Philanthropic motives are often combined with business motives, and the combination may often be genuinely conducive to the human welfare of the community.Temperance, sanitation, and hygiene, educational and recreative opportunities may be made available.Certain regulations, chiefly of a prohibitory nature, regarding the use of alcohol, betting, or marriage, are imposed by some employers as conditions of employment.Such interferences outside the hours of labour are, however, exceptional and are generally justified on special grounds of economic safety and efficiency.
§11.But an altogether wider issue is opened up in the claims, not of the particular employer but of industrial society to impose or evoke standards of consumption scientifically adjusted to the various grades of industrial efficiency.If we regard a nation as an economic society, putting out productive energy in wealth-creation, it becomes evident that science has much to say, and can have more, regarding the expenditure of incomes and the consequent consumption of wealth.The science of scientific management, with all its psycho-physical apparatus for measuring results, can be applied to standards of living for individuals and families.The beginnings of this idea are found in the distinction which figured so largely in the classical Political Economy between productive and unproductive consumption.The discussions of Arthur Young, Eden and others, regarding the respective merits of wheat and oatmeal, beer and tea, as ingredients of working-class diet, were directed avowedly by this conception of economy.
A good food was one that yielded more muscular energy or endurance per penny of expenditure.The more enlightened doctrine known as 'the economy of high wages' was early recommended by philanthropists like Robert Owen, or business men like Mr.Brassey, on the score of experiments relating to the larger output of labour-power which higher wages with better feeding rendered possible.But there was no 'science' worth mention in these crude experiments.Only within recent years, with the advance of organic chemistry and physiology, has the 'science' of dietetics begun to emerge, analysing the various foods and assigning them their values as producers of tissue and of energy.We are now told the quantities of proteids, carbohydrates and fats contained in various foods, and dietaries based upon these analyses are prescribed for different sorts of workers, and for different ages of members of a family.At present the science does not pretend to any large amount of accuracy, indeed wide divergences still exist in its very foundations.
But there is no reason to doubt that further analysis and experimentation may be able to reach food standards which on the consumption side will correspond to the economy of standard methods of work under scientific management.It may be quite possible to lay down with considerable exactitude the amounts and combinations and intervals of food for coal-miners, weavers, clerks, motor-men, etc., together with estimates of the amount of expenditure required to maintain the different forms of industrial efficiency.The productive value of other elements of the wage-earner's expenditure will not indeed admit of so much exactitude, partly because his own 'utility'
obtained from such expenditure will not easily be separable from that of his family.But though family expenditure cannot thus be regarded as exclusively directed by productive considerations, the physical efficiency which is its chief test may be regarded primarily as an industrial asset.Indeed, this view is implicit in most talk of standards of comfort and in most discussions of a 'minimum' or 'living' or 'subsistence' wage.It means such wage as, economically expended, will enable a wage-earner to rear an average family in that measure and kind of efficiency required to do work of a sort similar to that by which he earns the wage.No doubt this notion is tempered by some slight considerations of education and of betterment.
But productive efficiency is always the basic factor.Food and housing, by far the most important elements in working-class expenditure, are clearly in process of being standardised by hygienics in the service of a science of productive consumption.
§12.Two other sciences, by which society may seek to standardise the lives of workers, are eugenics and education.In both of these the humanists may have a fierce battle to fight against the dominion of the industrialists.Eugenics, if it can get recognition as a social art, will regulate marriage for the purposes of good stock.But good for what? Perhaps for industry and war, if some specialists should have their way.So too with education.Primary education has already been ear-marked in our towns for the production of cheap clerks, and technical and professional training under various guises invade our citadels of higher learning.All is part of the same great claim of society to economise and standardise the body and the mind of its citizen, primarily in order that he may do more efficiently the social or routine services it requires of him.
