[4]. “In the matter of rigging the stock-market the American railroad manager has no superior. In the matter of providing safe and expeditious facilities for transportation he has no inferior in any nation of the first rank. He can manipulate political conventions. He can debauch legislatures. He can send his paid attorneys to Congress and sometimes put them on the bench. In these matters he is a master, just as he is a master in the art of issuing and juggling securities. It is only in the operation of railroads that he is deficient. The mere detail of transporting lives and property safely and satisfactorily he seems to regard as unworthy of his genius. His equipment is usually inadequate. His road-bed is generally second class or worse. His employees are undisciplined and his system is archaic. Whatever the causes may be, the fact remains that, judged by the results of operation, the American railroad manager is incompetent, and the records of death and disaster prove it.”—New York World.
In the same way it is cheaper for a theatre-manager to bribe police officials with free tickets than to comply with the regulations of the Fire Department; and so it is that five or six hundred people are burned up in five minutes. It is easier to bribe a building inspector than it is to put steel rivets in a building, and so you have a Darlington Hotel collapse, and kill ten or twenty workingmen. And a few weeks later came the Slocum disaster, and a helpless steamboat captain was punished, and the responsible capitalists not even named. At the same time, in Trenton, New Jersey, some other capitalists were arrested for making life-preservers with iron bars in them. Of course they were not punished, for everyone understands that such things cannot be helped. In 1893 the number of miners killed in the United States and Canada was two and fifty-three hundredths per thousand; in 1902 it was three and fifty-one hundredths. Better precautions against accidents were one of the demands for making which the miners of Colorado were strung up to telegraph poles, shut in bull-pens, beaten and “deported.” Their mortality was thirty-two per thousand in ten years; the mortality among railroad brake-men is now thirty-two per thousand in two years, so it was very unreasonable of the miners to complain.
There are annually, says Social Service, 344,900 accidents among the 7,086,000 people engaged in this country in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits. It calculates that if the percentage of accidents among the other 23,000,000 employed in other occupations is only one-tenth as much as the above, it means that another 100,000 must be added to the list. “This is perpetual war on humanity,” the paper goes on to say, “and more bloody than any civil or international war known to history. This war is costing suffering, physical and mental, which is beyond calculation. It is costing great economic loss. It is creating a sense of wrong and a feeling of class-hatred on the part of those who are its victims.”
In the same category of waste of human life belong all the facts of over-driving, long hours, and irregular employment among workingmen. Under the old Southern system of slavery the master took care of his servant the year round; but the wage-slave is kept only while he is needed, and only while he remains at his maximum of working efficiency. Recently in a single month, I clipped from a New York newspaper, items to the effect that the Brooklyn street-railroad combine was discharging all of its superannuated employees; that the master-pilots of the Great Lakes had agreed to engage no man over forty; that the Delaware and Hudson Railroad Company had just published a rule barring all over thirty-five; and that the Carnegie Steel Company had done the same.
And in this same category of waste of human life belong all the facts of woman and child-labour. For of course the children die; and the women produce deformed and idiot and degenerate offspring, to fill our asylums and prisons. The reader is referred, for first-hand accounts of the life of the American woman wage-slave, to Van Vorst’s “The Woman who Toils,” and to that fascinating human document, “The Long Day.” In Mr. John Spargo’s “The Bitter Cry of the Children,” he will find a mass of facts about child-labour, the most hideous of all the evils incidental to the process of wealth-concentration.
There is, if one had only time to point it out, no tiniest nook of our society where human lives are not being ground up for profit; the capitalists are ground up, as Mr. Schwab was, and the meanest woman of the town shares his fate. There was a time when a prostitute was an independent person, who could support herself until she grew old; nowadays, under the stress of competition, every city has its prostitution trust. It takes capital to pay the police, and the business is therefore in the hands of the proprietors of houses, who buy young girls out of the slums and immigrant population by thousands and tens of thousands, use them up in a year or two, and then fling them out into the gutters to die, often when they are not out of their teens. In the same way the gambler and the saloon-keeper are now as much employees as are the officials of the Standard Oil Company: the whole profits of these occupations flowing into the hands of some “captain of industry” as inevitably as all the rills on the mountain-side flow into the river. All of these facts are perfectly familiar, but for the sake of concreteness, I will quote a paragraph from Mr. Steffens’s book, “The Shame of the Cities.” He is telling of the city of Pittsburg:
“The vice-graft ... is a legitimate business, conducted, not by the police, but in an orderly fashion by syndicates, and the chairman of one of the parties at the last election, said it was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. I saw a man who was laughed at for offering seventeen thousand five hundred dollars for the slot-machine concession; he was told that it was let for much more. ‘Speakeasies’ (unlicensed drinking places) pay so well that when they earn five hundred dollars or more in twenty-four hours their proprietors often make a bare living. Disorderly houses are managed by ward syndicates. Permission is had from the syndicate real-estate agent, who alone can rent them. The syndicate hires a house from the owners at, say, thirty-five dollars a month, and he lets it to a woman at from thirty-five to fifty dollars a week. For furniture, the tenant must go to the ‘official furniture-man,’ who delivers one thousand dollars worth of ‘fixings’ for a note for three thousand dollars, on which high interest must be paid. For beer the tenant must go to the ‘official bottler,’ and pay two dollars for a one-dollar case of beer; for wines and liquors to the ‘official liquor-commissioner,’ who charges ten dollars for five dollars’ worth; for clothes to the ‘official wrapper-maker.’ These women may not buy shoes, hats, jewellery, or any other luxury or necessity except from the official concessionaries, and then only at the official, monopoly prices.”
And by way of conclusion, in reference to this particular aspect of the consequences of the “increasing mass of capital,” let me quote the following little incident, which a friend of mine clipped from one of the New York newspapers:
“One night a young girl called at the entrance to the House of the Good Shepherd in New York City; she asked for food and a place to sleep. ’Twas a pitiful tale she told the matron in charge. She told of her parents having died and left her alone in the great dark city; she told of jobs she had secured but was discharged owing to her physical inability to keep pace with the machine, and as a last resort she appealed to this institution for succour and support. The matron in attendance, after having heard this terrible tale of woe and being thoroughly convinced as to the girl’s honesty and integrity, as well as to her virtue, informed her that she could not take her in there, as that institution was established for the reclamation of fallen women only. The poor girl went away, but on the following night she returned.... ‘You may take me now,’ she said, ‘you may take me now, for I am a fallen woman!’”