If the wonderful inventions of machinery, as they came along during the last century, could have been regarded as in some sense social possessions, the worst evils attending the factory system of production—starvation wages, exhausting hours, unnecessary monotony, child labor, and all the rest of the wretched list—might have been avoided in the interest of society itself. All this would have come about had human welfare been earlier regarded as a legitimate object of social interest.
But no such ethics had been developed in the beginning of this century. Society regarded machinery as the absolute possession of the man who owned it at the moment it became a finished product, quite irrespective of the long line of inventors and workmen who represented its gradual growth and development. Society was, therefore, destined to all the maladjustment which this century has encountered. Is it the militant spirit once more as over against the newer humanitarianism? The possessor of the machine, like the possessor of arms who preceded him, regards it as a legitimate weapon for exploitation, as the former held his sword.
One of the exhibits in the Paris Exposition of 1900 presented a contrast between a mediaeval drawing of a castle towering above the hamlets of its protected serfs, and a modern photograph of the same hill covered with a huge factory which overlooked the villages of its dependent workmen. The two pictures of the same hill and of the same plain bore more than a geographic resemblance. This suggestion of modern exploitation would be impossible had we learned the first lessons which an enlarged industrialism might teach us. Class and group divisions with their divergent moralities become most dangerous when their members believe that the inferior group or class cannot be appealed to by reason and fair dealing, but must be treated upon a lower plane. Terrorism is considered necessary and legitimate that they may be inhibited by fear from committing certain acts. So far as employers exhibit this spirit toward workmen, or trades unionists toward non-unionists, they inevitably revert to the use of brute force—to the methods of warfare.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Organized Labor, John Mitchell. Preface.
CHAPTER VI
PROTECTION OF CHILDREN FOR INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY
In the previous chapters it was stated that the United States, compared to the most advanced European nations, is deficient in protective legislation. This, as has been said, is the result of the emphasis placed upon personal liberty at the date of the first constitutional conventions and of the inherited belief in America that government is of necessity oppressive, and its functions not to be lightly extended.
It is also possible that this protection of the humblest citizen has been pushed forward in those countries of a homogeneous population more rapidly than in America, because of that unconscious attitude of contempt which the nationality at the moment representing economic success always takes toward the weaker and less capable. There is no doubt that we all despise our immigrants a little because of their economic standing. The newly arrived immigrant goes very largely into unskilled work; he builds the railroads, digs the sewers, he does the sort of labor the English-speaking American soon gets rid of; and then, because he is in this lowest economic class, he falls into need, and we complain that in America the immigrant makes the largest claim upon charitable funds. Yet in England, where immigration has counted for very little; in Germany, where it has counted almost not at all, we find the same claim made upon the public funds by people who do the same unskilled work, who are paid the same irregular and low wages. In Germany, where this matter is approached, not from the charitable, but from the patriotic side, there is a tremendous code of legislation for the protection of the men who hold to life by the most uncertain economic tenure. In England there exists an elaborated code of labor laws, protecting the laborer at all times from accidents, in ways unknown in America. Here we have only the beginning of all that legislation, partly because we have not yet broken through the belief that the man who does this casual work is not yet quite one of ourselves. We do not consider him entitled to the protective legislation which is secured for him in other countries where he is quite simply a fellow-citizen, humble it may be, but still bound to the governing class by ties of blood and homogeneity.
Our moral attitude toward one group in the community is a determining factor of our moral attitude toward other groups, and this relation of kindly contempt, of charitable rather than democratic obligation, may lend some explanation to the fact that the United States, as a nation, is sadly in arrears in the legislation designed for the protection of children. In the Southern States, where a contemptuous attitude towards a weaker people has had the most marked effect upon public feeling, we have not only the largest number of unprotected working children, but the largest number of illiterate children as well. There are, in the United States, according to the latest census[12] 580,000 children between the ages of ten and fourteen years, who cannot read nor write. They are not the immigrant children. They are our own native-born children. Of these 570,000 are in the Southern States and ten thousand of them are scattered over the rest of the Republic.
The same thing is true of our children at work. We have two millions of them, according to the census of 1900—children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their own livings.