The Vested Interests
There are certain saving clauses in common use among persons who speak for that well-known order of pecuniary rights and obligations which the modern point of view assumes as "the natural state of man." Among them are these: "Given the state of the industrial arts"; "Other things remaining the same"; "In the long run"; "In the absence of disturbing causes," It has been the praiseworthy endeavor of the votaries of this established law and custom to hold fast the good old plan on a strategic line of interpretation resting on these provisos. There have been painstaking elucidations of what is fundamental and intrinsic in the way of human institutions, of what essentially ought to be, and of what must eventually come to pass in the natural course of time and change as it is believed to run along under the guidance of those indefeasible principles that make up the modern point of view. And the disquieting incursions of the New Order have been disallowed as not being of the essence of Nature's contract with mankind, within the constituent principles of the modern point of view stabilised in the eighteenth century.
Now, as has already been remarked in an earlier passage, the state of the industrial arts has at no time continued unchanged during the modern era; consequently other things have never remained the same; and in the long run the outcome has always been shaped by the disturbing causes. All this reflects no discredit on the economists and publicists who so have sketched out the natural run of the present and future in the dry light of the eighteenth-century principles, since their reservations have not been observed. The arguments have been as good as the premises on which they proceed, and the premises have once been good enough to command unquestioning assent; although that is now some time ago. The fault appears to lie in the unexampled shifty behavior of the latter-day facts. Yet however shifty, these facts, too, are as stubborn as others of their kind.
The system of free competition, self-help, equal opportunity and free bargaining which is contemplated by the modern point of view, assumes an industrial situation in which the work and trading of any given individual or group can go on freely by itself, without materially helping or hindering the equally untrammeled working of the rest. It has, of course, always been recognised that the country's industry makes up something of a connected system; so that there would necessarily be some degree of mutual adjustment and accommodation among the many self-sufficient working units which together make up the industrial community; but these working units have been conceived to be so nearly independent of one another that the slight measure of running adjustment needed could be sufficiently taken care of by free competition in the market. This assumption has, of course, never been altogether sound at any stage in the industrial advance; but it has at least been within speaking distance of facts so late as the eighteenth century. It was a possible method of keeping the balance in the industrial system before the coming of the machine industry. Quite evidently it commended itself to the enlightened common sense of that time as a sufficiently workable ideal. So much so that it then appeared to be the most practical solution of the industrial and social difficulties which beset that generation. It is fairly to be presumed that the plan would still be workable in some fashion today if the conditions which then prevailed had continued unchanged through the intervening one hundred and fifty years, if other things had remained the same. All that was, in effect, before the coming of the machine technology and the later growth of population.
But as it runs today, according to the new industrial order set afoot by the machine technology, the carrying-on of the community's industry is not well taken care of by the loose corrective control which is exercised by a competitive market.
That method is too slow, at the best, and too disjointed. The industrial system is now a wide-reaching organisation of mechanical processes which work together on a comprehensive interlocking plan of give and take, in which no one section, group, or individual unit is free to work out its own industrial salvation except in active copartnership with the rest; and the whole of which runs on as a moving equilibrium of forces in action. This system of interlocking processes and mutually dependent working units is a more or less delicately balanced affair. Evidently the system has to be taken as a whole, and evidently it will work at its full productive capacity only on condition that the coordination of its interlocking processes be maintained at a faultless equilibrium, and only when its constituent working units are allowed to run full and smooth. But a moderate derangement will not put it out of commission. It will work at a lower efficiency, and continue running, in spite of a very considerable amount of dislocation; as is habitually the case today.
At the same time any reasonably good working efficiency of the industrial system is conditioned on a reasonably good coordination of these working forces; such as will allow each and several of the working units to carry on at the fullest working capacity that will comport with the unhampered working of the system as a balanced whole. But evidently, too, any dislocation, derangement or retardation of the work at any critical point --
which comes near saying at any point -- in this balanced system of work will cause a disproportionately large derangement of the whole. The working units of the industrial system are no longer independent of one another under the new order.
