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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
This eBook edition of "Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The book was published in 1915, after the First World War began. Veblen considered warfare a threat to economic productivity and contrasted the authoritarian politics of Germany with the democratic tradition of Britain, noting that industrialization in Germany had not produced a progressive political culture. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution is in major part a study of the deviations in cultural and social growth between the English and the German. It deals with the consequences those differences created in social, economic and other domains. Veblen here describes, through the study of German culture, historical and social aspect, how it came to forming of the Third Reich, even before it was formed. He suggests that the Germany's autocracy was an advantage compared to democratic countries. After it was censored during the war, it was later released and it represents a substantial contribution in its sphere of influence. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was an American economist and sociologist. He is well known as a witty critic of capitalism. Veblen is famous for the idea of "conspicuous consumption." Conspicuous consumption, along with "conspicuous leisure," is performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. Veblen explains the concept in his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Within the history of economic thought, Veblen is considered the leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology" is still called the Veblenian dichotomy by contemporary economists.
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Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution
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Table of Contents
Preface
Some apology may seem due on offering at this season so unwarlike a study as what here follows on the case of Imperial Germany and its place in modern civilisation. The essay was projected before the current war came on, though the complexion of subsequent events has also doubtless had its effect on the particular direction taken by the argument at more than one point in the inquiry. The inquiry in hand, therefore, is concerned neither with the controverted merits of the international quarrel nor with the comparative force and probable success of either belligerent. Its aim is the less polemical one of a comparison and correlation between the German case on the one hand and the English-speaking peoples on the other hand, considered as two distinct and somewhat divergent lines of the cultural development in modern times; and the ground on which the inquiry runs is that afforded by the economic, chiefly the industrial, circumstances that have shaped the outcome in either case.
It aims to account for Germany’s industrial advance and high efficiency by natural causes, without drawing on the logic of manifest destiny, Providential nepotism, national genius, and the like. It is believed to be the first attempt yet made at an explanation, as distinct from description or eulogy, of this episode in modern economic history; unless Professor Sombart’s Deutsche Volkswirtschaft im XIX. Jahrhundert may be so regarded. Apart from Professor Sombart’s study of this period, it is believed, nothing of consequence has appeared in the way of a theoretical inquiry into this Imperial era and the run of its industrial affairs, although many scholarly and workmanlike studies have presented the run of the facts from one point of view and another.
There is of course no intention here to impart information on the history of this period, whether political or economic; and the historical information made use of as material for argument is of the commonplace kind familiar by common notoriety or from the standard manuals accessible to all readers. Anything like a comprehensive citation of sources and authorities has accordingly been dispensed with, though citations and references covering given points have been brought in where special occasion appeared to call for it. The argument runs between the lines of the histories, as conventionally written, and does not lean on recondite material or niceties of detail.
To English readers, it is true, the chapter on the Old Order may appear in part to rest on recondite information. The argument bearing on this topic presumes a degree of familiarity with the archćology of the Baltic region, together with a fairly exhaustive first-hand acquaintance with what there is extant of literary remains in the Old Icelandic. It is not a matter in which the reader would be much helped out by a citation of sources; nor would a detailed enumeration of documents and textual passages appear to serve any useful end even in the hands of a specialist in this province of erudition, since the purpose for which this material is here used is such as would be served by nothing short of a somewhat protracted and inclusive familiarity with the entire range of literature in question. The early culture of the Germanic peoples, and of their pre-German forebears, that so comes in sight in these archćological and literary antiquities, is made use of as a term of contrast against which to exhibit the characteristic traits of the modern era, and as showing the cultural point of departure of these peoples, toward which any drift of reversion in their case will necessarily set.
It may also appear that a larger attention has been given to the case of the English-speaking community than would seem warranted by the caption of the title-page. Here, again, the need of a term of comparison has been allowed to decide, as well as the fact that, in the industrial respect, the current German situation is a derivative of the English and an outcome of the past development of the industrial arts as worked out in Great Britain. Some attention has therefore necessarily been given to this past development of industry and its consequences in the British community.
March 1915
Chapter I. Introductory - Races and Peoples
Among men who have no articulate acquaintance with matters of ethnology it is usual to speak of the several nations of Europe as distinct races. Even official documents and painstaking historians are not free from this confusion of ideas.
In this colloquial use “race” is not conceived to be precisely synonymous with “nation,” nor with “people”; although it would often be a difficult matter to make out from the context just what distinctive meaning is attached to one or another of these terms. They are used loosely and suggestively, and for many purposes they may doubtless be so used without compromise or confusion to the argument; so that it might seem the part of reason to take them as they come, with allowance for such margin of error as necessarily attaches to their colloquial use, and without taking thought of a closer definition or a more discriminate use than what contents those who so find these terms convenient for use in all their colloquial ambiguity.
But through all the current ambiguity in the use of these terms, and of others that serve as their virtual equivalents, there runs a certain consistent difference of connotation, such as to work confusion in much of the argument in which they are employed. Whatever else it may be taken to con-vey, “race” always implies a solidarity of inheritance within the group so designated; it always implies that the complement of hereditary traits is substantially the same for all the individuals comprised in the group. “Race” is a biological concept, and wherever it is applied it signifies common descent of the group from an ancestry possessed of a given specific type and transmitting the traits that mark this type, intact to all members of the group so designated. The other terms, that are currently used as interchangeable with “race,” as, e.g., “nation” or “people,” do not necessarily imply such a biological solidarity of the group to which they are applied; although the notion of a common descent is doubtless frequently present in a loose way in the mind of those who so use them.
In this colloquial use of terms, when the distinction between these several peoples or alleged races is not allowed to rest quite uncritically on a demarkation of national frontiers, the distinguishing mark to which recourse is usually had is the community of language. So it comes about that habituation to a given type of speech has come to do duty as a conventional mark of racial derivation. A certain (virtual) uniformity of habit is taken to mean a uniformity of hereditary endowment. And many historians and publicists who discuss these matters have been led into far-reaching generalisations touching hereditary characteristics of temperament, intelligence and physique, in cases where there is in fact ground for nothing more substantial than a discriminating comparison between divergent schemes of use and wont. Such differences of use and wont as mark off one people from another may be a sufficiently consequential matter, of course; but their reach and effect are after all of quite another character, and have quite another place and bearing in the cultural growth, than differences of racial type.
The scheme of institutions in force in any given community - as exemplified, e.g., by the language - being of the nature of habit, is necessarily unstable and will necessarily vary incontinently with the passage of time, though it may be in a consistent manner; whereas the type of any given racial stock is stable, and the hereditary traits of spiritual and physical endowment that mark the type are a matter of indefeasible biological heritage, invariable throughout the life-history of the race. A meticulous discrimination between the two concepts - of habit and heredity - is the beginning of wisdom in all inquiry into human behavior; and confusion of the two is accountable for much of the polemical animus, and not a little recrimination, in recent and current writing on historical, political and economic matters. And, of course, the larger the burden of chauvinism carried by the discussion the more spectacular and sweeping has been its output of systematic blunders.
If an inquiry into the case of Germany is to profit the ends of theoretical generalisation bearing on the study of human institutions, their nature and causes, it is necessary to discriminate between those factors in the case that are of a stable and enduring character and those that are variable, and at the same time it is necessary to take thought of what factors are peculiar to the case of the German people and what others are common to them and to their neighbors with whom their case will necessarily be compared. It hap-pens that these two lines of discrimination in great part coincide. In respect of the stable characteristics of race heredity the German people do not differ in any sensible or consistent manner from the neighboring peoples; whereas in the character of their past habituation - in their cultural scheme - as well as in respect of the circumstances to which they have latterly been exposed, their case is at least in some degree peculiar. It is in the matter of received habits of thought - use and wont - and in the conditions that have further shaped their scheme of use and wont in the recent past, that the population of this country differs from the population of Europe at large.
In view of the prevalent confusion or ignorance on this head among the historians and publicists who have been dealing with these matters, it seems necessary, even at the cost of some tedium, to recite certain notorious facts bearing on the racial complexion of the German people. In so far as may bear on the question of race for the German people taken as a whole, these facts are no longer in controversy. Students of European race questions still are, and no doubt long will be, engaged on many difficult problems of local displacement, migration and infiltration of racial elements, even within the frontiers of the Fatherland; but for the purpose in hand recourse need scarcely be had to any of these matters of recondite detail. Even if more might be convenient, nothing is required for present use beyond those general features of the case on which a secure consensus has already been reached.
It is only in so far as we can make shift to conceive that the linguistic frontiers coincide in some passable way with the political frontiers of German dominion that we can make use of the name as it is currently employed in historical, polemical and patriotic writing, without phrase or abatement. Taking the name, then, as loosely designating the Empire with its German-speaking population - das deutsche Volk - and overlooking any discrepancies in so doing, the aggregate so designated is in no defensible sense to be spoken of as a distinct race, even after all allowance has been made for intrusive elements in the population, such as the Jews or the Germanised Poles and Danes. The German people is not a distinct race either as against the non-German population of Europe or within itself. In both of these respects the case of this population is not materially different from that of any other national population in Europe. These facts are notorious.
Like the populations of the neighboring countries, the German population, too, is thoroughly and universally hybrid; and the hybrid mixture that goes to make up the German people is compounded out of the same racial elements that enter into the composition of the European population at large. Its hybrid character is perhaps more pronounced than is the case in the countries lying farther south, but the difference in degree of hybridisation as between the Germans and their southern neighbors is not a serious one. On the other hand the case of the Germans is in this respect virtually identical with that of the peoples lying immediately to the east and west.1
In point of race the population of south Germany is substantially identical with that of northern France or the neighboring parts of Belgium; while in the same respect the population of north Germany has substantially the same composition as that of Holland and Denmark on the west and of western Russia on the east; and, taking the Fatherland as a whole, its population is in point of race substantially identical with that of the British Isles. The variations in local detail within this broad belt of mixed populations are appreciable, no doubt, but they are after all of much the same character in one country as in another, and taken one with another they run to much the same effect both east, west and middle. When taken in the large there is, in other words, no sensible difference of race between the English, Dutch, Germans and the Slavs of Great Russia.
In the current expositions of national merit and notability, when a pure-bred German, Germanic or Anglo-Saxon race is spoken for, the context presently brings into view that what is present in the eulogist’s conception, if anything in the way of a definite biological category, is the dolicho-blond. Now it happens, unfortunately for the invidious insistence on purity of race, that this particular racial stock is less frequently to be found unmixed than either of the other two with which it is associated. It is, indeed, quite safe to affirm that there is no community extant, great or small, that is made up even approximately of pure-bred blonds to the exclusion of other racial elements.
One may even safely go further and assert that there is not by any chance an individual to be found in the population of Europe who, in point of pedigree, is of unmixed blond extraction. Nor is there any reasonable chance, nor any evidence available, that a community of pure-bred blonds ever has existed in any part of Europe. And the like assertion may be made, with but a slightly less degree of assurance, as regards pure-bred specimens of the other main European races.
The variation in race characters is very appreciable within each of these national populations; in the German case being quite pronounced between north and south. Whereas the differences which go to make the distinction between these nationalities taken as aggregates are of an institutional kind - differences in acquired traits not transmissible by inheritance, substantially differences of habituation. On this side, however, the divergences between one nationality and another may be large, and they are commonly of a systematic character; so that while no divergence of racial type may be alleged, the divergence in the cultural type may yet be serious enough.
The hybrid composition of these peoples affects their character in yet another bearing, which is of grave consequence in the growth of culture, at the same time that it affects the fortunes of all the peoples of Europe in much the same fashion, though perhaps not in the same degree. By consequence of their hybrid composition the individual members of these nationalities vary more widely in respect of their native capacities and aptitudes than would be the case in any pure-bred people.2 So that these peoples each present a much larger diversity of personalities than would be found among them if they were not crossbred. On the physical side, in respect of such traits as can be measured and compared by mechanical methods, this great range and complexity of variations within each nationality is obvious enough, - in stature, color, mass and anatomical proportions. But it no less indubitably comprises also those (spiritual and intellectual) traits that are less amenable to anthropometrical statistics, at the same time that they are of greater consequence to the fortunes of the people among whom they are found. It is these psychological traits - spiritual and intellectual proclivities, capacities, aptitudes, sensibilities - that afford the raw material out of which any given scheme of civilisation is built up and on which its life-history and the sequence of its permutations run their course. It is, of course, a trite matter-of-course that no people can work out a scheme of culture that lies beyond or outside the range of its capacities; and it is likewise a matter-of-course that a nation whose population is gifted with many and various capacities is thereby better fitted to meet the exigencies that arise in the course of its life-history, and so will be in a position more promptly to respond to any call. A larger, fuller, more varied and more broadly balanced scheme of culture will, under tolerable circumstances, be found among such a people than in a community made up of individuals that breed true with close approximation to a single specific type.
Such a hybrid population will, of course, also have the faults of its qualities.
The divergence of temperament and proclivities will be as wide as that of its capacities and aptitudes; and the unrest that works out in a multiform ramification of achievements on the one side is likely to work out also in a profuse output of irritation and dissentient opinions, ideals and aspirations on the other side. For good or ill, such has been the congenital make-up of the Western peoples, and such, it may be called to mind, has also been the history of Western civilisation.
All the while it may as well be kept in mind that in this respect, as regards the range and multifarious character of their native endowment, these Western peoples are today what they once were in neolithic time. The range of variations in each and all is very appreciably wider than would be had within any pure-bred stock; but it is no wider, nor is it in any sensible degree different, among the hybrid gen-erations that inhabit these countries today than it once was among the similarly hybrid generations that carried this Western culture in that earlier time. This wide-ranging heritage is after all a neolithic heritage; and however multiform and picturesquely varied the cultural scheme of the Western peoples in later times may seem, the stream does not, after all, rise higher than its neolithic source. The population that makes up and carries forward this civilisation is, after all, endowed with the faults of its qualities, and they are the neolithic qualities.
Chapter II. The Old Order
I
The state of civilisation and of the industrial arts into which the remote ancestry of the north-Europeans may be said to have been born was the earlier neolithic, - the earliest phase of the stone age of which there is certain evidence in northern Europe. The European palaeolithic does not come into the case, since it closed before the formation of that hybrid population out of which these later European peoples have sprung; besides which its traces are virtually wanting throughout the habitat in which this population of mixed race lived and moved and made good their survival. Even for Europe at large, it is held, there is no cultural continuity, and little if any racial continuity, between the palaeolithic and the neolithic. The neolithic is believed to have begun independently, so far as concerns its course in Europe, having come in as an intrusive culture, presumptively at the intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe, probably late in quaternary time; the earlier stages of the advance that led up to the European neolithic having been worked out outside the European area and before the bearers of the neolithic penetrated that quarter of the world.
It may therefore be said that this early neolithic state of the arts of life is in a way congenital to the north-European peoples. Whether such a statement will apply in the case of the Mediterranean race, which is held to have brought this culture into Europe, may be left an open question. It is of no immediate interest here. The like is true for the Alpine stock, which is held to have come in from the east, presumably from Asia, during the early neolithic, and which is likewise believed to have reached the neolithic stage before breaking into the European situation. Neither of these races, nor the two together, as they stood at the time of their intrusion into Europe, are to be reckoned the ancestors of the north-Europeans, in the sense of affording the ancestral type, whether physical or spiritual, of that north-European population that presently multiplies and continues to find a livelihood by help of the neolithic technology on the north-European seaboard.
Doubtless each of these races contributes its share to this ancestry; they are both present from the outset, or nearly so, in the mixed north-European population, and they have apparently always continued to account for at least one-half of the racial constitution of these peoples. But the ancestry of the north-Europeans can not be said properly to have come into effectual bearing until the dolicho-blond stock is mixed with the other two, so as to give rise to the particular hybrid strain that has continuously occupied this region since neolithic times and has peopled north Europe with the nations now living. The racial history of these peoples is the history of a population of hybrids made up of the three stocks in conjunction, not of one and another of these racial types in severalty; it can therefore not fairly be said to take its beginning until the three racial factors requisite for its constitution came into conjunction.
The selective test of fitness to survive in the climatic region of the Baltic and North Sea under neolithic conditions, and to hold that habitat against all comers, was not applied to the three constituent stocks in severalty, and so was not a conclusive test of superior fitness in either one of the three taken by itself. The test, and the conclusion to be drawn from the experiment, applies solely to the composite population into which the three enter as essential constituents. Such is obviously the case, since in the course of selective breeding through several thousands of years no one of the three constituent types has displaced both or either of the other two in any part of the region in question, nor has any one of the racial types at any point displaced the hybrid offspring of the three. The most that can be said is that while the population has continued through this long interval of time to be a hybrid mixture, the character of the mixture has come to vary from one place to another in such a way that this composite population is more blond toward the north and more brunet toward the south, at the same time that, even with an equal initial chance, the dolicho-brunet (Mediterranean) counts for less both north and south, within this special climatic region, than either of the other two constituent stocks.
For a contrast that will enforce this line of argument illustrative instances may be drawn from almost any country lying within striking distance of this Baltic-North Sea tract. The hybrid populations of this region have repeatedly, almost unremittingly, broken bounds and migrated in force into other countries and so have been mixed in by crossbreeding with these other peoples.
But in no case where the experiment has had time enough to be at all conclusive have they succeeded in making over the racial constitution of the peoples among whom they so have intruded, with such effect as in any instance to supplant the indigenous population and substitute their own racial composition for what they found at the time of their immigration; at least one of the racial factors that go to make up the northern hybrids - the dolicho-blond - has in all cases presently disappeared selectively from these outlying populations into which it so has been introduced; and the composite northern population has proved itself unfit in its composite character to live outside the Baltic-North Sea tract, at the same time that its constituents have proved unfit to hold this tract except in a composite.
Nor has any intrusive population of a different racial derivation, pure-bred or composite, succeeded in displacing the northern hybrids from this habitat, whether by mass movement or by infiltration, although that experiment has also been tried on a sufficient scale, - as, e.g., in the advance of the Finns (Lapps) into the Baltic country, particularly on the northern and northeastern borders of this region that has by a process of selection been proved to belong to the blond-hybrid peoples. At least in the one instance of Finland, and less assuredly elsewhere toward the north and east, the onset of the intruders was so far successful as to have displaced the language of the earlier population; but in the long run the racial composition of the inhabitants has reverted substantially to what it was before the coming of the Finns, so that there is at present no appreciable racial difference between the two shores of the Baltic.3
The early Baltic culture is of interest, then, as showing the state of the arts of life to which the ancestry of substantially all the north-European peoples was originally accustomed; which might, indeed, be said to be congenital to these peoples. This culture runs somewhat of an even course, as near as the evidence permits it to be seen, over a long interval, - sufficiently long to have tested the fitness of the Baltic population for the manner of life which it offered, and at the same time sufficiently exposed to contact with other racial elements or aggregates outside to prove that the characteristic hybrid mixture of these Baltic peoples was better fitted than any competing population for life on that technological footing and under the geographical and climatic conditions in which they were placed. A summary recital of the characteristic features and salient events of this cultural period, so far as the evidence permits, will substantiate the claim.4
In general terms the Baltic stone age may be characterised as a relatively advanced savagery, placed in a geographic situation drawn on a relatively small scale, - a small-scale system of tillage and presently of mixed farming. It may perhaps as fairly be called a relatively low stage of barbarism; there need be no dispute about the alternative terms; they both are suggestive rather than technically competent descriptive terms. And the bronze age comes under the same loose designation, with the necessary caution that it is marked, on the whole, by an appearance of greater technological efficiency and a larger accumulation of wealth, - perhaps also a more settled habit of life.
The neolithic population appear, throughout the period and throughout their territory, to have lived in open settlements of no great size, scattered over the face of the land as the available soil for tillage and pasture might decide.
It is doubtful whether these settlements were grouped in villages or loosely dispersed by individual households over the open country. But in any case there is said to be no evidence of towns, or even of large villages,5 nor is there any trace of fortifications or any evidence of a preference for naturally defensible sites. Taken in conjunction with the relative scarcity of weapons, and the total absence - in the available evidence - of any form of defensive armor, this defenseless distribution of settlements conveys perhaps an unduly broad suggestion of a peaceable habit of life. Yet with all due caution of allowance for what the material does not, and perhaps can not, show, it is impossible to set aside the circumstantial evidence that the culture was character- istically a peaceable one. And it necessarily follows also, in the light of considerations already set out above, that the population will have been of a peaceable temper on the whole. The like conditions continue, and the circumstantial evidence runs on with a degree of consistency to the same effect, not only through the stone age but also through the succeeding period of bronze.
In the latter period especially the distribution of the population has in several places been traced in some detail, showing that it followed the lay of the land in such a way as to take account of the most practicable fords and roadways, many of which are still in use.6
II. On the Merits of Borrowing
In one connection and another it has already appeared that this stone and bronze-age culture of the Baltic peoples drew for its elements on other cultural regions and earlier phases of civilisation. These peoples borrowed persistently and with great facility. So far as this practice of borrowing is traceable in the stone age it is necessarily a borrowing of technological elements, since the nature of the materials in which they worked has allowed very little but industrial appliances to come down to the present; but as regards these technological elements the borrowing is of the most ubiquitous character. Even in the use of flint, as shown by the series of implements running through the period specifically characterised by the kitchen middens and down over the full-blown neolithic into the bronze age, - even in their use of flint they appear to have learned much of the serviceable innovations from outside, chiefly from the south. The early kitchen-midden implements are rather rudely chipped flints, and it is apparent that the grinding of flint was unknown on the Scandinavian waters in that time. Presently, when this improvement comes into vogue, it comes in along with the use of new and more serviceable forms, such as to suggest that they were worked out by help of examples drawn from the more advanced neolithic populations to the south. But along with a due recognition of this technological indebtedness it is also to be recognised that the Baltic peoples presently carried this polished (and chipped) flint technology to a perfection of workmanship and mechanical serviceability not surpassed, even if it may have been equalled, by any other neolithic culture.
Again, neither the crop plants nor the domestic animals are visibly present in the kitchen middens from the outset. As for the crop plants this may mean only a quite intelligible failure of evidence, and does not conclusively argue that, e.g., barley was not known and used from the beginning of the Baltic settlement, though the total absence of any trace is not to be set aside as having no significance. For the domestic animals, on the other hand, the negative evidence is conclusive, and it must be taken as an ascertained fact that these were introduced gradually at an appreciable interval after the beginnings of the Baltic culture had been made, and after the Baltic peoples had definitely acquired the (hybrid) racial complexion that marks them through later time. The paucity of the material, not in volume but in range, permits little more to be said in this connection for the stone age; except it be that the only other appreciable material evidence available, that of the graves and mounds, runs to much the same effect, - the use of these being also held to have been learned from outside, and developed in a characteristic manner on lines originally given by the same usage as it prevailed in other countries.
Throughout the bronze and iron periods of prehistory the same facile borrowing goes on; both the use and the material of the bronze and iron work being of foreign derivation. And as the sequence comes on down the ages and approaches historical dates, offering a progressively increasing volume and diversity of archaeological material, the evidence of borrowing extends also to other than the industrial arts. As the beginning of history, in the stricter sense, is approached this borrowing shows itself ever more notoriously in the aesthetic arts; in which, at the close of the pagan era, e.g., Scandinavian art shows its indebtedness to the Irish and other Gaelic culture at every turn. What is known of late Baltic (mainly Scandinavian) paganism carries the same insidious suggestion of facility for new ideas in the domain of supernatural beliefs; very much as the shifting progression of usages in sepulture in the remoter past argues that these peoples were not above learning from their neighbors, or perhaps rather were temperamentally defenseless against in-novation from the outside. In the late pagan era they seem, e.g., to have borrowed, and in some degree made over, several deities of foreign extraction; and it may be recalled that the pagan era closes with the wholesale acceptance of an alien mythology and religious scheme, the improvement and adaptation of which to their own temperamental needs has occupied much of the serious attention of these peoples ever since.
None of this extensive and unremitting draught on the technological and institutional resources of other cultural regions can be called an idle borrowing. The borrowed elements have invariably been assimilated, drawn into the cultural system and so combined and shaped to its purpose as to have led to an unbroken evolution of a scheme peculiar to these (hybrid) peoples and their needs, rather than to the substitution of a scheme from outside or a piecing-out of the scheme of things into which it is intruded. In other words, the borrowing has been done in a thoroughly workmanlike manner and with a free hand.
This proclivity to borrow, and the free and easy efficiency with which borrowed elements are turned to account, is a characteristic trait of north-European antiquity, as, indeed, it is still something of a distinctive mark of these peoples. It probably marks a temperamental bent of the north-European population, at the same time that it gives a certain characteristic flexibility to their scheme of institutions. As a temperamental trait it would appear to be traceable, at least in good part, to the fact of their hybrid extraction; possibly also in part to the peculiar race characteristics of the stocks from which this hybrid population is derived.7 The efficacy of borrowing that so comes to light in the life-history of the Baltic culture, as also in a less notorious manner in other instances of cultural intercourse, puts up to the student of institutions a perplexing question, or rather a group of perplexing questions. Something has just been said on the question of why one people borrows elements of culture or of technology with greater facility and effect than another. But the larger question stands untouched: Why do the borrowed elements lend themselves with greater facility and effect to their intrinsic use in the hands of the borrower people than in the hands of the people to whose initiative they are due? Why are borrowed elements of culture more efficiently employed than home-grown innovations? or more so than the same elements at the hands of their originators? It would of course be quite bootless to claim that such is always or necessarily the case, but it is likewise not to be denied that, as a matter of history, technological innovations and creations of an institutional nature have in many cases reached their fullest serviceability only at the hands of other communities and other peoples than those to whom these cultural elements owed their origin and initial success. That such should ever be the case is a sufficiently striking phenomenon, - one might even say a sufficiently striking discrepancy.
An explanation, good as far as it goes, though it may not go all the way, is to be looked for in the peculiar circumstances attending the growth, as well as the eventual transmission by borrowing, of any article of the institutional equipment. Technological elements affecting the state of the industrial arts, as being the more concrete and more tangible, will best serve to demonstrate the proposition. Any far-reaching innovation or invention, such as may eventually find a substantial place in the inventory of borrowed elements, will necessarily begin in a small way, finding its way into use and wont among the people where it takes its rise rather tentatively and by tolerance than with a sweeping acceptance and an adequate realisation of its uses and ulterior consequences.
Such will have been the case, e.g., with the domestication of the crop plants and the beginnings of tillage, or the domestication of the useful animals, or the use of the metals, or, again, with the rise of the handicraft system, or the industrial revolution that brought in the machine industry. The innovation finds its way into the system of use and wont at the cost of some derangement to the system, provokes to new usages, conventions, beliefs, and principles of conduct, in part directed advisedly to its utilisation or to the mitigation of its immediate consequences, or to the diversion of its usufruct to the benefit of given individuals or classes; but in part there also grow up new habits of thought due to the innovation which it brings into the routine of life, directly in the way of new requirements of manipulation, surveillance, attendance or seasonal time-schedule, and indirectly by affecting the economic relations between classes and localities, as well as the distribution and perhaps the aggregate supply of consumable wealth.
In the early times, such as would come immediately in question here, it is a virtual matter-of-course that any material innovation, or indeed any appreciable unit of technological ways and means, will be attended with a fringe of magical or superstitious conceits and observances. The evidences of this are to be found in good plenty in all cultures, ancient or contemporary, on the savage and barbarian levels; and indeed they are not altogether wanting in civilised life.
Many students of ethnology, folk-psychology and religion have busied themselves to good effect with collecting and analysing such material afforded by magical and superstitious practice, and in most instances they are able to trace these practices to some ground of putative utility, connecting them with the serviceable working of the arts of life at one point or another, or with the maintenance of conditions conducive to life and welfare in some essential respect. Where the ethnologist is unable to find such a line of logical connection between superstitious practice and the exigencies of life and welfare, he commonly considers that he has not been able to find what is in the premises, not that the premises do not contain anything of the kind he is bound to expect. But if magical and superstitious practices, or such of them as are at all of material consequence, are with virtual universality to be traced back through the channels of habituation to some putative ground of serviceability for human use, it follows that the rule should work, passably at least, the other way; that the state of the industrial arts which serve human use in such a culture will be shot through with magical and superstitious conceits and observances having an indispensable but wholly putative efficacy.
In many of the lower cultures, or perhaps rather in such of the lower cultures as are at all well known, the workday routine of getting a living is encumbered with a ubiquitous and pervasive scheme of such magical or superstitious conceits and observances, which are felt to constitute an indispensable part of the industrial processes in which they mingle. They embody the putatively efficacious immaterial constituent of all technological procedure; or, seen in detail, they are the spiritual half that completes and animates any process or device throughout its participation in the industrial routine. Like the technological elements with which they are associated, and concomitantly with them, these magically efficacious devices have grown into the prevalent habits of thought of the population and have become an integral part of the common-sense notion of how these technological elements are and are to be turned to account.8 And at a slightly farther shift in the current of sophistication, out of the same penchant for anthropomorphic interpretation and analogy, a wide range of religious observances, properly so called, will also presently come to bear on the industrial process and the routine of economic life; with a proliferous growth of ceremonial, of propitiation and avoidance, designed to further the propitious course of things to be done.
These matters of the magical and religious ritual of industry and economic arrangements among the peoples of the lower cultures are sufficiently familiar to all ethnological students, and probably they also are so far a matter of common notoriety that there is no need of insistence on their place and value in these lower cultures. They are spoken of here only to recall the fact that the large and consequential technological elements involved in any primitive system of industry have commonly carried such a fringe of putatively efficacious, though mechanically futile, waste motion. These naive forms of mandatory futility are believed to belong only on the lower levels of culture, although it should not be overlooked that magical and religious conceits still exercise something of an inhibitory influence in the affairs of industry even among the very enlightened peoples of Christendom.
But aside from these simple-minded institutional inhibitions on industrial efficiency that seem so much a matter of course in the lower cultures, there are others that run to much the same effect and hold their place among the more enlightened peoples in much the same matter-of-course way. These are in part rather obscure, not having been much attended to in popular speculation, and in part quite notorious, having long been subjects of homiletical iteration. And since this growth of what may be called secular, as contrasted with magical or religious, institutional inhibitions on efficiency, has much to do with latterday economic affairs, as well as with the material fortunes of our prehistoric forebears, a more detailed exposition of their place in economic life will be in place.
On the adoption of new industrial ways and means, whether in the way of specific devices and expedients or of comprehensive changes in methods and processes, there follows a growth of conventional usages governing the utilisation of the new ways and means. This applies equally whether the new expedients are homebred innovations or technological improvements borrowed from outside; and in any case such a growth of conventions takes time, being of the nature of adaptive habituation. A new expedient, in the way of material appliances or of improved processes, comes into the industrial system and is adapted to the requirements of the state of things into which it is introduced. Certain habitual ways of utilising the new device come to be accepted; as, would happen, e.g., on the introduction of domestic animals among a people previously living by tillage alone and having no acquaintance with the use of such animals under other conditions than those prevailing among purely pastoral peoples. So, again, the gradual improvement of boat-building and navigation, such as took place among the prehistoric Baltic peoples, would induce a progressive change in the conventional scheme of life and bring on a specialisation of occupations, with some division of economic and social classes. Or, again, in such a large systematic shift as is involved in the coming of the handicraft industry and its spread and maturing; class distinctions, occupational divisions, standardisation of methods and products, together with trade relations and settled markets and trade routes) came gradually into effect. In part these conventional features resulting from and answering to the new industrial factors continued to have the force of common-sense conventional arrangement only; in part they also acquired the added stability given by set agreement, authoritative control and statutory enactment.
So, in the case of the handicraft system such matters as trade routes, methods of package, transportation and consignment, credit relations, and the like, continued very largely, though not wholly nor throughout the vogue of the system, to be regulated by conventional vogue rather than by authoritative formulation; while on the other hand the demarkation between crafts and classes of craftsmen, as well as the standardisation of methods and output, were presently, in the common run, brought under rigorous surveillance by authorities vested with specific powers and acting under carefully formulated rules.
But whether this standardisation and conventionalisation takes the set form of authoritative agreement and enactment or is allowed to rest on the looser ground of settled use and wont, it is always of the nature of a precipitate of past habituation, and is designed to meet exigencies that have come into effect in past experience; it always embodies something of the principle of the dead hand; and along with all the salutary effects of stability and harmonious working that may be credited to such systematisation, it follows also that these standing conventions out of the past unavoidably act to retard, deflect or defeat adaptation to new exigencies that arise in the further course.
Conventions that are in some degree effete continue to cumber the ground.
All this apparatus of conventions and standard usage, whether it takes the simpler form of use and wont or the settled character of legally competent enactment and common-law rule, necessarily has something of this effect of retardation in any given state of the industrial arts, and so necessarily acts in some degree to lower the net efficiency of the industrial system which it pervades. But this work of retardation is also backed by the like character attaching to the material equipment by use of which the technological proficiency of the community takes effect. The equipment is also out of the past, and it too lies under the dead hand. In a general way, any minor innovation in processes or in the extension of available resources, or in the scale of organisation, is taken care of as far as may be by a patchwork improvement and amplification of the items of equipment already in hand; the fashion of plant and appliances already in use is adhered to, with concessions in new installations, but it is adhered to more decisively so in any endeavor to bring the equipment in hand up to scale and grade. Changes so made are in part of a concessive nature, in sufficiently large part, indeed, to tell materially on the aggregate; and the fact of such changes being habitually made in a concessive spirit so lessens the thrust in the direction of innovation that even the concessions do not carry as far as might be.9 It is in the relatively advanced stages of the industrial arts that this retardation due to use and wont, as distinguished from magical and religious waste and inhibitions on innovation, become of grave consequence. There appears, indeed, to be in some sort a systematic symmetry or balance to be observed in the way in which the one of these lines of technological inhibition comes into effectual bearing as fast as the other declines. At the same time, as fast as commercial considerations, considerations of investment, come to rule industry, the investor’s interest comes also to exercise an inhibitory surveillance over technological efficiency, both by the well-known channel of limiting the output and holding up the price to what the traffic will bear, - that is to say what it will bear in the pecuniary sense of yielding the largest net gain to the business men in interest, - and also by the less notorious reluctance of investors and business concerns to replace obsolete methods and plant with new and more efficient equipment.
Beyond these simple and immediate inhibitory convolutions within the industrial system itself, there lies a fertile domain of conventions and institutional arrangements induced as secondary consequences of the growth of industrial efficiency and contrived to keep its net serviceability in bounds, by diverting its energies to industrially unproductive uses and its output to unproductive consumption.10
With any considerable advance in the industrial arts business enterprise presently takes over the control of the industrial process; with the consequence that the net pe-cuniary gain to the business man in control becomes the test of industrial efficiency. This may result in a speeding up of the processes of industry, as is commonly noted by economists. But it also results in “unemployment” whenever a sustained working of the forces engaged does not, or is not believed to, conduce to the employer’s largest net gain, as may notoriously happen in production for a market. Also, it follows that industry is controlled and directed with a view to sales, and a wise expenditure of industrial efficiency, in the business sense, comes to mean such expenditure as contributes to sales; which may often mean that the larger share of costs, as the goods reach their users, is the industrially wasteful cost of advertising and other expedients of salesmanship.
The normal result of business control in industry - normal in the sense of being uniformly aimed at and also in that it commonly follows - is the accumulation of wealth and income in the hands of a class. Under the well-accepted principle of “conspicuous waste” wealth so accumulated is to be put in evidence in visible consumption and visible exemption from work. So that with due, but ordinarily not a large, lapse of time, an elaborate scheme of proprieties establishes itself, bearing on this matter of conspicuous consumption, so contrived as to “take up the slack.” This system of conspicuous waste is a scheme of proprieties, decencies, and standards of living, the economic motive of which is competitive spending. It works out in a compromise between the immediate spending of income on conspicuous consumption - together with the conspicuous avoidance of industrial work - on the one side, and deferred spending - commonly called “saving” - on the other side. The deferred spending may be deferred to a later day in the lifetime of the saver, or to a later generation; its effects are substantially the same in either case. There is the further reservation to be noted, that in so far as property rights, tenures and the conjunctures of business gain are in any degree insecure, measures will be taken to insure against the risks of loss and eventual inability to keep up appearances according to the accepted standard of living. This insurance takes the shape of accumulation, in one form or another, - provision for future revenue.
Like other conventions and institutional regulations, the scheme of spending rests on current, i.e., immediately past, experience, and as was noted above it is so contrived as to take up the calculable slack, - the margin between production and productive consumption. It is perhaps needless to enter the caution that such a scheme of conspicuous waste does not always, perhaps not in the common run of cases, go to the full limit of what the traffic will bear; but it is also to be noted that it will sometimes, and indeed not infrequently, exceed that limit. Perhaps in all cases, but particularly where the industrial efficiency of the community is notably high, so as to yield a very appreciable margin between productive output and necessary current consumption, some appreciable thought has to be spent on the question of ways and means of spending; and a technique of consumption grows up.
It will be appreciated how serious a question this may become, of the ways and means of reputable consumption, when it is called to mind that in the communities where the modern state of the industrial arts has adequately taken effect this margin of product disposable for wasteful consumption will always exceed fifty per cent of the current product, and will in the more fortunate cases probably exceed seventy-five per cent of the whole. So considerable a margin is not to be disposed of to good effect by haphazard impulse. The due absorption of it in competitive spending takes thought, skill and time for the organisation of ways and means. It is also not a simple problem of conspicuously consuming time and substance, without more ado; men’s sense of fitness and beauty requires that the spending should take place in an appropriate manner, such as will not offend good taste and not involve an odiously aimless ostentation. And it takes time and habituation, as well as a discriminate balancing of details, before a scheme of reputable standardised waste is perfected; of course, it also costs time and specialised effort to take due care of the running adjustment of such a scheme to current conditions of taste, ennui and consumptive distinction, - as seen, e.g., in the technique of fashions. It has, indeed, proved to be a matter of some difficulty, not to say of serious strain, in the industrially advanced communities, to keep the scheme of conspicuous waste abreast of the times; so that, besides the conspicuous consumers in their own right, there have grown up an appreciable number of special occupations devoted to the technical needs of reputable spending. The technology of wasteful consumption is large and elaborate and its achievements are among the monuments of human initiative and en-deavor; it has its victories and its heroes as well as the technology of production.
But any technological scheme is more or less of a balanced system, in which the interplay of parts has such a character of mutual support and dependence that any substantial addition or subtraction at any one point will involve more or less of derangement all along the line. Neither can an extremely large contingent of reputable waste be suddenly superinduced in the accepted standard of living of any given community - though this difficulty is not commonly a sinister one - nor can a large retrenchment in this domain of what is technically called “the moral standard of living” be suddenly effected without substantial hardship or without seriously disturbing the spiritual balance of the community. To realise the import of such disturbance in the scheme of wasteful consumption one need only try to picture the consternation that would, e.g., fall on the British community consequent on the abrupt discontinuance of the Court and its social and civil manifestations, or of horseracing, or of the established church, or of evening dress.
But since the growth and acceptance of any scheme of wasteful expenditure is after all subsequent to and consequent upon the surplus productivity of the industrial system on which it rests, the introduction, in whole or in part, of a new and more efficient state of the industrial arts does not carry with it from the outset a fully developed system of standardised consumption; particularly, it need not follow that the standard scheme of consumption will be carried over intact in case a new industrial technology is borrowed. There is no intimate or intrinsic mutuality of mechanical detail between the technology of industry and the technique of conspicuous waste; the high-heeled slipper and the high-wrought “picture hat,” e.g., are equally well accepted in prehistoric Crete and in twentieth-century France; and the Chinese lady bandages her foot into deformity where the Manchu lady, in evidence of the same degree of opulence in the same town, is careful to let her foot run loose. It is only that, human nature being what it is, a disposable margin of production will, under conditions of private ownership, provoke a competent scheme of wasteful consumption.
Owing to this mechanical discontinuity between any given state of the industrial arts and the scheme of magical, religious, conventional, or pecuniary use and wont with which it lives in some sort of symbiosis, the carrying-over of such a state of the industrial arts from one community to another need not involve the carrying-over of this its spiritual complement. Such is particularly the case where the borrowing takes place across a marked cultural frontier, in which case it follows necessarily that the alien scheme of conventions will not be taken over intact in taking over an alien technological system, whether in whole or in part. The borrowing community or cultural group is already furnished with its own system of conceits and observances - in magic, religion, propriety, and any other line of conventional necessity - and the introduction of a new scheme, or the intrusion of new and alien elements into the accredited scheme already in force, is a work of habituation that takes time and special provocation. All of which applies with added force to the introduction of isolated technological elements from an alien culture, still more particularly, of course, where the technological expedients borrowed are turned to other uses and utilised by other methods than those employed in the culture from which they were borrowed, - as, e.g., would be the case in the acqquisition of domestic cattle by a sedentary farming community from a community of nomadic or half-nomadic pastoral people, as appears to have happened in the prehistoric culture of the Baltic peoples. The interposition of a linguistic frontier between the borrower and creditor communities would still farther lessen the chance of immaterial elements of culture being carried over in the transmission of technological knowledge. The borrowed elements of industrial efficiency would be stripped of their fringe of conventional inhibitions and waste, and the borrowing community would be in a position to use them with a freer hand and with a better chance of utilising them to their full capacity, and also with a better chance of improving on their use, turning them to new uses, and carrying the principles (habits of thought) involved in the borrowed items out, with unhampered insight, into farther ramifications of technological proficiency. The borrowers are in a position of advantage, intellectually, in that the new expedient comes into their hands more nearly in the shape of a theoretical principle applicable under given physical conditions; rather than in the shape of a concrete expedient applicable within the limits of traditional use, personal, magical, conventional. It is, in other words, taken over in a measure without the defects of its qualities.
Here, again, is a secondary effect of borrowing, that may not seem of first-rate consequence but is none the less necessarily to be taken into account. The borrowed elements are drawn into a cultural scheme in which they are aliens and into the texture of which they can be wrought only at the cost of some, more or less serious, derangement of the accustomed scheme of life and the accepted system of knowledge and belief. Habituation to their use and insight into their working acts in its degree to incapacitate the borrowers for holding all their homebred conceits and beliefs intact and in full conviction. They are vehicles of cultural discrepancy, conduce to a bias of skepticism, and act, in their degree, to loosen the bonds of authenticity. Incidentally, the shift involved in such a move will have its distasteful side and carry its burden of disturbance and discomfort; but the new elements, it is presumed, will make their way, and the borrowing community will make its peace with them on such terms as may be had; that assumption being included in the premises.
