THE
INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
I
1 •''.
m&
UPTON SINCLAI
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR
THE JUNGLE
MANASSAS
THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING
PRINCE HAGEN
KING MIDAS
Courtesy of Everybody' s Magazine
" VOORUIT " Home of the Socialist Societies of Ghent
Ind ust rial Republic
A Study of
Ten Years Hi-nce
By UPTON SINCLAIR
»»•
ILLUSTRATED
-
The Industrial Republic
A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence
By UPTON SINCLAIR
ILLUSTRATED
New York
Doublcday, Page & Company 1907
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANT
PUBLISHED, MAY, 1907
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
TO H. G. WELLS
"THE NEXT MOST HOPEFUL"
INTRODUCTION
The thought of the time has familiarised us with the evolutionary view of things; we understand that life is the product of an inner impulse, labouring to embody itself in the world of sense; and that the product is always changing — that there is nothing permanent save the principles and laws in accordance with which development goes on. We understand that the universe of things was evolved by slow stages, into what it is to-day, that all life has come into being in the same way. We have traced this process in the far-distant suns and in the strata of the earth; we have traced it in the vegetables and in the animals, in the seed and in the embryo; we have traced it in all of man's activities, his ways of thinking and acting, of eating and dressing and work- ing and fighting and praying.
This book is an attempt to interpret in the light of evolutionary science the social problem of our present world; to consider American institutions as they exist at this hour — what forces are now at work within them, and what changes they are likely to produce. The subject-matter dealt with is not abstract speculation, but rather the
vii
viii The Industrial Republic
everyday realities of the world we know — our present political parties and public men, our present corporations and captains of industry, our present labour unions and newspapers, colleges and churches. The thing sought is an answer to a concrete and definite question: What will America be ten years from now?
Inasmuch as the people who are most interested in practical affairs are very busy people, I judge it to be a common-sense procedure to set forth my ideas in minia- ture at the outset; so that one may learn in two or three minutes exactly what xmy book contains, and judge whether he cares to read it.
It is my belief that the student of a gener- ation from now will look back upon the last two centuries of human history and interpret them as the final stage of a long process whereby man was transformed from a solitary and predatory individual to a social and peaceable member of a single world community. He will see that men, pressed by the struggle for existence, had united themselves into groups under the discipline of laws and conventions; and that the last two centuries represented the period when these laws and conventions, having done their unifying work, and secured the survival of the group, were set aside and replaced by free and voluntary social effort.
Introduction ix
The student will furthermore perceive that this evolutionary process had two mani- festations, two waves, so to speak; the first political, and the second industrial; the first determined by man's struggle to protect his life, and the second by his struggle to amass wealth. The culmination of the first occurred successively in the English revolu- tions, the American and French revolutions, and the other various efforts after political freedom. After each of these achievements the historian notices a period of bitterness and disillusionment, a sense of failure, it being discovered that the expected did not occur, that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity did not become the rule of men's conduct. After that, however, succeeds a period of enlightenment, it having been realised that the work has only been half done, that man has been made only half free. The political sovereignty has been taken out of the pos- session of private individuals and made the property of the whole community, to be shared in by all upon equal terms; but the industrial sovereignty still remains the prop- erty of a few. A man can no longer be put in jail or taxed by a king, but ne can be starved and exploited by a master; his body is now his own, but his labour is another's — and there is very little difference between the two. So immediately there begins a new movement, the end of which is a
x The Industrial Republic
new revolution, and the establishment of
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC.
What do I mean by an Industrial Repub- lic ? I mean an organisation for the pro- duction and distribution of wealth, whose members are established upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who receive the full value of what their labour produces. I mean an industrial government of the people, by the people, for the people; a community in which the means of production have been made the inalienable property of the State. My purpose in writing this book is to point out me forces which are now rapidly develop- ing in America; and which, when they have attained to maturity, will usher in the Industrial Republic by a process as natural and as inevitable as that by which a chick breaks out of its shell or a child comes forth from the womb at the proper hour. I believe that the economic process is whirling us on with terrific momentum toward the crisis; and I look to see the most essential features of the great transformation accom- plished in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912.
If I had been a tactful person I should have kept that last Statement until far on in my argument. For I find many people who are interested in the idea of an Industrial Republic, and some few who are willing
Introduction xi
to think of it as a possibility; but I find none who do not balk when I presume to set the day. Yet the setting of the day is a vital part of my conviction, and I should play the reader false if I failed to mention it in this preliminary statement of my argument. It is a conviction to which I have come with the diligent use of the best faculties I pos- sess, and after a preparation of a sort that is certainly unusual, and possibly even quite unique.
Perhaps I cannot do better by way of introduction than to explain just what I mean. Our country has passed through two great crises, when important political and social changes came with startling suddenness. I refer to the Revolution and the Civil War; and to the latter of these crises, or rather the period of its preparation — 1847 to 1861 — I once had occasion to give two years of an interesting kind of study. I read everything which I could find in the two largest special collections in the country; not merely histories and biog- raphies, but the documents of the time, speeches and sermons and letters, news- papers and magazines and pamphlets. I literally lived in the period; I knew it more intimately than the world that was actually about me. My purpose was to write a novel which should make the crisis real to the people of the present; and so I had to
xii The Industrial Republic
read creatively, I had to get into the very soul of what I read. I had to struggle and to suffer with the people of that time, to forget my knowledge of the future, and to watch through their eyes the hourly unfold- ing of the mighty drama of events.
There were so many kinds of men — statesmen and business men, lawyers and clergymen, heroes and cowards; and I had to study them all, and see the thing through the eyes of each of them. And of course, I could only play at ignorance, for I knew the future; and I saw all their mistakes, and the reasons for them, and the pity and the folly and the tragedy of it all. Knowing, as I did, the great underlying forces which were driving behind the events, I saw all these people as puppets, moved here and there by powers of whose existence they never dreamed.
And, of course, all the while I was also reading my morning newspaper, and watch- ing the world of to-day; and inevitably I found myself testing the people of the present by these same methods. I would find myself seeking for the forces which were at work to-day, and striving to reach out to the future to which they were leading. I would find myself, by the way of helping in this interpretation, comparing and balancing the two eras, and transposing its leading figures back and forth. This famous
Introduction xiii
educator or this newspaper editor of to-day — what would he have been saying had he lived in 1852? And this clergyman friend of mine, this politician — where would he fit into that period ? Or if Yancey had been alive to-day, what would he have been doing ? Where should I have found Seward — what parts would Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips and Jefferson Davis have been playing ?
It was really a fascinating problem in proportion. The men of fifty years ago stood thus and so to a known crisis; similar men of the present stand thus to an unknown crisis — and now find the crisis. When I had finished "Manassas" I took up the writing of "The Jungle"; which is simply to say that I was drawn on irresistibly to seek for this latter crisis, and to try to un- derstand it — to get into the heart of it, and live it and follow it to its end, just as I had done with the earlier one. So now I feel that I have much the same sort of power as Cu- vier, the naturalist, who could construct a
Erehistoric animal from a bit of its bone. I ave far more than the bone of this monster — I have his tail, beginning far back in the seventies; and I have the whole of his huge body — the present. I have counted his scales and measured his limbs; I have even felt his pulse and had his blood under the microscope. And now you ask me — How
xiv The Industrial Republic
many more vertebrae will there be in the neck of this strange animal? And what will be the size and the shape of his head ? So it is that I write in all seriousness that the revolution will take place in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912; and, in saying this, I claim to speak, not as a dreamer nor as a child, but as a scientist and a prophet.
CONTENTS
PACK
Introduction . ...» \ «... vii
CHAPTER
I. The Coming Crisis » . . . . 3
•
II. Industrial Evolution 27
III. Markets and Misery . . • • , 72
IV. Social Decay . . ... . * * 103
V. Business and Politics . ...» 138
VI. The Revolution .179
VH. The Industrial Republic ....
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Vooruit," Home of the Socialist societies of
Ghent . ' '"*. - . . . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
A Socialist view of the Trusts . . / . 48
Reaping by hand and by machinery . . 92
Child labor in glass factories and coal mines 114
The Social contrast in New York . . . 126
Coxey's Army on the march and in Washington 206
The competitive vs. cooperative distribution
of information . . , .220
Helicon Hall . . , . . . 274
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
4
CHAPTER I
THE COMING CRISIS
thing which most impresses the stu- dent of the Civil War struggle, is how generally and completely the people who lived through it failed to understand it themselves. We of the present day know that the War was a clash between two incom- patible types of civilisation; between an agricultural and conservative aristocracy, and a commercial and progressive democ- racy. We can see that each society devel- oped in its people a separate point of view, separate customs and laws, ideals and policies, literatures and religions. We can see that their differing interests as to tariffs, police regulations, domestic improvements and foreign affairs, made political strife between them inevitable; and that finally the expansion which was necessary to the life of each brought them into a conflict which could only end with the submission of one or the other. Yet, plain as this seems to us now, the people of that time did not
3
4 The Industrial Republic
grasp it; through the whole long process they were dragged, as it were, by the hair of their heads, and each event as it came was a separate phenomenon, a fresh source of astonishment, alarm, and indignation. Even after the war had broken out, the vast majority of them would not be enlightened as in regard to it — a few of them have not been enlightened yet. I talked recently with an old Confederate naval officer, who said to me : "Oh, yes; it was the politicians who made the war. " I recall the astonished look which crossed the old gentleman's face when I ventured the opinion that the politicians of this country had never yet made anything except their own livings.
It seemed not merely that they could not understand the thing; they would not. The truth did not please them, and the best and wisest of them appeared to have the idea that they had only not to see it, and it would cease to be the truth; after the manner of the learned men of Galileo's time, who declined to look through his telescope, or to watch him drop weights from the Tower of Pisa. They made it a matter of offence that anyone should understand; the ability to predict political events was held to imply some collusion with them. When Lincoln, just before the crash, ventured to doubt the stability of "a house divided against itself," his enemies fell upon him precisely
The Coming Crisis 5
as if he had declared, not that such a house would fall, but that he intended to knock it down. And this was the established view of all the conservatism of the country, only two or three years before there burst upon it one of the most fearful cataclysms of history.
Let us endeavour to place ourselves in the position of the average man of 1860, and see how the whole matter appeared to him.
Way back in the early thirties, eight or ten more or less insane fanatics — "apostate priests and unsexed women," as one writer described them — had got together and begun an agitation for a wholly impossible and visionary (to say nothing of revolutionary and unconstitutional) programme — "the im- mediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves." They formed a society and started a paper called the Liberator. When governors of Southern states pro- tested concerning it, the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, Mayor of Boston, wrote as follows: "It appeared upon inquiry that no member of the city government, nor any person of my acquaintance, had ever heard of the publication. Sometime afterward it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few ignorant persons of
6 The Industrial Republic
all colours. This information, with the consent of the Aldermen, I communicated to the above named governors, with an utterance of my belief that the new fanati- cism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of the people."
Nevertheless, the danger of this propa- ganda was recognised, and before long the Abolitionists were being stoned and shot, their presses smashed, and their meetings broken up; a "broadcloth mob" put a rope round the neck of the editor of the Liber- ator and dragged him through the streets of the city. And still, in spite of this, the agitation went on. All the "cranks" of the country gradually rallied about the move- ment. Their leader was a woman's suffra- gist, an infidel, a prohibitionist, and a vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution as "an agreement with Death, and a cove- nant with Hell." There was one man among them who addressed meetings with clanking chains about his wrists, and a three-pronged iron slave-collar about his neck; and who declared to the people of a town that they "had better establish among them a hundred rum-shops, fifty gambling- houses and ten brothels, than one church." They allowed Negroes to speak on the plat- form with them, and they opened schools for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were
The Coming Crisis 7
broken up. One of them refused to pay taxes to a slave-holding government, and went to jail for it.
Assuredly, no common-sense person would have thought that here was anything save a madness that might be allowed to run its course. Yet the Abolitionists kept at it. In the election of 1840, a wing of them split off, and nominated a candidate for the Presidency, who received seven thousand votes out of a total of two or three millions. Four years later, when the Democratic Party was on the verge of forcing the country into a war with Mexico, they raised a hue and cry that this was a "slave-driver's enterprise," with the result that their vote went up to sixty-two thousand. And bv keeping up the ceaseless agitation all through the war, and taking advantage of a factional quarrel in New York state to nominate a politician who came into their camp for the sake of revenge, they cast, in 1848, a vote of two hundred and ninety-one thousand.
And also they had by this time succeeded in colouring a great mass of the popular thought with their views. They had gotten the country unsettled; they had made people feel that something was wrong, and all sorts of anti-slavery measures were beginning to be championed. Some wanted to exclude slavery from the new Territories; some wanted to exclude it from the National
8 The Industrial Republic
Capital; some wanted to restrict the domestic slave-trade. All of these people, of course, denied indignantly that they were Abolition- ists, denied that they had any sympathy with Abolitionism, or that their measures had anything to do with it. But the South, whom the matter concerned, understood perfectly well the folly of such a claim — understood that the institution of Slavery was one which could not be made war upon, or limited, and that the first hostile move which was made against it would necessarily mean its downfall. Hence, to the South, all these people were "Abolitionists."
Over the California question, there came at last a crisis, and all the Conservative forces of the nation were scarcely equal to the settling of it. Edward Everett and Rufus Choate and Calhoun and Clay and Webster, and a dozen others that one might name, exerted all their influence, and went about warning their countrymen of the danger, and denouncing what Webster called "the din and roll and rub-a-dub of Abolition presses and Abolition lectures." Under these circumstances the "Compromise" was adopted, and the vote of the Abolitionist Party fell off to one hundred and fifty-six thousand.
But then came the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which brought Lincoln into politics. The Abolition clamour surged up
The Coming Crisis 9
as never before — here was one proof the more, they said, that Slavery was menacing American institutions. The whole country seemed suddenly to be full of their support- ers; and the Kansas Raid only added more fuel to the flame. The Republican Party was formed, the Black Republican Party, as the slave-holders called it; and at the Presidential election of 1856, they cast more than one million three hundred thousand votes, about one-third of the total vote of the country.
After that came, in due course, the attempt of the Supreme Court to put an end to the Abolitionist agitation, declaring that Con- gress could not restrict slavery in the Terri- tories, which meant that the Republican Party had no right to exist. To "cheerfully acquiesce" in tne decision of the Supreme Court, was the duty of "all good citizens," according to President Buchanan; yet the only result of the action of the Supreme Court was to cause the agitation to burst out afresh. In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln ran for senator in flat defiance of the Supreme Court's decision, and the Republican Party all over the country went on in its revolution- ary course, precisely as if no Supreme Court had ever existed. A year or two later an agitator made matters still worse by his attempt to set free the slaves by force. "It is my firm and deliberate conviction," said
io The Industrial Republic
Senator Douglas, "that* the Harper's Ferry crime was the natural, logical and inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican Party." And he was perfectly right.
It was disgraceful, and yet it would not stop. The North had by this time become so full of Abolitionism, that even the Demo- crats were not to be trusted. When the split came, in Charleston, Yancey of Ala- bama explained this. "When I was a boy in the Northern States," he said, "Abo- litionists were pelted wTith rotten eggs. But now this band of Abolitionists has spread and grown into three bands — the Black Republicans, the Free-soilers, and the Squat- ter-sovereignty men — all representing the common sentiment that Slavery is wrong." And when Abraham Lincoln was elected President by a minority of the people, upon a platform which declared that the Consti- tution was to be disregarded, the party of conservatism and tradition resorted to force to maintain its rights.
And what happened then ? Why, simply this: a group of fanatical visionaries who had for thirty years been jeered at for demanding of the country something that was revolutionary and inconceivable — the destruction of an institution which had stood for centuries, and was built into the very framework of the nation — suddenly
The Coming Crisis n
began to see the mighty structure totter, to see cracks open in it, to see its pillars crumble, its roof fall in; and at last, before they had fairly time to realise what was happening, the whole heaven-defying colos- sus lay a heap of dust and ruins at their feet !
I have said that I believe that our coun- try is now -only a few years away from a similar great transformation. In order to maintain that thesis, it will be necessary to show, first, a great underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue; and second, a consequent movement of protest, slowly making headway and ulti- mately permeating the whole thought ofj the country.
What was the cause of the Civil War? To put it into a phrase, it was the need under which Slavery laboured of securing new territory. The reader may find a contemporary exposition of the situation in Olmstead's "Cotton Kingdom." Slave labour was a very wasteful means of culti- vation— only the top of the soil was used, and ten or fifteen crops exhausted it. Vir- ginia was once a great exporting state, but in the forties and fifties it had become simply a slave-breeding ground for the younger generation, which had moved to the Far South. And then, when the Far South began to prove insufficient, there was
12 The Industrial Republic
another move, into Texas; and finally an attempt at still a third, into Kansas — which brought on the clash with the free states.
At the present day we have a society, industrial instead of agricultural; and the struggle which we are witnessing is that between capital and labour. It is a struggle, not for land, but for profits ; and if we are to show that it is, like the Civil War, "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces," we must show in this case also that the thing struggled for is limited in quantity, and ultimately insufficient to satisfy the needs of both the contending parties.
That our industrial system is based upon profits, and that a failure of profits would lead to its collapse, will be admitted by anyone. But how could profits ever fail? the reader asks. Will not the soil always produce? And does not every man who comes into the world bring a pair of hands with him, to produce things and earn his living? And so, can there not always be profitable exchange? There could, I answer, provided that the various pairs of hands were to remain upon equal terms. But suppose that one pair were to get some advantage over the other pairs, and use that advantage to get constantly increasing advantage; might there not
The Coming Crisis 13
then come a time when the other pairs, having less and less, were finally un- able to furnish as much profits as were necessary ?
We began the economic battle in this country upon equal terms. Some got the advantage and became masters, the others becoming wage- workers. This advantage — that is, capital — brought constantly in- creasing advantage — profit, rent, interest; and those who had not the advantage stayed meanwhile just where they were — they got enough to live on, and no more. Numerous exceptions to this do not in the least disturb the main facts — that as a class the wage-workers stayed wage-workers, and the masters stayed masters. Neither does the fact that wages rose constantly in the least disturb the main fact, for the cost of living rose also; the wage-worker got his living then, and he gets it now. And meanwhile, according to the way of nature, and in spite of the outcry of moralists and old-fashioned statesmen, the strong went on growing stronger, and fighting among each other, the victors growing ten times stronger yet; until now we have come to a stage where, industrially speaking, we are a nation of eighty million pygmies and a dozen giants. Nor is the work quite done yet — it is going straight on, in spite of anti- trust decisions and the labour of the " muck-
14 The Industrial Republic
rake man" — and within a very few more years the dozen giants will be but one giant.
The dozen, meanwhile, are giants, and they are that because the industrial oppor- tunities of the nation are their property. They are the nation, economically speaking; they own its railroads and telegraphs, its coal mines, oil fields, factories and stores. And they grant to the eighty millions of the nation the right to these opportunities and a chance to earn their living upon one certain definite condition — that of what they pro- duce, they receive only a part, yielding up the balance to be "profits."
It is also important to notice that these profits are not taken "in kind" — the product must first be sold, so that both wages and profits can be paid in money. It thus fol- lows that the amount of profits is strictly limited by the amount of market that can be found; in other words, that a society whose income is limited, is also limited as to its profit-yielding capacity — that, for instance, a society of eighty millions of people receiv- ing a mere living wage will be able to yield just so much rent, interest and dividends, and not any more.
But what it yields has in the past been enough, says the reader. Why will it not be enough for the future?
Just this is the crux of the whole matter. Rent, interest, dividends, it must be under-
The Coming Crisis 15
stood, are fractions; and fractions may be decreased as well by increasing the denomin- ator, as by decreasing the numerator. A man, for instance, who invested a hundred dollars and made six, would receive six per cent, interest; but if he invested the second year one hundred and six dollars, and was able still to gain only six, his profit would be, not six per cent., but onlv five and a fraction. If he wished to make six, he would have to squeeze out a little more than six dollars; would have to compel the man who paid it to him to work just a little harder. And that, in miniature, is a representation of what is going on in our society to-day. You, the well-meaning reader, who are struggling to make the world better, and failing — whether the thing which you are trying to reform be politics or literature or religion, New York or Colorado or the Philippines, Fifth Avenue or Wall Street or Hell's Kitchen — you are meeting with failure because of that little arithmetical difficulty which has just been set forth.
Consider our millionaire fortunes, how they grow. Consider, for instance, that Mr. John D. Rockefeller makes fifty per cent, a year upon his holdings in the Standard Oil Company. The stock of the Standard Oil Company is now at five hun- dred, and h^^^een as high as eight hundred in the market. This is assuming that Mr.
16 The Industrial Republic
Rockefeller invested in the stock at par — though as a matter of fact, he put in only about twenty dollars a share, which would make his profit two hundred and fifty per cent. His income is at least fifty million dollars a year.
What does he do with it? Of course, he can't spend it — if he treated himself to a St. Louis Exposition every year, he couldn't spend it. What he does with it is to take it promptly, and reinvest it in the form of new capital; he employs a staff of thirty-two trained experts to aid him in this work. The effect of this is, of course, to make his income fifty per cent., compound interest, instead of simple; and what it will be in the course of time is a problem for those who like figures. While he is doing this, all the other capital- ists are doing the same — the American mil- lionaire lets his wife and daughters spend as much of his money as they can, but he seldom spends any himself; he is more interested in "doing things." The conse- quence is, therefore, that year after year we are paying the vast mass of our people mere living wages, and all the surplus prod- uct of our toil we are selling, and devoting to the creation of new instruments of pro- duction. We have, mark you, machinery that creates products for hundreds of times as many men as it employs-, and still we
The Coming Crisis 17
skim off the surplus and devote it to making new machines. Is it not obvious that this cannot go on forever? And that the time must come that we make all that we need — or rather that our people have money to buy, wages being what they are? And if that ever happens, then of course the factories will have to shut down. We shall have millions of men out of work, and starving on our streets; and when they form processions and begin agitating, de- manding that we give them work, then we say — that is, our newspapers, our preachers, our politicians, everybody says —
"But, my good man, there is no more work to be done!"
"But I am starving," insists the work- ingman, "we are aU starving. Why is there no work?"
"The reason there is no work is 'over- production.' The market is clogged with products, you must understand, and we can't sell them. What is your trade ?"
"I work in a shoe-factory."
"But the shoe market is already glutted — there are twice as many shoes as there is any use for."
"Twice as many shoes! But my feet are on the ground!"
"Well, we can't help that, my good man; that's because you have no money to buy them with."
i8 The Industrial Republic
"And my friend here," goes on the work- ingman— "he is a tailor, and he is naked because there are too many coats on the market?"
"Exactly."
"And the baker here is starving because we are both too poor to buy his bread ?"
"Exactly."
"And then this druggist is sick because we have no money to buy medicine ?"
"Exactly."
After which, the workingman stands and scratches his head for a moment. "There is too much of everything," he reflects. " There is no more work to be done." And suddenly the light breaks. "Oh, I see!" he cries, "we have finished our work for the capitalists!" And you answer, "Exactly! everything is complete, and of course there is no more room for you. Therefore you had best be off to another planet!"
So it would be, if the workingman were content to take his doctrines from the other side — from the retainers of those "to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom has entrusted the care of the property interests of the country." But, meantime, the working- man has been thinking for himself — and evolving a quite new doctrine, all his own, concerning the property interests of the
The Coming Crisis 19
country. This doctrine is, in a word, that the means of production of wealth belong of right to no individual, but to the whole people; and that in the hour of the col- lapse of the profit-making system, the thing for the people to do is to take posses- sion of the machinery, and use it to produce goods, no longer for those who own, but for those who work.
And that brings me to the second of my tasks. I have shown the "great under- lying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue"; there remains to show the consequent "movement of protest."
I have before me, as I write, a little pam- phlet published by the Standard Publishing Company," of Terre Haute, Indiana, and entitled, "The American Movement," by Eugene V. Debs. It opens with the statement that "The twentieth century, according to the prophecy of Victor Hugo, is to be the century of humanity," and will witness "the crash of despotism and the rise of world-wide democracy, freedom and brotherhood." The reader, continuing, soon discovers that the "American movement," with which this pamphlet deals, is the American Socialist movement. The writer tells of its early "Utopian" forms, the Owenites and the Brook-farmers, and names the exiles who came from abroad in 1848, bringing the Marxian doctrine, and
20 The Industrial Republic
influencing such men as Horace Greeley and Parke Godwin. "The first large society to adopt and propagate Socialism in America," he writes, "was composed of the German Gymnastic Unions. Through the sixties and seventies the agitation steadily in- creased, local organisations were formed in various parts of the country. Following the Paris Commune of 1871, and its tragic ending, many French radicals came to our shores and gave new spirit to the movement. In 1876 the Workingman's Party was or- ganised, and in 1877, at the convention held in Newark, it became the Socialist Labour Party. The Socialists were intent upon building up a wgrking-class party for in- dependent political action." This party, "composed of thoughtful, intelligent men, aggressive and progressive, of rugged honesty and thrilled with the revolutionary spirit and aspiration for freedom, became from its inception a decided factor in the labour movement. The busy, ignorant world about the revolutionary nucleus knew little or nothing about it; had no conception of its significance, and looked upon its ad- herents as foolish fanatics whose antics were harmless and whose designs would dissolve like bubbles on the surface of a stream. In March, 1885, was inaugurated the strike of the Knights of Labour. On May 1st of the same year, the general strikes
The Coming Crisis 21
for the eight-hour work-day broke out in various parts of the country. In 1884, Laurence Gronlund published his "Coop- erative Commonwealth." In 1888 Edward Bellamy published his "Looking Back- ward," and it had a wonderful effect upon the people. The editions ran into hundreds of thousands."
The author then goes on to narrate his version of the Pullman strike of 1893. He declares that the American Railway Union, of which he was president, had won, when the General Managers' Asso- ciation caused the swearing in of "an army of deputies," whom the Chief of Police of Chicago declared to be "thieves, thugs and ex-convicts," and that it was these men who caused the violence which led to President Cleveland's action, and the breaking of the strike. He then continues the story of the Socialist movement. The Coming Nation, started at Greensburg, Indiana, by J. A. Wayland, in 1893, was the first popular propaganda paper to be published in the interests of Socialism in this country. It reached a large circulation, and the pro- ceeds were used in founding and developing the Ruskin cooperative colony in Tennessee. Later Mr. Wayland began the publication of the Appeal to Reason, and it now numbers its subscribers by the hundreds of thousands. It is not saying too much for
22 The Industrial Republic
I the Appeal that it has been a great factor in preparing the American soil for the seed of Socialism. Its enormous editions have been and are being spread broadcast, and copies may be found in the remotest re- cesses and the most inaccessible regions. The periodical and weekly press, so necessary to any political movement, is now developing rapidly, and there is every reason to believe that within the next few years there will be a formidable array of reviews, magazines, illustrated journals, and daily and weekly papers to represent the movement and do battle for its supremacy. The last convention of the American Rail- way Union was the first convention of the Social Democracy of America, and this was held in Chicago, in June, 1897, the delegates voting to change the railway union into a working-class political party. The Rail- way Times, the official paper of the union, became the Social-Democrat, and later the Social-Democratic Herald, and is now published at Milwaukee in the interest of the Socialist Party. Since the election of 1900, there has been greater activity in organising, and a more widespread prop- aganda than ever before. In the elections of the past, it can scarcely be claimed that the Socialist movement was represented by a national party. It entered these contests with but few states organised, and with
The Coming Crisis 23
no resources worth mentioning to sustain it during the campaign. It is far different to-day. The Socialist Party is organised in almost every state and territory in the American Union. Its members are filled with enthusiasm and working with an energy born of the throb and thrill of revolution. The party has a press support- ing it that extends from sea to sea, and is as vigilant and tireless in its labours as it is steadfast and true to the party principles.
"Viewed to-day from any intelligent standpoint, the outlook of the Socialist movement is full of promise — to the capital- ist, of struggle and conquest; to the worker, of coming freedom. It is the break of dawn upon the horizon of human destiny, and it has no limitation but the walls of the
universe."
Whatever the reader may think about the foregoing narrative, there is one part of it which he cannot dismiss ; the statements concerning the growth of the American Socialist Party. In 1888 the Socialist vote was two thousand. In 1892, it was twenty- one thousand. In 1896, it was thirty-six thousand. In 1900, it was one hundred and thirty-one thousand. In 1904, it was four hundred and forty-two thousand.
The Socialist Party has some twenty-
24 The Industrial Republic
seven thousand subscribing members,, who pay monthly dues. It has over eighteen hundred "locals," or centres of agitation; the members of these "locals" are for the most part workingmen, who give their spare hours to the cause, holding meetings and debates, and circulating the literature of Socialism. In the larger cities, there are generally several lectures each week, and there are a score of "national organisers," who travel about, speaking night after night in various towns, forming new "locals," and taking subscriptions to the Socialist publications. Of these there are four month- lies and about thirty-five weeklies. Since 1892, Wayland's paper, The Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), has increased its paid circulation from one hundred and twenty-six thousand to over two hundred and seventy- five thousand, and last year it printed one edition of two millions and a half, and another of over three millions. Another Socialist
Eaper, Wilshire's Magazine (New York), as increased its circulation from fifty-five thousand to two hundred and seventy thou- sand in a single year. In addition to this, there are many publishing companies, which distribute books, leaflets and pamphlets, at little more than cost. I have before me a treatise, the price of which is one cent, of which over five million copies have been sold since its publication some years ago. Its
The Coming Crisis 25
title is "Why Workingmen Should Be Social- ists," by Gay lord Wilshire.
And in giving the figures of the Socialist growth, it is worth while to point out that tnis is not merely a local movement, but a world movement; that the United States is one of the most backward of the civilised nations in respect to Socialism. In Australia the labour unions have adopted a full Socialist program, and the labour unions hold the balance of power. In Eng- land, they have just elected twenty-seven members of Parliament; they have now members in the Cabinet of France, and in Italy they have turned out ministries. In Belgium, the vote of the party is half a million, and in Austria it is nearly a million, while in Germany it has grown from thirty thousand in 1870, to five hundred and forty- nine thousand in 1884, one million, eight hundred and seventy-six thousand in 1893, three million and eight thousand in 1903 and three million two hundred and fifty thousand in 1907. The Socialists are elect- ing representatives in Argentina and South Africa; in spite of government persecution, the movement is now growing rapidly in Japan. Including all languages, the Socialist journals number nearly seven hundred, and the Socialist vote of the world is figured at nearly eight million. Allowing for women, and for the disfranchised proletariat of such
26 The Industrial Republic
nations as Russia, Austria, and Italy, there are estimated to be thirty million class- conscious Socialists in the world.
To overlook the significance of a move- ment such as this, is but to repeat upon a larger scale the error of half a century ago, and to pay with blood and anguish for blundering and indifference. The processes of time have their laws, which can be studied; and all the waste and ruin of his- tory, which make its records scarcely to be read, are consequences of the fact that man has to be lashed to his goal through the darkness, instead of marching to it in the light. You take but a shallow view of the problems of our present time, if y®u do not realise that when thirty million people, in every corner of the civilised world, organise themselves into a political party, they do it because of some fundamental and tre- mendous motive, and that they will not be apt to abandon their efforts until they have accomplished some proportionately signifi- cant result.
CHAPTER II
INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
T_TERBERT SPENCER gives a definition •*•••• of Evolution, phrased in technical terms, which might be roughly summed up in these words : A process whereby many similar and simple things become dissimilar parts of one complex thing. If we trace, for instance, the evolution of human society, we see about as follows: In the beginning man exists in widely scattered and unrelated tribes, hav- ing a very loosely organised government, each individual doing about as he pleases, and all individuals being very much the same. Each finds his own food and cooks it, makes his own weapons and clothing, and looks and thinks and acts like his neigh- bour. Little by little, as the tribe grows, it begins to come into contact with other tribes that also are growing, and a pressure begins; the tribes make war upon each other, and each individual of the tribe is forced by the presence of danger to unite himself more closely with his fellows, to establish a more rigid rule of obedience, and to force refractory members to the general will. Then, under still growing pressure,
27
28 The Industrial Republic
one tribe unites with another against a common enemy, and the strongest man in the two rules both; which process of com- bining continues until at last there results an organism of great complexity, whose members are no longer equal and self- sustaining, but have different activities and ranks and characteristics, and are each dependent upon the rest. If, for instance, we examine France during the Feudal period, we find numerous principalities, duchies and baronies, each one an elaborate and complex organisation, with various classes and hierarchies and tributary parts, and a whole system of laws and customs and beliefs to correspond. And no sooner is this process complete than an evolution begins among these organisms; under the stress of jealousies and ambitions they too begin to struggle, to combine ; and presently in one of them arises a strong man who secures command of them all. When the process is completed, there stands in the place of a hundred principalities, one king- dom, the Kingdom of France.
The object of all this long labour is, of course, to get some kind of an organism that shall be capable of maintaining itself in a world of ferocious strife; that shall be able to withstand all enemies that may come against it, and all rebellions that may arise within it. The French monarchy
Industrial Evolution 29
was a marvellous piece of work when it was done; it had men graded into a thou- sand different classes and occupations, and everything fitted perfectly and ran like a clock. It had peasants to till the soil, and soldiers and sailors to fight; artisans to make all its necessaries, and merchants to handle them; and rising tier upon tier, a whole pyramid of governing and admin- istrative officials, up to the king. It had likewise the whole outfit of ideas and cus- toms necessary to its operation; it was com- plete and perfect and sublime — it was like a mighty vessel defying the tempests ; it had also its pennons that waved, and its songs for the crew to sing. Was it any wonder that those who had made it were proud of it, and felt that there was nothing more to be done in the world but to keep it going ?
And yet evolution was not through with it. Men grow weary and want to rest, they become "conservative" and fret at the bare thought of change — but the processes of life go on inexorably. This mighty structure,, the Kingdom of France, was only a means and not an end — its pur- pose was to bind the people of the nation together and protect them until they were able to take care of themselves. It took a long time for this idea to make its way; it took a fearful struggle — men were im- prisoned and exiled, burned and beheaded;
3O The Industrial Republic
but the idea went right on, and the nation .went right on; and when the time came, it burst the old integument to pieces, and out of the Kingdom of France there emerged the French Republic.
What a marvellous event that was, and what a stir it made in the world — what a stir especially in our own corner of the world — every one knows. Looking at it from a century's distance, and calmly, we see the whole age-long event as an exem- plification of the process of life; the com- bining of a number of simple things into one complex thing. The means was strug- gle and rivalry — it was a cruel process; but you will notice that at the end the effort and the pain are all gone — that the organism fulfils its functions freely and joyfully, and that the only difference between the first stage and the last is that the indi- vidual man has been raised to a higher plane of being.
Now, as I have said before, the first care of a man is to protect his life; the second is to accumulate wealth. A man does not set much store by his goods while his enemies are within sound; but just as soon as they are dispersed, the tribe begins to gather flocks, and to till the soil. And so, follow- ing close upon the heels of the evolution of political society, you have the evolution of industrial society.
Industrial Evolution 31
And it is precisely the same process. We may see nearly the whole of it in this country. It begins with the colonial village, where every man owns a little land and raises his own food; also he cobbles his own shoes, spins his own wool, weaves his own cloth, and makes his own clothes. In the very earliest days, he never buys anything, be- cause there is nothing to buy. He may be the deacon or the schoolmaster or the judge, but still he has his own farm, and any other man in the village is about as well fitted to be the deacon or the school-master or the judge as he. But then his goods expand and war begins — industrial war, I mean — a horse-trade, for example. Polit- ical evolution is slow, because the rate of increase of men is limited; but the rate of increase of goods proves to be unlimited. Machines are invented, and straightway the industrial process is accelerated ten- fold. It took a thousand years to evolve a monarchy; it took only a hundred to evolve a trust.
The industrial units fight each other, and the strongest survive as employers, the weakest becoming employees. Then, as growth continues, these various little groups all over the country come into contact, and they struggle also. The struggle is of course no longer fighting with swords — it is underselling; but the process is exactly
32 The Industrial Republic
the same, and its purpose is the building up of a capable industrial organism. Pre- cisely as in one case the tribes by combining find they are stronger to fight, the employers, by combining, find that they are stronger to undersell ; and this process goes on until you have an industrial feudalism, corre- sponding in all its details to the political feudalism of France. And then, as before, the barons and the princes and the dukes fight among each other, until out of the midst arises a strong man, a Rockefeller or a Harriman, who smashes them right and left, and makes himself a king.
He is a king in precisely the same way, and to precisely the same purpose, as Louis the Great was king. You know how Richelieu served the nobility of France — if they would not obey they simply lost their heads. If you have read Miss TarbelFs " History of the Standard Oil Company," or Henry D. Lloyd's "Wealth Against Commonwealth," you know how Mr. Rockefeller served the oil nobility; how he tricked them and crushed them; how some- times, it is said, he blew up their refineries with dynamite, or burned them with fire. You know how Louis said he was the State; and you heard the president of one of the coal companies, who is doing business in flat defiance of the laws of the land, declare that God in His Infinite Wisdom had en-
Industrial Evolution 33
trusted to him the property interests of the country. It is not necessary to pursue this analogy; if you do not see that in the due and inevitable course of evolution, our industrial organism has attained the mon- archical stage, it is simply because you do not wish to see it, and no amount of exposition will avail. I have only to add, as before, that the purpose of this process was to evolve an organism which should be capable of maintaining itself against all enemies, without and within. The task of King Louis was the aggrandisement of France; the task of Mr. Rockefeller is the keeping up of Standard Oil stock. In- cidentally, Louis the Great gave the world a race-heritage and a civilisation ; inciden- tally, Mr. Rockefeller furnishes the world with oil. Also — what is true in one case is true in the other — the Standard Oil Com- pany is a marvellous piece of work. It has men graded into a thousand different classes and occupations, and all fitting perfectly and running like a clock. It has labourers to till the soil, lobbyists and salesmen to fight, factories to make all its necessaries, and railroads to handle them; and, rising tier upon tier, it has a whole pyramid of governing and administrative officials, up to the president. It has likewise the whole outfit of ideas necessary to its operation; it is complete and perfect and sublime — it
34 The Industrial Republic
is like a mighty vessel, defying the tempests. Is it any wonder that those who have con- structed it are proud of it, and feel that there is nothing more to be done in the world but to keep it going ?
It is of course clear that the next step, according to my parallel, would be into an Industrial Republic. The reader differs from most Americans whom I meet if this idea is not startling to him. Let us go forward slowly.
In Mr. John Bach McMaster's "History of the People of the United States," is a narrative of the terrible yellow-fever epi- demic which occurred in Philadelphia in the year 1793, causing the death of over four thousand people in four months. In those days men had strange ideas as to the causes of yellow fever; they believed, in this case, that it "had come from a pile of stinking hides that had been on one of the wharves." The historian goes on to describe the strange expedients they adopted to get rid of it. "People were bidden to keep out of the sun, and not to get tired. The doctors had little faith in bonfires as purifiers of the air, but much in the burning of gun- powder. Every one then who could buy or borrow a gun, loaded and fired it from morning till night. Then one remedy after another would be suggested, and people would cover themselves with it — nitre, to
Industrial Evolution 35
tobacco, and garlic, mud-baths, camphor, and thieves' vinegar. The last could only be be procured by going to the shop. The purchaser going to get it was careful to have a piece of tarred rope wet with cam- phor at his nose, and in his pocket his hand- kerchief soaked with the last preventive he had heard of. He shunned me footpaths, fled down the nearest alley at sight of a carriage, and would go six blocks to avoid passing a house where a dead body had been taken out a week before. He would not enter a shop where another man stood at the counter; he would rush in, throw down the money, and rush home — soak everything in this prepared vinegar, and live on a prescribed diet, water-gruel, oat- meal, tea, barley-water, or a vile concoction called apple-tea. If his head pained him or his tongue felt rough, he would imme- diately wash out his mouth with warm
water and honey and vinegar " etc., etc.
At the time when I read all this, it made a peculiar impression upon me, because the newspapers happened just then to be full of the discovery of the true cause of yellow fever. And so all the time that I was reading about the man with the tarred rope in his hands and a sponge wet with camphor at his nose, I had this thought in my mind: And while he was waiting outside of the shop, a mosquito
36 The Industrial Republic
flew up, all unheeded, and bit him. And so he died!
It seemed to me a peculiarly neat illus- tration of the precise difference between knowledge and ignorance. It led me to reflect how very eager men ought to be to possess the former; and I put the anecdote away in my mind, thinking, "I shall use it some day when I want — all of a sudden — to scare someone out of a prejudice!"
For just imagine, if you can, that mos- quitoes, instead of being a pest about which every man was glad to believe evil, had been the basis of some important industry, or otherwise the source of incalculable advantage to the dominant classes of the community; that universities were endowed, and newspapers owned, and churches and hospitals supported, out of the proceeds of the mosquito monopoly! Are you sure that in that case the discovery of the physicians in Havana would have been hailed as a triumph of Science ? Or do you not think that there might have been a strong opposition to the fantastic specula- tion, and that the men who had published it might have been denounced as enemies of society, and turned out of office for their incendiary teachings? That other physi- cians of high standing might have been found to ridicule the idea ? That news-
Industrial Evolution 37
papers might have refused to print argu- ments in favour of it — that, in short, the mosquito monopoly might have succeeded in conjuring up before the imaginations of the multitude so horrible an image of this doctrine and its consequences, that they would have looked upon anyone who advocated it as in some way morally deformed ? Assuming that this could have been done, there are only two things to be added. The first is that all the while the mosquitoes would have gone right on caus- ing the yellow fever; and the second is that the people would have found it out in the end — that all that the makers of public opinion would have done, would be to put just so many millions of dollars into the pockets of the mosquito monopoly, at a cost of just so much misery to the human race. At the outset of this argument, I very much wish that you, the reader, would com- mune with yourself prayerfully, as to whether or not it might not possibly be that the ideas you have in your head concerning an "Industrial Republic" are really not ideas of your own at all, but prejudices which other people have put there for pur- poses known to them.
Let me repeat the definition which I gave at the outset of this argument: I mean by an Industrial Republic, an organisation
38 The Industrial Republic
for the production of wealth, whose mem- bers are established upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who share equally in all its advantages.
A century or two ago our ancestors were governed, "by grace of God," by an un- amiable old gentleman over in England, who controlled their destinies, and sent his representatives over here to tax and oppress them; and they impiously rose up and adopted a declaration to the effect that all men were born free and equal; and they seized the property and revenues of their king, and thereafter managed the country for their own benefit solely. "No taxation without representation," had been their doctrine beforehand. And you, who are an American, and celebrate the Fourth of July, and teach your children to admire the men who threw the tea into Boston Harbour — do you think that you could give me any reason why a man has a right to be represented where he pays his taxes, and no right to be represented where he gets his daily bread ? Do you not perceive that a man who can say to me, "Do thus, or you and your children can have nothing to eat," is just as much my lord and master as the man who can say to me, "Do thus, or be put into jail?"
You stop and think. "The case is not
Industrial Evolution 39
quite the same," you say. "One is not represented, to be sure; but certainly every man has a right to get his daily bread as he pleases."
Indeed, I answer. Suppose, for instance, that his occupation happens to be that of a steel-worker; has he any way of getting his daily bread, except upon certain precise terms which a certain group of men offer him?
"H'm," you say. "that's so. But then, if he doesn't like it, can't he change his occupation?"
My answer is, I do not believe that George the Third would have had any objection to one of our ancestors going to France to become a subject of King Louis. But I understand that freedom began in America when the men of Lexington and Bunker Hill resolved to stay at home and be free.
"This is all very well in theory," you say, "but how can it ever be realised?" As I said before, I expect to see it realised in the United States of America within the next ten years. I expect to see it, exactly as I should have expected to see the French Revolution, had I known what I know now; understood that institutions and systems have their day, and perceived the signs of a breakdown as they existed in France in 1780, and as they exist in America in 1907.
What was the cause of the French Revo-
40 The Industrial Republic
lution? The French monarchy was organ- ised upon a basis of force, represented by taxes; and those who ran the machine had no idea but that a machine so organised could go on forever. But in the long process of time, there developed a tendency on the part of those to whom the taxes came, to grow richer and richer, while those by whom the taxes were paid grew poorer and poorer. Little by little, all the property and all the land of France came into the hands of the nobility; until at last they had everything, and the populace had nothing. Then suddenly the machinery of a society organised upon a basis of force and taxes began to refuse to work; the French peasantry had stood everything, but they could not stand being required to pay taxes when they had nothing to pay with. So the States- General had to be sent for, and the Revolution came.
And note this — that the trouble was not at all that the country was poor. Every- one is familiar with the picture of the hor- rible condition of the peasantry of that time, how they were little better than wild animals, hiding in holes, naked, and with blackened skins. Yet all the while France was full of wealth — all the trouble was that it was stagnant in the hands of a single class; the fields of France were ready to produce, but the people were too poor to
Industrial Evolution 41
till them. And notice the curious fact, that no sooner was the Revolution accomplished than the difficulty vanished in a flash. The machinery started up again — the peasant had land and tilled it, and the artisans of the cities found work. It seems strange to read that under the "Terror," when the heads of the "aristocrats" were falling by the dozens every day and all the world was convulsed with horror, the people of France were more prosperous and happy than ever they had been before in history. And when war broke out, the nation that had been on the verge of bankruptcy for a gener- ation, withstood the armies of the combined kingdoms of Europe for more than twenty years !
Here in America, we all started even. Wages were high, and there was work for every man; there was no need to strike — a workingman had only to leave and go elsewhere if he were not pleased. We found employment for the stream of immi- grants as fast as they came — we had an enormous country to build up, and an inexhaustible supply of new lands for the settler. We manufactured only for our own use, and we could not manufacture half of what we needed.
But time passed on. Some who were frugal and diligent — and others who were cunning and unscrupulous — grew rich; and
42 The Industrial Republic
then machinery came in, and the pace grew faster. The rich were on top, and they stayed there. As the country expanded, railroads were built, and fortunes made; the war came, with its enormous expen- ditures, and still more fortunes were made. Capital grew; but it could not grow fast enough — in the seventies the rate of interest was ten per cent., and the promoters made fortunes besides. It was in those days that the battles of the giants were fought, the railroad wars in which the Gould and Vanderbilt millions were accumulated. Still there was plenty to do; the people had money, and there were some of them to buy everything we could make, and what came from abroad besides. The cities grew and spread, and the immigrants flowed in; rail- roads and factories were built, and the mighty structure of our modern industrial machine began to take shape. It must be understood that all the while inventions and improvements were being made, that enabled one man to do the work of ten, of fifty, of a hundred; and each such improve- ment set free so many thousands more men, to turn their attention to another part of the structure and to rush it on to completion.
Completion! Has it never dawned upon you that this machine might possibly some day reach completion ?
The purpose of it is a very definite and
Industrial Evolution 43
obvious one — it is to supply the needs of men; and when it is adequate to that pur- pose, it is complete. But how will you know when that is? Why, by the simplest of methods in the world — by that insuffi- ciency of profits which I described before. You are in business for profits, you under- stand; and when you are making some- thing that men need, you make profits; and when you are making something that men do not need, you stop making profits. It would be too bad if men went on making railroads where no one wanted to ride, and building houses for no one to occupy; how fortunate that Nature has arranged it so that we all know when our work is done!
We were trembling on the very verge — in fact, we were half-way over the verge — three years ago, when the Russo-Japanese War came along and saved us. Every- body had begun to realise the peril. The investor, who had been making ten per cent, in the seventies, came down to three. The workingman who had a job that did not suit him, stuck to it all the same, because he saw a million men in the country who had no job at all. And the capitalist, the captain of industry — he mounted into his watch-tower, and proceeded to scan the landscape. A market! A market! My kingdom for a market!
Our newspapers a few years ago were
44 The Industrial Republic
quite wild with delight over a phenomenon called the "American Invasion." They told how we were conquering all over the world — how Europe stood shuddering with fright — how our exports were mounting by leaps and bounds! How prosperous we were! What ocean-tides of wealth were coming in to us! It seemed so strange to read it all, and to understand that this "Invasion" which the editors were cele- brating, was in reality the last death-kick of the industrial system which they had been taught to consider the foundation of all society!
It will be more convenient to consider the whole question of foreign markets at a later stage; suffice it here to say, that if my analysis of the over-production of capital be correct, then the first signal of danger will be what is commonly hailed as a "favourable balance of trade" — the existence of a surplus product which must be sold abroad. You must distinguish, of course, between a mere exchange of goods, where exports are balanced by imports, and selling, which is sending out goods and taking in gold, or promises to pay gold. In 1893 our exports were eight hundred and forty-seven million dollars and our imports were eight hundred and sixty-six millions. But in 1901, our exports had leaped to one billion, four hundred and eighty-seven mil-
Industrial Evolution 45
lion dollars, and our imports had sunk to eight hundred and twenty-three millions; and during the next four years the excess of exports over imports amounted to a total of over a billion and a half of dollars ! According to an estimate made public on January 6, 1907, by the Secretary of the Treasury, the figures for 1906 will be: Imports, one billion, two hundred million dollars, and exports, one billion, eight hun- dred million dollars. And for how many more years does anyone imagine that the world will be able to pay us six hundred million dollars in cash, for those surplus products which we are compelled to sell ? Do not fail to mark the word " compelled." If we cannot sell them, we cannot make profits; and if we cannot make profits, we cannot pay dividends. "I am a great clamourer for dividends," said Mr. Rocke- feller; and other captains of industry share in his weakness. And when a few years ago they found that foreign markets were beginning to fail, they set to work to remedy the evil in the only other possible way — by combining, and limiting the product, and raising prices. And that brings us to the other great symptom of the approach of the breakdown — the organising of the trusts. For six or eight years the process has been going on, irresistibly, automatically — while the country raged and stormed, and poured
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out its wrath upon the greedy capitalist. And yet the capitalist was no more to blame than a steam-engine that turns aside when it comes to a switch. The capitalist was making profits; and he saw, by the cessa- tion of his profits, that the industrial machine of the country was getting too big for the country's use. Unless he, and the machine also, were to go to smash, com- petition in that particular industry must be ended.
The work is done now; we have only to sit by and wait until the people get through trying to undo it. I never realise more keenly the naive and touching incompetence of our so-called intellectual classes, than when I reflect that while our men of action have been accomplishing this mighty work —one of the greatest labours ever wrought for civilisation — our benevolent editors and college presidents have gone right on with their prattling of "freedom of contract" and "laissez faire." And actually, civilisa- tion must sit by and wait ten years, until our people have got through butting their heads against the granite wall of this accomplished fact!
But we Socialists have to take the world as we find it, and cultivate a cheerful dis- position; and so behold our great national spectacle, the morality-play of the terrible hundred-headed monster of Competition!
Industrial Evolution 47
The terrible monster has killed and de- stroyed himself, according to the nature of him; but now by Congressional statute and Supreme Court decree he has been patched together again, and will be compelled to go on fighting! Or at least he shall be stuffed and mounted, and shall look as if he were fighting! He shall have wires attached to his joints and electric lights to gleam from his eyes; he shall be taken out in the gor- geous Presidential campaign chariot, drawn by the Grand Old Party elephant, and all the people shall see him, and marvel at his ferocity, and at the deadly conflict he wages among his various heads! Come now, O people! — come editors and statesmen and judges and bishops — come and see how the terrible hundred-headed monster rends and tears himself, and shout for four years more of the "full dinner-pail."
But surely we must destroy the trusts! you say. Why must we destroy the trusts ? The trusts are marvellous industrial ma- chines, of power the like of which was never known in the world before; they are the last and most wonderful of the products of civilisation — and we must destroy them! We have been a century building them — you, and I, and the balance of the American people have toiled for three generations night and day, stinting and starving our- selves, so that we might get these trusts
48 The Industrial Republic
finished; we have taxed ourselves ten, twenty, thirty per cent, of our incomes, under the disguise of a protective tariff, to maintain and develop them; and now that they are complete, we must destroy them!
But they belong to Rockefeller! you pro- test to me. They belong to Rockefeller in precisely the same way and to precisely the same extent as the Kingdom of France belonged to Louis XIV, or the North American colonies to George III. They belong to the people of the United States, who made them, who contributed every plank of them, and drove every nail of them, and who paid Mr. Rockefeller and his family ample living wages while they super- intended the job.
But you only answer again — we must destroy the trusts! Go ahead then, and have your try! Have it out with them! War to the hilt with them! — and see which is the stronger, two corporations which are resolved not to cut each other's throats, or you with your law that they shall cut each other's throats ! Two railroad systems which know that they cannot continue to exist separately, or you who are resolved that they shall not exist together ! — It makes one think of the scene in "Twelfth Night," where Sir Toby has engineered a bloody duel between two terror-stricken antagonists. "Pox on't, I'll not meddle with him!" cries
Courtesy o/ n'imnirt's Alagasint
A SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS
Industrial Evolution 49
Sir Andrew Aguecheek. "Come, Sir An- drew," says Sir Toby. "There's no remedy. Come on, to't." But poor Sir Andrew will not to't, he fights with his back to the enemy.
You will hear people abuse the Socialists for wishing to abolish competition. No Socialist wishes to abolish competition, no modern Socialist at any rate. He watches competition, as the mischievous Irishmen watched the Kilkenny cats; keeping off at a suitable distance during the battle, and simply proposing to the spectators that when it is all over they shall recognise the accomplished fact.
There is some competition in the world to-day among the nations; there was re- cently competition between Russia and Japan, and there will perhaps be competition between some of the others. But what competition is left to-day within the limits of me United States, is left simply because it is of a kind so petty that the capitalists have not yet had time to bother with it. For the most part it exists between a swarm of retailers of trust-made products, and takes the form of the screwing down of the wages of helpless clerks and errand- boys, the adulteration of products, and the placarding of the surface of the land with blatant advertisements which affect a decent man like the stench of a carcass. One of
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the "competitive" industries that is flour- ishing just now is that of cereals prepared in packages and labelled with names that suggest Hiawatha and the South Sea Islands. The usual price of one of these packages is fifteen cents, and of that, two cents and a half represents the cost of the product, and nearly all of the balance goes into the effort to trap the public into buying it. And did not the "boodle" investigations in Missouri disclose the fact that William Ziegler had spent a fortune in bribing news- papers and legislatures to implant in the public mind the idea that "alum baking- powders" were poisonous, so that the Royal Baking Powder Trust might have the custom of the country?
But, you say, if competition perishes, what becomes of incentive — of initiative? Will not individual enterprise be destroyed ? I answer that it depends entirely upon what you mean by individual enterprise. If you mean that ardent desire which now consumes every man to cut his neighbour's economic throat, to get the better of him and make money out of him, to beat him down and leave him a financial wreck — why, civilisation will suppress this ardent desire in precisely the same way that it has suppressed the duel, or the right of private vengeance, and piracy, or the right of pri-
Industrial Evolution 51
vate war upon the high seas. The putting down of these things went hard, you know, for they had been the greatest glory of men, and all progress has been due to them. " Franz von Sickmgen was a robber-knight," writes Henderson, in his "History of Germany," "but with such noble traits, and such a concept of his calling, that one won- ders if he ought not rather to be put on the level of a belligerent prince. In carrying on feuds, he seldom aimed lower than a duke, or a free city of the Empire; and there are persons who insist to this day that his weapons were only drawn in favour of the oppressed. Be that as it may, he was not above exacting enormous fines; and being an excellent manager, he greatly in- creased his possessions. He was lord of many castles, which he furnished with splendid defences."
And then the historian goes on to describe the gallant struggle of this old nobleman against the advancing power of the Empire. "He determined, by one brilliant feud, to restore the tarnished splendour of his name. He would help the whole order of knighthood to assert itself against the power of the princes." The end of it was that "the enemy appeared in full force, demolished in a single day an outer tower with walls the thickness of twenty feet, and made a breach in the actual ramparts."
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Having been wounded, "the grim com- mander was carried to a dark, deep vault of the castle, where it was thought he would be safe from the cannon-balls of his pur- suers; such an unchristian shooting, he declared to an attendant, he had never heard in all his days." The castle surren- dered, and his foes gathered about him. "He had now to do, he said, with a greater lord, and a few hours later he closed his eyes. The three princes knelt at his side and prayed God for the peace of his soul." Let us hope that the makers of our Industrial Republic will not forget to pray for the souls of Baer and Parry, if these gallant captains of industry should perish in defending the elemental right of a capitalist to manage his own business in his own way.
This is all very well, you say, but will not such a system decrease production? I rather think that it will; I hope to see the prophecy of Annie Besant come true, that when men no longer have to struggle to get a living, they will at last begin to live. That they will at last open their eyes to the world of books and music, of nature and art, of friendship and love, that stretches out its arms to them; that they will cease to regard ingenuity and rapidity in the production of material things as the final end and goal of the creation of man ; that they will cease to look upon a human being as a
Industrial Evolution 53
machine for the getting of money — to be valued like an automobile, by the number of miles an hour it can be driven, by the number of thousands of miles it can cover before it is worn out and ready for the scrap-heap.
Let us have the philosophy of this thing, in order that we may understand it. We saw that the process of evolution, in an individual or in a society, consists of an expansion and a struggle, the end of which is the emergence of the organism into a higher state of being. There is a certain life impulse, and there is a certain environ- ment, certain difficulties with which it contends. We have perhaps no right to speak of purpose in the process, but we have a right to speak of results; and the result of this contest is to shape the or- ganism, to educate it, to bring out certain qualities in it which it did not possess before; until finally it triumphs over its environment, and emerges from its prison-house.
The struggle for life goes on, but the form of it changes unceasingly; and this chang- ing is progress. Without it there can be none — the very essence of progress consists in the suppressing of old forms of strife, the conquest of old difficulties and the escape from their thraldom. We know that
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there was once a time when men were hairy beings who dwelt in caves, and contended with club and hatchet against the monsters which assailed them; and now supposing that we could take some man of modern times, some one who has risen to eminence and power under the conditions which now prevail, and put him among those cave- men, how do you suppose that he would make out? How do you suppose that he would fare, if he were placed even one century back, in the country of the Iroquois, where the snapping of a twig and the flight of an arrow decided the fate of a man ? Is it not obvious that there has been here an entire change in the form of the struggle for existence ?
The same thing is true of nations. Once upon a time a nation was an army, and righting wras its business, the conquering of its neighbours was its glory and its ideal; but now we have moved on, we have become complex and highly organised, and can no longer afford to conquer our neigh- bours. It would not pay us financially, and intellectually and morally it would destroy us. We have, for instance, a power- ful country to the north of us; and imagine what would be the inconvenience and waste were we under the necessity of fortifying all our boundary lines, and keeping garrisons at every few miles of them; if every day we
Industrial Evolution 55
were shaken by rumours that an army was gathering at Montreal, that a fleet of tor- pedo-boats was building at Toronto. As a matter of simple fact, do we not both go quietly on our way, understanding that we are two civilised nations, between which a war of conquest would be an unthinkable crime ?
We have grown so used to the change, that the mere memory of the old ways of life makes us shudder; it seems to us horri- ble, and we forget that it was once beautiful and delightful to men: that the Germans of the time of Tacitus held fighting the joy of life, and imagined a heaven where a man might be patched up every night and fight again the next day. We have passed so far beyond such a state that we cannot even imagine it, and we have lost the power of seeing that it was ever necessary and right; that to those long ages of struggle we owe our physical being, with all its perfections, whicn we take so as a matter of course; a swift foot and a dexterous hand, an ear attuned to every sound, an eye that adjusts itself to every distance, a mind quick and alert, a spirit bold and enterprising. And in the same way the nations owe to war their unity and their complexity, and a great deal of their power, not merely physical, but industrial and moral as well.
It was one of the noblest of the world's poets who wrote that :
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"God's most dreaded instrument, In working out a pure intent, Is man — arrayed for mutual slaughter; Yea, Carnage is His daughter."
And to the same purpose writes Fletcher:
"Oh great corrector of enormous times, Shaker of o'er-rank states — that
heal'st with blood The earth when it is sick."
And yet the time of wars is past. We still have them, of course, and we still have a war-propaganda; but it would be easy to show that these wars are never military, but always commercial — that when two civilised states fight nowadays, it is not because they expect to subjugate each other, or desire to, but because their capitalists both need the same foreign market. I am acquainted with only one writer of any standing in the United States, Captain Mahan, who is nowadays willing even to hint that wars may still be necessary to the disciplining of a nation; and I think one might assert without fear of contradiction that people now go to war, not because they want to, but because they are persuaded they have to; and that right-thinking men throughout the world know that a war is a national calamity, a cause of evils innumer- able, scarcely ever overbalanced by good.
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And it is of the utmost importance to notice how this has been done; how it is that the military ideal is universally dis- credited in the world. It has not been due to the preachings of moralists and enthusiasts; it has not been brought about by the intervention of any deus ex machina. It has come about in the perfectly inevitable course of nature. No hero has arisen to slay the demon of war — the demon of war has slain himself. It is simply that the work of war is done. It is simply that war has brought about a survival of the fittest, and that there is no more need of conquest, and no possibility of it. The peoples have gone on to a different life, they have almost forgotten for thought of conquering, or of being conquered; they know that they cannot afford it; they know that their social organism is of too delicate a type to stand it; they can no more stand it than one of our modern captains of industry could stand the shock of jousting with Richard Coeur de Lion.
We have moved on to another kind of struggle — to the kind which is known as industrial competition. And we are to come to the end of that in precisely the same way. We are to see the fittest survive, and grow., and establish themselves impregna- biy; and so long as there is room for com- petition they wfll compete; and when they
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find there is no longer room for competition, that by continuing it they are doing as much harm to themselves as to their rivals, they will put an end to competition, and no power on earth can prevent their putting an end to it. Any power which really tried to prevent their putting an end to it would simply destroy them, as two civilised nations would be destroyed if they could be com- pelled to keep on making war against each other.
The great task of civilisation is the lead- ing of men to recognise when these mighty changes have taken place. For so far I have spoken of only one side of the evolu- tionary process; I have shown the victory— but there are also defeats. Sometimes in the struggle between the individual and his environment, it is the environment that conquers. Sometimes the man or the society is not equal to the new task, and falls back; and the law of this is death. The stag which can run swiftly enough escapes, and is able to run all the more swiftly as the result of the race; the stag which cannot run quite swiftly enough becomes venison. The tiny shoot which can grow high enough finds the light, and be- comes a mighty tree; its neighbour which could not grow quite so high, turns to mould. There comes now and then in the history of every living thing some moment when its
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future hangs in the balance; when it sum- mons all its forces, and lives or dies. The butterfly faces such a crisis when it emerges from the chrysalis; the child when it is born. You have known such fateful hours in your own moral life; and you can go through history and put your finger upon them — here when the Greeks drove back the Persians, here when the Franks drove back the Saracens, here on the field of Waterloo, on the hills of Gettysburg.
You would like to stay as you are, of course; for that is the least trouble. You have your routine and your habits, your old well-worn paths in which your thoughts move — you would like to stay as you are. But the curse of life is upon you — you can- not stay as you are. You have to go for- ward, or else to go back. When the crisis comes there is no escaping it — it comes. When the birth-pangs begin, either the child is born, or the mother dies; when the throes of revolution seize a nation, either the old forms are shattered, or the life of the people is crushed. There was once a reformation and a revolution in France; there was no reformation and no revolution in Spain. So in one case you have new life and abounding vigour — literatures and philosophies and sciences, and impulse after impulse without end; and on the other hand you have stagnation and ruin.
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The task was simply too hard for the Spanish nation; they had lived for centuries in imminent proximity to an enemy of an alien faith, and the result was the fastening upon the people of a system of military despotism and religious bigotry. And when the danger was by, when the work of these forces was done, and the time came for the people of Spain to throw them off, their efforts were of no avail; their kings and their priests tortured them and burned them at the stake; and so the impulse died, and never afterwards did they lift their heads. In the same way consider the "Negro ques- tion," as we have it in the United States. Here also we are dealing with a defeated race; a race which was bred where nature proved too strong for man — where savage beasts fell upon him, and deadly diseases smote him, and the swift powers of the jungle balked his every effort to rise. So for centuries and ages he was trampled upon and crushed, until every spark of genius was extinguished in him; and now we strive with all the resources of our civilisation — our noblest and best have given their lives to the task; and we do not know yet if we are to win or lose.
Let the reader of this book get a clear understanding upon at least one point- that no Socialist expects to abolish com- petition, and the survival of the fittest; all
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that any Socialist expects to do is to change the kind of competition and the standard of the fitness. The purpose of industrial competition is to raise up the industrially fit, and to establish a system for the feeding and clothing of men. The sign that the former task is done is the outcry against the money-madness of the time; the sign that the latter is done is "overproduction" and the "trust."
The purpose of this little book is to lay before candid and truth-seeking Americans the overwhelming evidence which exists of the fact that industrial competition, as an evolutionary force, has done its work in our society: that it has disciplined our labourers in diligence and skill, and our leaders in foresight, enterprise and ad- ministrative capacity; that it has built us up a machine for the satisfying of all the material needs of civilisation, a machine that has only to be used; and that until we have found out how to use it, our national life must remain at a standstill, stagnation must take the place of progress, and in every portion of our body politic, the symptoms of disease and decay must mul- tiply and grow more and more alarming.
We have been taught to think that the institutions of freedom in this country are so secure that we may go about our business and our play, and leave them to take care
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of themselves. And yet, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," is the motto our ancestors left us. For the forms of tyranny change from generation to generation, and it is always out of the old freedom that the new slavery is made. You think that you can stay free by clinging to the good old ways, by repeating the good old formulas, by standing by the good old faiths; but you cannot, for freedom is not a thing of institutions, but of the soul. It has always been under the forms of spirituality that men have been chained by priestcraft; and it is with the very pennons and banners of liberty that this land is bound to-day. It always has been so, and it always will be so — that the despot asks nothing save that things should stay as they are. What was it that the slave-holder wanted, but that things should stay as they were? That men should hold by the Constitution as it was, while America was made into a Slave Empire ? What is it that our masters want to-day, save that we should stand by the good old traditions of American individual- ism, freedom of contract and the right of every man to manage his own business as he pleases — the while the Republic of Jeffer- son and Lincoln is forged into a weapon for the enslaving of mankind ?
There is not one single tradition of the early times that is not being used to-day
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for the betraying of liberty. Take the Monroe Doctrine, for instance. We shout for it every Fourth of July, and we are rush- ing to completion a score or two of battle- ships to defend it; whenever it is in peril, our most rabid anti-trust editors and politi- cians drop everything and take to singing Yankee Doodle. And yet, has never the least suspicion about it come to you ? Has it never occurred to you to look who it is that is leading you upon this crusade of freedom — this strange propaganda of civil- isation and republican institutions by battle- ship and rapid-firing gun ? This zeal of our captains of industry for the spread of American institutions among the Filipinos and Hawaiians and Porto Ricans and Pana- manians and Venezuelans, the while they are so busy crushing American institutions in Rhode Island and Colorado !
There was once a time when all the des- potisms of Europe were banded together to destroy republican institutions, and when the threatening gesture of this young re- public held them back from halt a world. And thus bravely we guarded civilisation with our Monroe Doctrine, until the lesson of freedom had been learned. But now time has passed, and we have come to a new age, with new perils and new duties; there is a new kind of slavery in the world, and a kind in which we lead all civilisation.
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The control of our Republic has passed out of the hands of the people; by fraud and force our liberties have been overthrown — the very word has been relegated to schoolboy orations and Grand Army re- unions. And by this new despotism of greed the people have first been plundered and crushed, and now are to be marshalled and led out to do battle with other peoples, similarly beguiled. In this work every force of reaction and conservatism in civi- lised society is now enlisted, every tradition of olden time has been called into service. No pretence is too hollow, no blasphemy too abominable to be employed; every na- tiona,! prejudice, every racial hatred, every religious bigotry is made use of — and the starving wretches of the slums and gutters of London are sent into South Africa to capture diamond mines for the glory of free Britannia, while the helpless peasants of Russia are led out with jewelled images of the Virgin in front of them to steal Man- churia in the name of Jesus Christ.
It is with Germany that we Americans are scheduled to battle for the sake of the Monroe Doctrine. And what is the situa- tion in Germany ? There is first of all, the degenerate who sits upon its throne, and proclaims himself by grace of God the lord and master of the German people. There is in the second place, the hide-bound
Industrial Evolution 65
mediaeval nobility of the Empire, the direct descendants of those robber-knights of whom we read a while ago, some of them living in the very same castles from which their ancestors made their raids. There is in the third place, the aristocracy of the army, whose insolent and dissolute officers beat, kick and maim the helpless country boys and artisans who are herded like sheep under their command. There is in the fourth place, the bigoted seventeenth-century Pro- testant Church, with its snuffy country parsons and doctors of dusty divinity. There is in the fifth place, the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church, with its confession- al and other agencies of Darkness. There is in the sixth place, a subsidised "reptile press," whose opinions are written and whose news is garbled by knavish bureau officials. And every one of these powers, forgetting all past differences, and uniting with brotherly affection, are struggling with every prejudice they can appeal to, and every threat which they can wield, to hold the German people subject to the identical same "System" that rules in America, the industrial aristocracy of cunning and greed; is working them upon starvation wages at home, and driving them to serve in armies and navies, to conquer markets abroad; to threaten Dewey at Manila, and to seize Chinese ports and conduct "punitive
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expeditions" against Chinamen; to sell bad whiskey and firearms to Hereros and then slaughter them when they rebel; to blockade ports in Venezuela and to sink "pirates" in the West Indies; and to sound and measure channels as a preliminary to the taking of a naval base and the inauguration of a war with the United States!
But then, you say, we can't help that. What can we do? Is the only thing you can think of to do, to build battleships and get ready for the strife? How differently our fathers did it, in the old days when the Monroe Doctrine was really what it pre- tends to be — a pledge of freedom to men! How the* impulses that started in this land thrilled through the civilised world and made the "despots of Europe" tremble! What messages of brotherhood flashed upon invisible wires from continent to continent, bearing hope and comfort to all the oppressed of mankind! How we welcomed Lafayette, as if he had been an emperor! How the whole nation turned out in honour of Kossuth, making his long journey one triumphal procession! And are we doing anything like that now?
The people of Germany, you must under- stand, are closed in a death grip with all these powers of infamy. In spite of obloquy and contempt, in spite of lies and blan- dishments and menaces, in spite of per-
Industrial Evolution 67
secution and exile and imprisonment, for a generation they have been toiling — de- voted, heroic men and women have given their labour and their lives to the task of teaching, writing, speaking, exhorting, to open the eyes of the masses to the truth. And step by step they have marched on, gathering force every hour, strengthened by each new persecution, training them- selves in literary and political combat, building up a system of scientific thought which nas never been refuted and never can be, inspired by a moral purpose as noble as any the world has ever seen — pre- paring in all ways for the glorious hour when the people of the Fatherland are to come to their own! The man at their head was once a poor working boy, a wheel- wright, and he has raised himself to the leadership of the mightiest effort after freedom that the world now sees; and day by day in the Reichstag he leads the op- position to militarism and savagery, and his speeches are such as a century ago, and even half a century ago, woula have set this land aflame from end to end with revolutionary fervour. And this is no iso- lated movement of a nation, it is a world movement — it is a movement to which the lovers of liberty all over the earth are welcomed as comrades and brothers. It is a movement at one with every high
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tradition of American life; and you — what is your attitude to it ? What do you know about it — what do you care about it? Do you hold public meetings and send messages of sympathy? Do the halls of Congress ring with fervid speeches, as they did in the days of Webster and Henry Clay ? Do your papers teem with glowing editorials, with news about the movement, and sketches of its leaders ? What have you to say about it, what have you to do for it — but to repeat day in and day out one miserable, pitiful lie, with which you try to blind and deceive the masses of your own country, that this tremendous Socialist movement is not really a Socialist movement at all, but only a movement of political reform!
I do not think that we shall sleep forever; I do not think that the memories of Jeffer- son and Lincoln will call to us in vain forever; but assuredly there never was in all American history a sign of torpor so deep, of degeneration so frightful, as this fact that in such a crisis, when the down- trodden millions of the German Empire are struggling to free themselves from the tyranny of military and personal govern- ment, there should come to them not one breath of sympathy from the people of the American Republic! And all our interest, all our attention, is for that strutting turkey- cock, the war-lord whose mailed fist holds
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them down ! That monstrous creature, with his insane egotism, his blustering and his swaggering, his curled mustachios and mili- tary poses! An epileptic degenerate, who spends his whole life in cringing terror of hereditary insanity: whose spies and police agents are invading the homes of German Socialists, searching for letters in behalf of the agents of the Czar, obtaining evidence to send men in Russia to exile and death! This ruler of his people, who the other day cashiered a near relative, an army officer who had advised soldiers to complain when they were maltreated ! whose generals and admirals are swaggering about and spitting in the face of civilisation — and making maps and plans for a naval station in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine !
Forty years ago, at the time of our Civil War, when the fate of this nation hung trembling in the balance, when the Emperor of France and the aristocracy of England saw a chance to cripple republican govern- ment and to set back civilisation half a cen- tury— what was it then that prevented them ? What was it but the fact that in England there existed an organised opposition, alert and watchful, trained by a generation of parliamentary conflict, and with leaders who in such a crisis could not be put down? What was it but the fact that the workers of the factory towns of Great Britain had been
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disciplined and taught, and could not be deceived — that they chose rather to starve than to help the cause of Slavery ? And if you care to see what would have happened had not that opposition been ready, go back three- or four-score years, when the people of France struck their blow for liberty, and see the leaders of the British aristocracy crushing out protest and imprisoning objec- tors, and hurling the nation into a criminal and causeless war! Hear the king and the nobility, statesmen and authors, newspapers and pulpits screaming in frenzy and goading the people on, till they had desolated Europe with fifteen years of hideous slaughter, from the moral and spiritual effects of which the world has not yet recovered!
And now you stand and contemplate another such crime against civilisation. The two most enlightened peoples of the world are to come together and strip for a fight. The powers that rule in each of them made up their minds years ago, and among the officers, both in the army and in the navy of each, the coming conflict is taken for granted. Two or three years ago a German officer promised that an army corps would march from one end of this continent to the other; and an admiral in our own navy has publicly foretold the struggle. The German capitalists are in desperation tor new markets, and the German people are on
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the edge of a revolt, with an irresponsible military despot in absolute control of them, who knows that his only chance to put off the revolution is to pick a quarrel and beat the war-drum, ana summon the masses to the defence of the honour of the Father- land. When that supreme hour comes, and when the war-lust begins to burn, upon the Social-Democratic Party of Germany will fall the task of saving civilisation; and what shall we have done to help them — what encouragement shall we have sent them? We have sent ships of grain to the cotton- operatives of Lancashire when they were starving; but what have we done for the people of Germany? What reason have we given them, with our tariffs and imperial- isms, to think of us otherwise than as a nation of shopkeepers, a nation sunk in greed and commercialism, and dead to every noble impulse of men ?
CHAPTER HI
MARKETS AND MISERY
T GAVE in the first chapter a brief outline ••• of my view of the process of wealth con- centration. It is now time to consider the present status of affairs, and determine if we can exactly how near to completion our industrial machinery has come. Because of the vital part which the question of foreign markets has played and must play in our affairs, it is necessary that this inquiry should include a careful survey of conditions in the rest of the world.
The manufactures of the United States have grown from one hundred and ninety- eight million dollars in 1810, to five billion in 1890, and thirteen billion in 1900. Our exports to foreign countries increased from sixty-six million dollars in 1810 to eight hundred and fifty-six million in 1890, and a billion and half in 1905. Of course, if we could find unlimited markets abroad we might go on for half a century, or at least until our people grew tired of doing hard work for the rest of the world, and getting in return either bad debts, or else money to be used in building new machines
72
Markets and Misery 73
to do more work of the same sort. But this is not the case, as it happens; there are half a dozen nations that have been building up industrial machines of their own, and have completed them; the meaning of the Socialist movements of England and Ger- many and France and Belgium and Italy is simply that all these nations are now able to manufacture more than their own people are able to buy, under the old deadly com- bination of a monopoly price and a com- petitive wage. And so when we go over to Europe to look for markets, we meet people who are coming over to look for markets among us ; and when in our desper- ation we begin to sell out at any cost, the German capitalist cries out in protest, and the German workingmen are thrown on the streets, and the German Socialists increase their vote. And when the German capital- ist retaliates and sells out at cost, our capital- ists are checked, and our mills are stopped — and our Socialist vote goes up.
Look at the figures. England was the first in the field. The output of coal of Great Britain was one hundred and fifty million dollars in 1810; it was six hundred and sixty-five million dollars in 1878; in the same period the exports of manufactures rose from two hundred and thirty million dollars to one billion dollars. All that while, of course, England ruled the sea and
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had things her own way. In 1820 the value of all her manufactures was about seven billion dollars — equal to that of Germany and Austria combined, or to France and the United States combined, or to all the rest of the world, excluding these four nations. But then, little by little, the others began to catch up with her: in 1880, instead of manufacturing one-fourth of the world's products, Great Britain manufactured one- fifth, and in 1894 she manufactured less than one-sixth. Between the years 1894 and 1902, British exports increased only thirteen per cent., while those of France in- creased sixteen per cent., those of Germany thirty-nine per cent., and those of the United States sixty-six per cent. The result was that a few years ago tens and hundreds of thousands of starving men were parading the streets of London, and all England was startled by Mr. Chamberlain's announcement that the last hope of Eng- land was a tariff which would reserve for her the trade of the colonies! Of course England could not have made money by a tariff unless her colonies had consented to lose money; and the colonies were not planning to lose money — they were count- ing on making some by England's tax on food. So the plan simply reduced itself to an invitation to the British workingman to pay more for his bread so that he could
Markets and Misery 75
get starvation wages for doing the manu- facturing of Canada and Australia and India. Is it any wonder that the reply to the proposal should have been an indepen- dent labour vote which sent a thrill of alarm through the nation ?
And meanwhile Canada and Australia and India are straining every nerve to build up manufactures of their own! "No person connected with the cotton industry can be ignorant of the progress of cotton manu- factures in India,' wrote the Textile Recorder in 1888. "Indian cotton piece- goods are coming to the front and displacing those of Manchester." The Bombay Fac- tory Commission of the same year recorded in Parliament how this was being done. "The factory engines are at work as a rule from 5:00 A. M. to 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00 p. M. In busy times it happens that the same set of workers remain at the gins and presses night and day, with half an hour's rest in the evenings." And, like India, Canada also puts duties on British goods to protect her own growing industries!
Meanwhile, also, the rest of the world is hard at work. Let us continue viewing that same industry of cotton-spinning. The value of the manufactured-cotton product of Austria has grown from fifteen million dollars in 1834, to thirty-five million dollars in 1860, and ninety millions in 1894. The
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textile manufactures of Belgium trebled themselves in three years previous to 1894; those of Germany have increased twenty- fold in sixty years; those of Italy nine-fold in twenty years, while even such backward countries as Russia and Spain have doubled their textile industries, one in thirty, the other in twenty years. Most unexpected and disconcerting of all, however, is Japan, who was once looked upon as a permanent customer, but whose home industries have been growing like a magic plant. The textile manufactures of Japan doubled in value in the three years between 1896 and 1899. From six million pounds of cotton spun in 1886, Japan advanced to ninety-one million in 1893, and to one hundred and fifty-three million in 1895, in nine years increasing twenty-four fold. The value of all her textile produce was six million dol- lars in 1887, and it was seventy million dollars in 1895. Therefore her imports of cotton goods from Europe fell from eight million dollars in 1884 to four million in 1895. And while this was going on in the rest of the world, in the United States the value of manufactured cotton was rising from forty-five million dollars in 1840, to two hundred and ten million dollars in 1880, to two hundred and sixty-seven million dollars in 1890, and to three hnndred and thirty-nine million in 1900! Under such
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circumstances, is it any wonder that, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, the factories of Massachusetts and Canada were running on half-time, and dozens not running at all; that British cotton manu- facturers found that prices had decreased fifteen per cent, in as many years; that the weavers of Belgium were starving, and the country was full of riots and insurrections; and that all the nations of Europe were gathering in the Far East like vultures about a carcass — knowing that the sole condition upon which any one of them could maintain its industrial and social regime for another decade, was its ability to secure the custom of some hundreds of millions of Chinamen, who are so poor that a handful of rice and a cotton shirt are all they own in the world !
I often wonder what our college presidents and other after-dinner economists make of facts such as these. They do not discuss them in their speeches. I am acquainted with only one man among all our orthodox advisers who believes in the permanence of the competitive regime, and at the same time really understands what it is and what it implies — who cares for the truth, follows his views to their conclusions, and then speaks the conclusions. When I first became acquainted with this gentleman — intellectually acquainted, that is — it affected me painfully, and even now the sight of
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his book gives me internal sensations akin to those of a man in an ascending elevator which comes to a sudden halt.
The book is "The New Empire," and the author is Mr. Brooks Adams. He writes coldly and dispassionately, and with the certainty of the man of science, whose conclusions may not be disputed. His style is characteristic; it is brief and to the point, and there are no apologies .
Mr. Adams is the apostle of competition. He explains that he is this, not from choice but from necessity. 'Very probably keen competition is not a blessing. We cannot alter our environment. Nature has cast the United States into the vortex of the fiercest struggle ever known." His theory of life Mr. Adams condenses as follows: "For the purpose of obtaining a working hypothesis it is assumed that men are evolved from their environment like other animals, and that their intellectual, moral, and social qualities may be investigated as developments from the struggle for life. . . . Food is the first necessity, but as most regions produce food more or less abundantly, the pinch lies not so much in the existence of the food itself as with its dis- tribution. ... To satisfy their hunger men must not only be able to defend their own, but, in case of dearth, to rob their neighbours, where they cannot buy,
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for the weaker must perish. . . . Life may be destroyed as effectually by peaceful competition as by war. A nation which is undersold may perish by famine as com- pletely as if slaughtered by a conqueror. . . . For these reasons men have striven to equip themselves well for the combat, and since the end of the Stone Age no nation in the more active quarters of the globe has been able to do so without a supply of relatively cheap metal. . . . Thus the position of the mines has influenced the direction of travel. The centre of the mineral production is likely to be the seat of empire. I believe it is impossible to overestimate the effect upon civil sation of the variation of trade routes. According to the ancient tradition, the whole valley of the Syr-Daria was once so thickly settled that a nightingale could fly from branch to branch of different trees, and a cat walk from wall to wall and from housetop to housetop, from Kashgar to the Sea of Aral." But the trade route across central Asia was displaced, "and so it has come to pass that Bagdad has sunk into a mass of hovels, and the valley of Syr-Daria is a wilderness. The fate of the empire of Haroun-al-Raschid exemplifies an universal law."
"The greatest prize of modern times," in Mr. Adams's opinion, is northern China, and upon this trie fate of empire rests.
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His book was published in 1901, and he considered then that the chances were all with the United States. Ten years before we had been "tottering upon the brink of ruin. . . . Relief came through an exertion of energy and adaptability, per- haps without a parallel. ... In three years America reorganised her whole social system by a process of consolidation, the result of which has been the so-called trust. But the trust is in reality the highest type of administrative efficiency, and therefore of economy, which has as yet been attained. By means of this consolidation the American people were enabled to utilise their mines to the full . . . The shock of the impact of the new power seems overwhelming. . . . In March, 1897, Pittsburg achieved supremacy in steel, and in an instant Europe felt herself poised above an abyss. . . . The Spanish Empire disintegrated, and Great Britain displayed a lassitude which has attracted the attention of the entire world. . . . Germany has also been perturbed. . . . Russia has, how- ever, suffered most.
"The world seems agreed that the United States is likely to achieve, if indeed she has not already achieved, an economic supremacy. The vortex of the cyclone is near New York. No such activity prevails elsewhere; nowhere are undertakings so
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gigantic, nowhere is administration so per- fect; nowhere are such masses of capital centralised in single hands. And as the United States becomes an imperial market, she stretches out along the trade routes which lead from foreign countries to her heart, as every empire has stretched out from the days of Sargon to our own. The West Indies drift toward us, the Republic of Mexico hardly longer has an independent life, and the City of Mexico is an American town. With the completion of the Panama Canal all Central America will become a part of our system. We have expanded into Asia, we have attracted the fragments of the Spanish dominions, and reaching out into China, we have checked the demands of Russia and Germany, in territory, which, until yesterday, had been supposed to be beyond our sphere. We are penetrating Europe, and Great Britain especially is assuming the position of a dependency, which must rely upon us as the base from which she draws ner food in peace, and without which she could not stand in war." "Supposing the movement of the next fifty years only equal to that of the last," continues our author, . . . "the United States will outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined. The whole world will pay her tribute. Commerce will flow to her, both from east and west, and
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the order which has existed from the dawn of time will be reversed."
There is only one peril about all this, in the opinion of Mr. Adams. "Society is now moving with intense velocity, and masses are gathering bulk with proportional rapidity. There is also some reason to surmise that the equilibrium is corre- spondingly delicate and unstable. If so apparently slight a cause as a fall of prices for a decade has been sufficient to propel the seat of empire across the Atlantic, an equally slight derangement of the ad- ministrative functions of the United States might force it across the Pacific. Prudence therefore would dictate the adoption of measures to minimise the likelihood of sudden shocks. . . . If the New Empire should develop, it must be an enormous complex mass, to be administered only by means of a cheap, elastic and simple machin- ery; an old and clumsy mechanism must, sooner or later, collapse, and in sinking may involve a civilisation."
By "an old and clumsy mechanism" Mr. Adams explains elsewhere that he means our American political system. Our an- cestors were opposed to much consolidation, and they formed a constitution that was practically unchangeable, because they be- lieved they had "reached certain final truths of government." "The language of the
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Declaration of Independence, in which they proclaimed one of these truths (that all men are created ecjual), varies little from that of a Catholic council," says Mr. Adams. An American is apt to believe such formulas, being "dominated by tra- dition." But a modern thinker views them "as having no necessary relation to the conduct of affairs in the twentieth century." ' ' If men are to be observed scien- tifically, the standard by which customs and institutions must be gauged cannot be abstract moral principles, but success. . . . Institutions are good when they lead to success in competition, and bad when they hinder."
The United States now forms a "gigan- tic and growing empire. She occupies a position or extraordinary strength. Favoured alike by geographical position, by deposits of minerals, by climate, and by the character of her population, she has little to fear either in peace or war, from rivals, provided the friction created by the movement of the masses with which she has to deal does not neutralise her energy." » . .
"The alternative presented is plain. We may cherish ideals and risk substantial bene- fits to realise them. Such is the emotional instinct. Or we may regard our govern- ment dispassionately, as we would any other
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matter of business. . . . The United States has become the heart of the economic system of the age, and she must maintain her supremacy by wit and force, or share the fate of the discarded. What that fate is the follow- ing pages tell. . . . With conservative populations slaughter is nature's remedy." Never in my life shall I forget the hours in which I wrestled with these problems — the weeks and the months of perplexity and despair. It happened long before I ever heard of Mr. Adams — for of course these thoughts of his are the thoughts of the time, there is a whole literature of them, from Kipling, Roosevelt, and the Kaiser down. And to look back over the weary wastes of history — the blind, hideous nightmare of blood and tears — and then to look forward, and in all the future see nothing else! To see never any rest for agonised humanity, only kill or be killed for ages upon ages! To see this newest and noblest effort of man after freedom and peace — the American Republic — turned into an engine of slaughter ana oppression! To be shown by cold, scientific formulas that my reverence for the traditions of Lincoln was merely an "emotional impulse," and that the end of it could only be that my country would share "the fate of the discarded!" I could not believe it — I cried out in the night-time for deliverance from it.
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*There is a certain relentlessness about Mr. Adams, which fills the reader with rebellion, and makes him think. The average imperialist carefully avoids doing this; he veils his doctrines with moral phrases, with the decent pretence of "des- tiny" at the very least. But Mr. Adams dances a very war-dance upon the thing called "moral sense" —never before was it made to seem such an impertinent superfluity.
Have you, the reader, never had one smal- lest doubt ? Does it not, for instance, seem strange to you now, when you think of it, that this mighty people cannot stay quietly at home and live their own life and mind their own affairs? How does it happen that our existence as a nation depends upon expansion? Is it that our population is growing so fast? But here is our Im- perialist President lamenting that our popu- lation is not growing fast enough! And so we have to fight to find room for our chil- dren; and we have to have more children in order that we may be able to fight! We deplore race-suicide, and we give as our reason that it prevents race-murder!
Picture to yourself half a dozen men on an island. If the island be fertile they can get along without any foreign trade, can they
'Portions of the following argument were published as an article in the North American Review,
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not? And then why cannot a nation do it? According to Mulhall, in 1894 two millions of our agricultural labourers were raising food for foreign countries. And all our imports are luxuries, save a few things such as tea and coffee and some medicines! And still our existence as a nation depends upon foreign trade — trade with Filipinos and Chinamen, with Hottentots and Es- quimaux ! Why ?
Can you, the reader, tell me? We manufacture more than we can use, you say. Unless we can sell the balance to the Chinamen some of our factories must close down, and then some of our people would starve. But why, I ask, cannot our own starving people have the things that go abroad — some of all that food that goes abroad, for instance? Why is it that the Chinamen come first and our own people afterwards? Until we have made some things for the Chinamen, you explain, we have no money to buy anything ourselves. And so always the Chinamen first. It seems such a strange, upside-down arrange- ment— does it not seem so to you? For, look you, the people of England are in the same fix, and the people of Germany are in the same fix — the people of all the com- peting nations are in the same fix! They actually have to go to war to kill each other, in order to get a chance to sell something
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to the Chinamen, so that they can get money to buy some things for themselves! They were actually doing that in Manchuria for eighteen months! More amazing yet, they had to go and murder some of the Cninamen, in order to compel the rest to buy something, so that they could get money to buy some- thing for themselves!
How long can it be possible for a human being, with a spark of either conscience or brains in him, to gaze at such a state of affairs and not know that there is something wrong about it? And how long could he gaze before the truth of it would flash over him — that the reason for it is that some private party owns all the machinery and materials of production, and will not give the people anything, until they have first made something that can be sold! That all the world lies at the mercy of those who own the materials and machinery, and who leave men to starve when they cannot make profits! And that this is why we Americans cannot stay at home and be happy, but are forced to go trading with Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux, and competing for "empire" with our brothers in England and Germany and Japan!
If the reader be an average American, these thoughts will be new to him. He has been brought up on a diet of misunderstood Malthusianism. He is told that life has
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always been a struggle for existence and always will be; that mere is not food enough to go round, and that therefore, every now and then, the surplus population has to be cut down by famine an war. It is to be point- ed out concerning the doctrine that, while he swears allegiance to it, he doesn't like to think about it, and when it comes to the practical test he shows that he does not really believe it. Whenever famine comes, he subscribes to a grain-fund, and does his best to defeat nature; when war comes, he gets up a Red Cross Society for the same purpose. And yet he still continues to swear by this wiping out of the nations, and any discussion about abolishing poverty he waves aside as Utopian.
The writer may fail in his purpose with this paper, but he will not have written in vain if he can lead a few men to see the pitiful folly of that half-baked theory which ranks men with the wild beasts of the jungle, and ignores the existence of both science and morality. He can do that, assuredly, with any one whom he can induce to read one little book — Prince Kropotkin's "Fields, Factories and Workshops.5
The book was published nine years ago, but apparently it has not yet had time to affect tne cogitations of the orthodox econo- mists. You still read, as you have been used to reading since the days of Adam
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Smith, that the possibilities of the soil are strictly limited, and that population always stays just within the starvation limit. Nearly all the fertile land in this country, for in- stance, is now in use, and so we shall soon reach the limit here. The forty million people of Great Britain have long since passed it, and they would starve to death were it not for our surplus. And there are portions of the world where population is even more dense, as in Belgium. All this you have known from your school-days, and you think you know it perfectly, and beyond dispute; and so how astonished you will be to be told that it is simply one of the most stupid and stupefying delusions that ever were believed and propagated among men; that the limits of the produc- tive possibilities of the soil have not only not been attained, but are, so far as science can now see, absolutely unattainable; that not only could England support with ease her own population on her own soil, and not only could Belgium do it, but any most crowded portion of the world could do it, and do it once again, and yet once again, and do it with two or three hours of work a day by a small portion of its population! That England could now support, not merely her thirty-three million inhabitants, but seventy-five and perhaps a hundred million! And that the United States could
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now support a billion and a quarter of people, or just about the entire population of this planet! And that this could be done year after year, and entirely without any possibility of the exhaustion of the soil! And all this not any theory of a closet speculator or a Utopian dreamer, but by methods that are used year after year by thousands and tens of thousands of men who are making money by it in all portions of the world — in the market-gardens of Paris and London, of Belgium, Holland and the island of Jersey, the truck-farms of Florida and Minnesota, and of Norfolk, Virginia!
Prince Kropotkin writes:
"While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of nature and a legion of workers, whose very names will remain unknown to posterity, have created of late a quite new agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior to the old three-fields system of our ancestors. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops every three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land every twelve months. They do not understand our talk about and bad soils, because they make the
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soil themselves, and make it in such quan- tities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it; otherwise, it would raise up the levels of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass to the acre, as we do, but from fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same space; not twenty- five dollars' worth of hay, but five hundred dollars' worth of vegetables, of the plainest description, cabbages and carrots. That is where agriculture is going now."
The writer tells about all these things in detail. Here is the culture maraichere of Paris — a M. Ponce, with a tiny orchard of two and seven-tenths acres, for which he pays five hundred dollars rent a year, and from which he takes produce that could not be named short of several pages of figures: twenty thousand pounds of carrots, twenty thousand of onions and radishes, six thou- sand heads of cabbage, three thousand of cauliflower, five thousand baskets of to- matoes, five thousand dozen choice fruit, one hundred and fifty-four thousand heads of "salad" — in all, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of vegetables. Says the author:
"The Paris gardener not only defies the soil — he would grow the same crops on an asphalt pavement — he defies climate. His walls, which are built to reflect light and to
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protect the wall-trees from the northern winds, his wall-tree shades and glass pro- tectors, his pepinieres, have made a rich Southern garden out of the suburbs of Paris."
The consequence of this is that the popu- lation of the districts of that city, three millions and a half of people, could, if it were necessary, be maintained in their own territory, provided with food both animal and vegetable, from a piece of ground less than sixty miles on a side ! And at the same time, by the same methods, they are raising thirty tons of potatoes on an acre in Minne- sota, and three hundred and fifty bushels of corn in Iowa, and six hundred bushels of onions in Florida. And with machinery, on the prairie wheat-farms, they raise crops at a cost which makes twelve hours and a half of work of all kinds enough to supply a man with the flour part of his food for a year! And then, as if to cap the climax, comes Mr. Horace Fletcher with his dis- covery that all the ailments of civilised man, (including old age and death) are due to overeating; and Professor Chittenden with his practical demonstration that the quan- tity of food needed by man is about four- tenths of what all physiologists have pre- viously taught ! *And while all this has been
*Horace Fletcher: "The A-B-Z of Our Own Nutrition." R. L. Chit- tenden: "Physiological Economy in Nutrition."
Courtesy of Ifilshire's Magazint
Courtesy of H'itshire's Magazine
REAPING BY HAND AND BY MACHINERY
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going on for a decade, while encyclopedias nave been written about it, our political economists continue to discuss wages and labour, rent and interest, exchange and con- sumption, from the standpoint of the dreary, century-old formula that there must always be an insufficient supply of food in the world !
Such is the state of affairs with agricul- ture: and now how is it with everything else? In the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labour (1898), Carroll D. Wright has figured the relative costs of doing various pieces of work by hand and by modern machinery. Here are a few of me cases he gives:
"Making of 10 plows: By hand, 2 work- men, performing 11 distinct operations, working a total of 1,180 hours, and paid $54.46. By machine, 52 workmen, 97 operations, 37| hours, $7.90.
"Making of 500 Ibs. of butter: By hand, 3 men, 7 operations, 125 hours, $10.66. By machine, 7 men, 8 operations, 12J hours, $1.78.
"Making of 500 yds. twilled cottonade: By hand, 3 men, 19 operations 7,534 hours, $135.61. By machine, 252 men, 43 opera- tions, 84 hours, $6.81.
"Making of 100 pairs of cheap boots: By hand, 2 workmen, 83 operations, 1,436 hours, $408.50. By machine, 113 work- men, 122 operations, 154 hours, $35.40."
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Thus we see human labour has been cut to the extent of from eighty to ninety-five per cent. From other sources I have gathered a few facts about the latest machin- ery. In Pennsylvania, some sheep were shorn and the wool turned into clothing in six hours, four minutes. A steer was kifled, its hide tanned, turned into leather and made into shoes in twenty-four hours. The ten million bottles usea by the Standard Oil Company every year are now blown by machinery. An electric riveting-machine puts rivets in steel-frame buildings at the rate of two per minute. Two hundred and sixty needles per minute, ten million match- sticks per day, five hundred garments cut per day — each by a machine tended by one little boy. The newest weaving-looms run through the dinner hour and an hour and a half after the factory closes, making cloth with no one to tend them at all. The new basket-machine invented by Mergenthaler, the inventor of the linotype, is now in opera- tion everywhere, "making fruit-basKets, berry-baskets and grape-baskets of a strength and quality never approached by hand labour. Fancy a single machine that will turn out completed berry-baskets at the rate of twelve thousand per day of nine hours' work! This is at the rate of one thousand three hundred per hour, or over twenty baskets a minute! One girl, operating
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this machine, does the work of twelve skilled hand operators!"
Since all these wonders are the common- place facts of modern industry, it is not surprising that here and there men should begin to think about them ; here is the naive question recently asked by the editor of a Montreal newspaper whicn I happened on:
" With the best of machinery at the present day, one man can produce woollens for three hundred people. One man can produce boots ana shoes for one thousand people. One man can produce bread for two hundred people. Yet thousands cannot get woollens, boots and shoes, or bread. There must be some reason for this state of affairs. "
There is a reason, a perfectly plain and simple reason, which all over the world the working-people, whom it concerns, are com- ing to understand. The reason is that all the woollen manufactories, the boot and shoe and bread manufactories, and all the sources of the raw materials of these, and all the means of handling and distributing them when they are manufactured, belong to a few private individuals instead of to the com- munity as a whole. And so, instead of the cotton-spinner, the shoe-operative and the bread-maker having free access to them, to work each as long as he pleases, produce as much as he cares to, and exchange his products for as much of the products of
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other workers as he needs, each one of these workers can only get at the machines by the consent of another man, and then does not get what he produces, but only a small fraction of it, and does not get that except when the owner of the balance can find some one with money enough to buy that balance at a profit to him!
Prof. Hertzka, the Austrian economist, in his "Laws of Social Evolution," has elaborately investigated the one real question of political economy to-day, the actual labour and time necessary for the creation, under modern conditions, of the necessaries of life for a people. Here are the results for the Austrian people, of twenty-two million :
"It takes 26,250,000 acres of agricultural land, and 7,500,000 of pasturage, for all agricultural products. Then I allowed a house to be built for every family, consisting of five rooms. I found that all industries, agriculture, architecture, building, flour, sugar, coal, iron, machine-building, clothing, and chemical production, need 615,000 labourers employed 11 hours per day, 300 days a year, to satisfy every imaginable want for 22,000,000 inhabitants.
"These 615,000 labourers are only 12.3 per cent, of the population able to do work, excluding women and all persons under 16 or over 50 years of age ; all these latter to be considered as not able.
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"Should the 5,000,000 able men be en- gaged in work, instead of 615,000, they need only to work 36.9 days every year to produce everything needed for the support of the population of Austria. But should the 5,000,000 work all the year, say 300 days — which they would probably have to do to keep the supply fresn in every department — each one would only work 1 hour and 22 J minutes per day.
" But to engage to produce all the luxuries, in addition, would take, in round figures, 1,000,000 workers, classed and assorted as above, or only 20 per cent, of all those able, excluding every woman, or every person under 16 or over 50, as before. The 5,000,000 able, strong male members could produce everything imaginable for the whole nation of 22,000,000 in 2 hours and 12 minutes per day, working 300 days a year."
But then you say: If this be true, if two hours' work will produce everything, how can everybody go on working twelve hours forever? They can't; and that is just why I am writing this book. They can do it only until they have filled the needs, first of themselves, then of all the Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux who have money to buy anything — and then until they have filled all the factories, ware- houses and stores of the country to over- flowing. Then they cannot do one single
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thing more; then they are out of work They can go on so long as their masters can find a market in which to sell their product at a profit; then they have to stop. And then suddenly (instantly, God help them!) they have to take their choice between two alter- natives— between an Industrial Republic, and a political empire. Either thev will hear Prince Kropotkin, or they will hear Mr. Brooks Adams. Either they will take the instruments and means of production and produce for use and not for profit; or else tney will forge themselves into an engine of war to be wielded by a military despot. In that case, they will fling themselves upon China and Japan, and seize northern China, "the greatest prize of modern times." They will enter upon a career of empire, and by the wholesale slaughter of war they will keep down population, while at the same time by the wholesale destruction of war they keep down the surplus of products. So there will be more work for the workers for a time, and more profits for the masters for a time; until what wealth there is in northern China has also been concentrated and possessed, when once more there will begin distress. By that time, however, we shall have an hereditary aristocracy strongly intrenched, and a proletariat degraded be- yond recall; so that our riots will end in mere slaughter and waste, and we shall
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never again see freedom. We shall run then the whole course of the Roman Em- pire— of frenzied profligacy among the wealthy, and beastly ferocity among the populace : until at last we fall into imbecility, and are overwhelmed by some new, clean race which the strong heart of nature has poured out.
Empires have risen and have fallen; but it has not been, as Mr. Adams asserts, because of "variations of trade-routes," but solely because of wealth-concentration, with its ensuing corruption, ignorance and brutality among the populace, and avarice and luxury among the rich. Let the reader take Froude's "Caesar," and read, in the first chapter, his picture of the last days of the Roman Republic :
"An age in so many ways the counterpart of our own, the blossoming period of the old civilisation, when the intellect was trained to the highest point that it could reach, and on the great subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art, even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material prog- ress and material civilisation; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons
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and of dinner-parties, or senatorial major- ities and electoral corruption, The highest offices of state were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they were confined, in fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most ready use of the tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had been exchanged for distinctions of wealth. The struggles between plebeians and patricians for equality of privilege were over, and a new division had been formed between the party of property and a party that desired a change in the structure of society. The free cultivators were disappearing from the soil. Italy was being absorbed into vast estates, held by a few favoured families and culti- vated by slaves, while the old agricultural population was driven off the land, and was crowded into towns. The rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest, except for its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes was to obtain money without labour, and to spend it in idle enjoyment. Patriot- ism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendancy of the party which would maintain the existing order of things, or would overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good things which alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated in
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their hearts disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing splendour; the established forms were scrupulously ob- served. Public men spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any serious meaning there was none remaining beyond the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude."
Is not this a parallel to make one pause and think? And if our American republic is to escape the fate of Rome, to what cause will it be due? The Roman failure was due to the fact that "the men and women by whom the hard work of the world was done were chiefly slaves"; those who held the franchise, the free Roman citizens, were a comparatively small class, and the patricans bought them with "bread and circuses," and so held the reins of power. In our present time, however, those who do the work and those who have the ballot are the same class; and also they have the public school and the press, and the whole of modern science at their backs. More im- portant yet — the all-dominating fact — is the machine. The Roman chattel-slave worked with his hands, while the modern wage- slave works with tools of gigantic speed and power; which means that our modern econ- omic process, while infinitely more cruel and
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destructive, makes up for these qualities by the certainty and swiftness with which it rushes to its end. So it is that a Revo- lution which in Rome took centuries to culminate and fail, will require only decades in America to accomplish its inevitable triumph.
CHAPTER IV
SOCIAL DECAY
TF MY analysis of the industrial process ••• be correct, there will be two develop- ments observable in our society: the first a material change, a kind of economic apoplexy, the concentration of wealth in one portion of society, accompanied by an intensifi- cation of competition, a falling in the rate of interest, and a steady rise in the cost of living; and second, a spiritual change coincident with the material one, a protest against the rising frenzy of greed, and against the constantly increasing economic pressure.
It is important that these two processes should be clearly perceived, and their relationship correctly understood; for there is no aspect of the whole problem about which there is more bad thinking done. The two are cause and effect, and they explain and prove each other; and yet al- most invariably you will hear them cited as contradicting each other. If, for instance, one speaks of the ever-rising tide of misery and suffering in our society, he will be met with the response that "the world is getting
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better all the time." And when he asks for some proof of the statement, the reply will be that a great national awakening is going on, that we are developing new ideals and a new public spirit!
Similarly I have, time and again, when advocating this or that concrete remedy, been met with the statement that the cure for the evils of the time is publicity — that the people must be educated — that we must appeal to men's moral sense, etc. It is useless to argue with a person who cannot perceive that all these things are simply means to an end, and not the end. You cannot educate people just to be edu- cated; when you appeal to them, you have to appeal to them to do something.
One cannot insist too strongly upon the futility of sentiment in connection with this process. We are dealing with facts, with grim and brutal and merciless reality. And it will not avail you to try to smooth it over — it will not do any good to turn your head and refuse to face it. Here is the monster machine of competition, grinding remorse- lessly on ; the wealth of the world is rushing with cyclonic speed into one portion of the social body, and in the other portion whole classes of men and women and children are being swept out of existence, are being wiped off the economic slate. Exactly as capital piles up — at compounded and
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re-compounded interest — so also piles up the mass of human misery of every conceivable sort — luxury, debauchery and cynicism at the top, prostitution, suicide, insanity, and crime at the bottom. Political corruption spreads further and eats deeper, business practice becomes more impersonal and more ruthless ; and all progress awaits the swing of the pendulum, the time when the cumulative pressure of all this mass of misery shall nave driven the people to frenzy, and forced them to overturn the system of class exploitation and greed.
I purpose to cite in detail the symptoms of disease and decay in our body politic; before I begin, I wish to put my inter- pretation of them into one sentence, which a man can carry away with him. I say that the evils of our time are due without exception to one single cause — that our people are being driven, with constantly in- creasing rigour, to the ultimately hopeless task of paying interest upon a mass of capital which is increasing at compound interest.
Consider in the first place the broader aspect of the situation — the dollar-madness of the time which is the staple theme of the moralist. I have a friend who is in control of a great business concern, and who will read this little book with intense disapproval ; and yet so fearfully has this man been
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driven by the lash of competition that when I saw him last he could scarcely digest a bit of dry bread, and his hand trembled so that he could hardly lift a glass of water to his lips. He talked of his business in his sleep, and he could not go for a walk and forget it for five minutes. And why? Was it money? He has so much that his family could not spend it if they lived a hundred years; but it was his business, it was his life. He was caught in the mill and he could not get out. His is one of those few industries which have not yet formed a trust, and he is in the last gasp of the com- petitive struggle — he has to plot and plan day and night to get new orders, and to cut down expenses, and to keep up the dividends upon which his reputation rests.
And as it is with him, so it is with the rest of us. We have to play the game; we have to cut our neighbour's throat, knowing that otherwise our neighbour will cut ours. And year after year the pressure of the whole thing grows more tense. Suicide in the United States has increased from twelve per one hundred thousand of population in the year 1890, to sixteen in the year 1896, and seventeen in the year 1902; in Germany it rose from twenty to nearly twenty-two in the three years between 1900 and 1903; in England it rose from thirty in 1894, to thirty-fivein 1904, According to the Civilta
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Cattolica the frequency of this crime in Europe has increased four hundred per cent, while population has increased only sixty per cent. ; and there have been over one mil- lion suicides recorded in the last twenty-five years. There were ninety-two thousand in- sane persons in the United States in 1880, one hundred and six thousand in 1890, and one hundred and forty-five thousand in 1896. Per one thousand of population, there were twenty-nine prisoners in 1850, sixty-one in 1860, eighty-five in 1870, one hundred and seventeen in 1880, and one hundred and thir- ty-two in 1890. In 1876 the population of this country consumed eight and sixty-one one- hundred ths gallons of liquor per capita; in 1890 they consumed fifteen and fifty -three one-hundredths, and in 1902 they consumed nineteen and forty-eight one-hundredths. The actual consumption at the last date was a billion and a half of gallons. These figures take but a few lines to state ; and yet no human imagination can form any conception of the frightful mass of human anguish which they imply. They constitute in themselves a proof of the thesis here advanced, that there is at work in our society some great and fundamental evil force.*
*"An experienced magistrate. Recorder John W.Goff of New York, told me not Ipng since that in his judgment the course of crime in this coun- try is not only towards more frequency and gravity, but that it is chang- ing its old hot impulsiveness, openness and directness for cold calculation, secretiveness and deliberate intention to strike without being discovered . This progress and difference he attributes mediately and immediately to extending and deepening poverty." Henry George "The Menace of Priv- ilege."
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Whenever the administrators of our "con- stantly increasing mass of capital" find they are no longer making profits, they either reduce wages, or raise the price of their product. One or the other they must do, because without profits the machine cannot run. When good times come they some- times raise the wages again — because of the unions; but they never lower the price of the product — the poor consumer is a non- union man. Two years ago Mr. Rocke- feller put up the price of oil one cent, and the Beef Trust has done the same about once a year. And of course a general in- crease in prices is exactly the same as a general cut in wages — in either case the consumer has to work a little harder to make ends meet, and if he cannot work harder, he dies. The coal-miners rejoiced in the award of the Commission, untroubled by the extra fifty cents the coal companies put on the product; but when the miner comes to add up his account with the butcher and the oil man, he finds he is just where he was before. He does not know why, you understand — it is merely that he finds him- self compelled to do without something he used to consider a necessity. Dun's Review, figuring the cost of living in the United States upon a basis of 100, puts it at 72.455 in 1897, and 102.208 in 1904 — an increase of forty-one per cent. Bradstreet, reckon-
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ing in another way, shows an increase from 6.51 in 1897, to 9.05 in 1904, or thirty-nine per cent. According to the annual report of the Commissary General, United States Army, the cost of feeding the soldiers of the army has increased from eighteen cents in 1 898 to thirty-four and six-tenths cents in 1903. Statisticians have figured that the average employee earns ninety dollars a year more than he did twenty years ago, while it costs him to live on the same scale, one hundred and thirty dollars a year more. According to the last United States census the average compensation per wage earner was only three hundred and forty dollars, while the value of the manufactured product was two thousand four hundred and fifty dollars per wage earner. Perhaps no clearer state- ment of the intensification of exploitation can be found than in the fact that whereas the average profit on the products of all industries was three hundred and seventy- five dollars per wage earner in 1880, in 1900 it had increased to six hundred and twenty- six dollars.
Another consequence of the increasing strain is "race suicide"; which is simply a popular term for that "elimination of the middle class" which Karl Marx predicted half a century ago. The homilies of Presi- dent Roosevelt may have caused a few more superfluous bourgeois babies to be born;
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but I rather fancy that in general it has been a case of "everybody's business and nobody's business" — that the average middle-class American has no idea of lower- ing his standard of living for the purpose of affecting the census returns. As a result of a confidential census of "race suicide," taken in England and reported in the Popular Science Monthly, Mr. Sidney Webb found that the offspring had been volun- tarily limited in two hundred and twenty- four cases out of a total of two hundred and fifty-two marriages ; and out of the one hun- dred and twenty-eight cases in which the causes of limitation were given, economic causes were specified in seventy-three. Sim- ilar results would certainly follow an inquiry in this country; in fact Americans of refine- ment have come to have an instinctive feel- ing of repugnance to a large family; to have six or seven children is vulgar and "common," and suggestive of foreigners. The reason is simply that conditions now prevail which make large families im- possible, except to Poles and Hungarians and Italians and French-Canadians, people who are too ignorant to limit their offspring, and whose standards of life are close to animals — their children earning their own livings in sweatshops, mines and factories, as soon as they are able to walk.
And yet, low as our lowest classes have
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been ground, they are not low enough. Thousands of agents of steamship com- panies are gathering the outcasts from the sewers of Europe and shipping them here. The rate of immigration into this country was three hundred and eleven thousand in 1899, four hundred and eighty-seven thousand in 1901, six hundred and forty-eight thousand in 1902, eight hundred and fiftv- seven thousand in 1903, and over a million in 1905 — more than one-half of the last ship- ments being from Hungary, Russia, and southern Italy. All this, you must under- stand, is managed by the "System" which rules in our centres of industry. "In that unhappy anthracite country," writes Mr. John Graham Brooks, a person of authority, "the employers will tell you openly, and with conscious bravado, that they must get cheaper and cheaper labour to keep wages down, else they could make no money." And it was recently estimated by George W. Morgan, State Superintendent of Elec- tions in New York, that in one past year over six hundred thousand dollars profit was made by selling false naturalisation papers. The Federal authorities who had been investigating the frauds believed that over one hundred thousand sets of such papers had been sold, and that thirty thou- sand of these had been issued in New York City. Fully thirty per cent, of the Italian
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citizens in the southern district of New York were estimated to hold false papers.
Cheaper and cheaper labour! Women's labour and children's labour! Over one million of women are at present working in factories alone in this country; and one million and three-quarters of children between ten and fifteen years of age are engaged in gainful occupations. In the cotton factories of the South, while the number of men employed increased seventy-nine per cent, in the past ten years, the number of women increased one hundred and fifty- eight per cent, and the number of children under sixteen increased two hundred and seventy per cent. The number employed in Alabama alone was estimated by the Committee on Child Labour to be fifty thousand, with thirty-four per cent, of them under twelve years, and ten per cent, under ten years. These children work twelve hours a day, and the oldest get fifty cents and the youngest get nine cents. Here are the descriptions of observers:
44 A little boy of six years has been working 12 hours a day, from 6:20 A. M. to 6:20 p. M. (40 minutes off at noon), for 15 cents per day.
"Three boys aged respectively 9, 8, and 7 years. The boy aged 9 has been working two years, the boy aged 8 has been working three years; the boy aged 7 years has been
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working two years. These little fellows work 13 hours a day, from 5:20 A. M. to 6:30 p. M., with twenty minutes for dinner. In 'rush' periods their mill works until 9:30 and 10 p. M. They were refused a holiday for Thanksgiving and they obtained Christmas Day only by working till 7 P. M. in order to mak:e up the time."
Mrs. Irene Ashby-Macfadden says: "I have talked with a little boy of seven years, in Alabama, who worked for forty nights; and another child not nine years old, who at six years old had been on the night shift eleven months."
Miss Jane Addams, of Chicago, says: "In South Carolina, in a large new mill, I found a child of five working at night. In Columbia, S. C., in a mill controlled by Northern capital, I stood at ten-thirty at night and saw many children who did not know their own ages, working from 6 p. M. to 6. A. M."
Here is a description of their surroundings :
"An atmosphere redolent of oil, thick with lint, the deafening, incessant whir of machinery, in summer stifling heat, always the insensate machinery claiming the strained attention of young eyes and tiny fingers, broken threads clamorously crying for adjustment, all requiring not hard work, but incessant vigilance, springing feet and nimble fingers. Young eyes watching
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anxiously for a fault in these intricately constructed machines, paying with crushed or broken members for an error in judgment, for the crime of carelessness, how must the responsibility — lightly smiled at by adults — weigh upon the barely developed intelligence of a young child ? And after long hours, lagging footsteps, throbbing heads, wandering attention — what sort of stone is this, O Brothers, to be placed in the children's hands who cry for bread ?"
Several years ago I saw in the Indepen- dent an advertisement setting forth the advantages of the State of Alabama as an investing-place for capital. I wish I had cut it out. The point of it was that there were no "labour-troubles" in Ala- bama; the boycott being prohibited there, and labour unions being sued for damages and smashed. The advertisement might have added that there is no factory-legis- lation to amount to anything, and that the percentage of native white illiteracy is fourteen and e ght- tenths. There is factory- legislation in Massachusetts, and it is en- forced, and the percentage of native white illiteracy is only eight-tenths of one per cent., or one-eighteenth of the proportion of Ala- bama. So in the last overproduction crisis the mills of Alabama were running, while those of Massachusetts were shut down; and the special correspondence of the New
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York Evening Post contained the following pregnant item:
"ATLANTA, Ga., June 12 — 'The sceptre of commercial supremacy is falling from the palsied hand of New England industry; apparently it is to be taken up by the South. Grasp it firmly. The whole country, torn by labour disputes, looks to the South to make the final stand against legislative encroachments on the liberty of the individ- ual workman and the individual employer.'
"So Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, Conn., spoke to the members of the Georgia Industrial Association, at their annual con- vention at Warm Springs, Ga., last week. This association was one of the earliest to recognise the depressing effect of restrictive labour legislation upon the cotton manu- facturing of New England; its members fear that similar legislation in the South would be followed by even more disastrous consequences, and what has injuriously affected the more hardy and older establish- ments of the North, would, they believe, stunt the growth of the infant industries of the South, if it did not actually crush them."
I made an effort in "The Jungle" to show what is happening to the wage-earner in our modern highly concentrated industries, under the regime of a monopoly price and a competitive wage. I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there,
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and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report. But the reader does not have to take my word for it, there are any number of studies by indepen- dent investigators. Let him go to a library and consult the American Journal of Sociol- ogy for March, 1901, and read the reports of a graduate of the University of Chicago, who investigated the conditions in the garment-trade in that city. Here were girls working ten hours a day for forty cents a week. The average of all the "dress- makers" was but ninety cents a week, and they were able to find employment on the average only forty-two weeks in the year. The "pants-finishers" received a dollar and thirty-one cents, and they were employed only twenty-seven weeks in the year. The general average in the entire trade was less than two dollars and a half a week, and the average number of weeks of work was only thirty-one, making an average yearly wage for a whole industry of seventy-six dollars and seventy-four cents per year. Or let the reader get Mr. Jacob A. Riis's pictures of conditions in the slums of New York. In his book, "How the Other Half Lives," Mr. Riis states that in the block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney and Ridge streets, the size of which is two hundred by three hundred feet, are two thousand two
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hundred and forty-four human beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty- second streets, Amsterdam and West End End avenues, are over four thousand. Jack London, in his "War of The Classes," quotes the Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the block bounded by Hester, Canal, Eldridge and Forsyth Streets: "In a room twelve feet by eight, and five and a half feet high, it was found that nine persons slept and prepared their food. In another room, located in a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of seventeen, two women and four boys, nine, ten, eleven and fifteen years old — fourteen persons in all!" Apro- pos of this it may be well to add that an investigation conducted in Berlin established the fact that with families living in one room the death rate was one hundred and sixty- three per thousand, while with families living in three or four rooms it was twenty. What it was with three or four families living in one room does not appear. According to a recent report of the New York Tenement House Commission there were four hundred thousand "dark rooms" —rooms without any outside opening whatever. Mr. Riis has been so successful in battling with such conditions that he has been called by President Roosevelt "the most useful
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American." Neither the President nor Mr. Riis understand economics, and so probably they are both perplexed at the result of his ten years of effort — which is that rents on the East Side have gone up about fifty per cent, in the last two years, and there have been riots and evictions — and a Socialist all but elected to Congress!
But Mr. Riis is a business man, and he can figure the social cost of these evil con- ditions. Of the New York tenements he writes :
"They are the hot beds of epidemics that carry death to the rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a stand- ing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they taint the family life with deadly moral contagion."
In his newly published discussion of social problems called "In the Fire of the Heart," Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine writes of the country's situation as follows:
"And over ten millions of our people are in a state of chronic poverty at this very hour — almost one out of every seven, or,
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to make full allowance, one out of every eight of all our people are in the condition where they have not sufficient food, and clothing, and shelter to keep them in a state of physical and mental efficiency. And the sad part of it is that large additional numbers — numbers most appalling for such a country as this, are each year, and through no fault of their own, dropping into this same condition.
"And a still sadder feature of it is, that each year increasingly large numbers of this vast army of people, our fellow-beings, are, unwillingly on their part and in the face of almost superhuman efforts to keep out of it till the last moment, dropping into the pauper class — those who are compelled to seek or to receive aid from a public, or from private charitv, in order to exist at all, already in numoers about four million, while increasing numbers of this class, the pauper, sink each year, and so naturally, into the vicious, the criminal, the inebriate class. In other words, we have gradually allowed to be built around us a social and economic system which yearly drives vast numbers of hitherto fairly well-to-do, strong, honest, earnest, willing and admirable men with their families into the condition of poverty, and under its weary, endeavour- strangling influences many of these in time, hoping against hope, struggling to the last
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moment in their semi-incapacitated and pathetic manner to keep out of it, are forced to seek or to accept public or private charity, and thus sink into the pauper class.
"It is a well-authenticated fact that strong men, now weakened by poverty, will avoid it to the last before they will take this step. Many after first parting with every thing they have, break down and cry like babes when the final moment comes, and they can avoid it no longer. Numbers at this time take their own lives rather than pass through the ordeal, and still larger numbers desert their families for whom they have struggled so valiantly — it is almost invariably the woman who makes her way to the charity agencies. The public and private charities cost the country during the past year as nearly as can be conserv- atively arrived at, over two hundred million dollars.
"Moreover, a strange law seems to work with an accuracy that seems almost mar- vellous. It is this. Notwithstanding the brave and almost superhuman struggles that are gone through with, on the part of these, before they can take themselves to the public or private charity for aid, when the step is once taken, they gradually sink into the condition where all initiative and all sense of self-reliance seems to be stifled or lost, and it is only in a rare case now and then
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that they ever cease to be dependent, but remain content with the alms that are doled out to them — practically never do they rise out of that condition again. Talk with practically any charity agent or worker, one with a sufficiently extended experience, and you will find that there is scarcely more than one type of testimony concerning this. And as this condition gradually becomes chronic, and endeavour and initiative and self-respect are lost, a certain proportion then sink into the condition of the criminal, the diseased, the chronically drunk, the inebriate, from which reclamation is still more difficult."
The fullest and most authoritative treatise upon conditions in America is of course Mr. Robert Hunter's "Poverty." Mr. Hunter is a settlement-worker, and he has gathered his material in the midst of the conditions of which he writes. He quotes, for instance, the following definite facts, which are obtained from official sources:
"1903: twenty per cent, of the people of Boston in distress.
"1897: nineteen per cent, of the people of New York state in distress.
"1899: eighteen per cent, of the people of New York state in distress.
"1903 : fourteen per cent, of the families of Manhattan evicted.
"Every year ten per cent, (about) of those
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who die in Manhattan have pauper burials." "On the basis of these figures," Mr. Hunter continues, " it would seem fair to estimate that certainly not less than fourteen per cent, of the people, in prosperous times (1903), and probably not less than twenty per cent, in bad times (1897), are in distress. The estimate is a conservative one, for despite all the imperfections which may be found in the data, and there are many, any allow- ance for the persons who are given aid by sources not reporting to the State Board, or for those persons not aided by the author- ities of Boston, or for those persons who, al- though in great distress, are not evicted, must counterbalance the duplications or errors which may exist in the figures either of distress or evictions.
"These figures, furthermore, represent only the distress which manifests itself. There is no question but that only a part of of those in poverty, in any community, apply for charity. I think anyone living in a Settlement will support me in saying that many families who are obviously poor— that is, underfed, underclothed, or badly housed — never ask for aid or suffer the social disgrace of eviction. Of course, no one could estimate the proportion of those who are evicted or of those who ask assistance to the total number in poverty; for whatever opinion one may have formed is based, not
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on actual knowledge, gained by inquiry, but on impressions, gained through friendly intercourse, My own opinion is that prob- ably not over half of those in poverty ever apply for charity, and certainly not more than that proportion are evicted from their homes. However, I should not wish an opinion of this sort to be used in estimating, from the figures of distress, etc., the number of those in poverty. And yet from the facts of dis- tress, as given, and from opinions formed, both as a charity agent and as a Settlement worker, I should not be at all surprised if the number of those in poverty in New York, as well as in other large cities and industrial centres, rarely fell below twenty-five per cent, of all the people."
Such are the conditions in America to-day ; what they would be in the future, if present tendencies went on unchecked, the reader may learn by going to Europe, where in- dustrial evolution has been slower in coming to a head, and where the people have been held down by religious superstition and military despotism. Let him take Mr. Richard Whiteing's "No. 5 John Street"; or, if he has a particularly strong stomach, let him try Jack London s "People of the Abyss," or Charles Edward Russell's terrify- ing story of the poverty of India, in his "Soldiers of the Common Good." Here is a scene in a London park, selected,
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by way of example, from the first-named book:
"We went up the narrow, gravelled walk. On the benches on either side was arrayed a mass of miserable and diseased humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving. It wras a welter of filth and rags, of all manner of loathesome skin-diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness9 indecency, leering mon- strosities and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly nine months old, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor cover- ing, nor with anyone looking after it. Next, half a dozen men sleeping bolt upright, and leaning against one another in their sleep. In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the hus- band (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and another woman with thread and needle, sewing up rents. Ad- joining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his cloth- ing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with his head in the lap of a woman, not more
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than twenty-five years old, and also asleep. 'Those women there,5 said our guide, 'will sell themselves for thru 'pence or tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread.' He said it with a cheerful sneer."
And then turn back to the preface: "It must not be forgotten that the time of which I write was considered 'good times* in England. The starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery, which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest pros- perity. Following the summer in question came a hard winter. To such an extent did the suffering and positive starvation increase that society was unable to cope with it. Great numbers of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread. Mr. Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January, 1903, to the New York Indepen- dent, brieflv epitomises the situation, as follows: 'The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every night at their doors for food and shelter. All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famish- ing residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.'
And then consider that in the city where
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this was going on, the leading newspaper (the Times) was printing a three-column article setting forth the fact that competition had grown so great that it was now no longer possible for a "gentleman" to maintain his status with a family in London upon an income of half a million dollars a year!
Yet if one wishes for social contrasts, there is really no need of crossing the ocean. Mr. Schwab's nine million dollar palace in New York will answer the purpose; or so will the St. Regis Hotel. The swinging doors of the St. Regis, so the visitor is in- formed, cost ten thousand dollars apiece; the panelling of the smoking-room cost forty-five thousand dollars, and the carriage- entrance rain-shed cost eighty-five thousand dollars. The walls of it are covered with a silk brocade, which cost twenty dollars a yard, and the ceiling is gilded with material costing one dollar an ounce. It cost a hun- dred thousand dollars to fit up the office, and four million dollars to build the whole structure. A two-room apartment in it, without meals, is valued at nine thousand six hundred dollars a year; and for your meals you may try — say, " milk-fed chicken " at two dollars for each tiny portion.
Perhaps this seems monstrous; but it really is not — it is a perfectly inevitable con- sequence of industrial competition, and of the "constantly increasing mass of
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capital." Mr. John Jacob Astor, who owns the hotel, has an income of more than its value every year, and he is in desperate straits to find any way of investing it by which he can make profits. There are seven thousand millionaires in this country, who want the best, the only best they know being what costs the most; and so he knew that if he built a hotel exceeding in cost any other hotel in the world, that hotel would pay him profits. For precisely the same reason a number of buildings are now being torn down in Brooklyn to make room for a graveyard for wealthy people's pet dogs.
The founder of the Astor fortune came to New York a century ago and bought land while it was cheap. Millions of men have since contributed their labour to the build- ing up of New York; and no one of them did anything without adding to the wealth of the Astors — who merely sat by and watched. Now the property of the family is estimated to be worth four hundred and fifty millions of dollars, according to Mr. Burton J. Hendricks's recent account of it in McClure's Magazine. It includes half a dozen hotels like the St. Regis; it includes also innumerable slum-tenements with "dark rooms." Its value grows by leaps and bounds — one corner lot on Fifth Avenue "made" them seven hundred thou- sand dollars in two years. To Mr. William
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Waldorf Astor alone the harried and over- driven population of Manhattan Island delivers eight or ten millions of tribute money every year; and Mr. William Wal- dorf Astor resides at Clieveden, Taplow, Bucks, England — giving as his reason the fact that "America it not a fit place for a gentleman to live in."
The fundamental characteristic of the regime under which we live is that it values a man only in so far as he is capable of producing wealth. Hence one of the signs of the increasing difficulty of making profits will be an increasing recklessness of human life. Our railroads killed six thousand people in 1895, seven thousand in 1899, eight thousand in 1902, nine thousand in 1903, and ten thousand in 1904; they injured thirty-three thousand in 1895, forty-four thousand in 1899, sixty-four thousand in 1902, seventy-six thousand in 1903, and eighty- four thousand in 1904. According to the statistics of the Interstate Commerce Com- mission, our railways injured one passenger out of every one hundred and eighty-three thousand passengers they carried in 1894; in 1904 they injured one out of every seventy- eight thousand. If casualties are to con- tinue increasing at the same rate until 1912, there are one hundred thousand people under sentence of sudden death, and a number doomed to be maimed greater than
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the entire population of the District of Columbia, Delaware, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and the Hawaiian Islands.
In 1890, before the present appalling slaughter began, we were Tailing, of a given number of employees, twice as many as the State-owned roads of Germany, and three times as many as Austria. The street railroads of New York City alone take one human life every day, or one in ten thousand of the population every year. People walk about the streets carelessly, but tremble when there is a thunderstorm; yet the street-cars kill ten persons in a year for every one that the lightning kills in the lifetime of a man !
These things create indignation in our pulpits and editorial rooms; but any prac- tical railroad man could tell you that to stop them would be to overthrow society. The reason they occur is that it costs less to pay the damages than it would to take proper precautions, and if the railroads were forced to take the precautions, many of them would have to shut down at once. The situation is covered so completely in the following news item, clipped from the Minneapolis Journal of May 26, 1904, that I cannot do better than to quote it entire:
"Because James J. Hill guaranteed eight per cent, to the stockholders of the Burling-
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ton when he assumed control of that system, many of the older employees are undergoing what they consider real hardship. Ten days ago the Journal voiced the complaints of Burlington employees on other parts of the system, mentioning the fact that the runs to and from the Twin Cities had been com- bined in some way, to squeeze more work out of the train crews. The new schedule has now been in effect longer and com- plaints are correspondingly more emphatic. No dissatisfaction is openly expressed, as the Hill guillotine gets nobody more surely than the man who talks too much.
"Trainmen complain that with the long runs and long hours they are forced to work to a point almost beyond human endurance. They are haunted by the fear of accidents from unpreventable neglect of duty. They hold that the running of trains in safety depends upon the vigilance and alertness of the crews and they cannot do themselves and their employers justice, when com- pelled to work long hours on fast runs.
"Crews are now running from Minne- apolis to Chicago, a distance of about 430 miles, with seventy- two stops. The men start from Minneapolis at 7:30 A. M., and arrive, on locals, in Chicago at 9:35 p. M. The men leaving Chicago on No. 50 at 10:50 p. M. arrive in Minneapolis at 1 :20 p. M. the next afternoon.
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"Trainmen declare that in making this schedule the management has broken faith and virtually abrogates previous working agreements. Hints of a strike are made. In discussing the conditions an old Bur- lington employee said :
" 'A conductor and his crew feel a sense of responsibility for the lives of those upon a train. A man can only be worked so far when he becomes actually irresponsible. I hate to feel that I am in any way responsible for the lives of passengers on a train when the length of the run and hours have worked me beyond my limit. There is no flagman on the train, and the brake- man has to help load baggage, brake, flag, and do anything that comes up. He is certainly not in good condition to be an alert flagman on the latter end of the run.' "*
In the same way it is cheaper for a theatre- manager to bribe police officials with free tickets than to comply with the regulations of the Fire Department; and so it is that five or six hundred people are burned up in
* "In the matter of rigging the stock-market the American railroad manager has no superior. In the matter of providing safe and expeditious facilities for transportation he has no inferior in any nation of the first rank. He can manipulate political conventions. He can debauch legislatures. He can send his paid attorneys to Congress and sometimes put them on the bench. In these matters he is a master, just as he is a master in the art of issuing and juggling securities. It is only in the operation of railroads that he is deficient. The mere detail of transporting lives and property safely and satisfactorily he seems to regard as unworthy of his genius. His equipment is usually inadequate. His road-bed is generally second-class tor worse. His employees are undisciplined and his system is archaic. Whatever the causes may be, the fact remains that, judged by the results of operation, the American railroad manager is incompetent, and the records of death and disaster prove it."— New York World.
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five minutes. It is easier to bribe a building inspector than it is to put steel rivets in a building, and so you have a Darlington Hotel collapse, and kill ten or twenty workingmen. And a few weeks later came the Slocum disaster, and a helpless steam- boat captain was punished, and the re- sponsible capitalists not even named. At the same time, in Trenton, New Jersey, some other capitalists were arrested for making life-preservers with iron bars in them. Of course they were not punished, for everyone understands that such things cannot be helped. In 1893 the number of miners killed in the United States and Canada was two and fifty-three hundredths per thousand; in 1902 it was three and fifty-one hundredths. Better precautions against accidents were one of the demands for making which the miners of Colorado were strung up to telegraph poles, shut in bull-pens, beaten and "deported." Their mortality was thirty-two per thousand in ten years; the mortality among railroad brake- men is now thirty-two per thousand in two years, so it was very unreasonable of the miners to complain.
There are annually, says Social Service, 344,900 accidents among the 7,086,000 people engaged in this country in manufac- turing and mechanical pursuits. It calculates that if the percentage of accidents among
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the other 23,000,000 employed in other occupations is only one-tenth as much as the above, it means that another 100,000 must be added to the list. " This is perpetual war on humanity," the paper goes on to say, " and more bloody than any civil or inter- national war known to history. This war is costing suffering, physical and mental, which is beyond calculation. It is costing great economic loss. It is creating a sense of wrong and a feeling of class-hatred on the part of those who are its victims."
In the same category of waste of human life belong all the facts of over-driving, long hours, and irregular employment among workingmen. Under the old Southern sys- tem of slavery the master took care of his ser- vant the year round; but the wage-slave is kept only while he is needed, and only while he remains at his maximum of work- ing efficiency. Recently in a single month, I clipped from a New York newspaper, items to the effect that the Brooklyn street-railroad combine was discharging all of its super- annuated employees; that the master-pilots of the Great Lakes had agreed to engage no man over forty; that the Delaware and Hudson Railroad Company had just pub- lished a rule barring all over thirty-five; and that the Carnegie Steel Company had done the same.
And in this same category of waste of
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human life belong all the facts of woman and child-labour. For of course the children die; and the women produce deformed and idiot and degenerate offspring, to fill our asylums and prisons. Trie reader is referred, for first-hand accounts of the life of the American woman wage-slave, to Van Vorst's" The Woman who Toils," and to that fascinating human document, "The Long Day." In Mr. John Spargo's "The Bitter Cry of the Children," he will find a mass of facts about child-labour, the most hideous of all the evils incidental to the process of wealth-concentration.
There is, if one had only time to point it out, no tiniest nook of our society where human lives are not being ground up for profit; the capitalists are ground up, as Mr. Schwab was, and the meanest woman of the town shares his fate. There was a time when a prostitute was an indepen- dent person, who could support herself until she grew old; nowadays, under the stress of competition, every city has its prostitution trust. It takes capital to pay the police, and the business is therefore in the hands of the proprietors of houses, who buy young girls out of the slums and immi- grant population by thousands and tens of thousands, use them up in a year or two, and then fling them out into the gutters to die, often when they are not out of their
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teens. In the same way the gambler and the saloon-keeper are now as much em- ployees as are the officials of the Standard Oil Company: the whole profits of these occupations flowing into the hands of some "captain of industry" as inevitably as all the rills on the mountain-side flow into the river. All of these facts are perfectly familiar, but for the sake of concreteness, I will quote a paragraph from Mr. Steffens's book, *'The Shame of the Cities." He is telling of the city of Pittsburg:
"The vice-graft ... is a legitimate business, conducted, not by the police, but in an orderly fashion by syndicates, and the chairman of one of the parties at the last election, said it was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. I saw a man who was laughed at for offering seventeen thousand five hundred dollars for the slot-machine concession; he was told that it was let for much more. 'Speak- easies' (unlicensed drinking places) pay so well that when they earn five hundred dollars or more in twenty-four hours their proprietors often make a bare living. Dis- orderly houses are managed by ward syn- dicates. Permission is had from the syn- dicate real-estate agent, who alone can rent them. The syndicate hires a house from the owners at, say, thirty-five dollars a month, and he lets it to a woman at from
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thirty-five to fifty dollars a week. For furniture, the tenant must go to the 'official furniture-man/ who delivers one thousand dollars worth of 'fixings' for a note for three thousand dollars, on which high interest must be paid. For beer the tenant must go to the 'official bottler/ and pay two dollars for a one-dollar case of beer; for wines and liquors to the 'official liquor- commissioner/ who charges ten dollars for five dollars' worth ; for clothes to the 'official wrapper-maker.' These women may not buy shoes, hats, jewellery, or any other lux- ury or necessity except from the official concessionaries, and then only at the official, monopoly prices."
And by way of conclusion, in reference to this particular aspect of the consequences of the "increasing mass of capital," let me quote the following little incident, which a friend of mine clipped from one of the New York newspapers:
"One night a young girl called at the entrance to the House of the Good Shep- herd in New York City; she asked for food and a place to sleep. 'Twas a pitiful tale she told the matron in charge. She told of her parents having died and left her alone in the great dark city; she told of jobs she had secured but was discharged owing to her physical inability to keep pace with the machine, and as a last resort she appealed
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to this institution for succour and support. The matron in attendance, after having heard this terrible tale of woe and being thoroughly convinced as to the girl's honesty and integrity, as well as to her virtue, in- formed her that she could not take her in there, as that institution was established for the reclamation of fallen women only. The poor girl went away, but on the follow- ing night she returned. . . . 'You may take me now/ she said, 'you may take me now, for I am a fallen woman!' "
CHAPTER V
BUSINESS AND POLITICS
TN THIS discussion of the process of ••• wealth-concentration, I have so far purposely omitted all mention of the most important aspect of the phenomenon — the seizing by the "constantly increasing mass of capital" of the powers of the State, and their use for purpose of intensifying ex- ploitation. I have avoided that feature, partly because it is conspicuous enough to deserve a chapter to itself, but mainly in order to make clear my view-point, that the phenomenon, while important, is secondary — an effect rather than a cause.
This is, of course, contrary to the view usually taken. In most discussions of the problems of the time, it is taken for granted that "government by special interests" is the source of all the evil. But while recog- nising how enormously the process of wealm concentration has been accelerated by the political alliance, it is my thesis that exactly the same conditions would have developed had economic forces been left to work out their own results. I maintain that economic competition is a self-destroying stage in
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social development; and that to regard it as permanent is simply not to realise what it is. For competition is a struggle, and the purpose of every struggle is a victory; to conceive of a struggle without the inten- tion to end the struggle, is simply impossible in the nature of things. In the industrial combat the end is the victory of a class, and the reduction of all other classes to servitude — with the ultimate extinction of all individ- uals not needed by the victors.
Again, it is generally the custom to regard this phenomenon of class-government with indignation and astonishment, as if it were something abnormal and monstrous; but from the point of view of this discussion, it is a perfectly natural and inevitable incident of the intensification of competition. You are to picture Capital, seeking profits; like a wild beast in a cage, pacing about, watching for an opening, here and there; like water, caught behind a dam, creeping up, crowding forward, feeling for a weak spot. And the one thing to be determined is: Is there any way in which profits can be made through the powers of government? If so, it is quite certain that there will be an attempt made by capital to get possession of those powers.
You can see the thing in its germ in any primitive community; I once amused my- self by studying it in a little village in Can- ada, where the trusts had never been heard
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of. The storekeeper was a rich man, and he had a "pull" with the squire and with the constable and with the game-warden; he did little favours for them, and they for him — so that a poor "Frenchman" who was suspected of stealing a pair of socks found himself in jail before he knew why. And then there was a big "lumber man" in the township; he owned all the jobs, and he traded with the store-keeper, and the storekeeper in return ran the political machine. That was the whole story of the politics of the district — except that there were several fellows of independent tem- perament, who grumbled, and who con- stituted the germ of the Socialist movement.
Political corruption first became epidemic in our country in 1861, when the government had to go into business upon an enormous scale. There were contractors — and com- petition. And then, of course, there was the tariff, a shrewd scheme to compel the people to pay high prices without knowing it. Later on someone discovered the brilliant idea of the franchise, the selling for a nominal sum of the right to tax the public without limit. And so capital went into politics.
At first it did a purely retail business, buying up the legislators as it needed them; but soon the thing became systematised, and Capital got wholesale prices — it financed
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the machines, and chose its own candidates. The process culminated at the beginning of the present decade, when "big business" was in practically undisputed possession of both the majority parties, of Congress and the Presidency, and of the governments in every town, city and state in America.
You see, it was as if our society was in unstable equilibrium. We had a political democracy, and we were developing an industrial aristocracy; and it was impossible for them to exist side by side. Innocent people had taken it for granted that they could; but it is no more possible for a democ- racy to be aristocratic in any of its aspects ana remain a democracy, tnan it is for a virtuous man to be vicious in one particular, and remain a virtuous man. Democracy is not a code of laws, nor is it a system of government — it is an attitude of soul. It nas as its basis a perception of the spiritual nature of man, from which follows the corollary that all men either are equal, or must become so. And so between aristocracy and democracy, wherever and under whatever aspects they appear, there is, and forever must be, eternal and deadly war. Here is the testimony and the warning of the greatest of American democrats, Abraham Lincoln, who if he could rise from his grave to speak to us in these times of our country's trial could speak no more pertinent
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words than these. He had declared that the Slavery question was one between right and wrong. "Right and wrong," he saia — "that is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the principles which have stood face to face from the beginning of time and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says: 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labour, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."
It is worth while pointing out the utter hopelessness of the struggle. On the one hand was the capitalist, with his millions, alert, aggressive and resourceful; he had an army of experts to help him — shrewd attorneys, skilful lobbyists, newspapers and publicity bureaus, political henchmen trained all their lifetime to the trade; he was cold and unscrupulous — as a rule he
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was not a man at all, but a corporation, a thing without a soul, a monster "clamouring for dividends." He had a thousand de- vices, a thousand pretences, a thousand disguises. And opposed to him was the Public — unorganised, uninformed, and sound asleep!
Recently, when Mr. H. G. Wells was in this country, I had a long talk with him, and he asked me how I accounted for the saturnalia of corruption in our political life; he said that our people did not seem