“So you think that the present system is absolutely wrong?” I queried.
“Can you entertain any doubts?” answered Forest. “Look around! Is the leading principle in creation equality or variety? You find sometimes similitude but never conformity. Botanists have carefully compared thousands of leaves, which looked exactly alike at the first glance, but which after close examination were found to possess striking dissimilarities. Inequality is the law of nature and the attempt to establish equality is therefore unnatural and absurd. Where-ever such experiments have been made, they have ended in unqualified failure. Even some of the first Christians, moved by brotherly love and charity, failed in their efforts to establish communism permanently. And the lamented Procrustes used two bedsteads in which he placed his victims. He could not get along with one size for everybody. We may just as well try to make every man six feet long, forty-two inches around his chest, with a Grecian nose, blue eyes, light hair and a lyric tenor voice, as to attempt to equalize all lives and reduce them to a communistic state.—Now consider, in connection with the difference in the mental and physical powers of men, their different inclinations and tastes, the variety of their occupations, and then say, whether the establishment of society on the basis of communism, of absolute equality, is possible.”
“If I have formed a just appreciation of the organization of your society, you have recognized the right of all men to a living by giving everybody an equal share of the products of labor”, I objected; “but at the same time you give everybody the chance to select the profession or trade most to his taste and you have graded the men, belonging to a guild, thus inciting the ambition of the worker, to reach a higher grade, and creating a diversity of positions, adapted to that dissimilarity of men, you were just speaking of”.
“Yes”, said Forest, “we first established the principle of equality and then proceeded to arrange our system upon a basis of inequality, thus avoiding an open avowal that the new organization of society was a failure in both theory and practice. The question before us is a very plain one: “Are we all alike”? If we are, then communism is the proper form of society and everybody should have an equal share of the products of labor. If we are not alike, if we differ in mental power and in physical ability, if the results of the labor of men are different, then there is no reason, why the wealth of the nation should be equally divided. But we first proclaim equality and pretend that we divide the products of labor equally among all;—and then we divide the “workers into first, second and third grades, according to ability, and these grades are subdivided into first and second classes.”[6] Here we see the workers subdivided into six classes for the reason, expressly stated, that their ability differs. That their diligence also differs is not admitted, but it is nevertheless the fact. The inequality of men is thus distinctly recognized, but the products of labor are equally divided in the name of equality! Now, everybody has a natural right to the products of his activity, but we are taking a large share of the results of the labor of a clever worker of class A of the first grade to give it to a lazy fellow of class B of the third grade. This is downright robbery, not even hidden beneath the shabby cloak of the leading principle governing all the acts of the administration; and all those who can not admire this stealing, are denounced as enemies of the best organization of society, ever known in the history of mankind”.
[6] Page 125.
“You are to a certain extent an admirer of the civilization of the nineteenth century”, I answered; “and yet in our times the employers were accused by some of the labor agitators of “stealing” a large amount of the products of work by reaping very large profits and paying small wages. I would rather favor an equal division of all properties than a system, by which a comparatively small number of employers can enrich themselves at the expense of the masses of the laboring people.”
“I am not an admirer of the civilization of the nineteenth century, Mr. West,” Forest exclaimed. “I simply maintain, that the principles of competition under which society worked a hundred years ago was far superior to the communism, under which we are laboring. The unjust profits of the employers, of which you complain, could have been easily done away with, if your workmen had organized themselves into co-partnerships or associations. There was no law a hundred years ago to prevent a dozen shoemakers renting a loft with steam power, purchasing a few sewing and other machines and making boots and shoes at their own risk. There was no law to prevent all the other workingmen buying their boots and shoes at the shop of the co-operative association, thus securing for the members of the latter the profits of the manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer and workman. The laborers of all the different trades had a perfect right to organize such co-operative societies and thus secure all the profit that was in their labor. If the workmen preferred not to make use of this chance, if they did not care to assume the cares and risks of conducting a business for themselves, if they would rather work for an employer, leaving the cares and risks of the managements entirely to him, they had certainly no reason to complain of the profit of the employer. And if they were not satisfied with their treatment they could at any time seek other employment;—a thing that the workmen of our days can not do, for there is only one employer, the national administration.—The principle, that a man has a right to what he produces, was not questioned under your form of production. But we have in the name of equality and justice established the “right” to rob an industrious man of a part of the product of his labor and give this booty to his lazy comrade. If the workingmen of the nineteenth century, instead of sacrificing enormous sums in strikes, had organized one trade after another into co-operative associations, they would have solved what they styled the social questions with comparatively little trouble. And they would have saved us from the present outrageous form of society.”
“The strikes were an effect merely of the concentration of capital in greater masses, than had ever been known before”, I said, repeating the views of Dr. Leete on this question. “Before this concentration began ... the individual workman was relatively important and independent in his relations to his employers. Moreover, when a little capital or a new idea was enough to start a man in business for himself, workingmen were constantly becoming employers and there was no hard or fast line between the two classes. Labor unions were needless then and general strikes out of the question”.[7]
[7] Page 52.