leak in the very body of the ship, but the captain and crew are suffering the anticipation of approaching ruin. Gentlemen, I am not here with the vain dream that we shall ever abolish poverty. My creed of human nature is too bitter for that. There will always be men that drink, and as long as there are such, there will always be poor men—shiftless men. There are always half-made men—nobody knows why they were born.
“Is civilization a failure? Stretch out your gaze over all the civilized world. There are, perhaps, in Christendom two or three hundred millions of people, and one-half of them never have enough to eat. And even in this country one-half of the people have never had enough of mental food. All over the world one-half of Christendom starves either bodily or mentally. That is no exaggeration. You may go to France or England, and find a million of men that never saw meat once a year. Take your city, and go down into the very slums of existence, where human beings by the thousands live year in and year out in dwellings which no man in Fifth Avenue would trust his horses in for twelve hours. I will take the great social spectre that confronts social science the world over—prostitution, the social ulcer that eats into the nineteenth century. And everybody who studies the subject will confess that the great root from which it grows is that the poverty of one class makes it the victim of the wealth of another. Give woman her fair chance in her own fields of enterprise, and ninety-nine out of a hundred will disdain to buy diamonds and velvets with the wages of shame. Give man his fair chance in the world of labor and enterprise, and ninety-nine out of a hundred men will disdain to steal. The grog-shops of the great cities have always appointed the municipalities as their own standing, committees. And this is at once the cause and effect of the poverty of the masses. I have known men who were intemperate in Boston cured by being sent to Paris. Why? Because in the brighter life, the more generous stimulant, the great variety of interest in the European capital, he found something that called out his nobler nature, starved out his appetites. So it is with the intemperance of a nation; and to cure it, you must supplement their life with the stimulus of the soul. Why is
it that three-fourths of the criminals are of the poorer classes? Why do the students of crime tell you that when you have taken out about fifteen per cent. of the criminals, consisting of the enterprising, energetic, and intelligent, the rest are below par bodily and mentally? Because they are the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of persons who were bodily and mentally weak. Out of these weak ones the devil selects his best tools. Feed that class better, and you will empty your prisons.”
This plainly enough attributes the evils the workingmen seek to remedy to modern civilization, which enables the few to become rich and leaves the many poor, destitute, festering in ignorance and vice. M. Desmoulins, in his Apology for the Internationals, as quoted by The Dublin Review, says: “The Parisian Red, far from being out of the pale of human nature, is only a spontaneous product of what is pompously styled modern civilization—a civilization that, resting to this hour on war between nation and nation, town and town, farm and farm, men and men, is still in many respects sheer barbarism.” As far as we are able to collect the views of the Association, it attributes the undefined grievances of the proletarian class to no one specific cause, but to modern civilization in general. In this, if the workingmen confine their objection to material civilization—the only civilization the age boasts or recognizes—we are not disposed to quarrel with them. Yet we all remember the outcry raised in all classes of society and from all quarters against the Holy Father, because he refused to form an alliance of the church with modern civilization, and for his supposed condemnation of it in the Syllabus. The International Association of Workingmen, whose members are spread over nearly the whole world, and are numbered by millions,
is a vast organized revolt against this boasted civilization of this nineteenth century. And so far it is not wholly without excuse, and even much may be said in its defence, though their proposed substitute for it may be utterly indefensible.
Modern material civilization, dating from the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and more especially from the accession of the House of Hanover to the English throne, and the accession to power in England of what in the time of Swift and Addison was called the Urban party—money-changers, bankers, traders, merchants, and manufacturers—has been based on capital employed in trade and industry, in opposition to capital invested in land and agriculture. It is a shopkeeping and manufacturing and maritime civilization, essentially and eminently a burgher civilization, and resulting especially in the burgher class, or, as the French say, the bourgeoisie. A civilization based on material interests, and proposing the multiplication and amassing of material goods, necessarily produces the state of things which excites the opposition of Mr. Phillips and the Internationals. It creates necessarily an antagonism between the interests of capital and labor, and therefore between the employers, as representatives of capital, and the employed, or workmen. The interest of capital is to get labor at as low a rate of wages as possible; the interest of labor is to get as high a rate of wages as possible. This antagonism is inevitable.
Employers in vain pretend that the interests of capital and labor are the same. They are not so under a civilization based on Mammon, or under a civilization that seeks only the advancement of material interests, and invests capital only for the sake of material profit. In the struggle,
the stronger party, under a material system, is always sure to succeed. And this is always the party of capital; for labor seeks employment to live—capital, for profit or gain; and the capitalist can forego profit more easily than labor can forego employment, since to live is more urgent than to gain. This secures the advantage always to the capitalist. The inequality which necessarily results cannot be overcome by equality of suffrage, or the extension of suffrage to the proletarian class, as politicians pretend; for, though numbers may triumph at the polls, the stronger interest, as our American experience proves, is sure to carry the victory in the halls of legislation. “The stronger interest in a country,” said Mr. Calhoun to the writer, “always in the long run wields the power of the country.”
Universal suffrage, which was defended on the ground that it would tend to protect labor against capital, has in fact a contrary tendency, and in practice almost invariably favors capital. The whole of our legislation—which so favors capital or its substitute, credit, or which mortgages the future for the present, and makes debt supply the place of capital, covers the towns with money or business corporations, and builds up huge monopolies—has grown up under a system of universal suffrage. In an age and country where material interests predominate, what the people, capitalists or proletarians, ask of government is, laws that facilitate the acquisition of wealth; but when such laws are enacted, not more than one man in a hundred can avail himself of the facilities they afford.
The great scientific discoveries of which we boast, and which have wrought such marvellous changes in our modern industrial world, were, as