The sixteenth Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor,[53] for 1901, estimates the loss to employees resulting from strikes and lockouts from January 1, 1881, to December 1, 1900—a period of twenty years—at $306,683,223, and the loss to employers during the same time at $142,659,104—together $449,342,327; or roughly—$450,000,000. It is interesting to note how much less is the loss to employers who are relatively able to bear it than to employees who are relatively unable to bear it. But without regard to the injustice of a system that bears so hardly upon the workingman, no practical American who desires to see production attended with the least waste and friction, can look upon such a loss as this without impatience and humiliation.
Quite irrespective of the misery that results from unemployment and the evils that attend it for the whole community—employed as well as unemployed—too much emphasis cannot be put upon the foolish waste of human energy that unemployment occasions. There have been for two years in this country over a million (and probably much more than a million) able-bodied men willing and anxious to assist in the production and distribution of the things we need, and who have not been permitted to do so—the energy of over a million, and probably a great many more, absolutely wasted.
I have been amazed at the indifference of our wealthy class, and even of the philanthropists amongst our wealthy class, at this condition of the unemployed until a clue to this indifference was furnished by the naïveté of a few of our captains of industry.
Here is what one of them, Daniel Guggenheim, president of the American Smelting and Refining Company, says to the Wall Street Journal, August 10:
"Every manufacturer in the country has lowered his costs of production, partly through cheaper prices for raw materials, but principally on account of the increased efficiency of labor. The latter is one of the redeeming features of the current depression.
"For the first time in many years the employer is getting from his men the 100 per cent in efficiency for which he pays. It is a safe assertion that prior to the panic the efficiency of labor was no higher than 75 per cent, perhaps not even that.
"Another thing—wherever a thousand men are needed, twelve hundred apply. The result is that the thousand best men are picked; the others, of necessity, must be turned away. But the thousand work more conscientiously, knowing that two hundred are waiting to take the places of the incompetents."
Here again we have one small class benefited by the misery of millions of unemployed, and willing to perpetuate this condition of unemployment in order to profit by it. Of all the waste that attends the competitive system this waste of human energy is the most unjust, and the most unjustifiable, unless it can be found that the pauperism it imposes on the millions and the heartlessness it promotes in the few, contribute, as the bourgeois tells us, "to make character!" But if the waste of human energy at the cost of human agony is a matter of indifference to business men, there is another form of waste which is likely to appeal to them. We Americans pride ourselves upon our business efficiency. In the next chapter we will consider the waste of money that attends the competitive system and how the ablest business men have set about eliminating it.
§ 5. Adulteration
It would seem as though the indifference of the public at large to such wicked and wasteful things as unemployment, strikes, lockouts and prostitution, were due to hardness of heart; but if we observe a similar indifference to adulteration which concerns every individual to the utmost, we have to recognize that tolerance of the evils of the competitive system is due not so much to hardness of heart as to stupidity. For since the dawn of our present civilization, adulteration has been a constant and abominable evil. As the Encyclopedia Americana puts it: "Adulteration is coexistent with trade;"[54] and as the Britannica puts it: "The practice of adulteration has become an art in which the knowledge of science and the ingenuity of trade are freely exercised."