We regard with disapproval the bloody combats of some savage tribe; we
regard with horror the sacrifice of children and prisoners to some idol
of a Phenician Moloch or Mexican Huitzlio-Potchli; we are shocked at the
criminal proceedings of the infamous Torquemada with his inquisition
glorying in its terrors and tortures in the name of Christ; we are
sickened as we read of the religious wars in Europe; we shudder at the
horrors of the night of St. Bartholomew; we are appalled by the recent
slaughters of the Jews in Russia, by the wholesale massacre of the
Christians in Turkey.
All such atrocities, we say, belong to barbaric ages and are only
committed in semi-civilized countries. We flatter ourselves that we are
different in this age of enlightenment and civilization. Are we
different? Have we changed? Have we a right to fling stones at our older
brothers, the savage and the barbarian? We are so used to our life that
we do not notice its evils and misery. We can easily see the mote in the
eye of our neighbor, but do not notice the beam in our own.
We are still savage at heart. Our civilization is mere gloss, a thin
coating of paint and varnish. Our methods of inflicting pain are more
refined than those of the Indian, but no less cruel, while the number of
the victims sacrificed to our greed and rapacity may even exceed the
numbers fallen by the sword of the barbarian or by the torch of the
fanatic. The slums in our cities are foul and filthy, teeming with
deadly germs of disease where the mortality of our infants and children
in some cases rises to the frightful figure of 204 per thousand!
The sanitary conditions of our cities are filthy and deadly. They carry
in their wake all forms of plagues, pests and diseases, among which
tuberculosis is so well known to the laity. “Tuberculosis,” reads a
report of a Tenement House Commission, “is one of the results of our
inhumane tenements; it follows in the train of our inhumane sweatshops.
It comes where the hours of labor are long and the wages are small; it
afflicts the children who are sent to labor when they should yet be in
school.”
“The Consumers’ League,” says Mr. John Graham Brooks, “long hesitated to
lay stress upon these aspects of filth and disease, because of their
alarmist and sensational nature, and of the immediate and grave risk to
the consumer of the goods manufactured in the sweatshop and the tenement
house. If the sweatshop spread diphtheria and scarlet fever, there is
the hue and cry before personal danger. But these diseases are the very
slightest elements of the real risk to the general good. It is the
spoiled human life, with its deadly legacy of enfeebled mind and body,
that reacts directly and indirectly on the social whole.” We do not
realize that we drift into national degeneracy. We fail to realize that
we raise a generation of stunted lives, of physical and nervous wrecks,
of mental invalids and moral cripples.
We boast of our wealth unrivalled by other countries and by former ages.
We should remember the great poverty of our masses, the filthy
conditions of our wealthy cities, with their loathsome city-slums, in
which human beings live, breed and teem like so many worms.
We spend on barracks and prisons more than we do on schools and
colleges. What is the level of a civilization in which the cost of crime
and war far exceeds that of the education of its future citizens? We
spend on our army and navy a quarter of a billion dollars, which is
found to be insufficient, while the “total money burden of crime amounts
in this country to the enormous sum of 600 million dollars a year!”
The cost of crime alone is so enormous that a representative of the
Board of Charities of one of our Eastern states considers “the entire
abolition of all the penal codes and the complete liberty of the
criminal class.” Our civilization can boast of the city-slum, the abode
of misery and crime, the gift of our modern industrial progress, wealth
and prosperity.
Professor James and myself were over once on a visit to a charitable
institution for mentally defective. With his clear eye for the
incongruities and absurdities of life, Professor James remarked to me
that idiots and imbeciles were given the comforts, in fact, the luxuries
of life, while healthy children, able boys and girls, had to struggle
for a livelihood. Children under fourteen work in factories, work at a
wage of about twenty-five cents a day, and, according to the labor
bureau, the daily wage of the factory children of the South is often as
low as fifteen cents and sometimes falls to nine cents. In many of our
colleges many a student has to live on the verge of starvation, freeze
in a summer overcoat the whole winter and warm his room by burning
newspapers in the grate. We are charitable and help our mediocrities,
imbeciles and idiots, while we neglect our talent and genius. We have a
blind faith that genius, like murder, will out. We know of successful
talent, but we do not know of the great amount of unsuccessful talent
and genius that has gone to waste. We favor imbecility and slight
genius.
One of the physicians of the institution overheard our conversation and
attempted to justify his work by an argument commonly advanced and
uncritically accepted—“Our civilization, our Christian civilization
values human life.” Does our civilization really value human life? The
infant mortality of the slums of our large cities and the factory work
of our young children do not seem to justify such a claim.
The loss of life on our railways is as large as one caused by a national
war. Thus the number of persons killed on American railways during a
period of three years ending June 30, 1900, was about 22,000, while the
mortality of British forces, including death from disease, during three
years of the South African war amounted to 22,000. In 1901, one out of
every 400 railway employees was killed and one out of every 26 was
injured. In 1902, 2,969 employees were killed and 50,524 were injured.
Commenting on the statistics of railway accidents, Mr. John Graham
Brooks says: “One has to read and re-read these figures before their
grewsome significance is in the least clear. If we add the mining, iron
and lumbering industries,—portions of which are more dangerous than the
railroad,—some conception is possible of the mutilated life due to
machinery as it is now run.” It may also be of interest to learn that,
according to the calculation made by a representative of one of the
insurance companies, more than a million and a half are annually killed
and injured in the United States alone.
The waste of human life is in fact greater than in any previous age.
“Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands.” Think of
our modern warfare, with its infernal machines of carnage, mowing down
more men in a day than the warlike Assyrians and Romans, with their
crude bows, arrows and catapults, could destroy in a century. And is not
our country, our civilized Christian society, with its high valuation of
human life, keeping on increasing its army and navy, and perfecting
deadly weapons of slaughter and carnage? What about the justice dealt
out by Judge Lynch? From 1882 to 1900 there were about three thousand
lynchings! What about our grand imperial policy? What about our
dominance over weak and ignorant tribes, treated in no gentle way by the
armed fist of their civilized masters, who send to the benighted
heathens their missionaries to preach religion and their soldiers to
enforce the sale of narcotics and other civilizing goods?