INDUSTRIAL DISCONTENT
THE time seems to have come when the two antagonistic elements of American society should, and could afford to, throw off their disguises and frankly declare their principles and purposes. But what, it may be asked, are the two antagonistic elements? Dividing lines parting the population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn variously; for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and the criminal class. But the elements to which reference is here made are those immemorial and implacable foes which the slang of modern economics roughly and loosely distinguishes as “capital” and “labor.” A more accurate classification—as accurate a one as it is possible to make—would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who do not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to the laborer, the rich man who works with his hands is notobjectionable; the poor man who does not, is. Consciously or unconsciously, and alike by those whose necessities compel them to perform it and those whose better fortune enables them to avoid it, manual labor is considered the most insufferable of human pursuits. It is a pill that the Tolstois, the “communities” and the “Knights” of Labor can not sugar-coat. We may prate of the dignity of labor; emblazon its praise upon banners; set apart a day on which to stop work and celebrate it; shout our teeth loose in its glorification—and, God help our foolish souls to better sense, we think we mean it all!
If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is not mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street peddler—to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf from the door without eating him—to abandon their ignoble callings, seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them right sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those who are engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part of their incomesthey can purchase the right to work as hard as they like in even the dullest times.
Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard, imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feels that it sets upon his brow the sign of intellectual inferiority. And that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for everywhere and always he has fancied that he heard in our patronizing platitudes the note of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him the opportunity to avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government finds its main usefulness, activity and justification. Governments are evolved out of the necessity of protecting from the hand-worker the life and property of the brain-worker and the idler. The first of the trio is the most dangerous because the most numerous and the least content. Take from the science and the art of government, and from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousness of his ill-will and the fear of his power and what have you left? A pure republic—that is to say, no government.
I should like it understood that, if not absolutely devoid of political prejudices, I atleast believe myself to be; that except as to result I think no more of one form of government than of another; and that with reference to results all forms seem to me bad, but bad in different degrees. If asked my opinion as to the results of our own, I should point to Homestead, to Wardner, to Buffalo, to Coal Creek, to the interminable tale of unpunished murders by individuals and by mobs, to legislatures and courts unspeakably corrupt and executives of criminal cowardice, to the prevalence and immunity of plundering trusts and corporations and the multiplication of unhappy millionaires. I should invite attention to the abuses of the pension roll, to the similar and incredible extravagance of Republican and Democratic “Houses”—a plague o’ them both! If addressing Democrats only, I should mention the protective tariff; if Republicans, the hill-tribe clamor for free coinage of silver. I should call to mind the existence and prosperous activity of a thousand lying secret societies having for their main object mitigation of republican simplicity by means of pageantry, costumes grotesquely resembling those of kings and courtiers, and titles of address and courtesy exalted enough to draw laughter from an ox.
In contemplation of these and a hundred other “results,” no less shameful in themselves than significant of the deeper shame beneath, and prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: “Behold the outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people! Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words! We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted to the good honor of numbers, and are betrayed. Lo, this is the beginning of the end of the dream!”
Our no government has broken down at every point, and the two irreconcilable elements whose suspensions of hostilities are mistaken for peace are to try their hands at each other’s tempting display of throats. There is no longer so much as a pretense of amity; apparently there will not much longer be a pretense of regard for mercy and morals. Already “industrial discontent” has attained to the magnitude of war. It is important, then, that there be an understanding of principlesand purposes. As the combatants will not define their position truthfully by words, let us see if it can be inferred from the actions which are said to speak more plainly. If one of the men “directing the destinies” of the labor organizations in this country, could be enticed into the Palace of Truth and “examined” by a skilful catechist he would indubitably say something like this:
“Our ultimate purpose is effacement of the distinction between employer and employee, which is but a modification of that between master and slave.
“We purpose that the laborer shall be chief owner of all the property and profits of the enterprise in which he is engaged, and have through his union a controlling voice in all its affairs.
“We purpose overthrowing the system under which a man can grow richer by working with his head than with his hands, and preventing the man who works with neither from having anything at all.
“In the attainment of these ends any means is to be judged, as to its fitness for our use, with sole regard to its efficacy. We shall punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty. We shall destroy property and life under suchcircumstances and to such an extent as may seem to us expedient. Falsehood, treachery, arson, assassination, all these we look upon as legitimate if effective.
“The rules of ‘civilized warfare’ we shall not observe, but shall put prisoners to death or torture them, as we please.
“We do not recognize a non-union man’s right to labor, nor to live. The right to strike includes the right to strikehim.”
Doubtless all that (and the half is not told) sounds to the unobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of faith are founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, and servile insurrections are to-day what they ever were: the most cruel and ferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is rough work; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he does not consider too curiously with what he strikes it nor upon whom it falls. It will profit you to understand, my finegentlemen with the soft hands, the character of that which is confronting you. You are not threatened with a bombardment of roses.
Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossed with his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on his picket line. Suppose we hypnotize him and make him open his “shut soul” to our searching. He will say something like this:
“In the first place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own use or disuse as much of the earth’s surface as I am desirous and able to procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy of the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To the objection that this must eventually, here, as it has actually done elsewhere, deprive the rest of you of places upon which legally to be born, and exclude you, after surreptitious birth as trespassers, from all chance to procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that you can be born at sea and eat fish.
“I claim the right to induce you, by offer of employment, to colonize yourselves and families about my factories, and then arbitrarily, by withdrawing the employment,break up in a day the homes that you have been years in acquiring where it is no longer possible for you to procure work.
“In determining your rate of wages when I employ you, I claim the right to make your necessities a factor in the problem, thus making your misfortunes cumulative. By the law of supply and demand (God bless its expounder!) the less you have and the less chance to get more, the more I have the right to take from you in labor and the less I am bound to give you in wages.
“I claim the right to maintain a private army to subdue you when you rise.
“I claim the right to make you suffer, by creating for my advantage an artificial scarcity of the necessaries of life.
“As to falsehood, treachery and the other military virtues with which you threaten me, I shall go, in them, as far as you; but from arson and assassination I recoil with horror. You see you have very little to burn, and you are not more than half alive anyhow.”
That, I submit, is a pretty fair definition of the position of the rich man who works for himself with his head. It seems worth while to put it on record while he is extant to challenge or verify; for the probability is that unlesshe mend his ways he will not much longer be rich, nor work, nor have a head.
In discussion of such murderous misdoings as those at Homestead and Coeur d’Alene it is amusing to observe all the champions of law and order gravely prating of “principles” and declaring with all the solemnity of owls that these sacred things have been violated. On that ground they have the argument all their own way. Indubitably there is hardly a fundamental principle of law and morals that rioting laborers have not footballed out of the field of consideration. Indubitably, too, in doing so they have forfeited, as they must have expected to forfeit, all the “moral support” for which they do not care. If there were any question of their culpability this solemn insistence upon it would lack something of the humor with which it is now invested, and which saves the observer from death by dejection.
It is not only in discussions of the “labor situation” that we hear this eternal babble of “principles.” It is never out of ear, and in politics is especially clamant. Every successin an election is yawped of as “a triumph of Republican (or Democratic) principles.” But neither in politics nor in the quarrels of laborers and their employers have principles a place as factors in the problem. Their use is to supply to both combatants a vocabulary of accusation and appeal. All the fierce talk of an antagonist’s violation of those eternal principles upon which organized society is founded—and the rest of it—what is it but the cry of the dog with the chewed ear? The dog that is chewing foregoes the advantage of song.
Human contests engaging any number of contestants are struggles, not of principles but of interests; and this is no less true of those decided by the ballot than of those in which the franker bullet gives judgment. Nor, but from considerations of prudence and expediency, will either party hesitate to transgress the limits of the law and outrage the sense of right. At Homestead and Wardner the laborers committed robbery, pillage and murder, as striking workmen invariably do when they dare, and as cowardly newspapers and politicians encourage them in doing. But what would you have? They conceive it to be to their interest to do these things. Ifcapitalists conceived it to be to theirs they too would do them. They do not do them, for their interest lies in the supremacy of the law—under which they can suffer loss but do not suffer hunger.
“But they do murder,” say the labor unions; “they bring in gangs of armed mercenaries who shoot down honest workmen striving for their rights.” This is the baldest nonsense, as they know very well who utter it. The “Pinkerton men” are mere mercenaries and have no right place in our system, but there have been no instances of their attacking men not engaged in some unlawful prank. In the fight at Homestead the workmen were actually intrenched on premises belonging to the other side, where they had not the shadow of a legal right to be. American working men are not fools; they know well enough when they are rogues. But confession is not among the military virtues, and the question, Is roguery expedient? is not so simple that it can be determined by asking the first preacher that you meet.
It would be fair and fine all around if idle workmen would not riot nor idle employers meet force with force, but invoke the impossible sheriff. When the Dragon has beenchained in the Bottomless Pit and we are living under the rule of the saints things will be so ordered, but in these evil times “revolutions are not made with rosewater,” and this is a revolution. What is being revolutionized is the relation between our old friends, Capital and Labor. The relation has already been altered many times, doubtless; once, we know, within the period covered by history, at least in the countries that we call civilized. The relation was formerly a severely simple one—the capitalist owned the laborer. Of the difficulty and the cost of abolishing that system it is needless to speak at length. Through centuries of time and with an appalling sacrifice of life the effort has gone on, a continuous war characterized by monstrous infractions of law and morals, by incalculable cruelty and crime. Our own generation has witnessed the culminating triumphs of this revolution, and now, while still the clank of the falling chains is echoing through the world, and still a diminishing multitude of the world’s workers is in bondage under the old system, the others, for whose liberation was all this “expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” are sharply challenging the advantage of the new. The new is, in truth, breaking down at every point.The relation of employer and employee is giving but little better satisfaction than that of master and slave. The difference between the two is, indeed, not nearly so broad as we persuade ourselves to think it. In many industries there is virtually no difference, and the tendency is more and more to effacement of the difference where it exists.
The “labor question”—how to get half enough to eat by working for it—is as old as appetite. It burned in Assyrian bosoms and tormented the soul of the ancient Egyptian. In his day and country the medium of exchange was grain. The banks—all except those of the Nile—were granaries, and a check was an order for so much grain. Taxes were paid in grain, salaries and bribes of state officials, soldiers’ wages, pensions, nearly everything. The wages of laborers and other persons improvident enough to work by the day were commonly paid in loaves of bread, as is shown by an account-book of the steward of an “Abode of Rameses,” which was possibly the Ramesseum at Thebes. Among the entries are such as this: “Phamenoth the 8thday. Paid out the bread to the folk, 40 persons, each 2 loaves, making 80”—which shows, too, that the worthy steward had a very pretty knack at arithmetic. When paid by the month, and sometimes when paid by the day, the laborer receiving his wages in corn got also a certain stated quantity of oil, which, however, was not considered as money, but as rations. In apapyruspreserved at Turin one Hanefer imparts some directions to one Hora concerning certain characteristic work of these old pyramid and temple builders: “Note that the men be divided into three gangs, each gang under its captain: six hundred men, making for each gang two hundred. Make them drag the three great blocks which are before the gate of the temple of Maut, and not for one single day let it be omitted to give out their portions of corn and oil.... Also let oil be given to each driver of a pair of oxen.”
Strikes and other “remedial measures” appear to have been as common then as they are now. The unions, like those of Rome later, were turbulent and insurgent.
In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III a deputation of workmen employed in the Theban necropolis met the superintendent and thepriests with a statement of their grievances. “Behold,” said the spokesman, “we are brought to the verge of famine. We have neither food, nor oil, nor clothing; we have no fish; we have no vegetables. Already we have sent up a petition to our sovereign lord the Pharaoh, praying that he will give us these things, and we are going to appeal to the governor that we may have the wherewithal to live.” The response to this complaint was one day’s rations of corn. This appears to have been enough only while it lasted, for a few weeks later the workmen were in open revolt. Thrice they broke out of their quarter, rioting like mad and defying the police. Whether they were finally shot full of arrows by the Pinkerton men of the period the record does not state.
“Organized discontent” in the laboring population is no new thing under the sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity, and Omniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be very sure, and the sooner the “capitalist” can persuade himself to discern it the sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those who are able to live without physical toil and those who are not are a long way from finaladjustment, but are about to undergo a profound and essential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution is a hope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to be bloody noses and cracked crowns, and the good persons who suffer themselves to be shocked by such things in others will have a chance to try them for themselves. The working man is not troubling himself greatly about a just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater part go to those who do not work with their hands, he will not consider too curiously any one’s claim to exemption. It would perhaps better harmonize with his sense of the fitness of things if the disadvantages of the transitional period fell mostly to the share of his benefactors; but almost any distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a whole to the other side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the meantime it is to be wished that the moralizers and homilizers who prate of “principles” may have a little damnation dealt out to them on account. The head that is unable to entertain a philosophical view of the situation would be notably advantaged by removal.
It is the immigration of “the oppressed of all nations” that has made this country one of the most lawless on the face of the earth. The change from good to bad took place within a generation—so quickly that few of us have had the nimbleness of apprehension to “get it through our heads.” We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that we were taught at our father’s knees before the eagle became a buzzard. America is still “an asylum for the oppressed;” and still, as always and everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything but to be oppressed—makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly, but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his headabove the surface with another gentleman underfoot.
All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of southeastern Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories of Europe—even of southeastern Europe—may not be a good man; I say only that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. Let us not deny him his grievance: he works—when he works—for men no better than himself. He is required, in many instances, to take a part of his pay in “truck” at prices of breathless altitude; and the pay itself is inadequate—hardly more than double what he could get in his own country. Against all this his cry is justified; but his rioting and assassination are not—not even when directed against the property and persons of his employers. When directed against the persons of other laborers, who choose to exercise the fundamental human right to work for whom and for what pay they please—when he denies this right, and with it the right of organized society to exist, the necessity of shooting him is not only apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he and his kind, of whatever nationality, are usually forgiven this just debt of nature and suffered to execute,like rivers, their annual spring rise constitutes the most valid of the many indictments that decent Americans by birth or adoption find against the feeble form of government under which their country groans. A nation that will not enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its people.
This “citizen soldiery” business is a ghastly failure. The National Guard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be a Greater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with which the civil authorities are too feeble to cope. How often does it do so? Mostly it fraternizes with, or is cowed or beaten by, the savage mobs which it is called upon to kill. In a country with a competent militia and competent men to use it there would be crime enough and some to spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a republic is without excuse. If we have bad laws, or if our good laws are not enforced; if corporations and capital are “tyrannous and strong;” if white men murder one another and black men outrage white women, all this is our own fault—the fault of those, among others, who seek redress or revenge by rioting and lynching. The people of a republic have always as good government,as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of person, property and liberty, as they merit. They can have whatever they have the honesty to desire and the sense to set about getting in the right way. If as citizens of a republic we lack the virtue and intelligence rightly to use the supreme power of the ballot so that it really
executes a freeman’s willAs lightning does the will of God
executes a freeman’s willAs lightning does the will of God
executes a freeman’s willAs lightning does the will of God
executes a freeman’s will
As lightning does the will of God
we are unfit to be citizens of a republic, undeserving of peace, prosperity and liberty, and have no right to rise against conditions due to our moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way, Messieurs the Masses, to correct public evils: put wise and good men into power. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or will not for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed when you submit and shot when you rise.
To shoot a rioter or lyncher is a high kind of mercy. Suppose that twenty-five years ago (the longer ago the better) two or three criminal mobs in succession had been exterminated in that way, “as the law provides.”Suppose that several scores of lives had been so taken, including even those of “innocent bystanders”—though that kind of angel does not abound in the vicinity of mobs. Suppose that no demagogue judges had permitted officers in command of the “firing lines” to be persecuted in the courts. Suppose that these events had writ themselves large and red in the public memory. How many lives would this have saved? Just as many as since have been taken and lost by rioters, plus those that for a long time to come will be taken. Make your own computation from your own data; I insist only that a rioter shot in time saves the shooting of nine.
You know—you, the People—that all this is true. You know that in a republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than it cures—that it cures none. You know that even the “money power” is powerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know that nobody can bribe nor intimidate a legislator or voter who will not take a bribe nor suffer himself to be intimidated—that there can be no “money power” in a nation of honorable and courageous men. You know that “bosses” and “machines” can not control you if you will not suffer themto divide you into “parties” by playing upon your credulity and senseless passions. You know all this, and know it all the time. Yet not a man has the courage to stand forth and say to your faces what you know in your hearts. Well, Messieurs the Masses, I don’t consider you dangerous—not very. I have not observed that you want to tear anybody to pieces for confessing your sins, even if at the same time he confess his own. From a considerable experience in that sort of thing I judge that you rather like it, and that he whom, secretly, you most despise is he who echoes back to you what he is pleased to think you think, and flatters you for gain. Anyhow, for some reason, I never hear you speak well of newspaper men and politicians, though in the shadow of your dis-esteem they get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking fairly well of one another.