Manhood and womanhood are being utterly sacrificed to mere money-making. National wealth is calculated in units of dollars, and not in units of citizenship. To accumulate wealth is the controlling ambition of our people, and not to perpetuate the strong racial type from which we are all descended.
Not only is the original sturdy American Anglo-Saxon stock being degenerated, but we are bringing to our shores millions of the strong and vigorous races from Southern and Eastern Europe, and crowding them into tenements and slums to rot, both physically and mentally. That cancer is eating away the heart and corrupting the very lifeblood of this nation. Those conditions would soon be changed if the mass of our people, and particularly Organized Capital and Organized Labor, would place Humanity above Money.
Capital thinks only of Dividends. Labor thinks only of Wages. Neither gives the slightest heed to making this a nation of Rural Homes and thereby perpetuating the racial strength and virility of the people of the nation. That can only be done by providing a right life environment for all wageworkers and their families, particularly the children. A home for a family is not entitled to be called a home, unless it is both an individual home and a garden home. It must be a Homecroft—a home with an abundance of sunshine and fresh air, in decent, sanitary surroundings—a home with a piece of ground about it from which in time of stress or unemployment the family can get its living by its labor, and thereby enjoy economic independence.
Industry will destroy humanity unless a national system of life is universally adopted that will prevent racial deterioration. The only way that can be done is by a nation-wide abandonment of the artificial and degenerate life of the congested cities. The people must be educated and trained so that they will desert the flats and tenements as rats would abandon a sinking ship.
Our first great national undertaking should be the creation of a national system of life that will realize the ideals of the Homecroft Slogan:
"Every Child in a Garden,
Every Mother in a Homecroft, and
Individual Industrial Independence
For every worker in a
Home of his own on the Land."
Unless the united power of the people as a whole is soon put forth to check the physical and racial deterioration now going on at such an appalling rate among the masses of our wageworkers,—the result of the wrong conditions that surround their lives,—nothing can prevent the eventual ruin of this nation. We are already on the downward course along which Rome swept to the abyss of human degeneracy in which she was at last destroyed by the same causes that are so widely at work in this country to-day.
Employers of Labor are most directly responsible for these evil conditions. They cannot shirk that responsibility. They cannot evade the fact that the menace against which we most need national defense arises from the degeneracy that we are breeding in our midst. If we cannot do both, we had far better spend our national energies and revenues in fighting the evils that are rotting our citizenship, than in building forts and fortifications or maintaining a navy and an army for defense against the remote possibility of attacks by other nations.
We hear much of the danger to New York from such an attack. New York is in far greater danger from the criminal, immoral, evil, and degenerating forces that she is nursing in her own bosom than she is from any military force that might be landed on our shores by a foreign invader. The enemies she has most to fear are her own Gunmen and Bomb-throwers; Black-handers and White-Slavers; Apaches, Dope Fiends, Gamblers, and Gangsters; Tenement House Landlords; Out-of-Works, and all the breeders of poverty, crime, insanity, disease, and human misery that are rampant in her midst,—the direct result of the system of industry and human life which she has herself created and for which she alone is responsible.
This is no overdrawn picture. It is only the briefest possible outline of the evil conditions which less than a century of the Service of Mammon has bred in that mighty metropolis. Everyone who reads the newspapers which reflect the daily events of New York City will appreciate how impossible it is to portray in words the depth of degradation to which a great mass of humanity has sunk in that modern Babylon—rich as well as poor.