MEDICINAL PRODUCTS
“Turning from the iron and steel industry, we might take quinine, and many other medicinal products; we might take chemicals, many of them most essential in manufacturing industry; we might take borax, which sells in America at seven and one-half cents per pound, and in Britain at two and one-half cents per pound, because the Dingley duty is exactly five cents per pound; we might take mica, a mining product largely used in the electrical, wall-paper and stove-making industries, and which enjoys a modest protection ranging from one hundred and fifty to four thousand per cent. In short, we might take each and every staple product now made in America, and needlessly sheltered by the Dingley duties, and prove, by comparative prices at home and abroad, that the fabulous profits which the gentlemen engaged in these industries are now making—and which they have capitalised into watered “industrials”—are due chiefly and directly to the fostering care of the Dingley Bill, which was designed to protect our ‘infant’ industries.”
In the same issue, another correspondent, Mr. W. J. Gibson, shows how the Government serves as a tool of the trusts in tariff exactions. He gives several columns of facts about such outrages as the “Rupee Cases.” For instance:
“There have been nine or ten decisions on this one question against the Government, and still the secretary of the treasury refuses to refund the money which the courts have decided so often he has exacted illegally. The money he has directed to be wrongfully assessed and collected, and is retaining in these cases, known as “the Rupee Cases,” amounts to over a million dollars. The parties cannot get any interest for their money so wrongfully withheld, and the customs officials are still being directed to assess all merchandise coming from India on the basis of the rupee at the value of thirty-two cents in our money. This has gone on for more than six years, and against the decision of the United States Circuit Court since January 7, 1899.”
And now, can we get any broad view of the results of this long process of wealth-concentration? In 1850 the wealth of the United States was estimated at nine billions; in 1870 it was thirty billions; in 1890 it was sixty-five billions; and in 1900 it was ninety-five billions. How is this wealth distributed? Writing in 1896, Dr. C. B. Spahr made his famous calculation, embodied in the statement that one-eighth of the population owned seven-eighths of the wealth, and that one per cent. owned more than the remaining ninety-nine per cent. And at that time the machinery of exploitation had hardly more than got under way. The best attempt at an estimate since then is the one by Lucien Sanial, published by the American Branch of the International Institute of Social Science. This is the result of a careful analysis of the census of 1900; it shows that of ninety-five billions of the country’s present wealth, sixty-seven billions are owned by a capitalist-class of two hundred and fifty thousand persons, twenty-four billions by a middle class of eight million four hundred thousand persons, and four billions by a working-class of over twenty million persons. And now, if the sixty-seven billions owned by the capitalists be assumed to earn ten per cent.—which is surely a reasonable average amount—our people will be paying interest upon four hundred and fifty billion dollars at the end of the twenty year period!
And that represents the centralisation of the actual ownership of wealth; but one does not get a real understanding of the situation until he begins to consider the centralisation of the control of wealth. In explaining the struggle over the surplus of the life-insurance companies, one of our financial magnates remarked to me: “I would rather have the power of manipulating four hundred million dollars, than the actual ownership of fifty millions.” And with that crucial fact in mind, let one consider the figures given by Mr. Sereno S. Pratt in The World’s Work for December, 1903, and summarised in Dr. Strong’s “Social Progress,” as follows:
“One-twelfth of the estimated wealth of the United States is represented at the meeting of the Board of Directors of the United States Steel Corporation.
“They represent as influential directors more than two hundred other companies. These companies operate nearly one-half of the railroad mileage of the United States. They are the great miners and carriers of coal. The leading telegraph system, the traction lines of New York, of Philadelphia, of Pittsburg, of Buffalo, of Chicago, and of Milwaukee, and one of the principal express companies, are represented in the board. This group includes also directors of five insurance companies, two of which have assets of seven hundred millions of dollars. In the Steel Board are men who speak for five banks and ten trust companies in New York City, including the First National, the National City, and the Bank of Commerce, the three greatest banks in the country, and the heads of important chains of financial institutions. Telephone, electric, real estate, cable, and publishing companies are represented there, and our greatest merchant sits at the board table.
“What the individual wealth of these men is, it would be impossible and beside the point to estimate; but one of them, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, is generally estimated to be the richest individual in the world. But it is not the personal, but the representative, wealth of those men that makes the group extraordinary. They control corporations whose capitalisations aggregate more than nine billion dollars—an amount (if the capitalisations are real values) equal to about the combined public debts of Great Britain, France, and the United States. It is this concentration of power which is significant. There were at the time of the last statement sixty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-five stockholders in the Steel Corporation. But the control of this corporation is vested in twenty-four directors, and this board of directors is guided by the executive and finance committees, which in turn are largely directed by their chairmen, who are probably selected by the great banker who organised the corporation and in a large part sways its policy.
“Examinations show that the concentration of control of these great New York City banks has gone so far that a comparatively small group of capitalists possesses the power to regulate the flow of credit in this country. In the last analysis it is found that there are actually only two main influences, and that these are centred in Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller. It is possible to express in approximate figures the extent of the Morgan influence”—which the writer shows in a table to figure up over six billion two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars. How very conservative is Mr. Pratt’s estimate is shown by the fact that he gives the number of holders of shares of the railroads of this country as nine hundred and fifty thousand persons; with which the reader may contrast the following editorial paragraph from a recent issue of the New York Times:
“It would appear from evidence collected by the Interstate Commerce Commission and communicated to the Senate, that the ownership of the railroad system of this country is not as widely diffused as has been supposed. On the 30th of June, 1904, the 1,220 railroads reporting to the Commission had only 327,851 stockholders of record. This total includes many duplications, as it was impossible to know in how many instances one capitalist was represented in the stockholding interest of several railroads. Assuming the population of the United States to be, in round figures, eighty millions, the entire mileage of the railroads doing an interstate business is owned by about four-tenths of 1 per cent. of the people of this country.”
Such is the situation. It completes our view of the process of Industrial Evolution, so far as it has progressed up to date. The condition is like that of an oak tree planted in a jar, or a chick developing within its shell; the indefinite continuance of the process is inconceivable. What form the collapse will assume, and when it may be expected to occur, is the problem next to be taken up.
CHAPTER VI
THE 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 Chicago Tribune in 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 the steel 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 York Herald reported 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 destroying manufactured 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 Magazine
DIAGRAM SHOWS HOW HIGH PRICES FOLLOW WARS
Range 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 the course which political events in this country will take from the hour when the “hard times” arrive.
As we saw from the Chicago Tribune item, 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 a market—of a market of five million people—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 the present 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 respectable Harper’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 all our 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 is fundamentally 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, there has 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. And then 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 Socialist president 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 had succeeded 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 gave nearly half a million votes to Eugene V. Debs!
[6]. Figures quoted, evidently upon inside information, by the Washington Post, 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 he should 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.
| The Type. | Chattel Slavery. (1846–1863.) | Wage Slavery (1893–1914.) |
|---|---|---|
| The Conservative Reformer | Daniel Webster. | Grover Cleveland |
| The Unwilling Prophet | John C. Calhoun | Marcus A. Hanna |
| The Great Compromiser | Henry Clay | Theodore Roosevelt |
| The Timid Conservative | Edward Everett. | Alton B. Parker. |
| The Editor of Radicalism | Horace Greeley. | Arthur Brisbane |
| The Statesman of Radicalism | Charles Sumner. | Wm. J. Bryan. |
| The Politician of Radicalism | Wm. H. Seward. | Robt. M. LaFollette. |
| The Agitator of the Revolt | Wm. Lloyd Garrison. | Eugene V. Debs. |
| The Orator of the Revolt | Wendell Phillips. | Geo. D. Herron. |
| The Martyr of the Revolt | John Brown. | Charles H. Moyer ( ?). |
| The Voice of the Victim | Frederick Douglass. | Jack London. |
| The Compromising Reactionist | Stephen A. Douglas. | John C. Spooner. |
| The Aggressive Reactionist | Jefferson Davis. | Nelson W. Aldrich. |
| The Organiser of Reaction | Wm. Lownds Yancey. | David M. Parry. |
| The Last Figurehead | James Buchanan (1856). | William H. Taft (1908). |
| The Untried Hope | Abraham Lincoln (1860). | Wm. Randolph Hearst (1912). |
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 the Independent, 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]]
In the course of its editorial comment, the Independent suggested 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 picture many 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 them carte 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 the paper 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 defy all their 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 is a 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—they will 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.
Copyright, 1894, Leslie’s Weekly
Copyright, 1894, Leslie’s Weekly
COXEY’S ARMY ON THE MARCH AND IN WASHINGTON
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 blame it 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 is not 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 discovery that 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 the road: 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 the Government 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 going barefooted. 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!
CHAPTER VII
THE 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 interaction of 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 of a 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 all these 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 railroad trust 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 the whole 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 INFORMATION
The Congressional Library
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 not adjust 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.”
The Independent recently published an article entitled “Poverty: Its Cause and Cure,” 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,” the Independent continued, “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 the Independent to 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 salaries after 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—because no 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 and apartment 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, because the 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 government railroad 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, received mention 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 precisely described 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 works will 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 forces of 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 women is 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. Do you 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 the Christian Herald to 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 have enough 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 York Sun recently 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 their wars. 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 it hidden, 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 possible place, for instance, would there be for me in 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 of economics. For instance, Mr. Bryan has recently published in the Century Magazine an 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 title of 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. “Leaving to 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 and distribution 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 the material necessities of 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 some of 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 these conditions 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 turning out 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 the North American Review a couple of years ago there appeared an article by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, in which she set forth 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 in Collier’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. The bourgeoisie, 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 regard for 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 bourgeois does know 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 of the 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 been attained—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 does not like 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 the bourgeoisie is 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 happens that 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 their cuisine. 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, the bourgeois 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 and gallant 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 can bear 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 altogether Utopian 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 by Life to 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 field of 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.
CHAPTER VIII
THE COÖPERATIVE HOME
In all that I have outlined concerning the Industrial Republic, I have tried to indicate my belief that it will be the creation of no man’s will, but a product of evolution—the result of many forces which are now at work in our society. These forces we can study and analyse; and in picturing their final product, we are not simply indulging in fantastic speculation, but are making scientific deductions. I believe that we have now in our present world the half-developed embryo of everything which I have pictured in the future; the Revolution, which comes suddenly, and in the midst of strain and agony, is precisely the parallel of a child-birth. In our present “trusts,” for instance, we have perfect examples of the centralising and systematising of production and distribution; absolutely the only thing needed to fit them into the world I have pictured is a change of ownership. Again, in the labour unions, we see the building up of the machinery of industrial self-government. And similarly, in our churches and clubs, our benevolent and artistic and scientific associations, we have the germs of all the coöperative activities of the future. In our public educational system, we have a complete and perfect piece of practical Socialism, ready to fit into the structure of our Industrial Republic. In our Post Office we have still another, while in the army and navy we have examples of industrial paternalism which need only the breath of a new ideal to make them indispensable for all time. We saw after the San Francisco earthquake the real use of standing armies; and for such purposes they will continue to exist, long after war shall have become a nightmare memory.
It has occurred to me that in concluding my argument, it might be well to tell of another such seed of the future, in the planting of which I myself have had the pleasure of assisting. I refer to the Helicon Home Colony, at Englewood, New Jersey, where I have been living while writing this book.
Our industries are organised at present under the competitive system; and I do not believe that any coöperative method of production can drive human beings to the same pitch of effort as they are driven by the lash of wage-slavery. So I consider that any form of coöperation in production is doomed to failure, under present conditions; and I should prefer to watch from the outside any attempt to found “colonies” of the Brook Farm and Ruskin type. The case is quite otherwise, however, when it comes to coöperation in distribution, in the expenditure of one’s income. We are familiar with hundreds of forms of that sort of association—coöperative stores, benevolent fraternities, social clubs and churches. The practicability of any such enterprise depends upon two questions: First, are there a sufficient number of people who want the same thing, and second, can they get it more effectively in combination than otherwise.
The idea of coöperation in domestic industry has been well worked out in theory—notably in Mrs. Gilman’s book “The Home.” The first attempt to realise it in practice, so far as I know, is the Helicon Home Colony.
The plan was broached in an article which I published in The Independent, in June of 1906. In the course of the article, I outlined the situation as follows:
Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived—like a cave man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and dependants to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades: the trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the trade of washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat, of churning butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house, of decorating rooms, of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and clashing with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labour. It takes a hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly, while twenty cooks could prepare one meal for a hundred families, and do it perfectly. It costs a hundred thousand dollars to build and equip a hundred kitchens; it would cost only five thousand dollars to build one kitchen! But, of course, if you have large-scale cooking at present, you can only have it under capitalist auspices; and so it is associated in your minds with uncleanness, and bad service, and high prices. It takes a hundred churns and a hundred aching backs to make a thousand pounds of butter; it would take only one machine and a man to tend it to make the same thousand pounds, and the cost of making it would be cut ninety-five per cent. But of course you cannot have large-scale butter-making except it is done for profit—and that means adulteration and poisoning! It takes a hundred ignorant nursemaids to take care of the children of a hundred families, and develop every kind of ugliness and badness in them; it would take only twenty or thirty trained nurses and kindergarten teachers to take care of them coöperatively, and bring them up according to the teachings of science.
One could show this same thing in a thousand different forms, if it were necessary; but it has all been reasoned out in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book, “The Home,” and anyone to whom the idea is new may read it there. The purpose of this paper is not to persuade anyone, but to move to action those already persuaded. There must be, in and near New York, thousands of men and women of liberal sympathies, who understand this situation clearly, and are handicapped by its miseries in their own lives—authors, artists and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men, who abhor boarding houses and apartment hotels and yet shrink from managing servants, who have lonely and peevish children like my own, and are no fonder of eating poisons or of wasting their time and strength than I am. There must be a few who, like myself, have realised that it is a question of dragging through life a constantly increasing burden of care, or making an intelligent effort and solving the problem once for all. To such I offer my coöperation. I am not a business man, but circumstances have forced me to take up this problem, and I am not accustomed to failing in what I undertake. I have said that “Socialism is not an experiment in government, but an act of will”; and I say the same of this plan. Having gotten the figures from experts and found out exactly what we can do, the one thing remaining is to go ahead and do it.
I suppose that the average professional man invests ten thousand dollars in a home (or else pays rent equal to interest upon that sum); and that he pays two thousand dollars a year living expenses for his family. Let a hundred such families combine to found a coöperative home, and there would be a million dollars for building and equipment, and two hundred thousand dollars a year for running expenses; I believe that for half the outlay five hundred people could live and enjoy comforts at present possible only to millionaires. I have, however, no intention of asking anyone to risk his money upon such a guess. I write this to find out if there are people disposed to consider the project; and if there are enough, I will have the plan figured upon by architects, contractors, stewards, and other qualified experts, and have prepared a definite business proposition, and a plan of organisation for a stock company.
The following embodies my own conception of what such a “home colony” should be. It would be located within an hour of New York, and would have one hundred families, and three or four hundred acres of land, healthfully located, near some body of water, and as unspoiled by the hand of man as possible. It should have an abundant water supply and a filtering plant; an electric light and power plant, and a large garden and farm, raising its own stock, meat, poultry, fruit and vegetables, and canning the last for winter use. It should be administered by a board of directors, democratically elected. For the management of its various departments salaried experts should be employed; machinery should be installed wherever it could be made to pay, and the best modern methods should be applied in every industry. All its purchases should be in bulk and tested for quality; and, so far as the preparation and serving of food is concerned, the processes should be kept as aseptic as a surgical operation.
We are accustomed to having our buildings for public purposes endowed by persons with a great deal of money and few ideals; and so we consume much space and material and accomplish little, exactly typifying our civilisation. The buildings of this home colony should be of frame at the outset, of simple and expressive design, each structure exactly adapted to its specific purpose. The buildings should be conveniently grouped—those for the children in one place, those for cooking and eating in another, those for reading, for music and social intercourse, for recreation and exercise, in still other places. The greater part of the land would of course be given up to farm and woodland, and to the individual dwellings of the families. The ground available for this latter purpose should be divided into lots, priced according to size and location, and eased to stockholders for long terms. Each would erect his own home, according to his own taste—a home, of course, of a kind hitherto unknown, with no provision for the cooking of food, or the training of children, or other trades and professions. It would be a place where the family met, to rest and play and sleep. It might be large or small, anything that the owner chose to make it—my own would be a four- or five-room cottage, of rustic design, and it would cost from six to eight hundred dollars. Besides these there should be apartment buildings, owned by the colony, and dormitories with rooms for single men and women.
As to the public buildings, there should be a large and beautiful dining hall, and a modern, scientifically constructed kitchen. There should be separate tables for each family, or for congenial groups of people. The service should be unexceptionable, the food simple, but perfect in quality and preparation; there should be a vegetarian service for those who prefer this cheaper mode of life, and the charge for board should be based upon the cost of the service. As to what the cost would be, with a colony raising nearly all its own food upon the premises, I can only submit three experiences of my own: First, it cost me for my family of three to board in New York City, in one room and in the cheapest way, a thousand dollars a year. Second, it cost us, living in a three-room cottage in the country, doing our own work and buying our food from a farmer at wholesale prices, seven hundred dollars a year. Third, it cost us, living upon a sixty-acre farm, which represented a total investment of four thousand dollars, doing no work ourselves but the managing, paying a man and woman five hundred and forty dollars a year, having a horse and carriage, and feeding five persons instead of three, a total of less than six hundred dollars a year. Lest this should be unbelievable, I put it in another form—the total expenses of the farm, including labour, were less than twelve hundred dollars, the income was six hundred dollars, and the net loss, or the cost to us of a year’s living, was less than six hundred. And these figures, it should be explained, included not merely board, but also household supplies and repairs of all sorts, items which would appear in other places in the community’s accounts. I will probably be laughed at, but I believe that, granting the land, horses and machinery, buildings, equipment and capital, the members of such a colony as I describe could be provided with perfect service and an abundance of food of the best quality at a total cost of one hundred dollars a year per person.
So much for the coöperative preparation of food. And now for the caring for children. There should be two separate establishments, one for infants, who like to sleep, and one for children, who like to run and shout. Both should be scientifically constructed and ventilated and kept as clean as an up-to-date hospital; the food should be prepared under the general direction of a physician. No building for children should be over two stories high, and the upper windows should be beyond the reach of children; no matches or exposed fire should be permitted, and there should be a night watchman, fire extinguishers, and an automatic sprinkling apparatus. These establishments should be under the supervision of a board of women directors; and the actual work of caring for the children, washing, dressing and feeding them, playing with them and teaching them, should be done by trained nurses and kindergarten teachers who live in the colony as the friends and social equals, of its members. In other words, it is my idea that the caring for children should be recognised as a profession, and that servants should have nothing to do with it; it is my idea that it should be done in a place built for the purpose, with floors for babies to crawl where there is no dirt for them to eat, with playgrounds for children where there are no stoves and no boiling water, no staircases and wells, no cats and dogs, no workbaskets, lamps, pianos, sewing machines, jam closets, inkstands, and authors’ writing tables. Instead, there should be sleeping rooms and bedrooms, and sun parlours for nursing mothers; a separate building for the sick; kindergarten rooms and indoor playgrounds for bad weather, and a big all-outdoors romping ground, with sunny places and shady places, swings, rocking horses, sand piles, and all other accessories of a children’s heaven. Of course, any mother should come and play with or care for her own children just as much as she pleased, or take them home, as she chose; though I think that no one would care to assist this plan who did not believe that children should be cared for in accordance with the principles of science, and preserved from the corrupting influence of grandmothers and aunts. Of course, any mother who believed that her work in the world was caring for children, and who wished to care for her own and others, according to the methods of the commonwealth, would be free to do so, and to earn her living by doing it.
I have already explained that I should not regard this as an experiment in Socialism; but I do think that those who undertook it would have to be in sympathy with the spirit of Socialism, which is the spirit of brotherhood and democracy. Whenever I have mentioned this plan to friends they have always said: “The great difficulty would be to get together a community of congenial people.” It does not seem to me that this would be a difficulty at all. Every member of the community would have his own home, to which he would invite his personal friends as he chose; and the other members of the community he would meet in the same way that he meets acquaintances in business and politics, in theatres, restaurants, and clubs. I myself am the most unsociable of human beings when I am busy, and have no idea of giving up my hermit’s tastes. In a colony of a hundred families there ought to be persons of every kind of inclination, and it would not be in the least necessary for anyone to associate with those who were not congenial.
Of course there are people in the world whom we should not want near us at all; but such people, I think, would not care to join our colony. Vulgar and snobbish people get along very well in the world as it is, and do not find it a task to give orders to servants. Those who would be interested in such a plan would be men and women who wished to practise “plain living and high thinking”; and they would naturally wish to get as far as possible from every suggestion of ostentation and conventionality. They would establish the shirt-waist and the short skirt as en règle, and would, I trust, allow me in without a dress suit. They would be all hard-working people themselves, and they would not look down upon honest labour. This spirit, if wisely and earnestly cultivated, would solve the “servant problem” for the colony, and solve the health problem for its members as well. I know business and professional men who, when they need exercise, have to go down into the basement and lift weights and pull at rubber straps; and they envy me my farm, where I can hoe the garden, or pitch hay, or pick fruit, and not merely benefit my body, but also put money in my purse. In this community every member would be credited for the time he worked; and it ought to become the custom for the men to help with the harvests, and the women with the preserving of fruit, and the children with the berry picking and the weeding of the gardens. I have no doubt that there are thousands of young men and women in New York City, students of art and music and the professions, who would be glad of a chance to earn their way in a community where class feeling did not make labour degrading. I appreciate the difficulties in the way of such a project; the chances at present are against a coal-heaver’s being a socially possible person, and I am not insisting that the day labourers should share in the privileges of the community. But I do think that this should certainly be the case with those whom we select to care for and teach our children, and also, if possible, with those whom we permit to prepare and serve our food; if I am not willing to shake a man’s hand or sit next to him in a reading-room, I do not see why I should be willing to eat what he has cooked. I personally know a young man who is studying art, and who earns his living by washing dishes in a downtown restaurant, because it takes only two or three hours a day of his time. In Memorial Hall at Harvard University, in the sanitarium at Battle Creek, and in many other places I might name, those who wait upon the tables are college students; and anyone who knows the difference which there is in the atmosphere of such a dining hall knows what I should wish to attain.
The above article brought me replies from four or five hundred persons; and committees were named, which met all through the summer to work out the details of the plan. In October of the same year the purchase of Helicon Hall was made, and the “Colony” began its career. Six months after the publication of my first article, I contributed to The Independent an account of how the experiment was succeeding; I quote from it the following paragraphs:
We made many mistakes; I shall tell about some of them in due course, for the benefit of future pioneers. But there is one thing to be said here at the start: we made no mistake in believing in democratic institutions. It was a point about which the critics of our plan were all agreed, that it could not possibly work, because people could never decide what they wanted. That dreadful bugaboo called “human nature” would wreck us in the end. I, for my part, believed that people in America were used to the methods of majority government, and I believed that if we should apply those same methods in a coöperative home, a group of intelligent and sincere people could manage to solve all their problems. From the beginning our policy was publicity and democracy; and from the beginning it brought us through. At the committee meetings everyone had his say. And little by little you would see a majority opinion taking shape on the question at issue, until, finally, when all had been heard, the matter was put to a vote. There was no case where the minority did not give way with all courtesy. And now that the colony really exists we sit round the fireside and talk out our questions, and as a rule we do not even have to take a vote—an informal discussion is enough to make clear to everyone what is fair and right.
I am a believer in the materialistic conception of history; I am accustomed to interpret the characters of men from this position—to say that competition has made them selfish and deceitful, and that coöperation will make them beautiful and sincere. I think that I can see it working out in this colony. We have founded it upon justice and truth; socially we stand upon terms of equality, and economically we pay for exactly what we get. These are the principles we have built upon, and all take them for granted, and no other idea ever enters their thought.
Photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals, N. Y.
HELICON HALL
“But will this last?” you ask. I do not see how it can fail to last, and to grow—admitting, of course, that my analysis of the cause is correct. We did not start out with any enthusiasms and religious ecstasies; we had simply cold common sense; we employed lawyers and business men to put us on a sound basis. Our only real peril was at the beginning, before the colony spirit was well developed in our members, and some of us were tired and overworked; and even then there were no misunderstandings that a little discussion could not clear up. Now things are beginning to run smoothly, and we are realising some of the benefits.
We are as yet in our infancy, of course; there is no one of the departments in which we do not intend to make numerous improvements; but we have got over the roughest parts of the road, and we can begin to look about us a little. We are living in what I think is the most beautiful suburban town near New York. We have nine and a half acres of land, sloping down from the western brow of the Palisades, and commanding a view of thirty miles, and we have only half a mile to walk to come out upon the Hudson, where there is scenery which tourists would travel many miles to look at, if they only knew about it. The hall itself has nearly six thousand square feet of floor space on the ground floor alone, devoted to rooms for social purposes; there is a central court filled with palms and rubber trees, which have grown to the very top of the three-story building. We have a large pipe-organ, a swimming pool and bowling alley, a theatre, and a billiard room. We have thirty-five bedrooms, ranged in galleries about the court, so that we can look out of our windows in the morning and see the sun rise, and then look out of our door and see the tropics. We have the finest heating system in the world—we pump fresh air in from outside, heat it in a three-thousand-foot steam coil, and then distribute it to all the rooms, with the result that we feel as well all the time as other people feel when they take a trip to Arizona or the Adirondacks. In such a place as this we have a comfortable bedroom or study, where we can go and be by ourselves and never be disturbed, for $3 a week. And downstairs we have a huge fireplace, where, if we happen to feel in a sociable humour, we can sit and talk with our friends. And also, we have a dining-room, where a group of cultivated people meet three times a day to partake of wholesome and pleasant-tasting food, prepared by other members of our big family, whose cleanliness and honesty are matters of common knowledge to us. This last-named privilege costs us $5 a week, or $4 if we only eat two meals; and we do not have to add to this price any care or worry, because the price includes the salary of a superintendent and a manager, who work sixteen hours a day each to straighten out all the kinks and keep the machine running.
Finally, this magical building contains a dormitory and a children’s dining-room and play-room, where ten happy and healthy children receive their lessons in practical coöperation at a cost of four dollars a week for each child. It was over these “institutionalised infants” of ours that the critics of our plan were most incensed. Several dear ladies who had read my books and conceived a liking for me, sat down and wrote me tearful letters to point out the wickedness of “separating the mother from her children.” As a matter of fact, we have five mothers in the colony, and the work of caring for the children is divided among four of them. (The fifth is studying medicine in New York.) By the simple process of combining the care of the ten children we accomplish the following results: First, the labour and trouble of caring for each child is reduced about two-thirds; second, the child has playmates, and is happy all day long; third, we can afford to keep the child in a more hygienic place than the average nursery—we have a pump driving fresh air into his play-room all day; and, fourth, we can dispense with the services of nurse maids, and go away, leaving the child in the care of a friend.
Of course we cannot have everything that we should like in the “children’s department.” We have to wait for more colonists for that. With only ten children we have to dispense with a resident physician; we cannot even afford a kindergarten. And, of course, we have not the scientifically constructed dormitory of which we dream; we have only a converted theatre, and instead of the uniform cots and the dustproof walls and all the rest, we have to make apologies to visitors. However, our children are all enjoying it meantime; and our five mothers are holding meetings and learning to coöperate.
The other big problem which we promised to tackle is the servant problem. All the world is waiting to hear about this, so we are told; even the aristocracy of Englewood is waiting; the ladies come in and tell us their troubles and ask if we will feed them in cases of emergency. They were even going to invite me to lecture them about it—until one of them recollected that I was a Socialist “of a particularly dangerous type.”
We have been only a few months at it; and we have still a great deal left to accomplish. But we think that we have got far enough to claim to have proven our thesis—that by means of coöperation, with the saving which it implies, the introduction of system and of labour-saving machinery, household labour can be lifted to the rank of a profession, and people found to do it who can be admitted to the colony as members. Those who wish to make fun of the idea have assumed this to mean that we insist upon college diplomas from our cooks and chambermaids. It does not mean that at all; as a matter of fact, we prefer to employ people who have always earned their living by doing the work they do for us. It means simply that we look for people who are cleanly and courteous and honest; and that then, when they come into the colony, we treat them, simply and as a matter of course, exactly as we treat everyone else. So far as I know, there is no one here who has experienced the least difficulty or unpleasantness in consequence.
There remains to explain the financial organisation of the colony. The property is owned by the Home Colony Company, a separate corporation, which was formed to raise the necessary capital. The company puts the building in thorough repair and equips it for use as a residence, and the colony rents it upon a three-year lease, assuming responsibility for the interest on the mortgages, the insurance, taxes, and other charges, and paying eight per cent. dividends upon the company stock. The ownership of stock is thus entirely optional. One may live in the colony without contributing any capital.
The Helicon Home Colony is a membership corporation. It is governed by a board of directors, elected every six months by secret ballot. The only conditions to residence in the colony are “congeniality” and freedom from contagious disease; one may reside in the colony indefinitely without becoming a member, but only members have the right to vote. The conditions of membership are one month’s residence, election by a four-fifths vote, and the payment of an initiation fee of $25. The constitution of the colony provides for initiative, referendum and recall of members of the board of directors; also for a complete statement of the financial affairs of the colony, to be rendered every three months.
I have quoted this at length because, as I said before, I believe that it is the seed from which mighty forests are destined to grow. We should never have given the time and strength which we have given to this experiment, but for our certainty that all the world will some day be following in our footsteps. We are living in a coöperative home because we wish to do it—but some day you will be doing it because you have to. You get along badly enough with your servants, you admit; still you get along somehow or other. But has it ever occurred to you what your plight would be if, when you went to the “intelligence-office,” instead of getting a bad servant, you got no servant at all? When that time comes, you will be grateful to us pioneer “home-colonists.”
It is a most interesting thing to watch; it is the Industrial Republic in the making. We care nothing whatever about the intellectual opinions of the people who come to live in the colony; but I have observed that nearly every non-Socialist who has come here has been turned into a Socialist in the course of a month or two. And that is not because we argue with him, or bother him; it is simply because facts are facts. What becomes of the old shop-worn argument that it would be necessary to change human nature—when human nature is suddenly discovered to be so kindly and considerate as it is in this big home of ours? And what becomes of the ponderous platitudes about “Socialism versus Individualism” in a place where so many different kinds of individuals are developing their individualities.
I am often moved to use this experiment of ours as an illustration of what I said in the previous chapter, concerning the difference between material and intellectual production. Here in Helicon Hall we have all the dreadful machinery of paternalism which frightens our capitalist editors and college presidents whenever they contemplate Socialism; we submit ourselves to the blind rule of majorities—we allow a majority to decide what we shall pay for our rooms, and when we shall pay it; to lay out our menu, and refuse to give us pie for breakfast; to forbid our giving tips, or whistling in the halls, or dancing after a certain hour at night. And we have all the symbols of oppression—constitution and by-laws and boards of directors and managers. And yet somehow, we are freer than we ever were in the world before; because, by means of these little concessions, we have made possible a system—and so flung from our shoulders all at once the burden of care which used to wear the life out of us.
And in consequence of that, for the first time in our experience we find ourselves really free with regard to the real things of life. We have absolutely not a convention in the place. We do as we please, and we wear what we please. We are free to come and go, where we please and whenever we please. We have each our own rooms or apartments, to which we retire, and it never comes into anyone’s mind to ask what we are doing there. We may work all night and sleep all day, if we feel like it—so little do we bother with each others’ affairs that I have known people to be away for a day or two without being missed.
And on the other hand, if we feel like company, we can have it; there is always a group around our wonderful four-sided fireplace in the evening, and you can always find someone willing to play billiards or go for a walk. And as for our intellectual freedom—you should see the sparks scatter when our half-score assorted varieties of “Fabians” and “impossibilists,” “individualists” and “communist-anarchists,” all get together after dinner! There are so many typewriters in Helicon Hall that as you wander about the galleries in the morning you can fancy you hear a distant battle with rapid-firing guns; and the products of the industry vary from discussions of Yogi philosophy and modern psychic research to magazine fiction, woman’s suffrage debates, and Jungle “muck-raking.” And yet all these people share amicably in the ownership of the fireplace and the swimming-pool and the tennis-court; providing thereby a most beautiful illustration of the working out of the formula laid down by Kautsky for the society of the future: “Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual.”
It is working out so beautifully, that the spirit of it has got hold of even our children, and they are holding meetings and deciding things. Of our nine youngsters seven are under six years of age; and last night I attended a meeting of the whole nine, at which a grave question was gravely discussed: “When a child wakes up early in the dormitory, is it proper to wake the other children, or should the child lie still?” After a long debate, Master David (aged five) remarked: “All in favour, please say Aye.” Everybody said “Aye.”
The above was written in the middle of December, 1906. On March 16, 1907, at four o’clock in the morning, Helicon Hall was burned to the ground, and forty-six adults and fifteen children were turned out homeless upon the snow. The story of our ill-fated experiment is left to stand as it was first printed.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
- Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.