Fields, Factories and Workshops quotes

In proportion as technical knowledge becomes everybody’s virtual domain, in proportion as it becomes international, and can be concealed no longer, each nation acquires the possibility of applying the whole variety of her energies to the whole variety of industrial and agricultural pursuits.

Knowledge ignores artificial political boundaries.

So also do the industries; and the present tendency of humanity is to have the greatest possible variety of industries gathered in each country, in each separate region, side by side with agriculture.

Is it not a grand sight, this busy and intricate exchange of produce all over the earth which has suddenly grown up within a few years?”

Grand it may be, but is it not a mere nightmare? Is it necessary? At what cost has it been obtained, and how long will it last?

Let us turn a hundred years back. France lay bleeding at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Her young industry, which had begun to grow by the end of the 18th century, was crushed down. Germany, Italy were powerless in the industrial field.

Several more have followed since.

Capital is international and, protection or no protection, it crosses the frontiers.

The same is true of woollens. In this branch Russia was for a certain time relatively backward. However, wool-combing, spinning and weaving mills, provided with the best modern plant, were built every year in Russia and Poland by English, German and Belgian mill-owners;

… too much food in the homes of those agricultural labourers who earn twelve shillings a week, or of those women who earn from fivepence to sixpence a day in the clothing trade and other small industries which swarm in the outskirts of all great cities.

Over-production means merely and simply a want of purchasing powers amidst the workers.

And the same want of purchasing powers of the workers was felt everywhere on the Continent during the years 1885-1887.

As to the yet neutral markets, China will never be a serious customer to Europe: she can produce much cheaper at home; and when she begins to feel a need for goods of European patterns, she will produce them herself.

Woe to Europe, if on the day that the steam engine invades China she is still relying on foreign customers!

As to the African half-savages, their misery is no foundation for the well-being of a civilised nation.

As to the honest longing for more technical education—surely let us all have as much of it as possible: it will be a boon for humanity; for humanity, of course—not for a single nation, because knowledge cannot be cultivated for home use only.

Knowledge and invention, boldness of thought and enterprise, conquests of genius and improvements of social organisation have become international growths

; and no kind of progress—intellectual, industrial or social—can be kept within political boundaries; it crosses the seas, it pierces the mountains; steppes are no obstacle to it.

and almost one-half of the agricultural labourers have been sent away since 1861 to reinforce the ranks of the unemployed in the cities,[40] so that far from being over-populated, the fields of Britain are starved of human labour, as James Caird used to say.

The British nation does not work on her soil; she is prevented from doing so; and the would-be economists complain that the soil will not nourish its inhabitants!

I once took a knapsack and went on foot out of London, through Sussex. I had read Léonce de Lavergne’s work and expected to find a soil busily cultivated; but neither round London nor still less further south did I see men in the fields.

But how can that land be cultivated when there is nobody to cultivate it?

“We have fields; men go by, but never go in,” an old labourer said to me; and so it is in reality.

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the other half consists of a gravelly soil, or sands, “the natural sterility of which could be overpowered only by heavy manuring.”

Man, not nature, has given to the Belgium soil its present productivity.

With this soil and labour, Belgium succeeds in supplying nearly all the food of a population which is denser than that of England and Wales, and numbers 589 inhabitants to the square mile.

… seeds are carefully tried, the seedlings receive proper attention, and there is no fear of drought, because of the variety of crops, the liberal watering with the help of a steam engine, and the stock of plants always kept ready to replace the weakest individuals.

Almost each plant is treated individually.

There prevails, however, with regard to market-gardening, a misunderstanding which it would be well to remove. It is generally supposed that what chiefly attracts market-gardening to the great centres of population is the market. It must have been so;

… impossible to foresee at the present moment the limits as to the maximum number of human beings who could draw their means of subsistence from a given area of land, or as to what a variety of produce they could advantageously grow in any latitude.

Each day widens former limits, and opens new and wide horizons.

All we can say now is, that, even now, 600 persons could easily live on a square mile;

… be horror-stricken at seeing the population of this country increase by one individual every 1,000 seconds who think of a human being as a mere claimant upon the stock of material wealth of mankind, without being at the same time a contributor to that stock.

But we, who see in each new-born babe a future worker capable of producing much more than his own share of the common stock—we greet his appearance.

We know that a crowded population is a necessary condition for permitting man to increase the productive powers of his labour.

The doctrine of Malthus—Progress in wheat-growing—East Flanders—Channel Islands—Potato crops, past and present—Irrigation—Major Hallet’s experiments—Planted wheat.

Few books have exercised so pernicious an influence upon the general development of economic thought as Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population exercised for three consecutive generations.

It appeared at the right time, like all books which have had any influence at all, and it summed up ideas already current in the minds of the wealth-possessing minority.

… 4,000 tons of vegetables are sent every year to Paris.[100] And although the Roscoff peninsula enjoys a specially warm climate, small stone walls are erected everywhere, and rushes are grown on their tops in order to give still more protection and heat to the vegetables.[101]

The climate is improved as well as the soil.

In the neighbourhoods of Cherbourg it is upon land conquered from the sea that the best vegetables are grown—more than 800 acres of that land being given to potatoes exported to London; another 500 acres are given to cauliflower; 125 acres to Brussels sprouts;

From the technical point of view there is no obstacle whatever for such an organisation being started to-morrow with full success. The obstacles against it are not in the imperfection of the agricultural art, or in the infertility of the soil, or in climate.

They are entirely in our institutions, in our inheritances and survivals from the past—in the “Ghosts” which oppress us.

But to some extent they lie also—taking society as a whole—in our phenomenal ignorance. We, civilised men and women, know everything, we have settled opinions upon everything, we take an interest in everything.

Thousands of sweaters, some of them having their own workshops, and others merely distributing work to sub-sweaters who distribute it again amidst the destitute, supply those palaces and bazaars with goods made in the slums or in very small workshops.

The commerce is centralised in those bazaars—not the industry.

The furniture palaces and bazaars are thus merely playing the part which the feudal castle formerly played in agriculture: they centralise the profits—not the production.

The commerce is centralised in those bazaars—not the industry.

The furniture palaces and bazaars are thus merely playing the part which the feudal castle formerly played in agriculture: they centralise the profits—not the production.

In reality, the extension of the petty trades, side by side with the great factories, is nothing to be wondered at. It is an economic necessity.

The progress achieved of late in toy-making, as also the high perfection attained in the fabrication of mathematical and optical instruments, of furniture, of small luxury articles, of pottery and so on, are instances in point.

Art and science are no longer the monopoly of the great cities, and further progress will be in scattering them over the country.

The geographical distribution of industries in a given country depends, of course, to a great extent upon a complexus of natural conditions; it is obvious that there are spots which are best suited for the development of certain industries.

… succeeded in being a great exporter of grapes, and that Manchester has managed to become a seaport—we understand that in the geographical distribution of industries, the two factors of local produces and of an advantageous position by the sea are not yet the dominant factors.

We begin to understand that, all taken, it is the intellectual factor—the spirit of invention, the capacity of adaptation, political liberty, and so on—which counts for more than all others.

That all the industries find an advantage in being carried on in close contact with a great variety of other industries the reader has seen already from numerous examples. Every industry requires technical surroundings. But the same is also true of agriculture.

while many St. Petersburg manufacturers reduce their production in the summer, because the operatives return to their native villages for the culture of their allotments.

Agriculture cannot be carried on without additional hands in the summer; but it still more needs temporary aids for improving the soil, for tenfolding its productive powers.

Steam-digging, drainage, and manuring would render the heavy clays in the north-west of London a much richer soil than that of the American prairies.

No doubt the present factory owners would consider it ruinous if they had to stop their mills for several months every year, because the capital engaged in a factory is expected to pump money every day and every hour, if possible.

But that is the capitalist’s view of the matter, not the community’s view.

As to the workers, who ought to be the real managers of industries, they will find it healthy not to perform the same monotonous work all the year round, and they will abandon it for the summer, if indeed they do not find the means …

Divorce between science and handicraft—Technical education—Complete education—The Moscow system: applied at Chicago, Boston, Aberdeen—Concrete teaching—Present waste of time—Science and technics—Advantages which science can derive from a combination of brain work with manual work.

In olden times men of science, and especially those who have done most to forward the growth of natural philosophy, did not despise manual work and handicraft.

Galileo made his telescopes with his own hands. Newton learned in his boyhood the art of managing tools;

Brindley, the road-maker, despite his fourteenpence-a-day wages, enjoyed intercourse with educated men, and thus developed his remarkable engineering faculties; the son of a well-to-do family could “idle” at a wheel-wright’s shop, so as to become later on a Smeaton or a Stephenson.

We have changed all that. Under the pretext of division of labour, we have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker.

The masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than their grandfathers did;

Viewed in this light, the Moscow results do not seem extraordinary at all, and still better results may be expected if the same principles are applied from the earliest years of education.

Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education.

Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.

only then will they see that the teacher is playing no tricks when he asks them to solve problems with the rule and the compass without resorting to the protractor; only then will they know geometry.

“Through the eyes and the hand to the brain”—this is the true principle of economy of time in teaching.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, how geometry suddenly acquired for me a new meaning, and how this new meaning facilitated all ulterior studies.

and how geometry in space became plain when we began to make on a small scale a bastion with embrasures and barbettes—an occupation which obviously was soon prohibited on account of the state into which we brought our clothes.

“You look like navvies,” was the reproach addressed to us by our intelligent educators, while we were proud precisely of being navvies, and of discovering the use of geometry.

By compelling our children to study real things from mere graphical representations, instead of making those things themselves, we compel them to waste the most precious time; we uselessly worry their minds; we accustom them to the worst methods of learning;

we kill independent thought in the bud; and very seldom we succeed in conveying a real knowledge of what we are teaching. Superficiality, parrot-like repetition, slavishness and inertia of mind are the results of our method of education.

We do not teach our children how to learn.

The very beginnings of science are taught on the same pernicious system. In most schools even arithmetic is taught in the abstract way, and mere rules are stuffed into the poor little heads.

While industry, especially by the end of the last century and during the first part of the present, has been inventing on such a scale as to revolutionise the very face of the earth, science has been losing its inventive powers.

Men of science invent no more, or very little.

Is it not striking, indeed, that the steam-engine, even in its leading principles, the railway-engine, the steam-boat, the telephone, the phonograph, the weaving-machine, the lace-machine, the lighthouse, the macadamised road, photography in black and in colours, and thousands of less important things, have not been …

it is a simple division of labour.” But such a rejoinder would be utterly untrue. The march of progress is quite the reverse, because in a hundred cases against one the mechanical invention comes before the discovery of the scientific law.

It was not the dynamical theory of heat which came before the steam-engine—it followed it.

When thousands of engines already were transforming heat into motion under the eyes of hundreds of professors, and when they had done so for half a century, or more;

Even the empirical knowledge of the laws of electrical currents was in its infancy when a few bold men laid a cable at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, despite the warnings of the authorised men of science.

The name of “applied science” is quite misleading, because, in the great majority of cases, invention, far from being an application of science, on the contrary creates a new branch of science.

The American bridges were no application of the theory of elasticity; they came before the theory, and all we can say in favour of science is, that in this special branch, theory and practice developed in a parallel way, helping one another.

… a part of his life in the workshop or the farm (the workshop and the farm), if he were in contact with humanity in its daily work, and had the satisfaction of knowing that he himself discharges his duties as an unprivileged producer of wealth.

How much better the historian and the sociologist would understand humanity if they knew it, not in books only, not in a few of its representatives, but as a whole, in its daily life, daily work, and daily affairs!

How much more medicine would trust to hygiene, and how much less to prescriptions, if the young doctors were the nurses of the sick and the nurses received the education of the doctors of our time!

Free pursuit in new branches of art and knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be fully guaranteed.

And such a community would not know misery amidst wealth.

It would not know the duality of conscience which permeates our life and stifles every noble effort. It would freely take its flight towards the highest regions of progress compatible with human nature.

and under an educational system of which the motive is “profits,” and the means “specialisation,” we simply work to death the women teachers who take their educational duties in earnest.

What floods of useless sufferings deluge every so-called civilised land in the world!

When we look back on ages past, and see there the same sufferings, we may say that perhaps then they were unavoidable on account of the ignorance which prevailed. But human genius, stimulated by our modern Renaissance, has already indicated new paths to follow.

When we look back on ages past, and see there the same sufferings, we may say that perhaps then they were unavoidable on account of the ignorance which prevailed. But human genius, stimulated by our modern Renaissance, has already indicated new paths to follow.

For thousands of years in succession to grow one’s food was the burden, almost the curse, of mankind.

But it need be so no more.

… soon you will yourselves feel interested in that work, and you will have occasion to admire in your children their eager desire to become acquainted with Nature and its forces, their inquisitive inquiries as to the powers of machinery, and their rapidly developing inventive genius.

Such is the future—already possible, already realisable; such is the present—already condemned and about to disappear.

And what prevents us from turning our backs to this present and from marching towards that future, or, at least, making the first steps towards it, is not the “failure of science,” but first of all our crass cupidity—the cupidity of the man who killed …

It is evident that in France, as everywhere, the petty trades represent a very important factor of the industrial life.

Economists have been too hasty in celebrating their death.

And this conclusion becomes still more apparent when one analyses the different industries separately, taking advantage of the tables given in Résultats Statistiques.