CAPITAL AND LABOR
Among the dangers threatening the republic is the warfare which
admittedly exists between capital and labor, the manifest
tendency of which is in the direction of bolshevism. Some
citations are made showing its imminence.
One need not to have read the preceding pages to know that the United
States is fast approaching a crisis. Industrial and social unrest is
everywhere apparent. Capital and labor are at grips in many places,
while management, the all-essential factor, seems helpless to
accomplish reconciliation.
When given free rein, capital enforced unbearable terms. This resulted
in legislation forbidding combinations for the purpose of limiting
output or advancing prices of the products of labor. Thus far labor has
enjoyed express exemptions from anti-trust laws, and it is now making
unbearable exactions. I would like to warn labor unions that they are
liable to exceed the limits of prudence. Admittedly Congress has the
same power to forbid combinations of labor as it had to prohibit
combinations of capital. Combinations of every kind are beneficial so
long as their purpose is legitimate.
There is an old fable of a man who had an ox that he worked with a
donkey. One day the ox refused to work and at night he asked the donkey
how matters had progressed without him. “I had a very hard day, but I
got through with it,” said the donkey. “Did the boss say anything about
me?” asked the ox. “Not a word,” said the donkey. The next night the ox
again inquired and received the same reply: “A very hard day, but
completed.” “Did the boss say anything about me?” asked the ox. “Not a
word,” said the donkey, “but coming home he stopped in and talked
awhile with the butcher.” It might be well for us all to understand
that if one million or ten million bankers, if one million or ten
million farmers, or if one million or ten million organized labor men
should ever attempt to rule America in the interest of any one class,
and should assume to dictate the terms on which production can be
continued, it will be only a question of time when one hemisphere will
be freed from organized coercion. But every organization of labor,
every combination of capital, and every association of farmers, might
be dissolved and it would not more than temporarily relieve the
situation. It is a condition that confronts us and no amount of
theorizing will improve it.
Recently an official of the Department of Labor, in a carefully
prepared article, made the profound declaration that warfare between
capital and labor will continue until justice is assured. Grant, if
you please, that a court of exact justice could be created, with a
judge wiser than Solomon on the bench. Its decisions would satisfy
neither capital nor labor. Arbitration boards occasionally seek to do
exact justice. They usually ignore that element and aim simply to
effect a workable compromise, that will temporarily save the
situation. When the terms are accepted and acquiesced in, both sides
profess to be satisfied, but neither side is satisfied. Capital
thinks it is entitled to everything because without capital labor
would starve, and it demands that labor remove its shoes from off its
feet in its presence. Labor thinks _it_ is entitled to everything
because without labor capital would languish. It goes further and
declares capital to be a myth. It says that all so-called wealth is
the product of labor; and if labor had not been robbed there would be
no accumulated wealth—and all such socialistic and anarchistic
nonsense which emanates largely from German-bred or German-educated
teachers of political economy and sociology, emphasized by a large
number of public speakers both within and without the church, and by
demagogues generally. Hence “labor claims the full proceeds of its
service less enough to keep the tools and machinery in repair.” It
asks that capital remove its shoes. Both capital and labor ignore the
most important factor of production—management.
A century and more of matchless development, wherein money getting had
been the chief aim of life, especially with those possessing aptitude
and enough energy to pay the price of achievement, divided the people
into classes. Those possessing aptitude for acquisition won wealth,
those with aptitude for discovery won distinction, those possessing
aptitude for statesmanship, or for war, won fame. Many of those who won
wealth became arrogant, overbearing, snobbish and some of them
despisedly mean. Logically—for everything in this world proceeds from
cause to effect—those who did not possess the particular type of
aptitude necessary for acquisition, together with those who were
unwilling to pay the price, denounced riches and the possessors
thereof. Some of these became envious, threatening, even rebellious,
and not a few despisedly mean. The result is a different America than
the one our fathers knew, and it does not require an old fogy to see
it. A man is not a pessimist simply because he recognizes self-evident
facts. Noah came far nearer being a statesman than a pessimist. History
simply repeats itself. Macauley, singing of the “brave days of old,”
says:
“Then none was for a party,
Then all were for the State,
Then the rich man helped the poor
And the poor man loved the great.”
Now the poor man first envies the rich man and then hates him, the rich
man hates the richer, and the richer snubs the would-be rich. As a
matter of fact, there was never as much sympathy for the poor as now,
never as much being done for him as at present. But sympathy and
charity are not what he needs, as I hope to be able to show.
IS THE SITUATION HOPELESS?
If the human race has reached a condition where further progress is
impossible, and nothing but class antagonisms are left, it would seem
that a second occasion has arisen when Jehovah might “repent that he
had made man.” Patriotism demands a solution, without which no sane man
dares hope for anything except what the socialist predicts in language
more ominous than any direct threat.
Permit a few excerpts from a chapter, “The Revolution,” added by its
author to a pamphlet containing a debate on socialism, and which he
used extensively in his campaign for Congress in 1916. The author is a
man of excellent presence and seeming patriotism. I believe him to be
as sincere in his belief as any evangelist of the olden times. He
commends the vision of Ignatius Donneley in prophesying the approaching
cataclysm: “The people cannot comprehend it. They look around for their
defenders—the police, the soldier, where are they? Will not this
dreadful nightmare pass away? No, never! This is the culmination—this
is the climax, the century’s aloe blooms today.” He adds: “These are
the grapes of wrath which God has stored up for the day of His
vengeance; and now He is tramping them out and this is the red
juice—look you—that flows so thick and fast in the very gutters....
Evil has but one child—DEATH. For years you have nourished and
nurtured evil. Do you complain if her monstrous progeny is here, with
sword and torch? What else did you expect? Did you think she would
breed angels?” And then after explaining that he does not speak “these
bitter words in the spirit of a challenge, but with the kindliest,
deepest feeling of love for all humanity, and with the most fervent and
patriotic feelings of veneration for my country—the grandest country
in the world, but now being systematically robbed,” he warns “the
masters of the bread” thus: “I warn them that if they want ‘red hell’
with all the accompanying fireworks—with all the attendant brutality,
and crime, and suffering, and misery, and degradation, and sorrow and
death, with the destruction of their cities and the wiping out of their
so-called civilization, they can have it just when they most desire. It
is up to them. The revolutions of the past will be but kindergarten
affairs compared to the revolution now pending and coming when some one
strikes a match in the powder house.”