CHAPTER IV
SOCIAL DECAY
If my analysis of the industrial process be correct, there will be two developments observable in our society: the first a material change, a kind of economic apoplexy, the concentration of wealth in one portion of society, accompanied by an intensification of competition, a falling in the rate of interest, and a steady rise in the cost of living; and second, a spiritual change coincident with the material one, a protest against the rising frenzy of greed, and against the constantly increasing economic pressure.
It is important that these two processes should be clearly perceived, and their relationship correctly understood; for there is no aspect of the whole problem about which there is more bad thinking done. The two are cause and effect, and they explain and prove each other; and yet almost invariably you will hear them cited as contradicting each other. If, for instance, one speaks of the ever-rising tide of misery and suffering in our society, he will be met with the response that “the world is getting better all the time.” And when he asks for some proof of the statement, the reply will be that a great national awakening is going on, that we are developing new ideals and a new public spirit!
Similarly I have, time and again, when advocating this or that concrete remedy, been met with the statement that the cure for the evils of the time is publicity—that the people must be educated—that we must appeal to men’s moral sense, etc. It is useless to argue with a person who cannot perceive that all these things are simply means to an end, and not the end. You cannot educate people just to be educated; when you appeal to them, you have to appeal to them to do something.
One cannot insist too strongly upon the futility of sentiment in connection with this process. We are dealing with facts, with grim and brutal and merciless reality. And it will not avail you to try to smooth it over—it will not do any good to turn your head and refuse to face it. Here is the monster machine of competition, grinding remorselessly on; the wealth of the world is rushing with cyclonic speed into one portion of the social body, and in the other portion whole classes of men and women and children are being swept out of existence, are being wiped off the economic slate. Exactly as capital piles up—at compounded and re-compounded interest—so also piles up the mass of human misery of every conceivable sort—luxury, debauchery and cynicism at the top, prostitution, suicide, insanity, and crime at the bottom. Political corruption spreads further and eats deeper, business practice becomes more impersonal and more ruthless; and all progress awaits the swing of the pendulum, the time when the cumulative pressure of all this mass of misery shall have driven the people to frenzy, and forced them to overturn the system of class exploitation and greed.
I purpose to cite in detail the symptoms of disease and decay in our body politic; before I begin, I wish to put my interpretation of them into one sentence, which a man can carry away with him. I say that the evils of our time are due without exception to one single cause—that our people are being driven, with constantly increasing rigour, to the ultimately hopeless task of paying interest upon a mass of capital which is increasing at compound interest.
Consider in the first place the broader aspect of the situation—the dollar-madness of the time which is the staple theme of the moralist. I have a friend who is in control of a great business concern, and who will read this little book with intense disapproval; and yet so fearfully has this man been driven by the lash of competition that when I saw him last he could scarcely digest a bit of dry bread, and his hand trembled so that he could hardly lift a glass of water to his lips. He talked of his business in his sleep, and he could not go for a walk and forget it for five minutes. And why? Was it money? He has so much that his family could not spend it if they lived a hundred years; but it was his business, it was his life. He was caught in the mill and he could not get out. His is one of those few industries which have not yet formed a trust, and he is in the last gasp of the competitive struggle—he has to plot and plan day and night to get new orders, and to cut down expenses, and to keep up the dividends upon which his reputation rests.
And as it is with him, so it is with the rest of us. We have to play the game; we have to cut our neighbour’s throat, knowing that otherwise our neighbour will cut ours. And year after year the pressure of the whole thing grows more tense. Suicide in the United States has increased from twelve per one hundred thousand of population in the year 1890, to sixteen in the year 1896, and seventeen in the year 1902; in Germany it rose from twenty to nearly twenty-two in the three years between 1900 and 1903; in England it rose from thirty in 1894, to thirty-five in 1904. According to the Civiltà Cattolica the frequency of this crime in Europe has increased four hundred per cent. while population has increased only sixty per cent.; and there have been over one million suicides recorded in the last twenty-five years. There were ninety-two thousand insane persons in the United States in 1880, one hundred and six thousand in 1890, and one hundred and forty-five thousand in 1896. Per one thousand of population, there were twenty-nine prisoners in 1850, sixty-one in 1860, eighty-five in 1870, one hundred and seventeen in 1880, and one hundred and thirty-two in 1890. In 1876 the population of this country consumed eight and sixty-one one-hundredths gallons of liquor per capita; in 1890 they consumed fifteen and fifty-three one-hundredths, and in 1902 they consumed nineteen and forty-eight one-hundredths. The actual consumption at the last date was a billion and a half of gallons. These figures take but a few lines to state; and yet no human imagination can form any conception of the frightful mass of human anguish which they imply. They constitute in themselves a proof of the thesis here advanced, that there is at work in our society some great and fundamental evil force.[[3]]
[3]. “An experienced magistrate, Recorder John W. Goff of New York, told me not long since that in his judgment the course of crime in this country is not only towards more frequency and gravity, but that it is changing its old hot impulsiveness, openness and directness for cold calculation, secretiveness and deliberate intention to strike without being discovered. This progress and difference he attributes mediately and immediately to extending and deepening poverty.” Henry George: “The Menace of Privilege.”
Whenever the administrators of our “constantly increasing mass of capital” find they are no longer making profits, they either reduce wages, or raise the price of their product. One or the other they must do, because without profits the machine cannot run. When good times come they sometimes raise the wages again—because of the unions; but they never lower the price of the product—the poor consumer is a nonunion man. Two years ago Mr. Rockefeller put up the price of oil one cent, and the Beef Trust has done the same about once a year. And of course a general increase in prices is exactly the same as a general cut in wages—in either case the consumer has to work a little harder to make ends meet, and if he cannot work harder, he dies. The coal-miners rejoiced in the award of the Commission, untroubled by the extra fifty cents the coal companies put on the product; but when the miner comes to add up his account with the butcher and the oil man, he finds he is just where he was before. He does not know why, you understand—it is merely that he finds himself compelled to do without something he used to consider a necessity. Dun’s Review, figuring the cost of living in the United States upon a basis of 100, puts it at 72.455 in 1897, and 102.208 in 1904—an increase of forty-one per cent. Bradstreet, reckoning in another way, shows an increase from 6.51 in 1897, to 9.05 in 1904, or thirty-nine per cent. According to the annual report of the Commissary General, United States Army, the cost of feeding the soldiers of the army has increased from eighteen cents in 1898 to thirty-four and six-tenths cents in 1903. Statisticians have figured that the average employee earns ninety dollars a year more than he did twenty years ago, while it costs him to live on the same scale, one hundred and thirty dollars a year more. According to the last United States census the average compensation per wage earner was only three hundred and forty dollars, while the value of the manufactured product was two thousand four hundred and fifty dollars per wage earner. Perhaps no clearer statement of the intensification of exploitation can be found than in the fact that whereas the average profit on the products of all industries was three hundred and seventy-five dollars per wage earner in 1880, in 1900 it had increased to six hundred and twenty-six dollars.