Perhaps this seems monstrous; but it really is not—it is a perfectly inevitable consequence of industrial competition, and of the “constantly increasing mass of capital.” Mr. John Jacob Astor, who owns the hotel, has an income of more than its value every year, and he is in desperate straits to find any way of investing it by which he can make profits. There are seven thousand millionaires in this country, who want the best, the only best they know being what costs the most; and so he knew that if he built a hotel exceeding in cost any other hotel in the world, that hotel would pay him profits. For precisely the same reason a number of buildings are now being torn down in Brooklyn to make room for a graveyard for wealthy people’s pet dogs.
The founder of the Astor fortune came to New York a century ago and bought land while it was cheap. Millions of men have since contributed their labour to the building up of New York; and no one of them did anything without adding to the wealth of the Astors—who merely sat by and watched. Now the property of the family is estimated to be worth four hundred and fifty millions of dollars, according to Mr. Burton J. Hendricks’s recent account of it in McClure’s Magazine. It includes half a dozen hotels like the St. Regis; it includes also innumerable slum-tenements with “dark rooms.” Its value grows by leaps and bounds—one corner lot on Fifth Avenue “made” them seven hundred thousand dollars in two years. To Mr. William Waldorf Astor alone the harried and overdriven population of Manhattan Island delivers eight or ten millions of tribute money every year; and Mr. William Waldorf Astor resides at Clieveden, Taplow, Bucks, England—giving as his reason the fact that “America it not a fit place for a gentleman to live in.”
The fundamental characteristic of the régime under which we live is that it values a man only in so far as he is capable of producing wealth. Hence one of the signs of the increasing difficulty of making profits will be an increasing recklessness of human life. Our railroads killed six thousand people in 1895, seven thousand in 1899, eight thousand in 1902, nine thousand in 1903, and ten thousand in 1904; they injured thirty-three thousand in 1895, forty-four thousand in 1899, sixty-four thousand in 1902, seventy-six thousand in 1903, and eighty-four thousand in 1904. According to the statistics of the Interstate Commerce Commission, our railways injured one passenger out of every one hundred and eighty-three thousand passengers they carried in 1894; in 1904 they injured one out of every seventy-eight thousand. If casualties are to continue increasing at the same rate until 1912, there are one hundred thousand people under sentence of sudden death, and a number doomed to be maimed greater than the entire population of the District of Columbia, Delaware, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and the Hawaiian Islands.
In 1890, before the present appalling slaughter began, we were killing, of a given number of employees, twice as many as the State-owned roads of Germany, and three times as many as Austria. The street railroads of New York City alone take one human life every day, or one in ten thousand of the population every year. People walk about the streets carelessly, but tremble when there is a thunderstorm; yet the street-cars kill ten persons in a year for every one that the lightning kills in the lifetime of a man!
These things create indignation in our pulpits and editorial rooms; but any practical railroad man could tell you that to stop them would be to overthrow society. The reason they occur is that it costs less to pay the damages than it would to take proper precautions, and if the railroads were forced to take the precautions, many of them would have to shut down at once. The situation is covered so completely in the following news item, clipped from the Minneapolis Journal of May 26, 1904, that I cannot do better than to quote it entire:
“Because James J. Hill guaranteed eight per cent. to the stockholders of the Burlington when he assumed control of that system, many of the older employees are undergoing what they consider real hardship. Ten days ago the Journal voiced the complaints of Burlington employees on other parts of the system, mentioning the fact that the runs to and from the Twin Cities had been combined in some way, to squeeze more work out of the train crews. The new schedule has now been in effect longer and complaints are correspondingly more emphatic. No dissatisfaction is openly expressed, as the Hill guillotine gets nobody more surely than the man who talks too much.
“Trainmen complain that with the long runs and long hours they are forced to work to a point almost beyond human endurance. They are haunted by the fear of accidents from unpreventable neglect of duty. They hold that the running of trains in safety depends upon the vigilance and alertness of the crews and they cannot do themselves and their employers justice, when compelled to work long hours on fast runs.
“Crews are now running from Minneapolis to Chicago, a distance of about 430 miles, with seventy-two stops. The men start from Minneapolis at 7:30 A. M., and arrive, on locals, in Chicago at 9:35 P. M. The men leaving Chicago on No. 50 at 10:50 P. M. arrive in Minneapolis at 1:20 P. M. the next afternoon.
“Trainmen declare that in making this schedule the management has broken faith and virtually abrogates previous working agreements. Hints of a strike are made. In discussing the conditions an old Burlington employee said:
“‘A conductor and his crew feel a sense of responsibility for the lives of those upon a train. A man can only be worked so far when he becomes actually irresponsible. I hate to feel that I am in any way responsible for the lives of passengers on a train when the length of the run and hours have worked me beyond my limit. There is no flagman on the train, and the brake-man has to help load baggage, brake, flag, and do anything that comes up. He is certainly not in good condition to be an alert flagman on the latter end of the run.’”[[4]]