CHAPTER IIINDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
Herbert Spencer gives a definition of Evolution, phrased in technical terms, which might be roughly summed up in these words: A process whereby many similar and simple things become dissimilar parts of one complex thing. If we trace, for instance, the evolution of human society, we see about as follows: In the beginning man exists in widely scattered and unrelated tribes, having a very loosely organised government, each individual doing about as he pleases, and all individuals being very much the same. Each finds his own food and cooks it, makes his own weapons and clothing, and looks and thinks and acts like his neighbour. Little by little, as the tribe grows, it begins to come into contact with other tribes that also are growing, and a pressure begins; the tribes make war upon each other, and each individual of the tribe is forced by the presence of danger to unite himself more closely with his fellows, to establish a more rigid rule of obedience, and to force refractory members to the general will. Then, under still growing pressure,one tribe unites with another against a common enemy, and the strongest man in the two rules both; which process of combining continues until at last there results an organism of great complexity, whose members are no longer equal and self-sustaining, but have different activities and ranks and characteristics, and are each dependent upon the rest. If, for instance, we examine France during the Feudal period, we find numerous principalities, duchies and baronies, each one an elaborate and complex organisation, with various classes and hierarchies and tributary parts, and a whole system of laws and customs and beliefs to correspond. And no sooner is this process complete than an evolution begins among these organisms; under the stress of jealousies and ambitions they too begin to struggle, to combine; and presently in one of them arises a strong man who secures command of them all. When the process is completed, there stands in the place of a hundred principalities, one kingdom, the Kingdom of France.
The object of all this long labour is, of course, to get some kind of an organism that shall be capable of maintaining itself in a world of ferocious strife; that shall be able to withstand all enemies that may come against it, and all rebellions that may arise within it. The French monarchywas a marvellous piece of work when it was done; it had men graded into a thousand different classes and occupations, and everything fitted perfectly and ran like a clock. It had peasants to till the soil, and soldiers and sailors to fight; artisans to make all its necessaries, and merchants to handle them; and rising tier upon tier, a whole pyramid of governing and administrative officials, up to the king. It had likewise the whole outfit of ideas and customs necessary to its operation; it was complete and perfect and sublime—it was like a mighty vessel defying the tempests; it had also its pennons that waved, and its songs for the crew to sing. Was it any wonder that those who had made it were proud of it, and felt that there was nothing more to be done in the world but to keep it going?
And yet evolution was not through with it. Men grow weary and want to rest, they become “conservative” and fret at the bare thought of change—but the processes of life go on inexorably. This mighty structure, the Kingdom of France, was only a means and not an end—its purpose was to bind the people of the nation together and protect them until they were able to take care of themselves. It took a long time for this idea to make its way; it took a fearful struggle—men were imprisoned and exiled, burned and beheaded;but the idea went right on, and the nation went right on; and when the time came, it burst the old integument to pieces, and out of the Kingdom of France there emerged the French Republic.
What a marvellous event that was, and what a stir it made in the world—what a stir especially in our own corner of the world—every one knows. Looking at it from a century’s distance, and calmly, we see the whole age-long event as an exemplification of the process of life; the combining of a number of simple things into one complex thing. The means was struggle and rivalry—it was a cruel process; but you will notice that at the end the effort and the pain are all gone—that the organism fulfils its functions freely and joyfully, and that the only difference between the first stage and the last is that the individual man has been raised to a higher plane of being.
Now, as I have said before, the first care of a man is to protect his life; the second is to accumulate wealth. A man does not set much store by his goods while his enemies are within sound; but just as soon as they are dispersed, the tribe begins to gather flocks, and to till the soil. And so, following close upon the heels of the evolution of political society, you have the evolution ofindustrialsociety.
And it is precisely the same process. We may see nearly the whole of it in this country. It begins with the colonial village, where every man owns a little land and raises his own food; also he cobbles his own shoes, spins his own wool, weaves his own cloth, and makes his own clothes. In the very earliest days, he never buys anything, because there is nothing to buy. He may be the deacon or the schoolmaster or the judge, but still he has his own farm, and any other man in the village is about as well fitted to be the deacon or the schoolmaster or the judge as he. But then his goods expand and war begins—industrial war, I mean—a horse-trade, for example. Political evolution is slow, because the rate of increase of men is limited; but the rate of increase of goods proves to be unlimited. Machines are invented, and straightway the industrial process is accelerated tenfold. It took a thousand years to evolve a monarchy; it took only a hundred to evolve a trust.
The industrial units fight each other, and the strongest survive as employers, the weakest becoming employees. Then, as growth continues, these various little groups all over the country come into contact, and they struggle also. The struggle is of course no longer fighting with swords—it is underselling; but the process is exactlythe same, and its purpose is the building up of a capable industrial organism. Precisely as in one case the tribes by combining find they are stronger to fight, the employers, by combining, find that they are stronger to undersell; and this process goes on until you have an industrial feudalism, corresponding in all its details to the political feudalism of France. And then, as before, the barons and the princes and the dukes fight among each other, until out of the midst arises a strong man, a Rockefeller or a Harriman, who smashes them right and left, and makes himself a king.
He is a king in precisely the same way, and to precisely the same purpose, as Louis the Great was king. You know how Richelieu served the nobility of France—if they would not obey they simply lost their heads. If you have read Miss Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company,” or Henry D. Lloyd’s “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” you know how Mr. Rockefeller served the oil nobility; how he tricked them and crushed them; how sometimes, it is said, he blew up their refineries with dynamite, or burned them with fire. You know how Louis said he was the State; and you heard the president of one of the coal companies, who is doing business in flat defiance of the laws of the land, declare that God in His Infinite Wisdom had entrustedto him the property interests of the country. It is not necessary to pursue this analogy; if you do not see that in the due and inevitable course of evolution, our industrial organism has attained the monarchical stage, it is simply because you do not wish to see it, and no amount of exposition will avail. I have only to add, as before, that the purpose ofthisprocess was to evolve an organism which should be capable of maintaining itself against all enemies, without and within. The task of King Louis was the aggrandisement of France; the task of Mr. Rockefeller is the keeping up of Standard Oil stock. Incidentally, Louis the Great gave the world a race-heritage and a civilisation; incidentally, Mr. Rockefeller furnishes the world with oil. Also—what is true in one case is true in the other—the Standard Oil Company is a marvellous piece of work. It has men graded into a thousand different classes and occupations, and all fitting perfectly and running like a clock. It has labourers to till the soil, lobbyists and salesmen to fight, factories to make all its necessaries, and railroads to handle them; and, rising tier upon tier, it has a whole pyramid of governing and administrative officials, up to the president. It has likewise the whole outfit of ideas necessary to its operation; it is complete and perfect and sublime—itis like a mighty vessel, defying the tempests. Is it any wonder that those who have constructed it are proud of it, and feel that there is nothing more to be done in the world but to keep it going?
It is of course clear that the next step, according to my parallel, would be into an Industrial Republic. The reader differs from most Americans whom I meet if this idea is not startling to him. Let us go forward slowly.
In Mr. John Bach McMaster’s “History of the People of the United States,” is a narrative of the terrible yellow-fever epidemic which occurred in Philadelphia in the year 1793, causing the death of over four thousand people in four months. In those days men had strange ideas as to the causes of yellow fever; they believed, in this case, that it “had come from a pile of stinking hides that had been on one of the wharves.” The historian goes on to describe the strange expedients they adopted to get rid of it. “People were bidden to keep out of the sun, and not to get tired. The doctors had little faith in bonfires as purifiers of the air, but much in the burning of gunpowder. Every one then who could buy or borrow a gun, loaded and fired it from morning till night. Then one remedy after another would be suggested, and people would cover themselves with it—nitre,tobacco, and garlic, mud-baths, camphor, and thieves’ vinegar. The last could only be procured by going to the shop. The purchaser going to get it was careful to have a piece of tarred rope wet with camphor at his nose, and in his pocket his handkerchief soaked with the last preventive he had heard of. He shunned the footpaths, fled down the nearest alley at sight of a carriage, and would go six blocks to avoid passing a house where a dead body had been taken out a week before. He would not enter a shop where another man stood at the counter; he would rush in, throw down the money, and rush home—soak everything in this prepared vinegar, and live on a prescribed diet, water-gruel, oatmeal, tea, barley-water, or a vile concoction called apple-tea. If his head pained him or his tongue felt rough, he would immediately wash out his mouth with warm water and honey and vinegar——” etc., etc. At the time when I read all this, it made a peculiar impression upon me, because the newspapers happened just then to be full of the discovery of the true cause of yellow fever. And so all the time that I was reading about the man with the tarred rope in his hands and a sponge wet with camphor at his nose, I had this thought in my mind: And while he was waiting outside of the shop, a mosquitoflew up, all unheeded, and bit him. And so he died!
It seemed to me a peculiarly neat illustration of the precise difference between knowledge and ignorance. It led me to reflect how very eager men ought to be to possess the former; and I put the anecdote away in my mind, thinking, “I shall use it some day when I want—all of a sudden—to scare someone out of a prejudice!”
For just imagine, if you can, that mosquitoes, instead of being a pest about which every man was glad to believe evil, had been the basis of some important industry, or otherwise the source of incalculable advantage to the dominant classes of the community; that universities were endowed, and newspapers owned, and churches and hospitals supported, out of the proceeds of the mosquito monopoly! Are you sure that in that case the discovery of the physicians in Havana would have been hailed as a triumph of Science? Or do you not think that there might have been a strong opposition to the fantastic speculation, and that the men who had published it might have been denounced as enemies of society, and turned out of office for their incendiary teachings? That other physicians of high standing might have been found to ridicule the idea? That newspapersmight have refused to print arguments in favour of it—that, in short, the mosquito monopoly might have succeeded in conjuring up before the imaginations of the multitude so horrible an image of this doctrine and its consequences, that they would have looked upon anyone who advocated it as in some way morally deformed? Assuming that this could have been done, there are only two things to be added. The first is that all the while the mosquitoes would have gone right on causing the yellow fever; and the second is that the people would have found it out in the end—that all that the makers of public opinion would have done, would be to put just so many millions of dollars into the pockets of the mosquito monopoly, at a cost of just so much misery to the human race.
At the outset of this argument, I very much wish that you, the reader, would commune with yourself prayerfully, as to whether or not it might not possibly be that the ideas you have in your head concerning an “Industrial Republic” are really not ideas of your own at all, but prejudices which other people have put there for purposes known to them.
Let me repeat the definition which I gave at the outset of this argument: I mean by an Industrial Republic, an organisationfor the production of wealth, whose members are established upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who share equally in all its advantages.
A century or two ago our ancestors were governed, “by grace of God,” by an unamiable old gentleman over in England, who controlled their destinies, and sent his representatives over here to tax and oppress them; and they impiously rose up and adopted a declaration to the effect that all men were born free and equal; and they seized the property and revenues of their king, and thereafter managed the country for their own benefit solely. “No taxation without representation,” had been their doctrine beforehand. And you, who are an American, and celebrate the Fourth of July, and teach your children to admire the men who threw the tea into Boston Harbour—do you think that you could give me any reason why a man has a right to be represented where he pays his taxes, and no right to be represented where he gets his daily bread? Do you not perceive that a man who can say to me, “Do thus, or you and your children can have nothing to eat,” is just as much my lord and master as the man who can say to me, “Do thus, or be put into jail?”
You stop and think. “The case is notquite the same,” you say. “One is not represented, to be sure; but certainly every man has a right to get his daily bread as he pleases.”
Indeed, I answer. Suppose, for instance, that his occupation happens to be that of a steel-worker; has he any way of getting his daily bread, except upon certain precise terms which a certain group of men offer him?
“H’m,” you say, “that’s so. But then, if he doesn’t like it, can’t he change his occupation?”
My answer is, I do not believe that George the Third would have had any objection to one of our ancestors going to France to become a subject of King Louis. But I understand that freedom began in America when the men of Lexington and Bunker Hill resolved tostay at homeand be free.
“This is all very well in theory,” you say, “but how can it ever be realised?” As I said before, I expect to see it realised in the United States of America within the next ten years. I expect to see it, exactly as I should have expected to see the French Revolution, had I known what I know now; understood that institutions and systems have their day, and perceived the signs of a breakdown as they existed in France in 1780, and as they exist in America in 1907.
What was the cause of the French Revolution?The French monarchy was organised upon a basis of force, represented by taxes; and those who ran the machine had no idea but that a machine so organised could go on forever. But in the long process of time, there developed a tendency on the part of those to whom the taxes came, to grow richer and richer, while those by whom the taxes were paid grew poorer and poorer. Little by little, all the property and all the land of France came into the hands of the nobility; until at last they had everything, and the populace had nothing. Then suddenly the machinery of a society organised upon a basis of force and taxes began to refuse to work; the French peasantry had stood everything, but they could not stand being required to pay taxes when they had nothing to pay with. So the States-General had to be sent for, and the Revolution came.
And note this—that the trouble was not at all that the country was poor. Everyone is familiar with the picture of the horrible condition of the peasantry of that time, how they were little better than wild animals, hiding in holes, naked, and with blackened skins. Yet all the while France was full of wealth—all the trouble was that it was stagnant in the hands of a single class; the fields of France were ready to produce, but the people were too poor totill them. And notice the curious fact, that no sooner was the Revolution accomplished than the difficulty vanished in a flash. The machinery started up again—the peasant had land and tilled it, and the artisans of the cities found work. It seems strange to read that under the “Terror,” when the heads of the “aristocrats” were falling by the dozens every day and all the world was convulsed with horror, thepeopleof France were more prosperous and happy than ever they had been before in history. And when war broke out, the nation that had been on the verge of bankruptcy for a generation, withstood the armies of the combined kingdoms of Europe for more than twenty years!
Here in America, we all started even. Wages were high, and there was work for every man; there was no need to strike—a workingman had only to leave and go elsewhere if he were not pleased. We found employment for the stream of immigrants as fast as they came—we had an enormous country to build up, and an inexhaustible supply of new lands for the settler. We manufactured only for our own use, and we could not manufacture half of what we needed.
But time passed on. Some who were frugal and diligent—and others who were cunning and unscrupulous—grew rich; andthen machinery came in, and the pace grew faster. The rich were on top, and they stayed there. As the country expanded, railroads were built, and fortunes made; the war came, with its enormous expenditures, and still more fortunes were made. Capital grew; but it could not grow fast enough—in the seventies the rate of interest was ten per cent., and the promoters made fortunes besides. It was in those days that the battles of the giants were fought, the railroad wars in which the Gould and Vanderbilt millions were accumulated. Still there was plenty to do; the people had money, and there were some of them to buy everything we could make, and what came from abroad besides. The cities grew and spread, and the immigrants flowed in; railroads and factories were built, and the mighty structure of our modern industrial machine began to take shape. It must be understood that all the while inventions and improvements were being made, that enabled one man to do the work of ten, of fifty, of a hundred; and each such improvement set free so many thousands more men, to turn their attention to another part of the structure and to rush it on to completion.
Completion!Has it never dawned upon you that this machine might possibly some day reach completion?
The purpose of it is a very definite andobvious one—it is to supply the needs of men; and when it is adequate to that purpose, it is complete. But how will you know whenthatis? Why, by the simplest of methods in the world—by that insufficiency of profits which I described before. You are in business for profits, you understand; and when you are making something that men need, you make profits; and when you are making something that men do not need, youstopmaking profits. It would be too bad if men went on making railroads where no one wanted to ride, and building houses for no one to occupy; how fortunate that Nature has arranged it so that we all know when our work is done!
We were trembling on the very verge—in fact, we were half-way over the verge—three years ago, when the Russo-Japanese War came along and saved us. Everybody had begun to realise the peril. The investor, who had been making ten per cent. in the seventies, came down to three. The workingman who had a job that did not suit him, stuck to it all the same, because he saw a million men in the country who had no job at all. And the capitalist, the captain of industry—he mounted into his watch-tower, and proceeded to scan the landscape. A market! A market! My kingdom for a market!
Our newspapers a few years ago werequite wild with delight over a phenomenon called the “American Invasion.” They told how we were conquering all over the world—how Europe stood shuddering with fright—how our exports were mounting by leaps and bounds! How prosperous we were! What ocean-tides of wealth were coming in to us! It seemed so strange to read it all, and to understand that this “Invasion” which the editors were celebrating, was in reality the last death-kick of the industrial system which they had been taught to consider the foundation of all society!
It will be more convenient to consider the whole question of foreign markets at a later stage; suffice it here to say, that if my analysis of the overproduction of capital be correct, then the first signal of danger will be what is commonly hailed as a “favourable balance of trade”—the existence of a surplus product which must be sold abroad. You must distinguish, of course, between a mere exchange of goods, where exports are balanced by imports, andselling, which is sending out goods and taking in gold, or promises to pay gold. In 1893 our exports were eight hundred and forty-seven million dollars and our imports were eight hundred and sixty-six millions. But in 1901, our exports had leaped to one billion, four hundred and eighty-seven milliondollars, and our imports had sunk to eight hundred and twenty-three millions; and during the next four years the excess of exports over imports amounted to a total of over a billion and a half of dollars! According to an estimate made public on January 6, 1907, by the Secretary of the Treasury, the figures for 1906 will be: Imports, one billion, two hundred million dollars, and exports, one billion, eight hundred million dollars. And for how many more years does anyone imagine that the world will be able to pay us six hundred million dollars in cash, for those surplus products which we are compelled to sell?
Do not fail to mark the word “compelled.” If we cannot sell them, we cannot make profits; and if we cannot make profits, we cannot pay dividends. “I am a great clamourer for dividends,” said Mr. Rockefeller; and other captains of industry share in his weakness. And when a few years ago they found that foreign markets were beginning to fail, they set to work to remedy the evil in the only other possible way—by combining, and limiting the product, and raising prices. And that brings us to the other great symptom of the approach of the breakdown—the organising of the trusts. For six or eight years the process has been going on, irresistibly, automatically—while the country raged and stormed, and pouredout its wrath upon the greedy capitalist. And yet the capitalist was no more to blame than a steam-engine that turns aside when it comes to a switch. The capitalist was making profits; and he saw, by the cessation of his profits, that the industrial machine of the country was getting too big for the country’s use. Unless he, and the machine also, were to go to smash, competition in that particular industry must be ended.
The work is done now; we have only to sit by and wait until the people get through trying to undo it. I never realise more keenly the naïve and touching incompetence of our so-called intellectual classes, than when I reflect that while our men of action have been accomplishing this mighty work—one of the greatest labours ever wrought for civilisation—our benevolent editors and college presidents have gone right on with their prattling of “freedom of contract” and “laissez faire.” And actually, civilisation must sit by and wait ten years, until our people have got through butting their heads against the granite wall of this accomplished fact!
But we Socialists have to take the world as we find it, and cultivate a cheerful disposition; and so behold our great national spectacle, the morality-play of the terrible hundred-headed monster of Competition!The terrible monster has killed and destroyed himself, according to the nature of him; but now by Congressional statute and Supreme Court decree he has been patched together again, and will be compelled to go on fighting! Or at least he shall be stuffed and mounted, and shall look as if he were fighting! He shall have wires attached to his joints and electric lights to gleam from his eyes; he shall be taken out in the gorgeous Presidential campaign chariot, drawn by the Grand Old Party elephant, and all the people shall see him, and marvel at his ferocity, and at the deadly conflict he wages among his various heads! Come now, O people!—come editors and statesmen and judges and bishops—come and see how the terrible hundred-headed monster rends and tears himself, and shout for four years more of the “full dinner-pail.”
But surely we must destroy the trusts! you say.Whymust we destroy the trusts? The trusts are marvellous industrial machines, of power the like of which was never known in the world before; they are the last and most wonderful of the products of civilisation—and we must destroy them! We have been a century building them—you, and I, and the balance of the American people have toiled for three generations night and day, stinting and starving ourselves, so that we might get these trustsfinished; we have taxed ourselves ten, twenty, thirty per cent. of our incomes, under the disguise of a protective tariff, to maintain and develop them; and now that they are complete, we must destroy them!
But they belong to Rockefeller! you protest to me. They belong to Rockefeller in precisely the same way and to precisely the same extent as the Kingdom of France belonged to Louis XIV, or the North American colonies to George III. They belong to the people of the United States, who made them, who contributed every plank of them, and drove every nail of them, and who paid Mr. Rockefeller and his family ample living wages while they superintended the job.
But you only answer again—we must destroy the trusts! Go ahead then, and have your try! Have it out with them! War to the hilt with them!—and see which is the stronger, two corporations which are resolved not to cut each other’s throats, or you with your law that theyshallcut each other’s throats! Two railroad systems which know that they cannot continue to exist separately, or you who are resolved that they shall not exist together!—It makes one think of the scene in “Twelfth Night,” where Sir Toby has engineered a bloody duel between two terror-stricken antagonists. “Pox on’t, I’ll not meddle with him!” cries Sir Andrew Aguecheek. “Come, Sir Andrew,” says Sir Toby. “There’s no remedy. Come on, to’t.” But poor Sir Andrew will not to’t, he fights with his back to the enemy.
Courtesy of Wilshire’s MagazineA SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS
Courtesy of Wilshire’s MagazineA SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS
Courtesy of Wilshire’s MagazineA SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS
You will hear people abuse the Socialists for wishing to abolish competition. No Socialist wishes to abolish competition, no modern Socialist at any rate. He watches competition, as the mischievous Irishmen watched the Kilkenny cats; keeping off at a suitable distance during the battle, and simply proposing to the spectators that when it is all over they shall recognise the accomplished fact.
There is some competition in the world to-day among the nations; there was recently competition between Russia and Japan, and there will perhaps be competition between some of the others. But what competition is left to-day within the limits of the United States, is left simply because it is of a kind so petty that the capitalists have not yet had time to bother with it. For the most part it exists between a swarm of retailers of trust-made products, and takes the form of the screwing down of the wages of helpless clerks and errand-boys, the adulteration of products, and the placarding of the surface of the land with blatant advertisements which affect a decent man like the stench of a carcass. One ofthe “competitive” industries that is flourishing just now is that of cereals prepared in packages and labelled with names that suggest Hiawatha and the South Sea Islands. The usual price of one of these packages is fifteen cents, and of that, two cents and a half represents the cost of the product, and nearly all of the balance goes into the effort to trap the public into buying it. And did not the “boodle” investigations in Missouri disclose the fact that William Ziegler had spent a fortune in bribing newspapers and legislatures to implant in the public mind the idea that “alum baking-powders” were poisonous, so that the Royal Baking Powder Trust might have the custom of the country?
But, you say, if competition perishes, what becomes of incentive—of initiative? Will not individual enterprise be destroyed? I answer that it depends entirely upon what you mean by individual enterprise. If you mean that ardent desire which now consumes every man to cut his neighbour’s economic throat, to get the better of him and make money out of him, to beat him down and leave him a financial wreck—why, civilisation will suppress this ardent desire in precisely the same way that it has suppressed the duel, or the right of private vengeance, and piracy, or the right of privatewar upon the high seas. The putting down of these things went hard, you know, for they had been the greatest glory of men, and all progress has been due to them. “Franz von Sickingen was a robber-knight,” writes Henderson, in his “History of Germany,” “but with such noble traits, and such a concept of his calling, that one wonders if he ought not rather to be put on the level of a belligerent prince. In carrying on feuds, he seldom aimed lower than a duke, or a free city of the Empire; and there are persons who insist to this day that his weapons were only drawn in favour of the oppressed. Be that as it may, he was not above exacting enormous fines; and being an excellent manager, he greatly increased his possessions. He was lord of many castles, which he furnished with splendid defences.”
And then the historian goes on to describe the gallant struggle of this old nobleman against the advancing power of the Empire. “He determined, by one brilliant feud, to restore the tarnished splendour of his name. He would help the whole order of knighthood to assert itself against the power of the princes.” The end of it was that “the enemy appeared in full force, demolished in a single day an outer tower with walls the thickness of twenty feet, and made a breach in the actual ramparts.”Having been wounded, “the grim commander was carried to a dark, deep vault of the castle, where it was thought he would be safe from the cannon-balls of his pursuers; such an unchristian shooting, he declared to an attendant, he had never heard in all his days.” The castle surrendered, and his foes gathered about him. “He had now to do, he said, with a greater lord, and a few hours later he closed his eyes. The three princes knelt at his side and prayed God for the peace of his soul.” Let us hope that the makers of our Industrial Republic will not forget to pray for the souls of Baer and Parry, if these gallant captains of industry should perish in defending the elemental right of a capitalist to manage his own business in his own way.
This is all very well, you say, but will not such a system decrease production? I rather think that it will; I hope to see the prophecy of Annie Besant come true, that when men no longer have to struggle to get a living, they will at last begin to live. That they will at last open their eyes to the world of books and music, of nature and art, of friendship and love, that stretches out its arms to them; that they will cease to regard ingenuity and rapidity in the production of material things as the final end and goal of the creation of man; that they will cease to look upon a human being as amachine for the getting of money—to be valued like an automobile, by the number of miles an hour it can be driven, by the number of thousands of miles it can cover before it is worn out and ready for the scrap-heap.
Let us have the philosophy of this thing, in order that we may understand it. We saw that the process of evolution, in an individual or in a society, consists of an expansion and a struggle, the end of which is the emergence of the organism into a higher state of being. There is a certain life impulse, and there is a certain environment, certain difficulties with which it contends. We have perhaps no right to speak of purpose in the process, but we have a right to speak of results; and the result of this contest is to shape the organism, to educate it, to bring out certain qualities in it which it did not possess before; until finally it triumphs over its environment, and emerges from its prison-house.
The struggle for life goes on, but the form of it changes unceasingly; and this changing isprogress. Without it there can be none—the very essence of progress consists in the suppressing of old forms of strife, the conquest of old difficulties and the escape from their thraldom. We know thatthere was once a time when men were hairy beings who dwelt in caves, and contended with club and hatchet against the monsters which assailed them; and now supposing that we could take some man of modern times, some one who has risen to eminence and power under the conditions which now prevail, and put him among those cavemen, how do you suppose that he would make out? How do you suppose that he would fare, if he were placed even one century back, in the country of the Iroquois, where the snapping of a twig and the flight of an arrow decided the fate of a man? Is it not obvious that there has been here an entire change in theformof the struggle for existence?
The same thing is true of nations. Once upon a time a nation was an army, and fighting was its business, the conquering of its neighbours was its glory and its ideal; but now we have moved on, we have become complex and highly organised, and can no longer afford to conquer our neighbours. It would not pay us financially, and intellectually and morally it would destroy us. We have, for instance, a powerful country to the north of us; and imagine what would be the inconvenience and waste were we under the necessity of fortifying all our boundary lines, and keeping garrisons at every few miles of them; if every day wewere shaken by rumours that an army was gathering at Montreal, that a fleet of torpedo-boats was building at Toronto. As a matter of simple fact, do we not both go quietly on our way, understanding that we are two civilised nations, between which a war of conquest would be an unthinkable crime?
We have grown to used to the change, that the mere memory of the old ways of life makes us shudder; it seems to us horrible, and we forget that it was once beautiful and delightful to men: that the Germans of the time of Tacitus held fighting the joy of life, and imagined a heaven where a man might be patched up every night and fight again the next day. We have passed so far beyond such a state that we cannot even imagine it, and we have lost the power of seeing that it was ever necessary and right; that to those long ages of struggle we owe our physical being, with all its perfections, which we take so as a matter of course; a swift foot and a dexterous hand, an ear attuned to every sound, an eye that adjusts itself to every distance, a mind quick and alert, a spirit bold and enterprising. And in the same way the nations owe to war their unity and their complexity, and a great deal of their power, not merely physical, but industrial and moral as well.
It was one of the noblest of the world’s poets who wrote that:
“God’s most dreaded instrument,In working out a pure intent,Is man—arrayed for mutual slaughter;Yea, Carnage is His daughter.”
“God’s most dreaded instrument,In working out a pure intent,Is man—arrayed for mutual slaughter;Yea, Carnage is His daughter.”
“God’s most dreaded instrument,In working out a pure intent,Is man—arrayed for mutual slaughter;Yea, Carnage is His daughter.”
“God’s most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is man—arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is His daughter.”
And to the same purpose writes Fletcher:
“Oh great corrector of enormous times,Shaker of o’er-rank states—that heal’st with bloodThe earth when it is sick.”
“Oh great corrector of enormous times,Shaker of o’er-rank states—that heal’st with bloodThe earth when it is sick.”
“Oh great corrector of enormous times,Shaker of o’er-rank states—that heal’st with bloodThe earth when it is sick.”
“Oh great corrector of enormous times,
Shaker of o’er-rank states—that heal’st with blood
The earth when it is sick.”
And yet the time of wars is past. We still have them, of course, and we still have a war-propaganda; but it would be easy to show that these wars are never military, but always commercial—that when two civilised states fight nowadays, it is not because they expect to subjugate each other, or desire to, but because their capitalists both need the same foreign market. I am acquainted with only one writer of any standing in the United States, Captain Mahan, who is nowadays willing even to hint that wars may still be necessary to the disciplining of a nation; and I think one might assert without fear of contradiction that people now go to war, not because they want to, but because they are persuaded they have to; and that right-thinking men throughout the world know that a war is a national calamity, a cause of evils innumerable, scarcely ever overbalanced by good.
And it is of the utmost importance to notice how this has been done; how it is that the military ideal is universally discredited in the world. It has not been due to the preachings of moralists and enthusiasts; it has not been brought about by the intervention of anydeus ex machina. It has come about in the perfectly inevitable course of nature. No hero has arisen to slay the demon of war—the demon of war has slain himself. It is simply that the work of war isdone. It is simply that war has brought about a survival of the fittest, and that there is no more need of conquest, and no possibility of it. The peoples have gone on to a different life, they have almost forgotten for thought of conquering, or of being conquered; they know that they cannot afford it; they know that their social organism is of too delicate a type to stand it; they can no more stand it than one of our modern captains of industry could stand the shock of jousting with Richard Cœur de Lion.
We have moved on to another kind of struggle—to the kind which is known as industrial competition. And we are to come to the end of that in precisely the same way. We are to see the fittest survive, and grow, and establish themselves impregnably; and so long as there is room for competition they will compete; and when theyfind there is no longer room for competition, that by continuing it they are doing as much harm to themselves as to their rivals, they will put an end to competition, and no power on earth can prevent their putting an end to it. Any power which really tried to prevent their putting an end to it would simply destroy them, as two civilised nations would be destroyed if they could be compelled to keep on making war against each other.
The great task of civilisation is the leading of men to recognise when these mighty changes have taken place. For so far I have spoken of only one side of the evolutionary process; I have shown the victory—but there are also defeats. Sometimes in the struggle between the individual and his environment, it is the environment that conquers. Sometimes the man or the society is not equal to the new task, and falls back; and the law of this is death. The stag which can run swiftly enough escapes, and is able to run all the more swiftly as the result of the race; the stag which cannot run quite swiftly enough becomes venison. The tiny shoot which can grow high enough finds the light, and becomes a mighty tree; its neighbour which could not grow quite so high, turns to mould. There comes now and then in the history of every living thing some moment when itsfuture hangs in the balance; when it summons all its forces, and lives or dies. The butterfly faces such a crisis when it emerges from the chrysalis; the child when it is born. You have known such fateful hours in your own moral life; and you can go through history and put your finger upon them—here when the Greeks drove back the Persians, here when the Franks drove back the Saracens, here on the field of Waterloo, on the hills of Gettysburg.
You would like to stay as you are, of course; for that is the least trouble. You have your routine and your habits, your old well-worn paths in which your thoughts move—you would like to stay as you are. But the curse of life is upon you—you cannot stay as you are. You have to go forward, or else to go back. When the crisis comes there is no escaping it—itcomes. When the birth-pangs begin, either the child is born, or the mother dies; when the throes of revolution seize a nation, either the old forms are shattered, or the life of the people is crushed. There was once a reformation and a revolution in France; there was no reformation and no revolution in Spain. So in one case you have new life and abounding vigour—literatures and philosophies and sciences, and impulse after impulse without end; and on the other hand you have stagnation and ruin.
The task was simply too hard for the Spanish nation; they had lived for centuries in imminent proximity to an enemy of an alien faith, and the result was the fastening upon the people of a system of military despotism and religious bigotry. And when the danger was by, when the work of these forces was done, and the time came for the people of Spain to throw them off, their efforts were of no avail; their kings and their priests tortured them and burned them at the stake; and so the impulse died, and never afterwards did they lift their heads. In the same way consider the “Negro question,” as we have it in the United States. Here also we are dealing with a defeated race; a race which was bred where nature proved too strong for man—where savage beasts fell upon him, and deadly diseases smote him, and the swift powers of the jungle balked his every effort to rise. So for centuries and ages he was trampled upon and crushed, until every spark of genius was extinguished in him; and now we strive with all the resources of our civilisation—our noblest and best have given their lives to the task; and we do not know yet if we are to win or lose.
Let the reader of this book get a clear understanding upon at least one point—that no Socialist expects to abolish competition, and the survival of the fittest; allthat any Socialist expects to do is to change thekindof competition and the standard of the fitness. The purpose of industrial competition is to raise up the industrially fit, and to establish a system for the feeding and clothing of men. The sign that the former task is done is the outcry against the money-madness of the time; the sign that the latter is done is “overproduction” and the “trust.”
The purpose of this little book is to lay before candid and truth-seeking Americans the overwhelming evidence which exists of the fact that industrial competition, as an evolutionary force, has done its work in our society: that it has disciplined our labourers in diligence and skill, and our leaders in foresight, enterprise and administrative capacity; that it has built us up a machine for the satisfying of all the material needs of civilisation, a machine that has only to be used; and that until we have found out how to use it, our national life must remain at a standstill, stagnation must take the place of progress, and in every portion of our body politic, the symptoms of disease and decay must multiply and grow more and more alarming.
We have been taught to think that the institutions of freedom in this country are so secure that we may go about our business and our play, and leave them to take careof themselves. And yet, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” is the motto our ancestors left us. For the forms of tyranny change from generation to generation, and it is always out of the old freedom that the new slavery is made. You think that you can stay free by clinging to the good old ways, by repeating the good old formulas, by standing by the good old faiths; but you cannot, for freedom is not a thing of institutions, but of the soul. It has always been under the forms of spirituality that men have been chained by priestcraft; and it is with the very pennons and banners of liberty that this land is bound to-day. It always has been so, and it always will be so—that the despot asks nothing save that things should stay as they are. What was it that the slave-holder wanted, but that things should stay as they were? That men should hold by the Constitution as it was, while America was made into a Slave Empire? What is it that our masters want to-day, save that we should stand by the good old traditions of American individualism, freedom of contract and the right of every man to manage his own business as he pleases—the while the Republic of Jefferson and Lincoln is forged into a weapon for the enslaving of mankind?
There is not one single tradition of the early times that is not being used to-dayfor the betraying of liberty. Take the Monroe Doctrine, for instance. We shout for it every Fourth of July, and we are rushing to completion a score or two of battleships to defend it; whenever it is in peril, our most rabid anti-trust editors and politicians drop everything and take to singing Yankee Doodle. And yet, has never the least suspicion about it come to you? Has it never occurred to you to look who it is that is leading you upon this crusade of freedom—this strange propaganda of civilisation and republican institutions by battleship and rapid-firing gun? This zeal of our captains of industry for the spread of American institutions among the Filipinos and Hawaiians and Porto Ricans and Panamanians and Venezuelans, the while they are so busy crushing American institutions in Rhode Island and Colorado!
There was once a time when all the despotisms of Europe were banded together to destroy republican institutions, and when the threatening gesture of this young republic held them back from half a world. And thus bravely we guarded civilisation with our Monroe Doctrine, until the lesson of freedom had been learned. But now time has passed, and we have come to a new age, with new perils and new duties; there is a new kind of slavery in the world, and a kind in which we lead all civilisation.The control of our Republic has passed out of the hands of the people; by fraud and force our liberties have been overthrown—the very word has been relegated to schoolboy orations and Grand Army reunions. And by this new despotism of greed the people have first been plundered and crushed, and now are to be marshalled and led out to do battle with other peoples, similarly beguiled. In this work every force of reaction and conservatism in civilised society is now enlisted, every tradition of olden time has been called into service. No pretence is too hollow, no blasphemy too abominable to be employed; every national prejudice, every racial hatred, every religious bigotry is made use of—and the starving wretches of the slums and gutters of London are sent into South Africa to capture diamond mines for the glory of free Britannia, while the helpless peasants of Russia are led out with jewelled images of the Virgin in front of them to steal Manchuria in the name of Jesus Christ.
It is with Germany that we Americans are scheduled to battle for the sake of the Monroe Doctrine. And what is the situation in Germany? There is first of all, the degenerate who sits upon its throne, and proclaims himself by grace of God the lord and master of the German people. There is in the second place, the hide-boundmediæval nobility of the Empire, the direct descendants of those robber-knights of whom we read a while ago, some of them living in the very same castles from which their ancestors made their raids. There is in the third place, the aristocracy of the army, whose insolent and dissolute officers beat, kick and maim the helpless country boys and artisans who are herded like sheep under their command. There is in the fourth place, the bigoted seventeenth-century Protestant Church, with its snuffy country parsons and doctors of dusty divinity. There is in the fifth place, the mediæval Roman Catholic Church, with its confessional and other agencies of Darkness. There is in the sixth place, a subsidised “reptile press,” whose opinions are written and whose news is garbled by knavish bureau officials. And every one of these powers, forgetting all past differences, and uniting with brotherly affection, are struggling with every prejudice they can appeal to, and every threat which they can wield, to hold the German people subject to the identical same “System” that rules in America, the industrial aristocracy of cunning and greed; is working them upon starvation wages at home, and driving them to serve in armies and navies, to conquer markets abroad; to threaten Dewey at Manila, and to seize Chinese ports and conduct “punitiveexpeditions” against Chinamen; to sell bad whiskey and firearms to Hereros and then slaughter them when they rebel; to blockade ports in Venezuela and to sink “pirates” in the West Indies; and to sound and measure channels as a preliminary to the taking of a naval base and the inauguration of a war with the United States!
But then, you say,wecan’t help that. What can wedo? Is the only thing you can think of to do, to build battleships and get ready for the strife? How differently our fathers did it, in the old days when the Monroe Doctrine was really what it pretends to be—a pledge of freedom to men! How the impulses that started in this land thrilled through the civilised world and made the “despots of Europe” tremble! What messages of brotherhood flashed upon invisible wires from continent to continent, bearing hope and comfort to all the oppressed of mankind! How we welcomed Lafayette, as if he had been an emperor! How the whole nation turned out in honour of Kossuth, making his long journey one triumphal procession! And are we doing anything like that now?
The people of Germany, you must understand, are closed in a death grip with all these powers of infamy. In spite of obloquy and contempt, in spite of lies and blandishments and menaces, in spite of persecutionand exile and imprisonment, for a generation they have been toiling—devoted, heroic men and women have given their labour and their lives to the task of teaching, writing, speaking, exhorting, to open the eyes of the masses to the truth. And step by step they have marched on, gathering force every hour, strengthened by each new persecution, training themselves in literary and political combat, building up a system of scientific thought which has never been refuted and never can be, inspired by a moral purpose as noble as any the world has ever seen—preparing in all ways for the glorious hour when the people of the Fatherland are to come to their own! The man at their head was once a poor working boy, a wheelwright, and he has raised himself to the leadership of the mightiest effort after freedom that the world now sees; and day by day in the Reichstag he leads the opposition to militarism and savagery, and his speeches are such as a century ago, and even half a century ago, would have set this land aflame from end to end with revolutionary fervour. And this is no isolated movement of a nation, it is a world movement—it is a movement to which the lovers of liberty all over the earth are welcomed as comrades and brothers. It is a movement at one with every hightradition of American life; and you—what is your attitude to it? What do you know about it—what do you care about it? Do you hold public meetings and send messages of sympathy? Do the halls of Congress ring with fervid speeches, as they did in the days of Webster and Henry Clay? Do your papers teem with glowing editorials, with news about the movement, and sketches of its leaders? What have you to say about it, what have you to do for it—but to repeat day in and day out one miserable, pitiful lie, with which you try to blind and deceive the masses of your own country, that this tremendous Socialist movement is not really a Socialist movement at all, but only a movement of political reform!
I do not think that we shall sleep forever; I do not think that the memories of Jefferson and Lincoln will call to us in vain forever; but assuredly there never was in all American history a sign of torpor so deep, of degeneration so frightful, as this fact that in such a crisis, when the downtrodden millions of the German Empire are struggling to free themselves from the tyranny of military and personal government, there should come to them not one breath of sympathy from the people of the American Republic! And all our interest, all our attention, is for that strutting turkeycock, the war-lord whose mailed fist holdsthem down! That monstrous creature, with his insane egotism, his blustering and his swaggering, his curled mustachios and military poses! An epileptic degenerate, who spends his whole life in cringing terror of hereditary insanity: whose spies and police agents are invading the homes of German Socialists, searching for letters in behalf of the agents of the Czar, obtaining evidence to send men in Russia to exile and death! This ruler of his people, who the other day cashiered a near relative, an army officer who had advised soldiers to complain when they were maltreated! whose generals and admirals are swaggering about and spitting in the face of civilisation—and making maps and plans for a naval station in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine!
Forty years ago, at the time of our Civil War, when the fate of this nation hung trembling in the balance, when the Emperor of France and the aristocracy of England saw a chance to cripple republican government and to set back civilisation half a century—what was it then that prevented them? What was it but the fact that in England there existed an organised opposition, alert and watchful, trained by a generation of parliamentary conflict, and with leaders who in such a crisis could not be put down? What was it but the fact that the workers of the factory towns of Great Britain had beendisciplined and taught, and could not be deceived—that they chose rather to starve than to help the cause of Slavery? And if you care to see what would have happened had not that opposition been ready, go back three- or four-score years, when the people of France struck their blow for liberty, and see the leaders of the British aristocracy crushing out protest and imprisoning objectors, and hurling the nation into a criminal and causeless war! Hear the king and the nobility, statesmen and authors, newspapers and pulpits screaming in frenzy and goading the people on, till they had desolated Europe with fifteen years of hideous slaughter, from the moral and spiritual effects of which the world has not yet recovered!
And now you stand and contemplate another such crime against civilisation. The two most enlightened peoples of the world are to come together and strip for a fight. The powers that rule in each of them made up their minds years ago, and among the officers, both in the army and in the navy of each, the coming conflict is taken for granted. Two or three years ago a German officer promised that an army corps would march from one end of this continent to the other; and an admiral in our own navy has publicly foretold the struggle. The German capitalists are in desperation for new markets, and the German people are onthe edge of a revolt, with an irresponsible military despot in absolute control of them, who knows that his only chance to put off the revolution is to pick a quarrel and beat the war-drum, and summon the masses to the defence of the honour of the Fatherland. When that supreme hour comes, and when the war-lust begins to burn, upon the Social-Democratic Party of Germany will fall the task of saving civilisation; and what shallwehave done to help them—what encouragement shallwehave sent them? We have sent ships of grain to the cotton-operatives of Lancashire when they were starving; but what have we done for the people of Germany? What reason have we given them, with our tariffs and imperialisms, to think of us otherwise than as a nation of shopkeepers, a nation sunk in greed and commercialism, and dead to every noble impulse of men?