J. A. Hobson

“ Ricardo, for example, thus expresses himself:—"In every society the capital which is employed in production is necessarily of limited durability. The food and clothing consumed by the labourer, the buildings in which he works, the implements with which his labour is assisted, are all of a perishable value. There is, however, a vast difference in the time for which all these different capitals will endure. A steam engine will last longer than a ship, a ship than the clothing of the labourer, and the clothing of the labourer than the food which he consumes." ”

“ The congestion of the poorer population of our towns, and the [349] struggle for fresh air and elbow-room which it implies, is the most formidable barrier to the work of transforming the town from a big workshop into a human dwelling-place, with an individual life, a character, a soul of its own. The true reform policy is not to destroy the industrial town but to breathe into it the breath of social life, to temper and subordinate its industrial machine-goods-producing character to the higher and more complex purposes of social life. ”

“ Pace, size, number, cost, are ever on their lips. To visit every European capital in a fortnight, see acres of pictures, cathedrals, ruined castles, collect out of books or travel the largest mass of unassorted and undigested information, is the object of such portion of the commercial life as can be spared from the more serious occupations of life, piling up bale after bale of cotton goods and eating dinner after dinner of the same inharmoniously ordered victuals. ”

“ Setting aside that picked intelligence which flows to the town to compete successfully for intellectual employment, there can be no question but that the townsman has a larger superficial knowledge of the world and human nature. He is shrewd, alert, versatile, quicker, and more resourceful than the countryman. In thought, speech, action, this superiority shows itself. The townsman has a more developed consciousness, his intelligence is constantly stimulated in a thousand ways by larger and more varied society, and by a more diversified and complex economic environment. ”

“ A parsimonious people are never progressive, neither are they, as a rule, industrially efficient. It is the man with many wants—not luxurious fancies, but real legitimate wants—who works hard to satisfy his aspirations, and he it is who is worth hiring. Let economists still teach the utility and the necessity of saving, but let the sociologist as firmly insist that to so far practise economy as to prevent in the nineteenth century a corresponding advance in civilisation of the working with the other classes is morally inequitable and industrially bad policy. ”

“ Yet so firmly rooted in the business mind is the individualistic conception of industry, that any idea of a public development of those important private facts upon which the credit of a particular firm is based, would appear to destroy the very foundation of the commercial fabric. But, although in the game of commerce a single firm which played its hand openly while others kept theirs well concealed might suffer failure, it is quite evident that the whole community interested in the game would gain immensely if all the hands were on the table. ”

“ A whole country like England, thickly blotched at even intervals by big industrial villages comprised of a huge factory or two with a few rectangular streets of small, dull, grimy, red-brick cottages, and one or two mansions standing inside their parks at the side remote from the factories, would, from an æsthetic point of view, be repulsive to the last degree; and out of a country, the whole of which was thus ordered for pure purposes of industrial economy, it is difficult to believe that any of the higher products of human effort could proceed. ”

“ Modern machine-evolution, as is seen, permits and encourages the wanton invasion and destruction of forms of capital by the competition of new savings employed in an anti-social way. It likewise tends to the frequent destruction of the value of that labour power which is the sole property of the mass of workers. "The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation, so it is the most sacred and inviolable." ”

“ At any rate we have as yet no security that machinery, owned by individuals who do not themselves tend it, shall not be used in such a way as to increase the physical strain of those who do tend it. "There is a temptation," as Mr. Cunningham says, "to treat the machine as the main element in production, and to make it the measure of what a man ought to do, instead of regarding the man as the first consideration, and the machine as the instrument which helps him; the machine may be made the primary consideration, and the man may be treated as a mere slave who tends it." ”

“ So long as every purchaser is able to buy from two or more equally developed and effectively competing firms he can make them bid against one another until he obtains the full advantage of the economies of large-scale production which are common to them. So long as there remains effective competition, all the productive economies pass into the hands of the consumer in reduction of price. Nay, more than this, a competing firm cannot keep to itself the advantages of a private individual economy if its competitor has another private economy of equal importance. ”

“ Now, even in material goods, the more qualitative consumption becomes, and the more insistent each individual is upon the satisfaction of his peculiar tastes, the smaller will be the probability that two persons will collide in their desires, and struggle for the possession of the self-same commodity. Even in art-objects which are still bounded by matter, among genuine lovers of art the individuality of each stands out in mitigation of the antagonism of competition, for no two will have precisely the same tastes or estimates, or will seek with equal avidity the same embodiments of art. ”

“ The growth of factory work among women has brought with it inevitably a weakening of home interests and a neglect of home duties. The home has suffered what the factory has gained. Even the shortening of the factory day, accompanied as it has been by an intensification of labour during the shorter hours, does not leave the women competent and free for the proper ordering of home life. Home work is consciously slighted as secondary in importance and inferior, because it brings no wages, and if not neglected is performed in a perfunctory manner, which robs it of its grace and value. ”

“ So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and [376] begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? ”

“ The town presents the single raw material of local proximity out of which municipal life is to be built. The first business of the municipal reformer then is to transform this excessive proximity into wholesome neighbourhood, in order that true neighbourly feelings may have room to grow and thrive, and eventually to ripen into the flower of a fair civic life. "A modern city," it has been well said, "is probably the most impersonal combination of individuals that has ever been formed in the world's history." ”

“ So long as consumers consent to sink their individuality, to consume articles of precisely the same shape, size, colour, material, to assimilate their consumption to one another, machinery will supply them. But since no two individuals are precisely similar in physical, intellectual, or moral nature, so the real needs of no two will be the same, even in the satisfaction of ordinary material wants. ”

“ They poured their goods into America, so over-powering was the attraction of high prices. They supplied materials for the railways, and luxuries for their constructors. Their own prices rose in turn; their business burst into unwonted activity; profits and wages were enlarged; and the vicious cycle repeated itself in many countries of Europe. Over-consumption advanced with greater strides; the tide of prosperity rose ever higher; and the destruction of wealth marched at greater speed. ”

“ It is not unnatural that our commercial life should breed such an intellectual consumption, and that the English and American nations in particular, who have beyond others developed machine-production and the quantitative genius for commerce, should exhibit the same taste in their pursuit after knowledge. ”

“ It is true that Adam Smith in a well-known passage had given [262] powerful utterance to a different view of the relation between work and wages:—"The liberal reward of labour as it encourages the propagation so it encourages the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives." ”

“ The mere fact that two persons or groups of persons in different places are engaged in similar processes of production, that is to say, belong to the same trade, has no significance for us. The trade or aggregate of productive units of a particular sort receives industrial unity only in so far as there is competition of the units in buying the raw materials, tools, and labour for carrying on their trade, and in selling the results of their activity. ”

“ As we rise to purely intellectual or moral enjoyments, competition gives way to generous rivalry in co-operation. In the pursuit of knowledge or goodness the rivalry is no longer antagonism—what one gains another does not lose. One man's success is not another's failure. On the contrary, the enrichment of one is the enrichment of all. Both in the production and the consumption of the highest goods of Science, Art, and Virtue, social, not anti-social, motives are the chief [378] stimulus. ”

“ So long as the increased size of business brings with it a net economic advantage, the competition of ever larger competitors, whose total power of production is far ahead of sales at remunerative prices, and who are therefore constrained to devote an increased proportion of energy to taking one another's trade, must intensify this cut-throat warfare. The diminishing number of competitors in a market does not ease matters in the least, for the intensity of the strife reaches its maximum when two competing businesses are fighting a life or death struggle. ”