Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

As industrial relations imply peaceful relations, under a certain rough reorganization and reconstruction of governmental functions which the association of labor presents, it is inevitable that in its international aspects the association should formally advocate universal peace. Workmen have always realized, however feebly and vaguely they may have expressed it, that it is they who in all ages have borne the heaviest burden of privation and suffering imposed on the world by the military spirit.

The first international organization founded, not to promote a colorless peace, but to advance and develop the common life of all nations, was founded in London in 1864 by workingmen, and was called simply “The International Association of Workingmen.” They recognized that a supreme interest raised all workingmen above the prejudice of race, and united them by wider and deeper principles than those by which they were separated into nations. They hoped that as religion, science, art, had become international, so now at last labor might take its place as an international interest. A few years later, at its third congress in Brussels they recommended that in case of war a universal strike be declared.

There is a growing conviction among workingmen of all countries that, whatever may be accomplished by a national war, however moral the supposed aim of such a war, there is one inevitable result—an increased standing army, the soldiers of which are non-producers, and must be fed by the workers.

The surprising growth of Socialism, at the moment, is due largely to the fact that it is the only political party upon an international basis, and also that it frankly ventures its future upon a better industrial organization. These two aspects have had much more to do with its hold in industrial neighborhoods than have its philosophic tenets or the impassioned appeal of its propagandists. The Socialists are making almost the sole attempt to preach a morality sufficiently all-embracing and international to keep pace with even that material internationalism which has standarized the threads of screws and the size of bolts, so that machines may become interchangeable from one country to another. It is the same sort of internationalism which Mazzini preached when distracted Italy was making her desperate struggle for a unified and national life. He issued his remarkable address to her workingmen and solemnly told them that the life of the nation could not be made secure until her patriots were ready to die for human issues. He saw, earlier than most men, that the desire to be at unity with all human beings, to claim the sense of a universal affection is a force not to be ignored. He believed that it might even then be strong enough to devour the flimsy stuff called national honor, glory, and prestige, which incite to war and induce workingmen to trample over each other’s fields and to destroy the results of each other’s labor.

Workingmen dream of an industrialism which shall be the handmaid of a commerce ministering to an increased power of consumption among the producers of the world, binding them together in a genuine internationalism. Existing commerce has long ago reached its international stage, but it has been the result of business aggression and constantly appeals for military defense and for the forcing of new markets. In so far as commerce has rested upon the successful capture of the resources of the workers, it has been a relic of the mediaeval baron issuing forth to seize the merchants’ boats as they passed his castle on the Rhine. It has logically lent itself to warfare, and is, indeed, the modern representative of conquest. As its prototype rested upon slavery and vassalage, so this commerce is founded upon a contempt for the worker and believes that he can live on low wages. It assumes that his legitimate wants are the animal ones comprising merely food and shelter and the cost of replacement. The industrialism of which this commerce is a part, exhibits this same contemptuous attitude, but it is more easily extended to immigrants than to any other sort of workmen because they seem further away from a common standard of life. This attitude toward the immigrant simply illustrates once more that it is around the deeply significant idea of the standard of life that our industrial problems of to-day centre. The desire for a higher standard of living in reality forms the base of all the forward movements of the working class. “The significance of the standard of life lies not so much in the fact that for each of us it is different, as that for all of us it is progressive,”[8] constantly invading new realms. To imagine that for immigrants it is merely a question of tin cups and plates stored in a bunk versus a white cloth and a cottage table, and that all goes well if sewing-machines and cottage-organs reach the first generation of immigrants, and fashionable dressmakers and pianos the second, is of course a most untutored interpretation. Until the standard of life is apprehended in its real significance and made the crux of the immigrant situation, as recent economists are making the power of consumption the test of a nation’s prosperity, we shall continue to ignore the most obvious and natural basis for understanding and mutual citizenship.

Because workmen have been forced to consider this standard of living in regard to immigrants as well as themselves, they have made genuine efforts toward amalgamation. This is perhaps easily explained, for, after all, the man in this country who realizes human equality is not he who repeats the formula of the eighteenth century, but he who has learned that the “idea of equality is an outgrowth of man’s primary relations with nature. Birth, growth, nutrition, reproduction, death, are the great levelers that remind us of the essential equality of human life. It is with the guarantee of equal opportunities to play our parts well in these primary processes that government is chiefly concerned”[9] and not merely with the repression of the vicious, nor with guarding the rights of property. All that devotion of the trades union for the real issues and trials of life could, of course, easily be turned into a passion for self-government and for the development of the national life if we were really democratic from the modern evolutionary standpoint, and held our town-meetings upon the topics of vital concern.

So long, however, as the Government declines to concern itself with these deeper issues involved in the standard of life and the industrial status of thousands of its citizens, we must lose it.

If progress were inaugurated by those members of the community who possess the widest knowledge and superior moral insight, then social amelioration might be brought about without the bungling and mistakes which so distress us all. But, over and over again, salutary changes are projected and carried through by men of even less than the average ethical development, because their positions in life have brought them in contact with the ills of existing arrangements. To quote from John Morley: “In matters of social improvement, the most common reason why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that one happens to be more directly touched than the other by the unimproved practice.”[10] Perhaps this is a sufficient explanation of the fact that untrained workmen are entrusted with the difficult task of industrial amelioration and adjustment, while the rest of the community often seems ignorant of the truth that institutions which do not march with the extension of human needs and relationships are dead, and may easily become a deterrent to social progress. Unless we subordinate class interests and class feeling to a broader conception of social progress, unless we take pains to come in contact with the surging and diverse peoples who make up the nation, we cannot hope to attain a sane social development. We need rigid enforcement of the existing laws, while at the same time, we frankly admit the inadequacy of these laws, and work without stint for progressive regulations better fitted to the newer issues among which our lot is cast; for, unless the growing conscience is successfully embodied in legal enactment, men lose the habit of turning to the law for guidance and redress.

I recall, in illustration of this, an instance which took place fifteen years ago. I had newly come to Chicago, fresh from the country, and had little idea of the social and industrial conditions in which I found myself on Halsted Street, when a dozen girls came from a neighboring factory with a grievance in regard to their wages. The affair could hardly have been called a labor difficulty. The girls had never heard of a trades union, and were totally unaccustomed to acting together. It was more in the nature of a “scrap” between themselves and their foreman. In the effort toward adjustment, there remains vividly in my memory a conversation I had with a leading judge who arbitrated the difficulty. He expressed his belief in the capacity of the common law to meet all legitimate labor difficulties as they arise. He trusted its remarkable adaptability to changing conditions under the decisions of wise and progressive judges. He contended, however, that, in order to adjust it to our industrial affairs, it must be interpreted, not so much in relation to precedents established under a judicial order which belongs to the past, but in reference to that newer sense of justice which this generation is seeking to embody in industrial relations. He foresaw something of the stress and storm of the industrial conflicts which have occurred in Chicago since then, and he expressed the hope that the Bench of Cook County might seize the opportunity, in this new and difficult situation, of dealing with labor difficulties in a judicial spirit.

What a difference it would have made in the history of Chicago during the last fifteen years if more men had been possessed of this temper and wisdom, and had refused to countenance the use of force. If more men had been able to see the situation through a fresher medium; to apprehend that the old legal enactments were too individualistic and narrow; that a difference in degree may make a difference in kind; if they had realized that they were the first generation of American jurists who had to deal with a situation made novel by the fact that it was brought about by the coming together of two millions of people largely on an industrial basis!