SOCIAL DECAY
If my analysis of the industrial process be correct, there will be two
developments observable in our society: the first a material change, a
kind of economic apoplexy, the concentration of wealth in one portion of
society, accompanied by an intensification of competition, a falling in
the rate of interest, and a steady rise in the cost of living; and
second, a spiritual change coincident with the material one, a protest
against the rising frenzy of greed, and against the constantly
increasing economic pressure.
It is important that these two processes should be clearly perceived,
and their relationship correctly understood; for there is no aspect of
the whole problem about which there is more bad thinking done. The two
are cause and effect, and they explain and prove each other; and yet
almost invariably you will hear them cited as contradicting each other.
If, for instance, one speaks of the ever-rising tide of misery and
suffering in our society, he will be met with the response that “the
world is getting better all the time.” And when he asks for some proof
of the statement, the reply will be that a great national awakening is
going on, that we are developing new ideals and a new public spirit!
Similarly I have, time and again, when advocating this or that concrete
remedy, been met with the statement that the cure for the evils of the
time is publicity—that the people must be educated—that we must appeal
to men’s moral sense, etc. It is useless to argue with a person who
cannot perceive that all these things are simply means to an end, and
not the end. You cannot educate people just to be educated; when you
appeal to them, you have to appeal to them to _do_ something.
One cannot insist too strongly upon the futility of sentiment in
connection with this process. We are dealing with facts, with grim and
brutal and merciless reality. And it will not avail you to try to smooth
it over—it will not do any good to turn your head and refuse to face it.
Here is the monster machine of competition, grinding remorselessly on;
the wealth of the world is rushing with cyclonic speed into one portion
of the social body, and in the other portion whole classes of men and
women and children are being swept out of existence, are being wiped off
the economic slate. Exactly as capital piles up—at compounded and
re-compounded interest—so also piles up the mass of human misery of
every conceivable sort—luxury, debauchery and cynicism at the top,
prostitution, suicide, insanity, and crime at the bottom. Political
corruption spreads further and eats deeper, business practice becomes
more impersonal and more ruthless; and all progress awaits the swing of
the pendulum, the time when the cumulative pressure of all this mass of
misery shall have driven the people to frenzy, and forced them to
overturn the system of class exploitation and greed.
I purpose to cite in detail the symptoms of disease and decay in our
body politic; before I begin, I wish to put my interpretation of them
into one sentence, which a man can carry away with him. I say that the
evils of our time are due without exception to one single cause—_that
our people are being driven, with constantly increasing rigour, to the
ultimately hopeless task of paying interest upon a mass of capital which
is increasing at compound interest_.
Consider in the first place the broader aspect of the situation—the
dollar-madness of the time which is the staple theme of the moralist. I
have a friend who is in control of a great business concern, and who
will read this little book with intense disapproval; and yet so
fearfully has this man been driven by the lash of competition that when
I saw him last he could scarcely digest a bit of dry bread, and his hand
trembled so that he could hardly lift a glass of water to his lips. He
talked of his business in his sleep, and he could not go for a walk and
forget it for five minutes. And why? Was it money? He has so much that
his family could not spend it if they lived a hundred years; but it was
his business, it was his life. He was caught in the mill and he could
not get out. His is one of those few industries which have not yet
formed a trust, and he is in the last gasp of the competitive
struggle—he has to plot and plan day and night to get new orders, and to
cut down expenses, and to keep up the dividends upon which his
_reputation_ rests.
And as it is with him, so it is with the rest of us. We have to play the
game; we have to cut our neighbour’s throat, knowing that otherwise our
neighbour will cut ours. And year after year the pressure of the whole
thing grows more tense. Suicide in the United States has increased from
twelve per one hundred thousand of population in the year 1890, to
sixteen in the year 1896, and seventeen in the year 1902; in Germany it
rose from twenty to nearly twenty-two in the three years between 1900
and 1903; in England it rose from thirty in 1894, to thirty-five in
1904. According to the _Civiltà Cattolica_ the frequency of this crime
in Europe has increased four hundred per cent. while population has
increased only sixty per cent.; and there have been over one million
suicides recorded in the last twenty-five years. There were ninety-two
thousand insane persons in the United States in 1880, one hundred and
six thousand in 1890, and one hundred and forty-five thousand in 1896.
Per one thousand of population, there were twenty-nine prisoners in
1850, sixty-one in 1860, eighty-five in 1870, one hundred and seventeen
in 1880, and one hundred and thirty-two in 1890. In 1876 the population
of this country consumed eight and sixty-one one-hundredths gallons of
liquor per capita; in 1890 they consumed fifteen and fifty-three
one-hundredths, and in 1902 they consumed nineteen and forty-eight
one-hundredths. The actual consumption at the last date was a billion
and a half of gallons. These figures take but a few lines to state; and
yet no human imagination can form any conception of the frightful mass
of human anguish which they imply. They constitute in themselves a proof
of the thesis here advanced, that there is at work in our society some
great and fundamental evil force.[3]
Footnote 3:
“An experienced magistrate, Recorder John W. Goff of New York, told me
not long since that in his judgment the course of crime in this
country is not only towards more frequency and gravity, but that it is
changing its old hot impulsiveness, openness and directness for cold
calculation, secretiveness and deliberate intention to strike without
being discovered. This progress and difference he attributes mediately
and immediately to extending and deepening poverty.” Henry George:
“The Menace of Privilege.”
Whenever the administrators of our “constantly increasing mass of
capital” find they are no longer making profits, they either reduce
wages, or raise the price of their product. One or the other they must
do, because without profits the machine cannot run. When good times come
they sometimes raise the wages again—because of the unions; but they
never lower the price of the product—the poor consumer is a nonunion
man. Two years ago Mr. Rockefeller put up the price of oil one cent, and
the Beef Trust has done the same about once a year. And of course a
general increase in prices is exactly the same as a general cut in
wages—in either case the consumer has to work a little harder to make
ends meet, and if he cannot work harder, he dies. The coal-miners
rejoiced in the award of the Commission, untroubled by the extra fifty
cents the coal companies put on the product; but when the miner comes to
add up his account with the butcher and the oil man, he finds he is just
where he was before. He does not know why, you understand—it is merely
that he finds himself compelled to do without something he used to
consider a necessity. Dun’s Review, figuring the cost of living in the
United States upon a basis of 100, puts it at 72.455 in 1897, and
102.208 in 1904—an increase of forty-one per cent. Bradstreet, reckoning
in another way, shows an increase from 6.51 in 1897, to 9.05 in 1904, or
thirty-nine per cent. According to the annual report of the Commissary
General, United States Army, the cost of feeding the soldiers of the
army has increased from eighteen cents in 1898 to thirty-four and
six-tenths cents in 1903. Statisticians have figured that the average
employee earns ninety dollars a year more than he did twenty years ago,
while it costs him to live on the same scale, one hundred and thirty
dollars a year more. According to the last United States census the
average compensation per wage earner was only three hundred and forty
dollars, while the value of the manufactured product was two thousand
four hundred and fifty dollars per wage earner. Perhaps no clearer
statement of the intensification of exploitation can be found than in
the fact that whereas the average profit on the products of all
industries was three hundred and seventy-five dollars per wage earner in
1880, in 1900 it had increased to six hundred and twenty-six dollars.
Another consequence of the increasing strain is “race suicide”; which is
simply a popular term for that “elimination of the middle class” which
Karl Marx predicted half a century ago. The homilies of President
Roosevelt may have caused a few more superfluous bourgeois babies to be
born; but I rather fancy that in general it has been a case of
“everybody’s business and nobody’s business”—that the average
middle-class American has no idea of lowering his standard of living for
the purpose of affecting the census returns. As a result of a
confidential census of “race suicide,” taken in England and reported in
the _Popular Science Monthly_, Mr. Sidney Webb found that the offspring
had been voluntarily limited in two hundred and twenty-four cases out of
a total of two hundred and fifty-two marriages; and out of the one
hundred and twenty-eight cases in which the causes of limitation were
given, economic causes were specified in seventy-three. Similar results
would certainly follow an inquiry in this country; in fact Americans of
refinement have come to have an instinctive feeling of repugnance to a
large family; to have six or seven children is vulgar and “common,” and
suggestive of foreigners. The reason is simply that conditions now
prevail which make large families impossible, except to Poles and
Hungarians and Italians and French-Canadians, people who are too
ignorant to limit their offspring, and whose standards of life are close
to animals—their children earning their own livings in sweatshops, mines
and factories, as soon as they are able to walk.
And yet, low as our lowest classes have been ground, they are not low
enough. Thousands of agents of steamship companies are gathering the
outcasts from the sewers of Europe and shipping them here. The rate of
immigration into this country was three hundred and eleven thousand in
1899, four hundred and eighty-seven thousand in 1901, six hundred and
forty-eight thousand in 1902, eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand in
1903, and over a million in 1905—more than one-half of the last
shipments being from Hungary, Russia, and southern Italy. All this, you
must understand, is managed by the “System” which rules in our centres
of industry. “In that unhappy anthracite country,” writes Mr. John
Graham Brooks, a person of authority, “the employers will tell you
openly, and with conscious bravado, that they must get cheaper and
cheaper labour to keep wages down, else they could make no money.” And
it was recently estimated by George W. Morgan, State Superintendent of
Elections in New York, that in one past year over six hundred thousand
dollars profit was made by selling false naturalisation papers. The
Federal authorities who had been investigating the frauds believed that
over one hundred thousand sets of such papers had been sold, and that
thirty thousand of these had been issued in New York City. Fully thirty
per cent. of the Italian citizens in the southern district of New York
were estimated to hold false papers.
Cheaper and cheaper labour! Women’s labour and children’s labour! Over
one million of women are at present working in factories alone in this
country; and one million and three-quarters of children between ten and
fifteen years of age are engaged in gainful occupations. In the cotton
factories of the South, while the number of men employed increased
seventy-nine per cent. in the past ten years, the number of women
increased one hundred and fifty-eight per cent. and the number of
children under sixteen increased two hundred and seventy per cent. The
number employed in Alabama alone was estimated by the Committee on Child
Labour to be fifty thousand, with thirty-four per cent. of them under
twelve years, and ten per cent. under _ten_ years. These children work
twelve hours a day, and the oldest get fifty cents and the youngest get
nine cents. Here are the descriptions of observers:
“A little boy of six years has been working 12 hours a day, from 6:20 A.
M. to 6:20 P. M. (40 minutes off at noon), for 15 cents per day.
“Three boys aged respectively 9, 8, and 7 years. The boy aged 9 has been
working two years, the boy aged 8 has been working three years; the boy
aged 7 years has been working two years. These little fellows work 13
hours a day, from 5:20 A. M. to 6:30 P. M., with twenty minutes for
dinner. In ‘rush’ periods their mill works until 9:30 and 10 P. M. They
were refused a holiday for Thanksgiving and they obtained Christmas Day
only by working till 7 P. M. in order to make up the time.”
Mrs. Irene Ashby-Macfadden says: “I have talked with a little boy of
seven years, in Alabama, who worked for forty nights; and another child
not nine years old, who at six years old had been on the night shift
eleven months.”
Miss Jane Addams, of Chicago, says: “In South Carolina, in a large new
mill, I found a child of five working at night. In Columbia, S. C., in a
mill controlled by Northern capital, I stood at ten-thirty at night and
saw many children who did not know their own ages, working from 6 P. M.
to 6. A. M.”
Here is a description of their surroundings:
“An atmosphere redolent of oil, thick with lint, the deafening,
incessant whir of machinery, in summer stifling heat, always the
insensate machinery claiming the strained attention of young eyes and
tiny fingers, broken threads clamorously crying for adjustment, all
requiring not hard work, but incessant vigilance, springing feet and
nimble fingers. Young eyes watching anxiously for a fault in these
intricately constructed machines, paying with crushed or broken members
for an error in judgment, for the crime of carelessness, how must the
responsibility—lightly smiled at by adults—weigh upon the barely
developed intelligence of a young child? And after long hours, lagging
footsteps, throbbing heads, wandering attention—what sort of stone is
this, O Brothers, to be placed in the children’s hands who cry for
bread?”
Several years ago I saw in the _Independent_ an advertisement setting
forth the advantages of the State of Alabama as an investing-place for
capital. I wish I had cut it out. The point of it was that there were no
“labour-troubles” in Alabama; the boycott being prohibited there, and
labour unions being sued for damages and smashed. The advertisement
might have added that there is no factory-legislation to amount to
anything, and that the percentage of native white illiteracy is fourteen
and eight-tenths. There _is_ factory-legislation in Massachusetts, and
it is enforced, and the percentage of native white illiteracy is only
eight-tenths of one per cent., or one-eighteenth of the proportion of
Alabama. So in the last overproduction crisis the mills of Alabama were
running, while those of Massachusetts were shut down; and the special
correspondence of the New York _Evening Post_ contained the following
pregnant item:
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee_
]
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee_
CHILD LABOR IN GLASS FACTORIES AND COAL MINES
]
“ATLANTA, Ga., June 12—‘The sceptre of commercial supremacy is falling
from the palsied hand of New England industry; apparently it is to be
taken up by the South. Grasp it firmly. The whole country, torn by
labour disputes, looks to the South to make the final stand against
legislative encroachments on the liberty of the individual workman and
the individual employer.’
“So Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, Conn., spoke to the members of the
Georgia Industrial Association, at their annual convention at Warm
Springs, Ga., last week. This association was one of the earliest to
recognise the depressing effect of restrictive labour legislation upon
the cotton manufacturing of New England; its members fear that similar
legislation in the South would be followed by even more disastrous
consequences, and what has injuriously affected the more hardy and older
establishments of the North, would, they believe, stunt the growth of
the infant industries of the South, if it did not actually crush them.”
I made an effort in “The Jungle” to show what is happening to the wage
earner in our modern highly concentrated industries, under the régime of
a monopoly price and a competitive wage. I spent seven weeks in
Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest
detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact
as a government report. But the reader does not have to take my word for
it, there are any number of studies by independent investigators. Let
him go to a library and consult the American Journal of Sociology for
March, 1901, and read the reports of a graduate of the University of
Chicago, who investigated the conditions in the garment-trade in that
city. Here were girls working ten hours a day for forty cents a week.
The average of all the “dressmakers” was but ninety cents a week, and
they were able to find employment on the average only forty-two weeks in
the year. The “pants-finishers” received a dollar and thirty-one cents,
and they were employed only twenty-seven weeks in the year. The general
average in the entire trade was less than two dollars and a half a week,
and the average number of weeks of work was only thirty-one, _making an
average yearly wage for a whole industry of seventy-six dollars and
seventy-four cents per year_. Or let the reader get Mr. Jacob A. Riis’s
pictures of conditions in the slums of New York. In his book, “How the
Other Half Lives,” Mr. Riis states that in the block bounded by Stanton,
Houston, Attorney and Ridge streets, the size of which is two hundred by
three hundred feet, are two thousand two hundred and forty-four human
beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets,
Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand. Jack London, in
his “War of The Classes,” quotes the Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the
block bounded by Hester, Canal, Eldridge and Forsyth Streets: “In a room
twelve feet by eight, and five and a half feet high, it was found that
nine persons slept and prepared their food. In another room, located in
a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with
their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of
seventeen, two women and four boys, nine, ten, eleven and fifteen years
old—fourteen persons in all!” Apropos of this it may be well to add that
an investigation conducted in Berlin established the fact that with
families living in one room the death rate was one hundred and
sixty-three per thousand, while with families living in three or four
rooms it was twenty. What it was with three or four families living in
one room does not appear. According to a recent report of the New York
Tenement House Commission there were four hundred thousand “dark
rooms”—rooms without any outside opening whatever. Mr. Riis has been so
successful in battling with such conditions that he has been called by
President Roosevelt “the most useful American.” Neither the President
nor Mr. Riis understand economics, and so probably they are both
perplexed at the result of his ten years of effort—which is that rents
on the East Side have gone up about fifty per cent. in the last two
years, and there have been riots and evictions—and a Socialist all but
elected to Congress!
But Mr. Riis is a business man, and he can figure the social cost of
these evil conditions. Of the New York tenements he writes:
“They are the hot beds of epidemics that carry death to the rich and
poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and
police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to
the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the
last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our
charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all
that that implies; because, above all, they taint the family life with
deadly moral contagion.”
In his newly published discussion of social problems called “In the Fire
of the Heart,” Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine writes of the country’s situation
as follows:
“And over ten millions of our people are in a state of chronic poverty
at this very hour—almost one out of every seven, or, to make full
allowance, one out of every eight of all our people are in the condition
where they have not sufficient food, and clothing, and shelter to keep
them in a state of physical and mental efficiency. And the sad part of
it is that large additional numbers—numbers most appalling for such a
country as this, are each year, and through no fault of their own,
dropping into this same condition.
“And a still sadder feature of it is, that each year increasingly large
numbers of this vast army of people, our fellow-beings, are, unwillingly
on their part and in the face of almost superhuman efforts to keep out
of it till the last moment, dropping into the pauper class—those who are
compelled to seek or to receive aid from a public, or from private
charity, in order to exist at all, already in numbers about four
million, while increasing numbers of this class, the pauper, sink each
year, and so naturally, into the vicious, the criminal, the inebriate
class. In other words, we have gradually allowed to be built around us a
social and economic system which yearly drives vast numbers of hitherto
fairly well-to-do, strong, honest, earnest, willing and admirable men
with their families into the condition of poverty, and under its weary,
endeavour-strangling influences many of these in time, hoping against
hope, struggling to the last moment in their semi-incapacitated and
pathetic manner to keep out of it, are forced to seek or to accept
public or private charity, and thus sink into the pauper class.
“It is a well-authenticated fact that strong men, now weakened by
poverty, will avoid it to the last before they will take this step. Many
after first parting with every thing they have, break down and cry like
babes when the final moment comes, and they can avoid it no longer.
Numbers at this time take their own lives rather than pass through the
ordeal, and still larger numbers desert their families for whom they
have struggled so valiantly—it is almost invariably the woman who makes
her way to the charity agencies. The public and private charities cost
the country during the past year as nearly as can be _conservatively_
arrived at, over two hundred million dollars.
“Moreover, a strange law seems to work with an accuracy that seems
almost marvellous. It is this. Notwithstanding the brave and almost
superhuman struggles that are gone through with, on the part of these,
before they can take themselves to the public or private charity for
aid, when the step is once taken, they gradually sink into the condition
where all initiative and all sense of self-reliance seems to be stifled
or lost, and it is only in a rare case now and then that they ever cease
to be dependent, but remain content with the alms that are doled out to
them—practically never do they rise out of that condition again. Talk
with practically any charity agent or worker, one with a sufficiently
extended experience, and you will find that there is scarcely more than
one type of testimony concerning this. And as this condition gradually
becomes chronic, and endeavour and initiative and self-respect are lost,
a certain proportion then sink into the condition of the criminal, the
diseased, the chronically drunk, the inebriate, from which reclamation
is still more difficult.”
The fullest and most authoritative treatise upon conditions in America
is of course Mr. Robert Hunter’s “Poverty.” Mr. Hunter is a settlement
worker, and he has gathered his material in the midst of the conditions
of which he writes. He quotes, for instance, the following definite
facts, which are obtained from official sources:
“1903: twenty per cent. of the people of Boston in distress.
“1897: nineteen per cent. of the people of New York state in distress.
“1899: eighteen per cent. of the people of New York state in distress.
“1903: fourteen per cent. of the families of Manhattan evicted.
“Every year ten per cent. (about) of those who die in Manhattan have
pauper burials.” “On the basis of these figures,” Mr. Hunter continues,
“it would seem fair to estimate that certainly not less than fourteen
per cent. of the people, in prosperous times (1903), and probably not
less than twenty per cent. in bad times (1897), are in distress. The
estimate is a conservative one, for despite all the imperfections which
may be found in the data, and there are many, any allowance for the
persons who are given aid by sources not reporting to the State Board,
or for those persons not aided by the authorities of Boston, or for
those persons who, although in great distress, are not evicted, must
counterbalance the duplications or errors which may exist in the figures
either of distress or evictions.
“These figures, furthermore, represent only the distress which manifests
itself. There is no question but that only a part of those in poverty,
in any community, apply for charity. I think anyone living in a
Settlement will support me in saying that many families who are
obviously poor—that is, underfed, underclothed, or badly housed—never
ask for aid or suffer the social disgrace of eviction. Of course, no one
could estimate the proportion of those who are evicted or of those who
ask assistance to the total number in poverty; for whatever opinion one
may have formed is based, not on actual knowledge, gained by inquiry,
but on impressions, gained through friendly intercourse. My own opinion
is that probably not over half of those in poverty ever apply for
charity, and certainly not more than that proportion are evicted from
their homes. However, I should not wish an opinion of this sort to be
used in estimating, from the figures of distress, etc., the number of
those in poverty. And yet from the facts of distress, as given, and from
opinions formed, both as a charity agent and as a Settlement worker, I
should not be at all surprised if the number of those in poverty in New
York, as well as in other large cities and industrial centres, rarely
fell below twenty-five per cent. of all the people.”
Such are the conditions in America to-day; what they would be in the
future, if present tendencies went on unchecked, the reader may learn by
going to Europe, where industrial evolution has been slower in coming to
a head, and where the people have been held down by religious
superstition and military despotism. Let him take Mr. Richard Whiteing’s
“No. 5 John Street”; or, if he has a particularly strong stomach, let
him try Jack London’s “People of the Abyss,” or Charles Edward Russell’s
terrifying story of the poverty of India, in his “Soldiers of the Common
Good.” Here is a scene in a London park, selected, by way of example,
from the first-named book:
“We went up the narrow, gravelled walk. On the benches on either side
was arrayed a mass of miserable and diseased humanity, the sight of
which would have impelled Doré to more diabolical flights of fancy than
he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of filth and rags, of
all manner of loathsome skin-diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness,
indecency, leering monstrosities and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind
was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping
for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging
in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly nine months
old, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor
covering, nor with anyone looking after it. Next, half a dozen men
sleeping bolt upright, and leaning against one another in their sleep.
In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother’s
arms, and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated
shoe. On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags
with a knife, and another woman with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a
man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with his head in the
lap of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.
‘Those women there,’ said our guide, ‘will sell themselves for
thru’pence or tu’pence, or a loaf of stale bread.’ He said it with a
cheerful sneer.”
And then turn back to the preface: “It must not be forgotten that the
time of which I write was considered ‘good times’ in England. The
starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic
condition of misery, which is never wiped out, even in the periods of
greatest prosperity. Following the summer in question came a hard
winter. To such an extent did the suffering and positive starvation
increase that society was unable to cope with it. Great numbers of the
unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and
daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread. Mr. Justin
McCarthy, writing in the month of January, 1903, to the New York
_Independent_, briefly epitomises the situation, as follows: ‘The
workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who
are craving every night at their doors for food and shelter. All the
charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise
supplies of food for the famishing residents of the garrets and cellars
of London lanes and alleys.’”
And then consider that in the city where this was going on, the leading
newspaper (the _Times_) was printing a three-column article setting
forth the fact that competition had grown so great that it was now no
longer possible for a “gentleman” to maintain his status with a family
in London upon an income of half a million dollars a year!
Yet if one wishes for social contrasts, there is really no need of
crossing the ocean. Mr. Schwab’s nine million dollar palace in New York
will answer the purpose; or so will the St. Regis Hotel. The swinging
doors of the St. Regis, so the visitor is informed, cost ten thousand
dollars apiece; the panelling of the smoking-room cost forty-five
thousand dollars, and the carriage-entrance rain-shed cost eighty-five
thousand dollars. The walls of it are covered with a silk brocade, which
cost twenty dollars a yard, and the ceiling is gilded with material
costing one dollar an ounce. It cost a hundred thousand dollars to fit
up the office, and four million dollars to build the whole structure. A
two-room apartment in it, without meals, is valued at nine thousand six
hundred dollars a year; and for your meals you may try—say, “milk-fed
chicken” at two dollars for each tiny portion.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee_
]
[Illustration:
_From Stereograph, Copyrighted 1906, by Underwood & Underwood_
THE SOCIAL CONTRAST IN NEW YORK
]
Perhaps this seems monstrous; but it really is not—it is a perfectly
inevitable consequence of industrial competition, and of the “constantly
increasing mass of capital.” Mr. John Jacob Astor, who owns the hotel,
has an income of more than its value every year, and he is in desperate
straits to find any way of investing it by which he can make profits.
There are seven thousand millionaires in this country, who want the
best, the only best they know being what costs the most; and so he knew
that if he built a hotel exceeding in cost any other hotel in the world,
that hotel would pay him profits. For precisely the same reason a number
of buildings are now being torn down in Brooklyn to make room for a
graveyard for wealthy people’s pet dogs.
The founder of the Astor fortune came to New York a century ago and
bought land while it was cheap. Millions of men have since contributed
their labour to the building up of New York; and no one of them did
anything without adding to the wealth of the Astors—who merely sat by
and watched. Now the property of the family is estimated to be worth
four hundred and fifty millions of dollars, according to Mr. Burton J.
Hendricks’s recent account of it in _McClure’s Magazine_. It includes
half a dozen hotels like the St. Regis; it includes also innumerable
slum-tenements with “dark rooms.” Its value grows by leaps and
bounds—one corner lot on Fifth Avenue “made” them seven hundred thousand
dollars in two years. To Mr. William Waldorf Astor alone the harried and
overdriven population of Manhattan Island delivers eight or ten millions
of tribute money every year; and Mr. William Waldorf Astor resides at
Clieveden, Taplow, Bucks, England—giving as his reason the fact that
“America it not a fit place for a gentleman to live in.”
The fundamental characteristic of the régime under which we live is that
it values a man only in so far as he is capable of producing wealth.
Hence one of the signs of the increasing difficulty of making profits
will be an increasing recklessness of human life. Our railroads killed
six thousand people in 1895, seven thousand in 1899, eight thousand in
1902, nine thousand in 1903, and ten thousand in 1904; they injured
thirty-three thousand in 1895, forty-four thousand in 1899, sixty-four
thousand in 1902, seventy-six thousand in 1903, and eighty-four thousand
in 1904. According to the statistics of the Interstate Commerce
Commission, our railways injured one passenger out of every one hundred
and eighty-three thousand passengers they carried in 1894; in 1904 they
injured one out of every seventy-eight thousand. If casualties are to
continue increasing at the same rate until 1912, there are one hundred
thousand people under sentence of sudden death, and a number doomed to
be maimed greater than the entire population of the District of
Columbia, Delaware, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and
the Hawaiian Islands.
In 1890, before the present appalling slaughter began, we were killing,
of a given number of employees, twice as many as the State-owned roads
of Germany, and three times as many as Austria. The street railroads of
New York City alone take one human life every day, or one in ten
thousand of the population every year. People walk about the streets
carelessly, but tremble when there is a thunderstorm; yet the
street-cars kill ten persons in a year for every one that the lightning
kills in the lifetime of a man!
These things create indignation in our pulpits and editorial rooms; but
any practical railroad man could tell you that to stop them would be to
overthrow society. The reason they occur is that it costs less to pay
the damages than it would to take proper precautions, and if the
railroads were forced to take the precautions, many of them would have
to shut down at once. The situation is covered so completely in the
following news item, clipped from the Minneapolis _Journal_ of May 26,
1904, that I cannot do better than to quote it entire:
“Because James J. Hill guaranteed eight per cent. to the stockholders of
the Burlington when he assumed control of that system, many of the older
employees are undergoing what they consider real hardship. Ten days ago
the _Journal_ voiced the complaints of Burlington employees on other
parts of the system, mentioning the fact that the runs to and from the
Twin Cities had been combined in some way, to squeeze more work out of
the train crews. The new schedule has now been in effect longer and
complaints are correspondingly more emphatic. No dissatisfaction is
openly expressed, as the Hill guillotine gets nobody more surely than
the man who talks too much.
“Trainmen complain that with the long runs and long hours they are
forced to work to a point almost beyond human endurance. They are
haunted by the fear of accidents from unpreventable neglect of duty.
They hold that the running of trains in safety depends upon the
vigilance and alertness of the crews and they cannot do themselves and
their employers justice, when compelled to work long hours on fast runs.
“Crews are now running from Minneapolis to Chicago, a distance of about
430 miles, with seventy-two stops. The men start from Minneapolis at
7:30 A. M., and arrive, on locals, in Chicago at 9:35 P. M. The men
leaving Chicago on No. 50 at 10:50 P. M. arrive in Minneapolis at 1:20
P. M. the next afternoon.
“Trainmen declare that in making this schedule the management has broken
faith and virtually abrogates previous working agreements. Hints of a
strike are made. In discussing the conditions an old Burlington employee
said:
“‘A conductor and his crew feel a sense of responsibility for the lives
of those upon a train. A man can only be worked so far when he becomes
actually irresponsible. I hate to feel that I am in any way responsible
for the lives of passengers on a train when the length of the run and
hours have worked me beyond my limit. There is no flagman on the train,
and the brake-man has to help load baggage, brake, flag, and do anything
that comes up. He is certainly not in good condition to be an alert
flagman on the latter end of the run.’”[4]
Footnote 4:
“In the matter of rigging the stock-market the American railroad
manager has no superior. In the matter of providing safe and
expeditious facilities for transportation he has no inferior in any
nation of the first rank. He can manipulate political conventions. He
can debauch legislatures. He can send his paid attorneys to Congress
and sometimes put them on the bench. In these matters he is a master,
just as he is a master in the art of issuing and juggling securities.
It is only in the operation of railroads that he is deficient. The
mere detail of transporting lives and property safely and
satisfactorily he seems to regard as unworthy of his genius. His
equipment is usually inadequate. His road-bed is generally second
class or worse. His employees are undisciplined and his system is
archaic. Whatever the causes may be, the fact remains that, judged by
the results of operation, the American railroad manager is
incompetent, and the records of death and disaster prove it.”—_New
York World._
In the same way it is cheaper for a theatre-manager to bribe police
officials with free tickets than to comply with the regulations of the
Fire Department; and so it is that five or six hundred people are burned
up in five minutes. It is easier to bribe a building inspector than it
is to put steel rivets in a building, and so you have a Darlington Hotel
collapse, and kill ten or twenty workingmen. And a few weeks later came
the _Slocum_ disaster, and a helpless steamboat captain was punished,
and the responsible capitalists not even named. At the same time, in
Trenton, New Jersey, some other capitalists were arrested for making
life-preservers with iron bars in them. Of course they were not
punished, for everyone understands that such things cannot be helped. In
1893 the number of miners killed in the United States and Canada was two
and fifty-three hundredths per thousand; in 1902 it was three and
fifty-one hundredths. Better precautions against accidents were one of
the demands for making which the miners of Colorado were strung up to
telegraph poles, shut in bull-pens, beaten and “deported.” Their
mortality was thirty-two per thousand in ten years; the mortality among
railroad brake-men is now thirty-two per thousand in _two_ years, so it
was very unreasonable of the miners to complain.
There are annually, says _Social Service_, 344,900 accidents among the
7,086,000 people engaged in this country in manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits. It calculates that if the percentage of accidents among the
other 23,000,000 employed in other occupations is only one-tenth as much
as the above, it means that another 100,000 must be added to the list.
“This is perpetual war on humanity,” the paper goes on to say, “and more
bloody than any civil or international war known to history. This war is
costing suffering, physical and mental, which is beyond calculation. It
is costing great economic loss. It is creating a sense of wrong and a
feeling of class-hatred on the part of those who are its victims.”
In the same category of waste of human life belong all the facts of
over-driving, long hours, and irregular employment among workingmen.
Under the old Southern system of slavery the master took care of his
servant the year round; but the wage-slave is kept only while he is
needed, and only while he remains at his maximum of working efficiency.
Recently in a single month, I clipped from a New York newspaper, items
to the effect that the Brooklyn street-railroad combine was discharging
all of its superannuated employees; that the master-pilots of the Great
Lakes had agreed to engage no man over forty; that the Delaware and
Hudson Railroad Company had just published a rule barring all over
thirty-five; and that the Carnegie Steel Company had done the same.
And in this same category of waste of human life belong all the facts of
woman and child-labour. For of course the children die; and the women
produce deformed and idiot and degenerate offspring, to fill our asylums
and prisons. The reader is referred, for first-hand accounts of the life
of the American woman wage-slave, to Van Vorst’s “The Woman who Toils,”
and to that fascinating human document, “The Long Day.” In Mr. John
Spargo’s “The Bitter Cry of the Children,” he will find a mass of facts
about child-labour, the most hideous of all the evils incidental to the
process of wealth-concentration.
There is, if one had only time to point it out, no tiniest nook of our
society where human lives are not being ground up for profit; the
capitalists are ground up, as Mr. Schwab was, and the meanest woman of
the town shares his fate. There was a time when a prostitute was an
independent person, who could support herself until she grew old;
nowadays, under the stress of competition, every city has its
prostitution trust. It takes capital to pay the police, and the business
is therefore in the hands of the proprietors of houses, who buy young
girls out of the slums and immigrant population by thousands and tens of
thousands, use them up in a year or two, and then fling them out into
the gutters to die, often when they are not out of their teens. In the
same way the gambler and the saloon-keeper are now as much employees as
are the officials of the Standard Oil Company: the whole profits of
these occupations flowing into the hands of some “captain of industry”
as inevitably as all the rills on the mountain-side flow into the river.
All of these facts are perfectly familiar, but for the sake of
concreteness, I will quote a paragraph from Mr. Steffens’s book, “The
Shame of the Cities.” He is telling of the city of Pittsburg:
“The vice-graft ... is a legitimate business, conducted, not by the
police, but in an orderly fashion by syndicates, and the chairman of one
of the parties at the last election, said it was worth two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a year. I saw a man who was laughed at for
offering seventeen thousand five hundred dollars for the slot-machine
concession; he was told that it was let for much more. ‘Speakeasies’
(unlicensed drinking places) pay so well that when they earn five
hundred dollars or more in twenty-four hours their proprietors often
make a bare living. Disorderly houses are managed by ward syndicates.
Permission is had from the syndicate real-estate agent, who alone can
rent them. The syndicate hires a house from the owners at, say,
thirty-five dollars a month, and he lets it to a woman at from
thirty-five to fifty dollars a week. For furniture, the tenant must go
to the ‘official furniture-man,’ who delivers one thousand dollars worth
of ‘fixings’ for a note for three thousand dollars, on which high
interest must be paid. For beer the tenant must go to the ‘official
bottler,’ and pay two dollars for a one-dollar case of beer; for wines
and liquors to the ‘official liquor-commissioner,’ who charges ten
dollars for five dollars’ worth; for clothes to the ‘official
wrapper-maker.’ These women may not buy shoes, hats, jewellery, or any
other luxury or necessity except from the official concessionaries, and
then only at the official, monopoly prices.”
And by way of conclusion, in reference to this particular aspect of the
consequences of the “increasing mass of capital,” let me quote the
following little incident, which a friend of mine clipped from one of
the New York newspapers:
“One night a young girl called at the entrance to the House of the Good
Shepherd in New York City; she asked for food and a place to sleep.
’Twas a pitiful tale she told the matron in charge. She told of her
parents having died and left her alone in the great dark city; she told
of jobs she had secured but was discharged owing to her physical
inability to keep pace with the machine, and as a last resort she
appealed to this institution for succour and support. The matron in
attendance, after having heard this terrible tale of woe and being
thoroughly convinced as to the girl’s honesty and integrity, as well as
to her virtue, informed her that she could not take her in there, as
that institution was established for the reclamation of fallen women
only. The poor girl went away, but on the following night she
returned.... ‘You may take me now,’ she said, ‘you may take me now, for
I am a fallen woman!’”