservative tribunal of the
British nation, is too recent to permit its conse-
quences for trade-unionism to be appreciated. But
it seems fair to expect that the question which the
decision brmgs home to the unions will be, How
is this court-made pecuniary responsibility to

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 333

be evaded? not, How is it to be lived up to?
Patently,' the decision is unexceptionable under
common law rules; but, also patently,’ it broadly
traverses trade-union practice and is wholly alien
to the attitude of the trade-unionists.?

The animus shown by the trade-unionists in this
shirking of pecuniary responsibility is character-
istic of their attitude toward common law rules.
The unions and their methods of work are essen-
tially extra-legal. It is only reluctantly, as
defendants if at all, that unions are accustomed
to appear in court. When they make a move for
statutory enactment, as for the enforcement of a
normal day or of sanitary and safeguarding regula-
tions, it is prevailingly to criminal law that they
turn.

To all this it might, of course, be said that the

1 As, e.g., Mr. W. G. S. Adams cogently points out in a recent
number of the Journal of Political Economy (December 1902),

2As Mr. Webb shows (J/ndustrial Democracy, 1902, pp. xxiy-
XXXvi).

8 The historical explanation of this House of Lords reversal of
trade-union practice is probably to be found in the conservative, or
rather reactionary, trend given to British sentiment by the imperialist
policy of the last two or three decades, accentuated by the experiences
of the Boer War. ‘The Boer War seems to mark a turning-point in the
growth of sentiment and institutions. Since the seventies the imperi-
alist interest, that is to say, the dynastic interest, has been coming
into the foreground among the interests that engage the attention of
the British community. It seems now to have definitively gained the
first place, and may be expected in the immediate future to dominate
British policy both at home and abroad. Concomitantly, it may be
remarked, the British community has been slowing down, if not losing

ground, in industrial animus, technological efficiency, and scientific
spirit. Cf. Hobson, Imperialism, part IL. ch. I. and III.

334 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

workmen who make up the trade-union element
take the course indicated simply because their
selfish interest urges them to this course; that
their common necessities and common weakness
constrains them to stand together and to act collec-
tively in dealing with their employers; while the
fact that their demands have no standing in court
constrains them to seek their ends by extra-legal
means of coercion. But this objection is little else
than another way of saying that the exigencies
forced upon the workmen by the mechanically
standardized industrial system are extra-legal exi-
gencies — exigencies which do not run in business
terms and therefore are not amenable to the
natural-rights principles of property and contract
that underlie business relations; that they can
therefore not be met on common law ground; and
that they therefore compel the workmen to see
them from another point of view and seek to dis-
pose of them by an appeal to other principles than
those afforded by the common law standpoint.
That is to say, in other words, these exigencies
which compel the trade-unionists to take thought
of their case in other terms than those afforded by
existing legal institutions are the means whereby
the discipline of the machine industry is enforced
and made effective for recasting the habits of
thought of the workmen. The harsh discipline of
these exigencies of livelihood drives home the new

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 335

point of view and holds the workmen consistently
to it. But that is not all that the mechanical
standardization of industry does in the case; it
also furnishes the new terms in which the revised
scheme of economic life takes form. The revision
of the scheme aimed at by trade-union action runs,
not in terms of natural liberty, individual property
rights, individual discretion, but in terms of stand-
ardized livelihood and mechanical necessity ; it is
formulated, not in terms of business expediency, but
in terms of industrial, technological standard units
and standard relations.

The above presentation of the case of trade-
unionism is of course somewhat schematic, as such
a meagre, incidental discussion necessarily must be.
It takes account only of those features of trade-
unionism which characteristically mark it off from
that business scheme of things with which it comes
in conflict. There are, of course, many survivals,
pecuniary and others, in the current body of trade-
union demands, and much of the trade-union argu-
ment is carried on in business terms. The crudities
and iniquities of the trade-union campaign are suf-
ficiently many and notorious to require no rehearsal
here. These crudities and iniquities commonly bulk
large in the eyes of critics who pass an opinion
on trade-unionism from the natural-rights point of
view ; and, indeed, they may deserve all the dis-
paraging attention that is given them. Trade

336 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

unionism does not fit into the natural-rights scheme
of right and honest living; but therein, in great
part, lies its cultural significance. It is of the
essence of the case that the new aims, ideals, and
expedients do not fit into the received institutional
structure; and that the classes who move in trade-
unions are, however crudely and blindly, endeavor-
ing, under the compulsion of the machine process,
to construct an institutional scheme on the lines
imposed by the new exigencies given by the
machine process.

The point primarily had in view in entering on
this characterization of trade-unionism was that
under the discipline of the mechanically standard-
ized industry certain natural rights, particularly,
those of property and free contract, are in a degree
falling into abeyance among those classes who are
most immediately subjected to this discipline. It
may be added that other classes also, to an uncer-
tain extent, sympathize with the trade-unionists
and are affected with a similar (mild and equivocal)
distrust of the principles of natural liberty. When
distrust of business principles rises to such a pitch
as to become intolerant of all pecuniary institutions,
and leads to a demand for the abrogation of prop-
erty rights rather than a limitation of them, it is
spoken of as “socialism” or “anarchism.” This
socialistic disaffection is widespread among the

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 337

advanced industrial peoples. No other cultural
phenomenon is so threatening to the received eco-
nomic and political structure; none is so unprec-
edented or so perplexing for practical men of
affairs to deal with. The immediate point of
danger in the socialistic disaffection is a growing
disloyalty to the natural-rights institution of prop-
erty, but this is backed by a similar failure of re-
gard for other articles of the institutional furniture
handed down from the past. The classes affected
with socialistic vagaries protest against the exist-
ing economic organization, but they are not neces-
sarily averse to a somewhat rigorous economic
organization on new lines of their own choosing.
They demand an organization on industrial as con-
trasted with business lines. Their sense of eco-
nomic solidarity does not seem to be defective,
indeed it seems to many of their critics to be un-
necessarily pronounced ; but it runs on lines of
industrial coherence and mechanical constraint, not
on lines given by pecuniary conjunctures and con-
ventional principles of economic right and wrong.
There is little agreement among socialists as
to a programme for the future. Their construc-
tive proposals aro ill-defined and inconsistent and
almost entirely negative. The negative character
of the socialistic propaganda has been made a
point of disparagement by its critics, perhaps
justly. But their predilection for shifty icono-

338 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

clasm, as well as the vagueness and inconsistency
of their constructive proposals, are in the present
connection to be taken as evidence that the atti-
tude of the socialists cannot be expressed in posi-
tive terms given by the institutions at present in
force. It may also be evidence of the untenability
of the socialistic ideals; but the merits of the
socialist contentions do not concern the present
inquiry. The question here is as to the nature
and causes of the socialist disaffection; it does
not concern the profounder and more delicate
point, as to the validity of the socialist contentions.
Current socialism is an animus of dissent from
received traditions. The degree and the direction
of this dissent varies greatly, but it is, within the
socialist scheme of thought, agreed that the insti-
tutional forms of the past are unfit for the work
of the future."

The socialistic disaffection has been set down

1 All this applies to anarchism as well as to socialism ; similarly to
several minor categories of dissentients, In their negative proposals
the socialists and anarchists are fairly agreed. It is in the metaphys-
ical postulates of their protest and in their constructive aims that they