He pointed out that the manufacturer, having thoroughly mastered the home market, had found that tariff wars were shutting him out from the foreign markets he now needs. He might have added, as evidenced by the nature of the proposed reciprocity treaty with Canada, that many manufacturers are more interested in cheap raw material and cheap food for their workers (cheap food making low wages possible, as in free-trade Great Britain) than they are in a high tariff, and this even in some instances where they have a certain need for protection for the finished product and where no great export trade is in view.
Mr. Berger forgot England when he said that the tariff falls on the poor man's head, for England has shown that the abolition of the tariff does not benefit the poor man in the slightest degree. Poverty is far more widespread there than here. He pointed to the fact that the importation of goods into the United States was restricted, while that of labor was not. He forgot that where both are restricted, as in Australia, the workers are no better off than here.
The arguments employed in Mr. Berger's speech, in so far as they referred to the tariff, were for the most part not to be distinguished from those used by the Democrats in behalf of important capitalistic elements of the population, and hence the welcome with which they were received by the Democratic Congress and press. The Socialist matter in the speech relating only indirectly to the tariff was, of course, less favorably commented upon.
Mr. Berger's second speech before Congress was also significant. It was in support of governmental old-age pensions, a very radical departure for the United States and difficult of enactment because of our federal system—but already, as Mr. Berger said, in force in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Since the legislatures in all these countries are controlled by opponents of Socialism, it is evident that such measures have been adopted from other than Socialist motives. In fact they have no necessary relation to Socialism at all, but, on the contrary, have been widely enacted for capitalistic reasons without regard to the demands or power of the workers.
Mr. Berger is reported to have said a few days after this speech: "The idea will in five years have been incorporated into law. Both of the old parties within that time will have incorporated the theory into their platforms. Both the old parties to-day are approaching Socialistic ideas, and appropriating our ideas to save themselves from the coming overthrow."[163] The idea of governmental old-age pensions, on the contrary, has always been popular in certain anti-Socialist circles and is entirely in accord with any intelligent system of purely capitalistic collectivism. Its common adoption by progressive capitalists would seem to indicate that they consider it as being either directly or indirectly conducive to their own interests. It is unnecessary to assume that they adopt it from fear of Socialism. Few if any capitalists consider the overthrow of capitalism as imminent, or feel that Socialism is likely for many years to furnish them with a really acute political problem. A combination of Republicans and Democrats, for example, with a full vote, would easily overwhelm Mr. Berger, the sole Socialist Congressman in his own Congressional district. If present political successes continue, it will still take years for Socialism to send a score of representatives to Congress, and when it does do so, they will be as impotent as ever to overthrow the capitalist order.
For any independent representative without political power or responsibility to propose radical reforms in advance of the larger parties is a very simple matter. Statesmen with actual power cannot afford to take up such reforms until the time is politically ripe for their practical consideration. When such a measure is passed, for the individual or group that first proposed it to claim the credit for the change would be absurd. These reforms, when conditions have suitably evolved, become the order of the day, and are urged by all or nearly all the forces of the time. The radical British old-age pension bill, it will be remembered, was passed almost unanimously, although in the Parliament that passed it there were only about 40 Socialist or semi-Socialist representatives out of a total of 670 members.
What, then, could be more fatuous than such a view as the following, expressed recently by a well-known Socialist:—
"Do you not think that the whole country should be apprised that this (Berger's Old-age Pension bill) is a Socialist measure, introduced by a Socialist Representative, and backed by the Socialist Party—before the Republicans and Democrats realize the advisability of stealing our thunder. In England the working-class political movement is stagnant because the Liberal Party has out-generaled the Socialists by voluntarily enacting great social reforms."[164]
In his anxiety to prepare a bill that capitalist legislators would indorse and pass in the near future, Mr. Berger aroused great criticism within the Party. The New York Volkszeitung pointed out that in limiting the benefit of the law to those who had been naturalized citizens of the United States for sixteen years, he was requiring a residence of twenty-one years in this country, a provision which involved an excessively heavy discrimination against a very large proportion of our foreign-born workers. Mr. Berger's project, moreover, demanded that those convicted of felonies should also be excluded. Socialists, as is well known, have always asserted that the larger part of crimes and criminals were due to injustices of the existing social order, for which the "criminals" were in no sense to blame. Mr. Berger's secretary, Mr. W. J. Ghent, vigorously defended this clause, on the typical "State Socialist" ground that the future Society would deal more severely with criminals than the present one.
Mr. Berger's bill was objected to by New York Socialists on the ground that the old parties could be expected to give a more liberal bill in the near future, and that it would then be difficult to explain the narrower Socialist position. Mr. Ghent answered that nowhere had such a liberal measure been enacted. To this the Volkszeitung remarked that there is a tremendous difference between a bill that owes its origin to a capitalist government and one that comes from a Socialist representative of the working class: "The former sets up a minimum while the latter must demand the maximum." Finally, the New York Local of the Socialist Party resolved: "That we request the National Executive Committee to resolve that Comrade Berger shall, before introducing any bill, submit it to secure its approval by the National Executive Committee."