Modern convenience

“ The development of modern industry, with its facility in the production of livelihood, promises a time, and that at no very great distance, when this opportunity may be common property, and men everywhere may be able to participate in that unending search after love, beauty, justice, truth—the highest of which humanity is capable. ”

“ But the modern civilized home is, as a rule, and to all intents and purposes, only the shell of what it was before that revolution in industrial methods which began about the middle of the eighteenth century. ”

“ But it is simply whether you can keep your whole life, in the market or out, up to the level of a certain ideal, whether you can be honest, true, fair-minded, unselfish, merciful, and kind and at the same time do the work and meet the exigencies of modern commercial and industrial strife. ”

“ There are many changes and improvements in various methods of teaching these indispensable branches of human perfections, particularly in the present time; all these, however, depend more or less on the clever or judicious management of the proprietors of these modern and fashionable institutions. ”

“ It is there that we can note most clearly the lines on which modern industry and commerce develop with the full employment of modern appliances and the minimum of control from traditional habits and institutions. ”

“ The industry which so comes into the foreground and so affects the scheme of institutions is peculiar in that its [Pg 50] most obvious and characteristic trait is the workmanlike initiative and efficiency of the individual handicraftsman and the individual enterprise of the petty trader. ”

“ Now, modern society, the society in which competition without [Pg 393] prescription is predominant, is preëminently an industrial, economic society, and it is industrial—economic—excellence that most readily attracts the approving regard of that society. ”

“ Whether and how far these traits of human culture and the institutional structure built out of them are the outgrowth of material (economic) exigencies becomes a question of what kind and degree of efficiency belongs to the economic exigencies among the complex of circumstances that conduce to the formation of habits. ”

“ Therefore our civilisation tends in the main to multiply the needs and the consumption of man, so as to quicken production as much as possible, while the ancient civilisation tended to limit man’s needs and consumption, to hold up to esteem and imitation customs of simplicity and parsimony which involved a reduction in consumption, and therefore in production. ”

“ What is its rôle, and what are its limits? Put thus, the question is but a particular form of a more general question which philosophers have long been asking themselves: What is the mutual and reciprocal rôle of the different human activities? It is a well-known truth that with the advances of civilisation social life undergoes an inward process of differentiation. Commerce separates from industry, industry from war, war from government, government from the intellectual activities, which in their turn become specialised,—art, science, religion,335 etc. ”

“ They are naturally very covetous," the same authority asserts, "and become daily better acquainted with the value of our goods and their own peltry; they are everywhere at home, and travel without the expense or inconvenience attending our journey to them. ”

“ Expressions constantly recur in economic discussions which imply that the transactions discussed are carried out for the sake of the collective good or at the initiative of the social organism, or that "society" rewards so and so for their services. ”

“ Do man’s increasing wants and expanding necessities demand new and additional means of supply? In the providence of Him who suffers no sparrow to fall unnoticed, those wants are supplied. And when advancing science, art and commerce require new inventions and improvements, to increase the comfort, convenience and welfare of nations, God sends into the world the qualified minds to furnish the requisite means. ”

“ When we reflect that nine-tenths of the inventions and improvements constituting all the material features of the civilization of this century have been made by working men, it is manifest that they are entitled to much more of the comforts and convenience of life than are now accessible to them. ”

“ The men in industry must first create the mechanical possibility of such new and more economical methods and arrangements, before the undertaker sees the chance, makes the necessary business arrangements, and gives directions that the more effective working arrangements be adopted. ”

“ And so an emancipated army of leisure has been formed which has transformed the very nature of the culture with which it has busied itself. Books, periodicals, musical instruments, travel became cheaper and cheaper as the demand increased. Wholesale production makes almost any luxury accessible to every one. ”

“ Around these primary needs certain other demands have gathered—for elaboration in food and clothing, comfort in the home, and the like; and a multitude of commercial activities of a secondary kind have been set afoot and added to the sufficiently complex business of providing society with the first necessities of life. ”

“ And as a reward for bucking the system, the system itself has provided you with a life of luxury and leisure—full permission to come and go as you please, live in spacious ease, indulge in the gratification of every appetite, free of responsibility or restraint. ”

“ Civilization goes beyond these bare essentials of merchandizing by furnishing transportation and communication, making long term loans at interest, writing insurance, developing the techniques of accounting and management. Customers who visit the market have basic human needs--the necessities of life. Beyond these necessaries, there are conveniences, comforts, luxuries. The markets of civilization cover the entire range of human needs and human wants from necessaries to luxuries. ”

“ By virtue of their hedonistic preconceptions, their habituation to the ways of a pecuniary culture, and their unavowed animistic faith that nature is in the right, the classical economists knew that the consummation to which, in the nature of things, all things tend, is the frictionless and beneficent competitive system. ”

“ What is true of the individual in this respect is true of the group in which he lives. All economic change is a change in the economic community,—a change in the community's methods of turning material things to account. ”

“ I am 84far from complaining, as you know, of the nature of human demands being what it has been, as, from time to time, liberated industry has afforded a new supply. I am far from complaining that new graces have grown up within the domains of the rich, and that new notions of convenience require a larger satisfaction day by day. ”

“ But see how essential these agents are to the present condition of civilization. How many derangements among the wheels of business, and the plans of affection, if merely a snow-drift blocks the cars, or a thunder-storm snaps the wires! Our estimate of necessity, and, therefore, of utility, must be formed according to present conditions, and the legitimate demand that rises out of them; these conditions themselves being the necessary developments of society and of the individual. ”

“ On the whole, other things remaining the same, it must be admitted that, within wide limits, the easier the conditions of physical life for modern civilised man become, and the wider the horizon of each and the extent of the personal contact of each with his fellowmen, and the greater the opportunity of each to compare notes with his fellows, the greater will be the preponderance of economic success as a means of emulation, and the greater the straining after economic respectability. ”

“ But since it is in just this unhedonistic, unrationalistic pecuniary traffic that the tissue of business life consists; since it is this peculiar conventionalism of aims and standards that differentiates the life of the modern business community from any conceivable earlier or cruder phase of economic life; since it is in this tissue of pecuniary intercourse and pecuniary concepts, ideals, expedients, and aspirations that the conjunctures of business life arise and run their course of felicity and devastation ”

“ The quantity of the things which modern industry, thanks to electricity- and steam-driven machinery, produces, is prodigious. No century ever witnessed the realisation of the miracle of abundance in a more marvellous way. But the quality of the things suffers in consequence. The ugliness and the crude vulgarity of so many objects, which in much poorer times had an elegance and a beauty which have now vanished, are the price we pay for the abundance of our times. The necessities of man have increased beyond all measure, and to satisfy them lavish and rapid production50 is required. ”

“ Granted, it is said, all your facilities for travel and communication, for cheap and easy manufacture, for the distribution of cheap literature and news, your cheap education, better homes, and all the comforts and luxuries of your machine civilization, is the average man, the agriculturist, the machinist, the laborer any better for it all? Are there more purity, more honest, fair dealing, genuine work, fear and honor of God? Are the proceeds of labor more evenly distributed? ”

“ Whether the end and outcome is an invidious gain for the individual (in contrast with or at the cost of his neighbors) , or an enhancement of the facility of human life on the whole, is altogether a by-question in [Pg 139] any discussion of the range of incentives by which men are prompted to their work or the direction which their efforts take. ”

“ These facts must inspire the utmost reserve and circumspection in any one who is moved to propose even a subsidiary distinction of another kind between economic activities or agents. The terminology and the conceptual furniture of economics are complex and parti-colored enough without gratuitous innovation. ”

“ Why should we not expect, then, to find the same need, though in a refined and intense form, felt by those to whom superior intelligence and energy, or the favour of fortune, has granted the power to accumulate wealth in large quantities, those, in other words, who have at their disposal greater means of procuring for themselves the pleasures and good things of life? ”

“ However outer necessity, "competition," "minimum of cost," "iron law of wages," call it what you choose, direct and misdirect, through need of bread or greed of luxury, the application of human activity, that activity has to be there, and with it its own alleviation and reward: pleasure in work. All decent human work partakes (let us thank the great reasonablenesses of real things!) ”

“ And I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning of his due and wise provision for his household, to obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, serviceable, and steadily—however slowly— increasing, series of books for use through life ”

“ Even if we put aside all questions which involve a consideration of the effects of industrial institutions in modifying the habits and character of the classes of the community, ... that enough still remains to constitute a separate science, the mere enumeration of the chief terms of economics—wealth, value, exchange, credit, money, capital, and commodity—will suffice to show. ”

“ On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. ”

“ Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty, worth, or beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for a discussion of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the individual as an economic factor, and especially as an industrial agent. ”

“ But it is at the same time no less true that human conduct, economic or otherwise, is subject to the sequence of cause and effect, by force of such elements as habituation and conventional requirements. ”

“ It is evident that the main object of society now is to provide for our material wants, and still more and more luxuriously for them, while the higher wants of our nature are made secondary, put off for some Sunday service and future leisure. ”

“ But in so far as the inquiry is economic science, specifically, the attention will converge upon the scheme of material life and will take in other phases of civilization only in their correlation with the scheme of material civilization. ”

“ Whether the exigencies of nature are not to be answered by industry on our own soil? And how far the conveniences and comforts of life may be procured by a domestic commerce between the several parts of this kingdom? ”

“ Check among ourselves, in every possible way consistent with our present position, expensive habits of every kind, and even desires for costly gratifications. Encourage habits of simplicity and economy, and in every way prepare for entering into a state of comparative seclusion and frugality. ”

“ Now, to a theorist whose aim is to find the laws governing the economic life of a social organism, and who for this purpose conceives the economic community as a unit, the features of economic life which are of particular consequence are those which show the correlation of efforts and the solidarity of interests. ”

“ In this we ought to take nature for our guide, and throw into the public stock the offices of general utility, by a reciprocation of duties; sometimes by receiving, sometimes by giving, and sometimes to cement human society by arts, by industry, and by our resources. ”

“ Further, by increasing the freedom of movement of the individual and widening the environment to which the individual is exposed—increasing the number of persons before whose eyes each one carries on his life, and, pari passu, decreasing the chances which such persons have of awarding their esteem on any other basis than that of immediate appearances, it has increased the relative efficiency of the economic means of winning respect through a show of expenditure for personal comforts. ”