Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 131

ECONOMIC ADAPTATION
125
And it this, after all, anything but the same individual limi-
tation to which everyone must submit who wishes to enjoy the
advantages of living in a society, not to speak of a community
which has been condensed into a State?
The wages schedule, therefore, must exist, and accordingly
has to be protected, but it can no more than any other institu-
tion become the pivot on which developments turn. Evolution
follows its own course. It is, as we have seen, ultimately de-
termined by the primitive cravings of man. Evolution does not
submit to the dictates of institutions. If they have not sufficient
pliability to submit to evolution it passes over them; sometimes
it crushes them, at other times it reduces them to oblivion; even
the laws must have a time to sleep.
And to-day we are at a turning point which requires adapta-
tion. This has been to some extent perceived and understood,
fortunately by both parties. It has been realised that the endless
screw: higher wages, higher prices and then higher wages and so
forth, must lead us into a whirlpool. In collaboration with the
state the most energetic measures have been taken to prevent
it, but it seems evident that a further step must be taken, neces-
sitated by the great and permanent unemployment, and which
apparently has not been realised because people’s attention has
been directed in a one-sided manner only to the purely economic
side of the wage problem. It is not only important to secure
the labourer employed the highest standard of living which pro-
duction allows, it is equally important to guarantee the un-
employed a standard of living at all, — and a standard of living
based on the dole can hardly deserve the name — and on social
grounds above all this must be the aim. If this be not achieved,
the worst thing that can befall a community socially will hap-
pen, something which will carry with it the most extreme poli-
tical consequences: not a new disinherited class of society will
be precipitated, but a caste, a social stratum which must abandon
all hope.
An endeavour should therefore be made to find a form in
which the unemployed might be given work for wages which
could be paid by a productive industry that would not other-
wise be started, irrespective of whether these wages were at some
level between the dole and the scheduled wages.
As regards the question of adaptation in general we may
deal with this in summary fashion, because it is known to and