INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
Herbert Spencer gives a definition of Evolution, phrased in technical
terms, which might be roughly summed up in these words: A process
whereby many similar and simple things become dissimilar parts of one
complex thing. If we trace, for instance, the evolution of human
society, we see about as follows: In the beginning man exists in widely
scattered and unrelated tribes, having a very loosely organised
government, each individual doing about as he pleases, and all
individuals being very much the same. Each finds his own food and cooks
it, makes his own weapons and clothing, and looks and thinks and acts
like his neighbour. Little by little, as the tribe grows, it begins to
come into contact with other tribes that also are growing, and a
pressure begins; the tribes make war upon each other, and each
individual of the tribe is forced by the presence of danger to unite
himself more closely with his fellows, to establish a more rigid rule of
obedience, and to force refractory members to the general will. Then,
under still growing pressure, one tribe unites with another against a
common enemy, and the strongest man in the two rules both; which process
of combining continues until at last there results an organism of great
complexity, whose members are no longer equal and self-sustaining, but
have different activities and ranks and characteristics, and are each
dependent upon the rest. If, for instance, we examine France during the
Feudal period, we find numerous principalities, duchies and baronies,
each one an elaborate and complex organisation, with various classes and
hierarchies and tributary parts, and a whole system of laws and customs
and beliefs to correspond. And no sooner is this process complete than
an evolution begins among these organisms; under the stress of
jealousies and ambitions they too begin to struggle, to combine; and
presently in one of them arises a strong man who secures command of them
all. When the process is completed, there stands in the place of a
hundred principalities, one kingdom, the Kingdom of France.
The object of all this long labour is, of course, to get some kind of an
organism that shall be capable of maintaining itself in a world of
ferocious strife; that shall be able to withstand all enemies that may
come against it, and all rebellions that may arise within it. The French
monarchy was a marvellous piece of work when it was done; it had men
graded into a thousand different classes and occupations, and everything
fitted perfectly and ran like a clock. It had peasants to till the soil,
and soldiers and sailors to fight; artisans to make all its necessaries,
and merchants to handle them; and rising tier upon tier, a whole pyramid
of governing and administrative officials, up to the king. It had
likewise the whole outfit of ideas and customs necessary to its
operation; it was complete and perfect and sublime—it was like a mighty
vessel defying the tempests; it had also its pennons that waved, and its
songs for the crew to sing. Was it any wonder that those who had made it
were proud of it, and felt that there was nothing more to be done in the
world but to keep it going?
And yet evolution was not through with it. Men grow weary and want to
rest, they become “conservative” and fret at the bare thought of
change—but the processes of life go on inexorably. This mighty
structure, the Kingdom of France, was only a means and not an end—its
purpose was to bind the people of the nation together and protect them
until they were able to take care of themselves. It took a long time for
this idea to make its way; it took a fearful struggle—men were
imprisoned and exiled, burned and beheaded; but the idea went right on,
and the nation went right on; and when the time came, it burst the old
integument to pieces, and out of the Kingdom of France there emerged the
French Republic.
What a marvellous event that was, and what a stir it made in the
world—what a stir especially in our own corner of the world—every one
knows. Looking at it from a century’s distance, and calmly, we see the
whole age-long event as an exemplification of the process of life; the
combining of a number of simple things into one complex thing. The means
was struggle and rivalry—it was a cruel process; but you will notice
that at the end the effort and the pain are all gone—that the organism
fulfils its functions freely and joyfully, and that the only difference
between the first stage and the last is that the individual man has been
raised to a higher plane of being.
Now, as I have said before, the first care of a man is to protect his
life; the second is to accumulate wealth. A man does not set much store
by his goods while his enemies are within sound; but just as soon as
they are dispersed, the tribe begins to gather flocks, and to till the
soil. And so, following close upon the heels of the evolution of
political society, you have the evolution of _industrial_ society.
And it is precisely the same process. We may see nearly the whole of it
in this country. It begins with the colonial village, where every man
owns a little land and raises his own food; also he cobbles his own
shoes, spins his own wool, weaves his own cloth, and makes his own
clothes. In the very earliest days, he never buys anything, because
there is nothing to buy. He may be the deacon or the schoolmaster or the
judge, but still he has his own farm, and any other man in the village
is about as well fitted to be the deacon or the schoolmaster or the
judge as he. But then his goods expand and war begins—industrial war, I
mean—a horse-trade, for example. Political evolution is slow, because
the rate of increase of men is limited; but the rate of increase of
goods proves to be unlimited. Machines are invented, and straightway the
industrial process is accelerated tenfold. It took a thousand years to
evolve a monarchy; it took only a hundred to evolve a trust.
The industrial units fight each other, and the strongest survive as
employers, the weakest becoming employees. Then, as growth continues,
these various little groups all over the country come into contact, and
they struggle also. The struggle is of course no longer fighting with
swords—it is underselling; but the process is exactly the same, and its
purpose is the building up of a capable industrial organism. Precisely
as in one case the tribes by combining find they are stronger to fight,
the employers, by combining, find that they are stronger to undersell;
and this process goes on until you have an industrial feudalism,
corresponding in all its details to the political feudalism of France.
And then, as before, the barons and the princes and the dukes fight
among each other, until out of the midst arises a strong man, a
Rockefeller or a Harriman, who smashes them right and left, and makes
himself a king.
He is a king in precisely the same way, and to precisely the same
purpose, as Louis the Great was king. You know how Richelieu served the
nobility of France—if they would not obey they simply lost their heads.
If you have read Miss Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company,”
or Henry D. Lloyd’s “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” you know how Mr.
Rockefeller served the oil nobility; how he tricked them and crushed
them; how sometimes, it is said, he blew up their refineries with
dynamite, or burned them with fire. You know how Louis said he was the
State; and you heard the president of one of the coal companies, who is
doing business in flat defiance of the laws of the land, declare that
God in His Infinite Wisdom had entrusted to him the property interests
of the country. It is not necessary to pursue this analogy; if you do
not see that in the due and inevitable course of evolution, our
industrial organism has attained the monarchical stage, it is simply
because you do not wish to see it, and no amount of exposition will
avail. I have only to add, as before, that the purpose of _this_ process
was to evolve an organism which should be capable of maintaining itself
against all enemies, without and within. The task of King Louis was the
aggrandisement of France; the task of Mr. Rockefeller is the keeping up
of Standard Oil stock. Incidentally, Louis the Great gave the world a
race-heritage and a civilisation; incidentally, Mr. Rockefeller
furnishes the world with oil. Also—what is true in one case is true in
the other—the Standard Oil Company is a marvellous piece of work. It has
men graded into a thousand different classes and occupations, and all
fitting perfectly and running like a clock. It has labourers to till the
soil, lobbyists and salesmen to fight, factories to make all its
necessaries, and railroads to handle them; and, rising tier upon tier,
it has a whole pyramid of governing and administrative officials, up to
the president. It has likewise the whole outfit of ideas necessary to
its operation; it is complete and perfect and sublime—it is like a
mighty vessel, defying the tempests. Is it any wonder that those who
have constructed it are proud of it, and feel that there is nothing more
to be done in the world but to keep it going?
It is of course clear that the next step, according to my parallel,
would be into an Industrial Republic. The reader differs from most
Americans whom I meet if this idea is not startling to him. Let us go
forward slowly.
In Mr. John Bach McMaster’s “History of the People of the United
States,” is a narrative of the terrible yellow-fever epidemic which
occurred in Philadelphia in the year 1793, causing the death of over
four thousand people in four months. In those days men had strange ideas
as to the causes of yellow fever; they believed, in this case, that it
“had come from a pile of stinking hides that had been on one of the
wharves.” The historian goes on to describe the strange expedients they
adopted to get rid of it. “People were bidden to keep out of the sun,
and not to get tired. The doctors had little faith in bonfires as
purifiers of the air, but much in the burning of gunpowder. Every one
then who could buy or borrow a gun, loaded and fired it from morning
till night. Then one remedy after another would be suggested, and people
would cover themselves with it—nitre, tobacco, and garlic, mud-baths,
camphor, and thieves’ vinegar. The last could only be procured by going
to the shop. The purchaser going to get it was careful to have a piece
of tarred rope wet with camphor at his nose, and in his pocket his
handkerchief soaked with the last preventive he had heard of. He shunned
the footpaths, fled down the nearest alley at sight of a carriage, and
would go six blocks to avoid passing a house where a dead body had been
taken out a week before. He would not enter a shop where another man
stood at the counter; he would rush in, throw down the money, and rush
home—soak everything in this prepared vinegar, and live on a prescribed
diet, water-gruel, oatmeal, tea, barley-water, or a vile concoction
called apple-tea. If his head pained him or his tongue felt rough, he
would immediately wash out his mouth with warm water and honey and
vinegar——” etc., etc. At the time when I read all this, it made a
peculiar impression upon me, because the newspapers happened just then
to be full of the discovery of the true cause of yellow fever. And so
all the time that I was reading about the man with the tarred rope in
his hands and a sponge wet with camphor at his nose, I had this thought
in my mind: And while he was waiting outside of the shop, a mosquito
flew up, all unheeded, and bit him. And so he died!
It seemed to me a peculiarly neat illustration of the precise difference
between knowledge and ignorance. It led me to reflect how very eager men
ought to be to possess the former; and I put the anecdote away in my
mind, thinking, “I shall use it some day when I want—all of a sudden—to
scare someone out of a prejudice!”
For just imagine, if you can, that mosquitoes, instead of being a pest
about which every man was glad to believe evil, had been the basis of
some important industry, or otherwise the source of incalculable
advantage to the dominant classes of the community; that universities
were endowed, and newspapers owned, and churches and hospitals
supported, out of the proceeds of the mosquito monopoly! Are you sure
that in that case the discovery of the physicians in Havana would have
been hailed as a triumph of Science? Or do you not think that there
might have been a strong opposition to the fantastic speculation, and
that the men who had published it might have been denounced as enemies
of society, and turned out of office for their incendiary teachings?
That other physicians of high standing might have been found to ridicule
the idea? That newspapers might have refused to print arguments in
favour of it—that, in short, the mosquito monopoly might have succeeded
in conjuring up before the imaginations of the multitude so horrible an
image of this doctrine and its consequences, that they would have looked
upon anyone who advocated it as in some way morally deformed? Assuming
that this could have been done, there are only two things to be added.
The first is that all the while the mosquitoes would have gone right on
causing the yellow fever; and the second is that the people would have
found it out in the end—that all that the makers of public opinion would
have done, would be to put just so many millions of dollars into the
pockets of the mosquito monopoly, at a cost of just so much misery to
the human race.
At the outset of this argument, I very much wish that you, the reader,
would commune with yourself prayerfully, as to whether or not it might
not possibly be that the ideas you have in your head concerning an
“Industrial Republic” are really not ideas of your own at all, but
prejudices which other people have put there for purposes known to them.
Let me repeat the definition which I gave at the outset of this
argument: I mean by an Industrial Republic, an organisation for the
production of wealth, whose members are established upon a basis of
equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who
share equally in all its advantages.
A century or two ago our ancestors were governed, “by grace of God,” by
an unamiable old gentleman over in England, who controlled their
destinies, and sent his representatives over here to tax and oppress
them; and they impiously rose up and adopted a declaration to the effect
that all men were born free and equal; and they seized the property and
revenues of their king, and thereafter managed the country for their own
benefit solely. “No taxation without representation,” had been their
doctrine beforehand. And you, who are an American, and celebrate the
Fourth of July, and teach your children to admire the men who threw the
tea into Boston Harbour—do you think that you could give me any reason
why a man has a right to be represented where he pays his taxes, and no
right to be represented where he gets his daily bread? Do you not
perceive that a man who can say to me, “Do thus, or you and your
children can have nothing to eat,” is just as much my lord and master as
the man who can say to me, “Do thus, or be put into jail?”
You stop and think. “The case is not quite the same,” you say. “One is
not represented, to be sure; but certainly every man has a right to get
his daily bread as he pleases.”
Indeed, I answer. Suppose, for instance, that his occupation happens to
be that of a steel-worker; has he any way of getting his daily bread,
except upon certain precise terms which a certain group of men offer
him?
“H’m,” you say, “that’s so. But then, if he doesn’t like it, can’t he
change his occupation?”
My answer is, I do not believe that George the Third would have had any
objection to one of our ancestors going to France to become a subject of
King Louis. But I understand that freedom began in America when the men
of Lexington and Bunker Hill resolved to _stay at home_ and be free.
“This is all very well in theory,” you say, “but how can it ever be
realised?” As I said before, I expect to see it realised in the United
States of America within the next ten years. I expect to see it, exactly
as I should have expected to see the French Revolution, had I known what
I know now; understood that institutions and systems have their day, and
perceived the signs of a breakdown as they existed in France in 1780,
and as they exist in America in 1907.
What was the cause of the French Revolution? The French monarchy was
organised upon a basis of force, represented by taxes; and those who ran
the machine had no idea but that a machine so organised could go on
forever. But in the long process of time, there developed a tendency on
the part of those to whom the taxes came, to grow richer and richer,
while those by whom the taxes were paid grew poorer and poorer. Little
by little, all the property and all the land of France came into the
hands of the nobility; until at last they had everything, and the
populace had nothing. Then suddenly the machinery of a society organised
upon a basis of force and taxes began to refuse to work; the French
peasantry had stood everything, but they could not stand being required
to pay taxes when they had nothing to pay with. So the States-General
had to be sent for, and the Revolution came.
And note this—that the trouble was not at all that the country was poor.
Everyone is familiar with the picture of the horrible condition of the
peasantry of that time, how they were little better than wild animals,
hiding in holes, naked, and with blackened skins. Yet all the while
France was full of wealth—all the trouble was that it was stagnant in
the hands of a single class; the fields of France were ready to produce,
but the people were too poor to till them. And notice the curious fact,
that no sooner was the Revolution accomplished than the difficulty
vanished in a flash. The machinery started up again—the peasant had land
and tilled it, and the artisans of the cities found work. It seems
strange to read that under the “Terror,” when the heads of the
“aristocrats” were falling by the dozens every day and all the world was
convulsed with horror, the _people_ of France were more prosperous and
happy than ever they had been before in history. And when war broke out,
the nation that had been on the verge of bankruptcy for a generation,
withstood the armies of the combined kingdoms of Europe for more than
twenty years!
Here in America, we all started even. Wages were high, and there was
work for every man; there was no need to strike—a workingman had only to
leave and go elsewhere if he were not pleased. We found employment for
the stream of immigrants as fast as they came—we had an enormous country
to build up, and an inexhaustible supply of new lands for the settler.
We manufactured only for our own use, and we could not manufacture half
of what we needed.
But time passed on. Some who were frugal and diligent—and others who
were cunning and unscrupulous—grew rich; and then machinery came in, and
the pace grew faster. The rich were on top, and they stayed there. As
the country expanded, railroads were built, and fortunes made; the war
came, with its enormous expenditures, and still more fortunes were made.
Capital grew; but it could not grow fast enough—in the seventies the
rate of interest was ten per cent., and the promoters made fortunes
besides. It was in those days that the battles of the giants were
fought, the railroad wars in which the Gould and Vanderbilt millions
were accumulated. Still there was plenty to do; the people had money,
and there were some of them to buy everything we could make, and what
came from abroad besides. The cities grew and spread, and the immigrants
flowed in; railroads and factories were built, and the mighty structure
of our modern industrial machine began to take shape. It must be
understood that all the while inventions and improvements were being
made, that enabled one man to do the work of ten, of fifty, of a
hundred; and each such improvement set free so many thousands more men,
to turn their attention to another part of the structure and to rush it
on to completion.
_Completion!_ Has it never dawned upon you that this machine might
possibly some day reach completion?
The purpose of it is a very definite and obvious one—it is to supply the
needs of men; and when it is adequate to that purpose, it is complete.
But how will you know when _that_ is? Why, by the simplest of methods in
the world—by that insufficiency of profits which I described before. You
are in business for profits, you understand; and when you are making
something that men need, you make profits; and when you are making
something that men do not need, you _stop_ making profits. It would be
too bad if men went on making railroads where no one wanted to ride, and
building houses for no one to occupy; how fortunate that Nature has
arranged it so that we all know when our work is done!
We were trembling on the very verge—in fact, we were half-way over the
verge—three years ago, when the Russo-Japanese War came along and saved
us. Everybody had begun to realise the peril. The investor, who had been
making ten per cent. in the seventies, came down to three. The
workingman who had a job that did not suit him, stuck to it all the
same, because he saw a million men in the country who had no job at all.
And the capitalist, the captain of industry—he mounted into his
watch-tower, and proceeded to scan the landscape. A market! A market! My
kingdom for a market!
Our newspapers a few years ago were quite wild with delight over a
phenomenon called the “American Invasion.” They told how we were
conquering all over the world—how Europe stood shuddering with
fright—how our exports were mounting by leaps and bounds! How prosperous
we were! What ocean-tides of wealth were coming in to us! It seemed so
strange to read it all, and to understand that this “Invasion” which the
editors were celebrating, was in reality the last death-kick of the
industrial system which they had been taught to consider the foundation
of all society!
It will be more convenient to consider the whole question of foreign
markets at a later stage; suffice it here to say, that if my analysis of
the overproduction of capital be correct, then the first signal of
danger will be what is commonly hailed as a “favourable balance of
trade”—the existence of a surplus product which must be sold abroad. You
must distinguish, of course, between a mere exchange of goods, where
exports are balanced by imports, and _selling_, which is sending out
goods and taking in gold, or promises to pay gold. In 1893 our exports
were eight hundred and forty-seven million dollars and our imports were
eight hundred and sixty-six millions. But in 1901, our exports had
leaped to one billion, four hundred and eighty-seven million dollars,
and our imports had sunk to eight hundred and twenty-three millions; and
during the next four years the excess of exports over imports amounted
to a total of over a billion and a half of dollars! According to an
estimate made public on January 6, 1907, by the Secretary of the
Treasury, the figures for 1906 will be: Imports, one billion, two
hundred million dollars, and exports, one billion, eight hundred million
dollars. And for how many more years does anyone imagine that the world
will be able to pay us six hundred million dollars in cash, for those
surplus products which we are compelled to sell?
Do not fail to mark the word “compelled.” If we cannot sell them, we
cannot make profits; and if we cannot make profits, we cannot pay
dividends. “I am a great clamourer for dividends,” said Mr. Rockefeller;
and other captains of industry share in his weakness. And when a few
years ago they found that foreign markets were beginning to fail, they
set to work to remedy the evil in the only other possible way—by
combining, and limiting the product, and raising prices. And that brings
us to the other great symptom of the approach of the breakdown—the
organising of the trusts. For six or eight years the process has been
going on, irresistibly, automatically—while the country raged and
stormed, and poured out its wrath upon the greedy capitalist. And yet
the capitalist was no more to blame than a steam-engine that turns aside
when it comes to a switch. The capitalist was making profits; and he
saw, by the cessation of his profits, that the industrial machine of the
country was getting too big for the country’s use. Unless he, and the
machine also, were to go to smash, competition in that particular
industry must be ended.
The work is done now; we have only to sit by and wait until the people
get through trying to undo it. I never realise more keenly the naïve and
touching incompetence of our so-called intellectual classes, than when I
reflect that while our men of action have been accomplishing this mighty
work—one of the greatest labours ever wrought for civilisation—our
benevolent editors and college presidents have gone right on with their
prattling of “freedom of contract” and “_laissez faire_.” And actually,
civilisation must sit by and wait ten years, until our people have got
through butting their heads against the granite wall of this
accomplished fact!
But we Socialists have to take the world as we find it, and cultivate a
cheerful disposition; and so behold our great national spectacle, the
morality-play of the terrible hundred-headed monster of Competition! The
terrible monster has killed and destroyed himself, according to the
nature of him; but now by Congressional statute and Supreme Court decree
he has been patched together again, and will be compelled to go on
fighting! Or at least he shall be stuffed and mounted, and shall look as
if he were fighting! He shall have wires attached to his joints and
electric lights to gleam from his eyes; he shall be taken out in the
gorgeous Presidential campaign chariot, drawn by the Grand Old Party
elephant, and all the people shall see him, and marvel at his ferocity,
and at the deadly conflict he wages among his various heads! Come now, O
people!—come editors and statesmen and judges and bishops—come and see
how the terrible hundred-headed monster rends and tears himself, and
shout for four years more of the “full dinner-pail.”
But surely we must destroy the trusts! you say. _Why_ must we destroy
the trusts? The trusts are marvellous industrial machines, of power the
like of which was never known in the world before; they are the last and
most wonderful of the products of civilisation—and we must destroy them!
We have been a century building them—you, and I, and the balance of the
American people have toiled for three generations night and day,
stinting and starving ourselves, so that we might get these trusts
finished; we have taxed ourselves ten, twenty, thirty per cent. of our
incomes, under the disguise of a protective tariff, to maintain and
develop them; and now that they are complete, we must destroy them!
But they belong to Rockefeller! you protest to me. They belong to
Rockefeller in precisely the same way and to precisely the same extent
as the Kingdom of France belonged to Louis XIV, or the North American
colonies to George III. They belong to the people of the United States,
who made them, who contributed every plank of them, and drove every nail
of them, and who paid Mr. Rockefeller and his family ample living wages
while they superintended the job.
But you only answer again—we must destroy the trusts! Go ahead then, and
have your try! Have it out with them! War to the hilt with them!—and see
which is the stronger, two corporations which are resolved not to cut
each other’s throats, or you with your law that they _shall_ cut each
other’s throats! Two railroad systems which know that they cannot
continue to exist separately, or you who are resolved that they shall
not exist together!—It makes one think of the scene in “Twelfth Night,”
where Sir Toby has engineered a bloody duel between two terror-stricken
antagonists. “Pox on’t, I’ll not meddle with him!” cries Sir Andrew
Aguecheek. “Come, Sir Andrew,” says Sir Toby. “There’s no remedy. Come
on, to’t.” But poor Sir Andrew will not to’t, he fights with his back to
the enemy.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine_
A SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS
]
You will hear people abuse the Socialists for wishing to abolish
competition. No Socialist wishes to abolish competition, no modern
Socialist at any rate. He watches competition, as the mischievous
Irishmen watched the Kilkenny cats; keeping off at a suitable distance
during the battle, and simply proposing to the spectators that when it
is all over they shall recognise the accomplished fact.
There is some competition in the world to-day among the nations; there
was recently competition between Russia and Japan, and there will
perhaps be competition between some of the others. But what competition
is left to-day within the limits of the United States, is left simply
because it is of a kind so petty that the capitalists have not yet had
time to bother with it. For the most part it exists between a swarm of
retailers of trust-made products, and takes the form of the screwing
down of the wages of helpless clerks and errand-boys, the adulteration
of products, and the placarding of the surface of the land with blatant
advertisements which affect a decent man like the stench of a carcass.
One of the “competitive” industries that is flourishing just now is that
of cereals prepared in packages and labelled with names that suggest
Hiawatha and the South Sea Islands. The usual price of one of these
packages is fifteen cents, and of that, two cents and a half represents
the cost of the product, and nearly all of the balance goes into the
effort to trap the public into buying it. And did not the “boodle”
investigations in Missouri disclose the fact that William Ziegler had
spent a fortune in bribing newspapers and legislatures to implant in the
public mind the idea that “alum baking-powders” were poisonous, so that
the Royal Baking Powder Trust might have the custom of the country?
But, you say, if competition perishes, what becomes of incentive—of
initiative? Will not individual enterprise be destroyed? I answer that
it depends entirely upon what you mean by individual enterprise. If you
mean that ardent desire which now consumes every man to cut his
neighbour’s economic throat, to get the better of him and make money out
of him, to beat him down and leave him a financial wreck—why,
civilisation will suppress this ardent desire in precisely the same way
that it has suppressed the duel, or the right of private vengeance, and
piracy, or the right of private war upon the high seas. The putting down
of these things went hard, you know, for they had been the greatest
glory of men, and all progress has been due to them. “Franz von
Sickingen was a robber-knight,” writes Henderson, in his “History of
Germany,” “but with such noble traits, and such a concept of his
calling, that one wonders if he ought not rather to be put on the level
of a belligerent prince. In carrying on feuds, he seldom aimed lower
than a duke, or a free city of the Empire; and there are persons who
insist to this day that his weapons were only drawn in favour of the
oppressed. Be that as it may, he was not above exacting enormous fines;
and being an excellent manager, he greatly increased his possessions. He
was lord of many castles, which he furnished with splendid defences.”
And then the historian goes on to describe the gallant struggle of this
old nobleman against the advancing power of the Empire. “He determined,
by one brilliant feud, to restore the tarnished splendour of his name.
He would help the whole order of knighthood to assert itself against the
power of the princes.” The end of it was that “the enemy appeared in
full force, demolished in a single day an outer tower with walls the
thickness of twenty feet, and made a breach in the actual ramparts.”
Having been wounded, “the grim commander was carried to a dark, deep
vault of the castle, where it was thought he would be safe from the
cannon-balls of his pursuers; such an unchristian shooting, he declared
to an attendant, he had never heard in all his days.” The castle
surrendered, and his foes gathered about him. “He had now to do, he
said, with a greater lord, and a few hours later he closed his eyes. The
three princes knelt at his side and prayed God for the peace of his
soul.” Let us hope that the makers of our Industrial Republic will not
forget to pray for the souls of Baer and Parry, if these gallant
captains of industry should perish in defending the elemental right of a
capitalist to manage his own business in his own way.
This is all very well, you say, but will not such a system decrease
production? I rather think that it will; I hope to see the prophecy of
Annie Besant come true, that when men no longer have to struggle to get
a living, they will at last begin to live. That they will at last open
their eyes to the world of books and music, of nature and art, of
friendship and love, that stretches out its arms to them; that they will
cease to regard ingenuity and rapidity in the production of material
things as the final end and goal of the creation of man; that they will
cease to look upon a human being as a machine for the getting of
money—to be valued like an automobile, by the number of miles an hour it
can be driven, by the number of thousands of miles it can cover before
it is worn out and ready for the scrap-heap.
Let us have the philosophy of this thing, in order that we may
understand it. We saw that the process of evolution, in an individual or
in a society, consists of an expansion and a struggle, the end of which
is the emergence of the organism into a higher state of being. There is
a certain life impulse, and there is a certain environment, certain
difficulties with which it contends. We have perhaps no right to speak
of purpose in the process, but we have a right to speak of results; and
the result of this contest is to shape the organism, to educate it, to
bring out certain qualities in it which it did not possess before; until
finally it triumphs over its environment, and emerges from its
prison-house.
The struggle for life goes on, but the form of it changes unceasingly;
and this changing is _progress_. Without it there can be none—the very
essence of progress consists in the suppressing of old forms of strife,
the conquest of old difficulties and the escape from their thraldom. We
know that there was once a time when men were hairy beings who dwelt in
caves, and contended with club and hatchet against the monsters which
assailed them; and now supposing that we could take some man of modern
times, some one who has risen to eminence and power under the conditions
which now prevail, and put him among those cavemen, how do you suppose
that he would make out? How do you suppose that he would fare, if he
were placed even one century back, in the country of the Iroquois, where
the snapping of a twig and the flight of an arrow decided the fate of a
man? Is it not obvious that there has been here an entire change in the
_form_ of the struggle for existence?
The same thing is true of nations. Once upon a time a nation was an
army, and fighting was its business, the conquering of its neighbours
was its glory and its ideal; but now we have moved on, we have become
complex and highly organised, and can no longer afford to conquer our
neighbours. It would not pay us financially, and intellectually and
morally it would destroy us. We have, for instance, a powerful country
to the north of us; and imagine what would be the inconvenience and
waste were we under the necessity of fortifying all our boundary lines,
and keeping garrisons at every few miles of them; if every day we were
shaken by rumours that an army was gathering at Montreal, that a fleet
of torpedo-boats was building at Toronto. As a matter of simple fact, do
we not both go quietly on our way, understanding that we are two
civilised nations, between which a war of conquest would be an
unthinkable crime?
We have grown to used to the change, that the mere memory of the old
ways of life makes us shudder; it seems to us horrible, and we forget
that it was once beautiful and delightful to men: that the Germans of
the time of Tacitus held fighting the joy of life, and imagined a heaven
where a man might be patched up every night and fight again the next
day. We have passed so far beyond such a state that we cannot even
imagine it, and we have lost the power of seeing that it was ever
necessary and right; that to those long ages of struggle we owe our
physical being, with all its perfections, which we take so as a matter
of course; a swift foot and a dexterous hand, an ear attuned to every
sound, an eye that adjusts itself to every distance, a mind quick and
alert, a spirit bold and enterprising. And in the same way the nations
owe to war their unity and their complexity, and a great deal of their
power, not merely physical, but industrial and moral as well.
It was one of the noblest of the world’s poets who wrote that:
“God’s most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is man—arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is His daughter.”
And to the same purpose writes Fletcher:
“Oh great corrector of enormous times,
Shaker of o’er-rank states—that heal’st with blood
The earth when it is sick.”
And yet the time of wars is past. We still have them, of course, and we
still have a war-propaganda; but it would be easy to show that these
wars are never military, but always commercial—that when two civilised
states fight nowadays, it is not because they expect to subjugate each
other, or desire to, but because their capitalists both need the same
foreign market. I am acquainted with only one writer of any standing in
the United States, Captain Mahan, who is nowadays willing even to hint
that wars may still be necessary to the disciplining of a nation; and I
think one might assert without fear of contradiction that people now go
to war, not because they want to, but because they are persuaded they
have to; and that right-thinking men throughout the world know that a
war is a national calamity, a cause of evils innumerable, scarcely ever
overbalanced by good.
And it is of the utmost importance to notice how this has been done; how
it is that the military ideal is universally discredited in the world.
It has not been due to the preachings of moralists and enthusiasts; it
has not been brought about by the intervention of any _deus ex machina_.
It has come about in the perfectly inevitable course of nature. No hero
has arisen to slay the demon of war—the demon of war has slain himself.
It is simply that the work of war is _done_. It is simply that war has
brought about a survival of the fittest, and that there is no more need
of conquest, and no possibility of it. The peoples have gone on to a
different life, they have almost forgotten for thought of conquering, or
of being conquered; they know that they cannot afford it; they know that
their social organism is of too delicate a type to stand it; they can no
more stand it than one of our modern captains of industry could stand
the shock of jousting with Richard Cœur de Lion.
We have moved on to another kind of struggle—to the kind which is known
as industrial competition. And we are to come to the end of that in
precisely the same way. We are to see the fittest survive, and grow, and
establish themselves impregnably; and so long as there is room for
competition they will compete; and when they find there is no longer
room for competition, that by continuing it they are doing as much harm
to themselves as to their rivals, they will put an end to competition,
and no power on earth can prevent their putting an end to it. Any power
which really tried to prevent their putting an end to it would simply
destroy them, as two civilised nations would be destroyed if they could
be compelled to keep on making war against each other.
The great task of civilisation is the leading of men to recognise when
these mighty changes have taken place. For so far I have spoken of only
one side of the evolutionary process; I have shown the victory—but there
are also defeats. Sometimes in the struggle between the individual and
his environment, it is the environment that conquers. Sometimes the man
or the society is not equal to the new task, and falls back; and the law
of this is death. The stag which can run swiftly enough escapes, and is
able to run all the more swiftly as the result of the race; the stag
which cannot run quite swiftly enough becomes venison. The tiny shoot
which can grow high enough finds the light, and becomes a mighty tree;
its neighbour which could not grow quite so high, turns to mould. There
comes now and then in the history of every living thing some moment when
its future hangs in the balance; when it summons all its forces, and
lives or dies. The butterfly faces such a crisis when it emerges from
the chrysalis; the child when it is born. You have known such fateful
hours in your own moral life; and you can go through history and put
your finger upon them—here when the Greeks drove back the Persians, here
when the Franks drove back the Saracens, here on the field of Waterloo,
on the hills of Gettysburg.
You would like to stay as you are, of course; for that is the least
trouble. You have your routine and your habits, your old well-worn paths
in which your thoughts move—you would like to stay as you are. But the
curse of life is upon you—you cannot stay as you are. You have to go
forward, or else to go back. When the crisis comes there is no escaping
it—it _comes_. When the birth-pangs begin, either the child is born, or
the mother dies; when the throes of revolution seize a nation, either
the old forms are shattered, or the life of the people is crushed. There
was once a reformation and a revolution in France; there was no
reformation and no revolution in Spain. So in one case you have new life
and abounding vigour—literatures and philosophies and sciences, and
impulse after impulse without end; and on the other hand you have
stagnation and ruin.
The task was simply too hard for the Spanish nation; they had lived for
centuries in imminent proximity to an enemy of an alien faith, and the
result was the fastening upon the people of a system of military
despotism and religious bigotry. And when the danger was by, when the
work of these forces was done, and the time came for the people of Spain
to throw them off, their efforts were of no avail; their kings and their
priests tortured them and burned them at the stake; and so the impulse
died, and never afterwards did they lift their heads. In the same way
consider the “Negro question,” as we have it in the United States. Here
also we are dealing with a defeated race; a race which was bred where
nature proved too strong for man—where savage beasts fell upon him, and
deadly diseases smote him, and the swift powers of the jungle balked his
every effort to rise. So for centuries and ages he was trampled upon and
crushed, until every spark of genius was extinguished in him; and now we
strive with all the resources of our civilisation—our noblest and best
have given their lives to the task; and we do not know yet if we are to
win or lose.
Let the reader of this book get a clear understanding upon at least one
point—that no Socialist expects to abolish competition, and the survival
of the fittest; all that any Socialist expects to do is to change the
_kind_ of competition and the standard of the fitness. The purpose of
industrial competition is to raise up the industrially fit, and to
establish a system for the feeding and clothing of men. The sign that
the former task is done is the outcry against the money-madness of the
time; the sign that the latter is done is “overproduction” and the
“trust.”
The purpose of this little book is to lay before candid and
truth-seeking Americans the overwhelming evidence which exists of the
fact that industrial competition, as an evolutionary force, has done its
work in our society: that it has disciplined our labourers in diligence
and skill, and our leaders in foresight, enterprise and administrative
capacity; that it has built us up a machine for the satisfying of all
the material needs of civilisation, a machine that has only to be used;
and that until we have found out how to use it, our national life must
remain at a standstill, stagnation must take the place of progress, and
in every portion of our body politic, the symptoms of disease and decay
must multiply and grow more and more alarming.
We have been taught to think that the institutions of freedom in this
country are so secure that we may go about our business and our play,
and leave them to take care of themselves. And yet, “eternal vigilance
is the price of liberty,” is the motto our ancestors left us. For the
forms of tyranny change from generation to generation, and it is always
out of the old freedom that the new slavery is made. You think that you
can stay free by clinging to the good old ways, by repeating the good
old formulas, by standing by the good old faiths; but you cannot, for
freedom is not a thing of institutions, but of the soul. It has always
been under the forms of spirituality that men have been chained by
priestcraft; and it is with the very pennons and banners of liberty that
this land is bound to-day. It always has been so, and it always will be
so—that the despot asks nothing save that things should stay as they
are. What was it that the slave-holder wanted, but that things should
stay as they were? That men should hold by the Constitution as it was,
while America was made into a Slave Empire? What is it that our masters
want to-day, save that we should stand by the good old traditions of
American individualism, freedom of contract and the right of every man
to manage his own business as he pleases—the while the Republic of
Jefferson and Lincoln is forged into a weapon for the enslaving of
mankind?
There is not one single tradition of the early times that is not being
used to-day for the betraying of liberty. Take the Monroe Doctrine, for
instance. We shout for it every Fourth of July, and we are rushing to
completion a score or two of battleships to defend it; whenever it is in
peril, our most rabid anti-trust editors and politicians drop everything
and take to singing Yankee Doodle. And yet, has never the least
suspicion about it come to you? Has it never occurred to you to look who
it is that is leading you upon this crusade of freedom—this strange
propaganda of civilisation and republican institutions by battleship and
rapid-firing gun? This zeal of our captains of industry for the spread
of American institutions among the Filipinos and Hawaiians and Porto
Ricans and Panamanians and Venezuelans, the while they are so busy
crushing American institutions in Rhode Island and Colorado!
There was once a time when all the despotisms of Europe were banded
together to destroy republican institutions, and when the threatening
gesture of this young republic held them back from half a world. And
thus bravely we guarded civilisation with our Monroe Doctrine, until the
lesson of freedom had been learned. But now time has passed, and we have
come to a new age, with new perils and new duties; there is a new kind
of slavery in the world, and a kind in which we lead all civilisation.
The control of our Republic has passed out of the hands of the people;
by fraud and force our liberties have been overthrown—the very word has
been relegated to schoolboy orations and Grand Army reunions. And by
this new despotism of greed the people have first been plundered and
crushed, and now are to be marshalled and led out to do battle with
other peoples, similarly beguiled. In this work every force of reaction
and conservatism in civilised society is now enlisted, every tradition
of olden time has been called into service. No pretence is too hollow,
no blasphemy too abominable to be employed; every national prejudice,
every racial hatred, every religious bigotry is made use of—and the
starving wretches of the slums and gutters of London are sent into South
Africa to capture diamond mines for the glory of free Britannia, while
the helpless peasants of Russia are led out with jewelled images of the
Virgin in front of them to steal Manchuria in the name of Jesus Christ.
It is with Germany that we Americans are scheduled to battle for the
sake of the Monroe Doctrine. And what is the situation in Germany? There
is first of all, the degenerate who sits upon its throne, and proclaims
himself by grace of God the lord and master of the German people. There
is in the second place, the hide-bound mediæval nobility of the Empire,
the direct descendants of those robber-knights of whom we read a while
ago, some of them living in the very same castles from which their
ancestors made their raids. There is in the third place, the aristocracy
of the army, whose insolent and dissolute officers beat, kick and maim
the helpless country boys and artisans who are herded like sheep under
their command. There is in the fourth place, the bigoted
seventeenth-century Protestant Church, with its snuffy country parsons
and doctors of dusty divinity. There is in the fifth place, the mediæval
Roman Catholic Church, with its confessional and other agencies of
Darkness. There is in the sixth place, a subsidised “reptile press,”
whose opinions are written and whose news is garbled by knavish bureau
officials. And every one of these powers, forgetting all past
differences, and uniting with brotherly affection, are struggling with
every prejudice they can appeal to, and every threat which they can
wield, to hold the German people subject to the identical same “System”
that rules in America, the industrial aristocracy of cunning and greed;
is working them upon starvation wages at home, and driving them to serve
in armies and navies, to conquer markets abroad; to threaten Dewey at
Manila, and to seize Chinese ports and conduct “punitive expeditions”
against Chinamen; to sell bad whiskey and firearms to Hereros and then
slaughter them when they rebel; to blockade ports in Venezuela and to
sink “pirates” in the West Indies; and to sound and measure channels as
a preliminary to the taking of a naval base and the inauguration of a
war with the United States!
But then, you say, _we_ can’t help that. What can we _do_? Is the only
thing you can think of to do, to build battleships and get ready for the
strife? How differently our fathers did it, in the old days when the
Monroe Doctrine was really what it pretends to be—a pledge of freedom to
men! How the impulses that started in this land thrilled through the
civilised world and made the “despots of Europe” tremble! What messages
of brotherhood flashed upon invisible wires from continent to continent,
bearing hope and comfort to all the oppressed of mankind! How we
welcomed Lafayette, as if he had been an emperor! How the whole nation
turned out in honour of Kossuth, making his long journey one triumphal
procession! And are we doing anything like that now?
The people of Germany, you must understand, are closed in a death grip
with all these powers of infamy. In spite of obloquy and contempt, in
spite of lies and blandishments and menaces, in spite of persecution and
exile and imprisonment, for a generation they have been toiling—devoted,
heroic men and women have given their labour and their lives to the task
of teaching, writing, speaking, exhorting, to open the eyes of the
masses to the truth. And step by step they have marched on, gathering
force every hour, strengthened by each new persecution, training
themselves in literary and political combat, building up a system of
scientific thought which has never been refuted and never can be,
inspired by a moral purpose as noble as any the world has ever
seen—preparing in all ways for the glorious hour when the people of the
Fatherland are to come to their own! The man at their head was once a
poor working boy, a wheelwright, and he has raised himself to the
leadership of the mightiest effort after freedom that the world now
sees; and day by day in the Reichstag he leads the opposition to
militarism and savagery, and his speeches are such as a century ago, and
even half a century ago, would have set this land aflame from end to end
with revolutionary fervour. And this is no isolated movement of a
nation, it is a world movement—it is a movement to which the lovers of
liberty all over the earth are welcomed as comrades and brothers. It is
a movement at one with every high tradition of American life; and
you—what is your attitude to it? What do you know about it—what do you
care about it? Do you hold public meetings and send messages of
sympathy? Do the halls of Congress ring with fervid speeches, as they
did in the days of Webster and Henry Clay? Do your papers teem with
glowing editorials, with news about the movement, and sketches of its
leaders? What have you to say about it, what have you to do for it—but
to repeat day in and day out one miserable, pitiful lie, with which you
try to blind and deceive the masses of your own country, that this
tremendous Socialist movement is not really a Socialist movement at all,
but only a movement of political reform!
I do not think that we shall sleep forever; I do not think that the
memories of Jefferson and Lincoln will call to us in vain forever; but
assuredly there never was in all American history a sign of torpor so
deep, of degeneration so frightful, as this fact that in such a crisis,
when the downtrodden millions of the German Empire are struggling to
free themselves from the tyranny of military and personal government,
there should come to them not one breath of sympathy from the people of
the American Republic! And all our interest, all our attention, is for
that strutting turkeycock, the war-lord whose mailed fist holds them
down! That monstrous creature, with his insane egotism, his blustering
and his swaggering, his curled mustachios and military poses! An
epileptic degenerate, who spends his whole life in cringing terror of
hereditary insanity: whose spies and police agents are invading the
homes of German Socialists, searching for letters in behalf of the
agents of the Czar, obtaining evidence to send men in Russia to exile
and death! This ruler of his people, who the other day cashiered a near
relative, an army officer who had advised soldiers to complain when they
were maltreated! whose generals and admirals are swaggering about and
spitting in the face of civilisation—and making maps and plans for a
naval station in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine!
Forty years ago, at the time of our Civil War, when the fate of this
nation hung trembling in the balance, when the Emperor of France and the
aristocracy of England saw a chance to cripple republican government and
to set back civilisation half a century—what was it then that prevented
them? What was it but the fact that in England there existed an
organised opposition, alert and watchful, trained by a generation of
parliamentary conflict, and with leaders who in such a crisis could not
be put down? What was it but the fact that the workers of the factory
towns of Great Britain had been disciplined and taught, and could not be
deceived—that they chose rather to starve than to help the cause of
Slavery? And if you care to see what would have happened had not that
opposition been ready, go back three- or four-score years, when the
people of France struck their blow for liberty, and see the leaders of
the British aristocracy crushing out protest and imprisoning objectors,
and hurling the nation into a criminal and causeless war! Hear the king
and the nobility, statesmen and authors, newspapers and pulpits
screaming in frenzy and goading the people on, till they had desolated
Europe with fifteen years of hideous slaughter, from the moral and
spiritual effects of which the world has not yet recovered!
And now you stand and contemplate another such crime against
civilisation. The two most enlightened peoples of the world are to come
together and strip for a fight. The powers that rule in each of them
made up their minds years ago, and among the officers, both in the army
and in the navy of each, the coming conflict is taken for granted. Two
or three years ago a German officer promised that an army corps would
march from one end of this continent to the other; and an admiral in our
own navy has publicly foretold the struggle. The German capitalists are
in desperation for new markets, and the German people are on the edge of
a revolt, with an irresponsible military despot in absolute control of
them, who knows that his only chance to put off the revolution is to
pick a quarrel and beat the war-drum, and summon the masses to the
defence of the honour of the Fatherland. When that supreme hour comes,
and when the war-lust begins to burn, upon the Social-Democratic Party
of Germany will fall the task of saving civilisation; and what shall
_we_ have done to help them—what encouragement shall _we_ have sent
them? We have sent ships of grain to the cotton-operatives of Lancashire
when they were starving; but what have we done for the people of
Germany? What reason have we given them, with our tariffs and
imperialisms, to think of us otherwise than as a nation of shopkeepers,
a nation sunk in greed and commercialism, and dead to every noble
impulse of men?