A four years' war was fought in America, a million men were
killed and half a continent was devastated, in order to abolish
chattel slavery and put wage slavery in its place. I have made a
thorough study of both these industrial systems, and I freely
admit that there is one respect in which the lot of the wage
slave is better than that of the chattel slave. The wage slave is
free to think; and by squeezing a few drops of blood from his
starving body, he may possess himself of machinery for the
distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of the policeman's
club and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations, and
so he has the candle of hope to light him to his death-bed. But
excepting this consideration, and taking the circumstances of the
wage slave from the material point of view alone, I hold it
beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave of 1860
was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the
Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. It was the Southern master's real
concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be
kept physically sound; but it is nobody's business to care
anything about the wage slave. The children of the chattel slave
were valuable property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a
happy outdoor life, and medical attention if they fell ill. But
the children of the sweat-shop or the cotton-mill or the
canning-factory are raised in a city slum, and never know what it
is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling of security or
rest--
We are weary in our cradles
From our mother's toil untold;
We are born to hoarded weariness
As some to hoarded gold.
The system of competitive commercialism, of large-scale
capitalist industry in its final flowering! I quote from "The
Jungle":
Here in this city tonight, ten thousand women are shut up in foul
pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to live. Tonight
in Chicago there are ten thousand men, homeless and wretched,
willing to work and begging for a chance, yet starving, and
fronting with terror the awful winter cold! Tonight in Chicago
there are a hundred thousand children wearing out their strength
and blasting their lives in the effort to earn their bread! There
are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and
squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones!
There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless,
waiting for death to take them from their torments! There are a
million people, men and women and children, who share the curse
of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can stand and see,
for just enough to keep them alive; who are condemned till the
end of their days to monotony and weariness, to hunger and
misery, to heat and cold, to dirt and disease, to ignorance and
drunkenness and vice! And then turn over the page with me, and
gaze upon the other side of the picture. There are a
thousand--ten thousand, maybe--who are the masters of these
slaves, who own their toil. They do nothing to earn what they
receive, they do not even have to ask for it---it comes to them
of itself, their only care is to dispose of it. They live in
palaces, they riot in luxury and extravagance--such as no words
can describe, as makes the imagination reel and stagger, makes
the soul grow sick and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for
a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions
for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets,
for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies. Their
life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation
and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary
things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their
fellow-creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat
and tears and blood of the human race! It is all theirs--it comes
to them; just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the
streamlets into rivers, and the rivers into the ocean--so,
automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to
them. The farmer tills the soil, the miner digs in the earth, the
weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone, the clever man
invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the
inspired man sings--and all the results, the products of the
labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous
stream and poured into their laps!
This is the system. It is the crown and culmination of all the
wrongs of the ages; and in proportion to the magnitude of its
exploitation, is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical
camouflage which has been organized in its behalf. Beyond all
question, the supreme irony of history is the use which has been
made of Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God of this blood-thirsty
system; it is a cruelty beyond all language, a blasphemy beyond
the power of art to express. Read the man's words, furious as
those of any modern agitator that I have heard in twenty years of
revolutionary experience: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth!--Sell that ye have and give alms!--Blessed are ye poor,
for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!--Woe unto you that are rich,
for ye have received your consolation!--Verily, I say unto you,
that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of
Heaven!--Woe unto you also, you lawyers!--Ye serpents, ye
generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"
"And this man"--I quote from "The Jungle" again--"they have made
into the high-priest of property and smug respectability, a
divine sanction of all the horrors and abominations of modern
commercial civilization! Jewelled images are made of him, sensual
priests burn insense to him, and modern pirates of industry bring
their dollars, wrung from the toil of helpless women and
children, and build temples to him, and sit in cushioned seats
and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of dusty
divinity!"