Economic essays

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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366 APPENDIX ei 2 dl United States; also the French revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. The greatest thing that has happened in those one hundred and fifty years, however, perhaps we do not often fully grasp. We know that this 1s an age of machinery, that wonderful mechanisms have been invented, that the process of making things of all kinds has radically changed. We know that, before the period, there was scarcely any machinery in existence. The first steam engine only arrived at about that identical time. Textile machinery consisted of spinning wheels and hand looms. The enormous mass of machinery that is now at work is a new development; and it falls within those one hundred and fifty years. With it has come a complete reorganization of the economic life of mankind. It is now as utterly unlike what it was formerly as it would be if we had acquired the power to “summon spirits from the vasty deep” to do our work for us. “Quantity production” has ensued, and the countries that develop it can defy competition from any other quarter on earth. This has meant great corporations, which terrified us at first, though we discovered that they could be tamed and made to resemble working elephants rather than dinosaurs. They are working now and performing an indispensable funec- tion in world economy. They are helping to unify the life of the human race. There is no such thing as a really “national” economic system if, by that, we mean an activity confined within by the boundaries of any state. Economic society is world wide. Commercial laws and treaties have very little value unless they are inspired by a recognition of the essential unity of this great natural organism. Now the transformation of the old system into the present one is so complete that if a man of 1775 should come to life again and look about, he would think himself on a wholly different planet. He would recognize scarcely a trace of the economy he was used to take part in. If we should take him to a great department store and ask him to find something made by hand, he would have trouble in finding it. Only a microscopic part of the entire output is so made. All of it is wholly or in great part the product of machinery, much of which is automatic. It is as though the “genii of the lamp” were everywhere ready, at call, to create all manner of products in Aladdin-like profusion. Our visitor from the world of our grandparents would find that, in lieu of trade guilds, we have labor unions of a kind that he knew nothing of; and our corporations would strike him as something imported either from the celestial world or from the nether one. Holding companies would assuredly alarm him. The change that has meant all this has occupied only about a fiftieth part of the time covered by authentic history; and it is very much greater than the sum total of all previous changes that have fallen within that period. Men have made larger practical gains in a fiftieth part of the historic period than they had made in the previous forty-nine fiftieths of it. I am speaking primarily of changes in the economic system, and of those further changes which necessarily accompany them. The world is a different world, though the material substance of it is what it was. The dominant part of the life it sustains—the human part of it—is one great organism.

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