ties of government that will at last give us a body of uniform, industrial, and social legislation that will stand in some real relation to the actual facts of an industrial life that is no longer an affair of state boundaries, but of one common national area. Not to do this, means a still more rapid development of socialism. Meantime the questions raised by machinery have to be faced, one by one, until they are better understood. No single illustration can better bring out these facts as they bear upon the social question than the tragedy of industrial accidents and the whimsical incongruities of our present legal methods. The average of injuries is appalling in extent, but possibly one-half of them are due to avoidable causes. Those that cannot be avoided, can be honestly and humanely recompensed. It is not destiny that the casualtics from coupling cars in 1889 should have been 5235. If quarrying stone is fifteen times as hazardous to life and limb as making paper or cloth, it is not fate that the extra peril should be borne by the quarrymen without some corresponding compensation. It has been proved in theory and in practice that a rough money equivalent can be given. It is not fixed by nature that men should operate machinery so many hours and in conditions so unwholesome that the springs of life are exhausted before life is half lived out.

For these and kindred evils, traceable to machinery, as now owned and operated, socialism appears upon the scene with proposals of its own.

It is a fundamental assumption of the socialists, and more and more of organized labor, that if the means of production" were controlled by the community, rather than by private persons and corpora

tions, the evils now connected with machinery would pass away. (It is thus implied that the evils are inherent not in the machinery, but in the nature of its ownership and control. The collectivist therefore asks that the state take over the mines and the

machinery necessary to work them. Let it give a minimum living wage to every worker, with hours. not exceeding eight; in a word, the people have power to use machinery as it will. First, enlarge the public possession of this machinery, then the community shall have the profits, and what is perhaps a greater good, it shall use the machinery for the common weal. It has yet to be proved whether or not socialism can make this promise good. New Zealand and Australia have adopted this policy of using railroads, telegraph, telephone, etc., first for social service. Strictly business and dividend reasons are consciously subordinated to this higher interest. We watch this daring venture anxious to know if the new principle will work. Can they work this machinery through politics first for the public good, without loss of efficiency and a too heavy burden of costs? If this can be done, it will mark an era in social improvement.

While we await results, our task with the corresponding machinery is chiefly that of "regulation"; to subject these forces to such control that human and social interests shall not be too much endangered. In many countries the proof is now complete that uniform legal control can work incalculable social benefits. The limits of this control and its efficiency as compared with the collectivist principle can be known. only through that further experience that is now rapidly accumulating for our guidance.

CHAPTER VII

THE MASTER PASSION OF DEMOCRACY

I

Illusions

THE story of the social unrest cannot be told without reference to those motives which underlie its practical methods. At the heart of all socialistic aspiration is some conception of equality. At the heart of the larger labor movement is the race longing for a society in which at least the spirit of equality shall be realized. Most radical remedies are only means to this end. Beyond, and deeper than all the machinery of social reconstruction, is this master passion of democracy.

Henry George did not give his life for a system of taxation. He worked for thirty years with rare and high devotion to convert the world to his "single tax," but wholly beyond this was the thing he cared for; the larger equality which he believed the single tax would usher in. There is no sect of socialists of likewise true. Their several

which this is not

schemes stand only as means to this larger end of a more equal life. Is this dream, as so many tell us, a discredited absurdity?

Those who have written most persuasively in favor of equality have been moved to expression by the

violent and flaunting inequalities amidst which they lived. Rousseau and Godwin, the aristocratic St. Simon and the democratic Fourier, down to recent writers, like Zola and Tolstoi, are sore and angry before the fact that those who have too little and those who have too much so jostle each other along the highway of a common life. Almost more is it a source of irritation that those who are not in want are prone to excuse these extremes as natural, unavoidable, and even desirable. Godwin wrote this sentence, "The human mind is incredibly subtle in inventing an apology for that to which its inclination leads."

The prejudice of interest and of temperament rarely shows itself with more complacent confidence than in most discussions on that world-old dream of the democracy, equality. In the days when the tory hatred of Gladstone was so acrid that it was thought to be bad form to mention his name at a dinner table, I asked a wise Englishman what reason could be given for a bitterness so excessive. "Those who hate him," he answered, "cannot give reasons, or if they do, there is no consistency among them. You will notice that vituperation takes the place of argument. When Gladstone is gone, it will be seen by all that his rank is without dispute among the half dozen of the greatest statesmen England has produced. My own interpretation of the abhorrence in which the well-bred world professes to hold him, is that it sees in him a very terrible enemy to those property rights on which our social inequality rests. Not that Gladstone means this, or is conscious of it, but his enemies see in him a most redoubtable

champion of the coming democracy, and hate him accordingly." This exposition may be defective, but it illustrates the unreasoning passions that are kindled when interests for which men most care are put in danger.

by disturbing bias or Much of the literature

No subject is more beset class jealousy than equality. that extenuates inequalities exhibits a certain irritation, as if the author were arguing against one who had affronted him. This perversity of misunderstanding is epitomized in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln came again and again to the famous equality clause of the Declaration, "All men are created equal," etc. From the astute Douglas to the pettiest demagogue of proslavery politics, Lincoln was harassed because of his defence of equality. With his incomparable lucidity of statement, he tells the public what he means. He does not mean equal in all respects; color, stature, moral and intellectual gifts, are indefinitely variable, but deeper than this difference lies a basis of equality, absolute and impregnable. There is," said Lincoln, "no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence; the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living