A POOR MAN’S MOTOR.
The labor problem has not yet received a solution. Its central difficulty is to secure to workmen a fair share of the blessings of life. No one supposes that, taking the world together, they do now receive a fair share. In this country, workmen have fared uncommonly well; but there is a belief, resting on some facts, that the actual rewards of labor, as measured in the blessings of life, are rapidly declining, and must go on declining under the existing industrial system. Some theories on the subject are no longer tenable. The workman’s theory that capital robs him is not sound. Money, once worth ten per cent., has fallen to three per cent. for perfectly safe loans; when higher interest is paid, it is paid for conducting the business of lending (as in banks) or for risks of the loans. The government can borrow a thousand and more millions at two and one-half to three per cent.—and this shows what a hard time of it capital is having. The risks of manufacturing probably bleed labor; but the bleeding is not in the form of which the workman thinks. It is not profit but loss which drives the lancet in to the hilt. Political economists have shown (and they are entirely unanimous) that the high profits produce a competition which brings down profits. Capital is cheap; large profits can be made only in conditions which are monopolistic.
Our system of industrial exchange has one very weak place, called credit. This credit is a hole in the net through which industrial gains are dropped into the bottomless sea; and the system is so fixed upon us that there is no hope of reform in our day. To pay when we buy more and more offends something in our make-up. A wise man proposed that one, two and five dollar bills be abolished, in order that we might circulate, as the French do, a large amount of silver. A member of Congress immediately amended the suggestion thus: “No. Put this silver in the United States Treasury, and let us use ‘silver notes.’” We insist upon having even a credit money, and object to “the trouble” of handling coin. This refined and transcendental sentiment, or taste, or æstheticism about coin runs through us. The man who always pays, as well as the sneak who never pays if he can avoid it, says, “Charge it,” when he buys goods. Goods are sold by the manufacturer to the jobber on credit; the jobber sells to the wholesale houses on credit; the wholesale dealers sell to retailers on credit; the retailers sell to consumers on credit. It is within the mark to say, that more is lost in these four credit traps than capital gets—much more. It is not, in fact, the capitalist, but the well-dressed and the shabbily-dressed thieves who cheat and rob labor.
At first sight, the reader will wonder how the losses of the four credits come home to labor. We reply: they are merely the aggregate of the risks incurred in making staple goods—all other risks being insignificant in such manufacturing. The order of things is like this: what the jobber loses the manufacturer loses by the failure of the jobber. The jobber loses what the dealers between him and the consumers lose. Not quite all, perhaps, for the capitals of the dealers must be of some worth; but the consumer has, in the end, to pay all these losses, and the result is an enhanced price. In other words, a bale of goods starts out with a burden of risk which grows as it travels, and adds to the cost of goods so much that the consumer can not buy as much as he needs. The from 250 to 300 or more failures each week tell a part of the workman’s trouble; another vast body of his losses does not go to record at all. It is the fifty-cents-on-a-dollar compromise system between wholesalers and retailers.
Workmen ought to get what consumers pay, less three per cent. on capital and about as much more for risk of ordinary kinds and a fair cost of handling goods. We maintain a system of extraordinary risks, called a credit system, which consumes two or three times as much as capital. It is plain that workmen can not get (we write of such staples as cotton cloth) pay for lost goods. Wherever they are lost, the sums lost can not reach labor. We do not enter into the details of this argument; we have suggested reasons for believing that a cash system would stop one of the great leaks of the industrial system.
There are other great wastes in the existing forms of industrial management which, like the credit system, come out of the bones and blood of the workman. We pass them by to suggest that the industrial system has gone wrong, and can never go right, under the empire of steam. Steam is a centralizer. It concentrates industry, and by packing laborers into a small compass enhances the cost of living and enlarges the area of losses on sales and of distress in hard times. And to go at once to our solution of the labor problem, we will describe it as decentralization. A writer in MacMillan’s Magazine suggests that electric motors may prove to be the decentralizing force. Of course, it is not in the power of any material agent to effect great changes except as it coöperates with our inclinations. The expensiveness of steam machinery coöperated with our inclination to congregate in cities. We have congregated there. The larger half of our growth is in towns. The result is dear food, dear rent, pestilential diseases, moral degradation. When we grow sick of the experiment of building a modern Babel, our inclinations may coöperate with a motor energy which is plebeian and democratic. Let us suppose, then, that a workman can make any of the innumerable small articles which have iron or steel for a material. This workman has his bits of machinery and tools in his house. They do not cost more than a carpenter’s chest of tools. He has the skill; he has the tools; he wants power. But a neighbor tells him that he can buy in quart or gallon cans stored-up electricity, and by a little contrivance, which may cost fifty cents, he can attach his machinery to this democratic motor and be an independent workman, with all the advantages of machinery. He can make all these iron and steel contrivances in the middle of a prairie and sell them to his neighbors for cheap food and cheap rent. The divisibility of electric power may make it the poor man’s friend. You can not buy five cents’ worth of steam; there is now no reason to doubt that electric power may be sold in five-cent packages if there is a demand for it in such form. There is a vast aggregate of small manufacturing. Of course there are great industries to which our solution would not apply; but if half the laborers of the country could work profitably, each man by himself, in his own house—just as cobblers work—then the strain on the large industries, such as iron and steel making, would be so far reduced that workmen in those branches would probably command, permanently, excellent wages.
This article aims to do nothing more than to open a window of hope. We shall need to change a great deal; but the poor man’s motor will probably help us to change. A good many monopolies have grown up because steam favored their growth; others are the fruits of general ignorance. Under the sway of ignorance, the trade-mark becomes a tyrant, a grasping monopolist. For example, there are no patents on sewing machines, but machines of certain firms, wearing a certain trade-mark, command a monopoly price. Any good mechanic can build a good sewing machine for ten dollars. There might be men in every town engaged in supplying the local wants in the matter of sewing machines. No large factories, no heavy transportation bills, no eloquent traveling agents would be needed. There are thousands of things to which the same rule will apply when there is a poor man’s motor and such a diffusion of intelligence that the poor man can make, and people will buy, the home-made articles. The empire of the trade-mark will disappear when the motor and the intelligence come along, and both seem to be coming. It will not be necessary—if the motor arrives—to herd people together like cattle, or to transport goods long distances. The workmen will carry their kits of tools to the villages and live independently and cheaply in the midst of their customers. Is this a dream? But why should it not come true?