And all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to

have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with

your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you

because you are not running things as you promised. You see, the mass of

the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them

understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a

dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have

the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their

capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you

up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. And all the time you

are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the

factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast?

Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and

might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners?

If we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, unorganized

production, I admit that the only way to benefit the slaves might be to

turn out the masters by force. But here we have a social system of

infinite complexity, a delicate and sensitive machine, which no one

person in the world, and no group of persons understands thoroughly. In

the running of such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune; and

certainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our

expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel that

machine while keeping it running. The amount of wealth which we could

save by the achieving of that feat would be sufficient to maintain a

class of owners in idleness and luxury for a generation; and so I say,

with all the energy and conviction I possess, _pay them_! Pay them

anything that is necessary, in order to avoid civil war and social

disorganization! Pay them so much that they can have no possible cause

of complaint, that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the

country cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain! Pay them so that every

engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman and stenographer

and office-boy will stay on the job and work double time to put the

enterprise through! Pay them such a price that even Judge Gary and John

D. Rockefeller will be willing to help us do the job of social

readjustment!

"Ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds all very

beautiful, but it's the old Utopian dream of brotherhood and class

co-operation. That will never happen on this earth, until you have first

abolished capitalism." My answer is, it could happen tomorrow if we had

sufficient intelligence to make it happen. That it does not happen is

simply absence of intelligence. And will anyone maintain that it is the

part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he

knows? What is the use of our intelligence, if we abdicate its

authority, and give ourselves up to programs of action which we know are

blind and destructive and wasteful? We may see a great vessel going on

the rocks; we may feel certain that it is going, in spite of everything

we can do; but shall we fail to do what we can to make those in the

vessel realize how they might get safely into the harbor?

We have had the Russian revolution before us for four years. Mankind

will spend the next hundred years in studying it, and still have much to

learn, but the broad outlines of the great experiment are now plain

before our eyes. Russia was a backward country, and she tried to fight a

modern war, and it broke her down. She had practically no middle class,

and her ruling class was rotten, and so the revolutionists had their

chance, and they seized it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that

they came to the rescue of Russia, saving her from the hands of those

who were trying to force her to fight, when she was utterly exhausted

and incapable of fighting.

Anyhow, here was your dictatorship of the proletariat. It turned out all

the executive experts, or nearly all of them, because they were tainted

with the capitalist psychology; and then straightway it had to call them

back and make terms with them, because industry could not be run without

them. And of course these engineers and managers sabotaged the

revolution--every non-proletarian sabotaged it, both inside Russia and

outside. You denounced this, and protested against this, but all the

same it happened; it was human nature that it should happen, and it is

one of the things you have to count on, in any and every country where

you attempt the social revolution by minority action.

They have got power in Russia, and they dream of getting power in

America in the same way. But there is no such disorganization in our

country as there was in Russia, and it would take a generation of civil

strife to bring us to such a condition. We have a middle class,

powerful, thoroughly organized, and thoroughly conscious. Moreover, this

class has ideals of majority rule, which are bred in its very bones; and

while they have never realized these ideals, they think they have, and

they are prepared to fight to the last gasp in that belief. All that the

leaders of Moscow have to do is to bring about an attempt at forcible

revolution, and they will discover in American society sufficient power

of organization and of brutal action to put their movement out of

business for a generation.

A hundred years ago we had chattel slavery firmly fixed as the

industrial system of one-half of these United States. To far-seeing

statesmen it was manifest that chattel slavery was a wasteful system,

and that it could not exist in competition with free labor. There was a

great American, Henry Clay, who came forward with a proposition that the

people of the United States, through their government, should raise the

money, about a billion dollars, and compensate the owners of all the

slaves and set them free. For most of his lifetime Henry Clay pleaded

for that plan. But the masters of the South were making money fast; they

knew how to handle the negro as a slave, they could not imagine handling

him as a free laborer, and they would not hear to the plan. On the other

side of Mason and Dixon's line were fanatical men of "principle," who

said that slavery was wrong, and that was the end of it. There is a

stanza by Emerson discussing this question of confiscation versus

compensation:

Pay ransom to the owner

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him.

This, you see, is magnificent utterance, but as economic philosophy it

is reckless and unsound. The abolitionists of the North took up this

poem, and the slave power of the South answered with a battle-song:

War to the hilt,

Theirs be the guilt,

Who fetter the freeman to ransom the slave!

And so the issue had to be fought out. It cost a million human lives and

five billions of treasure, and it set American civilization back a

generation. And now we confront exactly the same kind of emergency, and

are coming to exactly the same method of solution. We have white

wage-slaves clamoring for their freedom, and we have business men making

money out of them, and exercising power over them, and finding it

convenient and pleasant. They are going to fight it out in a civil war,

and which side is going to win I am not sure. But when the historians

come to write about it a couple of generations from now, let them be

able to record that there were a few men in the country who pleaded for

a sane and orderly and human solution of the problem, and who continued

to voice their convictions even in the midst of the cruel and wasteful

strife!

CHAPTER LXVIII

THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND

(Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,

and compares it with other programs.)

The writer of this book has been watching the social process for twenty

years, trying to figure out one thing--how the change from competition

to co-operation can be brought about with the minimum of human waste. He

has come to realize that the first step is a mental one; to get the

people to want the change. That means that the program must be simple,

so that the masses can understand it. As a social engineer you might

work out a perfect plan, but find yourself helpless, because it was hard

to explain. As illustration of what I mean, I cite the single tax, a

theory which has a considerable hold in America, but which politically

has been utterly ineffective.

A few years ago a devoted enthusiast in Southern California, Luke North,

started what he called the "Great Adventure" to set free the idle land.

In the campaign of 1918 I gave my help to this movement, and when it

failed I went back and took stock, and revised my conclusions concerning

the single tax. Theoretically the movement has a considerable percentage

of right on its side. Land, in the sense that single taxers use it,

meaning all the natural sources of wealth, is certainly an important

basis of exploitation, and if you were to tax land values to the full

extent, you would abolish a large portion of privilege--just how large

would be hard to figure. I was perfectly willing to begin with that

portion, so I helped with the "Great Adventure." But a practical test

convinced me that it could never persuade a majority of the people.

The single tax proposal is to abolish all taxes except the tax on land

values. Then come the associations of the bankers and merchants and real

estate speculators, crying in outraged horror, "What? You propose to let

the rich man's stocks and bonds go free? You propose to put no tax on

his cash in the vaults and on his wife's jewels? You propose to abolish

the income tax and the inheritance tax, and put all the costs of

government on the poor man's lot?"

Now, of course, I know perfectly well that the rich man dodges most of

his income tax and most of his inheritance tax. I know that he pays a

nominal pittance on his cash in the bank and on his wife's jewels, and

likewise on his stocks and bonds. I know that the corporations issuing

these stocks and bonds would be far more heavily hit by a tax on the

natural resources they own; they could not evade this tax, and they know

it, and that is why they are moved to such deep concern for the fate of

the poor man and his lot. I know that the tax on the poor man's lot

would be infinitesimal in comparison with the tax on the great

corporation. But how can I explain all this to the poor man? To

understand it requires a knowledge of the complexities of our economic

system which the voters simply have not got.

How much easier to take the bankers and speculators at their word! To

answer, "All right, gentlemen, since you like the income and inheritance

taxes, the taxes on stocks and bonds and money and jewels, we will leave

these taxes standing. Likewise, we assent to your proposition that the

poor man should not pay taxes on his lot, while there are rich men and

corporations in our state holding twenty million acres of land out of

use for purposes of speculation. We will therefore arrange a land values

tax on a graduated basis, after the plan of the income tax; we will

allow one or two thousand dollars' worth of land exempt from all

taxation, provided it is used by the owner; and we will put a graduated

tax on all individuals and corporations owning a greater quantity of

land, so that in the case of individuals and corporations owning more

than ten thousand dollars' worth of land, we will take the full rental

value, and thus force all idle land into the market."

Now, the provision above outlined would have spiked every single

argument used by the opposition to the "Great Adventure" in California

in 1918; it would have made the real intent of the measure so plain as

to win automatically the additional votes needed to carry the election.

But I tried for three years, without being able to persuade a single one

of the "Great Adventure" leaders to recognize this plain fact. The

single taxer has his formula, the land values tax and no other tax, and

all else is heresy. Actually, the president of a big single tax

organization in the East declared that by the advocacy of my idea I had

"betrayed the single tax!" We may take this as an illustration of the

difference between dogmatism and science in the strategy of the class

struggle.

I first suggested my program immediately after the war, with the

provision that the land thrown on the market should be purchased by the

state, and used to establish co-operative agricultural colonies for the

benefit of returned soldiers. But we have preferred to have our returned

soldiers stay without work, or to displace the men and women who had

been gallantly "doing their bit." By this means we soon had five million

men out of work, and many other millions bitterly discontented with

their wages. Again I took up the proposition for a graduated land tax,

with the suggestion that the money should be used to provide a pension,

first for every dependent man or woman over sixty years of age in the

country, and second for every child in the country whose parents were

unable properly to support it, whether because they were dead or sick or

unemployed.

You may note that in advocating this program, you would not have to

convert anybody to any foreign theories, nor would you have to use any

long words; you would not have to say anything against the constitution,

nor to break any law, nor to give occasion for patriotic mobs to tar and

feather you. To every poor man in your state you could say, "If you own

your own house and lot, this bill will lift the taxes from both, and

therefore it will mean fifty or a hundred dollars a year in your pocket.

If you do not own a home, it will take millions of idle acres out of the

hands of the speculators, and break the price of real estate, so that

you can have either a lot in the city or a farm in the country with

ease."

Furthermore, you could say, "This measure will have the effect of

drawing the unemployed from the cities at once, and so stopping the

downward course of wages. At the same time that wages hold firm, the

cost of food will go down, because there will be millions more men

working on the land. In addition to that, the state will have an

enormous income, many millions of dollars a year, taken exclusively from

those who are owning and not producing. This money will be expended in

saving from suffering and humiliation the old people of the country, who

have worked hard all their lives and have been thrown on the scrap-heap;

also in making certain that every child in the country has food enough

and care enough to make him into a normal and healthy human being, so

that he can do his share of work in the world and pay his own way

through life."

I submit the above measure to those who believe that the road to social

freedom lies by some sort of land tax. But before you take it up I

invite you to consider whether there may not be some other way, even

easier. There is a homely old saying to the effect that "molasses

catches more flies than vinegar"; and I am always looking for some way

that will get the poor what they want, without frightening the rich any

more than necessary.

I know a certain type of radical whom this question always exasperates.

He answers that the opposition will be equally strong to any plan; the

rich will do anything for the poor except get off their backs--and so

on. In reply I mention that among the most ardent radicals I know are

half a dozen millionaires; I know one woman who is worth a million, who

pleads day and night for social revolution, while the people who work

for her are devoted and respectful wage slaves. Herbert Spencer said

that his idea of a tragedy was a generalization killed by a fact. I

shall not say that the existence of millionaire Socialists and parlor

Bolsheviks kills the theory of the class struggle, but I certainly say

it compels us to take thought of the rich as well as of the poor in

planning the strategy of our campaign.

And manifestly, if we want to consider the rich, the very last device we

shall use is that of a tax. Nobody likes to pay taxes; everybody agrees

in classifying taxes with death. Each feels that he is paying more than

his share already; each knows that the government which collects the tax

is incompetent or worse. Stop and recall what we have proven about the

"iron ring"; the possibilities of production latent in our society.

Realize the bearings of this all-important fact, that we can offer to

mankind a social revolution which will make everybody richer, instead of

making some people poorer! Exactly how to do this is the next thing we

have to inquire.

CHAPTER LXIX

THE CONTROL OF CREDIT

(Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of

industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.)

How is it that the rich are becoming richer? The single taxer answers

that it is by monopoly of the land, the natural sources of wealth; the

Socialist answers that it is by the control of the machinery of

production. But if you go among the rich and make inquiry, you speedily

learn that these factors, large as they are, amount to little in

comparison with another factor, the control of credit. There are hosts

of little capitalists and business men who deal in land and produce

goods with machinery, but the men who make the real fortunes and

dominate the modern world are those who control credit, and whose

business is, not the production of anything, but speculation and the

manipulation of markets.

"Money makes the mare go," our ancestors used to say; and money today

determines the destiny of empires. What is money? We think of it as gold

and silver coins, and pieces of engraved paper promising to pay gold and

silver coins. But the report of the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency

for 1919 shows that the business of the country was done, 5% by such

means and 95 % by checks; so, for practical purposes, we may say that

money consists of men's willingness to trust other men, or groups or

organizations of men, when they make written promise to pay. In other

words, money is credit; and the control of credit means the control of

industry. The problem of social readjustment is mainly but the problem

of taking the control of credit out of the hands of private individuals,

and making it a public or social function.

Who controls credit today? The bankers. And how do they control it? We

give it to them; we, the masses of the people, who take them our money

and leave it with them. A very little real money in hand becomes, under

our banking system, the basis of a great amount of imaginary money. The

Federal Reserve law requires that banks shall hold in reserve from

seven to thirteen per cent of demand deposits; which means, in

substance, that when you leave a dollar with a banker, the banker is

allowed, under the law, to turn that dollar into anywhere from seven to

thirteen dollars, and lend those dollars out. In addition, he deposits

his reserves with the Federal Reserve bank, and that bank keeps only

thirty-five per cent in reserve--in other words, the seven to thirteen

imaginary dollars are multiplied again by three.

Under the stress of war, this process of credit inflation has been

growing like the genii let out of the bottle. Under the law, the Federal

Reserve banks are supposed to hold a gold reserve of 40% to secure our

currency. But in December, 1919, these banks held a trifle over a

billion dollars' worth of gold, while our paper money was over four

billion. In addition, our banks have over thirty-three billions of

deposits, and all these are supposed to be secured by gold; in addition,

there are twenty-five billions of government bonds, and uncounted

billions of private notes, bonds and accounts, all supposed to be

payable in gold. So it appears that about one per cent of our

outstanding money is real, and the rest is imaginary--that is, it is

credit.

The point for you to get clear is this: The great mass of this imaginary

money is created by law, and we have the power to abolish it or to

change the ownership of it at any time we develop the necessary

intelligence. Let us consider the ordinary paper money, the one and two

and five and ten dollar "bills," with which we plain people do most of

our business. These are Federal Reserve notes, and there are about three

billions of them; how do they come to be? Why, we grant to the national

banks by law the right to make this money; the government prints it for

them, and they put it into circulation. And what does it cost them? They

pay one per cent for the use of the money; in some cases they pay only

one-half of one per cent; and then they lend it to us, the people--and

what do they charge us? The answer is available in a recent report of

the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency, as follows:

"I have the record of the loans made by one Texas national bank to a

hard-working woman who owned a little farm a few miles from town. She

borrowed, in the aggregate, $2,375, making about thirty loans during the

year. Listen to the details of the robbery: $162.50 for 30 days at 36

per cent; $377. for 34 days at 44 per cent; $620.25 for 23 days at 77

per cent; $11. for 30 days at 120 per cent; $21.50 for 30 days at 90

per cent; $33. for 2 days at 93 per cent; $27. for 15 days at 195 per

cent; $110. for 30 days at 120 per cent--that was to buy a horse for her

plowing; $20 for 48 days at 187 per cent; $6 for 10 days at 720 per

cent; $7 for 3 days at 2,000 per cent, and so on; every cent paid off by

what sweat and struggle only God knows."

In Oklahoma, where the legal rate of interest is six per cent, with ten

per cent as the maximum under special contract, harassed farmers paid

all the way from 12 to 2400 per cent, with 40 per cent as the average.

In the case of one bank, the Comptroller proved that not a single

solitary loan had been made under fifteen per cent. He cited one

particular case that he asked to be regarded as typical. In the spring

the farmer went to the bank and arranged for a loan of $200. Out of his

necessity he was compelled to pay 55 per cent interest charge. Unable to

meet the note at maturity, he had to agree to 100 per cent interest in

order to get the renewal. The next renewal forced him up to 125 per

cent. For four years the thing went on, and all the drudgery of the

father and the mother and the six children could never keep down the

terrible interest or wipe out the principal. As a finish the bank

swooped down and sold him out; the wretched man, barefoot and hungry,

went to work clearing a swamp, caught pneumonia and died; the county

buried him, and neighbors raised a purse to send the widow and children

back to friends in Arkansas.

This is the thing called the Money Trust in action, and this is the

power we have to take out of private control. It is our first job, and

all other jobs are in comparison hardly worth mentioning. How are we

going to do it?

The farmers of North Dakota have shown one way. They took the control of

their state government into their own hands, and the most important and

significant thing they did was to start a public bank. The interests

fought them tooth and nail; not merely the interests of North Dakota,

not merely of the Northwest, but of the entire United States. They

fought them in the law courts, up to the United States Supreme Court,

which decided in favor of the people of North Dakota. Therefore, make

note of this vital fact--the most important single fact in the strategy

of the class struggle--every state can, under the constitution, have a

public bank; every city and town can have one, and no court can ever

forbid it!

Therefore, I say to all Socialists, labor men and social reformers of

every shade and variety, nail at the top of your program of action the

demand for a public bank in your community, to take the control of

credit out of the hands of speculators and use it for the welfare of the

people. Make it your first provision that every dollar of public money

shall be deposited in this bank and every detail of public financing

handled by this bank; make it your second provision that the purpose of

this bank shall be to put all private banks out of business, and take

over their power for the people.

At present, you understand, it is taken for granted that the first

purpose of the government is to foster the private credit system. Take,

for example, the postal savings bank. The private banks fought this for

a generation, and finally they allowed us to have it, on condition that

it should be turned into a device for collecting money for them. Our

postal bank turns over all its money to the private banks, at the

grotesque rate of two per cent interest; and recently I read of the

director of the postal bank appearing before a convention of bankers,

asking for some small favor, and humbly explaining that it was not his

idea to make the postal bank a rival of the private savings banks. Why

should he not do so? Let us nail it to our radical program that the

postal savings bank is to fight for business, just as do the private

banks, and lend its funds direct to the people on good security.

Let our Federal banking system also become the servant of the public

welfare, and let its energy be devoted to breaking the strangle-hold of

predatory finance on our industry. Let the government issue all money,

and use it for the transfer of industry from private into public hands.

Do we want to socialize our railroads, our coal mines, our telegraphs

and telephones? Do we want to buy them, in order to avoid the wastes of

civil war and insurrection? We have agreed that we do; and here we have

the way of doing it. If the bankers can create, out of our willingness

to trust them, billions upon billions of imaginary money, then so can

we, the people of the United States, create money out of our willingness

to trust ourselves. And do not let anybody fool you for a single second

by talking about "fiat money" and "inflation of the currency." If you

are paying twice as much for everything as you did before the war, you

are paying it because the bankers have doubled the amount of money in

circulation--for that reason and that alone. That double money the

bankers own; the only question now to be decided is, who is to own the

double money that will be created tomorrow?

Make note of the fact that it costs nothing to start a public bank. If

you want to put the steel trust out of business by competition, you have

several hundred thousand dollars worth of rolling mills and ore land to

buy; but the banks can be put out of business by nothing but a law. The

material parts of a bank, the white marble columns and bronze railings

and mahogany trimmings, are as nothing compared with the inner soul of a

bank, its control of the life-blood of your business and mine; and this

we can have for the taking. We can keep our own "credit"; instead of

sending it to Wall Street, where speculators use it to bleed us white,

we can set it to building up our own community, under the direction of

officials whom we select. Also, we can have our gigantic national bank,

controlling all our thirty-three billions of dollars of deposits, and

likewise the hundreds of billions of credit built upon them.

The first time you suggest this plan to a banker or business man, you

will be told that increase of money by the government does not benefit

labor or the general consumer; "inflation of the currency" causes prices

to go up correspondingly. To this I will furnish an effective reply:

that at the same time the government issues new money, the government

will also fix prices; and then watch the face of your banker or business

man! If he is a man who can really think, and is not just repeating like

a parrot the formulas he has learned from others, he will perceive that

the combination of currency inflation and price-fixing would catch him

as the two parts of a nut-cracker catch a nut; and he will know that you

can take the meat out of him any time you please. He may argue that it

is not fair; but point out to him that it is exactly what the big banks

and the trusts have been doing to us right along--increasing the amount

of money in circulation, and at the same time raising the prices we pay

for goods, and so taking out the meat from us nuts!

We have agreed that we do not mean to be unfair either to the banker or

the manufacturer; we are simply going to stop their being unfair to us.

We are going to convince them that their power to catch us in a

nut-cracker is forever at an end. We allow them six per cent on their

investments, and guarantee them this by turning over to them some of our

new money--that is, government bonds. When we have thoroughly convinced

them that they can't get any more, they will take these bonds and quit;

and thus simply, without violence or destruction of property, we shall

slide from our present system of commercial cannibalism into the new

co-operative commonwealth.

We have had "cheap money" campaigns in the United States many times, and

as this book is written, it becomes evident that we are to have another.

Henry Ford is advocating the idea, and so is Thomas A. Edison. The

present writer would like to make plain that in supporting such a

program, he does it for one purpose, and one only--the taking over of

the industries by the community. The creation of state credit for that

purpose is the next step in the progress of human society; whereas the

creation of state credit for the continuance of the profit system is a

piece of futility amounting to imbecility. This distinction is

fundamental, and is the test by which to judge the usefulness of any new

program, and the intelligence of those who advocate it.

CHAPTER LXX

THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY

(Discusses various programs for the change from industrial

autocracy to industrial democracy.)

The program of the railway workers for the democratic management of

their industry is embodied in the Plumb plan. You may learn about it by

addressing the weekly paper of the railway brotherhoods, which is called

"Labor," and is published in Washington, D. C. It appears that our

transportation industry can be at once socialized, because of a clause

in the constitution which gives the national government power over

"roads and communications." Through decades of mismanagement under the

system of private greed, the railroads have been brought to such a

financial condition that they will be forced into nationalization,

whenever we stop them from dipping their fingers into the public

treasury.

Under the Plumb plan the government is to purchase the roads from their

present owners, paying with government bonds. The management is to be

under the control of a board consisting in part of representatives of

the government, and in part of the workers--this being a combination of

the methods of Socialism and Syndicalism. The same program can be

applied constitutionally to telegraphs and telephones, to interstate

trolley systems, express companies, oil pipe lines, and all other means

of interstate communication and distribution.

The Plumb plan also deals with coal and steel and other great

industries. These could not be nationalized without a constitutional

amendment, but it appears that in the majority of the constitutions of

the states are provisions that all corporate charters are held subject

to the power of the legislature to amend, modify, or revoke the same.

That gives us a right to take over these corporations through state

action. The only preliminary is to elect state administrations which

will represent us, instead of representing the corporations. Also, most

state constitutions contain the provision that "no corporation shall

issue its stocks or bonds, except for money, labor, or property actually

received." The word "labor" gives the opening wedge for the Plumb plan.

The state can purchase these industries, giving bonds in exchange, and

can issue to the workers labor stock, which stock will carry part

control of the industry.

Also, the railroad brotherhoods have started their own bank, in

Cleveland, Ohio, and it is proving an enormous success. Make note of

this point; every large labor union can have its own bank, to finance

its industries and its propaganda. Stop and consider how preposterous it

is that the five million organized workers of the United States should

deposit their hundreds of millions of savings in capitalist banks, to be

used to finance private undertakings which crush unions and hold labor

in bondage. Let every big labor union have its own building, its own

banking and insurance business, its own vacation camp in the country,

its own school for training its future leaders. Also, let every labor

council in every big city start a labor daily, to tell the workers the

truth and point the way to freedom. Let every farmers' organization

follow suit; and let these groups get together, to exchange their

products upon a co-operative basis. Already the railway men are

arranging with the farmers, to buy the farm products and distribute them

co-operatively; they are getting together with the clothing workers, to

have the latter make clothing for them, and with the shoe-workers to

make shoes.

This is the co-operative movement, which has become the largest single

industry in Great Britain, and is the backbone of industrial democracy

and sound radicalism. It is spreading rapidly in America now. It is

taking the money of the people out of the control of the profit system,

and diverting it into channels of public service. It is training men to

believe in brotherhood instead of in greed. It is giving them business

experience, so that when the time comes the taking over of our

industrial machine will not have to be done by amateurs, but by men who

know what co-operation is, and how to make a success of it.

This work will go on more rapidly yet when the workers have united

politically, and brought into power a government which will assist them

instead of assisting the bankers. A most interesting program for the

development of working-class financial credit is known as the "Douglas

plan," which is advocated by a London weekly, the "New Age," and is

explained in two books, called "Economic Democracy" and "Credit Power

and Democracy," by Douglas and Orage. This program is in brief that the

furnishing of credit shall become a function of organized labor, based

upon the fact that the true and ultimate basis of all credit is the

power of hand and brain labor to produce wealth. The labor unions, or

"guilds," shall pay the management of industry and pay capital for the

use of the industrial plant, and shall finance production and new

industrial development out of their "credit power," their ability to

promise production and to keep their promises.

This "Douglas plan" seeks to break the Money Trust by the method of

Syndicalism. Another method of breaking it, through state regulation of

bank loans, you will find most completely set forth in an extremely able

book, "The Strangle Hold," by H. C. Cutting, an American business man,

whom you may address at San Lorenzo, California. Another method,

utilizing the third factor in industry, the consumer, is the method of

banking by consumers' unions. Such are the Raffeisen banks, widely known

in Germany, and a specimen of which exists in the single tax colony at

Arden, Delaware. Those who wish to know about the co-operative bank, or

other forms of co-operation, may apply to the Co-operative League of

America, 2 West 13th Street, New York, whose president is Dr. James P.

Warbasse. Information concerning public ownership may be had from the

Public Ownership League, 127 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago; also from the

Socialist party, 220 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, and from the

Bureau of Social Research of the Rand School of Social Science, New

York.

Also, I ought to mention the very interesting plan for social

reconstruction set forth by Mr. King C. Gillette, inventor of the safety

razor. This plan you may find in your public library in two encyclopedic

volumes, "Gillette's Social Redemption," and "Gillette's World

Solution." The politician seeks to solve the industrial problem by means

of the state, and the labor leader seeks to solve it by the unions; it

is to be expected that Mr. Gillette, a capitalist, should seek to solve

it by means of the corporation. He points out that the modern "trust" is

the greatest instrument of production yet invented by man; and he asks

why the people should not form their own "trust," to handle their own

affairs, and to purchase and take over the industries from their present

private masters. It is interesting to note that Mr. Gillette's solution

is fully as radical and thorough-going as those of the State Socialists

or the Syndicalists. The "People's Corporation" which he projects and

plans some day to launch upon the world would be a gigantic "consumers'

union," whose "credit power" would speedily dominate and absorb all

other powers in modern society; it would make us all stockholders, and

give us our share of the benefits of social productivity.

CHAPTER LXXI

THE NEW WORLD

(Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with its money

aspects; the standard wage and its variations.)

It has been indicated that the new society will be different in

different countries and in different parts of the same country, in

different industries and at different times. No one can predict exactly

what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict is unscientific. But

every man can work out his own ideas of the most economical and sensible

arrangements for a co-operative society, and in these final chapters I

set forth my ideas.

One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money in the new

society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods paid for?" I answer

that there will be money, and the business methods of the new society

will be so nearly the same as at present that in this respect you would

hardly realize there had been any change. The only difference will be

that in the new society you will be paid several times as much for your

labor; or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to

buy several times as much with your money. Why should we waste our time

working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in

the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we

bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house

system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference

we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper

currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have

money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to

society an equivalent amount of service.

When you have earned your money in the new world, you will spend it

wherever you please, and for whatever you please; the only difference

being that the price you pay will be the exact labor-cost of producing

that article, with no deduction for any form of exploitation. As I wrote

sixteen years ago in "The Industrial Republic," you will be able to get,

if you insist upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the

only question society will ask is, Have you performed services

equivalent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that

unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it to you in

that complicated formula; it will simply ask, "Have you got the price?"

Which, you observe, is exactly the question society asks you at present.

The next thing that everybody wants to know is, "Shall we all be paid

the same wages?" I answer, yes and no, because there will be three

systems of payment. There will be a basic wage, which everybody will get

for every kind of useful service necessary to production; this will be,

as it were, the foundation of our economic structure. On top of this

will be built a system of special payments for special services, which

are of an intellectual nature, and cannot be standardized and dealt with

wholesale. In addition, there will be for a time a third arrangement,

applying to agricultural work, which is in a different stage of

development, and to which different conditions apply.

Let us take, first, our standard wage. The census of our Utopian

commonwealth reveals that we have ten million able-bodied workers

engaged in mining, manufacturing, and transportation; this including, of

course, office-work and management--everything that enters into these

industries. By scientific management, the best machinery, and the

elimination of all possible waste, we find that they produce eighty

million dollars worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set

aside to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and for

the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error--what our great

corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty million dollars

per hour left, and that means that we can pay for labor five dollars per

hour, or twenty dollars for the regular four-hour day. This is our

standard wage, received by all able-bodied workers.

But quickly we find that our industries are not properly balanced. A

great many men want to work at the jobs which are clean and pleasant,

such as delivering mail, and very few want to work at washing dishes in

restaurants and cleaning the sewers. There is no way we can adjust this,

except by paying a higher wage, or by reducing the number of hours in

the working day, which is the same thing. The only other method would be

to have the state assign men to their work, and that would be

bureaucracy and slavery, the essence of everything we wish to get away

from in our co-operative commonwealth.

What we shall have, so far as concerns our basic industries, is a

government department, registering with mathematical accuracy the

condition of supply and demand in all the industries of the country. Our

demand for shoes is increasing, for some reason or other; a thousand

more shoe-workers are needed, therefore the price of labor in the shoe

industry is increased five cents per day--or whatever amount will draw

that number of workers from other occupations. On the other hand, there

are too many people applying for the job of driving trucks, therefore we

reduce slightly the compensation for this work. There are more men who

want jobs in Southern California than in Alaska, therefore the payment

for the same grade of work in Alaska has to be higher. All this is not

merely speculation, it is not a matter of anybody's choice; it is an

automatic, self-adjusting system, subject to precise calculations. The

only change from our present system is from guesswork to exact

measurement. At present we do not know how many shoes our country will

require next season, neither do we know how many shoes are going to be

made, neither do we know how many people can make shoes, nor how many

would like to learn, nor how many would like to quit that job and take

to farming. It would be the simplest matter in the world to find out

these things--far simpler that it was to register all our possible

soldiers, and examine them physically and mentally, and train them and

feed them and ship them overseas to "can the Kaiser."

Of course, we drafted the men for this war job; but in the new world

nobody is drafted for anything. It is any man's privilege to starve if

he feels like it; it is his privilege to go out into the mountains and

live on nuts and berries if he can find them. Nobody makes him go

anywhere, or makes him work at anything--unless, of course, he is a

convicted criminal. To the free citizen all that society has to say is,

if he buys any products, he must pay for those products with his own

labor, and not with some other man's labor. Of course, he may steal, or

cheat, as under capitalism; our new world has laws against stealing and

cheating, and does its best to enforce them. The difference between the

capitalist world and our world is merely that we make it impossible for

any man to get money _legally_ without working.

Under these conditions the average man wishes to work, and the only

question remaining is, how shall he work? If he wants to work by

himself, and in his own way, nobody objects to it. He is able to buy

anything he pleases, whether raw materials or finished products. If he

wants to buy leather and make shoes after his own pattern, no one stops

him, and if he can find anyone to buy these shoes, he can earn his

living in that way. He is able to get land for as long a time as he

wants it, by paying to the state the full rental value of that land, and

if he wants to farm the land, he can do so, and sell his products. As a

matter of theory, he is perfectly free to hire others to farm the land

for him, or with him. There is no law to prevent it, neither is there

any law to prevent his renting a factory and buying machinery, and

hiring labor to make shoes.

But, as a matter of practical fact, it is impossible for him to do this,

because the community is in the business of making shoes, and on an

enormous scale, with great factories run democratically by the workers,

and there is very small chance of any private business man being able to

draw the workers away from these factories. The community factories have

all the latest machinery; they apply the latest methods of scientific

management, and they turn out standard shoes at such a rate that private

competition is unthinkable. Of course, there may be some special kind of

shoes, involving an intellectual element, in which there can be private

competition. This kind of manufacture is covered in our second method of

payment; but before we discuss it, let us settle the problem of our most

important basic industry, which is agriculture.

CHAPTER LXXII

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION

(Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster

co-operative farming and co-operative homes.)

Farming the land is a very ancient industry, and while its tools have

been improved, its social forms have been the same for a long time. The

worker on the land is conservative, and the Russian Bolsheviks, who

tried to rush their peasants into Communism, found that they had only

succeeded in stopping the production of food. We make no such blunder in

our new society. We have found a way to abolish speculation in land, and

exploitation based on land-ownership, while leaving the farmer free to

run his business in the old way if he wants to.

In our new society we take the full rental value of all land which is

not occupied and used by the state. The farmer and the city dweller

alike "own" their land, in the sense that they have the use of it for as

long as they please, but they pay to the state the rental value of the

land, minus the improvements. So they cannot speculate in the land or

rent it out to others; they can only use it, and they only pay for what

they actually use. They may put improvements on the land, with full

assurance of having the use and benefit thereof, and they may sell the

improvements, and the new owner enters into possession, with no

obligation but to pay the rental value of the unimproved land to the

state.

The farmer goes on raising his products, and if he wants to drive to

town and deliver them to his customers, he may do so; but he finds it

cheaper to market them through the great labor co-operatives and state

markets. As there is no longer any private interest involved in these

activities, no one has any interest in cheating him, and he gets the

full value of the products, less the cost of marketing. If the farmer

wishes to continue all his life in his old style individualistic method

of working the land, he is free to do so. But here is what he sees going

on within a few miles of his place:

The state has bought a square mile of land, and has taken down the

fences and established an agricultural co-operative for purposes of

experiment and demonstration. The farm is run under the direction of

experts; the soils are treated with exactly the right fertilizers for

each crop, the best paying crops are raised, the best seed is used, and

the best machinery. The workers of this new agricultural co-operative

receive the standard wage, and they live in homes specially built for

them, with all the conveniences made possible by wholesale production.

Also, these co-operators live in a democratic community; they determine

their own conditions of labor, being represented on the governing board,

along with the experts appointed by the state.

The farmer watches this experiment, at first with suspicion; but he

finds that his sons have less suspicion than he has, and his sons keep

pointing out to him that their little farm is not making the standard

wage or anything like it; and, moreover, the standard wage is constantly

increasing, whereas, the price of farm-products is dropping. And here is

the state, ready to direct new co-operative ventures, inviting a score

of farmers in the community to combine and buy out the unwilling ones,

and establish a new co-operative. Sooner or later the old farmer gives

way; or he dies, and his sons belong to the new world.

So ultimately we have our national agricultural system, in which all the

requirements of our people are studied, and all the possibilities of our

soil and climate, and the job of raising the exact quantities of food

that we need, both for our own use and for export, is worked out as one

problem. We know how much lumber we need, and we raise it on all our

hillsides and mountain slopes, and so protect ourselves from floods and

the denuding of our continent. We know where best to raise our wheat,

and where best to raise our potatoes and our cabbages, and we do not do

this by crude hand-labor, nor by the labor of women and children from

daybreak till dark. We have special machines that plant each crop, and

other machines that reap it or dig it out of the ground and prepare it

for market.

A few days ago I read a discussion in the Chamber of Commerce of

Calcutta. Some one called attention to the wastes involved in the

current method of handling rubber. One consignment of rubber had been

sold more than three hundred separate times, and the cost of these

transactions amounted to three times the value of the rubber. This is

only one illustration, and I might quote a thousand. If you doubt my

figures as to the possibility of production in the new society, remind

yourself that a large percentage of the things you use have been bought

and sold many scores of times before you get them. Consider the cabbage,

for which you pay six or eight cents a pound in the grocery store, and

for which the farmer gets, say, half a cent a pound.

In this new world the state has an enormous income, derived from its tax

on land values. It no longer has to send around men once a year to ask

you how many diamond rings your wife has, and to tax you on your

honesty, if you have any. It no longer has to make its money by such

lying devices as a tariff, therefore its moral being is no longer

poisoned by a tariff-lobby. It taxes every citizen for the right to use

that which nature created, and leaves free from taxation that which the

citizens' own labor created; this kind of taxation is honest, and fair

to all, because no one can evade it. The state uses the proceeds of this

land tax in the public services, the libraries and research laboratories

and information bureaus; in free insurance against fire and flood and

tempest; and in a pension to every member of society above the working

age of fifty-five, or below the working age of eighteen. Of course, the

state might leave it to every man to save up for his old age, but not

all men are this wise, and the state cannot afford to let the unwise

ones starve. It is more convenient for the state to figure that all men,

or nearly all, are going to be old, and to hold back some of their money

while they are young and strong, in the certainty that when they are

old, they will appreciate this service. Also the state takes care of the

sick and incapacitated, and the mentally or physically defective. But we

do not leave these latter loose in the world to reproduce their defects;

we have in our new world some sense of responsibility to the future, and

there is nothing to which we devote more effort than making certain that

nothing unsound or abnormal is allowed entrance into life.

The problem of the care of children is a complicated one, and our new

society is in process of solving it. We look back on the old world in

which the having of children was heavily taxed, in the form of an

obligation to care for these children until they were old enough to

work. Then the parents were allowed to exploit the labor of the

children, so that among the very poor the raising of children was a

business speculation, like the raising of slaves or poultry. But in our

new world we consider the interest of the child, and of the society in

which that child is to be a citizen. We decide that this society must

have citizens, and that the raising of the future citizens is a work

just exactly as necessary and useful as the raising of a crop of

cabbages. Therefore, we pay a pension to all mothers while they are

raising and caring for children. At the same time we assert the right to

see that this money is wisely spent, and that the child is really cared

for. If it is neglected, we are quick to take it away from its parents,

and put it in one of our twenty-four-hour-a-day schools.

We realize that the home is an ancient industry, even more ancient than

agriculture, and we do not try to socialize it all at once. But just as

we demonstrate to farmers that the individual farm does not pay, so we

demonstrate to mothers the wastefulness of the single laundry, the

single kitchen, the single nursery. We establish community laundries,

community kitchens, community nurseries, and invite our women to help in

these activities, and to learn there, under expert guidance, the

advantages of domestic co-operation. We convince them by showing better

results in the health and happiness of the children, and in the time and

strength of the mothers. So, little by little, we widen the field of

co-operative endeavor, and increase the total product of human labor and

the total enjoyment of human life.

CHAPTER LXXIII

INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION

(Discusses scientific, artistic and religious activities, as a

superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard wage.)

Karl Kautsky, intellectual leader of the German Social-democracy, gives

in his book, "The Social Revolution," a useful formula as to the

organization of the future society. This formula is: "Communism in

material production, Anarchism in intellectual production." It will

repay us to study this statement, and see exactly what it means.

Material production depends directly upon things; and as there is only a

limited quantity of things in the world, if any one person has more than

his share, he deprives some other person to that extent. So there have

to be strict laws concerning the distribution of material products. But

with intellectual things exactly the opposite is the case. There is no

limit in quantity, and any one person can have all he wants without

interfering with anybody else. Everybody in the world can perform a play

by Shakespeare, or play a sonata by Beethoven, and everybody can enjoy

it as much as he pleases without keeping other people from enjoying it

all they please. Also, material production can be standardized; we can

have great factories to turn out millions of boxes of matches, each

match like every other match, and the more alike they are the better.

But in intellectual affairs we want everyone to be different, or at

least we want everyone to be free to be different, and if some one can

become much better than the others, this is the most important kind of

production in the world, for he may make over our whole intellectual and

moral life.

For the production of material things our new society has great

factories owned in common, and run by majority vote of the workers, and

we place the products of that factory at the disposal of all members of

society upon equal terms. That is our "Communism in material

production." On the other hand, in our intellectual production we leave

everybody free to live his own life, and to associate himself with

others of like aims, and we place as few restrictions as possible upon

their activities. This is the method of free association, or "Anarchism

in intellectual production."

Our problem would be simple if material and intellectual production

never had to mingle. But, as it happens, every kind of intellectual

production requires a certain amount of material, and every kind of

material production involves an intellectual element. Therefore, our two

methods have to be combined, and we have a complex problem which we have

to solve in a variety of different ways, and upon which we must

experiment with open minds and scientific temper.

First, let us take the intellectual elements involved in the production

of purely material things, such as matches and shoes and soap. Let us

take invention. Naturally, we do not want to go on making matches and

shoes and soap in the same old way forever. On the contrary, we want to

stimulate all the workers in these industries to use their wits and

improve the processes in every possible way. The whole of society has an

interest in this, and the soap workers have an especial interest. Our

soap industry has an invention department, with a group of experts

appointed by the executive committee of the national council of soap

workers. All soap workers are taxed, say five cents a day, for the

support of this activity. Likewise the state contributes a generous sum

out of its income toward the work of soap research. In addition to this,

the soap industry offers prizes and scholarships for suggestions as to

the improvement of every detail of the work, and at meetings of every

local of soap workers somebody makes new suggestions as to methods of

stimulating their intellectual life--not merely as regards soap, but as

regards citizenship, and art and literature, and human life in general.

Our soap workers, you must understand, are no longer wage-slaves,

brutalized by toil and poverty; they are free citizens of a free

society. Our soap workers' local in every city has its own theatre and

concert hall and lecture bureau, and publishes its own magazine.

Every industry has its immediate intellectual problems, its trade

journals in which these are discussed, and its research boards in which

they are worked out. The ambitions of the young workers in that industry

are concentrated upon getting into this intellectual part of their

trade. Examinations are held and tests are made to discover the most

competent men, and written suggestions are considered by boards of

control. It is, of course, of great importance to every worker that the

channels of promotion should be kept open, and that the man who really

has inventive talent shall get, not merely distinction and promotion,

but financial reward, so that he may have time and materials to continue

his experiments.

This research department, you perceive, is a sort of superstructure,

built upon the foundation of our standard wage; and this same simile

applies to numerous other forms of intellectual production. For example,

our community paper mills turn out paper, and our community printers are

prepared to turn out millions of books. How shall we determine what is

to be the intellectual content of these material books? There are many

different methods. First, there is the method of individualism. A man

has something to say, and he writes a book; he works in the soap

factory, and saves a part of his standard wage, and when he has money

enough he orders the community printers to print his book, and the

community booksellers to handle it for him, and the community postoffice

to deliver it for him. Again, a group of men organize themselves into an

association, or club, or scientific society, and publish books. The

Authors' League takes up the work of publishing the writings of its

members, and the Poetry Society does the same.

This is the method of Anarchism, or free association. But there is no

reason why we should not have along side it the method of Socialism;

there is no reason why we should not have state publishing houses, just

as we have state universities and state libraries. The state should

certainly publish standard works of all sorts, bibles and dictionaries

and directories, and cheap editions of the classics. In this new world

our school boards are not chosen by business men for purposes of graft,

they are chosen by the people to educate our children; so it seems to us

perfectly natural that the National Educational Association should

conduct a publication department, and order the printing of the school

books which the children use.

In the same way, anyone is free to write a play, or to put on a play,

and invite people to come and see it. But, like the individual farmers

and the individual mothers of families, the play-producer in our society

is in competition with great community enterprises, which set a high

standard and make competition difficult. The same thing applies to the

opera, and to concerts, and to all the arts and sciences. You can start

a private hospital if you wish, but you will be in competition with

public institutions, and you can only succeed if you are a man of

genius--that is, if you have something to teach, too new and startling

for the public boards of control to recognize. You try your new method,

and it works, and that becomes a criticism of the public boards of

control, and before long the people by their votes turn out the old

board of control and put you in.

That is politics, you say; but we in our new world do not use the word

politics as one of contempt. We really believe that public sentiment is

in the long run the best authority, and the appeal to public sentiment

is at once a social privilege and a social service. What we strive to do

is to clear the channels of appeal, and avoid favoritism and stagnation.

To that end we maintain, in every art and every science and every

department of human thought, endless numbers of centers of free,

independent, co-operative activity, so that every man who has an

inspiration, or a new idea, can find some group to support him or can

form a new group of his own.

This is our "Anarchism in intellectual production," and it is the method

under which in capitalist society men organize all their clubs and

societies and churches. Devout members of the Roman Catholic Church will

be startled to be told that theirs is an Anarchist organization; but

nevertheless, such is the case. The Catholic Church owns a great deal of

property, and speculates in real estate, and to that extent it is a

capitalist institution. It holds a great many people by fear, and to

that extent it is a feudal institution. But in so far as members of the

church believe in it and love it and contribute of their free will to

its support, they are organizing by the method which all Anarchists

recommend and desire to apply to the whole of society. Anarchist clubs

and Christian churches are both free associations for the advocacy of

certain ideas, the only difference being in the ideas they advocate.

In our new world such organizations have been multiplied many fold, and

form a vast superstructure of intellectual activity, built upon the

foundation of the standard wage. In this new world all the people are

free. They are free, not merely from oppression, but from the fear of

oppression; they have leisure and plenty, and they take part naturally

and simply in the intellectual life. The old, of course, have not got

over the dullness which a lifetime of drudgery impressed upon them, but

the young are growing up in a world without classes, and in which it

seems natural that everyone should be educated and everyone should have

ideas. They earn their standard wage, and devote their spare time to

some form of intellectual or artistic endeavor, and spend their spare

money in paying writers and artists and musicians and actors to

stimulate and entertain them.

These latter are the ways of distinction in our new society; these are

the paths to power. The only rich men in our world are the men who

produce intellectual goods; the great artists, orators, musicians,

actors and writers, who are free to serve or not to serve, as they see

fit, and can therefore hold up the public for any price they care to

charge. Just now there is eager discussion going on in our world as to

whether it is proper for an opera singer, or a moving picture star, or a

novelist, to make a million dollars. Our newspapers are full of

discussions of the question whether anyone can make a million dollars

honestly, and whether men of genius should exploit their public. Some

point out that our most eminent opera singer spends his millions in

endowing a conservatory of art; but others maintain that it would be

better if he lowered his prices of admission, and let the public use its

money in its own way. The extremists are busy founding what they call

the Ten-cent Society, whose members agree to boycott all singers and

actors who charge more than ten cents admission, and all moving picture

stars who receive more than a hundred thousand dollars a year for their

service. These "Ten-centers" do not object to paying the money, but they

object to the commercializing of art, and declare especially that the

moral effect of riches is such that no rich person should ever, under

any circumstances, be allowed to influence the youth of the nation. In

this some of the greatest writers join them, and renounce their

copyrights, and agree to accept a laureateship from some union of

workers, who pay them a generous stipend for the joy and honor of being

associated with their names. The greatest poet of our time began life as

a newsboy, and so the National Newsvenders' Society has adopted him, and

taken his name, and pays him ten thousand dollars a year for the

privilege of publishing his works.

CHAPTER LXXIV

MANKIND REMADE

(Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what happens to

these in the new world.)

We have briefly sketched the economic arrangements of the co-operative

commonwealth. Let us now consider what are the effects of these

arrangements upon the principal social diseases of capitalism.

The first and most dreadful of capitalism's diseases is war, and the

economic changes here outlined have placed war, along with piracy and

slavery, among the half-forgotten nightmares of history. We have broken

the "iron ring," and are no longer dependent upon foreign concessions

and foreign markets for the preservation of our social system and the

aggrandizement of a ruling class. We can stay quietly at home and do our

own work, and as we produce nearly everything we need, we no longer have

to threaten our neighbors. Our neighbors know this, and therefore they

do not arm against us, and we have no pretext to arm against them. We

take toward all other civilized nations the attitude which we have taken

toward Canada for the past hundred years.

We have a small and highly trained army, a few regiments of which are

located at strategic points over the country. This army we regard and

use as we do our fire department. When there is widespread damage by

fire or flood or storm or earthquake, we rush the army to the spot to

attend to the work of rescue and rebuilding. Also, we have a small navy

in international service; for, of course, we are no longer an

independent and self-centered nation; we have come to realize that we

are part of the world community, and have taken our place as one state

in the International Socialist Federation. We send our delegates to the

world parliament, and we place our resources at the disposal of the

world government. However, it now takes but a small army and navy to

preserve order in the world. We govern the backward nations, but the

economic arrangements of the world are such that we are no longer driven

to exploit and oppress them. We send them teachers instead of soldiers,

and as there are really very few people in the world who fight for the

love of fighting, we have little difficulty in preserving peace. We pay

the backward peoples a fair price for their products which we need. Our

world government takes no money out of these countries, but spends it

for the benefit of those who live in the countries, to teach them and

train their young generations for self-government.

Next, what are the effects of our new arrangements upon political

corruption and graft? The social revolution has broken the prestige of

wealth. Money will buy things, but it no longer buys power, the right to

rule other men; it no longer buys men's admiration. Everybody now has

money, and nobody is any longer afraid of starvation. It is no longer

the fashion to save money--any more than it is the fashion to carry

revolvers in drawing-rooms or to wear chain mail in place of

underclothing. So our political life is cleansed of the money influence.

People now get power by persuading their fellows, not by buying them or

threatening them. The world is no longer full of men ravenous for jobs,

and ready to sell their soul for a "position." So it is no longer

possible to build up a "machine" based on desire for office.

The changes have resulted in an enormous intensification of our

political activities. We have endless meetings and debates; we have so

many propaganda societies that we cannot keep track of them. And some of

these societies, like the Catholic Church, have a large membership, and

large sums of money at their disposal. But a few experiments at carrying

elections by a "campaign-chest" have convinced everybody that to have

the facts on your side is the only permanent way to political power. Our

new society is jealous of attempts to establish any sort of ruling

class, and the surest way to discredit yourself is to advocate any form

of barrier against freedom of discussion, or the right of the people's

will to prevail.

Next, what is the status of crime? We have too recently escaped from

capitalism to have been able to civilize entirely our slum population,

and we still have occasional crimes of violence, especially crimes of

passion. But we have almost entirely eliminated those classes of crime

which had to do with property, and we have discovered that this was

ninety-five per cent of all crime. We have eliminated them by the simple

device of making them no longer profitable. Anybody can go into our

community factories, and under clean and attractive working conditions,

and without any loss of prestige or social position, can earn the means

of satisfying his reasonable wants by three hours work a day. Almost

everybody finds this easier than stealing or cheating.

But more important yet, as a factor in abolishing crime, is the

abolition of class domination and the prestige of wealth. We no longer

have in our community a ruling class which lives without working, and

which offers to the weak-minded and viciously inclined the perpetual

example of luxury. We no longer set much store on jewels and fine

raiment; we do not make costly things, except for public purposes, where

all may enjoy them; and nobody stores great quantities of money, because

everyone has a guarantee of security from the state. So we are gradually

putting our policemen and jailers and judges and lawyers to constructive

work.

Next, what about disease? The diseases of poverty are entirely done away

with. We are now able to apply the knowledge of science to the whole

community, and so we no longer have to do with tuberculosis and typhoid,

or with rickets and anaemia in children, or with heavy infant mortality.

We have sterilized our unfit, the degenerates and the defectives, and so

do not have to reckon with millions of children from these wretched

stocks. We now give to the question of public health that prominence

which in the old days we used to give to war and the suppression of

crime and social protest. Our public health officers now replace our

generals and admirals, and we really obey their orders.

Next, as to prostitution. Just as in the case of crime, we are still too

close to capitalism not to have among us the victims of social

depravity, both men and women. We still have a great deal of vice which

springs from untrained animal impulse, and we have some cultivated and

highly sophisticated pornography. But we have entirely done away with

commercial vice, and we have done it by cutting the root which nourished

it. Women in our communities are really free; and by that we do not mean

the empty political freedom which existed in the days of wage

slavery--we mean that women are permanently delivered from economic

inferiority, by the recognition on the part of the state of the money

value of their special kind of work, the bearing and training of

children. This kind of work not merely receives the standard wage, it

also receives the best surgical and nursing treatment free. Housework

and home-making are legally recognized services; and the woman before

marriage and after her children have been nursed is free to go into the

community factories and earn for herself the standard wage, with no loss

of social position. Consequently, no woman sells her sex, and no man

buys it.

This does not mean, of course, that we have solved the sex problem in

our new society. There are two great social problems with which we have

to deal, the first of these being the sex problem, and the second the

race problem. Our scientists are occupied with eugenics, and we are

finding out how to guide our young people in marriage, so that our race

may be built up, and the ravages of capitalism remedied as quickly as

possible. Also we are trying to find out the laws of happiness and

health in love. We are founding societies for the purpose of protecting

love, and, as hinted in the Book of Love, we have a determined social

struggle between two groups of women--the mother-women and the

mistress-women--those who take love gravely, as a means of improving the

race, and those who take it as a decoration, a form of play. Our men are

embarrassed by having to choose between these groups, and occupy

themselves with trying to keep the struggle from turning into civil war.

Second, the race problem. Our economic changes have, of course, done

away with some of the bitterest phases of this strife. White workingmen

in the North no longer mob and murder negro workingmen for taking their

jobs, and in the South our land values tax prevents the landlord from

exploiting either white or negro labor. But our white race is still

irresistibly bent upon preserving its integrity of blood, and the more

far-seeing among the negroes have come to realize that there can never

be any real happiness for them in a society where they are denied the

higher social privileges. There is a movement for the development of a

genuine Negro Republic in Africa, and for mass emigration. Also there is

a proposition, soon to be settled at an election, for the dividing of

the United States into three districts upon racial lines. First, there

are to be, in the Far South, three or four states which are inhabited

and governed solely by negroes, and to which white men may come only as

temporary visitors; a large group of states in the North which are white

states, and to which negroes may come only as visitors; and finally, a

middle group of states, in which both whites and black are allowed to

live, as at present, but with the proviso that no one may live there

who takes part in any form of racial strife or agitation. This program

gives to race-conscious negroes their own land, their own civilization,

their own chance of self-realization; it gives to race-conscious white

men the same opportunity; and it leaves to those who are not troubled by

the problem, a country where black and white may dwell in quiet good

fellowship.

Finally, what has been the effect of our economic changes upon the

purely personal vices which gave us so much trouble and unhappiness in

the old days? What, for example, has been the effect upon vanity? You

should see our new crop of children in our high schools! There are no

longer any social classes among them; the rich ones do not arrive in

private automobiles, to make the poor ones envious, and they do not

isolate themselves in little snobbish cliques. They arrive in community

automobiles, and all wear uniforms--one of the simple devices by which

we repress the impulse of the young toward display of personal egotism.

They are all full of health and happy play, and their heads are busily

occupied with interesting ideas. Our girls are trained to thinking,

instead of to personal adornment; they are developing their minds,

instead of catching a rich husband by sexual charms. So we have been

able, in a single generation of training, to make a real and appreciable

difference in the amount of vanity and self-consciousness to be found

among our young people.

And the same thing applies to a score of other undesirable qualities,

which, under the system of competitive commercialism, were

overstimulated in human beings. In those old days everyone was seeking

his own survival, and certain qualities which had survival value became

the principal characteristics of our race. Those qualities were greed

and persistence in acquisitiveness, cunning and subtlety, also bragging

and self-assertiveness. In that old world people destroyed their fellows

in order to make their own safety and power; they wasted goods in order

to be esteemed, to preserve what they called their "social position."

But now we have cut the roots of all these vile weeds. We have so

adjusted the business relationships of men that we do not have to have

hysterical religious revivals in order to keep the human factors alive

in their hearts. We have established it as a money fact, which everyone

quickly realizes, that it pays better to co-operate; there is more

profit and less bother in being of service to others. So we have

prepared a soil in which virtues grow instead of vices, and we find

that people become decent and kindly and helpful without exhortation,

and with no more moral effort than the average man can comfortably make.

Of course, we have still personal vices to combat, and new virtues to

discover and to propagate; but this has to do with the future, whereas

we are here confining ourselves to those things which have been

demonstrated in our new society.

INDEX

Abortion, 61

Abortions, 30

Advertising, 163

Agricultural co-operative, 206

Anarchism, 210

Anarchist, 89, 90

Anarchy, 172

Anglo-Saxon, 62, 111

"Appeal to Reason", 149

Aristocratic doctrine, 116

Armour, 128

Atherton, Gertrude, 87

Babies, 63

Bachelorhood, 52

Bacon, Francis, 51

Banking system, 192

Bankruptcy, 162

Barbarism, 124

Barnum, P. T., 27

Berkman, Alexander, 173

Biology, 103

Birth control, 61, 76

Birth Control Review, 64

Blatchford, Robert, 55, 161

"Blind" love, 58

Bolsheviks, 172

Breach of promise suit, 91

Brothel, 66

Brothels, 31

Burbank, Luther, 99

Business man, 143

Capital, 158

Capitalism, 136, 168

Capitalists, 142

Carnegie, 168

Catholic Church, 213, 216

Celibacy, 51, 52, 64

Chastity, 51

Chattel slavery, 186

Childbirths, 70

Children, 70, 72, 85, 208

Christianity, 115, 133

"Clarion", 31

Class struggle, 133, 177

Clay, Henry, 186

Coleridge, 85

"Collier's Weekly", 122, 163

Committee on Waste, 160

Commune, 129

Communism, 10, 170, 210

Compensation, 179

Competition, 108, 127

Competitive wage system, 148

"Complex", 49

Comstock, Anthony, 20

Confiscation, 179

Congress, 138

Contraception, 61

Co-operation, 109, 199, 200

Coquetry, 38

Corporation, 127

Courtship, 91

Credit, 152, 154, 192, 200

Credit-cards, 202

Crime, 164, 216

Culture, 62

Cutting, H. C., 200

Dances, 15

Debs, Eugene V., 155

Degeneration, 121

"Demi-monde", 80

Democratic doctrine, 115

Dictatorship, 180, 183, 185

Dill, James B., 25

Disarmament, 157

Discouragement, 164

Disease, 217

Divorce, 32, 93, 97

Double standard, 5

"Douglas plan", 199

"Dumping", 152

Economic evolution, 123

Economic man, 108

Emerson, 186

Emulation, 112

Engagements, 72

England, 120, 156, 175

Eugenics, 58

Evolution, 122

Exogamy, 105

Exploitation, 181

Exploiting, 148

Exports, 153

Factory system, 129

Farming, 206

"Favorable balance", 151

Fear, 122, 164

Federal Reserve Act, 154

Feminist, 69

Feudal stage, 124

Fires, 163

Foreign trade, 151

"Free love", 44, 87

"Free lover", 92

France, 175

France, Anatole, 44

Freud, 104

Gens, 9

Germany, 155, 156

Gillette, King C., 200

Goldman, Emma, 173

Gonorrhea, 30

Goode, Mary J., 41

Government, 166

"Graft", 127, 216

"Great Adventure", 188

Hammurabi, 78

"Hamon case", 26

"Hard times", 144

Hardy, 13

Harris, Frank, 21

"High life", 23

Home, 42, 209

Honeymoon, 56

Hoover, Herbert, 160

House of Commons, 137

Huguenots, 134

Human nature, 99

Hunger, 122

Ideals, 132

Imports, 153

Income tax, 143, 188

Industrial evolution, 126

Infant, 103

Infanticide, 61

Inflation, 196

Inheritance tax, 188

"Ingenues", 19

Instinct, 57

Insurance, 163

Intellectual production, 211

"Iron ring", 158

Island, 145

I. W. W., 169

James, William, 16

Jealousy, 89

Jews, 127

Kautsky, Karl, 210

"King Coal", 139

Kropotkin, 109, 129, 173

Labor, 158

Labor checks, 202

Labor union, 199

Laissez faire, 110

Land tax, 190

Land titles, 179

Land values, 208

Late marriage, 67

Lecky, 6, 33

Leviticus, 78

Liberty motor, 164

London, Jack, 62

Los Angeles Times, 157

Love, 34, 47, 100, 112, 218

Lust, 48

Luther, Martin, 129

Luxury, 60

Machinery, 149

"Magic gestures", 104

Magna Carta, 134

Malthusian law, 108

Markham, Edwin, 139

Marquesas Islands, 33

Marriage, 4

Marriage club, 71

Marriage market, 68

Marx, Karl, 132, 138, 176

Materialistic interpretation, 132

Material production 210

Maternity endowment 79

Meredith, George 43

"Merrie England" 161

Metchnikoff, Elie 33, 46

Mexico 121

Middle class 176, 186

Minor, Robert 173

Mistress 12

Money 37, 192, 202

Money Trust 194

Monogamy 5, 83, 90

Moors 134

Moralists 59

Morgan 128

Mother's pension 79

Moving pictures 17

Negro 218

Negroes 116

Neuroses 105

Neurotics 103

North Dakota 194

North, Luke 188

O'Brien, Frederick 10

Oedipus complex 104

"Open-shop" 177

Panic 154

Parasitism 74

Passion 58

Permanence 87

Piracy 111

Pity 74

Plumb plan 198

Political evolution 123

Political revolution 125

Politics 213

Pornography 20

Postal savings bank 195

Poverty 40

Primitive man 9

Privilege 36

Professor Sumner 122

Profit system 148, 158

"Progressive polygamy" 90

Proletariat 142

Promiscuity 87

Property marriage 44

Prosperity 144

Prostitute 6

Prostitution 4, 31, 41, 217

Proudhon 179

Psycho-analysis 49, 103

Public bank 194

Publishing 212

Quick, Herbert 165

Race prejudice 62

Race problem 218

Racial immaturity 116

Raffeisen bank 200

Reeve, Sidney A. 160

Republic 125

Research 212

"Resurrection" 53

Revolt 134

Ricardo 108

Richardson, Dorothy 26

Ring 148

Robinson, Dr. William, J, 21, 30, 70, 77

Roman Catholic church 90

"Romance" 91

"Romantic" love 55

Roosevelt 61

Rulers 119

Russia 129, 185

Sanger, Margaret 63

School of marriage 75

Selection 8

Sex 8

Sex education 72

Sex impulse 46

Sex problem 218

Sex urge 86

Sex war 81

Shelley 59, 89

"She-towns" 29

Shop management 168

Sienkiewicz 13

Sims, District Attorney 28

Single tax 188

Slavery 10, 126, 136

"Smart set" 24

Smith, Adam 108

Snobbery 61

Socialism, 166

Social revolution, 128, 147, 175

Soviets, 130, 171

"Speeding up", 138

Spencer, Herbert, 122

Spirituality, 64

Sport, 113

Standard wage, 203

Steel Trust, 137

Stopes, Dr. Marie C., 77

Strikes, 162

Syndicalism, 167

Syphilis, 30

Tabu, 9

Tariff, 153

Taxes, 191

Tennyson, 38, 120

"The Brass Check", 31, 137

"The Conquest of Bread", 173

"The Cost of Competition", 160

"The Industrial Republic", 202

"The Jungle", 139

"The Lady", 12

"The Long Day", 26, 29

"The Nature of Man", 33

"The Profits of Religion", 137

"The Social Revolution", 210

"The Strangle Hold", 200

Thompson, A. M., 31

Tolstoi, 53

"Totem and Taboo", 104

"Triangle", 56

Unconscious, 105

Unemployment, 147

"Vamps", 19

Vanity, 219

Varietism, 85

Venereal disease, 30, 67, 83

Voltaire, 36

Voluntary Parenthood League, 64

War, 162

Wars, 155

Waste, 165

Wells, H. G., 89

Wharton, Edith, 95

"Wild oats", 6

White man's burden, 117

White, William Allen, 17

Worker, 140

Workers, 176

Working class, 140

Woman, 12

"Young love", 56, 73

* * * * *

BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR

Published by the Author, Pasadena, California

Trade Distributors: The Paine Book Co., Chicago, [I].

The Brass Check

A Study of American Journalism

Who owns the press and why?

When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And

whose propaganda?

Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it

honest material?

No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the

first time the questions are answered in a book.

The first edition of this book, 23,000 copies, was sold out two weeks

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HERMANN BESSEMER, _in the "Neues Journal," Vienna_:

"Upton Sinclair deals with names, only with names, with balances,

with figures, with documents, a truly stunning, gigantic

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THE BOOK OF LIFE

A book of practical counsel. Volume One--Mind and Body. Discusses truth

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Tells people how to live, in order to avoid waste and pain, and to find

happiness and achieve progress.

Volume Two--Love and Society. Discusses health in sex; love and

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THE JUNGLE

This novel, first published in 1906, caused an international sensation.

It was the best selling book in the United States for a year; also in

Great Britain and its colonies. It was translated into seventeen

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action by Congress. The book has been out of print for ten years, and is

now reprinted by the author at a lower price than when first published,

although the cost of manufacture has since more than doubled.

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been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book

as has come to Upton Sinclair."--_New York Evening World._

"It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what 'Uncle

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and more accurately in 'The Jungle' than in 'Uncle Tom's

Cabin.'"--ARTHUR BRISBANE, _in the New York Evening Journal_.

KING COAL

A novel of the Colorado coal country.

"Clear, convincing, complete."--LINCOLN STEFFENS.

"I wish that every word of it could be burned deep into the heart

of every American."--ADOLPH GERMER.

DEBS AND THE POETS: Edited by Ruth Le Prade, with an introduction

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SYLVIA: A novel of the South.

SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE: A sequel. (Both in cloth only.)

100% A STORY OF A PATRIOT

Would you like to go behind the scenes and see the "invisible

government" of your country saving you from the Bolsheviks and the Reds?

Would you like to meet the secret agents and provocateurs of "Big

Business," to know what they look like, how they talk and what they are

doing to make the world safe for democracy? Several of these gentlemen

have been haunting the home of Upton Sinclair during the past three

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the investigators. He has put one of them, Peter Gudge by name, into a

book, together with Peter's ladyloves, and his wife, and his boss, and a

whole group of his fellow-agents and their employers.

_From_ LOUIS UNTERMEYER, _Author of "Challenge," etc._:

"Upton Sinclair has done it again. He has loaded his Maxim (no

Silencer attached), taken careful aim, and--bang!--hit the bell

plump in the center.

"First of all, '100%' is a story; a story full of suspense, drama,

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interest-crammed as (and a darned sight more truthful than) your

daily newspaper."

THEY CALL ME CARPENTER: A TALE OF THE SECOND COMING

Narrates how Jesus came to Los Angeles in the year 1921, and what

happened to Him. To be published in September, 1922.

THE CRY FOR JUSTICE

An anthology of the literature of social protest, with an introduction

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and scope. Buoyant, but never blatant, powerful and passionate, it

has the spirit of a challenge and a battle cry."--LOUIS UNTERMEYER.

"You have marvelously covered the whole ground. The result is a

book that radicals of every shade have long been waiting for. You

have made one that every student of the world's thought--economic,

philosophic, artistic--has to have."--REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.

THE PROFITS OF RELIGION

A study of supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to

privilege. The first investigation of this subject ever made in any

language.

"You have put a lot of work into it and you have marshalled your

facts in, masterly fashion."--WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

* * * * *

The following typographical errors have been corrected by the text

transcriber:

worshiping=>worshipping

changes takes place=>changes take place

is an impuse=>is an impulse

center of continous=>center of continuous

a starvling beggar at the gates=>a starving beggar at the gates

of fool nations about sex=>of fool notions about sex

any personal right in contravened=>any personal right is contravened

industrial evoluton=>industrial evolution

to the poeple=>to the people

Social revoluton=>Social revolution

her hands and and feet=>her hands and her feet

Liebault=>Liebault

Sienkewicz's "Whirlpools"=>Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"

Magna Charta, 134=>Magna Carta, 134