The confidential relations between our government and people have given
it a parental character. It has consequently been the study of our
legislation for ages past to assuage, as far as possible, those natural
evils which creep in as the result of unrestricted social forces.
Regarding the whole mass of our inhabitants as a family, the government
could never feel that its duty was faithfully performed, while a number
of its people were, relating to the ordinary enjoyments of life,
in a state of suppression from any removable cause. You began your
civilization, just as we began ours, by the crystallization of society
into two classes. Those who at first, by thrift, acquisitiveness, or
strong arms, became possessed of sufficient property to escape the
necessity of daily toil for the sustenance of life; and those who, by
the absence of these qualities or from other causes, were obliged from
day to day to exercise their muscular and nervous energies for the
benefit of those who found it profitable to use and pay for them. This
condition of society is a natural and just one, and there is nothing
whatever in it to prevent the largest possible amount of happiness
to all. But before many ages we discovered that the interests of
the property class and the labor class were not equally equipped to
maintain a fair and equitable relation with each other. We found that
the interests of labor in the many bore no comparison in its political
weight with the great power of wealth in the few; and foreseeing that
subjugation in time, of one by the other, which your experience has
shown, we made wide provision against it.
We acknowledge as the foundation of all material progress that the
honest accumulation of wealth should be the privilege of all; and that
the rights of property should be protected, and the enjoyment of it
secured to everyone. Yet with these principles firmly and successfully
carried out in our government, we have for many centuries, considered
it necessary to support and sustain the interests of the labor
class by special legislative attention. You have pursued a directly
opposite course. From the beginning of your history the privilege of
wealth to hold labor in subjection, and to use it as an instrument of
accumulation, with about the same regard for its well being as the
horse in the collar or the ox under its yoke, has prevailed, without
the enactment of any sincere and effective law to assist and sustain
it in its unequal contest. On the contrary, your statute books are
filled with oppressive laws against the labor class; and while in your
most civilized districts these unjust enactments are nearly obsolete,
there yet remains an average over your planet of such legal and social
suppressions of the class whose strong arm supports you, as to be
reckoned by us as the most unhappy and discreditable feature of your
social state.
It matters not how your economists may examine and discuss the
relations of labor with its co-operative interests, so long as they
offer no proposals of relief to it in the unjust burthen it bears of
the hardships of life. Your common view that labor must be unavoidably
submitted to the law of supply and demand, and that, consequently,
eighty per cent of your people are to be helplessly left to take
their chances of distress and suffering at each unfavorable turn of
the labor market, is peculiar to the planet upon which you live, and
is one of the most mistaken and unwise conclusions among you. This
heartless notion of yours is plainly the inheritance of your early
cruel ages. With such a state of things you can never have a very
high state of civilization. With so many of you constantly under the
vicissitude of such adverse changes of condition, there can be no
steady progress of the whole, and but little encouragement to thrift; a
lack of ambition must prevail in all the higher purposes of life, and
a general surrender to improvidence and the vices which follow. For
that class which has created your wealth, and is constantly renewing
it, and which constitutes so large a portion of your whole population,
you can show nothing of legislative effort in its favor except
indirectly, through some of the purposes to smooth the way and increase
the profits of capital. The opportunities of your comparatively small
capitalistic class to use for its purposes, in an entirely heartless
way, the larger body of wealth producers, have been made easy by
natural conditions which would have been removed or corrected long
ago, under a more humane and unselfish administration of your affairs,
and if your governments had not been exclusively in the hands of the
smaller class mentioned. We know of nothing more heartless and cruel
of the governing classes of the Earth, than their careless submission
of its wage-earners to the unrestricted influence of competition for
employment, under the compromising condition of a necessity for bread.
In our philosophy we recognize only two honest ways of accumulating
wealth. One is the saving of wages, and the other the profits of
capital; and our legislation has been chiefly directed to make the
chances of wealth by these two methods as even as possible. To perform
this service effectually, our greatest efforts have been directed
toward the labor interest. We feel ourselves justified in this, because
the welfare of about seven-eighths of our people is connected with this
interest; because to the labor class is entirely due the creation and
constant renewal of all the wealth on our planet. Because, also, that
capital has natural advantages over labor, which are first, its choice
of time and place for investment; second, its capacity to wait for
opportunities without the risk of physical suffering by its owners, and
the leisure for thought and knowledge it affords to those who control
it. Also, that capital, holding the position of a voluntary employer,
naturally assumes the rights and privileges of master, which labor, in
its constrained and dependent situation, is obliged to acknowledge.
We have long since considered these unequal relations and tendencies,
and have proceeded to remedy them. Our legislation in behalf of the
labor classes is the happiest and most satisfactory of any that we
have. Without it our present civilization would be impossible. Before
describing our methods, let me direct your attention to the immediate
and indirect causes which bear down upon the labor classes of your
planet.
Prominent among these is the promiscuous ownership of land. The
surrendering of the Earth’s surface to the control of individual
ownership is one of the most serious mistakes of your civilization.
It is not to be mentioned alone as the greatest objection to this,
that the planet upon which you were born is the natural inheritance of
all of you, from whose surface each and every one of you is destined
to derive a sustenance, and that a monopoly of it by the few is as
plain a violation of justice as it would be to hold the atmosphere in
private use by sections, were such a thing possible. But it is chiefly
to be taken into consideration, that your land policy enables the few
to dominate the many, suppresses one class and elevates another, and
insensibly transfers an undue portion of the earnings of labor into the
pockets of your land-holding classes.
Almost every influence now at work in the progress of your society
tends to throw money into the hands of your land holders, not fairly
earned by themselves. While the products of labor are cheapening
from day to day, partly due to increased skill, and the appliance of
machinery in their manufacture, and partly, also, by the competition
of labor, owing to increase of population, yet even by these very
operations the value of landed property goes up.
You already estimate rent as a considerable element of cost in the
production of your food materials, and you are gradually approaching
a period, when by the growth of population the cost of food will be
very much increased by rent charges. You have all along submitted to
this monopoly of land from causes plainly apparent. In the early days
of your history all private ownership of land was acquired and held by
force, and it may be safely asserted that no title at present exists in
any of your older countries that is not founded on violent conquest,
and that has not been maintained by an organized and armed authority,
whose existence depends upon retaining the system of ownership in
vogue. It is plain to see that when the demand of justice to all shall
be the basis of political action, and especially when the cost of your
food supply shall become greatly increased by the charges of rent, your
present system will not be quietly endured.
In your own more favored region of the Earth may be found temporary
conditions which tend not only to tolerate your present land ownership
system, but to render it popular. Your large area of unoccupied
agricultural surface, from which any of your citizens are permitted at
small cost to select a portion with a title in perpetuity, destroys
for the time being the monopolizing character of private ownership;
and while these governmental acts of land distribution are the most
remarkable concessions to labor in human history, we fail to discover
anything in the practice but a temporary compromise between the
interests of capital and labor. As your society progresses you must
arrive at the time when your landless class will be as effectually
excluded from the privilege of ownership as they are at present in the
older countries of the world.
Your own country in the newness of its human possession, by the lavish
distribution of its territory into private hands, has alleviated the
burdens of labor elsewhere, as well as within itself. It has effected
this in two ways: first by withdrawing from the surplus population of
densely inhabited districts abroad, and second by supplying from its
rich agricultural lands a cheaper food supply to the older countries of
the Earth than they were able to furnish from their own soils. But the
most unreasonable among you cannot fail to perceive the speedy limit
to these operations in the interests of labor, which after all must be
considered as merely effecting a truce between that conflict of the
laboring and landless many and the land-holding few which your people
will surely witness in time. We manage these things very differently on
Mars.