_Civilization Degrades the Masses_
There are men in all parts of the world, whose names have become
synonyms of learning and genius, who proclaim it from the housetops
that civilization is in a constant state of evolution to a higher,
purer, nobler, happier condition of the people, the great mass of
mankind, who properly make up society, and who have been styled, in
derision, the "_mudsills_ of society." So they are, society rests upon
them; society must build upon them; without them society cannot be,
because they are, in the broadest sense, society itself,--not only the
"mudsills" but the _superstructure_ as well. They not only constitute
the great producing class but the great consuming class as well. They
are the bone and sinew of society.
It is therefore of the utmost importance to know the condition of the
people; it is not only important to know exactly what that condition
is, but it is of the very first importance to the well-being of
society that there should be absolutely nothing in that condition to
arouse the apprehension of the sharks who live upon the carcass of the
people, or of the people who permit the sharks to so live. There is
nothing more absolutely certain than that the people--who submit to be
robbed through the intricate and multifarious processes devised by the
cupidity of individuals and of governments--when aroused to a full
sense of the wrongs inflicted upon them, will strike down their
oppressors in a rage of desperation born of despair.
Modern tyrannies are far more insidious than the military despotisms
of the past. These modern engines which crush society destroy the
energy and vitality of the people by the slow process of starvation,
sanctioned by the law, and in a majority of instances, are patiently
borne by the victims. It is only when human nature can endure no more
that protests are first heard; then armed resistance; then anarchy.
Thus it was with the French of the eighteenth century. Thus it is with
the Russian, the German, the English, the Irish peoples of to-day. The
heel of the tyrant is studded with too many steel nails to be borne
without excruciating pain and without earnest protest.
If in their desperate conflict with the serpent that has coiled its
slimy length about the body of the people the latter resort to
dynamite, and seek by savage warfare to right their wrongs, they are
to be condemned and controlled, for they confound the innocent with
the guilty and work ruin rather than reform. Yet there is another side
to be considered, for when injustice wraps itself in the robes of
virtue and of law, and calls in the assistance of armies and all the
destructive machinery of modern warfare to enforce its right to
enslave and starve mankind, what counter warfare can be too savage,
too destructive in its operations, to compel attention to the wrong?
The difficulty is that vengeance should discriminate, but that is a
refinement which blind rage can hardly compass.
I believe in law and order; but I believe, as a condition precedent,
that law and order should be predicated upon right and justice, pure
and simple. Law is, intrinsically, a written expression of justice;
if, on the contrary, it becomes instead written _injustice_, men are
not, strictly speaking, bound to yield it obedience. There is no law,
on the statute books of any nation of the world, which bears unjustly
upon the people, which should be permitted to stand one hour. It is
through the operations of law that mankind is ground to powder; it is
by the prostitution of the rights of the masses, by men who pretend to
be their representatives and are not, that misery, starvation and
death fill the largest space in the news channels of every land.
In New York City--where the intelligence, the enterprise, the wealth
and the christianized humanity of the New World are supposed to have
their highest exemplification--men, women and children die by the
thousands, starved and frozen out of the world! Thousands die yearly
in the city of New York from the effects of exposure and insufficient
nutriment. The world, into which they had come unbidden, and the
fruits of which a just God had declared they should enjoy as reward of
the sweat of their brows, had refused them even a bare subsistance;
and, this, when millions of food rot in the storehouses without
purchasers! The harpies of trade prefer that their substance should
resolve itself into the dirt and weed from which it sprung, rather
than the poor and needy should eat of it and live.
I have walked through the tenement wards of New York, and I have seen
enough want and crime and blasted virtue to condemn the civilization
which produced them and which fosters them in its bosom.
I have looked upon the vast army of police which New York City
maintains to protect life and so-called "vested rights," and I have
concluded that there is something wrong in the social system which can
only be kept intact by the expenditure of so much productive force,
for this vast army, which stands on the street corners and lurks in
the alley ways, "spotting," suspicious persons, "keeping an eye" on
strangers who look "smart," this vast army contributes nothing to the
production of wealth. It is, essentially, a parasite. And yet,
without this army of idlers, life would be in constant danger and
property would fall prey not only to the vicious and the desperate,
but to the hungry men and women who have neither a place to shelter
them from the storms of heaven, nor food to sustain nature's cravings
from finding an eternal resting place in the Potter's Field. And, even
after every precaution which selfishness can devise, courts of law and
police officers are powerless to stay the hand of the pariahs whom
society has outlawed--the men and women who are doomed to starve to
death and be buried at the expense of society. The streets of every
city in the Union are full of people who have been made desperate by
social adjustments which prophets laud to the skies and which
philosophers commend as "ideal," as far as they go.
One-half the producing power of the United States is to-day absolutely
dependent upon the cold charity of the world; one fourth does not make
sufficient to live beyond the day, while the other one-fourth only
manages to live comfortably at the expense of the most parsimonious
economy.
It is becoming a mooted question whether labor-saving machinery has
not supplanted muscle-power in the production of every article to such
a marvelous extent as to make thoughtful men tremble for the future of
those who can only hope to live upon the produce of their labors. The
machine has taken the place, largely, of man in the production of
articles of consumption, of wear and of ornamentation; but no machine
has, as yet, been invented to take the place of human wants. The
markets of the world are actually glutted with articles produced by
machine labor, but there are no purchasers with the means to buy, to
consume the additional production caused by machinery and the
consequent cheapening of processes of producing the articles of
consumption, ornamentation, etc. When men have work they have money;
and when men have money they spend it. Hence, when the toilers of a
land have steady employment trade is brisk; when business stagnation
forces them into idleness vice and crime afflict the country.
What avail the tireless labor of the machine and the mountains of
material it places upon the market, if there are no purchasers? One
man at a machine will do as much work in a factory to-day as required
the work of fifty men fifty years ago; but the enhanced volume of
production can have only one purchaser now where there was once fifty,
hence the fitful existence of the one and the desperate struggle for
existence of the forty-nine.[15] As iron and steel cannot compete with
muscle and brain in the volume of production, so iron and steel cannot
compete with muscle and brain in consumption. And, without
consumption, what does production amount to? What does it avail us
that our stores and granaries are overstocked, if the people are
unable to buy? The thing is reduced to a cruel mockery when stores and
granaries are over-gorged, while people clamor in vain for clothing
and food, and drop dead within reach of these prime elements of warmth
and sustentation.
What does it avail us if the balance of trade be in our favor by one,
or two, or three hundred millions of dollars, if this result be
obtained by the degradation and death of our own people? More; not
only at the expense of the well being of our own people, but of the
people of those countries in whose markets we are enabled to undersell
them, by reason of the more systematic pauperization of our own
producing classes.
Competition, it is declared, is the life of trade; if this be true, it
is truer that it is the death of labor, of the poorer classes. For
Great Britain has established herself in the markets of the world at
the expense of her laboring classes. While the capitalists of that
country hold up their heads among the proudest people of the world,
her laboring classes are absolutely ground to powder. Because of the
inhuman competition which her manufacturers have been led to adopt,
and the introduction of improved labor-saving machinery, her balance
of trade runs far into the millions of pounds, and political
economists place their hands upon their hearts and declare that Great
Britain is the most happy and prosperous country on the face of the
globe. But the declaration is illusory in the extreme. No country can
be happy and prosperous whose "mudsills" live in squalor, want,
misery, vice and death. If Great Britain is happy and prosperous, how
shall we account for the constant strikes of labor organizations for
higher pay or as a protest against further reduction of wages below
which man cannot live and produce? The balance of trade desire is the
curse of the people of the world. It can be obtained only by
underbidding other people in their own markets; and this can be done
only by the maximum of production at the minimum of cost--by forcing
as much labor out of the man or the machine as possible at the least
possible expense.
There is death in the theory; death to our own people and death to the
people with whom we compete. When a people no longer produce those
articles which are absolutely necessary to sustain life the days of
such people may be easily calculated.
Men talk daily of "over production," of "glutted markets," and the
like; but such is not a true statement of the case. There can be no
over production of anything as long as there are hungry mouths to be
fed. It does not matter if the possessors of these hungry mouths are
too poor to buy the bread; if they are hungry, there is no
overproduction. With a balance of $150,000,000 of trade; with
plethoric granaries and elevators all over the land; with millions of
swine, sheep and cattle on a thousand hills; with millions of surplus
revenue in the vaults of the National treasury, diverted from the
regular channels of trade by an ignorant set of legislators who have
not gumption enough to reduce unnecessary and burdensome taxation
without upsetting the industries of the country--with all its
grandiloquent exhibition of happiness and prosperity, the laboring
classes of the country starve to death, or eke out an existence still
more horrible.
The factories of the land run on half time, and the men, women and
children who operate them grow pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from
insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud
of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding
pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to
satisfy the exactions of the landlord--a monstrosity in the midst of
civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our
pretensions to civilization.
Yet, "competition" is the cry of the hour. Millionaires compete with
each other in the management of vast railroads and water routes,
reducing labor to the verge of subsistence while exacting mints of
money as tolls for transportation from the toilers of the soil and the
consumers who live by their labor in other industrial enterprises; the
manufacturers join in the competition, selling goods at the least
possible profit to themselves and the least possible profit to those
who labor for them; and, when no market can be found at home, boldly
enter foreign markets and successfully compete with manufacturers who
employ what our writers are pleased to style "pauper" labor. Every
branch of industry is in the field _competing_, and the competition is
ruining every branch of industry. The constant effort to obtain the
maximum of production at the minimum of cost operates injuriously upon
employer and employee alike; while the shrinkage in money circulation,
caused by the competition, reduces, in every branch of industry, the
wages of those who are the great consumers as well as producers; it
produces those "hard times" which bear so hardly upon the poor in
every walk of life. Even the laboring man has entered the race, and
now competes in the labor market with his fellow for an opportunity to
make a crust of bread to feed his wife and child. When things reach
this stage, when the man who is working for one dollar and a half per
day is underbid by a man who will work for a dollar and a quarter,
then the condition of the great wealth producing and consuming class
is desperate indeed. And so it is.
Frederick Douglass, the great Negro commoner, speaking at Washington,
April 16, 1883, on the "Twenty-first Anniversary of Emancipation in
the District of Columbia," said:
Events are transpiring all around us that enforce respect of
the oppressed classes. In one form or another, by one means
or another, the ideas of a common humanity against
privileged classes, of common rights against special
privileges, are now rocking the world. Explosives are heard
that rival the earthquake. They are causing despots to
tremble, class rule to quail, thrones to shake and
oppressive associated wealth to turn pale. It is for America
to be wise in time.
And the black philosopher, who had by manly courage and matchless
eloquence braved the mob law of the North and the organized brigandage
and robbery of the South in the dark days of the past, days that tried
men's souls, standing in the sunlight of rejuvenated manhood, still
was the oracle of the oppressed in the sentiments above quoted.
All over the land the voice of the masses is heard. Organizations in
their interests are multiplying like sands on the seashore. The
fierce, hoarse mutter of the starved and starving gives unmistakable
warning that America has entered upon that fierce conflict of
money-power and muscle-power which now shake to their very centers the
hoary-headed commonwealths of the old world. In _John Swintons Paper_
of a recent date I find the following editorial arraignment of the
present state of "Labor and Capital:"
The cries of the people against the oppressions of capital
and monopoly are heard all over the land; but the capitalist
and monopolist give them no heed, and go on their way more
relentlessly than ever. Congress is fully aware of the
condition of things; but you cannot get any bill through
there for the relief of the people. The coal lords of
Pennsylvania know how abject are the tens of thousands of
blackamoors of their mines; but they grind them without
mercy, and cut their days' wages again whenever they squeal.
Jay Gould knows of the wide-spread ruin he has wrought in
piling up his hundred millions; but he drives along faster
than ever in his routine of plunder. The factory Christians
of Fall River see their thousands of poor spinners
struggling for the bread of life amid the whirl of
machinery: but they order reduction after reduction in the
rate of wages, though the veins of the corporations are
swollen to congestion. The "Big Four" of Chicago, who corner
grain and provisions, and the capitalists here and elsewhere
who do the same thing, know well how the farmers suffer and
the tables of the poor are ravaged by their operations; but
they prosecute their work more extensively and recklessly
than ever. The railroad and telegraph corporations know
that, in putting on "all that the traffic will bear," they
are taking from this country more than the people can stand;
yet their only answer is that of the horseleech....
Our lawmakers know how the people are wronged through
legislation in the interest of privilege and plunder; but
they add statute to statute in that same interest. They know
how advantageous to the producers would be the few measures
asked in their name; yet they persistently refuse to adopt
them. The great employers of labor, the cormorants of
competition, know through what hideous injustice they enrich
themselves; but speak to them of fair play, and they flout
you from their presence. The wealthy corporations owning
these street car lines in New York see that their drivers
and conductors are kept on the rack from sixteen to eighteen
hours every day of the week, including Sundays; but when a
bill is brought into the State Legislature to limit the
daily working hours to twelve, they order their hired agents
of the lobby to defeat it. These gamblers of Wall street
know that their gains are mainly through fraud; yet
forever, fast and furious, do they play with loaded dice.
The landlords of these tenement quarters know by the
mortality statistics how broad is the swathe that death cuts
among their victims; but they add dollar to dollar as coffin
after coffin is carried into the street. * * *
These owners of the machinery of industry know how it bears
upon the men who keep it flying; but they are regardless of
all that, if only it fills their coffers. These owners of
palaces look upon the men by whom they are built; but think
all the time how to raise the rent of their hovels. These
great money-lenders who hold the mortgages on countless
farms know of the straits of the mortgage-bound farmers; yet
they never cease to plot for higher interest and harder
terms. The gilded priests of Mammon and hypocrisy cannot get
away from the cries of humankind; but when do you ever hear
them denouncing the guilty and responsible criminals in
their velvet-cushioned pews? Harder and harder grow the
exactions of capital. Harder and harder grows the lot of the
millions. Louder and louder grow the cries of the sufferers.
Deafer and deafer grow the ears of the millionaires. _Yet_,
if those who cry would but use their power in action,
peaceful action, they could right their wrongs, or at least
the most grievous of them, before the world completes the
solar circuit of this year.
Wm. Goodwin Moody (_Land and Labor in the United States_, p. 338),
reverting to the difficulties which beset the pathway of labor
organizations, which have so far been productive of nothing but
disaster to the laboring classes, says:
Is it not time that new weapons should be adopted, and new
methods introduced? * * * Will not the working men of the
country learn anything from the bitter experiences they have
passed through, and abandon methods that have been so
uniformly followed by the ultimate failure of all their
efforts. But the great evils by which we are surrounded, and
that are destroying the foundations of society, can be
removed by the working-men only. They form the large
majority of its members, and in our country they are
all-powerful. Still it is only by absolutely united action
that the working-men can accomplish any good. By disunion
they may achieve any amount of evil. The enemy they have to
contend against, though few in number, are strong in
position and possession of great capital. Nevertheless,
before the united working-men of the country, seeking really
national objects and noble ends, by methods that are just
and in harmony with the institutions under which we live,
the tyranny of capital will end. The working-men will also
draw to their support a very large part of the best thought
and intelligence of the country, that will be sure to keep
even step with the labor of society in its attack upon the
enemies of humanity and progress.
There is no fact truer than this, that the accumulated wealth of the
land, and the sources of power, are fast becoming concentrated in the
hands of a few men, who use that wealth and power to the debasement
and enthrallment of the wage workers. Already it is almost impossible
to obtain any legislation, in State or Federal legislatures, to
ameliorate the condition of the laboring classes. Capital has placed
its tyrant grip upon the throat of the Goddess of Liberty. The power
of railroad and telegraph corporations, and associated capital
invested in monopolies which oppress the many, while ministering to
the wealth, the comfort and the luxury of the few, has become
omnipotent in halls of legislation, courts of justice, and even in the
Executive Chambers of great States, so that the poor, the oppressed
and the defrauded appeal in vain for justice.
Such is the deplorable condition of the laboring classes in the west,
the north and the east. They are bound to the car of capital, and are
being ground to powder as fast as day follows day. They organize in
vain; they protest in vain; they appeal in vain. Civilization is doing
its work. "To him that hath, more shall be given; to him that hath
nothing, even that shall be taken from him."
Let us turn to the South and see if a black skin has anything to do
with the tyranny of capital; let us see if the cause of the laboring
man is not the same in all sections, in all States, in all
governments, in the Union, as it is in all the world. If this can be
shown; if I can incontestably demonstrate that _the condition of the
black and the white laborer is the same, and that consequently_ _their
cause is common_; that they should unite under the one banner and work
upon the same platform of principles for the uplifting of labor, the
more equal distribution of the products of labor and capital, I shall
not have written this book in vain, and the patient reader will not
have read after me without profit to himself and the common cause of a
common humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] W.G. Moody: _Land and Labor in the United States._
[15] Wm. Goodwin Moody shows this conclusively in his work on _Land
and Labor in the United States_.