CAPITAL AND CA' CANNY. BY LORD LEVERRULME.

IDO not know who was,, the philosopher who first stated that none preaches so well as the ant, and yet the ant utters nothing. We all require to learn from the silent sermon preached by the ant. This wonderful world has grown weary of listening to the contending powers of modern industrialism, when really these same powers ought to be pulling all together. Perhaps our patience has become exhausted because we forget that so-called Capital and Labour are human—intensely human. In this the whole difficulty of the situation can be found : we are all so human. If Capital and Labour were forces built like typewriters or calculating machines or automatic lathes or gravity conveyors, there would be no reason why human lives should not run as smoothly as if on ball bearings.

One great obstacle to good comradeship is that a Labour man who receives, say, £2 to £3 per week is convinced that he is underpaid when he sees that a Capitalist, say, Henry Ford, receives anything from £200,000 to £400,000 per week or, say, ten to twenty million pounds sterling a year. The Labour man is certain to ask himself whether all is well in the industrial world when one so-called Capitalist can receive as much money for his work as is received by one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand Labour men each paid £2 a week. He fails to grasp that the services of none of us can possibly be paid for other than out of the value of the product created. If the Labour man does grasp this fact, then he argues that Labour, and not brains or capital, creates all wealth.

The situation is further complicated by those very human attributes of envy and jealousy and a distorted feeling of injustice. Strange to say, the Labour man never disputes the justice of the award to, say, the artist or the musician, the actor, the author or the poet. The Labour man recognizes that whilst one artist can take the same tubes of colour, the same brushes and the same palette as had previously been used by another artist whose pictures would not sell for as much money as would keep the painter of the pictures and his wife and family in the bare necessaries of life, the artist of genius can, with these same colours, brushes and palette, produce pictures eagerly purchased at fabulous prices. The Labour man honours and respects the artist who can produce pictures, music, plays or poems that command the highest demand. The Labour man rejoices to have reproductions of these works in his home. They incite no feeling of any rankling sense of injustice. They are wel- comed for their inspiration and for the added beauty and adornment they give to his life and home.

The ability possessed by a Ford is just as exceptional and just as much the genius with which he was born as that of a great artist, musician, actor or poet ; but Ford is considered a social pestilence, whilst artists command honour and respect.

But just as in the case of the artist so in the case of Ford. The artist who paints pictures that command the highest price will be using tubes of colour, brushes and a palette similar to those used by the artist whose pictures will not sell. Equally so the motor-car manufacturer who is unable to produce cars to sell at Ford's low prices or to make a profit will be employing similar mechanics and workmen, will be using the same qualities of iron, • steel and other material for component parts, as does Ford. Yet out of these same materials and these same workmen the one produces cars that can be sold cheaper than any other car in the world and incidentally produces the largest income being made in the world by any one man •to-day, whilst the other motor-car maker fails to accomplish either. But the works of the great artist are an inspiration and a joy to everyone who either can possess an original or a reproduction, and are not con- sidered to be other than a product and inspiration of the highest type of civilization and the result of a well- organized state of society. • The life of Ford is considered to be an indication that society is organized on an entirely wrong basis, that social reconstruction is necessary to prevent Ford from exercising the abilities with which he was endowed, otherwise society becomes shipwreck.

In this state of mind the Labour man, whether he is an I.W.W. or not, very often adopts a policy of what is called " Ca' canny," believing that it is his only method to get justice, and yet the ea' canny policy only increases the difficulty of living for the whole community and especially for the Labour men who adopt it. It does not add to social comfort nor decrease social inequalities, but the opposite.

Now let us consider what Ford is doing. We will assume that the ordinary British workman paid 40s. 'a week can produce work which can sell for 50s. a week. This is far in excess of the profit to Ford upon the work- men and others he employs, so that we are not putting the increased value of the produce of the average British workman receiving 40s. a week at too low a basis when we call it worth 50s. Now, Ford takes a certain number of Labour men and materials in producing his cars. His present production is 2,000,000 cars per annum. In the production of these cars he will not tolerate any ca' canny policy on the part of his staff. A Ford man must look after as many automatic lathes as his abilities permit. Ford does not overwork his men, but he will not have the Ford men going easy by any ca' canny method. He pays considerably over the Trades Union rate of wages, and he works what are considered in the United States to be short hours, and it is now reported that he has within the last few months adopted what, for want of a better name at the time I advocated its adoption, I called " the six- hour day," so that the twenty-four hour day at Ford's works is divided into four shifts of six hours each, reduc- ing the work per man to 36 hours per week but more than doubling the capacity of the works, enabling the man to be paid the same wages for 36 hours as for 48. At Ford's works there is no possible chance for a ea' canny Labour policy, and on his railway—and he is a considerable owner of railway lines--he has made a rule that engine drivers and guards on the pay role waiting for their next job or for any reason unoccupied for a length of time must fill in that unoccupied time by doing something, even to cleaning the railway carriage windows. I only mention this to show you what Ford men do on these Ford railways. We are told that since Ford's acquisition of the railway on which he put his system into operation he has been able to more than double the pay of his railway staff, lower the rates charged for goods carried, and also to give for the .first time for many years a dividend to the railway shareholders.

However, it is Ford's motor-car works that we are considering. Ford cars are produced without any ea' canny policy on the part of the Ford staff. They are produced as good as a low-priced car can be made. I am told that a corresponding car in this country, where the workmen are paid possibly not more than half the Ford rate of wages, could not be made for less than £50 to £100 above the price at which Ford makes his ears in the United States. Ford's low-priced car from the United States has enabled the use of his motor-cars all over the world to be enormously increased. I can say from personal experience. when visiting America that it is not at all an unusual sight to see workmen going to their work in their own motor-ears and carrying their mates with them and this is exactly as it should be. We are told in the good old Book : " Thou shall not muzzle the ox that tre_adeth out the corn," and who is more entitled to ride in motor-cars than the men who make them, provided they are wise and not ca' canny workmen.

The ca' canny policy in England has been adopted with a view to finding employment for the unemployed. Our workmen are not lazy. They are workers ; but they are fellow-comrades with fellow-workmen, and the spirit of comradeship, I sincerely believe, is the spirit behind the policy of ca' canny and not the spirit of laziness.

But let us follow the Ford car produced free from any entanglement of ca' canny policy. First of all it enables double the rate of wages to be paid the workmen that British motor-car makers can pay in this country. It produces cars that can be made for f..50 to £100 each less money than any competing maker of cars can produce for in the United Kingdom. Ford cars are eagerly sought after all over the world and you meet them everywhere. In fact, it is Ford's boast that his cars are taking people everywhere except into " society."

Having to wait for a train at a Scotch railway station recently for over two hours, I hired a motor-car for a two hours' ride. When the car appeared I saw from its model that it was a very old Ford, I asked the driver and he said it was built in 1913. Yet this old Ford made in 1913 took myself and two other members of our party for a delightful motor run over very difficult Highland roads, up hill and down dale, and brought us back on time to catch our train without a single hitch or break- down on the way, so that Ford cars, notwithstanding their cheapness, are made as well and finished as well as low-priced cars can be.

Look, more widely, what the Ford policy produces. First of all it enables the cars to be sold at from £50 to £100 each less than competing cars made by British makers. In other words, the two million cars save the purchasers anything from one hundred to two hundred millions sterling a year. Now look what can be done in the way of finding employment by means of this money so saved. It is far larger for Ford men themselves than any employ- ment that could be provided them by any system of ea' canny. But in addition to this, the two million cars require drivers, and we may certainly say that possibly of the two million cars not more than one million cars, possibly not more than half a million, are replace- ments for spent old cars, calculating the average life of a Ford car to be not the ten years of the car I have recently ridden in, but something like an average of four years. So from half to one million additional drivers of cars are required to be provided each year in connection with the Ford output of two million cars. Car drivers are well-paid men. Therefore it is clear that employment is found every year by Ford for at least from half to one million well-paid additional motor-car drivers. But every car requires some repairs, however well made the car may be, and so there will be another army of men engaged in repairing, cleaning, oiling, painting, etc., these cars. What numbers these would run to we can only guess at, but they must be many hundreds of thousands.

A certain proportion of these cars are tourist cars, and they, in addition to giving health and happiness to those who use them, find employment for waiters and waitresses in village inns and country and town restaurants for many tens of thousands more.

And so we progress in an ever-widening circle of increased employment provided by the fact that Ford men make cars • without . any suspicion of ca' canny. Ford would promptly " sack " or, as is said in America, " fire " workmen who show a tendency to ca' canny, with the result that for every Ford man engaged on the making of Ford cars, and the number of which at most by any system of ea' canny might perhaps be doubled, we find that from ten to twenty times the number that might, under ea' canny, be employed at Ford works are required in driving the cars, repairing the cars, painting and renewing them, together with waiters and waitresses at country inns and restaurants, to say nothing of the gangs employed on modernizing roads, or improving and repairing roads because of the increased wear of roads' surface being many times greater the more motor-cars come into general use.

Birkenhead unhappily experienced recently an extreme example, but still an example and a living example, of this mistaken policy of modern Trade Unionism in efforts to provide artificially for employment by a strike at Messrs. Cammell Lairds over what was called the " burner " question. What is known in shipbuilding and ship-repairing as a " burner " is merely an oxygen acety- lene blow-pipe by means of which iron or steel plates up to ten inches in thickness can be cut through as easily as a knife cuts through cheese. A damaged plate can be taken out of the ship's side as easily as a damaged piece can be taken out of a sack and replaced with a new piece as a repair. One " burner," I understand, does the work, with the aid of two men or two boys to operate it (because it does not require much strength), of twenty men.

The strike was brought on because the Trade Union concerned insisted that for every " burner " that was put into use at Cammell Lairds' works, employment in Cammell Lairds' works should be found for the eighteen men the " burner " dispensed with, without discharging any of the existing staff. The strike lasted many weeks, but some compromise was finally arrived at, I believe, on the basis of limiting the number of " burners " to be used.

As an illustration one may take as a parallel the intro- duction of railways a century ago, and try to imagine where the lives of our workers would have been to-day if eighty to ninety years ago, on the introduction of railways, the waggoners, ostlers and teamsmen, &c., had then been Trade Unionists and had insisted that, whilst a train might carry from Liverpool to London, say, 500 tons of goods with one engine-driver, one stoker and one guard (three men), a corresponding number of waggoners, ostlers, teamsmen, &c., to balance those dispensed with under this new railway system should be riployed to stand idly by, say, on the railway embankments and watch the train go past on its way to London, receiving full wages for no corresponding service rendered. This is no exag- gerated picture of what is the equivalent of the modern- day idea of finding employment, as exemplified in the " burner " strike at Birkenhead.

The present-day position really is one of the most serious gravity for the welfare and happiness of the very people who adopt this policy. Whether a motor-car is sold at the lowest possible price, as is the Ford, or is a highly-finished product, such as a Rolls-Royce, sold at a correspondingly high price, matters little to certain people, but it matters everything to the masses of the people who are to be employed in driving motor-cars, &c., so that really the direct sufferers from the Ca' canny policy are the Labour men themselves.

Let us disregard altogether the ten to twenty millions sterling Henry Ford may receive on the narrow margin of £10 profit per car—probably the narrowest margin that cars can possibly be sold on in any country in the world— and concentrate our thoughts on the fact that, whilst this might make Henry Ford ten or twenty millions sterling a year for himself, he makes also one to two hundred millions for the purchasers of Ford cars, and finds employ- ment for hundreds of thousands of workmen at high wages in "maintaining the cars and roads and in driving cars, and, in fact, that Ford is the creator of a transaction that not only thus pays the Labour man and the public, but has a direct influence in raising the scale of social comfort and welfare of the Laboui man all over the world.

Iri short, the present industrial system, which has been evolved in the hundreds of thousands of years of man's activities in this good old world, whatever opprobrious adjectives may be applied to it, such as the Capitalistic system or otherwise, has raised mankind from the con- dition of the Congo savage to the position civilized man occupies in the world to-day.

In the old days of the Romans, prisoners were chained in gangs to act as galley-slaves on boats propelled by oars. Any man who adopts the life of a Ford will surely produce wealth for himself and the world, but he prac- tically chains himself as a galley-slave to the life he has adopted without possibility of escape until death releases him, as it finally did the old galley-slave of the old Roman days, and he will leave all his created wealth for the living. If it were merely a question of money, then even with twenty millions a year of profit, such a life would be intolerable, and no man, not even a miser, would accept it ; but you invariably find that the man in the position of a Ford is following the lines of his natural genius, that every working day at the galley-slave car sends a thrill of pleasure through his frame that no galley-slave of the old Roman days could possibly feel, and that the progress of his industry, which may be likened to the progress of the galley, is in itself a reward for all his labour.

Under no other system than its creating genius getting individually the direct result of his efforts will the world produce Fords to make of themselves galley-slaves to work long, laborious hours to produce results which rightly benefit the world at large a hundred times more than they individually can ever be benefited thereby.

The Fords of the world are not objects of pity, although they are galley-slaves ; they have the pleasure and thrill of accomplishment, the joy of winning and the money profits are matters of the least concern to them.

When I first visited Australia in 1892 there was then living in New South Wales one of the earliest Australian squatters, named Tyson, well over ninety years of age. He was a multi-millionaire in money, cattle, sheep and land, yet lived the same simple life he had lived as a shepherd in. England as a young man.

He was asked why he worked on when he had so much this world's wealth, and he replied :—" It is not money I work for, but I've put cattle where there were no cattle ; I've put sheep where there were no sheep ; I've put houses where there were no houses, and I've put white men and women on land where there never were white men and women before and made them happy, and that is worth working for, and not the money."

Yet all over Australia I heard him described as an avaricious old miser,