CHAPTER VITHE REVOLUTION

One is at a great disadvantage just at present in picturing an industrial crisis. We are at the very flood-tide of prosperity; the railroads are paralysed by the volume of the country’s business; the coal mines cannot furnish the coal, and the farmers are burning their grain because they cannot get it to market; the steel trust has orders for two years ahead—and so on without limit. I have to ask the reader to picture interest rates going down to zero, at a time when they are higher than they have been in a decade; I have to ask him to picture too much of everything in the country, at a time when there is not enough of anything. And yet all this excess of “prosperity” is an integral part of the phenomenon we are studying.

If the process of wealth-concentration and overproduction of capital went on unmodified by any other factor, we should witness a gradual rise in the price of commodities, a gradual increase in the number of unemployed, and a gradual fall in the rates of interest. As it happens, however,the movement proceeds in rhythmic pulses, like the swinging of a pendulum, or the ebbing and flowing of the tide. This is owing to the factor of credit-expansion, which we have still to interpret.

We have pictured Capital, ubiquitous, endlessly resourceful, incessantly alert—“clamouring for dividends.” Competition is a forcing-process by which every device that will increase profits is driven into general use, and subjected to its maximum strain. The most obvious of these devices is that of credit.

A business man has a certain amount of capital. If he makes his “turn over” once a year, he gains, say, ten per cent. profit; if he can make the “turn over” twice a year, he gains twenty per cent. He sees the business ahead, and so he goes into debt. And of course this step gives an impulse to the business of the man who manufactures his machinery, and to the man who raises his raw material, and to the railroads which handle both. The effect of that condition, prevailing throughout a whole community, is to accelerate enormously the industrial process; under it the capital of the community becomes, exactly as in the case of the railroads, not the actual definite cost of the instruments of production existing, but an altogether hypothetical thing, a function of anticipated earnings.

So it is that you have a “boom”—a period of furious and fevered activity, in which everyone sees fortunes springing up about him; and then comes some disturbing factor, which suggests to a number of men the advisability of realising on their expectations; and a chill settles upon the community, and there is a wild rush to collect, and the discovery is made that most of the anticipated profits are not in existence.

There is one more consideration which has to be touched upon before we are prepared to consider the concrete problem in America. The process which has been outlined is an industrial one; events have been pictured here as they would take place in a community given altogether to manufacturing, mining, and transportation. But as a matter of fact we have not only to reckon with thirteen billions a year of manufactured products, but also with four billions a year of farm products. The importance of this new element lies in the fact that the ownership of the farms is still largely in the hands of the masses; which means that once every year the process we have been picturing is stayed while the American people get rid of four billion dollars of spending money, which comes to them outside of and independent of the wage-fund. Thus, strange as it may seem,abundant crops tend to mitigate an “overproduction” crisis, while a failure of crops would do more than anything else in the world to precipitate one.

With these facts in mind we are now in position to interpret our recent industrial history. We have generally had our hard times in America at ten year intervals, with especially severe crises at twenty year intervals. We had our last severe attack in 1893, and we were due to have one of the lesser sort in 1903. What happened then was very interesting to watch, in the light of the views just explained. In the early winter and spring of 1904, the avalanche was well under way. Here, for instance, is an item clipped from the ChicagoTribunein April of that year:

“Organised labour is facing the greatest wage crisis since the panic of 1893, if the forecast of its leaders is correct. It is estimated that before the close of the year the greatest employing concerns of the country will have dismissed nearly one million men, most of them labourers and general-utility workers. Of this number the railroads are expected to discharge two hundred thousand employees; the mine operators, fifty thousand; the machine shops, iron, steel, and tin plate plants, two hundred and fifty thousand; and the building trades, forty thousand. The railroads and thesteel mills have already begun the work of reducing their forces, and the wage liquidation threatens to become as sensational as was the recent liquidation in stocks.”

And then on May 25th following, the New YorkHeraldreported that the railroads of the country had laid off seventy-five thousand men; and quoted the following in an interview with James J. Hill:

“The whole question falls back primarily upon decreasing business and the reason for it. Why are the railroads carrying less freight than they were a year or two years ago? Because the demand for the products of the United States is not commensurate with the supply. We manufacture and we grow and we mine more than we can consume in the United States. Hence we are dependent upon foreign markets in order to sell the surplus.”

The reasons why we got over this period of liquidation with only a severe scare are two: First, because there came in the fall a “bumper” crop of unprecedented proportions, which gave the railroads a new start; and second, and most important, because it happened that at the precise hour of our stress, there broke out one of the greatest military struggles of all history.

The war, you understand, was a new world-market. All at once a million or two of men were set to work at destroyingmanufactured articles; and at the same time several millions more were taken from their regular tasks to provide and maintain them while they did it; and the greater part of the surplus capital of civilisation was drawn off to pay the bills. It was not merely that during the first four months of the conflict Japan and Russia bought fifty million dollars’ worth of our spare products, or that they took hundreds of millions of our spare cash. It made no real difference where the money was raised, or where it was spent; the man who got it spent it again, and sooner or later the bulk of it came to us, because we had the things to sell. Under the conditions of modern Capitalism, all the world is one; and when a nation goes to war, whoever has a spare dollar lends it to pay the bills, and wherever in the world there is an idle labourer, he is put to work to help support the fighters of both nations. In return, the world gets from the warring governments a paper promise to wring an equivalent amount of service out of their people at some future date.

Before going on I ought to mention that there is another view of the events of 1904. I have heard Mr. Arthur Brisbane maintain that we are to have no more overproduction crises, for the reason that, competition having been abolished in all our principal industries, our trust magnates can so adjust supply to demand as to mitigate the stress, and give instead periods of partial idleness in widely scattered industries.

Diagram prepared by Wilshire’s MagazineDIAGRAM SHOWS HOW HIGH PRICES FOLLOW WARSRange of average prices of 25 leading Railway Stocks for the past 22 years

If this is true, it is very important, for it means a long continuance of Trust government; but I do not believe that it is true. The trusts have, of course, put an end to blind production without any assurance of a market; but even assuming that our industry were so far systematised and our management so conservative that we never manufactured goods except upon a definite order—how would that be able to hold in check a community gone mad with prosperity-drunkenness? For instance, the steel trust now has orders enough ahead for two years; and upon the basis of these orders, its administrators are going ahead building a new “steel city.” Yet does the steel trust know what proportion of its orders for steel rails are intended for the transportation of purely speculative freight? Does it know what proportion of its orders for structural steel is intended for buildings for imaginary tenants? Does it concern itself with the problem whether its customers are going to be able to find any use for the materials which they have bought?

There might be more plausibility in the argument, if our trust magnates were men of conscience and a keen sense of responsibility;but as a matter of fact their attitude toward their work is purely predatory. They are not administrators of production at all, but parasites upon production, exploiters and wreckers. Far from striving to regulate the madness of the public, they are competing among themselves to fan it to a flame, so that they may capitalise the expectations of their own properties.[5]

5. Anyone who wishes to make a scientific study of the true functions of modern finance is advised to read Professor Veblen’s last book, “The Theory of Business Enterprise,” a most extraordinary study of the whole field of present-day economics. In my opinion this book, together with its author’s other masterpiece, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” constitutes the greatest contribution to social science ever made in America, and perhaps the greatest in the world since Carl Marx. It might be worth while to add in passing that Professor Veblen was turned out of Mr. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago for writing it.

The ebb of the tide is coming; the only question is, when? According to precedent, it should come in 1913; but I expect it much sooner, partly because I do not believe that we had anything like a thorough liquidation in 1904, and partly because of the extreme violence of the present activity. During the last year the “boom” has reached real estate, and that always means that other avenues of investment are clogged.

I anticipate the storm in 1908 or 1909; but I do not predict it, because it depends upon uncertain factors. Another great war might put it off ten years; and on the other hand, crop failures might precipitate it this summer. What I do believe that I can predict—for reasons which I stated in the introduction to this argument—is thecourse which political events in this country will take from the hour when the “hard times” arrive.

As we saw from the ChicagoTribuneitem, the first sign of trouble is the turning out of work of a million workingmen; and what are the consequences—the economic consequences—of the turning out of work of a million men? According to the census the average yearly wage of the factory employee is four hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Dr. Peter Roberts says that the average wage in the anthracite coal district is less than five hundred dollars. In the Middle States a third of all the workers get less than three hundred a year, and in the South nearly sixty per cent. get less. It was proven before the Industrial Commission that the maximum wage of the hundred and fifty thousand railroad and track hands and the two hundred thousand carmen and shopmen, was a hundred and fifty dollars in the South, and less than three hundred and seventy-five in the North. And this to feed and clothe a family, and provide against sickness, accident, and old age! The meaning of it is simply that when a million men are laid off, in a month or two they and their families are starving.

And that, you understand, means a loss of amarket—of a market of five millionpeople—a population equal to that of the Dominion of Canada. And of course, therefore, those whose work it has been to supply these people, will be out of work, and likewise those who supply the suppliers. And even this is by far the least of the consequences; for another part of our domestic market depends upon the fact that our workingmen too have been able to form trusts. And when this period of depression comes, their trusts will fall to pieces, and competition will begin again—a process which they will find all the brickbats and dynamite in the country cannot check. The employers will, of course, be straining every nerve to make ends meet; and so wages will go down, and when strikes are declared, the starving workingman will “scab” and the strikes will fail. We shall have riots, and perhaps gatling guns in our streets, but the wages will go down; and step by step as the wages go down, consumption goes down, with the loss of another Dominion of Canada. When the thing is once started, it will be an avalanche that no power upon earth can stop; and it will be the beginning of the Revolution.

The word has an ominous sound. The reader thinks of street battles and barricades. By a Revolution I mean the complete transfer of the economic and political power of the country from the hands of thepresent exploiting class to the hands of the whole people; and in the accomplishment of this purpose the people will proceed, as in everything else they do, along the line of least resistance. It is very much less trouble to cast a ballot than it is to go out in the streets and shoot: and our people are used to the ballot method. However, the staid and respectableHarper’s Weekly, which calls itself a “Journal of Civilisation,” suggested in 1896 that if Mr. Bryan were elected, it might be necessary for the propertied classes to keep him out of office. If anything of that sort is attempted in this coming crisis, why then there will be violence—just as there will be in such countries as Germany and Russia, which have yet to learn to let the people have their own way. The worst feature of the situation with us is that we have gotten into the habit of letting our elections be carried by bribery; and that is likely to play us some ugly tricks in this new emergency.

The reader perhaps objects to my theory that this change must come with suddenness. It is such a tremendous change—and would it not be better if it were brought about little by little? Undoubtedly it would have been a great deal better; but the time to begin was ten or twenty years ago. Now the horse is stolen, and we are venting allour energies, and cannot even succeed in getting the stable-door locked afterward.

They are bringing it about gradually in Australia and New Zealand—the only countries in the world in which the people are effectually regulating the progress of the Juggernaut of Capitalism. That is because these countries are very young, with comparatively little capital, no slums, and an intelligent working-class. I have an idea—I do not know whether there is anything in it—that the extraordinary success of New Zealand may in part be due to the fact that it was a convict-settlement; the men whom capitalism makes into criminals being for the most part a very superior class of people, active, independent, and impatient of injustice. Transported to a new land, and given a fair chance, I should think that a burglar or a highwayman ought to make a very excellent Socialist.

You ask, perhaps, if the thing is not also being accomplished gradually in England and on the Continent; you point to “Municipal trading,” to the London County Council, to the state-owned railroads and telephones of Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. You have been accustomed to hear these things referred to as State Socialism, and you have accepted the statement—not understanding that the essence of Socialism is democracy, and that it isfundamentally opposed to paternalism in every conceivable form. Municipal and State ownership is not State Socialism at all, but State Capitalism. Under it, the government buys certain franchises, pays for them with bonds, and then runs the roads to pay the bondholders. Undoubtedly it is a better system for the people than private Capitalism, for the reason that it fixes the exploiters’ tax, instead of letting stock-watering go on indefinitely. But, unfortunately, economical administration by the State is possible at present only in such countries as have an aristocratic governing-class, jealous of the power of the capitalist. In this country the holders of the municipal bonds, who also own the street-car factories and the steel mills and the coal mines, would use the interest they got from the city to bribe the city’s servants to pay exorbitant prices for all the street-cars and steel rails and coal and other supplies which the city would have to have in order to operate the roads. You have seen that perfectly illustrated in the case of our Post Office. For example, we pay the railroads in rent for our mail-cars twice as much per year as it costs to build the cars; and the cars are so flimsy that the insurance companies, which own a large share of the railroads and the cars, refuse to insure the lives of the mail-clerks who work in them!

However, the advisability of Municipal Ownership under present conditions is a purely academic question, for the reason that the capitalist will never give us a chance to try it. The capitalist is in possession, and he “stands pat.” When you talk about “reform,” he will make you as many fine speeches and deliver you as many moral discourses as you wish; but when it comes to giving up any dollars—he has spent all his lifetime learning to hold on to his dollars.

You are thinking, perhaps, of President Roosevelt, who is hailed as a successful reformer. In the first place, it is of importance to point out that President Roosevelt is a complete anomaly in our political life; he was probably the last Republican in the country who would have been selected to rule us. He made himself governor by a shrewd device called “the Rough Riders;” he was made President for the first time by the bullet of an assassin, and the second time by the death of Mark Hanna. By a series of such blind chances as these the people have been given a chance to vote for what they want, and they of course have seized the chance. But assuredly it was no part of the “System’s” plan to ask them what they wanted, nor even to let them find out what they wanted themselves.

Under the peculiar circumstances, therehas been nothing for the “System” to do but make sure that the President accomplishes nothing; and that it has done as a matter of course. In saying this, let me remind the reader once more of my distinction between moral revolt and economic remedy. I have no wish to under-estimate the tremendous importance of President Roosevelt’s services in awakening the people; but I say that so far as actual concrete accomplishment is concerned, he might just as well never have lifted a finger. In one case, that of the suit against the Paper Trust, he did effect a lowering of prices; but in that case he was simply a pawn in the struggle between two trusts—of which the Newspaper Trust proved to be the stronger. In no case where the people alone were concerned has he effected any economic change whatever. The Northern Securities decision was evaded by another device; the Beef Trust and the Standard Oil suits ended with nominal fines. Over the rate regulation question we had two years’ agitation—and not one single rate has been lowered. In the struggle for life-insurance reform, to which the President gave all his moral support, a few grafting officials were hounded to death; but the real and vital evil, the exploitation of the surplus for purposes of stock-manipulation, was scarcely even touched upon. Andthen came the Chicago packing-house scandals—and I can speak with some knowledge of them. Sometimes, when I look back upon them, it seems like a dream—I can hardly believe that I ever played my part in that cosmic farce. Only think of it—we had the President and Congress and all the newspapers of the country discussing it—we had this entire nation of eighty million people literally thinking about nothing else for months—nay, more, we had the attention of the whole civilised world riveted upon those filthy meat-factories. We uncovered crimes for which the condemnation of every dollar’s worth of property in Packingtown would have been a nominal punishment; and then we settled back with a sigh of contentment, because we had put a few more inspectors at work and forced the whitewashing of some slaughter-house walls. And we left the monster upas-tree of commercialism to flourish untouched—to go on year after year bearing its fruit of corruption and death!

There is nothing whatever to be got from the capitalist. I used to think that the same thing was true of the politician. In common with most Socialists, I thought that the Revolution would have to wait until the people had come to full consciousness of their purpose, and had elected a Socialistpresident and a Socialist congress. But at the time of the coal-strike, when Dave Hill came out for government ownership of the coal mines, I realised that the politician is the jackal and not the lion. Of course we have amateur politicians—capitalists who play at the game—and they will not give way; but the professional politician is not a rich man—the competition has been too keen. He has served the capitalist because it paid; and when the people get ready to have their way, it will pay to serve the people. This is really a very important matter, for our political machinery is complicated, and the people have got used to it. It would be a frightful waste of energy to create new machinery—in fact, I do not think that our Constitution could stand the strain.

We will now assume that the industrial crisis has come. What will be the political consequences? It takes two or three years for industrial conditions to get themselves translated into political acts in this country; it means an immense amount of agitating—tens of thousands of meetings have to be held and hundreds of thousands of speeches made; and then there is all the machinery of conventions and elections. The panic of 1893, for instance, resulted in the Bryan movement of 1896. That movement was a revolt of the debtor class; if it hadsucceeded it would have precipitated a panic, and that would have been a misfortune, for the reason that both the people and their leaders were ignorant, and instead of the Industrial Republic, we should have had a severe reaction. Mark Hanna was a cunning man; but if he had been still more cunning, he would never have raised six million dollars to buy the presidency for William McKinley—he would have let the people have free silver, and then he would have had the people.

We came to the election of 1900 on the crest of a prosperity wave; but prosperity too takes its time to be realised, and so Hanna took the precaution to raise four million dollars and buy the election again.[6]And then came 1904, which, I think, was the most interesting election of them all. With the politicians the prosperity boom still held sway. Mark Hanna had Roosevelt all ready for the shelf; and the old-time “state-rights” Democrats arose and buried Mr. Bryan in the deepest vault of their party catacombs. But then came the people—with the country trembling on the verge of another “hard times.” They gave President Roosevelt the most tremendous majority ever recorded in America; and incidentally, as if this were not enough to show how they felt, they gavenearly half a million votes to Eugene V. Debs!

6. Figures quoted, evidently upon inside information, by the WashingtonPost, in 1906.

This election, according to my schedule, corresponds with the election of 1852 in the Civil War crisis. The “safe and sane” Democracy, which received its death-blow in 1904, corresponds with the old Whig party. It will probably make independent nominations in 1908 and 1912, exactly as did the Whigs, and will receive the votes of all those who believe in dealing with new conditions according to old formulas.

In the meantime, the real contestants of the coming crisis are forming their lines. Under ordinary circumstances the Republican party would have been the party of disguised but unrelenting conservatism; and our Presidents in 1904 and 1908 would have been either figureheads like Fairbanks and Shaw, or shrewd beguilers of the people like Cannon and Root. As it is, it looks now if President Roosevelt were to remain the master of his party, in which case we shall have in 1908 a mild reformer like Taft, or possibly even Governor Hughes. The one thing certain is that whoever receives the Republican nomination will be the next President. If it is a Roosevelt man, the President’s prestige will elect him; or if the “System” concludes to have its own way, he will be put in by bribery. In any case, he will go in, and it is best that heshould go in. So long as we are to have Capitalism, it is proper that the capitalist should have a free hand. Personally I should consider the election of a radical in 1908 a calamity; for “hard times” will be just about to break, and I greatly desire to see Cannon and Aldrich and the rest of them “caught with the goods on.”

Who will be the Democratic candidate? Will it be the champion of the Western farmers, or of the proletariat of our Eastern cities? I do not know, but I am inclined to think that it will be Mr. Bryan; and I am sorry, in a way, because that will put him out of the race in 1912. I conceived an intense admiration for Mr. Bryan after his last speech in New York City.

Never in our history did a public man face a greater temptation than he did after his two years of travel; everything in the country seemed to have turned conservative, and the money-power, frightened by Roosevelt, was ready to throw itself into his arms. What he did was to take his stand upon the great issue over which the battle of the next six years will be fought out—the nationalisation of the railroads; and in doing it he placed his name upon the roll of our statesmen.

A couple of years ago I was sketching out my comparison of the Civil War crisis and our own, in conversation with an English gentleman, who asked me to make him a table showing the parallel between the men of the two periods. This table was afterwards published in theIndependent, with an explanatory letter, (in the course of which I pointed out that one must not take it too literally, or look for a resemblance in external details).[7]

7. See table on page199.

In the course of its editorial comment, theIndependentsuggested another parallel, that between “The Jungle” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; and then it went on to express its perplexity at my venturing to compare Hearst with Lincoln.

There is no man in our public life to-day who interests me so much as William Randolph Hearst. I have been watching him for ten years, during the last half-dozen of them weighing and testing him as the man of the coming hour. I do not say that he will be the man; all that I can say is that he stands the best chance of being the candidate of the Democratic party in 1912; and that the man who secures that nomination will, if he does his work (and for him to fail to do it is almost inconceivable) write his name in our history beside the names of Washington and Lincoln.

Mr. Hearst is one of the by-products of the industrial process—a member of the “second generation.” You are to picturemany thousands of young men, heirs of the enormous fortunes of our captains of industry; they are brought up in luxury, and in complete idleness—the world gives themcarte blanche, with the result that at an early age they are sated with all the ordinary pleasures of human beings. And at the same time they have big, healthy bodies, and they crave excitement.

It would be interesting to compile a list of some of the things they have done. Of course, a great many simply follow in the footsteps of their fathers, and become commercial buccaneers; some devote themselves to automobiles and race-horses, some to society and gossip, some to mere brutal dissipation—such as the scions of the now extinct line of Pullman, who used to smash up the saloons of Chicago, and now and then amuse themselves by hurling brickbats through the windows of their father’s home. Now and then there is one who goes in for big game, or for monkey-dinners, or for Sunday-schools, or for Socialism, or for flying-machines; and there was one who went in for newspapers!

His father was reluctant to humour the whim—he thought that a million dollar racing-stable would cost less in the end than a forty thousand dollar newspaper: which of course put the young man upon his mettle—made him set out to make thepaper pay, and “show the old man.” To make it pay he had to get circulation; and to get circulation he had to get something new—there was no use doing things like the old newspapers, which were not paying, but had to be funded by the political powers which used them. So once more you see capital, as I have pictured it—“like a wild beast in a cage, pacing about, watching for an opening here and there.”

And where is the opening? Why, the people! The people, whom the merciless machinery of exploitation beats down and tramples upon, and pushes out of the way and forgets. They are brutalised and ignorant, they are stupid with toil—but yet they are human beings, they crave life. They never read newspapers—but give them what they want, and they will learn to read. Give them big head-lines, and a shock on every page; give them royalty and “high life,” scandal and spice, battle, murder and sudden death—and then they will buy your paper.

It was good fun for Mr. Hearst to do this. Watching his newspapers, what has struck me most is the sheer audacity of them. Audacity is his characteristic quality, and it is a characteristic American quality—it places him among our national treasures, along with Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum, and Buffalo Bill, and the Mississippi steamboats with the “nigger on the safety-valve.”

I am told by friends of Mr. Hearst that his instinct from the start was for democracy. If so, so much the better; but it is not necessary to my hypothesis. A newspaper has to have editorial opinions; and they had best be opinions that please its readers. If we are to publish a paper for the masses to read, we must also voice the hopes and the longings of the masses.

So Mr. Hearst turned traitor to his class. He seems to have done this instinctively, and without pangs. I find, what is very singular and striking, that the members of his own class hate him, not only publicly, but personally. It seems to have pleased him to defyalltheir conventions. I was told, for example, that when he first came to New York, he made himself a scandal in the “Tenderloin.” I was perplexed about that, for the members of our “second generation” are generally well known in the Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. But one young society man who had known Hearst well gave me the reason—and he spoke with real gravity: “It wasn’t what he did—we all do it: but it was the way he did. He didn’t take the trouble to hide what he did.”

I have made clear in this book my belief that the masses are driven to revolt by the pressure of stern and ruthless economic force. They were ignorant and helpless,and among our men of wealth and power there was no one to help them—there was no one among all our intellectual leaders to voice their wrongs. They were left to help themselves—so what more natural than that it should occur to some enterprising young millionaire to leap into the breach? There was endless excitement and notoriety to be won—and at the end, perhaps, power of a new and quite incredible sort.

You will observe that I am taking, deliberately, the lowest possible view. I am dealing with material conditions and picturing a material remedy for them. My point is, that whatever he may be personally, Mr. Hearst is mortgaged, body and soul, to the course to which he has given himself; not only his public reputation, but his entire fortune, is in his newspapers, and the public is the master of his newspapers. He has conjured a storm which he cannot possibly control—he must play out to the end the part he has chosen.

It is very curious to observe how his rôle has taken hold of him and changed him. I am told that when he first came to New York he wore checked trousers and fancy ties; and now he wears the traditional soft hat and frock coat of our statesmen. And also, I think, the rôle has changed his character. For this struggle is a real one, it isa struggle of the people for life; the cause is a cause of truth and justice, and the man does not live who can do battle for it as Mr. Hearst has done, and not come to take fire with the passion of it. The man does not live who can make the enemies Mr. Hearst has made, and not take a real and vital interest in the task of bringing them to their knees. I believe that Mr. Hearst is to-day as sincere a man as we have in political life.

It may be, of course, that some one else will get the Democratic nomination in 1912; that matters not at all in my thesis—the one thing certain is that it will be some man who stands pledged to put an end to class-government. Following it there will be a campaign of an intensity of fury such as this country has never before witnessed in its history.

Let us outline in a few words the situation as it will then exist.

In the first place there will be two or three million—perhaps five or ten million—men out of work. They will have been out for a year or two, and have had plenty of time to work up excitement. They may have forced Congress to provide them some temporary employment—which will, of course, be the first taste of blood to the tiger. They will certainly have been waging strikes of a violence never before known—theywill have been shot down in great numbers, and they may have done a great deal of burning and dynamiting. That some particularly conspicuous individual like Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Baer may have been assassinated, seems more than likely; that a “Coxey’s Army” of much larger size will have marched on Washington, seems quite certain.

When I was in Chicago, just after the last “Beef Strike,” I met half a dozen labour leaders who told me an interesting story. Chicago has the most thoroughly revolutionary working-class of any city in the country, and towards the end of this strike they were deeply stirred, and there had been several conferences in which a complete program had been laid out for an “anti-rent strike.” On a certain day, all the working people of Chicago were to refuse to pay rent until the meat-packers gave in. The project was nipped by the settlement of the strike, but it only waits a new occasion to be put into effect. By the time which we are picturing here, it will quite certainly have spread east and west to the two oceans, so that not half our city population will be paying any rent for their homes at this time.

And also, of course, there will have been processions in the streets, and unemployed demonstrations every day. There will be a Socialist meeting round every corner—all through this period of stress, you are to picture the Socialists working like bees at swarming time. That is the function of the Socialist party all through this crisis, to stir up and organise the proletariat, to make certain that in the crisis the people are not ignorant of the way. They will be heading the hunger-parades, carrying the banners and making the speeches, circulating tracts and five-million-copy editions of the “Appeal to Reason.” They will be polling unheard of votes—in one or two cities they will be carrying the elections, and Socialist mayors will be confiscating street-railroads, and clapping obstructive judges into jail. The Socialist party is a party of agitation rather than administration; but it is of vital importance that it should everywhere exist, as a party of the last resort, a club held over Society. Everywhere the cry will be: Do this, and do that, or the Socialists will carry the country.

So will be ushered in the election campaign and the death-grapple. You will try to beat the people back, as you have done before—but you will not succeed this time. Before this, the people were ignorant—but now they will know. They will have had the whole of the festering ulcer of commercialism laid open before their eyes. You will not be able to blameit on the labour unions, nor on the Rate Bill, nor on Roosevelt, nor on the Negro, nor on the Esquimau. You will not be able to awe the people with any great names, nor to fool them with respectability. They will have been taught to regard the leaders of our business affairs as convicted and unpunished criminals; and if you were to propose such a thing as a “business man’s parade,” you would be greeted with a scream of fury.

You will be utterly terrified at the state of affairs. Credit will be failing, and the business of the country will be holding its breath. You will subscribe a campaign fund of ten—fifteen—twenty millions of dollars—but there will be Mr. Hearst with his extras in a dozen cities, and his twenty million free copies a day, and he will tell how much you are raising and a whole lot more. So there will be committees of safety to guard the ballot—and a few more good campaign cries. There will be frenzied conferences among our political millionaires, and a week or two before election day Mr. Hearst’s opponent—quite probably ex-President Roosevelt—will come out favouring nearly all of his radical proposals, but declaring that they ought not to be carried into effect by a Socialist like Mr. Hearst. Mr. Hearst will reply with his ten thousand and tenth declaration that he isnot a Socialist, and has no sympathy with Socialism—a statement which the Socialists, who will not understand in the least the meaning of events, will cordially substantiate. Mr. Hearst will declare that he stands upon a platform of Americanism, and that he seeks only equal rights for all—and therefore Federal ownership of all criminal monopolies.

So election day will come, and Mr. Hearst will be elected; and within the next week the business of the country will have fallen into heaps. Banks will have closed, mills will be idle—there will be no freight, and railroads will be failing. The people of New York will be reminded that if the railroads stop the city will starve to death in a couple of weeks; and so, perhaps even before Mr. Hearst takes office, government ownership of the railroads will be realised.

How will it be accomplished? It is a charmingly simple process—I could do it all myself. Have you ever heard the inside story of how the last coal strike was settled? The operators were standing upon their rights as the persons to whom God in His infinite wisdom had entrusted the care of the property interests of the country; and all winter long the people had been lacking coal. Then suddenly President Roosevelt, who is a master of the art of feeling the public pulse, made the discoverythat government ownership of coal mines was about to crystallise into an issue of practical politics. So he sent Secretary Root to see Morgan, and tell him that the coal operators must give in. Morgan saw the operators, and they insisted upon their rights, and so Root went back to Washington, and came again to say that, as Mr. Morgan well knew, the coal roads were doing business in flat violation of the law; and that unless within twenty-four hours they gave their consent to the appointment by the President of a board of arbitration, the whole power of the United States Attorney General’s office would be turned upon an investigation of their business methods. And so the strike was settled in a day.

And in very similar ways will the future problems be settled. There will be similar conferences; and then some fine day a duly-accredited commissioner from the President will travel, say to Philadelphia, and enter the offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad, arch-corrupter of the great Keystone state. The directors of the company will receive him with bows and smiles, and will spread their books before him and his staff, and place themselves and their office at his disposal. He will hear a brief account of the situation, and will then give his orders to the president and other officials of theroad: to the effect that schedules are to be continued as previously; that all salaries will remain unaltered until further notice; and that passenger and freight rates are to be dropped to a point where net profits will be wiped out. Then he will shake hands with the directors and thank them for their services in building up the road, adding that their services are now at an end. And that, for all practical purposes, will be the application of Socialism to the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But, you say, by my hypothesis the road could not run; how will it be able to run now? The reason it couldn’t run before was that there were no profits; but now it will not be run for profits, but for service, like the Post Office. To help it over its momentary embarrassment, of course, the credit of the government may be needed: but even that is not likely. For exactly the same thing which happens to the Pennsylvania Railroad will be happening to the Steel Trust and the Oil Trust and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust; and all these industries will be starting into activity, and so there will be plenty of freight. With the captains of each of these trusts there will have been secret Presidential conferences, at which these gentlemen will have been told that since they can no longer run their business, they must allow theGovernment to take possession and run it—the price to be paid for their stock being a matter for future negotiation, and a matter of no great importance to them in any case, because of the income and inheritance tax laws just then being rushed through Congress.

Such will be the Revolution—and the gateway into the Industrial Republic. Precisely as in France we saw that the peasant who was starving because he could not pay his taxes, began to till the land and grow rich without any taxes, so in the midst of universal destitution, it will suddenly be discovered that the farmer who could not sell his grain, and therefore had no hat to wear, may now exchange his grain with the operative in the hat factory who had produced so many hats for his master that he was himself out of a job, and could not get any bread. And all the cotton mills which were shut because we could no longer sell shirts to the Chinamen, will now start merrily to work making shirts for all the shirtless wretches the length and breadth of America. And the shoe operatives of Massachusetts, who were making shoes for the Filipinos, which the poor Filipinos had to be forced at the point of the bayonet to buy, will begin making shoes for their own children, and for the unhappy people of the tenements who were before goingbarefooted. And the Steel Trust will suddenly leap into action, because those misery-smitten four hundred thousand families in the “dark rooms” of the New York City tenements will now earn money to build themselves decent habitations. And the tens of thousands of little boys and girls who are now being ground up in the glass factories of New Jersey and the cotton mills of Georgia and the coal mines of Pennsylvania, will come out into the sunlight and play, while their parents are building schools to which they can be sent. And the young girl who stands shuddering on the brink of prostitution, working ten hours a day in an East Side sweatshop for a wage of forty cents a week, will receive the full value of her product, and be able to maintain herself by two hours of work a day.

I know what is the attitude of the medical profession towards a “cure-all”; and yet it is but the sober truth that for nearly every evil that troubles our age there is one remedy and only one—the democratisation of our industry. If you were to take a growing boy and rivet an iron band about his chest, there would come sooner or later a time when the boy would show symptoms of distress—and for every symptom there would be but one remedy. Is the boy cross and complaining? Break the band!Is he pale and sickly? Break the band! Does he gasp and cry out? Break the band! Do you not know that in the monarchy of France, in the year 1780, a man who set out to find a remedy for this or that evil of the hour would have found but one remedy for all of them—the overthrowing of the aristocracy? And similarly all the diseases of this period, which are the despair of the moralist and the patriot, are consequences of the fact that our society is gasping in a last desperate agony of effort to maintain its system of competitive industry. We are like a man running on a railroad track pursued by a train. The train is increasing its speed, and do what he will, it gains upon him; he cries out, he gasps for breath, he is agonised, wild with terror, making his last leap with the engine at his very heels—and then suddenly it occurs to him to leap to one side, and so the train flashes by, and he sits down and mops his brow and thinks how very stupid it was of him!

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