There are at all times numbers of persons standing waiting and ready to step forward to take advantage of any favorable movement among the people which seems to offer inducements. It matters not to them in what, or where the movement may originate; they have no principles to crush out or control in order that they may fall into the current. It is almost impossible to escape the curse of these ever-ready tools. The safest and surest remedy against them is to select those who have never mingled in politics, and who will come direct from the shop or the field. It does not matter so much if they are not able advocates, if they only understand the work to be done and are devoted and true. Let this course be pursued a few years, and the enormous proportion of lawyer-legislators would be diminished by one-half. Many of these have no sympathies in common with you, most of them are, by all their controlling influences, drawn from the consideration even of your condition. What does it matter to them if the few articles you must purchase to render yourselves and families comfortable, cost you ten, twenty or fifty per cent. more than the actual cost of their production, if corporations for which they are attorneys become still more corpulent upon this that is indirectly filched from you! For, do you not know that capital under such rule does not pay the taxes of the country, but that your labor does? In this way, the common laborer, who should not be compelled to pay any levy at all, is taxed on almost everything he eats, drinks and wears, and thus labor is compelled not only to produce what makes wealth possible, but also to sustain it after having produced it. This is a vast inequality in favor of capital and against labor, and still it is the laborer’s fault; and it lies just where we pointed, in the selection of proper candidates as representatives, State and national.
There are but a very few newspapers that do not profess to be the advocates of the rights of labor. Let them be called upon to take hold of this matter, and take hold of it at just that point where the remedy must be applied. Let them lay before the people a plain exposition of the matter, and certainly aim to make the people understand it. Let them urge the people to assemble and concert plans and devise means to carry them out, and to warn them to no longer intrust the most vital parts of the “necessary course” to the care of hereditary members of the caucus, whom money buys or whisky controls. It has become proverbial that he who would be elected to any important position must dispense both these “powers” with a lavish hand; and he who can do this the most profusely is pretty sure to “be elected.” You may rest perfectly assured that if he spend ten thousand dollars to secure his election by your votes, he intends at least to double his venture during his official term. You should know by this time that “the purity of the ballot box” is simply a “play upon words,” and that elections are but farces to approve what is previously determined.
The people, then, must look on every side for treachery to their interests and dishonesty of purpose, not forgetting that a large portion of the press that profess your interests so warmly, that you almost know their truth, are open to the influence of at least one of the abovementioned powers, and that to go counter to the commands of those who “back them” is to go to certain destruction. Nevertheless, demand of the press a course that cannot be denominated hypocritical, and if it does not respond, withdraw your patronage, and give it where it will contribute to your interests.
These introductory details cannot be dwelt upon too long nor insisted upon too earnestly. To begin a work right, is to have it half accomplished; and most powerfully does this apply in the matter of determining who shall be your representatives.
PAPERS ON LABOR AND CAPITAL.
NO. V.
One of the great questions of the day, if not the greatest, is the true relations that should exist between labor and capital. It is one fraught with more direct benefit to a greater number of people than any other question has even the external appearance of being. The real merits of the question are of much greater significance than is generally supposed, even by those who raise it. The welfare and the individual rights of three-fourths of the people are at stake. The question assumes this shape: Labor has, by its continuous efforts, produced a certain amount of wealth, from the use of the materials nature presents, that has not been required to support and sustain the general life of man. By certain advantages, either of general policy or of individual acuteness, certain individuals have accumulated more than their necessities demanded they should expend, and this accumulation has become an added power to that possessed by the individual previously, which power endeavors to maintain itself partly at the expense of that which first produced it, and to transfer just so much of the cost of its production from itself.
That such conditions can exist and really increase in power and importance, so that they can virtually control legislation, gives evidence that principles are operative that do not promote the interests of the entire people. There must be a fault somewhere, which fault it is necessary to discover and expose, and then remedy. Now, where does this fault really have beginning? It is in certain protections and guarantees that law extends to individuals, which permit them to have an advantage over those with whom they sustain the relations of society. These laws arise out of false conceptions of the principles of common equality and economy, which pertain to man as a common fraternity. In legislation, which first allows and then fosters such departures, then, must the point at which reform should begin be sought. Any attempt to teach the general mind can have no practical effect, unless, finally, the result of the teachings express themselves through legislation. Legislation presupposes legislators, and to have the right kind of legislators involves the necessity of the laboring classes giving sufficient time and attention to the matter of nominations and elections to insure that those who will represent their true interests shall be returned.
Although the remedy for all the laborer’s ills must be sought through legislation, there are, nevertheless, many fallacies still received, even by the laborer, that have the direct tendency to degrade labor and to elevate the position of capital. One of the principal of these is a false monetary basis, a false representative standard of values, which is arbitrarily imposed upon the people, with no positive and absolute value within itself, except that which such arbitrary law gives it. Gold, as a standard of values, has been set up and worshiped so long, that people submit to its decrees with about the same appreciation of its real merits that they have of the mysteries of religion, as expounded by their paid oracles, who have constituted themselves into authorities to declare, “Thus saith the Lord.” The people have surrendered their reason in these matters to these self-constituted authorities, and so have they surrendered common sense to the god of value.
Another, and almost as important fallacy, is that of interfering with the natural ebb and flow of the products of the world by imposing upon certain of them such tribute as makes it pretty nearly impracticable for them to find their way to the locality of natural demand, in order that a special few who inhabit that locality may produce the same at a greatly increased cost, which the consumer must pay in order to obtain. It does not matter how this plain statement may be twisted and bent by the alluring sophistries and glittering generalities of the protectionist; a plain statement, viewed with clear light, needs no authoritative sanction to determine its truth. If it be any benefit for a thousand men to pay one man ten per cent more for a desired article, because it is of home production, than it could be purchased for from a foreign producer, we should be most happy to have it demonstrated. The argument used is, that by that one man being protected in its production he is thereby enabled to give employment to a certain number of laborers. But to make even this tenable upon their own statement, they must at the same time prove that those laborers would not have been able to apply themselves to any other labor during the time required to produce the article in question. This at once leads to such an intricacy of cause and effect that those who attempt to solve the mysticism prefer to accept the declaration that protection is a good thing rather than acknowledge that they are lost in the fog and obscurity they have been sent to explore to find the required evidence.