TWO ERRORS OF INDUSTRIALISM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3011, 16 March 1926, Page 4

TWO ERRORS OF INDUSTRIALISM.

TOO LITTLE SENTIMENT AND TOO MUCH.

There are those who say “business is business’ and sentiment should not be brought into it. There are also those who abjure business because it is not wholly founded on sentiment. Both are wrong. “Production for use and not for profit,” is the postulate of socialists who are thinking only of the needs of the people and not of the laws of production. It is no more rational than to cry out “production for profit and not for use.” One of the first great errors of our modern industrial system was in dreaming that wealth production was purely a matter of material laws and that sentiment could well be left outside in the conduct of industrial enterprises. The period of the Industrial Revolution in England, when her great manufactures were established, was characterised by an utter disregard of sentiment in the conducting of industrial undertakings. Employers believed that the lower they forced wages, the longer the hours worked, the earlier the age at which children were put to work, the higher would be their profits. Production for profits only was exalted to the degradation of vast numbers 'vf the people. It was a o-rieVous error and the state of affairs could not last. The public conscience condemned it. Tom Hood in his ‘Song of the Shirt’ and Mrs Browning in “the cry of the i children” only interpreted what the nation felt. It was not foolish abuse of it which prevented both employers and employed obtaining the incomes they could secure by other and better means.

NEW SPIRIT IN INDUSTRY. The organisations of labour, the growing sense of humanity, and the increasing appreciation of the folly of this method of working, looked at from the most selfish point of view, brought about rapid changes, and to-day the worst paid worker in this country would rightly regard as deplorable the industrial conditions which existed in the period about which Marx writes, fhe improved conditions of the manual workers, who are three to four times as well off as they were a hundred years ago, has not resulted from a diminution of the employers’ profits, but from the great increase in production which has resulted from a saner application of the principles of production. THE PRESENT DANGER. Prom the error of no sentiment in industry the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the danger being met with to-day is a disposition to think that economic affairs can be handled entirely on the basis of sentiment. Socialist writers and other sentimentalists have harped so much on the wrongs of the poor, as if no poverty was of the individuals own making, that the public mind has been confused hi regard to sound principles. Paternal Government is invoked to do often what is economically impossible for either Government or individuals to perform. Rights are claimed for Labour with-it regard to any corresponding responsibilities.

W'e are committing the second great error of too much sentiment. The poor are referred to as if it were only necessary to he poor in order to be virtuous, and the workers are being regarded not as ordinary human beings but as somehow “sacro-sanet” under the title of Labour.

Britain is paying dearly for this second error, just as her people suffered by the last. Neither too much sentiment or too little but a due admixture with sound reason. “Evil is wrought for want of thought as well as by want of heart.” This is the lesson we have to learn to-day if our economy is to be sound and make for general welfare on the line of progress that has in it the element of sability. (Contributed by the New Zealand Welfare League).