MARKETS AND MISERY
I gave in the first chapter a brief outline of my view of the process of
wealth-concentration. It is now time to consider the present status of
affairs, and determine if we can exactly how near to completion our
industrial machinery has come. Because of the vital part which the
question of foreign markets has played and must play in our affairs, it
is necessary that this inquiry should include a careful survey of
conditions in the rest of the world.
The manufactures of the United States have grown from one hundred and
ninety-eight million dollars in 1810, to five billion in 1890, and
thirteen billion in 1900. Our exports to foreign countries increased
from sixty-six million dollars in 1810 to eight hundred and fifty-six
million in 1890, and a billion and half in 1905. Of course, if we could
find unlimited markets abroad we might go on for half a century, or at
least until our people grew tired of doing hard work for the rest of the
world, and getting in return either bad debts, or else money to be used
in building new machines to do more work of the same sort. But this is
not the case, as it happens; there are half a dozen nations that have
been building up industrial machines of their own, and have completed
them; the meaning of the Socialist movements of England and Germany and
France and Belgium and Italy is simply that all these nations are now
able to manufacture more than their own people are able to buy, under
the old deadly combination of a monopoly price and a competitive wage.
And so when we go over to Europe to look for markets, we meet people who
are coming over to look for markets among us; and when in our
desperation we begin to sell out at any cost, the German capitalist
cries out in protest, and the German workingmen are thrown on the
streets, and the German Socialists increase their vote. And when the
German capitalist retaliates and sells out at cost, _our_ capitalists
are checked, and _our_ mills are stopped—and _our_ Socialist vote goes
up.
Look at the figures. England was the first in the field. The output of
coal of Great Britain was one hundred and fifty million dollars in 1810;
it was six hundred and sixty-five million dollars in 1878; in the same
period the exports of manufactures rose from two hundred and thirty
million dollars to one billion dollars. All that while, of course,
England ruled the sea and had things her own way. In 1820 the value of
all her manufactures was about seven billion dollars—equal to that of
Germany and Austria combined, or to France and the United States
combined, or to all the rest of the world, excluding these four nations.
But then, little by little, the others began to catch up with her: in
1880, instead of manufacturing one-fourth of the world’s products, Great
Britain manufactured one-fifth, and in 1894 she manufactured less than
one-sixth. Between the years 1894 and 1902, British exports increased
only thirteen per cent., while those of France increased sixteen per
cent., those of Germany thirty-nine per cent., and those of the United
States sixty-six per cent. The result was that a few years ago tens and
hundreds of thousands of starving men were parading the streets of
London, and all England was startled by Mr. Chamberlain’s announcement
that the last hope of England was a tariff which would reserve for her
the trade of the colonies! Of course England could not have made money
by a tariff unless her colonies had consented to lose money; and the
colonies were not planning to lose money—they were counting on making
some by England’s tax on food. So the plan simply reduced itself to an
invitation to the British workingman to pay more for his bread so that
he could get starvation wages for doing the manufacturing of Canada and
Australia and India. Is it any wonder that the reply to the proposal
should have been an independent labour vote which sent a thrill of alarm
through the nation?
And meanwhile Canada and Australia and India are straining every nerve
to build up manufactures of their own! “No person connected with the
cotton industry can be ignorant of the progress of cotton manufactures
in India,” wrote the _Textile Recorder_ in 1888. “Indian cotton
piece-goods are coming to the front and displacing those of Manchester.”
The Bombay Factory Commission of the same year recorded in Parliament
how this was being done. “The factory engines are at work as a rule from
5:00 A. M. to 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00 P. M. In busy times it happens that
the same set of workers remain at the gins and presses night and day,
with half an hour’s rest in the evenings.” And, like India, Canada also
puts duties on British goods to protect her own growing industries!
Meanwhile, also, the rest of the world is hard at work. Let us continue
viewing that same industry of cotton-spinning. The value of the
manufactured-cotton product of Austria has grown from fifteen million
dollars in 1834, to thirty-five million dollars in 1860, and ninety
millions in 1894. The textile manufactures of Belgium trebled themselves
in three years previous to 1894; those of Germany have increased
twenty-fold in sixty years; those of Italy nine-fold in twenty years,
while even such backward countries as Russia and Spain have doubled
their textile industries, one in thirty, the other in twenty years. Most
unexpected and disconcerting of all, however, is Japan, who was once
looked upon as a permanent customer, but whose home industries have been
growing like a magic plant. The textile manufactures of Japan doubled in
value in the three years between 1896 and 1899. From six million pounds
of cotton spun in 1886, Japan advanced to ninety-one million in 1893,
and to one hundred and fifty-three million in 1895, in nine years
increasing twenty-four fold. The value of all her textile produce was
six million dollars in 1887, and it was seventy million dollars in 1895.
Therefore her imports of cotton goods from Europe fell from eight
million dollars in 1884 to four million in 1895.
And while this was going on in the rest of the world, in the United
States the value of manufactured cotton was rising from forty-five
million dollars in 1840, to two hundred and ten million dollars in 1880,
to two hundred and sixty-seven million dollars in 1890, and to three
hundred and thirty-nine million in 1900! Under such circumstances, is it
any wonder that, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, the
factories of Massachusetts and Canada were running on half-time, and
dozens not running at all; that British cotton manufacturers found that
prices had decreased fifteen per cent. in as many years; that the
weavers of Belgium were starving, and the country was full of riots and
insurrections; and that all the nations of Europe were gathering in the
Far East like vultures about a carcass—knowing that the sole condition
upon which any one of them could maintain its industrial and social
régime for another decade, was its ability to secure the custom of some
hundreds of millions of Chinamen, who are so poor that a handful of rice
and a cotton shirt are all they own in the world!
I often wonder what our college presidents and other after-dinner
economists make of facts such as these. They do not discuss them in
their speeches. I am acquainted with only one man among all our orthodox
advisers who believes in the permanence of the competitive régime, and
at the same time really understands what it is and what it implies—who
cares for the truth, follows his views to their conclusions, and then
speaks the conclusions. When I first became acquainted with this
gentleman—intellectually acquainted, that is—it affected me painfully,
and even now the sight of his book gives me internal sensations akin to
those of a man in an ascending elevator which comes to a sudden halt.
The book is “The New Empire,” and the author is Mr. Brooks Adams. He
writes coldly and dispassionately, and with the certainty of the man of
science, whose conclusions may not be disputed. His style is
characteristic; it is brief and to the point, and there are no
apologies.
Mr. Adams is the apostle of competition. He explains that he is this,
not from choice but from necessity. “Very probably keen competition is
not a blessing. We cannot alter our environment. Nature has cast the
United States into the vortex of the fiercest struggle ever known.” His
theory of life Mr. Adams condenses as follows: “For the purpose of
obtaining a working hypothesis it is assumed that men are evolved from
their environment like other animals, and that their intellectual,
moral, and social qualities may be investigated as developments from the
struggle for life.... Food is the first necessity, but as most regions
produce food more or less abundantly, the pinch lies not so much in the
existence of the food itself as with its distribution.... To satisfy
their hunger men must not only be able to defend their own, but, in case
of dearth, to rob their neighbours, where they cannot buy, for the
weaker must perish.... Life may be destroyed as effectually by peaceful
competition as by war. A nation which is undersold may perish by famine
as completely as if slaughtered by a conqueror.... For these reasons men
have striven to equip themselves well for the combat, and since the end
of the Stone Age no nation in the more active quarters of the globe has
been able to do so without a supply of relatively cheap metal.... Thus
the position of the mines has influenced the direction of travel. The
centre of the mineral production is likely to be the seat of empire. I
believe it is impossible to overestimate the effect upon civilisation of
the variation of trade routes. According to the ancient tradition, the
whole valley of the Syr-Daria was once so thickly settled that a
nightingale could fly from branch to branch of different trees, and a
cat walk from wall to wall and from housetop to housetop, from Kashgar
to the Sea of Aral.” But the trade route across central Asia was
displaced, “and so it has come to pass that Bagdad has sunk into a mass
of hovels, and the valley of Syr-Daria is a wilderness. The fate of the
empire of Haroun-al-Raschid exemplifies an universal law.”
“The greatest prize of modern times,” in Mr. Adams’s opinion, is
northern China, and upon this the fate of empire rests. His book was
published in 1901, and he considered then that the chances were all with
the United States. Ten years before we had been “tottering upon the
brink of ruin.... Relief came through an exertion of energy and
adaptability, perhaps without a parallel.... In three years America
reorganised her whole social system by a process of consolidation, the
result of which has been the so-called trust. But the trust is in
reality the highest type of administrative efficiency, and therefore of
economy, which has as yet been attained. By means of this consolidation
the American people were enabled to utilise their mines to the full....
The shock of the impact of the new power seems overwhelming.... In
March, 1897, Pittsburg achieved supremacy in steel, and in an instant
Europe felt herself poised above an abyss.... The Spanish Empire
disintegrated, and Great Britain displayed a lassitude which has
attracted the attention of the entire world.... Germany has also been
perturbed.... Russia has, however, suffered most.
“The world seems agreed that the United States is likely to achieve, if
indeed she has not already achieved, an economic supremacy. The vortex
of the cyclone is near New York. No such activity prevails elsewhere;
nowhere are undertakings so gigantic, nowhere is administration so
perfect; nowhere are such masses of capital centralised in single hands.
And as the United States becomes an imperial market, she stretches out
along the trade routes which lead from foreign countries to her heart,
as every empire has stretched out from the days of Sargon to our own.
The West Indies drift toward us, the Republic of Mexico hardly longer
has an independent life, and the City of Mexico is an American town.
With the completion of the Panama Canal all Central America will become
a part of our system. We have expanded into Asia, we have attracted the
fragments of the Spanish dominions, and reaching out into China, we have
checked the demands of Russia and Germany, in territory, which, until
yesterday, had been supposed to be beyond our sphere. We are penetrating
Europe, and Great Britain especially is assuming the position of a
dependency, which must rely upon us as the base from which she draws her
food in peace, and without which she could not stand in war.”
“Supposing the movement of the next fifty years only equal to that of
the last,” continues our author, ... “the United States will outweigh
any single empire, if not all empires combined. The whole world will pay
her tribute. Commerce will flow to her, both from east and west, and the
order which has existed from the dawn of time will be reversed.”
There is only one peril about all this, in the opinion of Mr. Adams.
“Society is now moving with intense velocity, and masses are gathering
bulk with proportional rapidity. There is also some reason to surmise
that the equilibrium is correspondingly delicate and unstable. If so
apparently slight a cause as a fall of prices for a decade has been
sufficient to propel the seat of empire across the Atlantic, an equally
slight derangement of the administrative functions of the United States
might force it across the Pacific. Prudence therefore would dictate the
adoption of measures to minimise the likelihood of sudden shocks.... If
the New Empire should develop, it must be an enormous complex mass, to
be administered only by means of a cheap, elastic and simple machinery;
an old and clumsy mechanism must, sooner or later, collapse, and in
sinking may involve a civilisation.”
By “an old and clumsy mechanism” Mr. Adams explains elsewhere that he
means our American political system. Our ancestors were opposed to much
consolidation, and they formed a constitution that was practically
unchangeable, because they believed they had “reached certain final
truths of government.” “The language of the Declaration of Independence,
in which they proclaimed one of these truths (that all men are created
equal), varies little from that of a Catholic council,” says Mr. Adams.
An American is apt to believe such formulas, being “dominated by
tradition.” But a modern thinker views them “as having no necessary
relation to the conduct of affairs in the twentieth century.” “If men
are to be observed scientifically, the standard by which customs and
institutions must be gauged cannot be abstract moral principles, but
success.... Institutions are good when they lead to success in
competition, and bad when they hinder.”
The United States now forms a “gigantic and growing empire. She occupies
a position of extraordinary strength. Favoured alike by geographical
position, by deposits of minerals, by climate, and by the character of
her population, she has little to fear either in peace or war, from
rivals, provided the friction created by the movement of the masses with
which she has to deal does not neutralise her energy.”...
“The alternative presented is plain. We may cherish ideals and risk
substantial benefits to realise them. Such is the emotional instinct. Or
we may regard our government dispassionately, as we would any other
matter of business.... The United States has become the heart of the
economic system of the age, and she must maintain her supremacy by wit
and force, or share the fate of the discarded. What that fate is the
following pages tell.... With conservative populations _slaughter_ is
nature’s remedy.”
Never in my life shall I forget the hours in which I wrestled with these
problems—the weeks and the months of perplexity and despair. It happened
long before I ever heard of Mr. Adams—for of course these thoughts of
his are the thoughts of the time, there is a whole literature of them,
from Kipling, Roosevelt, and the Kaiser down. And to look back over the
weary wastes of history—the blind, hideous nightmare of blood and
tears—and then to look forward, and in all the future see nothing else!
To see never any rest for agonised humanity, only kill or be killed for
ages upon ages! To see this newest and noblest effort of man after
freedom and peace—the American Republic—turned into an engine of
slaughter and oppression! To be shown by cold, scientific formulas that
my reverence for the traditions of Lincoln was merely an “emotional
impulse,” and that the end of it could only be that my country would
share “the fate of the discarded!” I could not believe it—I cried out in
the night-time for deliverance from it.
[1]There is a certain relentlessness about Mr. Adams, which fills the
reader with rebellion, and makes him think. The average imperialist
carefully avoids doing this; he veils his doctrines with moral phrases,
with the decent pretence of “destiny” at the very least. But Mr. Adams
dances a very war-dance upon the thing called “moral sense”—never before
was it made to seem such an impertinent superfluity.
Footnote 1:
Portions of the following argument were published as an article in the
_North American Review_.
Have you, the reader, never had one smallest doubt? Does it not, for
instance, seem strange to you now, when you think of it, that this
mighty people cannot stay quietly at home and live their own life and
mind their own affairs? How does it happen that our existence as a
nation depends upon expansion? Is it that our population is growing so
fast? But here is our Imperialist President lamenting that our
population is not growing fast enough! And so we have to fight to find
room for our children; and we have to have more children in order that
we may be able to fight! We deplore race suicide, and we give as our
reason that it prevents race-murder!
Picture to yourself half a dozen men on an island. If the island be
fertile they can get along without any foreign trade, can they not? And
then why cannot a _nation_ do it? According to Mulhall, in 1894 two
millions of our agricultural labourers were raising food for foreign
countries. And all our imports are luxuries, save a few things such as
tea and coffee and some medicines! And still our existence as a nation
depends upon foreign trade—trade with Filipinos and Chinamen, with
Hottentots and Esquimaux! Why?
Can you, the reader, tell me? We manufacture more than we can use, you
say. Unless we can sell the balance to the Chinamen some of our
factories must close down, and then some of our people would starve. But
why, I ask, cannot our own starving people have the things that go
abroad—some of all that food that goes abroad, for instance? Why is it
that the Chinamen come first and our own people afterwards? Until we
have made some things for the Chinamen, you explain, we have no money to
buy anything ourselves. And so always the Chinamen first. It seems such
a strange, upside-down arrangement—does it not seem so to you? For, look
you, the people of England are in the same fix, and the people of
Germany are in the same fix—the people of all the competing nations are
in the same fix! They actually have to go to war to kill each other, in
order to get a chance to sell something to the Chinamen, so that they
can get money to buy some things for themselves! They were actually
doing that in Manchuria for eighteen months! More amazing yet, they had
to go and murder some of the Chinamen, in order to compel the rest to
buy something, so that they could get money to buy something for
themselves!
How long can it be possible for a human being, with a spark of either
conscience or brains in him, to gaze at such a state of affairs and not
_know_ that there is something wrong about it? And how long could he
gaze before the truth of it would flash over him—that the reason for it
is that some private party owns all the machinery and materials of
production, and will not give the people anything, until they have first
made something that can be sold! That all the world lies at the mercy of
those who own the materials and machinery, and who leave men to starve
when they cannot make profits! And that this is why we Americans cannot
stay at home and be happy, but are forced to go trading with Filipinos
and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux, and competing for “empire” with
our brothers in England and Germany and Japan!
If the reader be an average American, these thoughts will be new to him.
He has been brought up on a diet of misunderstood Malthusianism. He is
told that life has always been a struggle for existence and always will
be; that there is not food enough to go round, and that therefore, every
now and then, the surplus population has to be cut down by famine and
war. It is to be pointed out concerning the doctrine that, while he
swears allegiance to it, he doesn’t like to think about it, and when it
comes to the practical test he shows that he does not really believe it.
Whenever famine comes, he subscribes to a grain-fund, and does his best
to defeat nature; when war comes, he gets up a Red Cross Society for the
same purpose. And yet he still continues to swear by this wiping out of
the nations, and any discussion about abolishing poverty he waves aside
as Utopian.
The writer may fail in his purpose with this paper, but he will not have
written in vain if he can lead a few men to see the pitiful folly of
that half-baked theory which ranks men with the wild beasts of the
jungle, and ignores the existence of both science and morality. He can
do that, assuredly, with any one whom he can induce to read one little
book—Prince Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories and Workshops.”
The book was published nine years ago, but apparently it has not yet had
time to affect the cogitations of the orthodox economists. You still
read, as you have been used to reading since the days of Adam Smith,
that the possibilities of the soil are strictly limited, and that
population always stays just within the starvation limit. Nearly all the
fertile land in this country, for instance, is now in use, and so we
shall soon reach the limit here. The forty million people of Great
Britain have long since passed it, and they would starve to death were
it not for our surplus. And there are portions of the world where
population is even more dense, as in Belgium. All this you have known
from your school-days, and you think you know it perfectly, and beyond
dispute; and so how astonished you will be to be told that it is simply
one of the most stupid and stupefying delusions that ever were believed
and propagated among men; that the limits of the productive
possibilities of the soil have not only not been attained, but are, so
far as science can now see, absolutely unattainable; that not only could
England support with ease her own population on her own soil, and not
only could Belgium do it, but any most crowded portion of the world
could do it, and do it once again, and yet once again, and do it with
two or three hours of work a day by a small portion of its population!
That England could now support, not merely her thirty-three million
inhabitants, but seventy-five and perhaps a hundred million! And that
the United States could now support a billion and a quarter of people,
or just about the entire population of this planet! And that this could
be done year after year, and entirely without any possibility of the
exhaustion of the soil! And all this not any theory of a closet
speculator or a Utopian dreamer, but by methods that are used year after
year by thousands and tens of thousands of men who are making money by
it in all portions of the world—in the market-gardens of Paris and
London, of Belgium, Holland and the island of Jersey, the truck-farms of
Florida and Minnesota, and of Norfolk, Virginia!
Prince Kropotkin writes:
“While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a
limited number of lovers of nature and a legion of workers, whose very
names will remain unknown to posterity, have created of late a quite new
agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior
to the old three-fields system of our ancestors. They smile when we
boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the
field one crop every year, or four crops every three years, because
their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of
land every twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and
bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such
quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it; otherwise, it
would raise up the levels of their gardens by half an inch every year.
They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass to the acre, as we
do, but from fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same
space; not twenty-five dollars’ worth of hay, but five hundred dollars’
worth of vegetables, of the plainest description, cabbages and carrots.
That is where agriculture is going now.”
The writer tells about all these things in detail. Here is the _culture
maraîchere_ of Paris—a M. Ponce, with a tiny orchard of two and
seven-tenths acres, for which he pays five hundred dollars rent a year,
and from which he takes produce that could not be named short of several
pages of figures: twenty thousand pounds of carrots, twenty thousand of
onions and radishes, six thousand heads of cabbage, three thousand of
cauliflower, five thousand baskets of tomatoes, five thousand dozen
choice fruit, one hundred and fifty-four thousand heads of “salad”—in
all, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of vegetables. Says the
author:
“The Paris gardener not only defies the soil—he would grow the same
crops on an asphalt pavement—he defies climate. His walls, which are
built to reflect light and to protect the wall-trees from the northern
winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his _pépinières_, have
made a rich Southern garden out of the suburbs of Paris.”
The consequence of this is that the population of the districts of that
city, three millions and a half of people, could, if it were necessary,
be maintained in their own territory, provided with food both animal and
vegetable, from a piece of ground less than sixty miles on a side! And
at the same time, by the same methods, they are raising thirty tons of
potatoes on an acre in Minnesota, and three hundred and fifty bushels of
corn in Iowa, and six hundred bushels of onions in Florida. And with
machinery, on the prairie wheat-farms, they raise crops at a cost which
makes twelve hours and a half of work of _all kinds_ enough to supply a
man with the flour part of his food for a year! And then, as if to cap
the climax, comes Mr. Horace Fletcher with his discovery that all the
ailments of civilised man, (including old age and death) are due to
overeating; and Professor Chittenden with his practical demonstration
that the quantity of food needed by man is about four-tenths of what all
physiologists have previously taught! [2]And while all this has been
going on for a decade, while encyclopedias have been written about it,
our political economists continue to discuss wages and labour, rent and
interest, exchange and consumption, from the standpoint of the dreary,
century-old formula that there must always be an insufficient supply of
food in the world!
Footnote 2:
Horace Fletcher: “The A-B-Z of Our Own Nutrition.” R. L. Chittenden:
“Physiological Economy in Nutrition.”
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine_
]
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine_
REAPING BY HAND AND BY MACHINERY
]
Such is the state of affairs with agriculture: and now how is it with
everything else? In the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of
Labour (1898), Carroll D. Wright has figured the relative costs of doing
various pieces of work by hand and by modern machinery. Here are a few
of the cases he gives:
“_Making of 10 plows_: By hand, 2 workmen, performing 11 distinct
operations, working a total of 1,180 hours, and paid $54.46. By machine,
52 workmen, 97 operations, 37½ hours, $7.90.
“_Making of 500 lbs. of butter_: By hand, 3 men, 7 operations, 125
hours, $10.66. By machine, 7 men, 8 operations, 12½ hours, $1.78.
“_Making of 500 yds. twilled cottonade_: By hand, 3 men, 19 operations
7,534 hours, $135.61. By machine, 252 men, 43 operations, 84 hours,
$6.81.
“_Making of 100 pairs of cheap boots_: By hand, 2 workmen, 83
operations, 1,436 hours, $408.50. By machine, 113 workmen, 122
operations, 154 hours, $35.40.”
Thus we see human labour has been cut to the extent of from eighty to
ninety-five per cent. From other sources I have gathered a few facts
about the latest machinery. In Pennsylvania, some sheep were shorn and
the wool turned into clothing in six hours, four minutes. A steer was
killed, its hide tanned, turned into leather and made into shoes in
twenty-four hours. The ten million bottles used by the Standard Oil
Company every year are now blown by machinery. An electric
riveting-machine puts rivets in steel-frame buildings at the rate of two
per minute. Two hundred and sixty needles per minute, ten million
match-sticks per day, five hundred garments cut per day—each by a
machine tended by one little boy. The newest weaving-looms run through
the dinner hour and an hour and a half after the factory closes, making
cloth with no one to tend them at all. The new basket-machine invented
by Mergenthaler, the inventor of the linotype, is now in operation
everywhere, “making fruit-baskets, berry-baskets and grape-baskets of a
strength and quality never approached by hand labour. Fancy a single
machine that will turn out completed berry-baskets at the rate of twelve
thousand per day of nine hours’ work! This is at the rate of one
thousand three hundred per hour, or over twenty baskets a minute! One
girl, operating this machine, does the work of twelve skilled hand
operators!”
Since all these wonders are the commonplace facts of modern industry, it
is not surprising that here and there men should begin to think about
them; here is the naïve question recently asked by the editor of a
Montreal newspaper which I happened on:
“With the best of machinery at the present day, one man can produce
woollens for three hundred people. One man can produce boots and shoes
for one thousand people. One man can produce bread for two hundred
people. Yet thousands cannot get woollens, boots and shoes, or bread.
_There must be some reason for this state of affairs._”
There is a reason, a perfectly plain and simple reason, which all over
the world the working-people, whom it concerns, are coming to
understand. The reason is that all the woollen manufactories, the boot
and shoe and bread manufactories, and all the sources of the raw
materials of these, and all the means of handling and distributing them
when they are manufactured, belong to a few private individuals instead
of to the community as a whole. And so, instead of the cotton-spinner,
the shoe-operative and the bread-maker having free access to them, to
work each as long as he pleases, produce as much as he cares to, and
exchange his products for as much of the products of other workers as he
needs, each one of these workers can only get at the machines by the
consent of another man, and then does not get what he produces, but only
a small fraction of it, and does not get that except when the owner of
the balance can find some one with money enough to buy that balance at a
profit to him!
Prof. Hertzka, the Austrian economist, in his “Laws of Social
Evolution,” has elaborately investigated the one real question of
political economy to-day, the actual labour and time necessary for the
creation, under modern conditions, of the necessaries of life for a
people. Here are the results for the Austrian people, of twenty-two
million:
“It takes 26,250,000 acres of agricultural land, and 7,500,000 of
pasturage, for all agricultural products. Then I allowed a house to be
built for every family, consisting of five rooms. I found that all
industries, agriculture, architecture, building, flour, sugar, coal,
iron, machine-building, clothing, and chemical production, need 615,000
labourers employed 11 hours per day, 300 days a year, to satisfy every
imaginable want for 22,000,000 inhabitants.
“These 615,000 labourers are only 12.3 per cent. of the population able
to do work, excluding women and all persons under 16 or over 50 years of
age; all these latter to be considered as not able.
“Should the 5,000,000 able men be engaged in work, instead of 615,000,
they need only to work 36.9 days every year to produce everything needed
for the support of the population of Austria. But should the 5,000,000
work all the year, say 300 days—which they would probably have to do to
keep the supply fresh in every department—each one would only work 1
hour and 22½ minutes per day.
“But to engage to produce all the _luxuries_, in addition, would take,
in round figures, 1,000,000 workers, classed and assorted as above, or
only 20 per cent. of all those able, excluding every woman, or every
person under 16 or over 50, as before. The 5,000,000 able, strong male
members could produce everything imaginable for the whole nation of
22,000,000 in 2 hours and 12 minutes per day, working 300 days a year.”
But then you say: If this be true, if two hours’ work will produce
everything, how can everybody go on working twelve hours forever? They
can’t; and that is just why I am writing this book. They can do it only
until they have filled the needs, first of themselves, then of all the
Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux who have money to buy
anything—and then until they have filled all the factories, warehouses
and stores of the country to overflowing. Then they cannot do one single
thing more; then they are out of work. They can go on so long as their
masters can find a market in which to sell their product at a profit;
then they have to stop. And then suddenly (_instantly_, God help them!)
they have to take their choice between two alternatives—between an
Industrial Republic, and a political empire. Either they will hear
Prince Kropotkin, or they will hear Mr. Brooks Adams. Either they will
take the instruments and means of production and produce for use and not
for profit; or else they will forge themselves into an engine of war to
be wielded by a military despot. In that case, they will fling
themselves upon China and Japan, and seize northern China, “the greatest
prize of modern times.” They will enter upon a career of empire, and by
the wholesale slaughter of war they will keep down population, while at
the same time by the wholesale destruction of war they keep down the
surplus of products. So there will be more work for the workers for a
time, and more profits for the masters for a time; until what wealth
there is in northern China has also been concentrated and possessed,
when once more there will begin distress. By that time, however, we
shall have an hereditary aristocracy strongly intrenched, and a
proletariat degraded beyond recall; so that our riots will end in mere
slaughter and waste, and we shall never again see freedom. We shall run
then the whole course of the Roman Empire—of frenzied profligacy among
the wealthy, and beastly ferocity among the populace: until at last we
fall into imbecility, and are overwhelmed by some new, clean race which
the strong heart of nature has poured out.
Empires have risen and have fallen; but it has not been, as Mr. Adams
asserts, because of “variations of trade routes,” but solely because of
wealth-concentration, with its ensuing corruption, ignorance and
brutality among the populace, and avarice and luxury among the rich. Let
the reader take Froude’s “Cæsar,” and read, in the first chapter, his
picture of the last days of the Roman Republic:
“An age in so many ways the counterpart of our own, the blossoming
period of the old civilisation, when the intellect was trained to the
highest point that it could reach, and on the great subjects of human
interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art, even on religion
itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought as we think,
doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and struggled after
the same objects. It was an age of material progress and material
civilisation; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age
of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner-parties, or
senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. The highest offices of
state were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they were confined, in
fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most ready use of the
tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had been exchanged
for distinctions of wealth. The struggles between plebeians and
patricians for equality of privilege were over, and a new division had
been formed between the party of property and a party that desired a
change in the structure of society. The free cultivators were
disappearing from the soil. Italy was being absorbed into vast estates,
held by a few favoured families and cultivated by slaves, while the old
agricultural population was driven off the land, and was crowded into
towns. The rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical
interest, except for its material pleasures; the occupation of the
higher classes was to obtain money without labour, and to spend it in
idle enjoyment. Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant
the ascendancy of the party which would maintain the existing order of
things, or would overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good
things which alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the
laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The
educated in their hearts disbelieved it. Temples were still built with
increasing splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed.
Public men spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on
their opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life
had any serious meaning there was none remaining beyond the circle of
the silent, patient, ignorant multitude.”
Is not this a parallel to make one pause and think? And if our American
republic is to escape the fate of Rome, to what cause will it be due?
The Roman failure was due to the fact that “the men and women by whom
the hard work of the world was done were chiefly slaves”; those who held
the franchise, the free Roman citizens, were a comparatively small
class, and the patricians bought them with “bread and circuses,” and so
held the reins of power. In our present time, however, those who do the
work and those who have the ballot are the same class; and also they
have the public school and the press, and the whole of modern science at
their backs. More important yet—the all-dominating fact—is the machine.
The Roman chattel-slave worked with his hands, while the modern
wage-slave works with tools of gigantic speed and power; which means
that our modern economic process, while infinitely more cruel and
destructive, makes up for these qualities by the certainty and swiftness
with which it rushes to its end. So it is that a Revolution which in
Rome took centuries to culminate and fail, will require only decades in
America to accomplish its inevitable triumph.