needs; so that the business of retailing the vulgar necessaries of
life descends to the level of the handicrafts and factory labor. Manual
labor, or even the work of directing mechanical processes, is of course
on a precarious footing as regards respectability. A qualification is
necessary as regards the discipline given by the pecuniary employments.
As the scale of industrial enterprise grows larger, pecuniary management
comes to bear less of the character of chicanery and shrewd competition
in detail. That is to say, for an ever-increasing proportion of the
persons who come in contact with this phase of economic life, business
reduces itself to a routine in which there is less immediate suggestion
of overreaching or exploiting a competitor. The consequent exemption
from predatory habits extends chiefly to subordinates employed in
business. The duties of ownership and administration are virtually
untouched by this qualification. The case is different as regards those
individuals or classes who are immediately occupied with the technique
and manual operations of production. Their daily life is not in the same
degree a course of habituation to the emulative and invidious motives
and maneuvers of the pecuniary side of industry. They are consistently
held to the apprehension and coordination of mechanical facts and
sequences, and to their appreciation and utilization for the purposes
of human life. So far as concerns this portion of the population, the
educative and selective action of the industrial process with which they
are immediately in contact acts to adapt their habits of thought to the
non-invidious purposes of the collective life. For them, therefore, it
hastens the obsolescence of the distinctively predatory aptitudes and
propensities carried over by heredity and tradition from the barbarian
past of the race.
The educative action of the economic life of the community, therefore,
is not of a uniform kind throughout all its manifestations. That range
of economic activities which is concerned immediately with pecuniary
competition has a tendency to conserve certain predatory traits; while
those industrial occupations which have to do immediately with the
production of goods have in the main the contrary tendency. But with
regard to the latter class of employments it is to be noticed in
qualification that the persons engaged in them are nearly all to some
extent also concerned with matters of pecuniary competition (as, for
instance, in the competitive fixing of wages and salaries, in the
purchase of goods for consumption, etc.). Therefore the distinction
here made between classes of employments is by no means a hard and fast
distinction between classes of persons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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