There is a reason, a perfectly plain and simple reason, which all over the world the working-people, whom it concerns, are coming to understand. The reason is that all the woollen manufactories, the boot and shoe and bread manufactories, and all the sources of the raw materials of these, and all the means of handling and distributing them when they are manufactured, belong to a few private individuals instead of to the community as a whole. And so, instead of the cotton-spinner, the shoe-operative and the bread-maker having free access to them, to work each as long as he pleases, produce as much as he cares to, and exchange his products for as much of the products of other workers as he needs, each one of these workers can only get at the machines by the consent of another man, and then does not get what he produces, but only a small fraction of it, and does not get that except when the owner of the balance can find some one with money enough to buy that balance at a profit to him!
Prof. Hertzka, the Austrian economist, in his “Laws of Social Evolution,” has elaborately investigated the one real question of political economy to-day, the actual labour and time necessary for the creation, under modern conditions, of the necessaries of life for a people. Here are the results for the Austrian people, of twenty-two million:
“It takes 26,250,000 acres of agricultural land, and 7,500,000 of pasturage, for all agricultural products. Then I allowed a house to be built for every family, consisting of five rooms. I found that all industries, agriculture, architecture, building, flour, sugar, coal, iron, machine-building, clothing, and chemical production, need 615,000 labourers employed 11 hours per day, 300 days a year, to satisfy every imaginable want for 22,000,000 inhabitants.
“These 615,000 labourers are only 12.3 per cent. of the population able to do work, excluding women and all persons under 16 or over 50 years of age; all these latter to be considered as not able.
“Should the 5,000,000 able men be engaged in work, instead of 615,000, they need only to work 36.9 days every year to produce everything needed for the support of the population of Austria. But should the 5,000,000 work all the year, say 300 days—which they would probably have to do to keep the supply fresh in every department—each one would only work 1 hour and 22½ minutes per day.
“But to engage to produce all the luxuries, in addition, would take, in round figures, 1,000,000 workers, classed and assorted as above, or only 20 per cent. of all those able, excluding every woman, or every person under 16 or over 50, as before. The 5,000,000 able, strong male members could produce everything imaginable for the whole nation of 22,000,000 in 2 hours and 12 minutes per day, working 300 days a year.”
But then you say: If this be true, if two hours’ work will produce everything, how can everybody go on working twelve hours forever? They can’t; and that is just why I am writing this book. They can do it only until they have filled the needs, first of themselves, then of all the Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux who have money to buy anything—and then until they have filled all the factories, warehouses and stores of the country to overflowing. Then they cannot do one single thing more; then they are out of work. They can go on so long as their masters can find a market in which to sell their product at a profit; then they have to stop. And then suddenly (instantly, God help them!) they have to take their choice between two alternatives—between an Industrial Republic, and a political empire. Either they will hear Prince Kropotkin, or they will hear Mr. Brooks Adams. Either they will take the instruments and means of production and produce for use and not for profit; or else they will forge themselves into an engine of war to be wielded by a military despot. In that case, they will fling themselves upon China and Japan, and seize northern China, “the greatest prize of modern times.” They will enter upon a career of empire, and by the wholesale slaughter of war they will keep down population, while at the same time by the wholesale destruction of war they keep down the surplus of products. So there will be more work for the workers for a time, and more profits for the masters for a time; until what wealth there is in northern China has also been concentrated and possessed, when once more there will begin distress. By that time, however, we shall have an hereditary aristocracy strongly intrenched, and a proletariat degraded beyond recall; so that our riots will end in mere slaughter and waste, and we shall never again see freedom. We shall run then the whole course of the Roman Empire—of frenzied profligacy among the wealthy, and beastly ferocity among the populace: until at last we fall into imbecility, and are overwhelmed by some new, clean race which the strong heart of nature has poured out.
Empires have risen and have fallen; but it has not been, as Mr. Adams asserts, because of “variations of trade routes,” but solely because of wealth-concentration, with its ensuing corruption, ignorance and brutality among the populace, and avarice and luxury among the rich. Let the reader take Froude’s “Cæsar,” and read, in the first chapter, his picture of the last days of the Roman Republic:
“An age in so many ways the counterpart of our own, the blossoming period of the old civilisation, when the intellect was trained to the highest point that it could reach, and on the great subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art, even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material progress and material civilisation; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner-parties, or senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. The highest offices of state were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they were confined, in fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most ready use of the tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had been exchanged for distinctions of wealth. The struggles between plebeians and patricians for equality of privilege were over, and a new division had been formed between the party of property and a party that desired a change in the structure of society. The free cultivators were disappearing from the soil. Italy was being absorbed into vast estates, held by a few favoured families and cultivated by slaves, while the old agricultural population was driven off the land, and was crowded into towns. The rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest, except for its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes was to obtain money without labour, and to spend it in idle enjoyment. Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendancy of the party which would maintain the existing order of things, or would overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good things which alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated in their hearts disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed. Public men spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any serious meaning there was none remaining beyond the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude.”
Is not this a parallel to make one pause and think? And if our American republic is to escape the fate of Rome, to what cause will it be due? The Roman failure was due to the fact that “the men and women by whom the hard work of the world was done were chiefly slaves”; those who held the franchise, the free Roman citizens, were a comparatively small class, and the patricians bought them with “bread and circuses,” and so held the reins of power. In our present time, however, those who do the work and those who have the ballot are the same class; and also they have the public school and the press, and the whole of modern science at their backs. More important yet—the all-dominating fact—is the machine. The Roman chattel-slave worked with his hands, while the modern wage-slave works with tools of gigantic speed and power; which means that our modern economic process, while infinitely more cruel and destructive, makes up for these qualities by the certainty and swiftness with which it rushes to its end. So it is that a Revolution which in Rome took centuries to culminate and fail, will require only decades in America to accomplish its inevitable triumph.