THE 
 
 INDUSTRIAL 
 RBPUBLIC 
 
 UPTON SINCLAIR 
 
 :^S. 
 
BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 Benrg W. Sage 
 
 1891 
 
 ^. XtHL^'^ ■! L.l, /2j.6.f i^.o-J. 
 
HX86.S6l''Tr" ""'™"'"' ''""^ 
 
 The industrial republic 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 032 590 394 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032590394 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC 
 
BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR 
 
 THE JUNGLE 
 
 MANASSAS 
 
 THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING 
 
 PRINCE HAGEN 
 
 KING MIDAS 
 
Courtesy of Everybody' s ^Sa^azins 
 
 " VOORUIT" 
 Home of the Socialist Societies of Ghent 
 
The 
 Industrial Republic 
 
 A Study of the America of 
 Ten Years Hence 
 
 By 
 
 UPTON SINCLAIR 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 New York 
 
 Doubleday, Page & Company 
 
 1907 
 
% 
 
 coptbight, 1907, bt 
 
 doubledat, page & compint 
 
 Published, Mat, 1907 
 
 All Rights Eeservbd 
 
 Including that op Translation into Foreign Languages 
 
 Including the Scandinavlan 
 
TO H. G. WELLS 
 
 "THE NEXT MOST HOPEFUL" 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The thought of the time has familiarised 
 us with the evolutionary view of things; we 
 understand that life is the product of an 
 inner impulse, labouring to embody itself 
 in the world of sense; and that the product 
 is always changing — that there is nothing 
 permanent save the principles and laws in 
 accordance with which development goes 
 on. We understand that the universe of 
 things was evolved by slow stages into what 
 it is to-day, that all life has come into being 
 in the same way. We have traced this 
 process in the far-distant suns and in the 
 strata of the earth; we have traced it in the 
 vegetables and in the animals, in the seed 
 and in the embryo; we have traced it in 
 all of man's activities, his ways of thinking 
 and acting, of eating and dressing and work- 
 ing and fighting and praying. 
 
 This book is an attempt to interpret in 
 the light of evolutionary science the social 
 problem of our present world; to consider 
 American institutions as they exist at this 
 hour — what forces are now at work within 
 them, and what changes they are likely 
 to produce. The subject-matter dealt witn 
 is not abstract speculation, but rather the 
 
 vii 
 
viii The Industrial Republic 
 
 everyday realities of the world we know — 
 our present political parties and public men, 
 our present corporations and captains of 
 industry, our present labour unions and 
 newspapers, colleges and churches. The 
 thing sought is an answer to a concrete and 
 definite question: What will America be 
 ten years from now? 
 
 Inasmuch as the people who are most 
 interested in practical afi^airs are very busy 
 people, I judge it to be a common-sense 
 procedure to set forth my ideas in minia- 
 ture at the outset; so that one may learn 
 in two or three minutes exactly what my 
 book contains, and judge whether he cares 
 to read it. 
 
 It is my belief that the student of a gener- 
 ation from now will look back upon the 
 last two centuries of human history and 
 interpret them as the final stage of a long 
 process whereby man was transformed from 
 a solitary and predatory individual to a 
 social and peaceable member of a single 
 world community. He will see that men, 
 pressed by the struggle for existence, had 
 united themselves into groups under the 
 discipline of laws and conventions; and that 
 the last two centuries represented the period 
 when these laws and conventions, having 
 done their unifying work, and secured the 
 survival of the group, were set aside and 
 replaced by free and voluntary social effort. 
 
Introduction ix 
 
 The student will furthermore perceive 
 that this evolutionary process had two mani- 
 festations, two waves, so to speak; the first 
 political, and the second industrial; the first 
 determined by man's struggle to protect 
 his life, and the second by his struggle to 
 amass wealth. The culmination of the first 
 occurred successively in the English revolu- 
 tions, the American and French revolutions, 
 and the other various efforts after political 
 freedom. After each of these achievements 
 the historian notices a period of bitterness 
 and disillusionment, a sense of failure, it 
 being discovered that the expected did not 
 occur, that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity 
 did not become the rule of men's conduct. 
 After that, however, succeeds a period of 
 enlightenment, it having been realised that 
 the work has only been half done, that man 
 has been made only hah free. The political 
 sovereignty has been taken out of the pos- 
 session of private individuals and made 
 the property of the whole community, to be 
 shared m by all upon equal terms; but the 
 industrial sovereignty still remains the prop- 
 erty of a few. A man can no longer be put 
 in jail or taxed by a king, but he can be 
 starved and exploited by a master; his body 
 is now his own, but his labour is another's — 
 and there is very little difference between 
 the two. So immediately there begins a 
 new movement, the end of which is a 
 
X The Industrial Republic 
 
 new revolution, and the establishment of 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC. 
 
 What do I mean by an Industrial Repub- 
 lic ? I mean an organisation for the pro- 
 duction and distribution of wealth, whose 
 members are established upon a basis of 
 equality; who elect representatives to govern 
 the organisation; and who receive the full 
 value of what their labour produces. I 
 mean an industrial government of the people, 
 by the people, for the people; a community 
 in which the means of production have been 
 made the inalienable property of the State. 
 My purpose in writing this book is to point 
 out the forces which are now rapidly develop- 
 ing in America; and which, when they 
 have attained to maturity, will usher in the 
 Industrial Republic by a process as natural 
 and as inevitable as that by which a chick 
 breaks out of its shell or a child comes forth 
 from the womb at the proper hour. I 
 believe that the economic process is whirling 
 us on with terrific momentum toward the 
 crisis; and I look to see the most essential 
 features of the great transformation accom- 
 plished in America within one year after 
 the Presidential election of 1912. 
 
 If I had been a tactful person I should 
 have kept that last Statement until far on in 
 my argument. For I find many people who 
 are interested in the idea of an Industrial 
 Republic, and some few who are willing 
 
Introduction xi 
 
 to think of it as a possibility; but I find none 
 who do not balk when I presume to set the 
 day. Yet the setting of the day is a vital 
 part of my conviction, and I should play 
 the reader false if I failed to mention it in 
 this preliminary statement of my argument. 
 It is a conviction to which I have come with 
 the diligent use of the best faculties I pos- 
 sess, and after a preparation of a sort that 
 is certainly unusual, and possibly even 
 quite unique. 
 
 Perhaps I cannot do better by way of 
 introduction than to explain just what I 
 mean. Our country has passed through 
 two great crises, when important political 
 and social changes came with startling 
 suddenness. I refer to the Revolution and 
 the Civil War; and to the latter of these 
 crises, or rather the period of its preparation 
 - — 1847 to 1861—1 once had occasion to 
 give two years of an interesting kind of 
 study. I read everything which I could find 
 in the two largest special collections in the 
 country; not merely histories and biog- 
 raphies, but the documents of the time, 
 speeches and sermons and letters, news- 
 
 f)apers and magazines and pamphlets. I 
 iterally lived in the period; I knew it more 
 intimately than the world that was actually 
 about me. My purpose was to write a 
 novel which should make the crisis real to 
 the people of the present; and so I had to 
 
xii The Industrial Republic 
 
 read creatively, I had to get into the very 
 soul of what I read. I had to struggle and 
 to suffer with the people of that time, to 
 forget my knowledge of the future, and to 
 watch through their eyes the hourly unfold- 
 ing of the mighty drama of events. 
 
 There were so many kinds of men — 
 statesmen and business men, lawyers and 
 clergymen, heroes and cowards; and I had 
 to study them all, and see the thing through 
 the eyes of each of them. And of course, 
 I could only play at ignorance, for I knew 
 the future; and I saw all their mistakes, 
 and the reasons for them, and the pity and 
 the folly and the tragedy of it all. Knowing, 
 as I did, the great underlying forces which 
 were driving behind the events, I saw all 
 these people as puppets, moved here and 
 there by powers of whose existence they 
 never dreamed. 
 
 And, of course, all the while I was also 
 reading my morning newspaper, and watch- 
 ing the world of to-day; and inevitably I 
 found myself testing the people of the 
 present by these same methods. I would 
 find myself seeking for the forces which were 
 at work to-day, and striving to reach out to 
 the future to which they were leading. I 
 would find myself, by the way of helping in 
 this interpretation, comparing and balancing 
 the two eras, and transposing its leading 
 figures back and forth. This famous 
 
Introduction xiii 
 
 educator or this newspaper editor of to-day — 
 what would he have been saying had he 
 Hved in 1852 ? And this clergyman friend 
 of mine, this politician — ^where would he fit 
 into that period ? Or if Yancey had been 
 alive to-day, what would he have been 
 doing ? Where should I have found Seward 
 — what parts would Edward Everett and 
 Wendell Phillips and Jefferson Davis have 
 been playing ? 
 
 It was really a fascinating problem in 
 proportion. The men of fifty years ago 
 stood thus and so to a known crisis; similar 
 men of the present stand thus to an unknown 
 crisis — and now find the crisis. When I 
 had finished "Manassas" I took up the 
 writing of "The Jungle"; which is simply 
 to say that I was drawn on irresistibly to 
 seek for this latter crisis, and to try to un- 
 derstand it — to get into the heart of it, and 
 live it and follow it to its end, just as I had 
 done with the earlier one. So now I feel that 
 I have much the same sort of power as Cu- 
 vier, the naturalist, who could construct a 
 
 Erehistoric animal from a bit of its bone. I 
 ave far more than the bone of this monster 
 — I have his tail, beginning far back in the 
 seventies; and I have the whole of his huge 
 body — the present. I have counted his 
 scales and measured his limbs; I have even 
 felt his pulse and had his blood under the 
 microscope. And now you ask me — How 
 
xiv The Industrial Republic 
 
 many more vertebrae will there be in the 
 neck of this strange animal? And what 
 will be the size and the shape of his head ? 
 So it is that I write in all seriousness that 
 the revolution will take place in America 
 within one year after the Presidential election 
 of 1912; and, in saying this, I claim to speak, 
 not as a dreamer nor as a child, but as a 
 scientist and a prophet. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction vii 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Coming Crisis 3 
 
 II. Industrial Evolution 27 
 
 III. Markets and Misery 72 
 
 IV. Social Decay 103 
 
 V. Business and Politics 138 
 
 VI. The Revolution 179 
 
 VII. The Industrial Repubhc .... 215 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 " Vooruit," Home of the Socialist societies of 
 
 Ghent ..... Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 A Socialist view of the Trusts ... 48 
 
 Reaping by hand and by machinery . . 92 
 
 Child labor in glass factories and coal mines 114 
 
 The Social contrast in New York . . . 126 
 
 Coxey's Army on the march and in Washington 206 
 
 The competitive vs. cooperative distribution 
 
 of information . . . . . 220 
 
 Helicon Hall ...... 274 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE COMING CRISIS 
 
 'T^HE thing which most impresses the stu- 
 -■- dent of the Civil War struggle, is 
 how generally and completely the people 
 who lived through it failed to understand 
 it themselves. We of the present day know 
 that the War was a clash between two incom- 
 patible types of civilisation; between an 
 agricultural and conservative aristocracy, 
 and a commercial and progressive democ- 
 racy. We can see that each society devel- 
 oped in its people a separate point of view, 
 separate customs and laws, ideals and 
 policies, literatures and religions. We can 
 see that their differing interests as to tariffs, 
 police regulations, domestic improvements 
 and foreign affairs, made political strife 
 between them inevitable; and that finally 
 the expansion which was necessary to the 
 life of each brought them into a conflict 
 which could only end with the submission 
 of one or the other. Yet, plain as this seems 
 to us now, the people of that time did not 
 
 3 
 
4 The Industrial Republic 
 
 grasp it; through the whole long process 
 they were dragged, as it were, by the hair 
 of their heads, and each event as it came was 
 a separate phenomenon, a fresh source of 
 astonishment, alarm, and indignation. Even 
 after the war had broken out, the vast 
 majority of them would not be enlightened as 
 in regard to it — a few of them have not been 
 enlightened yet. I talked recently with an 
 old Confederate naval officer, who said to me : 
 "Oh, yes; it was the politicians who made 
 the war. " I recall the astonished look which 
 crossed the old gentleman's face when I 
 ventured the opinion that the politicians of 
 this country had never yet made anything 
 except their own livings. 
 
 It seemed not merely that they could not 
 understand the thing; they would not. The 
 truth did not please them, and the best and 
 wisest of them appeared to have the idea 
 that they had only not to see it, and it would 
 cease to be the truth; after the manner of 
 the learned men of Galileo's time, who 
 declined to look through his telescope, or 
 to watch him drop weights from the Tower 
 of Pisa. They made it a matter of offence 
 that anyone should understand; the ability 
 to predict political events was held to imply 
 some collusion with them. When Lincoln, 
 just before the crash, ventured to doubt 
 the stability of "a house divided against 
 itself," his enemies fell upon him precisely 
 
The Coming Crisis 5 
 
 as if he had declared, not that such a house 
 would fall, but that he intended to knock 
 it down. And this was the established view 
 of all the conservatism of the country, only 
 two or three years before there burst upon 
 it one of the most fearful cataclysms of 
 history. 
 
 Let us endeavour to place ourselves in 
 the position of the average man of 1 860, and 
 see how the whole matter appeared to him. 
 
 Way back in the early thirties, eight or 
 ten more or less insane fanatics — "apostate 
 priests and unsexed women," as one writer 
 described them — had got together and begun 
 an agitation for a wholly impossible and 
 visionary (to say nothing of revolutionary 
 and unconstitutional) programme — "the im- 
 mediate and unconditional emancipation of 
 the slaves." They formed a society and 
 started a paper called the Liberator. 
 When governors of Southern states pro- 
 tested concerning it, the Hon. Harrison 
 Gray Otis, Mayor of Boston, wrote as 
 follows: "It appeared upon inquiry that 
 no member of the city government, nor any 
 person of my acquaintance, had ever heard 
 of the publication. Sometime afterward 
 it was reported to me by the city officers that 
 they had ferreted out the paper and its 
 editor ; that his office was an obscure hole, 
 his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his 
 supporters a very few ignorant persons of 
 
6 The Industrial Republic , 
 
 all colours. This information, with the 
 consent of the Aldermen, I communicated 
 to the above named governors, with an 
 utterance of my belief that the new fanati- 
 cism had not made, nor was likely to make, 
 proselytes among the respectable classes of 
 the people." 
 
 Nevertheless, the danger of this propa- 
 ganda was recognised, and before long the 
 Abolitionists were being stoned and shot, 
 their presses smashed, and their meetings 
 broken up; a "broadcloth mob" put a rope 
 round the neck of the editor of the Liber- 
 ator and dragged him through the streets 
 of the city. And still, in spite of this, the 
 agitation went on. All the "cranks" of the 
 country gradually rallied about the move- 
 ment. Their leader was a woman's saiffra- 
 gist, an infidel, a prohibitionist, and a 
 vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution 
 as "an agreement with Death, and a cove- 
 nant with Hell." There was one man 
 among them who addressed meetings with 
 clanking chains about his wrists, and a 
 three-pronged iron slave-collar about his 
 neck; and who declared to the people of a 
 town that they "had better establish among 
 them a hundred rum-shops, fifty gambling- 
 houses and ten brothels, than one church." 
 They allowed Negroes to speak on the plat- 
 form with them, and they opened schools 
 for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were 
 
The Coming Crisis 7 
 
 broken up. One of them refused to pay 
 taxes to a slave-holding government, and 
 went to jail for it. 
 
 Assuredly, no common-sense person would 
 have thought that here was anything save 
 a madness that might be allowed to run 
 its course. Yet the Abolitionists kept at it. 
 In the election of 1840, a wing of them split 
 off, and nominated a candidate for the 
 Presidency, who received seven thousand 
 votes out of a total of two or three millions. 
 Four years later, when the Democratic 
 Party was on the verge of forcing the country 
 into a war with Mexico, they raised a hue 
 and cry that this was a "slave-driver's 
 enterprise," with the result that their vote 
 went up to sixty-two thousand. And by 
 keeping up the ceaseless agitation all through 
 the war, and taking advantage of a factional 
 quarrel in New York state to nominate a 
 politician who came into their camp for the 
 sake of revenge, they cast, in 1848, a vote 
 of two hundred and ninety-one thousand. 
 
 And also they had by this time succeeded 
 in colouring a great mass of the popular 
 thought with their views. They had gotten 
 the country unsettled; they had made 
 people feel that something was wrong, and 
 all sorts of anti-slavery measures were 
 beginning to be championed. Some wanted 
 to exclude slavery from the new Territories ; 
 some wanted to exclude it from the National 
 
8 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Capital; some wanted to restrict the domestic 
 slave-trade. All of these people, of course, 
 denied indignantly that they were Abolition- 
 ists, denied that they had any sympathy 
 with Abolitionism, or that their measures 
 had anything to do with it. But the South, 
 whom the matter concerned, understood 
 perfectly well the folly of such a claim — 
 understood that the institution of Slavery 
 was one which could not be made war upon, 
 or limited, and that the first hostile move 
 which was made against it would necessarily 
 mean its downfall. Hence, to the South, 
 all these people were "Abolitionists." 
 
 Over the California question, there came 
 at last a crisis, and all the Conservative 
 forces of the nation were scarcely equal to 
 the settling of it. Edward Everett and 
 Rufus Choate and Calhoun and Clay and 
 Webster, and a dozen others that one might 
 name, exerted all their influence, and went 
 about warning their countrymen of the 
 danger, and denouncing what Webster called 
 "the din and roll and rub-a-dub of Abolition 
 presses and Abolition lectures." Under 
 these circumstances the "Compromise" was 
 adopted, and the vote of the Abolitionist 
 Party fell ofl^ to one hundred and fifty-six 
 thousand. 
 
 But then came the repeal of the Missouri 
 Compromise, which brought Lincoln into 
 politics. The Abolition clamour surged up 
 
\ The Coming Crisis 9 
 
 as never before — here was one proof the 
 more, they said, that Slavery was menacing 
 American institutions. The whole country 
 seemed suddenly to be full of their support- 
 ers; and the Kansas Raid only added more 
 fuel to the flame. The Republican Party 
 was formed, the Black Republican Party, 
 as the slave-holders called it; and at the 
 Presidential election of 1856, they cast more 
 than one million three hundred thousand 
 votes, about one-third of the total vote of 
 the country. 
 
 After that came, in due course, the attempt 
 of the Supreme Court to put an end to the 
 Abolitionist agitation, declaring that Con- 
 gress could not restrict slavery in the Terri- 
 tories, which meant that the Republican 
 Party had no right to exist. To "cheerfully 
 acquiesce" in the decision of the Supreme 
 Court, was the duty of "all good citizens," 
 according to President Buchanan; yet the 
 only result of the action of the Supreme 
 Court was to cause the agitation to burst out 
 afresh. In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln ran 
 for senator in flat defiance of the Supreme 
 Court's decision, and the Republican Party 
 all over the country went on in its revolution- 
 ary course, precisely as if no Supreme Court 
 had ever existed. A year or two later an 
 agitator made matters still worse by his 
 attempt to set free the slaves by force. "It 
 is my firm and deliberate conviction," said 
 
lo The Industrial Republic 
 
 Senator Douglas, "that the Harper's Ferry 
 crime was the natural, logical and inevitable 
 result of the doctrines and teachings of the 
 Republican Party." And he was perfectly 
 right. 
 
 It was disgraceful, and yet it would not 
 stop. The North had by this time become 
 so full of Abolitionism, that even the Demo- 
 crats were not to be trusted. When the 
 split came, in Charleston, Yancey of Ala- 
 bama explained this. "When I was a boy 
 in the Northern States," he said, "Abo- 
 litionists were pelted with rotten eggs. But 
 now this band of Abolitionists has spread 
 and grown into three bands — the Black 
 Republicans, the Free-soilers, and the Squat- 
 ter-sovereignty men — all representing the 
 common sentiment that Slavery is wrong." 
 And when Abraham Lincoln was elected 
 President by a minority of the people, upon 
 a platform which declared that the Consti- 
 tution was to be disregarded, the party of 
 conservatism and tradition resorted to force 
 to maintain its rights. 
 
 And what happened then ? Why, simply 
 this: a group of fanatical visionaries who 
 had for thirty years been jeered at for 
 demanding of the country something that 
 was revolutionary and inconceivable — the 
 destruction of an institution which had 
 stood for centuries, and was built into the 
 very framework of the nation — suddenly 
 
The Coming Crisis II 
 
 began to see the mighty structure totter, 
 to see cracks open in it, to see its pillars 
 crumble, its roof fall in; and at last, before 
 they had fairly time to realise what was 
 happening, the whole heaven-defying colos- 
 sus lay a heap of dust and ruins at their feet ! 
 
 I have said that I believe that our coun- 
 try is now only a few years away from a 
 similar great transformation. In order to 
 maintain that thesis, it will be necessary to 
 show, first, a great underlying economic 
 cause, working irresistibly to force the issue ; 
 and second, a consequent movement of 
 protest, slowly making headway and ulti- 
 mately permeating the whole thought of 
 the country. 
 
 What was the cause of the Civil War ? 
 To put it into a phrase, it was the need 
 under which Slavery laboured of securing 
 new territory. The reader may find a 
 contemporary exposition of the situation in 
 Olmstead's "Cotton Kingdom." Slave 
 labour was a very wasteful means of culti- 
 vation — only the top of the soil was used, 
 and ten or fifteen crops exhausted it. Vir- 
 ginia was once a great exporting state, but 
 m the forties and fifties it had become simply 
 a slave-breeding ground for the younger 
 generation, which had moved to the Far 
 South. And then, when the Far South 
 began to prove insufficient, there was 
 
12 The Industrial Republic 
 
 another move, into Texas; and finally an 
 attempt at still a third, into Kansas — 
 which brought on the clash with the free 
 states. 
 
 At the present day we have a society, 
 industrial instead of agricultural; and the 
 struggle which we are witnessing is that 
 between capital and labour. It is a struggle, 
 not for land, but for profits; and if we are to 
 show that it is, like the Civil War, "an 
 irrepressible conflict between opposing and 
 enduring forces," we must show in this case 
 also that the thing struggled for is limited 
 in quantity, and ultimately insufiicient to 
 satisfy the needs of both the contending 
 parties. 
 
 That our industrial system is based upon 
 profits, and that a failure of profits would 
 lead to its collapse, will be admitted by 
 anyone. But how could profits ever fail? 
 the reader asks. Will not the soil always 
 produce } And does not every man who 
 comes into the world bring a pair of hands 
 with him, to produce things and earn his 
 living.'' And so, can there not always be 
 profitable exchange? There could, I 
 answer, provided that the various pairs of 
 hands were to remain upon equal terms. 
 But suppose that one pair were to get 
 some advantage over the other pairs, and 
 use that advantage to get constantly 
 increasing advantage; might there not 
 
The Coming Crisis 13 
 
 then come a time when the other pairs, 
 having less and less, were finally un- 
 able to furnish as much profits as were 
 necessary ? 
 
 We began the economic battle in this 
 country upon equal terms. Some got the 
 advantage and became masters, the others 
 becoming wage-workers. This advantage 
 — ^that is, capital — brought constantly in- 
 creasing advantage — profit, rent, interest; 
 and those who had not the advantage 
 stayed meanwhile just where they were — 
 they got enough to live on, and no more. 
 Numerous exceptions to this do not in the 
 least disturb the main facts — that as a class 
 the wage-workers stayed wage-workers, and 
 the masters stayed masters. Neither does 
 the fact that wages rose constantly in the 
 least disturb the main fact, for the cost of 
 living rose also; the wage-worker got his 
 living then, and he gets it now. And 
 meanwhile, according to the way of nature, 
 and in spite of the outcry of moralists and 
 old-fashioned statesmen, the strong went 
 on growing stronger, and fighting among 
 each other, the victors growing ten times 
 stronger yet; until now we have come to a 
 stage where, industrially speaking, we are 
 a nation of eighty million pygmies and a 
 dozen giants. Nor is the work quite done 
 yet — it is going straight on, in spite of anti- 
 trust decisions and the labour of the "muck- 
 
14 The Industrial Republic 
 
 rake man" — and within a very few more 
 years the dozen giants will be but one giant. 
 
 The dozen, meanwhile, are giants, and 
 they are that because the industrial oppor- 
 tunities of the nation are their property. 
 They are the nation, economically speaking; 
 they own its railroads and telegraphs, its 
 coal mines, oil fields, factories and stores. 
 And they grant to the eighty millions of the 
 nation the right to these opportunities and a 
 chance to earn their living upon one certain 
 definite condition — that of what they pro- 
 duce, they receive only a part, yielding up 
 the balance to be "profits." 
 
 It is also important to notice that these 
 profits are not taken "in kind" — the product 
 must first be sold, so that both wages and 
 profits can be paid in money. It thus fol- 
 lows that the amount of profits is strictly 
 limited by the amount of market that can be 
 found; in other words, that a society whose 
 income is limited, is also limited as to its 
 profit-yielding capacity — that, for instance, 
 a society of eighty millions of people receiv- 
 ing a mere living wage will be able to yield 
 just so much rent, interest and dividends, 
 and not any more. 
 
 But what it yields has in the past been 
 enough, says the reader. Why will it not 
 be enough for the future.? 
 
 Just this is the crux of the whole matter. 
 Rent, interest, dividends, it must be under- 
 
The Coming Crisis 15 
 
 stood, are fractions; and fractions may be 
 decreased as well by increasing the denomin- 
 ator, as by decreasing the numerator. A 7^ 
 man, for instance, who invested a hundred 
 dollars and made six, would receive six 
 per cent, interest; but if he invested the 
 second year one hundred and six dollars, 
 and was able still to gain only six, his 
 profit would be, not six per cent., but 
 only five and a fraction. If he wished to 
 make six, he would have to squeeze out a 
 little more than six dollars; would have to 
 compel the man who paid it to him to work 
 just a little harder. And that, in miniature, 
 is a representation of what is going on in 
 our society to-day. You, the well-meaning 
 reader, who are struggling to make the 
 world better, and failing — whether the thing 
 which you are trying to reform be politics or 
 literature or religion. New York or Colorado 
 or the Philippines, Fifth Avenue or Wall 
 Street or Hell's Kitchen — you are meeting 
 with failure because of that little arithmetical 
 difiiculty which has just been set forth. 
 
 Consider our millionaire fortunes, how 
 they grow. Consider, for instance, that 
 Mr. John D. Rockefeller makes fifty per 
 cent, a year upon his holdings in the 
 Standard Oil Company. The stock of the 
 Standard Oil Company is now at five hun- 
 dred, and has been as high as eight hundred 
 in the market. This is assuming that Mr. 
 
i6 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Rockefeller invested in the stock at par — - 
 though as a matter of fact, he put in only 
 about twenty dollars a share, which would 
 make his profit two hundred and fifty per 
 cent. His income is at least fifty million 
 dollars a year. 
 
 What does he do with it? Of course, 
 he can't spend it — if he treated himself to 
 a St. Louis Exposition every year, he 
 couldn't spend it. What he does with it 
 is to take it promptly, and reinvest it in 
 the form of new capital; he employs a 
 staff of thirty-two trained experts to aid 
 him in this work. The effect of this is, 
 of course, to make his income fifty 
 per cent., compound interest, instead of 
 simple; and what it will be in the course of 
 time is a problem for those who like figures. 
 While he is doing this, all the other capital- 
 ists are doing the same — the American mil- 
 lionaire lets his wife and daughters spend 
 as much of his money as they can, but he 
 seldom spends any himself; he is more 
 interested in "doing things." The conse- 
 quence is, therefore, that year after year 
 we are paying the vast mass of our people 
 mere living wages, and all the surplus prod- 
 uct of our toil we are selling, and devoting 
 to the creation of new instruments of pro- 
 duction. We have, mark you, machinery 
 that creates products for hundreds of times 
 as many men as it employs, and still we 
 
The Coming Crisis 17 
 
 skim off the surplus and devote it to making 
 new machines. Is it not obvious that this 
 cannot go on forever? And that the time 
 must come that we make all that we need — 
 or rather that our people have money to 
 buy, wages being what they are ? And 
 if that ever happens, then of course the 
 factories will have to shut down. We 
 shall have millions of men out of work, and 
 starving on our streets; and when they 
 form processions and begin agitating, de- 
 manding that we give them work, then we 
 say — that is, our newspapers, our preachers, 
 our politicians, everybody says— 
 
 "But, my good man, there is no more 
 work to be done!" 
 
 "But I am starving," insists the work- 
 ingman, "we are all starving. Why is 
 there no work.^*" 
 
 "The reason there is no w^ork is 'over- 
 production.' The market is clogged with 
 products, you must understand, and we 
 can't sell them. What is your trade ?" 
 
 "I work in a shoe-factory." 
 
 "But the shoe market is already glutted — 
 there are twice as many shoes as there is 
 any use for." 
 
 "Twice as many shoes! But my feet are 
 on the ground!" 
 
 "Well, we can't help that, my good man; 
 that's because you have no money to buy 
 them with." 
 
i8 The Industrial Republic 
 
 "And my friend here," goes on the work- 
 ingman — "he is a tailor, and he is naked 
 because there are too many coats on the 
 market ?" 
 
 "Exactly." 
 
 "And the baker here is starving because 
 we are both too poor to buy his bread ?" 
 
 "Exactly." 
 
 "And then this druggist is sick because 
 we have no money to buy medicine ?" 
 
 "Exactly." 
 
 After which, the workingman stands and 
 scratches his head for a moment. "There 
 is too much of everything," he reflects. 
 "There is no more work to be done." And 
 suddenly the light breaks. "Oh, I see!" 
 he cries, "we have finished our work 
 for the capitalists!" And you answer, 
 "Exactly! everything is complete, and 
 of course there is no more room for you. 
 Therefore you had best be off to another 
 planet!" 
 
 So it would be, if the workingman were 
 content to take his doctrines from the other 
 side — from the retainers of those "to whom 
 God in His Infinite Wisdom has entrusted 
 the care of the property interests of the 
 country." But, meantime, the working- 
 man has been thinking for himself — and 
 evolving a quite new doctrine, all his own, 
 concerning the property interests of the 
 
The Coming Crisis 19 
 
 country. This doctrine is, in a word, that 
 the means of production of wealth belong 
 of right to no individual, but to the whole 
 people; and that in the hour of the col- 
 lapse of the profit-making system, the 
 thing for the people to do is to take posses- 
 sion of the machinery, and use it to produce 
 goods, no longer for those who own, but for 
 those who work. 
 
 And that brings me to the second of my 
 tasks. I have shown the "great under- 
 lying economic cause, working irresistibly 
 to force the issue"; there remains to show 
 the consequent "movement of protest." 
 
 I have before me, as I write, a little pam- 
 phlet published by the Standard Publishing 
 Company," of Terre Haute, Indiana, and 
 entitled, "The American Movement," by 
 Eugene V. Debs. It opens with the 
 statement that "The twentieth century, 
 according to the prophecy of Victor Hugo, 
 is to be the century of humanity," and will 
 witness "the crash of despotism and the 
 rise of world-wide democracy, freedom and, 
 brotherhood." The reader, continuing, soon 
 discovers that the "American movement," 
 with which this pamphlet deals, is the 
 American Socialist movement. The writer 
 tells of its early "Utopian" forms, the 
 Owenites and the Brook-farmers, and 
 names the exiles who came from abroad in 
 1848, bringing the Marxian doctrine, and 
 
20 The Industrial Republic 
 
 influencing such men as Horace Greeley and 
 Parke Godwin. "The first large society to 
 adopt and propagate Socialism in America," 
 he writes, "was composed of the German 
 Gymnastic Unions. Through the sixties 
 and seventies the agitation steadily in- 
 creased, local organisations were formed in 
 various parts of the country. Following the 
 Paris Commune of 1871, and its tragic 
 ending, many French radicals came to our 
 shores and gave new spirit to the movement. 
 In 1876 the Workingman's Party was or- 
 ganised, and in 1877, at the convention held 
 in Newark, it became the Socialist Labour 
 Party. The Socialists were intent upon 
 building up a working-class party for in- 
 dependent political action." This party, 
 "composed of thoughtful, intelligent men, 
 aggressive and progressive, of rugged 
 honesty and thrilled with the revolutionary 
 spirit and aspiration for freedom, became 
 from its inception a decided factor in the 
 labour movement. The busy, ignorant 
 world about the revolutionary nucleus knew 
 little or nothing about it ; had no conception 
 of its significance, and looked upon its ad- 
 herents as foolish fanatics whose antics 
 were harmless and whose designs would 
 dissolve like bubbles on the surface of a 
 stream. In March, 1885, was inaugurated 
 the strike of the Knights of Labour. On 
 May 1st of the same year, the general strikes 
 
The Coming Crisis 21 
 
 for the eight-hour work-day broke out in 
 various parts of the country. In 1884, 
 Laurence Gronlund published his "Coop- 
 erative Commonwealth." In 1888 Edward 
 Bellamy published his "Looking Back- 
 ward," and it had a wonderful effect upon 
 the people. The editions ran into hundreds 
 of thousands." 
 
 The author then goes on to narrate his 
 version of the Pullman strike of 1893. 
 He declares that the American Railway 
 Union, of which he was president, had 
 won, when the General Managers' Asso- 
 ciation caused the swearing in of "an army 
 of deputies," whom the Chief of Police of 
 Chicago declared to be "thieves, thugs and 
 ex-convicts," and that it was these men who 
 caused the violence which led to President 
 Cleveland's action, and the breaking of 
 the strike. He then continues the story of 
 the Socialist movement. The Corning 
 Nation, started at Greensburg, Indiana, 
 by J. A. Wayland, in 1893, was the first 
 popular propaganda paper to be published 
 in the interests of Socialism in this country. 
 It reached a large circulation, and the pro- 
 ceeds were used in founding and developing 
 the Ruskin cooperative colony in Tennessee. 
 Later Mr. Wayland began the publication 
 of the Appeal to Reason, and it now 
 numbers its subscribers by the hundreds of 
 thousands. It is not saying too much for 
 
22 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the Appeal that it has been a great factor 
 in preparing the American soil for the seed 
 of Socialism. Its enormous editions have 
 been and are being spread broadcast, and 
 copies may be found in the remotest re- 
 cesses and the most inaccessible regions. 
 The periodical and weekly press, so 
 necessary to any political movement, is 
 now developing rapidly, and there is every 
 reason to believe that within the next few 
 years there will be a formidable array of 
 reviews, magazines, illustrated journals, and 
 daily and weekly papers to represent the 
 movement and do battle for its supremacy. 
 The last convention of the American Rail- 
 way Union was the first convention of the 
 Social Democracy of America, and this was 
 held in Chicago, in June, 1897, the delegates 
 voting to change the railway union into a 
 working-class political party. The Rail- 
 way Times, the official paper of the union, 
 became the Social-Democrat, and later 
 the Social-Democratic Herald, and is now 
 published at Milwaukee in the interest of 
 the Socialist Party. Since the election of 
 1900, there has been greater activity in 
 organising, and a more widespread prop- 
 aganda than ever before. In the elections 
 of the past, it can scarcely be claimed that 
 the Socialist movement was represented by 
 a national party. It entered these contests 
 with but few states organised, and with 
 
The Coming Crisis 23 
 
 no resources worth mentioning to sustain 
 it during the campaign. It is far different 
 to-day. The Sociahst Party is organised 
 in almost every state and territory in the 
 American Union. Its members are filled 
 with enthusiasm and working with an 
 energy born of the throb and thrill of 
 revolution. The party has a press support- 
 ing it that extends from sea to sea, and is 
 as vigilant and tireless in its labours as 
 it is steadfast and true to the party 
 principles. 
 
 "Viewed to-day from any intelligent 
 standpoint, the outlook of the Socialist 
 movement is full of promise — to the capital- 
 ist, of struggle and conquest; to the worker, 
 of coming freedom. It is the break of dawn 
 upon the horizon of human destiny, and it 
 has no limitation but the walls of the 
 universe." 
 
 Whatever the reader may think about 
 the foregoing narrative, there is one part 
 of it which he cannot dismiss ; the statements 
 concerning: the growth of the American 
 Socialist Party. In 1888 the Socialist vote 
 was two thousand. In 1892, it was twenty- 
 one thousand. In 1896, it was thirty-six 
 thousand. In 1900, it was one hundred 
 and thirty-one thousand. In 1904, it was 
 four hundred and forty-two thousand. 
 
 The Socialist Party has some twenty- 
 
24 The Industrial Republic 
 
 seven thousand subscribing members, who 
 pay monthly dues. It has over eighteen 
 hundred "locals," or centres of agitation; 
 the members of these "locals" are for the 
 most part workingmen, who give their 
 spare hours to the cause, holding meetings 
 and debates, and circulating the literature 
 of Socialism. In the larger cities, there are 
 generally several lectures each week, and 
 there are a score of "national organisers," 
 who travel about, speaking night after night 
 in various towns, forming new "locals," 
 and taking subscriptions to the Socialist 
 publications. Of these there are four month- 
 lies and about thirty-five weeklies. Since 
 1 892, Wayland's paper. The Appeal to Reason 
 (Girard, Kansas), has increased its paid 
 circulation from one hundred and twenty-six 
 thousand to over two hundred and seventy- 
 five thousand, and last year it printed one 
 edition of two millions and a half, and another 
 of over three millions. Another Socialist 
 paper, Wilshire's Magazine (New York), 
 has increased its circulation from fifty-five 
 thousand to two hundred and seventy thou- 
 sand in a single year. In addition to this, 
 there are many publishing companies, which 
 distribute books, leaflets and pamphlets, at 
 little more than cost. I have before me a 
 treatise, the price of which is one cent, of 
 which over five million copies have been sold 
 since its publication some years ago. Its 
 
The Coming Crisis 25 
 
 title is " Why Workingmen Should Be Social- 
 ists," by Gaylord Wilshire. 
 
 And in giving the figures of the Socialist 
 growth, it is worth while to point out that 
 tliis is not merely a local movement, but a 
 world movement ; that the United States is 
 one of the most backward of the civilised 
 nations in respect to Socialism. In 
 Australia the labour unions have adopted 
 a full Socialist program, and the labour 
 unions hold the balance of power. In Eng- 
 land, they have just elected twenty-seven 
 members of Parliament; they have now 
 members in the Cabinet of France, and in 
 Italy they have turned out ministries. In 
 Belgium, the vote of the party is half a 
 million, and in Austria it is nearly a million, 
 while in Germany it has grown from thirty 
 thousand in 1870, to five hundred and forty- 
 nine thousand in 1884, one million, eight 
 hundred and seventy-six thousand in 1893, 
 three million and eight thousand in 1903 
 and three million two hundred and fifty 
 thousand in 1907. The Socialists are elect- 
 ing representatives in Argentina and South 
 Africa; in spite of government persecution, 
 the movement is now growing rapidly in 
 Japan. Including all languages, the Socialist 
 journals number nearly seven hundred, and 
 the Socialist vote of the world is figured at 
 nearly eight million. Allowing for women, 
 and for the disfranchised proletariat of such 
 
26 The Industrial Republic 
 
 nations as Russia, Austria, and Italy, there 
 are estimated to be thirty million class- 
 conscious Socialists in the world. 
 
 To overlook the significance of a move- 
 ment such as this, is but to repeat upon a 
 larger scale the error of half a century ago, 
 and to pay with blood and anguish for 
 blundering and indifference. The processes 
 of time have their laws, which can be 
 studied; and all the waste and ruin of his- 
 tory, which make its records scarcely to be 
 read, are consequences of the fact that man 
 has to be lashed to his goal through the 
 darkness, instead of marching to it in the 
 light. You take but a shallow view of the 
 problems of our present time, if you do not 
 realise that when thirty million people, in 
 every corner of the civilised world, organise 
 themselves into a political party, they do 
 it because of some fundamental and tre- 
 mendous motive, and that they will not be 
 apt to abandon their efforts until they have 
 accomplished some proportionately signifi- 
 cant result. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 
 
 TTERBERT SPENCER gives a definition 
 ■'--'- of Evolution, phrased in technical terms, 
 which might be roughly summed up in these 
 words : A process whereby many similar and 
 simple things become dissimilar parts of one 
 complex thing. If we trace, for instance, the 
 evolution of human society, we see about 
 as follows: In the beginning man exists in 
 widely scattered and unrelated tribes, hav- 
 ing a very loosely organised government, 
 each individual doing about as he pleases, 
 and all individuals being very much the 
 same. Each finds his own food and cooks 
 it, makes his own weapons and clothing, 
 and looks and thinks and acts like his neigh- 
 bour. Little by little, as the tribe grows, 
 it begins to come into contact with other 
 tribes that also are growing, and a pressure 
 begins; the tribes make war upon each 
 other, and each individual of the tribe is 
 forced by the presence of danger to unite 
 himself more closely with his fellows, to 
 establish a more rigid rule of obedience, and 
 to force refractory members to the general 
 will. Then, under still growing pressure, 
 
 27 
 
28 The Industrial Republic 
 
 one tribe unites with another against a 
 common enemy, and the strongest man in 
 the two rules both; which process of com- 
 bining continues until at last there results 
 an organism of great complexity, whose 
 members are no longer equal and self- 
 sustaining, but have different activities and 
 ranks and characteristics, and are each 
 dependent upon the rest. If, for instance, 
 we examine France during the Feudal 
 period, we find numerous principalities, 
 duchies and baronies, each one an elaborate 
 and complex organisation, with various 
 classes and hierarchies and tributary parts, 
 and a whole system of laws and customs and 
 beliefs to correspond. And no sooner is 
 this process complete than an evolution 
 begins among these organisms; under the 
 stress of jealousies and ambitions they too 
 begin to struggle, to combine ; and presently 
 in one of them arises a strong man who 
 secures command of them all. When the 
 process is completed, there stands in the 
 place of a hundred principalities, one king- 
 dom, the Kingdom of France. 
 
 The object of all this long labour is, of 
 course, to get some kind of an organism 
 that shall be capable of maintaining itself 
 in a world of ferocious strife; that shall 
 be able to withstand all enemies that may 
 come against it, and all rebellions that 
 may arise within it. The French monarchy 
 
Industrial Evolution 29, 
 
 was a marvellous piece of work when it 
 was done; it had men graded into a thou- 
 sand different classes and occupations, 
 and everything fitted perfectly and ran 
 like a clock. It had peasants to till the 
 soil, and soldiers and sailors to fight; artisans 
 to make all its necessaries, and merchants 
 to handle them; and rising tier upon tier, 
 a whole pyramid of governing and admin- 
 istrative officials, up to the king. It had 
 likewise the whole outfit of ideas and cus- 
 toms necessary to its operation; it was com- 
 plete and perfect and sublime — it was like 
 a mighty vessel defying the tempests ; it had 
 also its pennons that waved, and its songs 
 for the crew to sing. Was it any wonder 
 that those who had made it were proud of 
 it, and felt that there was nothing more to 
 be done in the world but to keep it going ? 
 
 And yet evolution was not through with 
 it. Men grow weary and want to rest, 
 they become "conservative" and fret at 
 the bare thought of change — but the 
 processes of life go on inexorably. This 
 mighty structure, the Kingdom of France, 
 was only a means and not an end — its pur- 
 pose was to bind the people of the nation 
 together and protect them until they were 
 able to take care of themselves. It took 
 a long time for this idea to make its way; 
 it took a fearful struggle — men were im- 
 prisoned and exiled, burned and beheaded; 
 
30 The Industrial Republic 
 
 but the idea went right on, and the nation 
 went right on; and when the time came, it 
 burst the old integument to pieces, and out 
 of the Kingdom of France there emerged 
 the French Republic. 
 
 What a marvellous event that was, and 
 what a stir it made in the world— what a 
 stir especially in our own corner of the 
 world — -every one knows. Looking at it 
 from a century's distance, and calmly, we 
 see the whole age-long event as an exem- 
 plification of the process of life; the com- 
 bining of a number of simple things into 
 one complex thing. The means was strug- 
 gle and rivalry — it was a cruel process; 
 but you will notice that at the end the 
 effort and the pain are all gone — that the 
 organism fulfils its functions freely and 
 joyfully, and that the only difference between 
 the first stage and the last is that the indi- 
 vidual man has been raised to a higher 
 plane of being. 
 
 Now, as I have said before, the first care 
 of a man is to protect his life; the second 
 is to accumulate wealth. A man does not 
 set much store by his goods while his enemies 
 are within sound; but just as soon as they 
 are dispersed, the tribe begins to gather 
 flocks, and to till the soil. And so, follow- 
 ing close upon the heels of the evolution of 
 political society, you have the evolution of 
 industrial society. 
 
Industrial Evolution 31 
 
 And it is precisely the same process. We 
 may see nearly the whole of it in this country. 
 It begins with the colonial village, where 
 every man owns a little land and raises his 
 own food; also he cobbles his own shoes, 
 spins his own wool, weaves his own cloth, 
 and makes his own clothes. In the very 
 earliest days, he never buys anything, be- 
 cause there is nothing to buy. He may be 
 the deacon or the schoolmaster or the 
 judge, but still he has his own farm, and any 
 other man in the village is about as well 
 fitted to be the deacon or the school-master 
 or the judge as he. But then his goods 
 expand and war begins — industrial war, 
 I mean — a horse-trade, for example. Polit- 
 ical evolution is slow, because the rate of 
 increase of men is limited; but the rate of 
 increase of goods proves to be unlimited. 
 Machines are invented, and straightway 
 the industrial process is accelerated ten- 
 fold. It took a thousand years to evolve 
 a monarchy; it took only a hundred to 
 evolve a trust. 
 
 The industrial units fight each other, and 
 the strongest survive as employers, the 
 weakest becoming employees. Then, as 
 growth continues, these various little groups 
 all over the country come into contact, and 
 they struggle also. The struggle is of 
 course no longer fighting with swords — -it 
 is underselling; but the process is exactly 
 
32 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the same, and its purpose is the building 
 up of a capable industrial organism. Pre- 
 cisely as in one case the tribes by combining 
 find they are stronger to fight, the employers, 
 by combining, find that they are stronger 
 to undersell; and this process goes on until 
 you have an industrial feudalism, corre- 
 sponding in all its details to the political 
 feudalism of France. And then, as before, 
 the barons and the princes and the dukes 
 fight among each other, until out of the 
 midst arises a strong man, a Rockefeller 
 or a Harriman, who smashes them right and 
 left, and makes himself a king. 
 
 He is a king in precisely the same way, 
 and to precisely the same purpose, as 
 Louis the Great was king. You know how 
 Richelieu served the nobility of France — 
 if they would not obey they simply lost their 
 heads. If you have read Miss Tarbell's 
 "History of the Standard Oil Company," 
 or Henry D. Lloyd's "Wealth Against 
 Commonwealth," you know how Mr. 
 Rockefeller served the oil nobility; how he 
 tricked them and crushed them; how some- 
 times, it is said, he blew up their refineries 
 with dynamite, or burned them with fire. 
 You know how Louis said he was the State; 
 and you heard the president of one of the 
 coal companies, who is doing business in 
 flat defiance of the laws of the land, declare 
 that God in His Infinite Wisdom had en- 
 
Industrial Evolution 33 
 
 trusted to him the property interests of the 
 country. It is not necessary to pursue this 
 analogy; if you do not see that in the due 
 and inevitable course of evolution, our 
 industrial organism has attained the mon- 
 archical stage, it is simply because you do 
 not wish to see it, and no amount of 
 exposition will avail. I have only to add, as 
 before, that the purpose of this process was 
 to evolve an organism which should be 
 capable of maintaining itself against all 
 enemies, without and within. The task of 
 King Louis was the aggrandisement of 
 France; the task of Mr. Rockefeller is the 
 keeping up of Standard Oil stock. In- 
 cidentally, Louis the Great gave the world 
 a race-heritage and a civilisation ; inciden- 
 tally, Mr. Rockefeller furnishes the world 
 with oil. Also — what is tiue in one case is 
 true in the other — the Standard Oil Com- 
 pany is a marvellous piece of work. It has 
 men graded into a thousand different classes 
 and occupations, and all fitting perfectly 
 and running like a clock. It has labourers 
 to till the soil, lobbyists and salesmen to 
 fight, factories to make all its necessaries, 
 and railroads to handle them; and, rising 
 tier upon tier, it has a whole pyramid of 
 governing and administrative officials, up 
 to the president. It has likewise the whole 
 outfit of ideas necessary to its operation; 
 it is complete and perfect and sublime — ^it 
 
34 The Industrial Republic 
 
 is like a mighty vessel, defying the tempests. 
 Is it any wonder that those who have con- 
 structed it are proud of it, and feel that there 
 is nothing more to be done in the world but 
 to keep it going ? 
 
 It is of course clear that the next step, 
 according to my parallel, would be into an 
 Industrial Republic. The reader differs 
 from most Americans whom I meet if this 
 idea is not startling to him. Let us go 
 forward slowly. 
 
 In Mr. John Bach McMaster's "History 
 of the People of the United States," is a 
 narrative of the terrible yellow-fever epi- 
 demic which occurred in Philadelphia in 
 the year 1793, causing the death of over four 
 thousand people in four months. In those 
 days men had strange ideas as to the causes 
 of yellow fever; they believed, in this case, 
 that it "had come from a pile of stinking 
 hides that had been on one of the wharves." 
 The historian goes on to describe the 
 strange expedients they adopted to get rid 
 of it. "People were bidden to keep out of 
 the sun, and not to get tired. The doctors 
 had little faith in bonfires as purifiers of 
 the air, but much in the burning of gun- 
 powder. Every one then who could buy 
 or borrow a gun, loaded and fired it from 
 morning till night. Then one remedy after 
 another would be suggested, and people 
 would cover themselves with it — nitre, to- 
 
Industrial Evolution 35 
 
 tobacco, and garlic, mud-baths, camphor, 
 and thieves' vinegar. The last could only be 
 be procured by going to the shop. The 
 purchaser going to get it was careful to 
 have a piece of tarred rope wet with cam- 
 phor at his nose, and in his pocket his hand- 
 kerchief soaked with the last preventive he 
 had heard of. He shunned the footpaths, 
 fled down the nearest alley at sight of a 
 carriage, and would go six blocks to avoid 
 passing a house where a dead body had 
 been taken out a week before. He would 
 not enter a shop where another man stood 
 at the counter; he would rush in, throw 
 down the money, and rush home — soak 
 everything in this prepared vinegar, and 
 live on a prescribed diet, water-gruel, oat- 
 meal, tea, barley-water, or a vile concoction 
 called apple-tea. If his head pained him 
 or his tongue felt rough, he would imme- 
 diately wash out his mouth with warm 
 
 water and honey and vinegar " etc., etc. 
 
 At the time when I read all this, it made a 
 peculiar impression upon me, because the 
 newspapers happened just then to be full 
 of the discovery of the true cause of yellow 
 fever. And so all the time that I was 
 reading about the man with the tarred 
 rope in his hands and a sponge wet 
 with camphor at his nose, I had this 
 thought in my mind: And while he was 
 waiting outside of the shop, a mosquito 
 
36 The Industrial Republic 
 
 flew up, all unheeded, and bit him. And 
 so he died! 
 
 It seemed to me a peculiarly neat illus- 
 tration of the precise difference between 
 knowledge and ignorance. It led me to 
 reflect how very eager men ought to be 
 to possess the former; and I put the 
 anecdote away in my mind, thinking, "I 
 shall use it some day when I want — all of 
 a sudden — to scare someone out of a 
 prejudice!" 
 
 For just imagine, if you can, that mos- 
 quitoes, instead of being a pest about which 
 every man was glad to believe evil, had 
 been the basis of some important industry, 
 or otherwise the source of incalculable 
 advantage to the dominant classes of 
 the community; that universities were 
 endowed, and newspapers owned, and 
 churches and hospitals supported, out of 
 the proceeds of the mosquito monopoly! 
 Are you sure that in that case the discovery 
 of the physicians in Havana would have 
 been hailed as a triumph of Science ? Or 
 do you not think that there might have been 
 a strong opposition to the fantastic specula- 
 tion, and that the men who had published 
 it might have been denounced as enemies of 
 society, and turned out of office for their 
 incendiary teachings ? That other physi- 
 cians of high standing might have been 
 found to ridicule the idea ? That news- 
 
Industrial Evolution 37 
 
 papers might have refused to print argu- 
 ments in favour of it — that, in short, the 
 mosquito monopoly might have succeeded 
 in conjuring up before the imaginations of 
 the multitude so horrible an image of this 
 doctrine and its consequences, that they 
 would have looked upon anyone who 
 advocated it as in some way morally 
 deformed ? Assuming that this could have 
 been done, there are only two things to be 
 added. The first is that all the while the 
 mosquitoes would have gone right on caus- 
 ing the yellow fever; and the second is 
 that the people would have found it out in 
 the end — that all that the makers of public 
 opinion would have done, would be to put 
 just so many millions of dollars into the 
 pockets of the mosquito monopoly, at a 
 cost of just so much misery to the human race. 
 At the outset of this argument, I very 
 much wish that you, the reader, would com- 
 mune with yourself prayerfully, as to 
 whether or not it might not possibly be that 
 the ideas you have in your head concerning 
 an "Industrial Republic" are really not 
 ideas of your own at all, but prejudices 
 which other people have put there for pur- 
 poses known to them. 
 
 Let me repeat the definition which I gave 
 at the outset of this argument: I mean 
 by an Industrial Republic, an organisation 
 
38 The Industrial Republic 
 
 for the production of wealth, whose mem- 
 bers are established upon a basis of equality; 
 who elect representatives to govern the 
 organisation; and who share equally in all 
 its advantages. 
 
 A century or two ago our ancestors were 
 governed, "by grace of God," by an un- 
 amiable old gentleman over in England, 
 who controlled their destinies, and sent his 
 representatives over here to tax and oppress 
 them; and they impiously rose up and 
 adopted a declaration to the effect that all 
 men were born free and equal; and they 
 seized the property and revenues of their 
 king, and thereafter managed the country 
 for their own benefit solely. "No taxation 
 without representation," had been their 
 doctrine beforehand. And you, who are 
 an American, and celebrate the Fourth of 
 July, and teach your children to admire 
 the men who threw the tea into Boston 
 Harbour — do you think that you could 
 give me any reason why a man has a right 
 to be represented where he pays his taxes, 
 and no right to be represented where he 
 gets his daily bread ? Do you not perceive 
 that a man who can say to me, "Do thus, 
 or you and your children can have nothing 
 to eat," is just as much my lord and master 
 as the man who can say to me, "Do thus, 
 or be put into jail?" 
 
 You stop and think. "The case is not 
 
Industrial Evolution 39 
 
 quite the same," you say. "One is not 
 represented, to be sure; but certainly every 
 man has a right to get his daily bread as he 
 pleases." 
 
 Indeed, I answer. Suppose, for instance, 
 that his occupation happens to be that of a 
 steel-worker; has he any way of getting his 
 daily bread, except upon certain precise 
 terms which a certain group of men offer 
 him ? 
 
 "H'm," you say, "that's so. But then, 
 if he doesn't like it, can't he change his 
 occupation ?" 
 
 My answer is, I do not believe that George 
 the Third would have had any objection to 
 one of our ancestors going to France to 
 become a subject of King Louis. But I 
 understand that freedom began in America 
 when the men of Lexington and Bunker 
 Hill resolved to stay at home and be free. 
 
 "This is all very well in theory," you say, 
 "but how can it ever be realised.?" As I 
 said before, I expect to see it realised in the 
 United States of America within the next 
 ten years. I expect to see it, exactly as I 
 should have expected to see the French 
 Revolution, had I known what I know now; 
 understood that institutions and systems 
 have their day, and perceived the signs of 
 a breakdown as they existed in France in 
 1780, and as they exist in America in 1907. 
 
 What was the cause of the French Revo- 
 
40 The Industrial Republic 
 
 lution? The French monarchy was organ- 
 ised upon a basis of force, represented by 
 taxes; and those who ran the machine had 
 no idea but that a machine so organised 
 could go on forever. But in the long 
 process of time, there developed a tendency 
 on the part of those to whom the taxes 
 came, to grow richer and richer, while those 
 by whom the taxes were paid grew poorer 
 and poorer. Little by little, all the property 
 and all the land of France came into the 
 hands of the nobility; until at last they had 
 everything, and the populace had nothing. 
 Then suddenly the machinery of a society 
 organised upon a basis of force and taxes 
 began to refuse to work; the French peasantry 
 had stood everything, but they could not 
 stand being required to pay taxes when 
 they had nothing to pay with. So the 
 States-General had to be sent for, and the 
 Revolution came. 
 
 And note this — that the trouble was not 
 at all that the country was poor. Every- 
 one is familiar with the picture of the hor- 
 rible condition of the peasantry of that 
 time, how they were little better than wild 
 animals, hiding in holes, naked, and with 
 blackened skins. Yet all the while France 
 was full of wealth — all the trouble was that 
 it was stagnant in the hands of a single 
 class; the fields of France were ready to 
 produce, but the people were too poor to 
 
\ Industrial Evolution 41 
 
 till them. And notice the curious fact, that 
 no sooner was the Revolution accomplished 
 than the difficulty vanished in a flash. The 
 machinery started up again — the peasant 
 had land and tilled it, and the artisans of 
 the cities found work. It seems strange to 
 read that under the "Terror," when the 
 heads of the "aristocrats" were falling by 
 the dozens every day and all the world was 
 convulsed with horror, the people of France 
 were more prosperous and happy than ever 
 they had been before in history. And when 
 war broke out, the nation that had been 
 on the verge of bankruptcy for a gener- 
 ation, withstood the armies of the combined 
 kingdoms of Europe for more than twenty 
 years ! 
 
 Here in America, we all started even. 
 Wages were high, and there was work for 
 every man; there was no need to strike— 
 a workingman had only to leave and go 
 elsewhere if he were not pleased. We 
 found employment for the stream of immi- 
 grants as fast as they came — we had an 
 enormous country to build up, and an 
 inexhaustible supply of new lands for the 
 settler. We manufactured only for our own 
 use, and we could not manufacture half of 
 what we needed. 
 
 But time passed on. Some who were 
 frugal and diligent — and others who were 
 cunning and unscrupulous — ^grew rich; and 
 
42 The Industrial Republic 
 
 then machinery came in, and the pace grew 
 faster. The rich were on top, and they 
 stayed there. As the country expanded, 
 railroads were built, and fortunes made; 
 the war came, with its enormous expen- 
 ditures, and still more fortunes were made. 
 Capital grew; but it could not grow fast 
 enough — in the seventies the rate of interest 
 was ten per cent., and the promoters made 
 fortunes besides. It was in those days that 
 the battles of the giants were fought, the 
 railroad wars in which the Gould and 
 Vanderbilt millions were accumulated. Still 
 there was plenty to do; the people had 
 money, and there were some of them to buy 
 everything we could make, and what came 
 from abroad besides. The cities grew and 
 spread, and the immigrants flowed in; rail- 
 roads and factories were built, and the 
 mighty structure of our modern industrial 
 machine began to take shape. It must be 
 understood that all the while inventions 
 and improvements were being made, that 
 enabled one man to do the work of ten, of 
 fifty, of a hundred; and each such improve- 
 ment set free so many thousands more men, 
 to turn their attention to another part of 
 the structure and to rush it on to completion. 
 
 Completion! Has it never dawned upon 
 you that this machine might possibly some 
 day reach completion ? 
 
 The purpose of it is a very definite and 
 
Industrial Evolution 43 
 
 obvious one — it is to supply the needs of 
 men; and when it is adequate to that pur- 
 pose, it is complete. But how will you 
 know when that is ? Why, by the simplest 
 of methods in the world — by that insuffi- 
 ciency of profits which I described before. 
 You are in business for profits, you under- 
 stand; and when you are making some- 
 thing that men need, you make profits; and 
 when you are making something that men 
 do not need, you stop making profits. It 
 would be too bad if men went on making 
 railroads where no one wanted to ride, and 
 building houses for no one to occupy; how 
 fortunate that Nature has arranged it so 
 that we all know when our work is done ! 
 
 We were trembling on the very verge — in 
 fact, we were half-way over the verge — 
 three years ago, when the Russo-Japanese 
 War came along and saved us. Every- 
 body had begun to realise the peril. The 
 investor, who had been making ten per cent, 
 in the seventies, came down to three. The 
 workingman who had a job that did not 
 suit him, stuck to it all the same, because 
 he saw a million men in the country who 
 had no job at all. And the capitalist, the 
 captain of industry — he mounted into his 
 watch-tower, and proceeded to scan the 
 landscape. A market! A market! My 
 kingdom for a market! 
 
 Our newspapers a few years ago were 
 
44 The Industrial Republic 
 
 quite wild with delight over a phenomenon 
 called the "American Invasion." They 
 told how we were conquering all over the 
 world — how Europe stood shuddering with 
 fright — how our exports were mounting by 
 leaps and bounds! How prosperous we 
 were! What ocean-tides of wealth were 
 coming in to us! It seemed so strange to 
 read it all, and to understand that this 
 "Invasion" which the editors were cele- 
 brating, was in reality the last death-kick 
 of the industrial system which they had 
 been taught to consider the foundation of 
 all society! ' 
 
 It will be more convenient to consider 
 the whole question of foreign markets at 
 a later stage; suffice it here to say, that 
 if my analysis of the over-production of 
 capital be correct, then the first signal of 
 danger will be what is commonly hailed 
 as a "favourable balance of trade" — the 
 existence of a surplus product which must 
 be sold abroad. You must distinguish, of 
 course, between a mere exchange of goods, 
 where exports are balanced by imports, 
 and selling, which is sending out goods 
 and taking in gold, or promises to pay gold. 
 In 1893 our exports were eight hundred and 
 forty-seven million dollars and our imports 
 were eight hundred and sixty-six millions. 
 But in 1901, our exports had leaped to one 
 billion, four hundred and eighty-seven mil- 
 
Industrial Evolution 45 
 
 lion dollars, and our imports had sunk to 
 eight hundred and twenty-three millions; 
 and during the next four years the excess 
 of exports over imports amounted to a 
 total of over a billion and a half of dollars! 
 According to an estimate made public on 
 January 6, 1907, by the Secretary of the 
 Treasury, the figures for 1906 will be: 
 Imports, one billion, two hundred million 
 dollars, and exports, one billion, eight hun- 
 dred million dollars. And for how many 
 more years does anyone imagine that the 
 world will be able to pay us six hundred 
 million dollars in cash, for those surplus 
 products which we are compelled to sell ? 
 Do not fail to mark the word "compelled." 
 If we cannot sell them, we cannot make 
 profits; and if we cannot make profits, we 
 cannot pay dividends. "I am a great 
 clamourer for dividends," said Mr. Rocke- 
 feller; and other captains of industry share 
 in his weakness. And when a few years 
 ago they found that foreign markets were 
 beginning to fail, they set to work to remedy 
 the evil in the only other possible way — by 
 combining, and limiting the product, and 
 raising prices. And that brings us to the 
 other great symptom of the approach of 
 the breakdown — the organising of the trusts. 
 For six or eight years the process has been 
 going on, irresistibly, automatically — while 
 the country raged and stormed, and poured 
 
46 The Industrial Republic 
 
 out its wrath upon the greedy capitalist. 
 And yet the capitalist was no more to blame 
 than a steam-engine that turns aside when 
 it comes to a switch. The capitalist was- 
 making profits; and he saw, by the cessa- 
 tion of his profits, that the industrial 
 machine of the country was getting too big 
 for the country's use. Unless he, and the 
 machine also, were to go to smash, com- 
 petition in that particular industry must 
 be ended. 
 
 The work is done now; we have only to 
 sit by and wait until the people get through 
 trying to undo it. I never realise more 
 keenly the naive and touching incompetence 
 of our so-called intellectual classes, than 
 when I reflect that while our men of action 
 have been accomplishing this mighty work 
 — one of the greatest labours ever wrought 
 for civilisation — our benevolent editors and 
 college presidents have gone right on with 
 their prattling of "freedom of contract" 
 and 'laissez faire." And actually, civilisa- 
 tion must sit by and wait ten years, until 
 our people have got through butting their 
 heads against the granite wall of this 
 accomplished fact! 
 
 But we Socialists have to take the world 
 as we find it, and cultivate a cheerful dis- 
 position; and so behold our great national 
 spectacle, the morality-play of the terrible 
 hundred-headed monster of Competition! 
 
Industrial Evolution 47 
 
 The terrible monster has killed and de- 
 stroyed himself, according to the nature of 
 him; but now by Congressional statute and 
 Supreme Court decree he has been patched 
 together again, and will be compelled to go 
 on fighting! Or at least he shall be stuffed 
 and mounted, and shall look as if he were 
 fighting! He shall have wires attached to 
 his joints and electric lights to gleam from 
 his eyes; he shall be taken out in the gor- 
 geous Presidential campaign chariot, drawn 
 by the Grand Old Party elephant, and all 
 the people shall see him, and marvel at his 
 ferocity, and at the deadly conflict he wages 
 among his various heads! Come now, O 
 people! — come editors and statesmen and 
 judges and bishops — come and see how the 
 terrible hundred-headed monster rends and 
 tears himself, and shout for four years more 
 of the "full dinner-pail." 
 
 But surely we must destroy the trusts! 
 you say. Why must we destroy the trusts .'' 
 The trusts are marvellous industrial ma- 
 chines, of power the like of which was never 
 known in the world before; they are the 
 last and most wonderful of the products of 
 civilisation — and we must destroy them! 
 We have been a century building them — 
 you, and I, and the balance of the American 
 people have toiled for three generations 
 night and day, stinting and starving our- 
 selves, so that we might get these trusts 
 
48 The Industrial Republic 
 
 finished; we have taxed ourselves ten, 
 twenty, thirty per cent, of our incomes, 
 under the disguise of a protective tariff, to 
 maintain and develop them; and now that 
 they are complete, we must destroy them! 
 
 But they belong to Rockefeller! you pro- 
 test to me. They belong to Rockefeller in 
 precisely the same way and to precisely the 
 same extent as the Kingdom of France 
 belonged to Louis XIV, or the North 
 American colonies to George III. They 
 belong to the people of the United States, 
 who made them, who contributed every 
 plank of them, and drove every nail of them, 
 and who paid Mr. Rockefeller and his 
 family ample living wages while they super- 
 intended the job. 
 
 But you only answer again — we must 
 destroy the trusts! Go ahead then, and 
 have your try! Have it out with them! 
 War to the hilt with them! — and see which 
 is the stronger, two corporations which are 
 resolved not to cut each other's throats, or 
 you with your law that they shall cut each 
 other's throats ! Two railroad systems which 
 know that they cannot continue to exist 
 separately, or you who are resolved that they 
 shall not exist together ! — It makes one think 
 of the scene in "Twelfth Night," where 
 Sir Toby has engineered a bloody duel 
 between two terror-stricken antagonists. 
 "Pox on't. I'll not meddle with him!" cries 
 
Courlesy of ll'iishire's Ma^aznu 
 
 A SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS 
 
Industrial Evolution 49 
 
 Sir Andrew Aguecheek. "Come, Sir An- 
 drew," says Sir Toby. "There's no remedy. 
 Come on, to't." But poor Sir Andrew 
 will not to't, he fights with his back to the 
 enemy. 
 
 You will hear people abuse the Socialists 
 for wishing to abolish competition. No 
 Socialist wishes to abolish competition, no 
 modern Socialist at any rate. He watches 
 competition, as the mischievous Irishmen 
 watched the Kilkenny cats; keeping off at 
 a suitable distance during the battle, and 
 simply proposing to the spectators that 
 when it is all over they shall recognise the 
 accomplished fact. 
 
 There is some competition in the world 
 to-day among the nations; there was re- 
 cently competition between Russia and 
 Japan, and there will perhaps be competition 
 between some of the others. But what 
 competition is left to-day within the limits 
 of the United States, is left simply because 
 it is of a kind so petty that the capitalists 
 have not yet had time to bother with it. 
 For the most part it exists between a swarm 
 of retailers of trust-made products, and 
 takes the form of the screwing down of 
 the wages of helpless clerks and errand- 
 boys, the adulteration of products, and the 
 placarding of the surface of the land with 
 blatant advertisements which affect a decent 
 man like the stench of a carcass. One of 
 
5© The Industrial Republic 
 
 the "competitive" industries that is flour- 
 ishing just now is that of cereals prepared 
 in packages and labelled with names that 
 suggest Hiawatha and the South Sea Islands. 
 The usual price of one of these packages 
 is fifteen cents, and of that, two cents and 
 a half represents the cost of the product, 
 and nearly all of the balance goes into the 
 effort to trap the public into buying it. 
 And did not the "boodle" investigations 
 in Missouri disclose the fact that William 
 Ziegler had spent a fortune in bribing news- 
 papers and legislatures to implant in the 
 public mind the idea that "alum baking- 
 powders" were poisonous, so that the 
 Royal Baking Powder Trust might have 
 the custom of the country.? 
 
 But, you say, if competition perishes, 
 what becomes of incentive — of initiative ? 
 Will not individual enterprise be destroyed ? 
 I answer that it depends entirely upon what 
 you mean by individual enterprise. If 
 you mean that ardent desire which now 
 consumes every man to cut his neighbour's 
 economic throat, to get the better of him 
 and make money out of him, to beat him 
 down and leave him a financial wreck — 
 why, civilisation will suppress this ardent 
 desire in precisely the same way that it has 
 suppressed the duel, or the right of private 
 vengeance, and piracy, or the right of pri- 
 
Industrial Evolution 51 
 
 vate war upon the high seas. The putting 
 down of these things went hard, you know, 
 for they had been the greatest glory of 
 men, and all progress has been due to them. 
 "Franz von Sickingen was a robber-knight," 
 writes Henderson, in his "History of 
 Germany," "but with such noble traits, and 
 such a concept of his calling, that one won- 
 ders if he ought not rather to be put on the 
 level of a belligerent prince. In carrying 
 on feuds, he seldom aimed lower than a 
 duke, or a free city of the Empire; and 
 there are persons who insist to this day that 
 his weapons were only drawn in favour of 
 the oppressed. Be that as it may, he was 
 not above exacting enormous fines; and 
 being an excellent manager, he greatly in- 
 creased his possessions. He was lord of 
 many castles, which he furnished with 
 splendid defences." 
 
 And then the historian goes on to describe 
 the gallant struggle of this old nobleman 
 against the advancing power of the Empire. 
 "He determined, by one brilliant feud, 
 to restore the tarnished splendour of his 
 name. He would help the whole order 
 of knighthood to assert itself against 
 the power of the princes." The end of it 
 was that "the enemy appeared in full force, 
 demolished in a single day an outer tower 
 with walls the thickness of twenty feet, and 
 made a breach in the actual ramparts." 
 
52 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Having been wounded, "the grim com- 
 mander was carried to a dark, deep vault of 
 the castle, where it was thought he would 
 be safe from the cannon-balls of his pur- 
 suers; such an unchristian shooting, he 
 declared to an attendant, he had never 
 heard in all his days." The castle surren- 
 dered, and his foes gathered about him. 
 "He had now to do, he said, with a greater 
 lord, and a few hours later he closed his 
 eyes. The three princes knelt at his side 
 and prayed God for the peace of his soul." 
 Let us hope that the makers of our Industrial 
 Republic will not forget to pray for the souls 
 of Baer and Parry, if these gallant captains 
 of industry should perish in defending the 
 elemental right of a capitalist to manage 
 his own business in his own way. 
 
 This is all very well, you say, but will 
 not such a system decrease production? I 
 rather think that it will; I hope to see the 
 prophecy of Annie Besant come true, that 
 when men no longer have to struggle to get 
 a living, they will at last begin to live. 
 That they will at last open their eyes to the 
 world of books and music, of nature and 
 art, of friendship and love, that stretches 
 out its arms to them; that they will cease 
 to regard ingenuity and rapidity in the 
 production of material things as the final end 
 and goal of the creation of man ; that they 
 will cease to look upon a human being as a 
 
Industrial Evolution 53 
 
 machine for the getting of money — to be 
 valued like an automobile, by the number 
 of miles an hour it can be driven, by the 
 number of thousands of miles it can cover 
 before it is worn out and ready for the 
 scrap-heap. 
 
 Let us have the philosophy of this thing, 
 in order that we may understand it. 
 We saw that the process of evolution, in 
 an individual or in a society, consists of an 
 expansion and a struggle, the end of which 
 is the emergence of the organism into a 
 higher state of being. There is a certain 
 life impulse, and there is a certain environ- 
 ment, certain difficulties with which it 
 contends. We have perhaps no right to 
 speak of purpose in the process, but we 
 have a right to speak of results; and the 
 result of this contest is to shape the or- 
 ganism, to educate it, to bring out certain 
 qualities in it which it did not possess 
 before; until finally it triumphs over its 
 environment, and emerges from its 
 prison-house. 
 
 The struggle for life goes on, but the form 
 of it changes unceasingly; and this chang- 
 ing is progress. Without it there can be 
 none — the very essence of progress consists 
 in the suppressing of old forms of strife, 
 the conquest of old difficulties and the 
 escape from their thraldom. We know that 
 
54 The Industrial Republic 
 
 there was once a time when men were hairy 
 beings who dwelt in caves, and contended 
 with club and hatchet against the monsters 
 which assailed them; and now supposing 
 that we could take some man of modern 
 times, some one who has risen to eminence 
 and power under the conditions which now 
 prevail, and put him among those cave- 
 men, how do you suppose that he would 
 make out ? How do you suppose that he 
 would fare, if he were placed even one 
 century back, in the country of the Iroquois, 
 where the snapping of a twig and the flight 
 of an arrow decided the fate of a man ? 
 Is it not obvious that there has been here an 
 entire change in the form of the struggle for 
 existence ? 
 
 The same thing is true of nations. Once 
 upon a time a nation was an army, and 
 fighting was its business, the conquering 
 of its neighbours was its glory and its ideal; 
 but now we have moved on, we have 
 become complex and highly organised, and 
 can no longer afford to conquer our neigh- 
 bours. It would not pay us financially, 
 and intellectually and morally it would 
 destroy us. We have, for instance, a power- 
 ful country to the north of us; and imagine 
 what would be the inconvenience and waste 
 were we under the necessity of fortifying 
 all our boundary lines, and keeping garrisons 
 at every few miles of them; if every day we 
 
Industrial Evolution 55 
 
 were shaken by rumours that an army was 
 gathering at Montreal, that a fleet of tor- 
 pedo-boats was building at Toronto. As a 
 matter of simple fact, do we not both go 
 quietly on our way, understanding that we 
 are two civilised nations, between which a war 
 of conquest would be an unthinkable crime ? 
 
 We have grown so used to the change, 
 that the mere memory of the old ways of 
 life makes us shudder; it seems to us horri- 
 ble, and we forget that it was once beautiful 
 and delightful to men : that the Germans 
 of the time of Tacitus held fighting the joy 
 of life, and imagined a heaven where a man 
 might be patched up every night and fight 
 again the next day. We have passed so far 
 beyond such a state that we cannot even 
 imagine it, and we have lost the power of 
 seeing that it was ever necessary and right; 
 that to those long ages of struggle we owe 
 our physical being, with all its perfections, 
 which we take so as a matter of course; a 
 swift foot and a dexterous hand, an ear 
 attuned to every sound, an eye that adjusts 
 itself to every distance, a mind quick and 
 alert, a spirit bold and enterprising. And 
 in the same way the nations owe to war 
 their unity and their complexity, and a great 
 deal of their power, not merely physical, 
 but industrial and moral as well. 
 
 It was one of the noblest of the world's 
 poets who wrote that : 
 
56 The Industrial Republic 
 
 "God's most dreaded instrument. 
 In working out a pure intent. 
 Is man — arrayed for mutual slaughter; 
 Yea, Carnage is His daughter." 
 
 And to the same purpose writes Fletcher: 
 
 "Oh great corrector of enormous times, 
 Shaker of o'er-rank states — that 
 
 heal'st with blood 
 The earth when it is sick." 
 
 And yet the time of wars is past. We 
 still have them, of course, and we still have 
 a war-propaganda; but it would be easy 
 to show that these wars are never military, 
 but always commercial — that when two 
 civilised states fight nowadays, it is not 
 because they expect to subjugate each other, 
 or desire to, but because their capitalists 
 both need the same foreign market. I am 
 acquainted with only one writer of any 
 standing in the United States, Captain 
 Mahan, who is nowadays willing even to 
 hint that wars may still be necessary to the 
 disciplining of a nation; and I think one 
 might assert without fear of contradiction 
 that people now go to war, not because they 
 want to, but because they are persuaded 
 they have to; and that right-thinking men 
 throughout the world know that a war is a 
 national calamity, a cause of evils innumer- 
 able, scarcely ever overbalanced by good. 
 
Industrial Evolution 57 
 
 And it is of the utmost importance to 
 notice how this has been done; how it is 
 that the mihtary ideal is universally dis- 
 credited in the world. It has not been due 
 to the preachings of moralists and 
 enthusiasts; it has not been brought about 
 by the intervention of any deus ex machina. 
 It has come about in the perfectly inevitable 
 course of nature. No hero has arisen to 
 slay the demon of war — the demon of war 
 has slain himself. It is simply that the 
 work of war is done. It is simply that war 
 has brought about a survival of the fittest, 
 and that there is no more need of conquest, 
 and no possibility of it. The peoples have 
 gone on to a different life, they have almost 
 forgotten for thought of conquering, or 
 of being conquered; they know that they 
 cannot afford it; they know that their social 
 organism is of too delicate a type to stand 
 it; they can no more stand it than one of 
 our modern captains of industry could 
 stand the shock of jousting with Richard 
 Coeur de Lion. 
 
 We have moved on to another kind of 
 struggle — to the kind which is known as 
 industrial competition. And we are to 
 come to the end of that in precisely the same 
 way. We are to see the fittest survive, and 
 grow,, and establish themselves impregna- 
 bly; and so long as there is room for com- 
 petition they will compete; and when they 
 
58 The Industrial Republic 
 
 find there is no longer room for competition, 
 that by continuing it they are doing as much 
 harm to themselves as to their rivals, they 
 will put an end to competition, and no 
 power on earth can prevent their putting 
 an end to it. Any power which really tried 
 to prevent their putting an end to it would 
 simply destroy them, as two civilised nations 
 would be destroyed if they could be com- 
 pelled to keep on making war against each 
 other. 
 
 The great task of civilisation is the lead- 
 ing of men to recognise when these mighty 
 changes have taken place. For so far I 
 have spoken of only one side of the evolu- 
 tionary process ; I have shown the victory — 
 but there are also defeats. Sometimes in 
 the struggle between the individual and 
 his environment, it is the environment that 
 conquers. Sometimes the man or the 
 society is not equal to the new task, and 
 falls back; and the law of this is death. 
 The stag which can run swiftly enough 
 escapes, and is able to run all the more 
 swiftly as the result of the race; the stag 
 which cannot run quite swiftly enough 
 becomes venison. The tiny shoot which can 
 grow high enough finds the light, and be- 
 comes a mighty tree; its neighbour which 
 could not grow quite so high, turns to mould. 
 There comes now and then in the history 
 of every living thing some moment when its 
 
Industrial Evolution 59 
 
 future hangs in the balance; when it sum- 
 mons all its forces, and lives or dies. The 
 butterfly faces such a crisis when it emerges 
 from the chrysalis; the child when it is 
 born. You have known such fateful hours 
 in your own moral life; and you can go 
 through history and put your finger upon 
 them — here when the Greeks drove back 
 the Persians, here when the Franks drove 
 back the Saracens, here on the field of 
 Waterloo, on the hills of Gettysburg. 
 
 You would like to stay as you are, of 
 course; for that is the least trouble. You 
 have your routine and your habits, your 
 old well-woi'n paths in which your thoughts 
 move — you would like to stay as you are. 
 But the curse of life is upon you — ^you can- 
 not stay as you are. You have to go for- 
 ward, or else to go back. When the crisis 
 comes there is no escaping it — it comes. 
 When the birth-pangs begin, either the 
 child is born, or the mother dies; when the 
 throes of revolution seize a nation, either 
 the old forms are shattered, or the life of 
 the people is crushed. There was once a 
 reformation and a revolution in France; 
 there was no reformation and no revolution 
 in Spain. So in one case you have new 
 life and abounding vigour — ^literatures and 
 philosophies and sciences, and impulse after 
 impulse without end; and on the other hand 
 you have stagnation and ruin. 
 
6o The Industrial Republic 
 
 The task was simply too hard for the 
 Spanish nation; they had lived for centuries 
 in imminent proximity to an enemy of an 
 alien faith, and the result was the fastening 
 upon the people of a system of military 
 despotism and religious bigotry. And when 
 the danger was by, when the work of these 
 forces was done, and the time came for the 
 people of Spain to throw them off, their 
 efforts were of no avail; their kings and 
 their priests tortured them and burned them 
 at the stake; and so the impulse died, and 
 never afterwards did they lift their heads. 
 In the same way consider the "Negro ques- 
 tion," as we have it in the United States. 
 Here also we are dealing with a defeated 
 race; a race which was bred where nature 
 proved too strong for man — where savage 
 beasts fell upon him, and deadly diseases 
 smote him, and the swift powers of the 
 jungle balked his every effort to rise. So 
 for centuries and ages he was trampled 
 upon and crushed, until every spark of 
 genius was extinguished in him; and now 
 we strive with all the resources of our 
 civilisation — our noblest and best have 
 
 fiven their lives to the task; and we do not 
 now yet if we are to win or lose. 
 Let the reader of this book get a clear 
 understanding upon at least one point — 
 that no Socialist expects to abolish com- 
 petition, and the survival of the fittest; all 
 
Industrial Evolution 6i 
 
 that any Socialist expects to do is to change 
 the kind of competition and the standard 
 of the fitness. The purpose of industrial 
 competition is to raise up the industrially 
 fit, and to establish a system for the feeding 
 and clothing of men. The sign that the 
 former task is done is the outcry against 
 the money-madness of the time; the sign 
 that the latter is done is "overproduction" 
 and the "trust." 
 
 The purpose of this little book is to lay 
 before candid and truth-seeking Americans 
 the overwhelming evidence which exists 
 of the fact that industrial competition, as 
 an evolutionary force, has done its work in 
 our society: that it has disciplined our 
 labourers in diligence and skill, and our 
 leaders in foresight, enterprise and ad- 
 ministrative capacity; that it has built us 
 up a machine for the satisfying of all the 
 material needs of civilisation, a machine 
 that has only to be used; and that until we 
 have found out how to use it, our national 
 life must remain at a standstill, stagnation 
 must take the place of progress, and in 
 every portion of our body politic, the 
 symptoms of disease and decay must mul- 
 tiply and grow more and more alarming. 
 
 We have been taught to think that the 
 institutions of freedom in this country are 
 so secure that we may go about our business 
 and our play, and leave them to take care 
 
62 The Industrial Republic 
 
 of themselves. And yet, "eternal vigilance 
 is the price of liberty," is the motto our 
 ancestors left us. For the forms of tyranny 
 change from generation to generation, and 
 it is always out of the old freedom that the 
 new slavery is made. You think that you 
 can stay free by clinging to the good old 
 ways, by repeating the good old formulas, 
 by standing by the good old faiths; but 
 you cannot, for freedom is not a thing of 
 institutions, but of the soul. It has always 
 been under the forms of spirituality that 
 men have been chained by priestcraft; 
 and it is with the very pennons and banners 
 of liberty that this land is bound to-day. 
 It always has been so, and it always will be 
 so — ^that the despot asks nothing save that 
 things should stay as they are. What was 
 it that the slave-holder wanted, but that 
 things should stay as they were ? That 
 men should hold by the Constitution as it 
 was, while America was made into a Slave 
 Empire ? What is it that our masters want 
 to-day, save that we should stand by the 
 good old traditions of American individual- 
 ism, freedom of contract and the right of 
 every man to manage his own business as 
 he pleases — the while the Republic of Jeffer- 
 son and Lincoln is forged into a weapon 
 for the enslaving of mankind ? 
 
 There is not one single tradition of the 
 early times that is not being used to-day 
 
Industrial Evolution 63 
 
 for the betraying of liberty. Take the 
 Monroe Doctrine, for instance. We shout 
 for it every Fourth of July, and we are rush- 
 ing to completion a score or two of battle- 
 ships to defend it; whenever it is in peril, 
 our most rabid anti-trust editors and politi- 
 cians drop everything and take to singing 
 Yankee Doodle. And yet, has never the 
 least suspicion about it come to you .? Has 
 it never occurred to you to look who it is 
 that is leading you upon this crusade of 
 freedom — this strange propaganda of civil- 
 isation and republican institutions by battle- 
 ship and rapid-firing gun ? This zeal of our 
 captains of industry for the spread of 
 American institutions among the Filipinos 
 and Hawaiians and Porto Ricans and Pana- 
 manians and Venezuelans, the while they 
 are so busy crushing American institutions 
 in Rhode Island and Colorado! 
 
 There was once a time when all the des- 
 potisms of Europe were banded together to 
 destroy republican institutions, and when 
 the threatening gesture of this young re- 
 public held them back from half a world. 
 And thus bravely we guarded civilisation 
 with our Monroe Doctrine, until the lesson 
 of freedom had been learned. But now 
 time has passed, and we have come to a 
 new age, with new perils and new duties; 
 there is a new kind of slavery in the world, 
 and a kind in which we lead all civilisation. 
 
64 The Industrial Republic 
 
 The control of our Republic has passed 
 out of the hands of the people; by fraud 
 and force our liberties have been overthrown 
 — the very word has been relegated to 
 schoolboy orations and Grand Army re- 
 unions. And by this new despotism of 
 greed the people have first been plundered 
 and crushed, and now are to be marshalled 
 and led out to do battle with other peoples, 
 similarly beguiled. In this work every 
 force of reaction and conservatism in civi- 
 lised society is now enlisted, every tradition 
 of olden time has been called into service. 
 No pretence is too hollow, no blasphemy 
 too abominable to be employed; every na- 
 tional prejudice, every racial hatred, every 
 religious bigotry is made use of — and the 
 starving wretches of the slums and gutters 
 of London are sent into South Africa to 
 capture diamond mines for the glory of 
 free Britannia, while the helpless peasants 
 of Russia are led out with jewelled images 
 of the Virgin in front of them to steal Man- 
 churia in the name of Jesus Christ. 
 
 It is with Germany that we Americans 
 are scheduled to battle for the sake of the 
 Monroe Doctrine. And what is the situa- 
 tion in Germany ? There is first of all, the 
 degenerate who sits upon its throne, and 
 proclaims himself by grace of God the lord 
 and master of the German people. There 
 is in the second place, the hide-bound 
 
Industrial Evolution 65 
 
 mediaeval nobility of the Empire, the direct 
 descendants of those robber-knights of whom 
 we read a while ago, some of them living in 
 the very same castles from which their 
 ancestors made their raids. There is in the 
 third place, the aristocracy of the army, 
 whose insolent and dissolute officers beat, 
 kick and maim the helpless country boys and 
 artisans who are herded like sheep under 
 their command. There is in the fourth 
 place, the bigoted seventeenth-century Pro- 
 testant Church, with its snuffy country 
 parsons and doctors of dusty divinity. 
 There is in the fifth place, the mediaeval 
 Roman Catholic Church, with its confession- 
 al and other agencies of Darkness. There 
 is in the sixth place, a subsidised "reptile 
 press," whose opinions are written and 
 whose news is garbled by knavish bureau 
 officials. And every one of these powers, 
 forgetting all past differences, and uniting 
 with brotherly affection, are struggling with 
 every prejudice they can appeal to, and 
 every threat which they can wield, to hold 
 the German people subject to the identical 
 same "System" that rules in America, the 
 industrial aristocracy of cunning and greed; 
 is working them upon starvation wages at 
 home, and driving them to serve in armies 
 and navies, to conquer markets abroad; 
 to threaten Dewey at Manila, and to seize 
 Chinese ports and conduct "punitive 
 
66 The Industrial Republic 
 
 expeditions" against Chinamen; to sell bad 
 whiskey and firearms to Hereros and then 
 slaughter them when they rebel ; to blockade 
 ports in Venezuela and to sink "pirates" 
 in the West Indies; and to sound and 
 measure channels as a preliminary to the 
 taking of a naval base and the inauguration 
 of a war with the United States! 
 
 But then, you say, we can't help that. 
 What can we do? Is the only thing you 
 can think of to do, to build battleships and 
 get ready for the strife? How differently 
 our fathers did it, in the old days when the 
 Monroe Doctrine was really what it pre- 
 tends to be — a pledge of freedom to men! 
 How the impulses that started in this land 
 thrilled through the civilised world and 
 made the "despots of Europe" tremble! 
 What messages of brotherhood flashed upon 
 invisible wires from continent to continent, 
 bearing hope and comfort to all the 
 oppressed of mankind! How we welcomed 
 Lafayette, as if he had been an emperor! 
 How the whole nation turned out in honour 
 of Kossuth, making his long journey one 
 triumphal procession! And are we doing 
 anything like that now ? 
 
 The people of Germany, you must under- 
 stand, are closed in a death grip with all 
 these powers of infamy. In spite of obloquy 
 and contempt, in spite of lies and blan- 
 dishments and menaces, in spite of per- 
 
Industrial Evolution 67 
 
 secution and exile and imprisonment, for 
 a generation they have been toiling — de- 
 voted, heroic men and women have given 
 their labour and their lives to the task of 
 teaching, writing, speaking, exhorting, to 
 open the eyes of the masses to the truth. 
 And step by step they have marched on, 
 gathering force every hour, strengthened 
 by each new persecution, training them- 
 selves in literary and political combat, 
 building up a system of scientific thought 
 which has never been refuted and never 
 can be, inspired by a moral purpose as 
 noble as any the world has ever seen — pre- 
 paring in all ways for the glorious hour 
 when the people of the Fatherland are to 
 come to their own ! The man at their head 
 was once a poor working boy, a wheel- 
 wright, and he has raised himself to the 
 leadership of the mightiest effort after 
 freedom that the world now sees; and day 
 by day in the Reichstag he leads the op- 
 position to militarism and savagery, and 
 his speeches are such as a century ago, and 
 even half a century ago, would have set 
 this land aflame from end to end with 
 revolutionary fervour. And this is no iso- 
 lated movement of a nation, it is a world 
 movement — it is a movement to which the 
 lovers of liberty all over the earth are 
 welcomed as comrades and brothers. It 
 is a movement at one with every high 
 
68 The Industrial Republic 
 
 tradition of American life; and you— what 
 is your attitude to it ? What do you know 
 about it — what do you care about it? Do 
 you hold public meetings and send messages 
 of sympathy? Do the halls of Congress 
 ring with fervid speeches, as they did in 
 the days of Webster and Henry Clay ? Do 
 your papers teem with glowing editorials, 
 with news about the movement, and sketches 
 of its leaders ? What have you to say 
 about it, what have you to do for it — but 
 to repeat day in and day out one miserable, 
 pitiful lie, with which you try to blind and 
 deceive the masses of your own country, 
 that this tremendous Socialist movement 
 is not really a Socialist movement at all, 
 but only a movement of political reform! 
 
 I do not think that we shall sleep forever; 
 I do not think that the memories of Jeffer- 
 son and Lincoln will call to us in vain 
 forever; but assuredly there never was in 
 all American history a sign of torpor so 
 deep, of degeneration so frightful, as this 
 fact that in such a crisis, when the down- 
 trodden millions of the German Empire 
 are struggling to free themselves from the 
 tyranny of military and personal govern- 
 ment, there should come to them not one 
 breath of sympathy from the people of the 
 American Republic! And all our interest, 
 all our attention, is for that strutting turkey- 
 cock, the war-lord whose mailed fist holds 
 
Industrial Evolution 69 
 
 them down ! That monstrous creature, with 
 his insane egotism, his blustering and his 
 swaggering, his curled mustachios and mili- 
 tary poses! An epileptic degenerate, who 
 spends his whole life in cringing terror of 
 hereditary insanity: whose spies and police 
 agents are invading the homes of German 
 Socialists, searching for letters in behalf of 
 the agents of the Czar, obtaining evidence 
 to send men in Russia to exile and 
 death! This ruler of his people, who 
 the other day cashiered a near relative, an 
 army officer who had advised soldiers to 
 complain when they were maltreated ! whose 
 generals and admirals are swaggering about 
 and spitting in the face of civilisation — 
 and making maps and plans for a naval 
 station in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine ! 
 
 Forty years ago, at the time of our Civil 
 War, when the fate of this nation hung 
 trembling in the balance, when the Emperor 
 of France and the aristocracy of England 
 saw a chance to cripple republican govern- 
 ment and to set back civilisation half a cen- 
 tury — what was it then that prevented them ? 
 What was it but the fact that in England 
 there existed an organised opposition, alert 
 and watchful, trained by a generation of 
 parliamentary conflict, and with leaders who 
 in such a crisis could not be put down ? 
 What was it but the fact that the workers of 
 the factory towns of Great Britain had been 
 
70 The Industrial Republic 
 
 disciplined and taught, and could not be 
 deceived — that they chose rather to starve 
 than to help the cause of Slavery ? And if 
 you care to see what would have happened 
 had not that opposition been ready, go back 
 three- or four-score years, when the people 
 of France struck their blow for liberty, and 
 see the leaders of the British aristocracy 
 crushing out protest and imprisoning objec- 
 tors, and hurling the nation into a criminal 
 and causeless war! Hear the king and the 
 nobility, statesmen and authors, newspapers 
 and pulpits screaming in frenzy and goading 
 the people on, till they had desolated Europe 
 with fifteen years of hideous slaughter, from 
 the moral and spiritual effects of which 
 the world has not yet recovered! 
 
 And now you stand and contemplate 
 another such crime against civilisation. The 
 two most enlightened peoples of the world 
 are to come together and strip for a fight. 
 The powers that rule in each of them made 
 up their minds years ago, and among the 
 officers, both in the army and in the navy 
 of each, the coming conffict is taken for 
 granted. Two or three years ago a German 
 officer promised that an army corps would 
 march from one end of this continent to 
 the other; and an admiral in our own navy 
 has publicly foretold the struggle. The 
 German capitalists are in desperation for 
 new markets, and the German people are on 
 
Industrial Evolution ' 71 
 
 the edge of a revolt, with an irresponsible 
 military despot in absolute control of them, 
 who knows that his only chance to put off 
 the revolution is to pick a quarrel and beat 
 the war-drum, and summon the masses 
 to the defence of the honour of the Father- 
 land. When that supreme hour comes, and 
 when the war-lust begins to burn, upon the 
 Social-Democratic Party of Germany will 
 fall the task of saving civilisation; and what 
 shall we have done to help them — what 
 encouragement shall we have sent them? 
 We have sent ships of grain to the cotton- 
 operatives of Lancashire when they were 
 starving; but what have we done for the 
 people of Germany ? What reason have 
 we given them, with our tariffs and imperial- 
 isms, to think of us otherwise than as a 
 nation of shopkeepers, a nation sunk in 
 greed and commercialism, and dead to every 
 noble impulse of men? 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MARKETS AND MISERY 
 
 T GAVE in the first chapter a brief outline 
 -'- of my view of the process of wealth con- 
 centration. It is now time to consider the 
 present status of affairs, and determine if 
 we can exactly how near to completion our 
 industrial machinery has come. Because 
 of the vital part which the question of foreign 
 markets has played and must play in our 
 affairs, it is necessary that this inquiry should 
 include a careful survey of conditions in the 
 rest of the world. 
 
 The manufactures of the United States 
 have grown from one hundred and ninety- 
 eight million dollars in 1810, to five billion 
 in 1890, and thirteen billion in 1900. Our 
 exports to foreign countries increased from 
 sixty-six million dollars in 1810 to eight 
 hundred and fifty-six million in 1890, and 
 a billion and half in 1905. Of course, if 
 we could find unlimited markets abroad 
 we might go on for half a century, or at 
 least until our people grew tired of doing 
 hard work for the rest of the world, and 
 getting in return either bad debts, or else 
 money to be used in building new machines 
 
 72 
 
Markets and Misery 73 
 
 to do more work of the same sort. But 
 this is not the case, as it happens; there are 
 half a dozen nations that have been building 
 up industrial machines of their own, and 
 have completed them; the meaning of the 
 Socialist movements of England and Ger- 
 many and France and Belgium and Italy 
 is simply that all these nations are now able 
 to manufacture more than their own people 
 are able to buy, under the old deadly com- 
 bination of a monopoly price and a com- 
 petitive wage. And so when we go over 
 to Europe to look for markets, we meet 
 people who are coming over to look for 
 markets among us ; and when in our desper- 
 ation we begin to sell out at any cost, the 
 German capitalist cries out in protest, and 
 the German workingmen are thrown on the 
 streets, and the German Socialists increase 
 their vote. And when the German capital- 
 ist retaliates and sells out at cost, our capital- 
 ists are checked, and our mills are stopped — 
 and our Socialist vote goes up. 
 
 Look at the figures. England was the 
 first in the field. The output of coal of 
 Great Britain was one hundred and fifty 
 million dollars in 1810; it was six hundred 
 and sixty-five million dollars in 1878; in the 
 same period the exports of manufactures 
 rose from two hundred and thirty million 
 dollars to one billion dollars. All that 
 while, of course, England ruled the sea and 
 
74 The Industrial Republic 
 
 had things her own way. In 1820 the value 
 of all her manufactures was about seven 
 billion dollars — equal to that of Germany 
 and Austria combined, or to France and 
 the United States combined, or to all the 
 rest of the world, excluding these four 
 nations. But then, little by little, the others 
 began to catch up with her: in 1880, instead 
 of manufacturing one-fourth of the world's 
 products. Great Britain manufactured one- 
 fifth, and in 1894 she manufactured less 
 than one-sixth. Between the years 1894 
 and 1902, British exports increased only 
 thirteen per cent., while those of France in- 
 creased sixteen per cent., those of Germany 
 thirty-nine per cent., and those of the 
 United States sixty-six per cent. The 
 result was that a few years ago tens and 
 hundreds of thousands of starving men were 
 parading the streets of London, and all 
 England was startled by Mr. Chamberlain's 
 announcement that the last hope of Eng- 
 land was a tariff which would reserve for 
 her the trade of the colonies! Of course 
 England could not have made money by a 
 tariff unless her colonies had consented to 
 lose money; and the colonies were not 
 planning to lose money — they were count- 
 ing on making some by England's tax on 
 food. So the plan simply reduced itself 
 to an invitation to the British workingman 
 to pay more for his bread so that he could 
 
Markets and Misery 75 
 
 get starvation wages for doing the manu- 
 facturing of Canada and Australia and 
 India. Is it any wonder that the reply to 
 the proposal should have been an indepen- 
 dent labour vote which sent a thrill of alarm 
 through the nation ? 
 
 And meanwhile Canada and Australia 
 and India are straining every nerve to build 
 up manufactures of their own! "No person 
 connected with the cotton industry can be 
 ignorant of the progress of cotton manu- 
 factures in India," wrote the Textile 
 Recorder in 1888. "Indian cotton piece- 
 goods are coming to the front and displacing 
 those of Manchester." The Bombay Fac- 
 tory Commission of the same year recorded 
 in Parliament how this was being done. 
 "The factory engines are at work as a rule 
 from 5:00 a. m. to 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00 p. m. 
 In busy times it happens that the same 
 set of workers remain at the gins and 
 presses night and day, with half an hour's 
 rest in the evenings." And, like India, 
 Canada also puts duties on British goods 
 to protect her own growing industries! 
 
 Meanwhile, also, the rest of the world is 
 hard at work. Let us continue viewing 
 that same industry of cotton-spinning. The 
 value of the manufactured-cotton product 
 of Austria has grown from fifteen million 
 dollars in 1834, to thirty -five million dollars 
 in 1860, and ninety millions in 1894. The 
 
76 The Industrial Republic 
 
 textile manufactures of Belgium trebled 
 themselves in three years previous to 1894; 
 those of Germany have increased twenty- 
 fold in sixty years; those of Italy nine-fold 
 in twenty years, while even such backward 
 countries as Russia and Spain have doubled 
 their textile industries, one in thirty, the 
 other in twenty years. Most unexpected 
 and disconcerting of all, however, is Japan, 
 who was once looked upon as a permanent 
 customer, but whose home industries have 
 been growing like a magic plant. The 
 textile manufactures of Japan doubled in 
 value in the three years between 1896 and 
 1899. From six million pounds of cotton 
 spun in 1886, Japan advanced to ninety-one 
 million in 1893, and to one hundred and 
 fifty-three million in 1895, in nine years 
 increasing twenty-four fold. The value of 
 all her textile produce was six million dol- 
 lars in 1887, and it was seventy million 
 dollars in 1895. Therefore her imports of 
 cotton goods from Europe fell from eight 
 million dollars in 1884 to four million in 1895. 
 And while this was going on in the rest 
 of the world, in the United States the value 
 of manufactured cotton was rising from 
 forty-five million dollars in 1840, to two 
 hundred and ten million dollars in 1880, 
 to two hundred and sixty-seven million 
 dollars in 1890, and to three hundred and 
 thirty-nine million in 1900! Under such 
 
Markets and Misery 77 
 
 circumstances, is it any wonder that, at 
 the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, 
 the factories of Massachusetts and Canada 
 were running on half-time, and dozens not 
 running at all; that British cotton manu- 
 facturers found that prices had decreased 
 fifteen per cent, in as many years; that the 
 weavers of Belgium were starving, and the 
 country was full of riots and insurrections; 
 and that all the nations of Europe were 
 gathering in the Far East like vultures about 
 a carcass — knowing that the sole condition 
 upon which any one of them could maintain 
 its industrial and social regime for another 
 decade, was its ability to secure the custom 
 of some hundreds of millions of Chinamen, 
 who are so poor that a handful of rice and a 
 cotton shirt are all they own in the world ! 
 
 I often wonder what our college presidents 
 and other after-dinner economists make of 
 facts such as these. They do not discuss 
 them in their speeches. I am acquainted 
 with only one man among all our orthodox 
 advisers who believes in the permanence of 
 the competitive regime, and at the same 
 time really understands what it is and what 
 it implies — who cares for the truth, follows 
 his views to their conclusions, and then 
 speaks the conclusions. When I first 
 became acquainted with this gentleman — ■ 
 intellectually acquainted, that is — it affected 
 me painfully, and even now the sight of 
 
78 The Industrial Republic 
 
 his book gives me internal sensations akin 
 to those of a man in an ascending elevator 
 vi^hich comes to a sudden halt. 
 
 The book is "The New Empire," and 
 the author is Mr. Brooks Adams. He 
 writes coldly and dispassionately, and with 
 the certainty of the man of science, whose 
 conclusions may not be disputed. His 
 style is characteristic; it is brief and to 
 the point, and there are no apologies. 
 
 Mr. Adams is the apostle of competition. 
 He explains that he is this, not from choice 
 but from necessity. "Very probably keen 
 competition is not a blessing. We cannot 
 alter our environment. Nature has cast 
 the United States into the vortex of the 
 fiercest struggle ever known." His theory 
 of life Mr. Adams condenses as follows: 
 "For the purpose of obtaining a working 
 hypothesis it is assumed that men are 
 evolved from their environment like other 
 animals, and that their intellectual, moral, 
 and social qualities may be investigated as 
 developments from the struggle for life. 
 . . Food is the first necessity, but 
 as most regions produce food more or less 
 abundantly, the pinch lies not so much in 
 the existence of the food itself as with its dis- 
 tribution. . . . To satisfy their hunger 
 men must not only be able to defend their 
 own, but, in case of dearth, to rob their 
 neighbours, where they cannot buy. 
 
Markets and Misery 79 
 
 for the weaker must perish. . . . Life 
 may be destroyed as effectually by peaceful 
 competition as by war. A nation which is 
 undersold may perish by famine as com- 
 pletely as if slaughtered by a conqueror. 
 . . . For these reasons men have striven 
 to equip themselves well for the combat, and 
 since the end of the Stone Age no nation in the 
 more active quarters of the globe has been 
 able to do so without a supply of relatively 
 cheap metal. . . . Thus the position of 
 the mines has influenced the direction of 
 travel. The centre of the mineral production 
 is likely to be the seat of empire. I believe 
 it is impossible to overestimate the effect 
 upon civilsation of the variation of trade 
 routes. According to the ancient tradition, 
 the whole valley of the Syr-Daria was once so 
 thickly settled that a nightingale could fly 
 from branch to branch of different trees, 
 and a cat walk from wall to wall and from 
 housetop to housetop, from Kashgar to 
 the Sea of Aral." But the trade route 
 across central Asia was displaced, "and so 
 it has come to pass that Bagdad has sunk 
 into a mass of hovels, and the valley of 
 Syr-Daria is a wilderness. The fate of 
 the empire of Haroun-al-Raschid exemplifies 
 an universal law." 
 
 "The greatest prize of modern times," 
 in Mr. Adams's opinion, is northern China, 
 and upon this the fate of empire rests. 
 
8o The Industrial Republic 
 
 His book was published in 1901, and he 
 considered then that the chances were all 
 with the United States. Ten years before 
 we had been "tottering upon the brink of 
 ruin. . . . Relief came through an 
 exertion of energy and adaptability, per- 
 haps without a parallel. ... In three 
 years America reorganised her whole social 
 system by a process of consolidation, the 
 result of wliich has been the so-called trust. 
 But the trust is in reahty the highest type 
 of administrative efficiency, and therefore 
 of economy, which has as yet been attained. 
 By means of this consolidation the American 
 people were enabled to utilise their mines 
 to the full . . . The shock of the impact 
 of the new power seems overwhelming. 
 . In March, 1897, Pittsburg achieved 
 supremacy in steel, and in an instant 
 Europe felt herself poised above an abyss. 
 . . The Spanish Empire disintegrated, 
 and Great Britain displayed a lassitude 
 which has attracted the attention of the 
 entire world. . . . Germany has also 
 been perturbed. . . . Russia has, how- 
 ever, suffered most. 
 
 "The world seems agreed that the United 
 States is likely to achieve, if indeed she 
 has not already achieved, an economic 
 supremacy. The vortex of the cyclone is 
 near New York. No such activity prevails 
 elsewhere; nowhere are undertakings so 
 
Markets and Misery 8i 
 
 gigantic, nowhere is administration so per- 
 fect; nowhere are such masses of capital 
 centralised in single hands. And as the 
 United States becomes an imperial market, 
 she stretches out along the trade routes 
 which lead from foreign countries to her 
 heart, as every empire has stretched out 
 from the days of Sargon to our own. The 
 West Indies drift toward us, the Republic 
 of Mexico hardly longer has an independent 
 life, and the City of Mexico is an American 
 town. With the completion of the Panama 
 Canal all Central America will become a 
 part of our system. We have expanded into 
 Asia, we have attracted the fragments of 
 the Spanish dominions, and reaching out 
 into China, we have checked the demands 
 of Russia and Germany, in territory, which, 
 until yesterday, had been supposed to be 
 beyond our sphere. We are penetrating 
 Europe, and Great Britain especially is 
 assuming the position of a dependency, 
 which must rely upon us as the base from 
 which she draws ner food in peace, and 
 without which she could not stand in war." 
 "Supposing the movement of the next 
 fifty years only equal to that of the last," 
 continues our author, . . , "the United 
 States will outweigh any single empire, if 
 not all empires combined. The whole 
 world will pay her tribute. Commerce 
 will flow to her, both from east and west, and 
 
82 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the order which has existed from the dawn 
 of time will be reversed." 
 
 There is only one peril about all this, 
 in the opinion of Mr. Adams. "Society 
 is now moving with intense velocity, and 
 masses are gathering bulk with proportional 
 rapidity. There is also some reason to 
 surmise that the equilibrium is corre- 
 spondingly delicate and unstable. If so 
 apparently slight a cause as a fall of prices 
 for a decade has been sufficient to propel 
 the seat of empire across the Atlantic, an 
 equally sHght derangement of the ad- 
 ministrative functions of the United States 
 might force it across the Pacific. Prudence 
 therefore would dictate the adoption of 
 measures to minimise the likelihood of 
 sudden shocks. . . . If the New Empire 
 should develop, it must be an enormous 
 complex mass, to be administered only by 
 means of a cheap, elastic and simple machin- 
 ery; an old and clumsy mechanism must, 
 sooner or later, collapse, and in sinking 
 may involve a civilisation." 
 
 By "an old and clumsy mechanism" 
 Mr. Adams explains elsewhere that he means 
 our American political system. Our an- 
 cestors were opposed to much consolidation, 
 and they formed a constitution that was 
 
 f)ractically unchangeable, because they be- 
 ieved they had "reached certain final truths 
 of government." "The language of the 
 
Markets and Misery 83 
 
 Declaration of Independence, in which they 
 proclaimed one of these truths (that all 
 men are created equal), varies little from 
 that of a Cathohc council," says Mr. 
 Adams. An American is apt to believe 
 such formulas, being "dominated by tra- 
 dition." But a naodern thinker views 
 them "as having no necessary relation to 
 the conduct of affairs in the twentieth 
 century." "If men are to be observed scien- 
 tifically, the standard by which customs 
 and institutions must be gauged cannot 
 be abstract moral principles, but success. 
 . Institutions are good when they 
 lead to success in competition, and bad 
 when they hinder." 
 
 The United States now forms a "gigan- 
 tic and growing empire. She occupies 
 a position of extraordinary strength. 
 Favoured alike by geographical position, 
 by deposits of minerals, by climate, and by 
 the character of her population, she has 
 little to fear either in peace or war, from 
 rivals, provided the friction created by 
 the movement of the masses with which 
 she has to deal does not neutralise her 
 energy." . . 
 
 "The alternative presented is plain. We 
 may cherish ideals and risk substantial bene- 
 fits to realise them. Such is the emotional 
 instinct. Or we may regard our govern- 
 ment dispassionately, as we would any other 
 
84 The Industrial Republic 
 
 matter of business. . . . The United 
 States has become the heart of the economic 
 system of the age, and she must maintain her 
 supremacy by wit and force, or share the fate 
 of the discarded. What that fate is the follow- 
 ing pages tell. . . . With conservative 
 populations slaughter is nature's remedy." 
 Never in my life shall I forget the hours 
 in which I wrestled with these problems — 
 the weeks and the months of perplexity and 
 despair. It happened long before I ever 
 heard of Mr. Adams — for of course these 
 thoughts of his are the thoughts of the time, 
 there is a whole literature of them, from 
 Kipling, Roosevelt, and the Kaiser down. 
 And to look back over the weary wastes of 
 history — the blind, hideous nightmare of 
 blood and tears — and then to look forward, 
 and in all the futui"e see nothing else! To 
 see never any rest for agonised humanity, 
 only kill or be killed for ages upon ages! 
 To see this newest and noblest effort of 
 man after freedom and peace — the American 
 Republic — turned into an engine of slaughter 
 and oppression! To be shown by cold, 
 scientific formulas that my reverence for 
 the traditions of Lincoln was merely an 
 "emotional impulse," and that the end of 
 it could only be that my country would share 
 "the fate of the discarded!" I could not 
 believe it — I cried out in the night-time for 
 deliverance from it. 
 
Markets and Misery 85 
 
 *There is a certain relentlessness about 
 Mr. Adams, which fills the reader with 
 rebellion, and makes him think. The 
 average imperialist carefully avoids doing 
 this; he veils his doctrines with moral 
 phrases, with the decent pretence of "des- 
 tiny" at the very least. But Mr. Adams 
 dances a very war-dance upon the thing 
 called "moral sense" — never before was 
 it made to seem such an impertinent 
 superfluity. 
 
 Have you, the reader, never had one smal- 
 lest doubt ? Does it not, for instance, seem 
 strange to you now, when you think of it, 
 that this mighty people cannot stay quietly 
 at home and live their own life and mind 
 their own affairs ? How does it happen 
 that our existence as a nation depends upon 
 expansion ? Is it that our population is 
 growing so fast ? But here is our Im- 
 perialist President lamenting that our popu- 
 lation is not growing fast enough! And so 
 we have to fight to find room for our chil- 
 dren; and we have to have more children 
 in order that we may be able to fight! We 
 deplore race-suicide, and we give as our 
 reason that it prevents race-murder! 
 
 Picture to yourself half a dozen men on an 
 island. If the island be fertile they can get 
 along without any foreign trade, can they 
 
 ♦Portions of the following argument were published as an article in 
 the North American Review. 
 
86 The Industrial Republic 
 
 not ? And then why cannot a nation do 
 it? According to Mulhall, in 1894 two 
 millions of our agricultural labourers were 
 raising food for foreign countries. And all 
 our imports are luxuries, save a few things 
 such as tea and coffee and some medicines! 
 And still our existence as a nation depends 
 upon foreign trade — trade with Filipinos 
 and Chinamen, with Hottentots and Es- 
 quimaux! Why? 
 
 Can you, the reader, tell me ? We 
 manufacture more than we can use, you 
 say. Unless we can sell the balance to 
 the Chinamen some of our factories must 
 close down, and then some of our people 
 would starve. But why, I ask, cannot our 
 own starving people have the things that go 
 abroad — some of all that food that goes 
 abroad, for instance ? Why is it that the 
 Chinamen come first and our own people 
 afterwards ? Until we have made some 
 things for the Chinamen, you explain, we 
 have no money to buy anything ourselves. 
 And so always the Chinamen first. It 
 seems such a strange, upside-down arrange- 
 ment — does it not seem so to you ? For, 
 look you, the people of England are in the 
 same fix, and the people of Germany are 
 in the same fix — the people of all the com- 
 peting nations are in the same fix! They 
 actually have to go to war to kill each other, 
 in order to get a chance to sell something 
 
Markets and Misery 87 
 
 to the Chinamen, so that they can get money 
 to buy some things for themselves! They 
 were actually doing that in Manchuria for 
 eighteen months! More amazing yet, they 
 had to go and murder some of the Chinamen, 
 in order to compel the rest to buy something, 
 so that they could get money to buy some- 
 thing for themselves ! 
 
 How long can it be possible for a human 
 being, with a spark of either conscience or 
 brains in him, to gaze at such a state of 
 affairs and not know that there is something 
 wrong about it? And how long could he 
 gaze before the truth of it would flash over 
 him- — that the reason for it is that some 
 private party owns all the machinery and 
 materials of production, and will not give 
 the people anything, until they have first 
 made something that can be sold! That 
 all the world lies at the mercy of those who 
 own the materials and machinery, and who 
 leave men to starve when they cannot make 
 profits ! And that this is why we Americans 
 cannot stay at home and be happy, but are 
 forced to go trading with Filipinos and 
 Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux, and 
 competing for "empire" with our brothers 
 in England and Germany and Japan ! 
 
 If the reader be an average American, 
 these thoughts will be new to him. He has 
 been brought up on a diet of misunderstood 
 Malthusianism. He is told that life has 
 
88 The Industrial Republic 
 
 always been a struggle for existence and 
 always will be; that there is not food enough 
 to go round, and that therefore, every now 
 and then, the surplus population has to be 
 cut down by famine an war. It is to be point- 
 ed out concerning the doctrine that, while he 
 swears allegiance to it, he doesn't like to 
 think about it, and when it comes to the 
 practical test he shows that he does not 
 really believe it. Whenever famine comes, 
 he subscribes to a grain-fund, and does his 
 best to defeat nature; when war comes, he 
 gets up a Red Cross Society for the same 
 purpose. And yet he still continues to 
 swear by this wiping out of the nations, and 
 any discussion about abolishing poverty 
 he waves aside as Utopian. 
 
 The writer may fail in his purpose with 
 this paper, but he will not have written in 
 vain if he can lead a few men to see the 
 pitiful folly of that half-baked theory which 
 ranks men with the wild beasts of the jungle, 
 and ignores the existence of both science 
 and morality. He can do that, assuredly, 
 with any one whom he can induce to read 
 one little book — Prince Kropotkin's " Fields, 
 Factories and Workshops." 
 
 The book was published nine years ago, 
 but apparently it has not yet had time to 
 affect the cogitations of the orthodox econo- 
 mists. You still read, as you have been 
 used to reading since the days of Adam 
 
Markets and Misery 89 
 
 Smith, that the possibilities of the soil are 
 strictly limited, and that population always 
 stays just within the starvation limit. Nearly- 
 all the fertile land in this country, for in- 
 stance, is now in use, and so we shall soon 
 reach the limit here. The forty million 
 people of Great Britain have long since 
 passed it, and they would starve to death 
 were it not for our surplus. And there are 
 portions of the world where population is 
 even more dense, as in Belgium. All this 
 you have known from your school-days, 
 and you think you know it perfectly, 
 and beyond dispute; and so how astonished 
 you will be to be told that it is simply one 
 of the most stupid and stupefying delusions 
 that ever were believed and propagated 
 among men; that the limits of the produc- 
 tive possibilities of the soil have not only 
 not been attained, but are, so far as science 
 can now see, absolutely unattainable; that 
 not only could England support with ease 
 her own population on her own soil, and not 
 only could Belgium do it, but any most 
 crowded portion of the world could do it, 
 and do it once again, and yet once again, 
 and do it with two or three hours of work a 
 day by a small portion of its population ! • 
 That England could now support, not 
 merely her thirty-three million inhabitants, 
 but seventy-five and perhaps a hundred 
 million! And that the United States could 
 
90 The Industrial Republic 
 
 now support a billion and a quarter of 
 people, or just about the entire population 
 of this planet! And that this could be done 
 year after year, and entirely without any 
 possibility of the exhaustion of the soil! 
 And all this not any theory of a closet 
 speculator or a Utopian dreamer, but by 
 methods that are used year after year by 
 thousands and tens of thousands of men 
 who are making money by it in all portions 
 of the world — in the market-gardens of 
 Paris and London, of Belgium, Holland 
 and the island of Jersey, the truck-farms of 
 Florida and Minnesota, and of Norfolk, 
 Virginia ! 
 
 Prince Kropotkin writes: 
 
 "While science devotes its chief attention 
 to industrial pursuits, a limited number of 
 lovers of nature and a legion of workers, 
 whose very names will remain unknown to 
 posterity, have created of late a quite new 
 agriculture, as superior to modern farming 
 as modern farming is superior to the old 
 three-fields system of our ancestors. They 
 smile when we boast about the rotation 
 system having permitted us to take from 
 the field one crop every year, or four crops 
 every three years, because their ambition 
 is to have six and nine crops from the very 
 same plot of land every twelve months. 
 They do not understand our talk about 
 good and bad soils, because they make the 
 
Markets and Misery 91 
 
 soil themselves, and make it in such quan- 
 tities as to be compelled yearly to sell some 
 of it; otherwise, it would raise up the levels 
 of their gardens by half an inch every year. 
 They aim at cropping, not five or six tons 
 of grass to the acre, as we do, but from 
 fifty to one hundred tons of various 
 vegetables on the same space; not twenty- 
 five dollars' worth of hay, but five hundred 
 dollars' worth of vegetables, of the plainest 
 description, cabbages and carrots. That 
 is where agriculture is going now." 
 
 The writer tells about all these things in 
 detail. Here is the culture maraichere of 
 Paris — a M. Ponce, with a tiny orchard of 
 two and seven-tenths acres, for which he 
 pays five hundred dollars rent a year, and 
 from which he takes produce that could not 
 be named short of several pages of figures: 
 twenty thousand pounds of carrots, twenty 
 thousand of onions and radishes, six thou- 
 sand heads of cabbage, three thousand of 
 cauliflower, five thousand baskets of to- 
 matoes, five thousand dozen choice fruit, 
 one hundred and fifty-four thousand heads 
 of "salad" — in all, two hundred and fifty 
 thousand pounds of vegetables. Says the 
 author : 
 
 "The Paris gardener not only defies the 
 soil — he would grow the same crops on an 
 asphalt pavement — he defies climate. His 
 walls, which are built to reflect light and to 
 
92 The Industrial Republic 
 
 protect the wall-trees from the northern 
 winds, his wall-tree shades and glass pro- 
 tectors, his pepinieres, have made a rich 
 Southern garden out of the suburbs of 
 Paris." 
 
 The consequence of this is that the popu- 
 lation of the districts of that city, three 
 millions and a half of people, could, if it 
 were necessary, be maintained in their own 
 territory, provided with food both animal 
 and vegetable, from a piece of ground less 
 than sixty miles on a side ! And at the same 
 time, by the same methods, they are raising 
 thirty tons of potatoes on an acre in Minne- 
 sota, and three hundred and fifty bushels 
 of corn in Iowa, and six hundred bushels 
 of onions in Florida. And with machinery, 
 on the prairie wheat-farms, they raise crops 
 at a cost which makes twelve hours and a 
 half of work of all kinds enough to supply 
 a man with the flour part of his food for a 
 year! And then, as if to cap the climax, 
 comes Mr. Horace Fletcher with his dis- 
 covery that all the ailments of civilised man, 
 (including old age and death) are due to 
 overeating; and Professor Chittenden with 
 his practical demonstration that the quan- 
 tity of food needed by man is about four- 
 tenths of what all physiologists have pre- 
 viously taught ! *And while all this has been 
 
 ♦Horace Fletcher: "The A-B-Z of Our Own Nutrition." R. L. Chit, 
 tenden; "Physiological Economy in Nutrition." 
 
Courtesy of IVilshire's Magazine 
 
 Courtesy of Wilshire's Magazine 
 
 REAPING BY HAND AND BY MACHINERY 
 
Markets and Misery 93 
 
 going on for a decade, while encyclopedias 
 have been written about it, our political 
 economists continue to discuss wages and 
 labour, rent and interest, exchange and con- 
 sumption, from the standpoint of the dreary, 
 century-old formula that there must always 
 be an insufficient supply of food in the world ! 
 
 Such is the state of aifairs with agricul- 
 ture: and now how is it with everything 
 else? In the Thirteenth Annual Report of 
 the Commissioner of Labour (1898), Carroll 
 D. Wright has figured the relative costs of 
 doing various pieces of work by hand and 
 by modern machinery. Here are a few of 
 the cases he gives: 
 
 "Making 0/ 10 plows: By hand, 2 work- 
 men, performing 11 distinct operations, 
 working a total of 1,180 hours, and paid 
 $54.46. By machine, 52 workmen, 97 
 operations, 37^ hours, $7.90. 
 
 "Making of 500 lbs. of butter: By hand, 
 3 men, 7 operations, 125 hours, $10.66. 
 By machine, 7 men, 8 operations, 12^ 
 hours, $1.78. 
 
 "Making of 500 yds. twilled cottonade: By 
 hand, 3 men, 19 operations 7,534 hours, 
 $135.61. By machine, 252 men, 43 opera- 
 tions, 84 hours, $6.81. 
 
 "Making of 100 pairs of cheap boots: By 
 hand, 2 workmen, 83 operations, 1,436 
 hours, $408.50. By machine, 113 work- 
 men, 122 operations, 154 hours, $35.40." 
 
94 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Thus we see human labour has been cut 
 to the extent of from eighty to ninety-five 
 per cent. From other sources I have 
 gathered a few facts about the latest machin- 
 ery. In Pennsylvania, some sheep were 
 shorn and the wool turned into clothing in 
 six hours, four minutes. A steer was killed, 
 its hide tanned, turned into leather and 
 made into shoes in twenty-four hours. The 
 ten million bottles used by the Standard 
 Oil Company every year are now blown by 
 machinery. An electric riveting-machine 
 puts rivets in steel-frame buildings at the 
 rate of two per minute. Two hundred and 
 sixty needles per minute, ten million match- 
 sticks per day, five hundred garments cut 
 f)er day — each by a machine tended by one 
 ittle boy. The newest weaving-looms run 
 through the dinner hour and an hour and a 
 half after the factory closes, making cloth 
 with no one to tend them at all. The new 
 basket-machine invented by Mergenthaler, 
 the inventor of the linotype, is now in opera- 
 tion everywhere, "making fruit-baskets, 
 berry-baskets and grape-baskets of a 
 strength and quality never approached by 
 hand labour. Fancy a single machine that 
 will turn out completed berry-baskets at 
 the rate of twelve thousand per day of nine 
 hours' work! This is at the rate of one 
 thousand three hundred per hour, or over 
 twenty baskets a minute ! One girl, operating 
 
Markets and Misery 95 
 
 this machine, does the work of twelve 
 skilled hand operators!" 
 
 Since all these wonders are the common- 
 place facts of modern industry, it is not 
 surprising that here and there men should 
 begin to think about them; here is the naive 
 question recently asked by the editor of a 
 Montreal newspaper which I happened on: 
 
 " With the best of machinery at the present 
 day, one man can produce woollens for three 
 hundred people. One man can produce 
 boots and shoes for one thousand people. 
 One man can produce bread for two hundred 
 people. Yet thousands cannot get woollens, 
 boots and shoes, or bread. There must be 
 some reason for this state of affairs. " 
 
 There is a reason, a perfectly plain and 
 simple reason, which all over the world the 
 working-people, whom it concerns, are com- 
 ing to understand. The reason is that all 
 the woollen manufactories, the boot and shoe 
 and bread manufactories, and all the sources 
 of the raw materials of these, and all the 
 means of handling and distributing them 
 when they are manufactured, belong to a 
 few private individuals instead of to the com- 
 munity as a whole. And so, instead of the 
 cotton-spinner, the shoe-operative and the 
 bread-maker having free access to them, 
 to work each as long as he pleases, produce 
 as much as he cares to, and exchange his 
 products for as much of the products of 
 
96 The Industrial Republic 
 
 other workers as he needs, each one of these 
 workers can only get at the machines by 
 the consent of another man, and then does 
 not get what he produces, but only a small 
 fraction of it, and does not get that except 
 when the owner of the balance can find 
 some one with money enough to buy that 
 balance at a profit to him ! 
 
 Prof. Hertzka, the Austrian economist, 
 in his "Laws of Social Evolution," has 
 elaborately investigated the one real question 
 of political economy to-day, the actual 
 labour and time necessary for the creation, 
 under modern conditions, of the necessaries 
 of life for a people. Here are the results for 
 the Austrian people, of twenty-two million : 
 
 "It takes 26,250,000 acres of agricultural 
 land, and 7,500,000 of pasturage, for all 
 agricultural products. Then I allowed a 
 house to be built for every family, consisting 
 of five rooms. I found that all industries, 
 agriculture, architecture, building, flour, 
 sugar, coal, iron, machine-building, clothing, 
 and chemical production, need 615,000 
 labourers employed 11 hours per day, 300 
 days a year, to satisfy every imaginable want 
 for 22,000,000 inhabitants. 
 
 "These 615,000 labourers are only 12.3 
 per cent, of the population able to do work, 
 excluding women and all persons under 16 
 or over 50 years of age ; all these latter to be 
 considered as not able. 
 
Markets and Misery 97 
 
 "Should the 5,000,000 able men be en- 
 gaged in work, instead of 615,000, they need 
 only to work 36.9 days every year to produce 
 everything needed for the support of the 
 population of Austria. But should the 
 5,000,000 work all the year, say 300 days— 
 which they would probably have to do to 
 keep the supply fresh in every department — 
 each one would only work 1 hour and 22 J 
 minutes per day. 
 
 "But to engage to produce all the luxuries, 
 in addition, would take, in round figures, 
 1,000,000 workers, classed and assorted as 
 above, or only 20 per cent, of all those able, 
 excluding every woman, or every person 
 under 16 or over 50, as before. The 
 5,000,000 able, strong male members could 
 produce evervthing imaginable for the whole 
 nation of 22,000,000 in 2 hours and 12 
 minutes per day, working 300 days a year." 
 
 But then you say : If this be true, if two 
 hours' work will produce everything, how 
 can everybody go on working twelve hours 
 forever ? They can't ; and that is just why 
 I am writing this book. They can do it 
 only until they have filled the needs, first 
 of themselves, then of all the Filipinos and 
 Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux who 
 have money to buy anything — and then 
 until they have filled all the factories, ware- 
 houses and stores of the country to over- 
 flowing. Then they cannot do one single 
 
98 The Industrial Republic 
 
 thing more; then they are out of work 
 They can go on so long as their masters can 
 find a market in which to sell their product at 
 a profit; then they have to stop. And then 
 suddenly (instantly, God help them!) they 
 have to take their choice between two alter- 
 natives — between an Industrial Republic, 
 and a political empire. Either they will 
 hear Prince Kropotkin, or they will hear 
 Mr. Brooks Adams. Either they will take 
 the instruments and means of production 
 and produce for use and not for profit; or 
 else tney will forge themselves into an engine 
 of war to be wielded by a military despot. 
 In that case, they will fling themselves 
 upon China and Japan, and seize northern 
 China, "the greatest prize of modern times." 
 They will enter upon a career of empire, 
 and by the wholesale slaughter of war they 
 will keep down population, while at the 
 same time by the wholesale destruction of 
 war they keep down the surplus of products. 
 So there will be more work for the workers 
 for a time, and more profits for the masters 
 for a time; until what wealth there is in 
 northern China has also been concentrated 
 and possessed, when once more there will 
 begin distress. By that time, however, we 
 shall have an hereditary aristocracy strongly 
 intrenched, and a proletariat degraded be- 
 yond recall; so that our riots will end in 
 mere slaughter and waste, and we shall 
 
Markets and Misery 99 
 
 never again see freedom. We shall run 
 then the whole course of the Roman Em- 
 pire — of frenzied profligacy among the 
 wealthy, and beastly ferocity among the 
 populace : until at last we fall into imbecility, 
 and are overwhelmed by some new, clean 
 race which the strong heart of nature has 
 poured out. 
 
 Empires have risen and have fallen; 
 but it has not been, as Mr. Adams asserts, 
 because of "variations of trade-routes," 
 but solely because of wealth-concentration, 
 with its ensuing corruption, ignorance and 
 brutality among the populace, and avarice 
 and luxury among the rich. Let the reader 
 take Froude's "Caesar," and read, in the 
 first chapter, his picture of the last days of 
 the Roman Republic : 
 
 " An age in so many ways the counterpart 
 of our own, the blossoming period of the old 
 civilisation, when the intellect was trained 
 to the highest point that it could reach, and 
 on the great subjects of human interest, 
 on morals and politics, on poetry and art, 
 even on religion itself and the speculative 
 problems of life, men thought as we think, 
 doubted where we doubt, argued as we 
 argue, aspired and struggled after the same 
 objects. It was an age of material prog- 
 ress and material civilisation; an age of 
 civil liberty and intellectual culture; an 
 age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons 
 
loo The Industrial Republic 
 
 and of dinner-parties, or senatorial major- 
 ities and electoral corruption. The highest 
 offices of state were open in theory to the 
 meanest citizen ; they were confined, in fact, 
 to those who had the longest purses, or the 
 most ready use of the tongue on popular 
 platforms. Distinctions of birth had been 
 exchanged for distinctions of wealth. The 
 struggles between plebeians and patricians 
 for equality of privilege were over, and a 
 new division had been formed between the 
 party of property and a party that desired a 
 change in the structure of society. The free 
 cultivators were disappearing from the soil. 
 Italy was being absorbed into vast estates, 
 held by a few favoured families and culti- 
 vated by slaves, while the old agricultural 
 population was driven off the land, and 
 was crowded into towns. The rich were 
 extravagant, for life had ceased to have 
 practical interest, except for its material 
 pleasures; the occupation of the higher 
 classes was to obtain money without labour, 
 and to spend it in idle enjoyment. Patriot- 
 ism survived on the lips, but patriotism 
 meant the ascendancy of the party which 
 would maintain the existing order of things, 
 or would overthrow it for a more equal 
 distribution of the good things which alone 
 were valued. Religion, once the foundation 
 of the laws and rule of personal conduct, had 
 subsided into opinion. The educated in 
 
Markets and Misery loi 
 
 their hearts disbelieved it. Temples were 
 still built with increasing splendour; the 
 established forms were scrupulously ob- 
 served. Public men spoke conventionally 
 of Providence, that they might throw on 
 their opponents the odium of impiety; but 
 of genuine belief that life had any serious 
 meaning there was none remaining beyond 
 the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant 
 multitude." 
 
 Is not this a parallel to make one pause 
 and think.? And if our American republic 
 is to escape the fate of Rome, to what 
 cause will it be due.? The Roman failure 
 was due to the fact that "the men and 
 women by whom the hard work of the world 
 was done were chiefly slaves"; those who 
 held the franchise, the free Roman citizens, 
 were a comparatively small class, and the 
 patricans bought them with "bread and 
 circuses," and so held the reins of power. 
 In our present time, however, those who do 
 the work and those who have the ballot 
 are the same class; and also they have the 
 public school and the press, and the whole of 
 modern science at their backs. More im- 
 portant yet — the all-dominating fact — is the 
 machine. The Roman chattel-slave worked 
 with his hands, while the modern wage- 
 slave works with tools of gigantic speed and 
 power; which means that our modern econ- 
 omic process, while infinitely more cruel and 
 
I02 The Industrial Republic 
 
 destructive, makes up for these qualities 
 by the certainty and swiftness with which 
 it rushes to its end. So it is that a Revo- 
 lution which in Rome took centuries to 
 culminate and fail, will require only decades 
 in America to accomplish its inevitable 
 triumph. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 SOCIAL DECAY 
 
 F MY analysis of the industrial process 
 be correct, there will be two develop- 
 ments observable in our society: the first a 
 material change, a kind of economic apoplexy, / 
 the concentration of wealth in one portion 
 of society, accompanied by an intensifi- 
 cation of competition, a falling in the rate 
 of interest, and a steady rise in the cost 
 of living; and second, a spiritual change 
 coincident with the material one, a protest 
 against the rising frenzy of greed, and 
 against the constantly increasing economic 
 pressure. 
 
 It is important that these two processes 
 should be clearly perceived, and their 
 relationship correctly understood; for there 
 is no aspect of the whole problem about 
 which there is more bad thinking done. 
 The two are cause and effect, and they 
 explain and prove each other; and yet al- 
 most invariably you will hear them cited as 
 contradicting each other. If, for instance, 
 one speaks of the ever-rising tide of misery 
 and suffering in our society, he will be met 
 with the response that "the world is getting 
 
 103 
 
104 The Industrial Republic 
 
 better all the time." And when he asks 
 for some proof of the statement, the reply 
 will be that a great national awakening is 
 going on, that we are developing new ideals 
 and a new public spirit ! 
 
 Similarly I have, time and again, when 
 advocating this or that concrete remedy, 
 been met with the statement that the cure 
 for the evils of the time is publicity — ^that 
 the people must be educated — that we 
 must appeal to men's moral sense, etc. 
 It is useless to argue with a person who 
 cannot perceive that all these things are 
 simply means to an end, and not the end. 
 You cannot educate people just to be edu- 
 cated; when you appeal to them, you have 
 to appeal to them to do something. 
 
 One cannot insist too strongly upon the 
 futility of sentiment in connection with this 
 process. We are dealing with facts, with 
 grim and brutal and merciless reality. And 
 it will not avail you to try to smooth it over — 
 it will not do any good to turn your head 
 and refuse to face it. Here is the monster 
 machine of competition, grinding remorse- 
 lessly on; the wealth of the world is rushing 
 with cyclonic speed into one portion of the 
 social body, and in the other portion whole 
 classes of men and women and children are 
 being swept out of existence, are being 
 wiped off the economic slate. Exactly as 
 capital piles up — at compounded and 
 
Social Decay 105 
 
 re-compounded interest^so also piles up the 
 mass of human misery of every conceivable 
 sort — luxury, debauchery and cynicism at 
 the top, prostitution, suicide, insanity, and 
 crime at the bottom. Political corruption 
 spreads further and eats deeper, business 
 practice becomes more impersonal and more 
 ruthless ; and all progress awaits the swing of 
 the pendulum, the time when the cumulative 
 pressure of all this mass of misery shall 
 have driven the people to frenzy, and forced 
 them to overturn the system of class 
 exploitation and greed. 
 
 I purpose to cite in detail the symptoms 
 of disease and decay in our body politic; 
 before I begin, I wish to put my inter- 
 pretation of them into one sentence, which 
 a man can carry away with him. I say 
 that the evils of our time are due without 
 exception to one single cause — that our 
 people are being driven, with constantly in- 
 creasing rigour, to the ultimately hopeless 
 task of paying interest upon a mass of 
 capital which is increasing at compound 
 interest. 
 
 Consider in the first place the broader 
 aspect of the situation— the dollar-madness 
 of the time which is the staple theme of the 
 moralist. I have a friend who is in control 
 of a great business concern, and who will 
 read this little book with intense disapproval ; 
 and yet so fearfully has this man been 
 
 y 
 
io6 The Industrial Republic 
 
 driven by the lash of competition that when 
 I saw him last he could scarcely digest a bit 
 of dry bread, and his hand trembled so that 
 he could hardly lift a glass of water to his 
 lips. He talked of his business in his sleep, 
 and he could not go for a walk and forget 
 it for five minutes. And why.? Was it 
 money.'' He has so much that his family 
 could not spend it if they lived a hundred 
 years; but it was his business, it was his 
 life. He was caught in the mill and he 
 could not get out. His is one of those few 
 industries which have not yet formed a 
 trust, and he is in the last gasp of the com- 
 petitive struggle — he has to plot and plan 
 day and night to get new orders, and to cut 
 down expenses, and to keep up the dividends 
 upon which his reputation rests. 
 
 And as it is with him, so it is with the rest 
 of us. We have to play the game; we have 
 to cut our neighbour's throat, knowing that 
 otherwise our neighbour will cut ours. 
 And year after year the pressure of the whole 
 thing grows more tense. Suicide in the 
 United States has increased from twelve 
 per one hundred thousand of population 
 in the year 1890, to sixteen in the year 1896, 
 and seventeen in the year 1902; in Germany 
 it rose from twenty to nearly twenty-two in 
 the three years between 1900 and 1903; 
 in England it rose from thirty in 1894, to 
 thirty-fivein 1904, According to the Civilth 
 
Social Decay 107 
 
 Cattolica the frequency of this crime in 
 Europe has increased four hundred per cent, 
 while population has increased only sixty 
 
 [)er cent. ; and there have been over one mil- 
 ion suicides recorded in the last twenty-five 
 years. There were ninety-two thousand in- 
 sane persons in the United States in 1880, one 
 hundred and six thousand in 1890, and 
 one hundred and forty-five thousand in 1896. 
 Per one thousand of population, there were 
 twenty-nine prisoners in 1850, sixty-one in 
 1860, eighty-five in 1870, one hundred and 
 seventeen in 1880, and one hundred and thir- 
 ty-two in 1890. In 1876 the population of this 
 country consumed eight and sixty-one one- 
 hundredths gallons of liquor per capita ; in 
 1890 they consumed fifteen and fifty-three 
 one-hundredths, and in 1902 they consumed 
 nineteen and forty-eight one-hundredths. 
 The actual consumption at the last date was 
 a billion and a half of gallons. These figures 
 take but a few lines to state ; and yet no human 
 imagination can form any conception of the 
 frightful mass of human anguish which they 
 imply. They constitute in themselves a 
 proof of the thesis here advanced, that there 
 IS at work in our society some great and 
 fundamental evil force.* 
 
 *"An experienced magistrate. Recorder John W. GofE of New Vork, told 
 me not ]f>ng since that in his judgment the course of crime in this coun- 
 try is not only towards more frequency and gravity, but that it is chang- 
 ing itsold hot impulsiveness, openness and directness for cold calculation, 
 secretiveness and deliberate intention to strike without being discovered . 
 This progress and difference he attributes mediately and immediately to 
 extending and deepening poverty ." Henry George: "The Menace of Priv- 
 ilege." 
 
io8 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Whenever the administrators of our "con- 
 stantly increasing mass of capital' ' find they 
 are no longer making profits, they either 
 reduce wages, or raise the price of their 
 product. One or the other they must do, 
 because without profits the machine cannot 
 run. When good times come they some- 
 times raise the wages again — because of 
 the unions; but they never lower the price 
 of the product — the poor consumer is a non- 
 union man. Two years ago Mr. Rocke- 
 feller put up the price of ou one cent, and 
 the Beef Trust has done the same about 
 once a year. And of course a general in- 
 crease in prices is exactly the same as a 
 general cut in wages — in either case the 
 consumer has to work a little harder to 
 make ends meet, and if he cannot work 
 harder, he dies. The coal-miners rejoiced 
 in the award of the Commission, untroubled 
 by the extra fifty cents the coal companies 
 put on the product; but when the miner 
 comes to add up his account with the butcher 
 and the oil man, he finds he is just where he 
 was before. He does not know why, you 
 understand — it is merely that he finds him- 
 self compelled to do without something he 
 used to consider a necessity. Dun's Review, 
 figuring the cost of living in the United States 
 upon a basis of 100, puts it at 72.455 
 in 1897, and 102.208 in 1904— an increase 
 of forty-one per cent. Bradstreet, reckon- 
 
Social Decay 109 
 
 ing In another way, shows an increase from 
 6.51 in 1897, to 9.05 in 1904, or thirty-nine 
 per cent. According to the annual report of 
 the Commissary General, United States 
 Army, the cost of feeding the soldiers of the 
 army has increased from eighteen cents in 1 898 
 to thirty-four and six-tenths cents in 1903. 
 Statisticians have figured that the average 
 employee earns ninety dollars a year more 
 than he did twenty years ago, while it costs 
 him to live on the same scale, one hundred 
 and thirty dollars a year more. According 
 to the last United States census the average 
 compensation per wage earner was only 
 three hundred and forty dollars, while the 
 value of the manufactured product was two 
 thousand four hundred and fifty dollars 
 per wage earner. Perhaps no clearer state- 
 ment of the intensification of exploitation 
 can be found than in the fact that whereas 
 the average profit on the products of all 
 industries was three hundred and seventy- 
 five dollars per wage earner in 1880, in 1900 
 it had increased to six hundred and twenty- 
 six dollars. 
 
 Another consequence of the increasing 
 strain is "race suicide"; which is simply 
 a popular term for that "elimination of the 
 middle class" which Karl Marx predicted 
 half a century ago. The homilies of Presi- 
 dent Roosevelt may have caused a few more 
 superfluous bourgeois babies to be born; 
 
no The Industrial Republic 
 
 but I rather fancy that in general it has 
 been a case of "everybody's business and 
 nobody's business" — that the average 
 middle-class American has no idea of lower- 
 ing his standard of living for the purpose 
 of affecting the census returns. As a result 
 of a confidential census of "race suicide," 
 taken in England and reported in the 
 Pojmlar Science Monthly, Mr. Sidney Webb 
 found that the offspring had been volun- 
 tarily limited in two hundred and twenty- 
 four cases out of a total of two hundred and 
 fifty-two marriages ; and out of the one hun- 
 dred and twenty-eight cases in which the 
 causes of limitation were given, economic 
 causes were specified in seventy-three. Sim- 
 ilar results would certainly follow an inquiry 
 in this country ; in fact Americans of refine- 
 ment have come to have an instinctive feel- 
 ing of repugnance to a large family ; to have 
 six or seven children is vulgar and 
 "common," and suggestive of foreigners. 
 The reason is simply that conditions now 
 prevail which make large families im- 
 possible, except to Poles and Hungarians 
 and Italians and French-Canadians, people 
 who are too ignorant to limit their offspring, 
 and whose standards of life are close to 
 animals — their children earning their own 
 livings in sweatshops, min^o and factories, as 
 soon as they are able to walk. 
 
 And yet, low as our lowest classes have 
 
Social Decay in 
 
 been ground, they are not low enough. 
 Thousands of agents of steamship com- 
 panies are gathering the outcasts from the 
 sewers of Europe and shipping them here. 
 The rate of immigration into this country 
 was three hundred and eleven thousand 
 in 1899, four hundred and eighty-seven 
 thousand in 1901, six hundred and forty-eight 
 thousand in 1902, eight hundred and fifty- 
 seven thousand in 1903, and over a million in 
 1905 — more than one-half of the last ship- 
 ments being from Hungary, Russia, and 
 southern Italy. All this, you must under- 
 stand, is managed by the "System" which 
 rules ia our centres of industry. "In that 
 unhappy anthracite country," writes Mr. 
 John Graham Brooks, a person of authority, 
 "the employers will tell you openly, and 
 with conscious bravado, that they must get 
 cheaper and cheaper labour to keep wages 
 down, else they could make no money." 
 And it was recently estimated by George 
 W. Morgan, State Superintendent of Elec- 
 tions in New York, that in one past year 
 over six hundred thousand dollars profit 
 was made by selling false naturalisation 
 papers. The Federal authorities who had 
 been investigating the frauds believed that 
 over one hundred thousand sets of such 
 papers had been sold, and that thirty thou- 
 sand of these had been issued in New York 
 City. Fully thirty per cent, of the Italian 
 
112 The Industrial Republic 
 
 citizens in the southern district of New York 
 were estimated to hold false papers. 
 
 Cheaper and cheaper labour! Women's 
 labour and children's labour! Over one 
 million of women are at present working in 
 factories alone in this country; and one 
 million and three-quarters of children 
 between ten and fifteen years of age are 
 engagedin gainful occupations. Inthecotton 
 factories of the South, while the number of 
 men employed increased seventy-nine per 
 cent, in the past ten years, the number of 
 women increased one hundred and fifty- 
 eight per cent, and the number of children 
 under sixteen increased two hundred and 
 seventy per cent. The number employed 
 in Alabama alone was estimated by the 
 Committee on Child Labour to be fifty 
 thousand, with thirty-four per cent, of them 
 under twelve years, and ten per cent, under 
 ten years. These children work twelve 
 hours a day, and the oldest get fifty cents 
 and the youngest get nine cents. Here are 
 the descriptions of observers: 
 
 "A little boy of six years has been working 
 12 hours a day, from 6:20 a. m. to 6:20 p. m. 
 (40 minutes off at noon), for 15 cents per 
 day. 
 
 "Three boys aged respectively 9, 8, and 
 7 years. The boy aged 9 has been working 
 two years, the boy aged 8 has been working 
 three years; the boy aged 7 years has been 
 
Social Decay 113 
 
 working two years. These little fellows 
 work 13 hours a day, from 5:20 a. m. to 
 6:30 p. M., with twenty minutes for dinner. 
 In 'rush' periods their mill works until 
 9:30 and 10 p. m. They were refused a 
 holiday for Thanksgiving and they obtained 
 Christmas Day only by working till 7 P. M. 
 in order to make up the time." 
 
 Mrs. Irene Ashby-Macfadden says: "I 
 have talked with a little boy of seven years, 
 in Alabama, who worked for forty nights; 
 and another child not nine years old, who at 
 six years old had been on the night shift 
 eleven months." 
 
 Miss Jane Addams, of Chicago, says: 
 "In South Carolina, in a large new mill, I 
 found a child of five working at night. In 
 Columbia, S. C, in a mill controlled by 
 Northern capital, I stood at ten-thirty at 
 night and saw many children who did not 
 know their own ages, working from 6 p. M. 
 to 6. A. M." 
 
 Here is a description of their surroundings : 
 
 "An atmosphere redolent of oil, thick 
 with lint, the deafening, incessant whir of 
 machinery, in summer stifling heat, always 
 the insensate machinery claiming the 
 strained attention of young eyes and tiny 
 fingers, broken threads clamorously crying 
 for adjustment, all requiring not hard work, 
 but incessant vigilance, springing feet and 
 nimble fingers. Young eyes watching 
 
1 14 The Industrial Republic 
 
 anxiously for a fault in these intricately 
 constructed machines, paying with crushed 
 or broken members for an error in judgment, 
 for the crime of carelessness, how must 
 the responsibility — lightly smiled at by 
 adults — weigh upon the barely developed 
 intelligence of a young child ? And after 
 long hours, lagging footsteps, throbbing 
 heads, wandering attention — what sort of 
 stone is this, O Brothers, to be placed in 
 the children's hands who cry for bread?" 
 
 Several years ago I saw in the Indepen- 
 dent an advertisement setting forth the 
 advantages of the State of Alabama 
 as an investing-place for capital. I wish I 
 had cut it out. The point of it was that 
 there were no "labour-troubles" in Ala- 
 bama; the boycott being prohibited there, 
 and labour unions being sued for damages 
 and smashed. The advertisement might 
 have added that there is no factory-legis- 
 lation to amount to anything, and that the 
 percentage of native white illiteracy is 
 fourteen and e ght-tenths. There is factory- 
 legislation in Massachusetts, and it is en- 
 forced, and the percentage of native white 
 illiteracy is only eight-tenths of one per cent., 
 or one-eighteenth of the proportion of Ala- 
 bama. So in the last overproduction crisis 
 the mills of Alabama were running, while 
 those of Massachusetts were shut down; 
 and the special correspondence of the New 
 
Social Decay 115 
 
 York Evening Post contained the following 
 pregnant item: 
 
 "Atlanta, Ga., June 12 — 'The sceptre 
 of commercial supremacy is falling from the 
 palsied hand of New England industry; 
 apparently it is to be taken up by the South. 
 Grasp it firmly. The whole country, torn 
 by labour disputes, looks to the South to 
 make the final stand against legislative 
 encroachments on the liberty of the individ- 
 ual workman and the individual employer.' 
 
 "So Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, 
 Conn., spoke to the members of the Georgia 
 Industrial Association, at their annual con- 
 vention at Warm Springs, Ga., last week. 
 This association was one of the earliest to 
 recognise the depressing effect of restrictive 
 labour legislation upon the cotton manu- 
 facturing of New England; its members 
 fear that similar legislation in the South 
 would be followed by even more disastrous 
 consequences, and what has injuriously 
 affected the more hardy and older establish- 
 ments of the North, would, they believe, 
 stunt the growth of the infant industries of 
 the South, if it did not actually crush them." 
 
 I made an effort in "The Jungle" to^ 
 show what is happening to the wage-earner 
 in our modern highly concentrated industries, 
 under the regime of a monopoly price and 
 a competitive wage. I spent seven weeks 
 in Packingtown studying conditions there. 
 
Ii6 The Industrial Republic 
 
 and I verified every smallest detail, so that 
 as a picture of social conditions the book is 
 as exact as a government report. But the 
 reader does not have to take my word for it, 
 there are any number of studies by indepen- 
 dent investigators. Let him go to a library 
 and consult the Ameri can Journal of Soci ol- 
 ogy fj3r_Marchj 1901, and read the reports 
 of a graduate orTKeTJniversity of Chicago, 
 who investigated the conditions in the 
 garment-trade in that city. Here were 
 girls working ten hours a day for forty cents 
 a week. The average of all the "dress- 
 makers" was but ninety cents a week, and 
 they were able to find employment on the 
 average only forty-two weeks in the year. 
 The "pants-finishers" received a dollar and 
 thirty-one cents, and they were employed 
 only twenty-seven weeks in the year. The 
 general average in the entire trade was less 
 than two dollars and a half a week, and the 
 average number of weeks of work was only 
 thirty-one, making an average yearly wage 
 for a whole industry of seventy-six dollars 
 and seventy-four cents per year. Or let 
 the reader get Mr. Jacob A. Riis's pictures 
 of conditions in the slums of New York. 
 In his book, "How the Other Half Lives," 
 Mr. Riis states that in the block bounded 
 by Stanton, Houston, Attorney and Ridge 
 streets, the size of which is two hundred by 
 three hundred feet, are two thousand two 
 
Social Decay 117 
 
 hundred and forty-four human beings. In 
 the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty- 
 second streets, Amsterdam and West End 
 End avenues, are over four thousand. 
 Jack London, in his "War of The Classes," 
 quotes the Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking 
 of the block bounded by Hester, Canal, 
 Eldridge and Forsyth Streets: "In a room 
 twelve feet by eight, and five and a half feet 
 high, it was found that nine persons slept 
 and prepared their food. In another room, 
 located m a dark cellar, without screens or 
 partitions, were together two men with 
 their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single 
 men and a boy of seventeen, two women 
 and four boys, nine, ten, eleven and fifteen 
 years old — ^fourteen persons in all!" Apro- 
 pos of this it may be well to add that an 
 investigation conducted in Berlin established 
 the fact that with families living in one room 
 the death rate was one hundred and sixty- 
 three per thousand, while with families living 
 in three or four rooms it was twenty. What 
 it was with three or four families living in 
 one room does not appear. According to 
 a recent report of the New York Tenement 
 House Commission there were four hundred 
 thousand "dark rooms" — rooms without 
 any outside opening whatever. Mr. Riis 
 has been so successful in battling with such 
 conditions that he has been called by 
 President Roosevelt "the most useful 
 
ii8 The Industrial Republic 
 
 American." Neither the President nor Mr. 
 Riis understand economics, and so probably 
 they are both perplexed at the result of his 
 ten years of effort — which is that rents on 
 the East Side have gone up about fifty per 
 cent, in the last two years, and there have 
 been riots and evictions — and a Socialist all 
 but elected to Congress! 
 
 But Mr. Riis is a business man, and he 
 can figure the social cost of these evil con- 
 ditions. Of the New York tenements he 
 writes : 
 
 "They are the hot beds of epidemics that 
 carry death to the rich and poor alike; the 
 nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill 
 our jails and police courts; that throw off 
 a scum of forty thousand human wrecks 
 to the island asylums and workhouses year 
 by year; that turned out in the last eight 
 years a round half million beggars to prey 
 upon our charities; that maintain a stand- 
 ing army of ten thousand tramps with all 
 that that implies; because, above all, they 
 taint the family life with deadly moral 
 contagion." 
 
 In his newly published discussion of 
 social problems called "In the Fire of the 
 Heart," Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine writes of 
 the country's situation as follows: 
 
 "And over ten millions of our people are 
 in a state of chronic poverty at this very 
 hour — almost one out of every seven, or. 
 
Social Decay 119 
 
 to make full allowance, one out of every 
 eight of all our people are in the condition 
 where they have not sufficient food, and 
 clothing, and shelter to keep them in a 
 state of physical and mental efficiency. And 
 the sad part of it is that large additional 
 numbers— numbers most appalling for such 
 a country as this, are each year, and through 
 no fault of their own, dropping into this 
 same condition. 
 
 "And a still sadder feature of it is, that 
 each year increasingly large numbers of 
 this vast army of people, our fellow-beings, 
 are, unwillingly on their part and in the 
 face of almost superhuman efforts to keep 
 out of it till the last moment, dropping into 
 the pauper class — those who are compelled 
 to seek or to receive aid from a public, or 
 from private charity, in order to exist at 
 all, already in numbers about four million, 
 while increasing numbers of this class, the 
 pauper, sink each year, and so naturally, 
 into the vicious, the criminal, the inebriate 
 class. In other words, we have gradually 
 allowed to be built around us a social and 
 economic system which yearly drives vast 
 numbers of hitherto fairly well-to-do, strong, 
 honest, earnest, willing and admirable men 
 with their families into the condition of 
 poverty, and under its weary, endeavour- 
 strangling influences many of these in time, 
 hoping against hope, struggling to the last 
 
I20 The Industrial Republic 
 
 moment in their semi-incapacitated and 
 pathetic manner to keep out of it, are forced 
 to seek or to accept public or private charity, 
 and thus sink into the pauper class. 
 
 "It is a well-authenticated fact that 
 strong men, now weakened by poverty, 
 will avoid it to the last before they will take 
 this step. Many after first parting with 
 every thing they have, break down and cry 
 like babes when the final moment comes, and 
 they can avoid it no longer. Numbers at 
 this time take their own lives rather than 
 pass through the ordeal, and still larger 
 numbers desert their families for whom they 
 have struggled so valiantly — it is almost 
 invariably the woman who makes her way 
 to the charity agencies. The public and 
 private charities cost the country during 
 the past year as nearly as can be conserv- 
 atively arrived at, over two hundred million 
 dollars. 
 
 "Moreover, a strange law seems to work 
 with an accuracy that seems almost mar- 
 vellous. It is this. Notwithstanding the 
 brave and almost superhuman struggles that 
 are gone through with, on the part of these, 
 before they can take themselves to the 
 public or private charity for aid, when the 
 step is once taken, they gradually sink into 
 the condition where all initiative and all 
 sense of self-reliance seems to be stifled or 
 lost, and it is only in a rare case now and then 
 
Social Decay 121 
 
 that they ever cease to be dependent, but 
 remain content with the alms that are 
 doled out to them — practically never do they 
 rise out of that condition again. Talk 
 with practically any charity agent or worker, 
 one with a sufficiently extended experience, 
 and you will find that there is scarcely more 
 than one type of testimony concerning this. 
 And as this condition gradually becomes 
 chronic, and endeavour and initiative and 
 self-respect are lost, a certain proportion 
 then sink into the condition of the criminal, 
 the diseased, the chronically drunk, the 
 inebriate, from which reclamation is still 
 more difficult." 
 
 The fullest and most authoritative treatise 
 upon conditions in America is of course 
 Mr. Robert Hunter's "Poverty." Mr. 
 Hunter is a settlement-worker, and he has 
 gathered his material in the midst of the 
 conditions of which he writes. He quotes, 
 for instance, the following definite facts, 
 which are obtained from official sources: 
 
 "1903: twenty per cent, of the people of 
 Boston in distress. 
 
 "1897: nineteen per cent, of the people of 
 New York state in distress. 
 
 "1899: eighteen per cent, of the people of 
 New York state in distress. 
 
 "1903 : fourteen per cent, of the families of 
 Manhattan evicted. 
 
 "Every year ten per cent, (about) of those 
 
122 The Industrial Republic 
 
 who die in Manhattan have pauper burials." 
 "On the basis of these figures," Mr. Hunter 
 continues, " it would seem fair to estimate 
 that certainly not less than fourteen per cent, 
 of the people, in prosperous times (1903), 
 and probably not less than twenty per cent, 
 in bad times (1897), are in distress. The 
 estimate is a conservative one, for despite 
 all the imperfections which may be found 
 in the data, and there are many, any allow- 
 ance for the persons who are given aid by 
 sources not reporting to the State Board, 
 or for those persons not aided by the author- 
 ities of Boston, or for those persons who, al- 
 though in great distress, are not evicted, 
 must counterbalance the duplications or 
 errors which may exist in the figures either 
 of distress or evictions. 
 
 "These figures, furthermore, represent 
 only the distress which manifests itself. 
 There is no question but that only a part of 
 of those in poverty, in any community, apply 
 for charity. I think anyone living in a 
 Settlement will support me in saying that 
 many families who are obviously poor — 
 that is, underfed, underclothed, or badly 
 housed — never ask for aid or suffer the social 
 disgrace of eviction. Of course, no one 
 could estimate the proportion of those who 
 are evicted or of those who ask assistance 
 to the total number in poverty ; for whatever 
 opinion one may have formed is based, not 
 
Social Decay 123 
 
 on actual knowledge, gained by inquiry, 
 but on impressions, gained through friendly 
 intercourse. My own opinion is that prob- 
 ably not over half of those in poverty ever 
 apply for charity, and certainly not more than 
 that proportion are evicted from their homes. 
 However, I should not wish an opinion of 
 this sort to be used in estimating, from the 
 figures of distress, etc., the number of those 
 in poverty. And yet from the facts of dis- 
 tress, as given, and from opinions formed, 
 both as a charity agent and as a Settlement 
 worker, I should not be at all surprised if 
 the number of those in poverty in New York, 
 as well as in other large cities and industrial 
 centres, rarely fell below twenty-five per 
 cent, of all the people." 
 
 Such are the conditions in America to-day ; 
 what they would be in the future, if present 
 tendencies went on unchecked, the reader 
 may learn by going to Europe, where in- 
 dustrial evolution has been slower in coming 
 to a head, and where the people have been 
 held down by religious superstition and 
 military despotism. Let him take Mr. 
 Richard Whiteing's "No. 5 John Street"; 
 or, if he has a particularly strong stomach, 
 let him try Jack London's "People of the 
 Abyss," or Charles Edward Russell's terrify- 
 ing story of the poverty of India, in his 
 "Soldiers of the Common Good." Here 
 is a scene in a London park, selected, 
 
124 The Industrial Republic 
 
 by way of example, from the first-named 
 book: 
 
 "We went up the narrow, gravelled walk. 
 On the benches on either side was arrayed 
 a mass of miserable and diseased humanity, 
 the sight of which would have impelled 
 Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than 
 he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a 
 welter of filth and rags, of all manner of 
 loathesome skin-diseases, open sores, 
 bruises, grossness, indecency, leering mon- 
 strosities and bestial faces. A chill, raw 
 wind was blowing, and these creatures 
 huddled there in their rags, sleeping for 
 the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were 
 a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty 
 years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly 
 nine months old, lying asleep, flat on the 
 hard bench, with neither pillow nor cover- 
 ing, nor with anyone looking after it. Next, 
 half a dozen men sleeping bolt upright, and 
 leaning against one another in their sleep. 
 In one place a family group, a child asleep 
 in its sleeping mother's arms, and the hus- 
 band (or male mate) clumsily mending 
 a dilapidated shoe. On another bench 
 a woman trimming the frayed strips of her 
 rags with a knife, and another woman with 
 thread and needle, sewing up rents. Ad- 
 joining, a man holding a sleeping woman 
 in his arms. Farther on, a man, his cloth- 
 ing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with 
 his head in the lap of a woman, not more 
 
Social Decay 125 
 
 than twenty-five years- old, and also asleep. 
 'Those women there,' said our guide, 
 'will sell themselves for thru'pence or 
 tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread.' He said 
 it with a cheerful sneer." 
 
 And then turn back to the preface: "It 
 must not be forgotten that the time of 
 which I write was considered 'good times' 
 in England. The starvation and lack of 
 shelter I encountered constituted a chronic 
 condition of misery, which is never wiped 
 out, even in the periods of greatest pros- 
 perity. Following the summer in question 
 came a hard winter. To such an extent 
 did the suffering and positive starvation 
 increase that society was unable to cope 
 with it. Great numbers of the unemployed 
 formed into processions, as many as a dozen 
 at a time, and daily marched through the 
 streets of London crying for bread. Mr. 
 Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of 
 January, 1903, to the New York Inde fen- 
 dent, briefly epitomises the situation, as 
 follows: 'The workhouses have no space 
 left in which to pack the starving crowds 
 who are craving every night at their doors 
 for food and shelter. AH the charitable 
 institutions have exhausted their means in 
 trying to raise supplies of food for the famish- 
 ing residents of the garrets and cellars of 
 London lanes and alleys.' 
 
 And then consider that in the city where 
 
126 The Industrial Republic 
 
 this was going on, the leading newspaper 
 (the Times) was printing a three-column 
 article setting forth the fact that competition 
 had grown so great that it was now no longer 
 possible for a "gentleman" to maintain 
 his status with a family in London upon an 
 income of half a million dollars a year! 
 
 Yet if one wishes for social contrasts, 
 there is really no need of crossing the ocean. 
 Mr. Schwab's nine million dollar palace in 
 New York will answer the purpose; or so 
 will the St. Regis Hotel. The swinging 
 doors of the St. Regis, so the visitor is in- 
 formed, cost ten thousand dollars apiece; 
 the panelling of the smoking-room cost 
 forty-five thousand dollars, and the carriage- 
 entrance rain-shed cost eighty-five thousand 
 dollars. The walls of it are covered with 
 a silk brocade, which cost twenty dollars a 
 yard, and the ceiling is gilded with material 
 costing one dollar an ounce. It cost a hun- 
 dred thousand dollars to fit up the office, 
 and four million dollars to build the whole 
 structure. A two-room apartment in it, 
 without meals, is valued at nine thousand 
 six hundred dollars a year; and for your 
 meals you may try — say, "milk-fed chicKen " 
 at two dollars for each tiny portion. 
 
 Perhaps this seems monstrous; but it 
 really is not — it is a perfectly inevitable con- 
 sequence of industrial competition, and 
 of the "constantly increasing mass of 
 
Social Decay 127 
 
 capital." Mr. John Jacob Astor, who owns 
 the hotel, has an income of more than its 
 value every year, and he is in desperate 
 straits to find any way of investing it by 
 which he can make profits. There are 
 seven thousand millionaires in this country, 
 who want the best, the only best they know 
 being what costs the most; and so he knew 
 that if he built a hotel exceeding in cost any 
 other hotel in the world, that hotel would 
 pay him profits. For precisely the same 
 reason a number of buildings are now being 
 torn down in Brooklyn to make room for 
 a graveyard for wealthy people's pet dogs. 
 
 The founder of the Astor fortune came 
 to New York a century ago and bought land 
 while it was cheap. Millions of men have 
 since contributed their labour to the build- 
 ing up of New York; and no one of them 
 did anything without adding to the wealth 
 of the Astors — who merely sat by and 
 watched. Now the property of the family 
 is estimated to be worth four hundred and 
 fifty millions of dollars, according to Mr. 
 Burton J. Hendricks's recent account of it 
 in McClure's Magazine. It includes 
 half a dozen hotels like the St. Regis; it 
 includes also innumerable slum-tenements 
 with "dark rooms." Its value grows by 
 leaps and bounds— one corner lot on Fifth 
 Avenue "made" them seven hundred thou- 
 sand dollars in two years. To Mr. William 
 
128 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Waldorf Astor alone the harried and over- 
 driven population of Manhattan Island 
 delivers eight or ten millions of tribute 
 money every year; and Mr. William Wal- 
 dorf Astor resides at Clieveden, Taplow, 
 Bucks, England — ^giving as his reason the 
 fact that "America it not a fit place for a 
 gentleman to live in." 
 
 The fundamental characteristic of the 
 regime under which we live is that it values 
 a man only in so far as he is capable of 
 producing wealth. Hence one of the signs 
 of the increasing difficulty of making profits 
 will be an increasing recklessness of human 
 life. Our railroads killed six thousand 
 people in 1895, seven thousand in 1899, 
 eight thousand in 1902, nine thousand in 
 1903, and ten thousand in 1904; they injured 
 thirty-three thousand in 1895, forty-four 
 thousand in 1899,sixty-fourthousandinl902, 
 seventy-six thousand in 1903, and eighty- 
 four thousand in 1904. According to the 
 statistics of the Interstate Commerce Com- 
 mission, our railways injured one passenger 
 out of every one hundred and eighty-three 
 thousand passengers they carried in 1894; 
 in 1904 they injured one out of every seventy- 
 eight thousand. If casualties are to con- 
 tinue increasing at the same rate until 1912, 
 there are one hundred thousand people 
 under sentence of sudden death, and a 
 number doomed to be maimed greater than 
 
Social Decay 129 
 
 the entire population of the District of 
 Columbia, Delaware, Montana, Arizona, 
 Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and the 
 Hawaiian Islands. 
 
 In 1890, before the present appalling 
 slaughter began, we were killing, of a given 
 number of employees, twice as many as 
 the State-owned roads of Germany, and 
 three times as many as Austria. The 
 street railroads of New York City alone 
 take one human life every day, or one in 
 ten thousand of the population every year. 
 People walk about the streets carelessly, 
 but tremble when there is a thunderstorm; 
 yet the street-cars kill ten persons in a year 
 for every one that the lightning kills in the 
 lifetime of a man ! 
 
 These things create indignation in our 
 pulpits and editorial rooms; but any prac- 
 tical railroad man could tell you that to 
 stop them would be to overthrow society. 
 The reason they occur is that it costs less 
 to pay the damages than it would to take 
 proper precautions, and if the railroads 
 were forced to take the precautions, many 
 of them would have to shut down at once. 
 The situation is covered so completely in 
 the following news item, clipped from the 
 Minneapolis Journal of May 26, 1904, that 
 I cannot do better than to quote it entire: 
 
 "Because James J. Hill guaranteed eight 
 per cent, to the stockholders of the Burling- 
 
130 The Industrial Republic 
 
 ton when he assumed control of that system, 
 many of the older employees are undergoing 
 what they consider real hardship. Ten 
 days ago the Journal voiced the complaints of 
 Burlington employees on other parts of the 
 system, mentioning the fact that the runs 
 to and from the Twin Cities had been com- 
 bined in some way, to squeeze more work 
 out of the train crews. The new schedule 
 has now been in effect longer and com- 
 plaints are correspondingly more emphatic. 
 No dissatisfaction is openly expressed, as 
 the Hill guillotine gets nobody more surely 
 than the man who talks too much. 
 
 "Trainmen complain that with the long 
 runs and long hours they are forced to work 
 to a point almost beyond human endurance. 
 They are haunted by the fear of accidents 
 from unpreventable neglect of duty. They 
 hold that the running of trains in safety 
 depends upon the vigilance and alertness 
 of the crews and they cannot do themselves 
 and their employers justice, when com- 
 pelled to work long hours on fast runs. 
 
 "Crews are now running from Minne- 
 apolis to Chicago, a distance of about 430 
 miles, with seventy-two stops. The men start 
 from Minneapolis at 7:30 a. m., and arrive, 
 on locals, in Chicago at 9:35 p. m. The 
 men leaving Chicago on No. 50 at 10:50 
 p. M. arrive in Minneapolis at 1 :20 p. m. the 
 next afternoon. 
 
Social Decay 131 
 
 "Trainmen declare that in making this 
 schedule the management has broken faith 
 and virtually abrogates previous working 
 agreements. Hints of a strike are made. 
 In discussing the conditions an old Bur- 
 lington employee said : 
 
 'A conductor and his crew feel a sense 
 of responsibility for the lives of those upon 
 a train. A man can only be worked so far 
 when he becomes actually irresponsible. 
 I hate to feel that I am in any way 
 responsible for the lives of passengers on a 
 train when the length of the run and hours 
 have worked me beyond my limit. There 
 is no flagman on the train, and the brake- 
 man has to help load baggage, brake, flag, 
 and do anything that comes up. He is 
 certainly not in good condition to be an 
 alert flagman on the latter end of the run.' "* 
 
 In the same way it is cheaper for a theatre- 
 manager to bribe police officials with free 
 tickets than to comply with the regulations 
 of the Fire Department; and so it is that 
 five or six hundred people are burned up in 
 
 * "In the matter of rigging the stock-market the American railroad 
 manager has no superior. In the matter of providing safe and 
 expeditious facilities for transportation he has no inferior in any nation 
 of the first rank. He can manipulate political conventions. He can 
 debauch legislatures. He can send his paid attorneys to Congress and 
 sometimes put them on the bench. In these matters he is a master, just 
 as he is a master in the art of issuing and juggling securities. It is only 
 in the operation of railroads that he is deficient. The mere detail of 
 transporting lives and property safely and satisfactorily he seems to 
 regard as unworthy of his genius. His equipment is usually inadequate. 
 His road-bed is generally second-class ^or worse. His employees are 
 undisciplined and his system is archaic. Whatever the causes may be, 
 the fact remains that, judged by the results of operation, the American 
 railroad manager is incompetent, and the records of death and disaster 
 prove it." — New York World, 
 
132 The Industrial Republic 
 
 five minutes. It is easier to bribe a building 
 inspector than it is to put steel rivets in a 
 building, and so you have a Darlington 
 Hotel collapse, and kill ten or twenty 
 workingmen. And a few weeks later came 
 the Slocum disaster, and a helpless steam- 
 boat captain was punished, and the re- 
 sponsible capitalists not even named. At 
 the same time, in Trenton, New Jersey, 
 some other capitalists were arrested for 
 making life-preservers with iron bars 
 in them. Of course they were not punished, 
 for everyone understands that such things 
 cannot be helped. In 1893 the number of 
 miners killed in the United States and 
 Canada was two and fifty-three hundredths 
 per thousand; in 1902 it was three and 
 fifty-one hundredths. Better precautions 
 against accidents were one of the demands 
 for making which the miners of Colorado 
 were strung up to telegraph poles, shut in 
 bull-pens, beaten and "deported." Their 
 mortality was thirty-two per thousand in ten 
 years; the mortality among railroad brake- 
 men is now thirty-two per thousand in two 
 years, so it was very unreasonable of the 
 miners to complain. 
 
 There are annually, says Social Service, 
 344,900 accidents among the 7,086,000 
 people engaged in this country in manufac- 
 turing and mechanical pursuits. It calculates 
 that if the percentage of accidents among 
 
Social Decay 133 
 
 the other 23,000,000 employed in other 
 occupations is only one-tenth as much as 
 the above, it means that another 100,000 
 must be added to the list. " This is perpetual 
 war on humanity," the paper goes on to say, 
 " and more bloody than any civil or inter- 
 national war known to history. This war 
 is costing suffering, physical and mental, 
 which is beyond calculation. It is costing 
 great economic loss. It is creating a sense 
 of wrong and a feeling of class-hatred on the 
 part of those who are its victims." 
 
 In the same category of waste of human 
 life belong all the facts of over-driving, long 
 hours, and irregular employment among 
 workingmen. Under the old Southern sys- 
 tem of slavery the master took care of his ser- 
 vant the year round; but the wage-slave 
 is kept only while he is needed, and only 
 while he remains at his maximum of work- 
 ing efficiency. Recently in a single month, 
 I clipped from a New York newspaper, items 
 to the effect that the Brooklyn street-railroad 
 combine was discharging all of its super- 
 annuated employees; that the master-pilots 
 of the Great Lakes had agreed to engage 
 no man over forty; that the Delaware and 
 Hudson Railroad Company had just pub- 
 lished a rule barring all over thirty-five; and 
 that the Carnegie Steel Company had done 
 the same. 
 
 And in this same category of waste of 
 
134 The Industrial Republic 
 
 human hfe belong all the facts of woman and 
 child-labour. For of course the children 
 die; and the women produce deformed 
 and idiot and degenerate offspring, to fill 
 our asylums and prisons. The reader is 
 referred, for first-hand accounts of the life 
 of the American woman wage-slave, to 
 Van Vorst's" The Woman who Toils," and 
 to that fascinating human document, "The 
 Long Day." In Mr. John Spargo's "The 
 Bitter Cry of the Children," he will find a 
 mass of facts about child-labour, the most 
 hideous of all the evils incidental to the 
 process of wealth-concentration. 
 
 There is, if one had only time to point it 
 out, no tiniest nook of our society where 
 human lives are not being ground up for 
 profit; the capitalists are ground up, as 
 Mr, Schwab was, and the meanest woman 
 of the town shares his fate. There was 
 a time when a prostitute was an indepen- 
 dent person, who could support herself 
 until she grew old; nowadays, under the 
 stress of competition, every city has its 
 prostitution trust. It takes capital to pay 
 the police, and the business is therefore in 
 the hands of the proprietors of houses, who 
 buy young girls out of the slums and immi- 
 grant population by thousands and tens of 
 thousands, use them up in a year or two, 
 and then fling them out into the gutters to 
 die, often when they are not out of their 
 
Social Decay 135 
 
 teens. In the same way the gambler and 
 the saloon-keeper are now as much em- 
 ployees as are the officials of the Standard 
 Oil Company: the whole profits of these 
 occupations flowing into the hands of some 
 "captain of industry" as inevitably as all 
 the rills on the mountain-side flow into the 
 river. All of these facts are perfectly 
 familiar, but for the sake of concreteness, 
 I will quote a paragraph from Mr. Steffens's 
 book, "The Shame of the Cities." He is 
 telling of the city of Pittsburg : 
 
 "The vice-graft ... is a legitimate 
 business, conducted, not by the police, but 
 in an orderly fashion by syndicates, and the 
 chairman of one of the parties at the last 
 election, said it was worth two hundred 
 and fifty thousand dollars a year. I saw 
 a man who was laughed at for ofi^ering 
 seventeen thousand five hundred dollars 
 for the slot-machine concession; he was 
 told that it was let for much more. 'Speak- 
 easies' (unlicensed drinking places) pay 
 so well that when they earn five hundred 
 dollars or more in twenty-four hours their 
 proprietors often make a bare living. Dis- 
 orderly houses are managed by ward syn- 
 dicates. Permission is had from the syn- 
 dicate real-estate agent, who alone can rent 
 them. The syndicate hires a house from 
 the owners at, say, thirty-five dollars a 
 month, and he lets it to a woman at from 
 
136 The Industrial Republic 
 
 thirty-five to fifty dollars a week. For 
 furniture, the tenant must go to the 'official 
 furniture-man,' who delivers one thousand 
 dollars worth of 'fixings' for a note for three 
 thousand dollars, on which high interest 
 must be paid. For beer the tenant must 
 go to the 'official bottler,' and pay two 
 dollars for a one-dollar case of beer; for 
 wines and liquors to the 'official liquor- 
 commissioner,' who charges ten dollars for 
 five dollars' worth ; for clothes to the 'official 
 wrapper-maker.' These women may not 
 buy shoes, hats, jewellery, or any other lux- 
 ury or necessity except from the official 
 concessionaries, and then only at the official, 
 monopoly prices." 
 
 And by way of conclusion, in reference 
 to this particular aspect of the consequences 
 of the "increasing mass of capital," let me 
 quote the following little incident, which 
 a friend of mine clipped from one of the 
 New York newspapers: 
 
 "One night a young girl called at the 
 entrance to the House of the Good Shep- 
 herd in New York City; she asked for food 
 and a place to sleep. 'Twas a pitiful tale 
 she told the matron in charge. She told 
 of her parents having died and left her alone 
 in the great dark city; she told of jobs she 
 had secured but was discharged owing to 
 her physical inability to keep pace with the 
 machine, and as a last resort she appealed 
 
Social Decay 137 
 
 to this institution for succour and support. 
 The matron in attendance, after having 
 heard this terrible tale of woe and being 
 thoroughly convinced as to the girl's honesty 
 and integrity, as well as to her virtue, in- 
 formed her that she could not take her in 
 there, as that institution was established 
 for the reclamation of fallen women only. 
 The poor girl went away, but on the follow- 
 ing night she returned. . . . 'You may 
 take me now,' she said, 'you may take me 
 now, for I am a fallen woman!' " 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 BUSINESS AND POLITICS 
 
 TN THIS discussion of the process of 
 -*- wealth-concentration, I have so far 
 purposely omitted all mention of the most 
 important aspect of the phenomenon — the 
 seizing by the "constantly increasing mass 
 of capital" of the powers of the State, and 
 their use for purpose of intensifying ex- 
 ploitation. I have avoided that feature, 
 partly because it is conspicuous enough to 
 deserve a chapter to itself, but maimy in 
 order to make clear my view-point, that the 
 phenomenon, while important, is secondary 
 — an effect rather than a cause. 
 
 This is, of course, contrary to the view 
 usually taken. In most discussions of the 
 problems of the time, it is taken for granted 
 that "government by special interests" is 
 the source of all the evil. But while recog- 
 nising how enormously the process of wealth 
 concentration has been accelerated by the 
 political alliance, it is my thesis that exactly 
 the same conditions would have developed 
 had economic forces been left to work out 
 their own results. I maintain that economic 
 competition is a self-destroying stage in 
 
 138 
 
Business and Politics 139 
 
 social development; and that to regard it 
 as permanent is simply not to realise what 
 it is. For competition is a struggle, and 
 the purpose of every struggle is a victory; 
 to conceive of a struggle without the inten- 
 tion to end the struggle, is simply impossible 
 in the nature of things. In the industrial 
 combat the end is the victory of a class, and 
 the reduction of all other classes to servitude 
 —with the ultimate extinction of all individ- 
 uals not needed by the victors. 
 
 Again, it is generally the custom to regard 
 this phenomenon of class-government with 
 indignation and astonishment, as if it were 
 something abnormal and monstrous; but 
 from the point of view of this discussion, it 
 is a perfectly natural and inevitable incident 
 of the intensification of competition. You 
 are to picture Capital, seeking profits; like a 
 wild beast in a cage, pacing about, watching 
 for an opening, here and there; like water, 
 caught behind a dam, creeping up, crowding 
 forward, feeling for a weak spot. And the 
 one thing to be determined is: Is there any 
 loay in which profits can he made through 
 the fowers of governments If so, it is quite 
 certain that there will be an attempt made 
 by capital to get possession of those powers. 
 
 You can see the thing in its germ in any 
 primitive community; I once amused my- 
 self by studying it in a little village in Can- 
 ada, where the trusts had never been heard 
 
 .^ 
 
140 The Industrial Republic 
 
 of. The storekeeper was a rich man, and 
 he had a "pull" with the squire and with 
 the constable and with the game- warden ; 
 he did little favours for them, and they for 
 him — so that a poor "Frenchman" who 
 was suspected of stealing a pair of socks 
 found himself in jail before he knew why. 
 And then there was a big "lumber man" in 
 the township; he owned all the jobs, and 
 he traded with the store-keeper, and the 
 storekeeper in return ran the political 
 machine. That was the whole story of the 
 politics of the district — except that there 
 were several fellows of independent tem- 
 perament, who grumbled, and who con- 
 stituted the germ of the Socialist movement. 
 
 Political corruption first became epidemic 
 in our country in 1861, when the government 
 had to go into business upon an enormous 
 scale. There were contractors — and com- 
 petition. And then, of course, there was 
 the tariff, a shrewd scheme to compel the 
 people to pay high prices without knowing it. 
 Later on someone discovered the brilliant 
 idea of the franchise, the selling for a 
 nominal sum of the right to tax the public 
 without limit. And so capital went into 
 politics. 
 
 At first it did a purely retail business, 
 buying up the legislators as it needed them; 
 but soon the thing became systematised, 
 and Capital got wholesale prices — it financed 
 
Business and Politics 141 
 
 the machines, and chose its own candidates. 
 The process culminated at the beginning of 
 the present decade, when "big business" 
 was in practically undisputed possession 
 of both the majority parties, of Congress 
 and the Presidency, and of the governments 
 in every town, city and state in America. 
 
 You see, it was as if our society was in 
 unstable equilibrium. We had a political 
 democracy, and we were developing an 
 industrial aristocracy; and it was impossible 
 for them to exist side by side. Innocent 
 people had taken it for granted that they 
 could; but it is no more possible for a democ- 
 racy to be aristocratic in any of its aspects 
 and remain a democracy, than it is for a 
 virtuous man to be vicious in one particular, 
 and remain a virtuous man. Democracy 
 is not a code of laws, nor is it a system of 
 government — it is an attitude of soul. It 
 has as its basis a perception of the spiritual 
 nature of man, from which follows the 
 corollary that all men either are equal, or 
 must become so. And so between 
 aristocracy and democracy, wherever and 
 under whatever aspects they appear, there 
 is, and forever must be, eternal and deadly 
 war. Here is the testimony and the warning 
 of the greatest of American democrats, 
 Abraham Lincoln, who if he could rise from 
 his grave to speak to us in these times of our 
 country's trial could speak no more pertinent 
 
 '^ 
 
142 The Industrial Republic 
 
 words than these. He had declared that 
 the Slavery question was one between right 
 and wrong. "Right and wrong," he said — 
 "that is the issue that will continue in this 
 country when these poor tongues of Judge 
 Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is 
 the eternal struggle between these two 
 principles — right and wrong — throughout 
 the world. They are the principles which 
 have stood face to face from the beginning 
 of time and will ever continue to struggle. 
 The one is the common right of humanity, 
 and the other is the divine right of kings. 
 It is the same principle in whatever shape 
 it develops itself. It is the same spirit that 
 says: 'You work and toil and earn bread, 
 and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape 
 it comes, whether from the mouth of a king 
 who seeks to bestride the people of his own 
 nation, and live by the fruit of their labour, 
 or from one race of men as an apology for 
 enslaving another race, it is the same 
 tyrannical principle." 
 
 It is worth while pointing out the utter 
 hopelessness of the struggle. On the one 
 hand was the capitalist, with his millions, 
 alert, aggressive and resourceful; he had 
 an army of experts to help him — shrewd 
 attorneys, skilful lobbyists, newspapers and 
 publicity bureaus, political henchmen 
 trained all their lifetime to the trade; he 
 was cold and unscrupulous — as a rule he 
 
Business and Politics 143 
 
 was not a man at all, but a corporation, a 
 thing without a soul, a monster "clamouring 
 for dividends." He had a thousand de- 
 vices, a thousand pretences, a thousand 
 disguises. And opposed to him was the 
 Public — unorganised, uninformed, and 
 sound asleep! 
 
 Recently, when Mr. H. G. Wells was in 
 this country, I had a long talk with him, and 
 he asked me how I accounted for the 
 saturnalia of corruption in our political life; 
 he said that our people did not seem to him 
 degraded or brutal, and he could not under- 
 stand why things were so much worse here 
 than in England. I said that in England 
 the economic process had been modified by 
 the existence of an hereditary aristocracy, 
 holding over from old times and having high 
 traditions of public service. By nature 
 this aristocracy sympathised with capital, 
 and to a certain extent fraternised with it; 
 but it would not abdicate to it, and occasion- 
 ally, to preserve its own power, it made con- 
 cessions to the public, and so served as a 
 check upon the forces of commercialism. 
 On the other hand the American people 
 had only themselves to rely upon and until 
 they had been goaded into revolt, there was 
 no limit whatever to the power of greed. 
 
 I suppose it is unnecessary to offer any 
 proofs of the existence of "government by 
 special interests." If there is anyone who 
 
144 The Industrial Republic 
 
 has been out of the country for the past 
 three years and has not read any of the 
 magazines, it will be sufficient to refer him 
 to the two books of Mr. Lincoln Steifens — 
 "The Shame of the Cities" and "The 
 Struggle for Self Government." 
 
 Mr. Steffens himself is a proof of the evil 
 conditions: a man who has spent ten years 
 studying our politics, who went to the task 
 with no preconceptions, and only a passion 
 for honesty and fair dealing — and who has 
 been made into a thorough-going radical by 
 the irresistible logic of facts. It was his 
 particular service to the Republic to trace the 
 stream of graft to its fountain-head, which is 
 what he calls "big-business"; and the series 
 of papers in which he proved that thesis to 
 our people will long be studied as models of 
 the higher journalism — the journalism which 
 is to ordinary newspaper writing what 
 statesmanship is to politics. 
 
 As I say, there is no need of proof; but 
 simply by way of illustration, and to call the 
 picture to the reader's mind, let me quote a 
 few paragraphs from one of these papers — 
 "Pittsburg, a City Ashamed": 
 
 "The railroads began the corruption of 
 this city. There always was some dis- 
 honesty, as the oldest public men I talked 
 with said, but it was occasional and criminal 
 till the first great corporation made it 
 business-like and respectable. The Penn- 
 
Business and Politics 145 
 
 sylvania Railroad was in the system from the 
 start, and as the other roads came in and 
 found the city government bought up by 
 those before them, they purchased their 
 rights of way by outbribing the older roads, 
 then joined the ring to acquire more rights 
 for themselves and to keep belated rivals 
 out. As corporations multiplied and capital 
 branched out, corruption increased nat- 
 urally, but the notable characteristic of the 
 'Pittsburg plan' of misgovernment was that 
 it was not a haphazard growth, but a de- 
 liberate, intelligent organisation. . , . The 
 Pennsylvania Railroad is a power in Penn- 
 sylvania politics, it is part of the State ring, 
 and part also of the Pittsburg ring. The 
 city paid in all sorts of rights and privileges, 
 streets, bridges, etc., and in certain periods 
 the business interests of the city were 
 sacrificed to leave the Pennsylvania road in 
 exclusive control of a freight traffic it could 
 not handle alone." 
 
 The "bosses" who ruled Pittsburg were 
 Magee and Flynn, and Mr. Steffens prints 
 in full the agreement between them and 
 Senator Quay, by which they divided the 
 boodle of the state. "Magee and Flynn 
 were the government and the law. How 
 could they commit a crime ? If they wanted 
 something from the city they passed an 
 ordinance granting it, and if some other 
 ordinance was in conflict it was repealed or 
 
146 The Industrial Republic 
 
 amended. If the laws of the state stood 
 in the way, so much the worse for the laws 
 of the state; they were amended. If the 
 constitution of the state proved a barrier, 
 as it did to all special legislation, the Legis- 
 lature enacted a law for cities of the second 
 class (which was Pittsburg alone) and the 
 courts upheld the Legislature. If there 
 were opposition on the side of public opinion, 
 there was a use for that also. 
 
 "As I have said before, unlawful acts 
 were exceptional and unnecessary in Pitts- 
 burg. Magee did not steal franchises and 
 sell them. His councils gave them to him. 
 He and the busy Flynn took them, and 
 built railways, which Magee sold and 
 bought and financed and conducted, like 
 any other man whose successful career is 
 held up as an example for young men. His 
 railways, combined into the Consolidated 
 Traction Company, were capitalised at 
 thirty million dollars. There was scandal 
 in Chicago over the granting of charters for 
 twenty-eight and fifty years. Magee's read, 
 'for nine hundred and fifty years,' 'for nine 
 hundred and ninety-nine years,' 'said 
 Charter is to exist a thousand years,' 'said 
 Charter is to exist perpetually,' and the 
 Councils gave franchises for the ' life of the 
 charter.' " 
 
 And all this was a regular profession, 
 a custom of the country, which its devotees 
 
Business and Politics 147 
 
 studied. "Two of them told me repeatedly 
 that they travelled about the country looking 
 up the business, and that a fellowship had 
 grown up among boodling aldermen of the 
 leading cities in the United States. Com- 
 mittees from Chicago would come to St. 
 Louis to find out what 'new games' the St. 
 Louis boodlers had, and they gave the St. 
 Louisans hints as to how they 'did the 
 business' in Chicago. So the Chicago and St. 
 Louis boodlers used to visit Cleveland and 
 Pittsburg and all the other cities, or, if the dis- 
 tance was too gi'eat, they got their ideas by 
 those mysterious channels which run all 
 through the 'World of Graft.' The meeting 
 place in St. Louis was Decker's stable, and 
 ideas unfolded there were developed into 
 plans which the boodlers say to-day, are 
 only in abeyance. In Decker's stable was 
 born the plan to sell the Union Market; 
 and though the deal did not go through, the 
 boodlers, when they saw it failing, made 
 the market-men pay ten thousand dollars 
 for killing it. This scheme is laid aside 
 for the future. Another that failed was to 
 sell the court-house, and this was well under 
 way when it was discovered that the ground 
 on which this public building stands was 
 given to the city on condition that it was to 
 be used for a court-house and nothing else. 
 . . . The grandest idea of all came from 
 Philadelphia. In that city the gas-works 
 
148 The Industrial Republic 
 
 were sold out to a private concern, and the 
 water-works were to be sold next. The St. 
 Louis fellows have been trying ever since 
 to find a purchaser for their waterworks. 
 The plant is worth at least forty million 
 dollars. But the boodlers thought they 
 could let it go at fifteen million dollars, and 
 get one million dollars or so themselves for 
 the bargain. 'The scheme was to do it 
 and skip,' said one of the boodlers who 
 told me about it, 'and if you could mix it 
 all up with some filtering scheme it could 
 be done. Only some of us thought we could 
 make more than one million dollars out of 
 it — a fortune apiece. It will be done some 
 day.' .... 
 
 "Such, then, is the boodling system as 
 we see it in St. Louis. Everything the city 
 owned was for sale by the officers elected 
 by the people. The purchasers might be 
 willing or unwilling takers; they might be 
 citizens or outsiders; it was all one to the 
 city government. So long as the members 
 of the combines got the proceeds they would 
 sell out the town. Would ? They did and 
 they will. If a city treasurer runs away 
 with fifty thousand dollars there is a great 
 halloo about it. In St. Louis the regularly 
 organised thieves who rule have sold fifty 
 million dollars' worth of franchises and other 
 valuable municipal assets. This is the 
 estimate made for me by a banker, who 
 
Business and Politics 149 
 
 said that the boodlers got not one-tenth of 
 the value of the things they sold." 
 
 Two or three years ago, before I met Mr. 
 Steffens, I thought that he knew only as 
 much as he "let on"; and so I wrote him 
 an "open letter," to point out the conse- 
 quences of this regime of "big business." 
 The story of this manuscript is an amusing 
 one, and worth telling for the light it throws 
 upon my argument. Mr. Steffens was 
 so good as to say that it was the best criticism 
 of himself that he had ever read; and it 
 was scheduled for publication in one of our 
 three or four largest magazines. But alas — 
 it was purchased by the enthusiastic young 
 editor, and then read by the elderly and 
 unenthusiastic proprietor. When I re- 
 belled at the long wait which followed, the 
 proprietor invited me to dinner, and un- 
 bosomed his soul to me. He was the dearest 
 old gentleman I ever met, and he put his 
 arm about me while he explained the situ- 
 ation. "My boy," he said, "you are a very 
 clever chap, and you know a lot; but why 
 don't you put it all into a book, where you 
 can't hurt anyone but yourself.'' Why do 
 you try to get it into my magazine, and 
 scare away my half -million subscribers ?" 
 
 So the letter was shelved. But the 
 questions it asked are now the questions 
 which events are asking of the American 
 people; and so I shall take the advice of 
 
150 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the elderly and unenthusiastic proprietor — 
 and publish some of the letter in a book! 
 It ran as follows: 
 
 This is the question I have wished to ask 
 you, Mr. Stefiens. "A revolution has hap- 
 pened," you tell us; we have no longer ' a 
 government of the people, by the people, 
 for the people," — we have "a government of 
 the people, by the rascals, for the rich." 
 And if we find that that revolution, which 
 has overthrown the law, and which defies 
 the law, cannot be put down and overcome 
 by the means of the law — what are we going 
 to do then .? Are we going to sit still, and 
 content ourselves with saying it is too bad .'' 
 Are we going to bear it — to bear it forever ? 
 Can we bear it forever ? And if we cannot 
 bear it forever what are we going to do when 
 we can bear it no longer ? 
 
 A revolution is a serious thing, Mr. Stef- 
 fens. A man should not talk about a 
 "revolution" except with a thorough real- 
 isation of what the word implies. A revo- 
 lution means that the social contract has 
 been broken, that rights have been violated 
 and justice defied — that, in a word, the game 
 of life has not been fairly played, that those 
 who have lost may possibly have had the 
 right to win. And the game of life is a 
 pretty stern game for many of us, Mr. 
 Steffens. 
 
Business and Politics 151 
 
 You and your friends, I and my friends, 
 belong to a class whom this "system" 
 touches only through our ideals. Editors 
 and authors, clergymen and lawyers, we are 
 pained to know that corruption is eating out 
 the heart of our country — but still, if the 
 problem be not solved to-day, we can put it 
 off till to-morrow, and not realise what a 
 difference it makes. But there are some 
 in our country whom the System touches 
 far more intimately and directly than this — 
 some to whom the difference between to-day 
 and to-morrow is simply a difference between 
 life and death. I happened only yesterday 
 to be reading a letter from a man who, I 
 think, knows that "System," which is our 
 new government, in this personal and 
 intimate way. I will quote a few words 
 from his letter: 
 
 "I have been arrested, put in jail, prose- 
 cuted and persecuted. I have had my 
 customers driven away; I have been boy- 
 cotted to the extent that men who dared to 
 trade with me have lost their jobs; I have 
 had my home broken into at night; been 
 beaten with guns and abused by vile and 
 foul-mouthed thugs; been torn, partly 
 dressed and bleeding, from the side of my 
 wife, who was driven from her bedroom 
 and roughly handled; and finally I have 
 been shipped out and told that if I returned 
 to my home I would be hung. Not satisfied 
 
152 The Industrial Republic 
 
 with this they have twice deported my 
 brother, who was conducting the business 
 in which we were both earning our hving, 
 so that it became necessary for an adjuster 
 to take charge of our store." All this was, 
 needless to say, in Colorado; the writer is 
 Mr. A. H. Floaten, a storekeeper of Tel- 
 luride, but now of Richmond County, Wis- 
 consin, where he was working in a hay- 
 field when he wrote. He goes on to add 
 that the charge upon which he was "de- 
 ported" was that of selling goods to members 
 of the Western Federation of Miners. "As 
 for my brother and myself," he states, "I 
 defy any and all persons to show a single 
 instance where either of us have ever vio- 
 lated any law or even been suspected of 
 crime, or have ever wronged any person." 
 Here is your "revolution," Mr. Steffens, 
 in full swing. One of the questions which 
 I have for some months found myself long- 
 ing to ask you is, how clearly you recognised 
 in the Colorado civil war the natural and 
 inevitable consequences of a continuation 
 of your "government of the people, by the 
 rascals, for the rich .5^" Here is an un- 
 equivocal declaration, by a vote of two to 
 one, by the people in one of the states of this 
 free country, in favour of a constitutional 
 amendment permitting an eight-hour law; 
 and here are representatives of both the 
 majority parties pledging themselves to 
 
Business and Politics 153 
 
 enact it, and then openly and shamelessly 
 selling themselves out to the predatory 
 corporations of the state. The people then 
 resort to a strike to secure their rights; and 
 when they are seen to be winning, the militia 
 is summoned, criminals are hired to commit 
 a dynamite outrage and afford the necessary 
 
 {)retext, and then every tradition of American 
 iberty and every safeguard of free institu- 
 tions is overthrown, and the strike crushed 
 and the striker's organisation exterminated 
 with a ruthlessness and a recklessness which 
 no police official in Russia could have sur- 
 passed. And then the party of "law and 
 order" — that is the "System" — sat en- 
 throned in Colorado, and the guileless reader 
 of newspaper despatches believed that an 
 "election" took place in that state last 
 November! The "System" suspended the 
 Habeas Corpus Act, censored newspapers 
 and telegrams, opened mails, entered houses 
 without warrant and drove women from 
 their beds at dead of night, deported men, 
 defied and threatened judges, shut down 
 mines in spite of their owners' will — and 
 finally haled a score or two of elected 
 ofiicials before it and put ropes around their 
 necks and compelled them to resign. And 
 then the "rebellion," that is, the agitation 
 for an eight-hour law, attempted to re- 
 assert itself in the form of ballots; and by 
 means of a threat of deposition it com- 
 
154 The Industrial Republic 
 
 pelled the newly elected governor to accede 
 in everything to its will — and in particular 
 to retain in office the infamous militia 
 official who was its agent in these crimes! 
 
 But we, as I said before, are touched by 
 these things only through our ideals. We 
 are sorry to see American institutions over- 
 thrown in an American state; but we do 
 not live in Colorado, and we are quite sure 
 that there is no danger of our being turned 
 out of our homes. And yet we know that 
 the system exists in our own city and state, 
 and sits just as surely intrenched there as 
 in Colorado. And we know also that it 
 exists for a purpose — that it exists to rule. 
 And are we to imagine that it exists to rule 
 the people of Patagonia, of Greenland and 
 Afghanistan ? De we not know that it 
 exists to rule usP 
 
 How does it rule us ? How does it rule 
 the people of Colorado ? Whatever is it 
 that is wanted of the people of Colorado ? 
 Why, simply that they should go into the 
 mines and factories and work, not eight hours 
 a day, as they wished to, but twelve hours 
 a day, the time the "System" bade them to. 
 And what is it that it wants everywhere 
 else — in California, in Maine and in Texas ? 
 What, save that those who have labour to 
 sell shall sell it at the price the "System" is 
 paying, and that those who have goods to 
 buy shall buy them at the price the " System" 
 
Business and Politics 155 
 
 asks ? If this be so, is not the only difference 
 between us and the people of Colorado 
 that they went on strike against the "Sys- 
 tem," whereas we are not on strike — we 
 fay ? 
 
 Let us deal with facts. Here is a cor- 
 poration which runs a street-railroad in a 
 city. It gives an abominable service, its 
 cars are cold and filthy, its employees are 
 underpaid wretches who work thirteen and 
 fifteen hours a day — and the fare is ]ust 
 double that of the splendid government 
 service of Berlin. And the public-spirited 
 men of the city have for ten or twenty years 
 been trying to do something with that cor- 
 poration at the state capital; but the cor- 
 E oration has its lobby and continues to pay 
 ig dividends upon its watered stock year 
 after year. And then do the people of the 
 city organise and go on strike against that 
 corporation ? No indeed — they pay. 
 
 You know of the agitation for a parcels 
 post; you know that under the parcels-post 
 system an Englishman can send a package 
 to California for one-third of what it costs 
 us to send one from New York. In Ger- 
 many a ten-pound package may be sent 
 anywhere in the Empire for twelve cents; 
 and our post office pays the railroads more 
 for its service than all the rest of the civil- 
 ised world combined, though the quantity 
 of mail matter carried is less than that of 
 
156 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Great Britain, France and Germany alone! 
 Yet we know that it is a waste of ink setting 
 these facts forth. Is not the president of 
 the United States Express Company the 
 United States senator from your own state ? 
 The railroad systems of this country have, 
 of course, their lobby in every state capital, 
 and in Washington as well ; and every single 
 year the railroad systems of this country 
 slaughter and maim the equivalent of a 
 Gettysburg campaign — there were as many 
 people killed in the last three years as the 
 British lost in the entire Boer war. Yet 
 there is not the least reason for this; the 
 railroads could, if they chose, build cars 
 which will not crumble up like matchboxes — 
 they have proven it by killing only six 
 Pullman-car passengers in the same three 
 years. But of course you have to pay a 
 large sum extra to ride in a Pullman car. 
 If you cannot pay with money, you pay 
 with your bones — in either case, of course, 
 you pay. 
 
 And then there is the tariff. You, Mr. 
 Steffens, are a man who has both the ability 
 and the honesty to think, and you know 
 what the tariff is. You know that it is a 
 device to keep out foreign competition and 
 thus enable home manufacturers to charge 
 higher prices. You know that in the early 
 days its effect was to make manufacturing 
 possible by keeping prices at a level where a 
 
Business and Politics 157 
 
 fair profit was paid. Above this level they 
 could not go, because there was free 
 domestic competition. The tariff was thus a 
 tax, self-imposed by every man in the 
 country, for the purpose of building up the 
 country's home industries; exactly as if 
 the owner of a sugar-plantation should 
 conclude it would pay him to grind his own 
 cane, and should set aside his gains for a 
 few years to buy the machinery. Now I 
 might stop to argue the socialistic impli- 
 cations of such a procedure — involving as 
 it does the doctrine that the manufactures 
 are the interest and concern of the whole 
 people, to the advantages of which, when 
 completed, they all have a right. (No 
 plantation master, I take it, would expect 
 to furnish himself with machinery out of 
 the wages of his hands.) Continuing, how- 
 ever, to discuss facts and not theories, you 
 see that these industries which we have 
 "encouraged" have now become the might- 
 iest power in the land. It is they who have 
 accomplished the revolution and set up the 
 "System"; it is they who use the money 
 which the people have turned over to them, 
 to maintain and perpetuate the old arrange- 
 ment — an arrangement which now enables 
 them, since they have become monopolies, 
 to charge for their products from thirty 
 to fifty per cent, more than a fair price, 
 as is proven by what they charge abroad. 
 
158 The Industrial Republic 
 
 The workingman, you know, Mr. Steffens, 
 has all this justified to him by the fact that 
 he gets his share of this "prosperity"; but 
 of late the workingman has been finding 
 that he does not get his share. He has 
 brought the industrial machinery of the 
 country to such a pitch of perfection that 
 he produces more than the country needs; 
 and so when foreign markets fail he is out 
 of work part of the time; and the mass of 
 unemployed labour operates by the "iron 
 law" to beat down wages and to break 
 strikes, and to make his share less and less. 
 And all the time, to pay interest on the con- 
 stantly increasing capital of the country, 
 the prices of trust products are being 
 raised yet higher, and the cost of living is 
 rising, year by year. 
 
 In the cotton mills of Alabama and 
 Georgia little children six and eight years 
 of age are working twelve hours for a wage 
 of nine cents a day. And how do you 
 think they fare in this fearful race for profits 
 — what do you think is the effect upon them 
 of the continued operation of the " System" ? 
 You may remember that I said a little way 
 back that there were people in this country 
 to whom the difference between to-day and 
 to-morrow is simply a difference between 
 life and death. It was such people as these 
 I had in mind. 
 
 Look, Mr. Steffens; you go from town to 
 
Business and Politics 159 
 
 city, and from city to state, and everywhere 
 you show us hordes of pohtical parasites 
 battening on corruption; and you tell us 
 that the fortunes that they make represent 
 but a small portion of what is made by the 
 ' ' big business-men ' ' who bribe them. Magee 
 and Quay, you tell us, made thirty millions 
 out of the street railroads of Pittsburg; and 
 all over this land, year in and year out, such 
 sums are being "made." And soon after- 
 ward came Mr. Lawson's story of how the 
 Standard Oil group "made" forty-six mil- 
 lion dollars in a single deal without turning 
 over their hands. Mr. Lawson expatiates 
 upon this way of "making" dollars — ^he 
 makes reflections which I had often won- 
 dered if you were making. I have wondered 
 if you realised entirely that these millions 
 of dollars were real dollars ? Dollars that 
 a man might spend, just the same as any 
 other dollars — with which he might pur- 
 chase food that men had toiled to raise, and 
 houses that men had toiled to build! I am 
 writing these words in October, and the 
 windows of my room look out upon a corn- 
 field. All the year long I have watched a 
 farmer and his son at work in this field — 
 first plowing it, then harrowing it back and 
 forth and across, then planting the corn, 
 patiently, row by row. The field is ten 
 acres in size, and it seemed to me that not 
 a week passed all summer that the farmer 
 
i6o The Industrial Republic 
 
 was not plowing and weeding it; and now 
 that the fall has come he has cut it stalk by 
 stalk, and stacked it; and now I can see 
 him and his son sitting on the bare, bleak 
 hillside this morning, husking it, ear by ear. 
 That will take them all of two or three 
 weeks, and when the whole thing has been 
 done they will gather up the ears to cart 
 them to town, and the farmer will have 
 five hundred bushels of corn and will get 
 for them two hundred and fifty dollars. 
 And then I read Mr. Lawson's account of 
 how the Rockefellers "made" forty-six 
 million dollars out of Amalgamated Copper 
 — and strive to realise that what they made 
 was the equivalent of the labour of the 
 farmer and the farmer's sons and the far- 
 mer's horses in one hundred and eighty- 
 six thousand ten-acre cornfields such as 
 the one I look out upon ! 
 
 Is it not obvious that if I were to have 
 the power to call a piece of paper one 
 dollar and to put it into circulation, ex- 
 changing it for two bushels of corn, I could 
 only do it by diminishing the value of every 
 other dollar in the country a certain small 
 amount.^ Supposing that the total wealth 
 of the country was one billion dollars, I 
 should diminish every single dollar by one- 
 billionth. Suppose that similarly I " made" 
 one million dollars — by any sort of "mak- 
 ing" whatever save by producing some 
 
 'II 
 
Business and Politics i6i. 
 
 useful thing and increasing the total wealth 
 of the country — I should then tax the holder 
 of every dollar one mill. A man who owned 
 ten thousand dollars would be robbed by 
 me of ten dollars — he would be robbed of 
 it just as literally and as actually as if I had 
 broken into his house and stolen his watch. 
 He would not know that he was robbed, 
 perhaps — all that he would know would be 
 that when he spent his ten thousand dollars 
 he would not get quite so much. In Dun's 
 and Bradstreet's the event would be recorded 
 in the statement that the cost of living had 
 risen one-tenth of one per cent, since last 
 week, and that interest rates had similarly 
 declined. And now here is the young girl 
 who works in the sweatshops of Chicago 
 for a wage of forty cents a week, as thousands 
 of them do. The great Amalgamated Cop- 
 per deal is consummated, Mr. Rockefeller 
 and his fellow-conspirators "make" forty -six 
 million dollars— and the young girl's wage 
 becomes thirty-nine cents and a fraction. 
 At forty cents she was hanging on for her 
 life; at thirty-nine cents and a fraction she 
 enters the nearest brothel. Here is the 
 little child of eight years toiling from six 
 at night till six in the morning in the midst 
 of throbbing cotton-looms for nine cents. 
 Magee and Quay of Pittsburg "make" 
 thirty million dollars in street railroads — 
 and the little child's wage becomes eight 
 
i62 The Industrial Republic 
 
 cents and a fraction. At nine cents he was 
 starving; at eight and a fraction he faints, 
 and the machinery seizes him, and his arm 
 has been torn out of him before anyone can 
 answer his screams. So it is, Mr. Steffens, 
 that there are people in this country to whom 
 the difference between to-day and to-morrow 
 is simply a difference between life and 
 death. 
 
 That farmer about whose work I spoke 
 will take his two hundred and fifty dollars 
 to the bank for deposit; and in the line 
 before the window will be a young spend- 
 thrift idler with a month's income from his 
 father's estate, and a politician with a bribe 
 for a street railway franchise; and to the 
 banker all these deposits will stand upon 
 equal terms, they will all be equally "good," 
 and will claim and get interest at the same 
 rate. The farmer will have to content 
 himself with a lower rate, because of the 
 competition of the others; and next week, 
 when the activities of some speculator in 
 Wall Street bring about a failure of the 
 bank, he will get not a bit more out of 
 the wreck than the other two. And then he 
 will go back and toil for another year, to 
 raise a similar crop — and what will he find 
 then? Why this: the forty-six millions of 
 the Standard Oil gang will have survived 
 all mischances, and having by their enor- 
 mous mass attracted profits, will have 
 
Business and Politics 163 
 
 become fifty millions, or even sixty; and the 
 thirty millions of Magee and Quay will 
 have become thirty-five. All the untold 
 millions of the capital of the country will 
 have increased similarly; and the investment 
 field will have become more crowded yet, 
 and the prizes fewer yet, and the chances 
 more hazardous yet; and the cost of living 
 will be a little higher yet; and the interest 
 rate a little lower yet, and wages a little 
 lower yet; and the whole of human society 
 will be toiling a little harder yet to pay the 
 profits upon that heaped-up mass of wealth. 
 More men will be taking to drink, and more 
 women will be taking to brothels — more to 
 suicide, madness, vagabondage and crime. 
 The race for profits will be a little more 
 fierce, social ostentation will be a little more 
 vulgar, political corruption will be a little 
 more shameless, strikes and riots will be a 
 little more common, the socialists will be 
 a little more active — and you, Mr. Lincoln 
 Stefiens, will be a little more saddened at 
 the sight of your country's downward career. 
 I have noticed the very curious fact about 
 your views, that all your hope of betterment 
 is in the future — it is always how we can 
 prevent new stealing, never how we can 
 punish the past. And so those thirty mil- 
 lion dollars of Magee and Quay, the forty- 
 six millions of the Amalgamated deal — 
 they are safe and beyond recall forever ? 
 
164 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Mr. Lawson talks about "restitution"; do 
 do you think he will ever bring it about — 
 do you see any signs of it so far ? And yet 
 those forty-six million dollars, assuming 
 that they grow at ten per cent., a small 
 earning for such a sum — year after year 
 they will be, roughly speaking, as follows: 
 46, 51, 56, 63, 69. 76, 84, 92, 101, 111, 122, 
 134, 147, 162, 178, 196, 216, 238, 262, 288, 
 318, and so on. In other words, the 
 heirs of the "Amalgamated" financiers will 
 twenty years from now have multiplied that 
 sum nearly seven times, and be receiving 
 nearly seven times as much tribute from 
 the sewing-girl in the Chicago slums and 
 the children in the Georgia cotton mill. I, 
 Mr. Steffens, am one of those who look upon 
 all profits, rent, interest, and dividends 
 as a survival of barbarism, the last but not 
 the least of the devices whereby the strong 
 enslave the weak and profit by their toil; 
 but I assume that you are not one of these — 
 that you are one of the class I heard de- 
 scribed by a speaker the other night, "who 
 think that the first dollar is a male dollar 
 and the second a female, and that when you 
 put them in the bank together they bring 
 forth dimes and nickels, which in the course 
 of the years grow up to be dollars as big 
 as their parents." Yet even so, you can not 
 but recognise the distinction between legit- 
 imate and illegitimate children. You can 
 
Business and Politics 165 
 
 not — to drop an inconvenient metaphor — 
 claim that society can by any possibility 
 whatever be required to go on paying tribute 
 to that stolen forty-six millions — the three 
 hundred and eighteen millions of twenty 
 years from now. It is a maxim of law, Mr. 
 Steffens, that there is no wrong without its 
 redress. 
 
 And if you grant this and begin to ex- 
 amine the millions in that light — what 
 perplexities you come upon ! Only take the 
 tariff, for instance — is there a dollar invested 
 in the business of this country to-day which 
 has not profited by that, and which is there- 
 fore not made up out of the tiny contri- 
 butions of thousands of persons who not 
 only do not own that dollar, but do not own 
 any other dollar ? And then consider that 
 the beginnings of most of our great fortunes 
 were made in Civil War times, when the 
 nation in its extremity paid two dollars for 
 every dollar in value it received! And con- 
 sider the chaos of political corruption that 
 followed, the twenty years of plundering of 
 every variety that American ingenuity could 
 invent, from Black Friday to the Western 
 land grabs and railroad steals! Try to 
 figure how many crimes are represented by 
 the Vanderbilt millions, how many by the 
 Goulds's; think of the commercial assassin- 
 ations represented by the word Standard 
 Oil — the secret rebates and discriminations, 
 
i66 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the wholesale buyings of legislatures and 
 elections; think of the whole institution of 
 corruption of the present day, of the "Sys- 
 tem," intrenched m village and town, city, 
 and state, and nation, owning both parties, 
 the execvitive, the legislative, and the judi- 
 cial branches of the Government, the schools, 
 the colleges, the pulpits, the press, literature, 
 and art, and public opinion — making it, not 
 figuratively and hyperbolically, but literally, 
 simply, and indisputably the fact that there 
 is not to-day in the land a place where a 
 man can take a dollar and invest it, and get 
 back a copper cent that is not tainted with 
 corruption, polluted by violence, treason, 
 and crime, and stained with the blood and 
 tears of uncounted thousands of agonised 
 women and children ! 
 
 So much for the letter. If there is any- 
 one who, after reading it, is still of the 
 opinion that the people should pay the 
 tribute demanded twenty years from now, 
 there is nothing more that I can say to him — 
 except to give a few statistics by way of 
 further elucidation, showing him how many 
 more millions of dollars there will be to enter 
 their claim. There will be, for instance, the 
 four hundred and fifty million dollars of the 
 Astor family — all invested in New York 
 City real estate, and at the rate of growth 
 of the city, certainly destined to be a billion 
 
Business and Politics 167 
 
 dollars in twenty years from date. There is 
 the half billion dollars of Mr. Rockefeller, 
 increasing by a most conservative estimate at 
 the rate of ten per cent, per year, and there- 
 fore destined to be over four billions at that 
 time. And then there are the railroads of the 
 country. We are now being prepared for 
 a decision to be some day delivered by the 
 Supreme Court, to the effect that any rate 
 regulation which interferes with dividends 
 is confiscation, and therefore unconstitu- 
 tional. And yet we know that railroad 
 capitalisation is simply a function of earning- 
 power; that what the financiers have uni- 
 formly done was to charge all the traffic 
 would bear, and then water their stock 
 until the rate of dividends came down to 
 the market average. The capitalisation 
 of the railroads of the country, fixed upon 
 this basis, is thirteen billion dollars, whereas 
 their actual cost was only six or seven 
 billions. To give one or two samples of 
 this process, the Western Maryland Railroad 
 was bought up by the Goulds, and watered 
 from nine millions up to fifty-one millions. 
 The Central Railroad of Georgia, which 
 cost less than seven millions, has now been 
 watered up to fifty-five millions. Assuming 
 that the watering were to stop to-day, and 
 that the railroads simply re-invested their 
 dividends at the present rate of six 
 per cent., in twenty years we should be 
 
i68 The Industrial Republic 
 
 paying interest upon over forty billion 
 dollars. 
 
 From a brokerage circular which recently 
 came in my mail, I have clipped a few more 
 instances of the workings of trust finance. 
 The argument of the circular is that I need 
 not be frightened at their offer to make my 
 money earn more than six per cent. — that 
 over a hundred per cent, is " being frequently 
 earned by legitimate business." Thus the 
 Diamond Match Company recently paid 
 ten per cent, on a capitalisation of fifteen 
 million dollars, when its original capitali- 
 sation had been only six million dollars. 
 The Western Union Telegraph Company 
 began in 1858 with only three hundred and 
 eighty-five thousand dollars, yet in 1874 
 it paid one hundred and fourteen per cent, 
 on seventeen million dollars. Anyone 
 who had invested one thousand dollars in 
 this stock in 1858 would by 1890 have 
 received fifty thousand dollars in stock divi- 
 dends and one hundred thousand dollars 
 in cash dividends. The present capital 
 is over ninety-seven millions— " and the 
 greater part of the equipment has been 
 created out of the earnings of the company!" 
 In the case of the Prudential Life Insurance 
 Company (owing, though the circular does 
 not state it, to a little deal between United 
 States Senator Dryden and the New Jersey 
 State Legislature) for every one thousand 
 
Business and Politics 169 
 
 dollars originally paid in, the stockholders 
 now own twenty-two thousand dollars' worth 
 of stock and received annual cash dividends 
 of twenty-two hundred dollars, or two 
 hundred and twenty per cent, upon their 
 original investment! 
 
 And then, to diversify the subject, let 
 us consider the tariff, and its variegated 
 plunderings. In a letter to the New York 
 Evening Post of Oct. 26th, 1904, Mr. J. R. 
 Dunlap gave some figures showing the 
 "scandalous taxes imposed by trusts upon 
 the people": 
 
 "Now, to show how the Dingley duty of 
 eight dollars per ton on steel rails taxes Amer- 
 ican railroads and hence reaches deep into the 
 pockets of shippers and travellers on Amer- 
 ican railroads, I need only cite the fact that, 
 during the year 1903 our American rail- 
 roads purchased from the steel pool exactly 
 three million forty-six thousand eight hun- 
 dred and thirty-six tons of new steel rails 
 (see statistical abstract, Department of 
 Commerce and Labour). The price to 
 foreign railroads being, say twenty dollars 
 per ton — as we now knov) — and the pool 
 price to American railroads being twenty- 
 eight dollars per ton, that means that the 
 American people, during the single year last 
 past, contributed a clean net profit of twenty- 
 four million three hundred and seventy -four 
 thousand six hundred and eighty-eight dol- 
 
170 The Industrial Republic 
 
 lars to the rail pool — by reason, presumably, 
 of their "patriotic" belief in the Dingley 
 duties! And during the past six years — 
 since the Dingley Bill was enacted — these 
 same American railroads have been forced 
 to contribute to the few members of the 
 rail pool exactly one hundred and two 
 million six hundred and twenty-one thou- 
 sand two hundred and fifty-six dollars, or 
 eight dollars per ton on twelve million eight 
 hundred and twenty-seven thousand six 
 hundred and fifty-seven tons of rails bought 
 and used. Dividing that stupendous sum 
 of protection profit (one hundred and two 
 million six hundred and twenty-one thou- 
 sand two hundred and fifty-six dollars) by 
 eighty million of population, we see that the 
 rail pool alone — to say nothing of other 
 combinations "sheltered" by the Dingley 
 duties — has collected a tax of exactly one 
 dollar and twenty -eight and one -quarter 
 cents ($1.28^) for every man, woman, and 
 child in America, white and coloured. 
 
 "To further indicate the fabulous profits 
 which the Dingley duties make possible to 
 our 'infant' iron and steel industries, I 
 need only cite recent and familiar records. 
 In the spring of 1899, when the Steel Trust 
 was in process of formation, and when it 
 became necessary for the influential men in 
 the steel industry to prove what enormous 
 profits the steel manufacturers were making. 
 
Business and Politics 171 
 
 and thus to induce the investing pubh'c to 
 put their money into Steel Trust stocks — 
 then it was that Mr. Charles M. Schwab, 
 president, wrote to Mr. Henry C. Frick, 
 chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, 
 the famous letter of May 15, 1899, now 
 public property, in which Mr. Schwab used 
 these words : ' 
 
 " ' What is true of rails is equally true of 
 other steel products. . . . You know 
 we can make rails for less than twelve dollars 
 per ton, leaving a nice margin on foreign 
 business.' 
 
 "Mark you, that was in 1899, when the 
 boom was at its zenith, when wages were 
 highest, and when all the costs of produc- 
 tion were far above all averages of recent 
 boom years. 
 
 "To show how accurate Mr. Schwab 
 was in these statements, and to show how 
 trustworthy was his confident forecast of 
 future profits, I need only cite the following 
 speaking figures from the two annual state- 
 ments which have been made public by the 
 United States Steel Corporation, namely: 
 Total number of employees: 
 1902. 1903. 
 
 168,127 167,709 
 
 Total annual salaries and wages paid : 
 
 $120,528,343.00 $120,763,896.00 
 Net earnings : 
 
 $133,308,763.72 $109,171,152.35 
 
172 The Industrial Republic 
 
 "It will be observed that during these 
 two years the average annual net earnings 
 of the Steel Trust exceeded the total labour 
 cost of their entire product! 
 
 MEDICINAL PRODUCTS 
 
 "Turning from the iron and steel in- 
 dustry, we might take quinine, and many 
 other medicinal products; we might take 
 chemicals, many of them most essential in 
 manufacturing industry; we might take 
 borax, which sells in America at seven and 
 one-half cents per pound, and in Britain at 
 two and one-half cents per pound, because 
 the Dingley duty is exactly five cents per 
 pound; we might take mica, a mining pro- 
 duct largely used in the electrical, wall-paper 
 and stove-making industries, and which 
 enjoys a modest protection ranging from 
 one hundred and fifty to four thousand per 
 cent. In short, we might take each and 
 every staple product now made in America, 
 and needlessly sheltered by the Dingley 
 duties, and prove, by comparative prices at 
 home and abroad, that the fabulous profits 
 which the gentlemen engaged in these in- 
 dustries are now making — and which they 
 have capitalised into watered "industrials" 
 — are due chiefly and directly to the fostering 
 care of the Dingley Bill, which was designed 
 to protect our 'infant' industries." 
 
Business and Politics 173 
 
 In the same issue, another correspondent, 
 Mr. W. J. Gibson, shows how the Govern- 
 ment serves as a tool of the trusts in tariff 
 exactions. He gives several columns of 
 facts about such outrages as the "Rupee 
 Cases," For instance: 
 
 "There have been nine or ten decisions 
 on this one question against the Govern- 
 ment, and still the secretary of the treasury 
 refuses to refund the money which the 
 courts have decided so often he has exacted 
 illegally. The money he has directed to be 
 wrongfully assessed and collected, and is 
 retaining in ihese cases, known as "the 
 Rupee Cases," amounts to over a million 
 dollars. The parties cannot get any inter- 
 est for their money so wrongfully withheld, 
 and the customs officials are still being 
 directed to assess all merchandise coming 
 from India on the basis of the rupee at the 
 value of thirty-two cents in our money. 
 This has gone on for more than six years, 
 and against the decision of the United 
 States Circuit Court since January 7, 1899." 
 
 And now, can we get any broad view of 
 the results of this long process of wealth- 
 concentration .f* In 1850 the wealth of the 
 United States was estimated at nine billions ; 
 in 1870 it was thirty billions; in 1890 it 
 was sixty-five billions; and in 1900 it was 
 ninety-five billions. How is this wealth 
 distributed? Writing in 1896, Dr. C. B, 
 
174 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Spahr made his famous calculation, em- 
 bodied in the statement that one-eighth of 
 the population owned seven-eighths of the 
 wealth, and that one per cent, owned more 
 than the remaining ninety-nine per cent. 
 And at that time the machinery of ex- 
 ploitation had hardly more than got under 
 way. The best attempt at an estimate since 
 then is the one by Lucien Sanial, published 
 by the American Branch of the International 
 Institute of Social Science. This is the 
 result of a careful analysis of the census of 
 1900; it shows that of ninety-five billions 
 of the country's present wealth, sixty-seven 
 billions are owned by a capitalist-class of two 
 hundred and fifty thousand persons, twenty- 
 four billions by a middle-class of eight 
 million four hundred thousand persons, 
 and four billions by a working-class of over 
 twenty million persons. And now, if the 
 sixty-seven billions owned by the capitalists 
 be assumed to earn ten per cent. — which is 
 surely a reasonable average amount — our 
 people will be paying interest upon four 
 hundred and fifty billion dollars at the end 
 of the twenty year period! 
 
 And that represents the centralisation 
 of the actual ownership of wealth; but one 
 does not get a real understanding of the 
 situation until he begins to consider the 
 centralisation of the control of wealth. In 
 explaining the struggle over the surplus 
 
Business and Politics 175 
 
 of the life-insurance companies, one of 
 our financial magnates remarked to me: 
 ' ' I would rather have the power of manipu- 
 lating four hundred million dollars, than the 
 actual ownership of fifty millions." And 
 with that crucial fact in mind, let one 
 consider the figures given by Mr. Sereno 
 S. Pratt in The World's Work for Decem- 
 ber, 1903, and summarised in Dr. Strong's 
 "Social Progress," as follows: 
 
 "One-twelfth of the estimated wealth of 
 the United States is represented at the meet- 
 ing of the Board of Directors of the United 
 States Steel Corporation. 
 
 "They represent as influential directors 
 more than two hundred other companies. 
 These companies operate nearly one-half 
 of the railroad mileage of the United States. 
 They are the great miners and carriers of 
 coal. The leading telegraph system, the 
 traction lines of New York, of Philadelphia, 
 of Pittsburg, of Buffalo, of Chicago, and of 
 Milwaukee, and one of the principal ex- 
 press companies, are represented in the 
 board. This group includes also directors 
 of five insurance companies, two of which 
 have assets of seven hundred millions of 
 dollars. In the Steel Board are men who 
 speak for five banks and ten trust companies 
 in New York City, including the First 
 National, the National City, and the Baiik 
 of Commerce, the three greatest banks in 
 
176 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the country, and the heads of important 
 chains of financial institutions. Telephone, 
 electric, real estate, cable, and publishing 
 companies are represented there, and our 
 greatest merchant sits at the board table. 
 
 "What the individual wealth of these 
 men is, it would be impossible and beside 
 the point to estimate; but one of them, Mr. 
 John D. Rockefeller, is generally estimated 
 to be the richest individual in the world. 
 But it is not the personal, but the represent- 
 ative, wealth of those men that makes the 
 group extraordinary. They control cor- 
 porations whose capitalisations aggregate 
 more than nine billion dollars — an amount 
 (if the capitalisations are real values) equal 
 to about the combined public debts of Great 
 Britain, France, and the United States. 
 It is this concentration of power which is 
 significant. There were at the time of the 
 last statement sixty-nine thousand nine 
 hundred and fifty-five stockholders in the 
 Steel Corporation. But the control of this 
 corporation is vested in twenty-four direc- 
 tors, and this board of directors is guided 
 by the executive and finance committees, 
 which in turn are largely directed by their 
 chairmen, who are probably selected by 
 the great banker who organised the cor- 
 poration and in a large part sways its policy. 
 
 "Examinations show that the concentra- 
 tion of control of these great New York 
 
Business and Politics 177 
 
 City banks has gone so far that a com- 
 paratively small group of capitalists 
 possesses the power to regulate the flow of 
 credit in this country. In the last analysis 
 it is found that there are actually only two 
 main influences, and that these are centred 
 in Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller. It 
 is possible to express in approximate figures 
 the extent of the Morgan influence" — 
 which the writer shows in a table to 
 figure up over six billion two hundred and 
 sixty-eight million dollars. How very con- 
 servative is Mr. Pratt's estimate is shown by 
 the fact that he gives the number of holders 
 of shares of the railroads of this country as 
 nine hundred and fifty thousand persons; 
 with which the reader may contrast the fol- 
 lowing editorial paragraph from a recent 
 issue of the New York Times: 
 
 " It would appear from evidence collected 
 by the Interstate Commerce Commission 
 and communicated to the Senate, that the 
 ownership of the railroad system of this 
 country is not as widely diffused as has been 
 supposed. On the 30th of June, 1904, the 
 1,220 railroads reporting to the Commission 
 had only 327,851 stockholders of record. 
 This total includes many duplications, as 
 it was impossible to know in how many 
 instances one capitalist was represented in 
 the stockholding interest of several railroads. 
 Assuming the population of the United 
 
178 The Industrial Republic 
 
 States to be, in round figures, eighty mil- 
 lions, the entire mileage of the railroads 
 doing an interstate business is owned by 
 about four-tenths of 1 per cent, of the people 
 of this country." 
 
 Such is the situation. It completes our 
 view of the process of Industrial Evolution, 
 so far as it has progressed up to date. The 
 condition is like that of an oak tree planted 
 in a jar, or a chick developing within its 
 shell; the indefinite continuance of the 
 process is inconceivable. What form the 
 collapse will assume, and when it may be 
 expected to occur, is the problem next to be 
 be taken up. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE REVOLUTION 
 
 /^NE is at a great disadvantage just 
 ^^ at present in picturing an indus- 
 trial crisis. We are at the very flood-tide 
 of prosperity; the railroads are paralysed 
 by the volume of the country's business; 
 the coal mines cannot furnish the coal, 
 and the farmers are burning their grain be- 
 cause they cannot get it to market; the steel 
 trust has orders for two years ahead — 
 and so on without limit. I have to ask 
 the reader to picture interest rates going 
 down to zero, at a time when they are 
 higher than they have been in a decade; 
 I have to ask him to picture too much of 
 everything in the country, at a time when 
 there is not enough of anything. And yet 
 all this excess of ' prosperity" is an integral 
 part of the phenomenon we are studying. 
 If the process of wealth concentration 
 and overproduction of capital went on 
 unmodified by any other factor, we should 
 witness a gradual rise in the price of com- 
 modities, a gradual increase in the number 
 of unemployed, and a gradual fall in the 
 rates of interest. As it happens, however, 
 
 179 
 
i8o The Industrial Republic 
 
 the movement proceeds in rhythmic pulses, 
 like the swinging of a pendulum, or the 
 ebbing and flowing of the tide. This is 
 owing to the factor of credit-expansion, 
 which we have still to interpret. 
 
 We have pictured Capital, ubiquitous, 
 endlessly resourceful, incessantly alert — 
 "clamouring for dividends." Competition 
 is a forcing-process by which every device 
 that will increase profits is driven into 
 general use, and subjected to its maximum 
 strain. The most obvious of these devices 
 is that of credit. 
 
 A business man has a certain amount 
 of capital. If he makes his "turn over" 
 once a year, he gains, say, ten per cent, 
 profit; if he can make the "turn over" 
 twice a year, he gains twenty per cent. 
 He sees the business ahead, and so he 
 goes into debt. And of course this step 
 gives an impulse to the business of the 
 man who manufactures his machinery, 
 and to the man who raises his raw material, 
 and to the railroads which handle both. 
 The effect of that condition, prevailing 
 throughout a whole community, is to acceler- 
 ate enormously the industrial process ; under 
 it the capital of the community becomes, 
 exactly as in the case of the railroads, not the 
 actual definite cost of the instruments of pro- 
 duction existing, but an altogether hypothet- 
 ical thing, a function of anticipated earnings. 
 
The Revolution i8i 
 
 So it is that you have a "boom" — a 
 period of furious and fevered activity, in 
 which everyone sees fortunes springing 
 up about him; and then comes some dis- 
 turbing factor, which suggests to a number 
 of men the advisabihty of reahsing on their 
 expectations; and a chill settles upon the 
 community, and there is a wild rush to 
 collect, and the discovery is made that 
 most of the anticipated profits are not in 
 existence. 
 
 There is one more consideration which 
 has to be touched upon before we are pre- 
 pared to consider the concrete problem in 
 America. The process which has been 
 outlined is an industrial one; events have 
 been pictured here as they would take 
 place in a community given altogether to 
 manufacturing, mining, and transportation. 
 But as a matter of fact we have not only to 
 reckon with thirteen billions a year of 
 manufactured products, but also with four 
 billions a year of farm products. The 
 importance of this new element hes in the 
 fact that the ownership of the farms is still 
 largely in the hands of the masses; which 
 means that once every year the process 
 we have been picturing is stayed while the 
 American people get rid of four billion 
 dollars of spending money, which comes 
 to them outside of and independent of the 
 wage-fund. Thus, strange as it may seem, 
 
1 82 The Industrial Republic 
 
 abundant crops tend to mitigate an "over- 
 production" crisis, while a failure of crops 
 would do more than anything else in the 
 world to precipitate one. 
 
 With these facts in mind we are now in 
 position to interpret our recent industrial 
 history. We have generally had our hard 
 times in America at ten year intervals, 
 with especially severe crises at twenty 
 year intervals. We had our last severe 
 attack in 1893, and we were due to have 
 one of the lesser sort in 1903. What hap- 
 pened then was very interesting to watch, 
 in the light of the views just explained. 
 In the early winter and spring of 1904, the 
 avalanche was well under way. Here, 
 for instance, is an item clipped from the 
 Chicago Tribune in April of that year: 
 
 "Organised labour is facing the greatest 
 wage crisis since the panic of 1893, if the 
 forecast of its leaders is correct. It is esti- 
 mated that before the close of the year the 
 greatest employing concerns of the country 
 will have dismissed nearly one million men, 
 most of them labourers and general-utility 
 workers. Of this number the railroads are 
 expected to discharge two hundred thou- 
 sand employees; the mine operators, fifty 
 thousand; the machine shops, iron, steel, 
 and tin plate plants, two hundred and 
 fifty thousand; and the building trades, 
 forty thousand. The railroads and the 
 
The Revolution 183 
 
 steel mills have already begun the work of 
 reducing their forces, and the wage liqui- 
 dation threatens to become as sensational 
 as was the recent liquidation in stocks." 
 
 And then on May 25th following, the 
 New York Herald reported that the 
 railroads of the country had laid off seventy- 
 five thousand men; and quoted the follow- 
 ing in an interview with James J. Hill: 
 
 "The whole question falls back primarily 
 upon decreasing business and the reason for 
 it. Why are the railroads carrying less 
 freight than they were a year or two years 
 ago ? Because the demand for the products 
 of the United States is not commensurate 
 with the supply. We manufacture and we 
 grow and we mine more than we can con- 
 sume in the United States. Hence we are 
 dependent upon foreign markets in order to 
 sell the surplus." 
 
 The reasons why we got over this period 
 of liquidation with only a severe scare are 
 two: First, because there came in the fall 
 a "•bumper" crop of unprecedented pro- 
 portions, which gave the railroads a new 
 start; and second, and most important, 
 because it happened that at the precise 
 hour of our stress, there broke out one of 
 the greatest military struggles of all history. 
 
 The war, you understand, was a new 
 world-market. All at once a million or 
 two of men were set to work at destroying 
 
184 The Industrial Republic 
 
 manufactured articles; and at the same 
 time several millions more were taken 
 from their regular tasks to provide and 
 maintain them while they did it; and the 
 greater part of the surplus capital of civili- 
 sation was drawn off to pay the bills. It 
 was not merely that during the first four 
 months of the conflict Japan and Russia 
 bought fifty million dollars' worth of our 
 spare products, or that they took hundreds 
 of millions of our spare cash. It made no 
 real difference where the money was raised, 
 or where it was spent; the man who got 
 it spent it again, and sooner or later the 
 bulk of it came to us, because we had the 
 things to sell. Under the conditions of 
 modern Capitalism, all the world is one; 
 and when a nation goes to war, whoever 
 has a spare dollar lends it to pay the bills, 
 and wherever in the world there is an 
 idle labourer, he is put to work to help 
 support the fighters of both nations. In 
 return, the woi'ld gets from the warring 
 governments a paper promise to wring an 
 equivalent amount of service out of their 
 people at some future date. 
 
 Before going on I ought to mention that 
 there is another view of the events of 1904. 
 I have heard Mr. Arthur Brisbane main- 
 tain that we are to have no more over- 
 production crises, for the reason that, com- 
 petition having been abolished in all our 
 
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 Diagram prepared by Wilshirc's Magazine 
 
 DIAGRAM SHOWS HOW HIGH PRICES FOLLOW WARS 
 Range of average prices of 25 leading Railway Stocks for the past 
 22 years 
 
The Revolution 185 
 
 principal industries, our trust magnates 
 can so adjust supply to demand as to miti- 
 gate the stress, and give instead periods of 
 partial idleness in widely scattered industries. 
 
 If this is true, it is very important, for it 
 means a long continuance of Trust govern- 
 ment; but I do not believe that it is true. 
 The trusts have, of course, put an end to 
 blind production without any assurance 
 of a market; but even assuming that our 
 industry were so far systematised and our 
 management so conservative that we never 
 manufactured goods except upon a definite 
 order — how would that be able to hold in 
 check a community gone mad with pros- 
 perity-drunkenness ? For instance, the steel 
 trust now has orders enough ahead for two 
 years; and upon the basis of these orders, 
 its administrators are going ahead building 
 a new "steel city." Yet does the steel 
 trust know what proportion of its orders 
 for steel rails are intended for the transporta- 
 tion of purely speculative freight.'' Does 
 it know what proportion of its orders for 
 structural steel is intended for buildings 
 for imaginary tenants ? Does it concern 
 itself with the problem whether its cus- 
 tomers are going to be able to find any use 
 for the materials which they have bought ? 
 
 There might be more plausibility in the 
 argument, if our trust magnates were men 
 of conscience and a keen sense of responsi- 
 
i86 The Industrial Republic 
 
 bility; but as a matter of fact their attitude 
 toward their work is purely predatory. 
 They are not administrators of production 
 at all, but parasites upon production, ex- 
 ploiters and wreckers. Far from striving 
 to regulate the madness of the public, 
 they are competing among themselves to 
 fan it to a flame, so that they may capitalise 
 the expectations of their own properties.* 
 
 The ebb of the tide is coming; the only 
 question is, when ? According to precedent, 
 it should come in 1913; but I expect it 
 much sooner, partly because I do not 
 believe that we had anything like a thorough 
 liquidation in 1904, and partly because of 
 the extreme violence of the present activity. 
 During the last year the "boom" has 
 reached real estate, and that always means 
 that other avenues of investment are clogged. 
 
 I anticipate the storm in 1908 or 1909; 
 but I do not predict it, because it depends 
 upon uncertain factors. Another great war 
 might put it off ten years; and on the 
 other hand, crop failures might precipitate 
 it this summer. What I do believe that I 
 can predict — for reasons which I stated in 
 the introduction to this argument — is the 
 
 ♦Anyone who wishes to make a scientific study of the true functions 
 ofjmodern finance is advised to read Professor Veblen's last book, "The 
 Tlieory of Business Enterprise," a most extraordinary study of the 
 whole field of present-day economics. In my opinion this book, together 
 with its author's other masterpiece, "The Theory of the Leisure Class," 
 constitutes the greatest contribution to social science ever made in 
 America, and perhaps the greatest in the world since Carl Marx. It 
 might be worth while to add in passing that Professor Veblen was 
 turned out of Mr. Rockefeller's University of Chicago for writing it. 
 
The Revolution 187 
 
 course which pohtical events in this country 
 will take from the hour when the "hard 
 times" arrive. 
 
 As we saw from the Chicago Tribune 
 item, the first sign of trouble is the turning 
 out of work of a million workingmen; and 
 what are the consequences — the economic 
 consequences — of the turning out of work 
 of a million men ? According to the census 
 the average yearly wage of the factory 
 employee is four hundred and thirty-seven 
 dollars. Dr. Peter Roberts says that the 
 average wage in the anthracite coal dis- 
 trict is less than five hundred dollars. In 
 the Middle States a third of all the workers 
 get less than three hundred a year, and in 
 the South nearly sixty per cent, get less. 
 It was proven before the Industrial Com- 
 mission that the maximum wage of the 
 hundred and fifty thousand railroad and 
 track hands and the two hundred thousand 
 carmen and shopmen, was a hundred and 
 fifty dollars in the South, and less than 
 three hundred and seventy-five in the 
 North. And this to feed and clothe a 
 family, and provide against sickness, acci- 
 dent, and old age! The meaning of it is 
 simply that when a million men are laid 
 off, in a month or two they and their 
 families are starving. 
 
 And that, you understand, means a loss 
 of a market — of a market of five million 
 
i88 The Industrial Republic 
 
 people — a population equal to that of the 
 Dominion of Canada. And of course, there- 
 fore, those whose work it has been to supply 
 these people, will be out of work, and like- 
 wise those who supply the suppliers. And 
 even this is by far the least of the conse- 
 quences; for another part of our domestic 
 market depends upon the fact that our 
 workingmen too have been able to form 
 trusts. And when this period of depression 
 comes, their trusts will fall to pieces, and 
 competition will begin again — a process 
 which they will find all the brickbats and 
 dynamite in the country cannot check. 
 The employers will, of course, be straining 
 every nerve to make ends meet; and so 
 wages will go down, and when strikes are 
 declared, the starving workingman will 
 "scab" and the strikes will fail. We shall 
 have riots, and perhaps gatling guns in our 
 streets, but the wages will go down; and 
 step by step as the wages go down, con- 
 sumption goes down, with the loss of another 
 Dominion of Canada. When the thing is 
 once started, it will be an avalanche that 
 no power upon earth can stop; and it will 
 be the beginning of'the Revolution. 
 
 The word has an ominous sound. The 
 reader thinks of street battles and barri- 
 cades. By a Revolution I mean the com- 
 plete transfer of the economic and political 
 power of the country from the hands of the 
 
The Revolution 189 
 
 present exploiting class to the hands of 
 the whole people; and in the accomplish- 
 ment of this purpose the people will pro- 
 ceed, as in everything else they do, along 
 the line of least resistance. It is very much 
 less trouble to cast a ballot than it is to go 
 out in the streets and shoot: and our peo- 
 ple are used to the ballot method. How- 
 ever, the staid and respectable Harper's 
 Weekly, which calls itself a "Journal of 
 Civilisation," suggested in 1896 that if Mr. 
 Bryan were elected, it might be necessary 
 for the propertied classes to keep him out 
 of office. If anything of that sort is at- 
 tempted in this coming crisis, why then 
 there will be violence — just as there will 
 be in such countries as Germany and Russia, 
 which have yet to learn to let the people 
 have their own way. The worst feature 
 of the situation with us is that we have got- 
 ten into the habit of letting our elections 
 be carried by bribery; and that is likely 
 to play us some ugly tricks in this new 
 emergency. 
 
 The reader perhaps objects to my theory 
 that this change must come with suddenness. 
 It is such a tremendous change — and would 
 it not be better if it were brought about 
 little by little ? Undoubtedly it would have 
 been a great deal better; but the time to 
 begin was ten or twenty years ago. Now 
 the horse is stolen, and we are venting all 
 
190 The Industrial Republic 
 
 our energies, and cannot even succeed in 
 getting the stable-door locked afterward. 
 
 They are bringing it about gradually in 
 Australia and New Zealand — the only coun- 
 tries in the world in which the people are 
 effectually regulating the progress of the 
 Juggernaut of Capitalism. That is be- 
 cause these countries are very young, with 
 comparatively little capital, no slums, and 
 an intelligent working-class. I have an 
 idea — I do not know whether there is any- 
 thing in it — that the extraordinary success 
 of New Zealand may in part be due to the 
 fact that it was a convict-settlement; the 
 men whom capitalism makes into criminals 
 being for the most part a very superior class 
 of people, active, independent, and im- 
 patient of injustice. Transported to a new 
 land, and given a fair chance, I should 
 think that a burglar or a highwayman ought 
 to make a very excellent Socialist. 
 
 You ask, perhaps, if the thing is not also 
 being accomplished gradually in England 
 and on the Continent; you point to "Muni- 
 cipal trading," to the London County 
 Council, to the state-owned railroads and 
 telephones of Germany, Switzerland, Swe- 
 den, etc. You have been accustomed to 
 hear these things referred to as State 
 Socialism, and you have accepted the state- 
 ment — not understanding that the essence 
 of Socialism is democracy, and that it is 
 
The Revolution 191 
 
 fundamentally opposed to paternalism in 
 every conceivable form. Municipal and 
 State ownership is not State Socialism at 
 all, but State Capitalism. Under it, the 
 government buys certain franchises, pays 
 for them with bonds, and then runs the 
 roads to pay the bondholders. Undoubt- 
 edly it is a better system for the people 
 than private Capitalism, for the reason that 
 it fixes the exploiters' tax, instead of letting 
 stock-watering go on indefinitely. But, un- 
 fortunately, economical administration by 
 the State is possible at present only in such 
 countries as have an aristocratic governing- 
 class, jealous of the power of the capitalist. 
 In this country the holders of the municipal 
 bonds, who also own the street-car factories 
 and the steel-mills and the coal-mines, 
 would use the interest they got from the 
 city to bribe the city's servants to pay ex- 
 orbitant prices for all the street-cars and 
 steel rails and coal and other supplies 
 which the city would have to have in order 
 to operate the roads. You have seen that 
 perfectly illustrated in the case of our Post 
 Office. For example, we pay the railroads 
 in rent for our mail-cars twice as much per 
 year as it costs to build the cars; and the 
 cars are so flimsy that the insurance com- 
 panies, which own a large share of the rail- 
 roads and the cars, refuse to insure the 
 lives of the mail-clerks who work in them ! 
 
192 The Industrial Republic 
 
 However, the advisabihty of Municipal 
 Ownership under present conditions is a 
 purely academic question, for the reason 
 that the capitalist will never give us a chance 
 to try it. The capitalist is in possession, 
 and he "stands pat." When you talk 
 about "reform," he will make you as many 
 fine speeches and deliver you as many moral 
 discourses as you wish; but when it comes 
 to giving up any dollars — he has spent all 
 his lifetime learning to hold on to his dollars. 
 
 You are thinking, perhaps, of President 
 Roosevelt, who is hailed as a successful 
 reformer. In the first place, it is of im- 
 portance to point out that President Roose- 
 velt is a complete anomaly in our political 
 life; he was probably the last Republican 
 in the country who would have been se- 
 lected to rule us. He made himself gover- 
 nor by a shrewd device called "the Rough 
 Riders;" he was made President for the 
 first time by the bullet of an assassin, and 
 the second time by the death of Mark 
 Hanna. By a series of such blind chances 
 as these the people have been given a chance 
 to vote for what they want, and they of 
 course have seized the chance. But as- 
 suredly it was no part of the " System's " 
 plan to ask them what they wanted, nor 
 even to let them find out what they wanted 
 themselves. 
 
 Under the peculiar circumstances, there 
 
The Revolution 193 
 
 has been nothing for the "System" to do 
 but make sure that the President aceom- 
 pHshes nothing; and that it has done as 
 a miatter of course. In saying this, let me 
 remind the reader once more of my dis- 
 tinction between moral revolt and economic 
 remedy. I have no wish to under-estimate 
 the tremendous importance of President 
 Roosevelt's services in awakening the people ; 
 but I say that so far as actual concrete 
 accomplishment is concerned, he might 
 just as well never have lifted a finger. In 
 one case, that of the suit against the Paper 
 Trust, he did effect a lowering of prices; 
 but in that case he was simply a pawn in 
 the struggle between two trusts — of which 
 the Newspaper Trust proved to be the 
 stronger. In no case where the people 
 alone were concerned has he effected any 
 economic change whatever. The Northern 
 Securities decision was evaded by another 
 device; the Beef Trust and the Standard 
 Oil suits ended with nominal fines. Over 
 the rate regulation question we had two 
 years' agitation — and not one single rate 
 has been lowered. In the struggle for life- 
 insurance reform, to which the President 
 gave all his moral support, a few grafting 
 officials were hounded to death; but the 
 real and vital evil, the exploitation of the 
 surplus for purposes of stock-manipulation, 
 was scarcely even touched upon. And 
 
19^ The Industrial Republic 
 
 then came the Chicago packing-house 
 scandals — and I can speak with some 
 knowledge of them. Sometimes, when I 
 look back upon them, it seems like a dream 
 - — I can hardly believe that I ever played 
 my part in that cosmic farce. Only think 
 of it — we had the President and Congress 
 and all the newspapers of the country dis- 
 cussing it — we had this entire nation of 
 eighty million people literally thinking about 
 nothing else for months — nay, more, we 
 had the attention of the whole civilised 
 world riveted upon those filthy meat- 
 factories. We uncovered crimes for which 
 the condemnation of every dollar's worth 
 of property in Packingtown would have 
 been a nominal punishment; and then we 
 settled back with a sigh of contentment, 
 because we had put a few more inspectors 
 at work and forced the whitewashing of 
 some slaughter-house walls. And we left 
 the monster upas-tree of commercialism 
 to flourish untouched— to go on year after 
 year bearing its fruit of corruption and 
 death ! 
 
 There is nothing whatever to be got from 
 the capitalist. I used to think that the 
 same thing was true of the politician. In 
 common with most Socialists, I thought 
 that the Revolution would have to wait until 
 the people had come to full consciousness 
 of their purpose, and had elected a Socialist 
 
The Revolution 195 
 
 president and a Socialist congress. But 
 at the time of the coal-strike, when Dave 
 Hill came out for government ownership 
 of the coal mines, I realised that the politi- 
 cian is the jackal and not the lion. Of 
 course we have amateur politicians — capital- 
 ists who play at the game — and they will 
 not give way; but the professional politican 
 is not a rich man — the competition has 
 been too keen. He has served the capitalist 
 because it paid; and when the people get 
 ready to have their way, it will pay to serve 
 the people. This is really a very important 
 matter, for our political machinery is com- 
 plicated, and the people have got used to 
 it. It would be a frightful waste of energy 
 to create new machinery — in fact, I do not 
 think that our Constitution could stand 
 the strain. 
 
 We will now assume that the industrial 
 crisis has come. What will be the political 
 consequences ? It takes two or three years 
 for industrial conditions to get themselves 
 translated into political acts in this country; 
 it means an immense amount of agitating — 
 tens of thousands of meetings have to be 
 held and hundreds of thousands of speeches 
 made; and then there is all the machinery 
 of conventions and elections. The panic 
 of 1893, for instance, resulted in the Bryan 
 movement of 1896. That movement was 
 a revolt of the debtor class; if it had 
 
196 The Industrial Republic 
 
 succeeded it would have precipitated a panic, 
 and that would have been a misfortune, 
 for the reason that both the people and 
 their leaders were ignorant, and instead of 
 the Industrial Republic, we should have 
 had a severe reaction. Mark Hanna was 
 a cunning man; but if he had been still 
 more cunning, he would never have raised 
 six million dollars to buy the presidency 
 for William McKinley — he would have let 
 the people have free silver, and then he 
 would have had the people. 
 
 We came to the election of 1900 on the 
 crest of a prosperity wave; but prosperity 
 too takes its time to be realised, and so 
 Hanna took the precaution to raise four 
 million dollars and buy the election again.* 
 And then came 1904, which, I think, was 
 the most interesting election of them all. 
 With the politicians the prosperity boom 
 still held sway. Mark Hanna had Roose- 
 velt all ready for the shelf; and the old- 
 time "state-rights" Democrats arose and 
 buried Mr. Bryan in the deepest vault of 
 their party catacombs. But then came 
 the people — with the country trembling 
 on the verge of another "hard times." 
 They gave President Roosevelt the most 
 tremendous majority ever recorded in Amer- 
 ica; and incidentally, as if this were not 
 enough to show how they felt, they gave 
 
 ♦Figures quoted, evidently upon inside information, by the Wash- 
 ington Poi/, in 1906. 
 
The Revolution 197 
 
 nearly half a million votes to Eugene V. 
 Debs! 
 
 This election, according to my schedule, 
 corresponds with the election of 1852 in 
 the Civil War crisis. The "safe and sane" 
 Democracy, which received its death-blow 
 in 1904, corresponds with the old Whig 
 party. It will probably make independent 
 nominations in 1908 and 1912, exactly as 
 did the Whigs, and will receive the votes of 
 all those who believe in dealing with new 
 conditions according to old formulas. 
 
 In the meantime, the real contestants 
 of the coming crisis are forming their lines. 
 Under ordinary circumstances the Repub- 
 lican party would have been the party of 
 disguised but unrelenting conservatism; and 
 our Presidents in 1904 and 1908 would have 
 been either figureheads like Fairbanks and 
 Shaw, or shrewd beguilers of the people 
 like Cannon and Root. As it is, it looks 
 now if President Roosevelt were to remain 
 the master of his party, in which case we 
 shall have in 1908 a mild reformer like Taft, 
 or possibly even Governor Hughes. The 
 one thing certain is that whoever receives 
 the Republican nomination will be the next 
 President. If it is a Roosevelt man, the 
 President's prestige will elect him; or if 
 the "System" concludes to have its own 
 way, he will be put in by bribery. In any 
 case, he will go in, and it is best that he 
 
198 The Industrial Republic 
 
 should go in. So long as we are to have 
 Capitalism, it is proper that the capitalist 
 should have a free hand. Personally I 
 should consider the election of a radical in 
 1908 a calamity; for "hard times" will be 
 just about to break, and I greatly desire to 
 see Cannon and Aldrich and the rest of 
 them "caught with the goods on." 
 
 Who will be the Democratic candidate ? 
 Will it be the champion of the Western 
 farmers, or of the proletariat of our Eastern 
 cities ? I do not know, but I am inclined to 
 think that it will be Mr. Bryan; and I am 
 sorry, in a way, because that will put him 
 out of the race in 1912. I conceived an 
 intense admiration for Mr. Bryan after his 
 last speech in New York City. 
 
 Never in our history did a public man 
 face a greater temptation than he did after 
 his two years of travel; everything in the 
 country seemed to have turned conservative, 
 and the money-power, frightened by Roose- 
 velt, was ready to throw itself into his 
 arms. What he did was to take his stand 
 upon the great issue over which the battle 
 of the next six years will be fought out — 
 the nationalisation of the railroads; and 
 in doing it he placed his name upon the 
 roll of our statesmen. 
 
 A couple of years ago I was sketching out 
 my comparison of the Civil War crisis and 
 our own, in conversation with an English 
 
The Revolution 
 
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 200 The Industrial Republic 
 
 gentleman, who asked me to make him a 
 table showing the parallel between the men 
 of the two periods. This table was after- 
 wards published in the Independent, with 
 an explanatory letter, (in the course of which 
 I pointed out that one must not take it too 
 literally, or look for a resemblance in ex- 
 ternal details).* 
 
 In the course of its editorial comment, 
 the Independent suggested another parallel, 
 that between "The Jungle" and "Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin"; and then it went on to 
 express its perplexity at my venturing to 
 compare Hearst with Lincoln. 
 
 There is no man in our public life to-day 
 who interests me so much as William 
 Randolph Hearst. I have been watching 
 him for ten years, during the last half-dozen 
 of them weighing and testing him as the man 
 of the coming hour. I do not say that he 
 will be the man; all that I can say is that 
 he stands the best chance of being the candi- 
 date of the Democratic party in 1912; 
 and that the man who secui'es that nomin- 
 ation will, if he does his work (and for him 
 to fail to do it is almost inconceivable) 
 write his name in our history beside the 
 names of Washington and Lincoln. 
 
 Mr. Hearst is one of the by-products of 
 the industrial process — a member of the 
 "second generation." You are to picture 
 
 *See table on page igg. 
 
The Revolution 201 
 
 many thousands of young men, heirs of the 
 enormous fortunes of our captains of in- 
 dustry; they are brought up in luxury, and 
 in complete idleness — the world gives them 
 carte blanche, with the result that at an 
 early age they are sated with all the ordin- 
 ary pleasures of human beings. And at 
 the same time they have big, healthy bodies, 
 and they crave excitement. 
 
 It would be interesting to compile a 
 list of some of the things they have done. 
 Of course, a great many simply follow in 
 the footsteps of their fathers, and become 
 commercial buccaneers; some devote them- 
 selves to automobiles and race-horses, some 
 to society and gossip, some to mere brutal 
 dissipation — such as the scions of the now 
 extinct line of Pullman, who used to smash 
 up the saloons of Chicago, and now and 
 then amuse themselves by hurling brick- 
 bats through the windows of their father's 
 home. Now and then there is one who 
 goes in for big game, or for monkey-dinners, 
 or for Sunday-schools, or for Socialism, or 
 for flying-machines; and there was one who 
 went in for newspapers! 
 
 His father was reluctant to humour the 
 whim — he thought that a million-dollar 
 racing-stable would cost less in the end than 
 a forty-thousand dollar newspaper: which 
 of course put the young man upon his 
 mettle — made him set out to make the 
 
202 The Industrial Republic 
 
 paper pay, and "show the old man." To 
 make it pay he had to get circulation ; and to 
 get circulation he had to get something new 
 — there was no use doing things like the 
 old newspapers, which were not paying, 
 but had to be funded by the political powers 
 which used them. So once more you see 
 capital, as I have pictured it — "like a wild 
 beast in a cage, pacing about, watching 
 for an opening here and there." 
 
 And where is the opening? Why, the 
 people! The people, whom the merciless 
 machinery of exploitation beats down and 
 tramples upon, and pushes out of the way 
 and forgets. They are brutalised and ignor- 
 ant, they are stupid with toil — but yet they 
 are human beings, they crave life. They 
 never read newspapers — but give them 
 what they want, and they will learn to read. 
 Give them big head-lines, and a shock on 
 every page ; give them royalty and " high life," 
 scandal and spice, battle, murder and sudden 
 death— and then they will buy your paper. 
 
 It was good fun for Mr. Hearst to do this. 
 Watching his newspapers, what has struck 
 me most is the sheer audacity of them. 
 Audacity is his characteristic quality, and 
 it is a characteristic American quality — it 
 places him among our national treasures, 
 along with Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum, 
 and Buffalo Bill, and the Mississippi steam- 
 boats with the "nigger on the safety-valve." 
 
The Revolution 203 
 
 I am told by friends of Mr. Hearst that 
 his instinct from the start was for democracy. 
 If so, so much the better; but it is not 
 necessary to my hypothesis. A newspaper 
 has to have editorial opinions; and they 
 had best be opinions that please its readers. 
 If we are to publish a paper for the masses 
 to read, we must also voice the hopes and 
 the longings of the masses. 
 
 So Mr. Hearst turned traitor to his class. 
 He seems to have done this instinctively, 
 and without pangs. I find, what is very 
 singular and striking, that the members 
 of his own class hate him, not only publicly, 
 but personally. It seems to have pleased 
 him to defy all their conventions. I was 
 told, for example, that when he first came 
 to New York, he made himself a scandal in 
 the "Tenderloin." I was perplexed about 
 that, for the members of our "second gen- 
 eration" are generally well known in the 
 Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. 
 But one young society man who had known 
 Hearst well gave me the reason — and he 
 spoke with real gravity: "It wasn't what he 
 did — we all do it: but it was the way he 
 did . He didn't take the trouble to 
 hide what he did." 
 
 I have made clear in this book my belief 
 that the masses are driven to revolt by the 
 pressure of stern and ruthless economic 
 force. They were ignorant and helpless, 
 
204 The Industrial Republic 
 
 and among our men of wealth and power 
 there was no one to help them — there was 
 no one among all our intellectual leaders to 
 voice their wrongs. They were left to 
 help themselves — so what more natural 
 than that it should occur to some enter- 
 prising young millionaire to leap into the 
 breach ? There was endless excitement and 
 notoriety to be won — and at the end, per- 
 haps, power of a new and quite incredible 
 sort. 
 
 You will observe that I am taking, de- 
 liberately, the lowest possible view. I am 
 dealing with material conditions and pict- 
 uring a material remedy for them. My 
 point is, that whatever he may be personally, 
 Mr. Hearst is mortgaged, body and soul, 
 to the course to which he has given himself; 
 not only his public reputation, but his entire 
 fortune, is in his newspapers, and the public 
 is the master of his newspapers. He has 
 conjured a storm which he cannot possibly 
 control — he must play out to the end the 
 part he has chosen. 
 
 It is very curious to observe how his role 
 has taken hold of him and changed him. I 
 am told that when he first came to New 
 York he wore checked trousers and fancy 
 ties; and now he wears the traditional soft 
 hat and frock coat of our statesmen. And 
 also, I think, the role has changed his char- 
 acter. For this struggle is a real one, it is 
 
The Revolution 205 
 
 a struggle of the people for hfe; the cause 
 is a cause of truth and justice, and the man 
 does not Uve who can do battle for it as 
 Mr. Hearst has done, and not come to take 
 fire with the passion of it. The man does 
 not live who can make the enemies Mr. 
 Hearst has made, and not take a real and 
 vital interest in the task of bringing them 
 to their knees. I believe that Mr. Hearst 
 is to-day as sincere a man as we have in 
 political life. 
 
 It may be, of course, that some one else 
 will get the Democratic nomination in 1912; 
 that matters not at all in my thesis — the one 
 thing certain is that it will be some man who 
 stands pledged to put an end to class-govern- 
 ment. Following it there will be a campaign 
 of an intensity of fury such as this country 
 has never before witnessed in its history. 
 
 Let us outline in a few words the situation 
 as it will then exist. 
 
 In the first place there will be two or 
 three million — perhaps five or ten million — 
 men out of work. They will have been out 
 for a year or two, and have had plenty of 
 time to work up excitement. They may 
 have forced Congress to provide them some 
 temporary employment — which will, of 
 course, be the first taste of blood to the 
 tiger. They will certainly have been wag- 
 ing strikes of a violence never before known 
 
2o6 The Industrial Republic 
 
 — they will have been shot down in great 
 numbers, and they may have done a great 
 deal of burning and dynamiting. That 
 some particularly conspicuous individual 
 like Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Baer may have 
 been assassinated, seems more than likely; 
 that a "Coxey's Army" of much larger 
 size will have marched on Washington, 
 seems quite certain. 
 
 When I was in Chicago, just after the 
 last " Beef Strike," I met half a dozen labour 
 leaders who told me an interesting story. 
 Chicago has the most thoroughly revolu- 
 tionary working class of any city in the 
 country, and towards the end of this strike 
 they were deeply stirred, and there had been 
 several conferences in which a complete 
 program had been laid out for an "anti- 
 rent strike." On a certain day, all the 
 working people of Chicago were to refuse 
 to pay rent until the meat-packers gave in. 
 The project was nipped by the settlement 
 of the strike, but it only waits a new occasion 
 to be put into effect. By the time which 
 we are picturing here, it will quite certainly 
 have spread east and west to the two oceans, 
 so that not half our city population will be 
 paying any rent for their homes at this time. 
 
 And also, of course, there will have been 
 processions in the streets, and unemployed 
 demonstrations every day. There will be 
 a Socialist meeting round every corner — 
 
^*fc*t^^^-.. ],, 
 
 Cr'fyrisht.iSgj. Les/ie's IVeekly 
 
 IWTOI^ 
 
 CiipyrLgkt lbi).j., LiSiie's H'eeK/y 
 
 COXEY'S ARMY ON THE MARCH AND IN WASHINGTON 
 
The Revolution 207 
 
 all through this period of stress, you are to 
 picture the Socialists working like bees at 
 swarming time. That is the function of 
 the Socialist party all through this crisis, 
 to stir up and organise the proletariat, to 
 make certain that in the crisis the people 
 are not ignorant of the way. They will 
 be heading the hunger-parades, carrying 
 the banners and making the speeches, cir- 
 culating tracts and five-million-copy editions 
 of the "Appeal to Reason." They will 
 be polling unheard of votes — in one or two 
 cities they will be carrying the elections, 
 and Socialist mayors will be confiscating 
 street-railroads, and clapping obstructive 
 judges into jail. The Socialist party is a 
 party of agitation rather than adminis- 
 tration; but it is of vital importance that 
 it should everywhere exist, as a party of 
 the last resort, a club held over Society. 
 Everywhere the cry will be: Do this, and 
 do that, or the Socialists will carry the 
 country. 
 
 So will be ushered in the election cam- 
 paign and the death-grapple. You will 
 try to beat the people back, as you have 
 done before — but you will not succeed 
 this time. Before this, the people were 
 ignorant — but now they will know. They 
 will have had the whole of the festering 
 ulcer of commercialism laid open before 
 their eyes. You will not be able to blame 
 
2o8 The Industrial Republic 
 
 it on the labour unions, nor on the Rate 
 Bill, nor on Roosevelt, nor on the Negro, 
 nor on the Esquimau. You will not be 
 able to awe the people with any great names, 
 nor to fool them with respectability. They 
 will have been taught to regard the leaders 
 of our business affairs as convicted and 
 unpunished criminals; and if you were to 
 propose such a thing as a "business man's 
 parade," you would be greeted with a 
 scream of fury. 
 
 You will be utterly terrified at the state 
 of affairs. Credit will be failing, and the 
 business of the country will be holding its 
 breath. You will subscribe a campaign 
 fund of ten — fifteen— twenty millions of 
 dollars — but there will be Mr. Hearst with 
 his extras in a dozen cities, and his twenty 
 million free copies a day, and he will tell 
 how much you are raising and a whole lot 
 more. So there will be committees of 
 safety to guard the ballot — and a few more 
 good campaign cries. There will be fren- 
 zied conferences among our political million- 
 aires, and a week or two before election 
 day Mr. Hearst's opponent — quite probably 
 ex-President Roosevelt — will come out 
 favouring nearly all of his radical proposals, 
 but declaring that they ought not to be 
 carried into effect by a Socialist like Mr. 
 Hearst. Mr. Hearst will reply with his ten 
 thousand and tenth declaration that he is 
 
The Revolution 209 
 
 not a Socialist, and has no sympathy with 
 Sociahsm — a statement which the Social- 
 ists, who will not understand in the least 
 the meaning of events, will cordially sub- 
 stantiate. Mr. Hearst will declare that he 
 stands upon a platform of Americanism, 
 and that he seeks only equal rights for all — 
 and therefore Federal ownership of all 
 criminal monopolies. 
 
 So election day will come, and Mr. 
 Hearst will be elected; and within the next 
 week the business of the country will have 
 fallen into heaps. Banks will have closed, 
 mills will be idle — there will be no freight, 
 and railroads will be failing. The people 
 of New York will be reminded that if the 
 railroads stop the city will starve to death 
 in a couple of weeks; and so, perhaps even 
 before Mr. Hearst takes office, government 
 ownership of the railroads will be realised. 
 
 How will it be accomplished ? It is a 
 charmingly simple process — I could do 
 it all myself. Have you ever heard the 
 inside story of how the last coal strike was 
 settled ? The operators were standing upon 
 their rights as the persons to whom God 
 in His infinite wisdom had entrusted the 
 care of the property interests of the country; 
 and all winter long the people had been 
 lacking coal. Then suddenly President 
 Roosevelt, who is a master of the art of 
 feeling the public pulse, made the discovery 
 
2IO The Industrial Republic 
 
 that government ownership of coal mines 
 was about to crystallise into an issue of 
 practical politics. So he sent Secretary 
 Root to see Morgan, and tell him that the 
 coal operators must give in. Morgan saw 
 the operators, and they insisted upon their 
 rights, and so Root went back to Washing- 
 ton, and came again to say that, as Mr. 
 Morgan well knew, the coal roads were 
 doing business in flat violation of the law; 
 and that unless within twenty-four hours 
 they gave their consent to the appointment 
 by the President of a board of arbitration, 
 the whole power of the United States 
 Attorney General's ofiice would be turned 
 upon an investigation of their business 
 methods. And so the strike was settled 
 in a day. 
 
 And in very similar ways will the future 
 problems be settled. There will be similar 
 conferences; and then some fine day a 
 duly-accredited commissioner from the 
 President will travel, say to Philadelphia, 
 and enter the offices of the Pennsylvania 
 Railroad, arch -corrupter of the great Key- 
 stone state. The directors of the company 
 will receive him with bows and smiles, and 
 will spread their books before him and his 
 staff, and place themselves and their office 
 at his disposal. He will hear a brief account 
 of the situation, and will then give his orders 
 to the president and other officials of the 
 
The Revolution 211 
 
 road: to the effect that schedules are to 
 be continued as previously; that all sal- 
 aries will remain unaltered until further 
 notice; and that passenger and freight rates 
 are to be dropped to a point where net 
 profits will be wiped out. Then he will 
 shake hands with the directors and thank 
 them for their services in building up the 
 road, adding that their services are now 
 at an end. And that, for all practical pur- 
 poses, will be the application of Socialism 
 to the Pennsylvania Railroad. 
 
 But, you say, by my hypothesis the road 
 could not run; how will it be able to run 
 now ? The reason it couldn't run before 
 was that there were no profits; but now 
 it will not be run for profits, but for service, 
 like the Post Office. To help it over its 
 momentary embarrassment, of course, the 
 credit of the government may be needed: 
 but even that is not likely. For exactly the 
 same thing which happens to the Penn- 
 sylvania Railroad will be happening to 
 the Steel Trust and the Oil Trust and the 
 Coal Trust and the Beef Trust; and all 
 these industries will be starting into activity, 
 and so there will be plenty of freight. With 
 the captains of each of these trusts there 
 will have been secret Presidential con- 
 ferences, at which these gentlemen will 
 have been told that since they can no longer 
 run their business, they must allow the 
 
212 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Government to take possession and run it — 
 the price to be paid for their stock being 
 a matter for future negotiation, and a 
 matter of no great importance to them in 
 any case, because of the income and in- 
 heritance tax laws just then being rushed 
 through Congress. 
 
 Such will be the Revolution — and the 
 gateway into the Industrial Republic. Pre- 
 cisely as in France we saw that the peasant 
 who was starving because he could not pay 
 his taxes, began to till the land and grow 
 rich without any taxes, so in the midst 
 of universal destitution, it will suddenly 
 be discovered that the farmer who could 
 not sell his grain, and therefore had no hat 
 to wear, may now exchange his grain with 
 the operative in the hat factory who had 
 produced so many hats for his master that 
 he was himself out of a job, and could not 
 get any bread. And all the cotton mills 
 which were shut because we could no 
 longer sell shirts to the Chinamen, will now 
 start merrily to work making shirts for all 
 the shirtless wretches the length and breadth 
 of America. And the shoe operatives of 
 Massachusetts, who were making shoes 
 for the Filipinos, which the poor Filipinos 
 had to be forced at the point of the bayonet 
 to buy, will begin making shoes for their 
 own children, and for the unhappy people 
 of the tenements who were before gomg 
 
The Revolution 213 
 
 barefooted. And the Steel Trust will sud- 
 denly leap into action, because those misery- 
 smitten four hundred thousand families 
 in the "dark rooms" of the New York City 
 tenements will now earn money to build 
 themselves decent habitations. And the 
 tens of thousands of little boys and girls 
 who are now being ground up in the glass- 
 factories of New Jersey and the cotton- 
 mills of Georgia and the coal-mines of 
 Pennsylvania, will come out into the sun- 
 hght and play, while their parents are build- 
 ing schools to which they can be sent. 
 And the young girl who stands shuddering 
 on the brink of prostitution, working ten 
 hours a day in an East Side sweat-shop 
 for a wage of forty cents a week, will receive 
 the full value of her product, and be able 
 to maintain herself by two hours of work a 
 day. 
 
 I know what is the attitude of the medical 
 profession towards a "cure-all"; and yet 
 it is but the sober truth that for nearly every 
 evil that troubles our age there is one 
 remedy and only one — the democratisation 
 of our industry. If you were to take a 
 growing boy and rivet an iron band about 
 his chest, there would come sooner or later 
 a time when the boy would show symptoms 
 of distress — and for every symptom there 
 would be but one remedy. Is the boy 
 cross and complaining.'' Break the band! 
 
214 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Is he pale and sickly? Break the band! 
 Does he gasp and cry out ? Break the band ! 
 Do you not know that in the monarchy of 
 France, in the year 1780, a man who set 
 out to find a remedy for this or that evil 
 of the hour would have found but one 
 remedy for all of them — the overthrowing 
 of the aristocracy ? And similarly all the 
 diseases of this period, which are the des- 
 pair of the moralist and the patriot, are 
 consequences of the fact that our society 
 is gasping in a last desperate agony of 
 effort to maintain its system of competitive 
 industry. We are like a man running on 
 a railroad track pursued by a train. The 
 train is increasing its speed, and do what he 
 will, it gains upon him; he cries out, he 
 gasps for breath, he is agonised, wild with 
 terror, making his last leap with the engine 
 at his very heels — and then suddenly it 
 occurs to him to leap to one side, and so 
 the train flashes by, and he sits down and 
 mops his brow and thinks how very stupid 
 it was of him! 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC 
 
 AND now let us imagine that society has 
 abohshed exploitation and the com- 
 petitive wage-system, and got its breath 
 and found leisure to examine itself under 
 the new regime. How will it find things 
 proceeding ? 
 
 One of the first objections that you will 
 run up against, if ever you start out to 
 agitate Socialism, is your lack of definite- 
 ness. Give us your program, people will 
 say — we want to know what sort of a world 
 you expect to make, and how you are going 
 to make it. And they will grow angry 
 when they find that you have not a cut-and- 
 dried scheme of society in your pocket — that 
 you have stirred them up all to no purpose. 
 And yet that is just what you have to go on 
 doing. There used to be Utopian Social- 
 ists — Plato was the first of them and Bel- 
 lamy was the last — who knew the coming 
 world from its presidents to its chimney- 
 sweeps; who could tell you the very colour 
 of its postage-st^ftups. But nowadays all 
 Socialists are scientific. They say that 
 social changes are the product of the inter- 
 
 215 
 
2i6 The Industrial Republic 
 
 action of innumerable forces, and cannot 
 be definitely foretold; they say that the 
 new organism will be the result of the striv- 
 ings of millions of men, acted upon by various 
 motives, ideals, prejudices and fears. And 
 so they call themselves no longer builders of 
 systems, but preachers of righteousness; 
 their answer to objectors is that I once 
 heard given by Hanford, recent candidate 
 for vice-president on the Socialist ticket, 
 to a lawyer with whom he was debating: 
 "Do you ask for a map of Heaven before 
 you join the Church?" 
 
 This much we may say, however. The 
 Industrial Republic will be an industrial 
 government of the people, by the people, 
 for the people. Exactly as political sov- 
 ereignty is the property of the community, 
 so will it be with industrial sovereignty — 
 that is, capital. It will be administered 
 by elected officials and its equal benefits 
 will be the elemental right of every citizen. 
 The officials may be our presidents and 
 governors and legislatures, or they may be 
 an entirely separate governing body, cor- 
 responding to our present directors and 
 presidents of corporations. In countries 
 where the revolution is one of violence they 
 will probably be trade-union committees. 
 The governing power may be chosen 
 separately in each trade and industry, by 
 those who work in it, just as the officials of 
 
The Industrial Republic 217 
 
 a party are now chosen by those who vote 
 in it; or they may be appointed, as our 
 postmasters and colonial governors are 
 appointed, by some central authority, per- 
 haps by the President. All of these thmgs 
 are for the collective wisdom of the country 
 to decide when the time comes; meanwhile 
 it is only safe to say that there will be as 
 little change as possible in the business 
 methods of the country— and so little that 
 the man who should come back and look 
 at it from the outside, would not even know 
 that any change had taken place. I have 
 heard a distinguished Republican orator, 
 poking fun at Socialism in a public address, 
 picture women disputing in the public 
 warehouses as to whether each had had her 
 fair share of shoes and fish. In the In- 
 dustrial Republic the workingman will go 
 to the factory, will work under the direction 
 of his superior officer, and will receive his 
 wages at the end of the week in exactly the 
 same way as to-day. He will spend his 
 money exactly as he spends it to-day — he 
 will go to a store, and if he gets a pair of 
 shoes he will pay for them. The farmer 
 will till his land exactly as he does to-day, 
 and when he takes his grain to market he will 
 be paid for it in money, and will put it in 
 the bank and will draw a check upon it to 
 pay for the suit of clothes he has ordered 
 by express. The only difference in all 
 
2i8 The Industrial Republic 
 
 these various operations will be that the 
 factories will be public property, and the 
 wages the full value of the product, with no 
 deductions for dividends on stock; and that 
 the street cars, the banks and the stores 
 will be public utilities, managed exactly as 
 our post-office is managed, charging what 
 the service costs, and making no profits. 
 In the year 1901 the U. S. Steel Corporation 
 paid one hundred and twenty-five million 
 dollars and employed one hundred and 
 twenty -five thousand men; under Socialism 
 the wages of each employee of the U. S. 
 Steel Corporation would therefore be in- 
 creased one thousand dollars a year, which 
 is two or three hundred per cent. In the 
 same way, the wages of an employee of the 
 Standard Oil Company would be increased 
 four thousand dollars, which is from eight 
 to ten hundred per cent. The fare upon 
 the government-owned street railroads in 
 the City of Berlin is two and a half cents, 
 which would mean that our workingman's 
 car-fare bill would be cut by fifty per cent. 
 The toll of the government-owned telephone 
 of Sweden is three cents, which would mean 
 that the workingman's telephone bill would 
 be cut seventy per cent. The elimination 
 of the speculator and the higher piracy of 
 Wall Street would raise the price of the 
 farmer's grain by fifty per cent. ; the elimin- 
 ation of the millers' trust and the railroad 
 
The Industrial Republic 219 
 
 trust would lower the price of bread by an 
 equal sum. The elimination of the tariff 
 on wool, of the sweater and the jobber, the 
 department store and the express trust, 
 would probably lower the price of the far- 
 mer's suit of clothes sixty per cent; the 
 elimination of the sweatshop and the slum 
 might raise it to its original level, while 
 decreasing the farmer's doctor's bills 
 correspondingly. Of course I do not mean 
 to say that the gains from the abolition of 
 exploitation will be distributed in exactly the 
 ratios outlined above. They will be distri- 
 buted so as to equalise the rewards of labour. 
 The point is that there will be a saving at 
 every point — because at every point there is 
 exploitation. 
 
 I have sketched in "The Jungle" 
 (Chapter 36) a few of the social savmgs 
 incidental to the abolition of competition. 
 The reader who cares for a thorough and 
 scientific study of the subject is referred to 
 a recently published book, "The Cost of 
 Competition," by Sidney A. Reeve. I had 
 never heard of Professor Reeve until his 
 publishers sent me his book. They say 
 that he worked on it for seven years; and 
 when I read it I counted myself that many 
 years to the good, for I had meant to try to 
 do the task myself. Professor Reeve has done 
 it in a way which leaves not a word to be 
 said. It is a marvellous analysis of the 
 
220 The Industrial Republic 
 
 whole of our present productive system; 
 and best of all, it is free from the jargon of 
 the schools — it is the work of a man who 
 has kept in touch with actual life, and has 
 moral feeling as well as scientific training. 
 Professor Reeve analyses, not merely the 
 "economic costs" of competition, but also 
 the "ethical costs," which after all are the 
 most important. The difference to the 
 workingman will be, not merely that his 
 wages will be several times as great, but that 
 he himself will no longer be a wage slave, 
 obliged to serve another man for his bread, 
 to cringe and grovel for a a job, to toil all 
 day for another man's profit, and save up 
 his little hoard and live in dread of the next 
 wage reduction, the next strike, or the next 
 closing down of the factory. He will be 
 a free and independent member of a coop- 
 erative State. He will be delivered from the 
 necessity of getting the better of his neigh- 
 bour, because his neighbour will no longer 
 be able to get the better of him. He will 
 be certain of permanent employment, with- 
 out possibility of loss or failure of payment — 
 certain that so long as he works he will 
 receive just what he produces, that in case of 
 accident or old age he will be maintained, 
 and that in case of death his children will 
 be cared for and brought up to become 
 cooperative partners in the great Industrial 
 Republic. 
 
I o The L I / L fcl: 
 
 THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION 
 The Conf^ressional Library 
 
 
 From " The Cost of Competition" 
 
 THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION 
 
The Industrial Republic 221 
 
 How, you ask, could Socialism guarantee 
 every man permanent employment ? Could 
 there not be overproduction under Socialism ? 
 There could not; the surplus product being 
 the property of the man who had produced 
 it, and not, as now, the property of some 
 other man, in a case of overproduction the 
 workingman would be, not out of work, 
 but on a vacation. As a matter of fact, 
 only a reasonable surplus would be pro- 
 duced, because the workingman would stop 
 when he had produced what he wanted — 
 just as you stop eating when you have 
 satisfied your hunger. 
 
 In the Industrial Republic there will be 
 an administrative officer, a cabinet official 
 with a bureau of clerks, whose task it will 
 be to register the decrees of the law of supply 
 and demand. It is found, let us assume, 
 that the amount of coal needed by the 
 community is represented by the labour of 
 two million men, five days in the week, 
 and six hours a day; the number of shoes 
 is represented by the labour of half a mil- 
 lion men the same time. The wages in 
 each trade are ten dollars a day, and at this 
 rate it is found that two million men go to 
 the shoe factories to work and only half a 
 million to the coal mines. The wages of 
 coal mining are therefore made twelve 
 dollars, and the wages of shoe-making 
 eight dollars; if the balance still does not 
 
422 The Industrial Republic 
 
 adjust itself, it will at the rate of thirteen to 
 seven, or fourteen to six. Every week the 
 government list shows the wages that can 
 be earned in the various trades; stoking in 
 a steamship is a painful and dangerous 
 task — stokers in steamships are receiving 
 twenty dollars a day, and still few takers, 
 so that the steamships have to be fitted with 
 stoking machinery at once. On the other 
 hand, driving a rural-delivery mail-wagon 
 is pleasant work, and is paying at present 
 only five dollars a day, and with prospects 
 of going still lower. And does all this seem 
 fantastic to you ? But it is exactly the way 
 our employment problem is solved to-day, 
 when it is solved at all ; it is solved by means 
 of "Help Wanted" advertisements and 
 viva voce rumours— imperfectly, blindly and 
 sluggishly, instead of instantly, intelligently 
 and consciously by a universal government 
 information bureau. Out in the country 
 where I lived two years ago the farmers were 
 unable to get help for love or money, while 
 millions were out of work and starving in 
 the cities; and that is only one of the thou- 
 sands of illustrations one could give of 
 "how much depends, when two men go 
 out to catch a horse, upon whether they 
 devote their time to catching him, or to 
 preventing each other from catching him." 
 The Independent recently published an 
 article entitled "Poverty: Its Cause and 
 
The Industrial Republic 223 
 
 Cure," by Mr. James Mackaye, a Harvard 
 graduate and technological chemist; in the 
 course of its editorial comment the paper 
 hailed his plan for the abolition of poverty 
 as "nothing less than a very great inven- 
 tion." "It adds something that was lack- 
 ing in the older schemes of Socialism," the 
 Independent continued, "but absolutely 
 necessary to any Socialism that would be 
 practically workable." This "something" 
 is a device to increase the salaries of man- 
 agers of the various industrial departments 
 in proportion as they reduced the "pro- 
 ducing time" of the commodity for which 
 they were responsible. Mr. Mackaye is 
 another student who, like Professor Reeve 
 and Professor Veblen, have come into 
 Socialism by their own routes. In his 
 elaborate book, "The Economy of Happi- 
 ness," he shows so thorough a grasp of the 
 whole subject that I cannot suppose him 
 to share in the ignorance of the literature 
 of modern proletarian Socialism, which 
 leads the Independent to hail his plan as 
 a "great invention." As a matter of fact, 
 I could name a score of Socialist books and 
 pamphlets in which such plans are sug- 
 gested and discussed. I personally have 
 always rejected them as unsound in 
 theory and unnecessary in practice. I 
 have already suggested the likelihood of 
 a continuance of present official salaries 
 
224 The Industrial Republic 
 
 after the revolution; but there will be a 
 strong tendency to reduce these, and I can 
 see no ultimate result except equality of 
 compensation by the State. I can see no 
 theoretical basis for the State's paying to 
 any employee more than it pays to another 
 in the same industry — hand-labour being 
 equally as necessary to the production of 
 wealth as is superintendence. To my mind, 
 the only necessary stimulus to efficiency is 
 the community of interest of all the workers. 
 The incentive to the manager is emulation, 
 and the higher range of activity which goes 
 with a position of command; and I should 
 be very jealous of the introduction of any 
 pecuniary motive into the struggle for 
 promotion — as likely to continue the old 
 evils of graft and favouritism to which we 
 are now subject. I do not think that, 
 when you have so organised industry that 
 every man is working for himself, you will 
 find it necessary to employ any outside 
 force to impel him to work; and in fact I 
 should consider it a violation of the rights 
 of the worker to attempt anything of the 
 sort. Of course if the workers themselves 
 chose to offer a bonus to a manager to 
 invent new methods, that would be another 
 matter; but that would come under the 
 head of intellectual production, which I shall 
 consider later on. 
 
 In discussing the question of salaries, 
 
The Industrial Republic 225 
 
 it is to be pointed out what a vast difference 
 will be made in the amount of money which 
 every individual needs, by the socialisation 
 of all the leading industries. In the In- 
 dustrial Republic a thousand dollars a 
 year will buy more comfort and happiness 
 than ten thousand in the world as at present 
 organised. There will come, at the very 
 outset, the great economic savings al- 
 ready outlined; and then, the whole power 
 of the cooperative mind of man being 
 applied to the elimination of waste and the 
 making of beauty and joy, we shall have 
 in a very short time a world in which few 
 men will care to cumber themselves with 
 possessions of any sort excepting the clothes 
 upon their backs and the few tools of their 
 intellectual trades,— books, music, etc. The 
 abolition of privilege and class-exploitation 
 will of course wipe out at a stroke all that 
 competition in ostentation which Professor 
 Veblen has enti titled "conspicuous con- 
 sumption of goods." In the Industrial 
 Republic there will be no luxury, for there 
 will be no slavery. There will be no menial 
 service of any sort under Socialism. I 
 believe that this gives one a key by which 
 he can do a great deal of predicting as to 
 what will be found in the world when the 
 impending revolution has taken place. In 
 the Industrial Republic no man will work 
 for another man — except for love — because 
 
226 The Industrial Republic 
 
 no other man will be able to pay the "pre- 
 vailing rate of wages." 
 
 It is the vision of this that makes the 
 critics of Socialism cry out that it will 
 destroy the home. What they mean is 
 that it will destroy that kind of a home which 
 exists upon a basis of butlers, cooks and 
 kitchen maids, banquets and carriages, 
 jewellery and fine raiment, sweat shops, and 
 slums, prostitution, child-labour, war and 
 crime. Unless I am very much mistaken, 
 those people who now wear diamonds, 
 and decorate their homes with all sorts of 
 objects of "art," would do a great deal less 
 of it if they had to pay for it with their own 
 toil — if they were not able to pay for it with 
 money extracted from the toil of others. 
 I imagine that those who now, in our res- 
 taurants and banquet halls, gorge them- 
 selves upon the contents of earth, sea, and 
 sky, would dine very much more simply — 
 and very much more wholesomely — if they 
 had to wash the dishes. For this reason, 
 I expect that in the Industrial Republic 
 there will be very little of that pseudo-art 
 which ministers to vanity and sensuality. 
 Our houses and clothing will become sim- 
 pler and more dignified, and the artist will 
 turn his thoughts to public works — ^he will 
 decorate the parks and public buildings, 
 the theatres, concert halls and libraries, 
 the great cooperative dining halls and 
 
The Industrial Republic 227 
 
 apartment houses. In the cities and towns 
 of the Industrial Republic there will of 
 course be possibilities of beauty such as we 
 cannot even dream of at present. Now our 
 cities grow haphazard, and are typical of 
 all our blindness, selfishness, and misery. 
 At every turn in them one comes upon new 
 and more painful signs of these things — 
 filthy and horrible slums, blatant and vul- 
 gar advertisements, insolent rich people in 
 carriages, wan and starving children in the 
 gutters. In the Industrial Republic a city 
 will be one thing, and a work of art. It 
 will not be crowded, for the combination 
 of poverty and the railroad trust will not 
 make spreading out impossible. Intelligent, 
 cooperative effort having become the rule, 
 nearly all the things that are now done 
 privately and selfishly will be done socially. 
 Manual work will not be a disgrace, and 
 poverty will not keep any man ignorant, 
 fifthy and repulsive. There will be no 
 classes and no class-feeling. There will 
 be not only public schools and academies — 
 there will be public playgrounds for all 
 children, and clubs and places of recreation 
 for men and women. In the Industrial 
 Republic you will not mind going to such 
 places and letting your children go. You 
 will not be afraid of disease, because there 
 will be pubhc hospitals for all the sick; and 
 you will not be afraid of rowdies, because 
 
228 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the rowdy is a product of the slum, and there 
 will not be any slum. 
 
 At present, we are all engaged in a 
 struggle to beguile as much money out of 
 each other as we can; and the State has 
 nothing to do save to stand by and see fair 
 play — and commonly finds that task too 
 much for it! As a consequence, we find our- 
 selves confronted with an infinite variety of 
 little petty exactions — we have to spend 
 money every time we turn around. Very 
 soon after the Revolution, I fancy, men will 
 begin to realise that these little exactions 
 are more of a nuisance than a saving. For 
 instance, I shall be very much surprised, if, 
 a generation from now, the use of postage- 
 stamps is not abolished. At present, with 
 society wasting so immense a portion of 
 its energy in competitive advertising, every 
 piece of matter which goes into the mail 
 has to be made to pay its way; but once do 
 away with competition, and the only mail 
 is government documents and personal 
 letters — and the time it takes to stamp and 
 cancel them will be many times greater than 
 the cost of carrying the additional number of 
 letters that a free mail service would bring 
 forth. In the same way it will be found not 
 worth while to employ conductors and 
 spotters, and print tickets and transfers; 
 after that we shall ride free on our street- 
 cars, and perhaps ultimately in our govern- 
 
The Industrial Republic 229 
 
 ment railroad trains. Similarly, all our 
 places of recreation and of artistic expression 
 would come to be free; and then some one 
 would realise the waste incidental to our 
 present system of book buying, and we 
 should then have a universal national 
 library, from which at frequent intervals 
 delivery service would bring you any books 
 then in existence. I have just witnessed in 
 New York an exhibition of an invention 
 which will make music as free as air. Bel- 
 lamy was ridiculed for predicting "electric 
 music" in the year 2000; and it is on sale 
 in New York City in the year 1907. By 
 this marvellous machine, the "telharmon- 
 ium," all previously existing musical in- 
 struments are relegated to the junk heap; 
 and all music composed for them becomes 
 out of date. At one leap the art of music 
 is set free from all physical limitations, and 
 the musician is given command of all pos- 
 sible tones, and may play to ten thousand 
 audiences at once. It is worth while point- 
 ing out, that, living under the capitalist 
 system as we are, the inventor had no re- 
 course save to use his machine to make 
 profits, and so the newspapers, which are 
 also in business for profits, left it to make its 
 own way. So it came about that the first 
 public exhibition of an invention which 
 means more to humanity than any dis- 
 covery since the art of printing, received 
 
230 The Industrial Republic 
 
 mention in only one New York paper, and 
 that to the extent of three or four inches. 
 
 But to return to the Revolution, and the 
 first steps which have to be taken. 
 
 There are some industries which anyone 
 can see are all ready for public ownership; 
 and when the people have once found out 
 the way, they will be very impatient with 
 all remaining forms of rent, interest, profit 
 and dividends. Also, the exploiters will 
 soon learn to give way. Just as soon as the 
 proprietors of department stores find that 
 the people seriously intend to open a public 
 store in every city, and to sell goods at cost, 
 they will be glad to sell out for a few cents 
 on the dollar; just as soon as the bankers 
 find out that there is really to be a national 
 bank, charging no interest, arid incapable 
 of failing, they will do the same with their 
 buildings and outfits. To quote a para- 
 graph from "The Jungle" (page 405), 
 "The cooperative Commonwealth is a uni- 
 versal automatic insurance company and 
 savings bank for all its members. Capital 
 being the property of all, injury to it is 
 shared by all and made up by all. The 
 bank is the universal government credit 
 account, the ledger in which every individ- 
 ual's earnings and spendings are balanced. 
 There is also a universal government bul- 
 letin, in which are listed and precisely 
 
The Industrial Republic 231 
 
 described everything which the Common- 
 wealth has for sale. As no one makes any 
 profit by the sale, there is no longer any 
 stimulus to extravagance, and no mis- 
 representation, no cheating, no adulteration 
 or imitation, no bribery, no 'grafting.' " 
 
 There remains only one other great prob- 
 lem to be mentioned — that of agriculture. 
 I think no one will want to interfere with 
 the farmer, any more than with the cobbler, 
 the small storekeeper, the newsman or any 
 other petty business. The farmer will stay 
 on his land, and make money — and study the 
 situation. He will find in the first place 
 that cooperation is a success, and has come 
 to stay. He will find that while he is work- 
 ing with his hands, the rest of society is 
 working with steam and electricity, and 
 leaving him far behind. He will find that he 
 can no longer hire help — that his hired man 
 is employed as a cooperative worker, and 
 receiving several times more than the far- 
 mer himself. He will understand that to 
 get his share of all the good things of the 
 new civilisation, he will have to put his land 
 into the common fund, and work for the 
 commonwealth and not for his own wealth. 
 In this case, of course, all the risks and 
 losses of his trade will be shared by the whole 
 community — the result of a bad crop in 
 Maine being made up by a good crop in 
 California, so that the farmer who works 
 
232 The Industrial Republic 
 
 will be as certain of gain and as free from 
 care as the factory hand. 
 
 And now let us consider the effect of this 
 new system upon certain of the leading 
 features of our civilisation. What, for in- 
 stance, will be the effect of Socialism 
 upon crime .P The man who becomes a 
 criminal at present finds himself in a 
 world where he is compelled to work 
 for some other man's profit, and to 
 have flaunted in his face every hour the 
 wealth which has been exacted from his 
 toil. But now he will find himself in a 
 world from which luxury and pauperism 
 have been banished, and in which coopera- 
 tion and mutual fellowship is the law. He 
 will find that he gets just what he produces, 
 and that he can produce in a day more than 
 he can steal in a month. Don't you think 
 that the criminal may find these powerful 
 motives to become a worker? He may 
 be a degenerate, of course, in which case we 
 shall put him in a hospital; we should do 
 that now, if we did not feel dimly that it 
 would be of no use, because our social sys- 
 tem is making criminals faster than we can 
 pen them up, and makes the life of the 
 majority of the working class so horrible 
 that men have been known to steal on pur- 
 pose to get into jail. 
 
 I have tried in "The Jungle" to give a 
 picture of the process whereby the forces 
 
The Industrial Republic 233 
 
 of commercialism turn honest workingmen 
 into criminals and tramps. There is 
 also another story to which I would 
 refer the reader who cares to have more 
 acquaintance with such conditions — "An Eye 
 for an Eye," by Clarence Darrow. — And 
 also, while we are considering this sub- 
 ject, let us not forget how the change would 
 affect the criminals of the future, the 
 wretched children of the slums and gutters, 
 who will now be cared for by the State, and 
 made into decent citizens in public asylums 
 and hospitals, training schools and play- 
 grounds. 
 
 What will be the effect of Socialism upon 
 prostitution ? Any young girl can go to the 
 public factories or stores, to the cooperative 
 boarding houses and hotels, the schools 
 and nursery playgrounds, and secure em- 
 ployment for the asking, and support her- 
 self by a couple of hours' work a day in 
 decent and attractive surroundings. She 
 will, moreover, be able to marry the man 
 who loves her, because the problem of a 
 living will no longer enter into the question 
 of marriage. She will be able to restrict 
 her family to as many as she and her hus- 
 band care to support, because she will be 
 as intelligent and sensible as the women of 
 our present upper classes. 
 
 The question of the relationship of the 
 system of wage-slavery to the lives of women 
 
234 The Industrial Republic 
 
 is too vast a one to be even outlined here; 
 suffice it to say that the Socialist battle is 
 the battle of woman, even more than it is 
 the battle of the workingman. I cannot 
 do better than to refer the reader to another 
 book in which the whole question of the 
 effects which age-long conditions of economic 
 inferiority has wrought in the minds and 
 bodies of women is discussed in scientific 
 and yet fascinating form — Mrs. Oilman's 
 "Woman and Economics." 
 
 What will be the effect of Socialism upon 
 drunkenness ? Under Socialism the work- 
 ingman will have a decent home, and at- 
 tractive clubs, reading rooms, and places 
 of entertainment of all sorts, with 
 plenty of time to frequent them. He 
 will have steady employment, wholesome 
 food, a pleasant place to work in, and — 
 railroad fares being almost nothing — a trip 
 to the country when he fancies it. His 
 wife will not be an overworked, repulsive 
 drudge, and his children will not be starving 
 brats. When he wants a drink he will go 
 to a public drinking-place and get it; what 
 he gets will be pure, and will be sold him 
 by a man who has no interest in getting him 
 drunk. On the contrary, the attendant 
 may be getting a royalty upon all non- 
 intoxicating drinks he sells, and the drinker 
 will quite certainly be paying a big tax upon 
 all the intoxicating drinks he buys. Do 
 
The Industrial Republic 235 
 
 you not think that all this may have some 
 effect upon the nation's drink bill, which 
 now is doubling itself every decade ? 
 
 Recently I was invited by the Christian 
 Herald to contribute to a symposium upon 
 the question of prohibition. I wrote as 
 follows: "In my opinion the drink evil 
 is primarily an effect, and not a cause; it is 
 a by-product of wage slavery. The 
 working classes are to-day organised as the 
 bond slaves of capital. The conditions 
 under which they live are such as to brutalise 
 and degrade them and drive them to drink. 
 As I have phrased it in "The Jungle," if 
 a man has to live in hell, he would a great 
 deal rather be drunk than sober. The 
 solution of the drink evil waits upon the 
 coming of Socialism. 
 
 "As a part of the capitalist system, you 
 have liquor sold for profit, and the liquor 
 interests are one of the forces which domi- 
 nate the land. Therefore, you are unable 
 to effect any legislation to correct the evil. 
 Liquor is sold in order to make money out 
 of the victim, therefore every inducement and 
 temptation is laid before him. Under 
 Socialism, the only barkeeper would be 
 the community, and the community would 
 have every object in limiting the traffic. 
 The children of the masses would be taken 
 in hand and taught the secret of right living ; 
 and when they grew up they would have 
 
236 The Industrial Republic 
 
 enough to eat and the means of keeping 
 in working condition, and would know 
 other sources of happiness than drunken- 
 ness. At present, attempts to reform the 
 evil are attempts to sweep back the tide. 
 Moreover, it is to be noticed that many of 
 those who are most active in the work are 
 themselves busily engaged in exploiting the 
 working class in their private business, 
 and are therefore directly identified with 
 the cause of the evil they are attempting 
 to combat." 
 
 What will be the effect of Socialism upon 
 war ? The New York Stin recently 
 expressed the opinion that the end of war 
 will come only with the Golden Age. If so, 
 the Golden Age is within sight of all of us. 
 Socialism will abolish war as inevitably, as 
 naturally and serenely, as the sunrise abol- 
 ishes the night. The cause of war is foreign 
 markets; and under Socialism the markets 
 will all be at home. Under Socialism the 
 existence of the workers of the United States, 
 of England, Gerinany, and Japan, will not 
 be dependent upon the ability of their 
 masters to sell their surplus products for 
 profit to Chinamen. Under Socialism an 
 International Congress will take in hand 
 the backward nations, will clean out their 
 sewers and wipe out their plagues and 
 famines, their kings and their capitalists, 
 their ignorance, their superstition and their 
 
The Industrial Republic 237 
 
 wars. It will do these things because they 
 need to be done — it will not do them as a 
 mere pretence to cover greed for gold mines 
 and markets. Outside of mines and mar- 
 kets there is no longer any cause of war, 
 save the old race hatreds which these have 
 begotten ; and race hatreds are not known 
 among Socialists. In their last Inter- 
 national Congress a Russian and a Japanese 
 shook hands upon the platform, while their 
 countrymen were flying at each other's 
 throats in Manchuria. The Socialist move- 
 ment is a world-movement — it has brought 
 under its banners, working shoulder to 
 shoulder, men and women of all religions, 
 races and colours. With their victory, and 
 only with their victory, will the efforts of 
 "Peace Congresses" bear fruit. 
 
 Finally, what will be the effect of Socialism 
 upon the "System".? It is important to 
 distinguish between corruption as a sporadic 
 event, an accident here and there, and 
 corruption as a national institution. In 
 the Industrial Republic a worker might of 
 course bribe his foreman to let him cheat 
 the community; but that would be every 
 man's loss, and there would be every induce- 
 ment to find it out and make it known, and 
 no hindrance whatever to its punishment. 
 At present, however, w^e have corruption 
 organised in town, county, city, state, and 
 nation, with every inducement to keep it 
 
238 The Industrial Republic 
 
 hidden, and almost no possibility of pun- 
 ishing it. Everybody understands that we 
 have corporations, and that the corpora- 
 tions rule us; all that everybody does not 
 yet understand is that the continuance of 
 their rule would mean the ruin of free 
 institutions in America, and ultimately the 
 downfall of civilisation itself. 
 
 I have outlined the economic and political 
 conditions which I believe will prevail in 
 the Industrial Republic; there remains to 
 consider what influences these will exert 
 upon the moral and intellectual life of men. 
 
 When people criticise the Socialist pro- 
 gramme they always think about government 
 censors and red tape, and limitations upon 
 free endeavour; and so they say that Social- 
 ism would lead to a reign of tameness and 
 mediocrity. They tell us that under the 
 new regime we should all have to wear the 
 same kind of coat and eat the same kind of 
 pie. They argue that if all the means 
 of production are owned by the Government 
 there will be no way for you to get your own 
 kind of pie; failing to perceive that govern- 
 ment control of the means of production no 
 more implies government control of the 
 product, than government control of the 
 post-office means government control of 
 the contents of your letters. Said a good 
 clergyman friend of mine: "What possible 
 
The Industrial Republic 239 
 
 place, for instance, would there be for me 
 in your Socialist society." And I answered, 
 "There would be just exactly the same place 
 for you that there is at present. How is it 
 that you get your living and your freedom ? 
 You are maintained by an association of 
 people who want the work you can do. 
 Every clergyman in the country is main- 
 tained in that way — and so are thousands 
 upon thousands of editors, authors, artists, 
 actors — so are all our clubs, societies, 
 restaurants, theatres and orchestras. The 
 Government has absolutely nothing to do 
 with them at present — and the Government 
 need have absolutely nothing to do with 
 them under Socialism. The people who 
 want them subscribe and pay for them. 
 Under our present system they pay the cost 
 to private profit-seekers; under Socialism 
 they would pay the State." 
 
 In the Industrial Republic a man will be 
 able to order anything he wishes, from a 
 flying machine to a seven-legged spider 
 made of diamonds; and the only question 
 that anyone will ever dream of asking him 
 will be: "Have you got the money to pay 
 for it.?" There remains only to add that, 
 the system of wealth-distribution being 
 now one of justice, that question will mean : 
 "Have you performed for society the equiv- 
 alent of the labour-time of the article you 
 desire society to furnish you .''" 
 
240 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Nine-tenths of the argument against 
 Socialism dissolves into mist the moment 
 one states that single all-important fact, 
 that Socialism is a science of economics. 
 For instance, Mr. Bryan has recently pub- 
 lished in the Century Magazine an article 
 entitled "Individualism versus Socialism;" 
 and here is the way he conti'asts the two: 
 "The individualist believes that competition 
 is not only a helpful but a necessary force in 
 society, to be guarded and protected; the 
 Socialist regards competition as a hurtful 
 force, to be entirely exterminated." Now 
 there are endless varieties of competition 
 with which Socialism could in no conceivable 
 way interfere: the competition of love, and 
 of friendship; the competition of political 
 life; the competition of ideals, of music 
 and books, of philosophy and science. It 
 is the claim of the Socialists that by setting 
 men free from the money-greed and the 
 money-terror — ^from the need of struggling to 
 deprive other men of the necessities of life 
 in order to prevent them from depriving 
 you of these necessities — the mind of the 
 race would be set free for more vigorous 
 competition in these other fields, and thus 
 the development of real individuality would 
 be for the first time made possible. This 
 being the desire of the Socialist, it should be 
 clear how fundamental is the misconception 
 of Mr. Bryan, indicated by the bare title 
 
The Industrial Republic 241 
 
 of his article— " Individualism versus Social- 
 ism." Socialism is not opposed to Individ- 
 ualism, and to set the two in opposition is 
 like the attempt to imagine a fight between 
 an elephant and a whale. 
 
 Socialism is a proposition for an economic 
 re-organisation; as such, the only thing to 
 which it can logically and intelligently be 
 opposed is Capitalism. Mr. Bryan in- 
 dicates that he discerns this, in another 
 portion of his article. He says; "For the 
 purpose of this discussion Individualism 
 will be defined as the private ownership of 
 the means of production and distribution 
 where competition is possible, leaving to 
 public ownership those means of production 
 and distribution in which competition is 
 practically impossible; and Socialism will 
 be defined as the collective ownership, 
 through the State, of all the means of pro- 
 duction and distribution." For general un- 
 fairness this statement makes me think of 
 the story of a man who was riding through 
 the country and stopped to admire a fine 
 pair of turkeys, and after praising them 
 with enthusiasm, remarked to the farmer: 
 "I will match you for them! Heads they 
 are mine, and tails they stay yours." Mr. 
 Bryan has composed a subtly worded defin- 
 ition of Individualism which takes all the 
 kernels from the Socialist ear, and leaves 
 to the Socialist only the husk. "Leaving 
 
242 The Industrial Republic 
 
 to public ownership those means of produc- 
 tion and distribution in which competition 
 is practically impossible!" What a beauti- 
 ful field for controversy, and what endless 
 opportunities for compromise and conces- 
 sion, for advance or retreat! Ten years 
 ago Mr. Bryan would not have appreciated 
 the necessity of inserting this clause; in- 
 dustrial evolution had not proceeded quite 
 so far, and all our radicals were bending 
 their efforts to destroying the trusts. It 
 was only after the last presidential election, 
 unless I am mistaken, that Mr. Bryan 
 definitely committed himself to the public 
 ownership "of those means of production 
 and distribution in which competition is 
 practically impossible." 
 
 If Mr. Bryan would only procure and read 
 a really authoritative treatise upon modern 
 scientific Socialism (say Vandervelde's " Col- 
 lectivism and Industrial Evolution") he 
 would understand that his programme is 
 so close to that of the Socialists that the 
 difference would require a microscope to 
 discern. In fact, I imagine that the major- 
 ity of modern proletarian thinkers would 
 be willing to subscribe to the programme of 
 "Individualism" exactly as Mr. Bryan 
 states it: "the private ownership of the 
 means of production and distribution where 
 competition is possible, leaving to public 
 ownership those means of production and 
 
The Industrial Republic 243 
 
 distribution in which competition is prac- 
 tically impossible." 
 
 The one point to be made absolutely 
 clear in this matter is that the Industrial 
 Republic will be an organisation for the 
 supplying of the material necessities of 
 human life. With the moral and intellec- 
 ual affairs of men it can have very little 
 to do. What Socialism proposes to organise 
 and systematise is industry, not thought. 
 The difference between the products of 
 industry and those of thought is a funda- 
 mental one. The former are strictly limited 
 in quantity, and the latter are infinite. No 
 man can have more than his fair share of 
 the former without depriving his neighbour ; 
 but to a thought there is no such limit — a 
 single poem or symphony may do for a 
 million just as well as for one. With the form- 
 er it is possible for one man to gain control 
 and oppress others; but it is not possible to 
 monopolise thought. And it is in conse- 
 quence of this fact that laws and systems 
 are necessary with the things of the body, 
 which would be preposterous with the 
 things of the mind. The bodily needs of 
 men are pretty much all alike. Men 
 need food, clothing, shelter, light, air, and 
 heat; and they need these of pretty nearly 
 the same quality and in pretty nearly the 
 same quantity — so that they can be fur- 
 nished methodically year in and year out, 
 
244 The Industrial Republic 
 
 according to order. This is being done 
 by our present industrial masters for profit; 
 in the Industrial Republic it will be done 
 by the State, for use. 
 
 Quite otherwise is it with things in which 
 men are not alike — ^their religions and their 
 arts and their sciences. The only con- 
 ditions under which the State can with any 
 justice or efficiency have to do with pro- 
 duction in these fields, is after men have 
 come to agreement — when opinion has given 
 place to knowledge. For instance, we have, 
 in certain fields of science, methods which 
 we can consider as agreed upon; it would 
 be perfectly possible for the State to endow 
 astronomical investigators, and seekers of the 
 North Pole, and inventors of flying machines, 
 and pioneers in all the technical arts. In 
 the same way we come to agree, within 
 certain limits, what is a worth-while play 
 or book; in so far as we agree, we can have 
 government theatres and publishing houses, 
 government newspapers and magazines. If 
 ever science should discover the rationale 
 of the phenomenon of genius, so that we 
 could analyse and judge it with precision, 
 we should then have the whole problem 
 solved. 
 
 You are a writer, perhaps; and you say 
 that you would not relish the idea of bring- 
 ing your book to a government official to 
 be judged. Ask yourself, however, if some 
 
The Industrial Republic 245 
 
 of your prejudice may not be due to your 
 conception of a government official as the 
 representative of a class, and of the interests 
 of a class. In the Industrial Republic 
 there will be no classes, and the officers 
 of the cooperative publishing house will 
 have no one to serve but the people. If 
 they are not satisfactory to the people, the 
 people can get rid of them — something the 
 people cannot do anywhere in the world 
 to-day. You think, perhaps, that you 
 choose your own governors in this country — 
 but you do not. What you do is 
 to go to the polls and choose between two 
 sets of candidates, both of whom have 
 been selected by your economic rulers as 
 being satisfactory to them. 
 
 While I do not profess to be certain, I 
 imagine that an author who wanted his 
 book published by the Government would 
 have to pay the expenses of the publi- 
 cation. This would not be any hardship, 
 for wages in the Industrial Republic 
 could not be less than ten dollars for a 
 day of six hours' work. With the rapid 
 improvement in machinery and methods 
 that would follow, they would probably 
 soon be double that — and of course it 
 would rest with the people who were doing 
 the work to see that it was done in an attrac- 
 tive place, with plenty of fresh air and due 
 safeguards against accidents. Under these 
 
246 The Industrial Republic 
 
 conditions a man of refinement could go 
 to a factory to work for pleasure and exercise, 
 instead of pulling at ropes in a gymnasium, 
 as he commonly does nowadays. And 
 when a young author had earned the cost 
 of making his book, he would have done 
 all that he had to do. He would not have 
 to enter into a race in vulgar advertising 
 with exploiting private concerns; nor 
 would the public form its ideas of his work 
 from criticisms in reviews which were run 
 to secure advertisements, and which gave 
 their space to the books that were ad- 
 vertised the most. Neither would his 
 critics be employed by a class, to maintain 
 the interests of a class, and to keep down 
 the aspirations of some other class. Also, 
 the book-reading public would no longer 
 consist — as our present society so largely 
 consists — of idle and unfeeling rich, and 
 ignorant, debased and hunger-driven poor. 
 
 And then, as I said, there is a second 
 method — the method of the churches and 
 clubs. Out in Chicago there was, four 
 years ago, a man who thought there ought 
 to be more Socialist books published than 
 there were. He had no money; but he 
 drew up a programme for a cooperative 
 publishing house, to furnish Socialist liter- 
 ature at cost to those who wanted it. He 
 got some ten thousand dollars in ten-dollar 
 shares, and since then he has been turning 
 
The Industrial Republic 247 
 
 out half a miUion pieces of Sociahst liter- 
 ature every year. That seems to me a 
 perfect illustration of what would happen 
 in the new society, the second way in which 
 books would be published. Such concerns 
 — free associations, as they are termed in 
 the Socialist vocabulary — would spring up 
 literally by the thousands. They would 
 cover every field that the liberated soul of 
 man might be interested in, they would care 
 for every type of thinker and artist, no 
 matter how eccentric; they would offer 
 encouragement to every man who showed 
 the slightest sign of power in any field. 
 The only reason we do not have many times 
 as many of these associations as we have 
 now, is simply that those people who really 
 care about the higher things of life are 
 almost invariably poor and helpless. 
 
 One of the curious things which I have 
 observed about those who pick flaws in 
 the suggestions of the Socialist, is how 
 seldom it ever occurs to them to apply 
 their own tests to the present system of 
 things. How is it with art and literature 
 production now — are all the conditions 
 quite free from objection ? Is the man of 
 genius always encouraged and protected, 
 and set free to develop his powers .'' 
 
 In the North American Review a couple 
 of years ago there appeared an article by 
 Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, in which she set 
 
24B The Industrial Republic 
 
 forth her opinion that "American literature 
 to-day is the most timid, the most anaemic, 
 the most lacking in individualities, the most 
 bourgeois, that any country has ever 
 known." This seemed to perplex Mrs. 
 Atherton very much — she could not com- 
 prehend why such a very great country 
 should have a "bourgeois" literature. I 
 replied to her in a paper which was pub- 
 lished in Collier's Weekly, in which I 
 maintained that "American literature is 
 the most bourgeois that any country has 
 ever known, simply because American life 
 is the most bourgeois that any country has 
 ever known." I shall quote a few para- 
 graphs from the essay, which began with an 
 attempt to define the word "bourgeois": 
 
 It signifies, in a sentence, that type of 
 civilisation, of law and convention, which 
 was made necessary bythe economic struggle, 
 and which is now maintained by the 
 economic victors for their own comfort and 
 the perpetuation of their power. The 
 bourgeoisie, or middle class, is that class 
 which, all over the world, takes the sceptre 
 of power as it falls from the hands of the 
 political aristocracy; which has the skill 
 and cunning to survive in the free-for-all 
 combat which follows upon the political 
 revolution. Its dominion is based upon 
 wealth; and hence the determining charac- 
 teristic of the bourgeois society is its regard 
 
The Industrial Republic 249 
 
 for wealth. To it, wealth is power, it is 
 the end and goal of things. The aristocrat 
 knew nothing of the possibility of revolu- 
 tion, and so he was bold and gay. The 
 bourgeois does know about the possibility 
 of revolution, and so it is that Mrs. Atherton 
 finds that our literature is "timid." She 
 finds it "ansemic," simply because the 
 bourgeois ideal knows nothing of the spirit, 
 and tolerates intellectual activity only for 
 the ends of commerce and material welfare. 
 She finds also that it "bows before the 
 fetich of the body," and she is much per- 
 plexed by the discovery. She does not 
 seem to understand that the bourgeois 
 represents an achievement of the body, and 
 that all that he knows in the world is body. 
 He is well fed himself, his wife is stout, and 
 his children are fine and vigorous. He 
 lives in a big house, and wears the latest 
 thing in clothes; his civilisation furnishes 
 these to every one — at least to every one who 
 amounts to anything; and beyond that he 
 understands nothing— save only the desire 
 to be entertained. It is for entertainment 
 that he buys books, and as entertainment 
 that he regards them; and hence another 
 characteristic of the bourgeois literature 
 is its lack of seriousness. The bourgeois 
 writer has a certain kind of seriousness, of 
 course — the seriousness of a hungry man 
 seeking his dinner; but the seriousness of 
 
250 The Industrial Republic 
 
 the artist he does not know. He will roar 
 you as gently as any sucking dove, he will 
 also wring tears from your eyes or thrill 
 you with terror, according as the fashion 
 of the hour suggests; but he knows exactly 
 why he does these things, and he can do 
 them between chats at his club. If you 
 expected him to act like his heroes, he 
 would think that you were mad. 
 
 The basis of a bourgeois society is cash 
 payment; it recognises only the accom- 
 plished fact. To be a Milton with a "Para- 
 dise Lost" in your pocket is to be a tramp: 
 to be a great author in the bourgeois literary 
 world is to have sold a hundred thousand 
 copies, and to have sold them within mem- 
 ory — ^that is, a year or two. With the 
 bourgeois, success is success, and there is 
 no going behind the returns; to discrimin- 
 ate between different kinds of success would 
 be to introduce new and dangerous distinc- 
 tions. As Mr. John L. Sullivan once 
 phrased it: "A big man is a big man, it 
 don't matter if he's a prize-fighter or a 
 president." Mr. John L. Sullivan is a big 
 man himself; so is Mr. Frank Munsey, 
 and so was Mr. Henry Romeike, and so 
 was Senator Hanna. So are they all, all 
 honourable men, and when you look up in 
 "Who's Who," you find that they are there. 
 
 The bourgeois ideal is a perfectly definite 
 and concrete one: it has mostly all been 
 
The Industrial Republic 251 
 
 attained — there are only a few small de- 
 tails left to be attended to, such as the 
 cleaning of the streets and the suppressing 
 of the labour unions. Thus there is no call 
 for perplexity, and no use for anything 
 hard to understand. Originality is super- 
 fluous, and eccentricity is anathema. The 
 world is as it always has been, and human 
 nature will always be as it is; the thing to 
 do is to find out what the public likes. The 
 public likes pathos and the homely virtues; 
 and so we give it "Eben Holden" and 
 "David Harum." The public likes high 
 life, and so we give it Richard Harding Davis 
 and Marie Corelli. The public does not 
 like passion; it likes sentiment, however — 
 it even likes heroics, provided they are con- 
 ventionalised, and so to amuse it we turn 
 all history into a sugar-coated romance. 
 The public's strong point is love, and we 
 lay much stress upon the love-element — 
 though with limitations, needless to say. 
 The idea of love as a serious problem among 
 men and women is dismissed, because the 
 social organisation enables us to satisfy 
 our passions with the daughters of the poor. 
 Our own daughters know nothing about 
 passion, and we ourselves know it only as 
 an item in our bank accounts. To the 
 bourgeois young lady — the Gibson girl, as 
 she IS otherwise known — literary love is 
 a sentiment, ranking with a box of bonbons, 
 
252 The Industrial Republic 
 
 and actual love is a class marriage with an 
 artifically restricted progeny. 
 
 These which have been described are 
 the positive and more genial aspects of the 
 bourgeois civilisation; the savage and terri- 
 ble remain to be mentioned. For it must 
 be understood that this civilisation of com- 
 fort and respectability furnishes its good 
 things only to a class, and to an exceedingly 
 small class. The majority of mankind it 
 pens up in filthy hovels and tenements, to 
 feed upon husks and rot in misery. This 
 was once easy, but now it is growing harder 
 — and thus little by little the bourgeoisie is 
 losing its temper. Just now it is like a fat 
 poodle by a stove — ^you think it is asleep 
 and venture to touch it, when quick as a 
 flash it has put its fangs in you to the bone. 
 
 The bourgeois civilisation is, in one 
 word, an organised system of repression. 
 In the physical world it has the police and 
 the militia, the bludgeon, the bullet, and 
 the jail; in the world of ideas it has the 
 political platform, the school, the college, 
 the press, the church — and literature. The 
 bourgeois controls these things precisely 
 as he controls the labour of society, by his 
 control of the purse-strings. Unless proper 
 candidates are named by political parties, 
 there are no campaign funds ; unless proper 
 teachers and college presidents are chosen, 
 there are no endowments. Thus it happens 
 
The Industrial Republic 253 
 
 that our students are taught a political 
 economy carefully divorced, not merely 
 from humanity, but also from science, 
 history, and sense; any other kind of polit- 
 ical economy the student sometimes des- 
 pises — more commonly he does not even 
 know that it exists. And it is just the same 
 with the churches and with theology. We 
 have at present established in this land a 
 religion which exists in the name of the 
 world's greatest revolutionist, the founder 
 of the Socialist movement; this man de- 
 nounced the bourgeois and the bourgeois 
 ideal more vehemently than ever it has since 
 been denounced — declaring in plain words 
 that no bourgeois could get into Heaven; 
 and yet his church is to-day, in all its forms, 
 and in every civilised land, the main pillar 
 of bourgeois society ! 
 
 With the press the bourgeois has a still 
 more direct method than endowment; the 
 press he owns. All the daily newspapers 
 in New York, for instance, are the property 
 of millionaires, and are run by them in 
 their own interests, exactly the same as 
 their stables or their cuisine. That does 
 not mean, of course, that many of their 
 journalistic menials are not sincere — it does 
 not mean that the college presidents and 
 clergymen may not be sincere. One of 
 the quaintest things about the bourgeois 
 editor, the bourgeois college president, the 
 
254 The Industrial Republic 
 
 bourgeois clergyman, is the whole-souled 
 naivete with which he takes it for granted 
 that just as all civilisation exists for the 
 comfort of the bourgeois, so also all truth 
 must necessarily be such as the bourgeois 
 would desire it to be. 
 
 And then there is literature. The bour- 
 geois recognises the novelist and the poet 
 as a means of amusement somewhat above 
 the prostitute, and about on a level with 
 the music-hall artist; he recognises the 
 essayist, the historian, and the publicist as 
 agents of bourgeois repression equally as 
 necessary as the clergyman and the editor. 
 To all of them he grants the good things 
 of the bourgeois life, a bourgeois home with 
 servants who know their places, and a 
 bourgeois club with smiling and obsequious 
 waiters. They may even, on state occasions, 
 become acquainted with the bourgeois mag- 
 nates, and touch the gracious fingers of 
 the magnates' pudgy wives. There is only 
 one condition, so obvious that it hardly 
 needs to be mentioned — ^they must be 
 bourgeois, they must see life from the bour- 
 geois point of view. Beyond that there is 
 not the least restriction; the novelist, for 
 instance, may roam the whole of space and 
 time — there is nothing in life that he may 
 not treat, provided only that he be bour- 
 geois in his treatment. He may show us 
 the olden time, with noble dames and 
 
The Industrial Republic 255 
 
 gallant gentlemen dallying with graceful 
 sentiment. He may entertain us with pic- 
 tures of the modern world, may dazzle us 
 with visions of high society in all its splen- 
 dours, may awe us with the wonders of 
 modern civilisation, of steam and electricity, 
 the flying-machine and the automobile. 
 He may thrill us with battle, murder, and 
 Sherlock Holmes. He may bring tears 
 to our eyes at the thought of the old 
 folks at home, or at his pictures of the 
 honesty, humility, and sobriety of the com- 
 mon man; he may even go to the slums 
 and show us the ways of Mrs. Wiggs, her 
 patient frugality and beautiful contentment 
 in that state of life to which it has pleased 
 God to call her. In any of these fields the 
 author, if he is worth his salt, may be 
 "entertaining" — and so the royalties will 
 come in. If there is any one whom this 
 does not suit — who is so perverse that the 
 bourgeois do not please him, or so obstinate 
 that he will not learn to please the bour- 
 geois — we send after him our literary police- 
 man, the bourgeois reviewer, and bludgeon 
 him into silence; or better yet, we simply 
 leave him alone, and he moves into a garret. 
 The bourgeois garrets resemble the bour- 
 geois excursion steamers. They are never 
 so crowded that there is not room for as 
 many more as want to come on board; and 
 any young author who imagines that he can 
 
256 The Industrial Republic 
 
 bear to starve longer than the world can 
 bear to let him starve, is welcome to try it. 
 Letting things starve is the specialty of the 
 bourgeois society — the vast majority of 
 the creatures in it are starving all the time." 
 So much for things as they are. The 
 Revolution will, of course, not change our 
 present bourgeois people — except that it 
 will scare them thoroughly, and make them 
 teachable. But it will bring to the front 
 an enormous class of people to whom life 
 is a new and wondrous thing; and their 
 children also will grow up in a different 
 world, and with a different ideal; and so 
 a generation from now there will be a new 
 art public. The people who compose it 
 will not have been forced to consider money 
 the only thing in life, the sole test of ex- 
 cellence and power; they will not hav« 
 been brought up on the motto, "Do others 
 or they will do you." They will have been 
 brought up in a world in which no man is 
 able to "do" another man, and in which 
 all men stand as equals as regards money. 
 They will have been brought up in a world 
 in which work and a decent life are the right 
 and duty of every man, and are taken for 
 granted with every man; in which in- 
 fluence, reputation, and command are given 
 for other things than money. If it be true 
 that faith, hope, and charity are greater 
 things than wealth, it is perhaps not al- 
 
The Industrial Republic 257 
 
 together Utopian to suppose that these 
 will be the things that the new public will 
 honour and will contrive to promote. The 
 best way in which one can be sure about 
 this is to study the writers who are shaping 
 the ideals of Socialism — such men as Whit- 
 man and Thoreau, Ruskin and William 
 Morris, Kropotkin and Carpenter and 
 Gorky. Above all I wish that I could be 
 the cause of the reader's looking into one 
 book, in which one of the master-spirits 
 of our time has made an attempt to picture 
 this beautiful world that is to be. When 
 I met Mr. H. G. Wells last year, I had not 
 read any of his books ; so he sent me a copy 
 of his "Modern Utopia," graciously in- 
 scribing it: "To the most hopeful of So- 
 cialists, from the next most hopeful!" 
 Afterward, I was asked by Life to name 
 the book which had given me the most 
 pleasure during the last year, and I named 
 this one. It is, in my opinion, one of the 
 great works of our literature; it is worthy 
 to be placed with the visions of Plato and 
 Sir Thomas More. It has three great 
 virtues which are rarely, if ever, found in 
 combination. In the first place, it is char- 
 acterised by a nobility and loftiness of spirit 
 which makes its reading a religious exer- 
 cise. In the second place, it is the work of 
 an engineer, a man with the modern sense of 
 reality and acquainted with the whole field 
 
258 The Industrial Republic 
 
 of scientific achievement. In the third 
 place, it is written in a a literary style 
 which makes the reading of each paragraph 
 a delight in itself. It is a book; to love 
 and to cherish; one leaves it, refreshed and 
 strengthened, to wait with patience and 
 cheerfulness the hour of the Great Change. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Cooperative Home 
 
 TN ALL that I have outlined concern- 
 -•- ing the Industrial Republic, I have 
 tried to indicate my belief that it will be 
 the creation of no man's will, but a product 
 of evolution — the result of many forces 
 which are now at work in our society. 
 These forces we can study and analyse ; and 
 in picturing their final product, we are not 
 simply indulging in fantastic speculation, 
 but are making scientific deductions. I 
 believe that we have now in our present 
 world the half-developed embryo of every- 
 thing which I have pictured in the future; 
 the Revolution, which comes suddenly, and 
 in the midst of strain and agony, is precisely 
 the parallel of a child-birth. In our present 
 "trusts," for instance, we have perfect 
 examples of the centralising and systematis- 
 ing of production and distribution; abso- 
 lutely the only thing needed to fit them into 
 the world I have pictured is a change of 
 ownership. Again, in the labour unions, 
 we see the building up of the machinery of 
 industrial self-government. And similarly, 
 in our churches and clubs, our benevolent 
 
 S59 
 
26o The Industrial Republic 
 
 and artistic and scientific associations, we 
 have the germs of all the cooperative 
 activities of the future. In our public 
 educational system, we have a complete and 
 perfect piece of practical Socialism, ready 
 to fit into the structure of our Industrial 
 Republic. In our Post Office we have 
 still another, while in the army and navy 
 we have examples of industrial paternalism 
 which need only the breath of a new ideal 
 to make them indispensable for all time. 
 We saw after the San Francisco earthquake 
 the real use of standing armies; and for 
 such purposes they will continue to exist, 
 long after war shall have become a night- 
 mare memory. 
 
 It has occurred to me that in concluding 
 my argument, it might be well to tell of 
 another such seed of the future, in the plant- 
 ing of which I myself have had the pleasure 
 of assisting. I refer to the Helicon Home 
 Colony, at Englewood, New Jersey, where 
 I have been living while writing this book. 
 
 Our industries are organised at present 
 under the competitive system; and I do not 
 believe that any cooperative method of 
 production can drive human beings to the 
 same pitch of effort as they are driven by 
 the lash of wage-slavery. So I consider 
 that any form of cooperation in production 
 is doomed to failure, under present con- 
 ditions; and I should prefer to watch from 
 
The Cooperative Home 261 
 
 the outside any attempt to found "colonies" 
 of the Brook Farm and Ruskin type. The 
 case is quite otherwise, however, when it 
 comes to cooperation in distribution, in the 
 expenditure of one's income. We are famil- 
 iar with hundreds of forms of that sort of 
 association— cooperative stores, benevolent 
 fraternities, social clubs and churches. The 
 practicability of any such enterprise depends 
 upon two questions: First, are there a suffi- 
 cient number of people who want the same 
 thing, and second, can they get it more 
 effectively in combination than otherwise. 
 
 The idea of cooperation in domestic 
 industry has been well worked out in theory 
 — notably in Mrs. Oilman's book "The 
 Home." The first attempt to realise it in 
 practice, so far as I know, is the Helicon 
 Home Colony. 
 
 The plan was broached in an article 
 which I published in The Independent, in 
 June of 1906. In the course of the article, 
 I outlined the situation as follows: 
 
 Here am I on my little farm, living as 
 my ancestors lived — like a cave man or a 
 feudal baron. I have my little castle and 
 my retainers and dependants to attend 
 me, and we practise a hundred different 
 trades: the trade of serving meals, and 
 the trade of cleaning dishes, the trade of 
 washing and ironing clothes, of killing and 
 dressing meat, of churning butter, of bak- 
 
262 The Industrial Republic 
 
 ing bread, of grinding meal, of raising 
 chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving 
 fruit, of heating a house, of decorating 
 rooms, of training children, and of writing 
 books! And all these crowded into one 
 establishment, in close proximity, and all 
 jarring and clashing with each other! And 
 all carried on in the most primitive and 
 barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and 
 by unskilled hand labour. It takes a 
 hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals 
 badly, while twenty cooks could prepare 
 one meal for a hundred families, and do it 
 perfectly. It costs a hundred thousand 
 dollars to build and equip a hundred 
 kitchens; it would cost only five thousand 
 dollars to build one kitchen 1 But, of course, 
 if you have large-scale cooking at present, 
 you can only have it under capitalist 
 auspices; and so it is associated in your 
 minds with uncleanness, and bad service, 
 and high prices. It takes a hundred churns 
 and a hundred aching backs to make a 
 thousand pounds of butter; it would take 
 only one machine and a man to tend it to 
 make the same thousand pounds, and the 
 cost of making it would be cut ninety-five 
 per cent. But of course you cannot have 
 large-scale butter-making except it is done 
 for profit — and that means adulteration 
 and poisoning! It takes a hundred ignor- 
 ant nursemaids to take care of the children 
 
The Cooperative Home 263 
 
 of a hundred famihes, and develop every 
 kind of ugHness and badness in them; it 
 would take only twenty or thirty trained 
 nurses and kindergarten teachers to take 
 care of them cooperatively, and bring them 
 up according to the teachings of science. 
 
 One could show this same thing in a 
 thousand diiferent forms, if it were nec- 
 essary; but it has all been reasoned out 
 in Charlotte Perkins Oilman's book, "The 
 Home," and anyone to whom the idea 
 is new may read it there. The purpose 
 of this paper is not to persuade anyone, 
 but to move to action those already per- 
 suaded. There must be, in and near New 
 York, thousands of men and women of 
 liberal sympathies, who understand this 
 situation clearly, and are handicapped by 
 its miseries in their own lives — authors, 
 artists and musicians, editors and teachers 
 and professional men, who abhor boarding 
 houses and apartment hotels and yet shrink 
 from managing servants, who have lonely 
 and peevish children like my own, and are 
 no fonder of eating poisons or of wasting 
 their time and strength than I am. There 
 must be a few who, like myself, have realised 
 that it is a question of dragging through life 
 a constantly increasing burden of care, or 
 making an intelligent effort and solving 
 the problem once for all. To such I offer 
 my cooperation. I am not a business man, 
 
264 The Industrial Republic 
 
 but circumstances have forced me to take 
 up this problem, and I am not accustomed 
 to failing in what I undertake. I have 
 said that "Socialism is not an experiment 
 in government, but an act of will"; and I 
 say the same of this plan. Having gotten 
 the figures from experts and found out 
 exactly what we can do, the one thing 
 remaining is to go ahead and do it. 
 
 I suppose that the average professional 
 man invests ten thousand dollars in a 
 home (or else pays rent equal to interest 
 upon that sum); and that he pays two 
 thousand dollars a year living expenses for 
 his family. Let a hundred such families com- 
 bine to found a cooperative home, and there 
 would be a million dollars for building and 
 equipment, and two hundred thousand 
 dollars a year for running expenses; I be- 
 lieve that for half the outlay five hundred 
 people could live and enjoy comforts at 
 present possible only to millionaires. I 
 have, however, no intention of asking any- 
 one to risk his money upon such a guess. 
 I write this to find out if there are people 
 disposed to consider the project; and if 
 there are enough, I will have the plan 
 figured upon by architects, contractors, 
 stewards, and other qualified experts, and 
 have prepared a definite business propo- 
 sition, and a plan of organisation for a stock 
 company. 
 
The Cooperative Home 265 
 
 The following embodies my own concep- 
 tion of what such a "home colony" should 
 be. It would be located within an hour of 
 New York, and would have one hundred 
 families, and three or four hundred acres 
 of land, healthfully located, near some body 1 
 of water, and as unspoiled by the hand of / 
 man as possible. It should have an abun- / 
 dant water supply and a filtering plant; an 1 
 electric light and power plant, and a large 
 garden and farm, raising its own stock, 
 meat, poultry, fruit and vegetables, and 
 canning the last for winter use. It should 1 
 be administered by a board of directors, \ 
 democratically elected. For the manage- \ 
 ment of its various departments salaried ex- i 
 
 perts should be employed ; machinery should ! 
 
 be installed wherever it could be made to / 
 pay, and the best modern methods should be 
 applied in every industry. All its purchases 
 should be in bulk and tested for quality; 
 and, so far as the preparation and serving 
 of food is concerned, the processes should 
 be kept as aseptic as a surgical operation. 
 
 We are accustomed to having our build- 
 ings for public purposes endowed by persons 
 with a great deal of money and few ideals; 
 and so we consume much space and material 
 and accomplish little, exactly typifying our 
 civilisation. The buildings of this home 
 colony should be of frame at the outset, of 
 simple and expressive design, each structure 
 
266 The Industrial Republic 
 
 exactly adapted to its specific purpose. The 
 buildings should be conveniently grouped 
 — those for the children in one place, those 
 for cooking and eating in another, those for 
 reading, for music and social intercourse, 
 for recreation and exercise, in still other 
 places. The greater part of the land would 
 of course be given up to farm and woodland, 
 and to the individual dwellings of the 
 families. The ground available for this 
 latter purpose should be divided into lots, 
 priced according to size and location, and 
 leased to stockholders for long terms. Each 
 would erect his own home, according to his 
 own taste — a home, of course, of a kind 
 hitherto unknown, with no provision for 
 the cooking of food, or the training of chil- 
 dren, or other trades and professions. It 
 would be a place where the family met, 
 to rest and play and sleep. It might be 
 large or small, anything that the owner 
 chose to make it — my own would be a 
 four- or five-room cottage, of rustic design, 
 and it would cost from six to eight hundred 
 dollars. Besides these there should be 
 apartment buildings, owned by the colony, 
 and dormitories with rooms for single men 
 and women. 
 
 As to the public buildings, there should 
 be a large and beautiful dining hall, and 
 a modern, scientifically constructed kitchen. 
 There should be separate tables for each 
 
The Cooperative Home 267 
 
 family, or for congenial groups of people. 
 The service should be unexceptionable, 
 the food simple, but perfect in quality 
 and preparation; there should be a vege- 
 tarian service for those who prefer this 
 cheaper mode of life, and the charge for 
 board should be based upon the cost of the 
 service. As to what the cost would be, 
 with a colony raising nearly all its own food 
 upon the premises, I can only submit three 
 experiences of my own: First, it cost me 
 for my family of three to board in New 
 York City, in one room and in the cheapest 
 way, a thousand dollars a year. Second, 
 it cost us, living in a three-room cottage in 
 the country, doing our own work and buying 
 our food from a farmer at wholesale prices, 
 seven hundred dollars a year. Third, it 
 cost us, living upon a sixty-acre farm, which 
 represented a total investment of four thou- 
 sand dollars, doing no work ourselves but 
 the managing, paying a man and woman 
 five hundred and forty dollars a year, 
 having a horse and carriage, and feeding 
 five persons instead of three, a total of less 
 than six hundred dollars a year. Lest this 
 should be unbelievable, I put it in another 
 form — the total expenses of the farm, in- 
 cluding labour, were less than twelve hun- 
 dred dollars, the income was six hundred 
 dollars, and the net loss, or the cost to us of 
 a year's living, was less than six hundred. 
 
268 The Industrial Republic 
 
 And these figures, it should be explained, 
 included not merely board, but also house- 
 hold supplies and repairs of all sorts, items 
 which would appear in other places in the 
 community's accounts. I will probably be 
 laughed at, but I believe that, granting the 
 land, horses and machinery, buildings, equip- 
 ment and capital, the members of such a 
 colony as I describe could be provided with 
 perfect service and an abundance of food 
 of the best quality at a total cost of one 
 hundred dollars a year per person. 
 
 So much for the cooperative preparation 
 of food. And now for the caring for chil- 
 dren. There should be two separate estab- 
 lishments, one for infants, who like to sleep, 
 and one for children, who like to run and 
 shout. Both should be scientifically con- 
 structed and ventilated and kept as clean 
 as an up-to-date hospital; the food should 
 be prepared under the general direction of 
 a physician. No building for children 
 should be over two stories high, and the 
 upper windows should be beyond the reach 
 of children; no matches or exposed fire 
 should be permitted, and there should be 
 a night watchman, fire extinguishers, and an 
 automatic sprinkling apparatus. These es- 
 tablishments should be under the super- 
 vision of a board of women directors; and 
 the actual work of caring for the children, 
 washing, dressing and feeding them, 
 
The Cooperative Home 269 
 
 playing with them and teaching them, should 
 be done by trained nurses and kindergarten 
 teachers who live in the colony as the friends 
 and social equals, of its members. In other 
 words, it is my idea that the caring for chil- 
 dren should be recognised as a profession, 
 and that servants should have nothing to do 
 with it; it is my idea that it should be done 
 in a place built for the purpose, with floors 
 for babies to crawl where there is no dirt 
 for them to eat, with playgrounds for chil- 
 dren where there are no stoves and no boiling 
 water, no staircases and wells, no cats and 
 dogs, no workbaskets, lamps, pianos, sewing 
 machines, jam closets, inkstands, and au- 
 thors' writing tables. Instead, there should 
 be sleeping rooms and bedrooms, and sun 
 
 Earlours for nursing mothers; a separate 
 uilding for the sick; kindergarten rooms 
 and indoor playgrounds for bad weather, 
 and a big all-outdoors romping ground, with 
 sunny places and shady places, swings, 
 rocking horses, sand piles, and all other 
 accessories of a children's heaven. Of 
 course, any mother should come and play 
 with or care for her own children just as 
 much as she pleased, or take them home, 
 as she chose; though I think that no one 
 would care to assist this plan who did 
 not believe that children should be cared 
 for in accordance with the principles of 
 science, and preserved from the corrupting 
 
270 The Industrial Republic 
 
 influence of grandmothers and aunts. Of 
 course, any mother who believed that her 
 work in the world was caring for children, 
 and who wished to care for her own and 
 others, according to the methods of the 
 commonwealth, would be free to do so, 
 and to earn her living by doing it. 
 
 I have already explained that I should 
 not regard this as an experiment in Social- 
 ism; but I do think that those who under- 
 took it would have to be in sympathy with 
 the spirit of Socialism, which is the spirit 
 of brotherhood and democracy. Whenever 
 I have mentioned this plan to friends they 
 have always said: "The great difficulty 
 would be to get together a community of 
 congenial people." It does not seem to me 
 that this would be a difficulty at all. Every 
 member of the community would have his 
 own home, to which he would invite his 
 personal friends as he chose; and the other 
 members of the community he would meet 
 in the same way that he meets acquaintances 
 in business and politics, in theatres, restau- 
 rants, and clubs. I myself am the most 
 unsociable of human beings when I am 
 busy, and have no idea of giving up my 
 hermit's tastes. In a colony of a hundred 
 families there ought to be persons of every 
 kind of inclination, and it would not be 
 in the least necessary for anyone to asso- 
 ciate with those who were not congenial. 
 
The Cooperative Home 271 
 
 Of course there are people in the world whom 
 we should not want near us at all; but such 
 people, I think, would not care to join our 
 colony. Vulgar and snobbish people get 
 along very well in the world as it is, and 
 do not find it a task to give orders to servants. 
 Those who would be interested in such a 
 plan would be men and women who wished 
 to practise "plain living and high thinking"; 
 and they would naturally wish to get as far 
 as possible from every suggestion of osten- 
 tation and conventionality. They would 
 establish the shirt-waist and the short skirt 
 as en regie, and would, I trust, allow me in 
 without a dress suit. They would be all 
 hard-working people themselves, and they 
 would not look down upon honest labour. 
 This spirit, if wisely and earnestly cultivated, 
 would solve the "servant problem" for the 
 colony, and solve the health problem for 
 its members as well. I know business and 
 professional men who, when they need 
 exercise, have to go down into the basement 
 and lift weights and pull at rubber straps; 
 and they envy me my farm, where I can 
 hoe the garden, or pitch hay, or pick fruit, 
 and not merely benefit my body, but also 
 put money in my purse. In this community 
 every member would be credited for the 
 time he worked; and it ought to become the 
 custom for the men to help with the harvests, 
 and the women with the preserving of fruit, 
 
272 The Industrial Republic 
 
 and the children with the berry picking and 
 the weeding of the gardens. I have no 
 doubt that there are thousands of young 
 men and women in New York City, stu- 
 dents of art and music and the professions, 
 who would be glad of a chance to earn their 
 way in a community where class feeling 
 did not make labour degrading. I appre- 
 ciate the difficulties in the way of such a 
 project; the chances at present are against 
 a coal-heaver's being a socially possible 
 person, and I am not insisting that the day 
 labourers should share in the privileges of 
 the community. But I do think that this 
 should certainly be the case with those 
 whom we select to care for and teach our 
 children, and also, if possible, with those 
 whom we permit to prepare and serve our 
 food; if I am not willing to shake a man's 
 hand or sit next to him in a reading-room, 
 I do not see why I should be willing to eat 
 what he has cooked. I personally know 
 a young man who is studying art, and who 
 earns his living by washing dishes in a 
 downtown restaurant, because it takes only 
 two or three hours a day of his time. In 
 Memorial Hall at Harvard University, in 
 the sanitarium at Battle Creek, and in 
 many other places I might name, those who 
 wait upon the tables are college students; 
 and anyone who knows the difference which 
 there is in the atmosphere of such a 
 
The Cooperative Home 273 
 
 dining hall knows what I should wish to 
 attain. 
 
 The above article brought me replies from 
 four or five hundred persons ; and committees 
 were named, which met all through the 
 summer to work out the details of the plan. 
 In October of the same year the purchase 
 of Helicon Hall was made, and the " Colony" 
 began its career. Six months after the 
 publication of my first article, I contributed 
 to The Independent an account of how the 
 experiment was succeeding; I quote from it 
 the following paragraphs : 
 
 We made many mistakes; I shall tell 
 about some of them in due course, for the 
 benefit of future pioneers. But there is 
 one thing to be said here at the start: we 
 made no mistake in believing in democratic 
 institutions. It was a point about which 
 the critics of our plan were all agreed, that 
 it could not possibly work, because people 
 could never decide what they wanted. 
 That dreadful bugaboo called "human 
 nature" would wrecK us in the end. I, for 
 my part, believed that people in America 
 were used to the methods of majority govern- 
 ment, and I believed that if we should apply 
 those same methods in a cooperative home, 
 a group of intelligent and sincere people 
 could manage to solve all their problems. 
 From the beginning our policy was publicity 
 
274 The Industrial Republic 
 
 and democracy; and from the beginning 
 it brought us through. At the committee 
 meetings everyone had his say. And little 
 by little you would see a majority opinion 
 taking shape on the question at issue, until, 
 finally, when all had been heard, the matter 
 was put to a vote. There was no case where 
 the minority did not give way with all 
 courtesy. And now that the colony really 
 exists we sit round the fireside and talk out 
 our questions, and as a rule we do not even 
 have to take a vote — an informal discussion 
 is enough to make clear to everyone what is 
 fair and right. 
 
 I am a believer in the materialistic con- 
 ception of history; I am accustomed to 
 interpret the characters of men from this 
 position — to say that competition has made 
 them selfish and deceitful, and that coopera- 
 tion will make them beautiful and sincere. 
 I think that I can see it working out in this 
 colony. We have founded it upon justice 
 and truth; socially we stand upon terms 
 of equality, and economically we pay for 
 exactly what we get. These are the prin- 
 ciples we have built upon, and all take them 
 for granted, and no other idea ever enters 
 their thought. 
 
 "But will this last?" you ask. I do not 
 see how it can fail to last, and to grow — 
 admitting, of course, that my analysis of 
 the cause is correct. We did not start out 
 
The Cooperative Home 275 
 
 with any enthusiasms and rehgious ecstasies ; 
 we had simply cold common sense; we 
 employed lawyers and business men to put 
 us on a sound basis. Our only real peril 
 was at the beginning, before the colony 
 spirit was well developed in our members, 
 and some of us were tired and overworked; 
 and even then there were no misunder- 
 standings that a little discussion could not 
 clear up. Now things are beginning to 
 run smoothly, and we are realising some of 
 the benefits. 
 
 We are as yet in our infancy, of course; 
 there is no one of the departments in which 
 we do not intend to make numerous im- 
 provements; but we have got over the 
 roughest parts of the road, and we can begin 
 to look about us a little. We are living in 
 what I think is the most beautiful suburban 
 town near New York. We have nine and 
 a half acres of land, sloping down from the 
 western brow of the Palisades, and com- 
 manding a view of thirty miles, and we have 
 only half a mile to walk to come out upon 
 the Hudson, where there is scenery which 
 tourists would travel many miles to look at, 
 if they only knew about it. The hall itself 
 has nearly six thousand square feet of floor 
 space on the ground floor alone, devoted to 
 rooms for social purposes ; there is a central 
 court filled with palms and rubber trees, 
 which have grown to the very top of the 
 
276 The Industrial Republic 
 
 three-story building. We have a large 
 pipe-organ, a swimming pool and bowling 
 alley, a theatre, and a billiard room. We 
 have thirty-five bedrooms, ranged in gal- 
 leries about the court, so that we can look 
 out of our windows in the morning and see 
 the sun rise, and then look out of our door 
 and see the tropics. We have the finest 
 heating system in the world — we pump 
 fresh air in from outside, heat it in a three- 
 thousand-foot steam coil, and then dis- 
 tribute it to all the rooms, with the result 
 that we feel as well all the time as other 
 people feel when they take a trip to Arizona 
 or the Adirondacks. In such a place as 
 this we have a comfortable bedroom or 
 study, where we can go and be by ourselves 
 and never be disturbed, for $3 a week. 
 And downstairs we have a huge fireplace, 
 where, if we happen to feel in a soci- 
 able humour, we can sit and talk with our 
 friends. And also, we have a dining-room, 
 where a group of cultivated people meet 
 three times a day to partake ot wholesome 
 and pleasant-tasting food, prepared by other 
 members of our big family, whose cleanliness 
 and honesty are matters of common knowl- 
 edge to us. This last-named privilege costs 
 us $5 a week, or $4 if we only eat two meals ; 
 and we do not have to add to this price 
 any care or worry, because the price in- 
 cludes the salary of a superintendent and 
 
The Cooperative Home 277 
 
 a manager, who work sixteen hours a day 
 each to straighten out all the kinks and keep 
 the maehine running. 
 
 Finally, this magical building contains 
 a dormitory and a children's dining-room 
 and play-room, where ten happy and healthy 
 children receive their lessons in practical 
 cooperation at a cost of four dollars a week 
 for each child. It was over these "insti- 
 tutionalised infants" of ours that the critics 
 of our plan were most incensed. Several 
 dear ladies who had read my books and 
 conceived a liking for me, sat down and 
 wrote me tearful letters to point out the 
 wickedness of "separating the mother from 
 her children." As a matter of fact, we have 
 five mothers in the colony, and the work of 
 caring for the children is divided among 
 four of them. (The fifth is studying medi- 
 cine in New York.) By the simple process 
 of combining the care of the ten children we 
 accomplish the following results: First, the 
 labour and trouble of caring for each child 
 is reduced about two-thirds; second, the 
 child has playmates, and is happy all day 
 long; third, we can afl^ord to keep the child 
 in a more hygienic place than the average 
 nursery — we have a pump driving fresh air 
 into his play-room all day; and, fourth, we 
 can dispense with the services of nurse 
 maids, and go away, leaving the child in 
 the care of a friend. 
 
278 The Industrial Republic 
 
 Of course we cannot have everything 
 that we should like in the "children's 
 department." We have to wait for more 
 colonists for that. With only ten children 
 we have to dispense with a resident 
 physician ; we cannot even afford a kinder- 
 garten. And, of course, we have not the 
 scientifically constructed dormitory of which 
 we dream; we have only a converted theatre, 
 and instead of the uniform cots and the 
 dustproof walls and all the rest, we have 
 to make apologies to visitors. However, 
 our children are all enjoying it meantime; 
 and our five mothers are holding meetings 
 and learning to cooperate. 
 
 The other big problem which we prom- 
 ised to tackle is the servant problem. All 
 the world is waiting to hear about this, so 
 we are told; even the aristocracy of Engle- 
 wood is waiting; the ladies come in and 
 tell us their troubles and ask if we will feed 
 them in cases of emergency. They were 
 even going to invite me to lecture them 
 about it — until one of them recollected that 
 I was a Socialist "of a particularly dangerous 
 type." 
 
 We have been only a few months at it; 
 and we have still a great deal left to accom- 
 plish. But we think that we have got far 
 enough to claim to have proven our thesis — 
 that by means of cooperation, with the 
 saving which it implies, the introduction of 
 
The Cooperative Home 279 
 
 system and of labour-saving machinery, 
 household labour can be lifted to the rank 
 of a profession, and people found to do it 
 vs^ho can be admitted to the colony as mem- 
 bers. Those who wish to make fun of the 
 idea have assumed this to mean that we 
 insist upon college diplomas from our cooks 
 and chambermaids. It does not mean that 
 at all; as a matter of fact, we prefer to em- 
 ploy people who have always earned their 
 living by doing the work they do for us. It 
 means simply that we look for people who 
 are cleanly and courteous and honest; and 
 that then, when they come into the colony, 
 we treat them, simply and as a matter of 
 course, exactly as we treat everyone else. 
 So far as I know, there is no one here who 
 has experienced the least difficulty or un- 
 pleasantness in consequence. 
 
 There remains to explain the financial 
 organisation of the colony. The property 
 is owned by the Home Colony Company, 
 a separate corporation, which was formed 
 to raise the necessary capital. The com- 
 pany puts the building in thorough repair 
 and equips it for use as a residence, and 
 the colony rents it upon a three-year lease, 
 assuming responsibility for the interest on 
 the mortgages, the insurance, taxes, and 
 other charges, and paying eight per cent, 
 dividends upon the company stock. The 
 ownership of stock is thus entirely optional. 
 
280 The Industrial Republic 
 
 One may live in the colony without contrib- 
 uting any capital. 
 
 The Helicon Home Colony is a member- 
 ship corporation. It is governed by a board 
 of directors, elected every six months by 
 secret ballot. The only conditions to resi- 
 dence in the colony are "congeniality" 
 and freedom from contagious disease; one 
 may reside in the colony indefinitely without 
 becoming a member, but only members 
 have the right to vote. The conditions of 
 membership are one month's residence, 
 election by a four-fifths vote, and the pay- 
 ment of an initiation fee of $25. The 
 constitution of the colony provides for 
 initiative, referendum and recall of members 
 of the board of directors; also for a com- 
 plete statement of the financial affairs of 
 the colony, to be rendered every three 
 months. 
 
 I have quoted this at length because, as 
 I said before, I believe that it is the seed 
 from which mighty forests are destined to 
 grow. We should never have given the 
 time and strength which we have given to 
 this experiment, but for our certainty that 
 all the world will some day be following in 
 our footsteps. We are living in a cooperative 
 home because we wish to do it — but some 
 day you will be doing it because you have 
 to. You get along badly enough with your 
 
The Cooperative Home 281 
 
 servants, you admit; still you get along 
 somehow or other. But has it ever occurred 
 to you what your plight would be if, when 
 you went to the "intelligence-office," in- 
 stead of getting a bad servant, you got no 
 servant at all ? When that time comes, you 
 will be grateful to us pioneer "home- 
 colonists." 
 
 It is a most interesting thing to watch; 
 it is the Industrial Republic in the making. 
 We care nothing whatever about the intel- 
 lectual opinions of the people who come to 
 live in the colony; but I have observed 
 that nearly every non-Socialist who has come 
 here has been turned into a Socialist in the 
 course of a month or two. And that is not 
 because we argue with him, or bother him; 
 it is simply because facts are facts. What 
 becomes of the old shop-worn argument 
 that it would be necessary to change human 
 nature — ^when human nature is suddenly 
 discovered to be so kindly and considerate 
 as it is in this big home of ours ? And what 
 becomes of the ponderous platitudes about 
 "Socialism versus Individualism" in a place 
 where so many different kinds of individuals 
 are developing their individualities. 
 
 I am often moved to use this experiment 
 of ours as an illustration of what I said in 
 the previous chapter, concerning the dif- 
 ference between material and intellectual 
 production. Here in Helicon Hall we have 
 
282 The Industrial Republic 
 
 all the dreadful machinery of paternalism 
 which frightens our capitalist editors and 
 college presidents whenever they contem- 
 plate Socialism; we submit ourselves to the 
 blind rule of majorities — we allow a ma- 
 jority to decide what we shall pay for our 
 rooms, and when we shall pay it; to lay out 
 our menu, and refuse to give us pie for 
 breakfast; to forbid our giving tips, or 
 whistling in the halls, or dancing after a 
 certain hour at night. And we have all the 
 symbols of oppression — constitution and 
 by-laws and boards of directors and 
 managers. And yet somehow, we are freer 
 than we ever were in the world before; be- 
 cause, by means of these little concessions, 
 we have made possible a system — and so 
 flung from our shoulders all at once the 
 burden of care which used to wear the life 
 out of us. 
 
 And in consequence of that, for the first 
 time in our experience we find ourselves 
 really free with regard to the real things of 
 life. We have absolutely not a convention 
 in the place. We do as we please, and we 
 wear what we please. We are free to come 
 and go, where we please and whenever we 
 please. We have each our own rooms or 
 apartments, to which we retire, and it never 
 comes into anyone's mind to ask what we 
 are doing there. We may work all night and 
 sleep all day, if we feel like it — ^so httle do 
 
The Cooperative Home 283 
 
 we bother with each others' affairs that I 
 have known people to be away for a day or 
 two without being missed. 
 
 And on the other hand, if we feel like 
 company, we can have it; there is always a 
 group around our wonderful four-sided 
 fire-place in the evening, and you can always 
 find someone willing to play biUiards or 
 go for a walk. And as for our intellectual 
 freedom — ^you should see the sparks scatter 
 when our half-score assorted varieties of 
 "Fabians" and " impossibilists," "individ- 
 ualists" and "communist-anarchists," all 
 get together after dinner! There are so 
 many typewriters in Helicon Hall that as 
 you wander about the galleries in the morn- 
 ing you can fancy you hear a distant 
 battle with rapid-firing guns; and the pro- 
 ducts of the industry vary from discussions 
 of Yogi philosophy and modern psychic 
 research to magazine fiction, woman's suf- 
 frage debates, and Jungle "muck-raking." 
 And yet all these people share amicably 
 in the ownership of the fireplace and the 
 swimming-pool and the tennis-court; pro- 
 viding thereby a most beautiful illustration 
 of the working out of the formula laid down 
 by Kautsky for the society of the future: 
 "Communism in material production, 
 anarchism in intellectual." 
 
 It is working out so beautifully, that the 
 spirit of it has got hold of even our children. 
 
284 The Industrial Republic 
 
 and they are holding meetings and deciding 
 things. Of our nine youngsters seven are 
 under six years of age; and last night I 
 attended a meeting of the whole nine, at 
 which a grave question was gravely dis- 
 cussed: "When a child wakes up early in 
 the dormitory, is it proper to wake the 
 other children, or should the child lie still ?" 
 After a long debate. Master David (aged 
 five) remarked: "All in favour, please say 
 Aye." Everybody said "Aye." 
 
 The above was written in the middle of 
 December, 1906. On March 16, 1907, at 
 four o'clock in the morning, Helicon Hall 
 was burned to the ground, and forty-six 
 adults and fifteen children were turned out 
 homeless upon the snow. The story of 
 our ill-fated experiment is left to stand as 
 it was first printed.