Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Co-Operation and the Future of Industry
The system, as we know it, has evolved with considerable rapidity from the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From those earliest times right through the nineteenth century and up to the outbreak of the Great War it has shown unmistakable and increasing signs or various defects. These defects are the result of a chronic and deep-seated dissatisfaction of the majority of the human parts of the machine, the workers or wage-earners, with the position and work assigned to them. The bankruptcy and final aban donment of the whole doctrine of laissez-faz're, the growth of Socialism, Trade Unionism, and Syndicalism the extraordinary importance that Social Reform has attained in the legislation of all European countries; the persistence of Labour Un rest with its strikes and rumours of strikes the open preach ings of class warfare; these things are signs of the evils* and defects inherent in the present industrial system.
Some people affect to believe that this war is going to act in some way as a kind of purge to human society. No belief could be more erroneous and disastrous. So far as industry is concerned, we can predict with absolute certainty that, in the years which follow the war, the defects of our system will become doubly and trebly clear, and the evil results of those defects will be terribly intensified. Every war has been followed by a period of difficulty and distress for the industrial classes, due to a dislocation of the industrial machine. To the destruc tion of wealth, the violent ?uctuation in prices, the sudden withdrawal of large masses of men from, and their equally sudden return into, the labour market. But the world has never seen in any previous war so vast a dislocation of the industrial system as that which it will now be called upon to face. We must therefore look forward to, and we should be wise, if pos sible, to provide against arecrudescence of all those industrial troubles which we have in recent years grown accustomed to call Labour Unrest.
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