The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are.
The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in America, which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they ought to be good—the goodness in each man which in our present system he bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor unions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right to be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now, and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be.
The mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in America, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let our machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads. Our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers and workmen to one another, caricature us.
All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working together to make a dollar worth fifty cents.
The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owes it to himself and to his class to furnish as little work for a dollar as he dares and take a dollar for fifty cents' worth of work.
Each man sees this several times a day, but he belongs to a vast machine for getting something for nothing. Every man knows in his heart that the cure for everybody's trying to get something for nothing is everybody's at once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. Then the American dollar will quit being worth fifty cents.
Why doesn't he do it? Because the machinery he belongs with and that everybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothing machines. Both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor are geared for backing in producing and not for going forward. All that has to be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have what we want.
People on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion that the way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybody to produce more and to charge less for what he produces.
But labor will not do this if capital does not do it.
Capital will not do this if labor does not do it.