CHAPTER VIITHE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
And now let us imagine that society has abolished exploitation and the competitive wage-system, and got its breath and found leisure to examine itself under the new régime. How will it find things proceeding?
One of the first objections that you will run up against, if ever you start out to agitate Socialism, is your lack of definiteness. Give us your program, people will say—we want to know what sort of a world you expect to make, and how you are going to make it. And they will grow angry when they find that you have not a cut-and-dried scheme of society in your pocket—that you have stirred them up all to no purpose. And yet that is just what you have to go on doing. There used to be Utopian Socialists—Plato was the first of them and Bellamy was the last—who knew the coming world from its presidents to its chimneysweeps; who could tell you the very colour of its postage-stamps. But nowadays all Socialists are scientific. They say that social changes are the product of the interactionof innumerable forces, and cannot be definitely foretold; they say that the new organism will be the result of the strivings of millions of men, acted upon by various motives, ideals, prejudices and fears. And so they call themselves no longer builders of systems, but preachers of righteousness; their answer to objectors is that I once heard given by Hanford, recent candidate for vice-president on the Socialist ticket, to a lawyer with whom he was debating: “Do you ask for a map of Heaven before you join the Church?”
This much we may say, however. The Industrial Republic will be an industrial government of the people, by the people, for the people. Exactly as political sovereignty is the property of the community, so will it be with industrial sovereignty—that is, capital. It will be administered by elected officials and its equal benefits will be the elemental right of every citizen. The officials may be our presidents and governors and legislatures, or they may be an entirely separate governing body, corresponding to our present directors and presidents of corporations. In countries where the revolution is one of violence they will probably be trade-union committees. The governing power may be chosen separately in each trade and industry, by those who work in it, just as the officials ofa party are now chosen by those who vote in it; or they may be appointed, as our postmasters and colonial governors are appointed, by some central authority, perhaps by the President. All of these things are for the collective wisdom of the country to decide when the time comes; meanwhile it is only safe to say that there will be as little change as possible in the business methods of the country—and so little that the man who should come back and look at it from the outside, would not even know that any change had taken place. I have heard a distinguished Republican orator, poking fun at Socialism in a public address, picture women disputing in the public warehouses as to whether each had had her fair share of shoes and fish. In the Industrial Republic the workingman will go to the factory, will work under the direction of his superior officer, and will receive his wages at the end of the week in exactly the same way as to-day. He will spend his money exactly as he spends it to-day—he will go to a store, and if he gets a pair of shoes he will pay for them. The farmer will till his land exactly as he does to-day, and when he takes his grain to market he will be paid for it in money, and will put it in the bank and will draw a check upon it to pay for the suit of clothes he has ordered by express. The only difference in allthese various operations will be that the factories will be public property, and the wages the full value of the product, with no deductions for dividends on stock; and that the street cars, the banks and the stores will be public utilities, managed exactly as our post office is managed, charging what the service costs, and making no profits. In the year 1901 the U. S. Steel Corporation paid one hundred and twenty-five million dollars and employed one hundred and twenty-five thousand men; under Socialism the wages of each employee of the U. S. Steel Corporation would therefore be increased one thousand dollars a year, which is two or three hundred per cent. In the same way, the wages of an employee of the Standard Oil Company would be increased four thousand dollars, which is from eight to ten hundred per cent. The fare upon the government-owned street railroads in the City of Berlin is two and a half cents, which would mean that our workingman’s car-fare bill would be cut by fifty per cent. The toll of the government-owned telephone of Sweden is three cents, which would mean that the workingman’s telephone bill would be cut seventy per cent. The elimination of the speculator and the higher piracy of Wall Street would raise the price of the farmer’s grain by fifty per cent.; the elimination of the millers’ trust and the railroadtrust would lower the price of bread by an equal sum. The elimination of the tariff on wool, of the sweater and the jobber, the department store and the express trust, would probably lower the price of the farmer’s suit of clothes sixty per cent; the elimination of the sweatshop and the slum might raise it to its original level, while decreasing the farmer’s doctor’s bills correspondingly. Of course I do not mean to say that the gains from the abolition of exploitation will be distributed in exactly the ratios outlined above. They will be distributed so as to equalise the rewards of labour. The point is that there will be a saving at every point—because at every point there is exploitation.
I have sketched in “The Jungle” (Chapter 36) a few of the social savings incidental to the abolition of competition. The reader who cares for a thorough and scientific study of the subject is referred to a recently published book, “The Cost of Competition,” by Sidney A. Reeve. I had never heard of Professor Reeve until his publishers sent me his book. They say that he worked on it for seven years; and when I read it I counted myself that many years to the good, for I had meant to try to do the task myself. Professor Reeve has done it in a way which leaves not a word to be said. It is a marvellous analysis of thewhole of our present productive system; and best of all, it is free from the jargon of the schools—it is the work of a man who has kept in touch with actual life, and has moral feeling as well as scientific training.
Professor Reeve analyses, not merely the “economic costs” of competition, but also the “ethical costs,” which after all are the most important. The difference to the workingman will be, not merely that his wages will be several times as great, but that he himself will no longer be a wage-slave, obliged to serve another man for his bread, to cringe and grovel for a a job, to toil all day for another man’s profit, and save up his little hoard and live in dread of the next wage reduction, the next strike, or the next closing down of the factory. He will be a free and independent member of a coöperative State. He will be delivered from the necessity of getting the better of his neighbour, because his neighbour will no longer be able to get the better of him. He will be certain of permanent employment, without possibility of loss or failure of payment—certain that so long as he works he will receive just what he produces, that in case of accident or old age he will be maintained, and that in case of death his children will be cared for and brought up to become coöperative partners in the great Industrial Republic.
From “The Cost of Competition”THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATIONThe Congressional Library
From “The Cost of Competition”THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATIONThe Congressional Library
From “The Cost of Competition”THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATIONThe Congressional Library
From “The Cost of Competition”THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
From “The Cost of Competition”THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
From “The Cost of Competition”THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
How, you ask, could Socialism guarantee every man permanent employment? Could there not be overproduction under Socialism? There could not; the surplus product being the property of the man who had produced it, and not, as now, the property of some other man, in a case of overproduction the workingman would be, not out of work, but on a vacation. As a matter of fact, only a reasonable surplus would be produced, because the workingman would stop when he had produced what he wanted—just as you stop eating when you have satisfied your hunger.
In the Industrial Republic there will be an administrative officer, a cabinet official with a bureau of clerks, whose task it will be to register the decrees of the law of supply and demand. It is found, let us assume, that the amount of coal needed by the community is represented by the labour of two million men, five days in the week, and six hours a day; the number of shoes is represented by the labour of half a million men the same time. The wages in each trade are ten dollars a day, and at this rate it is found that two million men go to the shoe factories to work and only half a million to the coal mines. The wages of coal mining are therefore made twelve dollars, and the wages of shoe-making eight dollars; if the balance still does notadjust itself, it will at the rate of thirteen to seven, or fourteen to six. Every week the government list shows the wages that can be earned in the various trades; stoking in a steamship is a painful and dangerous task—stokers in steamships are receiving twenty dollars a day, and still few takers, so that the steamships have to be fitted with stoking machinery at once. On the other hand, driving a rural-delivery mail-wagon is pleasant work, and is paying at present only five dollars a day, and with prospects of going still lower. And does all this seem fantastic to you? But it is exactly the way our employment problem is solved to-day, when it is solved at all; it is solved by means of “Help Wanted” advertisements and viva voce rumours—imperfectly, blindly and sluggishly, instead of instantly, intelligently and consciously by a universal government information bureau. Out in the country where I lived two years ago the farmers were unable to get help for love or money, while millions were out of work and starving in the cities; and that is only one of the thousands of illustrations one could give of “how much depends, when two men go out to catch a horse, upon whether they devote their time to catching him, or to preventing each other from catching him.”
TheIndependentrecently published an article entitled “Poverty: Its Cause andCure,” by Mr. James Mackaye, a Harvard graduate and technological chemist; in the course of its editorial comment the paper hailed his plan for the abolition of poverty as “nothing less than a very great invention.” “It adds something that was lacking in the older schemes of Socialism,” theIndependentcontinued, “but absolutely necessary to any Socialism that would be practically workable.” This “something” is a device to increase the salaries of managers of the various industrial departments in proportion as they reduced the “producing time” of the commodity for which they were responsible. Mr. Mackaye is another student who, like Professor Reeve and Professor Veblen, have come into Socialism by their own routes. In his elaborate book, “The Economy of Happiness,” he shows so thorough a grasp of the whole subject that I cannot suppose him to share in the ignorance of the literature of modern proletarian Socialism, which leads theIndependentto hail his plan as a “great invention.” As a matter of fact, I could name a score of Socialist books and pamphlets in which such plans are suggested and discussed. I personally have always rejected them as unsound in theory and unnecessary in practice. I have already suggested the likelihood of a continuance of present official salariesafter the revolution; but there will be a strong tendency to reduce these, and I can see no ultimate result except equality of compensation by the State. I can see no theoretical basis for the State’s paying to any employee more than it pays to another in the same industry—hand labour being equally as necessary to the production of wealth as is superintendence. To my mind, the only necessary stimulus to efficiency is the community of interest of all the workers. The incentive to the manager is emulation, and the higher range of activity which goes with a position of command; and I should be very jealous of the introduction of any pecuniary motive into the struggle for promotion—as likely to continue the old evils of graft and favouritism to which we are now subject. I do not think that, when you have so organised industry that every man is working for himself, you will find it necessary to employ any outside force to impel him to work; and in fact I should consider it a violation of the rights of the worker to attempt anything of the sort. Of course if the workers themselves chose to offer a bonus to a manager to invent new methods, that would be another matter; but that would come under the head of intellectual production, which I shall consider later on.
In discussing the question of salaries,it is to be pointed out what a vast difference will be made in the amount of money which every individual needs, by the socialisation of all the leading industries. In the Industrial Republic a thousand dollars a year will buy more comfort and happiness than ten thousand in the world as at present organised. There will come, at the very outset, the great economic savings already outlined; and then, the whole power of the coöperative mind of man being applied to the elimination of waste and the making of beauty and joy, we shall have in a very short time a world in which few men will care to cumber themselves with possessions of any sort excepting the clothes upon their backs and the few tools of their intellectual trades,—books, music, etc. The abolition of privilege and class exploitation will of course wipe out at a stroke all that competition in ostentation which Professor Veblen has entitled “conspicuous consumption of goods.” In the Industrial Republic there will be no luxury, for there will be no slavery. There will be no menial service of any sort under Socialism. I believe that this gives one a key by which he can do a great deal of predicting as to what will be found in the world when the impending revolution has taken place. In the Industrial Republic no man will work for another man—except for love—becauseno other man will be able to pay the “prevailing rate of wages.”
It is the vision of this that makes the critics of Socialism cry out that it will destroy the home. What they mean is that it will destroy that kind of a home which exists upon a basis of butlers, cooks and kitchen maids, banquets and carriages, jewellery and fine raiment, sweat shops, and slums, prostitution, child-labour, war and crime. Unless I am very much mistaken, those people who now wear diamonds, and decorate their homes with all sorts of objects of “art,” would do a great deal less of it if they had to pay for it with their own toil—if they were not able to pay for it with money extracted from the toil of others. I imagine that those who now, in our restaurants and banquet halls, gorge themselves upon the contents of earth, sea, and sky, would dine very much more simply—and very much more wholesomely—if they had to wash the dishes. For this reason, I expect that in the Industrial Republic there will be very little of that pseudo-art which ministers to vanity and sensuality. Our houses and clothing will become simpler and more dignified, and the artist will turn his thoughts to public works—he will decorate the parks and public buildings, the theatres, concert halls and libraries, the great coöperative dining halls andapartment houses. In the cities and towns of the Industrial Republic there will of course be possibilities of beauty such as we cannot even dream of at present. Now our cities grow haphazard, and are typical of all our blindness, selfishness, and misery. At every turn in them one comes upon new and more painful signs of these things—filthy and horrible slums, blatant and vulgar advertisements, insolent rich people in carriages, wan and starving children in the gutters. In the Industrial Republic a city will be one thing, and a work of art. It will not be crowded, for the combination of poverty and the railroad trust will not make spreading out impossible. Intelligent, coöperative effort having become the rule, nearly all the things that are now done privately and selfishly will be done socially. Manual work will not be a disgrace, and poverty will not keep any man ignorant, filthy and repulsive. There will be no classes and no class feeling. There will be not only public schools and academies—there will be public playgrounds for all children, and clubs and places of recreation for men and women. In the Industrial Republic you will not mind going to such places and letting your children go. You will not be afraid of disease, because there will be public hospitals for all the sick; and you will not be afraid of rowdies, becausethe rowdy is a product of the slum, and there will not be any slum.
At present, we are all engaged in a struggle to beguile as much money out of each other as we can; and the State has nothing to do save to stand by and see fair play—and commonly finds that task too much for it! As a consequence, we find ourselves confronted with an infinite variety of little petty exactions—we have to spend money every time we turn around. Very soon after the Revolution, I fancy, men will begin to realise that these little exactions are more of a nuisance than a saving. For instance, I shall be very much surprised, if, a generation from now, the use of postage-stamps is not abolished. At present, with society wasting so immense a portion of its energy in competitive advertising, every piece of matter which goes into the mail has to be made to pay its way; but once do away with competition, and the only mail is government documents and personal letters—and the time it takes to stamp and cancel them will be many times greater than the cost of carrying the additional number of letters that a free mail service would bring forth. In the same way it will be found not worth while to employ conductors and spotters, and print tickets and transfers; after that we shall ride free on our street-cars, and perhaps ultimately in our governmentrailroad trains. Similarly, all our places of recreation and of artistic expression would come to be free; and then some one would realise the waste incidental to our present system of book buying, and we should then have a universal national library, from which at frequent intervals delivery service would bring you any books then in existence. I have just witnessed in New York an exhibition of an invention which will make music as free as air. Bellamy was ridiculed for predicting “electric music” in the year 2000; and it is on sale in New York City in the year 1907. By this marvellous machine, the “telharmonium,” all previously existing musical instruments are relegated to the junk heap; and all music composed for them becomes out of date. At one leap the art of music is set free from all physical limitations, and the musician is given command of all possible tones, and may play to ten thousand audiences at once. It is worth while pointing out, that, living under the capitalist system as we are, the inventor had no recourse save to use his machine to make profits, and so the newspapers, which are also in business for profits, left it to make its own way. So it came about that the first public exhibition of an invention which means more to humanity than any discovery since the art of printing, receivedmention in only one New York paper, and that to the extent of three or four inches.
But to return to the Revolution, and the first steps which have to be taken.
There are some industries which anyone can see are all ready for public ownership; and when the people have once found out the way, they will be very impatient with all remaining forms of rent, interest, profit and dividends. Also, the exploiters will soon learn to give way. Just as soon as the proprietors of department stores find that the people seriously intend to open a public store in every city, and to sell goods at cost, they will be glad to sell out for a few cents on the dollar; just as soon as the bankers find out that there is really to be a national bank, charging no interest, and incapable of failing, they will do the same with their buildings and outfits. To quote a paragraph from “The Jungle” (page 405), “The coöperative Commonwealth is a universal automatic insurance company and savings bank for all its members. Capital being the property of all, injury to it is shared by all and made up by all. The bank is the universal government credit account, the ledger in which every individual’s earnings and spendings are balanced. There is also a universal government bulletin, in which are listed and preciselydescribed everything which the Commonwealth has for sale. As no one makes any profit by the sale, there is no longer any stimulus to extravagance, and no misrepresentation, no cheating, no adulteration or imitation, no bribery, no ‘grafting.’”
There remains only one other great problem to be mentioned—that of agriculture. I think no one will want to interfere with the farmer, any more than with the cobbler, the small storekeeper, the newsman or any other petty business. The farmer will stay on his land, and make money—and study the situation. He will find in the first place that coöperation is a success, and has come to stay. He will find that while he is working with his hands, the rest of society is working with steam and electricity, and leaving him far behind. He will find that he can no longer hire help—that his hired man is employed as a coöperative worker, and receiving several times more than the farmer himself. He will understand that to get his share of all the good things of the new civilisation, he will have to put his land into the common fund, and work for the commonwealth and not for his own wealth. In this case, of course, all the risks and losses of his trade will be shared by the whole community—the result of a bad crop in Maine being made up by a good crop in California, so that the farmer who workswill be as certain of gain and as free from care as the factory hand.
And now let us consider the effect of this new system upon certain of the leading features of our civilisation. What, for instance, will be the effect of Socialism upon crime? The man who becomes a criminal at present finds himself in a world where he is compelled to work for some other man’s profit, and to have flaunted in his face every hour the wealth which has been exacted from his toil. But now he will find himself in a world from which luxury and pauperism have been banished, and in which coöperation and mutual fellowship is the law. He will find that he gets just what he produces, and that he can produce in a day more than he can steal in a month. Don’t you think that the criminal may find these powerful motives to become a worker? He may be a degenerate, of course, in which case we shall put him in a hospital; we should do that now, if we did not feel dimly that it would be of no use, because our social system is making criminals faster than we can pen them up, and makes the life of the majority of the working-class so horrible that men have been known to steal on purpose to get into jail.
I have tried in “The Jungle” to give a picture of the process whereby the forcesof commercialism turn honest workingmen into criminals and tramps. There is also another story to which I would refer the reader who cares to have more acquaintance with such conditions—“An Eye for an Eye,” by Clarence Darrow.—And also, while we are considering this subject, let us not forget how the change would affect the criminals of the future, the wretched children of the slums and gutters, who will now be cared for by the State, and made into decent citizens in public asylums and hospitals, training schools and playgrounds.
What will be the effect of Socialism upon prostitution? Any young girl can go to the public factories or stores, to the coöperative boarding houses and hotels, the schools and nursery playgrounds, and secure employment for the asking, and support herself by a couple of hours’ work a day in decent and attractive surroundings. She will, moreover, be able to marry the man who loves her, because the problem of a living will no longer enter into the question of marriage. She will be able to restrict her family to as many as she and her husband care to support, because she will be as intelligent and sensible as the women of our present upper classes.
The question of the relationship of the system of wage-slavery to the lives of womenis too vast a one to be even outlined here; suffice it to say that the Socialist battle is the battle of woman, even more than it is the battle of the workingman. I cannot do better than to refer the reader to another book in which the whole question of the effects which age-long conditions of economic inferiority has wrought in the minds and bodies of women is discussed in scientific and yet fascinating form—Mrs. Gilman’s “Woman and Economics.”
What will be the effect of Socialism upon drunkenness? Under Socialism the workingman will have a decent home, and attractive clubs, reading rooms, and places of entertainment of all sorts, with plenty of time to frequent them. He will have steady employment, wholesome food, a pleasant place to work in, and—railroad fares being almost nothing—a trip to the country when he fancies it. His wife will not be an overworked, repulsive drudge, and his children will not be starving brats. When he wants a drink he will go to a public drinking-place and get it; what he gets will be pure, and will be sold him by a man who has no interest in getting him drunk. On the contrary, the attendant may be getting a royalty upon all nonintoxicating drinks he sells, and the drinker will quite certainly be paying a big tax upon all the intoxicating drinks he buys. Doyou not think that all this may have some effect upon the nation’s drink bill, which now is doubling itself every decade?
Recently I was invited by theChristian Heraldto contribute to a symposium upon the question of prohibition. I wrote as follows: “In my opinion the drink evil is primarily an effect, and not a cause; it is a by-product of wage-slavery. The working classes are to-day organised as the bond slaves of capital. The conditions under which they live are such as to brutalise and degrade them and drive them to drink. As I have phrased it in “The Jungle,” if a man has to live in hell, he would a great deal rather be drunk than sober. The solution of the drink evil waits upon the coming of Socialism.
“As a part of the capitalist system, you have liquor sold for profit, and the liquor interests are one of the forces which dominate the land. Therefore, you are unable to effect any legislation to correct the evil. Liquor is sold in order to make money out of the victim, therefore every inducement and temptation is laid before him. Under Socialism, the only barkeeper would be the community, and the community would have every object in limiting the traffic. The children of the masses would be taken in hand and taught the secret of right living; and when they grew up they would haveenough to eat and the means of keeping in working condition, and would know other sources of happiness than drunkenness. At present, attempts to reform the evil are attempts to sweep back the tide. Moreover, it is to be noticed that many of those who are most active in the work are themselves busily engaged in exploiting the working-class in their private business, and are therefore directly identified with the cause of the evil they are attempting to combat.”
What will be the effect of Socialism upon war? The New YorkSunrecently expressed the opinion that the end of war will come only with the Golden Age. If so, the Golden Age is within sight of all of us. Socialism will abolish war as inevitably, as naturally and serenely, as the sunrise abolishes the night. The cause of war is foreign markets; and under Socialism the markets will all be at home. Under Socialism the existence of the workers of the United States, of England, Germany, and Japan, will not be dependent upon the ability of their masters to sell their surplus products for profit to Chinamen. Under Socialism an international Congress will take in hand the backward nations, will clean out their sewers and wipe out their plagues and famines, their kings and their capitalists, their ignorance, their superstition and theirwars. It will do these things because they need to be done—it will not do them as a mere pretence to cover greed for gold mines and markets. Outside of mines and markets there is no longer any cause of war, save the old race hatreds which these have begotten; and race hatreds are not known among Socialists. In their last International Congress a Russian and a Japanese shook hands upon the platform, while their countrymen were flying at each other’s throats in Manchuria. The Socialist movement is a world movement—it has brought under its banners, working shoulder to shoulder, men and women of all religions, races and colours. With their victory, and only with their victory, will the efforts of “Peace Congresses” bear fruit.
Finally, what will be the effect of Socialism upon the “System”? It is important to distinguish between corruption as a sporadic event, an accident here and there, and corruption as a national institution. In the Industrial Republic a worker might of course bribe his foreman to let him cheat the community; but that would be every man’s loss, and there would be every inducement to find it out and make it known, and no hindrance whatever to its punishment. At present, however, we have corruption organised in town, county, city, state, and nation, with every inducement to keep ithidden, and almost no possibility of punishing it. Everybody understands that we have corporations, and that the corporations rule us; all that everybody does not yet understand is that the continuance of their rule would mean the ruin of free institutions in America, and ultimately the downfall of civilisation itself.
I have outlined the economic and political conditions which I believe will prevail in the Industrial Republic; there remains to consider what influences these will exert upon the moral and intellectual life of men.
When people criticise the Socialist programme they always think about government censors and red tape, and limitations upon free endeavour; and so they say that Socialism would lead to a reign of tameness and mediocrity. They tell us that under the new régime we should all have to wear the same kind of coat and eat the same kind of pie. They argue that if all the means of production are owned by the Government there will be no way for you to get your own kind of pie; failing to perceive that government control of the means of production no more implies government control of the product, than government control of the post office means government control of the contents of your letters. Said a good clergyman friend of mine: “What possibleplace, for instance, would there be formein your Socialist society.” And I answered, “There would be just exactly the same place for you that there is at present. How is it that you get your living and your freedom? You are maintained by an association of people who want the work you can do. Every clergyman in the country is maintained in that way—and so are thousands upon thousands of editors, authors, artists, actors—so are all our clubs, societies, restaurants, theatres and orchestras. The Government has absolutely nothing to do with them at present—and the Government need have absolutely nothing to do with them under Socialism. The people who want them subscribe and pay for them. Under our present system they pay the cost to private profit-seekers; under Socialism they would pay the State.”
In the Industrial Republic a man will be able to order anything he wishes, from a flying machine to a seven-legged spider made of diamonds; and the only question that anyone will ever dream of asking him will be: “Have you got the money to pay for it?” There remains only to add that, the system of wealth-distribution being now one of justice, that question will mean: “Have you performed for society the equivalent of the labour-time of the article you desire society to furnish you?”
Nine-tenths of the argument against Socialism dissolves into mist the moment one states that single all-important fact, that Socialism is a science ofeconomics. For instance, Mr. Bryan has recently published in theCentury Magazinean article entitled “Individualism versus Socialism;” and here is the way he contrasts the two: “The individualist believes that competition is not only a helpful but a necessary force in society, to be guarded and protected; the Socialist regards competition as a hurtful force, to be entirely exterminated.” Now there are endless varieties of competition with which Socialism could in no conceivable way interfere: the competition of love, and of friendship; the competition of political life; the competition of ideals, of music and books, of philosophy and science. It is the claim of the Socialists that by setting men free from the money-greed and the money-terror—from the need of struggling to deprive other men of the necessities of life in order to prevent them from depriving you of these necessities—the mind of the race would be set free for more vigorous competition in these other fields, and thus the development of real individuality would be for the first time made possible. This being the desire of the Socialist, it should be clear how fundamental is the misconception of Mr. Bryan, indicated by the bare titleof his article—“Individualism versus Socialism.” Socialism is not opposed to Individualism, and to set the two in opposition is like the attempt to imagine a fight between an elephant and a whale.
Socialism is a proposition for an economic re-organisation; as such, the only thing to which it can logically and intelligently be opposed is Capitalism. Mr. Bryan indicates that he discerns this, in another portion of his article. He says; “For the purpose of this discussion Individualism will be defined as the private ownership of the means of production and distribution where competition is possible, leaving to public ownership those means of production and distribution in which competition is practically impossible; and Socialism will be defined as the collective ownership, through the State, of all the means of production and distribution.” For general unfairness this statement makes me think of the story of a man who was riding through the country and stopped to admire a fine pair of turkeys, and after praising them with enthusiasm, remarked to the farmer: “I will match you for them! Heads they are mine, and tails they stay yours.” Mr. Bryan has composed a subtly worded definition of Individualism which takes all the kernels from the Socialist ear, and leaves to the Socialist only the husk. “Leavingto public ownership those means of production and distribution in which competition is practically impossible!” What a beautiful field for controversy, and what endless opportunities for compromise and concession, for advance or retreat! Ten years ago Mr. Bryan would not have appreciated the necessity of inserting this clause; industrial evolution had not proceeded quite so far, and all our radicals were bending their efforts to destroying the trusts. It was only after the last presidential election, unless I am mistaken, that Mr. Bryan definitely committed himself to the public ownership “of those means of production and distribution in which competition is practically impossible.”
If Mr. Bryan would only procure and read a really authoritative treatise upon modern scientific Socialism (say Vandervelde’s “Collectivism and Industrial Evolution”) he would understand that his programme is so close to that of the Socialists that the difference would require a microscope to discern. In fact, I imagine that the majority of modern proletarian thinkers would be willing to subscribe to the programme of “Individualism” exactly as Mr. Bryan states it: “the private ownership of the means of production and distribution where competition is possible, leaving to public ownership those means of production anddistribution in which competition is practically impossible.”
The one point to be made absolutely clear in this matter is that the Industrial Republic will be an organisation for the supplying of thematerial necessitiesof human life. With the moral and intellectual affairs of men it can have very little to do. What Socialism proposes to organise and systematise is industry, not thought. The difference between the products of industry and those of thought is a fundamental one. The former are strictly limited in quantity, and the latter are infinite. No man can have more than his fair share of the former without depriving his neighbour; but to a thought there is no such limit—a single poem or symphony may do for a million just as well as for one. With the former it is possible for one man to gain control and oppress others; but it is not possible to monopolise thought. And it is in consequence of this fact that laws and systems are necessary with the things of the body, which would be preposterous with the things of the mind. The bodily needs of men are pretty much all alike. Men need food, clothing, shelter, light, air, and heat; and they need these of pretty nearly the same quality and in pretty nearly the same quantity—so that they can be furnished methodically year in and year out,according to order. This is being done by our present industrial masters for profit; in the Industrial Republic it will be done by the State, for use.
Quite otherwise is it with things in which men are not alike—their religions and their arts and their sciences. The only conditions under which the State can with any justice or efficiency have to do with production in these fields, is after men have come to agreement—when opinion has given place to knowledge. For instance, we have, in certain fields of science, methods which we can consider as agreed upon; it would be perfectly possible for the State to endow astronomical investigators, and seekers of the North Pole, and inventors of flying machines, and pioneers in all the technical arts. In the same way we come to agree, within certain limits, what is a worth-while play or book; in so far as we agree, we can have government theatres and publishing houses, government newspapers and magazines. If ever science should discover the rationale of the phenomenon of genius, so that we could analyse and judge it with precision, we should then have the whole problem solved.
You are a writer, perhaps; and you say that you would not relish the idea of bringing your book to a government official to be judged. Ask yourself, however, if someof your prejudice may not be due to your conception of a government official as the representative of a class, and of the interests of a class. In the Industrial Republic there will be no classes, and the officers of the coöperative publishing house will have no one to serve but the people. If they are not satisfactory to the people, the people can get rid of them—something the people cannot do anywhere in the world to-day. You think, perhaps, that you choose your own governors in this country—but you do not. What you do is to go to the polls and choose between two sets of candidates, both of whom have been selected by your economic rulers as being satisfactory to them.
While I do not profess to be certain, I imagine that an author who wanted his book published by the Government would have to pay the expenses of the publication. This would not be any hardship, for wages in the Industrial Republic could not be less than ten dollars for a day of six hours’ work. With the rapid improvement in machinery and methods that would follow, they would probably soon be double that—and of course it would rest with the people who were doing the work to see that it was done in an attractive place, with plenty of fresh air and due safeguards against accidents. Under theseconditions a man of refinement could go to a factory to work for pleasure and exercise, instead of pulling at ropes in a gymnasium, as he commonly does nowadays. And when a young author had earned the cost of making his book, he would have done all that he had to do. He would not have to enter into a race in vulgar advertising with exploiting private concerns; nor would the public form its ideas of his work from criticisms in reviews which were run to secure advertisements, and which gave their space to the books that were advertised the most. Neither would his critics be employed by a class, to maintain the interests of a class, and to keep down the aspirations of some other class. Also, the book-reading public would no longer consist—as our present society so largely consists—of idle and unfeeling rich, and ignorant, debased and hunger-driven poor.
And then, as I said, there is a second method—the method of the churches and clubs. Out in Chicago there was, four years ago, a man who thought there ought to be more Socialist books published than there were. He had no money; but he drew up a programme for a coöperative publishing house, to furnish Socialist literature at cost to those who wanted it. He got some ten thousand dollars in ten-dollar shares, and since then he has been turningout half a million pieces of Socialist literature every year. That seems to me a perfect illustration of what would happen in the new society, the second way in which books would be published. Such concerns—free associations, as they are termed in the Socialist vocabulary—would spring up literally by the thousands. They would cover every field that the liberated soul of man might be interested in, they would care for every type of thinker and artist, no matter how eccentric; they would offer encouragement to every man who showed the slightest sign of power in any field. The only reason we do not have many times as many of these associations as we have now, is simply that those people who really care about the higher things of life are almost invariably poor and helpless.
One of the curious things which I have observed about those who pick flaws in the suggestions of the Socialist, is how seldom it ever occurs to them to apply their own tests to the present system of things. How is it with art and literature production now—are all the conditions quite free from objection? Is the man of genius always encouraged and protected, and set free to develop his powers?
In theNorth American Reviewa couple of years ago there appeared an article by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, in which she setforth her opinion that “American literature to-day is the most timid, the most anæmic, the most lacking in individualities, the most bourgeois, that any country has ever known.” This seemed to perplex Mrs. Atherton very much—she could not comprehend why such a very great country should have a “bourgeois” literature. I replied to her in a paper which was published inCollier’s Weekly, in which I maintained that “American literature is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known, simply because American life is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known.” I shall quote a few paragraphs from the essay, which began with an attempt to define the word “bourgeois”:
It signifies, in a sentence, that type of civilisation, of law and convention, which was made necessary by the economic struggle, and which is now maintained by the economic victors for their own comfort and the perpetuation of their power. Thebourgeoisie, or middle class, is that class which, all over the world, takes the sceptre of power as it falls from the hands of the political aristocracy; which has the skill and cunning to survive in the free-for-all combat which follows upon the political revolution. Its dominion is based upon wealth; and hence the determining characteristic of the bourgeois society is its regardfor wealth. To it, wealth is power, it is the end and goal of things. The aristocrat knew nothing of the possibility of revolution, and so he was bold and gay. The bourgeoisdoesknow about the possibility of revolution, and so it is that Mrs. Atherton finds that our literature is “timid.” She finds it “anæmic,” simply because the bourgeois ideal knows nothing of the spirit, and tolerates intellectual activity only for the ends of commerce and material welfare. She finds also that it “bows before the fetich of the body,” and she is much perplexed by the discovery. She does not seem to understand that the bourgeois represents an achievement of the body, and that all that he knows in the world is body. He is well fed himself, his wife is stout, and his children are fine and vigorous. He lives in a big house, and wears the latest thing in clothes; his civilisation furnishes these to every one—at least to every one who amounts to anything; and beyond that he understands nothing—save only the desire to be entertained. It is for entertainment that he buys books, and as entertainment that he regards them; and hence another characteristic of the bourgeois literature is its lack of seriousness. The bourgeois writer has a certain kind of seriousness, of course—the seriousness of a hungry man seeking his dinner; but the seriousness ofthe artist he does not know. He will roar you as gently as any sucking dove, he will also wring tears from your eyes or thrill you with terror, according as the fashion of the hour suggests; but he knows exactly why he does these things, and he can do them between chats at his club. If you expected him to act like his heroes, he would think that you were mad.
The basis of a bourgeois society is cash payment; it recognises only the accomplished fact. To be a Milton with a “Paradise Lost” in your pocket is to be a tramp: to be a great author in the bourgeois literary world is to have sold a hundred thousand copies, and to have sold them within memory—that is, a year or two. With the bourgeois, success is success, and there is no going behind the returns; to discriminate between different kinds of success would be to introduce new and dangerous distinctions. As Mr. John L. Sullivan once phrased it: “A big man is a big man, it don’t matter if he’s a prize-fighter or a president.” Mr. John L. Sullivan is a big man himself; so is Mr. Frank Munsey, and so was Mr. Henry Romeike, and so was Senator Hanna. So are they all, all honourable men, and when you look up in “Who’s Who,” you find that they are there.
The bourgeois ideal is a perfectly definite and concrete one: it has mostly all beenattained—there are only a few small details left to be attended to, such as the cleaning of the streets and the suppressing of the labour unions. Thus there is no call for perplexity, and no use for anything hard to understand. Originality is superfluous, and eccentricity is anathema. The world is as it always has been, and human nature will always be as it is; the thing to do is to find out what the public likes. The public likes pathos and the homely virtues; and so we give it “Eben Holden” and “David Harum.” The public likes high life, and so we give it Richard Harding Davis and Marie Corelli. The public doesnotlike passion; it likes sentiment, however—it even likes heroics, provided they are conventionalised, and so to amuse it we turn all history into a sugar-coated romance. The public’s strong point is love, and we lay much stress upon the love-element—though with limitations, needless to say. The idea of love as a serious problem among men and women is dismissed, because the social organisation enables us to satisfy our passions with the daughters of the poor. Our own daughters know nothing about passion, and we ourselves know it only as an item in our bank accounts. To the bourgeois young lady—the Gibson girl, as she is otherwise known—literary love is a sentiment, ranking with a box of bonbons,and actual love is a class marriage with an artificially restricted progeny.
These which have been described are the positive and more genial aspects of the bourgeois civilisation; the savage and terrible remain to be mentioned. For it must be understood that this civilisation of comfort and respectability furnishes its good things only to a class, and to an exceedingly small class. The majority of mankind it pens up in filthy hovels and tenements, to feed upon husks and rot in misery. This was once easy, but now it is growing harder—and thus little by little thebourgeoisieis losing its temper. Just now it is like a fat poodle by a stove—you think it is asleep and venture to touch it, when quick as a flash it has put its fangs in you to the bone.
The bourgeois civilisation is, in one word, an organised system of repression. In the physical world it has the police and the militia, the bludgeon, the bullet, and the jail; in the world of ideas it has the political platform, the school, the college, the press, the church—and literature. The bourgeois controls these things precisely as he controls the labour of society, by his control of the purse-strings. Unless proper candidates are named by political parties, there are no campaign funds; unless proper teachers and college presidents are chosen, there are no endowments. Thus it happensthat our students are taught a political economy carefully divorced, not merely from humanity, but also from science, history, and sense; any other kind of political economy the student sometimes despises—more commonly he does not even know that it exists. And it is just the same with the churches and with theology. We have at present established in this land a religion which exists in the name of the world’s greatest revolutionist, the founder of the Socialist movement; this man denounced the bourgeois and the bourgeois ideal more vehemently than ever it has since been denounced—declaring in plain words that no bourgeois could get into Heaven; and yet his church is to-day, in all its forms, and in every civilised land, the main pillar of bourgeois society!
With the press the bourgeois has a still more direct method than endowment; the press he owns. All the daily newspapers in New York, for instance, are the property of millionaires, and are run by them in their own interests, exactly the same as their stables or theircuisine. That does not mean, of course, that many of their journalistic menials are not sincere—it does not mean that the college presidents and clergymen may not be sincere. One of the quaintest things about the bourgeois editor, the bourgeois college president, thebourgeois clergyman, is the whole-souled naïveté with which he takes it for granted that just as all civilisation exists for the comfort of the bourgeois, so also all truth must necessarily be such as the bourgeois would desire it to be.
And then there is literature. The bourgeois recognises the novelist and the poet as a means of amusement somewhat above the prostitute, and about on a level with the music-hall artist; he recognises the essayist, the historian, and the publicist as agents of bourgeois repression equally as necessary as the clergyman and the editor. To all of them he grants the good things of the bourgeois life, a bourgeois home with servants who know their places, and a bourgeois club with smiling and obsequious waiters. They may even, on state occasions, become acquainted with the bourgeois magnates, and touch the gracious fingers of the magnates’ pudgy wives. There is only one condition, so obvious that it hardly needs to be mentioned—they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view. Beyond that there is not the least restriction; the novelist, for instance, may roam the whole of space and time—there is nothing in life that he may not treat, provided only that he be bourgeois in his treatment. He may show us the olden time, with noble dames andgallant gentlemen dallying with graceful sentiment. He may entertain us with pictures of the modern world, may dazzle us with visions of high society in all its splendours, may awe us with the wonders of modern civilisation, of steam and electricity, the flying machine and the automobile. He may thrill us with battle, murder, and Sherlock Holmes. He may bring tears to our eyes at the thought of the old folks at home, or at his pictures of the honesty, humility, and sobriety of the common man; he may even go to the slums and show us the ways of Mrs. Wiggs, her patient frugality and beautiful contentment in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call her. In any of these fields the author, if he is worth his salt, may be “entertaining”—and so the royalties will come in. If there is any one whom this does not suit—who is so perverse that the bourgeois do not please him, or so obstinate that he will not learn to please the bourgeois—we send after him our literary policeman, the bourgeois reviewer, and bludgeon him into silence; or better yet, we simply leave him alone, and he moves into a garret. The bourgeois garrets resemble the bourgeois excursion steamers. They are never so crowded that there is not room for as many more as want to come on board; and any young author who imagines that he canbear to starve longer than the world can bear to let him starve, is welcome to try it. Letting things starve is the specialty of the bourgeois society—the vast majority of the creatures in it are starving all the time.
So much for things as they are. The Revolution will, of course, not change our present bourgeois people—except that it will scare them thoroughly, and make them teachable. But it will bring to the front an enormous class of people to whom life is a new and wondrous thing; and their children also will grow up in a different world, and with a different ideal; and so a generation from now there will be a new art public. The people who compose it will not have been forced to consider money the only thing in life, the sole test of excellence and power; they will not have been brought up on the motto, “Do others or they will do you.” They will have been brought up in a world in which no man is able to “do” another man, and in which all men stand as equals as regards money. They will have been brought up in a world in which work and a decent life are the right and duty of every man, and are taken for granted with every man; in which influence, reputation, and command are given for other things than money. If it be true that faith, hope, and charity are greater things than wealth, it is perhaps not altogetherUtopian to suppose that these will be the things that the new public will honour and will contrive to promote. The best way in which one can be sure about this is to study the writers who are shaping the ideals of Socialism—such men as Whitman and Thoreau, Ruskin and William Morris, Kropotkin and Carpenter and Gorky. Above all I wish that I could be the cause of the reader’s looking into one book, in which one of the master-spirits of our time has made an attempt to picture this beautiful world that is to be. When I met Mr. H. G. Wells last year, I had not read any of his books; so he sent me a copy of his “Modern Utopia,” graciously inscribing it: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most hopeful!” Afterward, I was asked byLifeto name the book which had given me the most pleasure during the last year, and I named this one. It is, in my opinion, one of the great works of our literature; it is worthy to be placed with the visions of Plato and Sir Thomas More. It has three great virtues which are rarely, if ever, found in combination. In the first place, it is characterised by a nobility and loftiness of spirit which makes its reading a religious exercise. In the second place, it is the work of an engineer, a man with the modern sense of reality and acquainted with the whole fieldof scientific achievement. In the third place, it is written in a a literary style which makes the reading of each paragraph a delight in itself. It is a book to love and to cherish; one leaves it, refreshed and strengthened, to wait with patience and cheerfulness the hour of the Great Change.