FOR STANDING ROOM
AT no time in the world’s history have the relations between laborers and employers of labor received so much attention as now. All men who think are thinking of them, the meditation being quickened by the importance of the interests involved, the sharp significance of some of their observed phenomena and the conditions entailing them. Among these last, one of the most important is overpopulation in civilized countries; and it is only in such countries that any controversy has arisen between—to speak in the current phrase—capital and labor. Despite the magnitude and frequency of modern wars, the population of all civilized countries increases in the most astonishing way. In the six great nations of Europe the increase since the Napoleonic wars has been between fifty and sixty per cent. In this country our progression is geometrical—we double our population every twenty-five years!
Conquest and commerce have brought thewhole world under contribution to the strong nations. Inter-communication has reduced the areas of privation and almost effaced those of famine. Railways and steamships and banks and exchanges have diminished the friction between producer and consumer. By sanitary and medical science the average length of human life has been increased. Chemistry has taught us how to fertilize the fields, forestry and engineering how to prevent both inundation and drought, invention how to master the adverse forces of Nature and make alliance with the friendly ones by labor-saving machinery, so that the work of one man will now sustain many in idleness—with no lack of persons who by birth, breeding, disposition and taste are eligible to sustentation. The milder sway of modern government, the elimination of the “gory tyrant” as a factor in the problem of existence and the better protection of property and life have had, even directly, no mean influence on the death rate. These and many other causes have combined to make the conditions of life so comparatively easy that an extraordinary impetus has been given to the business of living; mankind may be said to have taken it up as a congenial pursuit. The cloud of despair that shadowed the faceof all Europe during those centuries of misrule and ignorance fitly called the Dark Ages has lifted, and multitudes are thronging into the sunshine. It is not a perfect beam, but its warmth and lumination are incomparably superior to anything of which the older generations ever dreamed. But the result is over population, and the result of over population is war, pestilence, famine, rapine, immorality, ignorance, anarchy, despotism, slavery, decivilization—depopulation!
This is man’s eternal round; this is the course of “progress”; in this circle moves the “march of mind.” The one goal of civilization is barbarism; to the condition whence it emerged a nation must return, and every invention, every discovery, every beneficent agency hastens the inevitable end. An ancient civilization would last a thousand years; confined to the same boundaries, a modern civilization would exhaust itself in half that time; but by emigration and interchange we uphold ourselves till all can go down together. One people cannot relapse till all similar peoples are ready.
Already we discern ominous instances of the working of the universal law. Consciously or unconsciously, all the modernstatesmen of Europe are contesting for “territorial aggrandizement.” They desire both extension of boundaries and colonial possessions. They quarrel with the statesmen of neighboring nations on this pretext and on that, and send their armies of invasion to capture and hold provinces. They dispatch their navies to distant seas to take possession of unconsidered islands. They must have more of the earth’s surface upon which to settle their surplus populations. All the wars of modern Europe have that ultimate, underlying cause.
The battle knows not why it is fought. It is for standing room. If it were not for the horrors of war the horrors of peace would be appalling. Peace is more fatal than war, for all must die, and in peace more are born. The bullet forestalls the pestilence by proffering a cleaner and decenter death.
What has all this to do with the labor question? “Industrial discontent” has many causes, but the chief is over-population. (In this country it is as yet a “coming event,” but its approach is rapid, and already it has “cast its shadow before.”) Where there are too many producers they are thinned out to make an army, which serves the double purpose of keeping the rest of them in subjection and resistingthe pressure from without. Armies are to fight with; no nation dares long maintain one in idleness; it is too costly for a toy; the people burn to see it put to practical use. They do not love it; they promise themselves the advantage of seeing it killed; but when the killing begins their blood is up and they want to go soldiering.
Our labor troubles—our strikes, boycotts, riots, dynamitation, can have but one outcome. We are not exempt from the inexorable. We shall soon hear a general clamor for increase of the army—to protect us against aggression from the east and the west. We shall have the army.
That is as far as one cares to follow the current of events into the dubious regions of prediction. What lies beyond is momentous enough to be waited for; but any man who fails to discern the profound significance of the events amongst which he is moving to-day may justly boast himself impregnable to the light.