To these things we are gradually and insensibly being led, so gradually and insidiously as to evade the inhibitory sense of the ludicrous. Already it is known that light, ventilation, and the general comfort of the worker are relevant to production. By slight and inexpensive changes in these respects output may be augmented say 3.5 or even 10 per cent, and the worker suffers less from nervous irritability and is less punctual in paying his subscription to his union. At any moment it may be found that hanging pictures on the workshop walls has a similar effect. Possibly Landseer’s would raise efficiency and contentment only 1 per cent, whilst Sargent’s would really justify their auction prices. We should then discover a more satisfactory policy with regard to our National Galleries. We should go to Port Sunlight to see good pictures and the Royal Academy would become the testing hall for experiments in industrial art.

All this is coming about no longer by mere chance or blind experiment, but by the operation of a principle which I take as a foundation stone for prophecy. Man has slowly and painfully acquired facility in adopting the scientific attitude of mind. Gradually he has been able to achieve this point of view in relation to the material universe. But he finds a peculiar difficulty in being scientific in the face of the animate; and the difficulty would appear to be almost insuperable in the face of mind. It is because we are living at a time when the feat is being accomplished that I feel impelled to prophesy an important revolution, a revolution beside which the Bolshevic incident, for instance, is dwarfed to almost comical insignificance.

The revolutionists are level-headed but far-seeing men of business, acting in alliance with the scientists. Here is their programme as voiced by Professor Catell in 1903.

“It is our business to make both a science and an art of human nature. As in the physical world we select first the material suited to our purpose, and turn the iron into steel, and temper the steel for a knife, so in the world of human action we must learn to select the right man, to educate him and fit him for his exact task. This indeed we try to do in all our institutions, religions, commerce, system of education, and government. But we work by rule of thumb――blind, deaf, and wasteful. The nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary increase in our knowledge of the material world, and in our power to make it subservient to our ends; the twentieth century will probably witness a corresponding increase in our knowledge of human nature and in our power to use it for our welfare.”[4]

[4] Homo Scientificus Americanus: Science, April 10, 1903.

Let us note the implications of this programme. At present we have made but a few experiments and a few discoveries in industrial psychology. The future, however, is to see the principle applied to education, criminology, government, war, perhaps religion and the intimate personal life of man.

Can we foresee the consequences? To some extent, I think, we can. As Dr Fournier d’Albe puts it in the first of his prophetic volumes,[5] we have but to extrapolate the curves of present developments into the future. We must, however, also take into account so far as possible some of the other factors at work. The general course of evolution is in outline known to be one of differentiation, specialization, integration, growing consciousness of ends, and substitution of systematic experiment in place of blind trial and error. We shall find other clues which, carefully studied, enable us to speak about the future with at least as much assurance as biologists and anthropologists enjoy in speaking about the remoter past. We shall, moreover, have the added benefit of finding confirmation in the years to come.

[5] Quo Vadimus.

III

Facts brought to light in the sphere of industry have an application in politics, so to politics and the arts of government let us turn. Let politicians consider, for example, the discovery that the incidence of shell-shock in war, and of nervous disorders in peace, is highest in the dangerous occupations which are also the occupations most liable to industrial unrest. Such facts prevent us from viewing the discontented worker either as a martyred idealist, or as a mere criminal. The case is paralleled by the suggestion that desertion and malingering in exhausted armies are symptoms or ‘defence reactions’ in incipient shell-shock. They force upon us a more dispassionate and a more therapeutic point of view. The criminal in general is coming to be regarded in this light. Turn now to the anarchist, and the psycho-analyst explains to you that his activities are minor symptoms of his ‘father complex’, which imprisonment, for example, will merely intensify.

From knowledge of the conditions of these things proceeds control. Possibly punitive measures may be genuinely counteracting causes. Perhaps, however, empirical science may declare that the best treatment for an anarchist is to make him a Lord Mayor, and the best remedy for a militant labour party is a term of office judiciously supervised by our permanent officials. The future student of social affairs will be preoccupied with the scientific investigation of the sources of power and its social reservoirs. The ‘party in power’, as it is charitably called, has not much of it. Public opinion seems to have much more. In fact, the chief function of a government, now-a-days, seems to be that of carrying out the programme of the opposition.[6] The opposition is relatively free from criticism; the Government moves in dread of it, being threatened by attrition in its bye-elections and by a general landslide at any appeal to the country.

[6] We have recently witnessed a paralysed Labour Government incapable of carrying out its projected remedies for industrial ills, and a Conservative Government maintaining a system of Free Trade.

Under such conditions the essential tasks of government are very much the same of whatever political colour the party in power may be. First and foremost it has to deal with emergencies, whether spontaneously arising or organized by the opposition, in such a way as to preserve its popularity with the public. It has also to carry out more or less efficiently the routine work of government, and it has to prepare for the next election by enshrining its most permanent tactical advantages within the framework of the Constitution. Any time and energy that may be left can be devoted to carrying out its ‘programme’ and in dealing with what it conceives to be the fundamental disorders of society.

A ‘party programme’, like a dream, has a manifest and a latent content. The manifest content is drawn from the incidents of the day and popular demands. The latent is constituted by those deeper policies for the furtherance of which this clap-trap may be closed. The distinction between the manifest and the latent content is not due, as is frequently asserted, to mere political dishonesty but to the necessities of the case; the primitive group mind’s need of a ‘Cause’ and of an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual economic doctrine. With the increased complexity and scientific character which the latent content is, in future, likely to assume political sacramentalism will become more and more important.

How will this affect the issue of our present discontents? Viewing the situation frankly, we find in society two powerful and opposed forces. Let us adopt the convenient labels and call them Capital and Labour. It would take us too far afield to discuss in detail the prospects of success in each of the various remedies suggested for their enmity. In general, it seems to me that all the proposals depend for their success upon large-scale persuasion, and ignore the fundamental causes of unrest and conflict. Even labour, it seems to me, is mistaken about the causes of its troubles, and labour might be expected to know them best. But even to ask this would be as unreasonable as to ask a patient to diagnose and prescribe for his own disease. The solution, I venture to think, will come along the lines upon which the only solution of any problem has ever before been found――along the lines of exact and scientific thought and piecemeal investigation. The recognition of this combined with attention to the apparent power of public opinion in modern politics has led many to suppose that the ultimate remedy lies in the dissemination of education, of exact and scientific thought throughout our great democracies. But, personally, I doubt the possibility of disseminating anything, least of all scientific habits or attitudes of mind. It would seem to violate the rule of differentiation. Nor can I bring myself to believe that there ever was or is ever likely to be a democracy in any important sense. It is sufficient if this scientific spirit be exploited by those who hold the reins of power, and it is because it seems that they are beginning to see the possibilities of this that I think the really significant revolution is to come. What is called ‘Public Opinion’ is now-a-days a carefully manufactured article produced by firms entirely outside the scope of the Factory Acts. Of course, even a despotism is a ‘democracy’ in the unimportant sense that the despot’s rule depends upon a certain kind of consent. What has happened lately is that a new kind of leader has been evolved. The old leader ruled by certain kind of obvious strength. The new ruler practices an art. He is moreover, a student of the science of persuasion. He appeals through various media directly to the masses, and does not so much inspire confidence as suggest that he is only a more articulate spokesman of their will. The contrast is rather like that between coercion and hypnotism, two obvious ways of making people do as you wish; and the transition from one to the other does not seem to me to be adequately described as a passage to democracy.