man for himself," as it used to be applied, is done with forever. The
time has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; when
the listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheeded of
his fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want and
broken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will end
these things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever gripped
his property with the iron clasp of legal right relaxes his grasp a
little when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. In
this respect five years of war have taught us more than a century of
peace. It has set in a clear light new forms of social obligation. The
war brought with it conscription--not as we used to see it, as the last
horror of military tyranny, but as the crowning pride of democracy. An
inconceivable revolution in the thought of the English speaking peoples
has taken place in respect to it. The obligation of every man, according
to his age and circumstance, to take up arms for his country and, if
need be, to die for it, is henceforth the recognized basis of
progressive democracy.
But conscription has its other side. The obligation to die must carry
with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he
must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen
the opportunity of a livelihood. "Unemployment," in the case of the
willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic
Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial
policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women
"out of work," looking for occupation and unable to find it. Work must
either be found or must be provided by the State itself.
Yet it is clear that a policy of state work and state pay for all who
are otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties.
The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money, for the
undertaking of public works of no real utility and for the subsidizing
of an army of loafers. But the difficulties, great though they are, are
not insuperable. The payment for state labor of this kind can be kept
low enough to make it the last resort rather than the ultimate ambition
of the worker. Nor need the work be useless. In new countries,
especially such as Canada and the United States and Australia, the
development of latent natural assets could absorb the labor of
generations. There are still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearly
enough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essential
for such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able to
enlist in the service of the commonwealth. But without it we perish.
Social betterment must depend at every stage on the force of public
spirit and public morality that inspires it.
So much for the case of those who are able and willing to work. There
remain still the uncounted thousands who by accident or illness, age or
infirmity, are unable to maintain themselves. For these people, under
the older dispensation, there was nothing but the poorhouse, the jail or
starvation by the roadside. The narrow individualism of the nineteenth
century refused to recognize the social duty of supporting somebody
else's grandmother. Such charity began, and ended, at home. But even
with the passing of the nineteenth century an awakened sense of the
collective responsibility of society towards its weaker members began to
impress itself upon public policy. Old age pension laws and national
insurance against illness and accident were already being built into the
legislative codes of the democratic countries. The experience of the war
has enormously increased this sense of social solidarity. It is clear
now that our fortunes are not in our individual keeping. We stand or
fall as a nation. And the nation which neglects the aged and infirm, or
which leaves a family to be shipwrecked as the result of a single
accident to a breadwinner, cannot survive as against a nation in which
the welfare of each is regarded as contributory to the safety of all.
Even the purest selfishness would dictate a policy of social insurance.
There is no need to discuss the particular way in which this policy can
best be carried out. It will vary with the circumstances of each
community. The action of the municipality, or of the state or province,
or of the central government itself may be called into play. But in one
form or another, the economic loss involved in illness and infirmity
must be shifted from the shoulders of the individual to those of
society at large. There was but little realization of this obligation in
the nineteenth century. Only in the sensational moments of famine, flood
or pestilence was a general social effort called forth. But in the
clearer view of the social bond which the war has given us we can see
that famine and pestilence are merely exaggerated forms of what is
happening every day in our midst.
We spoke much during the war of "man power." We suddenly realized that
after all the greatness and strength of a nation is made up of the men
and women who compose it. Its money, in the narrow sense, is nothing; a
set of meaningless chips and counters piled upon a banker's table ready
to fall at a touch. Even before the war we had begun to talk eagerly and
anxiously of the conservation of national resources, of the need of
safeguarding the forests and fisheries and the mines. These are
important things. But the war has shown that the most important thing of
all is the conservation of men and women.
The attitude of the nineteenth century upon this point was little short
of insane. The melancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the public
mind. Because it was difficult for a poor man to bring up a family, the
hasty conclusion was reached that a family ought not to be brought up.
But the war has entirely inverted and corrected this point of view. The
father and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons to
the conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these six
sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants,"
viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the
strength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one way
to increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easier
method of increase could be found in the wholesale import of Austrians,
Bulgarians and Czecho-Slovaks. The newer nations boasted proudly of
their immigration tables. The fallacy is apparent now. Those who really
count in a nation and those who govern its destinies for good or ill are
those who are born in it.
It is difficult to over-estimate the harm that has been done to public
policy by this same Malthusian theory. It has opposed to every proposal
of social reform an obstacle that seemed insuperable,--the danger of a
rapid overincrease of population that would pauperize the community.
Population, it was said, tends always to press upon the heels of
subsistence. If the poor are pampered, they will breed fast: the time
will come when there will not be food for all and we shall perish in a
common destruction. Seen in this light, infant mortality and the cruel
wastage of disease were viewed with complacence. It was "Nature's" own
process at work. The "unfit," so called, were being winnowed out that
only the best might survive. The biological doctrine of evolution was
misinterpreted and misapplied to social policy.
But in the organic world there is no such thing as the "fit" or the
"unfit," in any higher or moral sense. The most hideous forms of life
may "survive" and thrust aside the most beautiful. It is only by a
confusion of thought that the processes of organic nature which render
every foot of fertile ground the scene of unending conflict can be used
to explain away the death of children of the slums. The whole theory of
survival is only a statement of what is, not of what ought to be. The
moment that we introduce the operation of human volition and activity,
that, too, becomes one of the factors of "survival." The dog, the cat,
and the cow live by man's will, where the wolf and the hyena have
perished.
But it is time that the Malthusian doctrine,--the fear of
over-population as a hindrance to social reform,--was dismissed from
consideration. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow shaking its vain
rags in the wind. Population, it is true, increases in a geometrical
ratio. The human race, if favored by environment, can easily double
itself every twenty-five years. If it did this, the time must come,
through sheer power of multiplication, when there would not be standing
room for it on the globe. All of this is undeniable, but it is quite
wide of the mark. It is time enough to cross a bridge when we come to
it. The "standing room" problem is still removed from us by such
uncounted generations that we need give no thought to it. The physical
resources of the globe are as yet only tapped, and not exhausted. We
have done little more than scratch the surface. Because we are crowded
here and there in the ant-hills of our cities, we dream that the world
is full. Because, under our present system, we do not raise enough food
for all, we fear that the food supply is running short. All this is pure
fancy. Let any one consider in his mind's eye the enormous untouched
assets still remaining for mankind in the vast spaces filled with the
tangled forests of South America, or the exuberant fertility of
equatorial Africa or the huge plains of Canada, Australia, Southern
Siberia and the United States, as yet only thinly dotted with human
settlement. There is no need to draw up an anxious balance sheet of our
assets. There is still an uncounted plenty. And every human being born
upon the world represents a power of work that, rightly directed, more
than supplies his wants. The fact that as an infant he does not maintain
himself has nothing to do with the case. This was true even in the
Garden of Eden.
The fundamental error of the Malthusian theory of population and poverty
is to confound the difficulties of human organization with the question
of physical production. Our existing poverty is purely a problem in the
direction and distribution of human effort. It has no connection as yet
with the question of the total available means of subsistence. Some day,
in a remote future, in which under an improved social system the numbers
of mankind might increase to the full power of the natural capacity of
multiplication, such a question might conceivably disturb the equanimity
of mankind. But it need not now. It is only one of many disasters that
must sooner or later overtake mankind. The sun, so the astronomer tells
us, is cooling down; the night is coming; an all-pervading cold will
some day chill into rigid death the last vestige of organic life. Our
poor planet will be but a silent ghost whirling on its dark path in the
starlight. This ultimate disaster is, as far as our vision goes,
inevitable. Yet no one concerns himself with it. So should it be with
the danger of the ultimate overcrowding of the globe.
I lay stress upon this problem of the increase of population because, to
my thinking, it is in this connection that the main work and the best
hope of social reform can be found. The children of the race should be
the very blossom of its fondest hopes. Under the present order and with
the present gloomy preconceptions they have been the least of its
collective cares. Yet here--and here more than anywhere--is the point
towards which social effort and social legislation may be directed
immediately and successfully. The moment that we get away from the idea
that the child is a mere appendage of the parent, bound to share good
fortune and ill, wealth and starvation, according to the parent's lot,
the moment we regard the child as itself a member of society--clothed in
social rights--a burden for the moment but an asset for the future--we
turn over a new leaf in the book of human development, we pass a new
milestone on the upward path of progress.
It should be recognized in the coming order of society, that every child
of the nation has the right to be clothed and fed and trained
irrespective of its parents' lot. Our feeble beginnings in the direction
of housing, sanitation, child welfare and education, should be expanded
at whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. The
ancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's children
should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the
spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's
children should fight for them. The obligation must apply both ways.
No society is properly organized until every child that is born into it
shall have an opportunity in life. Success in life and capacity to live
we cannot give. But opportunity we can. We can at least see that the
gifts that are laid in the child's cradle by nature are not obliterated
by the cruel fortune of the accident of birth: that its brain and body
are not stunted by lack of food and air and by the heavy burden of
premature toil. The playtime of childhood should be held sacred by the
nation.
This, as I see it, should be the first and the greatest effort of social
reform. For the adult generation of to-day many things are no longer
possible. The time has passed. We are, as viewed with a comprehensive
eye, a damaged race. Few of us in mind or body are what we might be; and
millions of us, the vast majority of industrial mankind known as the
working class, are distorted beyond repair from what they might have
been. In older societies this was taken for granted: the poor and the
humble and the lowly reproduced from generation to generation, as they
grew to adult life, the starved brains and stunted outlook of their
forbears,--starved and stunted only by lack of opportunity. For nature
knows of no such differences in original capacity between the children
of the fortunate and the unfortunate. Yet on this inequality, made by
circumstance, was based the whole system of caste, the stratification
of the gentle and the simple on which society rested. In the past it may
have been necessary. It is not so now. If, with all our vast apparatus
of machinery and power, we cannot so arrange society that each child has
an opportunity in life, it would be better to break the machinery in
pieces and return to the woods from which we came.
Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are saying that the government
of every country ought to supply work and pay for the unemployed,
maintenance for the infirm and aged, and education and opportunity for
the children. These are vast tasks. And they involve, of course, a
financial burden not dreamed of before the war. But here again the war
has taught us many things. It would have seemed inconceivable before,
that a man of great wealth should give one-half of his income to the
state. The financial burden of the war, as the full measure of it dawned
upon our minds, seemed to betoken a universal bankruptcy. But the sequel
is going to show that the finance of the war will prove to be a lesson
in the finance of peace. The new burden has come to stay. No modern
state can hope to survive unless it meets the kind of social claims on
the part of the unemployed, the destitute and the children that have
been described above. And it cannot do this unless it continues to use
the terrific engine of taxation already fashioned in the war.
Undoubtedly the progressive income tax and the tax on profits and
taxation of inheritance must be maintained to an extent never dreamed of
before.
But the peace finance and the war finance will differ in one most
important respect. The war finance was purely destructive. From it came
national security and the triumph of right over wrong. No one would
belittle the worth of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense of
production, of bread winning, there came nothing; or nothing except a
new power of organization, a new technical skill and a new aspiration
towards better things. But the burden of peace finance directed towards
social efforts will bring a direct return. Every cent that is spent upon
the betterment of the population will come back, sooner or later, as
two.
But all of this deals as yet only with the field of industry and conduct
in which the state rules supreme. Governmental care of the unemployed,
the infant and the infirm, sounds like a chapter in socialism. If the
same régime were extended over the whole area of production, we should
have socialism itself and a mere soap-bubble bursting into fragments.
There is no need, however, to extend the régime of compulsion over the
whole field. The vast mass of human industrial effort must still lie
outside of the immediate control of the government. Every man will still
earn his own living and that of his family as best he can, relying first
and foremost upon his own efforts.
One naturally asks, then, To what extent can social reform penetrate
into the ordinary operation of industry itself? Granted that it is
impossible for the state to take over the whole industry of the nation,
does that mean that the present inequalities must continue? The
framework in which our industrial life is set cannot be readily broken
asunder. But we can to a great extent ease the rigidity of its outlines.
A legislative code that starts from sounder principles than those which
have obtained hitherto can do a great deal towards progressive
betterment. Each decade can be an improvement upon the last. Hitherto we
have been hampered at every turn by the supposed obstacle of immutable
economic laws. The theory of "natural" wages and prices of a supposed
economic order that could not be disturbed, set up a sort of legislative
paralysis. The first thing needed is to get away entirely from all such
preconceptions, to recognize that the "natural" order of society, based
on the "natural" liberty, does not correspond with real justice and real
liberty at all, but works injustice at every turn. And at every turn
intrusive social legislation must seek to prevent such injustice.
It is no part of the present essay to attempt to detail the particulars
of a code of social legislation. That must depend in every case upon the
particular circumstances of the community concerned. But some
indication may be given here of the kind of legislation that may serve
to render the conditions of industry more in conformity with social
justice. Let us take, as a conspicuous example, the case of the Minimum
wage law. Here is a thing sternly condemned in the older thought as an
economic impossibility. It was claimed, as we have seen, that under free
contract a man was paid what he earned and no law could make it more.
But the older theory was wrong. The minimum wage law ought to form, in
one fashion or another, a part of the code of every community. It may be
applied by specific legislation from a central power, or it may be
applied by the discretionary authority of district boards, or it may be
regulated,--as it has been in some of the beginnings already
made,--within the compass of each industry or trade. But the principle
involved is sound. The wage as paid becomes a part of the conditions of
industry. Interest, profits and, later, the direction of consumption and
then of production, conform themselves to it.
True it is, that in this as in all cases of social legislation, no
application of the law can be made so sweeping and so immediate as to
dislocate the machine and bring industry to a stop. It is probable that
at any particular time and place the legislative minimum wage cannot be
very much in advance of the ordinary or average wage of the people in
employment. But its virtue lies in its progression. The modest increase
of to-day leads to the fuller increase of to-morrow. Properly applied,
the capitalist and the employer of labor need have nothing to fear from
it. Its ultimate effect will not fall upon them, but will serve merely
to alter the direction of human effort.
Precisely the same reasoning holds good of the shortening of the hours
of labor both by legislative enactment and by collective organization.
Here again the first thing necessary is a clear vision of the goal
towards which we are to strive. The hours of labor are too long. The
world has been caught in the wheels of its own machinery which will not
stop. With each advance in invention and mechanical power it works
harder still. New and feverish desires for luxuries replace each older
want as satisfied. The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn
thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is
restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious
discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest. It
should be sent, as nerve patients are, to the seaside or the quiet of
the hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken the pace of its work
and shorten its working day.
And for this the thing needed is an altered public opinion on the
subject of work in relation to human character and development. The
nineteenth century glorified work. The poet, sitting beneath a shady
tree, sang of its glories. The working man was incited to contemplate
the beauty of the night's rest that followed on the exhaustion of the
day. It was proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleep
was sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honest
blacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long at
the loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them into
well-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than the
distracted sleep of princes.
The educated world repeated to itself these grotesque fallacies till it
lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is
too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at
the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too
long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raising
here the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be
shortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that a
working day of eight hours is too long for the full and proper
development of human capacity and for the rational enjoyment of life.
There is no need to quote here to the contrary the long and sustained
toil of the pioneer, the eager labor of the student, unmindful of the
silent hours, or the fierce acquisitive activity of the money-maker that
knows no pause. Activities such as these differ with a whole sky from
the wage-work of the modern industrial worker. The task in one case is
done for its own sake. It is life itself. The other is done only for the
sake of the wage it brings. It is, or should be, a mere preliminary to
living.
Let it be granted, of course, that a certain amount of work is an
absolute necessity for human character. There is no more pathetic
spectacle on our human stage than the figure of poor puppy in his beach
suit and his tuxedo jacket seeking in vain to amuse himself for ever. A
leisure class no sooner arises than the melancholy monotony of amusement
forces it into mimic work and make-believe activities. It dare not face
the empty day.
But when all is said about the horror of idleness the broad fact remains
that the hours of work are too long. If we could in imagination
disregard for a moment all question of how the hours of work are to be
shortened and how production is to be maintained and ask only what would
be the ideal number of the daily hours of compulsory work, for
character's sake, few of us would put them at more than four or five.
Many of us, as applied to ourselves, at least, would take a chance on
character at two.