The proportion of non-material to material wealth will increase, and there will be a corresponding increase in the proportion of productive activities that contain large factors of creative interest.Every enlargement of the scope for free individual expression through economic demand, even for purely material goods, will have a necessary effect in curbing the dominion of machinery and of routine labour.For social arrangements which enable and incite each consumer to seek a more personal satisfaction of his individual needs will force producers to study these individual needs and satisfy them.This cannot be done by mere machine-economy, which rests upon the opposite hypothesis that large numbers of consumers will consent to sink their individual differences of need and taste accepting certain routine forms of goods which do not exactly meet the requirements of any one of them.It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that a more equal and equitable distribution of income will evoke in the masses of population, who now consent to consume common 'routine' goods because they cannot afford to consult their particular tastes and preferences, a more personal and discriminative demand, which will set strict limits upon the machine economy and call for a larger application of individual skill in the various crafts.
Or if, valuing more highly as fields for personal expression the less material elements in their standard of living, they still consent to utilise routine industry for the satisfaction of their common physical needs, they will apply an increasing proportion of their interests and their incomes to the acquisition and enjoyment of those goods, artistic, intellectual, emotional, which are more ennobling alike in their production and their consumption.
§7 A final word upon population.Is there not reason to believe and hope that this sounder distribution of work and wealth will contribute to a satisfactory solution both of the quantitative and the qualitative population question? if women were no longer forced by economic pressure into marriages for which they had no natural inclination, much unfit parentage and much incompetent nurture would be averted.If they were free to live unmarried, or to choose the father of their children and the size of their family, the normal current of those instincts making for the preservation and instinct of the race, obstructed by artificial barriers of economic circumstances, would be restored to their natural course.If the support of a young family were no longer a heavy and injurious strain upon the economic resources of the parents and their future career a grave anxiety, the human love of children and the attractions of a complete home life would probably check that rapid decline of the birth-rate which to many is one of the darkest features of our present order.It would not, indeed, restore the reckless propagation of former times which imposed on parents, and chiefly upon the mother, a burden injurious in its private incidence and detrimental to society.But while the better economic order would stop compulsory marriages and undesired and therefore undesirable offspring, it would restore the play of the normal philoprogenitive instincts.The net effect would seem to be some retardation of the decline of birth-rate in those types of families where the conditions, physical and psychical, appear favourable to good nature and good nurture for children, and a positive elimination of certain types of union unfavourable to sound offspring.
The total effect upon the quantitative issue would of course depend upon the balance between this freer play of the philoprogenitive instinct and the other influences, not directly affected by economic causes, which make for smaller families.But that the quality or character of the population must be improved by the more natural play of the rejective and selective influences here indicated can hardly admit of controversy.Indeed, it may well be urged that the crowning testimony to the validity of the human law of distribution will consist in the higher quality of human life it will evoke by liberating and nourishing the natural art of eugenics in society.
NOTES:
1.Ruskin had a curious notion of this sort (cf.Time and Tide , par.107, Munera Pulveris , par.109, Fors Clavigera , Letter lxxxii), and the recent American 'Scientific Management' appears to endorse it.
2.Time and Tide , par.123.
