Social Justice Without Socialism

by John Bates Clark

Of all industrial abuses of the past the cruelest has been the crushing of the life of young children by hard and prolonged labor. We are making headway in removing this evil, but much still remains to be gained; and a vast amount is to be gained by a comprehensive policy for improving the status of working-women.

Social justice demands some effective means of getting legal justice. We have courts, certainly. Do they give the service that we need and, in particular, do they give it to the poor? We do not here impugn the motives of judges. Generally speaking, they are honest; but the whole system of court procedure is hampered by detailed statutes and technical rules, that mean an amount of cost and delay which in itself is the very quintessence of injustice. A citizen is offered a choice between submitting to the wrong inflicted by a fellow-citizen and accepting the wrong inflicted by a dilatory and crushingly costly legal procedure. We probably excel some nations in the rightfulness of the decisions we can get if we live long enough and have money enough to get them; but there are few civilized nations that do not excel us in the rapidity and cheapness of the process. A Chinese student in Columbia University served, during the first year of his residence in New York, as judge of Chinatown, and, by giving up only the Saturday evening of each week to the service, he settled the disputes which arose between Chinese residents. As he was learned in the principles of Confucius, I doubt not he settled them justly, and many a time in that same city I have sighed for his services for native Americans.

The line of division between labor and capital ought not always to be the sharp boundary that it is. Labor should be enabled to acquire a modest share of capital and to invest it securely. Protection for small investments is urgently needed, and would do much to change a proletariat into an independent working-class. This is an essential feature of the social system we wish for and work for. The man who hereafter shall correspond to Longfellow's "village blacksmith" will perhaps be the owner of a hundred shares in some corporation. In agriculture small holdings may always survive; but there may be large ones also, and in that case the farmer of the future may have either five acres and a hoe, or forty acres and a mule, or a hundred and sixty acres and a reaper, or an undivided share in a thousand acres and a traction engine.

If we could carry through even the reforms thus far enumerated, it would make us feel as if we had been lifted from a slough and placed on a plateau abounding in air and sunlight; but if we stopped with this, we should leave much to be desired. There are still more pressing measures to be enacted.

Nearly the greatest evil we are facing is monopoly. This is not the universal view. Though there are few who approve of monopoly, there are those who regard it with toleration and think that, if we accept it and regulate prices under it, we shall fare sufficiently well. As yet, it is in an incipient stage of development and has by no means revealed its full power for evil. If we let it grow freely, we shall find later what it is capable of. Wise measures, adopted even now, will come early enough to prevent it from ever growing to maturity.

With the steel trust, the Standard Oil trust, and other combinations before our eyes, it seems an absurdity to speak of monopolies as being in an incipient stage. Is it possible that anything whatever which these great combinations represent can be nipped in the bud? Are they not already in the fullest flower, and big and mature as they are ever likely to be? The companies themselves, with their vast material plants, certainly are so. What we are talking about, however, is not the mere size of the companies, but the element of monopoly that is in them. Have they such a power that they can safely charge anything they please for their products? Is it as though they were licensed by the Government to be the sole makers and vendors of their special wares? Business men know that this is not the case; and that something puts a check on their action. They can make their prices higher than they should be—higher than it is for the interest of the country to have them; but they cannot make them as high as they would be under a real and secure monopoly. The point I am making is that we can destroy such monopolistic power as they have. We can liberate competition, which has, in the main, afforded reasonable prices, and has also guaranteed that progress which is indispensable for maintaining a human life that is worth living. It is to-day the only means of insuring a constantly increasing power over nature—an ability to turn out, in greater and greater abundance, the things which make life comfortable.

These combinations now possess a power which it is highly perilous to let them keep. They can disable their rivals by foul play, which would be impossible under proper rules of the ring. By securing control of raw materials, by selling goods below cost in the territory where a small rival is operating and keeping up the prices everywhere else, by forcing merchants to boycott independent manufacturers, by getting, in spite of laws and commissions, some advantages from railroads, and by other similar practices, they can drive competitors out of business. Yet every one of these practices can be defined and prohibited, and resorting to any of them can be, if not wholly prevented, at least made so perilous that the practices will become extinct.

It is possible to give to every competitor a fair field and no favor, and, in so doing, to infuse again into the industrial system the life and vigor which competition guarantees. This and only this will insure that progress in production itself which is the sine qua non of future comfort. It may then be expected that inventions will continue, that machines will become more perfect, and that the power of society to pay wages will grow larger. Labor will then be the heir of the centuries, and under proper laws can claim and get its inheritance. If the world crowds itself fuller and fuller of population and progress at the same time stagnates, nothing can prevent an increase of poverty unrelieved by any bright outlook. Technical progress, power to make two blades of grass grow where one grows now, and to do it in the various departments where men labor, is the sole condition of a sound hope for the future of the wage-earner. It will be as necessary under Socialism as under the present system; but under Socialism it will be difficult to get. In so far as it is possible to judge, it depends on the preservation of normal competition in the general economic field.

Leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World have recently announced an intention of forcing the hours of labor downward from ten hours per day to eight, six, and finally, four, while at the same time the pay will be forced up in a more or less corresponding ratio. They have also announced an intention of making capital useless to its owners, by crippling its productive power, and so making it easier to seize it. It goes without saying that a four-hour day and high wages can never come by a war which destroys most of the income to be divided. Make the figures more moderate and allow time enough for it, and it may be made to come by the diametrically opposite plan of making industry more and more fruitful. The ten-hour day succeeded the twelve- or fourteen-hour one of former times in exactly that way.

The division of the social income is of vital importance as well as the general size of it. I have claimed for the regulation of monopoly that it is nearly the greatest of possible reforms. Perhaps the very greatest is a change in the mode of adjusting wages. They are fixed at present in a rough-and-ready way, though not without some reference to what labor produces and what employers can pay, and not, therefore, without the action of a principle which makes, in a powerful way, for justice. Any method, however, which involves many strikes and lockouts, is bad economically and worse morally. The contests are always costly, and they easily run into violent warfare; but underneath all these struggles and the hates and horrors that result, there is working, if we will see it, a law that makes for peace founded on justice. It tends in the direction of a fair division of products between employers and employed, and if it could work entirely without hindrances, would actually give to every laborer substantially what he produces. In the midst of all prevalent abuses this basic law asserts itself like a law of gravitation, and so long as monopoly is excluded and competition is free,—so long as both labor and capital can move without hindrance to the points at which they can create the largest products and get the largest rewards—its action cannot be stopped, while that of the forces that disturb it can be so. In this is the most inspiriting fact for the social reformer. If there are "inspiration points" on the mountain-tops of science, as well as on those of nature, this is one of them, and it is reached whenever a man discovers that in a highly imperfect society the fundamental law makes for justice, that it is impossible to prevent it from working and that it is entirely possible to remove the hindrances it encounters and let it have the first play. Nature is behind the reformer, often unseen, always efficient, and, in the end, resistless. To get a glimpse of what it can do and what man can help it do is to get a vision of the kingdoms of the earth, and the glory of them—a glory that may come from a moral redemption of the economic system. It is a redemption that man and nature can together bring about if only man himself is worthy of this alliance.