I
The time seems to have come when the two antagonistic elements of
American society should, and could afford to, throw off their disguises
and frankly declare their principles and purposes. But what, it may
be asked, are the two antagonistic elements? Dividing lines parting
the population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn
variously; for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and
the criminal class. But the elements to which reference is here made
are those immemorial and implacable foes which the slang of modern
economics roughly and loosely distinguishes as “capital” and “labor.”
A more accurate classification—as accurate a one as it is possible to
make—would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who
do not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to the
laborer, the rich man who works with his hands is not objectionable;
the poor man who does not, is. Consciously or unconsciously, and alike
by those whose necessities compel them to perform it and those whose
better fortune enables them to avoid it, manual labor is considered the
most insufferable of human pursuits. It is a pill that the Tolstois,
the “communities” and the “Knights” of Labor can not sugar-coat. We may
prate of the dignity of labor; emblazon its praise upon banners; set
apart a day on which to stop work and celebrate it; shout our teeth
loose in its glorification—and, God help our foolish souls to better
sense, we think we mean it all!
If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all
can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is not
mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail
idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street
peddler—to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf
from the door without eating him—to abandon their ignoble callings,
seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them
right sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those
who are engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part
of their incomes they can purchase the right to work as hard as they
like in even the dullest times.
Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard,
imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feels
that it sets upon his brow the sign of intellectual inferiority. And
that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at
no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for
everywhere and always he has fancied that he heard in our patronizing
platitudes the note of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him
the opportunity to avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government
finds its main usefulness, activity and justification. Governments
are evolved out of the necessity of protecting from the hand-worker
the life and property of the brain-worker and the idler. The first
of the trio is the most dangerous because the most numerous and the
least content. Take from the science and the art of government, and
from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousness of
his ill-will and the fear of his power and what have you left? A pure
republic—that is to say, no government.
I should like it understood that, if not absolutely devoid of political
prejudices, I at least believe myself to be; that except as to
result I think no more of one form of government than of another; and
that with reference to results all forms seem to me bad, but bad in
different degrees. If asked my opinion as to the results of our own,
I should point to Homestead, to Wardner, to Buffalo, to Coal Creek,
to the interminable tale of unpunished murders by individuals and by
mobs, to legislatures and courts unspeakably corrupt and executives
of criminal cowardice, to the prevalence and immunity of plundering
trusts and corporations and the multiplication of unhappy millionaires.
I should invite attention to the abuses of the pension roll, to the
similar and incredible extravagance of Republican and Democratic
“Houses”—a plague o’ them both! If addressing Democrats only, I should
mention the protective tariff; if Republicans, the hill-tribe clamor
for free coinage of silver. I should call to mind the existence and
prosperous activity of a thousand lying secret societies having
for their main object mitigation of republican simplicity by means
of pageantry, costumes grotesquely resembling those of kings and
courtiers, and titles of address and courtesy exalted enough to draw
laughter from an ox.
In contemplation of these and a hundred other “results,” no less
shameful in themselves than significant of the deeper shame beneath,
and prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: “Behold the
outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people!
Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon
the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted
abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the
efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words!
We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted to
the good honor of numbers, and are betrayed. Lo, this is the beginning
of the end of the dream!”
Our no government has broken down at every point, and the two
irreconcilable elements whose suspensions of hostilities are mistaken
for peace are to try their hands at each other’s tempting display of
throats. There is no longer so much as a pretense of amity; apparently
there will not much longer be a pretense of regard for mercy and
morals. Already “industrial discontent” has attained to the magnitude
of war. It is important, then, that there be an understanding of
principles and purposes. As the combatants will not define their
position truthfully by words, let us see if it can be inferred from
the actions which are said to speak more plainly. If one of the men
“directing the destinies” of the labor organizations in this country,
could be enticed into the Palace of Truth and “examined” by a skilful
catechist he would indubitably say something like this:
“Our ultimate purpose is effacement of the distinction between employer
and employee, which is but a modification of that between master and
slave.
“We purpose that the laborer shall be chief owner of all the property
and profits of the enterprise in which he is engaged, and have through
his union a controlling voice in all its affairs.
“We purpose overthrowing the system under which a man can grow richer
by working with his head than with his hands, and preventing the man
who works with neither from having anything at all.
“In the attainment of these ends any means is to be judged, as to its
fitness for our use, with sole regard to its efficacy. We shall punish
the innocent for the sins of the guilty. We shall destroy property and
life under such circumstances and to such an extent as may seem to us
expedient. Falsehood, treachery, arson, assassination, all these we
look upon as legitimate if effective.
“The rules of ‘civilized warfare’ we shall not observe, but shall put
prisoners to death or torture them, as we please.
“We do not recognize a non-union man’s right to labor, nor to live. The
right to strike includes the right to strike _him_.”
Doubtless all that (and the half is not told) sounds to the unobservant
like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles
of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of
exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or
lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious
and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of faith are
founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, and servile
insurrections are to-day what they ever were: the most cruel and
ferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is rough
work; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he does
not consider too curiously with what he strikes it nor upon whom it
falls. It will profit you to understand, my fine gentlemen with the
soft hands, the character of that which is confronting you. You are not
threatened with a bombardment of roses.
Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossed
with his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on
his picket line. Suppose we hypnotize him and make him open his “shut
soul” to our searching. He will say something like this:
“In the first place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own
use or disuse as much of the earth’s surface as I am desirous and able
to procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy
of the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To
the objection that this must eventually, here, as it has actually done
elsewhere, deprive the rest of you of places upon which legally to be
born, and exclude you, after surreptitious birth as trespassers, from
all chance to procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that
you can be born at sea and eat fish.
“I claim the right to induce you, by offer of employment, to colonize
yourselves and families about my factories, and then arbitrarily, by
withdrawing the employment, break up in a day the homes that you have
been years in acquiring where it is no longer possible for you to
procure work.
“In determining your rate of wages when I employ you, I claim the right
to make your necessities a factor in the problem, thus making your
misfortunes cumulative. By the law of supply and demand (God bless its
expounder!) the less you have and the less chance to get more, the more
I have the right to take from you in labor and the less I am bound to
give you in wages.
“I claim the right to maintain a private army to subdue you when you
rise.
“I claim the right to make you suffer, by creating for my advantage an
artificial scarcity of the necessaries of life.
“As to falsehood, treachery and the other military virtues with which
you threaten me, I shall go, in them, as far as you; but from arson and
assassination I recoil with horror. You see you have very little to
burn, and you are not more than half alive anyhow.”
That, I submit, is a pretty fair definition of the position of the
rich man who works for himself with his head. It seems worth while to
put it on record while he is extant to challenge or verify; for the
probability is that unless he mend his ways he will not much longer be
rich, nor work, nor have a head.