As De Tocqueville says: “Democracy and Socialism are the antipodes of each other. While Democracy extends the sphere of individual independence, Socialism contracts it. Democracy develops a man’s whole manhood; Socialism makes him an agent, an instrument, a cipher. Democracy and Socialism harmonize on one point only—the equality which they introduce. But mark the difference: Democracy seeks equality in liberty, while Socialism seeks it in servitude and constraint.”
CHAPTER V.
The Socialistic Programme—Fighting a Compromise—Opposition to the Eight-hour Movement—The Memorial to Congress—Eight Hours’ Work Enough—The Anarchist Position—An Alarm Editorial—“Capitalists and Wage Slaves”—Parsons’ Ideas—The Anarchists and the Knights of Labor—Powderly’s Warning—Working up a Riot—The Effect of Labor-saving Machinery—Views of Edison and Wells—The Socialistic Demonstration—The Procession of April 25, 1886—How the Arbeiter-Zeitung Helped on the Crisis—The Secret Circular of 1886.
WHILE the Socialists are bent on a revolution in the economic condition of the working class, or, as they choose to term it, the proletariat, they have conclusively shown that they do not desire to further that movement by pacific means. Imbued with the doctrines of violence and intent on the complete destruction of government, they do not seek their end by orderly, legitimate methods. This fact has been most thoroughly established by the extracts from their public declarations which I have already given.
But if any doubts still exist with reference thereto, they are completely dissipated by an examination into the attitude assumed by the Socialists toward the labor problem as it exists at the present day. It is not my purpose to enter into a detailed review of the whole field. I will simply call attention to one fact, and in that fact one sweeps the labor horizon, viewed from the Socialistic standpoint, as the astronomer sweeps the heavens with his telescope, striking the most prominent objects within the range of observation. This one fact is the position of the Socialists toward the eight-hour movement.
It is generally known that many economists and agitators, with neither affiliations nor sympathy for Socialism, have been contending for years that with the rapid increase in labor-saving machinery and the consequent displacement of labor, reduction in the hours of service has become an absolute necessity. The points made in support of this position are numerous, and as the most salient ones appear in a memorial on the part of a National Labor Convention to the Committee on Depression in Labor and Business of the Forty-sixth Congress, drafted November 10, 1879, I may briefly quote a few. The memorial asked a reduction:
1. In the name of political economy. “All political economists are agreed,” they said, “that the standard of wages is determined by the cost of subsistence rather than by the number of hours employed. Wages are recognized as resulting from the necessary cost of living in any given community. The cost of subsistence for an average family determines the rate, and it is for this reason that single men can save more if they will.”
2. In the interest of civilization. “The battle for a reduction of the hours of labor is a struggle for a wider civilization.” With less hours, more leisure is afforded for mental and social improvement. In proof the memorialists appealed to the past and to the fact that one day of rest in seven has raised the social condition of the people. Besides, they urged, the “history of the short-hour movement in England proved conclusively that every reduction of time in the United Kingdom had invariably been followed by an increase of wages,” and the consequent improvement of workingmen.