comes patronage and servility. The success of the schemes will be the destruction of the relationship between capital and labour which they were meant to perpetuate.

Advantages wrung by labour during the war after it saw the spirit in which Capitalism was working, are too expensive for Capitalism-or Society for that matter to maintain, though they were possible under the extravagant conditions of war. These, however, will not all be lost, and Capitalism will try and compensate itself for them, partly by a tightening up of management—a tightening up of the managers themselves as its servants, a tightening up of its grip on labour. Thus Capitalism will still further mechanicalize production, separate itself from human freedom, and take the part of a mighty materialist power dominating the life of the Society which it purports to serve. This relationship will never be accepted as long as man is, particularly so long as we educate our youth and help them to understand the economic mechanism of which they are a part. Management must drift towards labour and away from capital; the manager and the workmen are naturally cooperators and joint service givers; the division between management and labour created by Capitalism has been temporarily inevitable, but must produce a deadlock in industry if carried far into the future.

CAPITALISM AND PRODUCTION

Thus far I have been pointing out how the system of capitalist dominance, whatever may have been its justification as an historical period in the evolution of the industrial community, must fail to provide a satisfactory machinery for production, and

must be a menace of ever growing potentiality to the life of the people who come more and more under its authority. But despite this, it has been claimed for the system that it could produce wealth, that, under the pressure of interest, the machine, with all its faults, jerked along with energy and, though often stopped and never worked in full good will by the hired servants of Capitalism, still, in the end, gave a satisfactory result. I have given reasons for an opposite view, and I am supported by a mass of germane evidence.

I take first of all the prevalence of strikes and stoppages owing to disputes in industry. To those to whom Trade Unionism is anathema and the workers always wrong when they do not accept their master's decisions, the figures I am to quote will only prove the terrible perversity of labour and the extent of the victimization to which it subjects the "community." To those who know the actual state of the workmen's minds and hearts, the figures will show that the machine of Capitalism cannot run smoothly, that disputes belong to its nature, and that it produces strikes and lock-outs just as it does profits. I take pre-war figures because since then all industrial statistics are compiled from abnormal conditions and prove nothing except that war produces chaos. For the five years ending 1908, 20,800,000 days were lost in the aggregate owing to strikes; for the five years ending 1913, 75,500,000 days were thus lost. Even the higher of these figures is but a small proportion of the aggregate working time that was wasted, for they do not reveal the full extent of the damage. Dependent trades are put upon short time or are stopped altogether, and the time thus lost is not included in these totals. A system of production which involves

strikes is a wasteful system, and Capitalism makes strikes inevitable. Unemployment is another grievous form of waste, for it is not only a temporary cessation of production by willing and capable men, but it slackens demand, lowers standards of consumption, and helps to clog the market. At any given moment when trade is at its best three out of every hundred skilled workers are unemployed; when trade is bad, the three sometimes become ten -at the present moment owing to the war and the foreign policy pursued since the armistice, it is in some trades ninety.

The figures of total production, presented in two different ways, enable us to see what is meant by the inefficiencies and the antagonisms which I have been discussing. I shall deal first with the estimates made of the average value of production per head, and then with the national total of production. The first is a complicated figure to fix, as three things must be taken into account: the national income, prices, and the number of the working population. But there is no dispute as to general results. Between 1760 and 1803, when our productive machinery was being rapidly developed, production did not exceed £12 per head; it grew steadily for the next seventy years, when it reached £30; between 1870 and 1895 it went up rapidly to £54; then there was a check, and, up to the outbreak of war in 1914, the increase was not more than £2 5s. Some statisticians indeed believe there was a drop. This period coincides with growing labour discontent with Capitalism and a weakening in consequence of incentive to work. I regard these figures as showing the moral breakdown of Capitalism amongst other things. It is true that the parasitism of wealth had increased and had drawn

more and more people from the ranks of productive workers, that our national output was meeting with strenuous foreign competition, that the Boer War had had an adverse effect upon our industry; but over and above those things is the fact that the man at work was a discontented man.

The Census of Production taken in 1907 was, in consequence, a revelation to many complacently minded people. The net output of all the mines, quarries, factories, workshops in the United Kingdom was estimated to be not more than £762,000,000. No indictment has been made against the system of production in this country so strong as these official figures. A population of 11,000,000 people returned as workers, of whom a very large percentage are highly skilled, a country specially situated for export trade and possessed of many advantages arising from historical, geographical and geological reasons, the centre of an empire-and a total net product of £762,000,000. And yet, when one thinks over the question in detail, the reasons are on the surface. Let us grasp one important fact. Some apparently productive labour is not productive at all, and though much of the product of this labour is included in the above total and ought to be included in the sum total of national wealth, it does not enter into that wealth in beneficiary use which is the true wealth of a nation.

Let us consider the case of, say, a carpenter working on two jobs, the first for his neighbour, the blacksmith, the other for the landlord who, we shall assume, lives exclusively on rent, or on any of those tolls which the ownership of land deducts from wealth created, without in any way contributing to the production or returning an equivalent.

When the carpenter works for the blacksmith he produces to aid the blacksmith's production,* and he contributes not only to the dead total of wealth in the country, but to the fructifying volume of wealth used in the country. He makes wealth that makes wealth. His products make shorter hours, lower prices, better labour conditions and communal economies and well-being possible. If he discovers a new mode of production that reduces the prices of tables and chairs, he is working in a process that may enable the blacksmith to enjoy a higher standard of comfort and yet reduce the price of horse shoes and coulter sharpenings.

The effect of working for a landlord living on such an income as I have defined is altogether different. The carpenter may produce the same tables and chairs and may add precisely the same amount of wealth to the sum total held by all the individuals in the country as when he was working for the blacksmith. But he is contributing nothing to the effective wealth of the country, and he himself becomes a parasite on production. He is helping no one to produce another shilling, he is only helping someone to spend shillings abstracted from the volume of production. All that can be said of his work is that it is bringing back into the volume of economically effective wealth parts that had gone astray in the shape of tolls paid to allow production to be carried on. In so far as this carpenter, for this particular part of his work, devised a process of cheap production, it would not have the least effect on general production

* If, however, the blacksmith were employed exclusively by the landlord as in the second case which I am to assume, this would not be so, and it is less so in proportion to the time that the blacksmith spends on the landlord's work.