But, you say, by my hypothesis the road could not run; how will it be able to run now? The reason it couldn’t run before was that there were no profits; but now it will not be run for profits, but for service, like the Post Office. To help it over its momentary embarrassment, of course, the credit of the government may be needed: but even that is not likely. For exactly the same thing which happens to the Pennsylvania Railroad will be happening to the Steel Trust and the Oil Trust and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust; and all these industries will be starting into activity, and so there will be plenty of freight. With the captains of each of these trusts there will have been secret Presidential conferences, at which these gentlemen will have been told that since they can no longer run their business, they must allow the Government to take possession and run it—the price to be paid for their stock being a matter for future negotiation, and a matter of no great importance to them in any case, because of the income and inheritance tax laws just then being rushed through Congress.
Such will be the Revolution—and the gateway into the Industrial Republic. Precisely as in France we saw that the peasant who was starving because he could not pay his taxes, began to till the land and grow rich without any taxes, so in the midst of universal destitution, it will suddenly be discovered that the farmer who could not sell his grain, and therefore had no hat to wear, may now exchange his grain with the operative in the hat factory who had produced so many hats for his master that he was himself out of a job, and could not get any bread. And all the cotton mills which were shut because we could no longer sell shirts to the Chinamen, will now start merrily to work making shirts for all the shirtless wretches the length and breadth of America. And the shoe operatives of Massachusetts, who were making shoes for the Filipinos, which the poor Filipinos had to be forced at the point of the bayonet to buy, will begin making shoes for their own children, and for the unhappy people of the tenements who were before going barefooted. And the Steel Trust will suddenly leap into action, because those misery-smitten four hundred thousand families in the “dark rooms” of the New York City tenements will now earn money to build themselves decent habitations. And the tens of thousands of little boys and girls who are now being ground up in the glass factories of New Jersey and the cotton mills of Georgia and the coal mines of Pennsylvania, will come out into the sunlight and play, while their parents are building schools to which they can be sent. And the young girl who stands shuddering on the brink of prostitution, working ten hours a day in an East Side sweatshop for a wage of forty cents a week, will receive the full value of her product, and be able to maintain herself by two hours of work a day.
I know what is the attitude of the medical profession towards a “cure-all”; and yet it is but the sober truth that for nearly every evil that troubles our age there is one remedy and only one—the democratisation of our industry. If you were to take a growing boy and rivet an iron band about his chest, there would come sooner or later a time when the boy would show symptoms of distress—and for every symptom there would be but one remedy. Is the boy cross and complaining? Break the band! Is he pale and sickly? Break the band! Does he gasp and cry out? Break the band! Do you not know that in the monarchy of France, in the year 1780, a man who set out to find a remedy for this or that evil of the hour would have found but one remedy for all of them—the overthrowing of the aristocracy? And similarly all the diseases of this period, which are the despair of the moralist and the patriot, are consequences of the fact that our society is gasping in a last desperate agony of effort to maintain its system of competitive industry. We are like a man running on a railroad track pursued by a train. The train is increasing its speed, and do what he will, it gains upon him; he cries out, he gasps for breath, he is agonised, wild with terror, making his last leap with the engine at his very heels—and then suddenly it occurs to him to leap to one side, and so the train flashes by, and he sits down and mops his brow and thinks how very stupid it was of him!
CHAPTER VII
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
And now let us imagine that society has abolished exploitation and the competitive wage-system, and got its breath and found leisure to examine itself under the new régime. How will it find things proceeding?
One of the first objections that you will run up against, if ever you start out to agitate Socialism, is your lack of definiteness. Give us your program, people will say—we want to know what sort of a world you expect to make, and how you are going to make it. And they will grow angry when they find that you have not a cut-and-dried scheme of society in your pocket—that you have stirred them up all to no purpose. And yet that is just what you have to go on doing. There used to be Utopian Socialists—Plato was the first of them and Bellamy was the last—who knew the coming world from its presidents to its chimneysweeps; who could tell you the very colour of its postage-stamps. But nowadays all Socialists are scientific. They say that social changes are the product of the interaction of innumerable forces, and cannot be definitely foretold; they say that the new organism will be the result of the strivings of millions of men, acted upon by various motives, ideals, prejudices and fears. And so they call themselves no longer builders of systems, but preachers of righteousness; their answer to objectors is that I once heard given by Hanford, recent candidate for vice-president on the Socialist ticket, to a lawyer with whom he was debating: “Do you ask for a map of Heaven before you join the Church?”
This much we may say, however. The Industrial Republic will be an industrial government of the people, by the people, for the people. Exactly as political sovereignty is the property of the community, so will it be with industrial sovereignty—that is, capital. It will be administered by elected officials and its equal benefits will be the elemental right of every citizen. The officials may be our presidents and governors and legislatures, or they may be an entirely separate governing body, corresponding to our present directors and presidents of corporations. In countries where the revolution is one of violence they will probably be trade-union committees. The governing power may be chosen separately in each trade and industry, by those who work in it, just as the officials of a party are now chosen by those who vote in it; or they may be appointed, as our postmasters and colonial governors are appointed, by some central authority, perhaps by the President. All of these things are for the collective wisdom of the country to decide when the time comes; meanwhile it is only safe to say that there will be as little change as possible in the business methods of the country—and so little that the man who should come back and look at it from the outside, would not even know that any change had taken place. I have heard a distinguished Republican orator, poking fun at Socialism in a public address, picture women disputing in the public warehouses as to whether each had had her fair share of shoes and fish. In the Industrial Republic the workingman will go to the factory, will work under the direction of his superior officer, and will receive his wages at the end of the week in exactly the same way as to-day. He will spend his money exactly as he spends it to-day—he will go to a store, and if he gets a pair of shoes he will pay for them. The farmer will till his land exactly as he does to-day, and when he takes his grain to market he will be paid for it in money, and will put it in the bank and will draw a check upon it to pay for the suit of clothes he has ordered by express. The only difference in all these various operations will be that the factories will be public property, and the wages the full value of the product, with no deductions for dividends on stock; and that the street cars, the banks and the stores will be public utilities, managed exactly as our post office is managed, charging what the service costs, and making no profits. In the year 1901 the U. S. Steel Corporation paid one hundred and twenty-five million dollars and employed one hundred and twenty-five thousand men; under Socialism the wages of each employee of the U. S. Steel Corporation would therefore be increased one thousand dollars a year, which is two or three hundred per cent. In the same way, the wages of an employee of the Standard Oil Company would be increased four thousand dollars, which is from eight to ten hundred per cent. The fare upon the government-owned street railroads in the City of Berlin is two and a half cents, which would mean that our workingman’s car-fare bill would be cut by fifty per cent. The toll of the government-owned telephone of Sweden is three cents, which would mean that the workingman’s telephone bill would be cut seventy per cent. The elimination of the speculator and the higher piracy of Wall Street would raise the price of the farmer’s grain by fifty per cent.; the elimination of the millers’ trust and the railroad trust would lower the price of bread by an equal sum. The elimination of the tariff on wool, of the sweater and the jobber, the department store and the express trust, would probably lower the price of the farmer’s suit of clothes sixty per cent; the elimination of the sweatshop and the slum might raise it to its original level, while decreasing the farmer’s doctor’s bills correspondingly. Of course I do not mean to say that the gains from the abolition of exploitation will be distributed in exactly the ratios outlined above. They will be distributed so as to equalise the rewards of labour. The point is that there will be a saving at every point—because at every point there is exploitation.
I have sketched in “The Jungle” (Chapter 36) a few of the social savings incidental to the abolition of competition. The reader who cares for a thorough and scientific study of the subject is referred to a recently published book, “The Cost of Competition,” by Sidney A. Reeve. I had never heard of Professor Reeve until his publishers sent me his book. They say that he worked on it for seven years; and when I read it I counted myself that many years to the good, for I had meant to try to do the task myself. Professor Reeve has done it in a way which leaves not a word to be said. It is a marvellous analysis of the whole of our present productive system; and best of all, it is free from the jargon of the schools—it is the work of a man who has kept in touch with actual life, and has moral feeling as well as scientific training.
Professor Reeve analyses, not merely the “economic costs” of competition, but also the “ethical costs,” which after all are the most important. The difference to the workingman will be, not merely that his wages will be several times as great, but that he himself will no longer be a wage-slave, obliged to serve another man for his bread, to cringe and grovel for a a job, to toil all day for another man’s profit, and save up his little hoard and live in dread of the next wage reduction, the next strike, or the next closing down of the factory. He will be a free and independent member of a coöperative State. He will be delivered from the necessity of getting the better of his neighbour, because his neighbour will no longer be able to get the better of him. He will be certain of permanent employment, without possibility of loss or failure of payment—certain that so long as he works he will receive just what he produces, that in case of accident or old age he will be maintained, and that in case of death his children will be cared for and brought up to become coöperative partners in the great Industrial Republic.
