It is becoming increasingly evident that the logical result of state charity, or call it state insurance to avoid controversy, over a large field, and including millions of beneficiaries and claimants, is that the army of officials, the expenses of administration, and the payments themselves must sooner or later break the back of the state morally, politically, and financially. It rapidly increases parasitism among the receivers; makes a powerful though indifferent army of state servants of the distributers; and loses financially to the state far more in expense of administration, and loss of useful labor of the army of civil servants, than it gains by the loss to the state of individual incapacity resulting in pauperism and invalidism, which must be cared for. To put it briefly, it is far more dangerous to the state to tell the individual that he shall be taken care of than to tell him that he must shift for himself. As for the effect upon the individual, it is a lowering medicine, making the patient gradually dependent upon the drug, and bringing him finally to the incurable invalidism of surly apathy. To change Patrick Henry’s fiery peroration slightly: Give me liberty or in the end you give me moral and political death.
Students of the various forms of this modern political nostrum, of getting rid of the fools who are rich by deceiving the fools who are poor, will remember the decree of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in 1848: “This Government undertakes to guarantee the existence of the workman by work. It undertakes to guarantee work to every citizen.” On March 9 public works were started and 3,000 men employed. March 15 saw 14,000 on the pay-rolls, most of them unoccupied because there was no suitable work. Those not working received “inactivity pay” of a franc a day. The end of April saw 100,000 on the pay-rolls. In May a minister ventured to suggest that it was the workman’s duty to work! There were murmurs of disapproval, but the public treasury was nearing bankruptcy, and on June 22 an order was promulgated, that all of these workmen between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five were to enlist in the army. An insurrection followed this order that workmen should work, and 3,000 citizens were shot down in the streets, and another 3,000 were sent to penal colonies in Algeria. The French are a logical people. The state promised suitable work; that always means, from the point of view of the worker, agreeable work, and not too fatiguing at that. Of course, no such thing is possible, and the end was riot, murder, and penal servitude. The state can no more provide suitable and agreeable methods of livelihood for its citizens, than it can provide them with a duty-loving, unenvious, and honest disposition. As I have remarked elsewhere, the only thing that stands between state socialism and the instant solution of all our social problems is human nature! This mongrel demand for an artificial equality, is worse, because more degrading than any tyranny of church or state even. Every man wants superiority and distinction for himself, he only wants equality, invisibility, and inarticulateness for others.
When some such system as this is put to work in Ireland, I shall envy every physician in Ireland, for he will live in a joyous round of farces such as the world has never provided before for the lovers of the humorous. Already Ireland, with only 701,620 electors, out of a total of 8,058,025 in the United Kingdom, is represented in the House of Commons by 103 members out of the total of 670; and out of the 935,000 old-age pensioners on the lists at the beginning of 1912, Ireland had 202,810, and was drawing $12,943,000 out of the total paid of $59,445,500, while the total population of Ireland was 4,368,599, and of the rest of the United Kingdom 40,533,557! Further, as an example of the slight value of education in the game of politics, out of the 41,710 illiterate voters in the United Kingdom, Ireland has 22,515. Long life to Ireland for her gallant attack upon humbuggery with humbuggery! And this is, too, the little island that sent the Wellesleys, the Pallisers, the Moores, the Eyres, the Cootes, the Napiers, the Wolseleys, and Roberts to fight England’s battles, and half the officers and privates who conquered India; which in the Seven Years’ War furnished Austria with her best generals (Brown, Lacy, O’Donnell), and whose exiles, called the “Wild Geese,” flocked to the standard of Washington in 1776. This is proof positive that they are not naturally a parasitic race.
Even in Germany, where there is not a tithe of the impish humour that exists in Ireland, the Socialists have so misused the immense bureaucracy that must carry on the mere clerical work of insurance, that a new law passed the Reichstag in June, 1911, containing several hundred amendments. Employers must now pay one-half instead of one-third of the sickness insurance premiums, which gives them one-half instead of one-third of the management authority.
The management had degenerated into a mere game of politics, with the Socialists in such disproportionate control that they were rapidly turning the insurance machinery into a well-organized body for the exploitation of their own political doctrines; and the employer and the state were helpless. It is, therefore, amusing to the man on the spot to find certain English writers offering as proof of the success of the insurance laws the fact that the Socialists, who once opposed, are now satisfied with them. Of course they are satisfied with them. They have had a war-chest and weapons put into their hands such as they have never had before. Nor have these detailed parchment solutions of social questions done away with all the tramps, poor, sick, and destitute. Over a million persons passed through the municipal night shelters in Berlin during the last year; and there are still admittedly some 5,000 tramps in Germany. The vicious circle is in evidence in Germany as elsewhere. It might be possible to regulate men’s earning power by legislation, but even when this colossal task is done, there must follow the regulation of the spending power to make it complete. What conceivable legislative regulation can efface the difference between what A, B, and C will get out of five dollars once they have them! That is the real problem, but no one proposes a solution of it. A will use his five dollars to make him more powerful, B will use his in dissipation, and C will lose his. How is that to be regulated? And without that regulation you will have rich men and tramps all over again.
In urban and rural districts containing over 10,000 inhabitants, some $40,000,000 was expended for sick and poor relief, and this does not include the hundreds of districts with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants for which there are no figures. Even the wholly admirable Elberfeld system of charity, known all over the world to charity-workers, which is, briefly, investigation of cases by voluntary workers personally and privately, and each dealing with a small number, has not solved the problem. There were 1,537 strikes in Germany in 1909, and 2,109 in 1910. In 1910, 8,269 industrial plants were affected, in which 372,119 persons were employed, and 2,209 plants were obliged to shut down entirely. There were as many as 154,093 persons on strike at the same time. In 1910 there were also 1,121 lock-outs, affecting 10,381 plants and 314,988 persons.
Here again, as in the case of the temperament of the German people, one must look deeper than the average traveller has the time or the necessary experience back of him to do, in order to see and to sift the facts. Scores of travellers have told me: “I have never seen a tramp, a beggar, a drunken man in Germany.” I can only reply that I have seen tramps at large, and colonies of them besides; that I have seen hundreds of the poverty-stricken and diseased; that there are more than thirty drunkards’ homes in Germany; and that between 1879 and 1901 the number of persons under treatment for alcoholism had increased from 12,000 to 65,000, an increase of 500 per cent.; the cases of heart disease and rheumatism increased by 600 per cent.; while the total population had increased 33 per cent. There are 125,000 patients admitted to the public and private lunatic asylums of Germany, and there are accommodations in public and private hospitals for 1,300,000 in-patients passing through them in the year; in 1909, 544,183 persons were tried before the courts of first instance and convicted, of whom 49,697 were between twelve and eighteen years of age; and in the same year there were 183,700 illegitimate births and 14,225 suicides, or 22.3 per 100,000 of the population. The poor law authorities state that the cost to the empire of alcoholism in all its forms of poverty, crime, and disease amounts to some $13,000,000 a year. In 1910 Germany consumed 1,704 million gallons of malt liquors, the United States, 1,851 million gallons; of beer we consumed 20.09 gallons and Germany 26.47 gallons per capita. Germany’s drink bill even ten years ago was $560,000,000 for beer, $140,000,000 for spirits, and $125,000,000 for wine. There is a wine, beer, or spirit dealer in Berlin for every 157 of the inhabitants, men, women, and children. It has always been the avowed policy of autocracies to atone for the lack of political freedom by lax regulations in regard to moral matters. The citizen is imprisoned for insulting the state, but he may insult his own person by dissipation up to any limit, this side of disorderliness in public. Drinking, gambling, and other forms of vice are provided for the citizens of Berlin comfortably and, comparatively speaking, cheaply. Lotteries are sanctioned by all the states, and they use this incentive to the worst form of gambling for all sorts of purposes, from repairing churches to building patriotic monuments, and replenishing the treasury.
This is by no means an attack upon Germany or upon German methods in these matters; probably both in America and in England we are worse off in these respects than are they, but unprejudiced people will agree that it is high time to learn that not even German methods have solved these complicated and heatedly argued questions of social reform. Germany, due to its compactness and well-drilled and subservient population, should succeed if any nation can, for social legislation has never been in stronger or wiser hands or more admirably and honestly administered. In America such opportunities offered to the on-politics-living big and little bosses would lead swiftly to anarchy. We have laws enough now, but the baser politicians protect our city tramps, our gunmen, our decadents, our incendiaries against our elected magistrates, in order that they may keep ready to hand, and increase, the raw material of a purchasable vote, by the domination and protection of which they keep themselves in power. That is the whole secret of our municipal misgovernment wherever it exists, and also the reason for our barbarous crimes. We have a cowed magistracy seeking re-election from the manipulators of the purchasable voters.
The truth is that the Sacculina method of social reform is nowhere a success, certainly not in Germany. The Sacculina is a crustacean. It attaches itself in the form of a simple sac to the crab, into which its blood-vessels extend. It loses its power of locomotion and its limbs disappear. It lives at the expense of the crab; activity is not necessary, and it becomes the highest type of parasite, with no organs except ovaries and blood-vessels. It can propagate, but has lost all power or desire to do anything else. We have succeeded in producing no small number of people of the Sacculina type by playing social and political crab for them, and we are on the way to produce more, until the crab is exhausted and the Sacculina is shaken into the water to sink or swim for himself. “Charity causes half the suffering she relieves, but she can never relieve half the suffering she causes.
Compulsory insurance was tried in the practical and economical Swiss city of Basle and given up, because it was found that each year it was the same small class who reaped the benefit of the insurance. The crab gained nothing and the Sacculina became rapidly impotent. Basle, if I mistake not, will have imitators, inclined to the philosophy of Frederick the Great, who was surely no enemy to rational progress, but who once said: “Depuis bien longtemps je suis convaincu qu’un mal qui reste vaut mieux qu’un bien qui change.”