Twentieth Century Socialism: What It Is Not; What It Is: How It May Come

by Edmond Kelly

"I. An altogether incredible amount of overwork by everybody, reaching its extreme in the twelve-hour shift for seven days in the week in the steel mills and the railway switchyards.

"II. Low wages for the great majority of the laborers employed by the mills, not lower than other large cities, but low compared with the prices—so low as to be inadequate to the maintenance of a normal American standard of living; wages adjusted to the single man in the lodging-house, not to the responsible head of a family.

"III. Still lower wages for women, who receive for example in one of the metal trades in which the proportion of women is great enough to be menacing, one-half as much as unorganized men in the same shops and one-third as much as the men in the union.

"IV. An absentee capitalism, with bad effects strikingly analogous to those of absentee landlordism, of which Pittsburg furnishes noteworthy examples.

"V. A continuous inflow of immigrants with low standards, attracted by a wage which is high by the standards of Southeastern Europe, and which yields a net pecuniary advantage because of abnormally low expenditures for food and shelter; and inadequate provision for the contingencies of sickness, accident, and death.

"VI. The destruction of family life, not in any imaginary or mystical sense, but by the demands of the day's work and by the very demonstrable and material method of typhoid fever and industrial accidents; both preventable, but costing in single years in Pittsburg considerably more than a thousand lives, and irretrievably shattering nearly as many homes.

"VII. Archaic social institutions such as the aldermanic court, the ward school district, the family garbage disposal, and the unregenerate charitable institution, still surviving after the conditions to which they were adapted have disappeared.

"VIII. The contrast—which does not become blurred by familiarity with detail, but on the contrary becomes more vivid as the outlines are filled in—the contrast between the prosperity on the one hand of the most prosperous of all the communities of our western civilization, with its vast natural resources, the generous fostering of government, the human energy, the technical development, the gigantic tonnage of the mines and mills, the enormous capital of which the bank balances afford an indication; and, on the other hand, the neglect of life, of health, of physical vigor, even of the industrial efficiency of the individual. Certainly no community before in America or Europe has ever had such a surplus, and never before has a great community applied what it had so meagerly to the rational purposes of human life. Not by gifts of libraries, galleries, technical schools, and parks, but by the cessation of toil one day in seven, and sixteen hours in the twenty-four, by the increase of wages, by the sparing of lives, by the prevention of accidents, and by raising the standards of domestic life, should the surplus come back to the people of the community in which it is created."

It would be unfair, however, to the trusts not to recognize that in spite of the shameful conditions they create for the majority they do benefit a minority to no small degree. The highly skilled are highly paid; they are fairly safe from unemployment; they are also furnished an opportunity of purchasing stock, of which this minority avails itself. The effect of the trust system on the workingman is very much like that of the trade union; both benefit the highly skilled and highly efficient, but at the expense of all the rest.

Now those who believe in the competitive system regard this as proper; and that the highly skilled and highly efficient should fare better than the lazy and vicious is equally a part of the Socialist creed. All that the Socialist asks is that the punishment for falling short of the highest skill and the highest efficiency be not so severe as that described by the Pittsburg Survey; and this not only in the interest of the victim, but in that of the community of which he forms an essential part. It is because Socialism proposes a plan for giving to the efficient what their efficiency earns without committing the inefficient to a life of degradation, that it is entitled to the consideration of practical business men.