We call it new. Yet there is nothing new under the sun--which
statement, like most proverbs, is but a half truth.
The world has always been full of irrepressible conflicts, and will be
as long as life is worth living in it--and longer. There was one
between centrifugal and centripetal force, at the very start (assuming
a start), when the star dust began to whirl, and all that have been
since have been but differentiations from it. Old ones are between
sex-instinct and monogamy, between license and order, or call it
liberty and authority if you please, or freedom and slavery.
Sex-instinct, license, liberty, freedom are centrifugal; monogamy,
order, authority, even slavery, are centripetal. The conflict between
freedom and slavery gave rise to the phrase The Irrepressible
Conflict. It came through Seward at the time of the Civil War.
That Irrepressible Conflict has been succeeded by one which we have
called new, but which, though in a comparatively quiescent state, is
older than Jack Cade or even than Cleon. It took its start in the fact
that in human evolution, from the pithecanthropos up, some of us have
not got along as fast as others. Primitively, the conflict began by
those in front enslaving those behind--the minority enslaving the
majority. But that built Athens; and with it, civilization--as we
regard it. (This starting point is selected somewhat arbitrarily, but
most starting points must be.) It now looks, though, as if the boot
were getting on the other leg--the majority trying to enslave the
minority; and if they do before humanity is much farther evolved, what
Athens started will stop. But probably the result of the conflict
will not be as bad as that. Something like it has happened at times,
however--say when Southern Europe was rolled over by Northern Europe,
and when the Paris that had breeches was rolled over by the Paris that
had none; and possibly something like it began when Americans that had
three thousand dollars a year and found work for the rest of the
people, and paid wages, and bought the produce of the soil, and made
commerce and finance and the best in statecraft and science and
letters and the arts--when in two instances these men were legislated
away from powers and immunities granted to others.
* * * * *
Of all human conditions, the difference among men in capacities, and
consequently in possessions, is perhaps the most troublesome; and yet
it is because of that very condition, that most men have done most of
the things that raised them from the lowest savagery. The progress of
the world, as a whole, has depended upon the superior man leading the
way, and upon the mass of men working to keep up with him. Of course
we in our wisdom can ask why it was necessary to evolve men at
different rates, thus imposing upon most of us the pains of
inferiority and envy, and the strains of emulation. We don't know, but
so it is. Life is full of such paradoxes, way down to the existence
side by side of free will and necessity; and the only effective way of
life is to devote to each of the opposing conditions the best action
our little intellects can direct, without wasting them over vain
efforts at reconciliations that are beyond us.
* * * * *
Although the wage-earner of to-day is better off than the kings of
yore in every particular except that there are more men for him to
envy, that particular is a constant source of unhappiness to him, and
is rapidly making him a constant source of unhappiness to everybody
else. The man behind is getting more and more in conflict with the man
in front. Until lately the disturbances have been local and spasmodic.
Now they have become nation-wide and world-wide; and until evolution
has got so near its goal of equilibration that the differences
between men are much less than now, and the sympathies much greater,
the conflict will be irrepressible.
The differences from which it springs were, as is well known, much
less among the ancestors who shaped our government than they are among
ourselves. Leaving out the slaves who did nothing in that work, the
population was nearer homogeneous in wealth and race than it is now,
and the differences were not so great as to cause much conflict. There
was virtually no proletariat. In those days it took character to
emigrate to these shores: in these days, it almost seems to take
character not to. The nation consisted then almost entirely of farmers
and land-owners, and there continued some sort of basis for all the
talk of equality, until the proletariat "tasted blood" in the
greenbacks issued as a war measure. The impression brought by them
into the minds of the ignorant, and fostered by the demagogues, was
that to make everybody rich, it was only necessary to print more. This
delusion dropped into the minds of the first proletariat in the world
which had long enjoyed common-school education, and in that soil it
grew rapidly, and whenever put down in one form, it has arisen in
another. When people were satisfied that the millennium could not be
brought about by greenbacks, they felt certain, under the instruction
of that eminent financier our present Secretary-of-State, that it
could be brought about by silver. When they got through playing with
that delusion, they were entirely ready to welcome a flood of other
delusions which had found their principal sources in Europe among men
denied the electoral franchise. Up to that time the toy of political
equality had kept the American proletariat sufficiently amused to
prevent their paying much attention to the socialism, anarchism and
similar "isms" which had agitated the same classes abroad. But the
essential conditions had all the while been the same here, and the
assassination of McKinley illustrated that the great republic was at
last as far along in a certain sort of "progress" as the older
civilizations. It was the direct consequence of the crazy doctrines
preached all the way from Emma Goldman up to some of the most
"progressive" of the college professors.
* * * * *
But however discouraging the situation among the wage-earners may be,
it is perhaps better than one of ox-like content. The average man is
beginning to have ideals--not very high ideals; most of them concern
merely his back and his belly; but there are a few which find vent in
the orchestras and dramatic efforts at the settlements and village
halls; and in the bandstands on the village greens, horrible as
generally are the noises made in them. But these awakening ideals also
appear in the boycotts among the Danbury hatters, in the vandalisms of
the I. W. W., in the Los Angeles dynamiting, and in murders among the
Chicago teamsters and Pennsylvania miners, as well as in the
assassination of McKinley.
Then there is an intermediate showing of them, neither in art nor in
physical force, but in the opinions behind the force, in all sorts of
schemes toward the material basis of enlarged life. The people seek
short cuts across the gulf, and follow like sheep those who promise
them what they want. Just as Jack Cade promised them that every pint
pot should hold a quart, so Bryan promised them, virtually, that
silver should be as good as gold, and Roosevelt virtually promised
them that all judges should be afraid to decide against them in
industrial conflicts. True, he explains all that away in the Hibbert
Journal. But the people he harangues do not read the Hibbert Journal,
and he is astute enough to know it.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Irrepressible Conflict is
where it is not between two sides wanting the same dollars, but
between the real and the ideal. Nearly all the schemes are ideal,
eminently desirable, but utterly impossible in any state of human
nature that we know or can clearly foresee. Yet they appeal to the
sympathies of all, and therefore mislead the judgments of many. We
wish we felt as certain as we do of sunrise that in the present stage
of American evolution democratic government is not one of these
ideals; but we cannot. The American people has just passed its first
two measures of distinct and unqualified class legislation, and has
been running wild after the two greatest demagogues in history. But
fortunately as they both promise substantially the same things--"steal
each other's clothes," they tend to neutralize each other.
* * * * *
The sources of the most pronounced conflict between facts and ideals
are that ordinarily a man cannot have more than he creates and
conserves; that the desire to will torture those who create and
conserve little, as long as they have to look upon others who create
and conserve much; and that, as long as the difference lasts, those
who have little will want to get hold of what is held by those who
have much. The things that all men want, but few men have. Those who
have not, envy and often hate those who have. Of late this disposition
has been greatly intensified by the multitude of rapid fortunes from
the new control of Nature and from the trusts, and the parvenu
ostentation accompanying them. It makes a difference whether princely
state surrounds the king's son, or one's own pal of yesterday.
Worst of all, so many of these fortunes have been obtained wrongfully
that they intensify the impression that _all_ fortunes above the
average have.
Now the fundamental question in this conflict is: to whom does that
money rightfully belong? Among wise people who are not economists, the
width and profundity of the ignorance on this point tends to dissipate
the current skepticism regarding the miraculous.
The fortunes wrongfully acquired are exceptional and abnormal. Nearly
all comfortable fortunes come from legitimate industry. Within a
generation the economists have got the question of to whom they
rightfully belong, into the qualitative stage of settlement. The
quantitative stage is a much nicer and more complicated problem, and
varies more with different cases. Possibly the first germ of the
solution appeared a generation ago in a sentence in Marshall's
"Economics of Industry."
It was: "The earnings of management of a manufacturer represent the
value of the addition which his work makes to the total product of
capital and industry." The same holds true of a farmer, miner,
transporter, merchant or anybody else who directs industry. It is more
easily recognized in the case of the inventor. Francis A. Walker took
up this theme and gradually demonstrated that so far from the
employer's profits being wrung out of the wage-earner, they are
generally greatest where wages are highest, and proceed from devices
and economies effected by the employer, and would not exist without
them. This is being constantly illustrated by some employers
succeeding where others have failed, and failing where others have
succeeded. In support of the general thesis Walker says: "Discussions
in Economics and Statistics," (Vol. I., pp. 367-75):
"Looking at the better employers of whatever grade ... we note
that they pay wages, as a rule, equal to those paid by those
employers who realize no profits, or even sustain a loss; and
that, indeed, if regularity of employment be taken, as it should
be, into account, the employers of the former class pay really
higher wages than the latter class. We note, further, that the
successful men of business pay as high prices for materials and
as high rates of interest for the use of capital, if the scale of
their transactions and the greater security of payment be taken,
as it should be, into account.
"Whence, then, comes the surplus which is left in the hands of
the higher grades of employers, after the payment of wages, the
purchase of materials and supplies, the repair and renewal of
machinery and plant? I answer, This surplus, in the case of any
employer, represents that which he is able to produce over and
above what an employer of the lowest industrial grade can produce
with equal amounts of labor and capital. In other words, this
surplus is of his own creation, produced wholly by that business
ability which raises him above and distinguishes him from, the
employers of what may be called the no-profits class.
"... The excess of produce which we are contemplating comes from
directing force to its proper object by the simplest and shortest
ways; from saving all unnecessary waste of materials and
machinery; from boldly incurring the expense--the often large
expense--of improved processes and appliances, while closely
scrutinizing outgo and practicing a thousand petty economies in
unessential matters; from meeting the demands of the market most
aptly and instantly; and, lastly, from exercising a sound
judgment as to the time of sale and the terms of payment. It is
on account of the wide range among the employers of labor, in the
matter of ability to meet these exacting conditions of business
success, that we have the phenomenon, in every community and in
every trade, in whatever state of the market, of some employers
realizing no profits at all, while others are making fair
profits; others, again, large profits; others, still, colossal
profits. Side by side, in the same business, with equal command
of capital, with equal opportunities, one man is gradually
sinking a fortune, while another is doubling or trebling his
accumulations....
"If this be correct, we see how mistaken is that opinion too
often entertained by the wages class, which regards the
successful employers of labor--men who realize large fortunes in
manufactures or trade--as having in some way injured or robbed
them....
"In this view, profits constitute no part of the price of goods,
and are obtained through no deduction from the wages of labor. On
the contrary, they are the creation of those who receive them,
each employer's profits representing that which he has produced
over and above what the employers of the lowest industrial grade
have been able to produce with equal amounts of labor and
capital."
All this is now accepted doctrine among those entitled to opinions,
but as already intimated, the ignorance of it among even people of
good general intelligence is astounding, while the laboring classes
and their leaders shut their eyes to it. No man of inferior fortune
likes to admit, as this principle asks him to, that the inferiority is
in himself. And small blame to him for his reluctance.
Yet to state what is usually and normally the source of wealth, is not
to claim that individual wealth never has any other source, or to deny
that it is often increased by taking an undue advantage of inferior
capacity, and by monopoly and sundry other forms of disguised robbery.
But that wealth is _generally_ the result of pillage, and not of
invention, good management and other good forces, is probably the
worst and most destructive fallacy ever preached.
This destructive fallacy has seriously exaggerated the estimates of
the injustices and robberies on the part of employers; and in the
attempt to curb them, it has been busy for many years in impeding good
management, and has cost Labor terribly in unjustifiable strikes.
This, however, is by no means saying that there are no justifiable
strikes. They are inevitably a part of the present irrepressible
conflict, but its bitterness and cruelties are largely fed by a
general feeling that wealth generally has been accumulated at the
expense of the poor, when the truth is that generally, though not
always, it has been accumulated to their profit.
Yet it is far from plain how the man who tugs and sweats should justly
have little, while the man who does not tug and sweat should justly
have much. The man who tugs and sweats saw his own hands make, or
extract from the earth or the forests or the fields, or transport or
exchange what the other man has, and no one saw the hands of the man
who has it, do anything. Naturally, then, the man who has it not,
thinks that the man who has it, stole it--that it belongs to the man
who handled it. And he is going to take it.
But he is not going to take it by force: robbery he feels to be wrong.
He is going to take it "by due process of law"--by his vote: the law
has given him a vote, and the law is justice itself. As he is in
various ways permitted to vote away other people's possessions to his
own use, he takes it for granted that he has a moral as well as a
legal right to do so to any extent, and is full of schemes to that
end. But the law has also given the other man the property and the
means of holding onto it. Here is another outcrop of the Irrepressible
Conflict: the law is in conflict with itself. The conflict must be
reconciled: the man who wants the property must elect legislators and
judges who will change the law so the other man cannot get the
property away from the man who makes it with his own hands, and cannot
hold on to what he has already got of it.
At the outset, and to a certain extent, he is right: for to a certain
extent the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number is
unquestionably in conflict with the principle _suum cuique_. The
problem in each case is to draw the line between these opposing
forces.
Most of the expenses for public education, museums, parks, public
concerts, and even making, lighting and policing streets, and of the
courts and jails, have long been paid by taxpayers mainly for the
benefit of non-taxpayers, and no one wishes these expenses stopped. To
the education in the common schools are now being added medical
supervision, care of the eyes, dentistry, lunches, transportation to
and fro. These things are not done for the children of the people who
pay most of the money for them.
In still other ways, however, the poor man is increasing through law
his facilities for using the accumulations of the rich man. As already
indicated, we are just entering upon a system of income taxation where
there is not a pretence of making the poor man pay, or even the man of
moderately comfortable means; the poor man has had numerous statutes
passed relieving from the penalties of the common law, his
conspiracies to cripple the rich man's business if the poor man's
demands are not granted; and he has lately had wage-earners and
farmers exempted from the prosecutions under a fund for punishing
conspiracies in restraint of trade. How far can we continue along the
same road before we shall find legislation exempting the man in need,
or even fancied need, from any constraint against taking what he wants
wherever he can find it? That legislation has now entered upon that
road seems obvious. Where is it going to stop, and what is going to
stop it?
Are wage-earners and farmers going to be more definitely arrayed
against the rest of the community? We incline to think not, because
the farmer, as a rule, has property to protect, and although this
legislation is in favor of his annual income, it cannot go much
farther--especially in distributing favors elsewhere--without
attacking his accumulations. Moreover it seems impossible that there
should be a long continuance of the present degree of oblivion to the
desirability of having every man feel his interest in government,
through _some_ degree of the pinch of taxation.
Any considerable increase of the recent legislation, would of course
lead to the diminution of capital, both through expenditure and
through discouragement of accumulation. It would also diminish the
activity of those who are able to handle capital profitably, and the
consequent effect on wages would perhaps in time become apparent to
even the order of intellect behind the legislation.
How far can it go without drying up the springs of charity? There is
already free talk of saving income taxes out of charities.
Such legislation is certainly nursing antagonisms, and whether the
spread of general intelligence can be expected to be rapid enough to
prevent serious harm, is doubtful. It even sometimes appears a
question whether the conflict can be settled without more serious
bloodshed. Fortunately neither side has yet as much to complain of as
one side had in the revolutions which cost Charles I and Louis XVI
their heads; and it is doubtful whether either side has the power or
coherence or disposition to drive it to arms--whether the existing
sentiment in any civilized nation is longer such as to make such a
consummation possible. Times are growing more peaceful. Not only has
the biggest army in the world for nearly half a century been the
biggest engine of peace; not only has a permanent international
courthouse been built among the fortresses, after several temporary
ones had already done good service; but when the brotherhood of
locomotive engineers gets into conflict with their employers, instead
of settling it in the freight yards with torches and brickbats, both
sides go to the Waldorf-Astoria and have a judicial proceeding. For a
centrifugal explosion, they substitute a centripetal adjustment. And
the brawn supplies its share of the brains to do it.
The fundamental question is, of course, whether before serious harm
has been done, the differences in men's fortunes which, as said at the
outset, largely mean differences in men's powers, can be sufficiently
decreased to leave room for little conflict.
One answer is that the equalization is already taking place at a rate
that few people realize. Amid the poor, the impression that the rich
are growing richer and the poor poorer, is quite general, and of
course is fostered by the demagogues who make their living out of the
discontent--out of the justifiable discontent less perhaps than out of
the unjustifiable. Worse still, perhaps, the educated whose sympathies
lead them to instruct the ignorant, are to a shameful degree ignorant
of the truth in this regard, and, it must be feared, of the facts of
the economic situation generally: somehow the softness of heart which
actuates many such well-meaning people seems often to accompany a
softness of head which recoils from all hard facts that would narrow
the field where they delight to exercise their sympathies.
Nobody will question the progress of the average man from status to
contract--from slavery, serfdom, feudal dependence, to wage-earning;
but since the time of Marx, the claim of rich richer, and poor poorer
has been general--among the ignorant rich as well as the ignorant
poor. Nevertheless abundant authorities prove the exact contrary.
In the "poor poorer" part of the assertion, there was undeniably much
truth during the early part of the nineteenth century, especially
before industry became adjusted to the new machinery, and before the
rise of the trades unions and the overthrow of the _laissez-faire_
policy in legislation. But after those changes, there was a rapid
advance in wages, shortening of hours, and reduction in the price of
commodities. So great was the change that even Marx himself, who had
done more than any other man to spread the "increasing misery" theory,
abandoned it in an address delivered in 1864. Yet he so little
understood the force of admissions that he then made, that he let the
elaborate _a priori_ demonstration of the theory which he had already
built up, stand in his "Capital," which he did not publish till
1867.[1] But the admissions of 1864 did not end in theory. Facts
began to accumulate to confirm it. Early in the twentieth century the
changed conditions had attracted attention, and there were gathered
many data which proved that rapid betterment had taken place in the
condition of wage-earners.
[Footnote 1: See Simkhovitch: _Marxism versus Socialism_, pp.
122f.]
We have space for but a few of the facts, and they are not all up to
date. Of the results of the Census of 1910 which bear on this subject,
very few are yet published. Most of those of the Census of 1900 were
not published till 1907, and it is only up to about that time that
many data are at the moment available. But we hope before long to
present a careful study of the conditions up to the present time.
Meanwhile, it is pleasant to note the following:
In the United States wages in manufacturing industries averaged $247
in 1850, $427 in 1899, and $519 in 1909. And of course other
industries could not fall very far below manufactures.
The cost of living did not begin to show any such advance. Dun's
tables show that the yearly cost of living per capita in 1860, before
the civil war, was $16.87 _more_ than in 1905. For the sixteen years
1880 to 1895, inclusive, the average yearly cost was $101.65. For the
ten years 1896 to 1905, inclusive, the average was $81.52, $20.13
_less_ than for the earlier period. There has been a sharp advance
since 1905, but taking the whole period from 1850 to the present time,
nothing to compare with the advance in wages.
Although the recent class legislation in favor of the labor trusts
also included any possible farmer trust, the farmer appears to have
progressed with the wage-earner. His products have lately materially
advanced in price, and the abstract of the Census of 1910 says (p.
295):
The total value of the land and buildings of the 1,006,511 farms
shown for 1910 was $6,330,000,000, and the amount of debt was
$1,726,000,000, or 27.3 per cent. of the value. The corresponding
proportion in 1890, as shown in the reports, was 35.5 per cent.,
and to make this figure strictly comparable it would presumably
have to be increased slightly. There was thus during the 20
years a marked diminution in the relative importance of mortgage
debt ... but the average owner's equity per farm increased from
$2,220 to $4,574, or more than doubled.
Wholesale clothing dealers report a great increase in average size and
quality of clothes demanded, which shows that the people are better
fed and exercised and better off. Over all highly civilized countries
the consumption of food has been increasing faster than population.
This cannot mean that the rich eat and drink more; for they ate and
drank all they wanted before: so it must prove that the proportion of
those who can eat and drink freely is increasing.
Moreover, hours of labor have been decreasing without any diminution
of production. The United States Labor Bureau reports for 1913 show
that the average wage-earner is working shorter hours than ever
before, that he is receiving more pay for the short-hour week than he
formerly received for the long-hour week, and that the increase in his
average wage in most industries has been so great that its purchasing
power has risen, notwithstanding the increase in prices of many
commodities.
As to the "rich richer" fallacy: in Massachusetts for the period
1829-31 the probated estates under $5,000 were 85.6 per cent. of the
whole, in the period 1889-91 they had fallen to 69.5 of the whole. It
is nevertheless true that a few of the rich are richer than men have
been before, and in the case of an increasing proportion of them, it
has been for the good of all of us.
In Great Britain from 1840 to 1890, the number of estates subject to
succession tax increased twice as fast as population, while the
average amount per estate had not increased at all.
In France from 1853 to 1883 wages advanced some sixty per cent., and
in the principal occupations of women (outside of domestic service),
they nearly doubled.
Mr. W. H. Mallock, after an elaborate investigation in the British
Census reports, the details of which are given in his "Classes and
Masses," states the following conclusions: "The poor" (except those
who have nothing at all) "are getting richer; the rich, on an
average, getting poorer ... and of all classes in the community, the
middle class is growing the fastest." Since 1830 the population has
increased "in the proportion of 27 to 35; the increase of the section
in question [the middle class] was in the proportion of 27 to 84."
"The middle class has increased numerically in the proportion of 3 to
10; the rich class has increased only in the proportion of 3 to 8." In
1881, there were seven thousand windowless cabins occupied by families
in Scotland; by 1891, these had "almost disappeared; the one-roomed
dwellings with windows have decreased 25 per cent.; the two-roomed
dwellings have _increased_ by 8 per cent., and the three-roomed and
four-roomed dwellings by 17 per cent."
In 1815 there were 100,000 paupers in London. At the rate of increase
of population in 1875, there should have been 300,000. There actually
were less than 100,000, while from 1871 to 1908 the percentage of
population "relieved" fell from 31 to 22.
In Germany, income-tax statistics prove the same thing. In Prussia,
from 1876 to 1888, Dr. Soetbeer (quoted by Professor Mayo-Smith) finds
that the proportion of income-tax payers with their families, to the
whole population, had increased about 22 per cent., that is from 2.3
per cent. of the population to 2.8 per cent., and that the classes
which had increased at the most rapid rate were those with incomes of
over $500. And although the most rapid increase of all had been in the
class with incomes of over $25,000, the average incomes of that class
had decreased.
We regret that more recent figures than some we have given cannot be
had in time for the present article, but as already said, we hope
before long to present the results of a special study backed by the
forthcoming census bulletin, and attempting to weigh judicially the
confusing factor introduced into the situation by that part of the
rise in prices due to the unprecedented increase in the supply of
gold. Were it not for that extraneous circumstance, the showing for
the wage-earner's advance would be even greater.
The very recent and probably temporary rise in prices is principally
attributed to the unprecedented production of gold, the rush away
from the farms to the cities, the rise in wages, and certain wastes in
labor. In some trades wages have been forced to a height which, acting
on the prices of products, has in many particulars nullified the
advance in wages. All raising of wages by limiting labor instead of
increasing product, by increasing friction instead of efficiency, by
getting more than one's own instead of making one's own larger, must
raise prices. So, to put it more in detail, must all such adventitious
tricks as limiting apprentices; limiting each laborer's speed to that
of the slowest; limiting the kinds of things a man can reasonably
do--in short, all limiting of labor below its best efficiency by men
or masters, masters remembering of course that to best efficiency
reasonable rest, food and other good conditions are essential. So must
all making of work by putting onto a job more labor than can
accomplish it economically, as by calling a painter, a carpenter and a
plumber to do a little job that any one of them could complete alone,
and destroying good old product to make a call for new. Under ordinary
conditions there will always be work enough for everybody without
these efforts to create work artificially, and the extraordinary
conditions where there is not enough, are only multiplied and
intensified by such efforts.
But despite these influences contributory to the rise of prices in
recent years, the improvements in the wage-earner's lot that had been
noted for over half a century, have on the whole continued to the
present time.
* * * * *
All the forms of industrial conflict are but manifestations of
Nature's striving for equilibration--the goal of all evolution; and
only with a nearer equilibration of men's fortunes will there be
peace. How can it be brought about?
Will a victory of the socialists bring it? Yes, if, by premature
action, you make a desert and call it peace, or if you wait until the
civic virtues are so far developed that selections at the polls will
be as unbiassed and discriminating as those of Nature. But if that
time is approaching, it is with leaden feet; and to act as if it had
arrived would only delay it. Our steps must be cautious and
tentative. That the frightful wastes of both competition and monopoly
should be avoided by state management of all industries or even to any
great extent by state control, is a far-off ideal--so far-off that men
wise enough to be successful are slow to express opinions about it.
Beside this ideal, as beside the ideal of the land directly providing
the government revenue, stalks, as the extreme fallacy generally
stalks beside the truth, the false ideal of the government management
or the land tax producing enough revenue to take care of everybody,
and doing it, leaving to no one the saving duty of taking care of
himself.
The steps already taken toward that ideal, it may perhaps be worth
while to glance at. Outside of government's fundamental functions--the
maintenance of order and justice--it has also managed the post-office,
the coast and geological surveys, the currency, the census, the public
schools, the streets, and the care of the sick and incapable. Some
highly centralized and highly civilized governments have added the
railways, but the privately owned ones, with all their shortcomings,
are better; government telegraph service has been cheapened at the
expense of the taxpayers, and government telephone service has been
abominable. All this has been non-competitive work. There is not yet
any sign that government could make a success of competitive
industries. All the indications are the other way. Governments have so
far been too slow to invent or even adopt improvements, especially
where they involve scrapping old plant; and so far, government has
generally been an extravagant and wasteful employer.
* * * * *
Unlike many other conflicts, the new Irrepressible Conflict can never
be settled by violence: for violence cannot remove that difference in
the capacities of men from which the conflict arises. Violence, even
violence disguised under votes, may spasmodically lessen the natural
differences in property, but they will reappear as long as there are
differences in productive capacity, and society secures to the
individual a reasonable share of his production. In this and all
cases, advantageous exchange of course is productive of additional
value; and there is a less frequent exchange which tends not to mutual
increase of fortune, but to increased difference in fortune. Should
society ever go so far as to take from the inventor, the
capital-saver, the work-finder, the work-manager and the exchanger
their share of the products which, without them, would not exist, and
which are shared in by all, production would fall off, probably below
the starvation point.
If, then, the conflict cannot be fought out, how is peace to be
attained, even the limited degree of peace enjoyed before the modern
unrest? Simply by reducing to a negligible point the difference in the
productive powers of men--in their intelligence, energy and
reliability; and this by leveling up, not by leveling down, as some of
the trades unions, from noble but mistaken motives, attempt.
"Simply!" The general proposition is simple enough, but there are many
perplexities of detail. One inheres in the definition of "productive
powers." Probably it will serve to call them the _capacities of
furnishing satisfactions_; and to include in satisfactions those
produced for oneself as well as those exchanged. In this sense the
impecunious philosopher has high productive powers--often so high that
he would not exchange them for those of the captain of industry, and
he does not often feel discontent enough to make him a very active
factor in the Irrepressible Conflict. He does sometimes, though,
especially when he feels the pinch of his narrow financial income
compared with that of the producer of more material satisfactions. As
he is usually a man of gentle make-up, the effect of his narrow income
is increased by sympathy with the unfortunate, and sometimes these
combined influences send out mighty queer doctrine from professorial
chairs. Such phenomena, however, do not controvert the general
proposition that the satisfactions of the spirit are to be included
among those upon whose more equal production depends the disappearance
of the conflict that must be till then irrepressible.
There is no way to peace, then, other than increasing the productive
power of the less productive man. Sharing with him material goods,
except to tide over emergencies that his powers cannot meet, won't do
the trick at all, as has been abundantly proved, from the English poor
laws down, and as is going to be proved again before some of our
recent "progressive" legislation has run its course.
This is far from saying, however, that legislation really progressive
in this direction is impossible. We for our part, however, do not see
as much hope in legislation as in improvement in knowledge and
understanding and disposition among people generally. That great
improvement in disposition may be near at hand, seems indicated by
recent experiences among the most revolutionary and suggestive in
human annals. The recent meeting at Gettysburg, not to speak of the
minor earlier ones at Lookout Mountain and elsewhere, indicates an
advance in human nature so immense that it has not been realized. Not
the least significant thing it demonstrated, is the vast decrease in
the necessity of wasting thousands of lives and billions of treasure
to settle differences of opinion.
As this is now so startlingly indicated regarding the Irrepressible
Conflict which culminated at Gettysburg, and which _could_ be settled
by force, is there not even much more reason to hope for a settlement
not very remote, by methods of reason, of our new Irrepressible
Conflict, which _cannot_ be settled by force?
* * * * *
But even if the outcroppings of the conflict are so soon settled, the
fundamental conflict will persist as long as the difference in men is
so great, and that difference is the most important thing to be dealt
with by all lovers of peace and humanity. The only way to cancel it is
for the men in front to help those behind, and for those behind to
help themselves--to everything that does not belong to somebody else.
But those in front are entitled to have their judgments followed where
they are not plainly tainted by self-interest, and it will pay them to
keep self-interest out of their judgments so far as self-preservation
does not demand it. But how much self-preservation can properly cover,
is a difficult question, and space permits little more than the
suggestion of it. Shall a man's self rightly be a wearer of but one
suit of clothes, an occupant of a hut, an eater of the plainest food,
and an entertainer of no guests: or shall his self rightly be clothed
beautifully and suitably for all occasions, occupy a house that shall
be a pleasure to gaze upon, consume the food essential to both the
greatest refinement and the greatest efficiency, dispense a generous
hospitality, broaden his mind and develop his taste so that he can
enlighten and inspire others, encourage letters and the arts, and have
leisure to devote to charities, education and the common good? There
are plenty of illustrations that a man may preserve a self as large as
this--as large as Goethe's or Marcus Aurelius's--and yet issue no
advice unworthy of the respect of smaller men, and be of an advantage
to the race beside which the cost of maintaining such a self is
nothing.
If most men cannot have the things just enumerated, and if many of
those who have them abuse them, is it best that none should have them?
That all should have them is, in the present stage of human
development, impossible. If all the wealth of the United States were
divided equally among us, we would have but a little over $1,300
apiece,[2] and much of it would be wasted at once, and no conceivable
laws would prevent what might be left, being in a very short time as
unevenly distributed as now. The only glimpse we can see of a time of
even fortunes, is of a time of even capacities; and the only rational
way we can see to such a time is through helping each other: every
other experiment toward it has proved illusive.
[Footnote 2: According to the State Census of 1904 as compiled in
a Bulletin of the National Census issued in 1907. The
corresponding data for the Census of 1910 are not yet arranged.]
The principal roots of the difficulty are generalized as ignorance and
incompetence. The ignorance has already been strongly, though very
blunderingly, attacked in the public schools, but not much more
blunderingly perhaps than in the universities. It is a strange paradox
that education, though the special care of the educated, should be
among the most backward of the arts, yet so the highest-educated are
the first to admit it to be. We are making hopeful progress in it,
though, and are rapidly developing it to care for incompetence not
only in mind but in body and disposition.
Then in the struggles of wage-earners and wage-payers, the principle
of arbitration is certainly making rapid inroads on the practice of
violence. The settlement of the recent great railroad controversies
was by deliberative assemblies, not by mobs.
The farther lessening of the difference in material possessions by
leveling down on one side as well as leveling up on the other, has
lately become a very real and active question. While the inventor has
seldom realized his share of production, and while the average
director of industry has seldom realized more than his, undoubtedly
extortionists and monopolists have rolled up fortunes out of all
proportion to their deserts; and the regulation of these, though not
doing much to fill up the differences, will do more to relieve the
spirit of discontent.
It will be interesting to see how much of the share now going to the
employer can go to the employee without stopping the employer's
functions of finder, organizer and director of profitable work. We
cannot intelligently foresee conditions in which these functions on
his part will not be absolutely essential to the progress of society.
The functions, however, are being more and more performed, even under
the trusts, by men rising from the ranks; and even the men remaining
in the ranks are probably performing more and more of those same
functions, though some of the short-sighted policies of the unions are
obstructing them.
And the unions themselves, despite policies not yet outgrown, have
unquestionably done much to raise the wage-earners' fortunes, and are
probably, with more experience and wider outlook, to do vastly more.
But not until they get beyond the policy of holding their own best men
back, will they enter on their full career, and then their least
effective men will most benefit. Moreover, the wisest and most
effective men are those most ready to learn from criticism, and when
the unions realize it, they will have another avenue to usefulness.
They will be helped to realize it, however, by more patience, candor
and disinterestedness on the part of the critics. So far, everybody is
bellicose, as first at Gettysburg. Cannot both sides to the present
Irrepressible Conflict better anticipate a conciliatory disposition
than did those heroes of fifty years ago?
When we can always carry the Irrepressible Conflict into courts and
arbitrations and, as Godkin said, substitute for the shock of battle,
the shock of trained intellects, peace will be in sight.
Its first essential is always a clear understanding. There are lies
somewhere in every human conflict. Probably the most pitiful and
pernicious of all lies is that all men are equal. The only remedy is
to make it true.