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Title: The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence

Author: Upton Sinclair

Release date: January 23, 2021 [eBook #64373]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC: A STUDY OF THE AMERICA OF TEN YEARS HENCE ***




                        THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC




                        BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR

                     THE JUNGLE
                     MANASSAS
                     THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING
                     PRINCE HAGEN
                     KING MIDAS

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy of Everybody’s Magazine_

  “VOORUIT”
  Home of the Socialist Societies of Ghent
]




                        The Industrial Republic
               A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence


                                   By
                             UPTON SINCLAIR

                              ILLUSTRATED

[Illustration]

                                New York
                       Doubleday, Page & Company
                                  1907




                          COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
                       DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
                          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 working 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
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 miniature at the outset; so that one may learn in two or
three minutes exactly what my book contains, and judge whether he cares
to read it.

It is my belief that the student of a generation 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.

The student will furthermore perceive that this evolutionary process had
two manifestations, 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 revolutions, 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 possession 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 property of a few. A man can no longer be put in jail or
taxed by a king, but he 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 new revolution, and the establishment of
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC.

What do I mean by an Industrial Republic? I mean an organisation for the
production 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 the forces which are now rapidly developing 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 accomplished
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 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 possess,
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 biographies, but the documents of
the time, speeches and sermons and letters, newspapers 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 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 unfolding 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 watching 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 figures back and forth. This famous
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 understand 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 Cuvier,
the naturalist, who could construct a prehistoric animal from a bit of
its bone. I have 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 many more vertebræ 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


                                                  PAGE
                          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

                     VII. The Industrial Republic  215




                             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. coöperative distribution of information            220

 Helicon Hall                                                           274




                        THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC




                               CHAPTER I
                           THE COMING CRISIS


The thing which most impresses the student 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 incompatible types of civilisation; between an
agricultural and conservative aristocracy, and a commercial and
progressive democracy. We can see that each society developed 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 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 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 now 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 immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves.”
They formed a society and started a paper called the _Liberator_. When
governors of Southern states protested 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 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 fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to
make, proselytes among the respectable classes of the people.”

Nevertheless, the danger of this propaganda 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 _Liberator_ 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
movement. Their leader was a woman’s suffragist, an infidel, a
prohibitionist, and a vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution as “an
agreement with Death, and a covenant 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 platform with them, and they opened
schools for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were 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 by 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 Capital; some wanted to restrict the
domestic slave-trade. All of these people, of course, denied indignantly
that they were Abolitionists, 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 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 supporters; 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 Congress could not
restrict slavery in the Territories, which meant that the Republican
Party had no right to exist. To “cheerfully acquiesce” in the 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
revolutionary 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 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 Democrats were not to
be trusted. When the split came, in Charleston, Yancey of Alabama
explained this. “When I was a boy in the Northern States,” he said,
“Abolitionists were pelted with rotten eggs. But now this band of
Abolitionists has spread and grown into three bands—the Black
Republicans, the Free-soilers, and the Squatter-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 Constitution 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 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 colossus lay a heap
of dust and ruins at their feet!


I have said that I believe that our country 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 ultimately permeating the
whole thought of 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
cultivation—only the top of the soil was used, and ten or fifteen crops
exhausted it. Virginia 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 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
then come a time when the other pairs, having less and less, were
finally unable 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 increasing
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 “muckrake 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 opportunities 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 produce, 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 follows 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 receiving 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 understood, are fractions; and fractions may be decreased as
well by increasing the denominator, 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 only 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 hundred, and has been as high as eight hundred in
the market. This is assuming that Mr. 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 capitalists are doing the same—the American
millionaire 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 consequence is, therefore, that year after year we
are paying the vast mass of our people mere living wages, and all the
surplus product of our toil we are selling, and devoting to the creation
of new instruments of production. We have, mark you, machinery that
creates products for hundreds of times as many men as it employs, and
still we 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, demanding 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 workingman, “we are _all_ starving.
_Why_ is there no work?”

“The reason there is no work is ‘overproduction.’ 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.”

“And my friend here,” goes on the workingman—“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 workingman has been thinking for
himself—and evolving a quite new doctrine, all his own, concerning the
property interests of the 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 collapse of the
profit-making system, the thing for the people to do is to take
possession 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
underlying 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 pamphlet 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 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 increased, 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 organised, and in 1877, at
the convention held in Newark, it became the Socialist Labour Party. The
Socialists were intent upon building up a working-class party for
independent 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 adherents 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 for the eight-hour work-day
broke out in various parts of the country. In 1884, Laurence Gronlund
published his “Coöperative Commonwealth.” In 1888 Edward Bellamy
published his “Looking Backward,” 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’ Association 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 proceeds were used in founding and
developing the Ruskin coöperative 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
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 recesses
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 Railway 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 Railway 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 propaganda
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 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 supporting 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 capitalist, 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-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 monthlies 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 paper,
_Wilshire’s Magazine_ (New York), has increased its circulation from
fifty-five thousand to two hundred and seventy thousand 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 title is “Why Workingmen Should Be Socialists,” by Gaylord Wilshire.

And in giving the figures of the Socialist growth, it is worth while to
point out that this 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 England, 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 electing 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 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 movement 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 history, 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 you 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 tremendous motive, and that they will not be apt to
abandon their efforts until they have accomplished some proportionately
significant result.




                               CHAPTER II
                          INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION


Herbert 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, having 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 neighbour. 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, one tribe unites with another against a
common enemy, and the strongest man in the two rules both; which process
of combining 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 kingdom, 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 was a marvellous piece of work when it was done; it had men
graded into a thousand 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 administrative officials, up to the king. It had
likewise the whole outfit of ideas and customs necessary to its
operation; it was complete 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
purpose 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
imprisoned and exiled, burned and beheaded; 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 exemplification of the process of life; the
combining of a number of simple things into one complex thing. The means
was struggle 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 individual 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, following close upon the heels of the evolution of
political society, you have the evolution of _industrial_ society.

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, because
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 schoolmaster or the
judge as he. But then his goods expand and war begins—industrial war, I
mean—a horse-trade, for example. Political 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 tenfold. 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 the same, and its
purpose is the building up of a capable industrial organism. Precisely
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,
corresponding 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 Tarbell’s “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 sometimes, 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 entrusted 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 monarchical 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. Incidentally, Louis the Great gave the world a
race-heritage and a civilisation; incidentally, Mr. Rockefeller
furnishes the world with oil. Also—what is true in one case is true in
the other—the Standard Oil Company 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 is like a
mighty vessel, defying the tempests. Is it any wonder that those who
have constructed 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 epidemic 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 gunpowder. 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, tobacco, and garlic, mud-baths,
camphor, and thieves’ vinegar. The last could only be procured by going
to the shop. The purchaser going to get it was careful to have a piece
of tarred rope wet with camphor at his nose, and in his pocket his
handkerchief soaked with the last preventive he had heard of. He shunned
the 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, oatmeal, tea, barley-water, or a vile concoction
called apple-tea. If his head pained him or his tongue felt rough, he
would immediately 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
flew up, all unheeded, and bit him. And so he died!

It seemed to me a peculiarly neat illustration 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 mosquitoes, 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 speculation, 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 physicians of high standing might have been found to ridicule
the idea? That newspapers might have refused to print arguments 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
causing 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 commune 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 purposes 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 for the
production of wealth, whose members 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 unamiable 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 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 Revolution? The French monarchy was
organised 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.
Everyone is familiar with the picture of the horrible 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 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 generation,
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 immigrants 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 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 expenditures, 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; railroads 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 improvement 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 obvious one—it is to supply the
needs of men; and when it is adequate to that purpose, it is complete.
But how will you know when _that_ is? Why, by the simplest of methods in
the world—by that insufficiency of profits which I described before. You
are in business for profits, you understand; and when you are making
something 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. Everybody 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 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 celebrating, 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 overproduction 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 million 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 hundred 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. Rockefeller;
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 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 cessation 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, competition 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 naïve 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,
civilisation 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 disposition; and so behold our great national spectacle, the
morality-play of the terrible hundred-headed monster of Competition! The
terrible monster has killed and destroyed 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
gorgeous 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 machines, 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 ourselves, so that we might get these trusts
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 protest 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 superintended 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 Sir Andrew
Aguecheek. “Come, Sir Andrew,” 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.

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine_

  A SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS
]

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 recently 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 the 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 the “competitive” industries that is flourishing 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 newspapers 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 private 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
Sickingen 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 wonders 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 increased 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.”
Having been wounded, “the grim commander was carried to a dark, deep
vault of the castle, where it was thought he would be safe from the
cannon-balls of his pursuers; such an unchristian shooting, he declared
to an attendant, he had never heard in all his days.” The castle
surrendered, 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 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 environment, 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 organism, 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 changing 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 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 cavemen, 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 fighting was 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
neighbours. It would not pay us financially, and intellectually and
morally it would destroy us. We have, for instance, a powerful 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 were
shaken by rumours that an army was gathering at Montreal, that a fleet
of torpedo-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 to used to the change, that the mere memory of the old
ways of life makes us shudder; it seems to us horrible, 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, which 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:

                  “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 innumerable, scarcely ever
overbalanced by good.

And it is of the utmost importance to notice how this has been done; how
it is that the military ideal is universally discredited 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 Cœur 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 impregnably; and so long as there is room for
competition they will compete; and when they 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 compelled to keep on making war against each other.

The great task of civilisation is the leading of men to recognise when
these mighty changes have taken place. For so far I have spoken of only
one side of the evolutionary 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 becomes 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 future hangs in the balance; when it summons 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 cannot stay as you are. You have to go
forward, 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.

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 question,” 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 competition, and the survival
of the fittest; all 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 administrative
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 multiply 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 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 individualism, freedom of contract and the right of every man
to manage his own business as he pleases—the while the Republic of
Jefferson 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 for the betraying of liberty. Take the Monroe Doctrine, for
instance. We shout for it every Fourth of July, and we are rushing to
completion a score or two of battleships to defend it; whenever it is in
peril, our most rabid anti-trust editors and politicians 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 civilisation and republican institutions by battleship 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 Panamanians and Venezuelans, the while they are so busy
crushing American institutions in Rhode Island and Colorado!

There was once a time when all the despotisms of Europe were banded
together to destroy republican institutions, and when the threatening
gesture of this young republic held them back from half 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.
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 reunions. 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 civilised 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 national 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 Manchuria 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 situation 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 mediæval 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 Protestant Church, with its snuffy country parsons
and doctors of dusty divinity. There is in the fifth place, the mediæval
Roman Catholic Church, with its confessional 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 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 pretends 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 understand, are closed in a death grip
with all these powers of infamy. In spite of obloquy and contempt, in
spite of lies and blandishments and menaces, in spite of persecution and
exile and imprisonment, for a generation they have been toiling—devoted,
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
themselves in literary and political combat, building up a system of
scientific thought which has never been refuted and never can be,
inspired by a moral purpose as noble as any the world has ever
seen—preparing 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 wheelwright, 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 opposition to
militarism and savagery, and his speeches are such as a century ago, and
even half a century ago, would have set this land aflame from end to end
with revolutionary fervour. And this is no isolated 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 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 Jefferson 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 downtrodden millions of the German Empire are struggling to
free themselves from the tyranny of military and personal government,
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 turkeycock, the war-lord whose mailed fist holds them
down! That monstrous creature, with his insane egotism, his blustering
and his swaggering, his curled mustachios and military 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 government and
to set back civilisation half a century—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 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 objectors,
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 for new markets, and the German people are on 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, and summon the masses to the
defence of the honour of the Fatherland. 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
imperialisms, 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 III
                           MARKETS AND MISERY


I gave in the first chapter a brief outline of my view of the process of
wealth-concentration. 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 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 Germany 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 combination of a monopoly price and a competitive 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
desperation 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 capitalist retaliates and sells out at cost, _our_ capitalists
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 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 increased 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 England 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 counting 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 get starvation wages for doing the manufacturing of Canada and
Australia and India. Is it any wonder that the reply to the proposal
should have been an independent 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 manufactures
in India,” wrote the _Textile Recorder_ in 1888. “Indian cotton
piece-goods are coming to the front and displacing those of Manchester.”
The Bombay Factory 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 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 dollars 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
hundred and thirty-nine million in 1900! Under such 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 manufacturers 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
régime 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 régime, 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 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 distribution.... 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, 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 completely 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 civilisation 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 the fate of empire rests. 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, perhaps 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, however, 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 gigantic, nowhere is administration so
perfect; 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 her
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 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 correspondingly 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 administrative 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 machinery;
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 ancestors were opposed to much
consolidation, and they formed a constitution that was practically
unchangeable, because they believed they had “reached certain final
truths of government.” “The language of the Declaration of Independence,
in which they proclaimed one of these truths (that all men are created
equal), varies little from that of a Catholic council,” says Mr. Adams.
An American is apt to believe such formulas, being “dominated by
tradition.” 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 scientifically, 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 “gigantic and growing empire. She occupies
a position of 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 benefits to realise them. Such is the emotional instinct. Or
we may regard our government dispassionately, as we would any other
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
following 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 and 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.

[1]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 “destiny” 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.

Footnote 1:

  Portions of the following argument were published as an article in the
  _North American Review_.

Have you, the reader, never had one smallest 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 Imperialist President lamenting that our
population is not growing fast enough! And so we have to fight to find
room for our children; 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 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 Esquimaux! 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 arrangement—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 competing 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 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 Chinamen, in order to compel the rest to
buy something, so that they could get money to buy something 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 always been a struggle for existence and always will
be; that there is not food enough to go round, and that therefore, every
now and then, the surplus population has to be cut down by famine and
war. It is to be pointed 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.”

The book was published nine years ago, but apparently it has not yet had
time to affect the cogitations of the orthodox economists. You still
read, as you have been used to reading since the days of Adam 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 instance, 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 productive
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 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 good and
bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such
quantities 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
maraîchere_ 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 thousand heads of cabbage, three thousand of
cauliflower, five thousand baskets of tomatoes, 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 protect the wall-trees from the northern
winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his _pépinières_, have
made a rich Southern garden out of the suburbs of Paris.”

The consequence of this is that the population 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 Minnesota, 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 discovery 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 quantity of food needed by man is about four-tenths of what all
physiologists have previously taught! [2]And while all this has been
going on for a decade, while encyclopedias have been written about it,
our political economists continue to discuss wages and labour, rent and
interest, exchange and consumption, from the standpoint of the dreary,
century-old formula that there must always be an insufficient supply of
food in the world!

Footnote 2:

  Horace Fletcher: “The A-B-Z of Our Own Nutrition.” R. L. Chittenden:
  “Physiological Economy in Nutrition.”

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine_
]

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine_

  REAPING BY HAND AND BY MACHINERY
]

Such is the state of affairs with agriculture: 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 the cases he gives:

“_Making of 10 plows_: By hand, 2 workmen, performing 11 distinct
operations, working a total of 1,180 hours, and paid $54.46. By machine,
52 workmen, 97 operations, 37½ hours, $7.90.

“_Making of 500 lbs. of butter_: By hand, 3 men, 7 operations, 125
hours, $10.66. By machine, 7 men, 8 operations, 12½ 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 operations, 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 workmen, 122
operations, 154 hours, $35.40.”

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 machinery. In Pennsylvania, some sheep were shorn and
the wool turned into clothing in six hours, four minutes. A steer was
killed, its hide tanned, turned into leather and made into shoes in
twenty-four hours. The ten million bottles used 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 operation
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 this machine, does the work of twelve skilled hand
operators!”

Since all these wonders are the commonplace facts of modern industry, it
is not surprising that here and there men should begin to think about
them; here is the naïve question recently asked by the editor of a
Montreal newspaper which 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 and 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 coming 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 community 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 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.

“Should the 5,000,000 able men be engaged 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 fresh in every department—each one would only work 1
hour and 22½ 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, warehouses
and stores of the country to overflowing. Then they cannot do one single
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 alternatives—between an
Industrial Republic, and a political empire. Either they 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 they 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 beyond recall; so that our riots will end in mere
slaughter and waste, and we shall never again see freedom. We shall run
then the whole course of the Roman Empire—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 “Cæsar,” 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 progress and material
civilisation; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age
of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner-parties, or
senatorial majorities 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 cultivated 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. Patriotism 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 their hearts disbelieved it. Temples were still built with
increasing splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed.
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 patricians 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 important 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 economic process, while infinitely more cruel and
destructive, makes up for these qualities by the certainty and swiftness
with which it rushes to its end. So it is that a Revolution which in
Rome took centuries to culminate and fail, will require only decades in
America to accomplish its inevitable triumph.




                               CHAPTER IV
                              SOCIAL DECAY


If my analysis of the industrial process be correct, there will be two
developments 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 intensification 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
almost 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 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 educated; 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 remorselessly 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
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 have 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 interpretation 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 increasing 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 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 competitive
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-five in
1904. According to the _Civiltà 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 million
suicides recorded in the last twenty-five years. There were ninety-two
thousand insane 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 thirty-two in 1890. In 1876 the population
of this country consumed eight and sixty-one one-hundredths 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.[3]

Footnote 3:

  “An experienced magistrate, Recorder John W. Goff of New York, told me
  not long since that in his judgment the course of crime in this
  country is not only towards more frequency and gravity, but that it is
  changing 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 Privilege.”

Whenever the administrators of our “constantly 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 sometimes raise the wages again—because of the unions; but they
never lower the price of the product—the poor consumer is a nonunion
man. Two years ago Mr. Rockefeller 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 increase 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 himself 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, reckoning
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 1898 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
statement 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 President
Roosevelt may have caused a few more superfluous bourgeois babies to be
born; 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 lowering 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 voluntarily limited in two hundred and twenty-four cases out of
a total of two hundred and fifty-two marriages; and out of the one
hundred and twenty-eight cases in which the causes of limitation were
given, economic causes were specified in seventy-three. Similar results
would certainly follow an inquiry in this country; in fact Americans of
refinement have come to have an instinctive feeling 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 impossible, 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 been ground, they are not low
enough. Thousands of agents of steamship companies 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 fifty-seven thousand in
1903, and over a million in 1905—more than one-half of the last
shipments being from Hungary, Russia, and southern Italy. All this, you
must understand, 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
Elections 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 thousand of these had been issued in New York City. Fully thirty
per cent. of the Italian 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:

“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 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 make 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 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 _Independent_ 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 Alabama; the boycott being prohibited there, and
labour unions being sued for damages and smashed. The advertisement
might have added that there is no factory-legislation to amount to
anything, and that the percentage of native white illiteracy is fourteen
and eight-tenths. There _is_ factory-legislation in Massachusetts, and
it is enforced, and the percentage of native white illiteracy is only
eight-tenths of one per cent., or one-eighteenth of the proportion of
Alabama. 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 York _Evening Post_ contained the following
pregnant item:

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee_
]

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee_

  CHILD LABOR IN GLASS FACTORIES AND COAL MINES
]

“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 individual workman and
the individual employer.’

“So Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, Conn., spoke to the members of the
Georgia Industrial Association, at their annual convention 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 manufacturing 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
establishments 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 régime of
a monopoly price and a competitive wage. I spent seven weeks in
Packingtown studying conditions there, 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 independent investigators. Let
him go to a library and consult the American Journal of Sociology 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 “dressmakers” 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 hundred and forty-four human
beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets,
Amsterdam and West 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!” Apropos 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 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 conditions. 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 standing 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, 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
charity, in order to exist at all, already in numbers 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 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 _conservatively_
arrived at, over two hundred million dollars.

“Moreover, a strange law seems to work with an accuracy that seems
almost marvellous. 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 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 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 allowance for the
persons who are given aid by sources not reporting to the State Board,
or for those persons not aided by the authorities of Boston, or for
those persons who, although 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 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 on actual knowledge, gained by inquiry,
but on impressions, gained through friendly intercourse. My own opinion
is that probably 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 distress, 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 industrial 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
terrifying story of the poverty of India, in his “Soldiers of the Common
Good.” Here is a scene in a London park, selected, 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 Doré to more diabolical flights of fancy than
he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of filth and rags, of
all manner of loathsome skin-diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness,
indecency, leering monstrosities 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
covering, 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 husband (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.
Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a
man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with his head in the
lap of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.
‘Those women there,’ 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 prosperity. 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
_Independent_, briefly 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 famishing residents of the garrets and cellars
of London lanes and alleys.’”

And then consider that in the city where 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 informed, 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 hundred 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.

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee_
]

[Illustration:

  _From Stereograph, Copyrighted 1906, by Underwood & Underwood_

  THE SOCIAL CONTRAST IN NEW YORK
]

Perhaps this seems monstrous; but it really is not—it is a perfectly
inevitable consequence of industrial competition, and of the “constantly
increasing mass of 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 building 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 thousand
dollars in two years. To Mr. William Waldorf Astor alone the harried and
overdriven population of Manhattan Island delivers eight or ten millions
of tribute money every year; and Mr. William Waldorf 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 régime 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
Commission, 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
continue 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 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 killing,
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 practical 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 Burlington 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 combined in some way, to squeeze more work out of
the train crews. The new schedule has now been in effect longer and
complaints 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 compelled to work long hours on fast runs.

“Crews are now running from Minneapolis 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.

“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 Burlington 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.’”[4]

Footnote 4:

  “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 or 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._

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 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 steamboat captain was punished,
and the responsible 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 manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits. It calculates that if the percentage of accidents among 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 international 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 system of slavery the master took care of his
servant the year round; but the wage-slave is kept only while he is
needed, and only while he remains at his maximum of working 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 superannuated 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 published 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 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. The 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
independent 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 immigrant 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 teens. In the
same way the gambler and the saloon-keeper are now as much employees 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. ‘Speakeasies’
(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. Disorderly houses are managed by ward syndicates.
Permission is had from the syndicate 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
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 luxury 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
Shepherd 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 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, informed 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 following 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


In 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
exploitation. 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 recognising how enormously the process of wealth 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 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 intention 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 individuals 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 myself by studying it in a little village in Canada, where the
trusts had never been heard 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
storekeeper, 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 temperament, who grumbled, and
who constituted 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 competition. 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 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 democracy to be aristocratic in any of its aspects and remain a
democracy, than 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 has 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 words than these. He had declared that the Slavery question
was one between right and wrong. “Right and wrong,” he said—“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 was not a man at all, but a corporation, a thing without a
soul, a monster “clamouring for dividends.” He had a thousand devices, 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
to him degraded or brutal, and he could not understand why things were
so much worse here than in England. I said that in England the economic
process had been modified by the existence of an hereditary aristocracy,
holding over from old times and having high traditions of public
service. By nature this aristocracy sympathised with capital, and to a
certain extent fraternised with it; but it would not abdicate to it, and
occasionally, to preserve its own power, it made concessions to the
public, and so served as a check upon the forces of commercialism. On
the other hand the American people had only themselves to rely upon and
until they had been goaded into revolt, there was no limit whatever to
the power of greed.

I suppose it is unnecessary to offer any proofs of the existence of
“government by special interests.” If there is anyone who has been out
of the country for the past three years and has not read any of the
magazines, it will be sufficient to refer him to the two books of Mr.
Lincoln Steffens—“The Shame of the Cities” and “The Struggle for Self
Government.”

Steffens himself is a proof of the evil conditions: a man who has spent
ten years studying our politics, who went to the task with no
preconceptions, and only a passion for honesty and fair dealing—and who
has been made into a thorough-going radical by the irresistible logic of
facts. It was his particular service to the Republic to trace the stream
of graft to its fountain-head, which is what he calls “big business”;
and the series of papers in which he proved that thesis to our people
will long be studied as models of the higher journalism—the journalism
which is to ordinary newspaper writing what statesmanship is to
politics.

As I say, there is no need of proof; but simply by way of illustration,
and to call the picture to the reader’s mind, let me quote a few
paragraphs from one of these papers—“Pittsburg, a City Ashamed”:

“The railroads began the corruption of this city. There always was some
dishonesty, as the oldest public men I talked with said, but it was
occasional and criminal till the first great corporation made it
business-like and respectable. The Pennsylvania Railroad was in the
system from the start, and as the other roads came in and found the city
government bought up by those before them, they purchased their rights
of way by outbribing the older roads, then joined the ring to acquire
more rights for themselves and to keep belated rivals out. As
corporations multiplied and capital branched out, corruption increased
naturally, but the notable characteristic of the ‘Pittsburg plan’ of
misgovernment was that it was not a haphazard growth, but a deliberate,
intelligent organisation.... The Pennsylvania Railroad is a power in
Pennsylvania politics, it is part of the State ring, and part also of
the Pittsburg ring. The city paid in all sorts of rights and privileges,
streets, bridges, etc., and in certain periods the business interests of
the city were sacrificed to leave the Pennsylvania road in exclusive
control of a freight traffic it could not handle alone.”

The “bosses” who ruled Pittsburg were Magee and Flynn, and Mr. Steffens
prints in full the agreement between them and Senator Quay, by which
they divided the boodle of the state. “Magee and Flynn were the
government and the law. How could they commit a crime? If they wanted
something from the city they passed an ordinance granting it, and if
some other ordinance was in conflict it was repealed or amended. If the
laws of the state stood in the way, so much the worse for the laws of
the state; they were amended. If the constitution of the state proved a
barrier, as it did to all special legislation, the Legislature enacted a
law for cities of the second class (which was Pittsburg alone) and the
courts upheld the Legislature. If there were opposition on the side of
public opinion, there was a use for that also.

“As I have said before, unlawful acts were exceptional and unnecessary
in Pittsburg. Magee did not steal franchises and sell them. His councils
gave them to him. He and the busy Flynn took them, and built railways,
which Magee sold and bought and financed and conducted, like any other
man whose successful career is held up as an example for young men. His
railways, combined into the Consolidated Traction Company, were
capitalised at thirty million dollars. There was scandal in Chicago over
the granting of charters for twenty-eight and fifty years. Magee’s read,
‘for nine hundred and fifty years,’ ‘for nine hundred and ninety-nine
years,’ ‘said Charter is to exist a thousand years,’ ‘said Charter is to
exist perpetually,’ and the Councils gave franchises for the ‘life of
the charter.’”

And all this was a regular profession, a custom of the country, which
its devotees studied. “Two of them told me repeatedly that they
travelled about the country looking up the business, and that a
fellowship had grown up among boodling aldermen of the leading cities in
the United States. Committees from Chicago would come to St. Louis to
find out what ‘new games’ the St. Louis boodlers had, and they gave the
St. Louisans hints as to how they ‘did the business’ in Chicago. So the
Chicago and St. Louis boodlers used to visit Cleveland and Pittsburg and
all the other cities, or, if the distance was too great, they got their
ideas by those mysterious channels which run all through the ‘World of
Graft.’ The meeting place in St. Louis was Decker’s stable, and ideas
unfolded there were developed into plans which the boodlers say to-day,
are only in abeyance. In Decker’s stable was born the plan to sell the
Union Market; and though the deal did not go through, the boodlers, when
they saw it failing, made the market-men pay ten thousand dollars for
killing it. This scheme is laid aside for the future. Another that
failed was to sell the court-house, and this was well under way when it
was discovered that the ground on which this public building stands was
given to the city on condition that it was to be used for a court-house
and nothing else.... The grandest idea of all came from Philadelphia. In
that city the gas-works were sold out to a private concern, and the
water-works were to be sold next. The St. Louis fellows have been trying
ever since to find a purchaser for their water-works. The plant is worth
at least forty million dollars. But the boodlers thought they could let
it go at fifteen million dollars, and get one million dollars or so
themselves for the bargain. ‘The scheme was to do it and skip,’ said one
of the boodlers who told me about it, ‘and if you could mix it all up
with some filtering scheme it could be done. Only some of us thought we
could make more than one million dollars out of it—a fortune apiece. It
will be done some day.’...

“Such, then, is the boodling system as we see it in St. Louis.
Everything the city owned was for sale by the officers elected by the
people. The purchasers might be willing or unwilling takers; they might
be citizens or outsiders; it was all one to the city government. So long
as the members of the combines got the proceeds they would sell out the
town. Would? They did and they will. If a city treasurer runs away with
fifty thousand dollars there is a great halloo about it. In St. Louis
the regularly organised thieves who rule have sold fifty million
dollars’ worth of franchises and other valuable municipal assets. This
is the estimate made for me by a banker, who said that the boodlers got
not one-tenth of the value of the things they sold.”

Two or three years ago, before I met Mr. Steffens, I thought that he
knew only as much as he “let on”; and so I wrote him an “open letter,”
to point out the consequences of this régime of “big business.” The
story of this manuscript is an amusing one, and worth telling for the
light it throws upon my argument. Mr. Steffens was so good as to say
that it was the best criticism of himself that he had ever read; and it
was scheduled for publication in one of our three or four largest
magazines. But alas—it was purchased by the enthusiastic young editor,
and then read by the elderly and unenthusiastic proprietor. When I
rebelled at the long wait which followed, the proprietor invited me to
dinner, and unbosomed his soul to me. He was the dearest old gentleman I
ever met, and he put his arm about me while he explained the situation.
“My boy,” he said, “you are a very clever chap, and you know a lot; but
why don’t you put it all into a book, where you can’t hurt anyone but
yourself? Why do you try to get it into my magazine, and scare away my
half million subscribers?”

So the letter was shelved. But the questions it asked are now the
questions which events are asking of the American people; and so I shall
take the advice of the elderly and unenthusiastic proprietor—and publish
some of the letter in a book! It ran as follows:


This is the question I have wished to ask you, Mr. Steffens. “A
revolution has happened,” you tell us; we have no longer “a government
of the people, by the people, for the people,”—we have “a government of
the people, by the rascals, for the rich.” And if we find that that
revolution, which has overthrown the law, and which defies the law,
cannot be put down and overcome by the means of the law—what are we
going to do then? Are we going to sit still, and content ourselves with
saying it is too bad? Are we going to bear it—to bear it forever? _Can_
we bear it forever? And if we cannot bear it forever what are we going
to do when we can bear it no longer?

A revolution is a serious thing, Mr. Steffens. A man should not talk
about a “revolution” except with a thorough realisation of what the word
implies. A revolution means that the social contract has been broken,
that rights have been violated and justice defied—that, in a word, the
game of life has not been fairly played, that those who have lost may
possibly have had the right to win. And the game of life is a pretty
stern game for many of us, Mr. Steffens.

You and your friends, I and my friends, belong to a class whom this
“system” touches only through our ideals. Editors and authors, clergymen
and lawyers, we are pained to know that corruption is eating out the
heart of our country—but still, if the problem be not solved to-day, we
can put it off till to-morrow, and not realise what a difference it
makes. But there are some in our country whom the System touches far
more intimately and directly than this—some to whom the difference
between to-day and to-morrow is simply a difference between life and
death. I happened only yesterday to be reading a letter from a man who,
I think, knows that “System,” which is our new government, in this
personal and intimate way. I will quote a few words from his letter:

“I have been arrested, put in jail, prosecuted and persecuted. I have
had my customers driven away; I have been boycotted to the extent that
men who dared to trade with me have lost their jobs; I have had my home
broken into at night; been beaten with guns and abused by vile and
foul-mouthed thugs; been torn, partly dressed and bleeding, from the
side of my wife, who was driven from her bedroom and roughly handled;
and finally I have been shipped out and told that if I returned to my
home I would be hung. Not satisfied with this they have twice deported
my brother, who was conducting the business in which we were both
earning our living, so that it became necessary for an adjuster to take
charge, of our store.” All this was, needless to say, in Colorado; the
writer is Mr. A. H. Floaten, a storekeeper of Telluride, but now of
Richmond County, Wisconsin, where he was working in a hayfield when he
wrote. He goes on to add that the charge upon which he was “deported”
was that of selling goods to members of the Western Federation of
Miners. “As for my brother and myself,” he states, “I defy any and all
persons to show a single instance where either of us have ever violated
any law or even been suspected of crime, or have ever wronged any
person.”

Here is your “revolution,” Mr. Steffens, in full swing. One of the
questions which I have for some months found myself longing to ask you
is, how clearly you recognised in the Colorado civil war the natural and
inevitable consequences of a continuation of your “government of the
people, by the rascals, for the rich?” Here is an unequivocal
declaration, by a vote of two to one, by the people in one of the states
of this free country, in favour of a constitutional amendment permitting
an eight-hour law; and here are representatives of both the majority
parties pledging themselves to enact it, and then openly and shamelessly
selling themselves out to the predatory corporations of the state. The
people then resort to a strike to secure their rights; and when they are
seen to be winning, the militia is summoned, criminals are hired to
commit a dynamite outrage and afford the necessary pretext, and then
every tradition of American liberty and every safeguard of free
institutions is overthrown, and the strike crushed and the striker’s
organisation exterminated with a ruthlessness and a recklessness which
no police official in Russia could have surpassed. And then the party of
“law and order”—that is the “System”—sat enthroned in Colorado, and the
guileless reader of newspaper despatches believed that an “election”
took place in that state last November! The “System” suspended the
_Habeas Corpus_ Act, censored newspapers and telegrams, opened mails,
entered houses without warrant and drove women from their beds at dead
of night, deported men, defied and threatened judges, shut down mines in
spite of their owners’ will—and finally haled a score or two of elected
officials before it and put ropes around their necks and compelled them
to resign. And then the “rebellion,” that is, the agitation for an
eight-hour law, attempted to reassert itself in the form of ballots; and
by means of a threat of deposition it compelled the newly elected
governor to accede in everything to its will—and in particular to retain
in office the infamous militia official who was its agent in these
crimes!

But we, as I said before, are touched by these things only through our
ideals. We are sorry to see American institutions overthrown in an
American state; but we do not live in Colorado, and we are quite sure
that there is no danger of our being turned out of our homes. And yet we
know that the system exists in our own city and state, and sits just as
surely intrenched there as in Colorado. And we know also that it exists
for a purpose—that it exists to rule. And are we to imagine that it
exists to rule the people of Patagonia, of Greenland and Afghanistan? Do
we not know that it exists to rule _us_?

How does it rule us? How does it rule the people of Colorado? Whatever
is it that is wanted of the people of Colorado? Why, simply that they
should go into the mines and factories and work, not eight hours a day,
as they wished to, but twelve hours a day, the time the “System” bade
them to. And what is it that it wants everywhere else—in California, in
Maine and in Texas? What, save that those who have labour to sell shall
sell it at the price the “System” is paying, and that those who have
goods to buy shall buy them at the price the “System” asks? If this be
so, is not the only difference between us and the people of Colorado
that they went on strike against the “System,” whereas we are not on
strike—we _pay_?

Let us deal with facts. Here is a corporation which runs a
street-railroad in a city. It gives an abominable service, its cars are
cold and filthy, its employees are underpaid wretches who work thirteen
and fifteen hours a day—and the fare is just double that of the splendid
government service of Berlin. And the public-spirited men of the city
have for ten or twenty years been trying to do something with that
corporation at the state capital; but the corporation has its lobby and
continues to pay pig dividends upon its watered stock year after year.
And then do the people of the city organise and go on strike against
that corporation? No indeed—they pay.

You know of the agitation for a parcels post; you know that under the
parcels-post system an Englishman can send a package to California for
one-third of what it costs us to send one from New York. In Germany a
ten-pound package may be sent anywhere in the Empire for twelve cents;
and our post office pays the railroads more for its service than all the
rest of the civilised world combined, though the quantity of mail matter
carried is less than that of Great Britain, France and Germany alone!
Yet we know that it is a waste of ink setting these facts forth. Is not
the president of the United States Express Company the United States
senator from your own state? The railroad systems of this country have,
of course, their lobby in every state capital, and in Washington as
well; and every single year the railroad systems of this country
slaughter and maim the equivalent of a Gettysburg campaign—there were as
many people killed in the last three years as the British lost in the
entire Boer war. Yet there is not the least reason for this; the
railroads could, if they chose, build cars which will not crumble up
like matchboxes—they have proven it by killing only six Pullman-car
passengers in the same three years. But of course you have to pay a
large sum extra to ride in a Pullman car. If you cannot pay with money,
you pay with your bones—in either case, of course, you pay.

And then there is the tariff. You, Mr. Steffens, are a man who has both
the ability and the honesty to think, and you know what the tariff is.
You know that it is a device to keep out foreign competition and thus
enable home manufacturers to charge higher prices. You know that in the
early days its effect was to make manufacturing possible by keeping
prices at a level where a fair profit was paid. Above this level they
could not go, because there was free domestic competition. The tariff
was thus a tax, self-imposed by every man in the country, for the
purpose of building up the country’s home industries; exactly as if the
owner of a sugar-plantation should conclude it would pay him to grind
his own cane, and should set aside his gains for a few years to buy the
machinery. Now I might stop to argue the socialistic implications of
such a procedure—involving as it does the doctrine that the manufactures
are the interest and concern of the whole people, to the advantages of
which, when completed, they all have a right. (No plantation master, I
take it, would expect to furnish himself with machinery out of the wages
of his hands.) Continuing, however, to discuss facts and not theories,
you see that these industries which we have “encouraged” have now become
the mightiest power in the land. It is they who have accomplished the
revolution and set up the “System”; it is they who use the money which
the people have turned over to them, to maintain and perpetuate the old
arrangement—an arrangement which now enables them, since they have
become monopolies, to charge for their products from thirty to fifty per
cent. more than a fair price, as is proven by what they charge abroad.

The workingman, you know, Mr. Steffens, has all this justified to him by
the fact that he gets his share of this “prosperity”; but of late the
workingman has been finding that he does _not_ get his share. He has
brought the industrial machinery of the country to such a pitch of
perfection that he produces more than the country needs; and so when
foreign markets fail he is out of work part of the time; and the mass of
unemployed labour operates by the “iron law” to beat down wages and to
break strikes, and to make his share less and less. And all the time, to
pay interest on the constantly increasing capital of the country, the
prices of trust products are being raised yet higher, and the cost of
living is rising, year by year.

In the cotton mills of Alabama and Georgia little children six and eight
years of age are working twelve hours for a wage of nine cents a day.
And how do you think they fare in this fearful race for profits—what do
you think is the effect upon them of the continued operation of the
“System”? You may remember that I said a little way back that there were
people in this country to whom the difference between to-day and
to-morrow is simply a difference between life and death. It was such
people as these I had in mind.

Look, Mr. Steffens; you go from town to city, and from city to state,
and everywhere you show us hordes of political parasites battening on
corruption; and you tell us that the fortunes that they make represent
but a small portion of what is made by the “big business men” who bribe
them. Magee and Quay, you tell us, made thirty millions out of the
street railroads of Pittsburg; and all over this land, year in and year
out, such sums are being “made.” And soon afterward came Mr. Lawson’s
story of how the Standard Oil group “made” forty-six million dollars in
a single deal without turning over their hands. Mr. Lawson expatiates
upon this way of “making” dollars—he makes reflections which I had often
wondered if you were making. I have wondered if you realised entirely
that these millions of dollars were _real_ dollars? Dollars that a man
might spend, just the same as any other dollars—with which he might
purchase food that men had toiled to raise, and houses that men had
toiled to build! I am writing these words in October, and the windows of
my room look out upon a cornfield. All the year long I have watched a
farmer and his son at work in this field—first plowing it, then
harrowing it back and forth and across, then planting the corn,
patiently, row by row. The field is ten acres in size, and it seemed to
me that not a week passed all summer that the farmer was not plowing and
weeding it; and now that the fall has come he has cut it stalk by stalk,
and stacked it; and now I can see him and his son sitting on the bare,
bleak hillside this morning, husking it, ear by ear. That will take them
all of two or three weeks, and when the whole thing has been done they
will gather up the ears to cart them to town, and the farmer will have
five hundred bushels of corn and will get for them two hundred and fifty
dollars. And then I read Mr. Lawson’s account of how the Rockefellers
“made” forty-six million dollars out of Amalgamated Copper—and strive to
realise that what they made was the equivalent of the labour of the
farmer and the farmer’s sons and the farmer’s horses in one hundred and
eighty-six thousand ten-acre cornfields such as the one I look out upon!

Is it not obvious that if I were to have the power to call a piece of
paper one dollar and to put it into circulation, exchanging it for two
bushels of corn, I could only do it by diminishing the value of every
other dollar in the country a certain small amount? Supposing that the
total wealth of the country was one billion dollars, I should diminish
every single dollar by one-billionth. Suppose that similarly I “made”
one million dollars—by any sort of “making” whatever save by producing
some useful thing and increasing the total wealth of the country—I
should then tax the holder of every dollar one mill. A man who owned ten
thousand dollars would be robbed by me of ten dollars—he would be robbed
of it just as literally and as actually as if I had broken into his
house and stolen his watch. He would not know that he was robbed,
perhaps—all that he would know would be that when he spent his ten
thousand dollars he would not get quite so much. In Dun’s and
Bradstreet’s the event would be recorded in the statement that the cost
of living had risen one-tenth of one per cent. since last week, and that
interest rates had similarly declined. And now here is the young girl
who works in the sweatshops of Chicago for a wage of forty cents a week,
as thousands of them do. The great Amalgamated Copper deal is
consummated, Mr. Rockefeller and his fellow-conspirators “make”
forty-six million dollars—and the young girl’s wage becomes thirty-nine
cents and a fraction. At forty cents she was hanging on for her life; at
thirty-nine cents and a fraction she enters the nearest brothel. Here is
the little child of eight years toiling from six at night till six in
the morning in the midst of throbbing cotton-looms for nine cents. Magee
and Quay of Pittsburg “make” thirty million dollars in street
railroads—and the little child’s wage becomes eight cents and a
fraction. At nine cents he was starving; at eight and a fraction he
faints, and the machinery seizes him, and his arm has been torn out of
him before anyone can answer his screams. So it is, Mr. Steffens, that
there are people in this country to whom the difference between to-day
and to-morrow is simply a difference between life and death.

That farmer about whose work I spoke will take his two hundred and fifty
dollars to the bank for deposit; and in the line before the window will
be a young spendthrift idler with a month’s income from his father’s
estate, and a politician with a bribe for a street railway franchise;
and to the banker all these deposits will stand upon equal terms, they
will all be equally “good,” and will claim and get interest at the same
rate. The farmer will have to content himself with a lower rate, because
of the competition of the others; and next week, when the activities of
some speculator in Wall Street bring about a failure of the bank, he
will get not a bit more out of the wreck than the other two. And then he
will go back and toil for another year, to raise a similar crop—and what
will he find then? Why this: the forty-six millions of the Standard Oil
gang will have survived all mischances, and having by their enormous
mass attracted profits, will have become fifty millions, or even sixty;
and the thirty millions of Magee and Quay will have become thirty-five.
All the untold millions of the capital of the country will have
increased similarly; and the investment field will have become more
crowded yet, and the prizes fewer yet, and the chances more hazardous
yet; and the cost of living will be a little higher yet; and the
interest rate a little lower yet, and wages a little lower yet; and the
whole of human society will be toiling a little harder yet to pay the
profits upon that heaped-up mass of wealth. More men will be taking to
drink, and more women will be taking to brothels—more to suicide,
madness, vagabondage and crime. The race for profits will be a little
more fierce, social ostentation will be a little more vulgar, political
corruption will be a little more shameless, strikes and riots will be a
little more common, the socialists will be a little more active—and you,
Mr. Lincoln Steffens, will be a little more saddened at the sight of
your country’s downward career.

I have noticed the very curious fact about your views, that all your
hope of betterment is in the future—it is always how we can prevent new
stealing, never how we can punish the past. And so those thirty million
dollars of Magee and Quay, the forty-six millions of the Amalgamated
deal—they are safe and beyond recall forever? Mr. Lawson talks about
“restitution”; do you think he will ever bring it about—do you see any
signs of it so far? And yet those forty-six million dollars, assuming
that they grow at ten per cent., a small earning for such a sum—year
after year they will be, roughly speaking, as follows: 46, 51, 56, 63,
69, 76, 84, 92, 101, 111, 122, 134, 147, 162, 178, 196, 216, 238, 262,
288, 318, and so on. In other words, the heirs of the “Amalgamated”
financiers will twenty years from now have multiplied that sum nearly
seven times, and be receiving nearly seven times as much tribute from
the sewing-girl in the Chicago slums and the children in the Georgia
cotton mill. I, Mr. Steffens, am one of those who look upon all profits,
rent, interest, and dividends as a survival of barbarism, the last but
not the least of the devices whereby the strong enslave the weak and
profit by their toil; but I assume that you are not one of these—that
you are one of the class I heard described by a speaker the other night,
“who think that the first dollar is a male dollar and the second a
female, and that when you put them in the bank together they bring forth
dimes and nickels, which in the course of the years grow up to be
dollars as big as their parents.” Yet even so, you can not but recognise
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. You can
not—to drop an inconvenient metaphor—claim that society can by any
possibility whatever be required to go on paying tribute to that stolen
forty-six millions—the three hundred and eighteen millions of twenty
years from now. It is a maxim of law, Mr. Steffens, that there is no
wrong without its redress.

And if you grant this and begin to examine the millions in that
light—what perplexities you come upon! Only take the tariff, for
instance—is there a dollar invested in the business of this country
to-day which has not profited by that, and which is therefore not made
up out of the tiny contributions of thousands of persons who not only do
not own that dollar, but do not own any other dollar? And then consider
that the beginnings of most of our great fortunes were made in Civil War
times, when the nation in its extremity paid two dollars for every
dollar in value it received! And consider the chaos of political
corruption that followed, the twenty years of plundering of every
variety that American ingenuity could invent, from Black Friday to the
Western land grabs and railroad steals! Try to figure how many crimes
are represented by the Vanderbilt millions, how many by the Goulds’s;
think of the commercial assassinations represented by the word Standard
Oil—the secret rebates and discriminations, the wholesale buyings of
legislatures and elections; think of the whole institution of corruption
of the present day, of the “System,” intrenched in village and town,
city, and state, and nation, owning both parties, the executive, the
legislative, and the judicial branches of the Government, the schools,
the colleges, the pulpits, the press, literature, and art, and public
opinion—making it, not figuratively and hyperbolically, but literally,
simply, and indisputably the fact that there is not to-day in the land a
place where a man can take a dollar and invest it, and get back a copper
cent that is not tainted with corruption, polluted by violence, treason,
and crime, and stained with the blood and tears of uncounted thousands
of agonised women and children!


So much for the letter. If there is anyone who, after reading it, is
still of the opinion that the people should pay the tribute demanded
twenty years from now, there is nothing more that I can say to
him—except to give a few statistics by way of further elucidation,
showing him how many more millions of dollars there will be to enter
their claim. There will be, for instance, the four hundred and fifty
million dollars of the Astor family—all invested in New York City real
estate, and at the rate of growth of the city, certainly destined to be
a billion dollars in twenty years from date. There is the half billion
dollars of Mr. Rockefeller, increasing by a most conservative estimate
at the rate of ten per cent. per year, and therefore destined to be over
four billions at that time. And then there are the railroads of the
country. We are now being prepared for a decision to be some day
delivered by the Supreme Court, to the effect that any rate regulation
which interferes with dividends is confiscation, and therefore
unconstitutional. And yet we know that railroad capitalisation is simply
a function of earning-power; that what the financiers have uniformly
done was to charge all the traffic would bear, and then water their
stock until the rate of dividends came down to the market average. The
capitalisation of the railroads of the country, fixed upon this basis,
is thirteen billion dollars, whereas their actual cost was only six or
seven billions. To give one or two samples of this process, the Western
Maryland Railroad was bought up by the Goulds, and watered from nine
millions up to fifty-one millions. The Central Railroad of Georgia,
which cost less than seven millions, has now been watered up to
fifty-five millions. Assuming that the watering were to stop to-day, and
that the railroads simply re-invested their dividends at the present
rate of six per cent., in twenty years we should be paying interest upon
over forty billion dollars.

From a brokerage circular which recently came in my mail, I have clipped
a few more instances of the workings of trust finance. The argument of
the circular is that I need not be frightened at their offer to make my
money earn more than six per cent.—that over a hundred per cent. is
“being frequently earned by legitimate business.” Thus the Diamond Match
Company recently paid ten per cent. on a capitalisation of fifteen
million dollars, when its original capitalisation had been only six
million dollars. The Western Union Telegraph Company began in 1858 with
only three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars, yet in 1874 it paid
one hundred and fourteen per cent. on seventeen million dollars. Anyone
who had invested one thousand dollars in this stock in 1858 would by
1890 have received fifty thousand dollars in stock dividends and one
hundred thousand dollars in cash dividends. The present capital is over
ninety-seven millions—“and the greater part of the equipment has been
created out of the earnings of the company!” In the case of the
Prudential Life Insurance Company (owing, though the circular does not
state it, to a little deal between United States Senator Dryden and the
New Jersey State Legislature) for every one thousand dollars originally
paid in, the stockholders now own twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of
stock and received annual cash dividends of twenty-two hundred dollars,
or two hundred and twenty per cent. upon their original investment!

And then, to diversify the subject, let us consider the tariff, and its
variegated plunderings. In a letter to the New York _Evening Post_ of
Oct. 26th, 1904, Mr. J. R. Dunlap gave some figures showing the
“scandalous taxes imposed by trusts upon the people”:

“Now, to show how the Dingley duty of eight dollars per ton on steel
rails taxes American railroads and hence reaches deep into the pockets
of shippers and travellers on American railroads, I need only cite the
fact that, during the year 1903 our American railroads purchased from
the steel pool exactly three million forty-six thousand eight hundred
and thirty-six tons of new steel rails (see statistical abstract,
Department of Commerce and Labour). The price to _foreign_ railroads
being, say twenty dollars per ton—as we _now know_—and the pool price to
American railroads being twenty-eight dollars per ton, that means that
the American people, _during the single year last past_, contributed a
clean net profit of twenty-four million three hundred and seventy-four
thousand six hundred and eighty-eight dollars to the rail pool—by
reason, presumably, of their “patriotic” belief in the Dingley duties!
And during the past six years—since the Dingley Bill was enacted—these
same American railroads have been forced to contribute to the few
members of the rail pool exactly one hundred and two million six hundred
and twenty-one thousand two hundred and fifty-six dollars, or eight
dollars per ton on twelve million eight hundred and twenty-seven
thousand six hundred and fifty-seven tons of rails bought and used.
Dividing that stupendous sum of protection profit (one hundred and two
million six hundred and twenty-one thousand two hundred and fifty-six
dollars) by eighty million of population, we see that the rail pool
alone—to say nothing of other combinations “sheltered” by the Dingley
duties—has collected a tax of exactly one dollar and twenty-eight and
one-quarter cents ($1.28¼) for every man, woman, and child in America,
white and coloured.

“To further indicate the fabulous profits which the Dingley duties make
possible to our ‘infant’ iron and steel industries, I need only cite
recent and familiar records. In the spring of 1899, when the Steel Trust
was in process of formation, and when it became necessary for the
influential men in the steel industry to _prove_ what enormous profits
the steel manufacturers were making, and thus to induce the investing
public to put their money into Steel Trust stocks—then it was that Mr.
Charles M. Schwab, president, wrote to Mr. Henry C. Frick, chairman of
the Carnegie Steel Company, the famous letter of May 15, 1899, now
public property, in which Mr. Schwab used these words:’

“‘What is true of rails _is equally true of other steel products_....
_You know_ we can make rails for less than twelve dollars per ton,
leaving a nice margin on foreign business.’

“Mark you, that was in 1899, when the boom was at its zenith, when wages
were highest, and when all the costs of production were far above all
averages of recent boom years.

“To show how accurate Mr. Schwab was in these statements, and to show
how trustworthy was his confident forecast of future profits, I need
only cite the following speaking figures from the two annual statements
which have been made public by the United States Steel Corporation,
namely:

Total number of employees:

                             1902.   1903.
                            168,127 167,709

Total annual salaries and wages paid:

                    $120,528,343.00 $120,763,896.00

Net earnings:

                    $133,308,763.72 $109,171,152.35

“It will be observed that during these two years the average annual net
earnings of the Steel Trust _exceeded the total labour cost of their
entire product_!”


                           MEDICINAL PRODUCTS

“Turning from the iron and steel industry, we might take quinine, and
many other medicinal products; we might take chemicals, many of them
most essential in manufacturing industry; we might take borax, which
sells in America at seven and one-half cents per pound, and in Britain
at two and one-half cents per pound, because the Dingley duty is exactly
five cents per pound; we might take mica, a mining product largely used
in the electrical, wall-paper and stove-making industries, and which
enjoys a modest protection ranging from one hundred and fifty to four
thousand per cent. In short, we might take each and every staple product
now made in America, and needlessly sheltered by the Dingley duties, and
prove, by comparative prices at home and abroad, that the fabulous
profits which the gentlemen engaged in these industries are now
making—and which they have capitalised into watered “industrials”—are
due chiefly and directly to the fostering care of the Dingley Bill,
which was designed to protect our ‘infant’ industries.”

In the same issue, another correspondent, Mr. W. J. Gibson, shows how
the Government serves as a tool of the trusts in tariff exactions. He
gives several columns of facts about such outrages as the “Rupee Cases.”
For instance:

“There have been nine or ten decisions on this one question against the
Government, and still the secretary of the treasury refuses to refund
the money which the courts have decided so often he has exacted
illegally. The money he has directed to be wrongfully assessed and
collected, and is retaining in these cases, known as “the Rupee Cases,”
amounts to over a million dollars. The parties cannot get any interest
for their money so wrongfully withheld, and the customs officials are
still being directed to assess all merchandise coming from India on the
basis of the rupee at the value of thirty-two cents in our money. This
has gone on for more than six years, and against the decision of the
United States Circuit Court since January 7, 1899.”

And now, can we get any broad view of the results of this long process
of wealth-concentration? In 1850 the wealth of the United States was
estimated at nine billions; in 1870 it was thirty billions; in 1890 it
was sixty-five billions; and in 1900 it was ninety-five billions. How is
this wealth distributed? Writing in 1896, Dr. C. B. Spahr made his
famous calculation, embodied in the statement that one-eighth of the
population owned seven-eighths of the wealth, and that one per cent.
owned more than the remaining ninety-nine per cent. And at that time the
machinery of exploitation had hardly more than got under way. The best
attempt at an estimate since then is the one by Lucien Sanial, published
by the American Branch of the International Institute of Social Science.
This is the result of a careful analysis of the census of 1900; it shows
that of ninety-five billions of the country’s present wealth,
sixty-seven billions are owned by a capitalist-class of two hundred and
fifty thousand persons, twenty-four billions by a middle class of eight
million four hundred thousand persons, and four billions by a
working-class of over twenty million persons. And now, if the
sixty-seven billions owned by the capitalists be assumed to earn ten per
cent.—which is surely a reasonable average amount—our people will be
paying interest upon four hundred and fifty billion dollars at the end
of the twenty year period!

And that represents the centralisation of the actual ownership of
wealth; but one does not get a real understanding of the situation until
he begins to consider the centralisation of the _control_ of wealth. In
explaining the struggle over the surplus of the life-insurance
companies, one of our financial magnates remarked to me: “I would rather
have the power of manipulating four hundred million dollars, than the
actual ownership of fifty millions.” And with that crucial fact in mind,
let one consider the figures given by Mr. Sereno S. Pratt in _The
World’s Work_ for December, 1903, and summarised in Dr. Strong’s “Social
Progress,” as follows:

“One-twelfth of the estimated wealth of the United States is represented
at the meeting of the Board of Directors of the United States Steel
Corporation.

“They represent as influential directors more than two hundred other
companies. These companies operate nearly one-half of the railroad
mileage of the United States. They are the great miners and carriers of
coal. The leading telegraph system, the traction lines of New York, of
Philadelphia, of Pittsburg, of Buffalo, of Chicago, and of Milwaukee,
and one of the principal express companies, are represented in the
board. This group includes also directors of five insurance companies,
two of which have assets of seven hundred millions of dollars. In the
Steel Board are men who speak for five banks and ten trust companies in
New York City, including the First National, the National City, and the
Bank of Commerce, the three greatest banks in the country, and the heads
of important chains of financial institutions. Telephone, electric, real
estate, cable, and publishing companies are represented there, and our
greatest merchant sits at the board table.

“What the individual wealth of these men is, it would be impossible and
beside the point to estimate; but one of them, Mr. John D. Rockefeller,
is generally estimated to be the richest individual in the world. But it
is not the personal, but the representative, wealth of those men that
makes the group extraordinary. They control corporations whose
capitalisations aggregate more than nine billion dollars—an amount (if
the capitalisations are real values) equal to about the combined public
debts of Great Britain, France, and the United States. It is this
concentration of power which is significant. There were at the time of
the last statement sixty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-five
stockholders in the Steel Corporation. But the control of this
corporation is vested in twenty-four directors, and this board of
directors is guided by the executive and finance committees, which in
turn are largely directed by their chairmen, who are probably selected
by the great banker who organised the corporation and in a large part
sways its policy.

“Examinations show that the concentration of control of these great New
York City banks has gone so far that a comparatively small group of
capitalists possesses the power to regulate the flow of credit in this
country. In the last analysis it is found that there are actually only
two main influences, and that these are centred in Mr. Morgan and Mr.
Rockefeller. It is possible to express in approximate figures the extent
of the Morgan influence”—which the writer shows in a table to figure up
over six billion two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars. How very
conservative is Mr. Pratt’s estimate is shown by the fact that he gives
the number of holders of shares of the railroads of this country as nine
hundred and fifty thousand persons; with which the reader may contrast
the following editorial paragraph from a recent issue of the New York
_Times_:

“It would appear from evidence collected by the Interstate Commerce
Commission and communicated to the Senate, that the ownership of the
railroad system of this country is not as widely diffused as has been
supposed. On the 30th of June, 1904, the 1,220 railroads reporting to
the Commission had only 327,851 stockholders of record. This total
includes many duplications, as it was impossible to know in how many
instances one capitalist was represented in the stockholding interest of
several railroads. Assuming the population of the United States to be,
in round figures, eighty millions, the entire mileage of the railroads
doing an interstate business is owned by about four-tenths of 1 per
cent. of the people of this country.”


Such is the situation. It completes our view of the process of
Industrial Evolution, so far as it has progressed up to date. The
condition is like that of an oak tree planted in a jar, or a chick
developing within its shell; the indefinite continuance of the process
is inconceivable. What form the collapse will assume, and when it may be
expected to occur, is the problem next to be taken up.




                               CHAPTER VI
                             THE REVOLUTION


One is at a great disadvantage just at present in picturing an
industrial crisis. We are at the very flood-tide of prosperity; the
railroads are paralysed by the volume of the country’s business; the
coal mines cannot furnish the coal, and the farmers are burning their
grain because they cannot get it to market; the steel trust has orders
for two years ahead—and so on without limit. I have to ask the reader to
picture interest rates going down to zero, at a time when they are
higher than they have been in a decade; I have to ask him to picture too
much of everything in the country, at a time when there is not enough of
anything. And yet all this excess of “prosperity” is an integral part of
the phenomenon we are studying.

If the process of wealth-concentration and overproduction of capital
went on unmodified by any other factor, we should witness a gradual rise
in the price of commodities, a gradual increase in the number of
unemployed, and a gradual fall in the rates of interest. As it happens,
however, the movement proceeds in rhythmic pulses, like the swinging of
a pendulum, or the ebbing and flowing of the tide. This is owing to the
factor of credit-expansion, which we have still to interpret.

We have pictured Capital, ubiquitous, endlessly resourceful, incessantly
alert—“clamouring for dividends.” Competition is a forcing-process by
which every device that will increase profits is driven into general
use, and subjected to its maximum strain. The most obvious of these
devices is that of credit.

A business man has a certain amount of capital. If he makes his “turn
over” once a year, he gains, say, ten per cent. profit; if he can make
the “turn over” twice a year, he gains twenty per cent. He sees the
business ahead, and so he goes into debt. And of course this step gives
an impulse to the business of the man who manufactures his machinery,
and to the man who raises his raw material, and to the railroads which
handle both. The effect of that condition, prevailing throughout a whole
community, is to accelerate enormously the industrial process; under it
the capital of the community becomes, exactly as in the case of the
railroads, not the actual definite cost of the instruments of production
existing, but an altogether hypothetical thing, a function of
anticipated earnings.

So it is that you have a “boom”—a period of furious and fevered
activity, in which everyone sees fortunes springing up about him; and
then comes some disturbing factor, which suggests to a number of men the
advisability of realising on their expectations; and a chill settles
upon the community, and there is a wild rush to collect, and the
discovery is made that most of the anticipated profits are not in
existence.

There is one more consideration which has to be touched upon before we
are prepared to consider the concrete problem in America. The process
which has been outlined is an industrial one; events have been pictured
here as they would take place in a community given altogether to
manufacturing, mining, and transportation. But as a matter of fact we
have not only to reckon with thirteen billions a year of manufactured
products, but also with four billions a year of farm products. The
importance of this new element lies in the fact that the ownership of
the farms is still largely in the hands of the masses; which means that
once every year the process we have been picturing is stayed while the
American people get rid of four billion dollars of spending money, which
comes to them outside of and independent of the wage-fund. Thus, strange
as it may seem, abundant crops tend to mitigate an “overproduction”
crisis, while a failure of crops would do more than anything else in the
world to precipitate one.

With these facts in mind we are now in position to interpret our recent
industrial history. We have generally had our hard times in America at
ten year intervals, with especially severe crises at twenty year
intervals. We had our last severe attack in 1893, and we were due to
have one of the lesser sort in 1903. What happened then was very
interesting to watch, in the light of the views just explained. In the
early winter and spring of 1904, the avalanche was well under way. Here,
for instance, is an item clipped from the Chicago _Tribune_ in April of
that year:

“Organised labour is facing the greatest wage crisis since the panic of
1893, if the forecast of its leaders is correct. It is estimated that
before the close of the year the greatest employing concerns of the
country will have dismissed nearly one million men, most of them
labourers and general-utility workers. Of this number the railroads are
expected to discharge two hundred thousand employees; the mine
operators, fifty thousand; the machine shops, iron, steel, and tin plate
plants, two hundred and fifty thousand; and the building trades, forty
thousand. The railroads and the steel mills have already begun the work
of reducing their forces, and the wage liquidation threatens to become
as sensational as was the recent liquidation in stocks.”

And then on May 25th following, the New York _Herald_ reported that the
railroads of the country had laid off seventy-five thousand men; and
quoted the following in an interview with James J. Hill:

“The whole question falls back primarily upon decreasing business and
the reason for it. Why are the railroads carrying less freight than they
were a year or two years ago? Because the demand for the products of the
United States is not commensurate with the supply. We manufacture and we
grow and we mine more than we can consume in the United States. Hence we
are dependent upon foreign markets in order to sell the surplus.”

The reasons why we got over this period of liquidation with only a
severe scare are two: First, because there came in the fall a “bumper”
crop of unprecedented proportions, which gave the railroads a new start;
and second, and most important, because it happened that at the precise
hour of our stress, there broke out one of the greatest military
struggles of all history.

The war, you understand, was a new world-market. All at once a million
or two of men were set to work at destroying manufactured articles; and
at the same time several millions more were taken from their regular
tasks to provide and maintain them while they did it; and the greater
part of the surplus capital of civilisation was drawn off to pay the
bills. It was not merely that during the first four months of the
conflict Japan and Russia bought fifty million dollars’ worth of our
spare products, or that they took hundreds of millions of our spare
cash. It made no real difference where the money was raised, or where it
was spent; the man who got it spent it again, and sooner or later the
bulk of it came to us, because we had the things to sell. Under the
conditions of modern Capitalism, all the world is one; and when a nation
goes to war, whoever has a spare dollar lends it to pay the bills, and
wherever in the world there is an idle labourer, he is put to work to
help support the fighters of both nations. In return, the world gets
from the warring governments a paper promise to wring an equivalent
amount of service out of their people at some future date.

Before going on I ought to mention that there is another view of the
events of 1904. I have heard Mr. Arthur Brisbane maintain that we are to
have no more overproduction crises, for the reason that, competition
having been abolished in all our principal industries, our trust
magnates can so adjust supply to demand as to mitigate the stress, and
give instead periods of partial idleness in widely scattered industries.

[Illustration:

  _Diagram prepared by Wilshire’s Magazine_

  DIAGRAM SHOWS HOW HIGH PRICES FOLLOW WARS

  Range of average prices of 25 leading Railway Stocks for the past 22
    years
]

If this is true, it is very important, for it means a long continuance
of Trust government; but I do not believe that it is true. The trusts
have, of course, put an end to blind production without any assurance of
a market; but even assuming that our industry were so far systematised
and our management so conservative that we never manufactured goods
except upon a definite order—how would that be able to hold in check a
community gone mad with prosperity-drunkenness? For instance, the steel
trust now has orders enough ahead for two years; and upon the basis of
these orders, its administrators are going ahead building a new “steel
city.” Yet does the steel trust know what proportion of its orders for
steel rails are intended for the transportation of purely speculative
freight? Does it know what proportion of its orders for structural steel
is intended for buildings for imaginary tenants? Does it concern itself
with the problem whether its customers are going to be able to find any
use for the materials which they have bought?

There might be more plausibility in the argument, if our trust magnates
were men of conscience and a keen sense of responsibility; but as a
matter of fact their attitude toward their work is purely predatory.
They are not administrators of production at all, but parasites upon
production, exploiters and wreckers. Far from striving to regulate the
madness of the public, they are competing among themselves to fan it to
a flame, so that they may capitalise the expectations of their own
properties.[5]

Footnote 5:

  Anyone who wishes to make a scientific study of the true functions of
  modern finance is advised to read Professor Veblen’s last book, “The
  Theory of Business Enterprise,” a most extraordinary study of the
  whole field of present-day economics. In my opinion this book,
  together with its author’s other masterpiece, “The Theory of the
  Leisure Class,” constitutes the greatest contribution to social
  science ever made in America, and perhaps the greatest in the world
  since Carl Marx. It might be worth while to add in passing that
  Professor Veblen was turned out of Mr. Rockefeller’s University of
  Chicago for writing it.

The ebb of the tide is coming; the only question is, when? According to
precedent, it should come in 1913; but I expect it much sooner, partly
because I do not believe that we had anything like a thorough
liquidation in 1904, and partly because of the extreme violence of the
present activity. During the last year the “boom” has reached real
estate, and that always means that other avenues of investment are
clogged.

I anticipate the storm in 1908 or 1909; but I do not predict it, because
it depends upon uncertain factors. Another great war might put it off
ten years; and on the other hand, crop failures might precipitate it
this summer. What I do believe that I can predict—for reasons which I
stated in the introduction to this argument—is the course which
political events in this country will take from the hour when the “hard
times” arrive.

As we saw from the Chicago _Tribune_ item, the first sign of trouble is
the turning out of work of a million workingmen; and what are the
consequences—the economic consequences—of the turning out of work of a
million men? According to the census the average yearly wage of the
factory employee is four hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Dr. Peter
Roberts says that the average wage in the anthracite coal district is
less than five hundred dollars. In the Middle States a third of all the
workers get less than three hundred a year, and in the South nearly
sixty per cent. get less. It was proven before the Industrial Commission
that the maximum wage of the hundred and fifty thousand railroad and
track hands and the two hundred thousand carmen and shopmen, was a
hundred and fifty dollars in the South, and less than three hundred and
seventy-five in the North. And this to feed and clothe a family, and
provide against sickness, accident, and old age! The meaning of it is
simply that when a million men are laid off, in a month or two they and
their families are starving.

And that, you understand, means a loss of a _market_—of a market of five
million people—a population equal to that of the Dominion of Canada. And
of course, therefore, those whose work it has been to supply these
people, will be out of work, and likewise those who supply the
suppliers. And even this is by far the least of the consequences; for
another part of our domestic market depends upon the fact that our
workingmen too have been able to form trusts. And when this period of
depression comes, their trusts will fall to pieces, and competition will
begin again—a process which they will find all the brickbats and
dynamite in the country cannot check. The employers will, of course, be
straining every nerve to make ends meet; and so wages will go down, and
when strikes are declared, the starving workingman will “scab” and the
strikes will fail. We shall have riots, and perhaps gatling guns in our
streets, but the wages will go down; and step by step as the wages go
down, consumption goes down, with the loss of another Dominion of
Canada. When the thing is once started, it will be an avalanche that no
power upon earth can stop; and it will be the beginning of the
Revolution.

The word has an ominous sound. The reader thinks of street battles and
barricades. By a Revolution I mean the complete transfer of the economic
and political power of the country from the hands of the present
exploiting class to the hands of the whole people; and in the
accomplishment of this purpose the people will proceed, as in everything
else they do, along the line of least resistance. It is very much less
trouble to cast a ballot than it is to go out in the streets and shoot:
and our people are used to the ballot method. However, the staid and
respectable _Harper’s Weekly_, which calls itself a “Journal of
Civilisation,” suggested in 1896 that if Mr. Bryan were elected, it
might be necessary for the propertied classes to keep him out of office.
If anything of that sort is attempted in this coming crisis, why then
there will be violence—just as there will be in such countries as
Germany and Russia, which have yet to learn to let the people have their
own way. The worst feature of the situation with us is that we have
gotten into the habit of letting our elections be carried by bribery;
and that is likely to play us some ugly tricks in this new emergency.

The reader perhaps objects to my theory that this change must come with
suddenness. It is such a tremendous change—and would it not be better if
it were brought about little by little? Undoubtedly it would have been a
great deal better; but the time to begin was ten or twenty years ago.
Now the horse is stolen, and we are venting all our energies, and cannot
even succeed in getting the stable-door locked afterward.

They are bringing it about gradually in Australia and New Zealand—the
only countries in the world in which the people are effectually
regulating the progress of the Juggernaut of Capitalism. That is because
these countries are very young, with comparatively little capital, no
slums, and an intelligent working-class. I have an idea—I do not know
whether there is anything in it—that the extraordinary success of New
Zealand may in part be due to the fact that it was a convict-settlement;
the men whom capitalism makes into criminals being for the most part a
very superior class of people, active, independent, and impatient of
injustice. Transported to a new land, and given a fair chance, I should
think that a burglar or a highwayman ought to make a very excellent
Socialist.

You ask, perhaps, if the thing is not also being accomplished gradually
in England and on the Continent; you point to “Municipal trading,” to
the London County Council, to the state-owned railroads and telephones
of Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. You have been accustomed to hear
these things referred to as State Socialism, and you have accepted the
statement—not understanding that the essence of Socialism is democracy,
and that it is fundamentally opposed to paternalism in every conceivable
form. Municipal and State ownership is not State Socialism at all, but
State Capitalism. Under it, the government buys certain franchises, pays
for them with bonds, and then runs the roads to pay the bondholders.
Undoubtedly it is a better system for the people than private
Capitalism, for the reason that it fixes the exploiters’ tax, instead of
letting stock-watering go on indefinitely. But, unfortunately,
economical administration by the State is possible at present only in
such countries as have an aristocratic governing-class, jealous of the
power of the capitalist. In this country the holders of the municipal
bonds, who also own the street-car factories and the steel mills and the
coal mines, would use the interest they got from the city to bribe the
city’s servants to pay exorbitant prices for all the street-cars and
steel rails and coal and other supplies which the city would have to
have in order to operate the roads. You have seen that perfectly
illustrated in the case of our Post Office. For example, we pay the
railroads in rent for our mail-cars twice as much per year as it costs
to build the cars; and the cars are so flimsy that the insurance
companies, which own a large share of the railroads and the cars, refuse
to insure the lives of the mail-clerks who work in them!

However, the advisability of Municipal Ownership under present
conditions is a purely academic question, for the reason that the
capitalist will never give us a chance to try it. The capitalist is in
possession, and he “stands pat.” When you talk about “reform,” he will
make you as many fine speeches and deliver you as many moral discourses
as you wish; but when it comes to giving up any dollars—he has spent all
his lifetime learning to hold on to his dollars.

You are thinking, perhaps, of President Roosevelt, who is hailed as a
successful reformer. In the first place, it is of importance to point
out that President Roosevelt is a complete anomaly in our political
life; he was probably the last Republican in the country who would have
been selected to rule us. He made himself governor by a shrewd device
called “the Rough Riders;” he was made President for the first time by
the bullet of an assassin, and the second time by the death of Mark
Hanna. By a series of such blind chances as these the people have been
given a chance to vote for what they want, and they of course have
seized the chance. But assuredly it was no part of the “System’s” plan
to ask them what they wanted, nor even to let them find out what they
wanted themselves.

Under the peculiar circumstances, there has been nothing for the
“System” to do but make sure that the President accomplishes nothing;
and that it has done as a matter of course. In saying this, let me
remind the reader once more of my distinction between moral revolt and
economic remedy. I have no wish to under-estimate the tremendous
importance of President Roosevelt’s services in awakening the people;
but I say that so far as actual concrete accomplishment is concerned, he
might just as well never have lifted a finger. In one case, that of the
suit against the Paper Trust, he did effect a lowering of prices; but in
that case he was simply a pawn in the struggle between two trusts—of
which the Newspaper Trust proved to be the stronger. In no case where
the people alone were concerned has he effected any economic change
whatever. The Northern Securities decision was evaded by another device;
the Beef Trust and the Standard Oil suits ended with nominal fines. Over
the rate regulation question we had two years’ agitation—and not one
single rate has been lowered. In the struggle for life-insurance reform,
to which the President gave all his moral support, a few grafting
officials were hounded to death; but the real and vital evil, the
exploitation of the surplus for purposes of stock-manipulation, was
scarcely even touched upon. And then came the Chicago packing-house
scandals—and I can speak with some knowledge of them. Sometimes, when I
look back upon them, it seems like a dream—I can hardly believe that I
ever played my part in that cosmic farce. Only think of it—we had the
President and Congress and all the newspapers of the country discussing
it—we had this entire nation of eighty million people literally thinking
about nothing else for months—nay, more, we had the attention of the
whole civilised world riveted upon those filthy meat-factories. We
uncovered crimes for which the condemnation of every dollar’s worth of
property in Packingtown would have been a nominal punishment; and then
we settled back with a sigh of contentment, because we had put a few
more inspectors at work and forced the whitewashing of some
slaughter-house walls. And we left the monster upas-tree of
commercialism to flourish untouched—to go on year after year bearing its
fruit of corruption and death!

There is nothing whatever to be got from the capitalist. I used to think
that the same thing was true of the politician. In common with most
Socialists, I thought that the Revolution would have to wait until the
people had come to full consciousness of their purpose, and had elected
a Socialist president and a Socialist congress. But at the time of the
coal-strike, when Dave Hill came out for government ownership of the
coal mines, I realised that the politician is the jackal and not the
lion. Of course we have amateur politicians—capitalists who play at the
game—and they will not give way; but the professional politician is not
a rich man—the competition has been too keen. He has served the
capitalist because it paid; and when the people get ready to have their
way, it will pay to serve the people. This is really a very important
matter, for our political machinery is complicated, and the people have
got used to it. It would be a frightful waste of energy to create new
machinery—in fact, I do not think that our Constitution could stand the
strain.

We will now assume that the industrial crisis has come. What will be the
political consequences? It takes two or three years for industrial
conditions to get themselves translated into political acts in this
country; it means an immense amount of agitating—tens of thousands of
meetings have to be held and hundreds of thousands of speeches made; and
then there is all the machinery of conventions and elections. The panic
of 1893, for instance, resulted in the Bryan movement of 1896. That
movement was a revolt of the debtor class; if it had succeeded it would
have precipitated a panic, and that would have been a misfortune, for
the reason that both the people and their leaders were ignorant, and
instead of the Industrial Republic, we should have had a severe
reaction. Mark Hanna was a cunning man; but if he had been still more
cunning, he would never have raised six million dollars to buy the
presidency for William McKinley—he would have let the people have free
silver, and then he would have had the people.

We came to the election of 1900 on the crest of a prosperity wave; but
prosperity too takes its time to be realised, and so Hanna took the
precaution to raise four million dollars and buy the election again.[6]
And then came 1904, which, I think, was the most interesting election of
them all. With the politicians the prosperity boom still held sway. Mark
Hanna had Roosevelt all ready for the shelf; and the old-time
“state-rights” Democrats arose and buried Mr. Bryan in the deepest vault
of their party catacombs. But then came the people—with the country
trembling on the verge of another “hard times.” They gave President
Roosevelt the most tremendous majority ever recorded in America; and
incidentally, as if this were not enough to show how they felt, they
gave nearly half a million votes to Eugene V. Debs!

Footnote 6:

  Figures quoted, evidently upon inside information, by the Washington
  _Post_, in 1906.

This election, according to my schedule, corresponds with the election
of 1852 in the Civil War crisis. The “safe and sane” Democracy, which
received its death-blow in 1904, corresponds with the old Whig party. It
will probably make independent nominations in 1908 and 1912, exactly as
did the Whigs, and will receive the votes of all those who believe in
dealing with new conditions according to old formulas.

In the meantime, the real contestants of the coming crisis are forming
their lines. Under ordinary circumstances the Republican party would
have been the party of disguised but unrelenting conservatism; and our
Presidents in 1904 and 1908 would have been either figureheads like
Fairbanks and Shaw, or shrewd beguilers of the people like Cannon and
Root. As it is, it looks now if President Roosevelt were to remain the
master of his party, in which case we shall have in 1908 a mild reformer
like Taft, or possibly even Governor Hughes. The one thing certain is
that whoever receives the Republican nomination will be the next
President. If it is a Roosevelt man, the President’s prestige will elect
him; or if the “System” concludes to have its own way, he will be put in
by bribery. In any case, he will go in, and it is best that he should go
in. So long as we are to have Capitalism, it is proper that the
capitalist should have a free hand. Personally I should consider the
election of a radical in 1908 a calamity; for “hard times” will be just
about to break, and I greatly desire to see Cannon and Aldrich and the
rest of them “caught with the goods on.”

Who will be the Democratic candidate? Will it be the champion of the
Western farmers, or of the proletariat of our Eastern cities? I do not
know, but I am inclined to think that it will be Mr. Bryan; and I am
sorry, in a way, because that will put him out of the race in 1912. I
conceived an intense admiration for Mr. Bryan after his last speech in
New York City.

Never in our history did a public man face a greater temptation than he
did after his two years of travel; everything in the country seemed to
have turned conservative, and the money-power, frightened by Roosevelt,
was ready to throw itself into his arms. What he did was to take his
stand upon the great issue over which the battle of the next six years
will be fought out—the nationalisation of the railroads; and in doing it
he placed his name upon the roll of our statesmen.

        THE TYPE.           CHATTEL SLAVERY.          WAGE SLAVERY
                              (1846–1863.)            (1893–1914.)

 The Conservative        Daniel Webster.         Grover Cleveland
   Reformer

 The Unwilling Prophet   John C. Calhoun         Marcus A. Hanna

 The Great Compromiser   Henry Clay              Theodore Roosevelt

 The Timid Conservative  Edward Everett.         Alton B. Parker.

 The Editor of           Horace Greeley.         Arthur Brisbane
   Radicalism

 The Statesman of        Charles Sumner.         Wm. J. Bryan.
   Radicalism

 The Politician of       Wm. H. Seward.          Robt. M. LaFollette.
   Radicalism

 The Agitator of the     Wm. Lloyd Garrison.     Eugene V. Debs.
   Revolt

 The Orator of the       Wendell Phillips.       Geo. D. Herron.
   Revolt

 The Martyr of the       John Brown.             Charles H. Moyer ( ?).
   Revolt

 The Voice of the Victim Frederick Douglass.     Jack London.

 The Compromising        Stephen A. Douglas.     John C. Spooner.
   Reactionist

 The Aggressive          Jefferson Davis.        Nelson W. Aldrich.
   Reactionist

 The Organiser of        Wm. Lownds Yancey.      David M. Parry.
   Reaction

 The Last Figurehead     James Buchanan (1856).  William H. Taft (1908).

 The Untried Hope        Abraham Lincoln (1860). Wm. Randolph Hearst
                                                   (1912).

A couple of years ago I was sketching out my comparison of the Civil War
crisis and our own, in conversation with an English gentleman, who asked
me to make him a table showing the parallel between the men of the two
periods. This table was afterwards published in the _Independent_, with
an explanatory letter, (in the course of which I pointed out that one
must not take it too literally, or look for a resemblance in external
details).[7]

Footnote 7:

  See table on page 199.

In the course of its editorial comment, the _Independent_ suggested
another parallel, that between “The Jungle” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; and
then it went on to express its perplexity at my venturing to compare
Hearst with Lincoln.

There is no man in our public life to-day who interests me so much as
William Randolph Hearst. I have been watching him for ten years, during
the last half-dozen of them weighing and testing him as the man of the
coming hour. I do not say that he will be the man; all that I can say is
that he stands the best chance of being the candidate of the Democratic
party in 1912; and that the man who secures that nomination will, if he
does his work (and for him to fail to do it is almost inconceivable)
write his name in our history beside the names of Washington and
Lincoln.

Mr. Hearst is one of the by-products of the industrial process—a member
of the “second generation.” You are to picture many thousands of young
men, heirs of the enormous fortunes of our captains of industry; they
are brought up in luxury, and in complete idleness—the world gives them
_carte blanche_, with the result that at an early age they are sated
with all the ordinary pleasures of human beings. And at the same time
they have big, healthy bodies, and they crave excitement.

It would be interesting to compile a list of some of the things they
have done. Of course, a great many simply follow in the footsteps of
their fathers, and become commercial buccaneers; some devote themselves
to automobiles and race-horses, some to society and gossip, some to mere
brutal dissipation—such as the scions of the now extinct line of
Pullman, who used to smash up the saloons of Chicago, and now and then
amuse themselves by hurling brickbats through the windows of their
father’s home. Now and then there is one who goes in for big game, or
for monkey-dinners, or for Sunday-schools, or for Socialism, or for
flying-machines; and there was one who went in for newspapers!

His father was reluctant to humour the whim—he thought that a million
dollar racing-stable would cost less in the end than a forty thousand
dollar newspaper: which of course put the young man upon his mettle—made
him set out to make the paper pay, and “show the old man.” To make it
pay he had to get circulation; and to get circulation he had to get
something new—there was no use doing things like the old newspapers,
which were not paying, but had to be funded by the political powers
which used them. So once more you see capital, as I have pictured
it—“like a wild beast in a cage, pacing about, watching for an opening
here and there.”

And where is the opening? Why, the people! The people, whom the
merciless machinery of exploitation beats down and tramples upon, and
pushes out of the way and forgets. They are brutalised and ignorant,
they are stupid with toil—but yet they are human beings, they crave
life. They never read newspapers—but give them what they want, and they
will learn to read. Give them big head-lines, and a shock on every page;
give them royalty and “high life,” scandal and spice, battle, murder and
sudden death—and then they will buy your paper.

It was good fun for Mr. Hearst to do this. Watching his newspapers, what
has struck me most is the sheer audacity of them. Audacity is his
characteristic quality, and it is a characteristic American quality—it
places him among our national treasures, along with Mark Twain, and P.
T. Barnum, and Buffalo Bill, and the Mississippi steamboats with the
“nigger on the safety-valve.”

I am told by friends of Mr. Hearst that his instinct from the start was
for democracy. If so, so much the better; but it is not necessary to my
hypothesis. A newspaper has to have editorial opinions; and they had
best be opinions that please its readers. If we are to publish a paper
for the masses to read, we must also voice the hopes and the longings of
the masses.

So Mr. Hearst turned traitor to his class. He seems to have done this
instinctively, and without pangs. I find, what is very singular and
striking, that the members of his own class hate him, not only publicly,
but personally. It seems to have pleased him to defy _all_ their
conventions. I was told, for example, that when he first came to New
York, he made himself a scandal in the “Tenderloin.” I was perplexed
about that, for the members of our “second generation” are generally
well known in the Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. But one
young society man who had known Hearst well gave me the reason—and he
spoke with real gravity: “It wasn’t what he did—we all do it: but it was
the way he did. He didn’t take the trouble to hide what he did.”

I have made clear in this book my belief that the masses are driven to
revolt by the pressure of stern and ruthless economic force. They were
ignorant and helpless, and among our men of wealth and power there was
no one to help them—there was no one among all our intellectual leaders
to voice their wrongs. They were left to help themselves—so what more
natural than that it should occur to some enterprising young millionaire
to leap into the breach? There was endless excitement and notoriety to
be won—and at the end, perhaps, power of a new and quite incredible
sort.

You will observe that I am taking, deliberately, the lowest possible
view. I am dealing with material conditions and picturing a material
remedy for them. My point is, that whatever he may be personally, Mr.
Hearst is mortgaged, body and soul, to the course to which he has given
himself; not only his public reputation, but his entire fortune, is in
his newspapers, and the public is the master of his newspapers. He has
conjured a storm which he cannot possibly control—he must play out to
the end the part he has chosen.

It is very curious to observe how his rôle has taken hold of him and
changed him. I am told that when he first came to New York he wore
checked trousers and fancy ties; and now he wears the traditional soft
hat and frock coat of our statesmen. And also, I think, the rôle has
changed his character. For this struggle is a real one, it is a struggle
of the people for life; the cause is a cause of truth and justice, and
the man does not live who can do battle for it as Mr. Hearst has done,
and not come to take fire with the passion of it. The man does not live
who can make the enemies Mr. Hearst has made, and not take a real and
vital interest in the task of bringing them to their knees. I believe
that Mr. Hearst is to-day as sincere a man as we have in political life.


It may be, of course, that some one else will get the Democratic
nomination in 1912; that matters not at all in my thesis—the one thing
certain is that it will be some man who stands pledged to put an end to
class-government. Following it there will be a campaign of an intensity
of fury such as this country has never before witnessed in its history.

Let us outline in a few words the situation as it will then exist.

In the first place there will be two or three million—perhaps five or
ten million—men out of work. They will have been out for a year or two,
and have had plenty of time to work up excitement. They may have forced
Congress to provide them some temporary employment—which will, of
course, be the first taste of blood to the tiger. They will certainly
have been waging strikes of a violence never before known—they will have
been shot down in great numbers, and they may have done a great deal of
burning and dynamiting. That some particularly conspicuous individual
like Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Baer may have been assassinated, seems more
than likely; that a “Coxey’s Army” of much larger size will have marched
on Washington, seems quite certain.

When I was in Chicago, just after the last “Beef Strike,” I met half a
dozen labour leaders who told me an interesting story. Chicago has the
most thoroughly revolutionary working-class of any city in the country,
and towards the end of this strike they were deeply stirred, and there
had been several conferences in which a complete program had been laid
out for an “anti-rent strike.” On a certain day, all the working people
of Chicago were to refuse to pay rent until the meat-packers gave in.
The project was nipped by the settlement of the strike, but it only
waits a new occasion to be put into effect. By the time which we are
picturing here, it will quite certainly have spread east and west to the
two oceans, so that not half our city population will be paying any rent
for their homes at this time.

[Illustration:

  _Copyright, 1894, Leslie’s Weekly_
]

[Illustration:

  _Copyright, 1894, Leslie’s Weekly_

  COXEY’S ARMY ON THE MARCH AND IN WASHINGTON
]

And also, of course, there will have been processions in the streets,
and unemployed demonstrations every day. There will be a Socialist
meeting round every corner—all through this period of stress, you are to
picture the Socialists working like bees at swarming time. That is the
function of the Socialist party all through this crisis, to stir up and
organise the proletariat, to make certain that in the crisis the people
are not ignorant of the way. They will be heading the hunger-parades,
carrying the banners and making the speeches, circulating tracts and
five-million-copy editions of the “Appeal to Reason.” They will be
polling unheard of votes—in one or two cities they will be carrying the
elections, and Socialist mayors will be confiscating street-railroads,
and clapping obstructive judges into jail. The Socialist party is a
party of agitation rather than administration; but it is of vital
importance that it should everywhere exist, as a party of the last
resort, a club held over Society. Everywhere the cry will be: Do this,
and do that, or the Socialists will carry the country.

So will be ushered in the election campaign and the death-grapple. You
will try to beat the people back, as you have done before—but you will
not succeed this time. Before this, the people were ignorant—but now
they will know. They will have had the whole of the festering ulcer of
commercialism laid open before their eyes. You will not be able to blame
it on the labour unions, nor on the Rate Bill, nor on Roosevelt, nor on
the Negro, nor on the Esquimau. You will not be able to awe the people
with any great names, nor to fool them with respectability. They will
have been taught to regard the leaders of our business affairs as
convicted and unpunished criminals; and if you were to propose such a
thing as a “business man’s parade,” you would be greeted with a scream
of fury.

You will be utterly terrified at the state of affairs. Credit will be
failing, and the business of the country will be holding its breath. You
will subscribe a campaign fund of ten—fifteen—twenty millions of
dollars—but there will be Mr. Hearst with his extras in a dozen cities,
and his twenty million free copies a day, and he will tell how much you
are raising and a whole lot more. So there will be committees of safety
to guard the ballot—and a few more good campaign cries. There will be
frenzied conferences among our political millionaires, and a week or two
before election day Mr. Hearst’s opponent—quite probably ex-President
Roosevelt—will come out favouring nearly all of his radical proposals,
but declaring that they ought not to be carried into effect by a
Socialist like Mr. Hearst. Mr. Hearst will reply with his ten thousand
and tenth declaration that he is not a Socialist, and has no sympathy
with Socialism—a statement which the Socialists, who will not understand
in the least the meaning of events, will cordially substantiate. Mr.
Hearst will declare that he stands upon a platform of Americanism, and
that he seeks only equal rights for all—and therefore Federal ownership
of all criminal monopolies.

So election day will come, and Mr. Hearst will be elected; and within
the next week the business of the country will have fallen into heaps.
Banks will have closed, mills will be idle—there will be no freight, and
railroads will be failing. The people of New York will be reminded that
if the railroads stop the city will starve to death in a couple of
weeks; and so, perhaps even before Mr. Hearst takes office, government
ownership of the railroads will be realised.

How will it be accomplished? It is a charmingly simple process—I could
do it all myself. Have you ever heard the inside story of how the last
coal strike was settled? The operators were standing upon their rights
as the persons to whom God in His infinite wisdom had entrusted the care
of the property interests of the country; and all winter long the people
had been lacking coal. Then suddenly President Roosevelt, who is a
master of the art of feeling the public pulse, made the discovery that
government ownership of coal mines was about to crystallise into an
issue of practical politics. So he sent Secretary Root to see Morgan,
and tell him that the coal operators must give in. Morgan saw the
operators, and they insisted upon their rights, and so Root went back to
Washington, and came again to say that, as Mr. Morgan well knew, the
coal roads were doing business in flat violation of the law; and that
unless within twenty-four hours they gave their consent to the
appointment by the President of a board of arbitration, the whole power
of the United States Attorney General’s office would be turned upon an
investigation of their business methods. And so the strike was settled
in a day.

And in very similar ways will the future problems be settled. There will
be similar conferences; and then some fine day a duly-accredited
commissioner from the President will travel, say to Philadelphia, and
enter the offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad, arch-corrupter of the
great Keystone state. The directors of the company will receive him with
bows and smiles, and will spread their books before him and his staff,
and place themselves and their office at his disposal. He will hear a
brief account of the situation, and will then give his orders to the
president and other officials of the road: to the effect that schedules
are to be continued as previously; that all salaries will remain
unaltered until further notice; and that passenger and freight rates are
to be dropped to a point where net profits will be wiped out. Then he
will shake hands with the directors and thank them for their services in
building up the road, adding that their services are now at an end. And
that, for all practical purposes, will be the application of Socialism
to the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But, you say, by my hypothesis the road could not run; how will it be
able to run now? The reason it couldn’t run before was that there were
no profits; but now it will not be run for profits, but for service,
like the Post Office. To help it over its momentary embarrassment, of
course, the credit of the government may be needed: but even that is not
likely. For exactly the same thing which happens to the Pennsylvania
Railroad will be happening to the Steel Trust and the Oil Trust and the
Coal Trust and the Beef Trust; and all these industries will be starting
into activity, and so there will be plenty of freight. With the captains
of each of these trusts there will have been secret Presidential
conferences, at which these gentlemen will have been told that since
they can no longer run their business, they must allow the Government to
take possession and run it—the price to be paid for their stock being a
matter for future negotiation, and a matter of no great importance to
them in any case, because of the income and inheritance tax laws just
then being rushed through Congress.

Such will be the Revolution—and the gateway into the Industrial
Republic. Precisely as in France we saw that the peasant who was
starving because he could not pay his taxes, began to till the land and
grow rich without any taxes, so in the midst of universal destitution,
it will suddenly be discovered that the farmer who could not sell his
grain, and therefore had no hat to wear, may now exchange his grain with
the operative in the hat factory who had produced so many hats for his
master that he was himself out of a job, and could not get any bread.
And all the cotton mills which were shut because we could no longer sell
shirts to the Chinamen, will now start merrily to work making shirts for
all the shirtless wretches the length and breadth of America. And the
shoe operatives of Massachusetts, who were making shoes for the
Filipinos, which the poor Filipinos had to be forced at the point of the
bayonet to buy, will begin making shoes for their own children, and for
the unhappy people of the tenements who were before going barefooted.
And the Steel Trust will suddenly leap into action, because those
misery-smitten four hundred thousand families in the “dark rooms” of the
New York City tenements will now earn money to build themselves decent
habitations. And the tens of thousands of little boys and girls who are
now being ground up in the glass factories of New Jersey and the cotton
mills of Georgia and the coal mines of Pennsylvania, will come out into
the sunlight and play, while their parents are building schools to which
they can be sent. And the young girl who stands shuddering on the brink
of prostitution, working ten hours a day in an East Side sweatshop for a
wage of forty cents a week, will receive the full value of her product,
and be able to maintain herself by two hours of work a day.

I know what is the attitude of the medical profession towards a
“cure-all”; and yet it is but the sober truth that for nearly every evil
that troubles our age there is one remedy and only one—the
democratisation of our industry. If you were to take a growing boy and
rivet an iron band about his chest, there would come sooner or later a
time when the boy would show symptoms of distress—and for every symptom
there would be but one remedy. Is the boy cross and complaining? Break
the band! Is he pale and sickly? Break the band! Does he gasp and cry
out? Break the band! Do you not know that in the monarchy of France, in
the year 1780, a man who set out to find a remedy for this or that evil
of the hour would have found but one remedy for all of them—the
overthrowing of the aristocracy? And similarly all the diseases of this
period, which are the despair of the moralist and the patriot, are
consequences of the fact that our society is gasping in a last desperate
agony of effort to maintain its system of competitive industry. We are
like a man running on a railroad track pursued by a train. The train is
increasing its speed, and do what he will, it gains upon him; he cries
out, he gasps for breath, he is agonised, wild with terror, making his
last leap with the engine at his very heels—and then suddenly it occurs
to him to leap to one side, and so the train flashes by, and he sits
down and mops his brow and thinks how very stupid it was of him!




                              CHAPTER VII
                        THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC


And now let us imagine that society has abolished exploitation and the
competitive wage-system, and got its breath and found leisure to examine
itself under the new régime. How will it find things proceeding?

One of the first objections that you will run up against, if ever you
start out to agitate Socialism, is your lack of definiteness. Give us
your program, people will say—we want to know what sort of a world you
expect to make, and how you are going to make it. And they will grow
angry when they find that you have not a cut-and-dried scheme of society
in your pocket—that you have stirred them up all to no purpose. And yet
that is just what you have to go on doing. There used to be Utopian
Socialists—Plato was the first of them and Bellamy was the last—who knew
the coming world from its presidents to its chimneysweeps; who could
tell you the very colour of its postage-stamps. But nowadays all
Socialists are scientific. They say that social changes are the product
of the interaction of innumerable forces, and cannot be definitely
foretold; they say that the new organism will be the result of the
strivings of millions of men, acted upon by various motives, ideals,
prejudices and fears. And so they call themselves no longer builders of
systems, but preachers of righteousness; their answer to objectors is
that I once heard given by Hanford, recent candidate for vice-president
on the Socialist ticket, to a lawyer with whom he was debating: “Do you
ask for a map of Heaven before you join the Church?”

This much we may say, however. The Industrial Republic will be an
industrial government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Exactly as political sovereignty is the property of the community, so
will it be with industrial sovereignty—that is, capital. It will be
administered by elected officials and its equal benefits will be the
elemental right of every citizen. The officials may be our presidents
and governors and legislatures, or they may be an entirely separate
governing body, corresponding to our present directors and presidents of
corporations. In countries where the revolution is one of violence they
will probably be trade-union committees. The governing power may be
chosen separately in each trade and industry, by those who work in it,
just as the officials of a party are now chosen by those who vote in it;
or they may be appointed, as our postmasters and colonial governors are
appointed, by some central authority, perhaps by the President. All of
these things are for the collective wisdom of the country to decide when
the time comes; meanwhile it is only safe to say that there will be as
little change as possible in the business methods of the country—and so
little that the man who should come back and look at it from the
outside, would not even know that any change had taken place. I have
heard a distinguished Republican orator, poking fun at Socialism in a
public address, picture women disputing in the public warehouses as to
whether each had had her fair share of shoes and fish. In the Industrial
Republic the workingman will go to the factory, will work under the
direction of his superior officer, and will receive his wages at the end
of the week in exactly the same way as to-day. He will spend his money
exactly as he spends it to-day—he will go to a store, and if he gets a
pair of shoes he will pay for them. The farmer will till his land
exactly as he does to-day, and when he takes his grain to market he will
be paid for it in money, and will put it in the bank and will draw a
check upon it to pay for the suit of clothes he has ordered by express.
The only difference in all these various operations will be that the
factories will be public property, and the wages the full value of the
product, with no deductions for dividends on stock; and that the street
cars, the banks and the stores will be public utilities, managed exactly
as our post office is managed, charging what the service costs, and
making no profits. In the year 1901 the U. S. Steel Corporation paid one
hundred and twenty-five million dollars and employed one hundred and
twenty-five thousand men; under Socialism the wages of each employee of
the U. S. Steel Corporation would therefore be increased one thousand
dollars a year, which is two or three hundred per cent. In the same way,
the wages of an employee of the Standard Oil Company would be increased
four thousand dollars, which is from eight to ten hundred per cent. The
fare upon the government-owned street railroads in the City of Berlin is
two and a half cents, which would mean that our workingman’s car-fare
bill would be cut by fifty per cent. The toll of the government-owned
telephone of Sweden is three cents, which would mean that the
workingman’s telephone bill would be cut seventy per cent. The
elimination of the speculator and the higher piracy of Wall Street would
raise the price of the farmer’s grain by fifty per cent.; the
elimination of the millers’ trust and the railroad trust would lower the
price of bread by an equal sum. The elimination of the tariff on wool,
of the sweater and the jobber, the department store and the express
trust, would probably lower the price of the farmer’s suit of clothes
sixty per cent; the elimination of the sweatshop and the slum might
raise it to its original level, while decreasing the farmer’s doctor’s
bills correspondingly. Of course I do not mean to say that the gains
from the abolition of exploitation will be distributed in exactly the
ratios outlined above. They will be distributed so as to equalise the
rewards of labour. The point is that there will be a saving at every
point—because at every point there is exploitation.

I have sketched in “The Jungle” (Chapter 36) a few of the social savings
incidental to the abolition of competition. The reader who cares for a
thorough and scientific study of the subject is referred to a recently
published book, “The Cost of Competition,” by Sidney A. Reeve. I had
never heard of Professor Reeve until his publishers sent me his book.
They say that he worked on it for seven years; and when I read it I
counted myself that many years to the good, for I had meant to try to do
the task myself. Professor Reeve has done it in a way which leaves not a
word to be said. It is a marvellous analysis of the whole of our present
productive system; and best of all, it is free from the jargon of the
schools—it is the work of a man who has kept in touch with actual life,
and has moral feeling as well as scientific training.

Professor Reeve analyses, not merely the “economic costs” of
competition, but also the “ethical costs,” which after all are the most
important. The difference to the workingman will be, not merely that his
wages will be several times as great, but that he himself will no longer
be a wage-slave, obliged to serve another man for his bread, to cringe
and grovel for a a job, to toil all day for another man’s profit, and
save up his little hoard and live in dread of the next wage reduction,
the next strike, or the next closing down of the factory. He will be a
free and independent member of a coöperative State. He will be delivered
from the necessity of getting the better of his neighbour, because his
neighbour will no longer be able to get the better of him. He will be
certain of permanent employment, without possibility of loss or failure
of payment—certain that so long as he works he will receive just what he
produces, that in case of accident or old age he will be maintained, and
that in case of death his children will be cared for and brought up to
become coöperative partners in the great Industrial Republic.

[Illustration:

  _From “The Cost of Competition_”

  THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION

  The Congressional Library
]

[Illustration:

  _From “The Cost of Competition_”

  THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
]

How, you ask, could Socialism guarantee every man permanent employment?
Could there not be overproduction under Socialism? There could not; the
surplus product being the property of the man who had produced it, and
not, as now, the property of some other man, in a case of overproduction
the workingman would be, not out of work, but on a vacation. As a matter
of fact, only a reasonable surplus would be produced, because the
workingman would stop when he had produced what he wanted—just as you
stop eating when you have satisfied your hunger.

In the Industrial Republic there will be an administrative officer, a
cabinet official with a bureau of clerks, whose task it will be to
register the decrees of the law of supply and demand. It is found, let
us assume, that the amount of coal needed by the community is
represented by the labour of two million men, five days in the week, and
six hours a day; the number of shoes is represented by the labour of
half a million men the same time. The wages in each trade are ten
dollars a day, and at this rate it is found that two million men go to
the shoe factories to work and only half a million to the coal mines.
The wages of coal mining are therefore made twelve dollars, and the
wages of shoe-making eight dollars; if the balance still does not adjust
itself, it will at the rate of thirteen to seven, or fourteen to six.
Every week the government list shows the wages that can be earned in the
various trades; stoking in a steamship is a painful and dangerous
task—stokers in steamships are receiving twenty dollars a day, and still
few takers, so that the steamships have to be fitted with stoking
machinery at once. On the other hand, driving a rural-delivery
mail-wagon is pleasant work, and is paying at present only five dollars
a day, and with prospects of going still lower. And does all this seem
fantastic to you? But it is exactly the way our employment problem is
solved to-day, when it is solved at all; it is solved by means of “Help
Wanted” advertisements and viva voce rumours—imperfectly, blindly and
sluggishly, instead of instantly, intelligently and consciously by a
universal government information bureau. Out in the country where I
lived two years ago the farmers were unable to get help for love or
money, while millions were out of work and starving in the cities; and
that is only one of the thousands of illustrations one could give of
“how much depends, when two men go out to catch a horse, upon whether
they devote their time to catching him, or to preventing each other from
catching him.”

The _Independent_ recently published an article entitled “Poverty: Its
Cause and Cure,” by Mr. James Mackaye, a Harvard graduate and
technological chemist; in the course of its editorial comment the paper
hailed his plan for the abolition of poverty as “nothing less than a
very great invention.” “It adds something that was lacking in the older
schemes of Socialism,” the _Independent_ continued, “but absolutely
necessary to any Socialism that would be practically workable.” This
“something” is a device to increase the salaries of managers of the
various industrial departments in proportion as they reduced the
“producing time” of the commodity for which they were responsible. Mr.
Mackaye is another student who, like Professor Reeve and Professor
Veblen, have come into Socialism by their own routes. In his elaborate
book, “The Economy of Happiness,” he shows so thorough a grasp of the
whole subject that I cannot suppose him to share in the ignorance of the
literature of modern proletarian Socialism, which leads the
_Independent_ to hail his plan as a “great invention.” As a matter of
fact, I could name a score of Socialist books and pamphlets in which
such plans are suggested and discussed. I personally have always
rejected them as unsound in theory and unnecessary in practice. I have
already suggested the likelihood of a continuance of present official
salaries after the revolution; but there will be a strong tendency to
reduce these, and I can see no ultimate result except equality of
compensation by the State. I can see no theoretical basis for the
State’s paying to any employee more than it pays to another in the same
industry—hand labour being equally as necessary to the production of
wealth as is superintendence. To my mind, the only necessary stimulus to
efficiency is the community of interest of all the workers. The
incentive to the manager is emulation, and the higher range of activity
which goes with a position of command; and I should be very jealous of
the introduction of any pecuniary motive into the struggle for
promotion—as likely to continue the old evils of graft and favouritism
to which we are now subject. I do not think that, when you have so
organised industry that every man is working for himself, you will find
it necessary to employ any outside force to impel him to work; and in
fact I should consider it a violation of the rights of the worker to
attempt anything of the sort. Of course if the workers themselves chose
to offer a bonus to a manager to invent new methods, that would be
another matter; but that would come under the head of intellectual
production, which I shall consider later on.

In discussing the question of salaries, it is to be pointed out what a
vast difference will be made in the amount of money which every
individual needs, by the socialisation of all the leading industries. In
the Industrial Republic a thousand dollars a year will buy more comfort
and happiness than ten thousand in the world as at present organised.
There will come, at the very outset, the great economic savings already
outlined; and then, the whole power of the coöperative mind of man being
applied to the elimination of waste and the making of beauty and joy, we
shall have in a very short time a world in which few men will care to
cumber themselves with possessions of any sort excepting the clothes
upon their backs and the few tools of their intellectual trades,—books,
music, etc. The abolition of privilege and class exploitation will of
course wipe out at a stroke all that competition in ostentation which
Professor Veblen has entitled “conspicuous consumption of goods.” In the
Industrial Republic there will be no luxury, for there will be no
slavery. There will be no menial service of any sort under Socialism. I
believe that this gives one a key by which he can do a great deal of
predicting as to what will be found in the world when the impending
revolution has taken place. In the Industrial Republic no man will work
for another man—except for love—because no other man will be able to pay
the “prevailing rate of wages.”

It is the vision of this that makes the critics of Socialism cry out
that it will destroy the home. What they mean is that it will destroy
that kind of a home which exists upon a basis of butlers, cooks and
kitchen maids, banquets and carriages, jewellery and fine raiment, sweat
shops, and slums, prostitution, child-labour, war and crime. Unless I am
very much mistaken, those people who now wear diamonds, and decorate
their homes with all sorts of objects of “art,” would do a great deal
less of it if they had to pay for it with their own toil—if they were
not able to pay for it with money extracted from the toil of others. I
imagine that those who now, in our restaurants and banquet halls, gorge
themselves upon the contents of earth, sea, and sky, would dine very
much more simply—and very much more wholesomely—if they had to wash the
dishes. For this reason, I expect that in the Industrial Republic there
will be very little of that pseudo-art which ministers to vanity and
sensuality. Our houses and clothing will become simpler and more
dignified, and the artist will turn his thoughts to public works—he will
decorate the parks and public buildings, the theatres, concert halls and
libraries, the great coöperative dining halls and apartment houses. In
the cities and towns of the Industrial Republic there will of course be
possibilities of beauty such as we cannot even dream of at present. Now
our cities grow haphazard, and are typical of all our blindness,
selfishness, and misery. At every turn in them one comes upon new and
more painful signs of these things—filthy and horrible slums, blatant
and vulgar advertisements, insolent rich people in carriages, wan and
starving children in the gutters. In the Industrial Republic a city will
be one thing, and a work of art. It will not be crowded, for the
combination of poverty and the railroad trust will not make spreading
out impossible. Intelligent, coöperative effort having become the rule,
nearly all the things that are now done privately and selfishly will be
done socially. Manual work will not be a disgrace, and poverty will not
keep any man ignorant, filthy and repulsive. There will be no classes
and no class feeling. There will be not only public schools and
academies—there will be public playgrounds for all children, and clubs
and places of recreation for men and women. In the Industrial Republic
you will not mind going to such places and letting your children go. You
will not be afraid of disease, because there will be public hospitals
for all the sick; and you will not be afraid of rowdies, because the
rowdy is a product of the slum, and there will not be any slum.

At present, we are all engaged in a struggle to beguile as much money
out of each other as we can; and the State has nothing to do save to
stand by and see fair play—and commonly finds that task too much for it!
As a consequence, we find ourselves confronted with an infinite variety
of little petty exactions—we have to spend money every time we turn
around. Very soon after the Revolution, I fancy, men will begin to
realise that these little exactions are more of a nuisance than a
saving. For instance, I shall be very much surprised, if, a generation
from now, the use of postage-stamps is not abolished. At present, with
society wasting so immense a portion of its energy in competitive
advertising, every piece of matter which goes into the mail has to be
made to pay its way; but once do away with competition, and the only
mail is government documents and personal letters—and the time it takes
to stamp and cancel them will be many times greater than the cost of
carrying the additional number of letters that a free mail service would
bring forth. In the same way it will be found not worth while to employ
conductors and spotters, and print tickets and transfers; after that we
shall ride free on our street-cars, and perhaps ultimately in our
government railroad trains. Similarly, all our places of recreation and
of artistic expression would come to be free; and then some one would
realise the waste incidental to our present system of book buying, and
we should then have a universal national library, from which at frequent
intervals delivery service would bring you any books then in existence.
I have just witnessed in New York an exhibition of an invention which
will make music as free as air. Bellamy was ridiculed for predicting
“electric music” in the year 2000; and it is on sale in New York City in
the year 1907. By this marvellous machine, the “telharmonium,” all
previously existing musical instruments are relegated to the junk heap;
and all music composed for them becomes out of date. At one leap the art
of music is set free from all physical limitations, and the musician is
given command of all possible tones, and may play to ten thousand
audiences at once. It is worth while pointing out, that, living under
the capitalist system as we are, the inventor had no recourse save to
use his machine to make profits, and so the newspapers, which are also
in business for profits, left it to make its own way. So it came about
that the first public exhibition of an invention which means more to
humanity than any discovery since the art of printing, received mention
in only one New York paper, and that to the extent of three or four
inches.


But to return to the Revolution, and the first steps which have to be
taken.

There are some industries which anyone can see are all ready for public
ownership; and when the people have once found out the way, they will be
very impatient with all remaining forms of rent, interest, profit and
dividends. Also, the exploiters will soon learn to give way. Just as
soon as the proprietors of department stores find that the people
seriously intend to open a public store in every city, and to sell goods
at cost, they will be glad to sell out for a few cents on the dollar;
just as soon as the bankers find out that there is really to be a
national bank, charging no interest, and incapable of failing, they will
do the same with their buildings and outfits. To quote a paragraph from
“The Jungle” (page 405), “The coöperative Commonwealth is a universal
automatic insurance company and savings bank for all its members.
Capital being the property of all, injury to it is shared by all and
made up by all. The bank is the universal government credit account, the
ledger in which every individual’s earnings and spendings are balanced.
There is also a universal government bulletin, in which are listed and
precisely described everything which the Commonwealth has for sale. As
no one makes any profit by the sale, there is no longer any stimulus to
extravagance, and no misrepresentation, no cheating, no adulteration or
imitation, no bribery, no ‘grafting.’”

There remains only one other great problem to be mentioned—that of
agriculture. I think no one will want to interfere with the farmer, any
more than with the cobbler, the small storekeeper, the newsman or any
other petty business. The farmer will stay on his land, and make
money—and study the situation. He will find in the first place that
coöperation is a success, and has come to stay. He will find that while
he is working with his hands, the rest of society is working with steam
and electricity, and leaving him far behind. He will find that he can no
longer hire help—that his hired man is employed as a coöperative worker,
and receiving several times more than the farmer himself. He will
understand that to get his share of all the good things of the new
civilisation, he will have to put his land into the common fund, and
work for the commonwealth and not for his own wealth. In this case, of
course, all the risks and losses of his trade will be shared by the
whole community—the result of a bad crop in Maine being made up by a
good crop in California, so that the farmer who works will be as certain
of gain and as free from care as the factory hand.

And now let us consider the effect of this new system upon certain of
the leading features of our civilisation. What, for instance, will be
the effect of Socialism upon crime? The man who becomes a criminal at
present finds himself in a world where he is compelled to work for some
other man’s profit, and to have flaunted in his face every hour the
wealth which has been exacted from his toil. But now he will find
himself in a world from which luxury and pauperism have been banished,
and in which coöperation and mutual fellowship is the law. He will find
that he gets just what he produces, and that he can produce in a day
more than he can steal in a month. Don’t you think that the criminal may
find these powerful motives to become a worker? He may be a degenerate,
of course, in which case we shall put him in a hospital; we should do
that now, if we did not feel dimly that it would be of no use, because
our social system is making criminals faster than we can pen them up,
and makes the life of the majority of the working-class so horrible that
men have been known to steal on purpose to get into jail.

I have tried in “The Jungle” to give a picture of the process whereby
the forces of commercialism turn honest workingmen into criminals and
tramps. There is also another story to which I would refer the reader
who cares to have more acquaintance with such conditions—“An Eye for an
Eye,” by Clarence Darrow.—And also, while we are considering this
subject, let us not forget how the change would affect the criminals of
the future, the wretched children of the slums and gutters, who will now
be cared for by the State, and made into decent citizens in public
asylums and hospitals, training schools and playgrounds.

What will be the effect of Socialism upon prostitution? Any young girl
can go to the public factories or stores, to the coöperative boarding
houses and hotels, the schools and nursery playgrounds, and secure
employment for the asking, and support herself by a couple of hours’
work a day in decent and attractive surroundings. She will, moreover, be
able to marry the man who loves her, because the problem of a living
will no longer enter into the question of marriage. She will be able to
restrict her family to as many as she and her husband care to support,
because she will be as intelligent and sensible as the women of our
present upper classes.

The question of the relationship of the system of wage-slavery to the
lives of women is too vast a one to be even outlined here; suffice it to
say that the Socialist battle is the battle of woman, even more than it
is the battle of the workingman. I cannot do better than to refer the
reader to another book in which the whole question of the effects which
age-long conditions of economic inferiority has wrought in the minds and
bodies of women is discussed in scientific and yet fascinating form—Mrs.
Gilman’s “Woman and Economics.”

What will be the effect of Socialism upon drunkenness? Under Socialism
the workingman will have a decent home, and attractive clubs, reading
rooms, and places of entertainment of all sorts, with plenty of time to
frequent them. He will have steady employment, wholesome food, a
pleasant place to work in, and—railroad fares being almost nothing—a
trip to the country when he fancies it. His wife will not be an
overworked, repulsive drudge, and his children will not be starving
brats. When he wants a drink he will go to a public drinking-place and
get it; what he gets will be pure, and will be sold him by a man who has
no interest in getting him drunk. On the contrary, the attendant may be
getting a royalty upon all nonintoxicating drinks he sells, and the
drinker will quite certainly be paying a big tax upon all the
intoxicating drinks he buys. Do you not think that all this may have
some effect upon the nation’s drink bill, which now is doubling itself
every decade?

Recently I was invited by the _Christian Herald_ to contribute to a
symposium upon the question of prohibition. I wrote as follows: “In my
opinion the drink evil is primarily an effect, and not a cause; it is a
by-product of wage-slavery. The working classes are to-day organised as
the bond slaves of capital. The conditions under which they live are
such as to brutalise and degrade them and drive them to drink. As I have
phrased it in “The Jungle,” if a man has to live in hell, he would a
great deal rather be drunk than sober. The solution of the drink evil
waits upon the coming of Socialism.

“As a part of the capitalist system, you have liquor sold for profit,
and the liquor interests are one of the forces which dominate the land.
Therefore, you are unable to effect any legislation to correct the evil.
Liquor is sold in order to make money out of the victim, therefore every
inducement and temptation is laid before him. Under Socialism, the only
barkeeper would be the community, and the community would have every
object in limiting the traffic. The children of the masses would be
taken in hand and taught the secret of right living; and when they grew
up they would have enough to eat and the means of keeping in working
condition, and would know other sources of happiness than drunkenness.
At present, attempts to reform the evil are attempts to sweep back the
tide. Moreover, it is to be noticed that many of those who are most
active in the work are themselves busily engaged in exploiting the
working-class in their private business, and are therefore directly
identified with the cause of the evil they are attempting to combat.”

What will be the effect of Socialism upon war? The New York _Sun_
recently expressed the opinion that the end of war will come only with
the Golden Age. If so, the Golden Age is within sight of all of us.
Socialism will abolish war as inevitably, as naturally and serenely, as
the sunrise abolishes the night. The cause of war is foreign markets;
and under Socialism the markets will all be at home. Under Socialism the
existence of the workers of the United States, of England, Germany, and
Japan, will not be dependent upon the ability of their masters to sell
their surplus products for profit to Chinamen. Under Socialism an
international Congress will take in hand the backward nations, will
clean out their sewers and wipe out their plagues and famines, their
kings and their capitalists, their ignorance, their superstition and
their wars. It will do these things because they need to be done—it will
not do them as a mere pretence to cover greed for gold mines and
markets. Outside of mines and markets there is no longer any cause of
war, save the old race hatreds which these have begotten; and race
hatreds are not known among Socialists. In their last International
Congress a Russian and a Japanese shook hands upon the platform, while
their countrymen were flying at each other’s throats in Manchuria. The
Socialist movement is a world movement—it has brought under its banners,
working shoulder to shoulder, men and women of all religions, races and
colours. With their victory, and only with their victory, will the
efforts of “Peace Congresses” bear fruit.

Finally, what will be the effect of Socialism upon the “System”? It is
important to distinguish between corruption as a sporadic event, an
accident here and there, and corruption as a national institution. In
the Industrial Republic a worker might of course bribe his foreman to
let him cheat the community; but that would be every man’s loss, and
there would be every inducement to find it out and make it known, and no
hindrance whatever to its punishment. At present, however, we have
corruption organised in town, county, city, state, and nation, with
every inducement to keep it hidden, and almost no possibility of
punishing it. Everybody understands that we have corporations, and that
the corporations rule us; all that everybody does not yet understand is
that the continuance of their rule would mean the ruin of free
institutions in America, and ultimately the downfall of civilisation
itself.


I have outlined the economic and political conditions which I believe
will prevail in the Industrial Republic; there remains to consider what
influences these will exert upon the moral and intellectual life of men.

When people criticise the Socialist programme they always think about
government censors and red tape, and limitations upon free endeavour;
and so they say that Socialism would lead to a reign of tameness and
mediocrity. They tell us that under the new régime we should all have to
wear the same kind of coat and eat the same kind of pie. They argue that
if all the means of production are owned by the Government there will be
no way for you to get your own kind of pie; failing to perceive that
government control of the means of production no more implies government
control of the product, than government control of the post office means
government control of the contents of your letters. Said a good
clergyman friend of mine: “What possible place, for instance, would
there be for _me_ in your Socialist society.” And I answered, “There
would be just exactly the same place for you that there is at present.
How is it that you get your living and your freedom? You are maintained
by an association of people who want the work you can do. Every
clergyman in the country is maintained in that way—and so are thousands
upon thousands of editors, authors, artists, actors—so are all our
clubs, societies, restaurants, theatres and orchestras. The Government
has absolutely nothing to do with them at present—and the Government
need have absolutely nothing to do with them under Socialism. The people
who want them subscribe and pay for them. Under our present system they
pay the cost to private profit-seekers; under Socialism they would pay
the State.”

In the Industrial Republic a man will be able to order anything he
wishes, from a flying machine to a seven-legged spider made of diamonds;
and the only question that anyone will ever dream of asking him will be:
“Have you got the money to pay for it?” There remains only to add that,
the system of wealth-distribution being now one of justice, that
question will mean: “Have you performed for society the equivalent of
the labour-time of the article you desire society to furnish you?”

Nine-tenths of the argument against Socialism dissolves into mist the
moment one states that single all-important fact, that Socialism is a
science of _economics_. For instance, Mr. Bryan has recently published
in the _Century Magazine_ an article entitled “Individualism versus
Socialism;” and here is the way he contrasts the two: “The individualist
believes that competition is not only a helpful but a necessary force in
society, to be guarded and protected; the Socialist regards competition
as a hurtful force, to be entirely exterminated.” Now there are endless
varieties of competition with which Socialism could in no conceivable
way interfere: the competition of love, and of friendship; the
competition of political life; the competition of ideals, of music and
books, of philosophy and science. It is the claim of the Socialists that
by setting men free from the money-greed and the money-terror—from the
need of struggling to deprive other men of the necessities of life in
order to prevent them from depriving you of these necessities—the mind
of the race would be set free for more vigorous competition in these
other fields, and thus the development of real individuality would be
for the first time made possible. This being the desire of the
Socialist, it should be clear how fundamental is the misconception of
Mr. Bryan, indicated by the bare title of his article—“Individualism
versus Socialism.” Socialism is not opposed to Individualism, and to set
the two in opposition is like the attempt to imagine a fight between an
elephant and a whale.

Socialism is a proposition for an economic re-organisation; as such, the
only thing to which it can logically and intelligently be opposed is
Capitalism. Mr. Bryan indicates that he discerns this, in another
portion of his article. He says; “For the purpose of this discussion
Individualism will be defined as the private ownership of the means of
production and distribution where competition is possible, leaving to
public ownership those means of production and distribution in which
competition is practically impossible; and Socialism will be defined as
the collective ownership, through the State, of all the means of
production and distribution.” For general unfairness this statement
makes me think of the story of a man who was riding through the country
and stopped to admire a fine pair of turkeys, and after praising them
with enthusiasm, remarked to the farmer: “I will match you for them!
Heads they are mine, and tails they stay yours.” Mr. Bryan has composed
a subtly worded definition of Individualism which takes all the kernels
from the Socialist ear, and leaves to the Socialist only the husk.
“Leaving to public ownership those means of production and distribution
in which competition is practically impossible!” What a beautiful field
for controversy, and what endless opportunities for compromise and
concession, for advance or retreat! Ten years ago Mr. Bryan would not
have appreciated the necessity of inserting this clause; industrial
evolution had not proceeded quite so far, and all our radicals were
bending their efforts to destroying the trusts. It was only after the
last presidential election, unless I am mistaken, that Mr. Bryan
definitely committed himself to the public ownership “of those means of
production and distribution in which competition is practically
impossible.”

If Mr. Bryan would only procure and read a really authoritative treatise
upon modern scientific Socialism (say Vandervelde’s “Collectivism and
Industrial Evolution”) he would understand that his programme is so
close to that of the Socialists that the difference would require a
microscope to discern. In fact, I imagine that the majority of modern
proletarian thinkers would be willing to subscribe to the programme of
“Individualism” exactly as Mr. Bryan states it: “the private ownership
of the means of production and distribution where competition is
possible, leaving to public ownership those means of production and
distribution in which competition is practically impossible.”

The one point to be made absolutely clear in this matter is that the
Industrial Republic will be an organisation for the supplying of the
_material necessities_ of human life. With the moral and intellectual
affairs of men it can have very little to do. What Socialism proposes to
organise and systematise is industry, not thought. The difference
between the products of industry and those of thought is a fundamental
one. The former are strictly limited in quantity, and the latter are
infinite. No man can have more than his fair share of the former without
depriving his neighbour; but to a thought there is no such limit—a
single poem or symphony may do for a million just as well as for one.
With the former it is possible for one man to gain control and oppress
others; but it is not possible to monopolise thought. And it is in
consequence of this fact that laws and systems are necessary with the
things of the body, which would be preposterous with the things of the
mind. The bodily needs of men are pretty much all alike. Men need food,
clothing, shelter, light, air, and heat; and they need these of pretty
nearly the same quality and in pretty nearly the same quantity—so that
they can be furnished methodically year in and year out, according to
order. This is being done by our present industrial masters for profit;
in the Industrial Republic it will be done by the State, for use.

Quite otherwise is it with things in which men are not alike—their
religions and their arts and their sciences. The only conditions under
which the State can with any justice or efficiency have to do with
production in these fields, is after men have come to agreement—when
opinion has given place to knowledge. For instance, we have, in certain
fields of science, methods which we can consider as agreed upon; it
would be perfectly possible for the State to endow astronomical
investigators, and seekers of the North Pole, and inventors of flying
machines, and pioneers in all the technical arts. In the same way we
come to agree, within certain limits, what is a worth-while play or
book; in so far as we agree, we can have government theatres and
publishing houses, government newspapers and magazines. If ever science
should discover the rationale of the phenomenon of genius, so that we
could analyse and judge it with precision, we should then have the whole
problem solved.

You are a writer, perhaps; and you say that you would not relish the
idea of bringing your book to a government official to be judged. Ask
yourself, however, if some of your prejudice may not be due to your
conception of a government official as the representative of a class,
and of the interests of a class. In the Industrial Republic there will
be no classes, and the officers of the coöperative publishing house will
have no one to serve but the people. If they are not satisfactory to the
people, the people can get rid of them—something the people cannot do
anywhere in the world to-day. You think, perhaps, that you choose your
own governors in this country—but you do not. What you do is to go to
the polls and choose between two sets of candidates, both of whom have
been selected by your economic rulers as being satisfactory to them.

While I do not profess to be certain, I imagine that an author who
wanted his book published by the Government would have to pay the
expenses of the publication. This would not be any hardship, for wages
in the Industrial Republic could not be less than ten dollars for a day
of six hours’ work. With the rapid improvement in machinery and methods
that would follow, they would probably soon be double that—and of course
it would rest with the people who were doing the work to see that it was
done in an attractive place, with plenty of fresh air and due safeguards
against accidents. Under these conditions a man of refinement could go
to a factory to work for pleasure and exercise, instead of pulling at
ropes in a gymnasium, as he commonly does nowadays. And when a young
author had earned the cost of making his book, he would have done all
that he had to do. He would not have to enter into a race in vulgar
advertising with exploiting private concerns; nor would the public form
its ideas of his work from criticisms in reviews which were run to
secure advertisements, and which gave their space to the books that were
advertised the most. Neither would his critics be employed by a class,
to maintain the interests of a class, and to keep down the aspirations
of some other class. Also, the book-reading public would no longer
consist—as our present society so largely consists—of idle and unfeeling
rich, and ignorant, debased and hunger-driven poor.

And then, as I said, there is a second method—the method of the churches
and clubs. Out in Chicago there was, four years ago, a man who thought
there ought to be more Socialist books published than there were. He had
no money; but he drew up a programme for a coöperative publishing house,
to furnish Socialist literature at cost to those who wanted it. He got
some ten thousand dollars in ten-dollar shares, and since then he has
been turning out half a million pieces of Socialist literature every
year. That seems to me a perfect illustration of what would happen in
the new society, the second way in which books would be published. Such
concerns—free associations, as they are termed in the Socialist
vocabulary—would spring up literally by the thousands. They would cover
every field that the liberated soul of man might be interested in, they
would care for every type of thinker and artist, no matter how
eccentric; they would offer encouragement to every man who showed the
slightest sign of power in any field. The only reason we do not have
many times as many of these associations as we have now, is simply that
those people who really care about the higher things of life are almost
invariably poor and helpless.

One of the curious things which I have observed about those who pick
flaws in the suggestions of the Socialist, is how seldom it ever occurs
to them to apply their own tests to the present system of things. How is
it with art and literature production now—are all the conditions quite
free from objection? Is the man of genius always encouraged and
protected, and set free to develop his powers?

In the _North American Review_ a couple of years ago there appeared an
article by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, in which she set forth her opinion
that “American literature to-day is the most timid, the most anæmic, the
most lacking in individualities, the most bourgeois, that any country
has ever known.” This seemed to perplex Mrs. Atherton very much—she
could not comprehend why such a very great country should have a
“bourgeois” literature. I replied to her in a paper which was published
in _Collier’s Weekly_, in which I maintained that “American literature
is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known, simply because
American life is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known.” I
shall quote a few paragraphs from the essay, which began with an attempt
to define the word “bourgeois”:

It signifies, in a sentence, that type of civilisation, of law and
convention, which was made necessary by the economic struggle, and which
is now maintained by the economic victors for their own comfort and the
perpetuation of their power. The _bourgeoisie_, or middle class, is that
class which, all over the world, takes the sceptre of power as it falls
from the hands of the political aristocracy; which has the skill and
cunning to survive in the free-for-all combat which follows upon the
political revolution. Its dominion is based upon wealth; and hence the
determining characteristic of the bourgeois society is its regard for
wealth. To it, wealth is power, it is the end and goal of things. The
aristocrat knew nothing of the possibility of revolution, and so he was
bold and gay. The bourgeois _does_ know about the possibility of
revolution, and so it is that Mrs. Atherton finds that our literature is
“timid.” She finds it “anæmic,” simply because the bourgeois ideal knows
nothing of the spirit, and tolerates intellectual activity only for the
ends of commerce and material welfare. She finds also that it “bows
before the fetich of the body,” and she is much perplexed by the
discovery. She does not seem to understand that the bourgeois represents
an achievement of the body, and that all that he knows in the world is
body. He is well fed himself, his wife is stout, and his children are
fine and vigorous. He lives in a big house, and wears the latest thing
in clothes; his civilisation furnishes these to every one—at least to
every one who amounts to anything; and beyond that he understands
nothing—save only the desire to be entertained. It is for entertainment
that he buys books, and as entertainment that he regards them; and hence
another characteristic of the bourgeois literature is its lack of
seriousness. The bourgeois writer has a certain kind of seriousness, of
course—the seriousness of a hungry man seeking his dinner; but the
seriousness of the artist he does not know. He will roar you as gently
as any sucking dove, he will also wring tears from your eyes or thrill
you with terror, according as the fashion of the hour suggests; but he
knows exactly why he does these things, and he can do them between chats
at his club. If you expected him to act like his heroes, he would think
that you were mad.

The basis of a bourgeois society is cash payment; it recognises only the
accomplished fact. To be a Milton with a “Paradise Lost” in your pocket
is to be a tramp: to be a great author in the bourgeois literary world
is to have sold a hundred thousand copies, and to have sold them within
memory—that is, a year or two. With the bourgeois, success is success,
and there is no going behind the returns; to discriminate between
different kinds of success would be to introduce new and dangerous
distinctions. As Mr. John L. Sullivan once phrased it: “A big man is a
big man, it don’t matter if he’s a prize-fighter or a president.” Mr.
John L. Sullivan is a big man himself; so is Mr. Frank Munsey, and so
was Mr. Henry Romeike, and so was Senator Hanna. So are they all, all
honourable men, and when you look up in “Who’s Who,” you find that they
are there.

The bourgeois ideal is a perfectly definite and concrete one: it has
mostly all been attained—there are only a few small details left to be
attended to, such as the cleaning of the streets and the suppressing of
the labour unions. Thus there is no call for perplexity, and no use for
anything hard to understand. Originality is superfluous, and
eccentricity is anathema. The world is as it always has been, and human
nature will always be as it is; the thing to do is to find out what the
public likes. The public likes pathos and the homely virtues; and so we
give it “Eben Holden” and “David Harum.” The public likes high life, and
so we give it Richard Harding Davis and Marie Corelli. The public does
_not_ like passion; it likes sentiment, however—it even likes heroics,
provided they are conventionalised, and so to amuse it we turn all
history into a sugar-coated romance. The public’s strong point is love,
and we lay much stress upon the love-element—though with limitations,
needless to say. The idea of love as a serious problem among men and
women is dismissed, because the social organisation enables us to
satisfy our passions with the daughters of the poor. Our own daughters
know nothing about passion, and we ourselves know it only as an item in
our bank accounts. To the bourgeois young lady—the Gibson girl, as she
is otherwise known—literary love is a sentiment, ranking with a box of
bonbons, and actual love is a class marriage with an artificially
restricted progeny.

These which have been described are the positive and more genial aspects
of the bourgeois civilisation; the savage and terrible remain to be
mentioned. For it must be understood that this civilisation of comfort
and respectability furnishes its good things only to a class, and to an
exceedingly small class. The majority of mankind it pens up in filthy
hovels and tenements, to feed upon husks and rot in misery. This was
once easy, but now it is growing harder—and thus little by little the
_bourgeoisie_ is losing its temper. Just now it is like a fat poodle by
a stove—you think it is asleep and venture to touch it, when quick as a
flash it has put its fangs in you to the bone.

The bourgeois civilisation is, in one word, an organised system of
repression. In the physical world it has the police and the militia, the
bludgeon, the bullet, and the jail; in the world of ideas it has the
political platform, the school, the college, the press, the church—and
literature. The bourgeois controls these things precisely as he controls
the labour of society, by his control of the purse-strings. Unless
proper candidates are named by political parties, there are no campaign
funds; unless proper teachers and college presidents are chosen, there
are no endowments. Thus it happens that our students are taught a
political economy carefully divorced, not merely from humanity, but also
from science, history, and sense; any other kind of political economy
the student sometimes despises—more commonly he does not even know that
it exists. And it is just the same with the churches and with theology.
We have at present established in this land a religion which exists in
the name of the world’s greatest revolutionist, the founder of the
Socialist movement; this man denounced the bourgeois and the bourgeois
ideal more vehemently than ever it has since been denounced—declaring in
plain words that no bourgeois could get into Heaven; and yet his church
is to-day, in all its forms, and in every civilised land, the main
pillar of bourgeois society!

With the press the bourgeois has a still more direct method than
endowment; the press he owns. All the daily newspapers in New York, for
instance, are the property of millionaires, and are run by them in their
own interests, exactly the same as their stables or their _cuisine_.
That does not mean, of course, that many of their journalistic menials
are not sincere—it does not mean that the college presidents and
clergymen may not be sincere. One of the quaintest things about the
bourgeois editor, the bourgeois college president, the bourgeois
clergyman, is the whole-souled naïveté with which he takes it for
granted that just as all civilisation exists for the comfort of the
bourgeois, so also all truth must necessarily be such as the bourgeois
would desire it to be.

And then there is literature. The bourgeois recognises the novelist and
the poet as a means of amusement somewhat above the prostitute, and
about on a level with the music-hall artist; he recognises the essayist,
the historian, and the publicist as agents of bourgeois repression
equally as necessary as the clergyman and the editor. To all of them he
grants the good things of the bourgeois life, a bourgeois home with
servants who know their places, and a bourgeois club with smiling and
obsequious waiters. They may even, on state occasions, become acquainted
with the bourgeois magnates, and touch the gracious fingers of the
magnates’ pudgy wives. There is only one condition, so obvious that it
hardly needs to be mentioned—they must be bourgeois, they must see life
from the bourgeois point of view. Beyond that there is not the least
restriction; the novelist, for instance, may roam the whole of space and
time—there is nothing in life that he may not treat, provided only that
he be bourgeois in his treatment. He may show us the olden time, with
noble dames and gallant gentlemen dallying with graceful sentiment. He
may entertain us with pictures of the modern world, may dazzle us with
visions of high society in all its splendours, may awe us with the
wonders of modern civilisation, of steam and electricity, the flying
machine and the automobile. He may thrill us with battle, murder, and
Sherlock Holmes. He may bring tears to our eyes at the thought of the
old folks at home, or at his pictures of the honesty, humility, and
sobriety of the common man; he may even go to the slums and show us the
ways of Mrs. Wiggs, her patient frugality and beautiful contentment in
that state of life to which it has pleased God to call her. In any of
these fields the author, if he is worth his salt, may be
“entertaining”—and so the royalties will come in. If there is any one
whom this does not suit—who is so perverse that the bourgeois do not
please him, or so obstinate that he will not learn to please the
bourgeois—we send after him our literary policeman, the bourgeois
reviewer, and bludgeon him into silence; or better yet, we simply leave
him alone, and he moves into a garret. The bourgeois garrets resemble
the bourgeois excursion steamers. They are never so crowded that there
is not room for as many more as want to come on board; and any young
author who imagines that he can bear to starve longer than the world can
bear to let him starve, is welcome to try it. Letting things starve is
the specialty of the bourgeois society—the vast majority of the
creatures in it are starving all the time.

So much for things as they are. The Revolution will, of course, not
change our present bourgeois people—except that it will scare them
thoroughly, and make them teachable. But it will bring to the front an
enormous class of people to whom life is a new and wondrous thing; and
their children also will grow up in a different world, and with a
different ideal; and so a generation from now there will be a new art
public. The people who compose it will not have been forced to consider
money the only thing in life, the sole test of excellence and power;
they will not have been brought up on the motto, “Do others or they will
do you.” They will have been brought up in a world in which no man is
able to “do” another man, and in which all men stand as equals as
regards money. They will have been brought up in a world in which work
and a decent life are the right and duty of every man, and are taken for
granted with every man; in which influence, reputation, and command are
given for other things than money. If it be true that faith, hope, and
charity are greater things than wealth, it is perhaps not altogether
Utopian to suppose that these will be the things that the new public
will honour and will contrive to promote. The best way in which one can
be sure about this is to study the writers who are shaping the ideals of
Socialism—such men as Whitman and Thoreau, Ruskin and William Morris,
Kropotkin and Carpenter and Gorky. Above all I wish that I could be the
cause of the reader’s looking into one book, in which one of the
master-spirits of our time has made an attempt to picture this beautiful
world that is to be. When I met Mr. H. G. Wells last year, I had not
read any of his books; so he sent me a copy of his “Modern Utopia,”
graciously inscribing it: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the
next most hopeful!” Afterward, I was asked by _Life_ to name the book
which had given me the most pleasure during the last year, and I named
this one. It is, in my opinion, one of the great works of our
literature; it is worthy to be placed with the visions of Plato and Sir
Thomas More. It has three great virtues which are rarely, if ever, found
in combination. In the first place, it is characterised by a nobility
and loftiness of spirit which makes its reading a religious exercise. In
the second place, it is the work of an engineer, a man with the modern
sense of reality and acquainted with the whole field of scientific
achievement. In the third place, it is written in a a literary style
which makes the reading of each paragraph a delight in itself. It is a
book to love and to cherish; one leaves it, refreshed and strengthened,
to wait with patience and cheerfulness the hour of the Great Change.




                              CHAPTER VIII
                          THE COÖPERATIVE HOME


In all that I have outlined concerning the Industrial Republic, I have
tried to indicate my belief that it will be the creation of no man’s
will, but a product of evolution—the result of many forces which are now
at work in our society. These forces we can study and analyse; and in
picturing their final product, we are not simply indulging in fantastic
speculation, but are making scientific deductions. I believe that we
have now in our present world the half-developed embryo of everything
which I have pictured in the future; the Revolution, which comes
suddenly, and in the midst of strain and agony, is precisely the
parallel of a child-birth. In our present “trusts,” for instance, we
have perfect examples of the centralising and systematising of
production and distribution; absolutely the only thing needed to fit
them into the world I have pictured is a change of ownership. Again, in
the labour unions, we see the building up of the machinery of industrial
self-government. And similarly, in our churches and clubs, our
benevolent and artistic and scientific associations, we have the germs
of all the coöperative activities of the future. In our public
educational system, we have a complete and perfect piece of practical
Socialism, ready to fit into the structure of our Industrial Republic.
In our Post Office we have still another, while in the army and navy we
have examples of industrial paternalism which need only the breath of a
new ideal to make them indispensable for all time. We saw after the San
Francisco earthquake the real use of standing armies; and for such
purposes they will continue to exist, long after war shall have become a
nightmare memory.

It has occurred to me that in concluding my argument, it might be well
to tell of another such seed of the future, in the planting of which I
myself have had the pleasure of assisting. I refer to the Helicon Home
Colony, at Englewood, New Jersey, where I have been living while writing
this book.

Our industries are organised at present under the competitive system;
and I do not believe that any coöperative method of production can drive
human beings to the same pitch of effort as they are driven by the lash
of wage-slavery. So I consider that any form of coöperation in
production is doomed to failure, under present conditions; and I should
prefer to watch from the outside any attempt to found “colonies” of the
Brook Farm and Ruskin type. The case is quite otherwise, however, when
it comes to coöperation in _distribution_, in the expenditure of one’s
income. We are familiar with hundreds of forms of that sort of
association—coöperative stores, benevolent fraternities, social clubs
and churches. The practicability of any such enterprise depends upon two
questions: First, are there a sufficient number of people who want the
same thing, and second, can they get it more effectively in combination
than otherwise.

The idea of coöperation in domestic industry has been well worked out in
theory—notably in Mrs. Gilman’s book “The Home.” The first attempt to
realise it in practice, so far as I know, is the Helicon Home Colony.

The plan was broached in an article which I published in _The
Independent_, in June of 1906. In the course of the article, I outlined
the situation as follows:

Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived—like a cave
man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and
dependants to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades: the
trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the trade of
washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat, of churning
butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising chickens, of
cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house, of decorating
rooms, of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded
into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and clashing
with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and barbarous
fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labour. It takes a
hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly, while twenty cooks could
prepare one meal for a hundred families, and do it perfectly. It costs a
hundred thousand dollars to build and equip a hundred kitchens; it would
cost only five thousand dollars to build one kitchen! But, of course, if
you have large-scale cooking at present, you can only have it under
capitalist auspices; and so it is associated in your minds with
uncleanness, and bad service, and high prices. It takes a hundred churns
and a hundred aching backs to make a thousand pounds of butter; it would
take only one machine and a man to tend it to make the same thousand
pounds, and the cost of making it would be cut ninety-five per cent. But
of course you cannot have large-scale butter-making except it is done
for profit—and that means adulteration and poisoning! It takes a hundred
ignorant nursemaids to take care of the children of a hundred families,
and develop every kind of ugliness and badness in them; it would take
only twenty or thirty trained nurses and kindergarten teachers to take
care of them coöperatively, and bring them up according to the teachings
of science.

One could show this same thing in a thousand different forms, if it were
necessary; but it has all been reasoned out in Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s book, “The Home,” and anyone to whom the idea is new may read
it there. The purpose of this paper is not to persuade anyone, but to
move to action those already persuaded. There must be, in and near New
York, thousands of men and women of liberal sympathies, who understand
this situation clearly, and are handicapped by its miseries in their own
lives—authors, artists and musicians, editors and teachers and
professional men, who abhor boarding houses and apartment hotels and yet
shrink from managing servants, who have lonely and peevish children like
my own, and are no fonder of eating poisons or of wasting their time and
strength than I am. There must be a few who, like myself, have realised
that it is a question of dragging through life a constantly increasing
burden of care, or making an intelligent effort and solving the problem
once for all. To such I offer my coöperation. I am not a business man,
but circumstances have forced me to take up this problem, and I am not
accustomed to failing in what I undertake. I have said that “Socialism
is not an experiment in government, but an act of will”; and I say the
same of this plan. Having gotten the figures from experts and found out
exactly what we can do, the one thing remaining is to go ahead and do
it.

I suppose that the average professional man invests ten thousand dollars
in a home (or else pays rent equal to interest upon that sum); and that
he pays two thousand dollars a year living expenses for his family. Let
a hundred such families combine to found a coöperative home, and there
would be a million dollars for building and equipment, and two hundred
thousand dollars a year for running expenses; I believe that for half
the outlay five hundred people could live and enjoy comforts at present
possible only to millionaires. I have, however, no intention of asking
anyone to risk his money upon such a guess. I write this to find out if
there are people disposed to consider the project; and if there are
enough, I will have the plan figured upon by architects, contractors,
stewards, and other qualified experts, and have prepared a definite
business proposition, and a plan of organisation for a stock company.

The following embodies my own conception of what such a “home colony”
should be. It would be located within an hour of New York, and would
have one hundred families, and three or four hundred acres of land,
healthfully located, near some body of water, and as unspoiled by the
hand of man as possible. It should have an abundant water supply and a
filtering plant; an electric light and power plant, and a large garden
and farm, raising its own stock, meat, poultry, fruit and vegetables,
and canning the last for winter use. It should be administered by a
board of directors, democratically elected. For the management of its
various departments salaried experts should be employed; machinery
should be installed wherever it could be made to pay, and the best
modern methods should be applied in every industry. All its purchases
should be in bulk and tested for quality; and, so far as the preparation
and serving of food is concerned, the processes should be kept as
aseptic as a surgical operation.

We are accustomed to having our buildings for public purposes endowed by
persons with a great deal of money and few ideals; and so we consume
much space and material and accomplish little, exactly typifying our
civilisation. The buildings of this home colony should be of frame at
the outset, of simple and expressive design, each structure exactly
adapted to its specific purpose. The buildings should be conveniently
grouped—those for the children in one place, those for cooking and
eating in another, those for reading, for music and social intercourse,
for recreation and exercise, in still other places. The greater part of
the land would of course be given up to farm and woodland, and to the
individual dwellings of the families. The ground available for this
latter purpose should be divided into lots, priced according to size and
location, and eased to stockholders for long terms. Each would erect his
own home, according to his own taste—a home, of course, of a kind
hitherto unknown, with no provision for the cooking of food, or the
training of children, or other trades and professions. It would be a
place where the family met, to rest and play and sleep. It might be
large or small, anything that the owner chose to make it—my own would be
a four- or five-room cottage, of rustic design, and it would cost from
six to eight hundred dollars. Besides these there should be apartment
buildings, owned by the colony, and dormitories with rooms for single
men and women.

As to the public buildings, there should be a large and beautiful dining
hall, and a modern, scientifically constructed kitchen. There should be
separate tables for each family, or for congenial groups of people. The
service should be unexceptionable, the food simple, but perfect in
quality and preparation; there should be a vegetarian service for those
who prefer this cheaper mode of life, and the charge for board should be
based upon the cost of the service. As to what the cost would be, with a
colony raising nearly all its own food upon the premises, I can only
submit three experiences of my own: First, it cost me for my family of
three to board in New York City, in one room and in the cheapest way, a
thousand dollars a year. Second, it cost us, living in a three-room
cottage in the country, doing our own work and buying our food from a
farmer at wholesale prices, seven hundred dollars a year. Third, it cost
us, living upon a sixty-acre farm, which represented a total investment
of four thousand dollars, doing no work ourselves but the managing,
paying a man and woman five hundred and forty dollars a year, having a
horse and carriage, and feeding five persons instead of three, a total
of less than six hundred dollars a year. Lest this should be
unbelievable, I put it in another form—the total expenses of the farm,
including labour, were less than twelve hundred dollars, the income was
six hundred dollars, and the net loss, or the cost to us of a year’s
living, was less than six hundred. And these figures, it should be
explained, included not merely board, but also household supplies and
repairs of all sorts, items which would appear in other places in the
community’s accounts. I will probably be laughed at, but I believe that,
granting the land, horses and machinery, buildings, equipment and
capital, the members of such a colony as I describe could be provided
with perfect service and an abundance of food of the best quality at a
total cost of one hundred dollars a year per person.

So much for the coöperative preparation of food. And now for the caring
for children. There should be two separate establishments, one for
infants, who like to sleep, and one for children, who like to run and
shout. Both should be scientifically constructed and ventilated and kept
as clean as an up-to-date hospital; the food should be prepared under
the general direction of a physician. No building for children should be
over two stories high, and the upper windows should be beyond the reach
of children; no matches or exposed fire should be permitted, and there
should be a night watchman, fire extinguishers, and an automatic
sprinkling apparatus. These establishments should be under the
supervision of a board of women directors; and the actual work of caring
for the children, washing, dressing and feeding them, playing with them
and teaching them, should be done by trained nurses and kindergarten
teachers who live in the colony as the friends and social equals, of its
members. In other words, it is my idea that the caring for children
should be recognised as a profession, and that servants should have
nothing to do with it; it is my idea that it should be done in a place
built for the purpose, with floors for babies to crawl where there is no
dirt for them to eat, with playgrounds for children where there are no
stoves and no boiling water, no staircases and wells, no cats and dogs,
no workbaskets, lamps, pianos, sewing machines, jam closets, inkstands,
and authors’ writing tables. Instead, there should be sleeping rooms and
bedrooms, and sun parlours for nursing mothers; a separate building for
the sick; kindergarten rooms and indoor playgrounds for bad weather, and
a big all-outdoors romping ground, with sunny places and shady places,
swings, rocking horses, sand piles, and all other accessories of a
children’s heaven. Of course, any mother should come and play with or
care for her own children just as much as she pleased, or take them
home, as she chose; though I think that no one would care to assist this
plan who did not believe that children should be cared for in accordance
with the principles of science, and preserved from the corrupting
influence of grandmothers and aunts. Of course, any mother who believed
that her work in the world was caring for children, and who wished to
care for her own and others, according to the methods of the
commonwealth, would be free to do so, and to earn her living by doing
it.

I have already explained that I should not regard this as an experiment
in Socialism; but I do think that those who undertook it would have to
be in sympathy with the spirit of Socialism, which is the spirit of
brotherhood and democracy. Whenever I have mentioned this plan to
friends they have always said: “The great difficulty would be to get
together a community of congenial people.” It does not seem to me that
this would be a difficulty at all. Every member of the community would
have his own home, to which he would invite his personal friends as he
chose; and the other members of the community he would meet in the same
way that he meets acquaintances in business and politics, in theatres,
restaurants, and clubs. I myself am the most unsociable of human beings
when I am busy, and have no idea of giving up my hermit’s tastes. In a
colony of a hundred families there ought to be persons of every kind of
inclination, and it would not be in the least necessary for anyone to
associate with those who were not congenial.

Of course there are people in the world whom we should not want near us
at all; but such people, I think, would not care to join our colony.
Vulgar and snobbish people get along very well in the world as it is,
and do not find it a task to give orders to servants. Those who would be
interested in such a plan would be men and women who wished to practise
“plain living and high thinking”; and they would naturally wish to get
as far as possible from every suggestion of ostentation and
conventionality. They would establish the shirt-waist and the short
skirt as _en règle_, and would, I trust, allow me in without a dress
suit. They would be all hard-working people themselves, and they would
not look down upon honest labour. This spirit, if wisely and earnestly
cultivated, would solve the “servant problem” for the colony, and solve
the health problem for its members as well. I know business and
professional men who, when they need exercise, have to go down into the
basement and lift weights and pull at rubber straps; and they envy me my
farm, where I can hoe the garden, or pitch hay, or pick fruit, and not
merely benefit my body, but also put money in my purse. In this
community every member would be credited for the time he worked; and it
ought to become the custom for the men to help with the harvests, and
the women with the preserving of fruit, and the children with the berry
picking and the weeding of the gardens. I have no doubt that there are
thousands of young men and women in New York City, students of art and
music and the professions, who would be glad of a chance to earn their
way in a community where class feeling did not make labour degrading. I
appreciate the difficulties in the way of such a project; the chances at
present are against a coal-heaver’s being a socially possible person,
and I am not insisting that the day labourers should share in the
privileges of the community. But I do think that this should certainly
be the case with those whom we select to care for and teach our
children, and also, if possible, with those whom we permit to prepare
and serve our food; if I am not willing to shake a man’s hand or sit
next to him in a reading-room, I do not see why I should be willing to
eat what he has cooked. I personally know a young man who is studying
art, and who earns his living by washing dishes in a downtown
restaurant, because it takes only two or three hours a day of his time.
In Memorial Hall at Harvard University, in the sanitarium at Battle
Creek, and in many other places I might name, those who wait upon the
tables are college students; and anyone who knows the difference which
there is in the atmosphere of such a dining hall knows what I should
wish to attain.


The above article brought me replies from four or five hundred persons;
and committees were named, which met all through the summer to work out
the details of the plan. In October of the same year the purchase of
Helicon Hall was made, and the “Colony” began its career. Six months
after the publication of my first article, I contributed to _The
Independent_ an account of how the experiment was succeeding; I quote
from it the following paragraphs:

We made many mistakes; I shall tell about some of them in due course,
for the benefit of future pioneers. But there is one thing to be said
here at the start: we made no mistake in believing in democratic
institutions. It was a point about which the critics of our plan were
all agreed, that it could not possibly work, because people could never
decide what they wanted. That dreadful bugaboo called “human nature”
would wreck us in the end. I, for my part, believed that people in
America were used to the methods of majority government, and I believed
that if we should apply those same methods in a coöperative home, a
group of intelligent and sincere people could manage to solve all their
problems. From the beginning our policy was publicity and democracy; and
from the beginning it brought us through. At the committee meetings
everyone had his say. And little by little you would see a majority
opinion taking shape on the question at issue, until, finally, when all
had been heard, the matter was put to a vote. There was no case where
the minority did not give way with all courtesy. And now that the colony
really exists we sit round the fireside and talk out our questions, and
as a rule we do not even have to take a vote—an informal discussion is
enough to make clear to everyone what is fair and right.

I am a believer in the materialistic conception of history; I am
accustomed to interpret the characters of men from this position—to say
that competition has made them selfish and deceitful, and that
coöperation will make them beautiful and sincere. I think that I can see
it working out in this colony. We have founded it upon justice and
truth; socially we stand upon terms of equality, and economically we pay
for exactly what we get. These are the principles we have built upon,
and all take them for granted, and no other idea ever enters their
thought.

[Illustration:

  _Photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals, N. Y._

  HELICON HALL
]

“But will this last?” you ask. I do not see how it can fail to last, and
to grow—admitting, of course, that my analysis of the cause is correct.
We did not start out with any enthusiasms and religious ecstasies; we
had simply cold common sense; we employed lawyers and business men to
put us on a sound basis. Our only real peril was at the beginning,
before the colony spirit was well developed in our members, and some of
us were tired and overworked; and even then there were no
misunderstandings that a little discussion could not clear up. Now
things are beginning to run smoothly, and we are realising some of the
benefits.

We are as yet in our infancy, of course; there is no one of the
departments in which we do not intend to make numerous improvements; but
we have got over the roughest parts of the road, and we can begin to
look about us a little. We are living in what I think is the most
beautiful suburban town near New York. We have nine and a half acres of
land, sloping down from the western brow of the Palisades, and
commanding a view of thirty miles, and we have only half a mile to walk
to come out upon the Hudson, where there is scenery which tourists would
travel many miles to look at, if they only knew about it. The hall
itself has nearly six thousand square feet of floor space on the ground
floor alone, devoted to rooms for social purposes; there is a central
court filled with palms and rubber trees, which have grown to the very
top of the three-story building. We have a large pipe-organ, a swimming
pool and bowling alley, a theatre, and a billiard room. We have
thirty-five bedrooms, ranged in galleries about the court, so that we
can look out of our windows in the morning and see the sun rise, and
then look out of our door and see the tropics. We have the finest
heating system in the world—we pump fresh air in from outside, heat it
in a three-thousand-foot steam coil, and then distribute it to all the
rooms, with the result that we feel as well all the time as other people
feel when they take a trip to Arizona or the Adirondacks. In such a
place as this we have a comfortable bedroom or study, where we can go
and be by ourselves and never be disturbed, for $3 a week. And
downstairs we have a huge fireplace, where, if we happen to feel in a
sociable humour, we can sit and talk with our friends. And also, we have
a dining-room, where a group of cultivated people meet three times a day
to partake of wholesome and pleasant-tasting food, prepared by other
members of our big family, whose cleanliness and honesty are matters of
common knowledge to us. This last-named privilege costs us $5 a week, or
$4 if we only eat two meals; and we do not have to add to this price any
care or worry, because the price includes the salary of a superintendent
and a manager, who work sixteen hours a day each to straighten out all
the kinks and keep the machine running.

Finally, this magical building contains a dormitory and a children’s
dining-room and play-room, where ten happy and healthy children receive
their lessons in practical coöperation at a cost of four dollars a week
for each child. It was over these “institutionalised infants” of ours
that the critics of our plan were most incensed. Several dear ladies who
had read my books and conceived a liking for me, sat down and wrote me
tearful letters to point out the wickedness of “separating the mother
from her children.” As a matter of fact, we have five mothers in the
colony, and the work of caring for the children is divided among four of
them. (The fifth is studying medicine in New York.) By the simple
process of combining the care of the ten children we accomplish the
following results: First, the labour and trouble of caring for each
child is reduced about two-thirds; second, the child has playmates, and
is happy all day long; third, we can afford to keep the child in a more
hygienic place than the average nursery—we have a pump driving fresh air
into his play-room all day; and, fourth, we can dispense with the
services of nurse maids, and go away, leaving the child in the care of a
friend.

Of course we cannot have everything that we should like in the
“children’s department.” We have to wait for more colonists for that.
With only ten children we have to dispense with a resident physician; we
cannot even afford a kindergarten. And, of course, we have not the
scientifically constructed dormitory of which we dream; we have only a
converted theatre, and instead of the uniform cots and the dustproof
walls and all the rest, we have to make apologies to visitors. However,
our children are all enjoying it meantime; and our five mothers are
holding meetings and learning to coöperate.

The other big problem which we promised to tackle is the servant
problem. All the world is waiting to hear about this, so we are told;
even the aristocracy of Englewood is waiting; the ladies come in and
tell us their troubles and ask if we will feed them in cases of
emergency. They were even going to invite me to lecture them about
it—until one of them recollected that I was a Socialist “of a
particularly dangerous type.”

We have been only a few months at it; and we have still a great deal
left to accomplish. But we think that we have got far enough to claim to
have proven our thesis—that by means of coöperation, with the saving
which it implies, the introduction of system and of labour-saving
machinery, household labour can be lifted to the rank of a profession,
and people found to do it who can be admitted to the colony as members.
Those who wish to make fun of the idea have assumed this to mean that we
insist upon college diplomas from our cooks and chambermaids. It does
not mean that at all; as a matter of fact, we prefer to employ people
who have always earned their living by doing the work they do for us. It
means simply that we look for people who are cleanly and courteous and
honest; and that then, when they come into the colony, we treat them,
simply and as a matter of course, exactly as we treat everyone else. So
far as I know, there is no one here who has experienced the least
difficulty or unpleasantness in consequence.

There remains to explain the financial organisation of the colony. The
property is owned by the Home Colony Company, a separate corporation,
which was formed to raise the necessary capital. The company puts the
building in thorough repair and equips it for use as a residence, and
the colony rents it upon a three-year lease, assuming responsibility for
the interest on the mortgages, the insurance, taxes, and other charges,
and paying eight per cent. dividends upon the company stock. The
ownership of stock is thus entirely optional. One may live in the colony
without contributing any capital.

The Helicon Home Colony is a membership corporation. It is governed by a
board of directors, elected every six months by secret ballot. The only
conditions to residence in the colony are “congeniality” and freedom
from contagious disease; one may reside in the colony indefinitely
without becoming a member, but only members have the right to vote. The
conditions of membership are one month’s residence, election by a
four-fifths vote, and the payment of an initiation fee of $25. The
constitution of the colony provides for initiative, referendum and
recall of members of the board of directors; also for a complete
statement of the financial affairs of the colony, to be rendered every
three months.


I have quoted this at length because, as I said before, I believe that
it is the seed from which mighty forests are destined to grow. We should
never have given the time and strength which we have given to this
experiment, but for our certainty that all the world will some day be
following in our footsteps. We are living in a coöperative home because
we wish to do it—but some day you will be doing it because you _have_
to. You get along badly enough with your servants, you admit; still you
get along somehow or other. But has it ever occurred to you what your
plight would be if, when you went to the “intelligence-office,” instead
of getting a bad servant, you got no servant at all? When that time
comes, you will be grateful to us pioneer “home-colonists.”

It is a most interesting thing to watch; it is the Industrial Republic
in the making. We care nothing whatever about the intellectual opinions
of the people who come to live in the colony; but I have observed that
nearly every non-Socialist who has come here has been turned into a
Socialist in the course of a month or two. And that is not because we
argue with him, or bother him; it is simply because facts are facts.
What becomes of the old shop-worn argument that it would be necessary to
change human nature—when human nature is suddenly discovered to be so
kindly and considerate as it is in this big home of ours? And what
becomes of the ponderous platitudes about “Socialism versus
Individualism” in a place where so many different kinds of individuals
are developing their individualities.

I am often moved to use this experiment of ours as an illustration of
what I said in the previous chapter, concerning the difference between
material and intellectual production. Here in Helicon Hall we have all
the dreadful machinery of paternalism which frightens our capitalist
editors and college presidents whenever they contemplate Socialism; we
submit ourselves to the blind rule of majorities—we allow a majority to
decide what we shall pay for our rooms, and when we shall pay it; to lay
out our _menu_, and refuse to give us pie for breakfast; to forbid our
giving tips, or whistling in the halls, or dancing after a certain hour
at night. And we have all the symbols of oppression—constitution and
by-laws and boards of directors and managers. And yet somehow, we are
freer than we ever were in the world before; because, by means of these
little concessions, we have made possible a _system_—and so flung from
our shoulders all at once the burden of care which used to wear the life
out of us.

And in consequence of that, for the first time in our experience we find
ourselves really free with regard to the real things of life. We have
absolutely not a convention in the place. We do as we please, and we
wear what we please. We are free to come and go, where we please and
whenever we please. We have each our own rooms or apartments, to which
we retire, and it never comes into anyone’s mind to ask what we are
doing there. We may work all night and sleep all day, if we feel like
it—so little do we bother with each others’ affairs that I have known
people to be away for a day or two without being missed.

And on the other hand, if we feel like company, we can have it; there is
always a group around our wonderful four-sided fireplace in the evening,
and you can always find someone willing to play billiards or go for a
walk. And as for our intellectual freedom—you should see the sparks
scatter when our half-score assorted varieties of “Fabians” and
“impossibilists,” “individualists” and “communist-anarchists,” all get
together after dinner! There are so many typewriters in Helicon Hall
that as you wander about the galleries in the morning you can fancy you
hear a distant battle with rapid-firing guns; and the products of the
industry vary from discussions of Yogi philosophy and modern psychic
research to magazine fiction, woman’s suffrage debates, and Jungle
“muck-raking.” And yet all these people share amicably in the ownership
of the fireplace and the swimming-pool and the tennis-court; providing
thereby a most beautiful illustration of the working out of the formula
laid down by Kautsky for the society of the future: “Communism in
material production, anarchism in intellectual.”

It is working out so beautifully, that the spirit of it has got hold of
even our children, and they are holding meetings and deciding things. Of
our nine youngsters seven are under six years of age; and last night I
attended a meeting of the whole nine, at which a grave question was
gravely discussed: “When a child wakes up early in the dormitory, is it
proper to wake the other children, or should the child lie still?” After
a long debate, Master David (aged five) remarked: “All in favour, please
say Aye.” Everybody said “Aye.”


The above was written in the middle of December, 1906. On March 16,
1907, at four o’clock in the morning, Helicon Hall was burned to the
ground, and forty-six adults and fifteen children were turned out
homeless upon the snow. The story of our ill-fated experiment is left to
stand as it was first printed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.



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