LETTER VII

My dear Judd:

When I was a youth, trying to find out about my country, one of the first things I learned was that its politics were corrupt. I lived in New York City, and saw that corruption all about me, and the hideous ruin of human lives; naturally I tried to figure out why these things had to be. The explanation given me in school was that it was the ignorant foreigners who crowded into our cities; they didn’t understand our institutions, they sold their votes, and delivered our political parties into the hands of bosses.

It happened that I had a certain relative—I won’t tell his name, suffice it that he was a financial man, on his way to becoming one of our great millionaires. He wanted to break into New York, so he opened an office, and gave a big block of stock to Richard Croker, at that time boss of Tammany Hall; he made another Tammany chieftain the head of his New York office—and that was all there was to it, he was “in,” and his firm took over the city’s business along that line, and all city officials and employes were given to understand that they must patronize it. Later on my relative—he was very fond of me, and told me all his doings—named a certain man for treasurer of New York state on the Democratic ticket; he smiled as he told me what that was going to mean, his firm would open offices all over the state and would get the state’s business. After which my worthy relative proceeded to scold me for my budding “radicalism,” and to assure me that our big business leaders were all patriots and men of honor.

Thus I saw the game from the inside, and little by little I came to understand it. Yes, it was true that the boss paid the ignorant foreigners for their votes; but where did the boss get the money for that purpose? The answer, though painful, was plain: he got it from my relative; he got it from all such business men, seeking all such favors and privileges from the state. And here was a further fact which was plain—my relative did not pay the boss for nothing; he intended to get, and did get, a hundred times as much out of the bargain as he paid to the boss and to the political machine of the boss. And that, I found, was the universal rule of this game of graft; the boss was merely anagent, set up by big business men to run the political part of their affairs; and as for the ignorant foreigner, he was a convenience which the business man made use of, in politics as in the labor market.

In the old days of the Tweed ring, the politicians used to steal our money outright; but that is over now, because every politician knows, just as every business man knows, that it is so much better to “make” money than to steal it; you can “make” so much more, and there is no danger of being sent to jail. So nowadays the rule of our politics is “honest graft.” The chiefs of Tammany Hall do not loot the treasury; what they do is to receive blocks of stock in paving companies and construction companies, which do the work for the city at enormous profits; they own stock in the banks which handle the city’s funds; they are in on all the big traction deals; they get up little pet companies, to do this or that service for the public service corporations—to furnish them with ink erasers, or time-clocks, or chewing gum, at several times the market price; and all that is perfectly safe and regular, and instead of sending them to jail we envy them.

I open my morning paper, and here is Arthur Brisbane, sneering at some young men in New York who are starting a paper called “The New Masses”: nobody in America wants to belong to the “masses,” and the young men ought to call their paper, “How to Make a Million the First Year.” Yes, Judd, that is what everybody wants; but can everybody do it? That is a point which Mr. Brisbane, multi-millionaire real estate speculator, fails to cover. But you see how it is: the very essence of “making a million the first year” is that you take it away from other people, who lose in the great business gamble, and remain the “masses,” in spite of desperate determination not to.

There is a charming fable by an old-time Italian named Pestolozzi, to the effect that the little fishes in the pond held a meeting to protest against the cruelty of the big pike; and the pike considered their protest and declared the matter should be remedied by a decree to the effect that every year two little fishes should be permitted to become pike. The fable does not tell us how the little fishes took that offer; but if they had been little American fishes they would have been delighted, and would have called it “liberty.”

Whether or not some particular little fish becomes a pike is a matter of interest to that little fish, but it does not change the social system. The “masses” remain, and by their labor produce the wealth, and the “classes” take it away from them. What I am trying to make clear to you, friend Judd, is that when you admire the possessor of a bit of juicy graft, what you are really admiring is the power to rob you; because it is your wealth the robber is getting, there is no other wealth for him to get. The old-fashioned criminal graft came out of the tax-payers; and the new fashioned “honest graft” comes out of the consumers of gas and electricity and telephones and transportation and all otherservices. Every dollar of profits, whether legitimate or illegitimate, is either paid by the consumer, or else it is written down as obligations, covered by “securities” of some sort, stocks or bonds, and forever after its claim is sacred, and the courts will protect its right to draw tribute from the consumer to the end of all time.

Take our railroads, for example; the history of American railroads is a history of bribery and fraud, continued through generations, and of stock-watering and speculation monstrous beyond belief. The common idea is that two-thirds of our railroad securities are water. LaFollette succeeded in getting a provision for a “physical valuation” of the railroads, and I saw, tucked away in an obscure corner of a newspaper, the results for two Southern lines—the water was nine dollars out of ten! So the “physical valuation” project was apparently dropped—at least, I can’t find out any more about it. And now what has happened? The courts have decided that the railroads are entitled to a “fair return” on their present paper values; it is the law of the land that they are guaranteed 5½% on their securities, and if they fail to earn that, the government makes it up to them!

The same principle applies to the public service companies in all our cities and towns. No matter by what bribery their franchises may have been gained, no matter how many oceans of water may have been pumped into their stocks, these values are sacred, and no legislature may pass a law reducing prices below a “fair return.” We have public service commissions which are supposed to put a stop to future stock-waterings and fraud, and to protect the public against unjust rates; but what are these commissions doing? The answer is, they are selling us out; and the proof is published daily, in the stock market quotations for the securities of these corporations. That is one kind of proof to which there is no answer, Judd; other people may be fooled about money matters, but the men who buy and sell in Wall Street are not fooled for long; they watch earnings, and, automatically every stock takes the ranking to which its dividends entitle it. If public service commissions are protecting you and me in our rights, then the stocks of public service corporations are of no use for purposes of speculation in Wall Street; on the other hand, if Wall Street is scrambling for them, and boosting the prices of them, it means one thing and one only—the big thieves have broken down the defenses we built up against them.

And what are the facts? Here are the “high” quotations for some of our biggest public utility corporations, the first figure for the year 1921, and the second for the year 1925; the gains speak for themselves: American Gas, 49, 79; American Light and Traction, 112, 249; Middle West Utilities, 24, 112; Public Service Company of N. Illinois, 82, 126; Standard Gas and Electric, 17, 59; Western Power, 30, 86.

And incredible as it may seem, Judd, here is our old friend the “stock dividend!” Yes, even in public utilities, they are getting away with so much that they have to hide it! American WaterWorks gave five new shares for one old share; Cities Service Co. the same! Western Power declared a 50% stock dividend; Columbia Gas and Electric gave three new shares “of no par value” for one old share. Here is a new trick, Judd—no par value any more, so you will never be able to say what that corporation ought to earn! You will never be able to raise the awkward question how much real money was put into the concern at the start! They won’t have to declare any more stock dividends, for the old ones will serve to infinity; as the cheerful phrase has it, the sky is the limit!

Look, Judd; three years ago we had a big “power fight” in Southern California. It was proposed by public-spirited people that the state should issue bonds for $500,000,000 and develop its own water power. Our big newspapers raved at the wicked idea; they told you that would be “Socialism,” and you believed them, and voted down the proposal. So now the great power companies have the field without a rival; they are spending the money—and where are they getting it? Selling stocks and bonds in Wall Street, of course; and on what basis? What basis could there be—except the fancy prices they intend to charge you for power, with the permission of the corrupt public authorities of this state?

And one thing more, Judd; when they come to present their bills—with the permission of the public service commission—they are going to include in the items the amount of $501,605.68 which they paid in the political campaign to bamboozle you! Yes, Judd, they will do that, and you will never know it, because it will be classified as “organizing expenses,” or “advertising,” or something like that; and how carefully do you go into the reports of the public service corporations which supply you with power? Six power companies admitted before the legislative investigating committee that they had paid that sum in the campaign; the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the old established rulers of this community, the purchasers of our local government, put in the tidy sum of $133,933.80. And so here is a sentence to paste in your hat, Judd:

Not only do they rob you; they make you want to be robbed, and they make you pay them for teaching you to want to be robbed!

And one more, Judd—a “slogan” for the next campaign:

Letting yourself be robbed is Americanism; defending yourself against robbery is Socialism!

My dear Judd:

You read about the rich growing richer and the poor poorer, and you wonder why the poor have stood it. Why didn’t they “do something.”

The answer is, they tried to, but the rich wouldn’t let them. It is of the nature of wealth to be powerful, and to use its power to protect and perpetuate itself. Jesus said: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have.” You have there the whole of political and economic science, and no professor in any capitalist university can say it any better. The history of our country is a record of incessant struggles on the part of the poor, continually repressed and brought to naught by the rich. The most powerful weapon in this conflict has been, of course, the government; the rich have had it, and the poor have been trying to take it away from them, and have failed.

In their battle the rich have had four lines of defense. First, the elections; they put up the money, and subsidize a political party, and carry on a campaign of falsehood and abuse, and buy votes and stuff ballot-boxes, and so defeat the poor at the polls. Second, assuming they fail in this, comes the legislative line of defense; they sow discord in the ranks of their opponents, they buy up some of their representatives, they delay action and confuse the public and plant “jokers” in the bills which are passed. And then comes the third line, the courts; the rich have named as judges their own retainers and corporation attorneys, their fellow club-members and table-companions, thoroughly trained in reference for property; and these judges discover the “jokers” in the laws, and declare them unconstitutional, null and void. Fourth, assuming these three lines fail, the rich simply defy the laws; resting upon the certainty that their government will not punish them; and it does not.

Do these seem to you extreme statements? Each one can be proved a thousand times over by the well-established facts of our history. In a previous letter I made the assertion that out of fifteen presidential elections since the civil war, fourteen were carried by the party which had the biggest campaign fund. Here are the figures, direct from headquarters—the “Wall Street Journal.” The winning party is listed first:

1868, Rep. $150,000, Dem. $75,000;1872, R. $250,000, D. $50,000;1876, R. $950,000, D. $900,000;1880, R. $1,100,000, D. $355,000;1884, D. $1,400,000, R. $1,300,000;1888, R. $1,350,000, D. $855,000;1892, D. $2,350,000, R. $1,850,000;1896, R. $16,500,000, D. $675,000;1900, R. $9,500,000, D. $425,000;1904, R. $3,500,000, D. $1,250,000;1908, R. $1,700,000, D. $750,000;1912, D. $850,000, R. $750,000, Prog. $325,000;1916, D. $1,400,229, R. $2,012,535;1920, R. $3,986,383, D. $2,891,252;1924, R. $3,359,478, D. $845,520, Prog. $225,936. Total of winning party, $49,683,369; of losing party, $14,797,001.

As to ballot-box stuffing, Judd I am not making any guesses, but telling you what I have seen with my own eyes. In my ardent youth I gave my services as election-watcher for the “reform” ticket in New York City, and came very close to getting my head stove in, for trying to prevent the counting of illegal ballots byTammany heelers; the thing that saved me was the fact that as the returns came in, the heelers perceived that they had won anyhow, and didn’t need the extra ballots! Lincoln Steffens, in his book, “The Shame of the Cities,” tells how in Philadelphia the machine used to vote “dead dogs and negro babies”; the title of that chapter was “Philadelphia Corrupt and Contented,” and today you can take out the name Philadelphia, and insert the name of any big American city you please.

The poor have never carried a national election in this country since the civil war, and the reason is simple, they have been too poor. It costs a million dollars to put a single piece of literature into the hands of all the voters in our country; and when you figure the cost of the speakers and the halls and the advertising and the bands and the red fire and the rockets and the flags and the bunting and the bunk, you have a total of several times as many millions as ever got acknowledged in the reports of campaign expenditures turned in according to law. The poor cannot produce these millions; and even if they had the money, they could not get the publicity, because the capitalist papers will not print the arguments of the poor, even as advertisements—I know, because I have tried it; the radio will not accept speakers for the poor—I know, because I have tried that also.

As for the second line of defense, the breaking up of popular movements and the bedeviling of popular legislation, the proof is the story of every “reform” movement that has taken office anywhere in the United States. Never once since the Civil War have the people succeeded in making effective a major piece of legislation in their own interest; the proof of which extreme statement lies in the statistics of real wages in the United States—the fact that in the richest nation in the world, for the period of its greatest productivity and expansion, the poor have been growing poorer. We have had campaigns of “muckraking,” yes; I remember how, many years ago, “Everybody’s Magazine” printed a boastful editorial, listing all the crusades they had carried on for the benefit of the people; and I wrote, challenging them to point out one single practical result which had come of all their efforts, to show where they had been able to divert a single dollar from the pockets of the rich into the pockets of the poor; and “Everybody’s” did not take up that challenge, nor even print it. To complete the story, note that “Everybody’s” has long since forgotten that it ever had any interest in social justice, and so has every other magazine of big circulation in the United States.

The third line of defense, the courts: that is the most shameful story of all, and for it I reserve a separate letter. For the moment let me make just one statement: there is not in the Constitution of the United States one line which entitles the courts to throw out or to annul an act of Congress. Such action is pure and absolute usurpation, a power which the courts have seized; and they have got away with it for one reason and one only—because it has served the interests of the rich. On that basis they havevetoed law after law, culminating in the recent decision which sentenced a million little children to slave out their lives in cotton mills and coal mines.

And then, the last line of defense: I say that when the rich do not like the law, they simply defy it. The proof of that statement is written on the front pages of our newspapers day by day. The rich are making no pretense of obeying the prohibition law; I have had drinks offered to me, in defiance of law, in the offices of leading senators and government officials. The big bootleggers today are eminent citizens, on terms of equality with bankers and judges and corporation attorneys; and yet we speculate about the spread of the crime wave!

But the crimes that interest me, Judd, are not house-breaking and safe-cracking, nor even bootlegging; for these take only a few lives, and destroy only a few characters. What I am after are those crimes which degrade whole populations, beating down their standards of life, and depriving them of hope and self-respect; those crimes which sap the foundations of free institutions. And those are the crimes of big business—in other words, the crimes committed by bankers and judges and corporation attorneys. I remind you of the report of a United States Comptroller of the Currency, published in 1916—to the effect that out of 7,613 national banks, 2,743, or 36% were “guilty of usury”—and this “according to sworn reports, made by the banks themselves!” But do you see any procession of national bankers going to the federal penitentiaries for robbing the poor? You do not!

Or take the Sherman Anti-trust law; the most flagrant case in our history of the nullification of a major statute by the will of the rich. This was a law forbidding combination in restraint of trade; it stood in the way of the profits of big business, and big business simply refused to give those profits up. The trust magnates fought the government—for thirty-one years that fight has been going on, in the courts, at the polls, in the kept press, and secretly by intrigue and bribery. Those public officials who could not be bought have been slandered and driven out of public life—Theodore Roosevelt, for example; and the result is that today the law is an absolute dead letter. The great combinations are being formed, all the way down the line—the power trust, the bread trust, the radio trust, the movie trust; they are establishing monopolies and holding up prices and watering stocks a thousand or ten thousand per cent; and what is the state of public opinion on the subject? One of the most conspicuous of the law-breakers, Secretary Mellon of the Aluminum trust, sits in our cabinet at Washington, and dictates a law cutting his own income taxes in half, and another law keeping his income taxes secret!

Or take what happened in the case of the Standard Oil trust. In 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it to “dissolve,” the purpose being to restore competition. The concern made a paper “dissolution,” into thirty-two separate companies, but for some reason these little companies remained in complete and brotherlyharmony: so much so that in ten years they increased the market value of their stocksthirty-five times, and the dividends paid, including of course the stock dividends, amounted toeighteen times the total capital when the dissolution took place! In other words, what Standard Oil did was to make a joke of the law, obeying it on paper and defying it in reality. Yet, are the securities of this criminal organization any the less valid, any the less sacred under the law? Are its dollars any the less real? To ask such a question is to be a “Bolshevik.”

Throughout our history, ever since the Civil War, we have had scandals, and government officials have been caught selling out the people to big business thieves. The “credit mobilier,” the Tweed ring, the railroad land steals, the Ballinger land steals, the airplane steals, the war-contract frauds, the Sinclair and Doheny oil steals—one could name scores of such. Here and there efforts were made to punish the thieves; but in no case was the stolen money recovered. All those billions of fraudulent dollars exist today in Wall Street, in the form of perfectly sound and respectable securities, standing on a par with all other vested property rights. You, and the rest of our toiling masses, continue to pay dividends and interest upon them; as the system stands, and so long as it stands, you must pay tribute to all that mass of stolen wealth, before ever you can have one penny in your own pocket, one morsel of food in your own mouth!

My dear Judd:

We know by now what the word “privilege” means. Hundreds of thousands of people do not have to do useful labor in our society; they draw off the profits of other people’s labor, and the good things of life flow to them in a stream so great as sometimes to overwhelm them. And this flow is guaranteed them for life, and to their descendants to the end of time. All our political teachings, all our economic calculations, are based upon the idea that this state of affairs is permanent; the right of property to draw interest, dividends and profits is inviolable.

It is easy to understand that the favored ones of privilege believe in the sacredness of such rights. Once upon a time the priests protected them, and then the kings; now it is the judges, and here is our modern form of superstition, the worship of the Dead Hand. Our newspapers know nobody more wicked than the man who assails the courts; he is a demagog and an incendiary, and now and then some court reaches out its mighty hand and claps him into jail.

Nevertheless, Judd, I take the risk, and point out to you that judges are men like other rich men. I have never seen statistics as to how many are ex-corporation-lawyers, but the percentage must be close to one hundred; for what else is there for a would-be judge to be, except a corporation lawyer? He must be a “big”lawyer, before he is fit for the bench; and how else can you be “big”—that is, earn a great deal of money—except by serving those who have the money? And how are you going to get your nomination, except by going to see the political boss who has the giving of nominations? And will the boss give you this honor, without asking what use you are going to make of it after you get it? When there are so many millions upon millions of dollars at stake, depending upon your judicial decisions? Really, Judd, if you expect things like that to happen, you are as big a dunce as your industrial masters think you!

It happens that I once knew intimately a very “big” judge; he was a member of the Court of Appeals of the State of New Jersey, which is to say he was one of the five highest judges in a state which was extremely important, because many of our biggest corporations were formed under its safe and easy laws. At the same time the “big” judge was a “big” corporation lawyer on the other side of the Hudson River, in New York state; in fact, he was the highest paid corporation lawyer in the city, which was surely going some; he was the author of “Dill on Corporations,” the standard text-book in every law-school in the country. I have sat in James B. Dill’s library many an evening, and watched him smoke big black cigars, and listened to him pour out his soul. I will tell you the first story of his career, and then I will tell you the last.

A young law-graduate, he got a job in the law department of a big railroad, I think he said the New York Central; he was to defend accident suits, and the lawyer who took him in charge pulled open a drawer in his desk and took out a list of the judges of the state. “You will notice that some of these names are checked,” said the man. “When we have cases, get them before one of those judges. Those areourjudges.” Said Dill to me: “That was a young man’s first introduction to the law.” I asked: “Is it as bad as that now?” He answered, “There are twenty-two judges of the supreme court in New York state, and nineteen of them are crooked. I can say to each one, ‘I know whose man you are,’ and not one will dare contradict me.”

And then the last story. Dill had just been appointed to his high post in New Jersey, and the day after the news was published, one of his old college friends came to see him, and brought him an offer from E. H. Harriman, railroad magnate, to retain his services in New York for fifty thousand dollars a year, “and you needn’t do any work.” Dill said to his friend, “What case has Harriman got before the Jersey courts?” The friend replied that it was just general principles, the great magnate liked to have friends on the bench. Dill answered, “You tell Harriman—being a fisherman you can explain what I mean—that a fat trout does not rise to a fly.”

Men do not change their skins when they put on black silk robes and mount the judicial bench. A hard-boiled, hard-fisted attorney for labor-smashing employers’ associations, such as Butlerof Minneapolis, whose whole political career was an expression of the hateful arrogance of class-greed—when such a man is raised to the United States Supreme Court, he does not alter his nature a particle, but goes right on at his old fighting job and in his old fighting spirit; only now he has the terrible power to say that acts of Congress are null and void. The Constitution gives no such power to nullify the will of the people; and you don’t have to be a “big” lawyer to verify that—you can read the Constitution for yourself, and see. And then watch the use which these ex-corporation-lawyers make of this stolen power! To protect the sacred right of great manufacturing corporations to employ child slaves! And likewise the right of employers to underpay their women slaves! And likewise the right of stock dividends to escape taxation! And likewise the right of judges’ salaries to escape taxation!

But on the other hand, when the rich pass laws in their own interest, and these laws are in contradiction to the Constitution, what happens then? The answer is that the courts uphold these laws—and it matters not how explicit the provisions of the Constitution may be. The supposed-to-be sacred Constitution of the United States provides that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”; and yet the legislature of New York state passed a law forbidding a man to keep a revolver in his home, and a New York lawyer fought that law to the highest courts, and was beaten. Here in California the Constitution provides that “every citizen may freely speak, write, and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right; and no law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press.” How could words be more explicit? And yet we have a “criminal syndicalism” law, under which seventy men are now in jail for their political opinions, no other offense having been even charged against them. I personally, as you know, was arrested and held “incommunicado” under that law; my offense being that I started to read the Constitution of the United States, while standing upon private property with the written permission of the owner, and after notice to the authorities that I intended to exercise my constitutional right.

Let me tell you a curious detail, in connection with that incident. The day after I came out of jail I happened to meet on the street one of the highest judges in this state—I know him because I play in tennis tournaments with his son. The old gentleman patted me on the back and said: “Go to it, my boy, you are absolutely right!” But when I asked him to say that publicly, he didn’t think it would be proper; and when I asked him to join the Civil Liberties Union, and help to protect all citizens in such rights, he didn’t think that would be proper, either. You see how even the most liberal of judges is bound by red-tape and precedent, and leaves it to others to defend the law.

I have seen in Los Angeles a magazine office raided without warrant of law, and the editor, a war veteran, manhandled and thrown into jail—all because the authorities objected to what thiseditor was publishing. And not only did the courts permit this, they tried the man, and would have convicted him if he had not run away. All over the country such things were done, with the full sanction of the courts. In New York City federal agents arrested a man and held him in a room in an office building for three weeks “incommunicado,” and tortured him until he flung himself out of the window and was smashed on the pavement below. Two other men began holding meetings of protest against this outrage, and they were “framed” on a charge of murder, and the labor movement has so far raised and spent about a quarter of a million dollars to keep them from being hanged. That is the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and you may learn about many as bad or worse from the American Civil Liberties Union, 100 Fifth Avenue, New York.

And how it is with ordinary civil litigation, in which the poor seek justice against the rich? Here I do not have to ask you to take my word, for the scandal is so notorious that even capitalist authorities have been forced to admit it. You see, there are eminent legal gentlemen, occupied in crushing the poor in major ways—the tariff, the trusts, the banking graft, “tight money,” child labor, and so on—but when it comes to a poor widow seeking justice against an employer who withholds her wages, these gentlemen think that the law ought to preserve an aspect of impartiality; it ought not be too obvious that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. For example, a majestic plutocrat like ex-president Taft, now chief justice of our Supreme Court; when such a weighty personage denounces capitalist justice, you surely will believe what he says! Here he is, speaking before the Virginia Bar Association: “We must make it so that the poor man will have as nearly as possible an equal opportunity in litigating as the rich man, and, under present conditions, ashamed as we may be of it, this is not the fact.”

Notice the delicacy of the phrasing, Judd: “as nearly aspossible!” There is nothing “utopian” about our chief justice! Just how possible it is for impotence to be equal to power, is something which has not yet been shown to us; but evidently there is some limit to the possibility, for Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School speaks of the attitude of the law to the poor as “this neglect which disgraces American justice.”

For my part, you understand, I do not expect the poor ever to get equal justice against the rich; it seems to me absurd to imagine such a thing happening. The existence of riches in the world, at the same time as poverty, is in itself the sum of all injustices; and so, if we really care about justice, we must either make the rich as poor as the poor, or else make the poor as rich as the rich, or else strike a happy medium between the two. This last is my solution and I hope to show you how it can be done.

My dear Judd:

We have seen the poor struggling to protect themselves against the rich in the field of politics, and meeting with no great success. There is another place where they struggle—in the labor market. Let us see what happens to them there.

Seeing the employers combining into larger and larger organizations, it naturally occurred to the workers to combine, and sell their labor as a unit. At first the employers made this action a crime, and a great many working men went to jail, before the right of labor combination was granted. Even now, it is only grudgingly granted; the employers in their hearts are still certain that anything which reduces their profits is a crime, and through their courts they hedge the labor unions about with all sorts of restrictions. The doctrine of the present hour is briefly this: that labor organization is all right, provided it does not accomplish anything.

You, Judd, are a non-union man. You grew up in small places, and live now in a suburban neighborhood which is like a small place, in that everybody knows everybody else, and the people you work for are not much better off than you are. You can leave your job any time you don’t like it, and that gives you a sense of freedom. But suppose, Judd, you had been raised in the slums of a city, and had to do your carpentering on great buildings, under a firm of contractors; and suppose you found that your freedom to leave your job involved the necessity of hunting another job, under some contractor who belonged to the same employers’ association, and paid the same scale, and followed the same working rules as your previous boss? You must see that this would make quite a difference in your sense of “freedom.”

Or suppose you had grown up in some industrial center, and worked for the coal trust, or the steel trust, or the beef trust. You have read “The Jungle,” and know how the wage-slaves of Packingtown lived twenty years ago. Well, Judd, they are living exactly the same way today. I said concerning “The Jungle” that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach”; the public insisted that some pretense be made that their meat was better, but no one even pretended that the workers were helped. And the same thing is true of the slaves of “King Coal”; it did not trouble the American people to learn that the men who dug their coal were living in privately-owned empires, where the elemental rights of American citizens, and even of human beings, had no existence.

In such places the only hope of the workers is to organize, and present a solid front to their masters, and extort better terms by the threat of withholding their labor. For a hundred years the workers have been forging that weapon, and trying it out. There are about four million of them organized, out of the forty-two million wage-earners of the country, and that seems a pitiful few;but you know about the leaven in the dough, Judd. Perhaps it never occurred to you to realize the influence which the organized carpenters—some 315,000 of them—exercise upon the lives of unorganized carpenters like yourself. They set a standard, that would otherwise be unknown in the carpenter world; they make it certain that no boss can get a really big job done at lower than the union scale—first, because it is hard to get a lot of skilled men together except through the unions, and second, because of the constant threat that a union organizer will get in among them. It is strange to see a man like yourself, rather suspicious of unions, because of all the poison you absorb from the capitalist press—and yet at the same time profiting every working hour of your life from the sacrifices made by union men! Also it is strange to see employers who fight the unions, and denounce them, and boast of the contentment of their non-union workers—and make that contentment by paying the union scale, which otherwise neither the employer nor the men would ever have dreamed of! Once let the “open shop” bosses have their way, Judd, and then see how a “free” carpenter’s wages will drop!

We have seen that there is in America a law for the rich, and quite a different law for the poor; and that state of affairs is well known to organized labor, you may be sure. The unions never get far in their effort to raise their members’ standards, without encountering the iron fist of the government. I have shown you how the rich defy the laws they do not like; but let no workingman, union or non-union, ever make the mistake of trying that! There are jails and prisons, and also there is the hideous “third degree,” with torture-chambers where workingmen are taught their “place”—of subjection and impotence.

Let me give you an illustration, Judd, right here at home, in this paradise of the “open shop.” We have a group of employers’ federations, with an iron-clad policy of class warfare. An employer who “panders to the union element” cannot get any business, he cannot get credit with the banks—they smash him as you would a louse. And, of course, they keep a card list of men who belong to unions, they follow a man up—the grim device known as the “blacklist.” And all this quite openly, it is the industrial policy of Los Angeles, and its boast. And do you hear anything about its being a violation of law? Do you see the publisher of the Los Angeles “Times” being sent to jail for advising employers not to hire members of the carpenters’ union? No, Judd, you do not see that!

So, naturally, the idea occurred to the workers that two could play at this game. If the employers could refuse to do business with them, obviously they could refuse to do business with the employers. So they tried it; and then what happened? Why then there appeared suddenly a new crime in the calendar of the law; a monstrous form of wickedness known as the “boycott!” It was a “conspiracy,” a plot to ruin a business man and deprive him of his property; and the judges were called upon to forbid it,and they did so. For violation of such a judge-made “law,” the Danbury hatters—union workingmen of Connecticut—were fined $240,000; and the United States Supreme Court upheld that decision. Afterwards union labor succeeded in getting a law in their favor through Congress, and now the courts are engaged in paring that down to nothing. Workingmen may boycott their own employers, but not other employers! But do you ever see employers limited to blacklisting their own workingmen?

I have shown you the judges taking by force the right to annul laws of Congress. Confronting the emergencies of labor strife, these judges proceeded to invent another weapon, known as the “injunction”; which means in brief that any ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench will issue an order forbidding workingmen to do anything that the corporations do not want them to do; and the workingmen have to obey that order, or else the judge will send them to jail for any length of time that the corporation may desire; and there is no jury trial, and no defense, and no redress—the workingmen just go to jail!

What these injunction judges have forbidden labor to do makes a catalog over which you might have a good laugh, if you could forget all the heartbreak and agony of the poor that is summed up in the preposterous sentences. All the hopes that were blasted, the pitiful hopes of a little better food for a sick wife, of a chance to keep the children in school! Such things are the meaning of a strike to workingmen; and suddenly a grim personage in a black silk robe lifts a club and smashes these hopes over the head! As I write, some clothing workers of New York are on strike, and a judge has issued an injunction, forbidding them, not merely to picket the shops of their boss, but to go within ten blocks of the place! In the West Virginia coal fields, they are now forbidding mass-meetings, forbidding the use of money in unionizing the mines, and even the use of tent-colonies for the families of miners who have been ejected from company houses! In Oklahoma they recently forbade miners to pray! In Minneapolis I talked with a labor man who had spent six months in jail for violating an injunction, and he gave me the thing to read, a list of prohibitions that would fill a couple of pages of this book; as the man said, “I’d have broken the law if I’d waked up in the night and disliked my boss.”

And every year they are encroaching a little farther on the rights of the workers, and of all citizens. They are trying to set up the principle that it is a conspiracy against the public welfare to interfere with “essential industries.” Thirty years ago, when Grover Cleveland sent in Federal troops over the head of Governor Altgeld of Illinois, and smashed the strike of the railwaymen, and threw Gene Debs into jail, it was considered quite a startling action. But now we have got used to things like that, and in 1922 they imprisoned eight railway leaders in Los Angeles, calling their strike “a conspiracy to interfere with the mail.” Now President Coolidge, in his message to Congress, is calling for a law to forbidall such strikes, and take off the shoulders of the judges the embarrassment of having to create the law!

And so, once more, Judd, do you see why the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer? Do you see why the index figures of a university professor revealed that the wage-earners of America, taken as a whole, were five per cent poorer today than in 1890? I told you that riches and poverty are not caused by the Will of God, nor yet by any implacable Economic Law, but purely and simply by the actions of men, driven by the basest of all human impulses, which is greed. And here you see, Judd, exactly what these actions are. Every time an ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench issues an injunction which smashes a strike, he is reducing the average real wages of the workers of America; he is taking away a little more from the poor, and handing it to the rich—and that is the job for which the rich set him up in office, and bought him his black silk robe!

My dear Judd:

I don’t know whether you ever played poker, but I did a few times in my naughty youth. I recall a game known as “freeze-out”; you played till you lost all your money, and the game ended entirely when one man got all the chips. That is our social system—a colossal game of “freeze-out,” with winter and disease and death to clear the players from the board. Those who lose at the game are the workers of the world.

You, Judd, must realize that you are in an unusual position for a worker grown old; you own two lots and three houses, and can live partly on the rent. But how many others are there like that? Consider the statement given out this month by the Industrial Accident Commission of California: “One million men and women of America suffered disabling accidents in industries this year.” Assuming that a workingman puts in forty years, as you have done, what are his chances of getting off without a disabling accident? There being forty-two million people gainfully employed, the chances would appear to be one in twenty; but of course only part of the disabling is permanent—the victims get well, and go back to be disabled again. The number of accidents increased 30 per cent in 1924, so you see your chances grow less and less.

The worst you got, Judd, was a rupture. But suppose you had been one of the 21,232 to be killed; or suppose you were of the 105,629 who suffered “permanent partial disability” last year; or suppose that you had eight or ten children, instead of one or two; or that your wife, instead of dying in an accident as she did, had been crippled, and left upon your hands for life. Do you think you or your heirs would still have the two lots, and the three houses, and the fine American sense of security?

Look, old friend, here are some figures worked out frominsurance tables by the National City Bank of New York, the richest bank in the country. They are trying to persuade people to take out insurance, so that the money will come back to Wall Street for them to use in stock gambling. Taking 100 people 25 years old, they ask what will be the position of these same people at the age of 65; and they say 1 will be independent, 4 will be well to do, 5 will be working for a meagre living, 36 will be dead, “many of them for want of attention that money would have secured,” and 54 will be dependent upon others. “Out of the entire 100, only 5 will be in satisfactory circumstances.” There you have a picture of what the richest nation in the world has been able to achieve in the way of sound human happiness!

Our Mother Nature is a wasteful parent, who creates many millions of salmon eggs in order to produce one salmon. It is the same way with human life also in its dark beginnings; history is a tale of mighty empires arising only to be destroyed again, and of populations wiped out by plague and famine and slaughter. But now the light of reason is beginning to dawn; a few of us have the idea that human energies might be rationally guided, and that men might cease to spend their time digging holes in the sand and filling them up again.

Consider war. Women bear children with much pain, and raise them with loving care, and then send them out, at the very prime of their lives, to be blown to pieces by shot and shell. Other men in factories, who might be making the means of human happiness—automobiles and radio sets and books and music—these men are making explosives to wipe out whole cities, and gases to poison the inhabitants. In the late war we destroyed 30,000,000 human beings and $300,000,000,000 worth of treasure, the product of a whole generation of useful toil.

They promised us that this war was to be the last, but what are the prospects? In 1912 our government spent for defense nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, and our 1926 budget for the same purpose is more than three times that amount. In 1920 the Bureau of Standards analyzed our budget and found that expenses for wars, past and future, composed 93 per cent thereof. Think of it, Judd, a great government spending one dollar to save life and property, and thirteen dollars to destroy it! Of course, the military men will say that the thirteen dollars are to prevent other nations from destroying us, but the obvious fact is that when we spend this money on armaments we cause other nations to do the same, so we might as well do our own destruction and have it over with.

Or consider child labor. We take a million children out of school and put them into factories and mines, thus stunting them in body and spirit, and when they grow up into cripples, defectives, criminals and grafters, we pay ten or a hundred times what we got out of their childhood labor! Or consider crime, which is caused by the presence of extreme poverty alongside extreme wealth. Including criminals and those who catch them, this factorof waste keeps more than 700,000 persons out of productive work. Or take prostitution, caused by poverty and low wages of women in industry. There are over a quarter of a million women in our country who live by spreading vice and disease, and the American Social Hygiene Association estimates that this costs us $628,000,000 every year.

Or consider adulteration, the putting of worthless goods and poisonous foods upon the market, all for profits, of course. Or the wastes of advertising—the seekers of profits spending a billion and a quarter dollars a year, and keeping more than 600,000 people busy all the time, in order to persuade us to stop buying the worthy products of Jones and to buy the unworthy products of Smith. This is civil war within our industry, and one of its weapons is fashion, the making of imbecile changes in our goods every season, in order that we may be ashamed to wear our perfectly good clothes after the first year.

Or take the wastes of mismanagement of industry. The so-called “Hoover Committee” of the American Engineering Societies made an elaborate study of this field, and it is interesting to notice that this employers’ body attributes 50 per cent of the blame to management and only 25 per cent to labor. They estimate the percentage of waste in a few great industries: Metal trades, 28 per cent; boots and shoes, 40 per cent; textiles, 49 per cent; building, 53 per cent; printing, 57 per cent; men’s clothing, 63 per cent. Notice that figure for building, Judd, and be sure you get what it means: out of 40 years you put in at carpentering, 21 years went to no purpose, because those who directed your labor were making money instead of making houses!

One great form of industrial waste is men and women willing to work, and able to work but unable to find work to do. I regard this as the basic evil, the cause of most of the others, and I believe that it is an essential part of our present profit system, without which that system would break down. First, let us see exactly how widespread the evil is.

I point out, Judd, that nowhere in these letters have I given you any Socialist figures about anything; in each case I go to the most “respectable” authorities, those who are least favorable to my point of view. In this case of unemployment I consult a volume prepared and published with money derived from the estate of one of the richest landlords and money-lenders that ever died in the city of New York. I refer to the Russell Sage Foundation, and here is the sentence in which they sum up their final figures on unemployment: “To conclude that, averaging good and bad years, from 10 to 12 per cent of all workers are idle all of the time, is probably an understatement of the situation.” The book calculates the number gainfully employed at 42,000,000, and 12 per cent of that is over 5,000,000.

When you talk about five million people out of work it doesn’t mean much, because we haven’t the mental power to grasp such athing. Let us sayoneperson out of work, and see what it means. It so happens that before I sat down to my typewriter this morning the postman brought a letter from such a person; twelve miles away from us, in the great rich city of Los Angeles, a war hero is begging a job, and his wife and children are starving. This hero encloses a visiting card, reading, “D. S. C.”—that means “Distinguished Service Cross”—and down in the corner is “Chevalier Legion d’ Honneur; Croix de Guerre,” the decorations prized above all things in France. And on the back of the card he has written: “Ex-soldier, bonus-pest, charity-dependent.” He encloses newspaper clippings: “Top-sergeant in the suicide squad of machine gunners,” left for dead on the field, taken to base hospital, returned to front, made lieutenant, more hospitals and medals—regular hero stuff, you see, and here he has been hunting any sort of job for months, and tells me how it goes:

“Louise the baby is low from malnutrition. Virginia, the oldest, the invalid around whom my book is written, coughs all night incessantly. We are making our last stand. As completely isolated as though in the heart of the Sahara. Today I received my first offer of a good job in weeks, but it necessitates my providing at least $22 of special tools. It’s on tractor transmission; I built them shortly after the armistice, but when I entered Stanford University I was through with mechanics, and gave away my kit. I took my D. S. C. and other war junk down to my favorite pawnbroker Saturday but they wouldn’t bring carfare to Pasadena now.”

So here, you see, is one of the victims of our great game of “freeze-out”; and what was his weakness that caused him to lose in the game? The answer is plain enough—he believed the propaganda of our war profiteers and went over to France and risked his life and ruined his health and fortune—while 23,000 able business gentlemen stayed at home and made themselves into millionaires! “What price Glory,” Judd!

My dear Judd:

I have said that unemployment is a disease of the profit system, incurable under that system. I am now going to show why, and I consider these facts the most important in the whole world for a workingman to understand. They are perfectly simple—any child can grasp them; yet they are never mentioned in any newspaper, and never taught in any school. The reason is equally simple—any editor who publishes them, or any teacher who teaches them, immediately loses his job.

I put them into a series of short sentences for you to paste all around the rim of your hat and study while you are sawing timbers and mixing cement. First, then:

The boss is not in business for his health. Ask him!

And then, equally easy to verify:

The boss will make no more goods than he can sell at a profit.

And so, plainly enough:

Profits for the boss, wages for the workingman; no profits for the boss, starvation and death for the workingman.

So far, every business man will agree; in fact, this is the doctrine they hammered into your head during the Coolidge campaign, and it got them seven million plurality. All right, then; and now let us suppose, just for the sake of arguing, that the Coolidge administration believed in allowing the rich to charge as high prices as they pleased for goods, and to break strikes and beat down the wages of the poor; what would happen then? Why, obviously the poor wouldn’t have the money to buy so much goods or to furnish so much profits for the bosses; it would be only the rich who had the money, and goods would be more and more for the rich, and less and less for the poor. Take notice, Judd, the Secretary of the Treasury estimated that in 1919 the amount spent for luxuries in our country was $22,700,000,000—and with millions of families lacking bread!

But with the flood of goods pouring out from the machines, the rich find it harder and harder to consume the product; they take to reinvesting their money, that is, using it to make more machines, to turn out more goods, to be sold for more profits. But already there are more goods than can be sold; there are no longer enough profits to supply the demands of the great mass of heaped-up capital. So comes a glut of goods, and factories have to shut down, and we have “hard times.” Just what are “hard times,” Judd? Paste this in your hat now:

Hard times are tenant farmers starving because they have raised too much food!

And again:

Hard times are weavers in rags, because they have made too much clothing!

And again:

Hard times are carpenters homeless, because they have built too many houses!

And finally:

Hard times are workingmen who have finished making the world for their masters, and are ordered to move on to some other planet!

You will say, Judd, that such absurd things could never happen. To that I answer, very simply:

They are happening right now to several million Americans who are hunting jobs and not finding them!

This insanity of “hard times” comes periodically in our affairs, in great waves known as “business cycles”; they are due atintervals of from seven to ten years, and are just as inevitable as the tides of the sea. Learned economists study the history of these tides of ruin and make charts and diagrams of them; but if you state the cause, you become an outcast from the business world; and so naturally nobody does state it—except a few outcasts like myself.

The professors of economics admit that this trouble is caused by “over-production,” and we must get straight exactly what that means. It doesn’t mean that we have produced more than we need; on the contrary, we have millions living below the wage level of common decency—our average wage is $1,200 a year, and the cost of keeping a family on the bare necessities is $2,000. But it doesn’t matter how much people need; the thing that counts is what they can buy. I give you another slogan, and next time you meet a professor of economics, ask him about it:

If you’ve got the price, you’re a consumer; if you haven’t got the price, you’re a bum.

Well, since we American consumers can’t buy our own product, the owners of the product—that is, the rich—have to look elsewhere for customers, and so comes the hunt for “foreign markets.” Understand me, I do not object to our going abroad for the things we can’t raise at home; to exchange automobiles and moving pictures for bananas and coffee—that is normal business. What I am talking about is a glut of goods that we can’t sell at home, but must sell abroad, under penalty of seeing our workers turned off to starve. We don’t take goods in exchange—oh no, that would break down our home industries, and we protect them by a high tariff wall. What we take are paper promises to pay us at some future date; we go on continually selling more than we buy, and filling our bank vaults with these paper promises, and that is called a “favorable balance of trade.”

But all the highly developed nations, Britain and France and Germany and Italy and Japan, are in exactly the same plight as ourselves; they also have more goods than their half-starved workers can purchase; they also are looking for foreign markets, to save their business system from collapse. Each finds its chance of salvation in selling to the backward nations, which cannot yet do their own manufacturing. So we run upon this curious situation:

The existence of American industry depends upon our selling cotton shirts to Chinamen, who are so poor they can’t afford but one shirt at a time.

And now, see the next step! Trying to save our own business system, we threaten ruin to the business system of some other country, say Japan. Naturally, the business men of Japan don’t like that; so we have trade rivalry, and out of that we have war. The cause of modern war may be put into one sentence—and Ibeg you to realize that it’s no joke, but the grimmest of grim realities:

If we don’t go to war with other nations, they will take away from us the chance to sell to Chinamen those cotton shirts of which our workers have produced so many that they have to go in rags.

I could go on like that indefinitely, making funny sentences about this funny system. I could tell the hilarious story of how Britain and Germany went to war to take away from each other the chance to sell shirts to Chinamen—and to Hindoos and Persians and Arabs and Turks, of course. When they had destroyed 30,000,000 human lives and $300,000,000,000 worth of goods you might think they would have cured their “over-production” for quite a while; but they had made a miscalculation, and fought too long, and borrowed too much money from us, and so their governments are burdened with enormous fixed charges, and there is chronic unemployment in both Britain and Germany, and almost a collapse in France.

And how about us? We have that “favorable balance of trade,” so ardently desired by the prosperity boosters; indeed, we have got such a bellyful of it that for the first time we are forced to realize that it’s nothing but wind. Europe owes us, in one form or another, some $19,000,000,000, and can’t even pay the interest; they made no pretense of trying—until they had to borrow some more! Italy came, bowing low and grinning behind its cap, agreeing to pay several billions in the course of 65 years—on condition that we lend another $200,000,000 right off! Germany did the same thing, and France will be doing it, probably before these words see the light of day. Our great financiers accept these paper pledges, for the reason that they are stuck with $19,000,000,000 of them already, and can’t contemplate what will happen when the whole thing turns out to be wind. We go on adding about a billion a year, because the only way we can keep our factories going is to ship our surplus goods abroad—and take nothing back, because that would stop the factories!

We promised our people “prosperity,” you remember, if only they would vote for Coolidge; and they did so, good, patient souls; so now we have to deliver it. The way of “prosperity” is to keep them working to feed and clothe Frenchmen and Germans and Italians and Chinamen and Guatemalans and Haytians—anybody who will send us a beautiful engraved sheet of paper promising to pay us 65 years from now! To be exact, Judd, they don’t even have to engrave the paper; we do that in Wall Street, and they send us a “mission” of white or yellow or black gentlemen in frock coats, to sign opposite the red seal. So here, Judd, you have this wonderful jazz system in its final, delirium stage—our whole people starving themselves on half wages, and sending the surplus abroad, so that our rich men may fill their vaults with pieces of paper which they dare not permit to be redeemed! We alreadyhave more than half the gold in the world, and far from taking any more, we have to ship some abroad now and then, to keep some debtor nation from going bankrupt!

Don’t you wish, Judd, that you could find some benevolent storekeeper to do business with you on this ultra-modern jazz basis? Never, never can he be persuaded to take your money, but takes only checks, and does not cash them for 65 years; and if at any time you need money, you threaten to go broke, and immediately he gives you cash and takes some more checks; and if ever you try to send him a truckload of goods, to pay off at least part of the debt, he holds up his hands in a fit of high-tariff horror and says he couldn’t think of taking goods, it would ruin the people inside his store who have the jobs of making that same thing! “For God’s sake, take away your truck,” he exclaims. “Just mail me another paper promise, and anything in the place is yours!”

I conclude with one more sentence for you to learn, Judd:

Our present system of “high finance” is a soap-bubble, which differs from other soap-bubbles in just one respect—it is as big as the world.

My dear Judd:

The essence of our industrial system is the private ownership of the means of production; with profit for the private owner as the motive power of industry. The capitalist produces the goods we need, and in order to get them we pay him everything above the bare means of keeping us alive and enabling us to raise the next generation. If this system should break down, it is obvious that we must change to some form of social ownership of the means of production; instead of having the capitalist produce for us, we must do it for ourselves, and the motive power will be, not the desire of the capitalist for profit, but our own desire for the goods.

What difference will that make in the industrial system? At first you might see no difference at all. The worker will go to the factory, where he will find foremen and superintendents in charge, and a time-clock keeping tab on him. On Saturday night he will get his pay envelope, and will take the money and spend it at the stores. The goods produced in the factory will be shipped to all parts of the world, to people who pay for them by checks, which go through banks and a clearing-house—you might follow the whole process, and fail to realize there had been any change. At only one place would the difference appear—inside the pay envelopes. There being no longer any absentee owners, drawing off rent, interest and profits, those who do the work, whether of hand or brain, will now be the only people to draw anything out; and consequently there will be considerably more in each pay envelope.

Wall Street propagandists are fond of figuring how much goes to labor and how much to capital, and proving that to wipe out the capitalist would add only a small percentage, say ten per cent, to the share of each worker. This is a trick, for the reason that a great part of the capitalist’s share appears, not as profits, but as various forms of “fixed charges” against the industry: the interest on bonds, the rent of land, the royalties to owners of various privileges. To give just one illustration, the New York Central Railroad crosses a bridge near Albany, and a private concern owns that bridge, and the railroad pays one cent for every passenger, a small fortune every year. Our whole industrial system is a tangle of grafts such as that; the railroads are plundered by right-of-way companies, sleeping-car companies, refrigerator-car companies; industrial concerns are plundered by private railway lines, owned by “insiders,” or by companies having a “cinch” on repairs or materials or accessories. Just the bookkeeping on such rights is a vast industry, and the adjusting of them supplies a living for thousands of lawyers and their clerks. To wipe all that out will be to dump a mountain’s weight off the back of production.

But even suppose it was as the Wall Street propagandists argue—that capital got only ten per cent—would that be the only gain for labor? No, Judd, it would not; and here is the most important point that I have to get across to you in these letters. The proposition may seem difficult, but I beg you to put your mind on it and get it straight, for it is not too much to say that all freedom and happiness for the workingman in our time depend upon his understanding these matters, so that the clever hired writers of privilege cannot befuddle his mind.

Whatever may be the percentage that goes to capital—whether ten per cent, as Wall Street claims, or thirty or forty per cent, as I could prove—nevertheless it is this percentage which causes our industrial ills today. It is this surplus which, drawn off and re-invested in more means of production, causes the glut of goods which we know as “hard times”; it is this surplus which causes speculation and panics, and turns the worker out to join the ranks of the “unemployed,” and to beat down the wages of his fellows; it is this surplus which causes the search for foreign markets, and draws the great industrial nations into war. Figure to yourself a body having an iron ring riveted about it. At first this ring makes no difference, but as the body grows it causes strangulation, and the time comes when for all the agonies of that body there is but one remedy, to cut the ring.

Cutting the ring is simply this: to take the surplus product away from capital and give it to labor; so instantly you have remedied the evil and relieved the pain. How so? Because labor now becomes able to consume the entire product of industry. Labor can consume it, because labor has the money to buy it. Before this, as we have seen, labor got only part of the money, and so could buy only part of the product; the rest had to beeither wasted by the rich, or sold abroad. But give labor the full value, the actual equivalent in purchasing power of the amount of goods produced, and so consumption balances production, and the factories can work merrily, as many hours as we desire, turning out for each and every one of us as much goods as we care to consume. The only restriction is the basic law of social justice—that before any man consumes anything he must render to the community an equivalent service.

The hired men of the exploiters do all they can to confuse this argument; I hear them laugh that I have some kind of deluded horror of a surplus. We ought to save, they insist, and provide against a “rainy day”! Yes, of course—and not merely against rain, but against famine and earthquake and tornado. I have no objection whatever to a surplus; the question is, who is to own that surplus—those who do the work, or those who live as parasites? That makes all the difference; for when a workingman has made too much wealth for his master, the workingman is out of a job; but when the workingman has made too much wealth for himself, the workingman is on a vacation.

Here is this great rich country of ours, with all its natural resources, its marvelous machines, its willing and clever workers; and when we have broken the iron ring we can produce goods for ourselves, and consume and enjoy them, and stay quietly within our own boundaries. No longer do we keep our workers on starvation wages, and ship all our surplus products abroad, to be consumed by Frenchmen and Italians and Turks and Chinamen and Hindoos, in return for paper promises to pay money to our capitalists! No longer do we have to go to war, to seize foreign markets from other capitalists! The workers now own the factories, and also they own the working capital, and they produce goods for use, and if we have foreign trade it is because we want things from abroad, and not because we have to get rid of our surplus product under penalty of starving. This is what I describe as a Free Society, Judd; I say that in such a society, with production rationally planned, and all wastes removed, we should produce wealth in such quantities, so quickly and so easily—well, you would think I was joking. But leading engineers have told us that we have, in our machine power, the constant labor ofthree billion slaves. In thirteen industries, figured by the capitalist, Mr. Babson, we have88 timesthe productive power we used to have by hand labor. Just think what that ought to mean!

Or look at it another way. Twenty years ago Sidney A. Reeve, an engineering expert, calculated how much we wasted by the competitive production of goods, and in a big book full of tables and charts, he worked out the figure of 70 per cent waste. We have seen the Hoover Committee, considering merely the wastesinsideeach industry, giving figures as high as 60 per cent of waste. Mr. Stuart Chase, in his wonderful book, “The Tragedy of Waste,” figures 50 per cent as the minimum. Well,let us take the minimum, for a start. What does it mean? I answer:

In a free society what we now have will cost us four hours labor a day.

And more than that, Judd—something absolutely vital to every poor man in our country:

In a free society every man may work as many hours as he wants to work, and get the full value of what he produces.

So now we can make what would have seemed at the beginning a bold claim:

From a free society involuntary poverty will be banished.

And finally—one sentence more—and I beg you to learn this one:

The end of involuntary poverty means the end of most prostitution and crime, and of all war between civilized peoples.

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