Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) was a Baptist minister among
the poor and the industrial workers of New York city.
In the agricultural stage of society the chief means of enrichment
was to gain control of large landed wealth; the chief danger to
the people lay in losing control of the great agricultural means
of production, the land. Since the industrial revolution the man-made
machinery of production has assumed an importance formerly unknown.
The factories, the machines, the means of transportation, the
money to finance great undertakings, are fully as important in
the modern process of production as the land from which the raw
material is drawn. Consequently the chief way to enrichment in
an industrial community will be the control of these factors of
production; the chief danger to the people will be to lose control
of the instruments of industry.
That danger, as we saw in our brief sketch of the industrial revolution,
was immediately realized in the most sweeping measure. The people
lost control of the tools of industry more completely than they
ever lost control of the land. Under the old system the workman
owned the simple tools of his trade. To-day the working people
have no part nor lot in the machines with which they work. In
capitalistic production there is a cooperation between two distinct
groups: a small group which owns all the material factors of land
and machinery; a large group which owns nothing but the personal
factor of human labor power. In this process of cooperation the
propertyless group is at a fearful disadvantage.
No attempt is made to allot to each workman his share in the profits
of the joint work Instead he is paid a fixed wage. The upward
movement of this wage is limited by the productiveness of his
work; the downward movement of it is limited only by the willingness
of the workman to work at so low a return. His willingness will
be determined by his needs. If he is poor or if he has a large
family, he can be induced to take less. If he is devoted to his
family, and if they are sick, he may take still less. The less
he needs, the more he can get; the more he needs, the less he
will get. This is the exact opposite of the principle that prevails
in family life, Where the child that needs most care gets most.
In our family life we have solidarity and happiness; in our business
life we have individualism and-well, not exactly happiness.
The statistics of wages come with a shock to any one reading them
with an active imagination. In my city of Rochester the average
wage for males over sixteen reported by the United States Census
of 1900 was $480.50 a year and for females $267.10. I do not know
how accurate that was. It hardly matters. Fifty dollars one way
or the other would mean a great deal to the families affected,
but it would not change the total impression of pitiable inadequacy.
But the real wages are not measured by dollars and cents, but
by the purchasing power of the money. That the necessaries of
life have risen in price in recent years is familiar enough to
every housekeeper. Wages, too, have risen in some trades. Very
earnest efforts have been made by experts to prove that the rise
in wages has kept pace with the rise in prices, but with dubious
results. Dun's Review some time ago compared the prices of 350
staple commodities in July 1, 1897, and December 1, 1901, and
found that $1013 in 1901 would buy no more than $724 in 1897.
Hence if wages had remained apparently stationary, they had actually
declined.
The purchasing power of the wages determines the health and comfort
of the workingman and his family. It does not decide on the justice
of his wage. That is determined by comparing the total product
of his work with the share paid to him. The effectiveness of labor
has increased immensely since the advent of the machine. The wealth
of the industrial nations consequently has grown in a degree unparalleled
in history. The laborer has doubtless profited by this in common
with all others. He enjoy., luxuries that were beyond the reach
of the richest in former times. But the justice of our system
will be proved only if we can show that the wealth, comfort, and
security of the average workingman in 1906 is as much greater
than that of the average workingman in 1760 as the wealth of civilized
humanity is now greater than it was in 1760. No one will be bold
enough to assert it. The bulk of the increase in wealth has gone
to a limited class who in various ways have been strong enough
to take it. Wages have advanced on foot; profits have taken the
Limited Express. For instance, the report of the Interstate Commerce
Commission of June, 1902, stated that from 1896-1902 the average
wages and salaries of the railway employees of our country, 1,200,000
men, had increased from $550 to $580, or five per cent. During
the same period the net earnings of the owners had increased from
$377,000,000 to $610,000,000, or sixty-two per cent. Thorold Rogers,
in his great work "Six Centuries of Work and Wages,"
says: "It may well be the case, and there is every reason
to fear it is the case, that there is collected a population in
our great towns which equals in amount the whole of those who
lived in England and Wales six centuries ago; but whose condition
is more destitute, whose homes are more squalid, whose means are
more uncertain, whose prospects are more hopeless, than those
of the peasant serfs of the Middle Ages or the meanest drudges
of the mediaeval cities." If the celebrated saying of John
Stuart Will is true, that " it is questionable if all the
mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of
any human being," it means that the achievements of the human
mind have been thwarted by human injustice. Our blessings have
failed to bless us because they were not based on justice and
solidarity.
The existence of a large class of population without property
rights in the material they work upon and the tools they work
with, and without claim to the profits resulting from their work,
must have subtle and far-reaching effects on the character of
this class and on the moral tone of the people at large.
A man's work is not only the price he pays for the right to fill
his stomach. In his work he expresses himself. It is the output
of his creative energy and his main contribution to the common
life of mankind. The pride which an artist or professional man
takes in his work, the pleasure which a housewife takes in adorning
her home, afford a satisfaction that ranks next to human love
in delightsomeness.
One of the gravest accusations against our industrial system is
that it does not produce in the common man the pride and joy of
good work. In many cases the surroundings are ugly, depressing,
and coarsening. Much of the stuff manufactured 'is dishonest in
quality, made to sell and not to serve, and the making of such
cotton or wooden lies must react on the morals of every man that
handles them. There is little opportunity for a man to put his
personal stamp on his work. The mediaeval craftsman could rise
to be an artist by working well at his craft. The modern factory
hand is not like to develop artistic gifts as he tends his machine.
It is a common and true complaint of employers that their men
take no interest in their work. But why should they? What motive
have they for putting love and care into their work? It is not
theirs. Christ spoke of the difference between the hireling shepherd
who flees and the owner who loves the sheep. Our system has made
the immense majority of industrial workers mere hirelings. If
they do conscientious work nevertheless, it is a splendid tribute
to human rectitude. Slavery was cheap labor; it was also dear
labor. In ancient Rome the slaves on the country estates were
so wasteful that only the strongest and crudest tools could be
given them. The more the wage worker approaches their condition,
the more will the employer confront the same problem. The finest
work is done only by free minds who put love into their work because
it is their own. When a workman becomes a partner, he " hustles
" in a new spirit. Even the small bonus distributed in profit-sharing
experiments has been found to increase the carefulness and willingness
of the men to such an extent that the bonus did not diminish the
profits of the employers. The lowest motives for work are the
desire for wages and the fear of losing them. Yet these are almost
the only motives to which our system appeals. It does not even
hold out the hope of promotion, unless a man unites managing ability
to his workmanship. The economic loss to the community by this
paralysis of the finer springs of human action is beyond computation.
But the moral loss is vastly more threatening.
The fear of losing his job is the workman's chief incentive to
work. Our entire industrial life, for employer and employee, is
a reign of fear. The average workingman's family is only a few
weeks removed from destitution. The dread of want is always over
them, and that is worse than brief times of actual want. It is
often said in defence of the wages system that while the workman
does not share in the hope of profit, neither is he troubled by
the danger of loss; he gets his wage even if the shop is running
at a loss. Not for any length of time. His form of risk is the
danger of being out of work when work grows slack, and when his
job is gone, all his resources are gone. In times of depression
the misery and anxiety among the working people are appalling;
yet periodical crises hitherto have been an unavoidable accompaniment
of our speculative industry. The introduction of new machinery,
the reorganization of an industry by a trust, the speeding of
machinery which makes fewer men necessary, the competition of
cheap immigrant labor, all combine to make the hold of the working
classes on the means of life insecure. That workingmen ever dare
to strike work is remarkable testimony to the economic pressure
that impels them and to the capacity of sacrifice for common ends
among them.
While a workman is in his prime, he is always in danger of losing
his job. When he gets older, he is almost certain to lose it.
The pace is so rapid that only supple limbs can keep up. Once
out of a job, it is hard for an elderly man to get another. Men
shave clean to conceal gray hairs. They are no longer a crown
of honor, but an industrial handicap. A man may have put years
of his life into a business, but he has no claim on it at the
end, except the feeble claim of sympathetic pity. President Eliot
thinks that he has a just but unrecognized claim because he has
helped to build up the goodwill of the business. There is a stronger
claim in the fact that the result of his work has never been paid
to him in full. If, for instance, a man has produced a net value
of $800 a year and has received $500 a year, $300 annually stand
to his credit in the sight of God. These dividends with compound
interest would amount to a tidy sum at the end of a term of years
and ought to suffice to employ him at his old wages even if his
productive capacity declines. But at present, unless his employer
is able and willing to show him charity, or unless by unusual
thrift he has managed to save something, he becomes dependent
on the faithfulness of his children or the charity of the public.
In England a very large proportion of the aged working people
finally "go on the parish." In Germany they have a socialist
system of insurance for old age. The fact that so few Germans
have emigrated in recent years is probably due in part to the
hope held out by this slight capitalization of their life's labor.
We are not even thinking of such an institution in America. Fear
and insecurity weigh upon our people increasingly, and break down
their nerves, their mental buoyancy, and their character.
This constant insecurity and fear pervading the entire condition
of the working people is like a corrosive chemical that disintegrates
their self-respect. For an old man to be able to look about him
on the farm or business he has built up by the toil of his life,
is a profound satisfaction, an antidote to the sense of declining
strength and gradual failure. For an old man after a lifetime
of honest work to have nothing, to amount to nothing, to be turned
off as useless, and to eat the bread of dependence, is a pitiable
humiliation. I can conceive of nothing so crushing to all proper
pride as for a workingman to be out of work for weeks, offering
his work and his body and soul at one place after the other, and
to be told again and again that nobody has any use for such a
man as he. It is no wonder that men take to drink when they are
out of work; for drink, at least for a while, creates illusions
of contentment and worth. The Recessional of Alcohol has the refrain,
"Let us forget." Every great strike, every industrial
crisis, pushes some men over the line of self respect into petty
thievery and vagrancy, and over the gate to the long road of hoboism
is written, "Leave all hope behind, all ye that enter here."
To accept charity is at first one of the most bitter experiences
of the self-respecting workingman. Some abandon their families,
go insane or commit suicide rather than surrender the virginity
of their independence. But when they have once learned to depend
on gifts, the parasitic habit of mind grows on them, and it becomes
hard to wake them back to self-support. They have eaten the food
of the lotus-eaters and henceforth "surely, surely slumber
is more sweet than toil." It would be a theme for the psychological
analysis of a great novelist to describe the slow degradation
of the soul when a poor man becomes a pauper. During the great
industrial crisis in the 90's I saw good men go into disreputable
lines of employment and respectable widows consent to live with
men who would support them and their children. One could hear
human virtue cracking and crumbling all around. Whenever work
is scarce, petty crime is plentiful. But that is only the tangible
expression of the decay in the morale of the working people on
which statistics can seize. The corresponding decay in the morality
of the possessing classes at such a time is another story. But
industrial crises are not inevitable in nature; they are mere]y
inevitable in capitalism.
A similar corrosive influence is the hatred generated by our system.
The employees are often hot with smouldering resentment at their
treatment by the employers, and the employers are at least warm
with annoyance at the organizations of the men, and full of distrust
for the honesty and willingness of their helpers. The economic
loss to both sides in every strike is great enough, but the loss
in human fellowship and kindliness is of far greater moment. It
would be far better for a community to lose a million dollars
by fire than to lose it by a strike or lockout. The acts of violence
committed on both sides, by legalized means on the one, by spontaneous
brutality on the other, are only the efflorescence of the inflamed
feeling created. And the acute inflammation tends to become chronic.
Every animal will fight other animals that trench on its feeding
grounds. Every social class in history has used whatever weapons
it had-sword, law, ostracism, or clerical anathema-to strike at
any other class that endangered its income. Railways use lobbies;
their employees use clubs; each uses the weapon that is handy
and effective. But it is all brutalizing and destructive. Strikes
are mild civil war, and "war is hell." If our industrial
organization cannot evolve some saner method of reconciling conflicting
interests than twenty-four thousand strikes and lockouts in twenty
years, it will be a confession of social impotence and moral bankruptcy.
It used to be a fine thing to mark how the richer food and free
life in our country increased the stature and beauty of the immigrant
families. America meant a rise in the standard of living, and
hence an increase in physical efficiency. The rapid progress of
our country has been due to the wealth of natural resources on
the one side and the physical vigor and mental buoyancy of the
human resources on the other side.
To-day there are large portions of the wage-earning population
of which that is no longer true. They are not advancing, but receding
in stamina, and bequeathing an enfeebled equipment to the next
generation.
The human animal needs space, air, and light, just like any other
highly developed organism. But the competitive necessities of
industry crowd the people together in the cities. Land speculation
and high car-fares hem them in even where the location of our
cities permits easy expansion. High rents mean small rooms. Dear
coal means lack of ventilation in winter. Coal-smoke means susceptibility
to all throat and lung diseases. The tenement districts of our
great cities are miasmic swamps of bad air, and just as swamps
teem with fungous growths, so the bacilli of tuberculosis multiply
on the rotting lungs of the underfed and densely housed multitudes.
The decline in the death-rate with the advance in sanitary science,
the sudden drop of the rate after the destruction and rebuilding
of slum districts in English cities,2 prove clearly how preventable
a great proportion of deaths are. The preventable decimation of
the people is social murder.
The human animal needs good food to be healthy, just like a horse
or cow. The artificial rise in food prices is at the expense of
the vital force of the American people. The larger our cities,
the wider are the areas from which their perishable food is drawn
and the staler and less nourishing will be the food. Canned goods
are a sorry substitute for fresh food. The ideal housewife can
make a palatable and nourishing meal from almost anything. But
the wives of the workingmen have been working girls, and they
rarely have a chance to learn good housekeeping before they marry
Scorching a steak diminishes its nutritive value and the appetite
of the eater, and both are essential for nutrition.
Poor food and cramped rooms lower the vitality of the people.
At the same time the output of vitality demanded from them grows
ever greater. Life in a city, with the sights and sounds, the
hurry for trains, the contagious rush, is itself a flaring consumer
of nervous energy. The work at the machine is worse. That tireless
worker of steel, driven by the stored energy of the sun in forgotten
ages, sets the pace for the exhausted human organism that feeds
it. The speeding of machines is greater in America than anywhere
in the world. Unless the food and housing remain proportionately
better, the American workman is drained faster. Immigrants who
try to continue the kind of food that kept them in vigor at home,
collapse under the strain.
Under such a combination of causes the health of the people inevitably
breaks down. Improved medical science has counteracted the effects
to a large extent, but in spite of all modern progress the physical
breakdown is apparent in many directions. Diseases of the nerves,
culminating in prostration and insanity; diseases of the heart
through overstrain; diseases of the digestion through poor nutrition,
haste in mastication, and anxiety; zymotic diseases due to crowding
and dirt-all these things multiply and laugh at our curative efforts.
Tuberculosis, which might be eradicated in ten years if we had
sense, continues to cripple our children, to snuff out the life
of our young men and women in their prime, and to leave the fatherless
and motherless to struggle along in their feebleness. Alcoholism
is both a cause and an effect of poverty. The poor take to drink
because they are tired, discouraged, and flabby of will, and without
more wholesome recreation. When the narcotic has once gained control
over them, it works more rapidly with them than with the well
fed who work in the open. Tuberculosis and alcoholism are social
diseases, degenerating the stock of the people, fostered by the
commercial interests of landowners and liquor dealers, thriving
on the weak and creating the weak.
This condition of exhaustion tends to perpetuate itself. Children
are begotten in a state of physical exhaustion. Underfed and overworked
women in tenement and factory are nourishing the children in their
prenatal life. During the years when a workingman's family is
bringing up young children, before their earnings become available,
the family is submerged in poverty through these parental burdens,
and neither the parents nor the growing children are likely to
be well fed and well housed. Very early in life the children are
hitched to the machine for life, and the vitality which ought
to build their bodies during the crucial period of adolescence
is used up to make goods a little cheaper, or, what is more likely,
merely to make profits a little larger. Imagine that any breeder
of live stock should breed horses or cows under such conditions,
what would be the result in a few generations? Our apple orchards
are planted in wide squares, so that every tree has the soil,
the air, the sunshine, which it needs. If we planted a dense jungle
of trees, we should have a dwarfed growth, scraggy and thorny,
and only here and there a crabbed apple. What harvest of human
kind will we have in the broad field of our republic if we plant
men in that way?
The physical drain of which we have spoken is gradual and slow,
and therefore escapes observation and sympathy. But it is the
lot of the working people in addition to this to suffer frequent
mangling and mutilation. A workman who tends one of our great
machines is pitted against a monster of blind and crushing strength
and has to be ever alert, like one who enters a cage of tigers.
Yet human nature is so constituted that it grows careless of danger
which is always near, and cheerfully plucks the beard of death.
Unless the machines are surrounded with proper safeguards, they
take a large toll of life and limb. The state accident insurance
system in Germany has revealed a terrible frequency of industrial
accidents. We have never yet dared to get the facts for our country,
except in mining and railroading; but it is safe to say that no
country is so reckless of accidents as our own. It is asserted
that one in eight of our people dies a violent death. The Interstate
Commerce Commission in October, 1904, stated that 78,152 persons
had been killed on the railroads in the previous ten years, and
78,247 had been injured in the single preceding year. Any one
who has ever been through a railway accident knows what a horrible
total of bloody and groaning suffering these figures imply. Yet
few railways voluntarily introduced automatic car-couplers to
lessen one of the most frequent causes of accident. They resisted
legislation as long as they could; introduced the automatic couplers
as slowly as they could; and are now resisting the introduction
of the block system in the same way. Yet automatic coupling reduced
the number of men killed from 433 in 1893 to 167 in 1902, and
the number injured from 11,277 to 2864, in spite of the fact that
the total number of employees had greatly increased during these
ten years. The same resistance met the efforts to guard the lives
of sailors by the Plimsoll mark, and indeed almost every effort
to compel owners to provide safety appliances, or to make them
liable for accidents to their servants. It is dividends against
human lives. All great corporations have agents whose sole business
it is to look after accidents and see that the company suffers
as little loss as possible through the claims of the injured.
Yet many are injured in railway work and elsewhere because long
hours in the service of those same corporations had so worn them
down that their mind was numb and they were unable to look out
for themselves.
I venture to give concreteness to these matters by telling a single
case which I followed from beginning to end.
An elderly workingman, a good Christian man, was run down by a
street car in New York City. His leg was badly bruised. He was
taken to an excellent hospital near by. His wife and daughter
visited him immediately. After that they had to wait to the regular
visiting day. On that day they came to me in great distress and
said that he had been sent forward to Bellevue Hospital. I went
with them and we found that he had been there only one night,
and had again been sent on to the Charity Hospital on Blackwell's
Island. At both hospitals they said the case was not serious and
they had shifted him to make room for graver cases. The steamer
connecting Bellevue and the Island had left on its last trip that
day. If the two women had been alone, they would have been helpless
in their anxiety till the next day. I got them across. After hours
of fear, which almost prostrated them, we found the old man. He
was fairly comfortable and reported that his night at Bellevue
had been spent on the floor. A few days later gangrene set in
the leg was twice amputated, and he died. I am not competent to
say if this result was due to neglect or not. I know of other
cases in which that first hospital shipped charity patients elsewhere
without giving any notice whatever to the relatives.
The agent of the street-car company promptly called on the family
and offered $100 in settlement of all damages. I saw the manager
on their behalf. He explained courteously that since the case
resulted in death, $5000 would be the maximum allowed by New York
laws, and since the man's earnings had been small and he had but
few years of earning capacity before him, the amount of damage
allowed by the courts in his case would be slight. The suffering
to the affections of the family did not enter into the legal aspect
of the matter. The company paid its counsel by the year. If the
family sued and was successful in the lower court, the manager
frankly said they would carry it to the higher courts and could
wear out the resources of the family at slight expense to the
corporation. The president, a benevolent and venerable- looking
gentleman, explained to me that the combined distance traveled
by their cars daily would reach from New York to the Rocky Mountains.
People were constantly being run over, and the company could not
afford to be more generous. The widow concluded to submit to the
terms offered. The $100 was brought to her in the usual form of
single dollar bills to make it look like vast wealth to a poor
person. The daughter suffered very serious organic injury through
the shock received when her father had disappeared from the hospital,
and this was probably one cause for her death in child-birth several
years later.
The officers of the hospitals and the officers of the street railway
company were not bad men. Their point of view and their habits
of mind are entirely comprehensible. I feel no certainty that
I should not act in the same way if I had been in their place
long enough. But the impression remained that our social machinery
is almost as blindly cruel as its steel machinery, and that it
runs over the life of a poor man with scarcely a quiver.
There is certainly a great and increasing body of chronic wretchedness
in our wonderful country. It is greatest where our industrial
system has worked out its conclusions most completely. Our national
optimism and conceit ought not to blind us longer to the fact.
Single cases of unhappiness are inevitable in our frail human
life; but when there are millions of them, all running along well-defined
grooves, reducible to certain laws, then this misery is not an
individual, but a social matter, due to causes in the structure
of our society and curable only by social reconstruction. We point
with pride to the multitude of our charitable organizations. Our
great cities have annual directories of their charitable organizations,
which state the barest abstract of facts and yet make portly volumes.
These institutions are the pride and the shame of Christian civilization;
the pride because we so respond to the cry of suffering; the shame,
because so much need exists. They are a heavy financial drag.
The more humane our feeling is, the better we shall have to house
our dependents and delinquents. But those who have had personal
contact with the work, feel that they are beating back a swelling
tide with feeble hands. With their best intentions they may be
harming men more than helping them. And the misery grows. The
incapables increase faster than the population. Moreover, beyond
the charity cases lies the mass of wretchedness that spawns them.
For every halfwitted pauper in the almshouse there may be ten
misbegotten and muddle-headed individuals bungling their work
and their life outside. For every person who is officially declared
insane, there are a dozen whose nervous organization is impaired
and who are centres of further trouble. For every thief in prison
there are others outside, pilfering and defrauding, and rendering
social life insecure and anxious. Mr. Hunter t estimates that
about four million persons are dependent on public relief in the
United States that an equal number are destitute, but bear their
misery in silence; and that ten million have an income insufficient
to maintain them even in a state of physical efficiency to do
their work. The methods by which he arrives at these results seem
careful and fair. But suppose that he were a million or two out
of the way, does that affect the moral challenge of the figures
much?
Sir Wilfred Lawson told of a test applied by the head of an insane
asylum to distinguish the sane from the insane. He took them to
a basin of water under a running faucet and asked them to dip
out the water. The insane merely dipped and dipped. The sane turned
off the faucet and dipped out the rest. Is our social order sane?
Approximate equality is the only enduring foundation of political
democracy. The sense of equality is the only basis for Christian
morality. Healthful human relations seem to run only on horizontal
lines. Consequently true love always seeks to create a level.
If a rich man loves a poor girl, he lifts her to financial and
social equality with himself. If his love has not that equalizing
power, it is flawed and becomes prostitution. Wherever husbands
by social custom regard their wives as inferior, there is a deep-seated
defect in married life. If a teacher talks down at his pupils,
not as a maturer friend, but with an "I say so," he
confines their minds in a spiritual straight-jacket instead of
liberating them. Equality is the only basis for true educational
influences. Even our instinct of pity, which is love going out
to the weak, works with spontaneous strength only toward those
of our own class and circle who have dropped into misfortune.
Business men feel very differently toward the widow of a business
man left in poverty than they do toward a widow of the poorer
classes. People of a lower class who demand our help are "cases";
people of our own class are folks.
The demand for equality is often ridiculed as if it implied that
all men were to be of identical wealth, wisdom, and authority.
But social equality can coexist with the greatest natural differences.
There is no more fundamental difference than that of sex, nor
a greater intellectual chasm than that between an educated man
and his little child, yet in the family all are equal. In a college
community there are various gradations of rank and authority within
the faculty, and there is a clearly marked distinction between
the students and the faculty, but there is social equality. On
the other hand, the janitor and the peanut vender are outside
of the circle, however important they may be to it.
The social equality existing in our country in the past has been
one of the chief charms of life here and of far more practical
importance to our democracy than the universal ballot. After a
long period of study abroad in my youth I realized on my return
to America that life here was far poorer in music, art, and many
forms of enjoyment than life on the continent of Europe; but that
life tasted better here, nevertheless, because men met one another
more simply, frankly, and wholesomely. In Europe a man is always
considering just how much deference he must show to those in ranks
above him, and in turn noting jealously if those below him are
strewing the right quantity of incense due to his own social position.
That fundamental democracy of social intercourse, which is one
of the richest endowments of our American life, is slipping from
us. Actual inequality endangers the sense of equality. The rich
man and the poor man can meet on a level if they are old friends,
or if they are men of exceptional moral qualities, or if they
meet under unusual circumstances that reduce all things to their
primitive human elements. But as a general thing they will live
different lives, and the sense of unlikeness will affect all their
dealings. With women the spirit of social caste seems to be even
more fatally easy than with men. It may be denied that the poor
in our country are getting poorer, but it cannot well be denied
that the rich are getting richer. The extremes of wealth and poverty
are much farther apart than formerly, and thus the poor are at
least relatively poorer. There is a rich class and a poor class,
whose manner of life is wedged farther and farther apart, and
whose boundary lines are becoming ever more distinct. The difference
in housing, eating, dressing, and speaking would be a sufficient
barrier. The dominant position of the one class in industry and
the dependence of the other is even more decisive. The owners
or managers of industry are rich or highly paid; they have technical
knowledge, the will to command, the habits of mind bred by the
exercise of authority; they say "Go," and men go; they
say "Do this," and an army of men obeys. On the other
side is the mass who take orders, who are employed or dismissed
at a word, who use their muscles almost automatically, and who
have no voice in the conduct of their own shop. These are two
distinct classes, and no rhetoric can make them equal. Moreover,
such a condition is inseparable from the capitalistic organization
of industry. As capitalism grows, it must create a proletariat
to correspond. Just as militarism is based on military obedience,
so capitalism is based on economic dependence.
We hear passionate protests against the use of the hateful word
"class" in America. There are no classes in our country,
we are told. But the hateful part is not the word, but the thing.
If class distinctions are growing up here, he serves his country
ill who would hush up the fact or blind the people to it by fine
phrases. A class is a body of men who are so similar in their
work, their duties and privileges, their manner of life and enjoyment,
that a common interest, common conception of life, and common
moral ideals are developed and cement the individuals. The business
men constitute such a class. The industrial workers also constitute
such a class. In old countries the upper class gradually adorned
itself with titles, won special privileges in court and army and
law, and created an atmosphere of awe and apartness. But the solid
basis on which this was done was the feudal control of the land,
which was then the great source of wealth. The rest was merely
the decorative moss that grows up on the rocks of permanent wealth.
With the industrial revolution a new source of wealth opened up;
a new set of men gained control of lt and ousted the old feudal
nobility more or less thoroughly. The new aristocracy, which is
based on mobile capital, has not yet had time to festoon itself
with decorations, but likes to hasten the process by intermarriage
with the remnants of the old D; feudal nobility. Whether it will
ever duplicate the old forms in this country is immaterial, as
long as it has the fact of power. In some way the social inequality
will find increasing outward expression and will tend to make
itself permanent. Where there are actual class differences, there
will be a dawning class consciousness, a clear class interest,
and there may be a class struggle.
In the past the sympathy between the richer and the poorer members
of American society has still run strong. Many rich men and women
were once poor and have not forgotten their early struggles and
the simple homes of their childhood. As wealth becomes hereditary,
there will be more who have never known any life except that of
luxury, and have never had any associates except the children
of the rich or their servants. Formerly the wealthiest man in
a village or town still lived in the sight of all as a member
of the community. As the chasm widens, the rich withdraw to their
own section of the city; they naturally use means to screen themselves
from the intrusive stare of the public which concentrates its
gaze on them; they live in a world apart, and the mass of the
people have distorted ideas about them and little human sympathy
for them. There are indications enough how far apart we already
are. We have a new literature of exploration. Darkest Africa and
the polar regions are becoming familiar; but we now have intrepid
men and women who plunge for a time into the life of the lower
classes and return to write books about this unknown race that
lives in the next block. It is amazing to note how intelligent
men and women of the upper classes bungle in their judgment on
the virtues and the vices of the working people, and vise versa.
Socialism is coming to be the very life-breath of the intelligent
working-class, but if all the members of all the social and literary
clubs of a city were examined on socialism, probably two-thirds
would fail to pass. Many are still content to treat one of the
great elemental movements of human history as the artificial and
transitory misbehavior of a few agitators and their dupes. The
inability of both capital and labor to understand the point of
view of the other side has been one chief cause of trouble, arid
almost every honest effort to get both sides together on a basis
of equality has acted like a revelation. But that proves how far
they have been apart.
Individual sympathy and understanding has been our chief reliance
in the past for overcoming the differences between the social
classes. The feelings and principles implanted by Christianity
have been a powerful aid in that direction. But if this sympathy
diminishes by the widening of the social chasm, what hope have
we? It is true that we have an increasing number who, by study
and by personal contact in settlement work and otherwise, are
trying to increase that sympathetic intelligence. But it is a
question if this conscious effort of individuals is enough to
offset the unconscious alienation created by the dominant facts
of life which are wedging entire classes apart.
Facts and institutions are inevitably followed by theories to
explain and justify the existing institutions. In a political
democracy we have democratic theories of politics. In a monarchy
they have monarchical theories. Wherever inequality has been a
permanent situation, theoretical thought has defended it. Aristotle
living in a slave holding society said: "There are in the
human species individuals as inferior to others as the body is
to the soul, or as animals are to men. Adapted to corporeal labor
only, they are incapable of a higher occupation. Destined by nature
to slavery, there is nothing better for them to do than to obey."
Similarly in feudal society the lord regarded the serf as by nature
little different from a beast of burden, and even the serf regarded
oppression as a fixed fact in life, like cold and rain. If we
allow deep and permanent inequality to grow up in our country,
it is as sure as gravitation that not only the old democracy and
frankness of manners will go, but even the theory of human equality,
which has been part of our spiritual atmosphere through Christianity,
will be denied. It is already widely challenged.
Any shifting of the economic equilibrium from one class to another
is sure to be followed by a shifting of the political equilibrium.
If a class arrives at economic wealth, it will gain political
influence and some form of representation. For instance, when
the cities grew powerful at the close of the Middle Ages, and
the lesser nobles declined in power, that fact was registered
in the political constitution of the nations. The French Revolution
was the demand of the business class to have a share in political
power proportionate to its growing economic importance. A class
which is economically strong will have the necessary influence
to secure and enforce laws which protect its economic interests.
In turn, a class which controls legislation will shape it for
its own enrichment. Politics is embroidered with patriotic sentiment
and phrases, but at bottom, consciously or unconsciously, the
economic interests dominate it always. If therefore we have a
class which owns a large part of the national wealth and controls
nearly all the mobile part of it, it is idle to suppose that this
class will not see to it that the vast power exerted by the machinery
of government serves its interests. And if we have another class
which is economically dependent and helpless, it is idle to suppose
that it will be allowed an equal voice in swaying political power.
In short, we cannot join economic inequality and political equality.
As Oliver Cromwell wrote to Parliament, "If there be any
one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a
Commonwealth." The words of Lincoln find a new application
here, that the republic cannot be half slave and half free.
The power of capitalism over the machinery of our government,
and its corroding influence on the morality of our public servants,
has been revealed within recent years to such an extent that it
is almost superfluous to speak of it. If any one had foretold
ten years ago the facts which are now understood by all, he would
have been denounced as an incurable pessimist. Our cities have
surrendered nearly all the functions that bring an income, keeping
only those that demand expenditure, and they are now so dominated
by the public service corporations that it takes a furious spasm
of public anger, as in Philadelphia, or a long-drawn battle, as
in Chicago, to drive the robbers from their intrenchments in the
very citadel of government and after the victory is won there
is absolutely no guarantee that it will be permanent. There is
probably not one of our states which is not more or less controlled
by its chief railways. How far our national government is constantly
warped in its action, the man at a distance can hardly tell, but
the public confidence in Congress is deeply undermined. Even the
successful action against the meat-packers and against railway
rebates only demonstrated what overwhelming popular pressure is
necessary to compel the government to act against these great
interests.
The interference of President Roosevelt in the great coal strike
was hailed as a demonstration that the people are still supreme.
In fact, it rather demonstrated that the supremacy of the people
is almost gone. The country was on the verge of a vast public
calamity. A sudden cold snap would have sent Death through our
Eastern cities, not with his old fashioned scythe, but with a
modern reaper. The President merely undertook to advise and persuade,
and was met with an almost insolent rejoinder. Mr. Jacob A. Riis,
in his book "Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen," says
that the President, when he concluded to interfere, set his face
grimly and said: "Yes, I will do it. I suppose that ends
me; but it is right, and I will do it." The Governor of Massachusetts
afterward sent him "the thanks of every man, woman, and child
in the country." The President replied: " Yes, we have
put it through. But heavens and earth ! It has been a struggle."
Mr. Riis says, "It was the nearest I ever knew him to come
to showing the strain he had been under." Now what sinister
and ghostly power was this with which the President of our nation
had wrestled on behalf of the people, and which was able to loosen
even his joints with fear? Whose interests were so inviolable
that they took precedence of the safety of the people, so that
a common-sense action by the most August officer of the nation
was likely to bring political destruction upon him? To what extent
is a power so threatening able to turn the government aside from
its functions by silent pressure, so that its fundamental purpose
of public service is constantly frustrated? Have we a dual sovereignty,
so that our public officers are in doubt whom to obey?
Here is another instance showing how political power is simply
a tool for the interests of the dominant class. In 1891 the Working
Women's Society of New York began to agitate for proper sanitary
accommodations and seats for the female clerks in the department
stores. This sensible bill was annually met and defeated at Albany
by a lobby of the retail merchants. In 1896 it was at last enacted
and the right of inspection and enforcement was given to the local
boards of health. For eighteen months it was enforced in New York
in the most tyrannical manner to make the law odious. The Tammany
mayor then appointed one of the owners of a great department store
as president of the Board of Health. This man said that he desired
the position partly to quash an indictment against a certain philanthropic
enterprise of his and partly to paralyze the Mercantile Inspection
Law. The mayor suggested that the necessary appropriation-be withheld,
and so the law became a dead letter.
To secure special concessions and privileges and to evade public
burdens have always been the objects for which dominant classes
used their political power. For instance, the feudal nobility
of France originally held their lands as franchises from the crown,
in return for a tax of service, chiefly military, to be rendered
to the nation. When the old feudal levies proved inefficient in
the Hundred Years' War with England, a standing army was organized
and supported by a money tax. The nobility were thereby relieved
from their old obligation of levying and supporting soldiers,
yet they successfully evaded their share of the tax. This is merely
a sample case. Il can safely be asserted that throughout history
the strongest have been taxed least, and the weakest most. The
same condition prevails in our country. The average homes in the
cities are usually taxed to the limit the most opulent homes,
and especially their contents, are taxed lightly. Vacant lots,
held for speculation, are often flagrantly favored, though they
are a public nuisance. In 1856 taxes were paid in New York State
on $148,473,154 worth of personal property over and above the
capital of banks and trust companies. During the following forty
years the increase in personal property in the State was immense,
yet in 1896 the amount found for taxation had increased by only
$66,000,000. In that year a study was made of 107 estates, taken
at random in the State of New York and ranging from $54,559 to
$3,319,500. After the death of the owners these estates disclosed
personalty aggregating $215,132,366; but the year before their
deaths the owners had been assessed only $3,819,412 on their personal
property. Thirty four of them had escaped taxation altogether
An investigation by Professor E. W. Bemis in Ohio in 1901 showed
that while farms and homes were assessed at about sixty per cent
of their value, railways were assessed at from thirty-five per
cent down to thirteen per cent of the market value of their stocks
and bonds.2 The interests which thus evade taxation have usually
been enriched by public gifts, by franchises, mining rights, water
rights, the unearned increment of the land, etc., and yet they
allow the public burdens to settle on the backs of those classes
who are already fearfully handicapped.
The courts are the instrument by which the organized community
exercises its supremacy over the affairs of the individual, and
the control of the courts is therefore of vital concern to the
privileged classes of any nation. Exemption from the jurisdiction
of certain courts which would be troublesome, was a desirable
privilege, and both the feudal aristocracy and the clergy had
that privilege. To a wide extent the feudal nobles down to our
own time had the right of jurisdiction within their own domains,
and when they sat as judges, they were not likely to hurt their
own interests. The English landowners long made the law in Parliament
and interpreted it in their courts. The terrible punishments visited,
for instance, on poaching are a demonstration how they dealt with
offences against their cherished class rights. In our own country
all are equal before the law-in theory. In practice there is the
most serious inequality. The right of appeal as handled in our
country gives tremendous odds to those who have financial staying
power. The police court, which is the poor man's court, deals
with him very summarily. If a rich man and a poor man were alike
fined $1O for being drunk and disorderly, the equal punishment
would be exceedingly unequal. If the poor man is unable to pay
the fine, he gets ten days; nothing likely to be inflicted on
the rich man for a similar offence would hit him equally hard.
To what extent the judges are actually corrupt it is probably
impossible to say. We have been trying to keep up our courage
amid the general official corruption by asserting that the integrity
of the judiciary at least is above reproach. But the only thing
that would make them immune to the general disease is the spirit
and the tradition of their profession. But class spirit and professional
honor are a rather fragile barrier against the terrible temptations
which can be offered by the great interests, and when that barrier
is once undermined by evil example, it will wash away with increasing
speed. Recent revelations have not been calculated to cheer us.
The judge is frequently a successful politician before he sits
on the bench. Is the sanctifying power of official responsibility
so great that it will purge out the habits of mind acquired by
a successful political career, as politics now goes? At any rate,
it is safe to say that the study and practice of the law create
an ingrained respect for things as they have been, and that the
social sympathies of judges are altogether likely to be with the
educated and possessing classes. This inward trend of sympathy
is a powerful element in determining a man's judgment in single
cases. That a man should be tried by a jury of his peers was so
important an historical conquest, because it recognized the bias
of class differences and turned it in favor of the accused. Unless
a judge is affected by the new social spirit, he is likely to
be at least unconsciously on the side of those who have, and this
is equivalent to a special privilege granted them by the courts.
Connecticut alone, among English-speaking countries, has hitherto
permitted the defendant in damage suits to transfer such suits
from a jury to a bench of judges. When the constitution of Connecticut
was revised in 1902, it was proposed to make jury trials mandatory
in damage suits. The active "corporation group" in the
convention bent its chief interest toward the defeat of this proposition.
In the experience of corporations, judges must then be more favorably
disposed to them than juries.
The ultimate power on which we stake our hope in our present political
decay is the power of public opinion. Whenever some temporary
victory has been scored by the people, the newspapers triumphantly
announce that the people are really still sovereign, and that
nothing can resist public opinion when once aroused. In reality
this sheet anchor of our hope is as dependable as the wind that
blows. It takes strenuous efforts to arouse the public. Only spectacular
evils are likely to impress it. When it is aroused, it is easily
turned against some side issue or some harmless scapegoat. And,
like all passions, it is very short-lived and sinks back to slumber
quickly. Despotic governments have always trusted in dilatory
tactics, knowing well the somnolence of public opinion. The same
policy is adroitly used by those who exploit the people in our
country. To this must be added the fact that the predatory interests
are tampering with the organs which create public opinion. If
public opinion is indeed so great a power, it is not likely that
it will be overlooked by those who are so alert against all other
sources of danger. It will not be denied that some newspapers
are directly in the pay of certain interests and are their active
champions. It will not be denied that the counting-room standpoint
is profoundly influential in the editorial policy of all newspapers,
and that large advertisers can muzzle most papers if they are
determined on a policy. Not only the editorials are affected,
but the news matter. After the first great election in Chicago
in 1902, in which the people by referendum decided for municipal
ownership of street railways and of the gas and electric lighting
plants by an astonishing majority, the Associated Press despatches
and the great New York dailies were almost or wholly silent on
this significant demonstration of public ownership sentiment.
After the presidential election of 1892, in which the Populist
Party played so important a part, I was unable to find any figures
on their vote in the New York dailies. The day after the presidential
election of 1904, in which the Socialist vote took its first large
leap forward, I traveled through several States, but no paper
which I saw contained the statistics of the Socialist vote. The
only fact mentioned was that their vote had declined in one or
two cities. When the Mercantile Inspection Bill, to which reference
was made above, was before the New York legislature, one of the
most respectable metropolitan newspapers contained frequent articles
and interviews opposing the bill from the point of view of the
department stores. One of my friends, who championed the bill,
spoke to one of his friends on the staff of this paper and asked
him in fairness to print an interview on the other side. The man
replied, "Certainly, that is only fair, I will go and arrange
for it." He returned and said that absolute orders had come
from the counting-room that nothing in favor of the bill was to
be printed. Now the justice and efficiency of democratic government
depend on the intelligence and information of the citizens. If
they are purposely misled by distorted information or by the suppression
of important information, the larger jury before which all public
causes have to be pleaded is tampered with, and the innermost
life of our republic is in danger.
In an address before the Nineteenth Century Club in 1904, Professor
Franklin H. Giddings, one of the most eminent sociologists of
our country, said: " We are witnessing to-day, beyond question,
the decay-perhaps not permanent, but at any rate the decay-of
republican institutions. No man in his right mind can deny it."
We have, in fact, one kind of constitution on paper, and another
system of government in fact. That is usually the way when a slow
revolution is taking place in the distribution of political and
economic power. The old structure apparently remains intact, but
actually the seat of power has changed. The Merovingian kings
remained kings long after all real power had passed to the Major
Domo and they had become attenuated relics. The Senate of Rome
and the consuls continued to transact business in the time-hallowed
way, though they merely registered the will of the real sovereign.
The president of great university has predicted that we shall
have an emperor within twenty years. We shall probably never have
an emperor, but we may have a chairman of some committee or other,
some person not even mentioned in any constitution or law, who
will be the de facto emperor of our republic. Names are trifies.
An emperor by any other name will smell as sweet. The chief of
the Roman Empire was called Caesar or Augustus, which happened
to be the names of the men who first concentrated power in that
form. When the tottering Empire rested on military force alone,
the prefect of the praetorian guard came to be the virtual prime
minister, uniting the chief judicial and executive functions in
his hands. The boss in American political life is the extra-constitutional
ruler simply because he stands for the really dominant powers.
The political life of a nation represents the manner in which
that nation manages its common affairs. It is not a thing apart
from the rest of the national life. It is the direct outgrowth
of present forces and realities, somewhat modified by past traditions,
and in turn it intensifies the conditions which shape it. The
ideal of our government was to distribute political rights and
powers equally among the citizens. But a state of such actual
inequality has grown up among the citizens that this ideal becomes
unworkable. According to the careful calculations of Mr. Charles
B. Spahr, one per cent of the families in our country held more
than half of the aggregate wealth of the country's more than all
the rest of the nation put together. And that was in 1890. Is
it likely that this small minority, which is so powerful in possessions,
will be content with one per cent of the political power wherewith
to protect these possessions? Seven-eighths of the families held
only one-eighth of the national wealth. Has it ever happened in
history that such a seven-eighths would permanently be permitted
to wield seven-eighths of all political power? If we want approximate
political equality, we must have approximate economic equality.
If we attempt it otherwise, we shall be bucking against the law
of gravitation. But when we consider what a long and sore struggle
it cost to achieve political liberty; what a splendid destiny
a true republic planted on this glorious territorial base of ours
might have what a mission of liberty our country might have for
all the nations-it may well fill the heart of every patriot with
the most poignant grief to think that this liberty may perish
once more; that our birthright among the nations may be lost to
us by our greed; and that already our country, instead of being
the great incentive to political democracy in other nations, is
a heavy handicap on the democratic movement, an example to which
the opponents of democracy abroad point with pleasure and which
the lovers of popular liberty pass with averted face.
Our moral character is wrought out by choosing the right of when
we are offered the wrong. It is neither possible nor desirable
to create a condition in which the human soul will not have to
struggle with temptation. But there are conditions in which evil
is so dominant and its attraction so deadly and irresistible,
that no wise man will want to expose himself or his children to
such odds. Living in a tainted atmosphere does not increase the
future capacity of the body to resist disease. Swimming is hard
work and therefore good exercise, but not swimming where the undertow
locks the swimmer's limbs in leaden embrace and drags him down.
We cannot conceal from ourselves that in some directions the temptations
of modern life are so virulent that characters and reputations
are collapsing all about us with sickening frequency. The prevalence
of fraud and the subtler kinds of dishonesty for which we have
invented the new term "graft," is a sinister fact of
the gravest import. It is not merely the weak who fall, but the
strong. Clean, kindly, religious men stoop to methods so tricky,
hard, and rapacious, that we stand aghast whenever the curtain
is drawn aside and we are shown the inside facts. Every business
man who has any finer moral discernment will realize that he himself
is constantly driven by the pressure of business necessity into
actions of which he is ashamed. Men do not want ta do these things
but in a given situation they have to, if they want to survive
or prosper, and the sum of these crooked actions gives an evil
turn to their life.
If it were proposed to invent some social system in which covetousness
would be deliberately fostered and intensified in human nature,
what system could be devised which would excel our own for this
purpose ? Competitive commerce exalts selfishness to the dignity
of a moral principle. It pits men against one another in a gladiatorial
game in which there is no mercy and in which ninety per cent of
the combatants finally strew the arena. It makes Ishmaels of our
best men and teaches them that their hand must be against every
man, since every man's hand is against them. It makes men who
are the gentlest and kindliest friends and neighbors, relentless
taskmasters in their shops and stores, who will drain the strength
of their men and pay their female employees wages on which no
girl can live without supplementing them in some way. It spreads
things before us and beseeches and persuades us to buy what we
do not want. The show windows and bargain-counters are institutions
for the promotion of covetousness among women. Men offer us goods
on credit and dangle the smallness of the first installment before
our eyes as an incentive to go into debt heedlessly. They try
to break down the foresight and self restraint which are the slow
product of moral education, and reduce us to the moral habits
of savages who gorge to-day and fast to-morrow. Kleptomania multiplies.
It is the inevitable product of a social life in which covetousness
is stimulated by all the ingenuity of highly paid specialists.
The large stores have to take the most elaborate precautions against
fraud by their employees and pilfering by their respectable customers.
The finest hotels are plundered by their wealthy patrons of anything
from silver spoons down to marked towels. After the annual Ladies'
Day at a prominent club in Chicago over two hundred spoons and
two hundred thirty-seven sprigs of artificial decoration, besides
miniature vases and bric-a-brac, were missing, and that is always
the case after Ladies' Day, and never at other times. At a reform
school for boys two lads were pointed out to me as the sons of
two men of great wealth. They had been placed there by their parents
to cure them of their inveterate habit of stealing. Their fathers
were in the United States Senate. Our business life borders so
closely on dishonesty that men are hardly aware when they cross
the line. It is a penal offence for a government officer to profit
by a contract which he awards or mediates in business life that
is an everyday occurrence. No wonder that our officials are corrupt
when their corruption is the respectability of business life.
Gambling is the vice of the savage. True civilization ought to
outgrow it, as it has outgrown tattooing and cannibalism. Instead
of that our commercial life stimulates the gambling instinct.
Our commerce is speculative in its very nature. Of course risk
is inseparable from human life. It is the virtue of the pioneer
to take risks boldly. Every field sown by the farmer represents
a certain risk. But the element of labor is the main thing in
the farmer's work and that makes the process wholesome. In the
measure in which productive labor is eliminated and the risk taken
becomes the sole title to the profit gained, the transaction approximates
gambling. Above the entrance of an Eastern penal institution the
motto has been inscribed, "The worst day in the life of a
young man is when he gets the idea that he can make a dollar without
doing a dollar's worth of work for it." That is good sense,
but how would that motto look on the walls of the New York Stock
Exchange or the Chicago Produce Exchange? If a man buys stock
or wheat on a margin and clears a hundred dollars, what labor
or service has he given for which this is the reward? In what
respect does it differ from crap-shooting in which a boy risks
his pennies and uses his skill just like the speculator? In Europe,
lotteries are state institutions and prized privileges of churches
and benevolent undertakings. We have fortunately outlawed them
in our country, but gambling is one of our national vices because
our entire commerce is saturated with the spirit of it.
The social nature of man makes him an imitative creature. The
instinct of imitation and emulation may be a powerful lever for
good if individuals and classes set the example of real culture
and refinement of manners and taste. But the processes of competitive
industry have poured vast wealth into the lap of a limited number
and have created an unparalleled lavishness of expenditure which
has nothing ennobling about it. Those who have to work hard for
their money will, as a rule, be careful how they spend it. Those
who get it without effort, will spend it without thought. Thus
parasitic wealth is sure to create a vicious luxury, which then
acts as a centre of infection for all other classes. Fashions
operate downward. Each class tries to imitate the one higher up,
and to escape from the imitation of those lower down. Thus the
ostentation of the overfull purses of the predatory rich lures
all society into the worship of false gods. It intensifies "the
lust of the eye and the pride of life" unnaturally, and to
that extent expels "the love of the Father," which includes
the love of all true values. Any one can test the matter in his
own case by asking himself how much of his money, his time, and
his worry is consumed in merely " keeping up with the procession,"
and is diverted from real culture to mere display by the compulsion
of social requirements about him. The man who lives only on his
labor is brought into social competition with people who have
additional income through rents and profits, and must break his
back merely to keep his wife and children on a level with others.
The very spirit of democracy which has wiped out the old class
lines in modern life, makes the rivalry keener. In Europe a peasant
girl or a servant formerly was quite content with the dress of
her class and had no ambition to rival the very different dress
of the gentry. With us the instinct of imitation works without
a barrier from the top of the social pyramid to the bottom, and
the whole process of consumption throughout society 1S feverishly
affected by the aggregation of unearned money at the top. The
embezzlements of business men, the nervous breakdown of women,
the ruin of girls, the neglect of home and children, are largely
caused by the unnatural pace of expenditures. If the rich had
only what they earned, and the poor had all that they earned,
all wheels would revolve more slowly and life would be more sane.
Industry and commerce are in their nature productive and therefore
good. But in our industry a strong element o rapacity vitiates
the moral qualities of business life. A railway president in New
York said to me-half in joke, of course: " The men who go
down town on the Elevated at seven and eight o'clock really make
things. We who go down at nine and ten, only try to take things
away from one another." Supplying goods to the people is,
of course, the main thing; but crowding out the other man, who
also wants to supply them, takes a large part of the time and
energy of business. Our competitive life has so deeply warped
our moral judgment that not one man in a thousand will realize
anything immoral in attracting another man 's customers. "Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor's trade" is not in our decalogue.
The same instinct of rapacity cheats the consumer. They sell us
fruit-jam made without fruit butter that never saw the milk-pail;
potted chicken that grunted in the barnyard; all-wool goods that
never said "baah," but leave it to the buyer to say
it. If a son asks for bread, his father will not offer him a stone
but ground soapstone is freely advertised as an adulterant for
flour. Several years ago the Secretary of Agriculture, on the
basis of an extensive inquiry, estimated that thirty per cent
of the money paid for food products in the United States is paid
for adulterated or misbranded goods. We are fortunate if the title
of the food is false, but the food is wholesome. But when fruit
flavors are made with coal-tar and benzoic acid, and when the
milk for our children is pre served with formaldehyde, the rapacity
becomes murderous. The life of a mother or a child may depend
on the purity of a medicine administered at the critical stage
of a disease; but we have very little guarantee that our medicines
are not adulterated. In 1904 the Board of Health in New York City
had a list of about three hundred druggists and dealers who had
attempted to sell spurious mixtures to the very officers of the
Board. Most of the patent medicines to which our people trust
are cheap and worthless concoctions. Others are insidious conveyers
of narcotic poisons which are intended to set up a morbid appetite
in the consumers for the profit of the dealers. And if patent
medicines were as health giving as they claim to be, the very
principle of patenting and withholding from general use a beneficent
invention for the saving of human life would be a shameful confession
of selfish greed. The liquor traffic presents a striking case
of a huge industry inducing people to buy what harms them. It
is militant capitalism rotting human lives and characters to distil
dividends. In the atrocities on the Congo we have the same capitalism
doing its pitiless work in a safe and distant corner of the world,
on an inferior race, and under the full support of the government.
The rapacity of commerce has been the secret spring of most recent
wars. Speculative finance is the axis on which international politics
revolve.
The counts in the indictment against our marvellous civilization
could be multiplied at pleasure. It is a splendid sinner, "magnificent
in sin." The words which Bret Harte addressed to San Francisco
in its earlier days, characterize the whole of modern society:-
"I know thy cunning and thy greed, Thy hard, high lust and
wilful deed, And all thy glory loves to tell Of specious gifts
material." It defrauds the customer who buys its goods. It
drains and brutalizes the workman who does its work. It hunts
the business man with fear of failure, or makes him hard with
merciless success. It plays with the loaded dice of false prospectuses
and watered stock, and the vaster its operations become, the more
do they love the darkness rather than the light. It corrupts all
that it touches,-politics, education, the Church. For a profession
to be " commercialized " means to be demoralized. The
only realms of life in which we are still glad and happy are those
in which the laws of commerce are not practised. If they entered
the home, even that would be hell.
Industry and commerce are good. They serve the needs of men. The
men eminent in industry and commerce are good men, with the fine
qualities of human nature. But the organization of industry and
commerce is such that along with its useful service it carries
death, physical and moral. Frederick Denison Maurice, one of the
finest minds of England in the Victorian Age, said, " I do
not see my way farther than this, Competition is put forth as-
the law of the universe that is a lie." And his friend Charles
Kingsley added, "Competition means death; cooperation means
life.". Every joint-stock company, trust, or labor union
organized, every extension of government interference or government
ownership, is a surrender of the competitive principle and a halting
step toward cooperation. Practical men take these steps because
competition has proved itself suicidal to economic welfare. Christian
men have a stouter reason for turning against it-; because it
slays human character and denies human brotherhood. If money dominates,
the ideal cannot dominate. If we serve mammon, we cannot serve
the Christ.
We have purposely left to the last what properly comes first in
any consideration of social life. The family is the structural
cell of the social organism. In it lives the power of propagation
and renewal of life. It is the foundation of morality, the chief
educational institution, and the source of nearly all the real
contentment among men. To create a maximum number of happy families
might well be considered the end of all statesmanship. As President
Roosevelt recently said, all other questions sink into insignificance
when the stability of the family is at stake. The most significant
part of that utterance was that such a thing had to be uttered
at all.
Hard times are always marked by a downward curve in the percentage
of marriages. In our country the decline has become chronic for
some years past. Men marry late, and when the mating season of
youth is once past, many never marry at all. In my city of Rochester,
N.Y., with a population of 162,608, the census of 1900 showed
25,219 men between the age of 25 and 44, the years during which
a man ought to be enjoying a home and rearing children, and; 7355
of them were still unmarried. There were 28,218 women of the same
years, relatively further along in marriageable age than the men,
and 8l09 were still unmarried.
Now the attraction between men and women is just as fundamental
a fact in social life as the attraction of the earth is in physics,
and the only way in which that tremendous force of desire can
be prevented from wrecking lives 1S to make it build lives by
home contentment. The existence of a large class of involuntary
celibates in society is a more threatening fact even than the
increase of divorces. The slums are aggregations of single men
and women. If the monastic celibates of the Middle Ages, who had
the powerful incentive of religious enthusiasm and all the preventives
of isolation and supervision, could not keep chaste, is it likely
that the unmarried thousands in the freedom of modern life will
maintain their own purity and respect the purity of others. They
are thrust into the lonely life through no wise resolve of their
own, but mainly through the fear that they will not be able to
maintain a family in the standard of comfort which they deem necessary
for their life
If a man and woman do marry, they do not yet constitute a true
family. The little hand of a child, more than the blessing of
a priest, consecrates the family. France has long been held up
as furnishing the terrible example of a dec1ining birth-rate,
but the older portions of our country are saved from the same
situation only by the fertility of the immigrants. The native
population of New England would not reproduce.
The chief cause for this profoundly important fact is economic
fear. Whenever the economic condition of an class 1S hopeful and
improving, there is an increase in the birth-rate. Whenever there
is economic disaster or increasing pressure, there is a decline.
In the West, where land is still abundant, families are large.
The immigrants, who feel the relative easement of pressure, multiply.
The natives, who suffer by the competition of the immigrants and
who feel the tightening grip of our industrial development, refuse
to bring children into a world which threatens them with poverty.
Our cheerful newspaper optimists assure us that the American child
makes up by quality what it lacks in numbers They quote the reply
of the lioness in the fable, " One, but a lion." But
that is merely an effort to make an ugly fact look sweet. People
hunting for apartments in a large city soon discover one cause.
"As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children
of youth," said the Psalmist. "Happy is the man that
hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be put to shame when
they speak with their enemies in the gate." But they shall
talk very humbly and beseechingly when they speak with their prospective
landlords nowadays. The concentration of population in the cities
through competitive necessities, the consequent increase in rents,
the enforced proximity to undesirable neighbors, the rise in the
standard of luxury together with the decreased purchasing power
of the average income-these account in the main for the declining
birth-rate. When men are hardly able to keep their head above
water, they fear to carry a child on their back. Fear stands where
the spring of life should bubble and freezes it into subsidence.
That situation raises the most serious questions in the most intimate
morality oi human life. Moreover, the absence of children decreases
i the cohesive power of the married relation, the blitheness and
youthfulness of life, the unselfishness of character, the insight
into human nature; in short, it blights much of what is really
fine and high in the souls and relations of men. The luxury and
culture made possible by the absence of children is a glittering
varnish to cover decaying wood.
The menace to the future of our nation is still greater through
the fact that sterility is most marked among the able and educated
families. The shiftless, and all those with whom natural passion
is least restrained, will breed most freely. The prudent consider
and shrink. The poor have little to lose. Children are their form
of old-age pensions. The well-to-do see the possible depth to
which they or their children may descend, and are afraid. Thus
the reproduction of the race is left to the poor and ignorant.
Unusual ability is not transmitted. The benefits of intellectual
environment fail to be prolonged by heredity. The vital statistics
of Harvard and Columbia graduates show a rapidly declining birth-rate
and complete failure to reproduce their own number, I sat at a
table with seven of the best and ablest men I know. We talked
of children and found that only two had a child one of the two
was a Swede, the other the son of German immigrants. In a previous
chapter we referred to the loss suffered by mankind through the
sterility of its most ideal individuals while monasticism and
priestly celibacy prevailed.2 Here we have a fact of equal historical
significance, but unrelieved by the idealism of the monastic vow.
Education can only train the gifts with which a child is endowed
at birth. The intellectual standard of humanity can be raised
only by the propagation of the capable. Our social system causes
an unnatural selection of the weak for breeding, and the result
is the survival of the unfittest.
When the family is small, the influence of brothers and sisters
on the formation of character is lacking. When the father has
to work long hours and then spend additional time in travelling
between his home and his work, the element of fatherhood in the
home is reduced to a minimum. If the mother, too, goes out to
work, the children are left to "the street," which is
an educator of rather doubtful value. If boarders and roomers
are taken in to help in paying the rent, an alien and often a
demoralizing element enters the family. Thus the economic situation
everywhere saps family life.
One family to one house is the only normal condition. When twenty
families live in one tenement, twenty souls inhabit one body.
That was the condition of the demoniac of Gadara, in whom dwelt
a legion. He was crazy.
To be a home in the fullest sense, it must be loved with the sense
of proprietorship. As cities grow, home ownership declines. A
semi-vagrancy from one flat to the next grows up. In the borough
of Manhattan only six per cent of the homes are owned by those
who live in them; in Philadelphia, a city of small houses, only
twenty-two per cent own their homes. Rochester is an almost ideal
city for the development of homes, and the popular assumption
is that nearly everybody owns his home. Yet the census of 1900
showed that of the 33,964 homes in the city only 12,290 were owned
by the tenants, and half of these were mortgaged.
The condition of the home determines the condition of woman. If
girls are eagerly sought in marriage, they can choose the best.
If few men can afford a good home, girls must take what offers
or go without. If a man can easily make a living for a family,
he can afford to be indifferent to anything but the person of
the woman he loves. As the economic pressure tightens and social
classes grow more clearly defined, American men, too, will begin
to inquire what property comes to them with their bride. We shall
have love modified by the "dot."
Our optimists treat it as a sign of progress that " so many
professions are now open to women." But it is not choice,
but grim necessity, that drives woman into new ways of getting
bread and clothing. The great majority of girls heartily prefer
the independence and the satisfaction of the heart which are offered
to a woman only in a comfortable and happy home. Some educated
girls think they prefer the practice of a profession because the
dream of unusual success lures them; but when they have had a
taste of the wearing routine that prevails in most professions,
they turn with longing to the thought of a home of their own.
Our industrial machine has absorbed the functions which women
formerly fulfilled in the home, and has drawn them into its hopper
because female labor is unorganized and cheap labor. They are
made to compete with the very men who ought to marry them, and
thus they further diminish their own chance of marriage. If any
one has a sound reason for taking the competitive system by the
throat in righteous wrath, it is the unmarried woman and the mother
with girls.
Girls go to work at the very age when their developing body ought
to be shielded from physical and mental strain Many are kept standing
for long hours at a time. During rush seasons they are pushed
to exhaustion. In few cases can they permit themselves that periodical
easement which is essential to the continued health of most women.
Many of them enter marriage with organic troubles that develop
their full import only in later years. Girls pass from school
to shop or store and never learn housekeeping well. If they marry,
they assume charge of a manufacturing establishment in which all
the varied functions are performed by one woman They have to learn
the work at an age when the body no longer acquires new habits
readily. If the burden of maternity is added at the same time,
the strain is immense, and is likely to affect the temper and
the happiness of the home. It is thus our civilization prepares
its women for the all important function of motherhood, for on
the women of the working class rests the function of bearing and
rearing the future citizens of the republic. Individually Americans
are more tender of women than any other nation. Collectively we
treat them with cruelty and folly.
A large proportion of working women are not paid wages sufficient
to support themselves in comfort and to dress as the requirements
of their position and of modern taste demand. In that case they
must either suffer want or supplement their earnings. They are
fortunate if fathers and brothers support the home. In that case
they are able to underbid those who are dependent on their own
labor alone. If the home does not thus shield them, what are they
to do ? There are numbers of unmarried and married men about them
looking for transient love. The girls themselves have the womanly
desire for the company and love of men. Satisfaction by marriage
may not be in sight. They crave for the clothing, the trinkets,
the pleasures that glitter about them. It is so easy to get a
share. When I reflect on the unstained virtue and nobility of
the great majority of working girls whom I have known, I feel
the deepest respect for them. But some are always on the edge
of danger. As the crocodile takes toll of the Hindu women at the
river ford, so every now and then one of the girls throws up her
hands and goes under. Those who are strong by personal vigor,
or by religious training, can escape, and blessed is he who strengthens
their hands. But that does not satisfy the situation. If a ship
were wrecked and the passengers clinging to the tilted deck, the
strongest would hold on best. If some one cheered their failing
strength and showed them how best to cling, it would be a great
service. But if the deck kept on tilting at a steeper angle, more
still would go. There are employers in European cities who expect
as a matter of course that their female clerks will give them
more than the working capacity of their bodies. There are stores
in New York and elsewhere where some girls get the easy positions
and some are made uncomfortable for reasons well understood. That
sort of oppression will be successful in the measure in which
the girls fear to lose their positions. Woe to the weak! They
are like birds fluttering in the hot hand of the pursuer. The
most serious danger is not the increase of professional prostitutes,
but the frequency with which women supplement their wages and
secure their pleasures by occasional immorality. Prostitutes are
ostracized by their class It is worse if girls are tainted, but
retain their standing and spread the contagion. The freedom of
movement in American life and the growing knowledge of preventives
makes sin easy and safe. To any one who realizes the value of
womanly purity, it is appalling to think that the standard of
purity for their whole sex may drop and approximate the standard
prevailing among men.
The health of society rests on the welfare of the home What, then,
will be the outcome if the unmarried multiply; if homes remain
childless; if families are homeless; if girls do not know housework;
and if men come to distrust the purity of women?
The continents are strewn with the ruins of dead nations and civilizations.
History laughs at the optimistic illusion that "nothing can
stand in the way of human progress." It would be safer to
assert that progress is always for a time only, and then succumbs
to the inevitable decay. One by one the ancient peoples rose to
wealth and civilization, extended their sway as far as geographical
conditions would permit, and then began to decay within and to
crumble away without, until the mausoleums of their kings were
the haunt of jackals, and the descendants of their conquering
warriors were abject peasants slaving for some alien lord. What
guarantee have we, then, that our modern civilization with its
pomp will not be "one with Nineveh and Tyre"?
The most important question which humanity ought to address to
its historical scholars is this: "Why did these others die,
and what can we do to escape their fate?" For death is not
an inevitable and welcome necessity for a nation, as it is for
the individual. Its strength and bloom could be indefinitely prolonged
if the people were wise and just enough to avert the causes of
decay. There is no inherent cause why a great group of nations,
such as that which is now united in Western civilization, should
not live on in perpetual youth, overcoming by a series of rejuvenations
every social evil as it arises, and using every attainment as
a stepping-stone to a still higher culture of individual and social
life. It has never yet been done. Can it be done in a civilization
in which Christianity is the salt of the earth, the social preservative?
Of all the other dead civilizations we have only scattered relics
and fragmentary information, as of some fossil creature of a past
geological era. We can only guess at their fate. But the rise
and fall of one happened in the full light of day, and we have
historical material enough to watch every step of the process.
That was the Grace-Roman civilization which clustered about the
Mediterranean Sea.
Its golden age, which immediately preceded its rapid decline,
had a striking resemblance to our own time. In both cases there
was a swift increase in wealth. The Empire policed the seas and
built roads. The safety of commerce and the ease of travel and
transportation did for the Empire what steam transportation did
for the nineteenth century. The mass of slaves secured by the
wars of conquest, and organized for production in the factories
and on the great estates, furnished that increase in cheap productive
force which the invention of steam machinery and the division
and organization of labor furnished to the modern world. No new
civilization was created by these improved conditions but the
forces latent in existing civilization were stimulated and set
free, and their application resulted in a rapid efflorescence
of the economic and intellectual life. Just as the nations about
the Seven Seas are drawing together to-day and are sharing their
spiritual possessions in a common civilization, so the Empire
broke down the barriers of the nations about the Mediterranean,
gathered them in a certain unity of life, and poured their capacities
and thoughts into a common fund. The result was a breakdown of
the old faiths and a wonderful fertilization of intellectual life.
Wealth--to use a homely illustration--is to a nation what manure
is to a farm. If the farmer spreads it evenly over the soil, it
will enrich the whole. If he should leave it in heaps, the land
would be impoverished and under the rich heaps the vegetation
would be killed.
The new wealth created in the Roman Empire was not justly distributed,
but fell a prey to a minority who were in a position to seize
it. A new money aristocracy arose which financed the commercial
undertakings and shouldered the old aristocratic families aside,
just as the feudal aristocracies were superseded in consequence
of the modern industrial revolution. A few gained immense wealth,
while below them was a mass of slaves and free proletarians. The
independent middle class disappeared. The cities grew abnormally
at the expense of the country and its sturdy population. Great
fortunes were made and yet there was constant distress and frequent
hard times. The poor had no rights in the means of production,
so they used the political power still remaining to them to secure
state grants of land, money, grain, and pleasures. There was widespread
reluctance to marry and to rear children. Education became common,
and yet culture declined. There were plenty of universities, great
libraries, well-paid professors, and yet a growing coarseness
of taste and a decline in creative artistic and literary ability.
If the yellow newspaper could have been printed, it would have
"filled a long-felt want." The social conditions involved
a readjustment of political power. A strong centralized government
was necessary to keep the provinces quiet while Rome taxed them
and the bureaucracy grew rich on them. Government was not based
broadly on the just consent of the governed, but on the swords
of the legions, and especially of the praetorian guard. The old
republican forms were long maintained, but Rome verged more and
more toward despotic autocracy.
In a hundred ways the second century of our era seemed to be the
splendid culmination of all the past. The Empire seemed imperishable
in the glory of almost a thousand years of power. To prophesy
its fall would have seemed like predicting the failure of civilization
and humanity. The reverses which began with the death of Marcus
Aurelius in A.D. 180 seemed mere temporary misfortunes. Yet they
were the beginning of the end.
The German and Celtic tribes had long swirled and eddied about
the northern boundary of the Empire, like the ocean about the
dikes of Holland. The little Rome of Marius a hundred years before
Christ had successfully beaten back the Cimbrians and Teutons.
For two centuries the strong arm of the legions had dammed the
flood behind the Rhine and Danube. Rome was so much superior in
numbers, in wealth, in the science of war and all the resources
of civilization, that it might have continued to hold them in
check and to turn their forward movements in other directions.
But the decay at the centre now weakened the capacity for resistance
at the borders. The farmers who had made the legions of the Republic
invincible had been ruined by the competition of slave labor,
crowded out by land monopoly, and sucked into the ragged proletariat
of the cities. The armies had to be recruited from the conquered
provinces and finally from barbarian mercenaries. The moral enthusiasm
of a citizen soldiery fighting for their homes was gone. The impoverished
and overtaxed provinces were unable to respond to additional financial
needs. Slowly the barbarians filtered into the Northern provinces
by mass immigration. The civilized population did not have vitality
enough to assimilate the foreign immigrants. Slowly, by gradual
stages, hardly fast enough for men to realize what was going on,
the ancient civilization retreated, and the flood of barbarism
covered the provinces, with only some islands of culture rising
above the yellow flood.
And how will it be with us ? Will that vaster civilization which
began in Europe and is now spreading along the shores of all the
oceans, as Rome grew from Italy outward around the great inland
sea, run through the same stages? If the time of our weakness
comes, the barbarians will not be wanting to take possession.
Where the carcass is, the vultures will gather.
Nations do not die by wealth, but by injustice. The forward impetus
comes through some great historical opportunity which stimulates
the production of wealth, breaks up the caked and rigid order
of the past, sets free the energies of new classes, calls creative
leaders to the front, quickens the intellectual life, intensifies
the sense of duty and the ideal devotion to the common weal, and
awakens in the strong individuals the large ambition of patriotic
service. Progress slackens when a single class appropriates the
social results of the common labor, fortifies its evil rights
by unfair laws, throttles the masses by political centralization
and suppression, and consumes in luxury what it has taken in covetousness.
Then there is a gradual loss of productive energy, an increasing
bitterness and distrust, a waning sense of duty and devotion to
country, a paralysis of the moral springs of noble action. Men
no longer love the Commonwealth, because it does not stand for
the common wealth. Force has to supply the cohesive power which
love fails to furnish. Exploitation creates poverty, and poverty
is followed by physical degeneration. Education, art, wealth,
and culture may continue to advance and may even ripen to their
mellowest perfection when the worm of death is already at the
heart of the nation. Internal convulsions or external catastrophes
will finally reveal the state of decay.
It is always a process extending through generations or even centuries.
It is possible that with the closely knit nations of the present
era the resistive vitality is greater than in former ages, and
it will take much longer for them to break up. The mobility of
modern intellectual life will make it harder for the stagnation
of mind and the crystallization of institutions to make headway.
But unless the causes of social wrong are removed, it will be
a slow process of strangulation and asphyxiation.
In the last resort the only hope is in the moral forces which
can be summoned to the rescue. If there are statesmen, prophets,
and apostles who set truth and justice above selfish advancement;
if their call finds a response in the great body of the people;
if a new tide of religious faith and moral enthusiasm creates
new standards of duty and a new capacity for self-sacrifice; if
the strong learn to direct their love of power to the uplifting
of the people and see the highest self-assertion in self-sacrifice-then
the intrenchments of vested wrong will melt away; the stifled
energy of the people will leap forward; the atrophied members
of the social body will be filled with a fresh flow of blood;
and a regenerate nation will look with the eyes of youth across
the fields of the future.
The cry of "Crisis! crisis!" has become a weariness.
Every age and every year are critical and fraught with destiny.
Yet in the widest survey of history Western civilization is now
at a decisive point in its development.
Will some Gibbon of Mongol race sit by the shore of the Pacific
in the year A.D. 3000 and write on the "Decline and Fall
of the Christian Empire"? If so, he will probably describe
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the golden age when
outwardly life flourished as never before, but when that decay,
which resulted in the gradual collapse of the twenty-first and
twenty-second centuries, was already far advanced.
Or will the twentieth century mark for the future historian the
real adolescence of humanity, the great emancipation from barbarism
and from the paralysis of injustice, and the beginning of a progress
in the intellectual, social, and moral life of mankind to which
all past history has no parallel ?
It will depend almost wholly on the moral forces which the Christian
nations can bring to the fighting line against wrong, and the
fighting energy of those moral forces will again depend on the
degree to which they are inspired by religious faith and enthusiasm.
It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge.
Source:
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918): CHR1STIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS (New York,
The MacMillan Company, 1908): 230-86
This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted
texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World
history.
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the
document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying,
distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal
use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source.
No permission is granted for commercial use of the Sourcebook.
(c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997
