§4.We are already beginning to recognise that our State is disabled for the fully satisfactory solution of some of the most pressing of our social problems.The immigration of foreign labour complicates our treatment of sweated industries.The improvement of conditions of labour in our trades may be rendered more difficult by the admission of sweated imports, or our feelings may be shocked by the influx of the products of slave labour.
The policy of taxing interests and profits may be thwarted by our inability to trace the incomes derived from foreign investment and trade.A financial crisis in America or germany may deplete our gold reserve and work havoc on our credit.As these movements gather force and frequency, the impotence of any single State to exercise an effective control over the primary economic interests of its people will grow more apparent.The gravest social-economic problems will be found insoluble except by international arrangement.An era of free conferences and of more or less loose agreements between States will lay the foundation for what in time must amount to international regulation of industry.In other words, the economic internationalism, which I have traced, will weave for itself the necessary apparel of political institutions.
The true germ of world-federation is perhaps to be traced to-day less clearly at the Hague than at Bern, where the representatives of the leading industrial nations have already met to set the seal of their respective governments upon undertakings to promote common policies of legislation in such matters as the regulation of night labour for women, and the disuse of poisonous ingredients in the match trade.In such agreements, as in the better-known Postal Union (which also has its offices at Bern), one finds the earliest contributions made by modern industrialism to the federal government of the world.
These facts I cite, partly to enforce the thesis that the tendencies of modern industry which make for harmony and cooperation are gaining, both in the smaller and the larger areas, over those which make for discord and for competition.This growing harmony of fact must tend to evoke a corresponding harmony of thought and feeling.But here we are retarded by a set of psychological obstacles which pervert or disguise the truth.
I have alluded to the damage due to the false representation of nations as rival traders, contending for a limited market upon terms which signify that the gain of one is the loss of another.But the whole intellectual and moral atmosphere is thick with similar mistakes of fact and fallacies of reasoning, chiefly sustained by false phrases which evoke false images and arouse injurious desires and passions.Ordinary business language is filled with selfish, separatist and combative phrases, representing trade as a warfare, in which every man must fight for his own hand, must force his wares upon the public, outwit or bludgeon his competitors, conquer new markets, beat down the prices of the goods he buys, or in finance become a 'bull' or a 'bear.' In certain large departments of the business world there still remains so much disorder, insecurity and competition as to afford support to these combative views and feelings.But they are no longer representative of the main normal activities of industry, and they ought and must by degrees be displaced by views and feelings accommodated to the more organic conception.It is an important task of economic science to enforce conceptions of the operation of economic laws which will support these newer and sounder views and feelings.For only with this growing recognition of the social harmony represented by industry can the social will be nourished that is necessary to support and further it.So long as the ordinary business man or worker has his eyes, his mind, his heart and will, glued to the tiny patch of industry to which his own directly personal effort is applied, the pulse of humanity beats feebly through the system of industry.But let the ordinary education of every man and woman impose clear images of this economic order as a great human cooperation in which each bears an essential part, as producer, consumer and citizen, the quickened intelligence and sympathy will respond, so that the blind processes of cooperation will become infused and strengthened by the current of a conscious will.
NOTES:
1.The foremost example of such organisation in a great staple industry is the International Iron & Steel Association, formed in July 1911by representatives of Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Russia, Spain, United States.The objects of this organisation were to regulate production, so as to control profitable prices and to prevent undercutting in times of depression.(Cf.Chiozza-Money, Things that Matter , Ch.XI).
