A good deal of modern legislation is due to fatigue, and some of the rest to ill-founded apprehension, that unless there is a change of some kind the masters of the legislators will discharge them, because they do not furnish enough novelties. In the meantime nobody is bold enough to proclaim to the restless ones, seeking ever some new thing, that there is nothing original except what has been forgotten. The originality of such students of history, and panderers to majorities, as the leaders of the discontented in England, Germany and in America, dates back to about the time of the fall of Pericles and the Athenian republic.
The cry of “discontent” has become a fetich among unthinking politicians. We are all, thank God, discontented, and a poor lot we should be if we were not. The workingman’s discontent has been over-emphasized, for the reason that what he demands is material, ponderable, for sale, easy to see, and not far out of the reach of one’s hand. He wants more rooms, more meat, more tobacco, more beer, more leisure. I am glad he does want them, and let me say just once, in answer to my detractors along these lines, that the workingman has no heartier champion than am I. I applaud his discontent just as I cherish my own, for “it is precisely this that keeps us all alive!” It is just because I wish him well that every ounce of my influence and experience are his, to open his eyes to the demagogues who fatten upon him, fool him, rope him, throw him and brand him, as they have done in Germany, as they are attempting to do in England, and as they will shortly begin to do in America. State socialism means slavery for him, with an army of officials living on him. He will be given so much bread, and beer, and meat, and tobacco; so much music, theatre, and literature; and there will grow up an army whose business it will be to keep him in order, and to cut him down if he revolts, as was done by the police in one of the suburbs of Berlin not long ago. The German workman is already so entangled in the ropes of insurance, so harried by petty officials, so branded by the police, and he has permitted to increase such a host of guardians, that revolt or revolution is practically impossible. Counting the army, navy, and officials, there are said to be three million officials, great and small in Germany; and there are fourteen million electors, or, roughly, one policeman to every five adults. And those three million policemen, armed with lethal and legal weapons, are inflexibly and unalterably for no change. Does the workingman ever stop to think that those officials draw salaries amounting to something like $1,200,000,000 a year, and is he still fool enough to think that he does not pay those salaries to these slave-drivers! I have said that the population is well fed, well clothed, and well looked after. Of course they are. No slave-owner so maltreats his slaves that they cannot work for him! But is man fed by bread alone, even in the sugared form of music and theatricals?
If the socialist Pygmalion ever succeeds in bringing his statue to life, how she will scorn him, hate his suffocating environment, wish for the wealth and softness he cannot give, desert him, begging to return to her marble tomb again.
Long life to discontent, say I; but is the workingman such a fool that his eyes are not opened when a man of Bismarck’s way of thinking, when an autocrat like the Emperor have favored state socialism! Does he not see that socialism is the neatest hangman of them all to strangle his discontent! Does he not see the demagogue gradually assuming the features and the powers of the tyrant! Tyranny is not alone the prerogative of an aristocracy. “It is the place of a court to make its servants insignificant. If the people should fall into the same humor, and should choose their servants on the same principles of mere obsequiousness and flexibility, and total vacancy and indifference of opinion in all public matters, then no party of the state will be sound, and it will be vain to think of saving it.” Thus writes Burke, the champion of our American revolt against his own country. The electors, now so flattered by the smooth phrases of their tyrants disguised as liberators, will one day be aghast to find themselves in a veritable house of correction paid for from their own savings. They will have learnt then, at last, that you cannot get rid of the fools who are rich by deceiving the fools who are poor; and corporalism will be found to be a harsher, fussier, a more meddlesome and a more indifferent tyrant than even feudalism.
Even at the Krupp works at Essen, and the various branches elsewhere, where there is the most elaborate combination of Lady Bountiful and successful business anywhere in the world, men are not satisfied. If they are not contented there, then nowhere in this world will the workingman be contented. The Krupp business employs some 70,000 persons. In the particular Essen works, for a hundred years, there has never been a strike, though others of their employees elsewhere have used the strike. Though the Cadburys and Levers and Taylors, in England, the Armours, the United States Steel Corporation, the National Cash Register Company, the Procter and Gamble Company, the General Electric Company, and others in America, and the famous and successful adoption of co-operation in Monsieur Godin’s iron foundry at Guise, in France, have worked along the lines of recognition of their workmen’s right to participate in the profits, there is nothing on such an elaborate scale as at Essen, under the regime of the Krupps.
From 1904 to 1910 the Krupps spent, for beneficial institutions of all kinds, $14,250,000, or 56 per cent. of the dividends during that time. I have passed many hours at Essen, and seen thoroughly, from cellar to attic, this truly noble institution for the comfortable and safe guardianship of men, women, and children who are at the same time factors in a huge and successful industrial enterprise. There are schools, technical schools, hospitals, convalescent homes, a library with 71,000 volumes, theatre, orchestra, band, lectures, concerts, pension and insurance funds, lodgings for bachelors, tenements and dwellings for married people, separate cottages for widows and widowers too old for work, and every opportunity, with a high rate of interest, for saving. There is in existence a co-operative store, as well managed as the co-operative stores at Tuxedo Park, and with much the same system of rebates. There are bathing facilities, gymnasium, a boat club, a system of providing hot meals from a central kitchen, reading-rooms and smoking-rooms. There is invested, not including the value of the land, which has risen enormously in value, over $12,500,000 in houses for the working-people, the return on the money being about 2 3/4 per cent. It would require volumes - indeed, two bulky volumes were issued last year by the company to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Krupp works - to describe merely the machinery for making the people comfortable.
In 1851 the Krupps exhibited at the exposition in London the first cannon made of cast steel; now they turn out more shells and shrapnel in a week than were used at the whole battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa), which lasted from eight o’clock in the morning till four o’clock in the afternoon on July 3, 1866. The queen of this, the greatest factory of destructive agencies in the world, is a gentle Madonna-faced lady who might well pose for a statue of peace, and whose loveliness is a mirror of the countless and untiring benefactions with which the people who work here are surrounded. Both the powers and the people of Germany may well be proud of the Krupps, for if sane beneficence were to be raised to the rank of statehood this great colony would well deserve the honor. The gross profits for the last year were $9,000,000, half of which was written off and the rest devoted to the reserve, to dividends, and to contributions to the invalid and pension funds of the employees, which now amount to $9,500,000. The employees also have on deposit with the management $8,700,000. The contribution of the Krupps to the workmen’s state-insurance fund amounted, in 1910, to $1,320,000. The Krupp family is rich, but what would their wealth have been had they practised the gobbling and juggling financial methods of — ; but I will not pillory my own countrymen by name, for, after all, our political methods have made them, and not they themselves.
The German manufacturer has been at a disadvantage, too, for several reasons, and this may well be noted as one of Germany’s problems. She has not the deposits of coal that have made England rich, nor the wonderful soil of America, from which alone we take $9,000,000,000 every year, nor France’s population, now at a standstill, and which can feed itself off its own soil. She has been a large borrower of capital to finance her enormous expansion of industry and commerce, and, above all, the gold supply of the world, which in the last resort is the foundation of credit, is not in her hands, nor can it be so long as British and American fleets keep the ocean highways over which that gold travels.
The world’s gold output in 1911 was $493,100,000; of this $177,600,000 came from the Transvaal; $100,350,000 from the United States; $63,600,000 from Australia; $42,300,000 from Russia; $23,300,000 from Mexico; $35,600,000 from Rhodesia, India, and Canada; and $15,650,000 from Central and South America, or $458,000,000, of the total output of $493,100,000, from countries which in time of war would be unlikely to ship gold to Germany. More than one half the output comes from the British Empire alone. To those who are satisfied with the easy answer to the reason for the increased cost of living, that the output of gold has increased, it must be puzzling to learn that of the total output, in round numbers, of $500,000,000, $150,000,000 is used in the arts and manufactures and $150,000,000 goes to India, where it is buried and hoarded, and $100,000,000 is retained in the United States for currency and other purposes. In spite of the fact that the gold output of the world doubled between 1890 and 1897, and nearly doubled again between 1897 and 1911, money is dear, and is likely to be so long as present conditions last.
The reason for the higher cost of living is to be found in the movement of the population, from the dulness of the plough to the sprightliness of the cinematograph. This choice every freeman has a right to make for himself, but the trouble arises when the politician comes forward and pays his admission to the cinematograph entertainment, out of the public funds, in order to get his vote. The man who does not leave the plough under those conditions is either a fool or a saint, and the percentage of the growth of cities is a fair measure of their relative numbers. The increased cost of living is the result, not of too much gold, but of too little labor on the land, and this is due, in turn, to the voluptuous rhetoric of the political street-walkers, whose promises of pleasure are as illegitimate as they are impossible of fulfilment. A debtor nation like Germany is highly sensitive to these conditions, and just as she is overcoming, by her splendid success as a manufacturing nation this problem, she is met by increased and ever-increasing rivalry. America, in 1901, exported $466,000,000 of manufactures; in 1891 only $188,000,000; but in 1911, $910,000,000; and in 1912, $1,021,753,918. We now have in America 225,000 manufacturing plants employing 6,000,000 people, with an annual pay-roll of $3,500,000,000 and producing every twelve months $15,000,000,000 worth of goods. The total value of exports and imports of Japan thirty years ago was $30,000,000, or 87 cents per capita; in 1911 the figures were $480,000,000, or $10 per capita. England during the years 1911 and 1912 surpassed all previous figures both for exports and imports. Germany’s rivals, it is thus seen, have not been idle.