THE ANATOMY OF FRUSTRATION : XII. THE FRUSTRATION OF ABUNDANCE

By H. G. WELLS

IFIND something at once heroic and faintly absurd in the big volume in which Steele attempts to develop a summary, complete enough to allow us to make directive conclusions, of the vast mass of human thinking, theorising and experimenting about what he calls, " Property- Money Conventions."

One thing that I find particularly good and clear in this valiant effort—at times it is like a single cow trying to turn a thousand haystacks and a continent of grassland into milk—is Steele's rejection of all legalistic and his- torical accounts of money. However it came about, money is now part of the mechanism which deflects indi- vidual desire and effort into the economic service of the community. He says in one place " There never was nor is a Social Contract, and yet it is quite the best form in which to deal with endless relationships. And equally there never was nor is a systematic social-economic machine, and yet we have in effect a social-economic machine, and we can bring all our laws and arrangements about ownership, production and distribution to the test of its operative efficiency."

The only natural things underlying the mechanism of property are greed and respect for our fellows. On these a vast intricate fluctuating system of conventions has been built, entirely artificial and entirely amenable to modification. And in his titanically conceived ninth volume, he attempts to get together and bring into comparison every usage and every idea about ownership, accounting and monetary symbols that can be found in operation or under consideration in the world.

Certain tendencies that have been emerging throughout Steele's previous volumes become much plainer to himself and his readers in this ninth hale. Someone has written of Steele as a " sample modern mind " trying to make head or tail of the contemporary drive in things. Steele would have said that it was the duty of every living brain to make the same attempt that he was making. It is an impossibly intricate task for an isolated mind, but it is not at all an impossibly intricate task if there is an organisation of minds. If many with a certain com- munity of spirit attempt it, they must fall into co- operation and all the possibilities will alter. A guideless man or a man pestered by false and interested guides might easily be lost in the streets of London or the by-ways of Europe, but not a man with good maps and time-tables. Competent economic charting is a primary need for civilisation, and the increase in individual power due to competent charting seems incalculably great.

Steele knows quite clearly that his survey of property- money is about as useful a guide for behaviour as those pathetic maps of the world which existed before the sixteenth century would have been as guides for world- planning. Mapping has only begun ; we have only mapped geographically. The primary weapon we now need in the human fight against frustration is a New Encyclopaedia. If I had to invent a name for Steele and his type of thought, I should call hint a New Encyclo- paedist and his philosophy the " New Encyclopaedism." To be more precise I should say he was a stoical huthani- tarian whose method was the encyclopaedic method. He would have his perpetually renewed Next Beginning, guided and followed up by a perpetually revised Encyclo- paedia. He wanted to bring " Diderot up to date " and keep him up to date, to evoke a world-wide organisation for factual exchange and mental clearing-house work, which would have the same relation to the old Encyclo- paedias that the modern transport network has to a train of pack mules.

But this demand for a world encyclopaedia is merely a digression in his ninth book ; he was to expand it more fully in his tenth. The general lay-out of his Survey is interesting. His threefold method of approach produces what are practically three parallel surveys. The first is a sketch of economic geography. He ranges all over the world and probes as far into the crust as he can. " This," he says in effect, " is the human estate. Why do we make so poor a use of it ? Here are resources undeveloped. Here are resources wasted. Why ? " He leaves his answer open, but the open ends often point in very definite directions.

The second survey is taken from the consumer's end. Here are needs and appetites going unsatisfied. Why ? He makes big vague gestures towards an estimate for a world properly clothed, fed and sheltered. It is not his fault that his estimates are mere wild guesseS. There is no absolute reason against such estimates being precise. A standard of life, given a quantitative knowledge of what is at present mere speculation, could be defined. A world atlas of today in comparison with a world atlas of 1500 A.D. is not more informative than the working estimates We need here would be in comparison with our 'existing views. The third limb Of-his survey arises out of the former two. It -is really the project of an immense essay on- to rise his own phrase—" OWnership, Wages and Other Claiths." It is a demand for a science upon which law • and morality in 'relation to property and money can be rebuilt. This science would be essentially a hranqh of psycholOgy, and he invade* one stormy region of , con- troversy after another with an unfaltering temerity. I think 'perhaps 'the Most' interesting thing for the general reader will' be what he calls his Three 'Theses. They run as folio-Ws- Firstly : that whatever the origins of the ideas and practices Of ownership may be, ownership is now made, protected -and enforced by the laws of society, 'and there is no reason whatever except the collective welfare why any sort of ownership or any particular ownership should enforced or permitted. This is plainly the sole basis for all modern law affecting property throughout the world.

Secondly : that whatever the distribution of sovereign- ties may have been in the past, All Mankind is now the ultaflnates.oaaner Of the natural resources of the planet, earth, sky and sea, and that, failing for ithe presenta complete general direction for the exploitation of these resources—which general direction will in time arrive not by any usurpation of power but by the natural development of scientific imperatives — all current .sovereignties and ownerships must be regarded as pro- visional; and. those who have them must be regarded as caretakers of treasure-trove and navigators of derelicts, all responsible to a final accounting. The criterion by which, all the conditions. of their ownership must be .valued , is the ,extent to which these conditions fall in with and exploit the primitive human impulses so as to subserve. the human commonweal. Property is the quid, pro quo by which the man of spirit surrenders to collective living and it is the common guarantee against intolerable usurpation. Men without sovereignty, owner- ship pr freedom, or the pride that comes with these things, are incurably careless with the goods of this world and spiritless in production. For that reason property must continue to exist. But property must be " kinetic." It must never " congeal." Modern property in land or any sort of natural resources can be at most only a " stimulating responsible leasehold."

Arising out of this thesis comes another hypertrophied footnote,, another of those headlong, copious, inspiring and inadequate summaries which arc so characteristic of the frustrated encyclopaedist in Steele, a survey of the .conditions under which land, mineral rights, terri- torial. rights (of hunting,- of way, &c.), boats and ships, weapons, wives, slaves, covenanted services, family rights, debts and obligations, homes, clothing, ornaments, temples, are and have been owned, and the psychology Which tolerates and enforces or has in the past tolerated and enforced all these variants upon the themes of " It is mine ". and " It is ours." The reader whose reading goes back to Victorian days will be reminded of . that other frustrated and now forgotten prospectus, Herbert Spencer's scheme for the study of sociology.

The third thesis opens with the provocatiye.statement that "money exists to pay wages." It is the mechanism of the producer's share-out. Steele argues that the whole economic machine is essentially a process of work ; that it can be. presented as a spectacle of work ; that the workers' instinct to render unrewarded services, is practically negligible and that it is money. that " works the worker." Payment in kind means servitude but payment in money is liberty of choice. The expectation of security and satisfaction upholds the worker through the less interesting parts of his task and justifies the parts that are interesting. " Work " he uses in a very wide, sense for .anything and everything wilful that keeps the economic machine running. Acquiescence is " work," being born and undergoing education is " work.", Work done justifies not only immediate pay, but pensions, retirement pay, leisure and independence. The xvhola Monetary system is. to be judged by the test whether the money put into the hands of the worker on pay-day satisfies his expectations and keeps its promises. The money system has to be worked out to a final simplicity in .which you will draw your pay as you earn it, keep it by you, bother no more about it, and be sure it will neither lose nor gain in " pureliasing power " until you spend it.

This Ultimate simplification of money so that, a note or coin means the same thing all over the. world is. Steele asserts, the plain objective of every constructive economist. Anything but a, world currency becomes an anachronism. And from this third and last thesis he launches out into another big volume of concentrated encyclopaedism, a sketch of the history of trading, accounting and money, from their beginnings up-to now. He tries to find the social advantages of each new develop- ment and' their, under each new development, he 'makes asectiondevoted to what he calls its " corruptions."

Monetary manipulation has become increasingly vexa- tious in trade policy and lOreign policy. It has inter- woven with the felted corruptions of tariffs and trade restrictions. He calls all this the perversion of money, but then he hits out the remark, '" money is a born per- vert. We have:to cure a congenital disease here." The more men knoW of monetary complications the easier is it to reap personal advantages, and the more disingenuous becomes the attitude of the expert. The less men knOw, the- less able they are to deal with the business.. .I This monetary science. is " a. corrupting science," says Steele, and its practitioners should " work with rubber gloves." The conflict. of expertise with disinterestedness is ;the paradox of scientific finance. Economic life can only be simplified if it is " drenched in light and kept Mean- descent. with good intentions." • And its simplification to real efficiency- must be a corn- plicated.incessant business of adjustment. " Revolution " is no final remedy for economic frustration except - in •so far as it may clear away some very .close-knit system of abuses. Revolution means a new beginning, with new naïve principles, all void of immunity and ready to .be corrupted. It carries with it a strategic necessity, usually exaggerated, for the suppression, of criticism as opposition. The enquiring visitor can trace the development of a whole system of new corruptions in Russia, terrorism,' wangling, exploitation of mass sentimentality, unscrupu- lously defensive privilege, beneath the dark cloak of doctrinaire intolerance.

The Frustration of World Peace, according to Steele, is due to the inadequate.education of the human imagina- tion, and it can be defeated only by an immense poetic effort, by teaching, literature, suggestion and illumina- tion. A vast. Ku/fur-Kampf lies between mankind and peace. We must go through that battle ; there is no way round. Equally does escape from economic frustra- tion to universal abundance and social justice depend upon a mighty intellectual effort. It will have to be an effort as extensive as a world war and far more prolonged. Upon the organisation and co-ordination of thousands of students and men of experience, discussing and pub- lishing . freely, . helping and stimulating one another, depends the possibility of an advance into enduring plenty. And at present there is nothing in the wide world to represent the vital science needed but a few scattered professors and specialists working with negligible resources and the disconnectedness of amateurs.

. Are We to despair because of the unprecedented great- ness and complexity of the work to be done ? Take hope from the story of flying, says Steele. For two thousand years and more men dreamt of flying and. sought*, fly. But for a wearisome sequence of centuries - they never got a step forward. Now one man constructed his machine and jumped and flopped, and now another ; the general wisdom remained quite sure that flying was for ever denied to man. There is a long list of names of solitary men who announced that they were discovering or had discovered flying. They achieved nothing ; they left nothing to their successors but broken bodies, broken wings and discouragement. Only when a convergence of tendencies stimulated the general imagination to believe in the possibility of flying was there " a sufficient and interlocking continuity and multitudinousness of effort for a real advance."

Then in scarcely .a dozen years the problem of flying, was solved. By whom ? You do not know, for the simple reason that it was done by a multitude of men working in correlation. So and so flew quite early, and so and • so, and so and so ; but hundreds of contemporary brains had contributed even to the earliest machine that rose from the ground. It was not an inventor but a science that took men into the air. As science really grips its matter doctrinaires disaypear. The Jenkins Panacea and Orthodox Jabberism will melt into a living flux of assembled and analysed economic fact and synthesised guiding generalisations. But in economic science -there is still nothing but doctrinaires. In his library, Steele says,- he has several thousand books of monetary and general economic theory. It is rare that- any.• of these writers refer to each other:; still rarer to find. the slightest attempt to understand, respond or summarise, It is less like. science than the gabble of geese on a.• common: " Three thousand years of isolated dreamers and still no man could fly a yard. A few years of free co-operation, • of correlated, well-reported experiments and free dis- cussion, and Man could fly round his world. So likewise will it be with the attainment of world plenty," writes Steele, and ties up his economic bale with these words, quite hopefully pointing our hopes for material welfare to the busy skies.

[Next Week : The Frustration of 17 otah."J