The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

CONSUMPTION AND CO-OPERATION 61

on the contrary, they added to the burdens of labour and entangled labour the more cunningly in the wage-system. So far from saving labour, these mechanisms were used deliberately to compete with labour, to bear down wages. If they were genuinely labour-saving, why is not the working day already reduced to three or four hours ?

This play on words is not mine but the economists’. They do not mean, and never have meant, that the workers were saved from unnecessary toil. The words have always meant that, so far as any particular process was concerned, the new machine dispensed with labour, which could starve in thousands and as the records show did starve. Labour has, in fact, paid infinitely more for new inventions than have the Capitalists or the rest of the community. It will be for the House of Industry to redress the balance, by applying all new inventions and processes to the real saving of labour and the correlative increase of well-paid leisure. Need I add that it is in well-paid leisure—the child of increased production—the most effective demand for the greatest range of goods and services is found ?

Unhappily, there is a yet more difficult problem awaiting the House of Industry. It will be observed that, at this time of writing, unemployment is most rife in our staple industriescoal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, textiles and engineering. These are our oldest industries and presumably most subject to the law of diminishing