Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/63

 successful being by our present system of concentrated manufacturing, would revive. Crafts of what we call regretfully the good old kinds would spring up, rejuvenated: cheap uniformity would cease to be the principal ideal of manufacture. The people would be able to afford agreeable furniture, utensils, decorations, and household goods of all kinds, where they now have to put up with horrible but cheap makeshifts. For one great advantage of the ordinance just predicted must not be lost sight of. When you restrain the rich from becoming inordinately richer, you concurrently save the poor from being made proportionately poorer. This ideal, it should be remarked, is in no sense socialistic. It is, on the contrary, the natural development of individualism.

Hardly less certain is it that before the beginning of the twenty-first century all manufactures and all commerce will be co-operative, the workers in every industry being paid, not by fixed wages, but by a share in the produce of their labour. Instead of the profit of all trade and manufacture being secured to the managers and owners of lands, machinery, transport and other commercial utilities; while labour, the equally necessary and indeed the preponderant element of production, is reckoned as a mere element of cost, in the form of wages; the profit will be shared all round. The more prosperous the enterprise, the more money the