PRINCE KROPOTKIN'S COW
Some of my experiences led me to wonder if there is a correspondence
course for economists and statesmen. Anyway, I have been coming into
contact with thinkers, the perfection of whose theories can only be
accounted for on the hypothesis that they are graduates of a
correspondence school. They have world-shaping plans that could only be
excused on the plea that those who propound them either know God's plan
or have a better one. Only a correspondence school could give a man such
sublime self-confidence. Still, the reading of many books on economics,
and class papers, would have much the same effect as a correspondence
course, and that probably accounts for the finished thinkers that are
forever putting one down in arguments.
But this is a tough old world and politics is a science too human to be
put into books. The economists take no account of "human cussedness" or
the instinct to do anything except what the wise of the world say that
we should do. No matter how beneficent your theory may be, we will have
none of it--and a good thing it is for the world that we will not.
Still, the correspondence-school statesmen and economists are so much a
part of the life of to-day, with its agitations and movements and
tiresome futilities, that one must give them some attention. The mildest
of these world-shapers are clamoring for the nationalization of
everything from railroads to cranberry bogs. Indeed, I have met with
thinkers to whom all this would be merely a preliminary step. I have
heard it gravely suggested, or rather vehemently suggested, that things
will not be right in this world until all the inequalities due to
education and variations of brain power are also wiped out. This would
give us equality with a vengeance: the kind of blessed equality we have
in the stable at home, where the cattle are all chained so that the
energetic red cow cannot get more than her share of the food. The simple
fact is that in the new world social theories are being reduced to an
absurdity, even before being applied. This is the land of violent
contrasts, and the programme I laid out for myself has enabled me to see
some of these contrasts at their sharpest. I have made it a point to
hunt up friends of my youth who have either grown up with the country or
have gone down under its progress. In one city on the Canadian prairies
I found a friend so prosperous that he was living in the almost
sybaritic luxury of a great hotel of the kind that show how railroading
pays in Canada. Another friend was "down and out" in the same city, and
lending an attentive ear to the wildest kind of propaganda. Being an old
friend, the rich man poured forth the story of his prosperity and his
wrath against those who are hampering capital and threatening to put an
end to progress. Moved by the same bond of sacred friendship, the poor
man told of the greed and rapacity of which he had been the victim. The
poor man had lacked what another friend called "the monetary clutch,"
and while he had seen wealth all about him, had been unable either "to
have or to hold." How would it be possible for any one to hold the
scales between these two men? I didn't try. I passed on to another city,
where the same condition developed in another way. An old friend took me
to his club, where I enjoyed luncheon with a number of men who were
prosperous and satisfied. A few hours later I accidentally found myself
at a gathering of city employees who were preparing for a strike. They
advocated direct action with guns. "Why not?" they asked. "The
Governments of the world are settling their differences with guns and
high explosives and why shouldn't the down-trodden use the same method?"
It is almost certain that the social problems pressing for settlement
will be settled here first. In one of the old lands a poet wrote:
"Lazarus sits as he sat through history,
Through pride of heroes and pomp of kings,
At the rich man's gate, the eternal mystery,
Receiving his evil things."
In that land I have seen the people of place and power pass through the
streets entirely indifferent to the misery by which they were
surrounded, while those who were in misery were so accustomed to that
condition that they looked at their oppressors with dull apathy. Here it
is different; this is a new country. Dives and Lazarus are both here,
but they have known one another all their lives. They were brought up in
the same town and played with the same pup. Lazarus received the same
public school education as Dives, and perhaps beat him in his classes.
He is lacking in respect for him, and if there is any way by which he
can force a showdown while Dives is here--before he is in torment--he is
going to force it.
But no matter what changes may be adopted, whether revolutionary or
reactionary, there is an irreducible minimum of work that must be done.
The world must be fed and clothed.
Noticing that much is made of providing milk for children and invalids
whenever a general strike is in progress, it seemed worth while to see
how the best thinkers propose to deal with the matter in the new world
they propose to give us. Remembering that a college president to whom I
had mentioned the matter had given me Prince Kropotkin's "Conquest of
Bread," I turned to it for information regarding the subject of milk. As
might be expected he deals with it in the vague way of people who have
no personal knowledge of cows. Just because wheat can be produced by
spurts of labor at the proper seasons and requires no care while growing
and maturing, he apparently assumed that the milk supply could be
secured in the same way. Dealing with the provisioning of the city of
Paris under the anarchistic Commune, he sums up the whole matter as
follows:
"A population of three and a half million must have at least 1,200,000
adult men and as many women capable of work. Well, then, to give bread
and meat to all, it would need seventeen and a half days a year per man.
Add three million work-days, or double that number if you like, in order
to obtain milk. That will make twenty-five work-days of five hours in
all--nothing more than a little pleasurable country exercise--to obtain
the three principal products: bread, meat, and milk, the three products
which, after housing, cause daily anxiety to nine tenths of mankind. And
yet--let us not tire of repeating--these are not fancy dreams."
One night before leaving home, I had to milk the cows, owing to an
impending ball game, and while attending to this chore I fell to
thinking of the milk supply under Communistic or Soviet rule. These poor
people overlook the fact that the cows must be milked every day and
twice a day. Under the five-hour-a-day rule the milkers would be
different every morning and evening, and if the necessary twenty-five
days of work were distributed over the year, it is probable that the
milkers would be changed every few days. Any dairyman will tell you that
with such treatment the cows would probably go dry in a few weeks. Even
if they didn't object to the frequent change of the milkers, their flow
of milk would be greatly diminished, as they are not fond of strangers
fussing with them. The truth of this was brought home to me by the fact
that the red cow kicked at me when I sat down beside her and came to
rest with her foot firmly planted on my big toe. If that happened to me,
what would have happened to some one taking "a little pleasurable
country exercise." But perhaps Prince Kropotkin had in mind some strain
of cow that I have not yet heard of. He must know of some kind of cow
that will give up her year's production of milk in a pleasurable round
of five-hour milkings. Yet it is on the teachings of such men that the
workers of the world depend for plans to right their wrongs and make
the world an ideal place to live in. That the condition of the workers
should be improved every thinking man must admit, but they will find
experience more helpful than the theories of dreamers. Their present
plans not only assume that human nature can be changed by a revolution,
but that cow nature can also be changed.