CHAPTER IX: INTER-DEPENDENCE AND INTEGRATION.

§ 763. In the six preceding chapters a good deal has been implied respecting the industrial integration which has accompanied industrial differentiation. Before proceeding to specially illustrate and emphasize this trait of social evolution, it will be well to indicate the results thus indirectly brought to light.

Iron-works make possible the pick and shovel, and the steel-tipped bar with which blast holes are punched out. On these, joined with the blasting-powder and dynamite elsewhere made, depends the carrying on of mining. To the various metals and the coal obtained by mining, we owe the tools and the explosives. So that these several kinds of production develop by mutual aid; and it is so with multitudinous kinds of production. The processes of distribution are in like manner mutually dependent. For any locality to have an extensive system of retail trading, there must co-exist a system of wholesale trading; since, unless large quantities of commodities are brought, the retailers cannot carry on their functions. Meanwhile the growth of wholesale distribution is made possible only by the growth of retail distribution; since the bringing of goods in large quantities is useless unless there are retailers of them. Again, these divisions of the distributing organization both evolve pari passu, with the producing organization, while they enable it also to evolve. Evidently extensive distribution Edition: current; Page: [405] implies roads, vehicles, canals, boats and ships, which can come into existence only as fast as the various kinds of production develop; and evidently these can develop only as fast as the different articles produced in different localities are interchanged by distributors. Once more, both these developments depend on the development of an instrumentality which substitutes purchase for barter. With a good monetary system the resistance to exchange disappears; relative values of things can be measured; current prices can be recognized; and there arises competition with all the cheapenings, stimulations, and improvements resulting from it. And that production and distribution may be thus facilitated the medium of exchange has to be differentiated and developed within itself; since, until to a metallic currency there is added a currency of paper promises-to-pay, various in their kinds, all the larger and remoter commercial transactions are greatly impeded.

See, then, how great has become the interdependence. Different kinds of production aid one another. Distribution, while depending for its roads and vehicles on various kinds of production, makes production more abundant and varied. While a developed and differentiated currency furthers production and raises the rate of distribution. Thus, by their mutual influences, the structures carrying on these processes become more and more integrated.

§ 764. But no adequate idea of this integration can be formed without contemplating other manifestations of it more special in their kinds.

First among these may be set down the cooperation of separate processes and appliances in wider and more varied ways. Some man, observing how a housemaid trundling a mop dispersed the water, saw that by the aid of centrifugal force various things might be dried and others separated. Among results of his thought here are some. Masses of wet sugar placed in a rotating drum with a perforated periphery, Edition: current; Page: [406] are thus freed from the adherent syrup and left dry. Wet clothes put into such a drum are made by its rotation to part with nearly all their water, and come out merely damp. And now, by the same method, the more liquid part of milk is separated from the less liquid part—the cream.

In such cases the new process, which facilitates processes previously used, is separate from them; but in other cases the new process is so integrated with preceding processes as to form a continuous process. Here, for instance, is an appliance for raising to a high temperature a great body of air passing through it. At one end is a steam-engine working a force-pump which sends in this air, and at the other end is a twyre or blower, which conducts the powerful stream of hot air into a blast furnace: thus raising the intensity of the smelting action above that produced by cold air, and increasing the out-put of molten iron. And now there has come a further stage. Instead of a separate and subsequent process of puddling (changing cast-iron into wrought-iron), there has been made an arrangement such that the molten iron flows from the blast-furnace direct into a puddling-furnace, or a furnace which effects the like change; and so there is saved all the coal previously expended in re-heating pig-iron. Here then three sets of appliances are united into one set.

But advance in the cooperation of appliances is best seen in the development of mechanism. At first “the mechanical powers,” as they are called—lever, inclined plane, wedge, screw, wheel-and-axle, pulley—were used only separately; but in course of time there arose, by combinations of them, what we distinguish as machines. For a machine—say a water-mill, a loom, a steam-engine, a printing press—combines these various mechanical powers in special ways for special purposes. Comparison of early machines with late machines shows that, by increases in complexity, they have been adjusted to increasingly complex acts of production.

A further stage, characteristic of modern days, is to be Edition: current; Page: [407] noted. Beyond the cooperation of many appliances integrated in the same machine, we have now the cooperation of several machines. Newspaper-printing supplies an instance. Instead of the primitive process of dipping a porous tray into a mass of pulp, taking it out, putting it aside to drain, detaching the moist layer, then pressing and trimming the single sheet of paper produced, we have, in the first place, the paper-machine worked by a steam-engine, in which pulp, delivered on to an endless revolving web, loses during a short journey most of its water, passes between rollers to squeeze out the remainder, then round heated cylinders to dry it, and comes out at the other end of the machine either cut into sheets or wound into a long roll. If wanted for a newspaper, such a roll, containing a mile or two of paper, is fixed to a printing machine. This, worked by a steam-engine (which with its attached appliances is made self-stoking as well as self-governing), draws into its interior this continuous sheet, and, printing now one of its sides and now the other, brings it out at the far end, where it is cut into separate newspapers by an attached machine, and afterwards, in some cases, delivered from it into a folding machine. Because paper-making requires a good supply of fit water and much space, it is not the practice to make the paper at the place where the printing is done; but in the absence of impediments the arrangement would be such that at one end of the united machines there was supplied a stream of wet pulp, while at the other end there were delivered the printed and folded newspapers.

This example of the cooperation of appliances—this integration of machines—may be usefully contemplated here as being symbolic of the wider and less manifest integrations which we must now observe as displayed throughout the whole industrial organization.

§ 765. Until analysis enlightens us we regard any object of use or luxury as wholly produced by the ostensible maker Edition: current; Page: [408] of it. We forget that he is in almost every case a man who combines the productions of various other men who have supplied him with the prepared materials. Take the example which, speaking literally, comes first to hand—this book. It is a product to the completion of which many different kinds of workers, scattered about in different localities, have contributed. We need not dwell on its main component, the paper, made in one place, the printing ink, made in another place, and the printing machine, made elsewhere; but, setting out with the printed sheets sent to the binders, let us observe the sources of the united components. One manufacturer sends the rough millboards, originally formed of old ropes torn into pulp; from another comes the strong textile fabric forming the flexible back; others severally supply the thread used for stitching the sheets, the transverse tapes to which the sheets are fastened, the glue used for strengthening their united backs, the ornamental cloth covering the outside, which itself is a joint product of weaver and dyer; and, lastly, there is the gold leaf consumed in lettering. To this add that there are every minute employed sundry tools supplied by other manufacturers. Thus is it everywhere—thus is it with our houses, highly complicated in their genesis, and with all the multitudinous articles contained in them.

So that the industrial organization presents a universal network uniting each workshop with many other workshops, each of which is again united with many others; and every workshop is a place where various threads of products are elaborated into a special combination. In short then the division of labour commonly conceived as exhibited by a multitude of different kinds of producers, is quite misconceived unless the differentiation of them is thought of as accompanied by integration.

§ 766. But we have still to take note of a reciprocal influence. Not only is the genesis of each product in large Edition: current; Page: [409] measure dependent on the genesis of many other products, but, conversely, many other products are profoundly influenced by the genesis of each. The many affect the one and one affects the many.

A striking instance is afforded by the caoutchouc manufacture. Originally called india-rubber in recognition of its place of origin and its solitary use for rubbing out pencil-marks, this substance has in the course of sixty or seventy years not only yielded us numerous articles of personal and domestic convenience, but has also improved various industries. It is replacing leather for machine-belting, for fire-engine hose, for the tubing used in various businesses. It is used for buffers, valves for engines and pumps, washers for pipe-joints, piston-packing, squeezing-cylinders, and now most conspicuously for the wheels of carriages and cycles. So that by its radiating influences the india-rubber manufacture has modified many other manufactures.

Still more striking, and far more important, have been the radiating influences of the Bessemer-steel manufacture. A material, the expensiveness of which, until 1850, was such as to limit its use mainly to cutting instruments, is now employed wholesale for things of large size—armoured vessels of war, great fast steamers and ships generally, with their boilers, propellers, shafts, chain-cables, anchors, &c. Steel wire has come into extensive use for traction-ropes, hawsers, and vast suspension-bridges; while viaducts, larger than were before practicable, are now framed of steel. In houses, steel-girders, beams, floor-joists are replacing those of wood; and in New York enormous steel-frameworks hold together their vast, many-storied buildings. In all kinds of machinery steel is replacing iron—in cog-wheels, axles, cranks, framings. Thin sheet-steel is being stamped into bowls, trays, cans, saucepans, covers, &c., and from sheet-steel, tinned plates are now made to an immense extent. In 1892, in the United States alone, more than 200,000 tons of steel nails were manufactured. But above all there are the Edition: current; Page: [410] effects on railways; where, besides extensive improvements in rolling stock, the permanent way has been revolutionized by the substitution of steel rails for iron rails. In England 32,000 miles of single track have been thus re-laid, and in the United States 175,000 miles.*

Something more has happened. While this cheaply manufactured steel has entered into, and improved, many other manufacturers (a much greater number than above enumerated) each primary set of changes has initiated many secondary sets. Each of these cheapened or improved products has itself become a centre of radiating influences. Take an example. A steel-rail outlasts six iron rails; and since a large element in the cost of maintaining a railway is the replacing of worn-out rails, the use of steel-rails achieves a great economy, which, under the influence of competition, entails some reduction in fares and freights. There follows a lowering of prices of various commodities, and, in many cases, the bringing to places of consumption commodities which higher freights would have excluded. By the use of steel for ships, similar multitudinous effects are produced upon the prices and distributions of sea-borne commodities; since one-fourth increase of cargo-carrying capacity is obtained in a steel-ship.

§ 767. The moral of all this is weighty. Immensely more complex than at first appears is the inter-dependence of businesses, and far closer than we at once see has become the integration of them. An involved plexus having centres Edition: current; Page: [411] everywhere and sending threads everywhere, so brings into relation all activities, that any considerable change in one sends reverberating changes among all the rest. From those far past days when flint-scrapers were used to shape clubs, the cooperation of appliances, then commenced, has been increasing, at the same time that the cooperation of workers has been increasing; until now the tools as well as the men form an aggregate of mutually dependent parts. Progress here, as everywhere, has been from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity.

Blind to the significance of the innumerable facts surrounding them, multitudes of men assert the need for the “organization of labour.” Actually they suppose that at present labour is unorganized. All these marvellous specializations and these endlessly ramifying connections, which have age by age grown up since the time when the members of savage tribes carried on each for himself the same occupations, are non-existent for them; or if they recognize a few of them, they do not perceive that these form but an infinitesimal illustration of the whole.

A fly seated on the surface of the body has about as good a conception of its internal structure, as one of these schemers has of the social organization in which he is imbedded.