Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Jeannie Howse and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
* * * * *
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has |
| been preserved. |
| |
| Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For |
| a complete list, please see the end of this document. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *
THE COMMON SENSE
OF SOCIALISM
A SERIES OF LETTERS ADDRESSED TO
JONATHAN EDWARDS, OF PITTSBURG
BY
JOHN SPARGO
Author of "The Bitter Cry of the Children," "Socialism: A
Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles,"
"The Socialists: Who They Are and What They
Stand For," "Capitalist and Laborer,"
Etc., Etc., Etc.
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1911
Copyright 1909
BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
TO
GEORGE H. STROBELL
AS
A TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE
THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 1
II WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AMERICA? 4
III THE TWO CLASSES IN THE NATION 12
IV HOW WEALTH IS PRODUCED AND HOW IT IS DISTRIBUTED 26
V THE DRONES AND THE BEES 44
VI THE ROOT OF THE EVIL 68
VII FROM COMPETITION TO MONOPOLY 81
VIII WHAT SOCIALISM IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT 94
IX WHAT SOCIALISM IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT--_Continued_ 118
X THE OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM ANSWERED 136
XI WHAT SHALL WE DO, THEN? 170
APPENDICES:
I A SUGGESTED COURSE OF READING ON SOCIALISM 175
II HOW SOCIALIST BOOKS ARE PUBLISHED 179
THE COMMON SENSE OF SOCIALISM
I
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
Socialism is undoubtedly spreading. It is, therefore, right
and expedient that its teachings, its claims, its tendencies,
its accusations and promises, should be honestly and seriously
examined.--_Prof. Flint._
_My Dear Mr. Edwards_: I count it good fortune to receive such letters
of inquiry as that which you have written me. You could not easily
have conferred greater pleasure upon me than you have by the charming
candor and vigor of your letter. It is said that when President
Lincoln saw Walt Whitman, "the good, Gray Poet," for the first time he
exclaimed, "Well, he looks like a man!" and in like spirit, when I
read your letter I could not help exclaiming, "Well, he writes like a
man!"
There was no need, Mr. Edwards, for you to apologize for your letter:
for its faulty grammar, its lack of "style" and "polish." I am not
insensible to these, being a literary man, but, even at their highest
valuation, grammar and literary style are by no means the most
important elements of a letter. They are, after all, only like the
clothes men wear. A knave or a fool may be dressed in the most perfect
manner, while a good man or a sage may be poorly dressed, or even
clad in rags. Scoundrels in broadcloth are not uncommon; gentlemen in
fustian are sometimes met with.
He would be a very unwise man, you will admit, who tried to judge a
man by his coat. President Lincoln was uncouth and ill-dressed, but he
was a wise man and a gentleman in the highest and best sense of that
much misused word. On the other hand, Mr. Blank, who represents
railway interests in the United States Senate, is sleek, polished and
well-dressed, but he is neither very wise nor very good. He is a
gentleman only in the conventional, false sense of that word.
Lots of men could write a more brilliant letter than the one you have
written to me, but there are not many men, even among professional
writers, who could write a better one. What I like is the spirit of
earnestness and the simple directness of it. You say that you have
"Read lots of things in the papers about the Socialists' ideas and
listened to some Socialist speakers, but never could get a very clear
notion of what it was all about." And then you add "Whether Socialism
is good or bad, wise or foolish, _I want to know_."
I wish, my friend, that there were more working men like you; that
there were millions of American men and women crying out: "Whether
Socialism is good or bad, wise or foolish, _I want to know_." For that
is the beginning of wisdom: back of all the intellectual progress of
the race is the cry, _I want to know_! It is a cry that belongs to
wise hearts, such as Mr. Ruskin meant when he said, "A little group of
wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools." There are lots
of fools, both educated and uneducated, who say concerning Socialism,
which is the greatest movement of our time, "I don't know anything
about it and I don't want to know anything about it." Compared with
the most learned man alive who takes that position, the least educated
laborer in the land who says "I want to know!" is a philosopher
compared with a fool.
When I first read your letter and saw the long list of your objections
and questions I confess that I was somewhat frightened. Most of the
questions are fair questions, many of them are wise ones and all of
them merit consideration. If you will bear with me, Mr. Edwards, and
let me answer them in my own way, I propose to answer them all. And in
answering them I shall be as honest and frank with you as I am with my
own soul. Whether you believe in Socialism or not is to me a matter of
less importance than whether you understand it or not.
You complain that in some of the books written about Socialism there
are lots of hard, technical words and phrases which you cannot
properly understand, even when you have looked in the dictionary for
their meaning, and that is a very just complaint. It is true that most
of the books on Socialism and other important subjects are written by
students for students, but I shall try to avoid that difficulty and
write as a plain, average man of fair sense to another plain, average
man of fair sense.
All your other questions and objections, about "stirring up class
hatred," about "dividing-up the wealth with the lazy and shiftless,"
trying to "destroy religion," advocating "free love" and "attacking
the family," all these and the many other matters contained in your
letter, I shall try to answer fairly and with absolute honesty.
I want to convert you to Socialism if I can, Mr. Edwards, but I am
more anxious to have you _understand_ Socialism.
II
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AMERICA?
It seems to me that people are not enough aware of the
monstrous state of society, absolutely without a parallel in
the history of the world, with a population poor, miserable
and degraded in body and mind, as if they were slaves, and yet
called freemen. The hopes entertained by many of the effects
to be wrought by new churches and schools, while the social
evils of their conditions are left uncorrected, appear to me
utterly wild.--_Dr. Arnold, of Rugby._
The working-classes are entitled to claim that the whole field
of social institutions should be re-examined, and every
question considered as if it now arose for the first time,
with the idea constantly in view that the persons who are to
be convinced are not those who owe their ease and importance
to the present system, but persons who have no other interest
in the matter than abstract justice and the general good of
the community.--_John Stuart Mill._
I presume, Mr. Edwards, that you are not one of those persons who
believe that there is nothing the matter with America; that you are
not wholly content with existing conditions. You would scarcely be
interested in Socialism unless you were convinced that in our existing
social system there are many evils for which some remedy ought to be
found if possible. Your interest in Socialism arises from the fact
that its advocates claim that it is a remedy for the social evils
which distress you--is it not so?
I need not harrow your feelings, therefore, by drawing for you
pictures of dismal misery, poverty, vice, crime and squalor. As a
workingman, living in Pittsburg, you are unhappily familiar with the
evils of our present system. It doesn't require a professor of
political economy to understand that something is wrong in our
American life today.
As an industrial city Pittsburg is a notable example of the defective
working of our present social and industrial system. In Pittsburg, as
in every other modern city, there are the extremes of wealth and
poverty. There are beautiful residences on the one hand and miserable,
crowded tenement hovels upon the other hand. There are people who are
so rich, whose incomes are so great, that their lives are made
miserable and unhappy. There are other people so poor, with incomes so
small, that they are compelled to live miserable and unhappy lives.
Young men and women, inheritors of vast fortunes, living lives of
idleness, uselessness and vanity at one end of the social scale are
driven to dissipation and debauchery and crime. At the other end of
the social scale there are young men and women, poor, overburdened
with toil, crushed by poverty and want, also driven to dissipation and
debauchery and crime.
You are a workingman. All your life you have known the conditions
which surround the lives of working people like yourself. You know how
hard it is for the most careful and industrious workman to properly
care for his family. If he is fortunate enough never to be sick, or
out of work, or on strike, or to be involved in an accident, or to
have sickness in his family, he may become the owner of a cheap home,
or, by dint of much sacrifice, his children may be educated and
enabled to enter one of the professions. Or, given all the conditions
stated, he may be enabled to save enough to provide for himself and
wife a pittance sufficient to keep them from pauperism and beggary in
their old age.
That is the best the workingman can hope for as a result of his own
labor under the very best conditions. To attain that level of comfort
and decency he must deny himself and his wife and children of many
things which they ought to enjoy. It is not too much to say that none
of your fellow-workmen in Pittsburg, men known to you, your neighbors
and comrades in labor, have been able to attain such a condition of
comparative comfort and security except by dint of much hardship
imposed upon themselves, their wives and children. They have had to
forego many innocent pleasures; to live in poor streets, greatly to
the disadvantage of the children's health and morals; to concentrate
their energies to the narrow and sordid aim of saving money; to
cultivate the instincts and feelings of the miser.
The wives of such men have had to endure privations and wrongs such as
only the wives of the workers in civilized society ever know.
Miserably housed, cruelly overworked, toiling incessantly from morn
till night, in sickness as well as in health, never knowing the joys
of a real vacation, cooking, scrubbing, washing, mending, nursing and
pitifully saving, the wife of such a worker is in truth the slave of a
slave.
At the very best, then, the lot of the workingman excludes him and his
wife and children from most of the comforts which belong to modern
civilization. A well-fitted home in a good neighborhood--to say
nothing of a home beautiful in itself and its surroundings--is out of
the question; foreign travel, the opportunity to enjoy the rest and
educative advantages of occasional journeys to other lands, is
likewise out of the question. Even though civic enterprise provides
public libraries and art galleries, museums, lectures, concerts, and
other opportunities of recreation and education, there is not the
leisure for their enjoyment to any extent. For our model workman, with
all his exceptional advantages, after a day's toil has little time
left for such things, and little strength or desire, while his wife
has even less time and even less desire.
You know that this is not an exaggerated account. It may be questioned
by the writers of learned treatises who know the life of the workers
only from descriptions of it written by people who know very little
about it, but you will not question it. As a workman you know it is
true. And I know it is true, for I have lived it. The best that the
most industrious, thrifty, persevering and fortunate workingman can
hope for is to be decently housed, decently fed, decently clothed.
That he and his family may always be certain of these things, so that
they go down to their graves at last without having experienced the
pangs of hunger and want, the worker must be exceptionally fortunate.
_And yet, my friend, the horses in the stables of the rich men of this
country, and the dogs in their kennels, have all these things, and
more!_ For they are protected against such overwork and such anxiety
as the workingman and the workingman's wife must endure. Greater care
is taken of the health of many horses and dogs than the most favored
workingman can possibly take of the health of his boys and girls.
At its best and brightest, then, the lot of the workingman in our
present social system is not an enviable one. The utmost good fortune
of the laboring classes is, properly considered, a scathing
condemnation of modern society. There is very little poetry, beauty,
joy or glory in the life of the workingman when taken at its very
best.
But you know very well that not one workingman in a hundred, nay, not
one in a thousand, is fortunate enough never to be sick, or out of
work, or on strike, or to be involved in an accident, or to have
sickness in his family. Not one worker in a thousand lives to old age
and goes down to his grave without having known the pangs of hunger
and want, both for himself and those dependent upon him. On the
contrary, dull, helpless, poverty is the lot of millions of workers
whose lines are cast in less pleasant places.
Mr. Frederic Harrison the well-known conservative English publicist,
some years ago gave a graphic description of the lot of the working
class of England, a description which applies to the working class of
America with equal force. He said:
"Ninety per cent of the actual producers of wealth have no
home that they can call their own beyond the end of a week,
have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs to
them; have nothing of value of any kind except as much as will
go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages which
barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed for the most
part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are
separated by so narrow a margin from destruction that a month
of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss brings them face to
face with hunger and pauperism."[1]
I am perfectly willing, of course, to admit that, upon the whole,
conditions are worse in England than in this country, but I am still
certain that Mr. Harrison's description is fairly applicable to the
United States of America, in this year of Grace, nineteen hundred and
eight.
At present we are passing through a period of industrial depression.
Everywhere there are large numbers of unemployed workers. Poverty is
rampant. Notwithstanding all that is being done to ease their misery,
all the doles of the charitable and compassionate, there are still
many thousands of men, women and children who are hungry and
miserable. You see them every day in Pittsburg, as I see them in New
York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and elsewhere. It is
easy to see in times like the present that there is some great, vital
defect in our social economy.
Later on, if you will give me your attention, Jonathan, I want you to
consider the causes of such cycles of depression as this that we are
so patiently enduring. But at present I am interested in getting you
to realize the terrible shortcomings of our industrial system at its
best, in normal times. I want to have you consider the state of
affairs in times that are called "prosperous" by the politicians, the
preachers, the economists, the statisticians and the editors of our
newspapers. I am not concerned, here and now, with the _exceptional_
distress of such periods as the present, but with the ordinary,
normal, chronic misery and distress; the poverty that is always so
terribly prevalent.
Do you remember the talk about the "great and unexampled prosperity"
in which you indulged during the latter part of 1904 and the following
year? Of course you do. Everybody was talking about prosperity, and a
stranger visiting the United States might have concluded that we were
a nation of congenital optimists. Yet, it was precisely at that time,
in the very midst of our loud boasting about prosperity, that Robert
Hunter challenged the national brain and conscience with the
statement that there were at lease ten million persons in poverty in
the United States. If you have not read Mr. Hunter's book, Jonathan, I
advise you to get it and read it. You will find in it plenty of food
for serious thought. It is called _Poverty_, and you can get a copy at
the public library. From time to time I am going to suggest that you
read various books which I believe you will find useful. "Reading
maketh a full man," provided that the reading is seriously and wisely
done. Good books relating to the problems you have to face as a worker
are far better for reading than the yellow newspapers or the sporting
prints, my friend.
When they first read Mr. Hunter's startling statement that there were
ten million persons in the United States in poverty, many people
thought that he must be a sensationalist of the worst type. It could
not be true, they thought. But when they read the startling array of
facts upon which that estimate was based they modified their opinion.
It is significant, I think, that there has been no very serious
criticism of the estimate made by any reputable authority.
Do you know, Jonathan, that in New York of all the persons who die one
in every ten dies a pauper and is buried in Potter's Field? It is a
pity that we have not statistics upon this point covering most of our
cities, including your own city of Pittsburg. If we had, I should ask
you to try an experiment. I should ask you to give up one of your
Saturday afternoons, or any day when you might be idle, and to take
your stand at the busiest corner in the city. There, I would have you
count the people as they pass by, hurrying to and fro, and every tenth
person you counted I would have you note by making a little cross on a
piece of paper. Think what an awful tally it would be, Jonathan. How
sick and weary at heart you would be if you stood all day counting,
saying as every tenth person passed, "There goes another marked for a
pauper's grave!" And it might happen, you know, that the fateful count
of ten would mark your own boy, or your own wife.
We are a practical, hard-headed people. That is our national boast.
You are a Yankee of the good old Massachusetts stock, I understand,
proud of the fact that you can trace your descent right back to the
Pilgrim Fathers. But with all our hard-headed practicality, Jonathan,
there is still some sentiment left in us. Most of us dread the thought
of a pauper's grave for ourselves or friends, and struggle against
such fate as we struggle against death itself. It is a foolish
sentiment perhaps, for when the soul leaves the body a mere handful of
clod and marl, the spark of divinity forever quenched, it really does
not matter what happens to the body, nor where it crumbles into dust.
But we cherish the sentiment, nevertheless, and dread having to fill
pauper graves. And when ten per cent, of those who die in the richest
city of the richest nation on earth are laid at last in pauper graves
and given pauper burial there is something radically and cruelly
wrong.
And you and I, with our fellows, must try to find out just what the
wrong is, and just how we can set it right. Anything less than that
seems to me uncommonly like treason to the republic, treason of the
worst kind. Alas! Alas! such treason is very common, friend
Jonathan--there are many who are heedless of the wrongs that sap the
life of the republic and careless of whether or no they are righted.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Report of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, 1886, p. 429.
III
THE TWO CLASSES IN THE NATION
Mankind are divided into two great classes--the shearers and
the shorn. You should always side with the former against the
latter.--_Talleyrand._
All men having the same origin are of equal antiquity; nature
has made no difference in their formation. Strip the nobles
naked and you are as well as they; dress them in your rags,
and you in their robes, and you will doubtless be the nobles.
Poverty and riches only discriminate betwixt
you.--_Machiavelli._
Thou shalt not steal. _Thou shalt not be stolen from._--_Thomas
Carlyle._
I want you to consider, friend Jonathan, the fact that in this and
every other civilized country there are two classes. There are, as it
were, two nations in every nation, two cities in every city. There is
a class that lives in luxury and a class that lives in poverty. A
class constantly engaged in producing wealth but owning little or none
of the wealth produced and a class that enjoys most of the wealth
without the trouble and pain of producing it.
If I go into any city in America I can find beautiful and costly
mansions in one part of the city, and miserable, squalid tenement
hovels in another part. And I never have to ask where the workers
live. I know that the people who live in the mansions don't produce
anything; that the wealth producers alone are poor and miserably
housed.
Republican and Democratic politicians never ask you to consider such
things. They expect you to let _them_ do all the thinking, and to
content yourself with shouting and voting for them. As a Socialist, I
want you to do some thinking for yourself. Not being a politician, but
a simple fellow-citizen, I am not interested in having you vote for
anything you do not understand. If you should offer to vote for
Socialism without understanding it, I should beg you not to do it. I
want you to vote for Socialism, of course, but not unless you know
what it means, why you want it and how you expect to get it. You see,
friend Jonathan, I am perfectly frank with you, as I promised to be.
You will remember, I hope, that in your letter to me you made the
objection that the Socialists are constantly stirring up class hatred,
setting class against class. I want to show you now that this is _not
true_, though you doubtless believed that it was true when you wrote
it. I propose to show you that in this great land of ours there are
two great classes, the "shearers and the shorn," to adopt Talleyrand's
phrase. And I want you to side with the _shorn_ instead of with the
_shearers_, because, if I am not sadly mistaken, my friend, _you are
one of the shorn_. Your natural interests are with the workers, and
all the workers are shorn and robbed, as I shall try to show you.
You work in one of the great steel foundries of Pittsburg, I
understand. You are paid wages for your work, but you have no other
interest in the establishment. There are lots of other men working in
the same place under similar conditions. Above you, having the
authority to discharge you if they see fit, if you displease them or
your work does not suit them, are foremen and bosses. They are paid
wages like yourself and your fellow workmen. True, they get a little
more wages, and they live in consequence in a little better homes
than most of you, but they do not own the plant. They, too, may be
discharged by other bosses above them. There are a few of the workmen
who own a small number of shares of stock in the company, but not
enough of them to have any kind of influence in its management. They
are just as likely to be turned out of employment as any of you.
Above all the workers and bosses of one kind and another there is a
general manager. Wonderful stories are told of the enormous salary he
gets. They say that he gets more for one week than you or any of your
fellow workmen get for a whole year. You used to know him well when
you were boys together. You went to the same school; played "hookey"
together; bathed in the creek together. You used to call him "Richard"
and he always used to call you "Jon'thun." You lived close to each
other on the same street.
But you don't speak to each other nowadays. When he passes through the
works each morning you bend to your work and he does not notice you.
Sometimes you wonder if he has forgotten all about the old days, about
the games you used to play up on "the lots," the "hookey" and the
swimming in the creek. Perhaps he has not forgotten: perhaps he
remembers well enough, for he is just a plain human being like
yourself Jonathan; but if he remembers he gives no sign.
Now, I want to ask you a few plain questions, or, rather, I want you
to ask yourself a few plain questions. Do you and your old friend
Richard still live on the same street, in the same kind of houses like
you used to? Do you both wear the same kind of clothes, like you used
to? Do you and he both go to the same places, mingle with the same
company, like you used to in the old days? Does _your_ wife wear the
same kind of clothes than _his_ wife does? Does _his_ wife work as
hard as _your_ wife does? Do they both belong to the same social "set"
or does the name of Richard's wife appear in the Social Chronicle in
the daily papers while your wife's does not? When you go to the
theater, or the opera, do you and your family occupy as good seats as
Richard and his family in the same way that you and he used to occupy
"quarter seats" in the gallery? Are your children and Richard's
children dressed equally well? Your fourteen-year-old girl is working
as a cash-girl in a store and your fifteen-year-old boy is working in
a factory. What about Richard's children? They are about the same age
you know: is his girl working in a store, his boy in a factory?
Richard's youngest child has a nurse to take care of her. You saw her
the other day, you remember: how about your youngest child--has she a
nurse to care for her?
Ah, Jonathan! I know very well how you must answer these questions as
they flash before your mind in rapid succession. You and Richard are
no longer chums; your wives don't know each other; your children don't
play together, but are strangers to one another; you have no friends
in common now. Richard lives in a mansion, while you live in a hovel;
Richard's wife is a fine "lady" in silks and satins, attended by
flunkeys, while your wife is a poor, sickly, anæmic, overworked
drudge. You still live in the same city, yet not in the same world.
You would not know how to act in Richard's home, before all the
servants; you would be embarrassed if you sat down at his dinner
table. Your children would be awkward and shy in the presence of his
children, while they would scorn to introduce your children to their
friends.
You have drifted far apart, you two, my friend. Somehow there yawns
between you a great, impassable gulf. You are as far apart in your
lives as prince and pauper, lord and serf, king and peasant ever were
in the world's history. It is wonderful, this chasm that yawns between
you. As Shakespeare has it:
Strange it is that bloods
Alike of colour, weight and heat, pour'd out together,
Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off
In differences so mighty.
I am not going to say anything against your one-time friend who is now
a stranger to you and the lord of your life. I have not one word to
say against him. But I want you to consider very seriously if the
changes we have noted are the only changes that have taken place in
him since the days when you were chums together. Have you forgotten
the Great Strike, when you and your fellow workers went out on strike,
demanding better conditions of labor and higher wages? Of course you
have not forgotten it, for that was when your scanty savings were all
used up, and you had to stand, humiliated and sorrowful, at the relief
station, or in the "Bread Line," to get food for your little family.
Those were the dark days when your dream of a little cottage in the
country, with hollyhocks and morning-glories and larkspurs growing
around it, melted away like the mists of the morning. It was the dream
of your young manhood and of your wife's young womanhood; it was the
dream of your earliest years together, and you both worked and saved
for that little cottage in the suburbs where you would spend the
sunset hours of life together. The Great Strike killed your beautiful
dream; it killed your wife's hopes. You have no dream now and no hope
for the sunset hours. When you think of them you become bitter and
try to banish the thought. I know all about that faded dream,
Jonathan.
Why did you stay out on strike and suffer? Why did you not remain at
work, or at least go back as soon as you saw how hard the fight was
going to be? "What! desert my comrades, and be a traitor to my
brothers in the fight?" you say. But I thought you did not believe in
classes! I thought you were opposed to the Socialists because they set
class to fight class! You were fighting the company then, weren't you;
trying to force them to give you decent conditions? You called it a
fight, Jonathan, and the newspapers, you remember, had great headlines
every day about the "Great Labor War."
It wasn't the Socialists who urged you to go out on strike, Jonathan.
You had never heard of Socialism then, except once you read something
in the papers about some Socialists who were shot down by the Czar's
Cossacks in the streets of Warsaw. You got an idea then that a
Socialist was a desperado with a firebrand in one hand and a bomb in
the other, madly seeking to burn palaces and destroy the lives of rich
men and rulers. No, it was not due to Socialist agitation that you
went out on strike.
You went out on strike because you had grown desperate on account of
the wanton, wicked, needless waste of human life that went on under
your very eyes, day after day. You saw man after man maimed, man after
man killed, through defects in the machinery, and the company, through
your old chum and playmate, refused to make the changes necessary.
They said that it would "cost too much money," though you all knew
that the shareholders were reaping enormous profits. Added to that,
and the fact that you went hourly in dread of similar fate befalling
you, your wife had a hard time to make both ends meet. There was a
time when you could save something every week, but for some time
before the strike there was no saving. Your wife complained; your
comrades said that their wives complained. Finally you all agreed that
you could stand it no longer; that you would send a committee to
interview the manager and tell him that, unless you got better wages
and unless something was done to make your lives safer you would go
out on strike.
When you and the manager were chums together he was a kind,
good-hearted, generous fellow, and you felt certain that when the
Committee explained things it would be all right. But you were
mistaken. He cursed at them as though they were dogs, and you could
scarcely believe your own ears. Do you remember how you spoke to your
wife about it, about "the change in Dick"?
You went out on strike. The manager scoured the country for men to
take your places. Ruffianly men came from all parts of the country;
insolent, strife-provoking thugs. More than once you saw your
fellow-workmen attacked and beaten by thugs, and then the police were
ordered to club and arrest--not the aggressors but your comrades. Then
the manager asked the mayor to send for the troops, and the mayor did
as he was bidden do. What else could he do when the leading
stockholders in the company owned and controlled the Republican
machine? So the Republican mayor wired to the Republican Governor for
soldiers and the soldiers came to intimidate you and break the strike.
One day you heard a rifle's sharp crack, followed by a tumult and they
told you that one of your old friends, who used to go swimming with
you and Richard, the manager, had been shot by a drunken sentry,
though he was doing no harm.
You were a Democrat. Your father had been a Democrat and you "just
naturally growed up to be one." As a Democrat you were very bitter
against the Republican mayor and the Republican Governor. You honestly
thought that if there had been a good Democrat in each of those
offices there would have been no soldiers sent into the city; that
your comrade would not have been murdered. You spoke of little else to
your fellows. You nursed the hope that at the next election they would
turn out the Republicans and put the Democrats in.
But that delusion was shattered like all the rest, Jonathan, when,
soon after, the Democratic President you were so proud of, to whom you
looked up as to a modern Moses, sent federal troops into Illinois,
over the protest of the Governor of that Commonwealth, in defiance of
the laws of the land, in violation of the sacred Constitution he had
sworn to protect and obey. Your faith in the Democratic Party was
shattered. Henceforth you could not trust either the Republican Party
or the Democratic Party.
I don't want to discuss the strike further. That is all ancient
history to you now. I have already gone a good deal farther afield
than I wanted to do, or than I intended to do when I began this
letter. I want to go back--back to our discussion of the great gulf
that divides you and your former chum, Richard.
I want you to ask yourself, with perfect candor and good faith,
whether you believe that Richard has been so much better than you,
either as workman, citizen, husband or father, that his present
position can be regarded as a just reward for his virtue and ability?
I'll put it another way for you, Jonathan: in your own heart do you
believe that you are so much inferior to him as a worker or as a
citizen, so much inferior in mentality and in character that you
deserve the hard fate which has come to you, the ill-fortune compared
to his good fortune? Are you and your family being punished for your
sins, while he and his family are being rewarded for his virtues? In
other words, Jonathan, to put the matter very plainly, do you believe
that God has ordained your respective states in accordance with your
just deserts?
You know that is not the case, Jonathan. You know very well that both
Richard and yourself share the frailties and weaknesses of our kind.
Infinite mischief has been done by those who have given the struggle
between the capitalists and the workers the aspect of a conflict
between "goodness" on the one side and "wickedness" upon the other.
Many things which the capitalists do appear very wicked to the
workers, and many things which the workers do, and think perfectly
proper and right, the capitalists honestly regard as improper and
wrong.
I do not deny that there are some capitalists whose conduct deserves
our contempt and condemnation, just as there are some workingmen of
whom the same is true. Still less would I deny that there is a very
real ethical measure of life; that some conduct is anti-social while
other conduct is social. I simply want you to catch my point that we
are creatures of our environment, Jonathan; that if the workers and
the capitalists could change places, there would be a corresponding
change in their views of many things. I refuse to flatter the workers,
my friend: they have been flattered too much already.
Politicians seeking votes always tell the workers how greatly they
admire them for their intelligence and for their moral excellencies.
But you know and I know that they are insincere; that, for the most
part, their praise is lying hypocrisy. They practice what you call
"the art of jollying the people" because that is an important part of
their business. The way they talk _to_ the working class is very
different from the way they talk _of_ the working class among
themselves. I've heard them, my friend, and I know how most of them
despise the workers.
The working men and women of this country have many faults and
failings. Many of them are ignorant, though that is not quite their
own fault. Many a workingman starves and pinches his wife and little
ones to gamble, squandering his money, yes, and the lives of his
family, upon horse races, prize-fights, and other brutal and senseless
things called "sport." It is all wrong, Jonathan, and we know it. Many
of our fellow workmen drink, wasting the children's bread-money and
making beasts of themselves in saloons, and that is wrong, too, though
I do not wonder at it when I think of the hells they work in, the
hovels they live in and the dull, soul-deadening grind of their daily
lives. But we have got to struggle against it, got to conquer the
bestial curse, before we can get better conditions. Men who soak their
brains in alcohol, or who gamble their children's bread, will never be
able to make the world a fit place to live in, a place fit for little
children to grow in.
But the worst of all the failings of the working class, in my humble
judgment, is its indifference to the great problems of life. Why is
it, Jonathan, that I can get tens of thousands of workingmen in
Pittsburg or any large city excited and wrought to feverish enthusiasm
over a brutal and bloody prize-fight in San Francisco, or about a
baseball game, and only a man here and there interested in any degree
about Child Labor, about the suffering of little babies? Why is it
that the workers, in Pittsburg and every other city in America, are
less interested in getting just conditions than in baseball games from
which all elements of honest, manly sport have been taken away; brutal
slugging matches between professional pugilists; horseraces conducted
by gamblers for gamblers; the sickening, details of the latest scandal
among the profligate, idle rich?
I could get fifty thousand workingmen in Pittsburg to read long,
disgusting accounts of bestiality and vice more easily than I could
get five hundred to read a pamphlet on the Labor Problem, on the
wrongfulness of things as they are and how they might be made better.
The masters are wiser, Jonathan. They watch and guard their own
interests better than the workers do.
If you owned the tools with which you work, my friend, and whatever
you could produce belonged to you, either to use or to exchange for
the products of other workers, there would be some reason in your
Fourth of July boasting about this
Blest land of Liberty.
But you don't. You, and all other wage-earners, depend upon the
goodwill and the good judgment of the men who own the land, the mines,
the factories, the railways, and practically all other means of
producing wealth for the right to live. You don't own the raw
material, the machinery or the railways; you don't control your own
jobs. Most of you don't even own your own miserable homes. These
things are owned by a small class of, people when their number is
compared with the total population. The workers produce the wealth of
this and every other country, but they do not own it. They get just
enough to keep them alive and in a condition to go on producing
wealth--as long as the master class sees fit to have them do it.
Most of the capitalists do not, _as capitalists_, contribute in any
manner to the production of wealth. Some of them do render services of
one kind and another in the management of the industries they are
connected with. Some of them are directors, for example, _but they are
always paid for their services before there is any distribution of
profits_. Even when their "work" is quite perfunctory and useless,
mere make-believe, like the games of little children, they get paid
far more than the actual workers. But there are many people who own
stock in the company you work for, Jonathan, who never saw the
foundries, who were never in the city of Pittsburg in their lives,
whose knowledge of the affairs of the company is limited to the stock
quotations in the financial columns of the morning papers.
Think of it: when you work and produce a dollar's worth of wealth by
your labor, it is divided up. You get only a very small fraction. The
rest is divided between the landlords and the capitalists. This
happens in the case of every man among the thousands employed by the
company. Only a small share goes to the workers, a third, or a fourth,
perhaps, the remainder being divided among people who have done none
of the work. It may happen, does happen in fact, that, an old
profligate whose delight is the seduction of young girls, a wanton
woman whose life would shame the harlot of the streets, a lunatic in
an asylum, or a baby in the cradle, will get more than any of the
workers who toil before the glaring furnaces day after day.
These are terrible assertions, Jonathan, and I do not blame you if you
doubt them. I shall _prove_ them for you in a later letter.
At present, I want you to get hold of the fact that the wealth
produced by the workers is so distributed that the idle and useless
classes get most of it. People will tell you, Jonathan, that "there
are no classes in America," and that the Socialists lie when they say
so. They point out to you that your old chum, Richard, who is now a
millionaire, was a poor boy like yourself. They say he rose to his
present position because he had keener brains than his fellows, but
you know lots of workmen in the employ of the company who know a great
deal more about the work than he does, lots of men who are cleverer
than he is. Or they tell you that he rose to his present position
because of his superior character, but you know that he is, to say the
least, no better than the average man who works under him.
The fact is, Jonathan, the idle capitalists must have some men to
carry on the work for them, to direct it and see that the workers are
exploited properly. They must have some men to manage things for them;
to see that elections are bought, that laws in their interests are
passed and not laws in the interests of the people. They must have
somebody to do the things they are too "respectable" to do--or too
lazy. They take such men from the ranks of the workers and pay them
enormous salaries, thereby making them members of their own class.
Such men are really doing useful and necessary work in managing the
business (though not in corrupting legislators or devising swindling
schemes) and are to that extent producers. But their interests are
with the capitalists. They live in palaces, like the idlers; they
mingle in the same social sets; they enjoy the same luxuries. And,
above all, they can invest part of their large incomes in other
concerns and draw enormous profits from the labors of other toilers,
sometimes even in other lands. They are capitalists and their whole
influence is on the side of the capitalists against the workers.
I want you to think over these things, friend Jonathan. Don't be
afraid to do your own thinking! If you have time, go to the library
and get some good books on the subject and read them carefully, doing
your own thinking no matter what the authors of the books may say. I
suggest that you get W.J. Ghent's _Mass and Class_ to begin with.
Then, when you have read that, I shall be glad to have you read
Chapter VI of a book called _Socialism: A Summary and Interpretation
of Socialist Principles_. It is not very hard reading, for I wrote the
book myself to meet the needs of just such earnest, hard-working men
as yourself.
I think both books will be found in the public library. At any rate,
they ought to be. But if not, it would be worth your while to save the
price of a few whiskies and to buy them for yourself. You see,
Jonathan, I want you to study.
IV
HOW WEALTH IS PRODUCED AND HOW IT IS DISTRIBUTED
It is easy to persuade the masses that the good things of this
world are unjustly divided--especially when it happens to be
the exact truth.--_J.A. Froude._
The growth of wealth and of luxury, wicked, wasteful and
wanton, as before God I declare that luxury to be, has been
matched step by step by a deepening and deadening poverty,
which has left whole neighborhoods of people practically
without hope and without aspiration.--_Bishop Potter._
At present, all the wealth of Society goes first into the
possession of the Capitalist.... He pays the landowner his
rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe-gatherer their
claims, and keeps a large, indeed, the largest, and a
constantly augmenting share of the annual produce of labour
for himself. The Capitalist may now be said to be the first
owner of all the wealth of the community, though no law has
conferred on him the right of this property.... This change
has been effected by the taking of interest on Capital ... and
it is not a little curious that all the lawgivers of Europe
endeavoured to prevent this by Statutes--viz., Statutes
against usury.--_Rights of Natural and Artificial Property
Contrasted_ (_An Anonymous work, published in London, in
1832_).--_Th. Hodgskin._
You are not a political economist, Jonathan, nor a statistician. Most
books on political economy, and most books filled with statistics,
seem to you quite unintelligible. Your education never included the
study of such books and they are, therefore, almost if not quite
worthless to you.
But every working man ought to know something about political economy
and be familiar with some statistics relating to social conditions.
So I am going to ask you to study a few figures and a little political
economy. Only just a very little, mind you, just to get you used to
thinking about social problems in a scientific way. I think I can set
the fundamental principles of political economy before you in very
simple language, and I will try to make the statistics interesting.
But I want to warn you again, Jonathan, that you must use your own
commonsense. Don't trust too much to theories and figures--especially
figures. Somebody has said that you can divide the liars of the world
into three classes--liars, damned liars and statisticians. Some people
are paid big salaries for juggling with figures to fool the American
people into believing what is not true, Jonathan. I want you to
consider the laws of political economy and all the statistics I put
before you in the light of your own commonsense and your own practical
experience.
Political economy is the name which somebody long ago gave to the
formal study of the production and distribution of wealth. Carlyle
called it "the dismal science," and most books on the subject are
dismal enough to justify the term. Upon my library shelves there are
some hundreds of volumes dealing with political economy, and I don't
mind confessing to you that some of them I never have been able to
understand, though I have put no little effort and conscience into the
attempt. I have a suspicion that the authors of these books could not
understand them themselves. That the reason why they could not write
so that a man of fair intelligence and education could understand them
was the fact that they had no clear ideas to convey.
Now, in the first place, what do we mean by _Wealth_? Why, you say,
wealth is money and money is wealth. But that is only half true,
Jonathan. Suppose, for example, that an American millionaire crossing
the ocean be shipwrecked and find himself cast upon some desert
island, like another Robinson Crusoe, without food or means of
obtaining any. Suppose him naked, without tool or weapon of any kind,
his one sole possession being a bag containing ten thousand dollars in
gold and banknotes to the value of as many millions. With that money,
in New York, or any other city in the world, he would be counted a
rich man, and he would have no difficulty in getting food and
clothing.
But alone upon that desert island, what could he do with the money? He
could not eat it, he could not keep himself warm with it? He would be
poorer than the poorest savage in Africa whose only possessions were a
bow and arrow and an assegai, or spear, wouldn't he? The poor kaffir
who never heard of money, but who had the simple weapons with which to
hunt for food, would be the richer man of the two, wouldn't he?
I think you will find it useful, Jonathan, to read a little book by
John Ruskin, called _Unto This Last_. It is a very small book, written
in very simple and beautiful language. Mr. Ruskin was a somewhat
whimsical writer, and there are some things in the book which I do not
wholly agree with, but upon the whole it is sane, strong and eternally
true. He shows very clearly, according to my notion, that the mere
possession of things, or of money, is not wealth, but that _wealth
consists in the possession of things useful to us_. That is why the
possession of heaps of gold by a man living alone upon a desert island
does not make him wealthy, and why Robinson Crusoe, with weapons,
tools and an abundant food supply, was really a wealthy man, though he
had not a dollar.