We have seen that in accumulated wealth, the city of New York increased by nearly half a billion dollars in the past ten years. A fair share of this material wealth was doubtless derived from the application of electricity to human uses, for that was pre-eminently the decade of electricity.
Yet, even in this respect the metropolis failed to hold its own. For, while the substitution of electricity for horse power has gone rapidly forward in the small cities of the West and South, New York has suffered an extension of its slow, filthy, and pest-breeding horse-car transportation. There can be little doubt that the unspeakable state of the streets contributed largely to the deadliness of the epidemic which raged at the close of 1889.
Nor was the electric lighting of New York more successfully developed than the use of electricity for transportation. The last night of the ten years found the city buried in stygian gloom, because the duty of lighting its streets is still a matter of private profit; and the insolent corporation which fattens upon this franchise surrendered the privilege of murdering its linemen unpunished, only when its poles were cut and its wires torn down. A more classic application of the Vanderbilt motto in action it would be hard to find, or a more thorough demonstration of the inadequacy of capitalism to rule the genii itself has summoned. Characteristic of the low plane of humane feeling in State and city is the substitution of the electrician for the hangman in judicial murder, at a time when the effort is general upon the Eastern Continent to abolish capital punishment.
As the application of electricity rose pre-eminently characteristic of the past decade among the uses of science, so architecture towered above all other arts. Yet, for one problem solved after the magnificent fashion of the Brooklyn bridge and the Dacotahs, hundreds of plans were devised with delicate ingenuity for filling up with bricks and mortar the small remaining air space in the rear of tenement blocks. And this noblest and most humane of all the arts was degraded in the service of millionnaire land-owners and sub-letting agents until the problem of to-day is, how to kennel the greatest mass of human beings upon the least area with smallest allowance of air, and light, and water, without infringing the building laws. One of the simplest solutions is superimposing floor upon floor, so compelling tired women and puny children to mount narrow, dark, and gloomy stairs, and increasing to its maximum the danger of fire. The Egyptian pyramids and the catacombs of Rome centuries ago were not poorer in healthful light and air than were these homes of our fellow-citizens in our own decade of retrogression.
But does this mean that our civilization is a failure, and the prime of life past for the Republic? Far from it. It means, I take it, that capitalism has done its work, and has become a hindrance, that the old industrial and social forms are inadequate to the new requirements and must be remodelled, and that promptly. It is now nearly half a century since Karl Marx wrote the following words, but they apply to the New York of to-day, as though he were among us and suffering with us:—
“It is the sad side which produces the movement that makes history by engendering struggle…. From day to day it becomes more clear that the conditions of production under which the capitalist class exists, are not of a homogeneous and simple character, but are two-sided, duplex; and that in the same proportion in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the same proportion in which there is development of the productive forces, there is also developed a force that begets repression; that these conditions only generate middle class wealth by continuously destroying the wealth of individual members of that class, and by producing an ever-growing proletariat.”
OLD HICKORY’S BALL.
BY WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE.