And so, once more, Judd, do you see why the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer? Do you see why the index figures of a university professor revealed that the wage-earners of America, taken as a whole, were five per cent poorer today than in 1890? I told you that riches and poverty are not caused by the Will of God, nor yet by any implacable Economic Law, but purely and simply by the actions of men, driven by the basest of all human impulses, which is greed. And here you see, Judd, exactly what these actions are. Every time an ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench issues an injunction which smashes a strike, he is reducing the average real wages of the workers of America; he is taking away a little more from the poor, and handing it to the rich—and that is the job for which the rich set him up in office, and bought him his black silk robe!
LETTER XI
My dear Judd:
I don’t know whether you ever played poker, but I did a few times in my naughty youth. I recall a game known as “freeze-out”; you played till you lost all your money, and the game ended entirely when one man got all the chips. That is our social system—a colossal game of “freeze-out,” with winter and disease and death to clear the players from the board. Those who lose at the game are the workers of the world.
You, Judd, must realize that you are in an unusual position for a worker grown old; you own two lots and three houses, and can live partly on the rent. But how many others are there like that? Consider the statement given out this month by the Industrial Accident Commission of California: “One million men and women of America suffered disabling accidents in industries this year.” Assuming that a workingman puts in forty years, as you have done, what are his chances of getting off without a disabling accident? There being forty-two million people gainfully employed, the chances would appear to be one in twenty; but of course only part of the disabling is permanent—the victims get well, and go back to be disabled again. The number of accidents increased 30 per cent in 1924, so you see your chances grow less and less.
The worst you got, Judd, was a rupture. But suppose you had been one of the 21,232 to be killed; or suppose you were of the 105,629 who suffered “permanent partial disability” last year; or suppose that you had eight or ten children, instead of one or two; or that your wife, instead of dying in an accident as she did, had been crippled, and left upon your hands for life. Do you think you or your heirs would still have the two lots, and the three houses, and the fine American sense of security?
Look, old friend, here are some figures worked out from insurance tables by the National City Bank of New York, the richest bank in the country. They are trying to persuade people to take out insurance, so that the money will come back to Wall Street for them to use in stock gambling. Taking 100 people 25 years old, they ask what will be the position of these same people at the age of 65; and they say 1 will be independent, 4 will be well to do, 5 will be working for a meagre living, 36 will be dead, “many of them for want of attention that money would have secured,” and 54 will be dependent upon others. “Out of the entire 100, only 5 will be in satisfactory circumstances.” There you have a picture of what the richest nation in the world has been able to achieve in the way of sound human happiness!
Our Mother Nature is a wasteful parent, who creates many millions of salmon eggs in order to produce one salmon. It is the same way with human life also in its dark beginnings; history is a tale of mighty empires arising only to be destroyed again, and of populations wiped out by plague and famine and slaughter. But now the light of reason is beginning to dawn; a few of us have the idea that human energies might be rationally guided, and that men might cease to spend their time digging holes in the sand and filling them up again.
Consider war. Women bear children with much pain, and raise them with loving care, and then send them out, at the very prime of their lives, to be blown to pieces by shot and shell. Other men in factories, who might be making the means of human happiness—automobiles and radio sets and books and music—these men are making explosives to wipe out whole cities, and gases to poison the inhabitants. In the late war we destroyed 30,000,000 human beings and $300,000,000,000 worth of treasure, the product of a whole generation of useful toil.