JUDAISM 
 
 ON THE 
 
 SOCIAL QUESTION. 
 
 BY 
 
 KABBI H. BEEKOWITZ. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER. 
 
 1888. 
 
Copyright, 1888, 
 
 BY 
 
 THE PROVIDENT BOOK COMPANY. 
 
 ^ i\ 
 
GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED 
 
 TO THE 
 
 REV. L. NAUMBURG, of ALLKGEANY CITY, PA., and 
 
 REV. DR. L. MAYER, of PITTSBURGH, PA. 
 
 The teachers and friends who first opened to me the portal 
 
 of Jewish learning and, by their encouragement and 
 
 instruction, directed the course of my life. 
 
 442342 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Discourse I. The Subject Defined 7 
 
 * II. Sources of the Social Difficulty 15 
 
 44 in. Have the Poor Grown Poorer? 24 
 
 44 IV. The subject Continued 34 
 
 " V. How Did Moses Solve the Social Problem?. . . 44 
 
 44 VI. The Social Chaos of the Dark Ages 55 
 
 44 VII. The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer 64 
 
 44 VIII. The subject Continued 74 
 
 44 IX. The Complaint of the Modern Laborer, 82 
 
 44 X. Violence the Proposed Solution 90 
 
 " XI. Socialism 101 
 
 44 , XII. The subject Continued . .110 
 
 44 XUI. Constructive Solutions. ResumS 119 
 
DISCOURSE I. 
 
 THE SUBJECT DEFINED. 
 
 THE true social question is the question 
 of social Justice. It is preeminently the 
 question of the day. It has been the ques- 
 tion of all ages. From the dawn of civiliza- 
 tion until now, long past the high noon of 
 this nineteenth century the social question 
 has vexed and baffled the champions of 
 peace. Its history is the history of the social 
 organism as constituted of Family, Tribe, 
 Community arid State. The question was 
 raised when society began. It has never 
 been completely solved. " Never does huma- 
 nity rest ; one experiment immediately suc- 
 ceeds another ; we advance through revolu- 
 tions of unknown destinies." As each judge 
 decides in succession the cases that are 
 brought before him, so each epoch decides 
 tKe questions of just relationship and equi- 
 table adaptation of circumstance in the whole 
 range of the complex social world as they are 
 presented in their changing phases. This is 
 a question as broad as the world, as deep as 
 the heart of humanity. 
 
 The special problem of our age is but the 
 outcome of this world's problem of all ages. 
 It is the latest phase and the most moment- 
 ous. It differs from all that preceded, for 
 the world has changed its aspects. Eman- 
 cipation has wrought miracles, not only in 
 the condition but in the aspiration, thought 
 
/8 , The Social Question. 
 
 r.i 1 endeavors of man. The barrier of caste 
 'ig overleaped -peasants mount to the throne. 
 Education has brought out the faculties 
 of the mind from torpidity with as won- 
 derful a metamorphosis as that of the but- 
 terfly from the grub. Science has silently 
 revolutionized all the previous modes of so- 
 cial life. The steam-ship has long since vir- 
 tually run the sailing vessel into the shoals 
 of oblivion, as the railroad-train has outdis- 
 tanced the stage-coach, the reaping-machine 
 vanquished the scythe, the thresher supplant- 
 ed the flail. The steam-hammer has grown 
 to be the megatherium of industry, and the 
 hundred-handed, myriad-fingered machines 
 of every description are indeed created in 
 the image of man's powers. Change and 
 transition are everywhere, and in everything, 
 and the task of intellect and the trust of vir- 
 tue lies in securing the best results by the 
 best methods. No age in history vibrates as 
 does this in which we live. All this change 
 and all this transition has made a new social 
 question. At present it is the strongest and 
 in tensest phase in the universal agitation 
 that reaches the altar and shakes the throne. 
 The air is filled with Utopian and revolu- 
 tionary ideas never dreamed of before. There 
 is a dread disease spreading with the fatal 
 swiftness of contagion. Discontent it is 
 called. It fills the hearts of men with the 
 bitterness of despair. It breathes upon their 
 minds and leaves the taint of impurity. The 
 whole world is restive and in dread of its 
 approach. All our political, social and moral 
 institutions are threatened by it. Men rave 
 and rush wildly about under its spell. Riot- 
 ing fills the streets of our cities. The gut- 
 ters run rivers of gore. The bad blood of 
 the races is stirred to fever heat. Women 
 
The Subject Defined. 9 
 
 are unsexed, and, waving aloft the red flag, 
 goad on the mass to reckless desperation, to 
 
 ?'.llage and murder and arson. In New 
 ork, in San Francisco, in Pittsburgh, in St. 
 Louis, in Chicago, there are broken-hearted 
 widows and orphans ; there are tombs of 
 martyrs ; and charred ruins are pointing 
 upward like blackened monuments, as if 
 they would charge the very heavens with 
 remissness. Trafalgar Square in London is 
 filled with a noisy multitude. As the mighty 
 waves of ocean break with ominous roar 
 against their rocky barriers, so the mob 
 chafes with noisy impatience against the 
 might of the militant powers. Parliament 
 Hall and the hallowed tombs of Westminster 
 Abbey have not yet forgotten the plots of 
 dynamite fiends. The aristocracies of rank 
 and power and wealth and birth are totter- 
 ing to their downfall. There are outbursts 
 of anarchy in Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Vienna 
 and St. Petersburg; the whole world is 
 thrilled by the explosion. 
 
 Thousands of minds are busy in thought, 
 thousands of hearts .are throbbing in pain, 
 thousands of throats are hoarsely shouting, 
 over the revolutionary war-cry of the day : 
 " The rich are growing richer, and less nu- 
 merous ; the poor are growing poorer, and 
 more numerous." 
 
 Is this true ? If so, why ? What is the 
 remedy ? This is the Social Question of to- 
 day. It is a question ablaze with the fire of 
 radicalism. Its glare is in our eyes. We 
 must "steady" our vision and not be blind- 
 ed. We must not we dare not shut our 
 eyes to its light. This is a question not to 
 be ignored, nor to be brushed aside with 
 lofty indifference or cool disdain ; not to be 
 sneered down ; not to be laughed down. It 
 
10 The Social Question. 
 
 is a serious theme. The cry of alarm has 
 pierced our ears ; its shrill tones have start- 
 led us out of the slumbers of a fancied se- 
 curity. Hearken, O ye sons of men ! By 
 the right hand of the Eternal God sits Jus- 
 tice enthroned. " If the magistracy calls 
 itself torture, if the Church calls itself in- 
 quisition, then humanity looks them in the 
 face and says to the judge : I will none of 
 thy law, and says to the priest : I will none 
 of thy dogma. Then philosophy rises in 
 wrath and arraigns the judge before justice 
 and the priest before God." 
 
 Has religion naught to say, then, to this 
 terrible issue? The journals have of late 
 been full of the reports of Synods and Con- 
 ferences of all sects and denominations. 
 There was a spirited discussion in Chicago, 
 where two of these gatherings of represent- 
 atives of different denominations were in 
 session, on such an all-important matter as 
 to whether or not it were allowable to ex- 
 change greetings in certain phrases ; but 
 not a word on the social difficulty. Else- 
 where there was much hot shot and powder 
 expended on what is called " the Andover 
 Controversy," as to whether there is any 
 chance for repentance and redemption from 
 eternal tortures in the next world for those 
 of us who do not believe in certain dogmas : 
 but not a word (that has reached us) on the 
 burning Social Question. The dead and 
 barren discussions of theology bar out the 
 living and fruitful questions of the day. 
 The people cry for bread, but receive a 
 stone. They have been pushed into the 
 water, and those who should be their best 
 helpers the teachers and preachers in- 
 stead of plunging in to rescue them, stand 
 safely upon the bank and weave fine theories 
 
The Subject Defined. 11 
 
 of freedom while those submerged are drown- 
 ing. And thus arises the charge of cowardice 
 against the pulpit: the charge that it is 
 dumb in matters that challenge the animosity 
 of wealth and power ; the charge that the 
 gaunt and meager specter of Secularism 
 scares them off from every endeavor to en- 
 large the sphere of righteousness. There is 
 a sentiment abroad which is a shame to the 
 intelligence of our age a sentiment which 
 declares that the pulpit is exclusively for 
 what is called "religious talk." Aught 
 else is sacrilege, even though that some- 
 thing else threaten the very life of all re- 
 ligion, even though it threaten the dissolution 
 of society itself. 
 
 But Judaism, at least, may claim exemp- 
 tion from these charges. Though she as- 
 pires unto the heavens, she still treads firm- 
 ly the earth. It is hers to " act, act in the 
 living present, heart within and God o'er- 
 head." " In full accordance with the spirit 
 of Mosaic legislation, which strives to regu- 
 late the relation between rich and poor, we 
 deem it our duty to participate in the great 
 task of modern times, to solve, on the basis 
 of justice and righteousness, the problems 
 presented by the contrasts and evils of the 
 present organization of society." Such is 
 the declaration of our American Rabbis at 
 the Conference of American Rabbis held at 
 Pittsburgh, Pa., Nov. 1885 ; and this dec- 
 laration is in perfect accord with the usual 
 and natural impulse and deed of the leaders 
 of Jewish thought throughout history. Ju- 
 daism has lived in the world, and been al- 
 ways of the world, to make the world more ' 
 heavenly. Through all the centuries of her 
 sorrowful life she brought the energies of 
 
12 The Social Question. 
 
 brain and heart to bear upon all the practi- 
 cal problems of man's relation to the eter- 
 nal laws of our eternal God ; she has through 
 all the long and weary centuries lifted up 
 her voice to denounce oppression and plead 
 for the oppressed. 
 
 Pages upon pages of her Bible forbid the 
 oppression of the poor ; pages upon pages 
 are full of laws for their maintenance and 
 help. Folio upon folio of her massive liter- 
 ature is devoted to the social question in its 
 whole broad range. She alone of all the world 
 proclaimed the dignity, the duty of labor, in 
 her command : " Six days shalt thou labor 
 and do thy work ; " and she, through the 
 Sabbath, by her queenly fiat has unceasing- 
 ly striven to check the mad passion for ma- 
 terial well-being, which, trampling upon 
 every ideal consideration and interest, has 
 degraded the dignity of man to the conven- 
 tional standard of possessing and enjoying 
 mere creature comforts. 
 
 We speak not to boast but to plead for 
 right. Whatever be the charges freely made 
 of hypocrisy and cowardice on the part of 
 religion, let there be a halt made, and ac- 
 knowledgment rendered to Jews and to Ju- 
 daism. Many of the master minds who 
 have lent their energies to the solution of 
 the all-absorbing social difficulties of the 
 various countries and peoples, in different 
 ages, were Jews. There was nothing in their 
 religion to hinder them ; nay, the codes and 
 precepts of Judaism have been the standard 
 and the Court of Appeal in all kindred de- 
 bates and contentions. Judaism has, indeed,' 
 something to say upon" the social question,' 
 and its teachers will not fail in the, courage 
 of their convictions ; \they will ],not fail .in 
 the overwhelming duty_pf the hour to spread 
 
The Subject Defined. 13 
 
 a truer knowledge and a clearer comprehen- 
 sion of this sacred and all-important matter. 
 Upon that intelligence and comprehension 
 depends the happiness of our children, if not 
 our own, for politics and all the relations of 
 domestic as well as of public economy are 
 already studded with new social queries as 
 a bush in spring is studded with opening 
 buds. 
 
 To this task, then, we must come all of 
 us learners as well as teachers, hearers and 
 speaker alike in the broad and philosophic 
 spirit of our little understood and greatly 
 maligned religion ; to this task we shall all 
 come, I trust, our hearts aglow with the 
 blaze of ardent sympathy, our hands stretch- 
 ing forth eagerly and warmly to grasp the 
 truth. We shall strive to search out the 
 true meaning of the social question in its 
 varying phases through the past on into the 
 present, in order that we may understand 
 the social questions of to-day their out- 
 come and find the Jewish contribution to 
 the solution of the great social problems. 
 We shall necessarily pass along in the midst 
 of a dismal forest of fallacies, overgrown 
 with the rank and poisonous weeds of error. 
 We shall walk often under the clouds of the 
 darkest pessimism. We must hew a path and 
 clear a way in the dark mazes of the musty 
 undergrowths of ignorance and dread, and 
 struggle onward into the open, safe paths of 
 an enlightened reassurance in the eternity of 
 truth and right, up to the sunny heights of 
 an all-surveying and all-controlling Justice. 
 
 I shall not presume to undertake to set 
 up any new hypotheses on the great social 
 question, but only in the name of Judaism 
 to give enlightenment ; only to seek to un- 
 derstand and interpret. This is my task. 
 
14 The Social Question. 
 
 To that task I shall lend my energies, earn- 
 estly praying, with the great Milton : 
 
 What in me is dark, 
 
 Illumine. What is low, raise and support ; 
 That to the height of this great argument 
 I may assert eternal Providence 
 And justify the ways of God to men," 
 
Sources of the Social Difficulty. 15 
 
 DISCOURSE II. 
 
 SOURCES OF THE SOCIAL DIFFICULTY. 
 
 " THERE is," says Emile de Laveleye, " in 
 human affairs one order which is the best. 
 That order is not always the one which ex- 
 ists, but is the order which should exist, for 
 the greatest good of humanity. God knows 
 it and wills it ; man's duty it is to discover 
 and establish it." 
 
 The fulfillment of this injunction, " to 
 discover and establish the one order in 
 human affairs which is the best this is the 
 effort to which we are called upon to devote 
 our services. What has the experience of 
 man to say ? How near has it come to find- 
 ing " one order which is best ? " These are 
 the questions with which we naturally be- 
 gin our investigation. We are driven to 
 history for a reply. Here the first difficulty 
 presents itself, for alas ! what a failure are 
 the records we call history ! We go to them 
 as to a storehouse, expecting to find ample 
 supplies of grain, and behold there are only 
 dry husks and empty shells. The history of 
 man has been written, but not the history 
 of mankind. Exaggerated pictures of Caesars 
 and Napoleons, Louis and Fredricks make up 
 the panorama. Generals with their hordes 
 of automatic nonentities called armies ; kings 
 posing before a mass of blind and docile 
 slaves called subjects ; such are the effigies 
 that are presented in life-size on the canvas 
 of history. They crowd upon and fill up the 
 
16 The Social Question. 
 
 scene ; national life forms the obscure back- 
 ground. Only here and there the fact that 
 there are people as well as sovereigns flashes 
 out in blood-red streaks of revolution. 
 
 " If you wish to understand the phenomena 
 of social evolution," such is the caustic warn- 
 ing of Herbert Spencer " you will not do 
 it, though you should read yourself blind 
 over the biographies of all the great rulers on 
 record down to Frederick the Greedy, and 
 Napoleon the Treacherous." 
 
 But even as gold is washed down the 
 mountains in minutest particles and must be 
 sought for amid the rocks and sands, so 
 amidst the debris of centuries we must search 
 out the secret of that " one order in human 
 affairs which is the best." Come to this 
 task all ye earnest seekers after truth! 
 Come with the lamps of patient inquiry ; 
 cast their light upon the phenomena which, 
 in the vague and scanty records of history 
 portray the evolution of social life ; let the 
 bright rays of knowledge irradiate them; 
 cause them to become more and more clearly 
 revealed; make them stand forth tangible 
 and luminous ! 
 
 At the very entrance of our study of the 
 social question, however, still another diffi- 
 culty confronts us. If you would study 
 botany, you go forth into the fields where 
 the whole plant-world is spread out at your 
 feet. If you would study geology, the rocks 
 await the ringing blows of your hammer. If 
 you would study the topography of a cer- 
 tain region, you ascend to the summit of a 
 neighboring mountain and overlook the 
 scene. But when you come to the study of 
 social science, the facts you have to deal 
 with are not spread out before you some- 
 where, apart from you, that you need but go 
 
Sources of the Social Difficulty. 17 
 
 thither and examine them. Nay, you your- 
 self are a part of the study. It has to do 
 with man in all his relations. You can not 
 so readily free yourself ; the bonds of family, 
 race, country and religion are twined about 
 
 S3U as the entangling threads of a web. 
 ot one in a thousand can get rid of his pre- 
 conceived notions, prejudices, errors, super- 
 stitions, preferences, and dislikes. We lie im- 
 bedded in them, enveloped and enfolded by 
 the wraps and integuments of training, habit 
 and education. 
 
 To mount to such heights of imperson- 
 ality, whence we may look out over the 
 whole range of the changes human society has 
 undergone and is undergoing ; to withstand 
 the raging and disturbing influences of 
 personal interest, of religious emotion and 
 patriotic impulse ah, here is a task whose 
 difficulty may well stagger the boldest, but 
 it is a task from which no earnest, thoughtful, 
 candid, honest man dare any longer shrink. 
 The Social Question must be faced. Better 
 that we prepare to meet it, however difficult 
 the preparation, than be confronted and over- 
 whelmed by it ere we are aware. Though its 
 difficulty overtop and threaten us as an 
 avalanche,, yet must we boldly face it and 
 lustily clamber up the precipitous mountain 
 of our present duty. 
 
 Some master minds, despite the difficulty, 
 have reached the summits of knowledge 
 whence they could overlook the solemn march 
 of the human family through-the ages. They 
 tell us that this endless procession of all 
 nations, resistlessly advancing, here in con- 
 fusion, there in contention, now hastening 
 madly forward, now wearily dragging along 
 that it is not " like the erratic phantasm of a 
 dream, without reason and without order," 
 2 
 
18 The Social Question. 
 
 but that all are marching under the general- 
 ship and direction of law. As the falling of 
 the rain, as the passing of the cloud, the 
 soughing of the wind and the brilliant sweep 
 of the comet, have all been traced to the 
 dominion of physical law, so the ever-chang- 
 ing, ever-shifting scenes of the social life of 
 nations are likewise found to be dominated 
 by economic law. 
 
 " These struggling tides of life that seem 
 In wayward, aimless course to tend, 
 Are eddies of the mighty stream 
 That rolls to its appointed end." 
 
 Such a conception commands itself to our 
 intellects by its very majesty and grandeur. 
 In the midst of the vanishing present we 
 discern the eternal. " From the life, the 
 pleasures, the suffering of humanity, it points 
 to the impassive ; from our wishes, wants 
 and woes to the inexorable. Leaving the 
 individual beneath the eye of Providence, it 
 shows society under the finger of law." * 
 Therefore, if you would understand the social 
 question, you must begin by rinding out the 
 laws that dominate social movements. Ask : 
 What was the source of the social difficulty ? 
 yea, what created a social question ? What 
 is the underlying principle that gave it 
 vitality and continuity ? 
 
 To answer these queries we must gather 
 the experience of mankind as through a 
 glass you gather the rays of the sun unto a 
 focus, i. e., through logical generalization we 
 must interpret the phenomena of the past. 
 Thus, and only thus, can we discover the 
 touchstone by means, of which we shall be 
 able to distinguish between what is pro- 
 gressive and what is retrogressive, between 
 
 * Draper. Intellectual Development of Europe. 
 
Sources of the Social Difficulty. 19 
 
 what is desirable and what is ruinous, be- 
 tween what is practicable and what is 
 Utopian in the schemes that swarm to-day 
 about the social cauldron. 
 
 To begin then with the beginning : 
 
 " Before man made us citizens, great 
 Nature made us men," 
 
 and as in the acorn, the creation of a thou- 
 sand forests is dormant, so in the first man 
 lay the germinal principle of all social order 
 and disorder. When the son of Adam hiding 
 in the dismal covert of some primeval forest, 
 heard the accusing voice of conscience in 
 bitter tones upbraid him, he defiantly made 
 reply : " Am I my brother's keeper ? " 
 
 Then the social conflict began. That was 
 the primitive form of the later social war-cry : 
 " Let every man look out for himself. Down 
 with the claims of others. The strongest 
 shall rule ! " Then began the struggle which 
 in the moral world is called the contest be- 
 tween selfishness and benevolence egoism 
 and altruism, and what in the social world 
 might with more or less accuracy be denomi- 
 nated the contest between Individualism and 
 Collectivism. As soon as a social combi- 
 nation of individuals arose there began ac- 
 tions and reactions between these individuals. 
 Inequalities arose and were found. At once 
 war was declared against the absolute sway 
 of individual will. That was the simple origin 
 of the Social Difficulty. 
 
 " As from inarticulate sounds came speech ; 
 as out of rude hieroglyphics came writing and 
 the art of printing ; as from counting on our 
 fingers we advanced to the most abstruse 
 calculations of stellar distances and revolu- 
 tions ; as from building rude habitations in the 
 woods we gradually improved until the mas- 
 
20 The Social Question. 
 
 sive cathedral was thought out and erected ; 
 as from harsh discordant war-songs we as- 
 cended to symphonies, and oratorios, and 
 sonatas, so out of the rude impulsiveness of 
 the first association of man and man came by 
 slow degrees the refinements of our modern 
 social life, and likewise the subtle and com- 
 plex questions of social relationship which 
 absorb the busy brain of our civilization."* 
 
 The history of the contest between indi- 
 vidualism and its opposing impulse, which 
 might best be called Collectivism, does not 
 move forward on the level of a plane, but 
 rather in projections and depressions like the 
 far-stretching ridges of a mountain range. 
 For the most part it is individual despotism 
 that is on the heights. Imperators, Czars and 
 Tyrants rule with iron hand. At rare in- 
 tervals a Magna Charta or a Declaration of 
 Independence is proclaimed from the sum- 
 mits of social emancipation. 
 
 It was in the family that the social ques- 
 tion first began, because the family was 
 the earliest and simplest form of social or- 
 ganization. There the contest has been inces- 
 sant. There have been unjust ineqalities in 
 the conditions of the husband and wife, parent 
 and child. The emancipation of women, 
 for example, is still one of the leading forms 
 of the social question to-day. 
 
 The family developed into the Clan, the 
 Tribe, the Community, the State. In each 
 of these, unjust inequality arose. Then 
 came the cry and protest. Thus the social 
 question sprang up spontaneously. 
 
 In politics it assumed this form : " Does 
 
 the Individual exist for the benefit of the 
 
 State, or does the State exist for the benefit 
 
 pf the Individual?" This is the rock 
 
 * Spencer's Socqlogy, 
 
Sources of the Social Difficulty. 21 
 
 upon which the Ship of State has al- 
 ways floundered in the stormy night of 
 revolutions. But even now philosophers 
 and statesmen are not yet agreed upon 
 the safest and the wisest course of navi- 
 gation. 
 
 In the Community, i. e., in that aggrega- 
 tion of men in which all put forth their ener- 
 gies for the maintenance of life and the im- 
 provement of its conditions,where they stand 
 related as producer and consumer, as master 
 and servant, as lord and serf, as owner and 
 slave, as employer and wage-earner, as capi- 
 talist and laborer in all these relationships 
 the social question has formed its largest 
 history; there the inequalities have been 
 broadest, boldest and bitterest. 
 
 Therefore its protest has been the loudest, 
 therefore it is so clamorous to-day. In this 
 phase, which is now regarded specifically as 
 the " Social Question," it will claim our at- 
 tention in these discourses, for wherever we 
 turn its din and tumult is in our ears, wher- 
 ever we go the glare of its fireband flashes 
 on our sight. In all its latest forms it is 
 still the conflict of the individualistic against 
 the collectivistic impulses. The extremes 
 have been found. Anarchy is " individual- 
 ism run riot." Communism is its utter ex- 
 tinction. 
 
 These then are the answers to the queries 
 that we propounded. In the Family, in the 
 Community, in the State, everywhere the 
 source of the social difficulty was unjust so- 
 cial inequality. The protest against this ine- 
 quality created in every age asocial question. 
 The struggle of and against individual domi- 
 nance, this afforded the underlying principle 
 that gave vitality and continuity to the social 
 contest. At times the wail of this social jro- 
 
22 The Social Question. 
 
 test has startled the world; again, like a 
 keen blade it has cut humanity to the quick 
 and made its bleeding heart to quiver. 
 
 " It was from Judea," says that most gift- 
 ed exponent of the social question, Emile de 
 Laveleye,* " It was from Judea that there 
 arose the most persistent protest against ine- 
 quality and the most ardent aspirations after 
 justice that have ever raised humanity out 
 of the actual into the ideal. We feel the 
 effect still. It is thence has come that leav- 
 en of evolution which still moves the world. 
 Job saw evil triumph and yet believed in 
 justice. Israel's prophets while thundering 
 against iniquity announced the good time 
 coming." 
 
 Opposite both the contending influences 
 of social life Judaism has lifted up her pro- 
 test. " Love thyself, " says Judaism. This is 
 the natural condition, this is axiomatic and 
 implied ; but remember it is never by itself 
 a moral injunction. Never shall it be sepa- 
 rated and wrenched from its place in the 
 eternal precept: " Love thy neighbor as 
 thyself. " Selfishness, egoism, as an exclu- 
 sive motive is entirely false ; but benevo- 
 lence in its largest sense. Altruism, is not, 
 therefore, entirely and exclusively right. It 
 likewise may defeat itself. It may prove 
 a positive injury a crime. It is wrong for 
 the worthy to be sacrificed in order to pre- 
 serve the unworthy. It is a sin for you to 
 give your hard-earned money to a vagabond 
 or a confirmed drunkard, by him to be squan- 
 dered. 
 
 Thus has Judaism pointed the ideal in 
 
 this conflict of social principles. True, she 
 
 has pointed high. All the generations of 
 
 bygone ages have failed in their efforts to 
 
 * Socialism qf to-day. 
 
Sources of the Social Difficulty. 23 
 
 attain it. We, too, no doubt, will also fail 
 in the ultimate adjustment of all things in 
 perfect equity and righteousness. Time's 
 hour-glass will, ere that day, have run its 
 sands of gold ten thousand thousand times 
 perhaps. Our golden age the Messianic 
 era of Judaism lies not in the dead, irrevo- 
 cable past, but in the promise of the fruitful 
 days to come. The millennium will come in 
 after the solution of the social problems, 
 after men shall have discovered and estab- 
 lished that " one order in human affairs 
 which is the best." 
 
 Our duty in the present is to stand not 
 in doubt, but to solve our own immediate 
 difficulties the present and the living phases 
 of this world-problem, to solve them by the 
 guidance of our golden precept, to push on 
 in good attempts, to still move forward to- 
 ward our lofty ideal, though that effort 
 means, as it does mean : 
 
 " To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; ^ 
 To forgive wrongs darker than the death of night; 
 To defy power which seems omnipotent; 
 To love and bear ; to hope till hope creates, 
 From its own wreck, the thingit contemplates." 
 
24 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSE 
 
 HAVE THE POOH GROWN POORER ? 
 
 THERE is avery ancient legend among the 
 Hebrew traditions which tells of a mighty 
 giant of Bashan named Og. It is said that 
 he lived at the time of the flood, and was of 
 such enormous stature that when the waters 
 descended and covered the earth until they 
 stood fifteen cubits above the highest moun- 
 tain tops he, nevertheless, towered above 
 the heaving billows and walked along in 
 safety, guiding the course of the Ark. Thus, 
 says the legend, he escaped the all-devouring 
 deluge and lived thereafter for thousands 
 and thousands of years. 
 
 Whatever may have stimulated the fancy 
 of men to invent this primitive story, there 
 is an earnest significance in it which attaches, 
 with peculiar aptness, to the theme upon 
 which we are now discoursing. 
 
 Oppression, injustice, cruelty, every form 
 of moral obliquity had descended upon the 
 earth and deluged it as with a flood. But, 
 towering high above its seething waters, 
 through all the ages, stalked unharmed the 
 personified Spirit of Justice, guiding to the 
 haven of safety the oppressed and injured, 
 the abused and derided among men. 
 
 Since the very beginning of the contest 
 against Individualism from the very incep- 
 tion of society there have been men and 
 women who were oppressed and abused 
 because they subservient and dependent 
 
Have the Poor Q-rown Poorer ? 25 
 
 there have been subjects hanging upon 
 the breath of their rulers, workmen bend- 
 ing under the rod of their masters. For 
 these Justice has still outlived the deluge of 
 wrong, passing through gory seas of blood- 
 shed and death. At last I firmly believe it 
 at last the bowof promise is to be discerned 
 in the skies and the weary dove is hastening 
 homeward with the token of peace. What- 
 ever be the storms we shall have still to 
 through in this social strife, now that the 
 clouds are discharging their worst burdens, 
 there must soon come cessation and calm. 
 There are signs of this. I take one of these 
 signs to be the extraordinarily improved 
 condition of the working people. Such a 
 statement may sound very paradoxical and 
 absurd in the face of the continuous com- 
 plaining we hear, and in the face of the 
 deeds of violence we see ; but it is my ear- 
 nest conviction that most of the social com- 
 motion in the midst of which we live, arises 
 out of a very palpable falsehood, out of an 
 unwarranted assumption, oft repeated, that 
 the condition of the working people is worse 
 to-day than ever it was. 
 
 An increasing number of persons, of 
 whom Mr. Henry George is the able repre- 
 sentative and leader, are sounding high and 
 low this cry of alarm, " the poor are grow- 
 ing poorer ! " They take up a current im- 
 pression and assert it as a fact, and firmly 
 believe in it. Upon this they build up their 
 systems of speculation, write books, organ- 
 ize societies, make speeches, instigate con- 
 tention, add fuel to existing strife, and con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, spur on the hot- 
 headed and ignorant to violence and 
 bloodshed. 
 
 Out of this empty assertion men are led 
 
26 The Social Queslion. 
 
 into a miserable and unwarranted pessimism. 
 They give up in despair, crying " Cursed be 
 the day on which we were born." They 
 deny God and the moral law : " Away with 
 these haunting nightmares of our dreams ! " 
 With ruthless blows they hew away at the 
 supports of religion : " Down with the beams 
 and rafters of this aged and crumbling 
 structure." 
 
 It is this assertion that the poor are poorer 
 than ever before which we must put to the 
 stern test of fact. Who then are the poor ? 
 If you would put the knife of discernment 
 right through this apple of discord, then 
 recognize at once the gulf that divides 
 pauperism from poverty. " The pauper and 
 the poor man stand on opposite poles ; the 
 whole diameter of manhood stretches between 
 them." The pauper cries, " Society owes 
 me a living," and seeks to get it out of the 
 industry of others. The poor man is he who, 
 though owing nothing, recognizes that it is 
 not man's misfortune, but his privilege and 
 duty to work, and sets about earning a living 
 for himself and those dependent on him. 
 
 The chief social problem, some one has well 
 said, ought to be : " What is to be done with 
 the drones the idlers, the lazy people in 
 palaces and huts, and the tramps on the high 
 roads? " Instead of this the proposition is 
 set up that we must get rid of poverty. 
 It is true that the complicated institution 
 we call Society ought to be regarded as a 
 grand partnership. By means of it we all 
 reap benefits through united action, which 
 would otherwise be unattainable,and through 
 these benefits some corresponding obligations 
 that we dare not shirk. It is in meeting 
 these obligations that we must distinguish 
 clearly those who have from those who have 
 
Have the Poor Grrown Poorer ? 27 
 
 not a righteous claim. Only those who, 
 under the universal laws of an All- Wise 
 God, have become the victims of circum- 
 stances which the best efforts of industry, 
 prudence and virtue could not forestall and 
 the keenest prevision of the most advanced 
 intelligence could not detect ; those who in 
 the great cause of human events have fallen 
 under the wheels of disappointment through 
 calamities, not to be foreseen, have a claim 
 a claim upon our charity which is sustained 
 by the law, enforced by the dictates of ethics 
 and urged by all the sanctities of religion. 
 Justice at its best will extirpate pauperism, 
 charity at its best will alleviate poverty 
 but as to abolishing it, this never will be, 
 this never can be accomplished as long as 
 the difference in human ability and energy 
 and worth continues ; as long as some will 
 outstrip others in exertion, and gain more ; 
 as long as there are those who will never 
 save or deny themselves in the present for 
 the days of helplessness or old age. This 
 difference, indeed, is the basis of all industrial 
 effort and progress. 
 
 Here Mercy has a task to perform. The 
 utmost that Justice can do is, to gain for the 
 poor man the freedom to do whatever work 
 he chooses and to secure for him the fruit 
 of his own toil, so that it may be within his 
 power by self-help to remove the burden of 
 poverty. Now it is asserted that Justice is 
 doing this less to-day than ever before, and 
 therefore the poor are poorer than ever they 
 were. 
 
 Let us then look upon the condition of 
 the laborer in the various eras of the past 
 and contrast it with the present and see 
 whether it is true, as Mr. George claims, 
 that " the tendency of what we call material 
 
28 The Social Question. 
 
 progress is in nowise to improve the condi- 
 tion of the lowest class in essentials of healthy, 
 happy human life. Nay, more, that it is to still 
 further depress the condition of the lowest 
 class.'** 
 
 To begin, then, with the earliest times. 
 First among the pioneers of mankind, our 
 greatest benefactor is Egypt. We choose 
 Egypt for this comparison between present 
 and most ancient clays, because Egypt (by 
 contrast with nerveless, apathetic India and 
 other Oriental Monarchies) offers such strik- 
 ing points of contact between the aims of 
 her civilization and ours, that in the study 
 of them our hearts vibrate and tremble as 
 with the passing of an electric current of 
 like thoughts, like interests, and like hopes. 
 
 Now observe what was the social condition 
 of the Egyptians. The caste system prevailed. 
 Priests and soldiers were the two ruling 
 orders. All mechanical trades were held in 
 contempt. The peaceful shepherd, as we 
 know from the story of Joseph and his 
 brethren, was despised. The swineherds were 
 not even permitted to enter the temples of 
 worship. The poor man, the laborer in 
 Egypt, was a slave ; he could own no land, 
 rise to no political power. In the condition 
 in which he was born he was forced to remain ; 
 from that rank he was forced to marry and 
 the children were doomed to continue the 
 degraded life of parents without a hope of 
 improvement.! 
 
 Mark from what I shall tell you whether 
 there is anything in any condition of the work- 
 ing classes of our day that will in the least 
 
 * Progress and Poverty. 
 
 * Kenrick. Ancient Egypt. 
 
Have the Poor Grown Poorer? 29 
 
 compare with the hardships, the misery and 
 the cruelty which the toilers of Egypt en- 
 dured. 
 
 The wonderful Pyramids, the gorgeous 
 temples, the gigantic obelisks and towering 
 colossi, all of which still remain to-day the un- 
 solved mystery, the amazement and wonder 
 of the world, are nothing but monuments 
 to the shame of that ancient civilization, 
 written all over with the records of the in- 
 human degradation of man by his fellow- 
 man. It took 360,000 people twenty years 
 to built one of those pyramids. All the gold 
 that has been dug from the hills of California 
 would not have sufficed to have paid free 
 men, working for honest hire, to undergo 
 the slavery that was needed to erect them. 
 " They tell us," (says Dr. Henry Brugsch 
 Bey, the most noted of Egyptologists) u more 
 emphatically than living speech or written 
 words of the tears and the pains, the suffer- 
 ing and miseries of a whole population which 
 was condemned to erect these everlasting 
 monuments of Pharaohnic vanity. Thirty 
 centuries even could not efface the curse 
 resting on their memory. When Herodotus, 
 about the middle of the fifth century B. C., 
 visited the field of the great Pyramid at 
 Gizeh the Egyptians told him of the im- 
 precations wrung from their unhappy fore- 
 fathers, and they would not from a feel- 
 ing of abhorrence so much as utter the 
 names of the kings who constructed the two 
 highest Pyramids." It took 200,000 men 
 three years to carry a huge stone designed 
 for the portico of a temple in Sais, the ancient 
 capital of Egypt, an ordinary twenty days' 
 journey. The building of the canal of the 
 Red Sea cost 120,000 lives. 
 
 Men, women, and children, the feeble and 
 
30 The Social Question. 
 
 the aged, all alike felt the scourge of the 
 taskmaster. They knew no joy " by reason 
 of anguish of spirit and cruel bondage." 
 Hounded to their tasks, they fell under 
 the weight of their burdens and died miser- 
 ably in their own tracks. In the light of 
 these facts the opening chapters of Exodus 
 convey a new meaning to us, and we can 
 no longer wonder that the deliverance 
 from Egyptian bondage heads the " Ten 
 Commandments." and that reference to this 
 deliverance is constantly made about one 
 hundred times in the Pentateuch and re- 
 peatedly in all later writings of the Hebrews. 
 The condition of the laborers in Egypt at 
 the time of the Pharaohs may serve as a 
 faithful index of their condition in all other 
 lands of those ancient days. In some of the 
 Oriental monarchies it was still worse. * 
 
 Has there been any improvement in the 
 condition of the laborers since those days ? 
 Are the poor worse off to-day in our most 
 civilized land, then they were in the most 
 civilized land of antiquity ? It is puerile to 
 ask. Even at this stage of our investigations 
 we are able to say, that never before in the 
 world's history have the laboring people 
 wielded such a power, social and political, as 
 they do to-day : that though there is misery 
 enough, God knows, yet never have men 
 been freer to choose their own work ; never 
 have they so fully reaped the fruits of their 
 toil. All this a further contrast with tliQ 
 past will confirm. 
 
 In passing we will only remark here that 
 what gives such gravity to the social ques- 
 tion to.day is the constant prating about the 
 modern slavery of the wage-worker and the 
 clamor for things undreamed of and unattain- 
 * Rawlinson, Seven Great Monarchies. 
 
Have the Poor Grrown Poorer ? 31 
 
 able. The laborer needs to hold this mirror 
 of history up before him. We, who are all 
 laborers, must look to the rock whence we 
 were hewn. We must recollect that through- 
 out weary ages the despotism of the State 
 was absolute and the flood tides of oppression 
 swept on unhindered. Justice has stemmed 
 the current, has triumphantly erected itself 
 above the destroying waters, and guided the 
 miserable slave of ancient days to the haven 
 of the better conditions of the laborer of to- 
 day. 
 
 Mr. George admits indeed that the con- 
 ditions of the lowest classes have in some 
 places, and in some respects been raised, but 
 affirms that, " There is no where any im- 
 provement which can be credited to increas- 
 ed productive power, and that the lowest 
 class does not share in these gains." 
 
 He forgets that the iron-roller, and the 
 glass-blower, and the railroad-hand, who 
 complain the most noisily about the op- 
 pression of labor, are now better taken care 
 of, well or sick, than kings were a thousand 
 years ago.* He forgets that through in- 
 
 * Senator George recently propounded a number of 
 enquiries with regard to the conditions of labor and the 
 distribution of wealth, to Mr. Edward Atkinson, a 
 gentleman famed for his great knowledge of statistics 
 relating to these subjects. The answers of Mr. Atkinson 
 disprove the popular fallacy that the poor are becoming 
 poorer, in proportion, as the wealth of the rich is in- 
 creasing. Everything in this country has an upward 
 tendency. Population is increasing, and labor-saving, 
 mechanical implements, invented in vast numbers, 
 have increased mechanical productions, and furnished 
 extra employment to skilled labor. While the products 
 of this labor are placed upon the markets at cheaper 
 rates, the result of this condition of affairs is, that 
 greater time prevails for intellectual pleasures, and a 
 number of articles heretofore the special property of the 
 extremely wealthy, now conduce to the pleasure and 
 enjoyment of the toiling masses. In the last twenty-five 
 years, Mr. Atkinson shows that the wages of the laborer 
 has been greatly enhanced, the duration of his hours of 
 
32 The Social Question. 
 
 creased productive power, and only thus 
 can he to-day put shoes on all his children 
 while only two hundred years ago his ances- 
 tors went bare foot ; that he can put clothes 
 on their back, even though he don't know 
 how to make them himself, while a hundred 
 years ago and less, the workmen wore only 
 what they themselves made, and ate only 
 such food as they could raise by their own 
 labor. He forgets that the process of the 
 social evolution, like that of any unfolding, 
 is slow and steady, that it can not, it will not 
 be hastened. However we fret and fume, it is 
 in vain. Not all at once, even if ever, can 
 we have society elevated from its very 
 foundations, the poor lifted above the pos- 
 sibility of want, the very lowest exempt from 
 anxiety for the material needs of subsistence ; 
 the poorest laborer's life a holiday ; youth 
 no longer stunted and starved ; age no longer 
 harried by avarice ; the child at play with the 
 tiger ; discord turned into harmony. 
 
 Yet such are the dizzy dreams the cham- 
 pions of labor have dared to dream. Con- 
 fusing the just claims of the poor man with 
 the absurd demand of the shiftless pauper, 
 they throw into the way of the natural pro- 
 gress of these claims towards realization the 
 
 labor lessened, and the purchasing power of his wages 
 vastly increased. Here are some of the statistics prov- 
 ing these facts, as derived from the answers of Mr. 
 Atkinson to Senator George's enquiries: The average 
 earnings of mechanics, in different trades, in sixty dif- 
 ferent establishments in I860, was a yearly average of 
 $468 in gold. Kow the average is $720. Of the purchas- 
 ing power of these wages, food, clothing, shoes, and 
 everything but house rents, is so changed in their 
 relative value from 1860 to 1886 that a year's earnings 
 in I860, which would buy 1,572 daily portions of the 
 necessaries of life, in 1886 purchased 2,400 portions 
 of the same ; and substantially the skilled laborer pro- 
 duces 80 to 100 per cent, more at present for a year's 
 work, than in 1860, while the common laborer receives 
 an increase of forty and fifty per cent, in the same time 
 
Have the Poor Grrown Poorer? 33 
 
 barrier of hasty, ruinous action, based on 
 weak and palpable fallacies. The denial of 
 progress and inprovernent in the condition 
 of the poor is such a fallacy. It comes of 
 blindness to the facts of history, blindness to 
 the fact that everywhere better modes of 
 life are made possible by civilization, and 
 higher standards of life set up. Because 
 these are not yet attained everywhere and 
 by all, is it right to curse God and man? 
 What we hear are the mad ravings of men 
 intoxicated by deep draughts from the new- 
 found waters of freedom. The delirium will 
 pass-. The righteous claims of reasoning 
 men will be heard. Justice will hold her 
 own course, whatever floods impede. 
 3 
 
34 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSE IV. 
 
 HAVE THE POOR GROWN POORER ? 
 {Continued?) 
 
 A MOST terrible indictment against our 
 civilization is made by those who charge 
 that the poor are growing poorer and more 
 numerous than ever. Looking at this 
 charge in the light of fact I would say to 
 you Do not believe it. 1 say this although 
 I know full well how poor the poor are. I 
 am not deaf to the cries of woe that are 
 wrung from them by the hardships of to- 
 day. My heart is troubled with anguish. 
 In my ears are ringing the pitiful moanings 
 of those who are drudging for the dregs of 
 subsistence. I have heard the wail of de- 
 spair that comes up from cellars and hovels 
 and is re-echoed from garrets and tenements 
 that are filthy with the festering sores of 
 physical and moral corruption. Not in vain 
 has the wild outburst of men maddened 
 with frenzy been ringing in my ears since 
 those terrible days of the memorable Pitts- 
 burgh railroad riot of 1877, when I, a won- 
 dering youth, followed the mob and saw the 
 red hand of Anarchy wield the torch of de- 
 struction, saw stores looted, houses demol- 
 ished and the flames with forked tongues 
 lick up hundreds of thousands of dollars' 
 worth of property, saw women rage, men in 
 drunken glee, citizens terrified, soldiers 
 panic-stricken. The scene is burned in. 
 
Have the Poor Grown Poorer. 35 
 
 upon my memory, and the affrighting inter- 
 rogatories then raised Why are men so 
 driven? Whence is this madness? have 
 ever since clamored in my breast for a re- 
 ply. 
 
 I have found out that it is owing to the 
 social agitator of to-day who poses as the 
 friend of humanity, " the champion of la- 
 bor." To his guilt most of this new frenzy 
 among laborers is to be charged. You can- 
 not call him a friend of the laboring man 
 who falsely, whether through conscious 
 error or blinded by a fanatic advocacy of 
 some new-fangled social theory, would make 
 him believe that he is worse off to-day than 
 ever, in the essentials of healthy, happy hu- 
 man life. 
 
 It is because I would dry the weeping 
 eyes, would hush the sobs of the mothers 
 and children, would clothe and warm their 
 shivering bodies, would satisfy the pangs of 
 hunger,, that I would speak to men and bid 
 them be men indeed ; to check the wild 
 passion that makes monsters of them, and 
 instead yield to the sober sway of earnest, 
 reasoned truth, for thus, and only thus, may 
 they hope to devise and achieve means of 
 betterment in their condition. Therefore . 
 do I warn them against this falsehood which 
 breeds discontent in their breasts, lodges 
 misery in their homes, and lets loose blood- 
 shed on the streets the falsehood that their 
 condition to-day is worse than ever that of 
 laborers was in the past. 
 
 I say to you emphatically it is false : false 
 as the face of hypocrisy. In the onward 
 sweep of history there is no sucK. law as that 
 the poor are growing poorer. In the un- 
 ceasing conflict against the individualism of 
 the Tyrant and the individualism of the. 
 
36 The Social Question. 
 
 State there has been progress, a betterment 
 of conditions, a steady evolution of social 
 justice. Despite all this wretchedness of 
 to-day the world is better and its conditions 
 improving. This the modern agitators do 
 not, will not see. This is their crime against 
 industry. They run from the open field 
 of history and get entangled in the narrow 
 thickets of local or temporary conditions. 
 
 If the social status of the poor laborer has 
 ever been better we want to know, in order 
 that we may restore the modes and forms 
 that rendered this possible. Therefore, is 
 this a question not to be evaded : Has his- 
 tory any such a poor man's paradise to tell 
 of? It certainly did not exist in remote an- 
 tiquity. We have shuddered at the horrors 
 unspeakable in the condition of the Egyp- 
 tian slave ; we have sighed for pity with the 
 outcasts in their degradation, and our hearts 
 were melted in sorrow as we retold the long- 
 forgotteri tale of woe, of those myriads of 
 mortals who died in chains and drudgery to 
 the shame of that ancient civilization. 
 
 But perhaps other countries those about 
 whose names the lustre of a still greater 
 fame is cast may have much happier scenes 
 -to present. Let us look in upon Athens in its 
 greatest glory, and upon Imperial Rome in 
 the brilliant centuries of her glorious Em- 
 pire. What was the condition of the laborer 
 then ? We speed along across the waters, 
 borne by the breath of imagination to the 
 restored places of that ancient world. We 
 land at the Piraeus, 
 
 " Where on the JEgean shore a city stands 
 Built nobly ; pure the air and light the soil; 
 Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
 And eloquence, native to famous wits." 
 
 We ride along by the great wall built by 
 
Have the Poor Grown Poorer? 37 
 
 Pericles, which connects the city with the 
 port. The sun has just come up and his ear- 
 liest rays as they break on the city reveal the 
 summit of the far-famed Acropolis, covered 
 with temples of gods and heroes, adorned 
 with the finest productions of the architect, 
 and the sculptor. Through the transparent 
 clearness of the Athenian atmosphere we 
 see high above the brilliant whiteness and 
 varied colors of the temples and museums, 
 the colossal ivory statue of the Virgin God- 
 dess Athene, the master-piece of the world's 
 greatest artist, Phidias, rising majestically 
 and looking serenely toward the sea, her 
 queenly brow radiant with the kisses of the 
 morning sun. 
 
 It is but dawn, but already the streets are 
 filling with people hastening to the market 
 in the center of the city where the main 
 streets cross and where the public edifices 
 are. We see that the Athenian citizens 
 virtually live in the public places. It is 
 their business to be there. Here are all the 
 men, old men, youths and striplings. Here 
 Socrates was wont to walk with thoughtful 
 mien and piercing eye. Here Diogenes car- 
 ried his lantern, seeking at broad daylight 
 for men, true men. 
 
 Here, as we pass up and down the narrow 
 streets to view the sights, we see men, 
 sitting before the porticos of the public 
 buildings, arguing hour after hour on po- 
 litical affairs, discussing the news and talk- 
 ing about the latest games, or the races. 
 We see them, cane in hand, strolling along, 
 visiting the shops, the markets and the public 
 baths. Almost every body seems to be attend- 
 ed. A man walks alongside carrying a 
 folding chair, which he prepares for his 
 master to sit upon when fatigued. 
 
38 The Social Question. 
 
 We introduce ourselves to one of these 
 citizens. He with the proverbial hospitality 
 of the Greek, invites us to his home to dine. 
 We are first led to the bath ; a slave attends 
 us. We then take our places on the soft 
 cushions and recline at the table ; a slave 
 assists us. All about us are slaves, who 
 deck us with garlands, who serve us with 
 food, who see to our every comfort and want. 
 We inquire, and from the conversation we 
 learn that all society in Greece is divided 
 into two classes, the conquerors and the 
 conquered the Greeks and the barbarians, 
 i. e.) the citizens and the slaves, among the 
 latter some few freedmen, still socially 
 regarded as of the slaves. In Athens there 
 are over half a million of souls ; fully four 
 fifths are slaves. There are on an average 
 twenty slaves to each household about 
 three slaves to every citizen. Slaves are 
 in the markets, slaves in the shops, slaves at 
 the baths, slaves in the fields, slaves in the 
 kitchens, slaves in the factories, slaves in 
 the quarries, slaves in the mines, slaves 
 building the public works, slaves in all places 
 where " naked human strength" is required. 
 All work, high and low, from the teachers 
 to the menials, is done by slaves.* 
 
 But do not the Greeks love freedom ? we 
 ask. Yes, freedom for the Greek ; he alone 
 is a man, he alone is a citizen. " The 
 title of citizen," Aristotle hath said, 
 " belongs only to those who need not work 
 to live." The citizen must occupy himself 
 only with the State. To do this he must 
 have leisure, he must attend the court, and 
 hear the harangues and take part in the 
 discussions of the market places. Work is 
 a hindrance to life. It is to be despised ; 
 
 * Smith's History of Greece. 
 
Have the Poor Grrown Poorer f 39 
 
 it is servile ; it degrades men ; it makes them 
 incapable of virtue ; it blunts the intelligence. 
 Politics and war and leisure are for the free- 
 man ; drudgery, toil, work are for the 
 contemptible slave. The Athenian shows 
 no more sympathy for the sufferings of his 
 slaves than a driver feels for the wheels of 
 his cart. 
 
 We inquire still further and we learn 
 that the slaves, although they do all 
 the work, are excluded from every benefit 
 to be derived from public institutions, while 
 the citizens fatten on the public revenues. 
 Every citizen has ^himself paid by the 
 government if possible. The orators have 
 themselves paid for speaking and the people 
 for hearing. The judges do not allow them- 
 selves to be forgotten, either. As many as 
 ten ambassadors are accredited to each 
 power at the same time. There are physicans 
 and poets maintained at the public expense ; 
 public copyists and criers are fed and lodged 
 by the State. In short, the multitude of 
 salaried officers is so great that laws have to 
 been forced against plurality of officers this 
 leprosy of Commonwealths. " The right of 
 laziness," as it has been called; the pride of 
 the unoccupied man, this is the virtue to 
 which the Athenian aspires. 
 
 In the Politics of Aristotle we are shown 
 these remarkable words : " The science of 
 the master reduces itself to knowing how to 
 make use of his slave." "It is nature herself, 
 who has created slavery. Animals are divid- 
 ed into males and females. The male is more 
 perfect; he commands. The female is less 
 complete ; she obeys. Does there then exist 
 after all, so great a difference between the 
 slave and the beast ? Their services resemble 
 each other ; it is by the body alone that they 
 
40 The Social Question. 
 
 are useful to us. Let us, then, conclude 
 from these principles that nature creates 
 some men for liberty others for slavery ; that 
 it is useful and just that the slave should 
 obey." 
 
 We hear most excellent discourse on Greek 
 philosophy which speaks in beautiful terms 
 about the human soul, its faculties, its vir- 
 tues, but we are amazed to observe that 
 only the soul of the free Greek citizen is 
 meant the laborer is excluded ! We inquire 
 of the law the law shows no more humanity 
 than does philosophy. Slaves are sold, lent, 
 given and bequeathed like cattle. They can 
 neither acquire or possess. If married, the 
 master may take away their wives. If the 
 slave has children, they are the property of 
 the master. The fate of the slave, we are 
 told, was in Athens much less harsh than in 
 any other Grecian state, and yet even in 
 Athens he was brutally abused on the slight- 
 est pretext. His life was not his own. he 
 was the sport of his master. Such was the 
 condition of the laborer in Greece. 
 
 We come down through the great Roman 
 world along the tide of years and see the 
 same social state of the laborer taking its 
 course to lower levels on these principles of 
 slavery. The workman is still likened to a 
 beast his life, should he be murdered, is 
 regarded by the law as of equal value with 
 that of an ox or a horse ; at day bound to the 
 roughest labor, at night shut up in subter- 
 ranean caverns damp and close. The slave 
 door-keeper chained to the door, is sold with 
 the house, forming in a way part of the 
 wall.* 
 
 Emperors and even women treat them with 
 barbarous cruelty at every change of whim. 
 * Suetonius. De Claris. ILL 
 
Have the Poor Crrown Poorer. 41 
 
 Cato sells his old slaves weakened by age, 
 at a low price, like worn out furniture, or if 
 unable to drive a bargain he orders them 
 away, caring little for their fate.* 
 - There is no pity for those who must work : 
 they are despised, they count for naught 
 they make good sport, and the barbarity of 
 the Roman world must needs gratify itself 
 with, the blood of its slaves in the wantonness 
 of the gladiatorial shows. The fondest amuse- 
 ment of the Romans women as well as 
 men is to see men, the slaves, their laborers, 
 fight with beast or man in the arena. No so- 
 lemnity inspires the Roman with more inter- 
 est. Tired of idleness, though he despises 
 work, he has tens to the amphitheatre ; is he 
 melancholy ? he wants to see men killed as 
 a diversion. 
 
 " Oh, what a society was this of Rome ! 
 tolerating orgies where the blood of slaves 
 mingled with the wine of their flower-crowned 
 masters, where mortal combats alternated 
 with impure pantomime, where the guests 
 were offered in turn the grimaces of the actors, 
 the carnage of gladiators and the kisses of 
 courtesans where, indeed, the most mon- 
 strous cruelty was allied with the most shame- 
 less libertinism ! "f 
 
 The gloom of this picture of pagan egoism 
 darkens gradually into the blackness of 
 extinction. Pericles institutes the Theorika, 
 the distribution of money to the citizens out 
 of the public treasury to feed a seditious, 
 lazy, hungry populace, and to buy tickets to 
 the theater for them. It becomes the policy 
 of demagogues ever thereafter to give great 
 public banquets and shows, in order to still 
 rebellious outbreaks. Thus came inevitably 
 
 * Plutarch (On Cato.( 
 
 t Schmidt, Social Results of Early Christianity. 
 
42 The Social Question. 
 
 the dissolution of these mighty empires of 
 old thus Greece was swept into the orbit of 
 the Roman world, her light extinguished; 
 thus the brilliancy of the Roman constella- 
 tion, like the lost Pleiad, faded forever from" 
 sight. 
 
 The gulf between the then and now is 
 broadened into an impassable ocean. Then 
 the problem was Slavery now it is Liberty. 
 Then the State recognized only the citizen 
 and made use of his body and mind for her 
 political deeds ; to-day the man is to be con- 
 sidered before the citizen, and individual 
 worth is asserting itself as the only true 
 standard of political and social rank. 
 
 They lived by conquest, i. e., by the labor 
 of others ; we live by industries and com- 
 merce, i. e., by our own labor. Then labor 
 was identified with ignominy ; to day it is 
 the badge of true manhood and womanhood. 
 Then the problem of the public men was to 
 find out how to enrich the people, not by 
 labor and manufacture, but with the rev- 
 enues of the State ; to-day the problem is, 
 what need in industry can we create, and 
 how shall every man best serve his country 
 by some useful toil. Then no one dreamed 
 of the resources that could be found in labor, 
 and the demon Idleness inserted his talons 
 in the breast of the State and tore out her 
 vitals ; to-day no one dreams of living in 
 idleness, from the " maid-servant that is be- 
 hind the mill to the chief magistrate that 
 sitteth on his throne." Then the soul was 
 merely the fanciful theme of the speculations 
 of the philosophers; to-day it is the recogni- 
 tion of the greatness and the divineness of the 
 human soul that lifts all men into the plane 
 of brotherhood and becomes the lofty principle 
 of all genuine social advancement. Thus is 
 
. Have the Poor Grrown Poorer. 43 
 
 our civilization vindicated from this terrible 
 unhistorical charge that the poor are poorer 
 than ever. 
 
 By this contrast with the past do we verify 
 the claim that " the modern free system of 
 industry offers to every living human being 
 chances of happiness indescribably in excess 
 of what former generations have possessed."* 
 If there be shades of blackness, the darkness 
 in which the laborers of the classic lands of 
 Greece and Rome dwelt, was perhaps some- 
 what less black than that of Egypt. By con- 
 trast with them we live in the broad light of 
 day, dimmed only by the shadows of the 
 passing clouds. 
 
 It was with the rise of the Judaic influ- 
 ences that the sun of freedom sent forth his 
 rays upon the laborer in pagan lands and 
 brightened his dark career. The study of 
 that influence will give us assurance that 
 there is a providential thread that runs 
 through the web of history and give us cause 
 to hope that " some day there will be no more 
 pariahs at the banquet of life." 
 
 * W. G. Simmer, Social Classes. 
 
44 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSE V. 
 
 HOW DTD MOSES SOLVE THE SOCIAL 
 PROBLEM ? 
 
 DISRAELI in his poetical novel. Tan- 
 cred, sends out a young English lord to 
 search the world for some remedy for 
 the social and political evils of Europe. 
 The young Englishman is lured by quaint 
 dreams and fancies to the far-away scenes 
 of Asiatic lands. After many days he wan^ 
 ders among the wild ranges of granite mount- 
 ains of Arabia. At midnight he stands alone 
 in that small, rock-bound plane far up the 
 steep of Mt. Sinai, the traditional scene of the 
 greatest event of time, the promulgation of 
 the Decalogue. Here upon the sacred soil, the 
 solitary pilgrim kneels and is lost in earnest 
 meditation and prayer. At last, lifting his 
 agitated face to peer into the starry vault 
 overhead, he clasps his hands in the anguish 
 of devotion and cries : " O Lord, God of Is- 
 rael, Creator of the universe, ineffable Jeho- 
 vah ! I come to thine ancient Arabian altars 
 to pour forth the heart of tortured Europe. 
 Why art thou silent ? Why no longer do 
 the messengers of thy renovating will de- 
 scend on earth ? Faith fades and duty dies. 
 A profound melancholy has fallen on the 
 spirit of man. The priest doubts, the mon- 
 arch can not rule, the multitude moans and 
 toils and calls in its frenzy on unknown 
 gods. If prophets may not arise again to 
 herald hope, at least, of all the starry mes- 
 sengers that guard thy throne let one appear 
 
How did Moses Solve the Social Problem. 45 
 
 to save thy creatures from a terrible de- 
 spair." 
 
 A dimness suffuses the stars of Arabia. 
 The kneeling pilgrim sinks upon the earth 
 senseless and in a trance, and to him there 
 appears a form, with shape human, but vast as 
 the surrounding hills. On his lofty forehead 
 glitters a star that throws a solemn radiance 
 on the repose of his majestic features ; 
 thought, rather than melancholy speaks from 
 the pensive passion ot his eye as gently he ut- 
 ters these words of wisdom : "Power is neither 
 the sceptre nor the sword, for these pass 
 away but ideas which are divine. The equal- 
 ity of man can only be acomplished by the 
 sovereignty of God. The longing for frater- 
 nity can never be satisfied but under the sway 
 oi a common Father. In the increased dis- 
 tance be ween God and man have grown up 
 all those developments that have made life 
 mournful. Cease, then, to seek in a vain phil- 
 osophy the solution of the social problem that 
 vexes you. Announce the sublime and solac- 
 ing doctrine of theocratic equality." 
 
 What does this weird, poetic figure mean ? 
 What is the import of this message ? It 
 means that to escape the " divine despair," 
 "which at the sight of the misery that ingulfs 
 the masses is falling with the blight of melan- 
 choly upon the spirits of earnest, thoughtful, 
 feeling men, we must break away from the 
 toils and fetters of modern error, and as the 
 tortured child hastens to the arms of its 
 mother, so we must hasten back to Judea the 
 mother of our civilization, in her bosom to 
 find solace and comfort and rest. It means 
 that we must go back to the cradle of the 
 world where wisdom first spake, and learn 
 again the message of truth that for all times 
 and unto all generations was proclaimed by 
 
46 The Social Question. 
 
 the Hebrews of old. It means that the 
 hotly contested social questions of our civili- 
 sation are to be settled neither according to 
 the ideas of the capitalist nor those of the 
 laborer, neither according to those of the 
 socialist, the communist, the anarchist or 
 the nihilist, but simply and only according 
 to the eternal laws of morality, which were 
 pronounced at Sinai. This is the truth 
 which it is our immediate, ail-important duty 
 to loudly proclaim and speedily establish, 
 that modern political economy and social 
 science can teach no new guiding principles 
 which are not already embraced in the 
 simple lessons of Judaism. 
 
 We turn, then, with eagerness to a study 
 of the social conditions of the Hebrews. 
 Our minds are still filled with the woful 
 pictures of artizan life in the monarchies of 
 the Orient, of Egypt, pagan Greece and 
 Rome. The sad spectacles of slavery, misery, 
 brutality and woe still depress us. But lo, 
 the scenes that present themselves, as we 
 look out in imagination upon the busy life 
 of Palestine under the sway of the Mosaic 
 law are so utterly different, so marvelously 
 changed for the better that, like one who 
 comes from the darkness suddenly into the 
 bright light, we are dazzled and almost over- 
 whelmed by the contrast. Indeed, it is 
 truly a transformation as of night into day. 
 The great cloud of misery is lifted from 
 humanity. Slavery fades away its dark- 
 ness is dispelled, for freedom bursts into the 
 skies effulgent as the new-born sun of day. 
 Liberty called out to a horde of slaves, 
 fainting under the burdens and crouching 
 under the lash of Egypt ; they hushed their 
 moaning, hearkened to her call and gladly 
 she led them forth from the House of Bon- 
 
Sow did Moses Solve the Social Problem ? 47 
 
 dage. Then for the first time the world saw 
 a nation of free men, all alike acknowledged 
 to be men with heavenly capacities created 
 in the image of God all alike inspired by the 
 same lofty purpose of life to develox) into 
 the spiritual likeness of the Creator. 
 
 Here were no casts. Mark this startling 
 transition. It utterly changes the social con- 
 ditions of the world. Grandly and majesti- 
 cally Moses sweeps above the heartless de- 
 gradation of man by man which every where 
 prevails, and lifts all men to the heights of 
 equality theocratic equality, wherein all 
 are alike the children of one God, all are 
 members of the noblest rank, the only rank 
 a priest people. Moses based his govern- 
 ment upon religion, and laid the foundation 
 of all virtues in the family. We know that 
 the evils which came upon the Jewish people 
 came only through a falling away from the 
 strict code of his politics and morality. 
 
 We pass at once to ask how Moses, with 
 his incomparable genius and matchless states- 
 manship, solved those special phases of the 
 social question which so agitate the world 
 to-day those that arise out of the contests 
 of men in the struggle for existence. 
 
 In the Hebrew Commonwealth we find, 
 for the first time in history, conditions that 
 thoroughly interest us because of their 
 similarity to our own. The conditions that 
 prevailed in the pagan world were so en- 
 tirely different from ours that the social 
 question, in the forms that most concern us, 
 could hardly have been said to exist. But 
 in the Mosaic legislation all is changed. 
 Here is free labor ; every man must work, 
 as is the case with us. Here is perfect 
 freedom to choose your own calling in life, 
 as with us ; here is the wage system by 
 
48 The Social Question. 
 
 which each one is to get the fruits of his toil, 
 as with us ; here is the right of private pos- 
 session maintained, as with us ; here is 
 property in land and the system of in- 
 heritance, as with us. Almost the whole 
 list of our social questions is here, for they 
 all come naturally with the abolition of 
 slavery. 
 
 The principles upon which the Mosaic 
 enactments were based were these : Israel 
 was himself a slave in Egypt, and there 
 suffered grievous oppression and severity 
 from which divine mercy has delivered him. 
 Israel, therefore, should not similarly oppress 
 those who are under his authority, or 
 in adverse circumstances, but should rather 
 show them mercy and kindness. * Israel, 
 since his deliverance from Egypt, has en- 
 tered the service of God. The servant of 
 God ought not to become the servant of men. 
 Perpetual and real servitude can not, there- 
 fore, exist among Israelites, for that would 
 be a virtual denial of God. f 
 
 And so, although you find slaves often 
 spoken of in the Bible, yet if you study the 
 condition of the few so-called slaves among 
 the Hebrews, you will find that it had none 
 of the brutal or degrading characteristics of 
 the slaves among all other peoples. In fact 
 it was simply that of hired servants among 
 us. This service could never be for longer 
 than six years. The seventh year and the 
 year of Jubilee set all slaves free. A man 
 if needy, could bind himself to such service 
 of slavery but he could also buy his freedom. 
 Many crimes were judicially punished by 
 condemning the culprit to slavery, some- 
 what after the principle of modern convict 
 
 *Ex. xxii. 20; xxiii. 9. Dent. v. 14-15 ; xv. 15; 
 xviii,12;xxiv. 18-22. 
 
 t Lev. xxx. 42; xxv. 13. 
 
How did Moses Solve the Social Problem ? 49 
 
 labor. But the sting of degradation and 
 ignominy was almost taken from the con- 
 ditions of slavery by reason of the total rev- 
 olution in sentiment, that Moses wrought 
 in that he caused work to be held in the 
 highest respect and dignity. In the Hebrew 
 Commonwealth not only the hirelings or 
 slaves, but all the people are at work. The 
 husband must work to support wife and 
 children. The wife looks faithfully to her 
 household and the praises of her domesticity 
 are sung in the matchless strains of the 
 Proverbs.* The children work to maintain 
 their aged parents. f 
 
 It is only over the labor of the slave that 
 the master has control ; unlike the master in 
 all other lands he has no control over the 
 life or property, none over the wife and 
 children of his slave. Nay, he is answerable 
 to the law for the slave's proper care and 
 treatment. He is not even allowed to send 
 him off empty-handed at the end of his 
 period of service, but must give him a 
 present of sheep, grain and wine.J The 
 slave is privileged to participate in various 
 religious exercises, the Sabbath is insti- 
 tuted with special reference to him ; he is 
 treated with clemeiicy, often with kind- 
 
 * Prov. ch. xxxi. t Jalkut I. 850. 
 
 t Deut. xv. 13, 14. 
 
 The normal day of labor is fixed in the Jewish law 
 at twelve hours, from which two hours were remitted 
 in the course of the day for meals and the recital of the 
 prescribed prayers, the Shemaand Tefillah, thus leaving 
 ten hours for work. (B. Mez. vn. I ; Chos. Mishpat, 
 Chap. 339, 1.) Workmen could require better condi- 
 tions but not a decrease in the number of hours, and a 
 raise in wages could not secure for employer increased 
 time but only better quality of work. (Chas. Mispp. 
 332, 5.) For further elucidation of this now much con- 
 tested matter see, Arbeit und Lolin nach Biblisch. Tal- 
 mudischern Gesetze" by J. Nobel, in Judische Presse, 
 Berlin, 1886. 
 
50 The Social Question. 
 
 ness and consideration due to a member of 
 the family. Is this slavery ? Assuredly by 
 contrast with the slavery of all other na- 
 tions there was no such a thing as slavery 
 in Judea.* 
 
 "Liberty was always the ultimate idea 
 of the great emancipator, and this idea 
 breathes and flames in all his laws which 
 touch poverty. Slavery he hated beyond 
 all measure ; he was enraged against it, but 
 he could not destroy it altogether, it was 
 too deeply rooted in the life of that hoary 
 age, and he had to content himself to 
 ameliorate by law the condition of the 
 slave, to facilitate his emancipation and to 
 limit the period of service. If, however, a 
 slave who was set free by the law, refused 
 to leave the house of his master, then 
 Moses ordained that this incorrigible ser- 
 vile scamp should be nailed by the ear to 
 the doorposts of the master's house, and 
 after this degrading exhibition he was 
 condemned to servitude for life."f 
 
 The Jewish nation was ever noted for 
 industry, energy, strength, ingenuity and 
 restless activity. Agriculture, stock-rais- 
 ing, and handicrafts were the main oc- 
 cupations. The Mosaic law promoted 
 and protected them. The little land of 
 Palestine was a perfect paradise, planted 
 and cultivated to the very mountain sum- 
 mits. From Egypt the Hebrews had 
 learned much science and art. Mechanical 
 pursuits were held in high favor. J Indeed 
 we find throughout that there, as among 
 us, all occupations were pursued by the 
 people, and work was loved and honored, 
 
 * Mielziner, Slavery among the Hebrews. 
 
 t Heinrich Heine. 
 
 | Ps. cxxviii. 2 ; Prov. vii. 6-8. 
 
How did Moses Solve the Social Problem? 51 
 
 " There is no trade which the world can 
 spare." (KidduMn^ 82, 2.) " When a man 
 teaches his son no trade, it is as if he brought 
 him np to highway robbery.'" (Kiddushin 
 29, 1.) " Only he who tills the soil will be 
 nourished by it " (. Mezia, 77.) " Love 
 work ; do not despise it, or consider yourself 
 superior to it." (Aboth 1, 10.) " Great is 
 work ; for it honors man : elevates and en- 
 riches him." B. Bathra, 110 ; Aboth de H 
 Nathan, 11.) 
 
 Such are a few among the numerous say- 
 ings of the Rabbis of the Talmud. Their 
 sayings reflected the sentiments of the people 
 for they were themselves of the people and 
 they practiced as they preached. More than 
 a hundred of those named in the Talmud be- 
 sides their rabbinical functions followed 
 trades. There were among others, tailors, 
 shoemakers, a baker, an architect, a grave- 
 digger, a fisher, a dyer, a carpenter, etc. 
 The practical rule of conduct which guided 
 the rabbis of old was pronounced by Rabban 
 Gamaliel, when he said (Aboth. II. 2) : " Fair 
 is the study of the law if accompanied by a 
 worldly occupation for the union of these 
 two annihilates sin." 
 
 Consider well these facts now cited, and 
 you will know why that cry of woe which 
 is ringing in our ears to-day was never heard 
 in Judea ; why the clamorous outbreaks of 
 the laborers which startle us from our dreams 
 of safety and peace were never known there. 
 You may search up and down through the 
 records of Jewish history and will never find 
 any revolts of slaves such as those which af- 
 flicted Rome and under Spartacus threaten- 
 ed the national safety, nor any uprisings 
 like those of the Plebeians of Rome, the 
 Demoi of Athens, or the Helots in Sparta ; 
 
52 The Social Question. 
 
 no wild scenes like those of the Paris Com- 
 mune ; no processions of hungry men, women 
 and children crying for bread like those that 
 are seen in London and Chicago in our day. 
 Moses had forestalled the possibility of such 
 ever arising. There was on the one hand, 
 such a respect for work and such a wide dif- 
 fusion of labor ; and on the other hand, such 
 a wonderful system of practical charity, 
 such complete and excellent provision for 
 the needy, that no idle class, no proletarians 
 ever could exist. Mark the miracle ! Pau- 
 perism, that spectre of our century, never 
 haunted the ancient land of our forefathers. 
 Tramps were not known there. 
 
 Private property in land was allowed in 
 Palestine, but it could never be entirely 
 alienated away, for in the Jubilee year all 
 property reverted to the original owner.* 
 Thus the undue accumulation of wealth in 
 the hands of the few in the face of the utter 
 poverty of the masses could not occur, for 
 every man called a piece of land his own. 
 
 *See Lev. xxv. 13, 44. The institution of the Jubilee 
 which never went into practical operation as far as re- 
 cords show, and which was certainly not given as a law 
 for all nations, has, strangely enough, been put forward 
 as an argument for the " nationalization of land," 
 while in fact it was an iron-clad law of entail and in- 
 sisted on private ownership in land. See The Forum 
 Nov. 1887. "Christianity and Communism," by Rev. Dr. 
 Yan Dyke, Jr. 
 
 " Instead of wrestling with the impossible, instead 
 of inconsiderately decreeing the abolition of property, 
 Moses only attempted its moralization ; he endeavored 
 to bring property in harmony with morality, with the 
 true law of reason, and this he accomplished, by 
 the introduction of the year of jubilee, in which 
 alienated land that was inherited, which, with an agri- 
 cultural people, constituted true property, fell back to 
 the original owner, regardless of the manner in which 
 it had been disposed of. This institution forms the 
 most decided contrast to that * outlawry' with the 
 Romans, where, after the lapse of a certain time, the 
 actual possessor of a property could not be compelled 
 by the legitimate owner to restore the property if he 
 could not bring evidence to show that he had demanded 
 
How did Moses Solve the Social Prollem ? 58 
 
 Thus Moses solved the social question. 
 Well may the world still stand entranced 
 before the genius of our great law-giver. 
 Well may we go back and sit at his feet 
 and learn the lessons that shall solve our 
 vexing and harassing difficulties. I do not 
 say that we should adopt the Mosaic in- 
 stitutions bodily. That would be an im- 
 possibility. In some respects it would be a 
 retrogression. Slavery however modified 
 would have to be restored. " We should 
 have to give up all the advantages gained 
 through the marvelous advance secured in 
 the comforts and refinements of life, through 
 the dominion over the forces of nature, 
 through the wondrous facility in intercom- 
 munications and transportation and espe- 
 cially through the protection against disease, 
 famine, and pestilence and all the thousand 
 and one appliances and contrivances physi- 
 cal, chemical and mechanical now benefit- 
 ing the poor, and elevating their material 
 condition in a manner never known hitherto 
 in the history of mankind. The world 
 has changed. There are new factors in 
 life unknown in Moses' day. His codes 
 were adapted to a peculiar people, homo- 
 geneous in character, living under cer- 
 tain conditions and environments which 
 
 restitution in due legal form. This last condition left 
 the field open to every possible fraud, especially in a 
 state where despotism and jurisprudence were in bloom 
 and where the unlawful possessor had in his power all 
 the means of intimidation especially when confronted 
 by the poor man who could not afford the expenses 
 which a contest involved. The Roman was soldier and 
 lawyer at the same time and he knew how to defend 
 with his glib tongue the property taken from others, 
 often with the sword. Only a nation of robbers and 
 casuists could in vent the laws of proscription and limit- 
 ation and to consecrate them in that execrable book 
 which might be called the Bible of the devil, the code 
 of Koman civil \aw."Heinrich Heine. 
 
54 The Social Question. 
 
 probably do not now exist in exactly the 
 same order anywhere. That would be a very 
 narrow policy, indeed, that would hamper 
 the world by bending it within the iron 
 bands of any set of ancient institutions, how- 
 ever perfect they were in their day. But 
 this we do aver ; that what Lord Beacons- 
 field from his political eminence saw as with 
 his mental vision he swept the whole broad 
 range of our sociai conditions, is the solemn 
 truth and stands at this moment the pro- 
 found conviction of every man of earnest 
 thought. I mean that only by those eternal 
 principles of justice which guided Moses in 
 his successful solutions of the problems of 
 his time, can we hope to solve the problems 
 of our time. We can not use his statutes, 
 perhaps, but their aim and motive we must 
 adopt. 
 
 And this lesson above all must we learn 
 from him that nothing good can be accom- 
 plished by sudden revolution and by violence. 
 Moses was a social reformer, and for success 
 he has no peer in the lists. Observe well 
 his method. He so legislated as to abolish 
 slavery ; out of a degraded populace dragged 
 from the slums of Egypt and saturated with 
 the vices, the errors and superstitions of 
 that land, by patient training and education, 
 he made a new nation and gave us the pat- 
 tern of the most successful social system the 
 world has ever known. This he did not 
 accomplish by mad radical revolution, by 
 tearing down, abolishing and destroying, but 
 by taking the materials as he found them, 
 the circumstances as they existed, and shap- 
 ing them by the might of his heavenly in- 
 tellect and by the strength of his marvelous 
 executive power, shaping them slowly but 
 positively to the ends of the perfect justice 
 of God. 
 
The Social Chaos of the Dark Ages. 55 
 
 DISCOURSE VI. 
 
 THE SOCIAL CHAOS OF THE DARK AGES. 
 
 BACK through the highways and byways 
 of the past we have wandered together in 
 imagination, by the guides of history, in 
 order that we might learn from the exper- 
 iences of men the wisdom that shall aid us 
 in the present. 
 
 We have studied the condition of the 
 laborers in the world's brightest eras, in the 
 ancient monarchies, in Egypt and the classic 
 lands of Greece and Rome. Let us note 
 well the scenes we have beheld, wretched, 
 pitiable, mournful throughout; let them serve 
 as a constant reminder ; let this picture of 
 the woful past stand in contrast with the 
 general status of the honest free laborer of 
 to-day, and thus shall we best banish the 
 discontent that consumes our lives, thus once 
 for all shall stand denounced the falsehood 
 so unblushingly asserted in the face of the 
 truth by all the social agitators of the day, 
 the charge that the poor are poorer now than 
 they ever were hitherto. One word gives 
 the lie to this charge ; one bitter, burning 
 word which epitomizes and vividly portrays 
 the horror, the misery, and woe, barely 
 conceivable to us in our bettered circum- 
 stances, of those myriads of men and women 
 who in the drearj r ages past labored on earth 
 only to perish in despair. That word is 
 Slavery. 
 
56 The Social Question. 
 
 The whole Orient, Africa, with monu- 
 mental Egypt, all the Levant, is enshrouded 
 in the densest moral darkness upon all that 
 appertains to the just conditions and rights 
 of the laborer. 
 
 At last ! at last ! we see the sun of. Free- 
 dom rise over the mountains of Arabia 
 and cast his beams athwart the hills and 
 vales of the little land of Palestine. There 
 under his fructifying influence grows up the 
 commonwealth of Moses and the first and 
 only social system that was developed 
 throughout, on the lines of the eternal justice 
 of the moral law. Here under the heat of 
 this sun of freedom, the chains melt from 
 the wrists of the bondsmen, arid the 
 world for the first time sees a nation of 
 freemen. Here for the first time we find 
 social conditions that run parallel to our 
 own. Here is free labor every man at 
 work. Here is the freedom to choose your 
 own calling in life, no castes or guilds ; here 
 is the wage system to secure to every one 
 the fruits of his toil ; here is the right of 
 private property and individual possession in 
 land maintained and a complete system of 
 inheritance upheld. 
 
 We see how the incomparable genius and 
 unrivaled statesmanship of Moses solved the 
 social difficulties of his day in such a marvel- 
 ous manner that never throughout the 
 course of Jewish history do we hear of upris- 
 ings and revolts of the people such as afflict 
 all other lands and that to-day threaten the 
 safety of all our institutions and make the 
 social question so abnormally prominent. 
 
 " Such a thing as this," said the great 
 German poet, Herder, contemplating th 
 achievements of Moses "is not a mere 
 
The Social Chaos of the Dark Ages. 57 
 
 figment of the imagination, such a his- 
 tory and all that attaches to it and depends 
 upon it, in short such a people cannot be a 
 fiction. Its guidance of the world is the 
 grandest poem of the ages."* 
 
 We are in possession of the records 
 to show that the Mosaic system was 
 not a mere ideal Utopian scheme. It was 
 a living reality, working with brilliant results 
 through successive generations. Since this 
 is so' ; since Moses so successfully solved the 
 social question under phases so similar to 
 ours, why is it, we are driven to ask, why 
 is it that these questions recur again, and why 
 do they come up only now after hundreds 
 and hundreds of years ? This is a question 
 of the profoundest interest and of the 
 most vital importance in understand- 
 ing the problems we have to deal with. Let 
 me try to unravel the seeming inconsistency. 
 I have spoken of the Sun of Freedom rising 
 over Judea. The metaphor is a true one. 
 The results of modern astronomy teach that 
 when you turn to look up to the shining orbs 
 overhead, the flash of light that greets your 
 eye comes, an aerial messenger, from far, far 
 across the immeasurable expanse of space, 
 and that he bears to you the report, not of 
 this moment's or even of this day's doings far 
 up there among the heavenly hosts, but he 
 has come out of the remote past; he has 
 reached you after traveling hundreds and 
 hundreds of years, his wings unwearied, his 
 flight unslackened in speed, and the history 
 he tells is older than the records of men. 
 Just so the sunlight of freedom, in which 
 we bask, of whose warmth and inspiration 
 
 * Study of Theology, Letter xii. 
 
58 The Social Question. 
 
 we boast with kindling eye and ardent speech 
 has come to us from far across the expanse 
 of time, and it took hundreds and hundreds 
 of years for it to pierce the intervening dark- 
 ness before it could finally shine in upon and 
 brighten our lives. 
 
 Let me illustrate still further. The atten- 
 tion of the country is being attracted just now 
 by the speedy growth of the " New South,'' 
 as it is called. Money, brain and toil are 
 being liberally expended in developing the 
 newly discovered mineral resources of the 
 State of Alabama. In the northern counties 
 of that and neighboring States, towering 
 mountains rear aloft their heads in majesty, 
 as if to hold secret converse with the silent 
 skies. There they have stood in mute and 
 solemn grandeur through the ages. A hun- 
 dred years arid more, civilized men have pass- 
 ed up and down and over them, and deemed 
 them perhaps only impediments, rude bar- 
 riers, that must be tunneled or leveled off in 
 order to make a way for traffic. These up^ 
 land hillsides have been plowed and culti- 
 vated, rich stores of timber have been cleared 
 for the usesof men; but who ever dreamed 
 until in recent days that those sleeping sum- 
 mits were nature's roof, under which lay 
 garnered those treasures whose undiscovered 
 limits set our brains to work building air 
 castles of material progress, and weaving 
 fantastic dreams of the possibilities hidden 
 in the future ? 
 
 Long ages ago, ere yet these hills had lifted 
 up their heads so proudly to such majestic 
 stature, the sun shining upon them caused 
 reedy vegetation to sprout ; season after 
 season, year after year, decade after decade, 
 this vegetation germinated, grew, blossomed, 
 
> The Social Chaos of the Dark Ages. 59 
 
 yielded seed, withered, died and was buried 
 where it fell. Through the ages great mass- 
 es of this vegetation, thus accumulated, 
 sank into the marshes, and were covered by 
 the shifting sands; the sand was compacted 
 into rock, and the vegetation in the great 
 laboratory of nature transformed into coal. 
 Then came the great upheavals of the earth's 
 surface by the forces dwelling in the heart 
 of the globe; the mountains were elevated 
 and their treasures made accessible to man. 
 
 As thus in a study of the processes of na- 
 ture we are able to " rethink the thoughts of 
 the Creator, " so, too, in tracing back the 
 history of civilization, we are able to discern 
 the issue and motive of its processes. We 
 are now able to see that it needed hundreds 
 and hundreds of years before the mists and 
 vapors of the slavish, inhuman degradation 
 of the laborer could be so effectually cleared 
 away that the sunlight of freedom might at 
 last shine forth in its perfect effulgence. We 
 ^re now able to see that after light had reach- 
 ed the world it took again hundreds and 
 hundreds of years before in the minds of 
 men the buried rubbish of error and corrup- 
 tion became transformed into the treasures 
 of matured virtue. No wonder, then, that 
 in the ever-thickening shadows of darkness 
 men fainted and faltered, and doubted wheth- 
 er ever humanity would be emancipated 
 and redeemed. Are there not those who still 
 doubt it, and declare that all the successive 
 civilizations are but like meteor flashes that 
 inevitably go out in the utter darkness of 
 oblivion ? 
 
 Byron stood on the Palatine Hill, whose 
 very soil is made of the crumbled bricks of 
 its decayed edifices; he looked in sadness 
 upon the ruins of the past grandeur of 
 
60 The Social Question. 
 
 Rome, and musing upon the lessons of his- 
 tory he thus spoke : 
 
 There is the moral of all human tales ; 
 
 ' Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. 
 
 First Freedom and then Glory. When that fails 
 
 Wealth, vice, corruption barbarism at last. 
 
 And history with all her volumes vast 
 
 Hath but one page." 
 
 If you flit lightly across the broad expanse 
 of the great ocean of events upon the winds 
 of inquiry, which but gently touch the sur- 
 face, you will reach the same disheartening 
 conclusion here pronounced by the poet; 
 but dive fearlessly into the great ocean of 
 history, sound its utmost depths, search them 
 well, and beneath you will find hidden the 
 genuine pearls of truth ; you will see that 
 while ruin is heaped upon ruin, and nations, 
 governments, religious and social systems 
 fall to pieces, yet one generation after an- 
 other, rising on the wrecks of the Past, thus 
 mounts to nobler and better things. 
 
 Assyria, Media, Persia, Babylonia and arf- 
 cient Egypt pass away ; but that which is 
 of eternal worth in their achievements can- 
 not perish ; it remains to the world ; it lives 
 again, refined and developed in the life of 
 Judea. But Judea, too, falls. Not however, 
 till after Alexander the Great has overrun 
 the East in conquest, and brought into con- 
 flict the civilizations of Europe and Asia in 
 that contact of the Greek and Hebrew, out 
 of which springs the new civilization which 
 centers in ancient Alexandria. This, too, is 
 overwhelmed, but yields its fruits to the 
 world, that is, to Rome. Then comes that 
 great struggle on the battle-field of Europe, 
 in which all the combined results of human 
 endeavor in the past are arrayed against 
 
The Social Chaos of the Dark Ages. 61 
 
 Barbarism; and while that contest is waged 
 the Dark Ages prevail. For long centuries the 
 darkness reigns. It is a night of hideous rev- 
 elry, a perfect Walpurgis Night, the witches' 
 high carnival. Hastening together from all 
 quarters of the globe, in all shapes and forms, 
 in all manner of costumes and hideous 
 adornment, the evil spirits, in that supersti- 
 tion of the Middle Ages, swarm up to the 
 summit of the Brocken Mountains, and there 
 whirl round and round in mad dances and 
 wildly reel and chase about in drunken or- 
 gies. Such is the scene which the world 
 presents during the Dark Ages. Everything 
 is in utter confusion. 
 
 " Night, 
 
 And chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold 
 Eternal anarchy amidst the noise 
 Of endless wars." 
 
 The Germans, tribe after tribe, press on- 
 ward to the Roman frontier ; the Huns push 
 forward from northern Asia and drive before 
 them the Slavonians and Gothics and pre- 
 cipitate the Visigoths across the Danube into 
 the heart of the Roman Empire. The Mo- 
 hammedans sweep onward at the South. 
 Wave follows wave in the great migration 
 of nations. One population crowds upon and 
 displaces another. Nothing is permanent, 
 nothing settled. The chaos is greatest in 
 Germany. France is more agitated than 
 Italy. Thus from the fifth to the tenth cen- 
 tury, in a state of continuous struggle among 
 themselves, all the principles and the forms 
 of political, religious and social organization 
 known to the world, civilized and barbarian, 
 exist side by side in Europe. 
 
 Here is the primitive individualism of the 
 rude barbarian, his inordinate love for a 
 selfish, personal independence, for activity 
 
62 The Social Question. 
 
 without labor; alongside of this the auto- 
 matic, apathetic, well-drilled soldierly life of 
 the old Roman cities. Here is the reign of 
 brute force, where violence is king, where 
 lies are the statutes and deceit is the only 
 principle of conduct ; opposed to them the 
 Christian Church, with its meek and ardent 
 devotees, all subject to law, under whose in- 
 fluence the mind struggles to extinguish its 
 own liberty and to deliver itself up to the 
 dictates of absolute faith. Here are powers 
 spiritual, powers temporal; the theocratic, 
 the monarchic, the aristocratic, the dem- 
 ocratic elements arrayed in hostile lines. 
 Here are all classes of society, all social 
 situations in a perfect jumble; infinite 
 wealth beside abysmal poverty ; the grandest 
 pomp and magnificence beside abject misery 
 and squalor ; idealistic chivalry and gross 
 sensuality. All the elements and influences 
 of social life known to the world, both civil- 
 ized and barbarian, are here in contention. 
 " There is no denying," says Guizot,* 
 "that we owe to this confusion, this di- 
 versity, this tossing and jostling of elements, 
 the slow progress of Europe, the storms by 
 which she has been buffeted, the -miseries to 
 which oftentimes she has been a prey." But, 
 ho,we ver dear these have cost us, we must not 
 regard them with unmingled regret. What 
 we might call the hard fortune of European 
 civilization has been of infinite service to 
 the progress of humanity through the full, 
 free and active exercise and development of 
 all the faculties, not of one, but of many, 
 many people ; indeed of all those who now 
 form the civilized world. Not one of the 
 elements then at war was triumphant. Some 
 yielded, others gained, but none singly could 
 
 * History of Civilization in Europe. Lect\ II. 
 
The Social Chaos of the Dark Ages. 63 
 
 exclude the rest. There was proximity, amal- 
 gamation, compromise, till at last out of 
 the storm and stress came a higher type of 
 civilization than any, bearing forth from 
 the contest the trophy Liberty. 
 
 Consider how the whole world changed 
 and what contentions it en (lured in all this 
 long interval ; remember how long on this 
 account it took for the rays of that Sun of 
 Freedom that burst over Judea to pierce the 
 darkness that enveloped the human intellect 
 groping in the midst of this social chaos, and 
 you will understand why, in all these ages, 
 the Social Question, as we understand it, 
 has been in abeyance, why, only to-day we 
 are taking up the problems which in his 
 times and amid his surroundings our great 
 law-giver, Moses, so successfully solved. 
 How these questions -have again been brought 
 forward, becomes the subject of our next 
 inquiry which we shall answer in tracing 
 out the rise of the modern free laborer. 
 
64 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSE VII. 
 
 THE RISE OF THE MODERN FREE LABORER. 
 
 I WILL ask you for a brief season to try 
 and forget the present. Leave these scenes 
 and wander back with me in imagination to 
 other times and strange places. Sink into 
 oblivion for awhile the things that distin- 
 guish our days. Blot out the discovery of 
 electricity and its wonders of light and tele- 
 graph and telephone. Go back to the time 
 when steam was not yet under the control 
 of man. The world was different then. The 
 affrighting locomotive, with its serpentine 
 trail of cars, did not rumble and roar through 
 the land, rousing with its shrieks from their 
 slumbers of all time, the denizens of the 
 forest and the cave. Those great round 
 columns that disfigure our cities and towns 
 did not then rise into the heavens to vomit 
 forth the smoke and soot; and the race of 
 dusky toilers in the mills and factories, work- 
 shops and foundries, had not yet been born. 
 Put aside newspapers and periodicals, and go 
 back even to beyond the time when the 
 necromantic art of printing first put the magi- 
 cian to blush. Continue on this retrogressive 
 journey until the wonders of modern times 
 one by one recede and disappear from the 
 earth to when bombs and fuses, mortars and 
 shells, Krupp guns and cannon balls, nitro- 
 glycerine and dynamite to when even gun* 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 65 
 
 powder had not yet been brought up from 
 the dark and fathomless mines in which men 
 delve for knowledge, to when the sword and 
 javelin, the bow and arrow, the clumsy pike 
 and armor were still the only weapons of 
 warfare. 
 
 To get to those times we must sail back 
 across the ocean, for then the very existence 
 of the American continent was a secret 
 known but to the winds but they breathed 
 not a whisper about it as they went speed- 
 ing afar across the world ; known also to the 
 waves -but they muttered not a word there- 
 of to men, as sullen and wrathful they rolled 
 over the deep and dashed upon the further 
 shores. 
 
 We sail down the most beautiful of rivers 
 the Rhine. " Like the stream of Time, it 
 flows mid the ruins of the Past," and as we 
 follow it up into the German border lands, 
 the mariners cheerily sing : 
 
 "O swift is thy current by town and by 
 tower, 
 
 The green sunny vale, and the dark lin- 
 den bower, 
 
 Thy waves as they dimple smile back on 
 the plain, 
 
 And Rhine, ancient river, thou'rt German 
 again." 
 
 We pass the place where the castled crag 
 of Drachenfels frowns down upon the stream, 
 and we let the eye revel in the grandeur of 
 the panorama of beauty that moves on before 
 us. And now we land where upon the sum- 
 mit of one of the high, overhanging, rugged 
 hills a castle stands, firm and forbidding, 
 with towers and battlements, with moat and 
 drawbridge, barbacan and donjon keep 
 5 
 
66 The Social Question. 
 
 " with strength to laugh a siege to scorn ; " 
 a defense against injury from abroad a 
 place of repose or of revelry for those within. 
 
 But we shall not weary ourselves with 
 climbing that great hill to the castle. We 
 know full well that a baron sits there in state 
 surrounded by his retainers, free men, 
 answerable only to him, and he a host unto 
 himself, answerable to none. We know that 
 the chivalrous knights there dance attend- 
 ance upon lovely ladies. We have heard 
 enough of the intrigues of the castle, of the 
 loves and sorrows of its beautiful dames and 
 the battles and bouts of the lordly knights. 
 Unlike other visitors who hasten on to do 
 homage at the castle, let us pause here at the 
 foot of the hill and note what is to be seen. 
 A modest church lifts its spire heavenward 
 to be kissed by the sun and to smile back 
 greetings to the clouds. Around about it 
 huddle promiscuously groups of dwellings. 
 Here abides a little population of laborers. 
 Our interest has been aroused more partic- 
 ularly to know of their welfare. Let us 
 then draw nearer. 
 
 What miserable, wretched homesteads are 
 these, crudely and bunglingly put together 
 of the roughest timber and of twigs matted 
 and covered with clay. But a poor protection 
 against wind and rain and sleet and snow is 
 that roof of thatched straw and reeds. With 
 the liberty that is allowed to fancy, we 
 silently enter. There is but one room. The 
 floor the hard, bare ground, at best covered 
 with dry leaves, Straw pallets are here for 
 beds and logs for pillows. Here the fowls are 
 at roost and the beasts are quartered along 
 with man and wife and child, and male and 
 female attendants, all living in most uncom- 
 fortable and indecent proximity. There is 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 67 
 
 an ill-fed, cheerless fire, and the smoke rising 
 curls up and about freely, searching for a 
 place of exit, and finds it at last, a hole 
 in the roof. Nowhere a chimney ; nowhere 
 a window. Men with grizzly beards,women 
 with matted and unkempt hair, children 
 filthy and half naked, all clad at best in un- 
 tanned skins roughly put together. Such 
 are the people of the house now gathered 
 round to their mid-day meal. There is but 
 one platter. From this, men, women, and 
 children all alike help themselves with 
 wooden spoons. There are no knives and 
 forks. Out of the same wooden trencher all 
 drink in turn. Now the meal is over. They 
 all hasten away to their work. As we step out 
 after them we pass by heaps of garbage and 
 rubbish thrown before the door and left to 
 putrefy there. We are sickened at the sights 
 and sounds and odors that affect us, and we 
 hasten after the men and women into the 
 fields. There we see them with their rude 
 primitive implements hard at work ; cheerless 
 sullen, stupid, dull, as the lifeless clod which 
 with his rude share each swain turns in the 
 furrow and to which he is in every manner 
 so nearly allied. Yes, allied ; for the slavery 
 of ancient days has now changed into serfdom 
 and the laborer from being attached to one 
 man whose absolute property he is, is now 
 attached to one piece of soil from which he 
 cannot be removed either by gift or by sale. 
 He is bound to a certain estate ; upon that he 
 works. When the land is sold he is sold, 
 with it into the service of another. 
 
 Such is the condition of the laborer in the 
 tenth century under the sway of the feudal 
 system. The lord of the stately castle is 
 enjoying the chase or is practicing at arms 
 either in the tournament, or while exercising 
 
68 The Social Question. 
 
 the FaustrecJit (right of private warfare) 
 in which he has need of all the able-bodied 
 men of his estate ; or perhaps "he is lolling in 
 idleness at table, and is indulging in the ex- 
 cesses of food and strong drink, listening to 
 the songs of the minstrel and the jokes of 
 his fool in cap and bell, while down in the 
 valley in misery and squalor his serfs are at 
 work. There is nothing morally in common 
 between lord and serf. They drudge for 
 him in times of peace and fight for him in 
 times of war. Such is the price they pay for 
 existence.* 
 
 We come on down through the tenth, 
 eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, 
 and fifteenth centuries: there is but slow 
 and scant improvement. In speaking of 
 the population of the countries of Europe 
 in those times we can not truthfully use the 
 word "people." Those serfs do not form a 
 people. They have no connection with 
 persons, things or governments. For them 
 there exists no common destiny, no common 
 country ; they are subject to every species 
 of lawless oppression. War, not work, is 
 still the occupation of men. Everywhere 
 lie broad tracts of land, wild and unculti- 
 vated ; pathless forests, howling wildernesses, 
 swamps and fens and bogs, exhaling poison. 
 There are no roads, except those built long 
 ago by the Romans, and these are infested 
 with predatory bands. Everything has 
 adapted itself to the forms of feudalism. The 
 churches and monasteries are in fact large 
 feudal strongholds, as much so as the cas- 
 tles that dot the land. The cities are like- 
 
 * Scherr, Deutsche Kultur und Sitten Geschichte ; 
 Buckle, History of Civilization in England ; Guizot 
 History of Civilization (for France) ; Lecky, History of 
 European Morals ; Hallam, Middle Ages. 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 69 
 
 wise under the patronage and protection of 
 the feudal barons. 
 
 Out of this abject and ignoble condition, 
 by slow and painful processes, the system 
 of modern free labor takes its rise. What 
 brings it about, do you ask ? Not any effort 
 of the ruling powers in state and in church. 
 It comes in the very face of them. They 
 do nothing to ameliorate the physical con- 
 dition of the people, nothing to favor their 
 intellectual development. Century after 
 century passes away and the laborers are 
 still considered no better than the cattle in 
 the fields. The influences that bring the 
 change are many. By some the Crusades 
 are accredited with having so stirred up 
 and altered the views and modes of life as 
 to make labor reputable ; by others it is 
 claimed that the revolts which yielded the 
 freedom of the cities from feudal tribute, 
 the formation of the Hanseatic League of 
 the German Free States, the affranchise- 
 ment of the guilds, the creation of the 
 Italian republics, the rise of free thought, 
 culminating in the Reformation of Luther, 
 and the political wars and wearisome con- 
 tentions that demoralized the continent 
 that one or several of these influences so 
 changed the conditions of European life as 
 to overthrow the feudal barriers, and upon 
 their ruins to draw up in array " The Third 
 Estate " the new host, the common people 
 and out of their midst, to slowly push for- 
 ward into just recognition, the modern free 
 laborer. 
 
 No doubt all the influences cited were at 
 work to accomplish this. But let us set 
 aside all theories and pet doctrines, let us 
 banish at once all sentiment and get down 
 to the hard facts in the matter. Ask your- 
 
70 The Social Question. 
 
 self what is it to-day that pushes the world 
 on to greater enterpriser-lifting men thereby 
 to larger views and more far-reaching coun- 
 sels ? What is it that calls Stanley back 
 from his American visit and dispatches him 
 into the heart of Africa ? What is it that 
 sets DeLesseps to build canals across Suez 
 and Panama and emboldens Eads to con- 
 struct his ship-railway across Central Amer- 
 ica ? What is that at home here so urges 
 the dredging of our harbor, the starting of 
 new steamship lines to New York and 
 Liverpool, and the building of railroads into 
 the heart of the mineral regions? It is 
 nothing but the primitive impulse of men to 
 get means of subsistence or having them to 
 earn more in order to make life easier and 
 more delightful. 
 
 Now, in this respect, human nature was 
 certainly no different in the Middle Ages 
 than it is now, and the real secret of the 
 changes then wrought, as to-day, may be 
 summed up in the word '' Commerce." She 
 was the enchantress whose wand worked 
 such marvelous transformations, and her first 
 and most faithful servants then, as now, were 
 the Jews. Commerce alone can unite the 
 world. Through commerce alone can come 
 the fulfilment of the dream, the hope of uni- 
 versal peace. The Jews are everywhere 
 loving and pursuing peace, laboring to bring 
 all the world under the shadow of the protect- 
 ing wings of peace. In the midst of feudal 
 anarchy the Jews alone stood free. They 
 kept alive and perfected the commercial 
 traditions of the world. They were free be- 
 cause they could not possibly become lords, 
 however rich, nor serfs, however poor ; for 
 while others could buy estates or sell them- 
 selves into serfdom when driven for want of 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 71 
 
 bread, the Christian oath of fealty that was 
 required, by king and lord, forever barred the 
 Jew from that act,* This is a fact to which 
 men have been strangely blind. With this 
 fact revealed let us once for all down with 
 the accursed lie, that (because the Jew did 
 not hold land in Europe in the past), lets his 
 enemies stamp him as an alien and falsely 
 charge him with lack of patriotism, branding 
 him a leech sucking the blood of riches but 
 producing nothing. 
 
 The Jews were free in the Middle Ages be- 
 cause they alone could trade with money. 
 For three thousand years the world has 
 been cursed with the fallacy that to deal 
 in money is a sin. The last vestiges 
 of that supertsition are but now fading 
 away. In the Middle Ages it was a civil as 
 well as an ecclesiastical crime. In modern 
 times political economy has made simple the 
 true and just and necessary part that interest 
 plays in all pecuniary transactions. The 
 Jews never had any such a ruinous fallacy to 
 hamper them. For these two reasons trade 
 of all kinds fell exclusively into their hands; 
 they became, as Kiesselbach says, f " an eco- 
 nomical necessity to the Middle Ages." So 
 necessary were they to the feudal landlords 
 that despite the multiplicity of the toll-houses 
 and the dangers of the highways, they held 
 safe-conducts that enabled them to travel far 
 and wide. They went great distances for rare 
 products, and brought within reach of the 
 wealthy customers in castle and abbey the 
 
 * Prof. Ernst Otto Stobbe in his History of the 
 Jeivs in Germany during the Middle Ages has recently 
 shown that it was because of the religious character of 
 the trade-guilds that the Jews were prevented from fol- 
 lowing handicrafts during mediaeval times. 
 
 iEinleitung in die Europaische Handelsgeschichte. 
 
72 The Social Question. 
 
 finest clothes, the rarest jewels, spices and 
 luxuries of every sort. 
 
 By much travel they learned the needs 
 and preferences of different communities and 
 from the centers of their industries in Spain, 
 and the Levant brought the appropriate sup- 
 plies. They corresponded with each other 
 carried samples and note-books, and little, by 
 little evolved the primitive forms of the mod- 
 ern banking system. * 
 " When a whole people," says the elder Dis- 
 raeli, f " devote themselves to one great 
 pursuit, one single art, they open sour- 
 ces of invention, they reach a noble per- 
 fection. Thus in the Middle Ages the 
 genius of the Jews produced the wonder- 
 ful invention of bills of exchange an object, 
 like the art of printing, become too familiar 
 to be admired. The miracle has ceased and 
 its utility only remains, yet both are sources 
 of civilization and connect together, as in 
 one commonwealth, the whole universe. 
 This successful pursuit of the Jews, however 
 worked their own fatality. For the steel- 
 clad baron they were sponges to suck in as 
 much water as they could hold, that his 
 protecting hand as he listed might squeeze 
 them to their last drop." 
 
 It is foreign to our purpose to trace out 
 the horrible persecutions to which the Jews 
 in those times were subject, in which they 
 displayed a heroism of which it is said that 
 that of "the defenders of every other creed 
 fades into insignificance before this martyr 
 people who, for thirteen centuries, confront- 
 ed all the evils that the fiercest fanaticism 
 could devise. But above all this the genius 
 of this wonderful people rose supreme." $ 
 
 * Blanqui, Hist. Polit. Jcon.Ch. xv. 
 t Genius of Judaism 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 73 
 
 When the intellect of Europe awoke out of 
 its Middle-Age stupor and shook off the mire 
 and filth of fanatic error and superstition in 
 which it had been groveling about in besotted 
 ignorance, it found that the Jews had kept 
 learning awake in Spain ; that the Jews had 
 peddled not only wares from door to door 
 through Europe but also ideas ; that the Jews 
 had brought not only the finest fabrics but al- 
 so the learning of Asia into the West. When 
 terrible plagues infested the world at that 
 time, the people cried out for help, and there 
 were none but Jews who understood medicine 
 enough to help them. When the sovereigns 
 got poor and the cities seized the chance to 
 buy their freedom, industry got a new im- 
 pulse ; when the crusaders set the people to 
 traveling and broke up their narrow con- 
 ditions ; when thus navigation was develop- 
 ed and inventions brought from Asia, then 
 the industrial elements received an extraordi- 
 nary impulse, yet in all this the world came 
 groping slowly along in the path which the 
 Jews had ages before hewn out, and all the 
 while quietly kept clear despite every diffi- 
 culty. As after much striking of the flint 
 came the spark and the blaze, so after much 
 painful effort on the part of the Jews to 
 bring better conditions and comforts of life, 
 better knowledge and broader views of 
 religion and morality to Europe, these pur- 
 poses at last flamed out, and those reforms 
 overspread the world which produced the 
 conditions that made possible the rise of 
 the system of modern free labor. 
 
74 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSE vm. 
 
 THE BISE OF THE MODERN FKEE LA- 
 BOREB, (Continued). 
 
 IT was the way of the world in ancient 
 times for men to get all work done by cap- 
 tives of war. Thus all workmen were origi- 
 nally slaves. In the process of time slavery 
 was transformed into serfdom, in which the 
 laborer was attached to the soil, instead of 
 the person of his master: he could not be 
 sold unless the land were sold. The con- 
 dition of serfdom lasted on down through 
 the eighteenth century. In Scotland the 
 colliers and laborers in the salt-works re- 
 mained in that condition until an act of 
 Parliament in 1775 emancipated them. This 
 (in civilized lands) was probably the last 
 and fatal blow given to that degraded con- 
 dition. Thereupon ensued the freedom of 
 the laborer. Like the waves of the incoming 
 tide that beat higher and higher with each 
 advance, so the political, social, and economic 
 freedom of the world's workers beat higher 
 and higher with the advance of time, until 
 at the close of the last century it washed 
 away every barrier that had impeded the on- 
 ward sweep of its mighty currents. 
 
 Let us try to discover the forces that im- 
 pelled them on. It is difficult to discern 
 amid the commotions and clashing events of 
 that brilliant epoch, the eighteenth century, 
 what specific influences those were that so 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 75 
 
 wrought upon the more obscure classes of the 
 people, the laborers. The origin of the 
 great change from serfdom to freedom would 
 seem to bear out the maxim that " trifles 
 make the sum of human things." 
 
 Then, even as now, the hearts of men 
 were filled with an intense avaricious longing 
 whenever they considered the magic that 
 could be wrought with gold. Fondly they 
 indulged in those vague fancies that had 
 long filled their minds of a land of gold 
 far, far across the sea, an Eldorado where 
 the mountains under the beams of the rising 
 and setting sun revealed their inmost secrets 
 and told of the veins of yellow ore under the 
 outer tegument of trees and herbs and grass, 
 and eagerly conjured up visions of remote 
 caves filled with stalagmites and stalactites 
 of the precious metal. The rivers of that 
 glorious land were supposed to be lined 
 with the shining metal that came down in 
 abundance washed through the channels of 
 the mountains and streams. Many and 
 many were the voyages undertaken long 
 before the age of discovery to find those 
 islands of gold. But in the meantime, sages, 
 men of profound erudition and secrecy, not 
 to be deluded by vain fantasies to try the 
 dangers and expeditions of the seas, re- 
 mained at home, secluded themselves from 
 all the world in the secret chambers of 
 gloomy castles, there bent low over the re- 
 torts and chemicals of their laboratories, 
 every faculty alert, every energy strained, 
 to find out the mystery of the philosopher's 
 stone for which the alchemists during hun- 
 dreds arid hundreds of years through the 
 twilight of reason had toiled, in order by it 
 to transmute all baser metals into kingly- 
 gold. 
 
76 The Social Question. 
 
 Strange to say these dreams of early days 
 were, in a certain sense, wondrously realized, 
 and by their realization came those change ; 
 in the life of the people to which we have 
 reverted. The golden city and the country 
 of Eldorado, of which Sir Walter Raleigh 
 has written such charming accounts, were 
 proven to be something more than dreams 
 when expedition after expedition returned 
 from the new world, bringing thence the 
 treasures so long dreamed of. The dis- 
 covery of the gold mines of America in- 
 creased in a few years the metal in circula- 
 tion in Europe to twelve times its previous 
 amount. From 1750 to 1800 the importation 
 of specie into Europe regularly exceeded one 
 hundred and eighty millions a year. This 
 gave a powerful stimulus to industry, for 
 enterprises that would not have otherwise 
 been thought of sprang into being ; habits 
 changed, luxuries grew into greater demand ; 
 transactions which had hitherto been difficult 
 or impossible employed a greater quantity 
 of money and a greater number of men. 
 There was an immense distribution of wages, 
 and the people for the first time began to 
 acquire lands and cultivate small farms and 
 hope for happy days. 
 
 Of course such a great change could not be 
 brought about without suffering. There was 
 a sudden rise in prices, and it took some 
 time before the increase of farm rents 
 and salaries could be adjusted into harmony 
 with prevailing high rates. People were 
 very much alarmed, and complained bitter- 
 ly. There was also a very feverish impulse 
 given to speculation. Sugar, cotton, tobacco, 
 spices hitherto unknown, became the objects 
 of trade and manufacture. Money had to 
 be advanced. Home banks sprang up from 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 77 
 
 the needs of labor, and the credit system 
 (which, though we rarely think of it in that 
 light, has become one of the world's most 
 powerful moral influences through the con- 
 trol it exercises over character) from the 
 hands of the Jews passed into general use. 
 What had been deemed an evil proved of 
 untold good. " Credit," says M. Blanqui,* 
 "has wrought a profound revolution in the 
 relations of peoples. The colossal enterprises 
 of which our century opens the career, the 
 spirit of association that spreads like a net- 
 work over the face of the world, the struggles 
 everywhere going on between civilization and 
 the relics of barbarism, are wholly the work 
 of credit. Since the birth of banks every 
 man has been able to carry his head high 
 with the pride which the hope of honorable 
 independence gives. Landed proprietors 
 have seen the workshops of industry rise by 
 the side of their castles ; the seas are covered 
 with ships. Everything has advanced with 
 rapid pace, and the world has made more 
 progress within two hundred years than it 
 did in the previous ten centuries." Such was 
 the fulfilment of the Eldorado dreams of the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 In like manner were the labors of the vision- 
 ary alchemists crowned with unexpected 
 achievements and successes. It was while 
 engaged in the search for the mystical phi- 
 losopher's stone, we arc told, that Roger Ba- 
 con stumbled on the composition of gunpow- 
 der, which, in due course of time, not only 
 utterly transformed the conditions and 
 modes of warfare, but what concerns our 
 inquiry more, gave rise to an exclusively mili- 
 tary profession, that is, it first created the 
 distinction between soldier and civilian. 
 
 * Hint. Polit. Econ., p.p. 3:29-30. 
 
78 The Social Question. 
 
 Before that all the men in Europe had formed 
 one massive standing army ; now arms be- 
 came the profession of the few, and the 
 masses of men turned at last from warfare 
 to work as their legitimate occupation. 
 
 It was in the search. for the "philosopher's 
 stone" by which all metals were to be changed 
 into gold, that modern inventions, springing 
 from the discoveries in chemistry and phys- 
 ics took their rise. Boetticher thus acci- 
 dentally lighted on the invention of Dresden 
 porcelain manufacture ; Geber on the prop- 
 erties of acids ; Van Helmont on the nature 
 of gas, and Glauber on the " salts" which 
 bear his name. Then followed, in due pro- 
 cess of time, the various great mechanical 
 inventions led by the spinning-jenny of Ark- 
 wright, the steam-engine of Watt, and the 
 locomotive of Stephenson, which in little 
 more than a generation changed the whole 
 course of history and revolutionized the 
 modes of life. 
 
 It is conceded that nothing in modern his- 
 tory has wielded a wider influence, socially 
 and politically, than this sudden growth of 
 manufactures. It inaugurated a movement 
 of disintegration, breaking the old ties that 
 had bound lord and serf, landlord and ten- 
 ant, master and servant, and the members 
 of the Middle Age guilds and corporations. 
 It destroyed old habits of discipline and 
 orderliness and created new cravings for 
 wealth. Formerly the son had been satisfied 
 to inherit the estate and trade and habits 
 and views of his father as he in turn had 
 done in the pattern of his paternal ancestors. 
 Now, however, there came a restless eager- 
 ness to change. A man could no longer 
 sit at the loom and weave the cloth while 
 his children by his side prepared the distaff 
 
The Rise of the Modern Free Laborer. 79 
 
 and his wife sat spinning at her wheel. A 
 few apprentices and a little capital had 
 served to give him a nice competence, but 
 now the apprentices were drawn off to the 
 towns, the workmen crowded into vast fac- 
 tories, collecting around the great propelling 
 machine, which startled them with its giant 
 power. And so old ties and habits were 
 broken up, till at last the workman stands 
 free, entirely free, as we see him to-day, when 
 there is no bond but that of interest which 
 binds him as a laborer to any man. 
 
 What a stupendous change is this we 
 have traced out from the days of the labor- 
 er's slavery until these days of his perfect 
 emancipation ! But it came not as easy as 
 the telling. Its path lay through the red 
 seas of revolution and along the high ridge 
 of suffering by the abysses of deepest misery 
 and woe. 
 
 This freedom in economic conditions came 
 only after political and social freedom. The 
 undying protest of the human race against 
 the inequitable distribution of the profits of 
 labor could only be heard after the laborer 
 had conquered the right to be heard. In 
 the eighteenth century free inquiry for the 
 first time became universal. The veil of 
 mystery was torn away from all questions 
 religious, political, philosophical, social, mor- 
 al, physical everything was studied, doubt- 
 ed, systematized. There never had been 
 such a time for tearing up institutions from 
 their very foundations. 
 
 From 1751 to 1772 was published the famous 
 Encyclopedie in 28 volumes, which was con- 
 tributed to by Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alem- 
 bert, Diderot and others noted for their rev- 
 olutionary ideas. At the same time arose 
 the school of the French Economists, Ques- 
 
80 The Social Question. 
 
 nay, Malesherbes, Turgot, etc., a few gen- 
 erous and noble philosophers, who first con- 
 ceived the idea that with regard to the social 
 relations of mankind there must be some 
 underlying principles of eternal truth ; that 
 there is a physiology of the social body as 
 well as of the human body, and laws for the 
 one as for the other by which they prosper 
 or waste away. They tried to ferret out and 
 establish the principles of an abstract science 
 of the natural rights of man ; in short, they 
 became the founders of the great modern sci- 
 ience of Political Economy. Directly after 
 them came Adam Smith, the Scotch philoso- 
 pher, who in 1776 published The Wealth of 
 Nations, which, from the amount of actual in- 
 fluence it has exerted in the world, is deemed 
 the most important book ever written.* The 
 fallacy that had hampered the world for ages 
 was at last repudiated by showing that wealth 
 consists not merely of gold and silver, but 
 of any and all consumable wares produced 
 by the labor of men. Money gold or silver 
 is only one form of merchandise, selected 
 as an instrument of exchange. In real- 
 ity the goods of foreign countries are 
 eventually purchased by the native produc- 
 tions of each land. Manufactures were thus 
 brought into their proper place of importance, 
 freed from every fetter of error and preju- 
 dice. 
 
 The introduction of machines met a fierce 
 opposition among the people because the first 
 result was to throw many out of employment 
 and to reduce wages, but by the efforts of 
 the political economists the world at last has 
 learned that the change which machinery 
 brought 13 of untold advantage, for the in- 
 creased production unfailingly creates a per- 
 
 * Buckle, History of Civilization, Vol. ii. 349. 
 
The rise of the Modern Free Labor. 81 
 
 manent demand, and capital gained in one 
 department finds its outlet in another.* From 
 this circle of French Economists came forth 
 the great social reforms of the last half of 
 the eighteenth century. The condition of 
 .the laborers hitherto so humbled and un- 
 justly degraded rises to an honorable rank, 
 and all other conditions correspondingly im- 
 prove. But well you know that all this 
 was not effected by the methods of peace. 
 The Declaration of Independence in the 
 United States and the French Revolution 
 proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, 
 and brought down the principle of the 
 brotherhood of men from the dream heights 
 of the ideal. The eighteenth century was 
 profoundly speculative and theoretical. 
 The nineteenth century is intensely practical 
 and earnest. The last century set the 
 laborer free ; it is the problem of the pres- 
 ent century to make his freedom a reality, 
 to make him able to maintain and rightly 
 use it. 
 
 Thus, as best we could in so narrow a 
 scope, we have indicated the great general 
 influences that gave rise to the freedom of 
 modern laborers. With these entirely new 
 conditions came new difficulties, vexations 
 and problems. These very difficulties, vexa- 
 tions, and problems constitute what is known 
 as the special Social Question of to-day. 
 6 
 
82 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSE IX. 
 
 THE COMPLAINT OF THE MODERN LABORER. 
 
 JEAN PAUL, the graphic German author, 
 pictures a remarkable scene. It is the night 
 of the memorable battle of Waterloo over 
 which the star of Napoleon has set. The 
 war-drums have ceased their beating. The 
 roar of the musketry is silenced. The mad- 
 dening outcries of the desperate combatants 
 are hushed forever. Far and wide over the 
 blood-red field, in wretched confusion, lie 
 smoking steeds and reeking soldiers, writh- 
 ing and gasping in the death agony. The terri- 
 ble night wears itself slowly out. At length 
 in the eastern sky the torch of day sends out 
 its earliest beams, and lo ! upon the failing 
 sight of the dying soldiers, nature's brightest 
 splendor falls from a glorious rainbow that 
 spans the morning skies. It is a crown of 
 victory stretched forth from on high ; it is a 
 soft band of varied tints with which heaven 
 would swathe the bleeding wounds of earth; 
 it is a bow of promise, symbol like unto the 
 first, when, after the deluge of waters, God 
 promised never more to blot out men from 
 off the face of the earth a second bow is 
 this, coining after the great deluge of blood, 
 and it is a token of even a grander assurance 
 than the first, giving promise that never more 
 shall man, even by the hand of his fellow- 
 mortal, be debased, enslaved, or wantonly 
 blotted out from off the face of the earth, 
 
The Complaint of the Modern Laborer. 83 
 
 Is this but the poetic fancy of one whose 
 heart beats fast with the impulses of a fond 
 but idle trust in the reality of brotherly love, 
 or is there indeed any fulfillment of the prom- 
 ise of better days which were predicted by 
 the rainbow of Waterloo ? This much we 
 know and can affirm, the old thrall of sub- 
 jection was then broken. After the long-drawn 
 subtle and painful processes of the centuries 
 which we have striven to trace out in 
 previous discourses, at last the shackles were 
 melted away in the heat of the last century's 
 revolutions, and the laborer of modern days 
 stood free. Yes, the old thrall of subjection 
 is broken, and work has supplanted war as the 
 legitimate occupation of civilized men. 
 
 As we studied out and marked these achieve- 
 ments, our hearts have indeed been thrill- 
 ed with the hope of the grander and better 
 things in store for struggling humanity. We 
 have seen how reforms in Church and State, 
 how Peasant Wars, French and American 
 Revolutions, Philosophies and the Sciences, 
 Discovery and Inventions, and a thousand 
 auxiliary influences have struggled, urged, 
 persisted, and at last achieved the conquest 
 of the indefeasible rights of men. We have 
 fairly shouted with gratitude to God and to 
 the heroes on earth as we recorded the tri- 
 umph of political equality, saw the barriers 
 of caste demolished, and the outrageous dis- 
 tinctions of olden times forever obliterated 
 on that day when every man was given a 
 voice in the administration of civil affairs. 
 
 " Let Israel still hope in the Lord," we say 
 with the Psalmist, " for with the Lord there 
 is kindness and with him is redemption in 
 abundance." For have we not seen the growth 
 of religious liberty, the confession of theo- 
 cratic equality, the spread of a universal relig- 
 
84 The Social Question. 
 
 ious toleration and the doctrine of the Proph- 
 et at last finding its echo in the hearts of men 
 prompting to the reiteration of his dictum. 
 " Have we not all one Father ; hath not God 
 created us all ? " * 
 
 Verily, there is a fulfillment of this omen 
 of promise, was the consoling unction we 
 laid to our souls as with the spread of in- 
 dustry and the emancipation of the workman 
 we saw honest labor coming day by day into 
 its merited rank and esteem ; saw how the 
 insane prejudices of the past against the 
 soiled hands of hardy toil were dying out, 
 and the ranks grow more and more decimat- 
 ed of those silly persons who look down 
 upon working people and would disdain to 
 handle a tool or household utensil. We 
 have rejoiced to see that Labor indeed lifts 
 all material civilization upon its shoulders 
 and strides the world like a Colossus we 
 have rejoiced to see men become honest at 
 last and pay to it their full meed and tribute 
 of praise. We glory to see its triumphs 
 after all the misery and persecution of ages. 
 We delight in the spectacle of statesmen 
 absorbed in its problems; philanthropists 
 striving to ease its tasks ; poets and orators 
 ringing its praises ; kings bowing in homage 
 before it ; republics anxious for its alliance, 
 all rendering acknowledgment that it sur- 
 passes in importance every other aim and 
 pursuit of civilization.! We recalled those 
 dismal epochs of history that we had pre- 
 viously passed in review, when slavery and 
 serfdom were branded into the flesh of 
 workmen. Then the controlling arm of the 
 State could not restrain the hand of violence, 
 and the smith who fashioned the sword and 
 
 * Malachi ii. 10. 
 
 t Lorimer, Studies in Social Life, p. 91. 
 
The Complaint of the Modern Labortr. 85 
 
 spear for his baron often made the weapon 
 that ended his own life. Then Commerce, 
 the modern Briareus, the giant, with many 
 hundred hands reaching forth in every di- 
 rection for the means of human subsistence, 
 had not yet risen to meet and overcome the 
 onsets of famine. Then science had not 
 gone forth armed cap-a-pie and confident of 
 its victory over whole hosts of diseases and 
 plagues. As these, with all their lovely 
 retinue of advantages, comforts, improve- 
 ments, elegancies, luxuries, and modes and 
 devices for physical, mental and moral bet- 
 terment, passed in memory's review we 
 exclaimed again : " Truly this is victory ! 
 and the bow of promise that gladdened the 
 eyes of those last slaves of the old regime, 
 who perished on the field of Waterloo, was 
 a truthful token unto these men, their sons 
 and successors." 
 
 It was a beautiful, joyous, and comforting 
 reflection to which we had surrendered 
 ourselves, and lovingly we lingered over it. 
 But suddenly, rudely, as if from a pleasant 
 dream, we were aroused by a dismal and 
 awful wail of despair, followed quickly by 
 the mutterings of many voices full of fierce 
 passion, and louder than these the piercing 
 shrieks of bitter hatred and the prolonged 
 cries of pain and suffering ; and louder still 
 than all these the fierce and angry shouts of 
 revolt and insurrection. 
 
 What is this? It is the outcry of the 
 great army of the discontented. It comes up 
 from the streets and alleys from those who 
 are hungry and have nothing to eat; from 
 those who are cold and lack clothes and 
 shelter ; it comes from the great army of the 
 unemployed, who are roaming through the 
 land ; it comes from the factories and mines 
 
86 The Social Question. 
 
 and workshops, muttering against " starva- 
 tion wages ;" it comes from tenements, hovels, 
 courts, and rookeries, appealing in heart-rend- 
 ing terms for help against cruel fate ; it comes 
 from struggling farmers and troubled mer- 
 chants vigorously protesting against the 
 tyranny of monopolies ; it makes itself heard 
 in every village and town, along the rail- 
 roads, in the great cities, and its clamors are 
 augmented by the bitter complaints that 
 come rolling across the waters from Ireland 
 and England, from Italy, Austria, Germany, 
 Russia, and France. And what does it 
 mean ? What does it say ? It declares the 
 bow of promise a phantasy and delusion, and 
 all its seeming fulfillments a lie. " You have 
 given us political freedom," it avers a to 
 society, "but have made us industrial slaves. 
 You have given us machines and labor-saving 
 implements, but we are like galley-slaves 
 bound to their service. The fires are light- 
 ed, the steam is on and we must be at our 
 posts, living automatons, mere appendages 
 of monster machines. Thus we grow more 
 and more automatic; more and more stupid, 
 as the days go by. You have supplanted 
 war with work; but yet the flower of the 
 old world's population is drained into the 
 military service, the tread of the armies 
 shakes the continent of Europe ; their brist- 
 ling bayonets glitter in the sun and to-day 
 ominous manoeuvres of ambitious command- 
 ers fill the whole world with doubt and 
 dread. Herein America the militia, police- 
 men, and Pinkerton detectives are banded 
 together to keep the workmen down. 
 
 " You have made us free, have taught us 
 to read and write, have filled us with a thirst 
 for knowledge and a yearning for the grati- 
 fication of new tastes and hopes only to dis- 
 
The Complaint of the Modern Laborer. 87 
 
 appoint us, only to deceive us only to make 
 us more discontented because all these new 
 desires are hopelessly beyond our reach and 
 their gratification forever denied us, because, 
 forsooth, we never have time nor means at 
 our disposal. We are hungry and must toil 
 for bread. 
 
 " You have made us free, but that only 
 means that you have cast us off. Under the 
 old system we were cared for, we belonged 
 to some one, our wants were looked to ; now 
 there are no bonds of interest that attach us 
 to any human soul. When our wages are paid 
 we are left to shift for ourselves as best we 
 may. If we fail, through some calamity, to 
 meet the payment of our rent on house or 
 land, we are ordered off, and must look out for 
 ourselves. On the steamboat- wharf the mate 
 of the vessel stands armed with revolver and 
 cane, and orders about his stevedores as if 
 they were brutes, not men. In the great 
 mercantile establishments salesmen and 
 women are made to stand the live-long day, 
 though it be in idleness. In the great 
 factories little children work under the terror 
 of their overseers, denied every privilege and 
 doomed to early decay and death. There is 
 no feeling in your hearts, no sympathy in 
 your souls. All your religion is fine senti- 
 ment, flimsy and flashy show before the 
 world. You may deceive men, but our cries 
 of anguish pierce the hollow bubble of your 
 pretensions, and before God your iniquity 
 will stand revealed. 
 
 " Look upon these contrasts," cries the 
 the poor laborer. " Brown stone mansions, 
 Queen Anne villas, gaudy club houses and 
 gorgeous theatres along side of vile hovels, 
 filthy tenements and beggarly alms-houses, 
 and jails. The former are for you, the latter 
 
88 r llie Social Question. 
 
 for us. In the courts there is one law for 
 the rich, another for the poor. Money- 
 bags have a charm that bench, bar and jury 
 can not withstand. See the exclusive priv- 
 ileges, franchises, and rights granted to the 
 rich syndicates and great proprietors own- 
 ing farms of 65,000, 100,000, yea, 500,000 
 acres. Almost all available lands are al- 
 ready taken out of the reach of the poor 
 man so that he is forced to live in the city 
 and sell his labor for whatever it will bring 
 in the market, and be worked to the utmost 
 limits of endurance only to be cast aside and 
 discharged when worn-out. The rich man's 
 sons and daughters dawdling in the parks 
 or theatres, sailing in their yacht or inhaling 
 the genial breezes, the poor man's son and 
 daughters huddling in the tenements, in- 
 haling pestilence, running the streets, or if 
 at work earning barely enough to purchase 
 the common decencies of life. Every work- 
 ing day America is declared to be four mil- 
 lion dollars richer at night than in the morn- 
 ing, and yet multitudes go in rags, an army 
 of the unemployed is tramping up and down 
 through the land, and every day the news- 
 papers tell the sad tale of the labor troubles. 
 " It is true we are free, but that only means 
 we are let loose like hounds on the chase in 
 the great competitive race for a living, a 
 race free for all on level ground. Nobody 
 is certain of his future. There is boundless 
 scope for action, but some always fail. There 
 is no ambition too high, but most are disap- 
 pointed. Nobody is contented with his lot. 
 The rich try to get richer, and we, the wage 
 earners, are never sure of our tasks nor of 
 the bread and meat to feed the hungry 
 mouths at home. In the heart of our civil- 
 ization our women faint for hunger, our 
 
The Complaint of the Modern Laborer. 89 
 
 little ones cry for shelter and food, and we 
 strong men are despairing while abundance 
 runs to waste. The whole world is one 
 grand game of grab, and there is no art or 
 method, no scheme or device, no collusion 
 or trickery whio-h is not brought into play. 
 4 Our master is our enemy ' is the conviction 
 of tenants and workmen in all lands. Cap- 
 ital is arrayed against labor, the opposing 
 forces are marshalling to the fray, the day of 
 conflict draws nearer and nearer. These 
 questions can be decided by no other means 
 than by the sword of war." * 
 
 These are bitter charges made to-day by 
 the laborers in every land. Some proclaim 
 by their deeds silently, many by such words 
 boldly and defiantly, that all these charges 
 are to be laid at the door of modern society 
 and summary vengeance is sooner or later to 
 be taken on the rich. 
 
 You know the whole land is full of such 
 cries. Perhaps you are impatient with them ; 
 declare them to be foolish, illogical ; mere 
 ranting, empty nonsense. For myself I will 
 say that whatever be their exaggerations 
 and fallacies, I am not one of those who will 
 come to the consideration of the complaints 
 of the workingman with the monotonous, 
 everlasting lie of a denial. I believe that 
 the bow of promise which spanned the 
 morning skies of the nineteenth century 
 was a true token of peace ; but for all that, 
 I realize that its promises are yet far, far 
 from having been fulfilled; and with the 
 laborer I see many, many ills in present 
 conditions, but bid him check his bitter 
 wrath and turn with me to hear the message 
 of hope, if there be any, and to study the 
 remedies that have been proffered. 
 
 * Socialism, Starkweather and Wilson, p. 4 
 
90 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSED. 
 
 VIOLENCE THE PROPOSED SOLUTION. 
 
 THE first solution of the social question 
 that was ever proposed which is still pro- 
 posed by many who believe the complaint 
 of the modern laborer to be true in all its 
 details, is violence the use of brute force. 
 " The misery that is everywhere prevalent," 
 they say, "is the outcome of fatal fallacies, 
 everywhere controlling. The existing social 
 order is rotten," they cry, " rotten to the 
 core. It must be extirpated root and branch. 
 This is the remedy. It is radical, but there 
 is no other. Therefore set your blazing 
 torches to the four corners of the world, let 
 cities and towns be laid waste; raze to the 
 ground those citadels of tyranny, the cham- 
 bers of Parliaments, the halls of Congress, 
 the court-houses and their hellish appendages, 
 jails, work-houses, and penitentiaries. Put 
 your explosives under every train that rum- 
 bles through the land ; blow up the million- 
 aires and scatter their millions. Assassinate 
 Kings, Emperors, Tzars and Presidents. 
 Let there be one universal conflagration, 
 one merciless slaughter of the oppressors. 
 Down, down, into the pit of destruction 
 with this whole accursed social system, this 
 monster of iniquities, born of the depravity 
 of the ages. Then, and only then, upon 
 the heaps of gory corpses, and up out of the 
 smoking ashes of this world-wide desolation 
 will arise, like the Phoenix, a new, a regen- 
 
Violence the Proposed Solution 91 
 
 erated, a perfect social system true to nature 
 and her primitive laws of justice ; then at 
 last all wrongs will be righted, and there 
 will no longer be any oppression, neither 
 poverty nor misery nor woe, and the discon- 
 tented will pass from off the face of the 
 earth.'' 
 
 Do not such utterances sound to you like 
 the senseless ravings of the demented? No 
 man, in his sense, you think, could make 
 such wild and horrifying demands. But the 
 fact is that this doctrine of violence as the 
 sole solution of the social question has, at 
 one time or another, been vociferously pro- 
 claimed from the very housetops in almost 
 every land of the globe. Through long 
 years of seeming peace, subtle conspiracies 
 have, with their poisonous breath, kept the 
 embers of the revolutionary fires aglow, so 
 that at favorable intervals the flames of de- 
 struction might burst forth in those murder- 
 ous, infernal, and utterly diabolical plots 
 and villainies which have shaken the world, 
 and the dread of which at this very day 
 hangs like a threatening cloud upon our 
 horizon. 
 
 Verify all this by the testimony of history. 
 Recall, for example, the famous conspiracy 
 of Catiline in Rome, 47 B. c. Recall the 
 incessant outbreaks which marked the decay 
 and downfall of the social structure of the 
 Middle Ages, the uprising of the Jacqueries 
 in France, the revolt under Jack Cade in Eng- 
 land, and the bloody peasant wars of Ger- 
 many. Annihilation, the complete overthrow 
 of all things, was their slogan ; violence 
 their mad and futile principle of action. 
 
 We have seen how, at the end of the last 
 century, amid the pangs and tortures of 
 revolution, political equality was achieved. 
 
92 The Social Question. 
 
 What followed? There came such an 
 awakening of the minds of men, such a 
 strange and irresistible impulse to all their 
 aspirations and activities that life was en- 
 tirely transformed materially, intellectually 
 and spiritually. " All men are now polit- 
 ically equal," cried those in the van of 
 modern progress, " why, then, shall we not 
 achieve social and economical equality, as 
 well? Is it not our right? Who shall pre- 
 vent? What shall hinder?" 
 
 Thus the social contest followed fast upon 
 the heels of the political. Wise men, filled 
 with a lofty ideal of what the social compact 
 should be, saw the great wave of distress 
 sweep across the sea of humanity, submerg- 
 ing the thousands, and in their hearts they 
 bitterly confessed to the evils which the 
 French Revolution, with its world-wide in- 
 fluence and promise, had failed to remedy. 
 Earnest men, true and sympathetic, saw the 
 wave of bitter, selfish competition come roll- 
 ing swiftly and mercilessly after, and their 
 hearts bled for the helpless victims of the 
 new order, ruthlessly severed from old ties 
 of patronage. As the Israelites of old 
 after having safely passed through the Red 
 Sea to liberty, clamored for a return to the 
 flesh-pots of Egypt, so they, after having 
 passed the gory sea of revolution to liberty, 
 now longed for a return of the good old days 
 in which lord and vassal, master and serf, 
 had been bound together, had, despite their 
 difference in rank, felt the warm pulsations 
 of a sincere attachment. 
 
 Woe was added to woe when machinery 
 came and drove the workmen out of employ ; 
 left their families to starve and maddened 
 them with the rage of discontent. The limit 
 of endurance was reached. Men of bold- 
 
Violence the Proposed Solution. 93 
 
 ness and daring, but debased and unscrupu- 
 lous, cast defiance into the very face of the 
 law itself, and afterward, smarting under 
 its penalties, were goaded on to a passion 
 ate and avowed enmity to all the insti- 
 tutions of civilization. 
 
 Then the great wave of violence broke 
 upon the shores of the social sea, and beat 
 madly against the towering cliffs called 
 " Tyranny of Capital," and dashed wildly 
 against the mighty Ship of State, breaking 
 its rotten beams and rafters, and wildly tear- 
 ing it from its moorings. From the high seat 
 of the revolutionists, as formerly against po- 
 litical, so now against social wrongs, the doc- 
 trine of despair was proclaimed, the methods 
 of violence were sanctioned, and the relent- 
 less condemnation of all things to subversion 
 and utter ruin was pronounced. 
 
 Out of the slums of those sunk in the de- 
 graded materialism of the French Revolution 
 came the first fanatic who preached Anarchy 
 in the modern era a condemned forger, 
 named Baboeuf, who for more than twenty 
 3^ears lived behind the prison bars of France 
 and even while thus confined successfully or- 
 ganized a conspiracy to overthrow the Gov- 
 ernment and establish the Social millennium. 
 Seventeen thousand men were secretly en- 
 rolled. Tracts were assiduously circulated. 
 The manifesto declared " The end of the 
 Revolution is to destroy inequality and es- 
 tablish the common happiness We are 
 
 prepared to consent to everything for it 
 
 Let all the arts perish, if need be, provided 
 we retain real equality. In a true society 
 the harmony is broken if one man in the 
 world be richer or more powerful than his 
 fellows." 
 
 This seems very absurd and foolish talk, 
 
94 The Social Question. 
 
 A child can see that if all things were to be 
 divided up equally, it would not be twenty- 
 four hours before under existing condi- 
 tions the inequalities would all be restored. 
 The business man's refutation of commu- 
 nism is simply that given by one of the Roths- 
 childs of Frankfort-on-the Main. Once hear- 
 ing a poor man complain of his lot and ex- 
 press a desire for the equality of commu- 
 ism, Rothschild is said to have immediately 
 put his hand in his pocket, drawn out a few 
 shillings and ,offered them, saying : " This 
 would be your full share if the wealth of a 
 Rothschild was to be equally divided among 
 all the inhabitants of Germany." * 
 
 But this was not what the communists 
 proposed. They were not so childish. Ba- 
 boeuf did not propose it. He would have all 
 to be equal, that is, none in command and 
 none in subjection. Therefore, no govern- 
 ment, that is, anarchy : those administering 
 the law to be no better than the rest, all neces- 
 sary offices to be held in rotation without 
 especial honor or emolument. There should 
 be no rich or poor ; therefore private prop- 
 erty must be abolished, all the people re- 
 duced to uniformity, live in the same man- 
 ner, eat the same kind of food, dress 
 alike, receive the same education, do such 
 equal shares of work as the law would parcel 
 out to each. Can you think of anything 
 more dreary, stupid and deadening than such 
 a scheme for lowering all abilities, tal- 
 ents, ambitions, and endeavors to the same 
 dead level of mediocrity? No nation ever 
 has, none ever will, for none ever can in- 
 stitute such a system. It is revolting, de- 
 basing, in manifest defiance -of the laws of 
 
 * Cited by Prof. Ely, French and German Social- 
 ism. 
 
Violence the Proposed Solution. 95 
 
 God stamped in the human soul and express- 
 ed through our ceaseless striving after better- 
 ment. 
 
 The conspiracy of Baboeuf failed. One 
 of its leaders turned traitor, Baboeuf was 
 guillotined March 24, 1797, and his confreres 
 punished. The firm hand of Napoleon I. 
 checked every further outbreak of violence 
 against the social regime. 
 
 In 1840 there appeared in France a book 
 entitled What is Property ? and containing 
 the startling answer, " Property is theft. 
 Property-holders are thieves." The author 
 was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a man of the 
 people, a self-made man, as we say ; a man 
 of brilliant parts, a fervid writer, of dauntless 
 courage and undoubted sincerity. His writ- 
 ings mark a new era in the history of " Vio- 
 lence as a Solution of the Social Question." 
 He emphatically opposed every socialistic 
 scheme hitherto proposed, and came out 
 bluntly and boldly for anarchy, pure and 
 simple. " I will destroy and I will build up." 
 was the motto he set before himself ; but, as 
 is usually the case, while he was" a mighty 
 giant in tearing clown, he was a weak and 
 puny dwarf in the task of restoring. He 
 proposed but failed to carry a bill through 
 the National Assembly of France, offering 
 a vague and impracticable banking scheme 
 to effect the exchange of product for pro- 
 duct by means of paper money. Interest 
 and profit were thus to be abolished. All 
 things were to be had at cost ; there was to 
 be credit for everybody at the Government 
 banks. Private property must be confiscated, 
 yet there was to be no authority, no govern- 
 ment, that is, anarchy. " To each one ac- 
 cording to his capacity ; to each capacity ac- 
 cording to his works "this was adopted as 
 
96 The Social Question. 
 
 the guiding principle of his system. It means, 
 as far as it is explicable to us, absolute un- 
 qualified individualism, and yet every indi- 
 vidual to have a just share in the production 
 and in the consumption of all goods, and 
 this without communism of any kind. Here 
 is a flat contradiction, and impossibility. 
 Nevertheless from this confusion and con- 
 tradictory source the ideas of all the anarch- 
 ists from his time until the present hour 
 have been drawn. 
 
 Proudhon hated the rich heartily. Harsh- 
 ly and bitterly he attacked them. But 
 unlike Babceuf he was not a conspirator. 
 He turned his back upon every scheme of 
 revolution by violence. But this is simply 
 another of his contradictions and a failure to 
 face the logical issue and natural extreme of 
 his own philosophy. The revolution in 
 1848 which placed Napoleon III. on the 
 throne of France ; the memorable commu- 
 nistic revolt of 1871, which followed up 
 Napoleon's deposition these are in part at 
 last, without doubt, the fruit of his planting. 
 
 The year 1848 was a blazing torch at which 
 the Anarchists of all European lands lit the 
 fire-brands of social revolution. The Chart- 
 ist movement in England, the Communistic 
 manifesto of Marx, and the rise of the " In- 
 ternational" (Workingmen's Association) in 
 Germany, the efforts of Weithling and 
 Becker in Switzerland, the numberless agi- 
 tations in Spain, all these kin died their flame 
 from the fires lit by Proudhon in France. 
 
 The most radical apostle of the doctrine 
 of violence was undoubtedly Bakunin, the 
 father of Russian Nihilism a mystical, ex- 
 travagant, audacious character, in whom 
 devotion to the revolutionary idea had run 
 into the blindest fanaticism, " Everything 
 
Violence the Proposed Solution. 97 
 
 is moral," says the Nihilistic catechism, 
 " which helps on the triumph of the revolu- 
 tion, everything is immoral and criminal 
 that hinders it " * Admitting no activity 
 but that of destruction assassination, in- 
 cendiarism, poison, poniard, rope and ex- 
 plosions * all means are sanctified and 
 are in use at this very day in Russia, 
 as you well know and as you may read 
 of in those strange books of startling 
 revelations^ Russia Under the Tsars and 
 Underground Russia, by Stepniak, who is 
 pronounced reliable by competent authori- 
 ties. 
 
 I have reviewed all this history of violence 
 in order that we may see just where we 
 stand in reference to it. For the discon- 
 tented spirits of all lands America has be- 
 come a refuge, and so we find here, in strange 
 companionship, adherents of every phase of 
 those fantasic systems, romantic plots, wild 
 vagaries, and fanatic schemes of revolution- 
 ary communism, anarchy, and nihilism, that 
 under the Old World conditions have been 
 conceived and brought into being. Prof. Ely, 
 of Johns Hopkins University, in his latest 
 earnest and exhaustive work, The Labor 
 Movement in America, estimates the number 
 of those in the United States who believe in 
 violence as the social remedy, at more than 
 ten thousand. 
 
 The latest and most violent proof of their 
 existence was given in Chicago on the 4th 
 of May, 1886, when a deadly bomb was 
 thrown into the ranks of the police. They 
 gave evidence of their purpose, methods and 
 power ten years ago in the great riot of 1877, 
 in which one hundred millions of dollars 
 worth of property was wantonly wasted and 
 
 * Emile de Laveley, Socialism of to-day. Ch. x. 
 7 
 
98 The Social Question. 
 
 many innocent lives lost. There are a great 
 many books, papers, and periodicals pub- 
 lished by them ; a great many public meet- 
 ings are held under their auspices, and ha- 
 rangues delivered to sympathetic audiences. 
 Through all their papers, speeches, books, 
 and resolutions runs one refrain-: "Get 
 ready for another 1 877 buy a musket for the 
 repetition of 1877." " Organize companies 
 and drill for a recurrence of the riots of 
 1877." " Buy dynamite for a second 1877." 
 This is the substance of the speeches of Herr 
 Most and of Mrs. Lucy Parsons. 
 
 I cite all this not as a sound of alarm, for 
 I see no danger which can not be averted or 
 met, but as a note of warning to every true- 
 hearted American workman, whether born 
 on this soil or having adopted this glorious 
 country as his home, whether hand-worker 
 or brain-worker, to all I say, as a public 
 teacher and speaking as the exponent of all 
 that is sacred : stand firm, keep pure and un- 
 defiled your loyalty to God, religion and law ; 
 guard against the un-American influence of 
 loud and erratic agitators and Revolutionists. 
 Welcome all freely to the privileges you en- 
 joy, but hold fast to your integrity. With 
 our Rabbis I say : " Love peace, pursue 
 peace," but that means eschew violence for 
 violence is a relic of barbarism, which unless 
 we prove that we have outgrown it, gives 
 the lie to our boasted civilization. 
 
 Look then to the methods of these strikes 
 that are springing up everywhere with a 
 mushroom growth. " Strikes are the insur- 
 rections of labor," says Professor Walker. * 
 Their motive may be just, but if their method 
 be violence then they are un-American, they 
 are unholy, they are sinful. I have shown 
 *The Wages Question, p. 390, 
 
Violence the Proposed Solution. 99 
 
 you their ancestry. They are the offspring 
 of the logic of Anarchy the blind progeny 
 of giant error. If you can not get that 
 price for your labor which you see fit to ask, 
 you have neither in reason nor in right any 
 cause for therefore attacking your employer 
 or the man who will take less for his work 
 no more right than the man who asks you 
 ten dollars for a coat has a right to abuse 
 you if you decline to pay it. Smashing 
 cars, breaking up machinery, ruining fac- 
 tories and mills, looting stores, interfering 
 with trade, burning, pillaging, abusing and 
 murdering those who are willing to work, and 
 injuring their families and yours all this is 
 suicidal. Mark this : 
 
 " New For A:, February 12, 188.7 Bradstreet's makes 
 the following estimates of losses, the result of strikes, 
 in this country since January 1st : Wages sacrificed by 
 strikers, $2,650,000 ; loss of wages to employes thrown 
 out of work by strikers of fellow-workmen, $350,000 ; 
 losses to trade and through the increased price of coal, 
 etc., #4,280,000, total, $7,280,000." 
 
 Such is a sample of the results of violence 
 as a solution to the social question. But 
 this folly will soon wear itself out. The day 
 is fast approaching when the free American 
 workman will look back upon this scandal 
 in shame, and though uniting with all labor- 
 ers for mutual good, will refuse to sell him- 
 self body and soul into any new servitude, 
 such as the strikes require, but will rise in 
 the might of his manhood and range himself 
 on the side of law and order, thrift and 
 peace. To hasten that day I speak because I 
 feel it to be a solemn task, a sacred duty 
 which devolves upon me as it rests upon 
 every earnest teacher of religion, every sin- 
 cere champion of God, every true lover of 
 
100 The Social Question. 
 
 his fellow-men. As a teacher in Israel it 
 behooves me most emphatically to proclaim 
 that Judaism unequivocally puts the stamp 
 of condemnation upon violence as a solu- 
 tion of the social question. 
 
Socialism. 101 
 
 DISCOURSE XL 
 
 SOCIALISM. 
 
 A THOROUGHGOING and practical solution 
 of the great Social Question has been put 
 forth on the basis of what claims to be a 
 clearly reasoned scientific criticism of the 
 industrial system of to-day. This solution 
 is broadly termed Socialism. An ominous 
 word is this " a name at which the world 
 turns pale." It is usually supposed to sub- 
 sume and embrace all possible schemes and 
 plots aiming at a social revolution, and to 
 be synonymous with whatever is dangerous, 
 lawless, subversive, and ruinous. 
 
 This its leaders aver is a mistaken impres- 
 sion. Modern Socialism, it is true, is thor- 
 oughly revolutionary, that is, it aims to 
 completely overthrow existing social con- 
 ditions for the purpose of supplanting them 
 with other and better ones, which shall for- 
 ever undo the evils of inequality under 
 which we now suffer, cut its methods are 
 to be peaceable, legal, legitimate. Violence 
 is not on its programme. It refuses to be 
 allied with anarchy or nihilism, however 
 much the mad adherents of those murderous 
 methods may pretend to be enrolled under 
 its ensign. 
 
 This is certainly a fair promise and wins 
 our eager attention. There is another fact 
 which intensifies our interest still more. It 
 is this : 
 
 That which is rightfully called Socialism 
 
102 The Social Question. 
 
 is unquestionably the product of the Jewish 
 spirit;- Its authors were men of Jewish ex- 
 ir&etioh. Commenting upon this fact, Emile 
 de Laveleye, says : " The Jews have been 
 nearly everywhere the initiators or prop- 
 agators of Socialism. The reason is plain. 
 Socialism is an energetic protest against the 
 iniquitous basis of the actual order of things, 
 and an ardent aspiration toward a better 
 system where justice would reign supreme. 
 Now, this is precisely the foundation of the 
 Judaism of Job and the Prophets. . . . 
 In the Jewish conception of the world, 
 it is here below that the greatest possible 
 amount of justice should be realized."* 
 
 M. Ernest Renan in the preface of his 
 recent translation of Ecclesiastes explains 
 this by a contrast. He says : " The Jew is 
 not resigned like the Christian. To the 
 Christian, poverty and humility are virtues, 
 while to the Jew they are misfortunes to be 
 avoided. Abuse and violence, which rind 
 the Christian calm, enrage the Jew. Hence 
 it is that the Israelite element has in our 
 time become an influence of reform and 
 progress in all countries where it is to be 
 found. . .In the revolutionary move- 
 ments of France the Jewish element played 
 an important part." 
 
 To these citations I would add, that, 
 while Christianity directs the eyes of its 
 votaries continuously toward the life to 
 come, Judaism, although none the less anx- 
 ious about the hereafter, makes " how to 
 live " precede the question, " how to die," 
 and insists upon the correct solution of the 
 former as the only true solution of the lat- 
 ter. It is because of the fundamental dif- 
 ference thus indicated that Judaism is ex- 
 
 * The Socialism of To-day. p,45. 
 
Socialism. 103 
 
 empt from the charge often made against 
 the Christian church, that it is dumb in 
 matters which challenge the animosity of 
 wealth and power ; the charge that the gaunt 
 and meager spectre of secularism scares it 
 off from every endeavor to enlarge the 
 sphere of righteousness.* 
 
 It is this sober, common-sense method of 
 living in the world and being of it, in order 
 to ennoble and improve its conditions, which 
 has helped Judaism to endure, and it is this 
 trait which accounts for the fact that, as in 
 all previous ages, so to-day, many of the 
 master minds who have lent their energies 
 to these absorbing contentions of real life, 
 happen to be products of the spirit of Juda- 
 ism. Three Jewish names present them- 
 selves on the first page of the history of 
 modern socialism. These are David Ricardo, 
 Ferdinand Lasalle and Karl Marx. 
 
 David Ricardo personally had no connec- 
 tion with the socialistic movement whatever. 
 He was a London stock-broker (1772-1823). 
 He devoted himself to a serious study of the 
 principles underlying those transactions in 
 which he was daily engaged, and eventually 
 achieved lasting recognition as a profound 
 scholar and a lucid writer on questions 
 of political economy. He followed Adam 
 Smith and the " orthodox " economists in 
 his teachings, and among his successors 
 James Mill and J. R. McCullough acknowl- 
 edge themselves to be his disciples. 
 
 The name of Ricardo heads the school of 
 modern Socialism because a theory of labor 
 and of wages which he formulated and which 
 bears his name became the starting point 
 
 *Behrends, Socialism and Christianity; Brown, 
 Studies in Modern Socialism, ch. I. Socialism, 
 Starkweather and Wilson, p. 32. 
 
104 The Social Question. 
 
 the casus belli the very weapon of attack 
 against existing institutions for those who 
 became the founders of the new system. 
 Ricardo's theories were simply a deduction 
 from the teachings of his predecessors and 
 were until of late universally, almost un- 
 questioningly adopted. He declared that 
 labor is the foundation of all value. From 
 this the Socialists infer that all wealth should 
 belong to the laborers. The wages theory 
 has been very graphically, although not 
 very technically described by Joseph Cook 
 as the see-saw theory, because it asserts the 
 relations between labor and capital to be 
 such that as the laborer goes down the capi- 
 talist goes up, and as the laborer goes up 
 the capitalist goes down. That is, the value 
 of labor depends upon how much it costs to 
 keep the laborer according to his customary 
 standard of living. Wages may fall below 
 or rise above this, but will always tend 
 toward a return to that gauge. When they 
 rise, the laborers being prosperous, will be 
 encouraged to marry ; thus eventually their 
 numbers will increase to such a degree that 
 by reason of the intensity of competition the 
 rate of wages will again fall. Then will 
 come starvation, increase of mortality, a dec- 
 imnation of their numbers until by reason 
 of there being fewer workmen, wages will 
 again rise. And so there is a constant up 
 and down, see-saw process extending through 
 long years of time. 
 
 This, in brief outline, is Ricardo's theory of 
 wages. Ricardo himself was, in all probabil- 
 ity, not conscious of what, in its fullest and 
 broadest application, his theory must lead 
 to. Other men looked deeper. There came 
 Ferdinand Lasalle, a German, born at Bres- 
 lau, 1825, a brilliant university man, a friend 
 
Socialism. 105 
 
 of the Mendelssohns in Berlin, dubbed 
 Wunderkind, "prodigy" by Alexander von 
 Humboldt, an intimate friend of Heinrieh 
 Heine when in Paris, ".a child of the new 
 era " admired and courted by Bismarck. 
 He looks into the theory, and behold ! he 
 revolts against it ; he avers that it means that 
 the workman has been released from serfdom 
 only to be put into the bondage of an in- 
 exorable economical law. Das JEherne Lohn- 
 gesetz, " the iron and cruel law of wages," 
 which keeps him forever from bettering 
 his condition or from reaping any reward 
 from the increased productivity of his own 
 hands. The existing regime is therefore, 
 wrong, thoroughly iniquitous from apex to 
 base. It must be subverted. An entirely 
 new social system must be instituted. 
 
 Thus Socialism comes into being avowing 
 itself the natural and indomitable foe of the 
 " tyranny of capital." What remedy does it 
 offer ? " Supply the laborer with capital and 
 make him independent of the degrading 
 wage system." But who shall supply the 
 capital ? How shall it be obtained ? " Noth- 
 ing easier," answers Lasalle. " The State ad- 
 vances capital to start railways, to develop 
 agriculture, promote manufacture. Why 
 shall it not furnish the poor man with capital? 
 Ninety-six per cent, of the population are 
 ground down by the ' iron law,' and can not 
 lift themselves above it by their own power. 
 The State must help them. Organize then, 
 and agitate for universal suffrage, and 
 through the ballot-box vote yourselves the . 
 help you need." This was his doctrine, and 
 he went up and down the country preaching 
 it, as it were, at every village and cross-road. 
 It is said that he exercised a fascination like 
 Abelard, charming women and fascinating 
 
106 The Social Question. 
 
 crowds. Young, handsome and eloquent, 
 " drawing the hearts of all after him," he left 
 enthusiastic disciples and admirers every- 
 where who formed the nucleus of working- 
 man's societies. Thus the energy of his style, 
 the rigor of his polemics, and to a still 
 greater degree his eloquence and personal 
 influence brought socialism from the regions 
 of dreamy philanthropy and obscure books, 
 little read, less understood, to throw it like 
 a firebrand of strife and dispute into the 
 public streets and into the workshops. 
 " There is no example," sa}^s Emile de Lave- 
 leye " in our times of an influence so great 
 and so extended acquired in so short a 
 period.* 
 
 Suddenly, and before he had done more 
 than merely to evoke that intense agitation 
 which brought into being the Democratic 
 Socialistic party in Germany, after only two 
 years of active effort in this cause, Lasalle 
 came to an untimely end in a duel brought 
 about by an unhappy love affair. If during his 
 life he was listened to like an oracle, after his 
 death, says the annalist, he was venerated as 
 a demi-god. His body was conveyed from 
 Switzerland back to Germany. Everywhere 
 pompous funerals were held. At Cologne, 
 however, it was intercepted by the police on 
 behalf of the Lasalle family and carried 
 quietly to Breslau, where he was laid silent- 
 ly with his fathers in the Jewish burying- 
 ground of his native place. " Fate, however, 
 had* not yet done with him," says Mr. John 
 Rae.f " It followed him beyond the tomb 
 to throw one more element of bizarre into 
 his strangely compounded career." The 
 Workingmen's Association, fearing that 
 
 * Socialism of To-day, Ch. v. 
 t Contemporary Socialism, p. 80. 
 
Socialism. 107 
 
 their cause would fail, determined to 
 strengthen it by his death. A Lasalle cultus 
 was instituted. He was worshiped as the 
 Messiah of Socialism. Many really believed 
 that he had died for them, and would yet be 
 resurrected and save them. In 1874 the tenth 
 anniversary of the day of his death was 
 celebrated with ceremonies almost like those 
 of a new religion. He was likened to the 
 Christian Saviour ; it was avowed that his 
 doctrines would reform society as Chris- 
 tianity had reformed the pagan world. These 
 aberrations of the Socialists were kept up in 
 Germany until the Anti-Socialist law of 1878 
 brought them to an end. 
 
 While Lasalle was spreading the new 
 gospel by word of mouth with flaming speech- 
 es, and by means of fiery pamphlets, Karl 
 Marx was laboring effectively in another 
 way. Persecuted because of his opinions, 
 he lead the life of a roving exile, passing 
 from Germany to France, from France to 
 Brussels, and back again to Germany, until 
 he at last found a haven of rest in London, 
 where he died in 1883. In all the years 
 from manhood to death his pen was busy. 
 He figured as a journalist and author. He 
 stands indisputably as the greatest social- 
 istic writer of Germany, perhaps of the 
 world. His chief work, Das Kapital, is 
 called the Bible of Socialism. All the 
 Socialist agitators draw their ideas and their 
 fervor from it swear by it, so to speak. 
 It is conceded to be an able, in many 
 respects a remarkable, work. The reader 
 feels himself " shut up within the iron bars 
 of his logic, as it were, a prey to a nightmare 
 because having admitted his premises, 
 which are borrowed from the most undoubted 
 authorities, we know not how to escape from 
 
108 The Social Question. 
 
 his conclusions. . . And yet, when we go to 
 the bottom of the matter and look around us, 
 we perceive that we have been enveloped 
 in a skillful tissue of errors and subtleties 
 intermingled with a few truths." * 
 
 We need not go into a detailed consider- 
 ation of his argument. Its theories found a 
 tangible and living expression through the 
 organization and efforts of the Internation 
 al Workingmen's Association, which had a 
 brief but brilliant meteoric existence from 
 1864 to 1872. Let a late manifesto of the 
 English leaders of this movement speak and 
 tell us what, in substance, Socialism demands. 
 It says : " All wealth is due to labor, there- 
 fore to the laborer all wealth is due. We call 
 for the nationalization of land. We claim 
 that the land, in country and towns, mines, 
 parks, mountains and moors, should be 
 owned by the people, for the people, to be 
 held, used, built over and cultivated upon 
 such terms as the people themselves see fit 
 to ordain. Above all the active capitalist 
 class contractors, factory-lords, mine-ex- 
 ploiters, these modern slave-drivers, these are 
 they who turn every advance in knowledge 
 and every improvement in dexterity into an 
 engine for accumulating wealth out of other 
 men's labors, and for exacting more and 
 more surplus value out of the wage-slaves 
 whom they employ. So long as the means 
 of production, either of raw materials or 
 manufactured goods, are the monopoly of a 
 class, so long must the laborers on the 
 farms, in the mines, or in the factory, sell 
 themselves for a bare subsistence wage. As 
 land must in future be a national possession, 
 so must the other means of producing and 
 distributing wealth. By these means a 
 
 * The Socialism of To-day, E. de Laveleye, p. 32. 
 
Socialism. 109 
 
 healthy independentand thoroughly educated 
 people will steadily grow up around us ready 
 to organize the labor of each for the benefit 
 of all, and determined to take finally the 
 control of the entire social and political 
 machinery of a state, in which class distinc- 
 tions and privileges shall cease to be."* 
 
 With the lofty purpose of ruling the world 
 by the principle of brotherly love, and with 
 the watchword " Proletarians of all nations 
 unite ! " The " International " fell apart by 
 reason of the unbrotherly hatred of its 
 members. They could only unite on negative 
 or destructive principles ; when arrested and 
 persecuted they were at once bound together 
 by an iron bond of negation, but the moment 
 they were let alone and free to act, free to 
 accomplish some positive, constructive act, 
 they differed and quarreled. There were 
 charges of bribery and treason, accusations 
 and suspicions which brought on the inevita- 
 disruption and end. 
 
 But though this society is dead, it lives 
 in other organizations, and the ideas of 
 Socialism are more widespread to-day than 
 ever before. An analysis of their merits 
 and demerits of their truths and fallacies, 
 must be reserved for the next discourse. 
 
 * Hallock Property and Progress^ pp.98, 99. 
 
110 The Social Question. 
 
 DISCOURSE XII. 
 
 SOCIALISM (Continued.) 
 
 IN the ancient mythologies Justice is 
 represented as a women blindfolded, who 
 holds in one hand a pair of scales in which 
 she metes out all things with equal balances, 
 while in the other hand she firmly grasps a 
 sword, threatening destruction to whomso- 
 ever should dare to gainsay her apportion- 
 ments. Upon her lips is the rigorous maxim 
 Fiat justitia per eat mundus ! " Let justice 
 be done, though the world should perish ! " 
 Such is the pagan conception of Justice 
 harsh, forbidding, unfeeling, utterly devoid 
 of the heavenly graces of mercy and love. 
 
 With us justice means something quite 
 different. It is true Judaism does not 
 permit any such an embodiment of her 
 teachings. We have only words in which 
 to express them, but the word that expresses 
 the Jewish idea of justice is synonymous 
 with, is the very same word which expresses 
 the idea of benevolence viz : Zedakali, and 
 which carries with it at the same time the 
 sense of moral freedom and of holiness. 
 The maxim of active justice as pursued by 
 the Hebrew is best uttered by the Prophet :* 
 Have I any pleasure in the death of the 
 wicked? saith the Lord God : and not rather 
 that he should return from his way and live ?" 
 And as opposed to the destroying sword of 
 
 xvn, 23, 
 
Socialism. Ill 
 
 Justitia the Rabbins taught that justice 
 sustains the world aided by truth and peace.* 
 In so far as Socialism conforms to the 
 divine idea of justice we believe that Socialism 
 is right ; in so far as it conforms to the Pagan 
 idea, we believe that Socialism is wrong. In 
 so far as Socialism is a vigorous protest 
 against whatever is iniquitous in the exist- 
 ing social order and voices an ardent aspira- 
 tion after better conditions, Judasim is at 
 one with it. It approves and loudly ap- 
 plauds the successful efforts of the new 
 school to unmask and reveal the hideous 
 features of oppression ; to lay bare the heart- 
 lessness of unfeeling and unprincipled mas- 
 ters ; to expose the roguery that fastens up- 
 on our institutions ; to dethrone bankruptcy, 
 bribery, every form of political and com- 
 mercial corruption which pompously usurps 
 the seat of respectability. Its most ardent 
 approval does Socialism win from our re- 
 ligion when, with an eloquence that is the 
 very passion of pathos, it pleads the cause of 
 the needy, of the strong struggling for life, 
 and the weak clamoring for aid ; and, above 
 all, when with clarion tones of command it 
 calls for the fair reward of his labors to every 
 one according to his toil. In all these re- 
 spects we are with the Socialists, for with 
 us they are on the side of right against 
 wrong, on the side of all that our Pro- 
 phets proclaimed in the inspiration of 
 oratory ; that our sacred bards rapturously 
 chanted under the spell of their heavenly 
 muse ; that our sages so earnestly fostered 
 with the full devotion of their life's best en- 
 ergies ; that all our legal codes from Moses' 
 down were so zealously striving to estab- 
 lish ; and for the Attainment of which 
 *Aboth. I . 
 
112 The Social Question. 
 
 the records of martyrdom were inscribed in 
 letters of blood upon every page of our proud 
 history of unending endurance. 
 
 Is Judaism then in perfect accord with 
 Socialism ? In its honest underlying motives 
 yes, but in the methods which Socialism 
 proposes for putting these aspirations after 
 betterment into living, active form among 
 men no. Why is this so ? Because in the 
 former Socialism' yields obedience to the 
 Jewish conception of Justice, but in the latter 
 it has prostrated itself before the pagan 
 goddess, has taken the sword from her hand 
 and the watchword from her lips proclaiming 
 the revolution in that heartless fiat : " Let 
 justice be done, and since it must be, let 
 this whole world perish this whole accursed 
 social system that so ruthlessly and hope- 
 lessly oppresses us ! " At these words Juda- 
 ism must let fall the hand that had been 
 warmly grasped, and give up the fellowship 
 in the cause of righteousness to which joy- 
 fully she would have allied herself. 
 
 It avails naught for the professors of Social- 
 ism to avow that while they are revolution- 
 ary in their teachings, they mean to be peace- 
 able in their methods, and that State-Social- 
 ism is utterly opposed to violence. They 
 are hugging a delusion. Lasalle himself de- 
 clared : " I am persuaded that a revolution 
 will take place. It will take place legally, 
 and with all the blessings of freedom, if be- 
 fore it is too late, our rulers become wise, de- 
 termined, and courageous enough to lead it. 
 Otherwise, after the lapse of a certain time, 
 the goddess of revolution will force an en- 
 trance into our social structure, amid all the 
 convulsions of violence, with wild, streaming 
 locks, and with brazen sandals on her feet. 
 In the one way or the other she will come ; 
 
Socialism. 113 
 
 and when, forgetting the tumult of the day, 
 I sink myself in history, I am able to hear 
 from afar her heavy tread." 
 
 Is not this worshiping the false god while 
 pretending allegiance to the true ? Choose 
 ye truly ! Whom will ye obey ? Justice 
 blind to all earthly conditions and wielding 
 the sword of revolution, or Justice with the 
 sceptre of truth and the crown of peace ? 
 If the latter, you are with us ; if the former 
 you are against us. There is no evading the 
 issue, because Socialism proclaims a doctrine 
 of despair. Socialism comes wrapt in clouds 
 of darkness and waving a dark-lantern with 
 which it lights up only the moral sores and 
 corrupt wounds of humanity. It sees noth- 
 ing healthful, nothing encouraging, nothing 
 reassuring ; while, on the other hand, Juda- 
 ism is \rreathed in a halo of light, and sends 
 out warming rays of hope and good cheer 
 and trust into every heart. Thus they dis- 
 place each other and are irreconcilable. 
 Socialism revives the legend of old King 
 Sisypus, of Corinth, who, because of his sins 
 in this world, is condemened in the Land of 
 Shades to roll a huge stone to the top of a 
 hill and place it there. No sooner has he 
 succeeded in getting it to the top when de- 
 spite his every effort, it rolls back again into 
 the lowest part of the valley beneath, and so 
 he must needs descend and begin anew, 
 hoping against hope, trying again and again 
 but in vain disappointment his eternal 
 doom. 
 
 The wage workers of the world, say 
 the Socialists, are under the curse of Sisy- 
 phus, always have been, always will be, un- 
 less the social order be reconstructed. They 
 are doomed by the "iron law of wages " to 
 roll the huge stone of their daily tasks to 
 8 
 
114 The Social Question. 
 
 the hill-top of endeavor, always expectant 
 to plant it firmly on the summit, only to see 
 it roll back again into the valley of disap- 
 pointment and disaster. This is their doom, 
 and there is no hope. Translated into 
 every day phrase, this means that the wage- 
 earner is ground down by competition to 
 the smallest amount of pay upon which it is 
 possible to subsist ; that he is in a new bond- 
 age, in which the capitalist stands as task- 
 master, wielding the lash of power and 
 threatening not only the back of his employe, 
 but his very existence and that of his 
 family. A heart-rending spectacle if it were 
 true. God be praised that the new light of 
 knowledge makes clear the fact that this 
 awful theory of wages is a sham a hollow 
 semblance of reality which shrivels up at the 
 touch of the finger of investigation. 
 
 Statistics collected by such unimpeachable 
 authorities as Prof. Leone Levi, Social Con- 
 dition of the Working Classes ; Prof. Thorold 
 Rogers, Work and Wages; Robert Giffen, 
 President of the British Statistical Society, 
 Progress of the Working Classes in the last 
 Half Century ; Edward Atkinson, Capital 
 and Labor Allies not Enemies ; Prof. F. A. 
 Walker, Chief of United States Bureau of 
 Statistics, The Wages Question; Prof. R. T. 
 Ely, in Publications of Johns Hopkins Uni- 
 versity Papers, and many others, prove that 
 the condition of the working people during the 
 period of industrial progress has so much im- 
 proved as to render this theory utterly unten- 
 able, ridiculous, and absurd. Yet Karl Marx 
 built up his whole scheme of Socialism on that 
 theory. " A more crushing and contemptuous 
 rebuke it is impossible to conceive," says 
 W. H. Mallock " than that which these facts 
 administer to one who, in the opinion of his 
 
Socialism. 115 
 
 disciples,is the prof oundest social philosopher 
 of his or any century." * The theory of de- 
 spair has no basis, in fact, and, therefore, we 
 must condemn the superstructure of Social- 
 ism as unsound. 
 
 Furthermore, Judaism is endeavoring to 
 make us happy and contented in this life. 
 She preaches happiness and content as doc- 
 trines ; aims to show us that the ills under 
 which we suffer are for the most part our 
 own making, and how they can be overcome 
 by the cultivation of the homely virtues of 
 honesty and thrift, by sobriety and intelli- 
 gence, and by faithfulness to our tasks, to 
 our families, to our country and our religion. 
 But Socialism, on the contrary, preaches 
 discontent ; and is at great pains to exag- 
 gerate the ills that, under existing conditions, 
 we are heir to. At every turn it dins into 
 our ears, along with its false philosophy of 
 despair, its false doctrine of discontent. It 
 declares that as physical labor creates wealth, 
 therefore to the laboring man all wealth 
 should belong. Karl Marx said : " In six 
 hours the laborer can earn all that he needs 
 for his own sustenance. Every hour be- 
 yond that is so much towards the enrich- 
 ment of the master. Look at these homes 
 of luxury, these carriages, these machines, 
 these palaces of industry. These are yours. 
 These are the products of your unrequited 
 toil, these are the things of which you have 
 been fleeced." 
 
 What ! mere physical labor the creator 
 of. all wealth this the fundamental doctrine 
 of Socialism ! Can sane men profess it ? 
 What about the brain that conceives and 
 plans and directs and controls the physical 
 labor? what about the inventions that make 
 
 * Mallocky Property and Progress, p. 2i7 
 
116 The Social Question. 
 
 it a thousand times more serviceable ? what 
 about the organization and oversight that 
 make it ten thousand times more effective ? 
 what about the material on which and with 
 which it toils land and ore and timber 
 the products of nature ? and what about cap- 
 ital accumulated money, the result of self- 
 denial, economy and foresight money which 
 runs all risks and keeps all labor in activity ? 
 Do these contribute nothing to the creation 
 of new wealth ? Any tyro can see that in 
 fact they contribute most, and therefore 
 justly receive the greater share of the reward 
 or profit. 
 
 Such is the weakness of Socialism. A 
 theory was adopted then by taking hold of 
 its threads and twisting and twining them 
 this way and that, men like Lasalle and 
 Marx wove a fine web. in which they en- 
 snared themselves and the working people. 
 Adam Smith and Ricardo would not recog- 
 nize their own teaching could they return to 
 earth. 
 
 Repeat these doctrines of despair and dis- 
 content again and again, with all the flour- 
 ishes of oratory and all the exaggeration of 
 rhetoric : keep dinning them into the ears 
 of laborers who are most likely through their 
 own folly and vices in misfortune, who are 
 ill-clad and ill-fed ; shout to them : " Look 
 at these homes of luxury, these carriages, 
 these palaces of industry these are right- 
 fully yours ! " Make such proclamation, 
 publish it day after day, and in the face of 
 truth and sober reason men will come to be- 
 lieve it. Play upon their emotions, stir 
 their baser passions, rouse the lion in their 
 breasts to madness, and do you still think 
 that he will suffer himself to be led tamely ? 
 Cry Revolution! and will you hope for 
 
Socialism. 117 
 
 peaceable methods? Cast firebrands into 
 the arsenal, and what shall prevent the ex- 
 plosion the and flames, desolation ? The pre- 
 tensions of peace are false. We can not fol- 
 low whither Socialism would lead. 
 
 There are certain truths or half-truths 
 which, mingled with a great quantity of well- 
 disguised error, have given the semblance 
 of rights to Socialism as a remedy against 
 such ills as afflict the industrial system of to- 
 day. "Separate the real ills from the fancied 
 ones and I am convinced that you can find 
 their remedy in such expedients and reforms 
 as are possible and within our reach under 
 existing forms of society. But as for Social- 
 ism, its promises are fair but false ; its theo- 
 ries unable to bear the pressure of facts. 
 
 Above all, from the standpoint of Judaism, 
 must it be condemned ; because Socialism 
 makes a broad distinction between social 
 science and moral science, it clamors for- 
 ever and forever about social rights, the 
 rights of labor, the rights of capital, asks, 
 How much ? and, Will it pay ? but never 
 dreams of social duties, duties of capital, 
 duties of labor : never asks, Is it right ? 
 Ought it to be ? 
 
 Here, after all, is the great and vulnerable 
 error in the system ; that is why it hesitates 
 not at demanding the confiscation of prop- 
 erty, tools, and machinery. Thus it con- 
 demns theft and in the same breath recom- 
 ends theft. It cries, " Down with the cap- 
 italist ; let the laborer rule." Thus it con- 
 demns one form of class-despotism, and in 
 the same breath clamors to replace it with 
 another form of class despotism. 
 
 From the standpoint of Judaism, from 
 the high ground of Jewish justice and Jewish 
 
118 The Social Question. 
 
 morality, the Socialism of to-day, worshiping 
 as it does at the shrine of pagan justice and 
 immorality, can never be admitted as the 
 true solution of the Social Question. 
 
Constructive Solutions Resume. 119 
 
 DISCOURSE XIII. 
 
 CONSTRUCTIVE SOLUTIONS. RESUME. 
 
 WE have passed in review the various so- 
 lutions to the Social Question that are known 
 under the name of Socialism, Nihilism, An- 
 archy, and their attendant train. We have 
 learned that they are destructive in their 
 method, utterly subversive not only of the 
 social but moral order. Therefore from the 
 standpoint of Judaism they must be con- 
 demned. But, there have also been honest 
 constructive efforts to undo the injustice that 
 exists in the relations of men in society. 
 
 From the very earliest times, since a right- 
 eous indignation against that injustice has 
 swelled the breasts of men, it has impelled 
 them to devise modes of betterment. Beauti- 
 ful are the dreams of a social Elysium that 
 have been dreamt. Glorious are the pictures 
 which fancy has painted. What might be 
 called the romantic literature of the social 
 question, fills many volumes of quaint and 
 interesting lore. Plato, in his Republic rep- 
 resents Socrates as studying the ideal man 
 in the ideal commonwealth. Plutarch, in 
 his Life of Lycurgus paints an ideal society, 
 as does Cicero also in his De Republlca. 
 After the revival of learning, and the dis- 
 covery of America, when the minds of men 
 were stirred and their imaginations made won- 
 drously luminous by the sudden enlargement 
 of their conception of the world. Sir Thomas 
 
120 The Social Question. 
 
 More wrote his famous Utopia. This was 
 followed by the Neiv Atlantis by Francis 
 Bacon ; The City of the Sun, by Thomas 
 Campanella, and other similar works. Al- 
 though ther.e writings have undoubtedly 
 influenced the current of the world's thought 
 on social matters, they have but lightly af- 
 fected the course of social reform practical. 
 
 There have been divers experiments in 
 real life to establish such perfect common- 
 wealths. Such were the societies of the Jew- 
 ish Essenes, the Buddhist Mendicants and 
 the Christian Monks. Since all these had 
 some ascetic or religious principle to foster, 
 apart from mankind, this fact removes them 
 entirely from any consideration as a solution 
 for the social evils that afflict society at 
 large. 
 
 But in France during the revolutionary 
 period, when the spirit of equality and frater- 
 nity were everywhere rife, the propositions 
 of social reformers took shape in definite 
 plans and methods by which the whole of 
 society was to be put on an entirely new 
 basis. Experiments were set on foot follow- 
 ing out the economic theories of such men as 
 St. Simon, Fourier, Lamennais, and espe- 
 cially of Etienne Cabet, who, besides writing 
 his Voyage to Icaria (a Utopia after the pat- 
 tern of Sir Thomas More's), also led into 
 America a colony in 1848, and devoted his 
 life to making real his social reforms in that 
 little society which he founded. Since then 
 our country has become the field of experi- 
 ment for a great many such comm unities. 
 Many of them are at present still existing 
 and prospering peacefully, such as the Econo- 
 mists, Zoarites, Shakers, and Icarians. They 
 are all in greater or less degree communistic 
 in character. Their methods are peaceful 
 
Constructive Solutions Resume. 121 
 
 although their ultimate aims are the same as 
 those of the revolutionary Socialists, that is, 
 the right of individual ownership is given 
 up, all things are held in common, one is as 
 rich as the other, all must labor alike and 
 all are provided for alike by the society. 
 Mr. Charles Nordhoff has visited all these 
 communities in the United States and pre- 
 pared an elaborate report of them. Have 
 they solved the social question ? Mr. Nord- 
 hoff thinks not. As the result of careful and 
 impartial investigation he says : " The 
 general feeling of modern society is blindly 
 right at bottom; Communism is a mutiny 
 against society. Only whether the Com- 
 munist shall rebel with a bludgeon and'a 
 petroleum torch, or with a plough and a 
 church, depends upon whether he has not or 
 has faith in God whether he is a religious 
 being or not." * 
 
 Now all these communistic schemes must 
 from the standpoint of Judaism, be un- 
 equivocally condemned. Communism, pluck- 
 ing the spurs from the heels of. ambition, 
 weakens and reduces all to a nerveless 
 mediocrity ; while Judaism, guarding strictly 
 the fences of equity, urges every one for- 
 ward to the utmost development of those 
 capacities with which God has endowed him. 
 
 Communism opposes the private owner- 
 ship of land, which in the Jewish law is 
 held sacred, as based on the principle of 
 justice and reward indelibly stamped in our 
 natures. According to the Jewish law, 
 every man was made a land-owner, and was 
 therefore ever on the side of law and order.* 
 
 *Nordhoff, Communistic Societies of the United States. 
 p. 208. 
 
 tin an interesting article entitled "Three Ways of 
 Living," by Mr. John Poison, in the Paisley Gazette, 
 the following reference was made to the Land Legisla- 
 
122 The Social Question. 
 
 Rabbi Eliezer even declares * that " no man 
 is truly a free man until he owns a piece of 
 ground which yields him a living." To this 
 end monopoly was checked (and we in our 
 times have not yet devised any correspond- 
 ing means to do this) through that strange 
 unique institution of Moses the Sabbatic 
 and Jubilee years adapted to the peculiar 
 circumstances of an agricultural, theocratic 
 nation. Communism comes into deadly 
 conflict with the moral law of Judaism when 
 tampering with the sanctity of the marital 
 relations and destroying the home, which is 
 the sacred shrine of all morality and social 
 order. Therefore unhesitatingly must Juda- 
 ism pass sentence against all these svstems. 
 
 tion of the Bible. As to primogeniture, it has high 
 sanction ; so, indeed, has entail. By the Mosaic law 
 both were established. The 600,000 adult males, who, 
 it is estimated, entered Canaan, hal the land divided 
 among them by lot, which gave, it is computed, about 
 sixteen to twenty-five acres to each. This was the 
 patrimony of each family, and it was by the institution 
 of primogeniture and the jubilee made inalienable, al- 
 though it is not certain that the provisions of the jubi- 
 lee ordinance were ever observed. They certainly were 
 not up to the time of the Babylonian captivity. By the 
 law of primogeniture, the eldest son, or if there were 
 no sons, the eldest daughter, and if dead, the eldest 
 child of such son or daughter, received a double portion 
 of the inheritance, the remainder being equally divided 
 among the others. And so rigid was the enactment, 
 that even in the case of a man with two wives the one 
 beloved and the other hated if a child of the hated 
 wife was the first born, the father had no power to dis- 
 possess him of his double portion. By the Jubilee 
 ordinance which did not apply to houses in towns 
 all alienated lands reverted, in the fiftieth year to J,he 
 legal heir, who may be said to have been the heir of 
 entail. These two provisions instead of nationalizing 
 land, as some people say, individualized it; and the 
 severest denunciations were pronounced against those 
 who in any way attempted to dispossess a man of the 
 " inheritance of his fathers." Dr. I. M. Wise, in the 
 American Israelite. 
 
 * See also Discourse V., Note, on same topic. 
 
 Jab. 63, Tosef. 
 
Constructive Solutions. Resume. 123 
 
 The task which we had set for ourselves 
 is now completed. The great social ques- 
 tion that is agitating the world from center 
 to circumference enlisted, nay, commanded 
 our most ardent interest. Earnestly we en- 
 tered upon a study of this great world-prob- 
 lem ; not indeed in the presumptuous hope 
 that for us it was reserved to find a final 
 solution for the ever-recurring riddle, or to 
 set forth any "sole possible method " of re- 
 moving once and forever the unjust inequali- 
 ties in the conditions of men which prevail, 
 but simply in the earnest search after knowl- 
 edge, to make intelligible, and thus if pos- 
 sible to bring to the Jewish mind and heart 
 a profound sense of the importance of the 
 questions which now so earnestly absorb 
 every intelligent and right feeling man and 
 woman. 
 
 It has been said both in private discussion 
 and in the press that the question I have 
 undertaken to present to you was irrelevant 
 here, that it was out of place in the Jewish 
 pulpit, or, for that matter, in any pulpit. I 
 respect the opinion of those who so think, 
 but I also exercise my high right to pos- 
 itively differ from them. Indeed so firmly 
 convinced was I of the opposite opinion 
 that when I was told that no Jewish minis- 
 ter had ever yet spoken out authoritatively 
 on this subject, it became to me an over- 
 whelming duty and necessity to do so. 
 Therefore with conscientious, painstaking 
 effort I ranged along the entire course of 
 history from the most ancient times until 
 to-day in order to point out the significance, 
 the supreme importance of this social ques- 
 tion in all its bearings, from its inception 
 on, and to show what its special significance 
 is to us Israelites ; to tell the world in be- 
 
124 The Sodal Question 
 
 half of the Judaism of to-day what our re- 
 ligion has had to offer in the past, what it 
 still has to present toward the solution of 
 the problem in hand. 
 
 Now recall briefly what in these studies 
 we have discerned, and you will confess that 
 Judaism has given to the world the largest 
 and best contributions to this Social Ques- 
 tion that have as yet been offered. The per- 
 nicious charge so sweepingly made by the 
 modern social agitator, that the rich are 
 richer and less numerous, the poor are poor 
 and more numerous than ever before, was 
 by a careful contrast with the records of the 
 past shown to be absolutely false. We saw 
 how throughout the ancient world the 
 laborers were bound in the shackles of slav- 
 ery and hounded by their masters unto the 
 very death. Judaism, defying Pharaoh and 
 the whole Egyptian host, first burst those 
 fetters and made the laborer free, and ever 
 thereafter through all the long and weary 
 centuries of her sorrowful existence never 
 failed to lift up her voice to denounce op- 
 pression and plead for the oppressed. And 
 now, at least in our blessed land of freedom, 
 the laborer, emancipated and in the enjoy- 
 ment of such material advantages as our 
 civilization and the increased productive 
 powers which the industrial advance of re- 
 cent days have brought, is lifted high above 
 the condition of the laborer in the past. 
 
 All that is not exaggerated, all that is just 
 in the complaint of the modern laborer arises 
 not from his being poorer than ever before in 
 the essentials of healthy, happy human life, 
 but simply of the stupidity, willful perverse- 
 ness, moral obliquity of rich and poor alike, 
 as seen, e. g., in the greed of one and the 
 thriftlessness of the other, in the abuse of 
 
Constructive Solutions Resume. 125 
 
 power by the master and the lawless spirit 
 of the employe. 
 
 Work upon character until these moral 
 differences have been allayed, and all that 
 will be removed which forestalls and hind- 
 ers the realization under the new and changed 
 conditions of our times of the eternal princi- 
 ples of justice and' right which Moses in his 
 day succeeded so well in actualizing in the 
 statutes that controlled the life of his people. 
 
 We saw how labor itself was despis- 
 ed, scorned and held degrading. Moses 
 grandly and majestically swept away the 
 caste-system, and the inhuman degrada- 
 tion of man by his fellow-men stood 
 forever condemned. Thus, Judaism again 
 pioneer and champion in the cause of right 
 was the first to make work instead of war 
 the legitimate occupation of men. The 
 Rabbins proclaim the dignity of labor, not 
 merely in words by precepts and laws, but 
 by their own lives and through their own 
 practical example, deeming the worldly oc- 
 cupation combined with the spiritual as the 
 only secure safeguard against sin. 
 
 In all the dismal era of European history 
 known as the Dark Ages the followers of 
 Judaism contributed most to the preserva- 
 tion and development of commerce and in- 
 dustry and upheld correct views of labor de- 
 spite the world. While humbly peddling 
 their oriental wares from castle to castle 
 along the bandit-ridden highways of medi- 
 aeval Europe, they retailed likewise those 
 ideas which, conquering at last, gave the 
 death blow to the serfdom of feudal days, 
 and made possible the rise of the laborer of 
 modern times into equal and free conditions 
 with his master. 
 
 That earnest aspiration after a better state 
 
126 The Social Question. 
 
 of things among men which gives to the 
 latest Socialistic movement its justification 
 for existence ; this, too, has been fostered 
 and most eloquently and profoundly main- 
 tained by sons of Israel in Germany, France, 
 and England.* There was nothing in their 
 religion to hinder them ; nay, the codes and 
 precepts given to the world by Judaism have 
 been and still remain the standard the 
 Court of Appeal in kindred debates and 
 contentions. 
 
 Thus it must be conceded that the genuine 
 triumphs that have been gained in behalf of 
 free labor and the freedom of the laborer, 
 these are in their last resort to be truely 
 traced to the influence and practical work- 
 ings of Judaism, whose sphere, unlike that 
 of other religions, is distinctively of this 
 world aspiring unto heaven, but ever tread- 
 ing firmly the earth, striving among men, 
 only to make men more God-like. 
 
 Is it for us to conceal these things and 
 falsify our position? I aver that it is our 
 solemn duty to set forth these achievements 
 in this important era and in self-defence 
 against that slur and imputation which by 
 social reformers is cast upon all religion, 
 show forth what Judaism has wrought, and 
 bid the oppressed hope, for their cause is not 
 forsaken. Too long, have we Jews been 
 forced to live behind the walls and barri- 
 cades of real Ghettos. Let us not build up 
 around us an intellectual Ghetto, and hiding 
 our works from the world in its recesses, 
 bring opprobrium where none is due. 
 
 Speaking now upon the present phase of 
 the Social Question speaking in the name 
 of Judaism, and from the standpoint of its 
 
 * Ricardo, Marx, LaSalle, Bamberger, E. Halvey, E. 
 Pereire, and others. 
 
Constructive Solutions Resume. 127 
 
 unapproachable ethical code, and measuring 
 all conditions by the standards that Moses, 
 our great law-giver, set up, and which in 
 Judea produced what was undoubtedly the 
 most successful social system that the world 
 has ever known, we are compelled not only 
 to condemn Communism, Socialism, Nihil- 
 ism, Anarchy, and all their attendants, but 
 furthermore to earnestly protest, solemnly 
 to warn, urgently to persuade, and, with all 
 the zeal that truth inspires, to contend 
 against their further encroachment. 
 
 As to the practical solutions now clamor- 
 ing for attention, they are all in a formative 
 process, and are as varied and numerous as 
 the individual minds that conceive them. 
 Arbitration is the white flag of truce between 
 the hostile organizations of capital and labor, 
 which are everywhere marshaling to the 
 combat. Profit-sharing and the various 
 forms of co-operation are the articles of a 
 permanent league of peace, in which the 
 risks, profits, and toils are equitably divided 
 between employers and employes, at a fair 
 valuation upon what each contributes. 
 Colonization is the scheme of philanthrop- 
 ists for removing the denizens of overcrowd- 
 ed cities and towns, from the scenes of 
 starvation and misery to the smiling acres 
 that invite their toil, with the promise of 
 plenty and happiness. Taxation upon 
 land arid land exclusively, is the remedy to 
 which Mr. Henry George has of late attracted 
 such extraordinary attention. 
 
 Whatever may ultimately survive of any 
 or of all these plans, this truth remains 
 paramount and is all that now really con- 
 cerns us : That the masses should be edu- 
 cated up to a recognition of the real evils 
 
128 The Social Question. 
 
 and be made to see the true methods by 
 which alone any reform can succeed. 
 
 Now, it is in this very direction that Juda- 
 ism with her peculiar common-sense practi- 
 cality, and wondrous adaptability has a 
 leading task still to perform in the world ; 
 her crown of greatest glory, I verily believe, 
 is still to be won through the establishment 
 of social justice among men. Toward this she 
 lias pointed the ideal with her golden precept : 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
 Her moral code alone can furnish the 
 -guiding methods and principles of any per- 
 manent social reform, whether it comes 
 along the line of political or economic 
 advancement, for the social question is, in 
 the main, after all a question of moral con- 
 duct. Supplant whining complaint with 
 manly action, drive out policy with the 
 whip of honesty, let energy vanquish sloth, 
 temperance conquer dissipation and intelli- 
 gence rout ignorance, and thousands of 
 those abuses which give reality to the social 
 question will be rectified, and countless 
 severities will be allayed. Let greed be 
 checked and passions be controlled, and all 
 bitterness will be swallowed up in sweet 
 fraternity, and the black clouds of strife 
 that threaten will be scattered and pass 
 away. 
 
 As Judaism has redeemed the laborer in 
 the past, and made every calling honored, 
 so must she now bend her efforts to establish 
 the truth that though labor may be a com- 
 modity whose value depends on the fluctua- 
 tions of the market, yet the laborer is not 
 such. He must be recognized as a human 
 being, a child of God ; and his physical, in- 
 tellectual, moral, and spiritual good must be 
 the first consideration in all the contracts of 
 
Constructive Solutions Resume. 129 
 
 industry. He must be guarded against dan- 
 ger, disease, overwork, and all oppression 
 and coercion, mental or moral. 
 
 In dealing with the great curse of poverty 
 the world has missed the very quintessence 
 of Moses' teachings : " Let the poor glean 
 in the fields and gather through bis own ef- 
 forts what he needs ; " that is, give to the 
 poor, not support, but opportunity to secure 
 his own support. But we reverse this 
 teaching, and as a result on the one side 
 noble pride silently perishes in destitution 
 rather than ask for aid, and on the other 
 there is insolence, tramping the country, 
 and demanding or stealing an unearned 
 sustenance. Mark it! these, our greatest 
 social evils, were unknown in Judea. 
 Above all else, we need to preserve and per- 
 petuate the model family-life whicli has ever 
 been proverbial of the Jewish home, and 
 strive to make the nations emulate its beauty 
 and its worth. 
 
 These are the methods of social reform 
 which we Israelites need to continually con- 
 vey to the world. Oh, let us not be blind 
 to the great opportunity that in this crisis 
 of history is before us. Never has Judaism 
 been so free to lavish its treasures on man- 
 kind. As the world has been redeemed 
 from the abyss of idolatry and corruption 
 by the vital force of Jewish ideas, so can it 
 likewise be redeemed from Social chaos. 
 Let not the atheists turn this Social Ques- 
 tion into a weapon against religion. If 
 other religions turn blindly from it, let us 
 dare to cherish it. Our duty is, not to 
 skulk, like Achilles in the tent, but like 
 doughty David of old, to boldly go out be- 
 fore the van. In all living vital questions 
 * Lev. xix. 10; Deut. xxiv. 21. 
 
130 The Social Question. 
 
 that concern the welfare of humanity, we 
 must be foremost to be interested, first to 
 study them, and ever ready to guide and 
 control their issue into the course of the 
 eternal laws of God. 
 
 FINIS. 
 


 
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