Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

golden grain, the barns and bins heaped full with accumulated harvests, the pork fattening in the valleys, the cattle feeding on a thousand hills. He would see the warehouses and shops of the hamlets and great cities filled with the supplies of human want-with stores of food and clothing and luxuries. He would see millions of strong men idle and threadbare and hungry in the roads and streets -millions of sad-eyed women and children standing by the shop windows looking longingly upon the piled objects of their need--which they could not buy. He would see millions more with the fear of he future shadowing their faces. Then he would ask a few questions and return to his own planet and report to the council of his people. He would tell the strange and pitiful tale of want in the midst of plenty. They would ask him in amazement whether he had received no explanation of such a strange condition of things as this. He would answer that he had; that he had applied to the college professors-the political economists; that they had made the matter quite clear; that these gentlemen had assured him that the reason why their fellow-citizens were idle was because too much work had been done in the world; that the reason why women and ch ldren were threadbare and ragged was because there was too much clothing; the reason why they were homeless was because there were too many houses; that the reason why men were starving was because there was too much wheat and bread! that there was a "glut in the market❞—over-production-and consequently “an industrial depression!"

So much for the intelligence of laissez faire! How stands its morality? In one of the royal libraries of the world there was said to be extant a few cenuries ago an ancient book, entitled A History of Snakes in Ireland. That volume, with its many chapters, and its curious binding of massive gilt and gold, contained but a single sentence. That sentence was as follows: "As to snakes

in Ireland, there are none there." A similar volume would hold the description of the morality of lassiez faire political economy-the doctrine of the modern competitive system of labor. There is none there.

Professor J. Stanley Jevons, one of the high priests of this doctrine, informs us in one of his books that the first step in the study of political economy is to rid the mind of the notion that there are any such things in matters of social industry as "abstract rights."

That is the morality of Wall streetjust sufficient to keep out of the penitentiary! That is the morality of the Paul Cliffords and Jesse Jameses, who hold up railroad trains. That is the morality of Rockefeller who buys up a hundred oil fields at a stroke to keep up the price of the poor man's light. These gentlemen are the apt and searching pupils of Mr. Jevons. His political economy furnishes the convenient principle of their trade. They are not troubled about abstract rights. They are political economists!

A professor of Yale College, another unextinct pachyderm of modern learning, assures us that "social classes Owe nothing to each other." Why is it that when the schemes of Satan are to be upheld in this world, the wisdom of the university and pulpit is so often at its call?-slavery, autocracy, robbery!

They prove to us, with curious and labored statistics, that the condition of the laborer of to-day is better than that of the poor man of history. They assail us with the maudlin argument that the modern workingman enjoys comforts unknown to the prince of a few centuries ago; that the feudal lord, like his serf, slept on bulrushes, and the modern poor man under a blanket-as if it were a question of bedclothes rather than of the security of sleep!

There is a difference between absolute and relative poverty. The poverty of past centuries was relative. That of to-day is absolute The blankets and

bread of the nineteenth century are better than the rushes and crusts of the middle ages; but humanity in the middle ages was at least certain of its crusts and rushes.

The morality of the competitive system, outside of a book, is the morality of medieval barbarism that made Might the basis of Right-the savage doctrine of the survival of the strongest, that strips Humanity naked at the feet of Cunning; that places manhood at the mercy of meanness; that asserts in the sunrise of the twentieth century that man is merchandise-his heart and brain to be bought and sold in the cheapest market, like a bundel of old furs!

Primitive man, the man of the woods and caves, would not endure hunger and want. He emerged for conquests and spoils. "The ravages of Atilla and Geneseric began from the stomach." Civilized want is shy and modest. It dresses itself, if it may, in the garb of respectability. It smiles in the face of the pitiless world. But underneath this ghastly complacence there exists to-day in the sharpened sensibilitees of modern men and women a mass of acute agonies such as never pierced the heart of savage

races.

The industrial competition under which we live is adjusted only to the satisfaction of the fortunate. Those who fall in the struggle with the praises of human dignity and equality ringing in their ears, naturally accuse the scheme which has brought them despair. Victor Hugo has said, "The Paradise of the rich is the hell of the poor." Under the American flag there should be no hungry man. On American soil there should be no want. A great philosopher has said that while there exists an honest man without enough to eat, no man should have more than enough.

But they tell us of the freedom of contract-the sacred freedom of contract between wealth and the workingman! That is freedom indeed!-the "iron law of wages!" Wealth can wait; wages

starve in a day. The freedom of contract with Death in the scales against the workingman!

That is the grim sarcasm of the freedom of contract.

Cardinal Manning, the great Catholic Englishman, declares that the freedom of contract on which political economy glorifies itself "cannot be rightly said to exist." He appeals to the great Catholic Church to protect the laboring poor who have builded the modern commonwealths.

It was said of the Italian Cæsar Borgia, that he was a soldier evey inch of him, but a villian to the last fiber. Cæsar Borgia said: "If a man wishes for success he must not hesitate to make stepping-stones of the corpses of his neighbors."

That is the morals of nineteenthcentury Industry. A heart of flint and a conscience as devoid of moral consideration as an absence of all fear can make it, are the chief stock in trade for success in modern competition.

But the gentlemen of the colleges assure us that the evils of the competitive scheme arise not from the use but from the abuse of that system. They are right. The unrestricted use of that scheme anywhere in this world is its abuse. That scheme carries within it the seeds of its own defeat. It insures combination. Where combination is possible, competition is impossible. The wages of labor do not purchase back the products of labor. There follows stagnation, depression, wrong.

That is your beautiful Adonis, laissez faire, when stripped naked! It is a padded hunch-back. It has neither a brain nor a heart.

Man is not a commodity. He is not a compound of mathematical quantities or chemical gases. He has a heart and a brain, and between these spring a thousand needs and emotions. He has the instinct of love. He is conquered by justice. Any scheme for the computation of man which leaves out justice will in this world be a failure.

But the toilers of the world are told that they should be content. They are assured that they do not grow poorer that they receive more for their work than a century ago. The answer is no longer enough. The laborer has become intelligent. He is the child of the republic of free schools. He has read the Declaration. He has heard of the doctrine of Equal Rights. He has taught it to his children until it has become his own faith. He has caught the echo of the words of Mirabeau, "There are only three ways of acquiring property, by work, by begging, and by stealth.' Civilization has increased his needs. He cannot live as did his forefathers, on the bare floors of a cabin. The glitter of his century would fill him with shame. Respectability would desert him. From his valley of poverty he points to those peaks of wealth and answers: "Those splendid heaps I helped to build; they are the product of my generation. I have worked for thirty years; my children are paupers, I have been robbed."

The laborer is right. He has a cause. He is logical. He is consistent with the teachings of the republic. If he is to be content with work and poverty, he should not have heard of the Declaration. He should have been protected from the New Testament. The only way to keep men satisfied with work and poverty is to keep them ignorant. Free schools and industrial pauperism side by side are a mistake. The history of labor from the earliest times shows that capital left to itself forces wages to a bare subsistence. A free government cannot afford to have its citizens dwarfs and paupers.

The workingman understands all this. He is fond of telling the story of the man with the mule and a patch of ground. The man said to the mule: "I will harness you to the plough and plough this land, on which I will raise beans. I will eat the beans; you shall have the stalks." The mule said to the man, "That will not be fair; I should have

[merged small][ocr errors]

If there were any fair distribution of the products of human labor there would go out from all the homes of this land men and women to purchase abundance of the necessities of life. There would be none of the "alternating fevers and chills" of our present industrial order. There would be no "gluts of the market” no "industrial depressions."

Three centuries before our era, the great Chinese sage, Mencius, taught that uncertainty as to the means of existence is the most important factor in the demoralization of a people. At the end of two centuries of unrestricted competition, three-fourths of the people of the most prosperous commonwealth of the world are insecure of the means of subsistence. We have approached the limit of the great speculative opportunities for wealth. Doubt paralyzes the limbs of industry. Dread poisons> the sweetness of the world. Fear sits like a specter at our brief banquet of life. Gloom shadows the way of the toiling millions. What kind of a civilization is that whose heart is Fear?

Upon the results of this scheme of aggregated and aggregating wealth in the hands of individuals and corporations on the political morality of the nation, I need not speak. They are too familiar.

One-eighth of the total wealth of the United States belongs to the monopoly of transportation, the railroads. Its use in these hands for oppression and corruption is notorious. American statesmanship, like American sovereignty, has retired into the offices of the corporations. The United States Senate sits directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, for "vested rights.”

We have heard of government by kings, by oligarchies, by aristocrats. We began a century ago as a government by the people. We have ended by giving

the world a new study in political science -government by corporations. When the Pennsylvania railroad has no more business to transact in the legislature of that State, it is said that that political body adjourns.

The late Mr. Tweed, of New York, had an acute appreciation of American politics. He manipulated a city and stole fifty millions of dollars. He recorded his vocation on the prison register as that of a statesman!

What is the conclusion? How will it end? The Duke of Weimar, looking upon the schemes of Napoleon in the height of his power, said, "This will not last; it is unjust."

I am not endeavoring to picture the details of an ideal commonwealth. There will come other days and there will be other gods. When civilized man is less a barbarian, the glitter of gold, the red wampum of the savage, will not intoxicate his senses. He will cease to be drunken with the lust of vulgar advantage over his fellow-men. The triumphs of the brain will measure his ambition. The triumphs of justice will ease his heart. The victories of art, the splendor of noble affections, will fill his dreams. That which is said here does not concern Utopian fancies. While there is human weakness there will be human suffering But organized wrong is curable. It should be assailed. There are ideas which, intrenched for centuries, stop the march of our race. They are superstitions. Human society has the right to examine from time to time the foundations on which it rests. It has the obligation to repair or renew these foundations when they have become rotten.

The power of human government is co-extensive with the welfare of peoples. it is limited by that welfare. To that limit it must approach. The open secret of history is that justice and virtue lie deeper than institutions; that honesty is the preserver of nations. Beyond all laws, beyond all government, beyond all institutions, beyond all vested rights,

beyond all sneers, lie the indefeasible rights of man.

Before nothing less than the intrenched citadel of these rights in the organization of human states, will the march of humanity pause. They are demanded by the conscience of mankind. Their security is the goal of the race.

What are these rights? The oldest of the economists, the wisest of the Greeks, Aristotle, treating of the natural wealth of the world-" the source and raw material of all other wealth"-summed it up in a single descriptive phrase, "the bounty of nature."

Supported by the great teachers of our kind, I affirm, as incontrovertible propositions commending themselves to the instinctive justice of man, that the world belongs to the living race; that the bounty of nature is the inheritance of all; that the wealth made by the common forces of any civilization is the common wealth. I affirm that the human hand is as sacred as the human brain. I affirm that the robbery of Cunning is as malignant as the robbery of Force. I affirm that every problem of the dealings between men is a moral problem. I affirm that no economic scheme for this world which ignores abstract rights is a science. I affirm that man's struggle should be with nature and not with his kind. I affirm that civilization without justice is a failure.

If for the realization of the rights here intimated, it is necessary to enter the gateway of the future by the partial or the absolute industrial coöperation of men, it is History that has led us to this door. There is no longer choice as to changing the route. The ruggedness of the present path has turned to an impossible steep. Struggling humanity, hungry and ragged in the presence of the riches it has created, has grown sick of its tyrants. The purpose of peoples is greater than the philosophy of the schools; and the peoples are saying, not "There should be," but, "There shall be a change!"

The toiling millions of the earth look

toward the Great Republic. It has given the world the spectacle of political government based upon the equality of manhood. There is awaited at its hands the spectacle of industry based on the brotherhood of Toil. Over the redoubts of the Past, over the bastions of Wrong,

over the dreams of the Old, bearing aloft the flag of the Declaration and the doctrines of the Nazarene, Americans will be the first to scale the heights and enter the citadel of the New Time.

WILLIAM JACKSON ARMSTRONG. Los Angeles, Calif.

THE

THE FEDERATION OF THE WORLD.

BY WALTER J. BARTNETT.

HE FEDERATION of the world -a conception so grandiose as probably to seem chimerical to one who has not observed the signs of the times, seems nevertheless to be slowly but surely taking form and substance.

Far in the past, on the minds of the world-conquerors, shone the ideal of a world united. In the present, on many a mind is shining this great ideal; but now has the dreamt-of tyranny of the past been glorified into the idea of a union of the nations in a voluntary federation.

Like the growth of a tree from a seed, the growth of the modern ideal has been of an inevitable and fateful character; and in its present stage a discerning eye can perceive the outlines of the grand consummation.

Immediately preceding the more definite conception of a world-federation are to be seen a number of nourishing factors-each adding its quota, its energy; as, for example, the application of steam to navigation and to land transportation, the extension of telegraph and telephone, the industrial inventions which have rendered each country dependent on others for vast quantities of supplies, the practice of international loaning of money, the growth of international brotherhoods, the readier and cheaper production of books, the growth of the press, the increase of general education, together with the potent humanizing activities of

the great republic of letters, and the consequent partial eradication of national prejudices; each of these bringing material benefit and inculcating ideas of interdependence and mutual help on a national scale.

Let us consider now that which corresponds to the sapling the young form which, out of the darkness and groping of the life in the soil, has risen to view and, though but partly developed, foreshadows the coming tree.

It is commonly accepted that the welfare and prosperity of mankind depend more upon agriculture than upon any other industry. Statistics from all lands on the production and consumption of agricultural products, intelligently disseminated, must affect the destinies of millions of people. Official and reliable data concerning the results obtained by such men as Luther Burbank, and miscellaneous information such as that gathered by organizations like the United States Department of Agriculture, if spread throughout the world freely for the benefit of all who are interested, cannot but profoundly influence for the better the agriculture of the world and consequently improve the condition of the people. If the advance made by the American farmers in wheat-growing during the past ten years could be intelligently presented to the peasants of Russia, much of the agrarian trouble of that country would be remedied. If the

« ZurückWeiter »