It is true that, amongst the wealthy, many men to-day are honestly advocating and honestly working for real, deep-planted, permanent reform.
It is almost astounding to read a paragraph like the following signed with the name of Andrew Carnegie:
Whatever the future may have in store for labour, the evolutionist, who sees nothing but certain and steady progress for the race, will never attempt to set bounds to its triumph, even to its final form of complete and universal industrial coöperation, which I hope is some day to be reached.
By industrial coöperation Mr. Carnegie explains that he means the slow process of selling or giving actual ownership of manufacturing industries to the workmen. He claims that they began this experiment in this country when the Carnegie Steel Company took in from time to time forty odd young partners, none of whom contributed a penny of money, the company taking their notes payable only out of profits.
A dozen other instances could be adduced, beginning with the United States Steel Corporation itself, the giant among the trusts. There is no doubt whatever that this reform is spreading. What is more, I believe it is an honest reform, and that most of the men who have introduced it into their companies have done it from an honest belief that it would elevate the workingman and solve in each separate instance the most dangerous of our industrial problems.
I am not myself a manufacturer, and I do not feel competent either to praise or to criticize this particular solution of particular industrial problems. I know that John Stuart Mill in his “Political Economy” vaguely hints at some such ultimate evolution of the wage-worker; and I know also that in many cases the coöperative idea, in actual practice, has succeeded very well indeed. In my own mind, knowing the habits of a plutocracy, I cannot help doubting whether widespread coöperation between wage workers and capital, particularly between the lower orders of the wage workers and the larger masters of capital, would not simply afford to dishonest, disreputable, or unprincipled captains of industry a fuller opportunity than they now enjoy to hold down the wages and profits of wage workers.
Yet I would but express this doubt as a personal feeling of my own, rather than as a conviction founded upon research or upon broad knowledge of the subject. It is not germane to my theme to enter upon a detailed discussion either of this possible reform or of any other. I would simply point out as illustrations two or three of the greater reforms that I hear month by month discussed more and more among the people of my class.
Personally, I am a bit tired of reform; for Society, as I have said, will plunge en masse through any door that has a reform label sticking on it anywhere. Often, as I think of the long list of reforms advocated by distinguished individuals, churches, educators, civic associations, politicians, and societies, I wonder what would happen if they all succeeded. I won’t be here to find out; but if, in some future existence, no matter what my destination, I hear that it has come to pass, I am quite sure that I shall be glad to be away.
In passing from this subject I cannot refrain from reiterating the note of warning contained in an earlier paragraph. To my charitable friends of the upper classes whose heads are full of reforms and alms-giving I would say, give not at all if, in giving, or in supporting reforms, you hope or expect thereby to gain the favour of the mob. Remember that in Rome the masses were a race of parasites who could be fed or crushed as the occasion demanded. In America, on the contrary, the masses are the producing elements of the nation, and you are the parasites. Between the cry of the Roman multitude for coin and the demand of the working American for wages there is an intensity and seriousness as much different as between the humming of the mosquito and the thunder of an earthquake.