Justice and safety to the republic demand that men shall not be born as rulers, nor born as serfs. The serf is the person who is born in poverty, with no right to a standing place, and whom society has left to the education of the street or of the coal mine, growing up without knowledge, without industrial skill—knowing nothing but to sell unskilled labor in a market crowded by a million others like himself or herself, and thus forced into that wretched life seen in all the great cities of America and Europe, the description of which is enough to make us cry out in despair, How long, O Lord, how long? Wherein does this white slavery differ from African slavery, except that the master cares nothing for the slave, is not bound by self-interest to take care of him, and cannot flog him though he can punish him in other ways, and on shipboard he can flog him also, and the horrors of nautical brutality have not even produced a society for its abolition?
Such is the serf, which our democracy allows its citizens to become,—men to whom the right of suffrage sometimes seems a worthless rag which they would gladly sell,—men on whose weak shoulders the republic cannot stand.
To abolish that class, every boy and girl should be guaranteed a solid intellectual and industrial education, making a permanent guarantee against pauperism and serfdom, a permanent guarantee that women shall not be enslaved by lust, but shall be enabled to rear an offspring of manly citizens. These are the most important things that a true nationalism should accomplish at present, and mainly by the gospel of industrial education, which the writer has long been urging with all his power.
Public sentiment has advanced so far on this question, that there will be very little opposition to abolishing the serf by industrial education; out with all our industrial education, our disorganized competition makes employment terribly uncertain, and impoverishes the industrious by enforced idleness, because there is no science, no social system to regulate the demand and supply of labor in different pursuits.
Hence, until we can do better, there must be at all times a vast number of idle men walking about in search of work, losing all their savings in times of enforced idleness, their days of gloom and despair.
They are our brothers, and we cannot say with Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We are our brothers’ keepers, for they are partners in this republic, and brothers in the family of God, and they help to make the social atmosphere in which we live, and they help the republic to sink or swim. We simply cannot afford to deny our brotherhood, and if we do we are the devil’s own fools.
Action on this matter is demanded now as it never was before, for we are advancing blindly to a crisis which our political economists and statesmen have not foreseen, and do not yet recognize. The genius that increases by invention the productive power of labor ought to increase the rewards of labor, but it does not. Labor is demanded only to supply what is consumed; and if at present a million laborers are employed to produce the food, clothing, fuel, furniture, and houses required, but in a few years invention enables half a million to produce the same, what is to become of the half million no longer needed? Will wages advance so that the million may still be employed, working for half a day instead of a day. That would be just, but instead, it produces a glut in the labor market, which by competition puts down wages, and starts a fierce contest between laborers and employers, and among laborers themselves. The fall in prices produced by competition in a crowded market makes the employer unwilling to advance wages, and an angry contest is inevitable. The multitude dislodged by invention is increased by the inevitable multitude arising from irregular demand and supply in fluctuating markets, and thus families by the hundred thousand are driven to the verge of immediate starvation, and this becomes our chronic condition, which must be rectified,—a chronic condition which bears most heavily on woman, and through her debases future generations.
We are bound to see that every honest citizen, male or female, has a fair chance in the battle of life, has a fair preparation at the start, and a fair field. To insure this,—to insure that the productive power of the nation is not wasted,—is a larger question than our statesmen have ever yet considered. It requires that the government shall have a Department of Productive Labor, in which honest men and women, when jostled out of their industrial positions, may enlist.[2] This department should be managed by the ablest and most benevolent business men of the Peter Cooper class, who understand all productive industries, and who, seeing what is permanently and largely needed for human consumption and not abundantly supplied, or what new industries can be started which will benefit the nation, what new productions can be acclimatized, shall take charge of all the laborers who wish to enlist in governmental employ for eight hours a day, with such pay and rations as will be satisfactory and fair; and if rightly managed, not only will their labor pay all costs of the department, but it may be made to teach the country great industrial lessons in agriculture and manufactures, by improvements which scientific combined labor on a large scale may introduce; and if we are anxious to make our country independent in all things, and superior in manufactures, this is the very method in which it can be done, by the instruction in the national establishments, which may be the means of starting all manufactures that we need, far better than the protective tariff which forces an unnatural growth at an enormous cost to the people.
There will then be no tramps, no paupers, no women compelled to sell their persons; and as poverty, gloom, and hardship are the chief sources of intemperance, we may anticipate, as another consequence, an immense diminution of the liquor traffic, when the Department of Productive Labor shall have gotten into full operation. Moral gloom and the bad passions impel men to intemperance, and when they acquire the happy and gentle temperament of woman they will also acquire her temperance.
Mr. Bellamy’s idea of the nation as the employer may not be practicable, but the Department of Productive Labor is an obvious method of initiating the principle of national co-operation, which an urgent necessity has compelled the British government to initiate in Ireland. But we cannot safely wait, like England, until famine is threatening.