“In Allegheny County, Pa., including Pittsburgh, 17,700 persons were killed or injured last year in the mills and on the railroads or in some of the workshops of that interesting Inferno. This number has been recorded and reported, and there were, of course, others whose deaths or injuries were not reported.... Life and limb are needlessly sacrificed—hundreds of thousands of lives every decade. This is one of the penalties that we pay for quick industrial success.”
“Quick industrial success” is good, a fine phrase indeed—in the mining industry, for example, in which in the United States from 1889 to 1909 over 30,000 men were killed.[[105]] If a war were on in the Philippines and 1500 of our men were being slaughtered every year the generals and captains in charge of our forces would be regarded as failures. Yet the captains of industry, in the capitalist administration of the mining industry alone, in the United States sacrifice more than 1500 brave men of the great industrial army every year.
That the modern industry, inspired by insane lust for profits for part of the people rather than by welfare for all the people—that this modern industry is far more deadly than real war on a large scale—this seems impossible. Yet it is not at all an impossibility; it is reality; it is experience; it is fact; it is the savagery of capitalist civilization.
All the profit-mongers’ proud and stupid boasting of the noble triumphs of capitalist “philanthropy” can not hush the loud-shouting fact that the sickle of death cuts down the toilers far more rapidly while peacefully on duty in the industries than it slashes down in time of war on the firing-line and in the military hospital—far more than the rifle, sword, bayonet, and disease combined.
This is true, horrible and important. And because it is true, horrible and important, all doubt concerning the matter should, as far as possible, be dispelled. And, therefore, still more evidence is here offered to make the matter clear.
The eminent publicist, Dr. Josiah Strong, testifies:[[106]]
“We might carry on a half dozen Philippine wars for three-quarters of a century with no larger number of total casualties than take place yearly in our peaceful industries.
“Taking the lowest of our three estimates of industrial accidents, the total number of casualties suffered by our industrial army in one year is equal to the average annual casualties of our Civil War, plus those of the Philippine War, plus those of the Russian-Japanese War.
“Think of carrying on three such wars at the same time, world without end.”
Losses from sickness in war and from sickness contracted in industry are, it should be remembered, not included in Dr. Strong’s calculations.