THE ELEMENTS OF RECONSTRUCTION. Герберт Уэллс
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try to summarise their argument, which is already quite sufficiently condensed. The reader will be much better employed in studying it in their own words. But it may be interesting to point out how remarkably their contention on this head is reinforced by the recently published Report—from which I have already quoted—of the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. In that Report, a remarkable document far above the average of official productions of its class, the opinion is expressed that ‘a good deal of the inertia which British manufacturers have shown towards research may have been due to a realisation, partly instinctive perhaps, but partly based on experience, that research on the small scale they could afford (the italics are mine) was at best a doubtful proposition.’ And again, ‘Our experience up to the present leads us to think that the small scale on which most British industrial firms have been planned is one of the principal impediments in the way of the organisation of research, with a view to the conduct of those long and complicated investigations which are necessary for the solution of the fundamental problems lying at the basis of our staple industries.’
Here we have precisely the same insistence on the ‘importance of scale’ which the reader will find repeatedly illustrated in the following pages. The words I have just quoted might be paralleled by a number of passages in this volume. I will quote only one: ‘Though a million pound business may be easily able to sustain and profit by fifty chemists, of whom one now and again makes a paying discovery, it does not follow that a hundred thousand pound business can profitably sustain any chemists at all, much less keep up a laboratory for five. Although a State containing a number of big businesses may maintain a multitude of industrial scientific investigators employed in them, it does not follow necessarily that another State, although it contains many more businesses and those of greater aggregate value, can, if they are businesses of a smaller scale individually, employ any investigators at all. It certainly does not reflect unfavourably upon either the intelligence, the energy or the patriotism of the business men in the small-scale-business country, and it is high time that that sort of blame, which entirely confuses the issue, ceased.’
The authors of the Report and the writers of this volume are both largely concerned with what, in the jargon of the day, are known as ‘pivotal or key industries.’ I think that the passages which I have just quoted from them may be said to contain a pivotal or key idea. It may turn out after all that the shortcomings with which it is just now the custom to reproach the British man of business, in contrast, for instance, with his German rival—his conservatism, his lack of enterprise, his neglect to avail himself of the aid of science, his reluctance to combine with his fellows for common ends—are not so much faults of character, as necessary consequences of an antiquated system, for which not individuals, but State policy, economic doctrine and wrong popular notions should share the blame. The majority of our men of business have no doubt been doing their best on the lines which they have always been taught, and have themselves believed to be the only right ones. But the world has been moving at a tremendous pace, and the industrial and commercial methods and maxims of fifty or sixty years ago have, under the changed conditions, lost much of their virtue. They were the natural product of the transitional epoch which followed the Industrial Revolution. The mistake which most people then made was in thinking that the principles of Go As You Please and the General Scramble, which may have been necessary and even appropriate during the inevitable break-up of the Old Order, could possibly be the permanent foundations of the New. But we all recognise now that there must be a fresh effort of economic and social organisation. We see the crude and formidable beginnings of it already in the growth of mammoth businesses and combines and in the huge federations of Labour. They are a product of the vast scale of modern enterprise resulting from the achievements of science in the development of mechanical power, and they render the position of the small isolated business and of the so-called ‘free,’ that is to say unassociated, labourer constantly more precarious and untenable. The drawback and evils of these great agglomerations are obvious, but they are after all the necessary raw material of the New Order. They only make for oppression and social conflict when they are not controlled in the interests of the community, and are directed, as they are even now not wholly directed, to the pursuit of purely selfish ends.
For this process of agglomeration is certainly going on. There is indeed no resisting it, and those who cannot accommodate themselves to inevitable conditions will presently be forced to the wall. The recognition of these truths is no longer confined to the theorist and the outside observer. From the heart of the business world itself come the most urgent warnings against excessive unregulated competition and the loudest appeals for organisation on co-operative lines and for the helping hand of the State. I wonder whether many of my readers have met with a little book, published not long ago, bearing the title of ‘Trade as a Science,’ from the pen of Mr. Ernest Benn. I am afraid it has so far not attracted the attention it deserves, for it is full of practical knowledge and shrewd ideas, expounded in a terse, fresh, vigorous, not to say pugnacious style. It is written exclusively from the point of view of a man actually engaged in ‘the making and selling of goods’ who has not much use for professional economists and none at all for politicians. Yet this eminently practical person is just as condemnatory as any member of the Fabian Society, of the ‘individualistic, inarticulate, unorganised mass’ of old-fashioned British trade. He sees as clearly as any one that the future belongs to big-scale businesses or to such smaller businesses as can learn to work together and to pool their resources for certain objects—the full use of scientific research being only one of them —which individually they are not strong enough to attain.
This modern tendency to concentration in business, alike on its productive and its distributive side, has all-important consequences beyond the economic sphere. It affects the whole structure of society and is responsible for the new views now steadily gaining ground of the functions and responsibilities of the State. Of this reaction of recent economic developments upon social and civic life our authors have much to say. It is indeed their central theme. And if in discussing it within such narrow limits of space they are compelled, as they themselves confess, to be ‘severely elementary,’ I do not think they can be accused of any lack of thoroughness in laying out the ground. Perhaps the point at which the whole range of their constructive principles is most clearly exhibited is in the brilliant chapter on ‘Scientific Agriculture and the Nation’s Food.’ Progressive agriculturists, in their uphill but increasingly hopeful struggle, will be grateful for the support here given to all their main objects by men who evidently are not of their number, but approach the subject from a new angle and purely from the national point of view\ And if I dare add another sentence or two to an Introduction which has already run to excessive length, let me specially commend to them, and to others, what our authors have to say about the true place and also the limitations of a Tariff, or indeed of any form of Protection, in a national economic policy. Their wise and discriminating words on this subject should show us a way out of what has now become a barren and boring controversy between Protectionists and Free Traders, obviate any further misunderstanding, and allow us all to get to practical business.
But I must not let myself be tempted to stray into any further discussion of the numerous and alluring topics which are crowded into this stimulating book. My duty is discharged in commending it to the public as a valuable and distinguished contribution to the national symposium on the revolution which is being brought about by the war. There are indeed some who think that all such speculations are idle and based on a false hypothesis. When the war is once over, they tell us, we shall all hasten to return to the old ways. Its lessons will soon be forgotten, and a few years hence everything will be very much the same as it was before. For my own part I differ entirely from that view of the probabilities of the future. No doubt it is possible to exaggerate the effect which even the greatest external events can have upon the character of human beings. The men and women who survive the war will be the same men and women, and it would be a moral miracle if they should be entirely transformed by it. But it would be even more miraculous if the catastrophic experiences of the last two years did not leave a permanent mark upon them. Apart from its material effects which both in the way of destruction and construction are simply immense, the present struggle is certain, as it seems to me, to leave behind it a profound change in the national spirit and outlook. Whether we like it or not there is no possibility of getting back into the old grooves. When the war at long last comes to an end, we shall find ourselves confronted with a maze