The second factor is the condition of organization and education of the workers. This likewise varies in every country, and in every part of every country. There is a continual struggle on the part of the workers to organize and educate themselves, and a continual effort on the part of the ruling class to prevent this. In some industries in America you find the workers one hundred per cent organized, and in other industries you find them not organized at all. It is obvious that in the former case the social change, when it comes, will be comparatively simple, involving little bloodshed and waste; in the latter case there will be social convulsions, rioting and destruction of property, disorganization of industry and widespread distress.
The third factor is the state of mind of the propertied classes, the amount of resistance they are willing to make to social change. I have done a great deal of pleading with the masters of industry in my country; I have written appeals to Vincent Astor and John D. Rockefeller, to capitalist newspapers and judges and congressmen and presidents. I have been told that this is a waste of my time; that these people cannot learn and will not learn, and that it is foolish to appeal either to their hearts or their understanding. But I perceive that the class struggle is like a fraction; it has a numerator and a denominator, and you can increase the fraction just as well by decreasing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To vary the simile, here are two groups of men engaged in a tug of war, and you can affect the result just as decisively by persuading one group to pull less hard, as by persuading the other group to pull harder.
Picture to yourself two factories. In factory number one the owner is a hard-driving business man, an active spirit in the so-called "open-shop" campaign. He believes in his divine right to manage industry, and he believes also in the gospel of "all that the traffic will bear." He prevents his men from organizing, and employs spies to weed out the radicals and to sow dissensions. When a strike comes, he calls in the police and the strike-breaking agencies, and in every possible way he makes himself hated and feared by his workers. Then some day comes the unemployment crisis, and a wave of revolt sweeping over the country. The workers seize that factory and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat and a "red terror." If the owner resists, they kill him; in any case, they wipe out his interest in the business, and do everything possible to destroy his power over it, even to his very name. They run the business by a shop committee, and you have for that particular factory a Syndicalist, or even Anarchist form of social reconstruction.
Now for factory number two, whose owner is a humane and enlightened man, studying social questions and realizing his responsibility, and the temporary nature of his stewardship. He gives his people the best possible working conditions, he keeps open books and discusses wages and profits with them, he educates the young workers, he meets with their union committees on a basis of free discussion. When the unemployment crisis comes and the wave of revolt sweeps the country, this man and his workers understand one another. He says: "I can no longer pay profits, and so I can no longer keep going under the profit system; but if you are ready to run the plant, I am ready to help you the best I can." Manifestly, this man will continue the president of the corporation, and if he trains his sons wisely, they will keep his place; so, instead of having in that factory a dictatorship and a terror, you will have a constitutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic republic.
CHAPTER LXVI
CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION
(Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they afford to do it, and what will be the price?)
The problem of whether the social revolution shall be violent or peaceable depends in great part upon our answer to the question of confiscation versus compensation. We are now going to consider, first, the abstract rights and wrongs of the question, and, second, the practical aspects of it.
There is a story very popular among single taxers and other advocates of freedom of the land. An English land-owner met a stranger walking on his estate, and rebuked him for trespassing. Said the stranger, "You own this land?" Said the other, "I do." "And how did you get it?" "I inherited it from my father." "And how did your father get it?" "He inherited it from his father." So on for half a dozen more ancestors, until at last the Englishman answered, "He fought for it." Whereupon the stranger took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and said, "I'll fight you for it."
This is all there is to say on the subject of the abstract rights of land titles. There is no title to land which is valid on a historical basis. Everything rests upon fraud and force, continued through endless ages of human history. We in the United States took most of our land from the Indians, and in the process our guiding rule was that the only good Injun was a dead Injun. We first helped the English kings to take large sections of our country from the French and Spanish, and then we took them from the English king by a violent revolution. We purchased our Southwestern states from Mexico, but not until we had taken the precaution of killing some thousands of Mexicans in war, which had the effect of keeping down the purchase price. It would be a simple matter to show that all public franchises are similarly tainted with fraud. Proudhon laid down the principle that "property is theft," and from this principle it is an obvious conclusion that society has the right to scrap all paper titles to wealth, and to start the world's industries over again on the basis of share and share alike.
But stop and consider for a moment. "Property is theft," you say. But go to your corner grocery, and tell the grocer that you deny his title to the sack of prunes which he exhibits in front of his counter. He will tell you that he has paid for them; but you answer that the prunes were raised on stolen land, and shipped to him over a railroad whose franchise was obtained by bribery. Will that convince the grocer? It will not. Neither will it convince the policeman or the judge, nor will it convince the voters of the country. Most people have a deeply rooted conviction that there are rights to property now definitely established and made valid by law. If you have paid taxes on land for a certain period, the land "belongs" to you; and I am sure you might agitate from now to kingdom come without persuading the American people that New Mexico ought to be returned to Mexico, or the western prairies to the Indian tribes.