The Common Sense of Socialism / A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg

by John Spargo

There was a Royal Commission appointed in England some years ago to consider the problem of the Aged Poor and how to deal with it. Of that Royal Commission Lord Aberdare was chairman—and he was a most implacable enemy of Socialism. The Commission reported in 1895: "We are confirmed in our view by the evidence we have received that ... as regards the great bulk of the working classes, during their lives, they are fairly provident, fairly thrifty, fairly industrious and fairly temperate." But they could not add that, as a result of these virtues, they were also fairly well-to-do! The Right Honorable Joseph Chamberlain, another enemy of Socialism, signed with several others a Minority Report, but they agreed "that the imputation that old age pauperism is mainly due to drink, idleness, improvidence, and the like abuses applies to but a very small proportion of the working population."

Very similar was the report of a Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to consider the best means of improving the condition of the "aged and deserving poor." The report read: "Cases are too often found in which poor and aged people, whose conduct and whose whole career has been blameless, industrious and deserving, find themselves from no fault of their own, at the end of a long and meritorious life, with nothing but the workhouse or inadequate outdoor relief as the refuge for their declining years."

And what is true of England in this respect is equally true of America.

Let me repeat here that I am not defending intemperance. I believe with all my heart that we must fight intemperance as a deadly enemy of the working class. I want to see the workers sober; sober enough to think clearly, sober enough to act wisely. Before we can get rid of the evils from which we suffer we must get sober minds, friend Jonathan. That is why the Socialists of Europe are fighting the drink evil; that is why, too, the Prussian Government put a stop to the "Anti-Alcohol" campaign of the workers, led by Dr. Frolich, of Vienna. Dr. Frolich was not advocating Socialism. He was simply appealing to the workers to stop making beasts of themselves, to become sober so that they could think clearly with brains unmuddled by alcohol. And the Prussian Government did not want that: they knew very well that clear thinking and sober judgment would lead the workers to the ballot boxes under Socialist banners.

I care most of all for the suffering of the innocent little ones. When I see that under our present system it is necessary for the mother to leave her baby's cradle to go into a factory, regardless of whether the baby lives or dies when it is fed on nasty and dangerous artificial foods or poor, polluted milk, I am stirred to my soul's depths. When I think of the tens of thousands of little babies that die every year as a result of these conditions I have described; of the millions of children who go to school every day underfed and neglected, and of the little child toilers in shops, factories and mines, as well as upon the farms, though their lot is less tragic than that of the little prisoners of the factories and mines—I cannot find words to express my hatred of the ghoulish system.

I should like you to read, Jonathan, a little pamphlet on Underfed School Children, which costs ten cents, and a bigger book, The Bitter Cry of the Children, which you can get at the public library. I wrote these to lay before thinking men and women some of the terrible evils from which our children suffer. I know that the things written are true. Every line of them was written with the single purpose of telling the truth as I had seen it.

I made the terrible assertions that more than eighty thousand babies are slain by poverty in America each year; that some "2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are the victims of poverty which denies them common necessities, particularly adequate nourishment"; that there were at least 1,750,000 children at work in this country. These statements, and the evidence given in support of them, attracted widespread attention, both in this country and in Europe. They were cited in the U.S. Senate and in Europe parliaments. They were preached about from thousands of pulpits and discussed from a thousand platforms by politicians, social reformers and others.

A committee was formed in New York City to promote the physical welfare of school children. Although one of the first to take the matter up, I was not asked to serve on that committee, on account of the fact, as I was afterwards told, of my being a Socialist. Well, that Committee, composed entirely of non-Socialists, and including some very bitter opponents of Socialism, made an investigation of the health of school children in New York City. They examined, medically, some 1,400 children of various ages, living in different parts of the city and belonging to various social classes. If the results they discovered are common to the whole of the United States, the conditions are in every way worse than I had declared them to be.

If the conditions found by the medical investigators for this committee are representative of the whole of the United States, then we have not less than twelve million school children in the United States suffering from physical defects more or less serious, and not less than 1,248,000 suffering from malnutrition—from insufficient nourishment, generally due to poverty, though not always—to such an extent that they need medical attention.[4]

Do you think a nation with such conditions existing at its very heart ought to be called a civilized nation? I don't. I say that it is a brutalized nation, Jonathan!