to perform, but which it cannot economically
undertake so long as large quantities of very cheap labour are
available. This class comprises the bulk of what are commonly called
the "sweating" trades, the cheap low-skilled domestic workshop labour.
The other class consists of artistic and intellectual work which
cannot be successfully undertaken by machinery. The first of these
classes is universally admitted to comprise cases of arrested
development. The irregular working of the more highly-evolved
industries, the successive supplantation of branches of skilled labour
by machinery, the blind migration of labour from distant parts, keeps
the large industrial centres supplied with a quantity of unskilled and
untrained labour, which can be bought so cheaply that in the lowest
branches of many trades it does not pay the _entrepreneur_ to incur
the initial cost of setting up expensive machinery and the risk of
working it. The social and moral progress of industrial nations
requires, as a first condition of orderly progress, that these cases
of arrested growth shall be absorbed into the general mass of
machine-industry. These problems of "the sweating system," the
unemployed, the pauper class, the natural products of the working of a
system of competition where the competitors start from widely
different lines of opportunity, can never be solved by the private
play of enlightened self-interest, unless that enlightenment take a
far more altruistic form than is consistent with the continuance of
competitive industry. This is the fundamental paralogism of that
school of reformers who find the cure of industrial maladies in the
humanisation of the private employer. A whole class of employers
sufficiently humane and far-sighted to consistently desire the welfare
of their employees (and no fewer than the whole class would suffice,
for otherwise the less benevolent will undersell and take the business
from the more benevolent) would be so highly civilised that they
would no longer be willing to compete with one another so as to injure
one another's business: they would out of pure goodwill organise into
a "monopoly," and working this monopoly for the exclusive interest of
themselves and their employees, rack-rent the consuming public; or if
their benevolence extended to all their customers they would socialise
their business, conducting it for the greatest good of all society.
Such a form of socialised industry, dependent upon the mo