CHAPTER V

THE INEVITABLENESS OF THE SOCIAL QUESTION

A VETERAN in the trade-union movement of Massachusetts said at a dinner of the Twentieth Century Club: "We have not got very far in understanding the social question until we rise out of the atmosphere of personal blaming. A man who thinks it is all the fault of this or that capitalist, has not got very far. Our real trouble is not with specific rich men, but with the general system which makes possible the man of one hundred millions on one side, and a mass of laborers struggling for the means of subsistence on the other. It is not primarily the fault of the magnates; it is the fault of all of us who consent to the conditions out of which these dangerous extremes spring up."

A member of the London County Council, making investigations in the United States, heard these words, and added: "I have been interviewing your business men ever since I landed, but not once have I heard so impersonal a judgment. I have found the pick of your labor leaders far better instructed upon all sides of the labor controversy than business men. The business man is cocksure about the trouble. It is the labor agitator. If only he could be suppressed, all would be well." His explanation was that men of affairs were too busy to read. They were simply vexed

by strikes and by trade-union interference, and out of this immediate experience made their philosophy.

This is a very insufficient analysis. These large and impersonal views are exceptions upon both sides, but they are as frequently met among business men as among those who represent labor. The perpetual astonishment of the student is, however, that business men know so little of those organs of opinion into which the wage earner puts his most earnest and most honest thought. It is droll that one should have to make this comment, but I have never yet seen an employer who had given the least serious attention to this literature. I have known a manufacturer of machinery who had been through repeated conflicts with his men over questions raised by the union. He did not treat these disturbances as mere perversity. He had read much general labor literature and showed some pride in admitting that "great changes were certain to occur between labor and capital during the next generation." Yet among the men in his own business, a trade journal had been printed month by month for several years. In the successive issues, every point of difference between his own views and those of his men had been repeatedly discussed. All that his men hoped for and were trying to attain, was here set down, yet this employer had never thought it worth his while to read a line of it. His intellectual curiosity led him to much study of popular sociological books, but schemes for improvements fermenting in the minds of his own workers had interested him so little that in his own words, "It never occurred to me that there was anything worth reading in the journal of these mechanics."

L

I have known intelligent builders and scholarly architects who had long fought trade unions among their own workmen and yet had never even heard of the trade journals in these crafts. These have contained for many years the opinions of these workers upon every issue that enters into their relation to the employers. Cigar makers and garment workers are thought to rank lower in the scale, yet no one can look through a batch of their trade organs without a wholly new conception of the movements there represented. As religious bodies, political parties, and business interests have their own press for propaganda, so that part of the labor world, from which the chief industrial resistance comes, has created an extensive periodical literature far abler than is commonly believed. In this literature they discuss not only the conditions under which they work, hours, wages, machinery, strikes, trade unions, - they also discuss every phase of the competitive régime under which the industrial struggle for existence goes on. From his employers and those who think with them, the workman hears the defence of this competitive struggle. He is told that under it men find their place according to their merit. "Talent and efficiency get their reward, mediocrity sinks to its proper level." He is told that in all wealth-making three factors are essential, land, labor, and capital, or, by more recent refinement, "natural opportunity, labor, and directing intelligence." Each, according to the service it renders, receives its portion of the product: land its rent, labor its wage, and organizing management its profits. He is assured that this triune relation has something of the sanctity of a divine decree, or at least the authority

of a natural law. Given a reign of "free contract," and a proper regard for competition, and industrially the best possible world is at hand, especially for the wage earner. The forces of distribution give him an ever increasing part of the product, while capital secures a relatively diminishing portion. This is the cheerful formula.

Meantime the victim of this instruction is busy with his own observations. He notes that the capitalist class enlarges its expenditure at a quite dizzying pace. The home, the equipage, the club, the sports and recreation, expand each year into more lavish and prodigal form. It is very apparent that dollar for dollar the interest on capital has fallen from a high to a low figure. It is apparent that dollar for dollar profits have in the majority of businesses also fallen, but the belectured wage earner sees that this jocund formula is modified not a little by the simple fact that the capitalist, during this fall in profits and interest, may somehow have doubled and redoubled his thrifty gains. If one possess four or five times. more capital, his income swells though the rate of interest and profit falls. The laborer is not, however, left alone with his doubts. The world is full of very wise people, who tell him with great frankness that labor does not in any sense get its fair share. They tell him that through the manipulating of a thousand chartered privileges, labor is defrauded of a formidable portion of its product. There are no abler economists than dozens who make this declaration.

As for the competitive wage system with its "free contract," a troop of eminent men denounce it in

unmeasured terms. They denounce it economically, because of its wastefulness through unnecessary duplication of rival plants, with the orgy of advertising which this rivalry occasions. They denounce it morally with even more confident disapproval. They see in it the teeming source of the self-seeking which delights to take every advantage of another's weakness or ignorance, to "best" him in the bargain. They see in it the chief stimulator of the universal hunger for quick riches which spreads among us the methods and the spirit of the gambler. They charge it with setting such a premium upon mere sharpness and cunning that this type of success becomes the attractive idol for general worship.

It is easy to convict these charges of exaggeration in the sense that they ignore the positive and serviceable side of competition. It is not easy to deny that they carry with them a disquieting truth. It is upon this, and not upon the shaded qualifications, that the disaffected workmen seize. The speculative portions of the labor press have become the receptacle of the most accusing criticism against the business world as now managed a criticism drawn not from the ranks of labor, but from the ranks of those who possess as much enlightenment as modern culture and opportunity usually give.

Few events during recent years have more significance than the growing popular sympathy with labor unions in these struggles, especially their struggles with semi-public corporations. This sympathy has had an almost universal expression in the recent anthracite coal strike. But for the unhappy fatalities of personal violence that break out in the later despair