THE LIBRARY OF THE NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY A Cornell University f Library The original of tliis book 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/cu31924002693350 r. ^ a ;5? r-pii- 3 a.; Poverty and Riches A STUDY OF THE INDUSTRIAL REGIME By SCOTT NEARING, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Toledo University. Author of "Wages in the United States," "Financing the Wage Earner's Family," "Income," "Re- ducing the Cost of Living," "Anthracite: an Instance of Natural Resource Monopoly," etc. illttBtnitrii With Photographs and Pictures by Charles F. Weller, Lewis W. Hine, George Frederick Watts, W. Balfour Ker and other artists. PROPERTY OF LJnpARY NEW w: r^" ^'-■■'^^ CORNELL UNiVERSITY THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY Philadelphia Copyright, 1916, by L. T. Myers TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PAGE Theory and Practice 9 The Ordeal of Firej 9— Intellectual Individualism, 12— The Industrial Regime in England and the United States, 13 — Laissez-Faire, 15 — ^Legislative Interference, 21 — Laissez- Faire Justified, 23— The Prophets of Better Things, 25— The Deluge, 32 — Individualism versus Liberty, 41 — The Message of Social Science, 42. CHAPTER I The Man and the Machine ^5 The Tool Maker, 45— The Tool and the Machine, 46— The Possibilities of the Machine, 49 — The Fruits of the Machine, 51 — The Industrial Revolution, 56— The Growth of Riches, 62 — Man — ^The Machine Tender, 64 — Caught in the Levers and Cogs, 70 — Worker and Product, 78— -Spiritual Values, 81— The Lilies of the Field, 84— The Machine and the Future, 86. CHAPTER II The Laborer and His Hire 89 Material and Spiritual Values, 89 — The Greatest Number, 90— What are Men Worth? 91— Does the Laborer Get Enough, 95 — ^The Measure of Wage Adequacy, 97 — What is the American Wage? 101 — The Phases of Wage Adequacy, 106 — ^Wages and Physical EfiBciency, 106 — TUss American Wage as a Business Proposition, 114— rThe Social Impli- cations of the American Wage, 119 — ^The Penalty of Labor, 122. (5) 6 CONTENTS CHAPTER III PAGE Industrial Leadership 124 The Call for Leadership, 124 — The Qualities of Leadership, 127 — ^America's Leader^p Heritage, 129 — ^The Duties of Leadership, 132 — ^The Opportunities for Leadership, 134 — The Position of the Industrial Leader, 139 — The Class Con- sciousness of the Leaders, 140 — The Men Half Way Up, 143 — ^The Methods of Securing Leaders, 146 — The Training of Industry, 148 — Leadership throu^ Education, 149— The Denial of Opportunity, 155. CHAPTER IV Poverty 161 Progress and Poverty, 161— What is Poverty? 163 — The Trail of Poverty, 165— The Burden of Poverty, 172— Crime Begins in Poverty, 175 — Poverty and Disease, 177 — "Let Him be Poor," 183 — Dives and Lazarus, 184 — Why are They Poor? 187— The Challenge of Poverty, 194— We Must Get Oft Their Backs, 197, CHAPTER V Riches 199 The Heaven of the Rich, 199— The Wealth Machine, 201— Wealth and the Wealthy, 207 — Riches and Self-Respeot, 209— The Pauperizing Power of Riches, 210— The Isolation of Riches, 211 — Spending as Philanthropy, 215 — ^We Can- not Serve Mammon, 219— What is Riches? 222— The Maxi- mum Inequality, 224. CHAPTER VI Industrial Democracy 227 The Impatience for Constructive Work, 227 — ^The Ideals of Democracy, 228 — Democratic Ideals and the Industrial Regime, 230 — Equahty of Opportunity, 232 — Liberty as Opportunity, 238 — (^portimity and Pursuit of Happiness, 242 — Workers and Eaters, 245 — ^A People's Government, 247— Taxation and Representation, 252— The Man above the Dollar, 253. Index 257 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SuMPTUOtrs Stables and Homeless Humans FrorUispiece FAGS Child Labokers of the Coal Mines 14 Children of thu Slums of New York City .... 37 Mammon 44 Women Workers in a Lynn Shoe Factory 69 Workrooms of the Poor and the Rich. . l 76 Chateau and Tenement 101 The Coal Famine 108 Ejng Canute 133 The Hand of Fate 140 Two Ways of Getting Fed 165 A Contrast in Bedrooms 172 The Vampire 197 Different Kinds op Dining Rooms 204 Destitution and Luxury 229 A Notorious Slum near the National Capitol 236 (7) INTRODUCTION Theory and Practice 1. The Ordeal of Fire 'C'VERY theory of human conduct must withstand ■*-* the fires of experience. Otherwise it is a use- less theory. The philosophies of nations and of individuals are constantly reshaped in the light of events. At some times the process is gradual; at other times great crises menace, and the most momentous consequences hang upon the decision. The war that swept over Em-ope in the summer of 1914 soon resolved itself into a struggle between the English and the Germans. Two types of culture were brought into conflict. The names most often appUed to these types are "individualism" and "socialism." Unfortimately the words are not accurately descriptive, nor are they mutually exclusive. Eng- land is to a degree socialistic, while individualism finds a place in every phase of German life. Further- more, the English variety of individualism is almost as far from Spencerian individualism as the German variety of socialism is far from Marxian Socialism. At the same time the words convey an idea that is firmly fixed in the public mind. The United States, as the offspring of England, is committed, by heredity (9) 10 THEORY AND PRACTICE and by training, to espouse the cause of "individual- ism" and "freedom" wherever they appear. The people of the United States are in sympathy with the Allies for many reasons, and among them is the strongly marked feeling that the United States is a Uneal descendant of individualized, democratic England. At that point several questions present them- selves. What is individuaUsm? Is it right or true? Will it work? Spencerian individualism regarded the human being as the basic unit of society. Intellectually, that premise is sound. Biologically and socially, it is unsound. The human being uses his mind as an individual, but he cannot reproduce himself without a mate. The biologic unit is therefore a male and female. Speaking in terms of race perpetuation, "individualism" must refer to the unit of a man and a woman. Socially, the unit is the family. Society depends for its future upon the care given by a man and a woman to their offspring. The family, in its home, thus becomes the center of social life; hence individ- uaUsm, in social terms, relates to a family. The idea of the individual unit may be carried further into social Ufe — to the commimity, town, city — ^that has an individuality of its own, quite as clearly marked as the individuality of a human being. The same idea may be carried into industrial life, where railroads, telephone systems, factories, THEORY AND PRACTICE 11 mines, and stores, employing hundreds and thou- sands of persons, are operated as units. In the industrial city, the railroad organization or the factory organization, the individual human being is helpless and useless unless he is willing to co-operate actively in making the work of the whole group a success. No individual can manage a city, a railroad or a factory unless there are others who will sub- ordinate themselves to his direction. Speaking in terms of modem community or of modem industrial life, the individual human being does not count. The thing that does count is the group, working in intelligent harmony. The individuaUsm of the Industrial Regime is an individualism of large imits of co-operating workers. The same thought may be amplified in the case of the human body. The body is an individual, com- posed of numerous individual organs, which, in turn, are composed of numerous individual cells. The hand is a vmit; each finger is a unit; the nerves, capillaries, bones and hairs of the fingers are units, as are the cells of which they are all com- posed. EngUsh individuahsm deals with the individual human being — ^it is intellectual individuahsm. Thinking in such terms, and applying their thought to the affairs of the state, the Enghsh-speaking world built up a social system on the supposition that the greatest sum of human happiness and nobility can be thus secured. 12 THEORY AND PRACTICE 2. Intellectual Individualism Will intellectual individualism work? Can a nation succeed that permits the individual citizens of which it is composed to extend the field of their activities so long as they do not interfere with their fellows? Some light is thrown on that question by the events that have transpired in Europe during the past few decades. The author holds no brief for either England or Germany, nor will any effort be made to discuss the war of 1914. The one problem that will be presented at this point relates to the experience which England has had with the intellectual individuahsm that has been made the comer-stone of her social philosophy. This does not in any way involve the question of the success of the system adopted by Germany. It merely raises the issues that are involved in the experiences of England and suggests some of the problems that America must face if she follows the English example. Many people assumed that the war of 1914 would end quickly and easily. There was, throughout England, an easy optimism. A few weeks, at most a few months, and all would be over. The German fleet swept from the seas, the Austrians humbled, Germany pushed back from Paris, Belgian soil freed from the invader — all this was to be accom- plished by the army and navy, with that deliberate dispatch which for time out of mind had marked the triumphs of British arms. Weeks drew them- THEORY AND PRACTICE 13 selves into months and months into years. During the frightful interval, criticisms were piled high. The members of the cabinet, the field leaders, and the other ofl&cers of administration all came in for their share of censure. Here and there a voice was raised, crying that England was suffering — ^nay, some even said dying — of individualism. Is individualism a disease? Will nations die of it? We, in America, have it in generous plenty. Will it prove fatal to the United States? Has it been a curse in England? 3. The Industrial Regime in England and the United States The same forces that have placed the industrial leaders of England in a dominant position have placed the industrial leaders of the United States in a dominant position. The position occupied by the American leaders is perhaps a little more dizzy, because in one sense it is higher and less secure. In the main, however, the individualistic doctrines advanced in both countries have led both in the same direction and toward the same end — the pre- eminence of industrial power. The sub-title of this book, "The Industrial Regime," was chosen with a purpose. First, it is perfectly evident to even the casual observer that the ruling power in the world today is the power of industry. The word "Regime" is used in recogni- tion of this rulership or leadership of industry. 14 THEORY AND PRACTICE Second, the crucial question before the nation today concerns the effectiveness of the industrial rule. The industrial leaders are directing national affairs. Are they directing wisely? The industrial machine has dominated the community. Has this industrial domination proved socially advantageous? There are people, not a few, who beUeve that the industrial order has justified itself; who are for letting things stand as they are. But will they stand? England was looked to as the mightiest power in the world, yet in the great world tourney she did not immediately demonstrate her supe- riority. This individuaUsm, that was, looked to as a source of the robust national health without which a nation must cease to exist, has not played fair with Eng- land. For two centuries individuahsm has held a firm grip on the Enghsh people, and now it seems to have drained them of much of their vitaUty. The ideal of individualism developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in opposition to the oppressive treatment that was being exercised by a decaying Feudalism, held that the individual must be left free to follow his own inclinations, which are necessarily good. Nature's man is a good man, according to this philosophy, and the important thing is to let man be free, as he was imder natiu-e, so that he might live out the yearnings of his heart. CHILD LABOPJ-IRS OP THE COAL MINES These boys are employed as "slate pickers." As the coal comes down the slide they must pick out each piece of rock or slate and put it in a separate chute. It is constant hard work, — le.ss agreeable than going to school, or fishing or playing baseball. (Copr., Underwood & I'nderwood, New York.) THEORY AND PRACTICE 15 4. Laissee-Faire The idea of individualism, applied to industry, took the form of the "laissez-faire" doctrine. Industry will necessarily develop most advantage- ously if it is unrestricted. Therefore it mjust be "let alone." This doctrine of the French School of Physiocrats was forced upon the attention of England by the economist, Adam Smith, at the time (1776) when^the modem method of factory production was getting its start in the British Isles. The doctrine offered marked advantages to the manufacturer, because it left him free to follow his own devices. The scheme therefore won the cordial support of the industrial class at the time that it was ascending to a position of domiuating importance. The laissez-faire idea gave the manufacturers exactly what they most desired — opportunity to develop their new projects, free from hampering influences. They seized the idea eagerly. They taught it, preached it, defended it. Industry, must be free to grow; only as it was let alone, could it demonstrate its full possibilities. So plausible was the doctrine; so able and power- ful were its advocates; so completely had men reacted against tyranny and oppression; so eager were they for liberty in whatever form it might appear, that for a half a century the laissez-faire idea held complete sway over the policies of England. The English manufacturers had a splen- 16 THEORY AND PRACTICE did chance to show what the real merits of the laissez-faire idea were. Factory industry grew up in England, unhampered by legislative restric- tions. There was none of the governmental inter- ference that in these days arouses such bitter opposi- tion in many industrial circles. No social idea ever had a better tryout than this of laissez-faire. And the results? Words almost fail. The more revolting details do not bear printing outside the realm of technical Uterature. At the beginning of the nine- teenth century, with the English manufacturers in full control, with a domination of the world markets, and wholly free from any government restrictions, the conditions in the factory districts are thus described by a careful student of the problem who is writing of the manner in which the workhoxise chil- dren were sold to the mill owners: "Sometimes regular traflfickers would take the place of the manu- facturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill-owner in want of hands, who could come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave dealers in the American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap, and their places could be so easily supplied. . . . The THEORY AND PRACTICE 17 hours of their labor were limited only by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Ilbiess was no excuse: no child was accounted ill till it was posi- tively impossible to force him or her to continue to labor, in spite of all the cruelty which the ingenuity of a tormenter could suggest. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night. Even Sunday was used as a convenient time to clean the machinery. The author of 'The History of the Factory Movement' writes: 'In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirring of a thousand wheels, little fingers and Uttle feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merci- less overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharp- ened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.' They were fed upon the coarsest and cheapest food. . . . They slept by turns, and in relays, in filthy beds which were never cool, for one set of children were sent to sleep in them as soon as the others had gone off to their daily or nightly toil. There was often no dis- crimination of sexes; and disease, misery, and vice grew as in a hot-bed of contagion. Some of these miserable beings tried to run away. To pre- vent them from doing so, those suspected of this tendency had irons riveted on their ankles, with long links reaching up to the hips, and were com- pelled to work and sleep in these chains, . . . 18 THEORY AND PRACTICE Many died, and were buried secretly at night in some desolate spot, lest people should notice the number of thegraves; and many committed suicide." There Gibbins stops with the remark, — "One dares not trust oneself to try and set down calmly all that might be told about this awful page in the history of industrial England."* The instances adduced in the course of Par- liamentary inquiries, and cited by Gibbins on sub- sequent pages, bum hot into the imagination of one schooled to the elements of humanitarian feel- ing. In one section (230) on "EngUsh Slavery" are set down the records of case after case of little chil- dren who were never employed "Under five," chained, beaten and in some cases dying of exhaus- tion brought on by excessive toil. These statements are corroborated and amplified by the historians of the early factory system. Thus Lecky, in his "England in the Ei^teenth Cen- tury,"" writes: "In the very infancy of the system, it became the custom of the master manufacturer to contract with the managers of workhouses through- out England, and of the charities of Scotland, to send their young children to the factories of the great towns. Many thousands of children between the ages of six and ten were thus sent, absolutely uncared for and unprotected; and left to the com- I" Industry in England," H.deB. Gibbins. New York: Scribner's 1897, pp. 388-90. « ""w», •Volume VI, pp. 224-25. THEORY AND PRACTICE 19 plete disposal of masters who often had not a single thought except speedily to amass fortunes, and who knew that if the first supply of infant labor was used, there was still much more to be obtained. Thou- sands of children at this early age might be foimd working in the factories of England and Scotland, usually from twelve to fourteen, sometimes even fifteen or sixteen, hours a day. Not infrequently diu-ing the greater part of the night. ... In one case brought before Parhament, a gang of these children was put up for sale among a bankrupt's effects, and publicly advertised as part of the property. In another, an agreement was disclosed between a London parish and a Lancashire manu- facturer, in which it was stipulated that with every twenty soxmd children one idiot should be taken. Instances of direct and aggravated cruelty to particular children were probably rare, and there appears a general agreement of evidence that they were confined to the small factories. But labor prolonged for periods that were utterly inconsistent with the health of children was general. In forty-two out of the forty-three factories at Manchester, it was stated before the Parhamentary Committee in 1816, that the actual hours of daily labor ranged from twelve to fourteen, and in one case they were fourteen and one-half. Even as late as 1840, when the most important manufacturers had been regulated by law. Lord Ashley was able to show that boys employed in 20 THEORY AND PRACTICE carpet manufactories at Kidderminister were called up at three and four in the morning, and kept work- ing sixteen or eighteen hours; children five years old were engaged in the unhealthy trade of pin mak- ing, and were kept at work from six in the morning to eight at night." The desperate straits to which a part of the working population of England was subjected as a resiUt of developing the factory system, are described by Lecky in these terms:' "The woolen manufacturing in the eighteenth century was carried on by numbers of small masters in their own homes. They usually employed about ten journeymen and apprentices, who were bound to them by long contracts, who boarded in master's house, and who worked together with him, under his immediate superintendence. In Leeds and its neighborhood, in 1806, there were no less than 3,500 of these estabUshments. But the gigantic factory with its vast capital, its costly machinery, and its extreme subdivision of labor, soon swept them away. (See Howell's ' Conflicts of Capital and Labor,' pp. 84-88.) Hand-loom weaving, once a flourishing trade — long maintained a desperate competition against the factories, and as late as 1830 a very competent observer described the multitude of weavers, who were living in the great cities, in houses utterly unfit for human habitation, ' "England in the Eighteenth Century," Lecky. Vol. VI, pp. THEORY AND PRACTICE 21 working fourteen hours a day and upwards, and earning only five to eight shillings a week. (See Kay's 'Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes,' p. 44; Wade's 'History of the Middle and Working Classes,' p. 571.)" Even more revolting are the descriptions written of the conditions that surroimded the lives of the mine workers in the early part of the nineteenth century. Women as well as men were taken into the mines, and there subjected to the most fearful hard- ships. In some cases, as the reports of the Parlia- mentary investigation showed, the women dragged the cars through passageways that were too low to admit of the use of ponies or mules. These are but examples of the many passages that might be cited of the monstrous conditions of labor prevailing in English industry at a time when there was no vestige of governmental interference. The profits of the business were immense, and to these immense profits some of the manufacturers sacrificed every consideration of humanity and decency. Laissez-faire at its best, was indescribably, unthink- ably frightful. 5. Legislative Interference Faced by such conditions at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the more far-seeing of EngUsh statesmen saw the danger to British national supremacy in a system of such fearful exploitation. Beginning in 1802, with the first Factory Act, law 22 THEORY AND PRACTICE after law was passed, safeguarding the health, first of the children, and later of women and men. Even the earliest of these laws, which contained little more than a theoretical departure from the policy of laissez-faire was carried, to use Lecky's phrase, "in the teeth of a fierce class opposition." The manu- facturers banded themselves together and fought the acts one by one. They alleged foreign competition, the danger to the existence of British industry, dwindling profits, and finally, the right of Britons to full individual liberty. Parliamentary investigations succeeded one another, and revelations that they made were so terrible that some action became imperative. This was particularly true of the investigation of the mines. The findings led at once to the passage of legislation forbidding the work of women imder- ground. The Act of 1831 forbade night work for persons between nine and twenty-one years of age, and limited the working day of persons under eighteen years to twelve hours a (lay and nine hours on Saturday. This law, applying to cotton factories only, was passed after a third of a century of cease- less agitation. Under it, children of nine could be called upon to work sixty-nine hoiu:s a week. "The hours of black slaves' labor in our colonies were at that very time carefully limited by law (Orders in Council, November 2, 1831) to nine per day for adults, and six for young persons and children, while THEORY AND PRACTICE 23 night work was simply prohibited."* Not until 1847 was a ten-hour day for women and children secured. 6. Laissez-Faire Justified The debates in Parliament over the early factory acts sound wierd and uncanny in twentieth century ears. The imspeakable working and Uving condi- tions of the industrial population were explained and justified in the name of liberty and individual freedom. The revolting conditions surrounding the Uves of the working population were more than offset, in the eyes of English statesmen, by the cheapness of the product, the profits of the industries to the manu- facturers and the splendid trade balances that were growing in favor of England. England was prosperous. She had developed the factory a generation in advance of the rest of the world; consequently she was able to imdersell her competitors in the world markets. It is probably true that Napoleon was beaten in the weaving sheds of England. The English factories threw the French hand-weavers out of emplosrment, while they took the French markets. England was rapidly insuring her place as the premier commercial nation of the world. Her factories captiu"ed markets through the low-priced goods that she turned out. Her ships were engaged * "Industry in England," op. cU., pp. 398-99. 24 THEORY AND PRACTICE in carrying these products to all parts of the world and bringing back raw material which, in turn, would be manufactured and sent out. England bought cheap and sold dear. She made a manu- facturer's and a trader's profit. The British nation was rapidly growing rich. Political economy, in those early days, measured prosperity in terms of trade balances. Profits were high — they were often equal to hundreds of per cent on the investment. Engaged as she was, in the importing of raw materials and exporting finished goods, England, from the standpoint of classical political economy, was in a superb position. The factory acts improved working conditions somewhat. Still the exploitation of labor continued. Wages were low. Rents were high. The manu- facturers grew rich while their employees lived, for the most part, in the depths of poverty. The yeomanry of England had disappeared. Agricultural land had been bought up, compmons had been enclosed, and the large sheep raisers had taken over the land. Now, under the impetus of factory organization, the people were moving rapidly into cities and towns, and while the country villages became "rotten boroughs," the manufacturing centers swarmed with human beings. Housing was inadequate; sanitation was primitive; disease floiuished. Still England was prosperous. Her trade was increasing; her manufactures were growing even THEORY AND PRACTICE 25 faster; profits were large; wealth was piling up at a phenomenal pace. Trade, manufacture, profits, wealth — these were prosperity. Economists and statesmen alike rejoiced in their country's progress. 7. The Prophets of Better Things The prosperity-enthusiasts did not have the field entirely to themselves. During the early years of the exploitation of EngHsh labor by the newly created system of factory industry, there were not lacking voices that uttered vehement warnings and earnest prophesies concerning the outcome of a sys- tem of industry that built prosperity upon poverty. Thus, Ruskin in one of his analogies, points out the similarity existing between a national household and a domestic household. In the one, as in the other, the prosperity of the institution must be analyzed in terms of the well being of the members. If any do not share in the prosperity of home^or state, perhaps, after all, the prosperity is not real. Applying this proposition to England, that was called prosperous by the classical economists of his time, he says: "The power of our wealth seems limited as respects the comfort of the servants, no less than their quietude. The persons in the kitchen appear to be ill-dressed, squalid, half-starved. One cannot help imagining that the riches of the establishment must be of a very theoretical and documentary character."* Again he notes the « "Unto This Last," John Ruskin. 26 THEORY AND PRACTICE "beautiful arrangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse and blackcock, so many brace to the acre, and men and women, so many brace to the garret."^ Throughout his dis- cussion of pohtical economy, Ruskin makes similar comparisons, and from each one he draws the con- clusion that true national prosperity can never be built upon poverty and squalor. Where wealth accumulates and men decay, there can be but one final result. Carlyle, too, had nothing but contempt for the widening abyss between poverty and riches. It was in 1831 that he wrote: "Does not the observant eye discern everywhere that saddest spectacle: The Poor perishing, like neglected, foundered, Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Over-work; the Rich, still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Over-Growth."" No one was more scornful of the new regime than was Carlyle, who found in it the negation of many of the social principles that were to him most dear. At a time when they "on all hands hear it passionately proclaimed: Laissez- Faire," Carlyle found nothing but condemnation of the doctrine in the events that were transpiring about him. It is because of this that he makes Teufelsdrockh exclaim: "Call ye that a Society where there is no longer any Social Idea extant; not so much as the Idea of a common Homej but ' "Crown of Wild Olive," Ruskin. ' "Sartor Resartus," Chapter 5. THEORY AND PRACTICE 27 of a common over-crowded Lodging House? Where each, isolated, regardless of his neighbor, turns against his neighbor, clutches what he can get, and cries 'Mine!' and calls it peace because, in the cut- purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a far cunninger sort can be employed?"' Again and again he records his vigorous protests against the abuses of the new industry that was preaching natural law while it multiplied profits. There were splendid true things said by Ruskin; Carlyle scattered his invective over the fields of social wrong that he saw about him; but perhaps the fiercest attacks against the abuses of the profit system were made by Charles Dickens. "Hard Times" reveals him at his best in his analysis of "Prosperity." He holds the thing up, looks at it, laughs at it, and then throws it from him, shuddering at its noisomeness and dirt. When Mr. McChoakimichild, the schoolmaster, assays to teach about "National Prosperity," Uttle Sissy Jupe, who has been raised in poverty, fails completely to understand his point of view. "Girl number twenty," he says, "Now this schoolroom is a nation. And in this nation there are fifty milUons of money. Isn't this a prosperous nation, and ain't you in a thriving state?" Poor Sissy was sadly puzzled, but she gave the wrong answer, for she said, "I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state « Sartor Resartus, Chapter 5. 28 THEORY AND PRACTICE or not, unless I know who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine." So the teacher stated the question differently. Said he: "This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion?" Again, Sissy was wrong, for she said she "thought it must be just as hard on those that were starved, whether the others be a million or a milhon milUon." So the teacher tried once more to give his point of view. "I find," he explained, "that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or biamt to death. What is the per- centage?" "Nothing," Sissy replied, "to the rela- tions and friends of the people who were killed." And she was wrong again! Thus does Dickens ridicule the proposition that the chief aim of statesmanship is to build a pros- perity based upon profits and trade-balances. Living in an age when prosperity was measured in terms of the well-being of manufacturers and traders, he recorded his contempt of the reverence with which the British nation regarded this kind of prosperity. A very different note enters his language when he turns from the lives of the owners and the exploiters to the lives of the workers. He enters the subject abruptly. "In the hardest-working part of Coketown; in THEORY AND PRACTICE 29 the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, ... in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys for want of air to make a draught were built in an immense variety of stimted and crooked shapes; . . . among the multitude of Coketown, generically called 'the Hands' — a race who would have found more favor with some people if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs — ^lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age. "Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns. There seemed, however, to have been a mistake or misadventure in Stephen's case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same some- body's thorns in addition to his own." Here Dickens is holding up to ridicule some of the favorite arguments of the political economists of his day. But in many a characterization through- out his novels he describes poverty, privation and hardship, particularly among children, with a telling power. As if to summarize his indictment against a society that permitted such frightful conditions to surround the lives of little children, he writes 30 THEORY AND PRACTICE the conversation between Scrooge, symbolizing com- mercialism, and the Spirit of Christmas, symbolizing the generosity of hiraian nature, in words of gravest import. "From the foldings of its robe it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. . . . "Oh, Man! look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost. "They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humihty. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked and glared out menac- ing. .. . "Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a he of such enormous magnitude." Scrooge then asks to whom they belonged. "They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom unless the THEORY AND PRACTICE 31 writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand toward the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!" Ruskin turns from such conditions and descrip- tions with his famous statement : ' ' There is no wealth but life." He had read the current Political Econ- omy, with its laudation of trade-balances, profits and production. Against such patently fallacious doctrine he revolted. Bullion would not save a country, neither would trade-balances, nor yet profits. Real human prosperity was impossible while poverty raised its menacing form beside riches. Against such a contradiction, he hurled his great afiirmation, "There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers, of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy hmnan beings; that man is richest who, having per- fected the fimctions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others."" These were his standards of economics. His " veins of wealth " were not yellow but purple. They were in the flesh; not in the rock. He saw life, with all of its abundant possibilities, as the goal of national existence. How far had the leaders of commercialism fallen from that high standard! » "Unto This Last." 32 THEORY AND PRACTICE 8. The Deluge The nineteenth century witnessed a mighty struggle in England between those who believed in exploitation and those who demanded at least a measure of humane treatment for the workers. On the whole, the hundred years recorded decided progress. The first factory act (1802) was an infant in swaddling clothes compared with the acts that followed — each more drastic than its predecessor. Laws were altered to legalize trade imions; educa- tion was made general; the hours of labor and the conditions surrounding the labor were vastly im- proved. Toward the end of the century an ambitious scheme of social legislation was formulated, and in the dawning years of the twentieth century the scheme was launched. And it was high time! England, mistress of the seas, proud carrier of the traffic of the world, the center of international finance; the richest among the nations — ^England was reeking with poverty. Beside her factories and warehouses were vilest slmns into which the people huddled, as in Ruskin's day, so many brace to the garret. There, in the back alleys of civiliza- tion, babies were bom and babies died, while those who lived grew to the impotent manhood of the street Hooligan. The power and glory of the British empire were built on the Cannon-gate of Edinburgh and the THEORY AND PRACTICE 33 Waterloo Junction slum of London. Thus based, were the foundations secure? ■ The Crimean War came, and ended, on the whole, to the credit of Great Britain. Then a half- century passed during which the British "fought a hundred campaigns against men without trousers." I The Boer war gave the English-speaking world a jolt. At the outbreak of the war the typical Britaia was still pictured as a sturdy man, with roimd, ruddy cheeks and a big frame, built of roast beef and EngUsh home-brewed ale. He was the victor at Poitiers, Agincourt, Crdcy and Waterloo. The Boers were a small group of farmers, easily disposed of. Still the war dragged on. The Colonial troops came ' in and won some battles. Finally, outnumbered and ; driven into a comer, the Boers made terms. The British nation was uneasy. It was not the' mismanagement of the war, nor the fact that the British army at the front had been facetiously described as "an army of lions led by asses." Sensa- tional reports were afloat regarding the character of the "lions." ' Charges about the recruiting were most disquiet- ing. The physical standards for acceptance in the army were low, and yet large numbers of applicants had been rejected for all kinds of physical defects. The rejection rate for the recruits as a whole seems to have been about two out of five offering. However, there were many instances in which the rate went very much higher than this. "In the Manchester 34 THEORY AND PRACTICE district 11,000 men offered themselves for war service between the outbreak of hostilities in October, 1899, and July, 1900. Of this number 8,000 were found to be physically imfit to carry a rifle and stand the fatigues of discipline. Of the 3,000 who were accepted only 1,200 attained the moderate standard of muscular power and chest measurement required by the military authorities. In other words, two out of every three men willing to bear arms in the Manchester district are virtually invaUds."'" Even more extreme charges were made by Dr. Robert R. Rentoul in a book entitled "Race Culture or Race Suicide" (The Walter Scott Pub. Co., London, 1906), which took up the problem, first from the side of the medical profession, showing how widespread serious physical . defect really was, and then urging the necessity of some form of drastic action looking to the improvement of the race standard of the English. Doctor. Rentoul (p. 19) states: "As regards the rejections in 1902, of those wishing to enter the army, there was an increase of 26.77 per thousand as com- pared with the previous year. Of recruits in Eng- land, the rejection rate was 335 per 1,000; Scotland, 275; and Ireland, 293. Of the previous occupations of recruits rejected, 359 per thousand were artisans, 328 shopmen and clerks, and 329 laborers. "The following are some of the causes of rejection: '""Efficiency and Empire," Arnold White. Methuen & Co., London, 1901, pp. 102-03. THEORY AND PRACTICE 35 syphilis, 219; debility, 343; defective vision, 3,437; disease of the heart, 1,518; loss of many teeth, 4,316; varicocele, 1,103; flat feet, 1,090; under height, 1,015; under chest measurement, 4,969; under weight, 1,903. It will be noted that the largest number of rejections were for . defective development — chiefly chest measurement. ' ' When I mention that the minimum chest measure- ment — chest fully expanded — ^was 33| inches; weight 112 pounds, and height 5 feet 2 inches, it will be recognized that a great amount of physical deteriora- tion exists. Nor can it be contended that the medical examination is severe, as a reference to the Ofiicial Regulations for the Army Service, and under the "Rules for the Examination of Recruits," no order is made for the examiners to examine the urine for kidney disease or diabetes." Doctor Rentoul comments further on the fact that these are the rejections by the examining medical ofl&cer. The War Office would publish no figures showing the mmiber of rejections by the recruiting sergeants. Regarding the rejections in the navy, Doctor Rentoul remarks, that "it is to be greatly deplored thatTthe AdmiraltyJ persistently refused to publish statistics." He mentions one statement from an apparently authoritative source to the effect that the rejection rate in the navy is "fully fifty per cent" (p. 19). The Parliamentary Committee on Physical Dete- 36 THEORY AND PRACTICE rioration insists that the recruiting figures reflect less upon the physical status of the English people as a whole than they do upon the type of man that the army attracts. One of the army officers who testified described the recruits as very largely "rubbish." This is not the entire explanation, however. The committee found some very serious conditions pre- vailing among the school children to whom it devoted a great deal of attention. Very careful evidence was offered, based on the measurement of the chil- dren in different parts of the population. The children going to the schools frequented by the well- to-do showed every evidence of good physical condi- tion. Among the children of the poor the facts were far otherwise. ' ' With regard to physical degeneracy, the children frequenting the poorer schools of Lon- don and the large towns betray a most serious condition of affairs, calling for ameliorative and arrestive measures, the most impressive features being the apathy of parents as regards the school, the lack of parental care of children, the poor phy- sique, powers of endurance, and educational attain- ments of the children attending school." The same page has a comment on the "very abundant signs of physical defect traceable to neglect, poverty, and ignorance."" These statements are supported by a great body of material, showing that the children of " Bfiport of the Committee on Physical Deterioration. London. 1904, Vol. 1, pp. 13-14. ^ THEORY AND PRACTICE 37 the poor, of whom there seem to be an alarming number, are badly noiirished, improperly clad, low in weight, under height, and suffering from many physical defects. The picture which this com- mittee of Parliament paints is, indeed, a black one for any friend of England to contemplate. Nor is this all. The town dwellers are suffering from the effects of town dwelling. The figures show that clearly enough. Ripley, in his "Races of Europe," generalized this fact in these words: "All over Britain there are indications of this law, that town populations are on the average comparatively short of stature. The townsmen of Glasgow and Edinburgh are four inches or more shorter than the coimtry folk round about, and thirty-six pounds on the average Ughter in weight. Doctor Beffoe, the great authority on this subject, concludes his investigation of the population of Great Britain thus: "It may therefore be taken as proved that the stature of men in the large towns of Britain is lowered considerably below the standard of the nation" (p. 552). The city population is suffering severely. The coimtry population is being drained into the city at an alarmingly rapid rate. There is a surprisingly small amount of rural popxilation left in the British Isles. The Com- mittee on Physical Deterioration places the town population of England and Wales at 77 per cent of the total population. That leaves but twenty-three 38 THEORY AND PRACTICE of each hundred in the villages and on the fanns. Even this small fraction of the English nation, from which the reddest blood was wont to flow, is in a pitiable plight. ' ' Rural England,' ' writes Masterman, "beyond the radius of certain favored neighborhoods, and apart from the specialized population which serves the necessities of the coimtry house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life of the fields for the life of the town."** Continuing, Master- man cites example after example of the decay of the rural life that remains in England. The Committee on Physical Deterioration was equally alarmed over the apparent failure of the rural population. They comment on "the with- drawal from the rural districts of the most capable of the population, leaving the inferior to supply their places and continue the stock, the evil being often aggravated, in the opinion of some, by the drifting into the coimtry of the debiUtated town population, which is crowded out by the onrush of more vigorous elements. There appears on the face of it to be considerable probabiUty that both these movements are in operation" (Vol. 1, pp. 34-35). Could a situation be more serious? Perhaps it is « "The Condition of England," C. F. G. Masterman. London: Metheim & Co., First Ed., 1909; Fourth Ed., 1910, p. 190. THEORY AND PRACTICE 39 most effectively brought out in the data that was presented with regard to school children. Conditions seem to be worst in the largest centers of population. Thus the Committee on Physical Deterioration reports greater extremes between the well-to-do and the poor children in London than elsewhere. In London, the report states, "The difference between the good and the poor types is very grave." The report makes the further point that among the well-to-do the standard for children seems to be about the same everywhere. "The best children are practically equally good in all towns." Among the poor children, however, there is a great difference. "In the case of younger children the worst in London are lower in stature than the worst else- where — ^Manchester, Salford, Leeds. The curves in Manchester and Salford are flatter than elsewhere, due possibly to the wider prevalence of rickets, but associated also probably with the Celtic strain in the population" (p. 73, Appendix). Taken alone, the problem in England seems to be serious. But it cannot be taken alone. England has competitors. What can be said of the com- parative position of the people in the coimtries with whom England must contend for the markets of the world? Arnold White and Arthur Shadwell took that matter very much to heart. The British Board of Trade conducted an investigation into the cost and standard of living of the working populations of 40 THEORY AND PRACTICE the leading industrial countries of the worid. The Board of Trade reports make it appear that the British workman is severely handicapped as com- pared to the workers in competitive countries. Doctor Shadwell, after a searching personal investigation into the condition of the working classes in Germany, England and the United States, gives it as his opinion that the workers of England are in a position of distinct inferiority. He utters a solemn warning to the people of England, and in the final chapter of his painstaking study he says, in emphatic language, that unless Britain can make some fundamental improvements in the physical and moral standards of her workers, she is helpless in her struggle for world markets, i* The conclusions reached by Arnold White, in his "EflSciency and Empire" are no less drastic. Here are some of his phrases: "Britain has four serious rivals, and while none of the four is deteriorating in physical stamina, two of them are actually improving." France has her peasant proprietor- ship. "Where a successful Englishman of the humbler ranks takes a public-house in a town street, a Frenchman who has saved money buys a bit of land." Germany, he says, "is improving the phy- sique of her people by the wise prevision of her statesmen." In Russia and the United States the people have an abundance of land and they are " "Industrial Efficiency," Arthur Shadwell. Longmans, Green & Co., London and New York, 1906. THEORY ^AND PRACTICE 41 living on it. "Nations that renounce the strength that comes from living in the open air do not long continue to produce efficient men." "It may be said, our aristocracy and our middle class are gen- erally of good stamina. Granted. But no courage or stamina in the comfortable classes will avail us in the great day of wrath, if the masses are deficient in physical health. Let those who think that England is safe watch the white faces of the street crowds" and "the swarming masses in the un- touched slums in the South and East of London, or with the white-faced operatives of Manchester, Northampton or Leicester."" 9. Individualism versus Liberty Passionately the leaders of British thought pro- claimed the doctrine of laissez-faire. Individualism was to be enthroned! Liberty was to triumph! Alas, for the disaster! The individualism of England was based on the law of self-interest — ^the dominant motive in men's lives according to the accepted philosophy of the time. The doctrine of laisses-faire became a weapon in the hands of the propertied classes — a weapon that was used and still is used to repress and confine the individuahty of those who are so unfortunate as to have no property. Under the individualism that developed in Nine- teenth Centvu"y England, profit-seeking selfishness " "Efficiency and Empire," op. cit., pp. 105-07. 42 THEORY AND PRACTICE strangled liberty, and the individual was free in name and slave in fact. Poverty, child labor, woman exploitation, squalor and misery all flourished in the name of liberty, and they flourished because they were the basis of handsome commercial profits. The United States has taken from Great Britain the nomenclature of liberty. She has likewise copied her machinery of exploitation. Here, as in England, squalor, child labor and beggarly wages challenge the boasted prosperity of a nation that tolerates abject poverty side by side with extrava- gant wealth. ^Like Great Britain, the United States must stand in the competition of nations. Space does not per- mit, nor does the occasion require a statement of the status of individuahsm in Germany. Only this must be said: There are those who resent the mili- tary bureaucracy of Germany because it has trampled upon the feet of liberty. Let the same individuals beware lest the plutocracy of England and the United States trample liberty into the dust. 10. The Message of Social Science We, in America, stand face to face with portentous problems. Om* social standards and our social philosophy are both on trial. If they are to survive they must withstand the test of effectiveness. Democratic institutions are made efi'ective only as the citizenship is intelligent and aggressive. Hear Carlyle as he counsels boldness and courage: THEORY AND PRACTICE 43 "Strangely enough," he makes Teufelsdrockh say of his spiritual troubles, "I lived in a continual indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured. Full of such himior, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dogday, after much per- ambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint- Thomas de I'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when, all at once,'^there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and pimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum- total of the worst ;that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee? Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself imder thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a 44 THEORY AND PRACTICE god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed; not Fear nor whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance."'* ' This is the message of social science. Men must leam from the mistakes that other men have made. They must advance along the path that others have indicated. When they come to the end of the beaten path, they must strike out a path for them- selves, with full faith and confidence in the results. Western Democracy is on trial. Its success must depend upon the temper of its people. « "Sartor Reaartua." A grim portrayal of the merciless power of predatory wealth, which crushes the life and aspiration of niankiiul, both its youth aud its rnaidenlmod. (A painting hy (Tcor^c I'^i-i'derick AVatts. ) CHAPTER I The Man and the Machine 1. The Tool Maker TI/TAN has been called the tool-making and tool- ■*■"■■■ using animal. Among living creatures, he alone has supplemented his powers by the use of tools. The tool augments man's possibilities. "Without tools, he is nothing; with tools, he is all," writes Carlyle. Ideas, taking shape in the tool, have placed man far in the lead of his competitors. Even the king of beasts falls an easy victim to his weapons. With neither defensive armor nor offensive powers, man, without tools, must rank as one of the weakest of earth's inhabitants. Armed with the tool, he is able to place aU hving things under his domination. Nature and all of her creatures bow before the tool- magic. The kingdom of man rests upon the tool, which, in its turn, depends upon the thurnb, the forefinger and the forehead. Among all the animals, none, except man and the man-like apes, can place the end of the thumb against the ends of all of the fingers; therefore, except for the anthropoids, no animal can make or successfully use a tool. This mechanical (45) 46 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE possibility, guided by the light of inteUigence that burns in the frontal lobe of the brain, organized and co-ordinated through man's reason, has built civili- zation. The tool gives man his power over the universe. He fashions the tool; wields it; owns it. A sense of possession goes with the fashioning of the tool. The savage who hollowed his canoe from the log or chipped the flint for his spear head owned the thing he had made. It was his because he fashioned it. Men love the work of their hands, because their hands have done the work. The man who wields a tool feels the power of his mastery. It is his. Backed by the strength of his arm and guided by the light of his brain, it pulsates to its task. He pushes, swings, pulls, directs. The tool user is master of his tool. Ownership carries with it a sense of proprietorship. The man has fashioned and wielded the tool. He owns it. It is his. The title, the right of possession remains in the man to whom the tool belongs. The power of the tool, backed by mah's master guidance, is the title to his kingdom. He has the earth. He has been told to master it and possess it. 2. The Tool and the Machine The modem tool is the machine. Ever since the first rude wooden spear was fashioned, ever since the first fish bone was shaped into a needle, the first clay was molded into a bowl, and the flint was THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 47 chipped and fitted to the arrow; from the most primitive begumings down to the present day, man has been perfecting the tool. He has seen in it new possibilities and dreamed into it new wonders of invention. Only yesterday, the man made, wielded and owned the tool. Today — what transformation! The tool has left the narrow confines of its age-long prison and appeared in its true form as a machine. Between the tool and the machine there is this most fundamental difference. The tool user fash- ioned, wielded and owned the tool; the machine user neither fashions nor wields his machine. Robert Bums describes the cotter, leaving his work on Saturday night. He "collects his spades, his mat- tocks and his hoes," throws them over his shoulder and trudges homeward. How unUke this is the picture presented by modem industry. Even on the farm, in these last few years, the mattocks and hoes have yielded place to plows, cultivators, potato diggers, seeders and a host of other horse-power machinery that performs the work that was) formerly the product of the cotter's back and arms. Carry the parallel one step further and make it in terms of industry. "Collects his electric cranes, loco- motive engines, steam rollers and blast furnaces." The words bespeak the contrast. Electric cranes, locomotive engines, steam rollers and blast furnaces are machines — intricate, huge, costly. They are the product of an age-long evolu- 48 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE tion of the tool — but they are more than the tool. The thumb, forefinger and forehead have made a being that is alive with a tireless, superhuman power. The machine is intricate. No man can make all of the parts or engage in all of the processes that go to the construction of any one machine. Men do not fashion the machines they use. The machine is huge. No man can toss it upon his shoulder and carry it to his cot. No man can wield it. The machine is not carried about as was the tool, from place to place. It is not raised or swung or wielded. Instead it is fixed in a place, to which the man comes to do his work. The machine is costly. No man can own the machinery with which he works. First, because it is too expensive for each man to own, and second, because where many men work with one machine, like a locomotive, if one should own it, another would necessarily be denied ownership. Aside from collective ownership, there is no possibility for the individual to own the machine. The huge, intricate, costly machine cannot be fashioned, wielded and owned by the man who uses it. The rail mill and the printing press differ essentially from the smith's hammer and the pen. The machine is a super-tool — a new entity — ^for behind it, within it, driving it relentlessly, are the eternal powers of nature which drive the universe. Jove's lightnings play through the dynamos and THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 49 along the wires. Water, earth and air concentrated in the machine, toil for man. For centuries men have harnessed the wind and the water, but it is only in recent years, with the development in iron and steel making, the use of coal, the steam engine, power-driven machinery, the turbine, the djoiamo, organic chemistry and applied mechanics, that nature's powers have been called upon to render effective service. When at last those forces were utilized — when nature was called upon to do man's work in the multitudinous activities of modem industry, the tool had been pushed aside by the machine, which, from that time forward, was destined to -heed the beck and call of the human race. 3. The Possibilities of the Machine The machine is the offspring of man's genius and nature's power. Is it to be a ministering angel? Is it to be a Frankenstein monster of destruction? Man has called this thing into being. Can he control the child of his imagination? the creature of his hands? The thumb and forefinger and the forehead have created a new being — the machine. They have bent nature to do their work. Can the forehead still rule the earth? During imtold ages mankind has struggled against want and privation. It was the effort to escape from this struggle that called the machine into being. The life of man was bitter. In the jungle, on the plain, under the mountain-side, dependent on nature, 50 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE he lived, precariously, from hand to mouth, warring continually with the forces by which he was sur- rounded; or else, a unit in some form of social organization, he earned black bread and a pallet of straw through unremitting toil. Conquest, tribute, slavery, serfdom were means of escape which raised a few above the crudities of the wolf struggle, while they groimd the majority of mankind into dust. Many slaves lived lives of hardship and subjection in order that one philosopher might make excursions into the realms of metaphysics, or one author pen his lyrics. The difficulties in the way of securing a living were so great! The odds against man were so stupendous! It took so much human energy to raise a pitcher of water or a bushel of wheat, to fashion a sword or polish a cup, that a full day of arduous toil produced little more than a bare living. It was only when many men, laboring and living on a very little, gave the surplus of their production to one whom they called "master," that the one man — ^the master — ^had freedom and leisure to think, speculate, experiment. The thinkers believed that they saw a great future for the human race. Could they but find a means of multiplying man's power! That means was first, in small measure, the tool, and later, in immense proportion, the machine. The machine has vanquished that most ancient enemy of mankind — ^famine. The machine has made want and privation eternally unnecessary. The THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 51 indiistrial- regime produces enough for all. No stomach need be empty, no back naked, no head shelterless. The machine has given man a hundred hands where before he had only two. Flour, woolen yam, leather, clapboards, may be had in ample abundance. If each man will do only a moderate amount of labor, the people of every country that employs machinery would be provided with all of the necessaries of life. The supply of these necessaries can be insured without overwork, .There is no need for a twelve- hour day. The users of machinery may be well suppUed with all things needful to life with a few hours work each day, leaving ample time for the imfolding of the human spirit. Leism-e is as much a product of the machine as are bread and shoes. The command, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou earn thy bread" is so mitigated by the powers of the machine that men may earn a generous living and have time to play and think in the same number of hours that formerly produced a bare subsistence. The machine augments the possibilities of life. By multiplying human productive power it increases the number of things that man may have at the same time that it enlarges his possibility of leisure. 4. The Fruits of the Machine What has the machine done? With so vast a possibility there should have gone some measure of 52 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE achievements. Machinery has multiplied human productive power. Has it, at the same time, aug- mented health and happiness? The machine has led, as might readily have been predicted, to the piling up of phenomenal masses of wealth. Man's productive power has been multi- plied by marvelous achievements. New resources are utihzed. Old ones are employed to better purpose. New methods, improved devices, save labor, time and energy, while they increase output. The change in the method of bread-baking gives an excellent idea of the advance in productive efficiency. Once or twice each week, in the old-time home, came baking day. The fire was tended, the oven made hot, and the dough, raised over the previous night, was kneaded, cut into loaves and set into the pans.. The housewife baked her bread with simple hand tools. Even when the baking was a complete success the toil was severe. But the baking was not always a complete success; failure was frequent, and the "bread that mother used to make" was frequently heavy and unpalatable. It is in the modem bread factory that bread-baking is put on a permanently expert basis. The successful factory bakers make and keep on hand a good supply of first-class yeast. This yeast is mixed with the flour and other ingredients of the bread in accordance with an exact formula which represents the result of years of study and experi- ment. When the bread is ready for the oven, it is THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 53 brought in great troughs and dumped into the hopper of the bread machine. The machine first cuts the dough into proper-sized loaves, sprinkUng flour on each piece. Then these loaves pass into the part of the machine that rolls, kneads and shapes them. They are then dropped into the pans, which are taken by an endless carrier to a chamber kept at a certain temperature where the dough rises; to a second and third chamber, and then into the oven. After about three-quarters of an hour in the oven the bread is dropped out, perfectly baked, passed into a machine, wrapped in paper and sent out to the trade. Nearly two hours have elapsed since the bread entered the machine as dough. During that time, no hand has touched it, but, in the course of its thousand-foot journey, it has been made into high-grade bread, in a machine tended by a dozen men whose sole duty it is to see that the machiae does its work. The housewife, in a day's baking would make a dozen loaves of bread. This machine makes fifty thousand loaves in the course of a night. The bread machine is complex, intricate, huge, costly. An outlay of a hundred thousand dollars is necessary to install one machine; but once at work, under proper direction, it increases the productive power of human energy to an extent that is almost unbelievable. The bread machine, invented and perfected by the human brain, and guided by the human hand, spells plenty for the sons of men. If grain can be 54 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE raised in sufficient quantities, no one, henceforth, needs to suffer for lack of the facilities for converting that grain into a usable form. The bread machine is an individual unit in the productive mechanism. The power of mechanical production is illustrated even more strikingly in great unified industries that have sprung into being during the past half century. Among these, none yields more wonderful results than the steel industry. There was a time when iron ore was dug from the ground with pick and shovel, loaded on wagons, hauled to a furnace, and after an immense expendi- ture of energy, converted into pig iron. This pig iron, in turn, was reheated and made into some form of wrought or cast iron or steel. The modem steel industry is built on machinery. The iron ore is dug from the Superior mines by a steam shovel, thrown on cars that run to the lake front by gravity, dumped into pockets that shoot the ore directly into the hold of the ore steamers which carry it to one of the lower lake ports, picked up from the holds of the steamers by great grab- buckets and thrown on cars, carried to the blast furnace, emptied on the ore dump, shifted by an endless conveyor up into the fiunace, and there, with coal and limestone, under a forced draft of heated gas and air, made into molten iron. Without more ado, this molten iron is carried to the con- verter, turned to steel, poured into molds, run over to the rolling mill, passed through the rolls, and THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 55 dropped out on the pile as a finished rail. In this whole process, from the ore mine to the rail pile, the lifting and carrying, heating, hammering and rolling has been done by machinery. In the entire process human hands have played no direct part. Only with lever, switches and mechanical devices, they have busied themselves in guiding the titanic powers of nature. Man's hand is no more mighty than it was in past ages, but, backed by the tireless energy of machinery, it is able, with but a sUght effort, to turn out products that even the strength and cunning of Seigfried could not have forged. The United States Bm-eau of Labor tells the story in figures. Twelve-pound packages of pins can be made by a man working with a machine in 1 hour 34 minutes. By hand the work would take 140 hours 55 minutes. The machine is ninety times quicker than the hand. Furthermore, " the machine- made pin is a much more desirable article than the hand-made" "A hundred pairs of men's medium grade, calf, welt, lace shoes, single soles, soft box toes, by machine work take 234 hours 26 minutes; by hand the same shoes take 1,831 hours 40 min- utes. The labor cost on the machine is $69.55; by hand, it is $457.92. Five hundred yards of gingham checks are made by machine labor in 73 hours; by hand labor in 5,844 hours. One hundred pounds of sewing cotton can be made by machine labor in 39 hours; by hand labor in 2,895 hours. 56 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE The labor costs are proportionate" The same facts hold true of agriculture. A good man with a scythe can reap one acre a day; a good reaper and binder does the same work in 20 minutes; six men with flails can thresh 60 hters of wheat in half an hour. One American thresher can do twelve times as much (740 liters). Commenting on these and similar figures, the government report states: "The in- creased effectiveness of man-labor, aided by the use of machinery, . . . varies from 150 per cent, in the case of rye, to 2,244 per cent, in the case of barley. From this point of view, a machine is not a labor- saving but rather a product-making device . . . ." This, then, is the machine — a thing conceived by man's inventive genius and utiUzing nature's power to supply htmian needs. The machine is man's energy and strength, multiplied many times. 5. The Industrial Revolution The machine is the unit out of which the Indus- trial Regime has been built. The process of its building has reconstructed society. Machine, factory, plant, city, railroad, financial institution, are the steps in the evolution that has produced the Industrial Regime. Before the coming of the machine, the individual craftsman was the unit in industry. He could make a shoe, a hat, a piece of cloth, from the raw material to the finished product. Such a craftsman single- handed could turn out industrial products. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 57 The power-driven machine entered the field. The craftsman laid aside his hand tools, left the home work shop and went into the factory. The step was inevitable. Power was the essential element in this new type of industry, and power could be used effectively only where many machines were brought together under one roof. The factory became the new unit of industry. No individual worker in the factory made a complete product, but each one, occupied in some specialized task, worked, under the factory management, on a basis of division of labor. The craftsman disappeared, because, instead of making a shoe, he was tending a machine that performed one small operation in the whole process of shoemaking. The factory began as a small affair, employing a few score persons. It has grown in scope until it employed hundreds and thousands."^ The craftsman i,The last census gives a table showing the number of persons employed in the factories of the United States in 1910. Table I. — Wagb-Earnehs in the Manufacturing Indttstbibs, Classified by Numbees op Wage-Eahnees. Number of Establislmieiits Average Number of Wage-Earners. Per Cent of Total ~ Employing. Establish- ment. Wage- Earners. 5 wage-earners or less 6-50 wage-earners 61-100 wage-earners 101-500 wage-earners 501-1,000 wage-earners . . Over 1,000 wage-earners . 164,001 80,742 10,964 11,021 1,223 640 311,704 1,405,201 782,298 2,265,096 837,473 1,013,274 6,615,046 61.1 30.1 4.1 4.1 0.5 0.2 100.0 4.7 21.3 11.8 34.2 12.7 15.3 Total 268,491 100.0 58 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE lived at home in a small village or town. His work- shop was ia his house or near it. There was no point in moving to town for work. The factory worker leaves his home and goes to the factory. He cannot hve too far away, otherwise the walking is impossible ia bad weather. A factory with a hundred people makes a village of three himdred souls, counting famihes, stores, traders and all. Ten such factories make the beginnings of a city. One large-sized steel works, employing ten thousand men requires a city of forty thousand to supply it with workers. The growth of factories carries with it, necessarily, the growth of cities. Then, too, industries attract industries. Here is a center of shoe manufactiumg. What better place for the estabUshment of a plant for the manufacture of shoe-making machiaery? The machine industry is imder way, and the demand quickly leads to the building of a foundry. Industry draws industry. The village becomes a city; still other factories come and the city spreads and converts the neighboring farm land into sites for factories and homes. The city is making shoes — a hundred times as many as those who live in it can wear. There must be some means of disposing of them. The shoe jobbers come into being. The shoes must be shipped to distant parts of the country. The railroad plays its part. The city has made itself indispensable to a hundred other cities, by making shoes for their citizens. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 59 Meanwhile, the people of the city, engaged solely in the manufacture of shoes, must be fed, clothed, housed and educated. To do this, the people of the himdred other cities make flour, woolen cloth, furni- ture and school books, and exchange with the people of the city which makes shoes. The factory is the unit of production, but it has built up a new social unit — the industrial city. The industrial city, depending on its neighbors for an exchange of products, becomes a unit in the indus- trial community. The railroads, telegraphs and telephones tie the community together. State bounderies and national lines alike become super- fluous. The people of the world have been joined by their interdependent industrial activity. The machine created the factory; the factory urbanized the village; the railroad bound together the scattered units into a closely knit community. There is another factor, not yet considered, which is of the utmost importance. While the machine was creating the structure of modem industrial society, the business world was occupied in securing a control over it. The steps in the establishment of business control were logical and inevitable. First the factory, with its mechanical power and simple division of industry, was made the unit in large scale industry. A man no longer controlled a factory. Instead, he had a "plant," or several factories. In modem parlance, he had a "battery" or a "brigade" of factories. 60 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE each one of which played its part in the work of the entire establishment. Then the plant was made the unit in an integrated industry — ^that is, an industry that controlled all of the stages of production from the raw to the finished product. These steps in industrial organization may be illustrated from the steel industry. A man has a mill in which he makes bar iron. He decides to add a mill in which bar steel is made and another mill in which structural steel is made. These three separate factories, built together, make up a plant. A larger idea is conceived. Iron mines, coal mines, coke ovens, railroads, blast furnaces and steel converters are all bought up by one group of interests and integrated with the bar and structural steel mills. The same industry now includes all of the steps in the production of steel from the ore in the mines to the finished structural steel. This represents the contribution of the organizers of industry. Now there come the organizers of finance, first with combination and then with "spheres of influence," to borrow a phrase from the language of diplomacy. The combination is a union of similar industries. A number of steel industries had secured control of their raw material. These industries were merged in the United States Steel Corporation, which was one of the many combinations, or "trusts" as they were popularly called, that combined like industries. There were the sugar, oil, steel, plate-glass, harvester THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 61 and many other combinations, each in greater or less control of a given industry. Then^the financial world took its last step in the organization of the Industrial Regime, by bringing together unlike industries. The process was colossal but simple. The prime essential was a group of banks, trust companies and insurance companies that would provide the neces- sary money and credit. With this financial backing as a basis, great integrated industries, trusts, com- bination of industries, railroads and mimicipal utilities were brought under the same "control" or "sphere of influence." They were not bought outri^t. Fifty-one per cent of the stock gives absolute control. But even stock purchase on a large scale was not necessary. Often adequate representation on the board of directors was the only thing needful. The power of the Rockefeller interests and the Morgan interests is built in that way. It is neither a "trust" nor a combination, but a co-ordination of all of the elements in the industrial and financial world, under the control of one small group of individuals, or even around one powerful individual. This is the Industrial Regime, and the small coterie of men who are at the center of financial control exercise whatever dominion is exercised over its affairs. Power, control, rule, government — which word must be used to characterize the part played in the affairs of the community by these few 62 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE mighty ones, in whose hands there is concentrated the influence over so vast a field? 6. The Growth of Riches The machine multiplies man's productive power. The co-ordination of industrial units leads to in- creased efficiency. Then the past half century of machine industry and of industrial organization, combination and concentration should have wit- nessed a great increase in wealth. The records of wealth-increase during the years that they are available almost pass belief. Many thinking men believed, in 1860, that the high point in productive efficiency had been reached. Since that time, the wealth of the United States, as esti- mated by the census officials, has increased twelve- fold. Table II. — The Total Wealth and Total Population op the United States, 1850-1912.' Total Wealth. Per Capita Wealth. Total Population. 1850 $7,135,780,000 16,159,616,000 30,068,518,000 43,642,000,000 65,037,091,000 88,517,307,000 107,104,202,000 187,739,071,000 $308 514 780 870 1,036 1,165 1,318 1,965 23,191,876 31,443,321 38,558,371 50,155,783 62,947,714 75,994,575 82,466,551 95,410,503 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1904 1912 The wealth of the country in 1850 was a little more than seven billions. By 1912 it had risen to a : Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1914, p. 628. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 63 hundred and eighty-seven billions. Although the population was only about four times as great in 1912 as it was in 1850 the total wealth of the country was twenty-five times as great. From the time when the earliest settlers landed, and when the wealth of the country was practically zero, for two centuries, the hand of man delving into nature's storehouse had raised the wealth of the country to seven biUions. It is imfortunate that the wealth figures do not run back to 1800, for then, when there was no machine industry the true progress of man, aided by the tool, might have been seen. Ignoring this, however, and assuming that the years up to 1850 were tool-using years, the wealth increase brought about since that time is httle short of marvelous. The immense increase in the total wealth has its parallel in the increase in the per capita wealth. The wealth of the coimtry per person was three hundred dollars in 1850 and almost two thousand dollars in 1912. This does not mean that each of the people in the country hstd that much wealth in 1912. Far from it! It simply means that if the total wealth of the coxmtry is divided by the total population, the result shows more than six times as much wealth per person in 1912 than there was in 1850. The machine has infinite possibiUties. It has fulfilled its promise by creating immense masses of wealth. The machine has done what it was expected 64 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE to do. There remains man, the creator of the machine, and the relations that have sprung up between the creator and the creature of his creative power. 7. Man — the Machine Tender The machine has converted man the tool user into man the machine tender. Markham's "Man with the Hoe" was master of his tool. "Bowed with the weight of centuries, he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground." Yet, when his contemplation was over, he could shoulder the hoe and take it home. He could wield it, repair it, duplicate it. It belonged to him. Man, the tool user, could fashion, wield and own his tool. Not so, man the machine tender. He is brought face to face with giant forces and mighty mechanisms. The tools of industry are no longer stored away beside the peasant's cot. Instead they are kept in the factories and plants where the work of the world is now done. The tap-tap of the home workshop has been replaced by the roar of the modem workshojp — the industrial world. The vast mechanical devices, symbols of man's ascending power, speak in sten- torian tones the watchword of the modem world. Many people have attempted to interpret the language of the machine. None have succeeded better than did Giovannitti, when he wrote of the "furious song of human toil." "Whirred the wheels THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 65 of the puissant machines, rattled and clanked the chains of the giant cranes, crashed the falling rocks, the riveters crepitated and glad and sonorous was the rhythm of the bouncing hammers upon the loud- throated anvils. i'^ "Like the chests of wrathfuUy toiling Titans, heaved and sniffed and panted the sweaty boilers, like the hissing of dragons sibilated the jets of steam, and the sirens of the workshops shrieked like angry hawks flapping above the crags of a dark and fathom- less chasm. I "The files shrieked and the trains thundered, the wires hummed, the dynamos buzzed, the fires crackled; and like a thunderclap from the cyclopean forge roared the blasts of the mines. "Wonderful and fierce was the mighty symphony of the world, as the terrible voices of metal and fire and water cried out into the listening ears of the gods the fiuious song of human toil."* The tool was wielded by the man who used it, but these thundering, puissant machines dominate the human beings who tend them. They are energized with an everlasting power. They are tireless and wholly without pity. They make the pace which the man and woman who work with them must follow. \ Here is a plant in which they are packing pork and beans. The cans, filled with beans pass close 'Arrows in the Gale. "The Cage." Arturo Giovannitti, Hillacre Bookhoiue, RiTerside, Conn. 66 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE before you, fixed on an endless carriage. As each can passes, you must slip a piece of pork in it; Failure means loss of wages or even loss of job. The machine is geared high. The cans move rapidly, and ten hours each day you devote to the endless task of getting a piece of pork in every can of beans that passes over your table. You sit down before a sewing machine that is run by electric power. You are putting the main seams in overalls. You reach over to the left of the machine, seize the two parts that are to be sewed together, place them side by side, push them tmder the needle, throw on the power, and for a moment the needle tears across the fabric at the speed of two thousand revolutions a minute. The piece is done; you break it from the thread, throw it into a box on the right of the machine, snatch two other pieces of goods and go on with the work as before. You are paid for the work at a piece rate that is set at a'^point which will enable you to make a living if you are quick and persistent at your task. There is no danger that you will loiter, for behind you, driving you to constant exertion are the want and hardship that go with low wages and perhaps the loss of a job. You work in a packing house, in the department where the sheep are skinned. The carcass of the animal is swung up on a hook that grips an endless carriage that is geared to move at a certain pace. The carcasses come slowly down the side' of the room where you stand. As each one passes you, THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 67 you must reach out, seize the fore-leg, slit the hide around the knuckle, and pull it back, ready to be torn away from the leg by the man next to you. You do that twice on each carcass, and by the time you have finished with one carcass, another has been brought to you by the endless carriage. There are perhaps fifty men engaged in the one occupation of taking the hide from a sheep. Each man's task is cut out for him. The speed at which he must do his work is fixed by the speed at which the machine brings the carcasses down the side of the room. That speed is so arranged that everyone is kept busy most of the time. There is a boy doing piece work. He sits in front of a revolving table, putting nuts onto bolts. He picks up a nut, places it upside down on the table; picks up a bolt, presses it against the revolving nut, which passes up on the thread of the bolt; picks up another nut, places it upside down on the revolving table; picks up a bolt and presses it against the nut; picks up another nut, threads it on a bolt, and so on through the twelve hoiurs of his "shift." If he is quick, he can finish about eight hundred bolts an hour. He receives ten cents a thousand for the work. This man is fastening the spokes into the iron eyelet that forms one side of the hub of a baby coach. He reaches for an eyelet, slips it to its place on the die, brings two pieces of bent wire that are to be the spokes and drops them into place with his 68 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE right hand, drops a third piece of wire in place with his left hand, presses a treadle with his foot; the machine drops a die that fastens the six spokes securely into the eyelet; the man throws the com- pleted work on a pile, reaches for another eyelet and repeats the process. There are seven hand motions and one foot motion required for each operation. The experienced operator turns out 20 pieces a minute; 1,200 pieces an hour, 10,000 pieces a day. In a week this machine tender repeats his series of eight motions from 50,000 to 60,000 times. What a prospect, at one week end, to contemplate for the coming week — fifty thousand repetitions of an habit- ual action! It is the price this man must pay for his daily bread. The soul that should expand through the creative effort of craftsmanship; the mind that should be occupied with the educative processes of constructive work; the hand that should be trained to follow the behests of the soul and obey the directions of the mind; the stream of the man's consciousness — ^his whole being are prostituted to eight motions re- peated, repeated, repeated until the imagination grows dizzy, as in the contemplation of infinity, with the difference that here it is affrighted by an infinity of littlenesses. The tool user made his tool, wielded it and owned it. The machine tender is using a machine made by other workers in highly specialized factories. He no longer wields the tool. Instead, leaving his home, Miiiil THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 69 he goes to the place where the tool is, to work with it there. As an individual, the tool user cannot own the machine that he uses. One machine — a blast furnace, for example — ^is used by many men, and is useless unless many men use it. The machine is a social tool — depending for its efficacy upon the co-operation of many people. The machine is social in nature, as the tool was individual. Many men work with the machine. If one man be permitted to own it, he has a potent advantage over his fellows which may enable him to dictate to them the terms under which they shall work, and to compel them to pay him a part of the product of their labor because he owns the machine. They must make a living. That means, nowadays, that they must work with machinery. The machine owner has an advantage because he owns the means of another's livelihood. His exercise of that advantage is called exploitation. The feudal lord exploited his tenants through his ownership of their means of Uvelihood — ^the fertile land. The modem world depends for its living upon machinery instead of upon agricultural land, and therefore the owner of machinery is in a position similar to that of the land owner in feudal Europe. The tool user was master of his tool. He could wield it. It was his. The machine tender cannot wield his machine. Instead, he gears himself to meet the pace which the machine sets. There is something fundamentally vicious about 70 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE this process of setting the man to keep the pace of the machine. The tool user worked according to his own volition. When he struck a blow with his hammer, he did so because he wished to strike. His emotions and his will were guiding principles. He was a free man! The machine tender does his work in time with the machine. He must accept its pace and follow its lead if he is to keep his job. He is under coercion by the machine. Those who insist on liberty and resent despotism may see in the machine a means of coercion that surpasses all of its predecessors in effectiveness and finality. 8. Caught in the Levers and Cogs ^ The man who takes a place in the modem Indus- trial Regime becomes a unit in a highly organized system. He is a unit, an unessential unit, because he can be easily replaced. He is working under the direction of a great industry. There is little contact between the men at the top and the men down below. The stops and gears are set. The machine is started. To paraphrase Lord Nelson, "Machinery expects every man to do his duty." His work is cut out for him. This relation between the individual and the Industrial Regime led G. Lowes Dickenson to write in his "Letters from John Chinaman,"* "Your ♦London: R. Bromley Johnson, 1903. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 71 capital is alive, and cries for food; starve it and it turns and throttles you. You produce, not because you will, but because you must" (p. 14). "You have hberated forces you cannot control; you are caught yoiu-selves in yom? own levers and cogs. In every department of business you are substituting for the individual the company, for the workman the tool" (pp. 13-14). There is much justification for this charge. The human race has been extensively victimized by its industrial forces. > Instances may be picked up, almost at random, of the manner in which industrial tyranny manifests itself. At times the work which is done by the machine tender is long continued as well as arduous. The steel industry is still on a basis of very long working hours. The investigators who made their report in 1912* found that "during May, 1910, the period covered by this investigation,! '50,000, or 29 per cent, of the 173,000 employees of blast fiu-naces and steel works and roUing mills covered by this report, cus- tomarily worked seven days aweek, and 20 per cent of them worked 84 hours or more per week, which, in effect, means a twelve-hour working day every day in the week, including Sunday. The evil of seven- day work is particularly accentuated by the fact, developed in the investigation, that the seven-day working week was not confined to the blast furnace ' Report on Conditions of Employment in Iron and Steel Industry, 62d Congress, 2d Session, Senate Doc. 301, pp. 8-10. 72 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE depEuiiment, where there is a metallurgical necessity for continuous operations, and in which department 88 per cent of the employees worked seven days a week; but it was also foimd that, to a considerable extent, in other departments where no such metal- lurgical necessity can be claimed, productive work was carried on on Sunday just as on other days in the week. , . . "The hardship of a twelve-hour day and a seven- day week is still further increased by the fact that every week or two weeks, as the case may be, where the employees on the day shift are transferred to the night shift, and vice versa, employees remain on duty without relief either 18 or 24 consecutive hours. . . . "Even in the blast furnace department, where there is a metallurgical necessity for continuous operation day and night throughout seven days of the week, there is practically nothing except the desire to economize in the expense of production that has prevented the introduction of a system that would give each employee one day of rest out of seven. "Approximately 14 per cent of the 173,000 employees work less than 60 hours per week and almost 43 per cent work 72 hours or over per week." The New York Factory Investigating Commission reports frequent instances where long-continued labor is required even of women.' In one case that •Report of New York Factory Investigating Commission: January 15, 1913, p. 242. "i«»i«u. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 73 is on record, a girl of twenty-three worked in a magazine bindery from 8.30 a. m. until 5.30 the next morning. "She was employed to fill the boxes of a gathering machine in a magazine bindery. She worked from 8.30 a. m. until 5.30 p. m. with a half hour at noon. She began again at 6.30 p. m. and worked imtil midnight. ^ After a recess of thirty minutes she continued her day's task until 5.30 a.m." On the next page the report continues : ' ' The United States Bureau of Labor in its report upon wage- earning women confirms our foregoing assertion of the existence of these excessive hours of labor of women in bookbinderies. In one bookbinding estabUshment in New York City agents of the government found girls employed overtime from 16 to 24J^ continuous hours, once and sometimes twice a week, during a period of from sixteen to twenty-four weeks." Here is the testimony of the manager of one New York canning factory: "Q. According to your tune sheet which you have produced of July 10, 1912, which is Wednesday, Mrs. D. began work at 6.45 in the morning that day. Is that right? A. Yes. "Q. And she finished at 2.30 the following morn- ing? A. Yes. "Q. Working 19^ hours? A. Of course she had one-half hour out for limch and supper that we gave her. . . . "Q. You produce the time sheet for the date of 74 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE July 11, 1912, and I find the same Mrs. D. — that is the same one, is it? A. Yes; 16 hours. "Q. And she began that morning at a quarter of seven and stopped at 12 o'clock, and she began at one o'clock — that was her lunch hour? A. Yes; she had an hour out. "Q. You didn't pay for that hour? A. No. "Q. Then she stopped at six and started at seven; you didn't pay for that hour? A. No. [■ "Q. She stopped at quarter of one in the morn- ing? A. Yes, sir."' There is another phase of the work of the machine tender that cannot escape mention. The machine does not need sleep at night. It is as tireless on a twenty-hour day as it is on a ten-hour day. Consequently the factories and mills frequently work both by day and by night. The time when the poet can find the world asleep never comes in a great center of industry and commerce. All night long the trains move back and forth, the glow of the glass factories and of the steel mills red- dens the night; and all night long men go to and from the never-ending work of the world. ^ Ours is a twenty-hour civilization. Certain industries have an excuse for night work. The cessation of activity leads to a heavy loss of the product. Other industries work at night because it pays better. ' Report of New York Factory Inyestigating Commission, January 15, 1913, p. 244. ,THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 75 The New York Commission has a great deal to say about the work of women at night in New York State. Writing of the night shift in a twine works, the Commission says: "Most of the women on the night shift are married. The appearance of the wonaen workers is very disheartening. They are stoUd, worn looking and pale. Their clothes, faces and hands are covered with oil and hemp dust."' "Among 100 of these women, 80 were between twenty and thirty years of age; 62 of the hundred were anemic. AH of the operatives worked stand- ing. . . . Dust is the predominating evil. . . . There is considerable dust in nearly all parts of the mill. ... It fills the preparing room where the hemp bales are opened and the- hemp prepared. . . . The dust in this department is so thick that the clothes and caps of the women are completely covered with it."' The work is surroimded by discomfort. "The clatter of the machinery here is so frightful that a voice can hardly be heard below a shriek. . . . The spinning room in the basement is eight or nine feet high. . . . The watchman says that on very hot nights the temperature on the top floor is 108° F."'° The reports of severe working conditions come from industries that employ men as well as women. ' Report'of New York Factory Investigating Commission, January 15, 1913, p. 235. » Ibid., pp. 237-38. »/Wa., p.238. 76 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE Here is a description from the steel industry:" "Their first working position is the cupola-charging floor, upon which the men who handle the raw materials for the cupola work. When the outside temperature was 81 degrees, the temperature of the charging floor was 117 degrees, to which temperature the men were subjected during the whole of" their twelve-hour turn, except for the short periods, totaling approximately three hours, in which they were free to rest. While resting, they were still in a temperature of 104 degrees." After giving a description of the varioiis other occupations, the report continues: "As will be seen from the records of actual readings, the men in testing and working the heat and in repairing the furnaces are exposed to this terrific heat of upwards of 150 degrees. This exposure lasts but a short time, it is true, but the heat is exhausting even imder the best of condi- tions. The best conception of the conditions during this work is given by the following notes of one of the agents of the Bureau: " 'Heat conditions and amoimt of work done in making bottom. . . . Began work at South end at 2 p. M. Work as follows: Four men pass in regular order to dolomite pile 12 feet from furnace, get shovelful of dolomite (20 pounds), walk to furnace door, pause to see where material is needed, throw in shovelful of dolomite, walk back to pile. . . " "Conditions of Employment in the Iron and Steel Industry.'' U. S. Bureau of Labor, Government Printing Office, 1913. VoJ. Ill, pp. 304-13. WOIMvItOOJIS OF THE POOR AND THE RICH Men in a I'ittsbiirgh Steel Mill are shoAvn in the upper picture, running a 5(H) piiund lump of wliite-liot metal from the furnace to the hammer. (Iline Photo Co.) Thi'ir working conditions are not so pleasant as those of the multi-millit.maire wht)se pri\ate office is shown below. Here the .sound-proof walls are panelled with rare woods. The furnishings are simple but costl.v and lu.xurious. (Courtesy of "System.") THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 77 Work regularly, but without hurry; each man averages four shovelfuls in three minutes. Exposed to extremely high temperature constantly. Gunny sacks containing magnesite, 12 to 14 feet from furnace, smoking constantly. One caught fire and blazed up. Men were in this zone during entire time they were at work. Finished at South end 2.09 p. M. Rested six minutes on bench back of charging track. . . . All young men at this plant.' The recorded temperature under which these men were at work was 220 degrees plus. Water boils at 212 degrees." The machine is exacting, implacable. Long hours and high temperatures are to it a matter of utter indifference. The machine works by night and by day under conditions that are humanly impos- sible, yet human beings are asked to keep the pace which the machine sets. These are but a few of the many discomforts that surround the work of machine tenders. No mention has been made of the more vicious features of machine tending, which are an incidental and not an integral element of industrial life. The high acci- dent rate and the industrial diseases so prevalent in some industries have in many cases been caused or intensified by the coming of the machine; nothing has been said of the child labor that the machine has made possible. Rather, it has been the aim to show that the machine is a pacemaker, shod with seven-league boots; a taskmaster, relentless and 78 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE implacable. Monotony, speed, intensity, strain, all are incident to work in which the rate is set by the power of the machine rather than by the ability of a worker to keep the pace. The machine is the dominant factor in industry. It is expensive; it must be used to its full capacity; it is made to turn out product — take these things together, and the worker finds himself serving the machine — caught in the levers and cogs. 9. Worker and Product The hand-craft worker, using the tool, had received an education in his trade. Apprenticeship was an efficient school, and the boy who was appren- ticed at twelve to a saddler, at twenty was a journey- man who knew his trade. The years spent in drudgery and in educative work had yielded, as produce, a man who could turn out a saddle. The apprenticeship method of trade education gave to the worker training, confidence, inde- pendence and a pride in his workmanship which is of supreme importance in the doing of good work. The machine tender, engaged in doing highly specialized work, receives little training; he is not a craftsman, and, above all else, he is denied the pride in good work which comes only when a man makes a completed product. The child says, "It is mine. I made it," and the ring of pride in his voice when he says, "I made it," finds an answer in the heart of every human THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 79 being who has created anything. The creation need not be elaborate. It may be of the very simplest description. Yet, throughout the human race the instinct of workmanship manifests itself in a pride that the thing has been done. The machine tender makes no products. He bores holes, planes a surface, polishes a cup, files a comer, varnishes a button, shapes a shaft. He and a thousand others, working with him, turn out a gas engine, a sideboard, a spring or a saw. Here and there a workman plays a large part in making the output. For the most part, the machine tender, with his machine, performs one small operation on the completed product. The instinct of workmanship is the basis of indus- trial moraUty. The soul of sound industry lies in this pride which a man feels in his work. Many attempts have been made to preach duty t0j)lthe organization as a substitute for the work- manship instinct. Such moraUty has proved a sadly defective antidote for clock-watching, and in consequence j^ece rate_^stems and bonus^ sygtems^ are depended upon to drive the maclune tender where the spirit of workmanship led the tool user. Again coercion is substituted for volition, and with equally bad results.! The machine tender suffers another loss. He is separated from his product. The hand worker very frequently used the things that he made. If he did sell them, it was to people 80 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE in his immediate neighborhood with whom he was well acquainted. He and his friends and neighbors used the things he made. The machine tender makes things for others to use, and when he makes the product, he has no idea who will use it. The shoe-worker in Brockton and the pork-packer in Omaha, work for the world. They do not use the things they make, and they never see or know the user. The machine tender makes things for other people to use, and the gulf between him and those others is so great that [they have no human meaning for him. Kipling notes the problem in his "Sons of Martha" when he writes of the relation between those who make the good things and those who use them. "They finger death at their glove's end when they piece and repiece the living wires; He rears behind the gates they tend, they feed him, hungry, beside their fires Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into his terrible stall And hale him forth like a haltered steer, and goad him and turn him until evenfall. "They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose; They do not preach that his pity allows them to leave their work whenever they choose. And in the thronged and enlightened ways. So in the dark and desert they stand, Wary and watchful, all their days, that their brethren's days may be long in the land." THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 81 The machine tender — a little unit in a large organization — does not understand the whole of which he is a part. He does not know the drama in which his role is that of supernumerary. He must be a machine tender because he must live, but of the significance of it all, he is ignorant. Agaiast this subordination of the individual and his intelligence the world shouts its resentment. Says Emerson: "Give us worse cotton, but give us better men," and Carlyle exclaims, "DeUver me those rickety, perishing souls of infants, and let the cotton trade take its chance." It is for the happy, noble himian beings of Ruskin's prophecy that the world is striving and it has grown impatient of an industrial order that sacrifices human happiness to the interest of material progress. 10. Spiritual Valiies Behind all human pm-pose, in its larger scope, is the conservation of spiritual values. Even the simplest necessaries of life must at times be sacrificed in the cause of those higher things — truth, justice, mercy, beauty. How much more readily will comforts and luxuries be sacrificed if they are built upon fotmdations of human degradation! The man cannot be sacrificed to the machine. The machine must serve mankind, yet the danger to the human race lurks, menacing, in the Industrial Regime. , The issue is strikingly stated in some verse 82 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE written by "Don Marquis" for the Atlanta Evening Journal after the defeat of a Child Labor Bill in the Georgia Senate. The author says to the Senators : "You and I had our play time, if it was only a few brief years, When we dreamed and wondered and lauded — ^we can look through a blur of tears. Back to the meadows of childhood, where through the golden haze Still move the deathless visions that graced those careless days, — But from these you would filch their spirits, a thing even God can't replace. The power to dream, all the gift of their first youth's nameless grace. "Better a pauper, penniless, asleep on the kindly sod. Better a gypsy houseless, but near to the heart of God, That beats for the ear not dulled by the clanking wheels of care; Better starvation and freedom, and hope and the good sweet air; Than death to the something in him that was born to laugh and dream. That was kin to the idle lilies and the ripples of the stream For out of the dreams of boyhood, the visions that come and go. The Boy gains strength unknowing, that the Man shall prove and know. The crystal cistern of mirth must be filled to the brim in May If the soul is to faint not nor perish in the heat of the life's later day. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 83 "In crushing the blossom of hope, ere it blooms in the heart of your youth, You are crushing your commonwealth's future, you fools sans sense or ruth. Dull-eyed, weary and old — old in his early teens. You are flinging his future and life to the maw of orute machines; And dumb the heart of him now. at the time when his heart should sing: — Are you making slaves or men. what hope will the future briQg? Twisted and stunted and stupid, and moiled in your mills of grief. Can yoiu: spiadles spin from this remnant a man, a man and chief? Fools, with your mills and your dollars, your lies and your bloody hands, Who make a God of a wheel, who worship your whirring ^bands. Go spin, spin, spin, — bow down to your spindles then. Tatter to shreds the human threads that were meant for the weaving of men But ever the Silent Spinners spin eariy and spin late Ye fools, have ye never heard of^the Sisters Three of Fate?" If the forebodings of some people are justified — ^if the machine threatens to inaugurate a new system of slavery that shall degrade man to the service of mechanical processes, then, indeed, the revolt which Don Marquis voices is justified, and the sooner it comes the better for the human race. 84 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 11. The Lilies of the Field The picture must not seem too dark. All are not subject to the rule of the machine. An element of craftsmanship remains. Many benefit imquali- fiedly through the Industrial Regime. The machines must be designed and made. Improvements are always possible. Every industry requires a quota of skilled men. In some industries this quota constitutes a large majority of all of the people employed. For the most part, however, the ^ge, highly organized industries of the country are manned by great numbers of unskilled and semi- skilled workers to whom some simple task involving neither craftsmanship nor skill is allotted. They make up the bulk of the workers in the ordinary factory, and for this majority industry is a hopeless treadmill. There is another side of the picture. The present organization of industry makes it possible for some to live in ease and comfort without working, while the rest of mankind is engaged in hewing wood and drawing water. These people, while they use the products of the Industrial Regime, are not called upon to contribute in any way to its activity. The device by which some of the beneficiaries of the Industrial Regime escape economic responsi- bility is a simple one known as "living on one's income." It is frequently met with in every part of the United States. The method of living on one's income is as effec- THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 85 tive as it is simple. Anyone with surplus wealth may put it into practice. The modern machine, as has already been said, is too costly for the individual worker to own. The machine must have an owner, however, and under the system now followed in the United States, some one, anyone in fact, may own the factories, shops, stores, buildings and the land on which they stand. This is an "investment" into which a man puts his smplus wealth. In return for this invest- ment, the owner, as his "right," takes interest or rent. After making the investment, he does not participate at all in the work of running the factory or the store. He is simply a holder of property. In retiun for this property ownership, however, and for as long as he holds it, he is paid six per cent. If his property is equal to $100,000 his income will be $6,000 a year. He needs a property of only $10,000 to receive an income equal to that of the common laborer — $600 a year, or $2 a working day. No one asks how a man gets enough surplus wealth to have this property income. He may inherit it, find it, earn it. It may come from his father, uncle or wife. Its source may be the steel business, the cotton business, the real estate market, the stock exchange or even the roulette wheel. It is not nec- essary for the owner of surplus wealth to explain. He simply puts his money into stocks, bonds or mortgages and draws his dividends or interest. The things produced by the Industrial Regime 86 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE must pay the workers who have been engaged in their production. The products must also pay the property owners who hold title to the wealth invested in the industry. Hats, shoes, dishes, kitchen ranges, all are made by human hands and machinery. Some of those who get these products work for the income. Others own for it. The Industrial Regime pays its owners as well as its workers. The larger owners receive immense returns. As the amount of capital invested in industry increases, as the amoimt of industrial wealth grows, through the increase in land values, and the higher earning power of invested capital, the possi- bilities of property income broaden. There are more people living on their incomes today than there were ten years ago. The habit and the possibility is rapidly growing with the growth of income- yielding property. The Industrisd Regime has bright sides, and its very brightest is turned to those who own industrial property. Like the lilies of the field, many of them toil not, neither do they spin, and yet they outshine the splendor of Solomom. 12. The Machine and the Future The machine has been hailed as the world's savior from drudgery. Within it lay infinite possi- bilities of happiness and well-being. This was the promise of the machine. Its per- formance sounds an ominous note — ^a note of warn- THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 87 ing to all well wishers of the future. The machine has subordinated the man, thrusting him aside, and taking from him the precious heritage of craftsman- ship, upon which he had reUed for education, for civilization itself. Instead of the apprenticeship which was so essential an element in hand industry, the machine has put highly specialized occupations, reeking with monotony and speeded to the top notch of hiiman staying powers. Large scale industry, in- tegration, combination and centralized financial con- trol are all a part of the industrial revolution which has followed in the wake of the machine. C. Hanford Henderson, in his "Pay Day," writes: "This institution of industry, the most primitive of all institutions, organized and developed in order to free mankind from the tyranny of things, has become itself the greater tyrant, degrading a multitude into the condition of slaves — slaves doomed to produce, through long and weary hours, a senseless glut of things, and then forced to suffer for lack of the very things they have produced." The machine threatens to inaugurate a new slavery — a slavery of the individual worker to routine, mechanical production, a slavery of the com- munity to an irresponsible, self-constituted, indus- trial plutocracy. The former menace has become a reality. The latter threat is still a nebulous, shadowy imcertainty. Let it become certain, and the political democracy of the eighteenth century is dead. That combination of steel and fire, which man 88 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE has produced and called a machine, must be ever the servant, never the master of man. Neither the machine nor the machine owner may rule the human race, The machine may be separated from its evil effects. Says Carlyle: "Cotton spinning is the clothing of the naked in its result; the triiimph of man over matter in its means. Soot and despair are not the essence of it; they are divisible from it — ^at this hour, are they not crying fiercely to be divided." There is one last test to which every act of machine or man is subject: What is its effect upon the men and women of the commxmity? "The man's the gold for a' that." It is the happiness and well-| being of the families of a conomimity that sets the| stamp of final social approval upon any measure. The machine is indispensable to civihzation. Without it we must revert to some form of serfdom or of slavery. The machine is the device that must hft all mankind out of the morass of economic degradation onto the tableland of economic suffi- ciency. The machine, as the servant of mankind, and not of any particular coterie of men, will decrease drudgery, increase the number and richness of things that all may possess, and the amount and quality of the leisure that all may enjoy. Machinery is the servant of all. The children of men, joint heirs to the untold advantages that may accrue to the world from the use of machinery and of the present industrial order, are learning from the Industrial Regime to look forward to a true Industrial Democracy. CHAPTER II The Laboeee and His Hire 1. Material and Spiritual Values THE possibilities of the machine light up many of the darkest comers of civilization. Hunger, nakedness, privation and hardship need no longer exist. The immense productive power of the machine may enable this century to write in the economic history of the human race a chapter headed "The Disappearance of Poverty." Such possibihties lie in the machine. Will they be utilized? Here is a new means through which men may free themselves from the Curse of Adam. Here is a key to human destiny standing ready in the lock of time. The effects of the machine may be measured in the increase of material things and in the increase of non-material values. Men may receive more food and clothes because of the machine, and they may also have more freedom, more courage, more generosity, more tolerance and a clearer vision of the things that are to be. The material advantages of life are vital, but no less vital than the non- material or spiritual values of life. The machine, while increasing wealth, may decrease liberty and (89) 90 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE thus prove a curse rather than a blessing to the human race. The machine carves its likeness into the lives of the workers and the leaders of industrial life. The leaders are comparatively few. The workers are the people — ^the common people — ^who make up the bulk of the commimity. In a democracy it is to them that inquiry must be directed first. 2. The Greatest Number Those who work for wages make up the great body of the people in an industrial society. They are "the greatest number." Since democracy is based on the assumption' that the welfare of the majority must be regarded as paramount, it seems evident that any system of governmental or social organization that professes to be democratic must regard the welfare of the wage-earners as of para- mount importance. In so far as the community fails|to give first place to the welfare of the wage- earners, who make up the greatest number in an industrial society, it fails in its efforts to establish democracy. When the American people are willing to stand frankly for the proposition that the good things of life shall go to the favored few who hold the natural resources or some other form of monoply power, there will be no further necessity to discuss democ- racy. But so long as the American government is organized as a democracy, and so long as American THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 91 society is based on democratic principles, it will be necessary to insist on the fundamentals of democracy until the last bulwark of privilege is destroyed and democracy is, indeed, a reality. The^workers who carry the burdens of industrial activity should, imder a democratic form of indus- trial organization, have its chief rewards. They do the work. They should receive the pay. There are some forms of labor which are their own reward — ^which involve constructive, creative activity, and which are always desirable, even if they yield the barest pittance of a wage. Such opportunities are not abimdant in industrial society. If the facts cited in the foregoing chapter established any point, it was that the work of the modem machine tender cannot be regarded as a reward in itself. It is so monotonous, barren of initiative and exacting that the only justification that men could have for continuing in it must be the cash payment that they receive in retimi for their labor. The wage thus becomes a matter of paramount importance. Since it is almost the sole reward that most machine tenders get for their efforts, it should be adequate. 3. What are Men Worth? Wages should be adequate. With that proposition most people will agree readily enough. But at once the question arises, "Adequate for what purpose?" Immediately a discussion is precipitated. 92 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE There are people — ^many of them — outside of the ranks of the wage-earners, who are convinced that the worker is now getting all that he is worth. Very frequently, cultured, inteUigent, well-to-do people take such a position, and then, to prove their point, they cite instances of paperhangers, plumbers, gardeners and washerwomen who were paid "more than they were worth." Such state- ments naturally raise the question, "What are men worth?" What is worth, and who are worthy? Centuries of social experience have furnished at least one negative answer to that question. Ancestry, education, culture and leisure are not synonyms for worth. They produce too much eimui, dilettantism and Pharisaism to be regarded as adequate worth tests. The experience of the ages has led also to the con- clusion that in terms of spiritual values, which are the highest values that man has thus far learned to measure, truth and justice and mercy are the real measures of worth. Emerson called these spiritual values "The manners of a man's soul." Whether they occur in Marcus AureUus the Emperor or in Epictetus the slave, they are still the measure of real worth. Service is the only test that the economist can apply as a measure of worth. In so far as we do for others, we are expressing truth, justice and mercy in our acts. Thus the spiritual values appear in material or at least in visible forms. THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 93 Worth is measured by service. Men are worth as much as they serve. Ruskin carried this doctrine so far, in his inter- pretation of economics, as to declare, "There is no wealth but life." Value, to him, was that which avails toward life. The things that enlarged life he called "wealth;" the things that narrowed life he called "illth." He based his entire economic philosophy on the relations of human welfare. The "useful" or "worthy" citizen is therefore the one who renders the great service. The com- mands, "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you" and "Love thy neighbor" are immortal because they are foimded on service, which is the first and greatest law of life. With this service measure of worth in mind, turn to the proposition that this cotton weaver and that salesgirl are receiving adequate wages. Here is a man who is giving the best of his time and energy — ^his very life — ^three hundred days a year, ten hours every day to the weaving of cotton cloth. As a return for this labor, he receives $600 a year. If such a man, giving three thousand hours each year to the task of making clothing that will be worn by his fellows, is worth $600, how much is the man worth who has been living since the day that he was bom, thirty years ago, on the income from his father's estate? Take another case. This girl stands all day behind the counter in a department store, selling laces. In 94 THE LABORER AND HIS HHIE return for this expenditure of time and energy, she receives $400 a year. If such a girl is worth $400, how much is a girl worth who lived on the income earned by her father until she married her husband; who has never bom children or raised her hand to serious labor; and who comes in the pursuit of her luxurious tastes to buy laces from the salesgirl who is worth $400 a year? The ordinary processes of mathematics do not leave for the son of his father or the wife of her husband a very ample economic basis for existence. If it is true that the worth of any individual must be measured in terms of the service which he con- tributes to his fellow-men, the status of these two people is already algebraic. They are worth zero at birth, minus the entire cost of their maintenance since that time. The father and the husband protest. "Have we not a right to keep our sons and our wives in idle- ness and luxury if we see fit to do so?" To be sure you have. You may put your wealth into their upkeep as you would to the upkeep of any other bit of decorative finery. At the same time you must realize that they are only decorative finery, and that therefore, like any other wanton luxury, they are an offense to the community so long as there are working people who lack the necessaries of life; and furthermore, that it is unseemly, even grotesque, for such people and for the group in society which they represent to say that this or that person who is THE LABORER AN!) HIS HIRE 95 engaged in doing some useful work is "getting all he is worth." Those who hew the wood and draw the water, those who labor with the head or with the hand in the interest of the upbuilding of the community, are in a class by themselves. In another class, distinct from the workers, are those who, because of their ownership of some natural resource or of some productive machinery, are able to take from the worker a part of the product of his labor in the form of rent or interest. The workers build society and make progress possible. The owners live, parasit- ically, upon the proceeds of the work which the workers are doing. The workers are an economic asset. They create prosperity. The owners are an economic liability. They are a burden on the productive forces of the community. Each day that they live throws them deeper into the debt of the society that supports them. 4. Does the Laborer Get Enough? Wages cannot be measiu-ed in terms of service to the community under a system of econonuc society that rewards the man who owns much more liberally than it rewards the man who works. Therefore it is necessary to turn to some of the more specific issues that are raised by the present rates of wage payment, and discover, if possible, whether the worker gets enough. 96 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE What is enough? There must be some way in which the wage received by a man may be adjudged adequate or inadequate. Other things of far less importance are measured with the greatest nicety. The amount of fertilizer required on a given piece of land to raise a bushel of potatoes; the proper consistency of the cement that goes into a railroad bridge; the tensile strength of structural iron; the maximum speed and effi- ciency of machinery; the possibiUties of petroleum and of coal tar — ^all of those things have received devoted attention from those who are giving their lives to the upbuilding of industry; and yet, with the exception of what is called the "Efficiency Movement," there has been no commensurate effort to solve the more serious aspects of the wage problem. The wage-problem is one of the most acute. The wage-earners are clamoring for higher wages. The employers are protesting that wages are already too high. Out of this difference of opinion grow bitter social conflicts. The basis on which the adequacy of wages is to be determined must be a social one. The demands of a particular laborer, or of a particular group of laborers, can have no more part in the determination of wage adequacy than the demands of a particular employer or of a particular group of employers. The final test of the adequacy of wages must be the THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 97 welfare of the community. A given wage seems 'sufhcient frum — thS^ standpoint of the majority- interest. Then that is an adequate wage. Another wage is so high or so low that it threatens the wel- fare of the conamunity. The wage is a subject for immediate revision. 5. The Measure of Wage Adequacy Wages are adequate when they reflect the best interests of the community. There are three impor- tant ways in which their effect on the community may be measured: z''' 1. The wage paid must be sufficient to maintain the efficiency of the workers. 2. The wage must be high enough to make poverty, hardship or social dependence unnecessary. 3. The wage must be sufficient to enable the worker and his family to live hke self- respecting members of the conununity. These three facts of wage adequacy are primary. No industry can endure which does not give to its workers an efficiency wage. Even were there an ample supply of labor to replace the workers as they were worn out and cast aside because of the deteriora- tion due to insufficient wages, there comes a time in the history of any industrial or social group when the mills and the factories plan to get their labor supply from among the sons and daughters of their former employees. To that end the wages should be 98 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE adequate to maintain the efl&ciency of the worker from day to day and to allow his children to grow up in health and physical efficiency. This is merely another way of saying that industry must be self- supporting. The managers of a power plant would be more than anxious to keep up the supply of water from which their power was generated. Labor is the power of civihzation. Those who direct the affairs of the world must see to it that the efficiency of the labor supply is maintained otherwise civilization breaks down. Society is interested in self-support. Each mem- ber of a social group, at some time during his life should make a contribution to society that is equal to the cost of his upbringing; the cost of maintaining him in old age; and in addition an amount sufficient to add something to the net wealth of the com- mimity. This is another way of saying that society must be self-supporting. The community must therefore oppose any wage that will lead to poverty, dependence or any other state of life that takes the individual out of the self-supporting group. If wages are inadequate to allow for self-support, sooner or later the commimity must go into bankruptcy. A manufacturer recently called up a charity society, explained that he had a man running an elevator in his plant who was paid a wage of $10 a week with which he was attempting to support a family of four children. The manufacturer called THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 99 the attention of the charity society to the fact that a man, wife and four children could not possibly live decently in that city on $10 a week, and asked whether the society would be wiUing to give the man a pension to supplement his wage. He explained that $10 a week was all that he could afford to pay an elevator man. This manufacturer was asking the community to repeat the experience of England with the EUzabethan poor law, imder which the employer paid a part of the wages of tens of thousands of EngUsh famihes, who were forced to depend for the remainder of their incomes on the grants of poor relief from the public authorities. In the course of time, wages were so adjusted that the man with a family to support took his wages and as a matter of coiu*se supplemented them by an appeal to the poor law authorities. The public authorities subsidized the business of employers, who were reheved of the necessity of paying living wages to their employees. Wages must be sufficient to enable the wage- earner and his family to live Uke self-respecting mem- bers of the commimity. It is not enough to keep the wolf from the door. The worker should be able to set up a positive standard of respectable Uving. Surely, no man in the com munity deservesJ axJive hfitter thanthe'man who does its woST If there is weal^ enoUgfr'tS" support anyone in decency, that person should be the worker. There is nothing that builds self-respect more 100 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE surely than honest work honestly done. The first consideration of an industrial society should be to see that the people who do the work of the world have every possible return in the form of wages that permit respectable living. Finally, the wage paid to the worker must be a family wage. The home is the basic institution of the conamunity. Each man expects and is expected by the community to make a home and bring up a family. There is no other basis on which the com- munity can hope to persist. If men are to make homes and to raise families, the wage paid to them by industry must be adequate for fanaUy support. Expenditures vary from one family to another. One housewife will make a wage go farther than her neighbor. AbiUty to manage and a knowledge of the way are both necessary for domestic success. After making all due allowance for this fact, there remains the undeniable fact that under any standard of house management there is a minimiun of food, clothing and shelter below which no family can exist. This minimum may be placed at a high figure or at a low figure, but when all is said, there it stands. Unless the wage of the worker will pay for this minimum of family life, neither individual efficiency nor family decency is possible. If the American wage is sufficiently high to maintain individual efficiency, to prevent social dependence and to guarantee self-respecting family life, it is an adequate wage. On the other hand. t'MATlilAU AN1> T]-]XEJnONT Tlip handsimie [•i>imtr.v residence ii£ an American captain of indus- try is built in the French style, lieside an artificial lake and sur- iiuinded by beautiful private parks and gardens. (Photo from "House & (Jnrden.") The tenement house shown below is inhabited liy a larfie number of poor people, tor whom there is only one wash i-ooiu. One floor and the basoneuf ai'e below the street level. (I'hoto by nine from "Neglected Neighbors.") THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 101 if the American wage will not permit these things for a family of reasonable size, under the direction of a person of ordinary managing ability, it is an inadequate wage. 6. What is the American Wage? The "American Wage" has been talked about and written about at great length. Is it a tangible something that can be measured and described as one would measure and describe a city lot? The best way of showing the wages paid to a group of people is to employ the scheme of classified wage figures. Instead of saying that the average wage is $1.80, we say that among the 200 wage-earners under consideration, 40 received less than $1.50 a day; 65 received $1.50 but less than $1.75; 50 received $1.75 but less than $2, and so on. By this use of classified wages, if the wage groups are small enough, a very clear idea may be obtained of the actual status of the 200 wage-earners. There should be no confusion on one point. The wage figures that are published show the wage that is paid by the industries of the United States to the people who do the work of industry. These wages do not. represent what the men earn. The wages paid by the American industries to the workers in those industries represent not what the workers earn but what they get. The wage is simply the amount received by the wage-earner in return for a given expenditure of time and energy. 102 THE LABORER AND HIB HIRE Sometimes the wage is the result of a bargain between the employer and the group of wage-earners, represented by a union. Sometimes it is the wage paid by the employer to the individuals who offer themselves for his employ. In either case, it is the amount paid by industry to its workers. Emphasis is laid on this point because people are prone to believe that the wage paid to the worker is determined by the worker. The phrase, "He gets all that he is worth," is based on that supposi- tion. As a matter of fact, the,,prii»fHgtresponsi- tjiUty fo r the wage_ paidby thehidustries J^Ited'^ates rests wrHTthe mdustries tEemselves. Ina vei^~fBw-eases-fl*ErgThere are pdW5rftd"~tfa3e^ unions, this is not true. As a general rule it holds. The wage-earners are getting all they can, while the industrial managers, for the most part, pay as little as they must to get a man of given ability. Table III. — The Weeklt Wage-Ratbs Paid to Adult Malbb BT THE MANUFACTtrRINQ INDUSTRIES OP MASSACHUSETTS, 1912. WeekIy "Financing the Wage-Earner's Family," Scott Hearing, op. dt., Chap. 3. THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE Il3 workers, with average daily wages of $2 to $2.50, would be able to earn $750 a year only by working a full year of 306 days. The largest number of days worked by the anthracite miners in recent years was 257 days, and that was well above the average of the five-year period. ■ Many contract miners are apparently in receipt of annual earnings that will provide living decency for a family of four young children. The great bulk of anthracite workers, however, seem to be in receipt of wages that will not buy such living decency. i There are many ways in which the miner may maintain conditions of living decency. He may refrain from marrying or from having children; his wife may take boarders; when his children grow older they may contribute to the family income; liis wife may work at some regular occupation; he may find extra work outside of mining hours; or he may supplement the family income with a cow, pigs, chickens or a truck patch. All these are possi- bihties. Nevertheless, the obligation remains upon industry to pay a living wage to its workers, and the bald fact of a wage scale largely below the cost of decent family living stares every man with yoxmg children square in the face. From the standpoint of social well-being, every man in the anthracite region who is receiving a wage that is insufficient to buy physical health and decency fpr his family of young children is inade- 114 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE quately paid. How many such men are there? Future investigations alone will show. Are the wages paid to American wage workers sufficient to maintaia health and decency? Com- pare the two statements: Cost of decent family liv- The wages of adult males ing in eastern industrial (allowing for imemploy- centers, $750 to $1,000 ment) i less than $750, per year. t^\ less than $1,000. Nothing could show more conclusively the frightful inadequacy of American wages. The present wage scale, paid to workers by American industry, does not enable miUions of them to give a family of young children the simple decencies of life that are nec- essary to the maintenance of health and efficiency. 9. The American Wage as a Business Proposition The wages paid by American industry to a great body of its workers are inadequate to provide health, efficiency and decency for a moderate-sized family. They are even more inadequate when they are considered from the standpoint of up-to-date business practice. . Many a successful business man, who is confident that "tibie workers are paid all that they are worth," and that "wages are far too high, anyway," has never stopped to analyze wages from a strictly business point of view. The wage-earner is, in real- ity, a business man. His place of business is his THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 115 home. The object of his business activity is the rearing of a family. To this end the worker labors during most of his adult life. Business men have worked ardently to safeguard business interests. After centuries of experiment, they have evolved what they regard as a safe and sane method of financial business procedure. : Every successful business man tries to Uve up to the follow- ing well-established formula: First. He pays out of his total returns, or gross receipts, the ordinary costs of doing business — - materials, labor, repairs and the like. These pay- ments are known as running expenses or upkeep. Second. After upkeep charges are paid he takes the remainder, called gross income, and pays out of it the fixed charges — ^taxes, insurance, interest and depreciation.' Third. The business man, having paid all of the necessary expenses of doing business (the running expenses and the fixed charges), has left a fund (net income) which, roughly speaking, is the profits of the business. Out of this net income, dividends ' A depreciation charge is one that is made against the wearing out of capital. A paper manufacturer buys a machine for which he pays $1,000. Experience tells him that this machine will wear out in ten years. Therefore the manufacturer sets aside each year a sum which at the end of ten years will equal $1,000 (a new machine). In this way, the business man keeps his capital intact. While the individual machines, tools and the nke do wear out, the accounts of the business are so kept that these pieces of capital will be automatically replaced when they are too old for use. The depreciation charge is recognized everywhere as a legitimate and necessary &xed charge on business. 116 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE are paid, improvements and extensions of the plant are provided for. Fourth. The careful business man increases the stability of his business by adding something to his surplus or undivided profits. This formula may be stated in terms of business bookkeeping. Revert for a moment to the anthracite industry, from which most of the profits go to the operating railroads. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, one of the largest of the anthracite carriers, pubHshed these operating statis- tics for 1912 (Poor's Manual of Raihoads, 1914, p. 193): Table III. — Operating Statistics op the Delawabe, Lacka- WANNA AND WESTERN RaILBOAO, 1912. Gross earnings 837,564,511 Total expenses 24,146,423 Net earnings $13,418,088 Other income 6,054,567 Gross income $19,472,755 Deductions: Taxes $1,771,980 Rentals 5,847,278 Interest on bonds 6,486 Renewals and betterments 1,720,698 Miscellaneous 84,242 Dividends 6,028,800 Total deductions $15,459,484 Surplus for the'year $4,013,271 Total per cent earned on stock 33 , 17 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 117 The bookkeepers of the Lackawanna begin with the total returns or gross earnings of $37,000,000. From these they deduct the expenses of business upkeep. To the net earnings which remain they add incidental income from dividends, rentals, other properties, etc. The total is gross income. Observe that in the operations of this road, a third of the gross earnings appears as net earnings, and the gross income of the road is equal to half the gross earnings. From gross income is deducted taxes, rentals and interest. These are the fixed charges, obUgations which must be met if the business is to continue. From gross income the bookkeepers also deducted $1,750,000 for renewing and improving the property of the road, as well as $6,000,000 for dividends. After all of the necessary deductions had been made, $4,000,000 (an amount equal to 11 per cent of the gross earnings) remained as surplus. Like every carefully handled business, the Lacka- wa^HS- Paid its rimning expenses. Paid its fixed obUgations. Divided up its profits. And kept a nest egg. The showing made by the Lackawanna is in one sense exceptional because of the high dividends paid by that road. On the other hand, the method of carrying on business is typical of the method pursued by every soimd business organization in the United States. 118 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE Suppose the wage-eamer who is striving to support a family on a wage ranging from $2.50 to $3.50 a working day ($600 to $1,000 per year) should apply to the financing of his family affairs the financial formula adopted by any well-managed modem business. Since he must allow for running expenses, fixed charges, dividends and surplus, he would pro- ceed as follows: First. He would pay from the total family income the family running expenses — ^food, clothing, housing, medicine and the Hke. Second. From the remainder, his gross income, he woiold take interest on the investment which has been made in bringing up and educating his wife and himself; insurance against all reasonable con- tingencies, such as sickness, accident, death and unemployment; and a sum for depreciation suffi- cient to compensate for the inevitable decrease in his earning power and for the old age during which he and his wife can no longer earn anything. Third. The remaining net income should be sufficient to enable the worker to pay himself dividends proportionate to the excessive risks which he runs in bringing a family into the world and attempting to rear it; and sufficient to add at least something to the surplus which the family lays aside to provide against such untoward events as births, deaths and prolonged sickness. A large percentage of wage-earners receive a wage which will not pay even decent running THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 119 expenses. No business man would attempt to con- duct a business on a basis that would pay only the flimsiest of upkeep charges, yet the bulk of wage- earners find themselves in exactly that predicament. The legitimate fixed charges of business — ^interest on the investment, adequate insurance and deprecia- tion — ^are far above the reach of most wage-workers who have a young family to support. Place before any level-headed man of affairs this proposition: "I have a busiaess which is barely able to pay running expenses. We cannot meet our fixed charges, and our wildest flights of Imagination have never carried us as far as dividends and surplus. Will you join in the venture?" The statement is grotesque, yet it sets forth the financial position of a great body of American wage-earners. As a business proposition, for a family, the ordinary American wage is absurdly inadequate. No business man would consider it. It violates every business standard which the practice of the modem man of affairs recognizes as legitimate. Every concept of modern business management cries "shame" at the very thought of the proposition which the American wage scale presents to millions of its workers. 10. The Social Implications of the American Wage The first, and probably the most fimdamental, social objection which may be raised against the present wage scale is that it fails ^very largely to 120 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE stimulate the ambition of the worker. There are two reasons for this failure. On the one hand, the wage scale is so rigid that the man doing good work is placed on the same footing with the man doing poor work. This holds true of piece-rate payment as well as of time-rate payment. The rule of most producing estabhshments is "anything that will pass the inspector." Fmiihermore, the individual may work as hard as he pleases, devoting all of his energy to the work in hand. Despite this, he is xmable to raise his wage rate and very frequently is unable to increase his wages. The wage scale is fixed either by an agreement between the employer and the union or by custom and common consent. No one even pretends that there is a definite relation between the values produced by the worker and the wage which he secures. The worker is not paid in proportion to his pro- duct. Wages are never fixed on that basis, with this single exception — ^that no employer can afford to pay any more in wages than a group of men are producing in product. The law of monopoly, "all that the traffic will bear," is the law which fixes the American wage. Another consequence follows from the ruthless bargaining of the competitive labor market. The bargain takes place between the employer and a worker, irrespective of social obligations. The consequences are doubly disastrous to the man with THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 121 the family depending upon him. Industry does not inquire into a worker's social obligations. It simply asks whether he is able to do the work, and at what price. The competition of the labor market does the rest. There is no relation between the social (family) needs of a man and the wage which he receives. Wages are fixed wholly independent of social relations. . The American wage is anti-social. The present system of wage payment fails to stimulate workers to industry and thrift because it has not given them a reward in proportion to their exertions and abihty. There is no relation between product and wages. Rather wages are fixed by competition and monopoly. The present wage scale fails completely to provide a return in proportion to social needs. The simplest requirements of social progress call for ambition, for justice, and for the provision of health necessities. The present American wage scale offends even these primitive social standards. The American wage, examined from any point of view, fails to provide a sufiicient return to the wage- earner who is carrying the burden of a yoimg family. American industry pays to the overwhelming majority of wage-earners a wage of less than $1,000 a year. Even where no allowance is made for unem- ployment, the wage rates of three-quarters of the men fall below $750 a year. Perhaps three wage- earners in each hundred are paid over $25 per week (a yearly rate of $1,300). Compared with the sums 122 THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE which are met with in the business world, the wage of the workers is small. The wage rates paid by industry, placed side by side with the cost of family health and decency, reveal an appalling situation. In great numbers of cases, the wages paid by iadustry to its adult male workers are insufficient to provide for the health and decency of a moderate-sized family. American wages, as a business proposition, are even less adequate than they are for the provision of health and decency. The ordinary principles of sound American business practice are all violated io the financing of the worker's family. There are certain well-recognized principles of social expediency: that industry shall pay a wage that will maintain the efficiency of its workers; that wages must prevent poverty and dependence; and that famiUes must be able to live as self-respecting imits in the community. These principles imderfie the sane conduct of society. Each of them is violated by the present American wage scale. 11. The Penalty of Labor The major portion of the world's work is done by the wage-earners. The work of the world cannot go on without them and their efforts. They are the human power behind the Industrial Regime, and yet, after noting the facts, who would be a wage- earner if he could be anything else? The Industrial Regime places a penalty on work. THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE 123 There is the pittance return — ^pitifully small, econom- ically and socially inadequate — ^paid to millions of workers in exchange for their energy and time during the best part of each day and the best part of their lives. No student of the problem can escape the feeling that this wage is wholly insuflScient in comparison with the contribution that the worker makes toward the upkeep of the Industrial Regime. The most elementary considerations of social justice and the simplest forms of social expediency would seem to demand that the worker receive a minimum wage sufficient to provide for health, efficiency, decency and self-respect; and that the return be rendered stable by adequate provisions against the vicissitudes of industrial and social life. The minimum wage and social insurance would seem to be the barest beginnings of a policy of economic justice applied to wages. CHAPTER IH Industrial Leadership 1. The Call for Leadership THE rank and file who do the work of the indus- trial world must have adequate wages. No need is greater. At the same time, wages cannot be paid by any form of organized industry unless leaders are found competent to direct the current of industrial affairs. The necessity for leadership is not confined to the fields of industry. It is felt in every realm of human activity. The whole world is voicing its call for leaders. Eager eyes scan the ranks of the new generation. Breathless throngs turn hither and thither. The people are seeking a Moses who will lead them out of the house of bondage, away from the perils of the wilderness, and into the promised land. Nameless dangers lurk in the portentous issues that confront western civilization. Never were the problems of life more pressing — more insistent. Never was the need for intelligent leadership more keenly felt by the high and the low of every nation. Men for centuries have declared their belief in Truth, Justice and Mercy. There is no yearning of (124) INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 125 the human heart that is more compelling than the yearning for these things, yet the diflficulties in the way of determining what interpretation shall be placed on Mercy, Justice and Truth, ia the face of the momentous problems that grow out of the use of the machine seem, at times, to be almost insu- perable. This meeting place of iron and fire — ^this machine — ^how can it best be made a servant of the commonweal? This vast new system — ^modern industry — built with machinery and cemented together by finance and industrial organization, how can it best be molded so that it may serve the commonweal? This world-prevalent, competitive struggle for foreign markets, growing out of the extended use of the machine and the industrial system and of the exploitation of home labor and the home consumer, now flowering in Europe and blighting whole peoples — how shall it be made to serve the common- weal? , Will these new tools of civilization, these steel- shod messengers of the gods that man's inventive genius has sunamoned into being, minister to the human race or destroy it? Can man control the work of his brain? Can he guide the forces of the universe that he has harnessed to the car of his progress? The answers to these and to all other questions of like tenor depend upon the leaders that the human 126 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP race can raise up to do its bidding. If the men and women who are called upon to assume the responsi- biUties of directing the activities of human society prove equal to the task of solving these questions, western civilization has taken a great step in advance of its predecessors in the conquest of nature and the ennobling of man. Where are the leaders with capacity sufficient to do this work? How shall they be discovered and chosen? The leaders of a nation must be the greatest among its great men. Only they can save the times from self-destruction. Let the great men be foimd and set to their tasks, and the nation need have no fear. "No time need have gone to ruin," writes Carlyle, "could it have foimd a man great enough, a man wise and good enough; wisdom to discern truly what the time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these are the salvation of any time. But I hken common languid times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, ... to dry dead fuel, waiting for the Ughtning out of Heaven that shall kindle it; the great man with his free force direct out of God's own hand is the lightning."* These times need leadership, if any times ever did. Here are the unbeUef, distress, perplexity. Here the dry dead fuel. Where are they with the free force direct from God? We bend our energy to the search for leadership. 1 "Heroes and Hero Worship." INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 127 2. The Qiuilities of Leadership J£h.e qualities that are necessary in the industrial leader are the same as those required of the leader in any other branch of social activity. The leaders are the directing force. Whether there is a road to build, a bank to manage, a city to govern, a factory to organize, a railroad to develop, a mercantile plant to superintend, or a river to tunnel, the work must be done by the men in the community who are best equipped with the talent and the training that are required for the particular task that is at hand. " The leader needs energy, vigor and enthusiasm. These quaUties are indispensable, because upon them is based that tireless effort without which leadership degenerates into a formal, meaningless cult. Among the aristocracies of the world, from which leaders are picked because of family connec- tions, and without any reference to abiUty, there are many leaders in name who are led by their lackeys. They have none of that mighty driving force — ^the power of purpose — that makes the leader leap to the front because he is a leader. Physical energy, mental vigor and the contagious enthusiasm that accompanies them are bom in the man. They must be found, cultivated and directed before they become effective. '- Leadership is not all force, either brute or intel- lectual. The personality of leadership is built of another group of elements that make up the spiritual side of the leader's equipment. These elements are 128 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP courage, insight and vision — ^forces that enable the leader to understand those around him and to point out to them the path that Ues ahead. The great leaders of history have possessed, above all else, the power to inspire trust. They radiated confidence as the sun radiates heat. They looked into the faces aroimd them and understood. They looked into the future and understood. Those about, feeling, by the touch of personality the completeness of understanding, have accepted and followed. The spiritual qualities of leadership are far more important than the physical qualities. They are the breath of God in the nostrils of the leader. During the past century the United States has been developing through the potency of its resources, of its inventions. It has been driven forward by the very exuberance of its youth. The time has come when a new thing is needed. It is no longer possible for the nation to drift haphazard before every wind of doctrine. Maturity follows youth; cosmos replaces chaos. There must be understanding and direction. The people must know whither they are growing. Mother Natiure cannot be looked to for all of the good things. Her tingling life blood that has nurtured us will suffice no longer. The life of a mature nation rests upon a basis very different from that which supported the life of its child- hood. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 129 3. America's Leadership Heritage The foxinders of the American nation have left for their descendants a virile heritage in all that makes for leadership. They led, and led mightily. The early colonists were seeking political and religious liberty. They had rebelled against the old tyrannies of Europe and were looking for an oppor- tunity to establish a social order that would yield larger possibilities to mankind. Therefore they ordained a government of the people under which, free from the dictation of any established rehgion, men should be at liberty to worship God as they saw fit. Behind the acts of these early settlers there were a number of great ideals for which they were wiUing to sacrifice and suffer. In the pursuit of these ideals they came to a new world to build a new civilization. The new order was founded upon the proposition that all men have an equal right to life, liberty and the piirsuit of happiness. Not equality, but equality of opportunity was the germ-thought in this rebirth of civiUzation. The colonists built strongly and courageously. When the test came, when the king, representing all those things that were sacred and venerable because they were old, commanded his subjects in the colonies to obey his laws, they took up arms and made their reply at the cannon's mouth. The Revolution was the answer of the New Civilization to the Older 130 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP Order of Social Life. Instead of doing what they were told to do, as all faithful subjects must, these men and women who had laid the foundations of a new world did what they believed to be right, acting on the principle that ideals of human liberty are more important than the word even of a king. The men who organized and led the Revolution were guilty of treason, the worst of all^the offenses that may be committed against organized society. They were guilty of rebeUion against their duly constituted ruler. They broke all of the laws of their government, destroyed the estabhshed order, overthrew precedent and backed up their position by killing the officers that the king sent to restore order and enforce the laws. There was scarcely an offense, from the tossing of privately owned tea into Boston Harbor to treason and open rebeUion, of which the colonists were not guilty. Even though they may have believed that they were tearing down in order to build a new structure better than the old, they were still/ guilty io the eyes of the law — so guilty that they deserved only the scaffold. The spirit that the colonists showed in their answer to English injustice, they displayed in a multitude of forms during their conquest of the American continent. There was a wilderness to be subdued and a new world to be built. These rugged, virile men and women fell to^heir task with a will. One of the early frontiersmen, in his autobiography, tells how his father moved his family into a territory INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 131 shortly after an Indian massacre. The men farmed with guns beside them. The children were not allowed to leave the stockade. Danger lurked every- where. What were the qualities that made those men succeed in the face of such frightful difficulties? Thomas Ewing names them. "The population of the garrison was made up of incongruous materials agreeing in little except poverty, courage and energy."' Poverty, courage and energy were the Ufe-might of the frontier. The early Americans subdued a wilderness as no wilderness had ever been subdued before. They invented their means of subjugation as the conquest proceeded. '_^o those who tried to block their pro- gress, they repUed with messengers of steel. They would not brook restraint. Courageous, energetic, they forged ahead in the settled conviction of righteousness. They overthrew, tore down and destroyed. They defied authority and threw precedent to the winds. It is because of these things that we honor them. They were leading the world toward a nobler civiUzation. These early builders of the American nation never let "I dare not wait upon I would" — ^they had the soul of leadership. They were filled with inde- pendence, initiative, courage and faith. They were '"The Autobiography of Thomas Ewing," edited by C. L. Martzholff. Ohio State Historical Society Publications, Vol. 21, p. 9. 132 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP ready "to brook the eternal devil" if need be, to defend the things in which they beUeved. This is the heritage of leadership that comes down to the American people. These were the founders of our civilization and our government. They had vigor, energy, enthusiasm, courage, iQsight and vision. They took orders from no one. They did what they believed to be right. They measured their duty and performed it fearlessly and nobly. They were the men who had turned their backs on the past and who were looking into the future with the power of purpose in their eyes. 4. The Duties of Leadership ^ The great leader is the great server. The leader derives his commission to leadership from the special quaUties that enable him to be of service to his fellows. The commonweal demands that the great burdens and the pressing issues of Ufe be met. The leader asserts his right to leader- ship because he, better than any other, can direct the activities of his fellows along the path that leads to a successful solution of the problems by which they are confronted. The great leader is the great server. "If anyone would be great among you, let him be your minister." The greater the service, the greater the leadership. The modern community recognizes five groups of leaders or professions. The five professions as they are known in every civilized country of the world INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 133 are the soldier, teacher, physician, lawyer and merchant. On certain occasions it is the duty of each of these professions to die for the community. "The soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The physician, rather than leave his post in plague. The pastor, rather than teach falsehood. The law- yer, rather than countenance injustice. The mer- chant — ^what is his due occasion of death? "^ The merchant, a term that Ruskin uses to refer to all who are engaged in any form of industrial pursuit, is ranked in the professional classes. He is con- stituted one of the leaders, and well he may be, since he is occupied in one of the most vital of all functions — feeding, clothing and housing the community and providing for its welfare. "Observe the merchant's function," Ruskin goes on to say, "is to provide for the nation. It is no more his function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman's function to get his stipend." The leader of industry, like the leader in any other profession, must look upon him- self as the servant of those people — called consumers — for whom the things that he produces are intended. The merchant, therefore, appears in a wholly new r61e. He is proudest when he is able to do the most for those who are depending upon him for the necessaries of life. • "Unto This Last," John Ruskin. Were' Ruskin writing today, he would doubtless add a sixth profession — that of "Bocial organ- izer." The union leader, the political boss, the social worker, and many others of the same type are giving themselves over to the co-ordination of social forces. 134 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP The moral duty of the leader has long been estab- lished in the older branches of the professional world. Upon the sea, for example, the rule that binds the leader to his crew and his passengers is as absolute as any rule of human conduct that is known to the human race. Ruskin is interested to inquire why this same rule of leadership morality will not apply with equal force to the leaders of industry. "And as the captain of a ship is bound to be the last man to leave his ship in case of wreck, and to share his last crust with the sailors in case of famine, so the manufacturer, in any commercial crisis or distress, is boimd to take the suffering of it with his men, and even to take more of it for him- self than he allows his men to feel."* Industriahsm is new. The relation of the indus- trial leaders I to the remainder of the community is not yet well established. As this relation works itself out in the coming years, one thing seems cer- tain — the industrial leader must be the industrial servant, both of the consumers and of the workers. Like all of the professions, leadership in industry, to command the respect and confidence of those who are seeking for guidance, must be built upon ideals of service. 5. The Opportunities for Leadership There is a sa3nng that has come down from the time when the frontier was still a factor in national « "Unto This Last." INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 135 life, "There is plenty of room at the top." The truth is that the modem organization of industry- calls for a very few men at the top and a great many men below. This system of industrial organization is just as well understood as the organization of a section on the railroad. There is one foreman in charge of a number of workers. Go into any mine, store or factory and you will find a certain niunber of superintendents, foremen, skilled and unskilled workers. This number will vary from one industry to another, but in the same industry it will be fairly constant. The traditions of American life had their origins at a time when the young man walked into the bank, swept the floor, ran errands and by a logical process worked up to the presidency. The feat was not so difficult either, because there were only four other men in the bank. Another young man walked into a shop, learned his trade, and by the time he was forty, had a thriving shop of his own. But then there were only a half-dozen men employed in the shop. Still another man apprenticed himself to the miller. Three men and a boy ran the mill. It was not a great task for the boy to get to the top as the years went by. It is not long since the industries of the country were all organized on a small scale basis that placed the man in the ranks very near to the man at the top. The era of small scale industry has passed in all of the important industries except agriculture. With 136 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP the passing of small scale industry has gone the abundant room at the top. The railroads of the United States are highly organized, and although there are no manufacturing industries ia which the problems presented are exactly like the problems of railroading, the census figures indicate that the larger and more highly evolved industries tend to approximate the conditions in the railroad industry. The figures for 1913 (Statistical 'Abstract, 1914, p. 267) show that there were 4,398 general officers in the employ of the American railroads. This is the smallest number of general officers reported in any year since 1890, when the figures of the Inter- state Commerce Commission were first compiled. Assume, for convenience of discussion, that all of these general officers are "at the top." In 1895 there were 5,407 general officers, or one for every 145 employees. In 1913 there was one general officer for each 413 employees. This change has been brought about in a period of nineteen years, beginning at a time when the railroads were already highly organized. In these two decades the room at the top has narrowed very perceptibly. During the same years the number of "other officers" — men half-way up — ^has increased rapidly. There were 2,534 in 1895, and 10,706 in 1913. The "other officers" are, of course, not men "at the top." They play their part as units in a vast machine, and they do its bidding with little oppor- tunity to direct or to decide. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 137 The ratio between the number of general officers and the total number of railroad employees will probably grow smaller as time goes on and the rail- road interests are consolidated. Like all other business, railroading is managed more scientifically and more centrally. The result is a steadily dwindling room at the top. The ratio of general officers to total employees — 1 to 413 — does not mean that the indiATidual employee has one chance ia 413 to become a general officer, and for several reasons. First, many of the men engaged in the operation of trains have a life span far smaller than that of the general officer. As a rule, the workers employed by the railroad at a wage of less than three dollars a day, at any given age have a death rate about twice as high as the death rate for that group of the population to which the general officers belong. In the second place, no consistent effort is made to determine whether the various grades of employees have iti them the making of general officers. Third, the general officers are not all picked from the ranks. There is a grow- ing tendency in railroading, as in every other busi- ness, to give the preference to the trained man. Besides, when the division superintendent hires a section hand, flagman, mechanic or brakeman, he does not want a prospective general officer, but rather a man who will stay at his assigned task and become highly efficient there. rThe room at the top is narrow and narrowing. 138 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP There is a small number above and a vast throng below. Even if these above were all picked from the ranks below, the room at the top would be small indeed for the average man. The Industrial Regime, as it is now organized, requires a few leaders and a very large nimiber of persons who must always be followers. The organized, highly specialized Industrial Re- gime has created a new feudalism. The children of the men higher up have an excellent chance to suc- ceed their fathers. The children of the men at the bottom of the pyramid of industrial organization have little real opportunity to do anything except follow in the footsteps of their fathers. The rewards of the men higher up enable them to give to their children a generous taste of the good things of life. Many of the men at the bottom are fortunate if they can secure for their families the barest neces- saries of existence. The room at the top is so narrow that the man at the bottom sees it as a hair-line. As the organization of industry is perfected, even the hair-line dwindles. The difference between chance and probability is significant. Every boy bom in the United States has a chance to be President. The facts show that the probabihties are far greater that a boy will live to be a hundred years old than that he will be President. The chance is there. Theoretically, any boy may be President. Practically, about 9,999,999 boys out of every INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 139 10,000,000 will not be President. The same thing is true of the room at the top of the Industrial Regime. All have a chance to get there, but in practice, very few ever will. Since the duties of leadership are being concen- trated in the hands of so small a number of people, it becomes increasingly important to determine that these few are the men and women best qualified to assume the duties of leadership/ 6. The Position of the Industrial Leader Under the centralization of industrial control in the hands of the jSnancial interests there is little real independence in the business world outside of the men who wield financial power. And even these men must be described as interdependent rather than independent. The men highest up — ^the presidents, vice-presi- dents and general managers — ^are boimd together by the tenacious power of common interests and obliga- tions. Common opportunity and common necessity alike lead the men who occupy even the most exalted stations in the industrial world to depend upon their fellows for support and to accept their coimsel in regard to all matters of moment. Perhaps among the important affihations that tie the industrial leader hand and foot, none is more omnipresent than the duty which he owes to "Prop- erty." Inevitably this is so. The managers, directors, superintendents and presidents are hired 140 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP by tke owners of the property to make the business pay — that is, to make it return money on the invest- ment. The independent business man who, as he says, is not in business for his health, means to make his business pay. The leaders of industry are the representatives of property, and as such, their chief concern is to safeguard property interests. Just how faF this attitude departs from a position of true community leadership may be gathered from a contrast between the Round Table of King Arthur and of the modern board of directors. The men who sat aroimd the table with King Arthur Uved "to crush all wrongers of the realm." Each man at that kingly board was sworn to "Live pure, speak true, right wrong." Their purposes and ainas were expressed in the most exalted terms. They led in ideals, in virtue, in courage. They were the servants of a great purpose — ^Truth and Justice. The directors of the modern corporation gather about their table with one object — "Six per cent or better." 7. The Class Consciousness of the Leaders The leaders of industry owe their first allegiance to property. As an immediate result of this property-fealty, there has developed a virile class feeling among the leaders of industry. A lawyer who, during the twelve years of his practice, had never taken a case on any except the employer's side, decided to help the Street Railway TtIK HANI) OF FATf The rich and ifUc ph^asure-seokpi-s at an or the wretched lahorin ceeds in l)rc,ikiiiK hin fi Balfour Ker. (_'niii-. hv uie-^ecKers at an crgy are terrified when ( g e ass who siijipoi-t the «oor „f pleasure s St thr.Hiffl, ,„ threat. (Painting by Willi, I ■>■ A. .Mitchell. ) INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 141 Union of his city in its effort to get more pay. He wished to bring before the Arbitration Board some employers from other fields of activity, who would testify as to the wages paid by them in their indus- tries. He could get the facts readily enough, but he wished to bring the men themselves into the pro- ceedings, to add the weight of their personalities to the facts. The first man that he approached made car wheels for the street railway company. The second said, "Of course you can see that if I did this, I would put myself in the position of help- ing out the union, and our policy is opposed to unionism." A third said, "You will readily under- stand that I cannot array myseU against the employ- ing interests of the city." This lawyer went to his friends, one by one. He knew them in his club, his church and his neighborhood. Not one of them would appear in the case. " I never knew that such pressure could be brought to bear as was laid on me to get out of that case," said the lawyer. "It has cost me some of my best clients. They say that I am on the other side." A group of men were discussing the rate of wages paid by the local street railway company. The wages were low and everyone there knew it. One of the wise business men present smiled. "Do you know," he remarked, "the stock of the traction company is well scattered. There is not a bank nor a trust company nor a holder of securities in this town that has not a little block of the stock. There 142 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP is not a banker nor a merchant nor a rising young lawyer in the community that would dare to say that the wages should be raised. The diffused stock ownership puts every important interest in this town on the side of the company." The industrial leader is a part of the "system," in the same way that a man is a part of an order. Each group of people has its objects, and the objects of the Industrial Regime is the making of profits, and the conservation of the propertied interests of the community. "Business is business," and the aim of all busioess is frankly recognized as the prop- erty returns which can be secured as a result of its operations. The industrial leader is a part of the industrial system. Therefore he must play the game accord- ing to the rules. When he accepts his position of leadership, he subscribes to those rules, and woe to him, if he deviates from them, for the punishment that is meted out to him is swift and very sure. The individual industrial leader, for example, is not allowed to pay a rate of wages higher than the going price in the community, because the payment of an advance rate "spoils the labor market." All of the employers of labor must stand together on that point, or else there is no telling what wages may be demanded by labor. The comments that were made by employers generally when Henry Ford announced his minimum wage of five dollars a day, gave an excellent idea of the attitude Jhat most employers take toward the wage problem. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 143 The rules of the Industrial Regime cannot always be broken with impunity as Henry Ford broke the wage rule. There are many businesses where the competition is so keen, and the margins of profit are so small that the individual employer is helpless before them. As Morris Hillquit once put it: "If Jesus Christ opened a coat shop on Hester Street (New York) he would be forced to exploit his labor or go out of business." The pressure of the system under which he was working would compel the proprietor of the coat shop to fall into line, no matter what his personal sentiments might be. 8. The Men Half Way Up The man higher up is hedged about by an estab- lished order of business life. So long as he is willing to devote his energy to furthering the interests of the business world, he is free to do his utmost. Let him begin to tinker with the machinery; let him inject into his vocabulary such phrases as social justice, and he is at once an object of suspicion. Should he carry his iconoclastic tendencies so far as to threaten the smooth ruiming of the business machine or to reveal its secrets, he is a man proscribed. From that day forward, let him beware! Scientific management, eflSciency systems and business organization still further reduce the initia- tive of the individual, whether he be high or low in the business world. The object to be attained by any of the devices for the improvement of business 144 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP organization is the standardization of the work and the consequent reduction of the risk that is incident to the bad judgment of the individual. Risk is reduced. So is the free play of individuality. The industrial leaders, except for the favored few, are caught in their own levers and cogs. The under officers of industry — ^the foremen, superintendents and managers — ^are a part of a scheme that holds them to the accepted method of getting results. They are the subjects of the machine that they drive. The under officers of a steel company or a rail- road are the creatures of their businesses. Their clubs, churches, ideas and public utterances are hand picked. With the few rare exceptions that mark the rule, such men do not dare to express themselves publicly with regard to social, economic or poUtical questions, vmless they are acting as the mouthpieces of the company that employs them. They do not even dare to express themselves in regard to their specialties, unless they are siu-e that there is nothing in their utterances that wiU in any way conffict with the poUcies of the company. The man half way up merges his personality with the industry in which he is employed. He sub- ordinates to it his moral, intellectual, civic and social self at the same time that he subordinates his business self. Even among the least protected of the many groups of defenseless wage-workers in the industries of the United States, one would search in vain for a group that was forced to subordinate INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP, 145 itself more completely to the will of the Industrial Regime than is the man half way up. ,The man half way up is a part of the organization, but not an essential part. He can be replaced with comparative ease. The fact that he is a part of the business prevents him from forming any defensive organization, like a trade union. The fact that he can be replaced without great difficulty robs him of bargaining power, and leaves him at the mercy of the man higher up who hires him. ^"The Message to Garcia," which was printed into the tens of /millions by the great industrial interests of the coimtry, was built around the thought — "Do what you are told; when you are told; and ask no questions.";! It bespeaks accurately the position of the men half way up. Nothing has been said thus far about that oft- mentioned figure in the field of economic mythology — ^the independent business man. A reader of the history of the Standard Oil Company, or of the testimony in the recent New Haven suit, can form some picture of the position of the so-called inde- pendent in business. When he collides with one of the larger interests, like the child in the express wagon running in front of the eight-cylinder touring car, his only chance lies in the possibility of escaping with his life. "The Industrial Regime racks above as it crushes below. Financial, manufacturing, railroad, mining and merchandising interests are knit close. Politics 10 146 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP is their handmaid. Together they work out thei» common ends. No individual, with a very few exceptions, counts particularly in these common ends. Each must go along or go imder. The Industrial R6gime has Prussianized the busi- ness world. In Germany no man may speak against the Emperor. Under the Industrial Regime no man may speak against the leaders and keep his place. Some wretch, as he is hurled toward the abyss of business obUvion, may scream out the name of Rockefeller or Morgan. With a few such excep- tions, the names of the leaders are mentioned publicly, except by disturbers and agitators, with bated breath, and gently, as one might name a loved one or a saint. Within the Industrial Regime is a despotism that might put many a medieval tjrrant to shame. 9. The Methods of Securing Leaders The old method of finding leaders assumed that they must come from a select, ruling class. The new method assimies that they are to be utiUzed, wherever found. The old method revolved about the aristocracy. The new method revolves about the great mass of men. Under the old scheme, leaders were to be bred; imder the new scheme, they are to be found. The old idea appears under the name Eugenics; the new idea under the name Education. The two methods of securing leaders may be contrasted : INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 147 The Old Thm New 1. 2. 3. 4. Breeding leaders. The elect. Aristocracy. Eugenics. 1. 2. 3. 4. Finding leaders. The ranks. Democracy. Education. The experience of the human race during the past thousand years has shown conclusively that when the elect are depended upon for leaders, the most fit among the elect are frequently less fit than the most fit among the masses. The race stock in a family seems to decay. If that family be a royal family, the subjects pay a frightful price for their method of selecting leaders. The world has yet to leam whether the democratic method of select- ing leaders will prove more effective in the long run than the aristocratic method. For the time being, there are miUions that beheve devoutly in the democratic way. There is one man in the community who should do each piece of work that is to be done — ^that man is the one best fitted by heredity and by training to do the work. The right leader is, therefore, the man best born and best trained for leadership. Heredity gives the quality of the steel. The training puts on the edge. Poor steel will not take an edge. But the best of steel will not cut unless it has been sharpened. How shall we deterrnine whether a given piece of steel will cut? Sharpen it and see! The old method rested its case with the education 148 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP of the elect. Why sharpen the rest of the metal m the commvinity when everyone knew that it was either poor steel or lead? There was no reason for extending opportunity beyond the elect. The new plan makes it necessary to begin the sharpening of every piece of metal in the community in order to determine which is the genuine tool steel. There is no means of deciding in advance which man is best able to assuming the position of community leader. The best leaders can be picked only through a process of continuous experimenta- tion. That process is called apprenticeship when it is applied to industry and education when it is applied to the community. 10. The Training of Industry True apprenticeship disappeared with the dis- appearance of the craft system of industry. Apprenticeship was possible while men practiced trades. Today there are practically none of the old hand trades left. Industry no longer educates. It speciahzes men. SpeciaUzation does not make leaders. Rather it produces a type that has been trained to take orders and obey accurately and unquestioningly. The result of speciaUzation is not leaders but minders. Recently one of the largest manufacturers in his city rose in public to make an indignant comment on the inability of the workers in his mills to assume any responsibility. "I have five thousand people," INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 149 he exclaimed, "and among them all I cannot find a man with brains enough to act as labor foreman." This manufacturer had the reputation of requiring the most impUcit obedience from the men in his employ. For them his word was the final law. For years he had rigorously eliminated every man who disobeyed orders, or refused to accept the dictation of his superior. When he turned to this group for men with initiative, he found, as the pro- duct of his administration, a group of people who knew how to do only what they were told. All manufacturers are not so exacting as this man; but all manufacturers are engaged in the organization of industry on a specialized basis that produces anything except leadership. The hierarchy of industry is being so developed that it is more and more difficult for a man to work his way up from the ranks. The room at the top grows smaller and smaller at the same time that the specialization of occupations takes away from the average worker any opportunity to learn through doing. 11. Leadership Through Education The answer of the industrial world to the charge that industriaUsm is not producing leadership is quick and final — "The problem of leadership is the problem of the schools." Some of the larger industries are maintaining schools in connection with their own businesses, but for the most part, the education of the prospective worker in industry will '> be given in the public educational system. 150 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP ^ Turn to the schools, and the same pyramiding that was commented on in connection with the organization of industry is met with in an extreme form. On the one hand, there are the few directors, or men at the top of the educational hierarchy, and the many teachers in the ranks. On the other hand, there are the many children in the lower schools and the few in the higher schools.* Again there are the few teachers above and the many children subject to their authority. The pyramid is still there, with its tiny apex and broad base. The teacher who becomes a part of the school system learns to do what she is told. If she teaches in a state like New York she is told by the Board of Regents, having charge of the educational work of the entire state. If she is a teacher in the schools of a large city, let us say Chicago, she is told by the city superintendent of schools. The teacher is provided with a coiu-se of study, and she is notified that a certain method is the approved method for the teaching of a given subject. Then, under the eye of a supervising principal (foreman) and of a district superintendent (manager) she does her work. With the cotu-se of study prescribed and the method prescribed, the teacher has a very little leeway. The elbow room that she might enjoy is 'The report of the United States Commissioner of Education for the year ending June 30, 1914, shows 19,064,787 pupils in elemen- tary schools; 1,366,822 pupils in high and preparatory schools, and 361,270 pupils in universities and coUeges, professional schools and normal schools. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 151 lessened because of a training in a formalized normal school that was designed to prepare the teacher for just this kind of a position. There are exceptional school systems and exceptional teachers, but the great body of American school teachers have learned to do what they are told. The machinery of the public schools is formalized. The children are no less so. They climb from grade to grade along a carefully built ladder, that is con- structed on the assumption that all of the children who use it are the same kind of children. If they are not of the same kind, there is something the matter with the children. Grade above gcade they go, imtil they reach the high school, where the tensity of the strain is lessened, by a differentiation of courses. During the eight years of work in the elementary school the children have been subject to one of the most sacred of all of the educational fetishes — ^the fetish" of "Discipline." The petty virtues such as punctuality,' neatness, and obedience are elevated to a post of supreme importance in the school room. For eight years the child is taught to do what he is told. The factory system finds its prototype in the school system. The man higher up gives the order. The teacher in the ranks obeys. The teacher passes the command on to the pupils, who accept her authority and do as they are told. The word that most nearly characterizes the public 152 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP school system of the United States is "authority." Children and teachers alike are taught to obey, without question, the directions of those above them. The schools, more perhaps than any other institution, are iuculcating in the American people an uninteUigent respect for those higher up in the ranks of administrative power. The word "Prussianize" has come to mean "control exercised in an absolute or despotic man- ner." There is no institution in the United States that is more completely Prussianized than the public schools. The power of the superintendent over the teacher is only exceeded by the power of the teacher over the child. In both cases the power may be exercised autocratically, without any prac- ticable means of redress. What have the children as a result of this school training? Is it true, as a prominent educator recently aflSrmed, that the great mass of children in the public schools — those who never finish the eighth grade — ^leam indifferently reading, writing, and simple operations with whole numbers? The employers who offer them jobs aver that it is. The elementary schools of the United States are not organized to make leaders. They are made to create followers. The children who leave them have been taught to do what they are told. They have learned the lessons that go to the making of successful and faithful servants. Think for a moment of the ordinary child in rela- .INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 153 tion to \h.e great school-machine. The heroes of old were fed, on the marrow of lions and bears; look at the average out-and-dried course of study. They kindled the fire of their spirits at the flash of Jove's lightning. Behold the average machine-made school teacher! When did greatness of spirit come out of the clicking of cogs? when were leaders made from the treadmill? And the inspiration of the leader — the kindling of soul at the fire of soul — can that come from a school teacher who dare not lead in his own town? How can the teacher inspire to leadership unless he is himself a leader? You turn, as well you may, for hope to the high schools. They have fulfilled at least a measure of their duty. Their classes have been small; their teachers well paid and fairly well chosen; their equipment has been good, and their courses suffi- ciently specialized to give some choice to the boys and girls entering them. One fact must not be lost sight of, however. Only a small fraction of the chil- dren who enter the first grade of the schools ever get to high school. Among the families of the well- to-do the percentage is reasonably high. Among those who have less means, the percentage falls in some sections to zero. And the colleges? Perhaps, in the colleges, better than anywhere else, the vice of the present educational system appears. The colleges are dealing with sap-wood. 154 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP With the exception of the professional schools, where probably it is less true, the boys who go to American colleges are for the most part "sent." A system of education that aimed to produce leaders would begin with a hundred children in the first year of their school lives, and train them care- fully, searching diligently for the strong points and talents that are latent everywhere. As these appeared, the school should foster them tenderly, as we would guard the most precious treasures in the community-^the spirit of the future. Year by year, the school would test and try these talents on this thing and on that, so that each might have his congenial work. At last, whether in high school, college or professional school, when the educational world had finished its work, the youth would step into the work to which his abilities and the training of the school had prepared him. How different the plan that we follow. The child enters the predetermined com-se of study; passes through the grades, as he would pass from onelfloor of an office building to the next; then, before he has completed the eighth year, in three cases out of four, he drops out. No, that is not a fair statement of the case. If his parents have means, he probably goes on. If his parents are poor, he probably starts to work. There seem to be two main causes for children leaving school. One is the lack of interest that the children have in'the school. The other is the short- age of family income. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 155 High school is passed in the same maimer. Then the time is ripe for college. Who shall go to college? Who does go to college? The other day I asked a senior in one of the smaller Eastern colleges whether there were any poor boys in his college. After a moment's thought he replied, "There are boys who come from the families of the respectable poor — ministers, teachers, widowed mothers and the like; but there is not one boy in the college whose father is a wage-earner." That would be less true of the professional schools; less true of the West than of the East; less true in some of the larger, better- known institutions. Nevertheless, the fact remains that of the two or three per cent of the original school population who do get to college, the great majority are, undoubtedly the children of the well-to-do. From these well-to-do famiUes the boys are "sent" to college and "kept" there while they get what training they can. Are the children of the well-to-do sent to college more generally than the children of the masses because they are any brighter than their school fellows? Not for a moment! They are sent to college because they are in that very small class in the community with a family income of at least $1,000 a year in the country and $1,800 a year in the city. 12. The Denial of Opportunity The educational system is training for leadership to this extent — ^it educates those who can get from 156 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP their homes stifficient food, clothing, stimulus and inspiration to stay in school. The system is doing its best to pick leaders from among those who are in the schools. But in the higher years only a small fraction of the children ever enter. They are kept out by a lack of family income. This is true despite the fact, so frequently reiterated, that the children of all classes of the population are probably about equal in capacity. After his exhaustive examination of the problem of abiUty among men, Lester F. Ward, in his "Applied Sociology," states his conclusion that capacity is latent everywhere. It is opportimity that is rare, not ability. "The fact that so many do struggle up out of obscurity does not so much show that they possess superiority as that they happen to be less bound down than others by the conventional bonds of society."' At another place Ward thus sum- marizes his findings: "This again indicates the true resources (the unworked mines) that society pos- sesses. Only ten per cent of these resources have been developed. Another ten per cent are some- what developed. There remain eighty per cent as yet almost imdeveloped."' There is an immense store of imused power in the world that remains unused because the social system under which men Uve presses out the lives of those imderneath. •"Applied Sociology," Lester F. Ward. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1906, p. 264. ' Ibid., p. 229. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 157 The children who are born into the United States in the twentieth century are running the race of life. One is clad in fine, well-suited garments; another is covered with rags. One is equipped with running shoes of the most approved pattern; another is barefoot, and there are thorns and sharp rocks in the path. One starts on soUd ground; another must crawl out of the mire before he can begin to run. One is sleek and well trained; another is haggard with want. One is free for the race; another is loaded down with the burden of a dependent family; one starts from scratch; the other has a start of twenty yards in a hundred-yard race. At such a race in the stadium men woidd turn their backs and scoff. Its blatant unfairness would arouse their deepest scorn. Yet that is the basis on which the children of the well-to-do and the children of the poor are asked to run the race of life. We are running the race of life, some free; others loaded down with the intolerable burdens that the present order of society imposes on the poor. Here are two boys, bom on the same day, of equal ability in every particular. One boy is the son of a cotton spinner; the other is the son of a judge. At fourteen, the son of the cotton spinner is sent to the mills to help support the family. There he works for ten years, and at the end of that time he is earn- ing ten dollars a week. The son of the judge is sent to high school at fourteen; to college at eighteen, and to the law school at twenty-one. At twenty- 158 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP four he enters his profession, backed by the reputa- tion, position and wide acquaintanceship of his father, and equipped with the best that the world has to offer in academic training. Visit those boys in their homes at thirty-five. One will be a cotton- spinner. The other will be a successful lawyer. They were equal at the start. Their opportunity has made them what they are. Such a situation calls from Ward his famous state- ment: "There can be no equaUty and no justice, not to speak of equity, so long as society is composed of members, equally endowed by nature, a few of whom only possess the social heritage of truth and ideas resulting from the laborious investigations and pro- foimd meditations of aU past ages, while the great mass are shut out from all the hght that human achievement has shed upon the world."* Society, even the supposedly democratic society in the United States, has barely begun its search for leadership. The latent capacities of the people exist on every hand. There is a need for leaders, and here is the material from which leadership is made, awaiting only the opportimity for its development. Through freedom of opportunity alone can the best men be secured for leadership. At this critical period — ^this turning point in the life history of the nation — ^when wise leadership is so imperatively demanded, there seems to be this one plain duty ""Applied Sociology," Lester F. Ward. Boston: Girm & Co., 1906, p. 281. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP 159 before the American people. Either they must assert the principles of democracy, as they were asserted by their forefathers, and live up to them, or else they must resort to some other method for the selec- tion of their leaders. If some aristocratic method of leadership selection is to be relied upon, let it be plainly set forth that all of the people naay know the strength of the thing upon which they repose the future welfare of the nation. If the democratic principle is still to be followed, let that fact be stated in no imcertain terms. Meanwhile the industries of the community are turning hither and thither, asking for those that will prove wise leaders. Industry itself can do its part; affording what training it may through apprentice- ship; allowing room for initiative; choosiag its leaders because of merit and not through favor. The part that industry can play is small, however, compared with the part that must be taken by the schools. The schools are the one pubUc institution that may bereUeduponto afford the opportunity that will'yield the development of leadership quaUties. Indeed, the public school is the only people's institution that there is. If the affairs of the state are to be admin- istered democratically, if the name "Public Opinion" is to be more than a name, the public school must make the boys and girls who come to it think. The logical place for the provision of opportunity is the schools. If all are to have an equal right to 160 INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP the development of talents, that right must be based on the work that is given in the schools. ' The schools must have a vocational plan of the city, the state and the nation. They must know where the demand for men and women is most strongly felt, and then they must train and prepare their pupils to participate in those civic, social and industrial activities, not as efficient machines, but as reasoning human beings. CHAPTER IV POVEBTY 1. Progress and Poverty THE Industrial Regime has centered the attention of men on the material values in life. Itself the embodiment of materiaUsm and devoted to the production of material goods, the Industrial Regime serves as a means of expression for the material interests. Still, wages remain low, and the leader of industry, a unit in a vast machine, finds himself asking what it all means to him and to his children. There remains one other important aspect of the whole problem. While the laborer has contested the wage rate, and while the schools were searching for leadership through the granting of opportunity to all on equal terms, the people of the western world were forndng a habit with two names — "Poverty" and "Riches." There are a thousand reasons that rise up to con- demn the habit, or, perhaps, better still, the vice of "Poverty" or "Riches." Codes of ethics, religions, moral sayings, logic, experience, under- standing, join in a chorus of protest, yet the habit gets a surer and surer hold on its victims. The machine has increased wealth in unheard-of pro- 11 (161) 162 POVERTY portions. Poverty has persisted while riches have multiplied. Despite the machine, or, perhaps, better still, because of the machine, "Poverty" and "Riches" have grown side by side in western civilization. The contrast between "progress and poverty" was set forth vividly by Heniy George. Like many another reformer, he felt the problem deeply, but, unlike many another one, he was able to describe it in unforgettable terms. He writes, in his "Intro- duction:" "The enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil. . . , The march of inven- tion has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful develop- ment, little children are at work; wherever the new forces are anything like fully utilized, large classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recoiu^e to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts." Poverty is appalling, yet its true significance can be appreciated only wheri it is contrasted with pros- perity. The association of poverty and progress is not only what Henry George called it, "the great enigma of our times," but unless the enigma can be POVERTY 163 solved, it will prove the undoing of any society that tolerates its presence. No thinking being can escape the issue. Heie, in a richly endowed, wealthy land, the avenues of progress and the back alleys of poverty lie side by side. The greater the city, the more splendid its public buildings and private dwellings, the more frightful does this contrast appear. With ease, comfort and luxury in ample abundance, poverty lurks and snarls. The effects of poverty are no less frightful than its presence. It blights communities, neighborhoods, families, children and unborn babies. It ciu-ses wherever it touches. The man who has looked the issue in the face; who has seen this affluence and that wretchedness; who has taken pains to inquire; who imderstands something of the reason for povery and for riches, finds the juxtaposition of the two strange, absurd, grotesque, repulsive, abhorrent, intolerable. These two things, placed side by side, are an affront to his sense of justice as they are a challenge to his manhood. 2. What is Poverty? There are many different standards that may be accepted as the criterion for deciding what is poverty. First, there is starvation. After a human being has starved to death, it is perfectly possible for the doctors to perform an 164 POVERTY autopsy, and decide that poverty was the cause of death. It is possible for the medical profession to go even farther, and to pick a child out of the schoolroom with the diagnosis, "anemic; poorly nourished." Starvation is not a reasonable measiu:e of poverty because no society can afford starvation. As a social condition in a rich community, it is unspeak- ably immoral. Even if it is being relied upon as a means of keeping down the surplus of population, it is brutal and wasteful. Subsistence, as a measure of poverty, is open to a similar objection from another point of view. An unvaried diet, ragged clothing and a narrow cell of a house are sufficient to keep some bodies and soxils together, but they are not sufficient to keep people personally happy and socially presentable. The people living on such a standard are living below the standard of life accepted by the commxmity. There are many people who believe that the black bread and thin soup of the French peasantry in the eighteenth century would be quite sufficient to keep alive the working population of the United States. Granted that this wastrue, and granted that indus- trial efficiency was not a desirable thing to attain, it would still be true that where one group of people is kept on the margin of subsistence, while another group enjoys the good things of life, the first group becomes a subject class, and democracy is destroyed. No industrial group and no social group can hope TWO AVAYS OF GETTIX(.; Fl-^l) Above, in the Bread Line, are men who are evidently not hoboi-s. Laek of pmphiynient has forced them to stand here tor hours until, after midnight, they are handed a cup of soup and chunk of bread by cliarity. lielow, is a flashlisbt of a debutante dinner given by one of the Avealtldest womeu in New York. The center of the table is transformed into a Japanese garden ; jierfect miniature islands with tiny ti-ees and plants are surrounded by the water > Committee on Physical Deterioration, op. cit. London, 1904, Vol. 1, p. 17. " Idem. 12 "Insurance," W. A. Frioke, 1898, p. 240. POVERTY 183 Tablb'V. — Death Rates from "All" and from "Certain" . Causes in Houses of Several Sizes, Glasgow. Size of House. Deaths per 1,000 of Population. All Causes. RrapiratOTy One apartment Two apartments Three apartments Four apartments and upward 32.7 21.3 13.7 11.2 7.7 4.6 2.4 2.0 7. "Let Him be Poor" Poverty is no longer a virtue. Many of the philosophers have extolled poverty. During the Middle Ages the Church preached it. As an antidote for the dissipated, voluptuous hfe of the court, it had undoubted merits, but in the guise that it assumes today it has laid aside its virtues and added richly to the list of its vices. / Modem thinkers and writers teach against pov- erty. Ruskin questioned it, writing in his "Political Economy of Art" of "the just and wholesome con- tempt in which we hold poverty." Some of the later writers curse it. Shaw makes Undershaft (Major Barbara) exclaim, "The worst of crimes. All other crimes are virtues beside it. . . . Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight or sound or smell of it.") The Introduction to the same play explains, in greater detail, Shaw's view of poverty. He assumes 184 POVERTY that in a certain case of poverty someone protests, "Let him be poor." This is Shaw's answer: "Now what does this 'Let him be poor' mean? It means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his prices by selling himself to do their work." Many centuries ago a great sage observed, "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." Not their vice, not their shiftlessness, not their inefficiency, but their poverty destroys the poor. The doctrine is still sound. Today, as of old, the thing that destroys the poor is the fact that they are poor. 8. Dives and Lazarus While the poor are being destroyed by their poverty, the rich are enjoying their abundance. Lazarus still challenges Dives, and the time seems to have passed when he is content merely to eat of the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. Ruskin, in his essay on "Work," comments on the distinction between Lazarus and Dives, which, he says, "exists more sternly, I suppose, in this day, than ever in the world. Pagan or Christian, until now." It is very hard to determine that the dis- tinction is greater at one time than it is at another, but certainly the contrast exists in accentuated form. Poverty is breeding vice and crime, scatter- POVERTY 185 ing disease, killing babies and wrecking homes while the feast of Dives go on. The winter of 1914 found times hard in many parts of the United States. There was one large city in particular where the straits of the poor were so desperate that the ordinary means of dispensing rehef proved utterly inadequate to meet the task in hand, and an emergency committee was organized. This emergency conamittee inaugurated an energetic campaign of pubhcity. The newspapers helped them Uberally, and they told the people, among other things, that throughout the poorer sections of the city babies were dying and that "56 cents per week will save one baby." There were babies in the city who were starving and "56 cents per week will save one baby." While that condition still persisted; while the babies were dying for lack of 56, cents a week, the notables of the city held their Assembly Ball. Fourteen hun- dred people, gorgeously arrayed and decked with jewels — ^people who were well fed and comfortably housed — came together, danced, ate and drank at an expense of tens of thousands of dollars, and "56 cents will save one baby." There were Lazarus and Dives. The starving babies and the feasting, merrymaking throngs of comfortable men and women who had never known even the taste' of want and hardship. There is something worth piu"suing beyond the bare contrast. Here are Lazarus and Dives living 186 POVERTY side by side in the same city. What is the relation between them? Dives is bestowing the crumbs on Lazarus. Can Lazarus make a return to his benefactor? The passage quoted from Ruskin's essay on "Work" goes on to an examination of that problem. First, RusMn points out the just basis for the dis- tinction betwerai poverty and riches. "The lawful basis of wealth is that a man who works should be paid fair value of his work; and that if he does not choose to spend it today he should have free leave to keep it and spend it tomorrow." There is another side to the question: "The power held over those who earn wealth by those who levy or exact it." After explaining the method used by the medieval baron to secure wealth by preyiag on the results of other men's labor, Ruskin comments: "Money is now exactly what mountain promontories were in old times. The barons fought for them fairly; the strongest and cunningest got them, then forti- fied them and made every one who passed below pay toll. Well, now capital is exactly what crags were then. Men fight fairly (we will at least grant so much, though it is more than we ought) for their money; but once having got it, the fortified million- aireFcan make everybody who passes below pay toll to his million and build another tower of his money castle; and I can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as much from the bag- baron as ever they did from the crag-barqn. Bags and crags have just the same result on rags." POVERTY 187 If this analysis is correct, a new relation appears. Can it be possible that Lazarus laid the feast which Dives ate, and received, as his part, a morsel from the leavings? 9. Why are They Poor? The appeal from the Emergency Aid Committee in the city where babies died for the lack of 56 cents' worth of milk, while 1,400 of the leading citizens spent their money liberally on a dance, stated some plain truths. It also contained some of the most extraordinary comments. Thus, for example, one statement (February 12, 1915) reads:/ "This is Not an Appeal foe Oedinart Chaeitt — It is an Appeal to Save a City from Calamity. "Sober, upright, industrious. God-fearing men are out of work — ^thousands of them. In cold homes, the women and children are waiting, with pathetic patience. They are hungry — often ill — and day by day the desolation and desperation increase. It does not matter what cause has brought about the misery. It is enough that it is here." Below these sentences were the names of the wives of many of the leading business men in the city. Notice the last sentence: "It does not matter what cause has brought about the misery." Could anything be more extraordinary? If the city had 188 POVERTY been plagued with flies, if an epidemic of typhoid or tuberculosis were raging, the very first question raised would be the question of cause. Why try to cure fever if the germs are being fed in by the bilUons through the city water supply? Here is widespread misery. The first question that would naturally present itself to the man of even moderate intelligence is the question "Why?" Poverty is prevalent. It is cursing whole sections of the population. The question of first importance is this: "Why is poverty?" Recent years have witnessed a number of energetic attempts to analyze the causes of poverty. No one can say finally this cause or that one is respon- sible for a definite percentage of the poverty in the community, but more general statements may, with justice, be made. There was a time when people were sent to prison for debt just as they were sent to prison for theft. The assumption was that the poor man was respon- sible for his poverty. He was vicious, drunken, lazy, inefficient. These things, Hke any other per- sonal offenses, were punished personally. / The latest work that has been done on poverty makes it possible to say, imequivocally, that personal vices and personal shortcomings are not the chief causes of poverty. Indeed, they are insignificant when compared with the larger social causes that \are responsible for poverty. Aa examination of the figures cited in Bliss' POVERTY 189 "Encyclopedia of Social Reform;" in Warner's "American Charities;" in Devine's "Misery and its Causes;" or in the reports published by the larger charity societies indicates that the personal shortcomings play very little part in the poverty that brings people to the charity societies. (Social forces like unemployment, accidents, sickness, wid- owhood and the like are largely responsible for poverty.! Hollander, in his masterful summary of the causes of poverty, makes this statement: "The great supply-sources of poverty are the underpaid, the unemployed and the unemployable."'^ Bliss, Warner and Devine set their standards largely in terms of pauperism. The people covered by the figures asked for help. Hollander is facing the matter in a broader way and making his estimates in terms of the entire community. A moment's reflection will reveal the justice of Hollander's position. Ite facts regarding the relation between the cost of decent living and the wages paid by American industry have already been stated. Millions of adult male workers are receiving a wage that can- not possibly support a family" in physical health and social decency. It is this fact that leads Hollander to place the underpaid first as the chief supply- source of poverty. He writes: "Poverty, in its practical aspect, is a phase of the wage question. " "The Abolition of Poverty," J. H. HoUander, p. 107. (/ 190 POVERTY Large bodies of toilers are in receipt of incomes less than enough to maintain wholesome existence, and it is from this class that the mass of the poor are mainly recruited." i* The chief cause of poverty is low wages. People are poor because the rate of wages paid by the industries of the United States will not permit them to be anything but poor. Those who have been in the habit of thinldng of poverty as a result of personal vices, should reflect on the relations that actually exist between people in the various walks of life in present-day society. No group of people has a monopoly either on the vices or the virtues. Not all of the people who drink are poor; not all vicious people are poor; nor are all dissipated, extravagant, idle, shiftless, inefl&cient people poor. Such people may be found in every economic group from the poorest to the richest. There is one group of people who are always poor — ^the people who are paid less than a living wage. The relation between low wages and poverty is as intimate as the relation between cholera microbes and cholera. The poor are poor, in the first instance, because the wages they get are poverty How inevitable, then, the conclusion which Pro- fessor Hollander sets forth on the next page of his book. " In the largest sense, it remains true that the most effective aid for those below the poverty line lies in the increase of income" (p. 47). » "The Abolition of Poverty," J. H. Hollander, p. 46. POVERTY 191 Next to low wages, the great outstanding cause of poverty is unemployment, which Doctor Devine describes as the greatest of all maladjustments. Rowntree and Lasker write of it as "a social evil appalling in its magnitude."'^ Unemployment is always present. "A definite quota, varying from two to ten per cent of the work- ing force of every industrial community, are doomed at any given time to involuntary idleness." ^^ Census, state and private figures show that there is always an irreducible minimum of unemployment. Sick- ness, accidents and shortage of work prevent the worker from engaging in his customary pxirsuits. All of the recent analyses of the causes of poverty place unemployment at the head of the list of the causes that lead to poverty. There are three other factors that, though less immediate and direct, cannot be overlooked, because of their ultimate connection with poverty: (1) The poor man pays the highest rents and the highest prices (because he buys in small lots) and gets the poorest stuff; (2) We eagerly seize the products of poverty; (3) We let his children grow up in poverty and become accustomed to it. These, again, are social forces. One ward in Johnstown where an appallingly high infant death rate was reported, had not a single decently graded, paved and drained street. Any- j « "Unemployment," London, 1911, p. 310. « "Abolition of Poverty," op. eil., p. 82. 192 POVERTY thing is good enough for the poor. Their curse is their poverty. They have no effective means of protest, and because of this fact, a certain type of cowardly, wolfish human creatures prey on them, exploit them and wring from them every penny that they can exact. Theoretically, the weak and the defenseless should be given special consideration. They are unable to take care of themselves adequately, and hence their fellows should care for them. Practically, the poor are exploited because they are poor. High prices and high rents are as effective in grinding the faces of the poor as are low wages. Both add to the intolerable pressure that life places upon them. We eagerly seize the products of poverty. Many things are cheap because of the cheap labor done on them. Bargains are all too frequently tainted with the bitterness of poverty, yet people are glad to get bargains, without being over anxious to know their origin, lest their enjoyment of them might be decreased by the knowledge of conditions surround- ing their origin. Low wages, high rents, high prices and bargains are some of the social forces behind poverty. Dives gains through low wages, lives on high prices and high rents and luxuriates on cheap, poverty-stained products. The well-to-do, respectable part of the community depends for much of its comfort and respectability upon the exploitation of the poor. POVERTY 193 Low wages, high prices and cheap prices are approved, conunanded, enjoyed and defended by those who reap the benefits from them. Meanwhile the weight of poverty rests a crushing load upon the poor. They are poor because wages are low and rents and prices are high. Their poverty makes possible the ease of the respectable and the well-to-do. The weight of civilization rests most heavily upon the backs of those who are, of all others, least able to bear its burdens. And then, facing this abyss which we have created and maintained, we dare to say, "God's poor." Many a social crime besides poverty has been laid at the door of the Almighty, but surely, never was the affrontery more complete. God's poor? Men working for prosperous industries are paid wages that make poverty inevitable. God's poor? The Steel Industry's poor; the Cotton Mills' poor; the Coal Mining poor and the Contractors' poor! Unemployment is rampant and there are no intelligent steps taken to prevent it or to distribute the risks and hardships when imemployment does come. Rents and prices are high. The bargain himter eagerly snatches the products of dying wages. Babies grow up to grovel in the squalor of the rook- eries and slums. God's poor? Our poor! Poverty is a social crime. The cause of poverty lies at our doors. People are poor because we make 194 POVERTY them poor. Children are growing up in poverty because we allow them to do it. 10. The Challenge of Poverty Perhaps these things about poverty are not true. In that case, they need give the conmiimity no concern, but if they are true — there are few students of the problem who question their truth — ^poverty is one of the most savage challenges that confronts modem civilization. That the richest coimtry and the richest centers in that rich country should per- mit children to grow up under the conditions of life that poverty involves would be grotesque if it were not so sinister. Side by side, the hovel and the palace. The hovel challenges the palace — questions it, threatens it, and the palace is built on the hovel. When the Great Louis impoverished France to build Versailles, he was erecting his palace on the hovels of the French peasantry. If his taxes had been less heavy, the people of France could have afforded better homes. His palace was buHt, how- ever, and he and his court Uved in boundless luxury while the people of France suffered hardship and privation. A great man of England — one of the hereditary chiefs of the country — owned a piece of property in one of the larger English cities upon which there had been erected a frightful slum. Year after year the agents of the great one collected rentals POVERTY 195 from the tenants. Year after year the great one rode and hunted and played and enjoyed. He was living on the proceeds of a slum. They were poor. He was rich. From their meager incomes they paid out large sums ia rentals to this man who had never known what it was to want. Furthermore, it was these slum^wellers and their kind who had built the palace and who were turning out each day the cotton and steel upon which the prosperity of England rested. They worked while the great one enjoyed the fruits of their labor. The Children's Bureau, in its report on Johnstown, stated that where the infant death rate was highest, lived the "families of men employed to do the unskilled work in steel naills and nunes." They shoulder the dirty work of the world, and out of the proceeds of their activity, while they receive a pittance, the masters build their gorgeous living places. The masters have perpetuated the slum for their profit. They maintain poverty because for them it means prosperity. The real estate interests fight housing reform; the manufacturing interests fight minimum wage laws and child labor laws. They keep the slum because there is profit in the slum. They pay dying wages because there is profit in dying wages. They employ child labor because there is profit in child labor. The leaders of indus- try and finance fight trade unions and sociahsm because, in the promise of unionism and socialism, they see lessened opportunity for profit to themselves. 196 POVERTY Victor Hugo makes Gwynplaine exclaim, "The heaven of the rich is built upon the hell of the poor." That is true. The rich know it. The poor are learrdng it. Had the masters wished to banish the slum and abolish dying wages, they might have done so. Had they been as anxious to wipe poverty from the earth as they have been to build up property rights, they could have done so. The will, not the way, was lacking. When they prayed, as some of them did pray, "Thy kingdom come on earth," they were serving with the lips. The heart and the mind were both bent on a retention of the present system. The poor could not. The rich would not, and while poverty, with vice and crime and ignorance, her running mates in the race of shame, stalked abroad, the masters rested, smug and satisfied. Whose was the fault? The ignorant were poor; the educated and culture were content. Says the old Bishop, " This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty person is not the person who committed the sin, but the person who created the shadow."" Poverty casts its shadow. Crime, vice and ignorance flourish there. The masters, and not the poor, cast the shadow. The well-to-do — the masters of the Industrial Regime — ^who direct its activities and reap its benefits are living on the backs of the poor. ""LesMis&ables," Victor Hugo, Vol. I, Part 1. THE VAMPIRE The worker in his sweatshop, ignorant of the fat exploiter who is sucking out the blood of his life. (A vampire is a monster which lives upon human blood, according to old legends. A cartoon by E. M. Lilien.) POVERTY 197 11. We Must Get Off Their Backs Are we willing to get off from the backs of the poor? Are we willing to relieve them — the weak — of the social burdens that should be borne only by the strong? Are we content to do our part in the eradication of poverty? The first move in getting off the backs of the poor is to pay them living wages. The community will not fulfil its duty to the workers until every person who works has a living wage ia return for his work. If the man is in a position that requires him to sup- port a family, that wage must include family support. No less important than the living wage "is the regulation of the conditions of work so that due allow- ance is made for unemployment, for trade risks, industrial diseases, accidents and the like. By such means the play of industrial forces may be paid for by the industry as a whole and not by any individual worker. The insurance principle — that risks are less burdensome when they are borne co-operatively by a group — ^must become one of the fundamental principles of industry. Those who would get off the backs of the poor must see to it that the things supplied to the poor are good in quality and fair in price. If it is imjust to exploit the well-to-do, who can in a measure protect themselves, it is doubly unjust to exploit the poor who are defenseless. Above all else, if we would get off the backs of the 198 POVERTY poor, we must relieve the children of the poor of the intolerable burdens of poverty. They die in baby- hood; they are underfed, ill-clad, badly housed and deprived of the manifold advantages that flow from good home life. They must be fed, clothed, housed and given every possible educational advantage if they are to have even the semblance of a fair oppor- tunity in the race of life. We must get off their backs — economically and socially. We must insure them fair treatment and guarantee to their children equal opportunity. CHAPTER V Riches 1. The Heaven of the Rich "pOVERTY is an individual curse and a social sin. ■■- It blights and destroys the lives of its victims. It is a disease, and existing, as it does, side by side with the unparalleled increase in productive power that has resulted from the use of the machine, it challenges civilization. Poverty is an outstanding feature of present-day civilization. So is riches. Side by side in the United States are great want and great wealth. Poverty and riches seem boimd to each other by some fast-holding tie. Where one is found, there, also, is the other. On closer examina- tion, it appears that the heaven of the rich is founded upon this hell of the poor. The rich man for his paradise is dependent upon the poor man in his squalor. Lazarus sets the feast for Dives and then eats of the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. The lot of the poor is a veritable hell — hideous in all of its aspects. The more closely it is viewed, the more frightful does it appear. The frightfulness of poverty needs no further (199) 200 RICHES emphasis, after the facts cited in the last chapter. The time has come, however, to turn from the hell of poverty to an examination of the heaven of riches. Americans have a certain abiding faith in riches that has led to no end of misimderstanding among people in other parts of the world. They praise riches in their homes, extol it in their schools, bow to it in the community life.'; Even though money is the root of all evil, they dig for it assiduously. Everywhere there is a feeling that the saying of Solomon, "With all thy getting, get wisdom," should be so altered as to read, "With all thy getting, get riches." " For surely," they contend, "all things that thou canst desire are not to be compared with them." The belief in riches is so general in the United States that it resolves itself into a kind of creed or confession of faith. Nine men and women out of every ten who are not rich would jump at the chance to be rich without inquiring seriously into the causes or the effects of riches. The hope for riches and the belief in riches has become a species of American second nature. The last hundred years have seen a phenomenal increase of riches in the United States, and par- ticularly since the Civil War, the number and the wealth of individual rich men have grown fabulously. Today, America numbers her millionaires by the thousands, and there are about one hundred and RICHES 201 fifty persons whose incomes exceed a million dollars a year. The leading cities are full of palatial resi- dences; pleasure hotels are able to collect immense fees for the supply of regal luxury; vast funds are donated for charity and philanthropy; and the pri- vate and pubhc expenditures of the rich in pursuit, largely, of their own enjoyment are staggering in amount. There is an oft-quoted saying of a great teacher, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." The assumption is that men must choose between the two fealties. Confronted by the choice between the service of God and of Mammon, Americans, for the most part, have frankly chosen Mammon. Their attitude toward the question makes it quite evident that they beUeve that the service of Mammon is, on the whole, a quite acceptable substitute for the service of God. There lies the issue. Can men serve Mammon? Granted that they cannot serve God and Mammon, is the service of Mammon a desirable one? Can the Mammon-server survive? 2. The Wealth Machine A very small number of people are rich. In olden times, to be rich meant to have plate, bullion, jewels and sometimes great landed estates as well. The rich man today is in a very different position. Incidentally, the modern rich man may have 202 RICHES a supply of plate, bullion and jewels, but in the first instance he secures possession of income-yielding property — stocks, bonds, mortgages and the like. There are two ways in which a man may make a living. He may work for it or he may own for it. The worker receives an income because cf some ser- vice that he renders. The owner's income is based on his ownership. The contrast may be illustrated in this concrete manner. Here is a man who manages a signal tower for the railroad company. Each year he receives $1,000 for his services. Yonder a man owns $20,000 of the railroad company's five per cent bonds. He receives $1,000 a year for his ownership. The tower- man is paid because he works. The bond-man is paid because he owns. The claim of the property owner is prior and is perpetual. Modem business is so organized that the first shock of industrial depression is carried by the discharged workman. The dividends may be paid on the stocks. The interest will be continued on the bonds. The first burdens of industrial hard- ship are saddled on the wage-earner. The rich man who invests his money carefully is a thousand times more secure than the worker who is engaged in the productive work of the community. There has never been established a right to work, but there is a virtual right to property income. At all times money invested in a savings bank will draw interest. Practically the same security is found in RICHES 203 gilt-edge bonds, mortgages and other forms of income-yielding property. The modem wealth machine has been so devised and evolved that it is only necessary for an individual to become the owner of property in order to be secure in his income. A man who can get title to $100,000 in money can exchange it for five per cent bonds or mortgages, and receive an income of $5,000 a year. He may Uve for forty years, drawing this income each year. Then he may place the $100,000 in trust for his son, who Uves, let us say, sixty years, drawing the income each year. This son, in turn, may hand the property on to a grandson, but even the two generations of father and son, from this $100,000 have received $5,000 a year for 100 years, or $500,000 in wealth. It is perfectly conceivable that neither of them earned the money. No one asks that question. The possession of $100,000 entitles the owner and his heirs to a $5,000 income so long as they continue to own the $100,000. One of the weekly papers, in a recent issue, carried this amusing parody on the wealth machine. "What did you tell that man just now?" "I told him to hurry." "What right have you to tell him to hurry?" "I pay him to hxu-ry." "What do you pay him?" "A dollar a day." "Where do you get tne money to pay him with?" "I sell bricks." 204 RICHES "Who makes the bricks?" "He does." "How many bricks does he make?" "Twenty-four men can make 24,000 bricks in a day." "Then, instead of you paying him, he pays you six dollars a day for standing around and telling him to hurry." "Well, but I own the machines." "How did you get the machines?" "Sold bricks and bought them." "Who made the bricks?" "Shut up, he might hear you." This is one proposition from which there is no escape. Bricks, shoes, chairs and every other usable thing were made by somebody. The significant question relates to the manner in which they are secured by the user. Cash payment is not final. There are reasons behind even cash payment. There was an excellent illustration during the winter of 1913-14 of the workings of the wealth machine. Reports indicated that in New York City a very large number of persons — ^from 250,000 to 400,000 — ^who had work ordinarily, were un- employed. They and those dependent on them needed food and clothing. The landlord demanded rent, but there was no work, because thousands of industrial establishments had shut down tempo- rarily. During each of those winter months, when the suffering was so general and so intense. use her Photo DIFFEKEXT KINDS OP DINING KOOJIS The sufffriiig and destitute old woman shown above had to stove for dining room tabh-. She slept in the same room. Photo- graph taken by Charles F. Weller and used by permission from Neglected Neighbors. The marble fireplace, carved ceiling costly paintings and elaborate furniture of the dining room shown' beloAV suggest til e luxury enjoyed at meals by wealthy families (Photo from House & Cardeii.") RICHES 205 one man, living near New York, was in receipt of an income of about five millions a month. Was he in need of those five millions? Hardly! He was already the possessor of some $800,000,000 of wealth, and it was for that reason that he received an income of about $60,000,000 a year. Here was a man of fabulous wealth, with an income of more than a hundred dollars a minute, while almost at his door there were hundreds of thousands of industrious people unable to get work — ^himgry, cold, suffering. The situation is grotesque. It fulfils, with dread- ful exactness, the saying, "To him that hath shall be given, he shall have more abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have." The wealth machine, enabling some to live by owning upon the products made by thosje who hve by working, has produced no more vicious result than this — the workers suffer hardship while the owners bask in nameless luxury.^ * Note this keen characterization of the present industrial order in Edward Bellamy's " Looking Backward ": "By way of attempting to give the reader some general imjjres- eion of the way people Uved together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than compare society as it then was to a prodi- gious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hiUy and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was nec- essarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. The seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places 206 RICHES Those who live on their incomes are hving on the work done by others. They are econonaically were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be whoUy lost. For aU that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were sUppmg out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode. "But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil! Had they no com- passion for fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hiU. At such times, the desperate strain- ing of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats. "It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the pas- sengers' sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach." RICHES 207 parasitic. The system that supports them penalizes the worker while it glorifies the owner. 3. Wealth and the Wealthy An attentive listener to the teachings of American life might easily assume that the rich were unques- tionably beneficiaries of their riches. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The most immediate result of riches is their disastrous effect on the rich. Disastrous? Must "riches" and "disastrous" be linked together? Examine the matter carefully, and the conclusion is inevitable. Riches saps initiative, undermines self-respect and prevents the rich man from enjoying human rela- tionships. To the extent that riches does these things it is disastrous to the individual who is rich. Riches saps initiative. All normal men and women have a greater or less amount of creative impulse — of yearning for self- expression. This self-expression is the outward manifestation of their spiritual selves. When they are children, they plan, build, decorate and play. As they grow older, they turn to more permanent forms of activity — ^inventing, painting, organizing, directing, planning and building tools, machines, pictures, businesses, cities and nations. Shelly wrote because he must write; Franklin experimented scientifically because the spirit within him would not be gainsaid. It was the manners of Lincoln's soul that carried him to the fore. These things are in the man. 208 RICHES Human faculties, including the will, grow strong through use. Activity is the law of life. Truly said Faust, "^'In the beginning was the deed." Poverty starves initiative. Riches surfeits it. Both, in the end, destroy it. The rich learn to depend upon others. The boy, bom into a rich family, who has someone at hand to fetch and carry for him, is denied the education that comes through doing. Instead of being stimulated to press forward in this direction or that, he is urged to "let James do it." Said one college lad, "Why should I worry? Why should I work? Nothing is going to happen to me. Father has plenty and he will take care of me." He had been raised in luxury, trained to depend upon others for the supplying of his daily wants, taught to accept this as a matter of course. In his expensive preparatory school the masters had given him his studies in the form of carefully sterihzed, pre-digested intellectual pillets; and in college as well as in life he expected someone to look out for him. This does not always happen. But just as the child of the poor is likely to be thrown too much on his own resources, so the child of the rich is Ukely to be thrown too little on his own resources. The attitude of the rich is well set forth in one passage from the twenty-third chapter of Matthew. "For they say and do not. For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move RICHES 209 them with one of their fingers." They wait for others to do it. Riches saps initiative by removing the immediate stimulus to activity. The "I must" of the man thrown on his own resources becomes the "What's the use? " of the man who need never worry about the morrow or the morrow's morrow. 4. Riches and Self-Respect Initiative is the grandmother of self-respect. Achievement is born of initiative, and self-respect is the child of achievement. Here are two boys. One has acquired the habit of failure, the other the habit of success. The boy who has learned to fail abhors himself. He is worth- less! He feels it in every fiber of his being. The boy who has learned to succeed passes from triumph to triumph. There is nothing too difficult for him to assay, and at each new achievement he becomes more capable of overcoming the next obstacle. Success, like failure, feeds upon itself. The rich, particularly in the second generation, are not called upon to achieve anything. They are relieved from the necessity of exertion. Their power of initiative atrophies. They never learn success. This denial of achievement undermines the self-respect of the rich and is one of the surest explanations of that profound dissatisfaction, world- weariness and ennui that is the spiritual scourge of the well-to-do. 210 RICHES Stevenson, in that inspired passage at the end of his essay, "Aes Triplex," tells what, in his estimate, it means to die young. The triimiphant soul has barely finished its work. "The sound of the mallet and hammer are scarcely quenched," when the spirit, in the high tide of its being, "shoots into the spiritual land." The hand of riches is as palsied as the hand of old age. Gradually, piece by piece, it wears down the foundations of self-respect until the rich man finds himself alone with his riches. 5. The Pauperising Power of Riches There is an element of contradiction, as well as of unassailable truth in the phrase "The Pauperizing Power of Riches." Yet, equivocal as it may seem, riches does pauperize the rich. What does "pauperize" mean? The rich are most solicitous about the poor. Whatever happens, they must not be pauperized. There is a danger of pauperization in all forms of philanthropy and charity. School lunches pauperize the children; mothers' pensions pauperize the families; all forms of assistance given to individuals at public expense pauperizes the individuals — ^that is, it renders them less capable of self-support. Pauperize means "To lead one person to depend for support on another; to make dependent." Riches pauperizes. The children of rich people, and to a less extent RICHES 211 the rich people themselves, learn to depend on others for their support. Servants wait on them; the world of productive industry supplies them with the things that they use. Riches tends to make the rich incapable of self-support. There are in riches the worst features of pauperization against which the rich are constantly seeking to guard the poor. The burden of riches rests heavily upon individual initiative and self-respect. Riches leads to depen- dence — inabiUty for self-support. Riches pauperizes. 6. The Isolation of Riches Riches isolates the rich as completely as though they were set upon an island of gold in the midst of a boundless ocean. The rich may have their friends among the rich, but they cannot reach the heart of humanity. Philanthropy is the effort of the rich to estabhsh human relations with the rest of mankind. As such, it is perhaps the most arid failure of the century. A rich woman who owned an estate of many acres near a large city decided to set up some tents among her beautiful shade trees and invite shop girls to come there and stay during the summer. She had a child-hke faith that while she was away on her summer travels they would come here and enjoy themselves. When she foimd that they would not come, she was displeased — ^affronted. They were, she said, "ungrateful." 212 RICHES The rich men of America in the present centm-y are repeating the elaborate philanthropies carried on in Rome by the rich men of the Augustan age. They built schools, baths, hbraries, fountains and public buildings in the hope that they could by these means atone for their riches. Like the phi- lanthropists of the twentieth century, they failed. The failure of philanthropy is inherent in the nature of such benefactions. Assume that the philanthropist is giving from the purest motives of altruism, the fact that he gives wealth and that another receives it throws between the two an impassable gulf. Philanthropist and beneficiary cannot be friends. Philanthropy annihilates friend- ship. Go one step farther, and have this phi- lanthropy handled professionally by a society whose purpose is organized benevolence, and the phi- lanthropy becomes grotesque. "He gives nothing but worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty," writes Lowell. The sentence might be paraphrased to read, "He gives nothing but worthless gold who gives professionally." The $100 wrung from the irascible philanthropist by the smooth-spoken agent of the charity society reeks with the contempt that the giver feels for his fellow men in general and the financial secretary of the charity society in particular. It is a means of disestablish- ing human relations. Instead of being a blessing, it is a curse. "All gifts," you insist, "are not given on that RICHES 213 basis." True enough, but those who are acquainted with the running of private philanthropic societies, and who know the lengths to which these organiza- tions go to raise funds, are gravely suspicious that a very large proportion of the dollars that make such an admirable showing after the names of the con- tributors published in the annual report would never have appeared in print but for the astuteness and persistence of men and women who are paid for their proficiency in the charitable art of wheedling. Personal relationships vanish when the philan- thropist signs the check that passes on his "worth- less gold." Organized philanthropy and personal relationship are antithetical terms. Charity is synonymous with love, not checks! The champion of organized philanthropy points in vain to his list of volunteer workers. The givers who have sought to be philanthropic by giving money are in the same trap of impossibilities. Philanthropy may be defended as conscience balm or as social fire insurance. The man who has stolen a hundred-thousand-dollar franchise may dedicate a ten-thousand-dollar stained glass window and "call it square." The astute millionaire may see in philanthropy a means of perpetuating a social system which, without philanthropy, would speedily become intolerable. Even in these cases, and they are probably not so numerous as some radical thinkers believe, there is no personal relation estab- lished between the giver and the receiver of the gift. 214 RICHES A considerable portion of the chapter on "Indus- trial Leadership" was devoted to the proposition that the leader must be the server, since great leadership involved great service. The only true philanthropist is the man who gives himself, and the possession of riches seems to erect a sharp barrier between the rich man and the world. Emerson, in his essay on "Manners," states the matter very clearly. "Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar." He might have said "ugly pauper" and been nearer to the truth. "The only gift," he writes, in "Gifts," "is a portion of thyself." The proposition is so clearly defined and so well established that it needs no elaboration. Lowell states the case in a manner even more sweeping. "Who gives himself with his gold feeds three — ^himself, his himgering neighbor and Me." The reverse holds equally true — that the man who does not give himself feeds no one. There is no word here about the great foundations and bequests, because, administered by high-paid directors and by boards of trustees, they do not even profess to represent "giving" in the personal sense of that word. The rich man, because he is rich, cannot give himself. It is this fact that led to the admonition which Jesus gave the rich yoimg man who had kept all of the commandments: "Go, sell all you have; come and follow me." Until he had divested him- self of the impenetrable armor which the possession RICHES 215 of riches threw about him, he was of no value as a personal worker. 7. Spending as Philanthropy "True enough," admit the rich, "we do not give generously. Even the largest gifts are, as a rule, paltry when one considers the amount the giver has left. At the same time, we spend our money generously, circulate it and thus make people prosperous." ,; That "spending" argument is very old and some- what overworked. Yet it is astonishing to find how many people believe it implicitly. To it there are several answers. First, if it were true that spending makes pros- perity, the cause of progress would be served best by having one person do all the spending for the community. That proposition even the most ardent advocate of the spending argument would hardly accept unless he was sure 'to be designated the spender. Second, in proportion to their income, the poor spend more than the rich. Therefore, if spending were the objective desired, the most successful way to have money spent would be to give it to the poor. Third, the assumption that spending rather than saving makes for prosperity, is based on an idea that is not necessarily correct. In a new country, the person who saves is more important than the 216 RICHES person who spends, because it is from the savings of the careful individual that the capital for new industries is secured. Fourth, the person who spends does not do so primarily because he wishes to be philanthropic. ^ He spends because he wishes to have the things that he buys. The rich man's food, clothing and house decoration are bought with an eye to the rich man's taste — ^not to the poor man's welfare. Fifth, when a rich man uses up food and clothing to supply himself with comforts and luxuries, he automatically denies the rest of the community those same things. There is a loaf of bread for supper. If father eats two-thirds of the loaf, there is only one-third left for mother and the children. At any given time there is only a certain amount of wealth in the community. If one man uses it, other people are automatically deprived of it unless there is more than enough to go round.' ^ The real irony of the position taken by the man who justifies spending on the ground that he thus helps other people is well set forth in some lines credited to Ernest Bilton: "Now Dives daily feasted and was gorgeously arrayed, Not at all because he liked it but because 'twas good for trade. That the people might have calico, he clothed himseU in sUk, And surfeited himself on cream that they might get the milk; He fed five hundred servants that the poor might not lack bread, And had his vessels made of gold that they might get more lead; And e'en to show his sympathy with the deserving poor He did no useful work himself that they might do the more. You'll think this very, very strange, but then of course, you know, [ 'Twas in a far-off country, and a long while ago." » This point is well illustrated by the comment that Victor Hugo puts in the mouth of the coimtry Bishop, who was visiting his richer brethren in Paris: "What fine clocks! What splendid carpets! What magnificent RICHES 217 The whole problem of the relation of the rich spender to the community is covered, as perhaps nowhere else in literatiu*e, by a passage from Ruskin's "Unto This Last:" "If you are a young lady, and employ a certain number of sempstresses for a given time, in making a given number of simple and serviceable dresses, suppose, seven; of which you can wear one yourself for half the winter, and give six away to poor girls who have none, you are spending your money unselfishly. But if you employ the same number of sempstresses for the same ' number of days, in making four, or five, or six beautiful flounces forjyour own^ball-dress — flounces which will clothe no one but yourself, and which you will yourself be unable to wear at more than one ball — you are emplojong your money selfishly. ... I don't say you are never to do so ; I don't say you ought not sometimes to think of yourselves only, and to make your- selves as pretty as you can; only do not confuse coquettishness with benevolence, nor cheat your- selves into thinking that all the finery you can wear is so much put into the himgry mouths of those beneath you; it is not so; . . . those fine dresses do not mean that so much has been put into their liveries! You must find all that very troublesome! '..,0h, I should not like to have all such superfluities to yell incessantly in my ears; there are people who are hungry; there are people who are cold; there are poor, there are poor." Or, from St. Augustine: "The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the poor. They who possess superfluities possess the goods of others," 218 RICHES mouths, but that so much has been taken out of their mouths. The real poUtico-economical signifi- cance of every one of those beautiful toilettes is just this: that you have had a certain number of people put for a certain number of days wholly under your authority by the sternest of slave-masters, hunger and cold, and have said to them, 'I will feed you, indeed, and clothe you, and give you fuel for so many days, but during those days you shall work for me only. Your little brothers need clothes, but you shall make none for them; your sick friend needs clothes, but you shall make none for her; you yourself will soon need another and a warmer dress, but you shall make none for yourself. You shall make nothing but lace and roses for me; for this fortnight to come, you shall work at the patterns and petals, and then I will crush and consume them away in an hour.' You will perhaps answer: 'It may not be particularly benevolent to do this, and we won't call it so; but at any rate we do no wrong in taking their labor when we pay them their wages. If we pay for their work we have a right to it.' No — a thousand times no. The labor which you have paid for does indeed become, by the act of purchase, your own labor; you have bought the hands and the time of those workers; they are, by right and justice, your own hands, your own time. But have you a right to spend your own time, to work with your own hands, only for your own advantage? — much more, when, by purchase, you have invested RICHES 219 your own person with the strength of others, and added to your own life a part of the life of others? ... as long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long there can be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime. In due time, when we have nothing better to set people to work at, it may be right to let them make lace and cut jewels; but so long as there are any who have no blankets for their beds and no rags for their bodies, so long it is blanket-making and tailoring we must set people to work at — not lace." 8. We Cannot Serve Mammon The declaration, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon," offers no real alternative. We cannot serve Mammon. The thinkers of the world for ages have imderstood this, but in regard to it the world is still in darkness. Here, in the United States, tens of thousands are busying themselves in Mammon's service, despite the very obvious fact, noted even by Emerson, that the rich, who are trying to be rich, "arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere."* Solomon, though he was rich, said, "Give me neither poverty nor riches." A long line of Greek and Roman philosophers made the same point. The followers of the early Christian Church went to the extreme of demanding poverty as a pre-requisite to salvation. The revolt against riches is normal if the argument • Essay on "Nature.", 220 RICHES presented is sound. If riches saps initiative, under- mines self-respect and prevents the rich man from establishing human relationships, even the rich should, with Timon of Athens, cast their riches aside. When it appears, further, that the rich are taking the wealth of the community for their own selfish enjoyments, while the poor must go without; and that riches, a relative term signifying the opposite of poverty, involves the maintenance of the maximum inequality in favor of those who are rich, society too must reject riches. Riches, with its running mate poverty, becomes the object of uni- versal condemnation. Riches leads those who are rich toward physical and spiritual death. Likewise it leads the com- munity toward the social death that is a necessary product of parasitism. There is a remarkable passage in the writings of James in which he cries to the rich, "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shaU be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire." Here is the warning that many of the later writers have put in stronger terms, but which is nowhere more strikingly stated. The destruction of the rich is their riches in the same sense that the destruction of the poor is their poverty. The camel shall go through the needle's eye more RICHES 221 easily than a rich man shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven. His riches cumber his life. The rich young man who had kept all of the commandments, but who was told to go sell all that he had and give it to the poor, "when he heard this, was very sorrow- ful; for he had great possessions." He was yoimg, but already the riches had a firm grip on his life. The same destructive effect of riches may be observed in a social group. Thus Paul writes to the Church of the Laodiceans: "Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." The riches of this group of people obstructed their vision of truth in exactly the same manner that the riches of the virtuous young man obstructed his vision. The objective point of social organization is happy and noble men and women. To this end, poverty and riches alike fail. Neither happiness nor nobility is inherent, either in poverty or in riches. "It is well," said Saint Augustine, "that thou givest bread to the hungry, but better were it that none hungered and that thou hadst none to ^ve." Poverty must give place to justice and riches must be supplanted by equal opportunity. Only thus can the greatest good be accomplished for that greatest number upon which the community depends for its continued success and from which alone the community must secure happiness and nobility. 222 RICHES 9. What is Riches? Some will insist, and very promptly, that the place for the definition of riches was at the outset of the discussion. It was deferred and set at this point in order that the reader might have, as a back- ground for definition, the considerations regarding riches that have been stated. The time has now come to define riches. Riches is a purely relative term. Not only is it true that the heaven of the rich is built upon the hell of the poor, but unless there were a hell of poverty there could be no heaven of riches. The terms "rich" and "poor" are opposites in the same sense that the terms "north" and "south" are opposites. Were the south eliminated, there could be no north. The existence of the one, pre- supposes the presence of the other. The Italian who comes to the United States, Uves in squalor, saves a thousand dollars and goes back to his little Italian village, is rich there. The "local banker" in the Illinois country village — ^the most prosperous, substantial citizen in his town — ^takes a trip to Chicago or New York, where he finds himself inexpressibly poor. The "richness" of riches con- sists, not at all in the amount of them, but in the contrast between the amount of wealth in the possession of the poor part of the community. An Italian peasant is far richer in his native village on a thousand dollars than is a provincial banker in New York on a million. Ruskin states the matter thus: RICHES 223 "Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following ceri;ain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. . . . The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbor's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for iti and the art of making yourself rich ... is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor." The poorer the neighbor, the more powerful is the rich man. The contrast between the poverty of the poor and the riches is the measure of the power that the rich can exercise over the poor. The greater the contrast, the greater the power of the rich. Were riches absolute, people might be both rich and happy. Thus, if every man who had a million were rich, and if no one, by any possibiUty, could get more than a milUon, then the rich could cease to strive when he reached the milUon mark, and be a satisfied man. Riches are not absolute, however. The man with a million is not rich so long as there is a man with a hundred million living across the street. Furthermore, even if the man with a milhon is the richest man in the commimity, there is the constantly impending probability that someone else may get two millions, and the possessor of one million strives as ardently as ever to keep ahead in the riches game. 224 RICHES Furthermore, since riches is as important for its power over the poor as it is for its supremacy among the rich, the rich man strives for more riches in order that he may have more power. The phrase "drunk with power" describes accu- rately the state of the man who is forging ahead in the wealth-game. Riches is a social stimulant, more exhilarating then champagne. It is more deadly, too, because it gets a stronger grip on its victims and holds them more siurely. The love of riches is the most consuming passion in the world. It grips all alike — ^young and old; weak and strong. It is for this reason that the Teacher exclaims, "How hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God!" The riches block their path and the more they have the greater obstacle do they become. Instead of mounting to a heaven of happiness and satisfaction on the moimtain of his riches, the rich man is crushed by them into a hell of taunting oblivions from which even the gilded monuments that he erects cannot save him, 10. The Maximum Inequality Unless riches carry with them power over men, they are meaningless. No rich man would hold title to mines, steamship lines or metropoUtan real estate unless they gave him this power. A man owns a great estate on which there is a splendid mansion, fine stables, houses, cattle, orchards, fertile fields. One day a pestilence kills RICHES 225 off tjie men and women who have been working on the estate. There are no more servants to be had, and the owner decides to keep up the property himself. What does he discover? That if he is a good workman, well equipped with up-to-date tools, his own efforts will maintain from one to five acres of land in a state of high cultivation, while the mansion, the stables and the rolling fields grow up to briers and thickets, and in a decade become a wilderness. The estate that one man can work is small indeed. Only when he can persuade others to accept a part of his riches in return for their services can he expect to be rich. The operation of each pice of industrial property depends upon the same principle. Of what use are railroads, steel mills, sugar refineries and silver mines unless someone can be found who is willing to pay a bonus (rent or interest) for the privilege of working there? Dives has assimied, absurdly enough, that he was conferring a favor when he allowed another to set his table. Unless there were some other than Lazarus to accept his pay and set his table, he would have no feast. Note the conclusion to which this argument leads: "What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially power over men; . . . And this power of wealth, of course, is greater or less in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to IS 226 RICHES the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves, and who are ready to give the same price for an article of which the supply is limited. ... So that, as above stated, the art of becoming 'rich,' in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbors shall have less. In accurate terms, it is "the art of establishing the maximum inequaUty in our own favor."' The art of becoming rich is "the art of estab- hshing the maximum inequality in our favor." Study that sentence carefully. Compare it with the ethical codes commonly accepted by the Chris- tian world, or the Pagan either, for that matter, and note the monstrous chasm that yawns between "the maximum iuequality in om* favor," and "do imto others as you would that they should do to you." Riches are of value only when they will com- mand the time and energy of another. The rich are rich because others are poor and in proportion as others are poor; the art of getting rich is the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our favor. This is the heaven of the rich that has been built on the hell of the poor. Here endeth the journey through Paradise. Thinking back over it all, do you wonder that Shaw writes of "That indispensable revolt against poverty that must also be a revolt against riches?"' ' "Unto This Last," John Ruskin. • " Major Barbara," Introduction. CHAPTER VI Industrial Democbacy 1. The Impatience for Constructive Work GO where you will; discuss what vital subject you please, and inevitably a question is asked. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" or more concretely, "Well, what can I do about it?" The world is tired of destructive thought; it is demanding a reaflBrmation of the fundamental truths of life. Truly did Carlyle anticipate the spirit of the present day in his utterance, "What! thou hast no faculty in that kind? only a torch for burning, no hammer for building? Take our thanks, then, and . . . thyself away."i The world is turning eagerly to him who has the hammer for building, asking where he keeps it, how he uses it, what it is made of, how it works, whether others could use one like it, and where duplicates are to be found. All of these queries must be answered, and, most important of all, they must be answered quickly, definitely and in certain terms. Nor are people satisfied that the tool of construc- tion should be a hammer. In an age of progress, why waste time over hammers? Why not have an 1 "Sartor ResartuB," Ch. 9. (227) 228 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY Aladdin's lamp or some other touchstone of creation that will erect the palace of our dreams while we sleep? Further, this constructive power must be a "remedy" that is guaranteed to cure the social ills. Not one disease must it master, but all diseases. It must be a, panacea that will work equally well in the case of each specific social ailment. This cure-all — ^the age-sought spring of perpetual social youth — ^is looked for as eagerly today as men ever sought its prototype in the days of De Soto. People, not a few, insist that they have found it, that they have it, and that if the world will but listen to their voices, it will be saved. At the same time, oddly enough, by a complete contradiction, these same people insist upon an evolutionary as opposed to a revolutionary method of getting results. Things must not be thrown down too hard. Removing and rebuilding must be as simultaneous as they are in the tissues of the human body. 2. The Ideals of Democracy One dramatic four-act answer may be made to all of these demands: 1. The world of human affairs always moves onward; and sometimes upward. 2. The onward movement is inevitable. Ths upward movement depends upon the will of man. DESTITUTION AND LUXURY An aged workman, stricken with paralysis after years of toil, bend- ing over a cold stove in a filtliy room ; linngry, helpless and friend- less, is shown above in a jdiotosraph tal;en by Charles F. Weller. In the living-room of a splendid lionso shown below, the wealthy man has every comfort and Inxnry. Nor is this the only room of which he has the u.se. (Photo from "Honse & (iarden." I INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 229 3. Men, in building upward, /work toward their ideals. 4. Everywhere, the world over, those who repre- sent a progressive democracy are working toward ideals that can be reduced to the same general terms. The ideas and ideals that lie at the foundation of the democratic thought of the United States are common to the democratic thinkers of Canada, Australia, Switzerland, France and England. They have been popularized by certain catch phrases that carry them to the minds and hearts of the citizenship. The most commonly accepted of the ideals upon which American democracy was built is summed up in the phrase, "The equal right of all people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Human beings differ physically and intellectually. No one hopes or even pretends that people can be made equal. It is proposed to equalize opportunity. The men and women who foxmded the American Colonies fled from a civiUzation in which there were hereditary inequalities of opportunity. In their new homes, they dedicated themselves to the task of giving equal opportunity to all of the sons and daughters of men. There was to be no special privilege. All were to be started fair in the race of life. The ideal of equal opportunity is one of the most brilliant dreams that ever came into the human consciousness. It makes room for the individual soul at the same time that it calls to the front the men who are best fitted to do the tasks of the world. 230 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY A second ideal of the early American democracy was aptly summed up in the phrase, "He that will not work, neither shall he eat." Citizens of a democracy must assume the responsibilities of citizenship imder pain of missing its benefits. . Conversely, the government in a democracy must serve the citizenship. In its early expression, this thought takes the form, "Taxation without repre- sentation is tyraimy." Those who pay the piper should call the tune. Later the expression appears as "A government of the people, by the people, and for the people," — a people's govermnent. A people's government can know only one duty — ^the service of those who support it. Then, in the fourth place, the democracy will "put the man above the dollar," because, in a democracy, the important values are the human values; the great rights are the human rights. Therefore, the rights of men and women will come before the rights of property. Here are four of the basic democratic concepts — equal opportunity, civic obligation, popular govern- ment and human rights. They were sound as tests of poUtical democracy. Perhaps they may be equally useful in testing the democracy of industry. 3. Democratic Ideals and the Industrial Rigime These ideals of democracy were applied to the political affairs of the community. Now that a INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 231 great new force has arisen, the same ideals of democracy must be applied to the Industrial Regime, or else other ideals must be formulated that are more adequate to express the relation between the people and the industrial institutions of which the people are the Uving force. Within a century the political functions of society have been pushed into the background, and in their places are the industrial forces, easily dominating, in their importance, every other activity of the community. Large scale industry has come to stay. It is an integral part of social life. It must be made a servant of man. How shall this admittedly desir- able end be brought about? How but by the very process that in past years forced political govern- ment to accept community service as its declared standard. The Industrial Regime drives a hard pace; it pays indecently low wages; it racks its leaders as it does the subordinates; it continues poverty in the presence of plenty; it permits piled up riches in the hands of a few. The Industrial Regime evidently has not brought "the greatest good to the greatest number." Low wages, over-work, distorted individuality, poverty and riches have no place in a democracy. The Industrial Regime seems on its face to be undemocratic or even anti-democratic. The democracy of it may be tested by examining it in terms of the generally accepted ideals of democracy. 232 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 4. Equality of Opportunity Equality of opportunity is the germ thought of democracy. There must be none who are specially privileged. There is no class that is entitled to the first-fruits. The ages have experimented with every form of hereditary special privilege, and American society, in its very inception, was a reaction against them. The world is weary of economic and social favoritism — outgrown garments that belong among the other relics of pseudo-barbarism. The Industrial Regime, the dominating force in modem life, must stand trial on all of the issues of democracy, but, most important of all, it must pro- vide equal opportimity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The record of the Industrial Regime. to date is like gall and wormwood to the apostle of democracy. Although its superb mechanical efficiency has greatly increased the wealth of the human race, that wealth has been so unequally divided that it has brought in its train a whole retinue of agents that work tirelessly to destroy the possibilities of equal opportimity. What does an equal opportunity for life mean? First, it means that children, unequally bom, as all children are, should have an equal chance to show the tme nature of this inequality. The genius, whether he is bom in the mansion or the hovel, must be given full scope for the development of his genius. The dunderhead, meanwhile, will be branded a INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 233 dunderhead. Equal opportunity for life means that all children are to start the race of life from scratch. Before there can be equality in life, the infant mortaUty differential must be abolished. At the present time the children of the poor die many times more frequently than the children of the rich. They die because the poor are poor; they die because the poor are ignorant. First of all, therefore, equality for life means a living wage — a wage that will provide the minimum necessities of life for a family of moderate size. In a community where it costs $850 a year to buy a living, no family, count its virtues as it may, will be able to live on 1500 and escape the penalties of poverty. That fact should be luminous, even to the socially blind, yet in every great industrial center of the United States, wages are paid to many earnest, efficient, hard-working men that under no circum- stances could buy the decencies of life foramoderate- sized family. Industry retorts that it cannot discriminate; that it is impossible to take into consideration the family needs of a man doing its work. Were one wage paid to single men and a higher to married men no married man could get employment until all single men were employed. If all were paid a family wage, the unmarried would receive a wage far higher than was necessary for support. Suppose that argument holds. The answer to it 234 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY is quite simple. If industry is unable to pay living wages to men with familes, the duty must devolve upon the community to see that families are provided with the simplest necessities of life. Motherhood pension, motherhood endowment — call it what you will. The family is engaged in that highest of all human occupations — ^the manufactiu-e of souls. For the future welfare of society it is imperative that these souls be of the finest quahty. If there is one case in which state subsidy seems justified, it is in case of motherhood. Steamship lines and manu- facturing industries are important, but motherhood is fundamental. Therefore, each mother must be paid a return in proportion to the number and age of her children. The state can afford to do no less for the well-being of its future citizens. Will not the poor, thereupon, breed recklessly for the sake of the financial gain? In so far as experi- ence is a vaUd guide, the result will be exactly the contrary. Reckless breeding occurs, for the most part, only among the very poor. The moment they receive a competence, they restrict the birth rate. A good living for the families of the poor would undoubtedly be the largest single asset in the fight for birth control. While the difference between $10 and $25 a week makes a difference of treble the infant death-rate, it is idle to speak of equal rights to life. Before there can be equal rights for life the ten-dollar wage must cease, or else all must get it. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 235 After the children reach school age, there is a very ready means of insuring at least a measure of physical weU-beiag. Poverty reproduces itself. If the chil- dren of the poor are to be anything except poor, they must be fed and clothed sufficiently to give them physical health and normal growth. That means that the school will be called upon to provide at least one good meal a day to all of its pupils. To all, because only thus can the poor children be relieved from the stigma that goes with alms. All have free seats and free text-books. No one is pauperized. The mind works ill on an empty stomach. Therefore, as an essential part of its educational scheme, the school must provide bread. Physically healthy children do not grow out of poverty. Living wages, endowed motherhood and school feeding — one or perhaps all of these means must be resorted to for the provision of equality in the physical basis of effective living. Second only to the necessity for equahty in the opportunities for physical life is the necessity for equality in the opportunities for educational life. The traditions of our education are all against equality. The nobility and the gentry among our European ancestors were looked upon as the legiti- mate objects of educational effort. The same thing was not true of the great mass of mankind who were born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Here, in the United States, the same thought held true in large meastire, and when, in the early 236 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY years of the nineteenth century, an energetic cam- paign was waged for free public education, the well- to-do uttered a frightened protest. "These people would not appreciate an education; they were not fit for it. Besides, if they are educated they will no longer be willing to work! The obvious thing was to deny them education. The spirit of democracy and the exigencies of the new and highly specialized industry both demanded that opportunity be equalized and education be provided for all. Thence grew the pubUc school system. The people who live in the newer parts of America express their confidence in democracy by sending their children to public school, but in the large eastern cities there are many families that consider their children too good for the public schools. The result is a large number of private schools, maintained by the well-to-do for their children. If these private schools are better than the pubUc schools, the students in them are given an unfair advantage at the beginning of their lives. If the private schools are not so good as the public schools, the children who attend them are handicapped. In either case, the private school works agaiost equality of opportimity. Whatever their intention or their intrinsic worth, most private schools develop in their pupils an idea that they are "better" than the public school children, thus laying the basis for a vicious system of class-conscious snobbery. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 237 The equalization of educational opportunity would seem to demand that all children, of whatever status in life, attend the public schools and there match their talents against those of the other children in the same neighborhood. There will still be dif- ferences between neighborhoods, particularly in the elementary schools, yet the sending of all children to public educational institutions will be a long step in the direction of equality of opportunity. Where children have been given an equal oppor- tunity for life in the form of food and clothing, and an equal opportunity for education in the form of a generally attended public school system, there re- mains the necessity for establishing an equahty of opportunity for achievement. That means that there must be no endowed youths and maidens in the community. At the present time the sons and daughters of the rich have a start in life that enables them to outstrip others who have no greater abilities. It is idle to contend that Rockefeller's son and the son of a Colorado miner have equal opj)ortunity, even though they have equal ability. The oppor- tunity of the one is immeasurably greater than that of the other. The system of parental endowment of untried youth is opposed to every concept of democ- racy as equal opportunity. Until all of the children in the community have an equal opportunity to get a healthy start in life, until all have like opportunities for education, and until there is an equalization of the conditions surround- 238 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY ing the livelihood struggle, it is idle to talk of equal- ity of opportunity for life. And since equality of opportunity for life — ^physical, intellectual, voca- tional — ^is one of the elemental ideals of democracy, democracy in any form is impossible until this equality is assured. 5. Liberty as Opportunity Liberty, to those who love it, is one of the most precious words in the language. To those who fear it, liberty is one of the most hateful. What is liberty? It is opportunity to come and go, to speak, to write, to think, subject always to the law of equal liberty, that makes the liberty of each man depend on the manner in which liberty is exercised by his neighbors. Liberty is thus a form of opportunity that is not directly concerned with the economic interests of life, and yet it is just where liberty contravenes economic interests that it is most seriously curtailed. The curtailment of Uberty that is involved in sending a man to jail for having in his possession, and giving to a stranger, a pamphlet on birth con- trol is scandalous iu the extreme; yet it is not of far- reaching importance, nor will it result in serious consequences to many people. The prohibition which places a heavy penalty on doctors who give information regarding birth control is a serious one and one that stands directly in the path of progress. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 239 If the well-to-do woman is to be put in possession of knowledge that will enable her to regulate the size of her family, it would seem that the poor woman, who is under an even greater necessity for family limitation, should have an opportunity to secure the same information. Indeed, there are people, not a few, who insist that the problem of birth control, involving, as it does, the only effective answer to the Malthusian doctrine, is of vital concern to the democracy. Were fewer babies bom into the families of the poor, there would be fewer to die and better care for those that did come; yet it is in those families least capable of caring for children that the highest birth-rate is found. Liberty to give information regarding any subject about which men have information is an essential factor in democracy. That liberty includes subjects like birth control, which offend against the moral standards of the community. Three centuries ago the curtailment of religious liberty must have been discussed in the same connection. At the present time, ia the United States, that question no longer presents itself. The real fight for liberty of opportunity at the present time centers about the economic world. It is there that the next battle for liberty will be lost or won. The leaders of the economic world have learned the importance of public opinion. Even if they believe that the public should be damned, they no 240 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY longer say so. On the contrary, they are resorting to every device to win public opinion for their own. The attitude is easily explained. During the seventies, eighties and nineties, when the great aggregations of private capital were being built up, there was no need to worry about pubhc opinion. The public was watching, mouth agape, the sleight- of-hand performances of the wonder-workers, who could build a city over night, with its rattling machinery and roaring forges. Later, when it came to paying the bill, the public began to take an active hand in business affairs; and now that it has become a question as to whether the people or the great corporations shall control the coimtry, the corporations are using every device to win public opinion, which is the key to the situation. The chaimels of public opinion are already well in hand. The bar, the pulpit, the college chair, the press, are all distinctly conservative. That is, content to let well enough alone,' There are radical and even revolutionary elements in all of these institutions for the shaping of public opinion, but the tone of the groups is conservative. In all of them, at the present time, the younger element is voicing an energetic protest. In all of them, the conservative forces are bringing the most terrific pressure to bear to keep the younger men in line During the past few years radicalism seems to have gained in all directions. More frequently, pleas for justice are heard from lawyers; pleas for INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 241 truth from ministers and teachers. The dead things of the past seem to be losing some of their power; the living things of the present and of the future seem to be gaining. Still it remains true that those who speak in favor of things as they are "get space," while those who speak on the other side are tucked into a comeir or else ignored. The fight is not yet won — ^it is hardly well begun. The contest for liberty in the industrial world is in its infancy. The professional groups in the popula- tion enjoy a moderate degree of liberty. The wage- earners have their liberty still to win. John Lawson in Colorado; Patrick Quinlan in Paterson; Little Falls, Pittsburgh, West Virginia — all bear eloquent testimony to the coming of fierce conflict. The men who wish to organize a imion are no longer jailed for conspiracy, but "the forces of law and order" are lined up against them and they are hampered in every direction. The most effective bribe is the bribe of a job. There is no hush money like the pay envelope. At the present time the surplus of labor is permitting the employing world to discriminate harshly against the man who is organizing with his fellows into any form of labor organization. The liberty of the employer to organize in trade bodies is commonly accepted. The rights of the workers in the same direction are, in many districts and in many trades, ignored or ruthlessly curtailed. 10 242 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 6. Opportunity and Pursuit of Happiness There is no way in which the pursuit of happiness may be measured unless some extremely mate- rialistic problem such as livelihood be considered. And after all, it remains true that happiness is impossible in the face of grinding poverty and is almost as impossible in the face of great riches. Therefore, while livelihood is by no means a measure or determiner of happiness except in the most mate- rialistic sense, it affords the surest foundation upon which a happy life may be built. The poor and the rich are not equal if equality is measured in terms of infant death rates, of sickness rates, of educational advantages and of opportunities to start the race of life. There is an even broader sense in which there is gross inequality as between poor and rich. Broadly speaking — ^and this statement must be broadly construed — ^the poor are the workers and the rich are the owners in the Industrial Regime. The poor give the great part of the human service; the rich control most of the productive machinery. The poor own. They own their clothing, their kicthen utensils and house furnishings. Frequently they own their own houses. But in the vast major- ity of cases they do not own stocks, bonds or any other form of title to the railroads, mines, factories and stores for which they work. These titles are held by the rich. Not all of those who work are poor, but the vast INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 243 majority of those who are poor work for wages. It is only a vanishingly small proportion of the poor who live on the community without engaging in productive toil. The Johnstown report pointed out the fact that where the infant mortality was highest there lived the "families of the men who do the unskilled work in the steel mills and mines." The poor are the workers, in Johnstown and elsewhere- Many of the rich — ^probably most of the rich men — are workers, but theii- riches consists, not primarily in the salary or returns for services, but in the income that they derive for their ownership of income- yielding property with which the poor must work if they are to live. Riches, in so far as it consists in "establishing the maximum inequaUty in our own favor," is diametrically opposed to equality of opportunity. Riches, in this sense, is as far from democracy as the east is from the west. Moreover, when it is remembered that the rich own the property with which the poor rnust work for a living, and that, in return for this ownership, they expect a return in the form of rent or interest, because they are the owners, and that the poor, who work with and live upon the property of the rich, must pay them a return out of the products of their work, it becomes apparent that the private ownership of income-yieldmg property creates an impossible barrier of special privilege between those 244 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY who work and those who own the property on which the work is done. Unless all are owners, those who own may and do exact a tribute from those who work, so that the harder the worker works and the more product he turns out, the greater is the return to the property owner and the wider is the gulf between the opportunities of him who works and him who owns. Those who own income-yielding property that is the product of their own accumulation and who may therefore live upon the income from this property without themselves doing any work, hold a means of enforcing inequality as between themselves and the workers. Those who inherit income-yielding prop- erty start the race of life with an assured livelihood, while the children of the workers must produce suflScient wealth to provide for their own necessities and to pay the interest and dividends on the prop- erty held by the sons of the rich. Thus the workers, in the race of life, must run their own race, carrying, meanwhile, the property owners who need do no work. Among these workers are many poor upon whose backs sit the few rich. There is a forceful statement of the contrast in Ruskin's "Unto This Last." "It has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich. I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor." While the poor, who work for a living, are compelled to support the rich who own for a living, it is idle to talk about equal INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 245 opportunity for livelihood. The opportunities for livelihood are in their very nature unequal and must inevitably remain so as long as a part of the people are permitted to hold titles and draw income from income-jdelding property with which the poor must work for a Uving. 7. Workers and Eaters The argument with which the preceding section concluded has an immediate bearing upon the next fundamental proposition of democracy: "He that will not work, neither shall he eat." Enough has already been said about the relative status of workers and owners in the United States. It is necessary, at this point, to emphasize the thought that all who share in the benefits of social activity should also share in its burdens. John Smith and his followers had fled from a system of economic organization xmder which those who owned the land fared sumptuously upon the rents paid to them by those who worked the land. The feudal system gave the land to a landed class, and by that fact put into the possession of the landed class the power to exact a rent from all who wished to use the land. The land owners, generation after generation, Uved without working, upon the income yielded by their land. Revolting against this form of economic parasitism, John Smith uttered his protest: "He that will not work, neither shall he eat." The welfare of the com- 246 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY munity seemed to require that those who share benefits also share burdens. The special privilege inherent in all forms of inconle-yielding property contravenes this funda- mental democratic principle. With the amoimt of income-yielding property limited, and with the necessity that those who earn their livelihood by working with this property shall pay those who own it for the privilege of using, it becomes certain that the private ownership of income-yielding property will create a parasitic class that will be able to eat without doing any work. The extent to which this is already done is aston- ishing. To take only one of the many forms of income-yielding property — corporate stocks and bonds — ^the United States Commissioner of Internal Revenue reports that the corporations required by law to pay the Federal revenue tax had (1913) total bonds of $34,750,000,000 and total stocks of $61,738,000,000. Together these corporation secu- rities amoimt to almost a hundred bilUons. If they pay an average interest of five per cent and an average dividend of four per cent, they yield about four and a quarter biUions of dollars in annual revenue to their owners. If to these income-yielding property titles are added the mortgages, the rented city real estate, the farms on lease, the property retiuns from unincorporated businesses and the income on public debt, some idea may be secured of the present possibilities before those people who wish to live on their incomes. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 247 One frequently hears the attitude of the wage- eamer decried. He soldiers. He does not deliver a fair day'^ work. Such critics would be vehement indeed if the wage-earner proposed to get his pay without doing any work. Yet this is exactly the proposition that the owners of income-yielding property are demonstrating every day that they hve on their ownership. There is probably no force more utterly demoralizing than the efforts of a part of the population to hve, without working, upon the labor of another part. Despite this quite obvious fact, the United States is today engaged in building up an economic system that guarantees a far better living to the rich loafer than it pays to the honest worker. 8. A Peo'ple's Government The government of the United States is a people's government. That is, it is organized on the general democratic proposition of the greatest good to the greatest number. The greatest number of the American people are wage-earners or lease-holders, who are using the property of others in the gaining of a livelihood. The American government, in order to be democratic, must apply this principle to the industrial world. In the first place, it must be quite apparent, with- out any argument, that industry is utterly un- democratic in its present organization. Democracy presupposes control by the people — 248 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY the majority of the people. As it has been worked out in modern society, it means the selection, by the people, of representatives who act for their constituency. This type of representative democ- racy has been accepted as a matter of course in poli- tics. Industry, meanwhile, is under the almost complete control of a non-representative and non- responsible plutocracy. With the exception of a very mild form of regula- tion exercised by state and Federal government over certain of the more important pubUc utiUties, those who own the industries control them as absolutely as the owner of a dukedom in medieval Germany controlled his estate. The modem wage- earners are not attached to the industry as the medieval serfs were attached to the land, but while they continue to work in an industry they are subject to the dictates of the owners of the industry. The corporation is the clearest type of this rela- tion between ownership and industrial control. The stockholder — the owners of the corporation — select a board of directors whose duty it is to manage the affairs of the property. The directors, in turn, designate certain administrative officers who carry on the active business of management. Not once are the workers consulted regarding any matter of industrial policy. They have no say, either in the selection of the officials or in the determination of the things that are to be done by the officials. The workers in a modem industry are just as far from INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 249 having a say in industrial affairs as were the serfs of medieval Europe from participating in the affairs of the estates on which they worked. It seems almost idle to reiterate such statements. They are so obvious. No worker supposes that he has a say in business policy. No owner of business property pretends that the workers have a say in business pohcy. At the same time most people fail to reahze the absolute negation of democracy that is involved in the present-day system of industrial organization. Industry is not only undemocratic in its internal organization, but it has actually presumed to reach out and lay its hands on the poUtical government for the furthering of its own interests. Thinking people cannot listen with anything short of alarm while the President speaks to Congress of the possi- bility that employers will allow the yoimg men in their employ to take a few months for mihtary training, saying, "I, for one, do not doubt the patriotic devotion either of our young men or of those who give them employment — those for whose bene- fit and "protection they would enlist."* It may be news to many people in the country that mihtary preparedness is for the benefit and protection of the employing class, yet the President makes the point quite frankly. To those who have followed the rectnt con- troversies between labor and capital, it is no news « Message of December 7, 1915. 250 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY that the power of government has been used ahnosl/ tmiversally on the side of capital and against labor) Shortly after the recent outbreak in Colorado, the Governor (Anmions) wrote an article for the North American Review in which he discussed the whole situation. When the Governor referred to "rights" he meant the rights of property; when he referred to "wrongs," he meant wrongs against property. In the subsequent testimony it was clearly brought out that certain of the mining companies had been for years deliberately violating the state mining laws. As a result of these violations, the lives of the miners were jeopardized. When these matters were brought to the attention of the Governor, he made no outcry against "wrongs" and in favor of "rights." He sent no militia to place the mine company officials under arrest until the conditions were remedied. The safety and even the life of the miners was endangered; the state took no action, but the moment that the property of the operators was threatened the officials acted. The same thing held true in West Virginia. Frightful explosions, resulting from deliberate neglect of official warnings, cost scores of lives without causing more than a ripple in officialdom. The moment the property of mine owners was threat- ened, the militia was called out, martial law was declared and the military courts railroaded cases that might have been as readily disposed of by civil procedure. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 251 Illustrations might be multiplied of the mamier ia which the owners of industry have succeeded in establishing a control over the naachinery of govern- ment. Their contributions to campaign funds, their manipulation of party machinery; their dictation of nominations and appointments; their success in securing the legislation they desire and in killing that to which they are opposed — ^in these and other directions industry has manifested its power over politics. The democracy and the plutocracy are at war and the democracy is fighting for its life. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly apparent that a modem nation cannot exist part democratic and part plutocratic. The interests of the democracy and those of the plutocracy are directly opposed to one another. The democracy asks for the control of the larger affairs of public life. The plutocracy con- fidently expects to exercise the same control. The plutocracy bases its power on some form of special privilege. The democracy stands for equality of opportunity. Special privilege is to democracy as the east is to the west. They cannot exist together. If special privilege is to dominate, equality of oppor- tunity must be denied. If equal opportunity is to be the rule of the community, special privilege must go. The struggle between plutocracy and democracy is a struggle for life and death. One must survive, the other must be destroyed. Perhaps the matter is best illustrated in its relation to the very important question of taxation. 252 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 9. Taxation and Representation "^.The problem of taxation has been one of pressing importance to the democracy for many centuries. In England a long struggle was waged before the Commons won the right to levy taxes and to direct the expenditure of public money. It was not until the twentieth century that the House of Lords officially relinquished the right to dictate in regard to the taxing power. The taxing power is one of the most important of all governmental functions. It is the source of public revenue. It includes the power to destroy the object of taxation. In its origiaal form, taxation was a tribute levied on the conquered by the conquerer. The tax- gatherer, the worst hated of all men, followed the rule, "Get all you can." Consequently the taxation was another name for tyranny. The evolution of democratic govenunent has carried, as a necessary accompaniment, the exercise of the taxing power. The tax-gatherer is no longer a hated official. Of old he levied on the weak and gave to the strong. The rich lived in luxury because the tax-gatherer squeezed the poor dry. Today the taxes that are raised by pubUc levy are spent for pubUc purposes — ^high schools, roads, public buildings and the like. Taxation and tjranny are no longer synonymous, because the people decide, through their representatives, what disposition shall be made of the money raised by taxation. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 253 Today, as of old, taxation without representation is tyranny, and taxation without representation is the rule of the plutocracy. The plutocracy today levies on the public as the landed aristocracy once levied on its public. Then the levy was made through the control of the land and of the machinery of government. Today it is made through the control of the natural resources and the machinery of transportation and finance. The new taxing power is called "Monopoly power." It includes the right to levy on all who are subject to its control, "all that the traffic will bear." That phrase means "get all you can." It is the watchword of the tax-gatherer of old in a new setting And a new land, but it is the same watchword. The great aggregations of capital, exercising their monopoly power today, occupy exactly the same position that was occupied by the landed aristocracy of old. They collect taxes and get all they can. Taxation without representation is still tyranny. The people in the exercise of their democratic powers are the only legitimate power to levy taxes; yet today the tax levied upon the people of the United States by those who hold income-yitelding property is probably greater in the aggregate than the total amount levied by local, state and national government. 10. The Man Above the Dollar The phrase "put the man above the dollar" describes the results that might be expected to flow 254 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY from the operations of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The saying finds its modem application in the contest between property rights and human rights. The people of a democracy who, like other people, hold their lives dearer than their property, might be expected to give the first consideration to human well- being and to consider the well-being of property as a matter of secondary importance. Feudal Europe had passed through a long experience during which property was considered before people — that is, the property of the governing group was considered before the well-being of the masses. Democracy was to remedy this glaringinhumanity by looking out for the well-being of people in whatever class they might be found, before the property of any par- ticular group was considered. This common humanity of man to man was to be an essential feature of the new democratic stand- ard that society would set up. Of necessity it would replace the old standards' ^which regarded man first as property, if he could be enslaved; later as attached to the land on which he worked; and still later, in the present era, as being of less importance to the world than capital. Ruskin voices the ideal when he lu-ges society to devote its energy to the production of happy and noble men and women. From his point of view, wealth is life, with all of its boundless possibilities. . Putting the man above the dollar as an element INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 255 in industrial democracy has a very definite meaning. Fenderless or poorly fendered street cars that grind people under the wheels because it is cheaper to pay accident claims than it is to equip the cars with adequate fenders; coal mines in which gas and dust accumulating through lack of proper precautions lead to disastrous explosionys; railroads; operating with improper equipment because proper equip- ment costs money;, factories unprovided with suffi- cient fire escapes, in which men and women are bmmed to death; children turned in to work at an early age because they are cheap and profitable; improtected workers in dangerous trades — aU of these and many other instances are the essential elements of an economic system that puts the dollar before the man — ^profits before people. While business is run for profits, the winning of profits will be the chief task of the man of affairs. Profits are cash profits, measured in dollars and not in human well-being. Therefore, as long as industry is run for profit, the dollar will be put above the man. Grant the truth of this assertion and it becomes apparent that there is a fundamental conflict between this principle of democracy and the present system of industry for profit. So long as industry i^run for profit primarily, it cannot be run primarily for service. Until industry is run for the service of the great body of people, it cannot be democratic. Industry for profit and democracy are diametrically opposed to one another. 256 INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY Putting the man above the dollar means running industry for people, not profits. Under such an industrial order, as in the family, human well-being will always come before property. The problem of industrial democracy has been approached from four points of view: (1) equality of opportunity; (2) obhgation to serve the com- munity; (3) the need of a government that will represent the people; and (4) the necessity for con- sidering human welfare as more important than property welfare. These principles of democracy must be applied to industry if industrial democracy is to be established. The analysis has suggested that the present system of wealth distribution; the gulf between those who work and those who own; economic parasitism, with its complement of exploi- tation; and industry for profit are, in their very nature, opposed to industrial democracy. If this is true, then industrial democracy will never be a reality while industry for profit remains. ' INDEX American colonists, spirit of, 131 American education, formalism in, 151 American leadership, tradition of, 129 American wage, anti-social na- ture of, 121 diagram of, 105 social implications of, 119 summary of, 101 Americanism, meaning of, 129 Bread making and machinery, Business accoimts, and wages, 114 method in, 115, 116 Business control, steps toward, 59 Causes, importance of, in fight- ing poverty, 187 Child labor, English factories, 16 Chad nutrition and poverty, 173 Child poverty, 172 City life, and deterioration, 37 Clothing and wage adequacy, 110 Community individualism, 10 Crime and poverty, 175 Death rates, and poverty, in Great Britain, 182 Democracy, and special privi- lege, 90 and the public school, 236 effectiveness of, 42 greatest number, 90 Democracy, ideals of, 228 in American industry, 249 people's government as, 247 Democratic ideals, and the in- dustrial regime, 230 Disease and poverty, 177 Dives and Lazarus, 184 relation between, 186 Earnings, yearly, estimate of, 104 Education as opportunity, 236 Efficiency, and empire, 40 and wage adequacy, 97 English mdividualism, nature of, 11 Equal opportunity, denial of, 157 meaning of, 232 Equal rights, as a democratic ideal, 229 Exploitation, and national great- ness, 21 and poverty, 192 basis for, 69 Carlyle on, 26 Dickens on, 27 early factory system, 18 results of, in England, 32 Kuskin on, 25 Factory acts, in England, 21 Factory growth, results of, 20 Factory system, abuses of, in England, 17 and laissez-faire, 16 Factory work and the home, 58 Family accounting as a business, 118 17 (257) 258 INDEXi Family wage, need of, 100 ' social guarantee of, 234 Financial interests, power of, 61 Freedom of contract, state of, in English industry, 18 Freedom of opportumty and leadership, 158 Great War, as a test of social values, 9 Higher education,' and leader- ship, 154 Human rights and property rights, 254 Humanity, and the machine, SO Ideals, of democracy, 228 Ignorance, menace of, 30 Individual Uberty, dogma of, 22 Individualism, and biology, 10 and the family, 10 conflict of, with liberty, 41 ideal of, 14 in England, 12 in English mdustry, 16 meaning of, 10 results in England, 14 Industrial activity, strain of, 66 routine of, 68 Industrial control, concentra- tion of, 58 Industrial leaders, position of, 139 Industrial leadership, class con- sciousness of, 140 standards of, 140 Industrial liberty, contest for, 241 Industrial organization, in the steel industry, 60 Industrial regime, abuses of, in England, 19 and democratic ideals, 230 growth of, 13 opportunity under the, 137 significance of, 13 social nature of, 11 undemocracy of, 231 Industrial revolution,' 56 Industrial slavery, menace of, 82 Industrial subordinates, position of, 143 Industrial virtues, category of, 145 Industrialism and exploitation, 70 Industry, and training for leader- ship, 148 distribution of occupations in, 136 need of leadership, 125 wages in, 102 Inequality, tihffough riches, 226 Infant deaths, and poverty, Fall River, 180 in Johnstown, 178 Instinct of workmanship, im- portance of, 79 Intellectual individualism, in England, 12 nature of, 11, 12 Kingdom of man, and the tool, 45 Labor, penalty of, 122 Laissez-faire, Carlyle on, 26 defense of, 23 doctrine of, 15 in English industry, 15 Ruskin on, 25 Leadership, and opportunity, 156 and the property interests, 141 and the schools, 150 and the system, 142 call for, 124 duties of, 132 inspiration for, 153 methods of securing, 146 need of, 124 opportunities for, 125, 134 picking men for, 126 qualities of, 127 tnrough education, 149 INDEX 259 Leisure, as a product of ma- chmeiy, 61 Liberty, and democracy, 239 as opportunity, 238 Life, as a measure of wealth, 31 Livelihood, measure of, 108 Living wage, and equal oppor- tunity, 233 Long day, persistence of, 72, 73 Low wages, and poverty, 168, 179 Machine^ characteristics of, 48 possibilities of the, 49 social nature of, 69 Machine-tending, vices of, 65 Machine tenders, man as, 64 Machinery, and the future, 86 advantage of, 55 and bread-making, 52 and human energy, 54 as a human asset, 50 fruits of, 61 supplants the tool, 47 Man, as tool maker, 45 importance of tools to, 45 Manufacturing, wage-earners in, 57 Material and spiritual values, 89 Measure of worth, 92 Minimum wage, for women, 108 Monopoly power and democ- racy, 252 New feudalism, menace of, 138 New York, poverty in, 168 Night work, growth of, 74 Nutrition and wage adequacy, 110 Occupations, distribution of, in America, 135 Opportunity, as a democratic ideal, 229 denial of, 165 equality of, 232 for happiness, 242 through education, 237 Owner^p, and the machine, 85 Ownership, as worth, 94 income, 202 income from, 86 Parasitism, and worth, 94 economic, in the United States, 84 Pauperization, through riches, 210 Philanthropy, and charity, 213 and riches, 212 failure of, 212 Physical deterioration, England reports on, 34, 35 produced by exploitation, 34, 35 Physical efficiency, as a measure of poverty, 156 Physical health, as equal oppor- tunity, 235 Physical standard, England, 36 Political economy, measure of prosperity, 24 Popular government, as a demo- cratic ideal, 230 Poverty, a social crime, 193 and child nutrition, 173 and comfort, 185 and disease, 177 and exploitation, 192 and infant deaths, 178 and infant deaths, Johnstown, 178 and personal vices, 190 and physical standard, 34, 35 and progress, 161 and richeSj 161 and typhoid in Pittsburgh, 181 as a phase of the wage ques- tion, 189 as a school of virtue, 166 burden of, 172 challenge of, 163, 194 crime as a source of, 175 definition of, 163 effect of, on English recruit- ing, 34 frighraulnesB of, 167 Galsworthy on, 174 260 INDEX Poverty, low wages as a cause of, 190 menace of, 30 persistence of, 162 profit from, 196 significance of, 183 social causes of, 189 the basis for riches, 194 the "Why" of, 187 trail of, 165 Preparedness, importance of real, 40, 41 Professions, leadership in the, 133 Property income, right to, 203 Property rights and human rights, 255 Prosperity, analysis of, by Dickens, 27, 28 and exploitation, 32 English idea of, 24 Prostitution, and poverty, 176 PubUc opinion, fight for, 239 importance of, 159 Public school, and democracy 236 Race deterioration, evidences of, 34 Railroads, distribution of occu- pations on, 136 Recruiting, in England, figures of, 33 Reform voice of, nineteenth century, England, 25 Riches, and inequahty, 226 and self-respect, 209 as a bar to personal relation- ships, 215 as power, 226 as special privilege, 224 danger of, 219 definition of, 222 immorality of, 224 increase of wealth, 62 isolation through, 211 leads to dependence, 208 pauperizing power of, 210 relativity of, 222 Riches, results of, 207 revolt against, 219 Room at the top, realities of, 135 School children, deterioration of, 38 School feeding, and poverty, 173 Schools, and leadership, 150 Self-respect, and riches, 209 and wage adequacy, 97 Service, as a test of worth, 92 Slavery, menace of, in industry, 82, 83 Social dependence, and wage adequacy^ 97 Social legislation, beginnings of, 22 Social science, message of, 42 Social self-support, and wage adequacy) 98 Special privilege, the foe of de- mocracy, 246 Spending, as a means to pros- perity, 217 as philanthropy, 215 Spiritual values^ place of^ 81 Standard of Uvmg, and mcome, 113 cost of, 112 Starvation, as a measure of pov- erty, 164 immorality of, in America, 164 Statesmansmp and prosperity, 28 Steel industry, working condi- tions, 71, 77 Steel maJking, without human energy, 54 Subsistence, as a measure of poverty, 164 Subway workers, poverty among, 168 Taxation, and democracy, 253 Theory, test of, 1 Tool power, 46 Tools, importance of ownership, 46 Town-dwelling, effects of, 37 ■ INDEX *261 Unemployment, as a cause of poverty, 191 United States, need of leader- ship in, 128 Vice and poverty, 175 Wage adequacy, measure of, 96, 97 Wage question and poverty, 189 Wages, adequacy of, 95 Wages, and unemplojfment, 103 as a business proposition, 114 livelihoodj adequacy of, 106 low, and mfant deaths, 179 in uie United States, 101 Wage-rates, in Massachusetts, 102 Want and wealth in the United States, 199 Wealth, and the machine, 52 Wealth, and the wealthy, 207 growth of, in the United States, 62 Wealth machine, character of, 201 Women, wages of, 107 Work as worth, 93 Work income, 202 Work, income from, 85 Worker, and product, 78 Worker and product, separation of, 80 Workers and eaters, 245 Working conditions, steel in- dustry, 77 Worth, in relation to Hfe, 93 Worth, measure of, 91 Yearly earnings, estimate of, 104 Yeomanry, place in English life, 24 * Text pages 261 + 32 pages for illustrations =293 total pages. Cornell university Library HN 64.N38 Poverty and nches,astudy,of the rr^^ i 1111 'I 11 I'll