CHAPTER IVSOCIAL DECAY

If my analysis of the industrial process be correct, there will be two developments observable in our society: the first a material change, a kind of economic apoplexy, the concentration of wealth in one portion of society, accompanied by an intensification of competition, a falling in the rate of interest, and a steady rise in the cost of living; and second, a spiritual change coincident with the material one, a protest against the rising frenzy of greed, and against the constantly increasing economic pressure.

It is important that these two processes should be clearly perceived, and their relationship correctly understood; for there is no aspect of the whole problem about which there is more bad thinking done. The two are cause and effect, and they explain and prove each other; and yet almost invariably you will hear them cited as contradicting each other. If, for instance, one speaks of the ever-rising tide of misery and suffering in our society, he will be met with the response that “the world is gettingbetter all the time.” And when he asks for some proof of the statement, the reply will be that a great national awakening is going on, that we are developing new ideals and a new public spirit!

Similarly I have, time and again, when advocating this or that concrete remedy, been met with the statement that the cure for the evils of the time is publicity—that the people must be educated—that we must appeal to men’s moral sense, etc. It is useless to argue with a person who cannot perceive that all these things are simply means to an end, and not the end. You cannot educate people just to be educated; when you appeal to them, you have to appeal to them todosomething.

One cannot insist too strongly upon the futility of sentiment in connection with this process. We are dealing with facts, with grim and brutal and merciless reality. And it will not avail you to try to smooth it over—it will not do any good to turn your head and refuse to face it. Here is the monster machine of competition, grinding remorselessly on; the wealth of the world is rushing with cyclonic speed into one portion of the social body, and in the other portion whole classes of men and women and children are being swept out of existence, are being wiped off the economic slate. Exactly as capital piles up—at compounded andre-compounded interest—so also piles up the mass of human misery of every conceivable sort—luxury, debauchery and cynicism at the top, prostitution, suicide, insanity, and crime at the bottom. Political corruption spreads further and eats deeper, business practice becomes more impersonal and more ruthless; and all progress awaits the swing of the pendulum, the time when the cumulative pressure of all this mass of misery shall have driven the people to frenzy, and forced them to overturn the system of class exploitation and greed.

I purpose to cite in detail the symptoms of disease and decay in our body politic; before I begin, I wish to put my interpretation of them into one sentence, which a man can carry away with him. I say that the evils of our time are due without exception to one single cause—that our people are being driven, with constantly increasing rigour, to the ultimately hopeless task of paying interest upon a mass of capital which is increasing at compound interest.

Consider in the first place the broader aspect of the situation—the dollar-madness of the time which is the staple theme of the moralist. I have a friend who is in control of a great business concern, and who will read this little book with intense disapproval; and yet so fearfully has this man beendriven by the lash of competition that when I saw him last he could scarcely digest a bit of dry bread, and his hand trembled so that he could hardly lift a glass of water to his lips. He talked of his business in his sleep, and he could not go for a walk and forget it for five minutes. And why? Was it money? He has so much that his family could not spend it if they lived a hundred years; but it was his business, it was his life. He was caught in the mill and he could not get out. His is one of those few industries which have not yet formed a trust, and he is in the last gasp of the competitive struggle—he has to plot and plan day and night to get new orders, and to cut down expenses, and to keep up the dividends upon which hisreputationrests.

And as it is with him, so it is with the rest of us. We have to play the game; we have to cut our neighbour’s throat, knowing that otherwise our neighbour will cut ours. And year after year the pressure of the whole thing grows more tense. Suicide in the United States has increased from twelve per one hundred thousand of population in the year 1890, to sixteen in the year 1896, and seventeen in the year 1902; in Germany it rose from twenty to nearly twenty-two in the three years between 1900 and 1903; in England it rose from thirty in 1894, to thirty-five in 1904. According to theCiviltàCattolicathe frequency of this crime in Europe has increased four hundred per cent. while population has increased only sixty per cent.; and there have been over one million suicides recorded in the last twenty-five years. There were ninety-two thousand insane persons in the United States in 1880, one hundred and six thousand in 1890, and one hundred and forty-five thousand in 1896. Per one thousand of population, there were twenty-nine prisoners in 1850, sixty-one in 1860, eighty-five in 1870, one hundred and seventeen in 1880, and one hundred and thirty-two in 1890. In 1876 the population of this country consumed eight and sixty-one one-hundredths gallons of liquor per capita; in 1890 they consumed fifteen and fifty-three one-hundredths, and in 1902 they consumed nineteen and forty-eight one-hundredths. The actual consumption at the last date was a billion and a half of gallons. These figures take but a few lines to state; and yet no human imagination can form any conception of the frightful mass of human anguish which they imply. They constitute in themselves a proof of the thesis here advanced, that there is at work in our society some great and fundamental evil force.[3]

3. “An experienced magistrate, Recorder John W. Goff of New York, told me not long since that in his judgment the course of crime in this country is not only towards more frequency and gravity, but that it is changing its old hot impulsiveness, openness and directness for cold calculation, secretiveness and deliberate intention to strike without being discovered. This progress and difference he attributes mediately and immediately to extending and deepening poverty.” Henry George: “The Menace of Privilege.”

Whenever the administrators of our “constantly increasing mass of capital” find they are no longer making profits, they either reduce wages, or raise the price of their product. One or the other they must do, because without profits the machine cannot run. When good times come they sometimes raise the wages again—because of the unions; but they never lower the price of the product—the poor consumer is a nonunion man. Two years ago Mr. Rockefeller put up the price of oil one cent, and the Beef Trust has done the same about once a year. And of course a general increase in prices is exactly the same as a general cut in wages—in either case the consumer has to work a little harder to make ends meet, and if he cannot work harder, he dies. The coal-miners rejoiced in the award of the Commission, untroubled by the extra fifty cents the coal companies put on the product; but when the miner comes to add up his account with the butcher and the oil man, he finds he is just where he was before. He does not know why, you understand—it is merely that he finds himself compelled to do without something he used to consider a necessity. Dun’s Review, figuring the cost of living in the United States upon a basis of 100, puts it at 72.455 in 1897, and 102.208 in 1904—an increase of forty-one per cent. Bradstreet, reckoningin another way, shows an increase from 6.51 in 1897, to 9.05 in 1904, or thirty-nine per cent. According to the annual report of the Commissary General, United States Army, the cost of feeding the soldiers of the army has increased from eighteen cents in 1898 to thirty-four and six-tenths cents in 1903. Statisticians have figured that the average employee earns ninety dollars a year more than he did twenty years ago, while it costs him to live on the same scale, one hundred and thirty dollars a year more. According to the last United States census the average compensation per wage earner was only three hundred and forty dollars, while the value of the manufactured product was two thousand four hundred and fifty dollars per wage earner. Perhaps no clearer statement of the intensification of exploitation can be found than in the fact that whereas the average profit on the products of all industries was three hundred and seventy-five dollars per wage earner in 1880, in 1900 it had increased to six hundred and twenty-six dollars.

Another consequence of the increasing strain is “race suicide”; which is simply a popular term for that “elimination of the middle class” which Karl Marx predicted half a century ago. The homilies of President Roosevelt may have caused a few more superfluous bourgeois babies to be born;but I rather fancy that in general it has been a case of “everybody’s business and nobody’s business”—that the average middle-class American has no idea of lowering his standard of living for the purpose of affecting the census returns. As a result of a confidential census of “race suicide,” taken in England and reported in thePopular Science Monthly, Mr. Sidney Webb found that the offspring had been voluntarily limited in two hundred and twenty-four cases out of a total of two hundred and fifty-two marriages; and out of the one hundred and twenty-eight cases in which the causes of limitation were given, economic causes were specified in seventy-three. Similar results would certainly follow an inquiry in this country; in fact Americans of refinement have come to have an instinctive feeling of repugnance to a large family; to have six or seven children is vulgar and “common,” and suggestive of foreigners. The reason is simply that conditions now prevail which make large families impossible, except to Poles and Hungarians and Italians and French-Canadians, people who are too ignorant to limit their offspring, and whose standards of life are close to animals—their children earning their own livings in sweatshops, mines and factories, as soon as they are able to walk.

And yet, low as our lowest classes havebeen ground, they are not low enough. Thousands of agents of steamship companies are gathering the outcasts from the sewers of Europe and shipping them here. The rate of immigration into this country was three hundred and eleven thousand in 1899, four hundred and eighty-seven thousand in 1901, six hundred and forty-eight thousand in 1902, eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand in 1903, and over a million in 1905—more than one-half of the last shipments being from Hungary, Russia, and southern Italy. All this, you must understand, is managed by the “System” which rules in our centres of industry. “In that unhappy anthracite country,” writes Mr. John Graham Brooks, a person of authority, “the employers will tell you openly, and with conscious bravado, that they must get cheaper and cheaper labour to keep wages down, else they could make no money.” And it was recently estimated by George W. Morgan, State Superintendent of Elections in New York, that in one past year over six hundred thousand dollars profit was made by selling false naturalisation papers. The Federal authorities who had been investigating the frauds believed that over one hundred thousand sets of such papers had been sold, and that thirty thousand of these had been issued in New York City. Fully thirty per cent. of the Italiancitizens in the southern district of New York were estimated to hold false papers.

Cheaper and cheaper labour! Women’s labour and children’s labour! Over one million of women are at present working in factories alone in this country; and one million and three-quarters of children between ten and fifteen years of age are engaged in gainful occupations. In the cotton factories of the South, while the number of men employed increased seventy-nine per cent. in the past ten years, the number of women increased one hundred and fifty-eight per cent. and the number of children under sixteen increased two hundred and seventy per cent. The number employed in Alabama alone was estimated by the Committee on Child Labour to be fifty thousand, with thirty-four per cent. of them under twelve years, and ten per cent. undertenyears. These children work twelve hours a day, and the oldest get fifty cents and the youngest get nine cents. Here are the descriptions of observers:

“A little boy of six years has been working 12 hours a day, from 6:20A. M.to 6:20P. M.(40 minutes off at noon), for 15 cents per day.

“Three boys aged respectively 9, 8, and 7 years. The boy aged 9 has been working two years, the boy aged 8 has been working three years; the boy aged 7 years has beenworking two years. These little fellows work 13 hours a day, from 5:20A. M.to 6:30P. M., with twenty minutes for dinner. In ‘rush’ periods their mill works until 9:30 and 10P. M.They were refused a holiday for Thanksgiving and they obtained Christmas Day only by working till 7P. M.in order to make up the time.”

Mrs. Irene Ashby-Macfadden says: “I have talked with a little boy of seven years, in Alabama, who worked for forty nights; and another child not nine years old, who at six years old had been on the night shift eleven months.”

Miss Jane Addams, of Chicago, says: “In South Carolina, in a large new mill, I found a child of five working at night. In Columbia, S. C., in a mill controlled by Northern capital, I stood at ten-thirty at night and saw many children who did not know their own ages, working from 6P. M.to 6.A. M.”

Here is a description of their surroundings:

“An atmosphere redolent of oil, thick with lint, the deafening, incessant whir of machinery, in summer stifling heat, always the insensate machinery claiming the strained attention of young eyes and tiny fingers, broken threads clamorously crying for adjustment, all requiring not hard work, but incessant vigilance, springing feet and nimble fingers. Young eyes watchinganxiously for a fault in these intricately constructed machines, paying with crushed or broken members for an error in judgment, for the crime of carelessness, how must the responsibility—lightly smiled at by adults—weigh upon the barely developed intelligence of a young child? And after long hours, lagging footsteps, throbbing heads, wandering attention—what sort of stone is this, O Brothers, to be placed in the children’s hands who cry for bread?”

Several years ago I saw in theIndependentan advertisement setting forth the advantages of the State of Alabama as an investing-place for capital. I wish I had cut it out. The point of it was that there were no “labour-troubles” in Alabama; the boycott being prohibited there, and labour unions being sued for damages and smashed. The advertisement might have added that there is no factory-legislation to amount to anything, and that the percentage of native white illiteracy is fourteen and eight-tenths. Thereisfactory-legislation in Massachusetts, and it is enforced, and the percentage of native white illiteracy is only eight-tenths of one per cent., or one-eighteenth of the proportion of Alabama. So in the last overproduction crisis the mills of Alabama were running, while those of Massachusetts were shut down; and the special correspondence of the New YorkEvening Postcontained the following pregnant item:

Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee

Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor CommitteeCHILD LABOR IN GLASS FACTORIES AND COAL MINES

“Atlanta, Ga., June 12—‘The sceptre of commercial supremacy is falling from the palsied hand of New England industry; apparently it is to be taken up by the South. Grasp it firmly. The whole country, torn by labour disputes, looks to the South to make the final stand against legislative encroachments on the liberty of the individual workman and the individual employer.’

“So Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, Conn., spoke to the members of the Georgia Industrial Association, at their annual convention at Warm Springs, Ga., last week. This association was one of the earliest to recognise the depressing effect of restrictive labour legislation upon the cotton manufacturing of New England; its members fear that similar legislation in the South would be followed by even more disastrous consequences, and what has injuriously affected the more hardy and older establishments of the North, would, they believe, stunt the growth of the infant industries of the South, if it did not actually crush them.”

I made an effort in “The Jungle” to show what is happening to the wage earner in our modern highly concentrated industries, under the régime of a monopoly price and a competitive wage. I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there,and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report. But the reader does not have to take my word for it, there are any number of studies by independent investigators. Let him go to a library and consult the American Journal of Sociology for March, 1901, and read the reports of a graduate of the University of Chicago, who investigated the conditions in the garment-trade in that city. Here were girls working ten hours a day for forty cents a week. The average of all the “dressmakers” was but ninety cents a week, and they were able to find employment on the average only forty-two weeks in the year. The “pants-finishers” received a dollar and thirty-one cents, and they were employed only twenty-seven weeks in the year. The general average in the entire trade was less than two dollars and a half a week, and the average number of weeks of work was only thirty-one,making an average yearly wage for a whole industry of seventy-six dollars and seventy-four cents per year. Or let the reader get Mr. Jacob A. Riis’s pictures of conditions in the slums of New York. In his book, “How the Other Half Lives,” Mr. Riis states that in the block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney and Ridge streets, the size of which is two hundred by three hundred feet, are two thousand twohundred and forty-four human beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand. Jack London, in his “War of The Classes,” quotes the Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the block bounded by Hester, Canal, Eldridge and Forsyth Streets: “In a room twelve feet by eight, and five and a half feet high, it was found that nine persons slept and prepared their food. In another room, located in a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of seventeen, two women and four boys, nine, ten, eleven and fifteen years old—fourteen persons in all!” Apropos of this it may be well to add that an investigation conducted in Berlin established the fact that with families living in one room the death rate was one hundred and sixty-three per thousand, while with families living in three or four rooms it was twenty. What it was with three or four families living in one room does not appear. According to a recent report of the New York Tenement House Commission there were four hundred thousand “dark rooms”—rooms without any outside opening whatever. Mr. Riis has been so successful in battling with such conditions that he has been called by President Roosevelt “the most usefulAmerican.” Neither the President nor Mr. Riis understand economics, and so probably they are both perplexed at the result of his ten years of effort—which is that rents on the East Side have gone up about fifty per cent. in the last two years, and there have been riots and evictions—and a Socialist all but elected to Congress!

But Mr. Riis is a business man, and he can figure the social cost of these evil conditions. Of the New York tenements he writes:

“They are the hot beds of epidemics that carry death to the rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they taint the family life with deadly moral contagion.”

In his newly published discussion of social problems called “In the Fire of the Heart,” Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine writes of the country’s situation as follows:

“And over ten millions of our people are in a state of chronic poverty at this very hour—almost one out of every seven, or,to make full allowance, one out of every eight of all our people are in the condition where they have not sufficient food, and clothing, and shelter to keep them in a state of physical and mental efficiency. And the sad part of it is that large additional numbers—numbers most appalling for such a country as this, are each year, and through no fault of their own, dropping into this same condition.

“And a still sadder feature of it is, that each year increasingly large numbers of this vast army of people, our fellow-beings, are, unwillingly on their part and in the face of almost superhuman efforts to keep out of it till the last moment, dropping into the pauper class—those who are compelled to seek or to receive aid from a public, or from private charity, in order to exist at all, already in numbers about four million, while increasing numbers of this class, the pauper, sink each year, and so naturally, into the vicious, the criminal, the inebriate class. In other words, we have gradually allowed to be built around us a social and economic system which yearly drives vast numbers of hitherto fairly well-to-do, strong, honest, earnest, willing and admirable men with their families into the condition of poverty, and under its weary, endeavour-strangling influences many of these in time, hoping against hope, struggling to the lastmoment in their semi-incapacitated and pathetic manner to keep out of it, are forced to seek or to accept public or private charity, and thus sink into the pauper class.

“It is a well-authenticated fact that strong men, now weakened by poverty, will avoid it to the last before they will take this step. Many after first parting with every thing they have, break down and cry like babes when the final moment comes, and they can avoid it no longer. Numbers at this time take their own lives rather than pass through the ordeal, and still larger numbers desert their families for whom they have struggled so valiantly—it is almost invariably the woman who makes her way to the charity agencies. The public and private charities cost the country during the past year as nearly as can beconservativelyarrived at, over two hundred million dollars.

“Moreover, a strange law seems to work with an accuracy that seems almost marvellous. It is this. Notwithstanding the brave and almost superhuman struggles that are gone through with, on the part of these, before they can take themselves to the public or private charity for aid, when the step is once taken, they gradually sink into the condition where all initiative and all sense of self-reliance seems to be stifled or lost, and it is only in a rare case now and thenthat they ever cease to be dependent, but remain content with the alms that are doled out to them—practically never do they rise out of that condition again. Talk with practically any charity agent or worker, one with a sufficiently extended experience, and you will find that there is scarcely more than one type of testimony concerning this. And as this condition gradually becomes chronic, and endeavour and initiative and self-respect are lost, a certain proportion then sink into the condition of the criminal, the diseased, the chronically drunk, the inebriate, from which reclamation is still more difficult.”

The fullest and most authoritative treatise upon conditions in America is of course Mr. Robert Hunter’s “Poverty.” Mr. Hunter is a settlement worker, and he has gathered his material in the midst of the conditions of which he writes. He quotes, for instance, the following definite facts, which are obtained from official sources:

“1903: twenty per cent. of the people of Boston in distress.

“1897: nineteen per cent. of the people of New York state in distress.

“1899: eighteen per cent. of the people of New York state in distress.

“1903: fourteen per cent. of the families of Manhattan evicted.

“Every year ten per cent. (about) of thosewho die in Manhattan have pauper burials.” “On the basis of these figures,” Mr. Hunter continues, “it would seem fair to estimate that certainly not less than fourteen per cent. of the people, in prosperous times (1903), and probably not less than twenty per cent. in bad times (1897), are in distress. The estimate is a conservative one, for despite all the imperfections which may be found in the data, and there are many, any allowance for the persons who are given aid by sources not reporting to the State Board, or for those persons not aided by the authorities of Boston, or for those persons who, although in great distress, are not evicted, must counterbalance the duplications or errors which may exist in the figures either of distress or evictions.

“These figures, furthermore, represent only the distress which manifests itself. There is no question but that only a part of those in poverty, in any community, apply for charity. I think anyone living in a Settlement will support me in saying that many families who are obviously poor—that is, underfed, underclothed, or badly housed—never ask for aid or suffer the social disgrace of eviction. Of course, no one could estimate the proportion of those who are evicted or of those who ask assistance to the total number in poverty; for whatever opinion one may have formed is based, noton actual knowledge, gained by inquiry, but on impressions, gained through friendly intercourse. My own opinion is that probably not over half of those in poverty ever apply for charity, and certainly not more than that proportion are evicted from their homes. However, I should not wish an opinion of this sort to be used in estimating, from the figures of distress, etc., the number of those in poverty. And yet from the facts of distress, as given, and from opinions formed, both as a charity agent and as a Settlement worker, I should not be at all surprised if the number of those in poverty in New York, as well as in other large cities and industrial centres, rarely fell below twenty-five per cent. of all the people.”

Such are the conditions in America to-day; what they would be in the future, if present tendencies went on unchecked, the reader may learn by going to Europe, where industrial evolution has been slower in coming to a head, and where the people have been held down by religious superstition and military despotism. Let him take Mr. Richard Whiteing’s “No. 5 John Street”; or, if he has a particularly strong stomach, let him try Jack London’s “People of the Abyss,” or Charles Edward Russell’s terrifying story of the poverty of India, in his “Soldiers of the Common Good.” Here is a scene in a London park, selected,by way of example, from the first-named book:

“We went up the narrow, gravelled walk. On the benches on either side was arrayed a mass of miserable and diseased humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Doré to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of filth and rags, of all manner of loathsome skin-diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly nine months old, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with anyone looking after it. Next, half a dozen men sleeping bolt upright, and leaning against one another in their sleep. In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother’s arms, and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and another woman with thread and needle, sewing up rents. Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with his head in the lap of a woman, not morethan twenty-five years old, and also asleep. ‘Those women there,’ said our guide, ‘will sell themselves for thru’pence or tu’pence, or a loaf of stale bread.’ He said it with a cheerful sneer.”

And then turn back to the preface: “It must not be forgotten that the time of which I write was considered ‘good times’ in England. The starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery, which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity. Following the summer in question came a hard winter. To such an extent did the suffering and positive starvation increase that society was unable to cope with it. Great numbers of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread. Mr. Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January, 1903, to the New YorkIndependent, briefly epitomises the situation, as follows: ‘The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every night at their doors for food and shelter. All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.’”

And then consider that in the city wherethis was going on, the leading newspaper (theTimes) was printing a three-column article setting forth the fact that competition had grown so great that it was now no longer possible for a “gentleman” to maintain his status with a family in London upon an income of half a million dollars a year!

Yet if one wishes for social contrasts, there is really no need of crossing the ocean. Mr. Schwab’s nine million dollar palace in New York will answer the purpose; or so will the St. Regis Hotel. The swinging doors of the St. Regis, so the visitor is informed, cost ten thousand dollars apiece; the panelling of the smoking-room cost forty-five thousand dollars, and the carriage-entrance rain-shed cost eighty-five thousand dollars. The walls of it are covered with a silk brocade, which cost twenty dollars a yard, and the ceiling is gilded with material costing one dollar an ounce. It cost a hundred thousand dollars to fit up the office, and four million dollars to build the whole structure. A two-room apartment in it, without meals, is valued at nine thousand six hundred dollars a year; and for your meals you may try—say, “milk-fed chicken” at two dollars for each tiny portion.

Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee

From Stereograph, Copyrighted 1906, by Underwood & UnderwoodTHE SOCIAL CONTRAST IN NEW YORK

Perhaps this seems monstrous; but it really is not—it is a perfectly inevitable consequence of industrial competition, and of the “constantly increasing mass of capital.” Mr. John Jacob Astor, who owns the hotel, has an income of more than its value every year, and he is in desperate straits to find any way of investing it by which he can make profits. There are seven thousand millionaires in this country, who want the best, the only best they know being what costs the most; and so he knew that if he built a hotel exceeding in cost any other hotel in the world, that hotel would pay him profits. For precisely the same reason a number of buildings are now being torn down in Brooklyn to make room for a graveyard for wealthy people’s pet dogs.

The founder of the Astor fortune came to New York a century ago and bought land while it was cheap. Millions of men have since contributed their labour to the building up of New York; and no one of them did anything without adding to the wealth of the Astors—who merely sat by and watched. Now the property of the family is estimated to be worth four hundred and fifty millions of dollars, according to Mr. Burton J. Hendricks’s recent account of it inMcClure’s Magazine. It includes half a dozen hotels like the St. Regis; it includes also innumerable slum-tenements with “dark rooms.” Its value grows by leaps and bounds—one corner lot on Fifth Avenue “made” them seven hundred thousand dollars in two years. To Mr. WilliamWaldorf Astor alone the harried and overdriven population of Manhattan Island delivers eight or ten millions of tribute money every year; and Mr. William Waldorf Astor resides at Clieveden, Taplow, Bucks, England—giving as his reason the fact that “America it not a fit place for a gentleman to live in.”

The fundamental characteristic of the régime under which we live is that it values a man only in so far as he is capable of producing wealth. Hence one of the signs of the increasing difficulty of making profits will be an increasing recklessness of human life. Our railroads killed six thousand people in 1895, seven thousand in 1899, eight thousand in 1902, nine thousand in 1903, and ten thousand in 1904; they injured thirty-three thousand in 1895, forty-four thousand in 1899, sixty-four thousand in 1902, seventy-six thousand in 1903, and eighty-four thousand in 1904. According to the statistics of the Interstate Commerce Commission, our railways injured one passenger out of every one hundred and eighty-three thousand passengers they carried in 1894; in 1904 they injured one out of every seventy-eight thousand. If casualties are to continue increasing at the same rate until 1912, there are one hundred thousand people under sentence of sudden death, and a number doomed to be maimed greater thanthe entire population of the District of Columbia, Delaware, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and the Hawaiian Islands.

In 1890, before the present appalling slaughter began, we were killing, of a given number of employees, twice as many as the State-owned roads of Germany, and three times as many as Austria. The street railroads of New York City alone take one human life every day, or one in ten thousand of the population every year. People walk about the streets carelessly, but tremble when there is a thunderstorm; yet the street-cars kill ten persons in a year for every one that the lightning kills in the lifetime of a man!

These things create indignation in our pulpits and editorial rooms; but any practical railroad man could tell you that to stop them would be to overthrow society. The reason they occur is that it costs less to pay the damages than it would to take proper precautions, and if the railroads were forced to take the precautions, many of them would have to shut down at once. The situation is covered so completely in the following news item, clipped from the MinneapolisJournalof May 26, 1904, that I cannot do better than to quote it entire:

“Because James J. Hill guaranteed eight per cent. to the stockholders of the Burlingtonwhen he assumed control of that system, many of the older employees are undergoing what they consider real hardship. Ten days ago theJournalvoiced the complaints of Burlington employees on other parts of the system, mentioning the fact that the runs to and from the Twin Cities had been combined in some way, to squeeze more work out of the train crews. The new schedule has now been in effect longer and complaints are correspondingly more emphatic. No dissatisfaction is openly expressed, as the Hill guillotine gets nobody more surely than the man who talks too much.

“Trainmen complain that with the long runs and long hours they are forced to work to a point almost beyond human endurance. They are haunted by the fear of accidents from unpreventable neglect of duty. They hold that the running of trains in safety depends upon the vigilance and alertness of the crews and they cannot do themselves and their employers justice, when compelled to work long hours on fast runs.

“Crews are now running from Minneapolis to Chicago, a distance of about 430 miles, with seventy-two stops. The men start from Minneapolis at 7:30A. M., and arrive, on locals, in Chicago at 9:35P. M.The men leaving Chicago on No. 50 at 10:50P. M.arrive in Minneapolis at 1:20P. M.the next afternoon.

“Trainmen declare that in making this schedule the management has broken faith and virtually abrogates previous working agreements. Hints of a strike are made. In discussing the conditions an old Burlington employee said:

“‘A conductor and his crew feel a sense of responsibility for the lives of those upon a train. A man can only be worked so far when he becomes actually irresponsible. I hate to feel that I am in any way responsible for the lives of passengers on a train when the length of the run and hours have worked me beyond my limit. There is no flagman on the train, and the brake-man has to help load baggage, brake, flag, and do anything that comes up. He is certainly not in good condition to be an alert flagman on the latter end of the run.’”[4]

4. “In the matter of rigging the stock-market the American railroad manager has no superior. In the matter of providing safe and expeditious facilities for transportation he has no inferior in any nation of the first rank. He can manipulate political conventions. He can debauch legislatures. He can send his paid attorneys to Congress and sometimes put them on the bench. In these matters he is a master, just as he is a master in the art of issuing and juggling securities. It is only in the operation of railroads that he is deficient. The mere detail of transporting lives and property safely and satisfactorily he seems to regard as unworthy of his genius. His equipment is usually inadequate. His road-bed is generally second class or worse. His employees are undisciplined and his system is archaic. Whatever the causes may be, the fact remains that, judged by the results of operation, the American railroad manager is incompetent, and the records of death and disaster prove it.”—New York World.

In the same way it is cheaper for a theatre-manager to bribe police officials with free tickets than to comply with the regulations of the Fire Department; and so it is that five or six hundred people are burned up infive minutes. It is easier to bribe a building inspector than it is to put steel rivets in a building, and so you have a Darlington Hotel collapse, and kill ten or twenty workingmen. And a few weeks later came theSlocumdisaster, and a helpless steamboat captain was punished, and the responsible capitalists not even named. At the same time, in Trenton, New Jersey, some other capitalists were arrested for making life-preservers with iron bars in them. Of course they were not punished, for everyone understands that such things cannot be helped. In 1893 the number of miners killed in the United States and Canada was two and fifty-three hundredths per thousand; in 1902 it was three and fifty-one hundredths. Better precautions against accidents were one of the demands for making which the miners of Colorado were strung up to telegraph poles, shut in bull-pens, beaten and “deported.” Their mortality was thirty-two per thousand in ten years; the mortality among railroad brake-men is now thirty-two per thousand intwoyears, so it was very unreasonable of the miners to complain.

There are annually, saysSocial Service, 344,900 accidents among the 7,086,000 people engaged in this country in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits. It calculates that if the percentage of accidents amongthe other 23,000,000 employed in other occupations is only one-tenth as much as the above, it means that another 100,000 must be added to the list. “This is perpetual war on humanity,” the paper goes on to say, “and more bloody than any civil or international war known to history. This war is costing suffering, physical and mental, which is beyond calculation. It is costing great economic loss. It is creating a sense of wrong and a feeling of class-hatred on the part of those who are its victims.”

In the same category of waste of human life belong all the facts of over-driving, long hours, and irregular employment among workingmen. Under the old Southern system of slavery the master took care of his servant the year round; but the wage-slave is kept only while he is needed, and only while he remains at his maximum of working efficiency. Recently in a single month, I clipped from a New York newspaper, items to the effect that the Brooklyn street-railroad combine was discharging all of its superannuated employees; that the master-pilots of the Great Lakes had agreed to engage no man over forty; that the Delaware and Hudson Railroad Company had just published a rule barring all over thirty-five; and that the Carnegie Steel Company had done the same.

And in this same category of waste ofhuman life belong all the facts of woman and child-labour. For of course the children die; and the women produce deformed and idiot and degenerate offspring, to fill our asylums and prisons. The reader is referred, for first-hand accounts of the life of the American woman wage-slave, to Van Vorst’s “The Woman who Toils,” and to that fascinating human document, “The Long Day.” In Mr. John Spargo’s “The Bitter Cry of the Children,” he will find a mass of facts about child-labour, the most hideous of all the evils incidental to the process of wealth-concentration.

There is, if one had only time to point it out, no tiniest nook of our society where human lives are not being ground up for profit; the capitalists are ground up, as Mr. Schwab was, and the meanest woman of the town shares his fate. There was a time when a prostitute was an independent person, who could support herself until she grew old; nowadays, under the stress of competition, every city has its prostitution trust. It takes capital to pay the police, and the business is therefore in the hands of the proprietors of houses, who buy young girls out of the slums and immigrant population by thousands and tens of thousands, use them up in a year or two, and then fling them out into the gutters to die, often when they are not out of theirteens. In the same way the gambler and the saloon-keeper are now as much employees as are the officials of the Standard Oil Company: the whole profits of these occupations flowing into the hands of some “captain of industry” as inevitably as all the rills on the mountain-side flow into the river. All of these facts are perfectly familiar, but for the sake of concreteness, I will quote a paragraph from Mr. Steffens’s book, “The Shame of the Cities.” He is telling of the city of Pittsburg:

“The vice-graft ... is a legitimate business, conducted, not by the police, but in an orderly fashion by syndicates, and the chairman of one of the parties at the last election, said it was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. I saw a man who was laughed at for offering seventeen thousand five hundred dollars for the slot-machine concession; he was told that it was let for much more. ‘Speakeasies’ (unlicensed drinking places) pay so well that when they earn five hundred dollars or more in twenty-four hours their proprietors often make a bare living. Disorderly houses are managed by ward syndicates. Permission is had from the syndicate real-estate agent, who alone can rent them. The syndicate hires a house from the owners at, say, thirty-five dollars a month, and he lets it to a woman at fromthirty-five to fifty dollars a week. For furniture, the tenant must go to the ‘official furniture-man,’ who delivers one thousand dollars worth of ‘fixings’ for a note for three thousand dollars, on which high interest must be paid. For beer the tenant must go to the ‘official bottler,’ and pay two dollars for a one-dollar case of beer; for wines and liquors to the ‘official liquor-commissioner,’ who charges ten dollars for five dollars’ worth; for clothes to the ‘official wrapper-maker.’ These women may not buy shoes, hats, jewellery, or any other luxury or necessity except from the official concessionaries, and then only at the official, monopoly prices.”

And by way of conclusion, in reference to this particular aspect of the consequences of the “increasing mass of capital,” let me quote the following little incident, which a friend of mine clipped from one of the New York newspapers:

“One night a young girl called at the entrance to the House of the Good Shepherd in New York City; she asked for food and a place to sleep. ’Twas a pitiful tale she told the matron in charge. She told of her parents having died and left her alone in the great dark city; she told of jobs she had secured but was discharged owing to her physical inability to keep pace with the machine, and as a last resort she appealedto this institution for succour and support. The matron in attendance, after having heard this terrible tale of woe and being thoroughly convinced as to the girl’s honesty and integrity, as well as to her virtue, informed her that she could not take her in there, as that institution was established for the reclamation of fallen women only. The poor girl went away, but on the following night she returned.... ‘You may take me now,’ she said, ‘you may take me now, for I am a fallen woman!’”

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