oblem in every
case is to ensure the progress necessary to the community without injury
to that sense of 'fellowship in the mystery' on which the social spirit
of the particular class of workmen depends. It is from this point of
view that recent American proposals in the direction of 'scientific
management' are most open to criticism: for they involve the break-up of
the craft-spirit without setting anything comparable in its place. In
fact, Mr. F. W. Taylor, one of the inventors of what is called the
'system' of scientific management, frankly ignores or despises the
craft-spirit and proposes to treat the workman as a being incapable of
understanding the principles underlying the practice of his art. He goes
so far as to lay it down as a general principle that 'in almost all the
mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so
great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to
actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this
science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him
or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient
mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent
industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time,
but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make
happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as
involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real
or intense relationship between the workman and his work, stands
self-condemned. If we are looking for _real_ industrial progress it is
elsewhere that we must turn.

This leads us naturally on to the second great division of our subject:
progress in the methods of co-operation between man and man in doing
industrial work. For if man is a social animal his power to do his bit
and his consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least, from his
social environment. The lonely craftsman perfecting his art in the
solitude of a one-man workshop does not correspond with our industrial
ideal any more than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general
religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship, William
Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of industry in his immortal
sentence: 'Fellowship is Life and lack of Fellowship is Death.' Our
study of the workman, then, is not complete when we have seen him with
his tools: we must see him also among