I have by no means exhausted the evils of the system under which we live in the brief catalogue I have made for you, my friend. If it were necessary, I could compile an immense volume of authentic evidence to overwhelm you with a sense of the awful failure of our civilization to produce a free, united, healthy, happy and virtuous people, which I conceive to be the goal toward which all good and wise men should aspire. But it is dreary and unpleasant work recounting evil conditions; constantly looking at the sores of society is a morbid and soul-destroying task.
I want you now to consider the cause of industrial misery and social inequality, to ask yourself why these conditions exist. For we can never hope to remove the evils, Jonathan, until we have discovered the underlying causes. How does it happen that some people are thrifty and virtuous and yet miserably poor and that others are thriftless and sinful and yet so rich that their riches weigh them down and make them as miserable as the very poorest? Why, in the name of all that is fair and good, have we got such a stupid, wasteful, unjust and unlovely social system after all the long centuries of human experience and toil? When you can answer these questions, my friend, you will know whither to look for deliverance.
You said in your letter to me the other day, Jonathan, that you thought things were bad because of the wickedness of man's nature. Lots of people believe that. The churches have taught that doctrine for ages, but I do not believe that it is true. It is a doctrine which earnest men who have been baffled in trying to find a satisfactory explanation for the evils have accepted in desperation. It is the doctrine of pessimism, despair and wild unfaith in man. If it were true that things were so bad as they are just because men were wicked and because there never were good men enough to make them better, we should not have any ground for hope for the future.
I propose to try and show you that the wickedness of our poor human nature is not responsible for the terrible social conditions, so that you will not have to depend for your hope of a better society upon the very slender thread of the chance of getting enough good men to make conditions better. Bad conditions make bad lives, Jonathan, and will continue to do so. Instead of depending upon getting good men first to make conditions good, we must make conditions good so that good lives may flourish and grow in them naturally.
You have read a little history, I daresay, and you know that there is no truth in the old cry that "As things are now things always have been and always will be." You know that things are always changing. If George Washington could come back to earth again he would be amazed at the changes which have taken place in the United States. Going further back, Christopher Columbus would not recognize the country he discovered. And if we could go back millions of years and bring to life one of our earliest ancestors, one of the primitive cave-dwellers, and set him down in one of our great cities, the mighty houses, streets railways, telephones, telegraphs, wireless telegraphy, electric vehicles on the streets and the ships out on the river would terrify him far more than an angry tiger would. Can you think how astonished and alarmed such a primitive cave-man would be to be taken into one of your great Pittsburg mills or down into a coal mine?
No. The world has grown, Jonathan. Man has enlarged his kingdom, his power in the universe. Step by step in the evolution of the race, man has wrested from Nature her secrets. He has gone down into the deep caverns and found mineral treasuries there; he has made the angry waves of the ocean bear great, heavy burdens from shore to shore for his benefit; he has harnessed the tides and the winds that blow and caught the lightning currents, making them all his servants. Between the lowest man in the modern tenement and the cave-man there is a greater gulf than ever existed between the beast in the forest and the highest man dwelling in a cave in that far-off period.
Things are not as they are to-day because a group of clever but desperately wicked men came together and invented a scheme of society in which the many must work for the few; in which some must have more than they can use, so that they rot of excess while others have too little and rot of hunger; in which little children must toil in factories so that big strong men may loaf in clubs and dens of vice; in which some women sell themselves body and soul for bread while other women spend the sustenance of thousands upon jewels for pet dogs. No. It was no such fiendish ingenuity which devised the capitalistic system and imposed it upon mankind. It has grown up through the ages, Jonathan, and is still growing. We have grown from savagery and barbarism through various stages to our present commercial system, and the process of growth is still going on. I believe we are growing into Socialism.
There have been many forces urging mankind onward in this long evolution. Religion has played a part. Love of country has played a part. Climate and the nature of the soil have been factors. Man's ever growing curiosity, his desire to know more of the life around him, has had much to do with it. I have put the ideals of religion and patriotism first, Jonathan, because I wanted you to see that they were by no means overlooked or forgotten, but in truth they ought not to be placed first. It is the verdict of all who have made a study of social evolution that, while these factors have exerted an important influence, back of them have been the material economic conditions.
In philosophy this is the basis of a very profound theory upon which many learned volumes have been written. It is generally called "The Materialistic Conception of History," but sometimes it is called "Economic Determinism" or "The Economic Interpretation of History." The first man to set forth the theory in a very clear and connected manner was Karl Marx, upon whose teachings the Socialists of the world have placed a great deal of reliance. I don't expect you to read all the heavy and learned books written upon this subject, for many of them require that a man must be specially trained in philosophy in order to understand them. For the present I shall be quite satisfied if you will read a ten-cent pamphlet called The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and, along with that, the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters of my book, Socialism, about a hundred pages altogether. These will give you a fairly clear notion of the matter. I shall not mention the hard, scientific name of this philosophy again. I don't like big words if little ones will serve.
If you enjoy reading a good story, a novel that is full of romance and adventure, I would advise you to read Before Adam, by Jack London, a Socialist writer. It is a novel, but it is also a work of science. He gives an account of the life of the first men and shows how their whole existence depended upon the crude weapons and tools, sticks picked up in the forests, which they used. They couldn't live differently than they did, because they had no other means of getting a living. How a people make their living determines how they live.