It is, perhaps, necessary to add that the industrial system has not yet reached anything like the last degree of development along this line; it is at least not yet a perfected automatic mechanism. But it should also be added that with each successive advance into the new order of industry created by the machine technology, and at a continually accelerated rate of advance, the processes of industry are being more thoroughly standardised, the working units of the system as a whole demand a more undeviating maintenance of its moving equilibrium, a more exacting mechanical correlation of industrial operations and equipment. And it seems reasonable to expect that things are due to move forward along this line still farther in the calculable future, rather than the reverse.
This state of things would reasonably suggest that the control of the industrial system had best be entrusted to men skilled in these matters of technology. The industrial system does its work in terms of mechanical efficiency, not in terms of price. It should accordingly seem reasonable to expect that its control would be entrusted to men experienced in the ways and means of technology, men who are in the habit of thinking about these matters in such terms as are intelligible to the engineers.
The material welfare of the community is bound up with the due working of this industrial system, which depends on the expert knowledge, insight, and disinterested judgment with which it is administered. It should accordingly have seemed expedient to entrust its administration to the industrial engineers, rather than to the captains of finance. The former have to do with productive efficiency, the latter with the higgling of the market.
However, by historical necessity the discretionary control in all that concerns this highly technological system of industry has come to vest in those persons who are highly skilled in the higgling of the market, the masters of financial intrigue. And so great is the stability of that system of law and custom by grace of which these persons claim this power, that any disallowance of their plenary control over the material fortunes of the community is scarcely within reason. All the while the progressive shifting of ground in the direction of a more thoroughly mechanistic organisation of industry goes on and works out into a more and more searching standardisation of works and methods and a more exacting correlation of industries, in an ever increasingly large and increasingly sensitive industrial system. All the while the whole of it grows less and less manageable by business methods;
and with every successive move the control exercised by the business men in charge grows wider, more arbitrary, and more incompatible with the common good.
Business affairs, in the narrow sense of the expression, have in time necessarily come in for an increasing share of the attention of those who exercise the control. The businesslike manager's attention is continually more taken up with "the financial end" of the concern's interests; so that by enforced neglect he is necessarily leaving more of the details of shop management and supervision of the works to subordinates, largely to subordinates who are presumed to have some knowledge of technological matters and no immediate interest in the run of the market. They are in fact persons who are presumed to have this knowledge by the business men who have none of it. But the larger and final discretion, which affects the working of the industrial system as a whole, or the orderly management of any considerable group of industries within the general system,- all that is still under the immediate control of the businesslike managers, each of whom works for his own concern's gain without much afterthought.
The final discretion still rests with the businesslike directorate of each concern -- the owner or the board -- even in all questions of physical organisation and technical management;
although this businesslike control of the details of production necessarily comes to little else than acceptance, rejection, or revision of measures proposed by the men immediately in charge of the works; together with a constant check on the rate and volume of output, with a view to the market.
In very great part the directorate's control of the industry has practically taken the shape of a veto on such measures of production as are not approved by the directorate for businesslike reasons, that is to say for purposes of private gain. Business is a pursuit of profits, and profits are to be had from profitable sales, and profitable sales can be made only if prices are maintained at a profitable level, and prices can be maintained only if the volume of marketable output is kept within reasonable limits; so that the paramount consideration in such business as has to do with the staple industries is a reasonable limitation of the output. "Reasonable" means "what the traffic will bear"; that is to say, "what will yield the largest net return."
Hence in the larger mechanical industries, which set the pace for the rest and which are organised on a standardised and more or less automatic plan, the current oversight of production by their businesslike directorate does not effectually extend much beyond the regulation of the output with a view to what the traffic will bear; and in this connection there is very little that the business men in charge can do except to keep the output short of productive capacity by so much as the state of the market seems to require; it does not lie within their competence to increase the output beyond that point, or to increase the productive capacity of their works, except by way of giving the technical men permission to go ahead and do it.
