I THE WHEEL OF FATE

The evil we are seeking to destroy clings about in corners especially in the form of catch-phrases by which even the intelligent can easily be caught. One phrase, which we may hear from anybody at any moment, is the phrase that such and such a modern institution has "come to stay." It is these half-metaphors that tend to make us all half-witted. What is precisely meant by the statement that the steam-engine or the wireless apparatus has come to stay? What is meant, for that matter, even by saying that the Eiffel Tower has come to stay? To begin with, we obviously do not mean what we mean when we use the words naturally; as in the expression, "Uncle Humphrey has come to stay." That last sentence may be uttered in tones of joy, or of resignation, or even of despair; but not of despair in the sense that Uncle Humphrey is really a monument that can never be moved. Uncle Humphrey did come; and Uncle Humphrey will presumably at some time go; it is even possible (however painful it may be to imagine such domestic relations) that in the last resort he should be made to go. The fact that the figure breaks down, even apart from the reality it is supposed to represent, illustrates how loosely these catch-words are used. But when we say, "The Eiffel Tower has come to stay," we are still more inaccurate. For, to begin with, the Eiffel Tower has not come at all. There was never a moment when the Eiffel Tower was seen striding towards Paris on its long iron legs across the plains of France, as the giant in the glorious nightmare of Rabelais came to tower over Paris and carry away the bells of Notre-Dame. The figure of Uncle Humphrey seen coming up the road may possibly strike as much terror as any walking tower or towering giant; and the question that may leap into every mind may be the question of whether he has come to stay. But whether or no he has come to stay he has certainly come. He has willed; he has propelled or precipitated his body in a certain direction; he has agitated his own legs; it is even possible (for we all know what Uncle Humphrey is like) that he has insisted on carrying his own portmanteau, to show the lazy young dogs what he can still do at seventy-three.

Now suppose that what had really happened was something like this; something like a weird story of Hawthorne or Poe. Suppose we ourselves had actually manufactured Uncle Humphrey; had put him together, piece by piece, like a mechanical doll. Suppose we had so ardently felt at the moment the need of an uncle in our home life that we had constructed him out of domestic materials, like a Guy for the fifth of November. Taking, it may be, a turnip from the kitchen-garden to represent his bald and venerable head; permitting the water-butt, as it were, to suggest the lines of his figure; stuffing a pair of trousers and attaching a pair of boots, we could produce a complete and convincing uncle of whom any family might be proud. Under those conditions, it might be graceful enough to say, in the merely social sense and as a sort of polite fiction, "Uncle Humphrey has come to stay." But surely it would be very extraordinary if we afterwards found the dummy relative was nothing but a nuisance, or that his materials were needed for other purposessurely it would be very extraordinary if we were then forbidden to take him to pieces again; if every effort in that direction were met with the resolute answer, "No, no; Uncle Humphrey has come to stay." Surely we should be tempted to retort that Uncle Humphrey never came at all. Suppose all the turnips were wanted for the self-support of the peasant home. Suppose the water-butts were wanted; let us hope for the purpose of holding beer. Suppose the male members of the family refused any longer to lend their trousers to an entirely imaginary relative. Surely we should then see through the polite fiction that led us to talk as if the uncle had "come," had come with an intention, had remained with a purpose, and all the rest. The thing we made did not come, and certainly did not come to do anything, either to stay or to depart.

Now no doubt most people even in the logical city of Paris would say that the Eiffel Tower has come to stay. And no doubt most people in the same city rather more than a hundred years before would have said that the Bastille had come to stay. But it did not stay; it left the neighbourhood quite abruptly. In plain words, the Bastille was something that man had made and, therefore, man could unmake. The Eiffel Tower is something that man has made and man could unmake; though perhaps we may think it practically probable that some time will elapse before man will have the good taste or good sense or even the common sanity to unmake it. But this one little phrase about the thing "coming" is alone enough to indicate something profoundly wrong about the very working of men's minds on the subject. Obviously a man ought to be saying, "I have made an electric battery. Shall I smash it, or shall I make another?" Instead of that, he seems to be bewitched by a sort of magic and stand staring at the thing as if it were a seven-headed dragon; and he can only say, "The electric battery has come. Has it come to stay?"

Before we begin any talk of the practical problem of machinery, it is necessary to leave off thinking like machines. It is necessary to begin at the beginning and consider the end. Now we do not necessarily wish to destroy every sort of machinery. But we do desire to destroy a certain sort of mentality. And that is precisely the sort of mentality that begins by telling us that nobody can destroy machinery. Those who begin by saying that we cannot abolish the machine, that we must use the machine, are themselves refusing to use the mind.

The aim of human polity is human happiness. For those holding certain beliefs it is conditioned by the hope of a larger happiness, which it must not imperil. But happiness, the making glad of the heart of man, is the secular test and the only realistic test. So far from this test, by the talisman of the heart, being merely sentimental, it is the only test that is in the least practical. There is no law of logic or nature or anything else forcing us to prefer anything else. There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier. Mankind has as much right to scrap its machinery and live on the land, if it really likes it better, as any man has to sell his old bicycle and go for a walk, if he likes that better. It is obvious that the walk will be slower; but he has no duty to be fast. And if it can be shown that machinery has come into the world as a curse, there is no reason whatever for our respecting it because it is a marvellous and practical and productive curse. There is no reason why we should not leave all its powers unused, if we have really come to the conclusion that the powers do us harm. The mere fact that we shall be missing a number of interesting things would apply equally to any number of impossible things. Machinery may be a magnificent sight, but not so magnificent as a Great Fire of London; yet we resist that vision and avert our eyes from all that potential splendour. Machinery may not yet be at its best; and perhaps lions and tigers will never be at their best, will never make their most graceful leaps or show all their natural splendours, until we erect an amphitheatre and give them a few live people to eat. Yet that sight also is one which we forbid ourselves, with whatever austere self-denial. We give up so many glorious possibilities, in our stern and strenuous and self-sacrificing preference for having a tolerable time. Happiness, in a sense, is a hard taskmaster. It tells us not to get entangled with many things that are much more superficially attractive than machinery. But, anyhow, it is necessary to clear our minds at the start of any mere vague association or assumption to the effect that we must go by the quickest train or cannot help using the most productive instrument. Granted Mr. Penty's thesis of the evil of machinery, as something like the evil of black magic, and there is nothing in the least unpractical about Mr. Penty's proposal that it should simply stop. A process of invention would cease that might have gone further. But its relative imperfection would be nothing compared with the rudimentary state in which we have left such scientific instruments as the rack and the thumbscrew. Those rude implements of torture are clumsy compared with the finished products that modern knowledge of physiology and mechanics might have given us. Many a talented torturer is left in obscurity by the moral prejudices of modern society. Nay, his budding promise is now nipped even in childhood, when he attempts to develop his natural genius on the flies or the tail of the dog. Our own strong sentimental bias against torture represses his noble rage and freezes the genial current of his soul. But we reconcile ourselves to this; though it be undoubtedly the loss of a whole science for which many ingenious persons might have sought out many inventions. If we really conclude that machinery is hostile to happiness, then it is no more inevitable that all ploughing should be done by machinery than it is inevitable that a shop should do a roaring trade on Ludgate Hill by selling the instruments of Chinese tortures.

Let it be clearly understood that I note this only to make the primary problem clear; I am not now saying, nor perhaps should I ever say, that machinery has been proved to be practically poisonous in this degree. I am only stating, in answer to a hundred confused assumptions, the only ultimate aim and test. If we can make men happier, it does not matter if we make them poorer, it does not matter if we make them less productive, it does not matter if we make them less progressive, in the sense of merely changing their life without increasing their liking for it. We of this school of thought may or may not get what we want; but it is at least necessary that we should know what we are trying to get. And those who are called practical men never know what they are trying to get. If machinery does prevent happiness, then it is as futile to tell a man trying to make men happy that he is neglecting the talents of Arkwright, as to tell a man trying to make men humane that he is neglecting the tastes of Nero.

Now it is exactly those who have the clarity to imagine the instant annihilation of machines who will probably have too much common sense to annihilate them instantly. To go mad and smash machinery is a more or less healthy and human malady, as it was in the Luddites. But it was really owing to the ignorance of the Luddites, in a very different sense from that spoken of scornfully by the stupendous ignorance of the Industrial Economists. It was blind revolt as against some ancient and awful dragon, by men too ignorant to know how artificial and even temporary was that particular instrument, or where was the seat of the real tyrants who wielded it. The real answer to the mechanical problem for the present is of a different sort; and I will proceed to suggest it, having once made clear the only methods of judgment by which it can be judged. And having begun at the right end, which is the ultimate spiritual standard by which a man or a machine is to be valued, I will now begin at the other end; I might say at the wrong end; but it will be more respectful to our practical friends to call it the business end.

If I am asked what I should immediately do with a machine, I have no doubt about the sort of practical programme that could be a preliminary to a possible spiritual revolution of a much wider sort. In so far as the machine cannot be shared, I would have the ownership of it shared; that is, the direction of it shared and the profits of it shared. But when I say "shared" I mean it in the modern mercantile sense of the word "shares." That is, I mean something divided and not merely something pooled. Our business friends bustle forward to tell us that all this is impossible; completely unconscious, apparently, that all this part of the business exists already. You cannot distribute a steam-engine, in the sense of giving one wheel to each shareholder to take home with him, clasped in his arms. But you not only can, but you already do distribute the ownership and profit of the steam-engine; and you distribute it in the form of private property. Only you do not distribute it enough, or to the right people, or to the people who really require it or could really do work for it. Now there are many schemes having this normal and general character; almost any one of which I should prefer to the concentration presented by capitalism or promised by communism. My own preference, on the whole, would be that any such necessary machine should be owned by a small local guild, on principles of profit-sharing, or rather profit-dividing: but of real profit-sharing and real profit-dividing, not to be confounded with capitalist patronage.

Touching the last point, it may be well to say in passing that what I say about the problem of profit-sharing is in that respect parallel to what I say also about the problem of emigration. The real difficulty of starting it in the right way is that it has so often been started in the wrong way; and especially in the wrong spirit. There is a certain amount of prejudice against profit-sharing, just as there is a certain amount of prejudice against emigration, in the industrial democracy of to-day. It is due in both cases to the type and especially the tone of the proposals. I entirely sympathize with the Trade Unionist who dislikes a certain sort of condescending capitalist concession; and the spirit which gives every man a place in the sun which turns out to be a place in Port Sunlight. Similarly, I quite sympathize with Mr. Kirkwood when he resented being lectured about emigration by Sir Alfred Mond, to the extent of saying, "The Scots will leave Scotland when the German Jews leave England." But I think it would be possible to have a more genuinely egalitarian emigration, with a positive policy of self-government for the poor, to which Mr. Kirkwood might be kind; and I think that profit-sharing that began at the popular end, establishing first the property of a guild and not merely the caprice of an employer, would not contradict any true principle of Trades Unions. For the moment, however, I am only saying that something could be done with what lies nearest to us; quite apart from our general ideal about the position of machinery in an ideal social state. I understand what is meant by saying that the ideal in both cases depends upon the wrong ideals. But I do not understand what our critics mean by saying that it is impossible to divide the shares and profits in a machine among definite individuals. Any healthy man in any historical period would have thought it a project far more practicable than a Milk Trust.

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