One of the most important effects of industrialism is the break-up of the family resulting from the employment of women. The employment of women has two effects: on the one hand it makes them economically independent of men, so that they cease to be subject to husbands; on the other hand it makes it difficult for them to bring up their children themselves. The tradition of the monogamic family is so strong in all the chief industrial countries that the effect of industrialism on the family has taken a long time to show itself. Even now it has hardly begun in America, where Christianity is still not uncommon; but throughout Europe the process of disintegration, which had already begun, has been enormously accelerated by the war, owing to the ease with which women found employment in government offices, in munition works, or on the land. Experience has shown that the average woman will not submit to the restraints of the old-fashioned marriage or remain faithful to one man when she can be economically independent. For the moment the restraints and concealments imposed by the upholders of traditional morality have somewhat obscured the extent of the change thus brought about. But the change will grow

the inherent tendencies of industrialism. In a pre-industrial community, rich men held their wives as property, while poor men made them coöperators in their work. Peasant women do much of the hard work of agriculture, and working-class women have hitherto had their time fully taken up with household work and the rearing of children. In this way, whether in town or country, the family formed an economic unit.

But when the woman goes out to industrial work like her husband, and the children spend most of their day at school, the economic tie between husband and wife is enormously weakened. It is probable that with the growth of industrialism the practice of eating in public eating-houses will increase and housework will be reduced to a minimum. The children will have first their midday meal, and then all meals, at school; thus the peculiar work that has hitherto been done by wives will grow less and less. Under these circumstances, marriage, as it has existed since men took to agriculture, is likely to come to an end. Women will prefer to preserve their independence and will not rely upon the precarious bounty of an individual man. They will share their children with the state rather than with a husband, not invariably, but in a continually increasing proportion of instances. I am not concerned to argue whether this change is desirable or undesirable; I say only that it belongs to the inherent tendencies of industrialism, and must be brought about by the continuance of industrialism unless counteracted by some very potent force.

potent force. It has, of course, the

effect, always characteristic of large

scale industry, of increasing the pressure of the community upon the individual. The family has been hitherto a refuge of privacy, where it was possible to escape from the state, and even, to a certain extent, from public opinion. A man with unusual tastes or opinions could bring up his children with a view to their sharing his peculiarities; but this must cease when the state takes over the education of children and, as it must ultimately do, the whole economic burden of their maintenance. Thus the break-up of the family must increase the tendency of uniformity throughout the population, and weaken all those individual traits which cannot grow or flourish in a life lived wholly in public.

§ 6

Religion, in its traditional form, appears to be difficult to combine with industrialism, although it is by no means obvious why this should be the

case.

Of course the successful capitalists remain religious, partly because they have every reason to thank God for their blessings, and partly because religion is a conservative force, tending to repress the rebelliousness of wageearners. But industrial wage-earners everywhere tend to lose their religious beliefs. I think this is partly for the merely accidental reason that the teachers of religion derive their incomes either from endowments or from the bounty of the rich, and therefore often take the side of the rich and represent religion itself as being on this side. But this cannot be the sole reason, since, if it were, wage-earners would invent democratic variants of the traditional religion, as was done by the English independents in the seventeenth century and by the peas

ants who revolted against agrarian oppression in the Middle Ages and in the time of Luther. It is singularly easy to adapt Christianity to the needs of the poor, since it is only necessary to revert to the teachings of Christ. Yet that is not the course that industrial populations take; on the contrary, they tend everywhere to atheism and materialism. Their rebellion against traditional religion must, therefore, have some deeper cause than the mere accidents of present-day politics.

The chief reason is, I believe, that the welfare of industrial wage-earners is more dependent upon human agency and less upon natural causes than is the case with people whose manner of life is more primitive. People who depend upon the weather are always apt to be religious, because the weather is capricious and non-human and is therefore regarded as of divine origin. On the rock-bound coast of Brittany, where Atlantic storms make seafaring a constant and imminent peril, the fishermen are more religious than any other population of Europe: churches crowd the coast, particularly its most dangerous portions, while every headland has its Calvary, with the lofty crucifix so placed as to be visible many miles out to sea. While the fisherman is at sea, he and his wife pray for his safe return; as soon as he lands, his relief finds expression in drunkenness. A life of this kind, exposed constantly to non-human dangers, is the most favorable to traditional religion. Indeed, the whole of traditional religion may be regarded as an attempt to mitigate the terror inspired by destructive natural forces. Sir J. G. Frazer, in his "Golden Bough," has shown that most of the elements in

Christianity are derived from worship of the spirit of vegetation, the religion invented in the infancy of agriculture to insure the fertility of the soil. Harvest Thanksgiving, prayers for rain or fair weather, and so on illustrate what has been really vital in religion. To the peasant fertility and famine are sent by God, and religious rites exist to secure the one and avert the other.

The industrial worker is not dependent upon the weather or the seasons, except in a very minor degree. The causes which make his prosperity or misfortune seem to him, in the main, to be purely human and easily ascertainable. It is true that natural causes affect him, but they are not such as we are accustomed to attribute to supernatural agency. God may send rain in answer to prayer, because the need of rain was felt while religion was still young and creative. But although a population may be ruined by the exhaustion of its coal-fields, no one supposes that God would create new seams however earnestly the miners were to pray. Petroleum may bring prosperity, but if Moses had brought petroleum out of the rock instead of water, we should have regarded the occurrence as a fact of geology, not as a miracle. The fact is that religion is no longer sufficiently vital to take hold of anything new; it was formed long ago to suit certain ancient needs, and has subsisted by the force of tradition, but is no longer able to assimilate anything that cannot be viewed traditionally. Hence the alteration of daily habits and interests resulting from industrialism has proved fatal to the religious outlook, which has grown dim even dim even among those who have not explicitly

rejected it. This is, I believe, the fundamental reason for the decay of religion in modern communities. The lessened vitality of religion, which has made it unable to survive new conditions, is in the main attributable to science.

87

There is one other tendency which has hitherto been very strong in industrialism, but which, I believe, might cease to characterize industry under socialism; I mean the tendency to value things for their uses rather than for their intrinsic worth. The essence of industrialism, as we saw, is an extension of the practice of making tools. In an industrial community the great majority of the population are not making consumable commodities, but only machines and appliances by means of which others can make consumable commodities. This leads men to become utilitarian rather than artistic, since their product has not in itself any direct human value. The man who makes a railway is regarded as more important than the man who visits his friends by traveling on it, although the purpose of the railway is to be traveled on. The man who reads a book is thought to be wasting his time, whereas the man who makes the paper, the man who sets the type, the man who does the binding, and the librarian who catalogues it are all regarded as performing valuable functions. The journey from means to end is so long, and the distinctive merits of industrialism are so exclusively concerned with means, that people lose sight of the end altogether and come to think more production the only thing that is of importance. Quantity is valued more

than quality, and mechanism more than its uses.

This reason, as well as the one previously mentioned, accounts for the decay of art and romance under industrialism. But the utilitarian tendency of industrialized thought goes deeper than the decay of art and romance; it upsets men's dreams of a better world, and their whole conception of the springs of action. It has come to be thought that the important part of a man's life is the economic part, because this is the part concerned with production and utilities. It is true that, at present, the economic part needs our thought, because it is diseased; just as, when a man's leg is broken, it is temporarily the most important part of his body. But when it is healed and he can walk on it, he forgets about it. So it ought to be with the economic part of life; we ought to be able to use it without having to think of it all day long. The bodily needs of all could be supplied as a matter of course by means of a few hours of daily labor on the part of every man and woman in the community. But it should be the remaining hours that would be regarded as important-hours that could be devoted to enjoyment or art or study, to affection and woodlands and sunshine in green fields. The mech

anistic utopian is unable to value these things: he sees in his dreams a world where goods are produced more and more easily and are distributed with impartial justice to workers too tired and bored to know how to enjoy them. What men are to do with leisure he neither knows nor cares; presumably they are to sleep till the time for work comes round again.

This utilitarianizing of men's outlook is, I believe, not inseparable from industrialism, but due to the fact that its growth has been dominated by commercialism and competition. A socialistic industry could be the servant, not the master, of the community; this is one fundamental reason for preferring socialism to capitalism. I wish to warn the advocates of economic reconstruction against the danger of adopting the vices of their opponents by regarding man as a tool for producing goods rather than goods as a subordinate necessity for liberating the non-material side of human life. Man's true life does not consist in the business of filling his belly and clothing his body, but in art and thought and love, in the creation and contemplation of beauty, and in the scientific understanding of the world. If the world is to be regenerated, it is in these things, not only in material goods, that all must be enabled to participate.