But then, you say, we can’t help that. What can we do? Is the only thing you can think of to do, to build battleships and get ready for the strife? How differently our fathers did it, in the old days when the Monroe Doctrine was really what it pretends to be—a pledge of freedom to men! How the impulses that started in this land thrilled through the civilised world and made the “despots of Europe” tremble! What messages of brotherhood flashed upon invisible wires from continent to continent, bearing hope and comfort to all the oppressed of mankind! How we welcomed Lafayette, as if he had been an emperor! How the whole nation turned out in honour of Kossuth, making his long journey one triumphal procession! And are we doing anything like that now?
The people of Germany, you must understand, are closed in a death grip with all these powers of infamy. In spite of obloquy and contempt, in spite of lies and blandishments and menaces, in spite of persecution and exile and imprisonment, for a generation they have been toiling—devoted, heroic men and women have given their labour and their lives to the task of teaching, writing, speaking, exhorting, to open the eyes of the masses to the truth. And step by step they have marched on, gathering force every hour, strengthened by each new persecution, training themselves in literary and political combat, building up a system of scientific thought which has never been refuted and never can be, inspired by a moral purpose as noble as any the world has ever seen—preparing in all ways for the glorious hour when the people of the Fatherland are to come to their own! The man at their head was once a poor working boy, a wheelwright, and he has raised himself to the leadership of the mightiest effort after freedom that the world now sees; and day by day in the Reichstag he leads the opposition to militarism and savagery, and his speeches are such as a century ago, and even half a century ago, would have set this land aflame from end to end with revolutionary fervour. And this is no isolated movement of a nation, it is a world movement—it is a movement to which the lovers of liberty all over the earth are welcomed as comrades and brothers. It is a movement at one with every high tradition of American life; and you—what is your attitude to it? What do you know about it—what do you care about it? Do you hold public meetings and send messages of sympathy? Do the halls of Congress ring with fervid speeches, as they did in the days of Webster and Henry Clay? Do your papers teem with glowing editorials, with news about the movement, and sketches of its leaders? What have you to say about it, what have you to do for it—but to repeat day in and day out one miserable, pitiful lie, with which you try to blind and deceive the masses of your own country, that this tremendous Socialist movement is not really a Socialist movement at all, but only a movement of political reform!
I do not think that we shall sleep forever; I do not think that the memories of Jefferson and Lincoln will call to us in vain forever; but assuredly there never was in all American history a sign of torpor so deep, of degeneration so frightful, as this fact that in such a crisis, when the downtrodden millions of the German Empire are struggling to free themselves from the tyranny of military and personal government, there should come to them not one breath of sympathy from the people of the American Republic! And all our interest, all our attention, is for that strutting turkeycock, the war-lord whose mailed fist holds them down! That monstrous creature, with his insane egotism, his blustering and his swaggering, his curled mustachios and military poses! An epileptic degenerate, who spends his whole life in cringing terror of hereditary insanity: whose spies and police agents are invading the homes of German Socialists, searching for letters in behalf of the agents of the Czar, obtaining evidence to send men in Russia to exile and death! This ruler of his people, who the other day cashiered a near relative, an army officer who had advised soldiers to complain when they were maltreated! whose generals and admirals are swaggering about and spitting in the face of civilisation—and making maps and plans for a naval station in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine!
Forty years ago, at the time of our Civil War, when the fate of this nation hung trembling in the balance, when the Emperor of France and the aristocracy of England saw a chance to cripple republican government and to set back civilisation half a century—what was it then that prevented them? What was it but the fact that in England there existed an organised opposition, alert and watchful, trained by a generation of parliamentary conflict, and with leaders who in such a crisis could not be put down? What was it but the fact that the workers of the factory towns of Great Britain had been disciplined and taught, and could not be deceived—that they chose rather to starve than to help the cause of Slavery? And if you care to see what would have happened had not that opposition been ready, go back three- or four-score years, when the people of France struck their blow for liberty, and see the leaders of the British aristocracy crushing out protest and imprisoning objectors, and hurling the nation into a criminal and causeless war! Hear the king and the nobility, statesmen and authors, newspapers and pulpits screaming in frenzy and goading the people on, till they had desolated Europe with fifteen years of hideous slaughter, from the moral and spiritual effects of which the world has not yet recovered!
And now you stand and contemplate another such crime against civilisation. The two most enlightened peoples of the world are to come together and strip for a fight. The powers that rule in each of them made up their minds years ago, and among the officers, both in the army and in the navy of each, the coming conflict is taken for granted. Two or three years ago a German officer promised that an army corps would march from one end of this continent to the other; and an admiral in our own navy has publicly foretold the struggle. The German capitalists are in desperation for new markets, and the German people are on the edge of a revolt, with an irresponsible military despot in absolute control of them, who knows that his only chance to put off the revolution is to pick a quarrel and beat the war-drum, and summon the masses to the defence of the honour of the Fatherland. When that supreme hour comes, and when the war-lust begins to burn, upon the Social-Democratic Party of Germany will fall the task of saving civilisation; and what shall we have done to help them—what encouragement shall we have sent them? We have sent ships of grain to the cotton-operatives of Lancashire when they were starving; but what have we done for the people of Germany? What reason have we given them, with our tariffs and imperialisms, to think of us otherwise than as a nation of shopkeepers, a nation sunk in greed and commercialism, and dead to every noble impulse of men?
CHAPTER III
MARKETS AND MISERY
I gave in the first chapter a brief outline of my view of the process of wealth-concentration. It is now time to consider the present status of affairs, and determine if we can exactly how near to completion our industrial machinery has come. Because of the vital part which the question of foreign markets has played and must play in our affairs, it is necessary that this inquiry should include a careful survey of conditions in the rest of the world.
The manufactures of the United States have grown from one hundred and ninety-eight million dollars in 1810, to five billion in 1890, and thirteen billion in 1900. Our exports to foreign countries increased from sixty-six million dollars in 1810 to eight hundred and fifty-six million in 1890, and a billion and half in 1905. Of course, if we could find unlimited markets abroad we might go on for half a century, or at least until our people grew tired of doing hard work for the rest of the world, and getting in return either bad debts, or else money to be used in building new machines to do more work of the same sort. But this is not the case, as it happens; there are half a dozen nations that have been building up industrial machines of their own, and have completed them; the meaning of the Socialist movements of England and Germany and France and Belgium and Italy is simply that all these nations are now able to manufacture more than their own people are able to buy, under the old deadly combination of a monopoly price and a competitive wage. And so when we go over to Europe to look for markets, we meet people who are coming over to look for markets among us; and when in our desperation we begin to sell out at any cost, the German capitalist cries out in protest, and the German workingmen are thrown on the streets, and the German Socialists increase their vote. And when the German capitalist retaliates and sells out at cost, our capitalists are checked, and our mills are stopped—and our Socialist vote goes up.
Look at the figures. England was the first in the field. The output of coal of Great Britain was one hundred and fifty million dollars in 1810; it was six hundred and sixty-five million dollars in 1878; in the same period the exports of manufactures rose from two hundred and thirty million dollars to one billion dollars. All that while, of course, England ruled the sea and had things her own way. In 1820 the value of all her manufactures was about seven billion dollars—equal to that of Germany and Austria combined, or to France and the United States combined, or to all the rest of the world, excluding these four nations. But then, little by little, the others began to catch up with her: in 1880, instead of manufacturing one-fourth of the world’s products, Great Britain manufactured one-fifth, and in 1894 she manufactured less than one-sixth. Between the years 1894 and 1902, British exports increased only thirteen per cent., while those of France increased sixteen per cent., those of Germany thirty-nine per cent., and those of the United States sixty-six per cent. The result was that a few years ago tens and hundreds of thousands of starving men were parading the streets of London, and all England was startled by Mr. Chamberlain’s announcement that the last hope of England was a tariff which would reserve for her the trade of the colonies! Of course England could not have made money by a tariff unless her colonies had consented to lose money; and the colonies were not planning to lose money—they were counting on making some by England’s tax on food. So the plan simply reduced itself to an invitation to the British workingman to pay more for his bread so that he could get starvation wages for doing the manufacturing of Canada and Australia and India. Is it any wonder that the reply to the proposal should have been an independent labour vote which sent a thrill of alarm through the nation?
And meanwhile Canada and Australia and India are straining every nerve to build up manufactures of their own! “No person connected with the cotton industry can be ignorant of the progress of cotton manufactures in India,” wrote the Textile Recorder in 1888. “Indian cotton piece-goods are coming to the front and displacing those of Manchester.” The Bombay Factory Commission of the same year recorded in Parliament how this was being done. “The factory engines are at work as a rule from 5:00 A. M. to 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00 P. M. In busy times it happens that the same set of workers remain at the gins and presses night and day, with half an hour’s rest in the evenings.” And, like India, Canada also puts duties on British goods to protect her own growing industries!