organizations have proven futile. The swelling tide of the labor
movement could not be stopped. The social and economic problem brought
to light by modern industry demanded a hearing, produced various
theories and an extensive literature on the subject--a literature that
spoke with a tongue of fire of the awful existence of the oppressed
millions, their trials, their tribulations, the uncertainty, the dangers
surrounding them; it spoke of the terrible results of their conditions,
of the lives crippled, of the hopes marred; a literature that demanded
to know why it is that those who toil are condemned to want and poverty,
while those who never produced were living in affluence and
extravagance.
Well-meaning people have even attempted to prove that Capital and Labor
are twins, and that in order to maintain their common interests they
ought to live in harmony; or, that if Sister Labor had a grievance
against its big brother it ought to be settled in a calm and peaceful
way. Meanwhile the dear sister was fleeced and bled by Brother Capital,
and every time the abused and slaved and outraged creature would turn to
her brother for justice the dear fellow would whip the rebellious child
into submission.
Along with the forcible subjection of organized labor, the minds of the
people were confused and blurred by the sugar-coated promises of
politicians who assured them that the trade unions ought to be organized
by the law, and that all labor quarrels ought to be settled by political
and legal means. Indeed, legislatures even discussed a few
labor-protective laws that either never saw the light of day, or, if
really enacted, were set aside or overridden by the possessing class as
an obstacle to profit-making.
Every government, no matter what political basis it rests upon, acts in
unison with wealth, and therefore it never passed any legislation in
behalf of the producing element of the country that would seriously
benefit the great bulk of the people or in any way aim at any change of
wage-slaving or economic subjugation.
Every step of improvement the workingmen have made is due solely to
their own economic efforts and not to any legal or political aid ever
given them, and through their own endeavors only can ever come the
reconstruction of the economic and social conditions of society. Just as
little as the workingmen can expect from legislative methods can they
gain from trade-unionistic efforts that attempt to better economic
conditions along the basic lines of the present industrial system.
The cardinal fault of the trade-union movement of this country lies in
the fact that its hopes and ideals rest upon the present social status;
these ideals ever rotate in the same circle and, therefore, cannot bear
intellectual and material fruit. Condemned to pasture in the lean
meadows of capitalistic economy, trade-unionism drags on a miserable
existence, satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the heavily laden
tables of their lordly masters.
True social science has amply proved the futility of a reconciliation
between the two opposing forces; the existence of the one force
representing possession, wealth and power inevitably has a paralyzing
effect upon its opposing force--Labor.
Trade-unionistic tactics of to-day unfortunately still travel the path
marked out for Labor by the powers that be, while the majority of the
labor leaders waste the time paid for by their organizations in
listening to or discussing with capitalists sweet nothings in the form
of arbitration or reconciliation, and are apparently unaware of the
fundamental difference between the body they represent and the powers
they bow to. And thus it happens that labor organizations are being
brutally attacked, that the militia and soldiers are maiming their
brothers in the various strike regions while the leaders are being dined
and wined. The American Federation of Labor is lobbying in Washington,
begging for legal protection, and in return venal Justice sends
Winchester rifles and drunken militiamen into the disturbed labor
districts. Recently the American Federation of Labor made an alleged
radical step in deciding to put up labor candidates for Congress--an old
and threadbare political move--thereby sacrificing whatever honest men
and clear heads they may have in their ranks. Such tactics are not worth
a single drop of sweat of the workingmen, since they are not only
contradictory to the basic principles of trade unionism, but even
useless and impractical.
Pity for and indignation against the workers fill one's soul at the
spectacle of the ridiculous strike methods so often employed and that as
often frustrate the possible success of every large labor war. Or is it
not laughable, if it were not so deadly serious, that the producers
publicly discuss for months in advance where and when they might strike,
and therewith give the enemy a chance to prepare his means of combat.
For months the papers of the money power bring long interviews with
labor leaders, giving detailed descriptions of the ways and means of the
proposed strikes, or the results of negotiations with this or that mine
magnate. The more often these negotiations are reported, the more glory
to the so-called leaders, for the more often their names appear in the
papers; the more "reasonable" the utterances of these gentlemen (which
means that they are neither fish nor flesh, neither warm nor cold), the
surer they grow of the sympathy of the most reactionary element in the
country or of an invitation to the White House to join the Chief
Magistrate at dinner. Labor leaders of such caliber fail to consider
that every strike is a labor event upon the success or failure of which
thousands of lives depend; rather do they see in it an opportunity to
push their own insignificant personalities into prominence. Instead of
leading their organized hosts to victory, they disclose their
superficiality in their zeal not to injure their reputation for
"respectability."
The workingmen? Be it victory or defeat, they must take up the reins of
every strike themselves; as it is, they play the dupes of the shrewd
attorneys on both sides, unaware of the price the trickery and cunning
of these men cost them.
As I said before, the unions negotiate strikes for days and weeks and
months beforehand, even allowing their men to work overtime in order to
produce all the commodities to continue business while the strike is
going on.
The printers, for instance, worked late into the night on magazines that
were being got ready four months in advance, and the miners who
discussed the strike so long until every remnant of enthusiasm was gone.
What wonder, then, that strikes fail? As long as the employer is in a
position to say, "Strike if you will; I do not need you; I can fill my
orders; I know that hunger will drive _you_ back into the mine and
factory, _I_ can wait," there is no hope for the success of the strike.
Such have been the results of the legal trade union methods.
The history of the labor struggle of this country shows an incident that
warrants the hope for an energetic, revolutionary trade union agitation.
That is the eight-hour movement of 1886 which culminated in the death of
five labor leaders. That movement contained the true element of the
proletarian and revolutionary spirit, the lack of which makes organized
labor of to-day a ball in the hands of selfish aspirants, know-nothings
and politicians.
That which specifically characterized the event of 1886 as a
revolutionary factor was the fact that the eight-hour workday could
never be accomplished through lobbying with politicians, but through the
direct and economic weapon, the general strike.
The desire to demonstrate the efficacy of this weapon gave birth to the
idea of celebrating the first of May as an appropriate day for Labor's
festival. On that day the workingmen were to give the first practical
demonstration of the power of the general strike as an at least one-day
protest against oppression and tyranny, and which day were gradually to
become the means for the final overthrow of economic and social
dependence.
One may suggest that the tragedy of the 11th of November of 1887 has
stamped the general strike as a futile method, but this is not true. The
battle of liberation cannot be put a stop to by the brutality and
rascality of the ruling powers. The vicious anger and the wild hatred
that strangled our brothers in Chicago are the safest guarantee that
their activity struck a potentially fatal blow to government and
capital.
Neither Mr. Mitchell nor Mr. Gompers run the risk of dying upon the
gallows of sacred capitalistic Justitia; her ladyship is not at all as
blind as some suppose her to be; on the contrary, she has a very keen
eye for all that may prove beneficial or dangerous to the society that
draws its subsistence from the lives' blood of its people. She has quite
made up her mind that the gentlemen in the ranks of Labor to-day lead
the people about in a circle and never will urge them out into the open,
towards liberation.
(_To be continued._)
[Illustration]
REFINED CRUELTY.
By ANNA MERCY.
CIVILIZATION has eliminated none of the qualities that marked the age of
savagery. The cruelties which especially characterized primitive man is
exercised as much to-day as in the days of cannibalism.
Civilization has been the refining agent of our qualities. Just as a
number of chemicals put into a crucible are refined by a certain acid,
while yet the original substances remain, though in different forms, so
has civilization refined and remolded the crude elements of our nature,
leaving the essence of our primitive qualities the same.
The subtlety with which cruelty is exercised to-day makes of it a
far-reaching and far more destructive force than formerly. Instead of
attacking our neighbors with sticks and stones and tomahawks, and
forcing them into captivity in order that they may work for us, we
obtain the same or even better results by numerous subtle methods. We
instill respect for law, wealth and morality. We withdraw the land and
other natural resources from general use. With a show of generous
sentiment, we allow the lambs we have shorn to assist us in the
shearing of other lambs.
Every morning and every evening we see a long procession of men and
women going or coming from the work, at which they have given up their
life force for the sake of a mere pittance. Look at these men and women!
There they go, evidently free! No shackles are on their hands or feet,
no overseer keeps them in check by club or gun. There they go
voluntarily to their prison factories, offices, stores, in the morning;
and in the evening, when the glorious sun is hidden from sight, they
come out again, haggard and worn, to creep to their prison homes.
When the savage desires to rob you, he may attempt to strangle and maim
you. But the civilized man scorns such crude methods. He builds cheap
tenements in which you may gradually and surely choke to death; and not
satisfied with that, he, with a great show of kindness, prepares your
foods for you, that they may slowly, very slowly, but surely, hasten
your deliverance. Babies are not frankly murdered any more, but they are
served with nice, adulterated milk, which accomplishes the same purpose
in a quieter way.
Under the name of law many atrocious crimes are committed. Imprisonment,
capital punishment and war are yet crude in their methods. They are
still susceptible of more refining. Here cruelty has rather a thin
garment on and needs to be covered up a little more.
Even in our every-day relations with each other, we use many and varied
forms of refined cruelty. When displeased, we no longer beat each other,
but we use the subtler forces of sarcasm, irony, slander, neglect. We
regard directness a rudeness, when in reality it is the greatest
kindness imaginable. Instead of being positive and direct in our
dealings with each other, we constantly exercise a passive cruelty, in
other words, the cruelty of refinement. We are evasive, delusive,
subdued, falsified. But we deceive with dignity, tell falsehoods
fluently, use words and cold behavior as daggers.
To-day we do not turn away an unwelcome visitor, but we announce that we
are not at home; or we slander him behind his back. When we love we
pretend to be modest and indifferent, while, in an indirect way, we
attempt to build walls around the person we love. There is nothing free
in the expression of our emotions, for we are subdued, crushed; we are
civilized!
Everything is sham and hypocrisy, and hidden daggers are everywhere, in
one form or another. These daggers are concealed under kindness,
charity, benevolence, morality, law, and are, therefore, difficult to
deal with. The blades are thrust into the back; you can feel them, but
you cannot grapple with them.
Our inherent cruelty is best illustrated in the treatment we give those
who are absolutely in our power--little children and the dumb animals.
With what authority do we elicit respect and obedience from our little
people! With rod in hand and with venomous tongues we begin the process
of subjugating and civilizing our little free, emotional people. In the
name of "their highest good" do we mould them to be actors, that they
may properly enact the tragedy of life as we had enacted it before them!
The dumb animals receive the cream of our refined cruelty. In order to
appear civilized, we drive in carriages pulled by horses whose spinal
columns have been docked, whose necks are held stiff by tight check
reins, whose eyes are blinded by "fashionable" devices.
There used to be cannibalism and human sacrifices; there used to be
religious prostitution and the murder of weak children and of girls;
there used to be bloody revenge and the slaughter of whole populations,
judicial tortures, quarterings, burnings at the stake, the lash, and
slavery, which have disappeared. But if we have outlived these dreadful
customs and institutions, this does not prove that there do not exist
institutions and customs amongst us which have become as abhorrent to
enlightened reason and conscience as those which have in their time been
abolished and have become for us only a dreadful remembrance. The way of
human perfecting is endless, and at every moment of historical life
there are superstitions, deceits, pernicious and evil institutions
already outlived by men and belonging to the past; there are others
which appear to us in the far mists of the future; and there are some
which we are now living through and whose over-living forms the object
of our life. Such in our time is capital punishment and all punishment
in general. Such is prostitution, such is the work of militarism, war,
and such is the nearest and most obvious evil, private property in land.
[Illustration]
"THE JUNGLE."
A Recension by VERITAS.
"THE JUNGLE," a recent story by Upton Sinclair, is a nightmare of
horrors, of which the worst horror is that it is not a phantom of the
night, but claims to be true history of one phase of our
twentieth-century civilization. Nothing but the book itself could
represent its own tragic power. In my opinion it is the most terrible
book ever written.
It is for the most part a tale of the abattoirs, those unspeakable
survivals in our Christendom in which man reeks his savage and sensual
will on the lesser animals; and indirectly it is a story of the moral
abattoirs of politics, economics, society, religion and the home, where
the victims are of the species human, and where man's inhumanity to man
is as selfish and relentless as his age-long cruelty to his brothers and
sisters just behind him in the great procession.
Possibly the title is inappropriate. There is a "law of the pack," which
is observed in the genuine jungle, but these human beasts appear to have
all of the jungle's vices and few of its virtues. The author might have
called his history, "The Slaughter House," or, perhaps, plain "Hell."
It is a common saying about a packing house, "We use all of the hog
except the squeal." This author uses the squeal, or, rather, the wild
death shrieks of agony of the ten millions of living creatures tortured
to death every year in Chicago and the other tens of millions elsewhere,
to pander to the old brutal, inhuman thirst of humanity for a diet of
blood. The billions of the slain have found a voice at last, and if I
mistake not this cry of anguish from the "killing-beds" shall not sound
on until men, whose ancestors once were cannibals, shall cease to devour
even the corpses of their murdered animal relatives. But while "The
Jungle" will undoubtedly make more vegetarians, it would take more than
the practice of universal vegetarianism to cause the book to fulfil its
mission; for this is a story of Civilization's Inferno and of the crisis
of the world, a recital of conditions for which, when once comprehended,
there can be no remedy but the revolution of revolutions, the event
toward which the ages ran, the establishment of a genuine political,
industrial and social democracy.[2]
If the story be dramatized and Mrs. Fiske take the part of Ona, her
presentation will make Tess seem like a pastoral idyll in comparison.
The book is great even from a political standpoint.
But more than this, it is a great moral appeal. Not in Victor Hugo or
Charles Dickens does the moral passion burn with purer or intenser light
than in these pages.
I should not advise children or very delicately constituted women to
read it.
I have said it is a book of horrors. I started to mark the passages of
peculiar tragedy and found that I was marking every page, and yet it is
a justifiable book and a necessary book.
The author tells as facts the story of "diseased meat," and worse, the
preparation in the night time of the bodies of the cattle which have
died from known and unknown causes before reaching the slaughter pens,
and the distribution of the effects, with the rest of the intentional
killing of the day; he describes the preparation of "embalmed beef" from
cattle covered with boils; he even narrates the story of "men who fell
into the vats," and "sometimes they would be overlooked for days till
all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure
Leaf Lard"; he writes of the making of smoked sausage out of waste
potatoes by the use of chemicals and out of spoiled meat as well; and he
further speaks of rats which were "nuisances, and the packers would put
poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread and
meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no
joke; the meat would be shovelled into carts and the man who did the
shovelling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw
one--there were things which went into the sausage in comparison with
which a poisoned rat was a tidbit."
But the worst of the story is a tale of the condition of the workers at
Packingtown and elsewhere. It is the story of strong men who justly
hated their work; of men, for no fault of their own, cast out in middle
life to die; of weeping children driven with whips to their ignoble
toil; of disease-producing conditions in winter, only surpassed by the
deadly summer; of people working with their feet upon the ice and their
heads enveloped in hot steam; of the perpetual stench which infests
their nostrils, the sores which universally covered their bodies; of the
terrible pace set by the continual "speeding up" of the pace makers,
goaded to a pitch of frenzy; of accidents commonplace in every family;
of the garbage pile of refuse from the tables of more fortunate
citizens, from which many were forced to satisfy their hunger; of the
terrors of the black list, the shut-down, the strike and the lockout;
and of the universal swindle, whether a man bought a house, or doctored
tea, coffee, sugar or flour.
It is still further a story of the moral enormities and monstrosities of
the almost universal graft, "the plants honeycombed with rottenness. The
bosses grafted off the men and they grafted off each other, and some day
the superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would
graft off the boss."
When the men were set to perform some peculiarly immoral act, they would
say, "Now we are working for the church," referring to the benefactions
of the proprietors to religious institutions.
It tells the story of the training of the children in vice, of girls
forced into immorality, so that a girl without virtue would stand a
better chance than a decent one. It is a tale of the terrible ending of
old Antanas by saltpeter poisoning; of Jonas, no one knows how, possibly
he fell into the vats; of little Kristoforas by convulsions; of little
Antanas by falling into a pit before the door of his house; of Marija,
in a house of shame; of Stanislovas, who was eaten by rats; and of
beautiful little Ona, to the description of whose ending no other than
the author's pen could do justice.
The book shows how men graft everywhere, not only in the packing house,
but how the slime of the serpent is over almost all of our modern
commercial and political practises.
No one can justly hold the meat kings responsible for all of this.
Nothing less than a thorough reconstruction of our whole social organism
will suffice. Palliative philanthropy is, as the author says, "like
standing upon the brink of the pit of hell and throwing snow balls in to
lower the temperature."
"The Jungle" is the boiling over of our social volcano and shows us what
is in it. It is a danger signal!
We are all indicted and must stand our trial. There rests upon us the
obligation to ascertain the facts. The author of "The Jungle" lived in
Packingtown for months, and the eminently respectable publishers who are
now issuing the book sent a shrewd lawyer to Chicago to report as to
whether the statements in it were exaggerated, and his report confirmed
the assertions of the author.
This book is a call to immediate action.
The Lithuanian hero found his solution of the problems suggested in
Socialism. The solution lies either in that direction or in something
better, and it behooves those who warn us against Socialistic
experiments to tell us if they know of any other effective remedy.
Surely all thoughtful men should study these theories of social
redemption and learn why their advocates claim that putting them in
practice would modify or abolish the evils of our modern conditions.
"The masters, lords and rulers of all lands," the thinkers and workers
of our time must speedily give themselves to the understanding and
application of some adequate remedy, or there will be blood, woe and
tears almost without end, "when this dumb terror shall reply to God,
after the silence of the centuries."
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Genuine or not genuine: we live right now in a democracy. If, in
spite of that, such diabolical crimes as Sinclair describes them are
committed daily, then this only proves that democracy is no panacea for
them. Why should it, if criminals of the Armour kind realize profits out
of their wholesale poisoning of such dimensions that they can easily buy
all the glory of the people's sovereignty.--Editor.
THE GAME IS UP.
By SADAKICHI HARTMANN.
"HELLO, Morrison, may I come in?" The door stood slightly ajar.
Morrison came to the door--the complexion of his face was sallow and his
eyes had a peculiar look--he recognized his visitor, hesitated for a
moment whether he should admit him, then opened the door and made a sort
of mock courtesy.
"Cleaning up?" the tall, lean man asked as he entered the little hall
room.
"Yes," and a wistful smile glided over Morrison's pale face; "cleaning
up for good."
The room had a peculiar appearance. There was no disorder and yet a lot
of things were lying about; it looked as if the lodger intended to go
away on a long journey and had tried to straighten up matters previous
to his departure. The visitor gazed curiously about the room. He had a
strange foreboding, but forced himself to ask in a jocular mood: "Going
to Egypt again?"
"Farther than that this time, but it won't take so long; the journey I
am contemplating will be over by to-morrow evening, I hope."