"I / 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 !l 

 
 CAPITALIST AND 
 LABORER 
 
 An Open Letter to Professor Goldwin Smith, D. C. L., 
 in reply to his Capital and Labor, 
 
 AND 
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 A Lecture delivered at the New York School of Phil- 
 
 anthrophy 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN SPARGO 
 
 Author of " The Bitter Cry of the Children," " Social- 
 ism, a Summary and Interpretation of Socialist 
 Principles," " The Socialists," etc. 
 
 • 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
 
 1907 
 
 .... . . 
 
 • . . , , , 
 • » * > • • • .
 
 Copyright 1907 
 By CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
 
 JOHN F. HIGGINS 
 CHICAGO
 
 
 TO 
 
 CERISE E. A. CARMAN 
 
 WITH PROFOUND ADMIRATION AND SINCERE FRIENDSHIP 
 
 CM 
 N 
 O 
 
 450128
 
 PREFACE 
 
 This little volume consists of two parts. 
 The first part contains a reply to Professor 
 Goldwin Smith's attack on Socialism in his 
 little book, Capital and Labor, the second a lec- 
 ture on Modem Socialism, delivered to the 
 students of the School of Philanthrophy, New 
 York City. 
 
 It will be seen that, while I have for Pro- 
 fessor Smith's character and scholastic attain- 
 ments the highest respect and admiration, I 
 cannot esteem other than lightly his argu- 
 ment on the relations of Capital and Labor. 
 Had the author's eminence in the world of 
 letters not been such that his words are given 
 great and serious attention wherever the Eng- 
 lish language is read and spoken, I should 
 not have felt that his little book merited any 
 reply. 
 
 As it is, I venture to ask a careful consider- 
 ation of the reply here printed, especially 
 
 5
 
 6 PREFACE 
 
 from those who have read Professor Smith's 
 book. 
 
 The lecture in the second part of the vol- 
 ume is here included in the belief that such 
 a brief expository statement will be welcomed 
 by many persons, and that it usefully supple- 
 ments the arguments contained in the earlier 
 portion. A certain amount of repetition oc- 
 curs, but not, I hope, sufficient to annoy the 
 reader. 
 
 Perhaps I ought to say that, owing to the 
 time limits, the lecture as originally delivered 
 was considerably abbreviated. It is here pub- 
 lished for the first time. 
 
 J. S. 
 
 Yonkers, N. Y., March, 1907.
 
 PART ONE 
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 An Open Letter to Prof. Goldwin Smith, 
 D.C.L. 
 
 7.
 
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 My Dear Professor Smith : 
 
 Rea«on 8 for Some time ago a friend in Tor- 
 this letter ontQ sent me & QQ ^ Qf & jj^ 
 
 pamphlet containing your " open letter," 
 Progress or Revolution? with the request that 
 I reply to it from the viewpoint of those mem- 
 bers of the working class who believe the ex- 
 isting industrial system to be unjust and des- 
 tined to be replaced by a saner and juster 
 system. While I was reluctant to associate 
 my name in a controversial way with that of 
 so eminent a citizen in the great republic of 
 letters, wherein I am so humble a citizen, as 
 yourself, I could not but feel emboldened by 
 the terms of friendship for Labor in which 
 your letter was couched. Further, it seeme^ 
 to me a matter of duty to set forth my rea- 
 sons for believing that Progress must be by 
 Revolution — albeit that the revolution need 
 not be associated with violence. I felt that 
 

 
 10 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 the manner in which your letter had come 
 under my observation was in a very real sense 
 a call to give reasons for the faith and hope 
 which, as a Socialist, I hold. It did not re- 
 quire even your very modest references to 
 your many services to the cause of the work- 
 ers in years past, and your friendship for men 
 like Joseph Arch and George Jacob Holy- 
 oake — men whom I also knew and loved — 
 to assure me that you would give my letter 
 of reply the same courteous consideration as 
 that which you desired for your letter which 
 called it forth. 
 
 That reply to Progress or Revolution was 
 written, under the title Progress by Revolu- 
 tion, and but for pressure of other matters 
 of more immediate importance would have 
 been published some time ago. Now that 
 your letter has appeared in a new and greatly 
 revised edition, and with the imprint of an 
 American publisher, I am grateful for the 
 delay, since it affords me the opportunity of 
 replying to your argument in its elaborated 
 and carefully revised form. I have taken the 
 liberty, therefore, of changing the title of my 
 reply to one conforming more nearly to the
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER II 
 
 one you have substituted for that of your orig- 
 inal choice. 
 
 That in a life so crowded with 
 
 A correction . , , • • , • i • 
 
 varied activities and interests as 
 your own the memory should sometimes falter 
 and fail is quite natural. It would be strange 
 were it otherwise. Your well-known love of 
 historical accuracy will, I am confident, cause 
 you to welcome a correction I desire to make 
 before proceeding to a consideration of your 
 general argument, even though it adds some- 
 what to the length of my letter and leads into 
 a bypath from which we must retrace our 
 steps. 
 
 After referring to the historical case of the 
 •transportation of the six (not seven as you 
 state) Dorchester laborers, you say, "Liber- 
 alism coming into power in England repealed 
 the Combination Laws." x May I remind 
 you that the act repealing the odious law of 
 1800, which prohibited workmen's combina- 
 tions, was passed in 1824 — ten years before 
 the vicious persecution of the Dorchester la- 
 borers, to winch you- refer, and of the Bcr- 
 mondsey tanners. It was not passed by the 
 
 1 Capital and Labor, p. 11.
 
 12 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 Liberals. It was, as you will remember, 
 " smuggled ' : through Parliament by its au- 
 thors, the philosophic radicals, Francis Place 
 and Joseph Hume, so that the Tory govern- 
 ment of the time was quite unaware of its 
 passage. Three weeks after the act went into 
 effect some cotton weavers in Lancashire were 
 sent to jail under the old law, the magistrates 
 never having heard of its repeal. The Prime 
 Minister and the Lord Chancellor declared a 
 year afterward that they had been " quite un- 
 aware of the passing of the Act," and that 
 had they been informed concerning it they 
 " never would have assented to it." An at- 
 tempt was accordingly made, in 1825, to undo 
 the work of Place and Hume. Some modifi- 
 cations were made in the Act of Repeal of 
 1824, but the result of the Tory legislation 
 was, upon the whole, satisfactory. The rights 
 of combination and collective bargaining were 
 for the first time in English history specific- 
 ally established by statute, and that by the 
 Tories. 1 
 
 1 The History of Trade Unionism, by Sidney and Be- 
 atrice Webb.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 1 3 
 
 pSrtJUSd 11 In l8 3°- the Liberals — so called 
 
 Trade Union- £ Qr ^ ^^ ^ mQ came illtO 
 
 power under that hater of democracy and lib- 
 erty, Lord Melbourne. As soon as he had 
 taken office, Melbourne appointed a Commis- 
 sion to inquire into the workings of the trade 
 unions, which he regarded as " a very formid- 
 able difficulty and danger." * Before me as 
 I write is the volume of Lord Melbourne's 
 papers which Mr. Lloyd C. Sanders edited. 
 From it alone the justice of my estimate of 
 Lord Melbourne could be easily justified. 
 That his two Commissioners were appointed 
 mainly because they were already known to 
 be bitterly hostile to the trade unions is well 
 known to every student of the subject. They 
 reported in favor of terrible measures of re- 
 pression in a report so vicious that Lord Mel- 
 bourne's government dared not even present 
 it to the House of Commons, much less try 
 to embody its proposals in legislation. 
 Nevertheless, Lord Melbourne and his Cabi- 
 net decided to carry on a campaign of perse- 
 cution against the unions. I need only men- 
 tion here the imprisonment of the Lancashire 
 1 History of Trade Unionism, Webb.
 
 14 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 miners and the Southwark shoemakers, ir 
 1832, and the already mentioned tanners o: 
 Bermondsey and laborers of Dorchester, ir 
 1834. 1 Any uninformed person reading youi 
 statement would naturally gather from it tha 
 the Liberals were the friends of trade union 
 ism and its emancipators, whereas they wen 
 in fact its bitterest enemies. 
 unions legal- It was left for the Tories to re 
 Tories 7 lieve the unions, by the Acts o 
 
 1859 and 1 86 1. They definitely legalizec 
 unionism and the use of peaceful, persuasiv< 
 methods of inducing non-unionists to join th< 
 unions — picketing. Again the Liberals, un 
 der Gladstone this time, showed their hostil 
 ity to organized Labor by passing th< 
 infamous Criminal Law Amendment Act, th< 
 most cruel measure ever directed against Eng 
 lish trade unions. You will remember hov 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison drew up a bill for th< 
 unions, embodying the proposals of the Mi 
 nority Report of the Royal Commission whicl 
 the Earl of Lichfield, Mr. Thomas Hughe: 
 and himself had signed. You will remember 
 too, how bitterly that bill was opposed by th< 
 
 1 Idem.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 1 5 
 
 government and how it was subsequently 
 withdrawn upon the promise of Mr. Glad- 
 stone's government that another bill, satisfac- 
 tory to the unions, would be speedily intro- 
 duced. When that measure was tardily 
 introduced, in 1871, by Mr. Bruce, who after- 
 ward became Lord Aberdare, it roused the 
 fiercest storm of opposittion on the part of the 
 unions ever directed against any measure, so 
 that the bill had to be divided. Two laws 
 were passed, one of which (34 and 35 Vic- 
 toria, C. 31) legalized trade unionism, and 
 the other of which, the Criminal Law Amend- 
 ment Act (34 and 35 Victoria, C. 32), well 
 nigh destroyed the unions. 1 
 virions per- Do you forget, Professor Smith, 
 
 Het'utlon of , r it 
 
 unionists the imprisonment ot the seven 
 women in South Wales for shouting "Bah!' : 
 after a "blackleg," 2 or the sentence of im- 
 prisonment passed upon the London gas-stok- 
 ers, in 1872, by Lord Justice Brett, merely for 
 preparing to strike? Do you forget the vig- 
 orous opposition to the iniquitous law carried 
 
 1 History of Trade Unionism, Webb. 
 - Idem " Blackleg " is the English equivalent for the 
 American term of contempt and reproach, " Scab."
 
 1 6 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 on by Mr. Frederic Harrison in his trenchant 
 letters to the Times, and the campaign of such 
 men as Messrs. Potter, Howell, Broadhurst, 
 and others? In 1874 the Liberals went out of 
 office with the curse of the trade unions upon 
 them, and it was left to the Tories once more 
 to do justice to the workers. 1 In 1875 Mr. 
 Cross introduced legislation, which was car- 
 ried in the teeth of strong Liberal opposition, 
 repealing the Criminal Law Amendment Act 
 of 1 87 1, and making employer and employee 
 equal parties to a civil contract. This was 
 the real charter of English trade unionism, 
 hailed as such by the Trade Union Congress 
 of 1875, which voted its thanks to Mr. Cross. 1 
 sources of I have far too much respect for 
 your splendid integrity as a his- 
 torian to regard your version of the attitude 
 of the English Liberal Party toward the trade 
 unions as anything other than a mistake aris- 
 ing from a confused memory of a not very 
 familiar phase of history. That the facts are 
 as I have briefly stated them, you can easily 
 satisfy yourself by referring to the authorities 
 I have cited, to the reports of the Trade Union 
 1 History of Trade Unionism, Webb.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER * IJ 
 
 Congress of the period, the files of the Lon- 
 don Times, the various volumes of Hansard's 
 Parliamentary Debates, or by asking Mr. 
 Frederic Harrison for the part in which he 
 was a distinguished participant. Elsewhere, 
 I have shown, beyond the possibility of seri- 
 ous doubt, I think, that the Liberal Party in 
 England always was the most bitter opponent 
 of industrial democracy. 1 I cannot but feel 
 that it is a very great pity that a man of your 
 eminence and distinction, upon whose every 
 word so much reliance is placed, should have 
 sown broadcast such error as your references 
 to the history of English trade unionism con- 
 tain. It is not a matter for wonder that this 
 Homeric nodding weakens confidence in your 
 other judgments and your advice to the work- 
 ers. 
 
 .whaiienge T P ass now to the general argu- 
 ■eeeptod ment Q f your | etter w hich is de- 
 
 signed, obviously, to serve as an intellectual 
 weapon to be used by the opponents of Social- 
 ism in their desperate and pathetic propa- 
 ganda. Temperate and kindly in tone as it 
 
 1 In the Social Democrat, London, October 1900, p. 
 294.
 
 1 8 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 is, it commands respectful attention whatever 
 its weakness may be, and quite apart from 
 the homage due to yourself. Since you have 
 sent it forth as a challenge to the Socialists, 
 challenging them in very definite terms, you 
 will not, I am sure, complain if I, a Socialist 
 to whom Socialism is an inspiration and spirit- 
 ual anchorage, take it upon myself to answer 
 your challenge and discuss the remainder of 
 your letter with perfect frankness and plain 
 speech. 
 Anincom- When I read in your letter the 
 
 plete state- J 
 
 ment declaration that " It would be 
 
 hard to require the employer to live in the 
 smoke and din of his works," x I could not 
 see my way clear to accepting it. Something 
 about it seemed wrong: the statement seemed 
 incomplete. I would not want the employer 
 to live " in the smoke and din of his works," 
 simply because the employer is a human be- 
 ing like myself. But I submit that the em- 
 ployer is not more than human, that dirt and 
 din are just as unpleasant, unwholesome and 
 unhealthy to the men and women who work 
 as to those for whom they work. It is both 
 
 1 Page 3.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 1 9 
 
 hard and wrong that any human being should 
 be doomed to live in such unfavorable condi- 
 tions. I have visited and slept in scores of 
 miserable " Company houses " in our mining 
 districts, squalid, ill-built, unsanitary and 
 monstrously ugly houses built by the employ- 
 ing companies for their " hands " and their 
 families to dwell in. I have lived in vile tene- 
 ment hovels in our greatest cities, hovels in 
 which tens of thousands of families are com- 
 pelled to reside, and in which thousands of 
 babies are born under conditions less favorable 
 to proper physical and spiritual development 
 than they would have if born in Africa in the 
 hut of a kaffir kraal. That such things are 
 necessary, I cannot believe. I cannot think 
 that they are due to anything but Ignorance 
 and Greed. I would not condemn the em- 
 ployer to such a struggle against unwholesome 
 environment as these conditions inevitably im- 
 pose upon their victims, nor can I believe it to 
 be anything less than my duty as a man and 
 citizen to do all that lies in my power to make 
 it impossible for such evils to continue. 
 rniiwiiiB "What most surprises and pains me 
 and inudeiity ^ y 0Ur i etter j s n0 |- j^e conserva-
 
 20 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 tism due to advancing age, which you recog- 
 nize with philosophic calm, but the lack of 
 idealism, of moral energy, faith and courage, 
 so unusual in your brilliant and honored ca- 
 reer. Realizing that the Socialist ideal of 
 human brotherhood means " social happiness 
 compared with which the highest pleasure at- 
 tainable in this world of inequality, strife, and 
 self-interest would be mean," 1 you seek to 
 pour cold water, the deadening cold water of 
 pessimism and infidelity, upon whatever en- 
 thusiasm and faith manifests itself in the pur- 
 suit of the great ideal. Many of your read- 
 ers must, I think, like myself, have asked 
 themselves, " Is it ever possible to be too earn- 
 est in the pursuit of righteousness ? ' : I have 
 asked myself constantly while studying your 
 letter, " Would Jesus have said ' Seek the 
 Kingdom of God and His Righteousness — 
 but seek it not too earnestly or with fervor ' ? " 
 If the Socialist ideal is as true and noble as 
 you declare it to be, surely it cannot be too 
 fervently pursued. It may, of course, be un- 
 wisely pursued — as, for example, when men 
 seek the short-cut of compromise with Error 
 
 1 Page 38.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 21 
 
 in the vain effort to promote the cause of 
 Truth — but too much moral earnestness 
 there cannot be. If the ideal cannot be im- 
 mediately attained, the most strenuous efforts 
 toward it will not achieve the impossible. 
 They can only bring the possibility of attain- 
 ment nearer. On the other hand, if it can 
 be attained immediately the only danger is in 
 delay. The pessimistic unfaith to Truth, the 
 infidelity which declares that it is not expedi- 
 ent to do right, is a curse to the world and a 
 blasphemy. 
 
 socialism I fi°d m your letter so many mis- 
 misrepresented representations of Socialism and 
 its advocates as were ever compressed in such 
 small compass. Your picture of the " fac- 
 tory-hand ' : (Your adoption of the popular, 
 impersonal term shows how completely the 
 fact that the worker is anything but the ad- 
 junct of a machine is forgotten!), taking his 
 Sunday stroll to the suburbs and looking with 
 envy upon the mansion of wealth " which 
 Karl Marx, or a disciple of Karl Marx, has 
 told him ought to be his own," ! is a case in 
 point. No word of Marx can be found in all 
 
 1 Page 3.
 
 22 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 his voluminous writings which gives the 
 slightest warrant for such a statement ; neither 
 Marx nor anyone who can be called a disciple 
 of Marx ever held or believed anything so 
 foolish. The poor, ill-paid and overworked 
 toiler may go from the dreary hovel which 
 only Love makes worthy the name of 
 " home " to see the mansion of wealth. If 
 he is ignorant of the great principles of po- 
 litical economy which Marx taught, he may 
 be filled with envy and hatred of the owner of 
 the mansion. If, however, he has even the 
 faintest perception of what Marx taught, he 
 is not envious; he does not, can not, say 
 " That fine mansion ought to be mine." He 
 knows that the costly mansion with its elab- 
 orate furnishings (a large part of which may 
 be quite useless, or worse) were purchased 
 with the proceeds of the joint labor of hun- 
 dreds of workers like himself. He contrasts 
 the waste and luxury of the mansion with his 
 own poverty and declares the distribution of 
 wealth to be unjust. He does not feel envy 
 or hatred toward the owner of the mansion 
 (except for personal reasons, perhaps, quite 
 distinct from the possession of the wealth) be
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 23 
 
 cause he knows that it is the system which is 
 at fault and that the rich man is no more re- 
 sponsible for making that system than him- 
 self. 
 Grotesque Again, when you suggest, infer- 
 
 ideas of , _ . . 
 
 socialism eiitially, that Socialists are trying 
 to leap into the millenium, 1 and when you say 
 that all the instruments of production are to 
 be simultaneously transferred to the Socialist 
 State, 2 you gravely, but, no doubt, without in- 
 tention, wrong the Socialist. The latter 
 statement is so demonstrably and obviously 
 impossible that it is inconceivable that any 
 sane man could believe it for a moment to be 
 practicable. I am quite certain that you 
 would not deny that among the many millions 
 of Socialists scattered throughout the world 
 there are sonic who are sane and intelligent 
 enough to reject such an absurd proposal as 
 impossible. Just as I have met many thou- 
 sands of Socialists in various lands without 
 ever meeting one remotely resembling your 
 factory-worker contemplating the mansion 
 with envy, I have never met one who believed 
 in the simultaneous transformation of society. 
 1 Page 38. 2 Page 32.
 
 24 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 It would be fundamentally opposed to the 
 whole philosophy of Socialism. 
 The critics of I nave often marvelled that so 
 socialism many writers and lecturers under- 
 take to oppose Socialism without taking the 
 trouble to understand it. In the case of other 
 subjects this is rarely so. No one presumes 
 to lecture upon or write about theology, for 
 instance, without some information upon the 
 subject. The same is true of geology, chem- 
 istry, biology, history, and most other sub- 
 jects. When we come to Socialism, however, 
 critics abound who have never made an at- 
 tempt to understand its meaning. Even the 
 most superficial examination of Socialism 
 would suffice to acquit its advocates from the 
 charge of seeking to change the whole social 
 and political life of the nation, or of the world, 
 at a single stroke. On the contrary, they 
 alone of all who seek to remedy the ills of to- 
 day base all their efforts and their programmes 
 upon a sense of the continuity of human his- 
 tory, upon the fact that Past, Present and Fu- 
 ture are linked together by the phenomena of 
 evolution. The Socialist movement of to-day, 
 quite unlike the Utopian schemes and visions
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 25 
 
 innumerable which were identified with the 
 word " Socialism," and whose only connec- 
 tion with the Socialism of to-day is that they 
 mark the line of departure from visionary 
 schemes to the study of facts, does not seek 
 to interfere with natural laws. On the con- 
 trary, it seeks to make clear the laws which 
 govern the progress of human society, in or- 
 der that human effort shall make for an intel- 
 ligent cooperation with those laws. And 
 this, which is the very soul of Socialism, is 
 in the interests of that peaceful progress which 
 you and all good men desire, and against that 
 havoc and violence which you and all good 
 men fear. 
 
 social evo- The Socialist sees in the long his- 
 lution tQr y Q £ maj-^jnd an evolution 
 
 from Savagedom through Slavedom and Serf- 
 dom to a very complex industrial civilization. 
 From the disappearance of rude savagery and 
 the appearance of slavery, the story is one of 
 great struggles — owners and slaves, lords 
 and serfs, masters and workmen constantly 
 struggling for supremacy. The great slave- 
 lords of antiquity were superseded by the serf- 
 lords of medieval feudalism, and these, in
 
 26 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 turn, by the industrial, manufacturing class. 
 Without denying the part which ideals, be- 
 liefs and emotions have played in the great 
 drama of human progress, the Socialist points 
 out that every epochal change has depended 
 upon, and been made possible by, some change 
 in the economic system. New means of pro- 
 ducing and exchanging wealth have invariably 
 preceded the great historical changes which 
 divide the world's history into epochs. 
 Raieofthe T ne industrial revolution in Eng- 
 tTonstoEng- land, so well described by Arnold 
 h hwtory Toynbee, resulted from the series 
 of great inventions by which new modes of 
 wealth-production were made possible. The 
 subsequent growth of England, its social and 
 political developments, cannot be understood 
 if the work of the great inventors, Har- 
 greaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright, 
 and others, is not taken into account. A 
 study of the expansion of the franchised class 
 and the presence of the present strong Labor 
 Party in the House of Commons, leads in- 
 evitably back to the great inventions and the 
 industrial changes they occasioned In like 
 manner, the student of social legislation, tne
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 2.y 
 
 factory laws and other legislation of a similar 
 kind, finds himself led back to the same events. 
 It does not rob history of its idealism and 
 romance to admit this great truth, as most 
 modern historians do. It does not, for in- 
 stance, deny the inspiration of great humani- 
 tarians like Robert Owen, Richard Oastler, 
 Lord Shaftsbury, Bronterre O'Brien, and 
 other notable pioneers of social and political 
 reform, to admit that the advances they strug- 
 gled for with splendid courage and faith were 
 made possible only by the enlarged indus- 
 trial powers of man. 
 
 ^frcesTn If we tur11 f rom England to the 
 American his- United States, and study impar- 
 tially the history of its system of slavery, and 
 its abolition as an incident of the Civil War, 
 we shall find the same truth graphically ex- 
 pressed. Few great epochal events in the re- 
 cent history of mankind have been so univer- 
 sally ascribed to the triumph of idealism as 
 the abolition of slavery in the Southern 
 States. Now, it is not necessary to deny, or 
 even to minimize, the idealistic factor, the 
 work and sacrifice of Garrison. Phillips, John 
 Brown, Lincoln, and others of the noble host,
 
 28 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 as a result of the belief that economic forces 
 made possible the glorious event of Emanci- 
 pation. 
 
 Economic, of Was it not an economic necessity, 
 slavery ^ e nee( j f or a c j ass £ cnea p men- 
 
 ial laborers, which led to the enslavement of 
 the free barbarians of Africa and their forced 
 deportation to America, just as at an earlier 
 date English felons had been enslaved, and 
 " press gangs " had scoured English villages 
 and forcibly deported many British freemen 
 to meet the same desperate need? On the 
 other hand, was it not a contrary condition, 
 the presence of an abundant supply of such 
 labor, which made the institution of African 
 slave-labor an impossibility in Europe ? 1 
 Does anybody now believe that the very gen- 
 eral manumission of slaves by the people in 
 the North, while the people in the South clung 
 tenaciously to their human chattels, resulted 
 from any moral superiority of the Northern 
 slaveowners over those of the Southern 
 States? Has it not been abundantly shown 
 that slave-labor had become relatively un- 
 
 1 c. f. Slavery and Abolition, by A. Bushnell Hart, 
 LL.D. (1906).
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 20, 
 
 profitable, and that the manumission of slaves 
 in the North was due to that fact, just as the 
 liberation of many thousands of Roman slaves 
 was the result of an increasing relative un- 
 profitableness? The North had, owing to a 
 variety of causes, come earlier than the South 
 to the universal conclusion that, in the words 
 of Adam Smith, " the work done by slaves, 
 though it appears to cost only their mainte- 
 nance, is, in the end, the dearest of any." 1 
 
 In this connection, the influence 
 in the N-orfh of the great British economist 
 
 and the South , 
 
 may be clearly seen in the famous 
 utterance made by Mr. Ellsworth in the Con- 
 stitutional Convention. " Let us not inter- 
 meddle.*' he said, " as population increases 
 poor laborers will be so plenty as to render 
 slaves useless." 2 In the North the increase 
 in population and the development of the 
 manufacturing system, at a very early period 
 in the history of the new republic, rendered 
 chattel slavery so unprofitable that negro chil- 
 dren were given away as soon as they were 
 
 1 Wealth of Nations, Book III, Chapter 2. 
 
 2 Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, 
 III, p. 218.
 
 30 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 weaned, like puppies, and advertised in the 
 newspapers to be given away. 1 In the South, 
 on the other hand, the relative scarcity of la- 
 borers, and the increased demand for labor 
 which arose as a result of the adoption of 
 Whitney's cotton-gin, made chattel slavery a 
 matter of vital economic importance and its 
 i profitable continuance for a long time possi- 
 ble. It can scarcely be doubted at this time 
 that had the South been left to its own re- 
 sources and experience in the matter slavery 
 would soon have died a natural death. As it 
 was, many Southern slave-owners had come 
 to the conclusion that slavery was unprofit- 
 able long before the Civil War began. Before 
 the war was finished the question of slavery 
 had become relatively unimportant, so much 
 so, indeed, that the confederate cabinet itself 
 proposed to abolish slavery in order to win 
 European friendship. 2 
 
 1 Williams, History of the NegtiblRace in America, 
 p. 209. The reader is also referred*' to the interesting 
 little monograph, Class Struggles in America, by A. M. 
 Simons, Third Edition, 1907, for a suggestive discus- 
 sion of this important phase of American history. 
 
 2 Rhodes, History of the U. S., v. 66-67.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 3 1 
 
 Pains dne to * f SOme P artS ° f this l ° U S argU- 
 
 transition men t appear to you somewhat ir- 
 relevant, I beg you be patient. Socialism 
 formulates the law of social evolution in defi- 
 nite, scientific terms. Its basal argument is 
 that the prime factor in the determination of 
 the course of human history is the extent of 
 man's power over the hostile forces of na- 
 ture; that great changes in the economic in- 
 stitutions and agencies of production and 
 distribution, necessitate a readjustment of the 
 social and political institutions to correspond. 
 The period of transition and readjustment is 
 naturally one of suffering and discomfort by 
 reason of the lack of balance between the eco- 
 nomic soul of society and its social and po- 
 litical environment. When you speak of 
 human society being in its general structure 
 " an ordinance of nature," * I presume that 
 some recognition of a great law, or great 
 laws, of evolution is implied. Otherwise I 
 confess the passage has for me no meaning. 
 In the former edition of your letter, published 
 under the title, Progress or Revolution? there 
 was a passage 2 to the effect that " changes 
 1 Page 37. - Page 24.
 
 32 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 happy in their permanent effects often bring 
 temporary evil in their train." You in- 
 stanced as illustrations of this the introduc- 
 tion of machinery and the development of the 
 great department stores. 
 concentration I regret the omission of the pas- 
 
 Kssential to ... . . 
 
 progress sage quoted from the present edi- 
 
 tion of your letter. It states a contention of 
 the Socialist with admirable force and clarity. 
 Many of the evils of our present social sys- 
 tem undoubtedly so caused. The evils attend- 
 ant upon the monopolization of industry and 
 commerce, for example, are very great, but no 
 Socialist doubts that the concentration is, upon 
 the whole, in the direction of good. The So- 
 cialist may base his indictment of capitalism 
 largely upon the evils associated with the de- 
 velopment of great monopolies, but he knows 
 the monopolies to be inevitable and essential to 
 human progress. Many of our most appalling 
 evils appear to be the birth pangs consequent 
 upon the birth of a new Social order, the entry 
 of Man upon a new stage of his great upward 
 and Godward climb. 
 
 prophecies fui- In our own time > even the genera- 
 flUed tion still in its prime, we have seen
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 33 
 
 great changes take place in the economic life 
 of society. We have seen the competition 
 which our fathers regarded as " the life of 
 trade " gradually die, leaving monopoly and 
 combination in its place. Half a century 
 ago, Karl Marx predicted this. 1 He pointed 
 out that competition would not be destroyed 
 from without, by conscious effort on the part 
 of those who believed it to be an evil, but 
 that it was destined to destroy itself. He 
 predicted the coming of the great Trusts and 
 corporations, but his predictions fell upon 
 skeptical ears. Little more than a quarter of 
 a century ago, a dear friend of mine, Mr. 
 Henry M. Hyndman, an English economist 
 of note, while visiting the United States wrote 
 to Mr. John M<>rley expressing in confident 
 terms that an age of industrial concentration 
 was near, an age in which " great trusts and 
 combines controlling practically .all the great 
 industries of the country" would be formed. 
 Mr. Morley published that letter in the Pall 
 Mall Gazette and it Inter found its way into 
 the columns of the New York Tribune, the 
 editor of which ridiculed the idea. The 
 1 Capital, English edition, p. 789; Kerr edition, p. 836.
 
 34 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 American editor could not imagine such a 
 state of things : it was " foreign to the Amer- 
 ican idea." Mr. Hyndman was described as 
 the greatest " fool traveller " who had ever 
 visited the United States. Yet, it was but a 
 twelvemonth or thereabouts before the Stand- 
 ard Oil Company was formed. Since that 
 time the progress of industrial and commer- 
 cial concentration has been rapid and cer- 
 tain. To-day we are confronted everywhere 
 by the great so-called Trust Problem. 
 Attempts to You rightly say that " Society is 
 
 revert to com* , . . , 
 
 petition revolting against trusts and com- 
 
 bines " j 1 rebelling against the subjection of 
 its life to the rule of a minority of industrial 
 lords. But what solution is proposed other 
 than Socialism to this grave problem of mo- 
 nopoly? Is there a single proposed solution 
 other than Socialism which commands serious 
 attention? True, there are those who, not 
 recognizing the laws of industrial evolution, 
 want to destroy the monopolies and return to 
 competitive methods. They believe that the 
 trusts and combines are the product of wick- 
 edness and greed; not recognizing the impos- 
 
 iPage 15.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 35 
 
 sibility of reversing natural laws, they vainly 
 desire to return to competition. They look 
 to the power of the State to lead them back- 
 ward to the Golden Age of competition, and 
 when the State makes the attempt with anti- 
 trust laws the result is pathetic in the ex- 
 treme. 
 
 The Socialists, on the other hand, 
 
 The commun- ' 
 
 du^t?on P of" see the course of natural evolu- 
 tion, inexorable and certain as the 
 flight of time. They do not talk about the 
 ''* wickedness " of the combinations, but point 
 to their inevitability and urge that the neces- 
 sary readjustment of the social and political 
 system be made to remedy the awful ills re- 
 sulting from the lack of adjustment — the 
 veritable anarchy which exists between our 
 methods of wealth production and its distri- 
 bution and enjoyment. Individual produc- 
 tion, as the prevailing system, has passed away 
 forever, so far as it is possible now to see. 
 You rightly point out that there is a vast 
 amount of cooperation or communism in the 
 production of wealth to-day. 1 If we take 
 such a common article as a penny newspaper 
 
 1 Page 32.
 
 36 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 and attempt to trace all the activities which 
 have entered into its production, the makers 
 of the paper, the fellers of the great forest 
 trees, the makers of the tools used by these, 
 the iron and coal miners, the makers and 
 operators of the machines, the railway work- 
 ers and many others whose labors must be 
 expended before there is so much as a sheet 
 of plain paper to be printed on; if we add to 
 these the thousands of other workers whose 
 labor, directly or indirectly, is combined in 
 the paper we so lightly toss aside, a wonder- 
 ful vision of automatic and half unconscious 
 cooperation, wonderfully beautiful, appears. 
 Now, Socialism is, in its last and deepest 
 analysis, an effort to communalize the full 
 benefits of this communism of production. 
 The issue to-day is whether the trusts shall 
 own and control the nation, or whether the 
 people shall own and control the nation and 
 all its resources. The trust socializes pro- 
 duction to a very great degree and individual- 
 izes the product; Socialism would socialize the 
 product as well as the labor of production. 
 Until that end is attained society must writhe 
 in the cruel, bitter, needless struggle of hos-
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 2)7 
 
 tile interests which your letter depicts with 
 so much concern. That is the revolution the 
 Socialists seek to bring about, not by violence 
 and bloodshed, but by the triumph of reason 
 and conscience over ignorance and greed. 
 The social revolution which we work for is a 
 peaceful revolution, by political conquest, in 
 the interests of Progress and Peace. 
 
 Conxion of l trust y° u wil1 pardon the implied 
 terms criticism if I say that I find it dif- 
 
 ficult to assure myself of your exact meaning 
 at times, owing to the fact that you do not 
 always use words in the same sense. With 
 no desire to be hypercritical, I call your at- 
 tention to the fact that while on page six you 
 make a distinction between capital and capi- 
 talists, you do not in subsequent pages bear 
 the distinction in mind. On the page noted 
 you say that " It is not between capital and 
 labor generally that the present war lias 
 broken out, but between the capitalist em- 
 ploying a body of workmen, and those whose 
 wages he is supposed to determine." If I un- 
 derstand the import of this passage and its 
 immediate context correctly, you would em- 
 phasize that " capital ' is inert, impersonal, 
 
 450128
 
 38 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 while the " war " is a human struggle into 
 which all human weaknesses and passions 
 must enter. When you use the word " capi- 
 tal " in the paragraphs immediately follow- 
 ing the passage quoted, you give it the same 
 meaning, but when you use it later, on page 
 ten, the sense is entirely different. You say: 
 " That capital 1 can be rapacious and unjust 
 to those in its employ is too certain. It can 
 be worse than rapacious and unjust, it can 
 be terribly cruel. Proof of this may be read 
 in the reports recording the treatment of chil- 
 dren in factories and of men, women and 
 children in coal mines which horrified the 
 British people and compelled the interference 
 of the British Parliament." In this para- 
 graph " capital ' : ceases to be an inert, im- 
 personal thing and becomes a conscious social 
 force. That I am not in error in so under- 
 standing it is shown, I think, very clearly by 
 the passage immediately following " Men 1 
 who were guilty of such things may have been 
 humane and even amiable in other walks of 
 life. The lust of gain hardened their hearts. 
 One of the great mine-owners was a wealthy 
 1 Italics mine. — J. S.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 39 
 
 peer who deserved to be sent to work in his 
 own mines." It is quite clear from this that 
 you fail to observe the important distinction 
 which you recognized and emphasized. This 
 loose use of terms is frequently met with in 
 your letter and is a cause of some obscurity 
 and much confusion. 
 
 The "war of Throughout you speak with dep- 
 recation and impatience of those 
 who give the relations of the employed and 
 employing classes " the aspect of a war be- 
 tween classes." Yet, if words are to be given 
 their ordinary meaning, you frequently give 
 the relations of the employer and his em- 
 ployees 'the aspect of a war between 
 classes." Thus : On page three you speak 
 of ' The sharp separation, industrial and so- 
 cial, between employer and employed " as be- 
 ing " another evil attendant upon the intro- 
 duction of production on a large scale." 
 Does this convey the idea of class distinction? 
 Again, on page eleven you say, " The masters 
 are naturally combined in the effort to keep 
 down wages." I ask why they should " nat- 
 urally " so combine if there is no class divi- 
 sion in society! When, on page six, in the
 
 40 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 passage already quoted, you speak of a " pres- 
 ent war " between the capitalist and his work- 
 men, are not definite class distinctions as 
 clearly indicated as language permits? 
 
 Allied with your deprecation of statements 
 that there is a deep-rooted class antagonism, 
 is your implied accusation that Socialists in- 
 cite class hatred. While this is a very com- 
 mon accusation, it is, so far as my experience 
 goes, altogether unfounded and untrue. All 
 Socialists, with the possible exception of a few 
 overzealous and uninformed individuals, will 
 agree with your statement that no good pur- 
 pose can be served by venemous exaggeration, 
 " applying to a whole class epithets of abuse 
 which only the worst members of it can de- 
 serve." 1 Unless I have utterly and lament- 
 ably failed in my attempt to make clear the 
 
 1 Page 28. The careful reader will note that Pro- 
 fessor Smith, with characteristic inconsistency, uses the 
 term ' class ' which he so earnestly condemns the So- 
 cialist for using. Incidentally, the quotation warrants 
 the suggestion, made in the same sentence, that the 
 whole body of Socialists ought not to be held responsi- 
 ble for the utterances of its least educated and most 
 ignorant members. What is sauce for the capitalist 
 goose must be sauce for the Socialist gander !
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 41 
 
 fundamental doctrine of Socialism, you will 
 readily perceive that it precludes abuse and 
 hatred of the capitalist as an individual. 
 socialism and The capitalist epoch which we be- 
 
 pea«ef ul prog- . ... 
 
 «•«« lieve to be now ripening into an 
 
 epoch of Socialism could not have been es- 
 caped by society, omitted from its evolution, 
 by any exercise of prudent genius or the ob- 
 servance of any ethical code. Capitalism, 
 therefore, represents a necessary stage in the 
 world-progress, and the capitalist class, as 
 such, has performed a distinct and important 
 service to mankind. It is only since the de- 
 velopment of industry to a point where vast 
 organization and mechanical power have made 
 possible the existence of enormous productive 
 and distributive units that the capitalist, as 
 such, has become superfluous. In accordance 
 with a law of evolution familiar to the biolo- 
 gist, and equally important to the sociologist, 
 that which once served a useful purpose be- 
 comes unnecessary and loses its function, or 
 continues to exercise it only as a parasite and 
 a menace to the life it once served. I re- 
 peat, the Socialists do not foment hatred be- 
 tween the men on the one side who are de-
 
 42 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 voted to their natural interests as capitalists 
 and the men on the other side who are de- 
 voted to their interests as wage-workers. 
 Elsewhere, 1 I have made the claim for Social- 
 ism that, by developing the class-conscious- 
 ness of the workers, by pointing out the social 
 significance of the antagonism between classes 
 which almost every man vaguely feels, where 
 he does not clearly comprehend, it is making 
 for peaceful progress against red-handed anar- 
 chy and violence. I repeat that claim here 
 with increased confidence. 
 
 It is not wonderful that the aw- 
 "^i£L-n°ed ful inequalities of wealth and 
 
 discontent " . . 
 
 enjoyment which mark our so- 
 cial system should produce feelings of envy 
 on the part of the less favored. The worker 
 who toils for a pittance in a factory where 
 foul atmosphere menaces the health, lives 
 in a tenement where decent opportunities 
 are denied to his family, works at joyless, 
 soul-deadening tasks, sees no hope for the 
 future nor any reward for his life's work 
 but an old age made miserable by poverty, 
 
 1 Socialism, A Summary and Interpretation of Social- 
 ist Principles, p. 144.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 43 
 
 can hardly be blamed if he views with rage 
 and resentment the wealth and luxury en- 
 joyed by others, especially when he feels 
 that the labor of himself and others makes 
 the wealth and luxury so wantonly displayed 
 in contrast to his own poverty. Hatred and 
 envy are the natural fruitage of the social 
 system in which the poorest are they who pro- 
 duce most wealth, and the richest are they 
 who neither toil nor spin. Instinctively, un- 
 restrained by education, the class feeling of 
 the workers leads to bitterness against the 
 individuals of the other class, and, often to 
 deeds of violence. The Socialist philosophy, 
 by placing this class antagonism in its true 
 light as one of the great social dynamic forces, 
 not only prevents personal hatreds and the 
 otherwise inevitable resort to violence, but 
 provides a more effective and intelligent out- 
 let for the energies of the dissatisfied. It im- 
 poses upon the working class a sense of the 
 impersonality of its struggle with the master 
 class, and the role it must play in the recon- 
 struction of society. By its political organi- 
 zation, on a definite basis of class interests, 
 the working class must, by peaceful, legal
 
 44 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 means, transform the social and political in- 
 stitutions of society to a point of ■ agreement 
 with the socialized production of wealth al- 
 ready developed by capitalism. 
 
 Socialism, then, is not inspired by class 
 hatred. It is, on the contrary, the most 
 powerful, and almost the only, force in the 
 world making for peaceful change and in- 
 dustrial order. It does not aim to change 
 masters, setting up the exploited of to-day to 
 become the bread-masters and exploiters. It 
 means the destruction of the fundamental con- 
 ditions which make the exploitation of one 
 class by another possible; it means the estab- 
 lishment of such conditions as will make fra- 
 ternal peace possible. Socialism is in a very 
 real sense the Herald of 
 " Peace on earth and Goodwill among men." 
 
 The meaning When we S P eak ° f the Socialist 
 
 of "labor" movement as a movement of the 
 working-class, and make our appeal primarily 
 to that class, we do not mean that none but 
 workingmen and workingwomen may be So- 
 cialists or join our ranks. Nor do we mean 
 manual labor alone when we speak of labor 
 applied to appropriate natural objects as the
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 45 
 
 sole source of wealth, as you suppose. 1 I 
 confess that I read your argument based upon 
 that assumption with amazement indescrib- 
 able. Had an uneducated man, one who was 
 unfamiliar with the most elementary princi- 
 ples of political economy, made such a mistake 
 it would have been understandable. You, 
 however, do not occupy that position. It is 
 simply inconceivable that you should be ig- 
 norant of the fact that all the great political 
 economists, writers like Adam Smith, Ricardo, 
 John Stuart Mill, and others more recent, use 
 the term " labor " to connote all useful, pro- 
 ductive energies regardless of whether they 
 be mental or physical. In the case of a rail- 
 way, for example, the Socialist, following the 
 time-honored usage of the economists of all 
 schools and times, includes in the category of 
 its necessary labor the designs planned by its 
 engineers and architects, the mental energies 
 expended in the making of its time-schedules, 
 its management, and so on, equally with the 
 physical energies of the plate-layers, engine- 
 drivers, signalmen and conductors. But 
 when all these services have been paid for, 
 
 1 Pages 5-6.
 
 46 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 when even the " services " of the " dummy 
 directors " and " guinea pigs "' have been ex- 
 travagantly paid for, there is a surplus which 
 is distributed in the form of interest among 
 people who, beyond the investment of money, 
 have performed no service of any kind for the 
 railroad — who, in many cases, have never 
 seen the railroads from which their dividends 
 are drawn. Their reward comes simply as 
 interest upon invested capital, and this, for the 
 most part, is simply so much fruit of the ex- 
 ploitation of past labor, just as the interest 
 it now draws is the fruit of present exploita- 
 tion. So we appeal to the workers, making 
 no distinction between the different forms of 
 labor, who feel the burden of this exploita- 
 tion and its injustice to join in a great com- 
 mon movement for its abolition. Some of the 
 brain-workers, those who are paid extrava- 
 gant salaries, will not be driven by economic 
 motives to join in with the manual workers, 
 their interests being nearly allied to those of 
 the capitalists. Again, some of the capitalists 
 themselves, feeling the justice of the workers' 
 claims, will join us, but their number must 
 needs be relatively few. It is in this sense,
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 47 
 
 and in this sense only, that the Socialist move- 
 ment is a class movement. 
 The capitalist Not onl y do } T ° U continually mis- 
 
 not a producer state the position Q f the Socialist 
 
 when you represent him as contending that 
 all progress and wealth are " entirely the 
 work of the manual laborer and that the man- 
 ual laborer is entitled to the whole," but you 
 constantly confuse the position of the capital- 
 ist with that of the director of industry. 
 " The capitalist," you say, " besides the 
 money which he risks, contributes labor of an 
 indispensable kind as organizer and director, 
 and is entitled to payment for that labor as 
 well as to interest on his capital." 1 Of 
 course, there are many capitalists who, as 
 managers and directors, but not as capitalists, 
 do contribute such services as you describe, 
 and, of course, they should be remunerated 
 for those services. As a matter of fact, they 
 are so remunerated. Thus far they are pro- 
 ducers, not capitalists. After a man has been 
 paid fully for any such service rendered as 
 a manager, if he draws a further sum for 
 which he has not rendered an equivalent serv- 
 
 1 Page 6.
 
 48 CAPITALIST, AND LABORER 
 
 ice in return, he is to that extent an exploiter 
 of labor. Take the director of a company 
 who is paid a salary of one hundred thousand 
 dollars a year: Waiving the question of the 
 righteousness of such a big salary, is it not 
 obvious that if he invests half of that sum in 
 some enterprise in which he does not serve as 
 a director, possibly in a remote part of the 
 world which he has never seen, and draws 
 interest upon it, there can be no sort of justi- 
 fication for saying that he has " contributed 
 labor of an indispensable kind " to the busi- 
 ness in which his money is invested ? No, the 
 capitalist, as capitalist, performs no useful 
 service. 
 
 wages and There is another paragraph in 
 your letter so remarkable for its 
 misconception of the economics of Socialism, 
 and indeed of the most elementary principles 
 of political economy, as for the confusion of 
 its language, that I venture to quote it entire. 
 You say : " Labor, we are told, adds the 
 value to the raw material. Undoubtedly it 
 does, and it receives the price of the value 
 added, in the form of wages, which are dis- 
 tributed by the equitable hand of Nature
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 49 
 
 along the whole line of laborers, from the 
 miner, say, to the artisan of the metal works, 
 and from the grower of cotton to the spinner ; 
 not excluding in either case the master by 
 whom the works have been set up and by 
 whose labor as manager and the distributer of 
 their products they are carried on." 1 To 
 analyze this paragraph closely would be un- 
 gracious as well as unprofitable. When you 
 say that labor receives " the price of the value 
 added (to the raw material) in the form of 
 wages," you surely do not, can not, mean 
 that it receives in wages the equivalent of the 
 value produced. Yet, if you do not mean 
 that the argument is evidently designed to 
 beg the whole question. Of course, labor 
 does not get in the form of wages the equiv- 
 alent of the value it creates, otherwise there 
 could be no surplus to divide among the non- 
 laboring investors. When you say, again, 
 that wages are " distributed by the equitable 
 hand of Nature," you surely cannot mean to 
 contend, in the face of so much evidence to 
 the contrary, that wages are paid upon any- 
 thing which can be called an " equitable 
 1 Pages 5-6. The italics arc mine— J. S.
 
 50 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 plan." When an absentee director receives 
 for merely nominal service upon the director- 
 ate of a railroad a salary many times greater 
 than the total yearly wages of many a highly 
 skilled artisan, where, I ask, is there any sign 
 of equitable division of the product of the 
 total labor- force expended? 
 The law of Of course, wages are not the price 
 of the values created by the wage- 
 receivers, but of their labor-power. And the 
 price, the amount of wages, is not determined 
 by an abstraction, Nature, spelled with a large 
 letter. It is fixed by the law of supply and 
 demand, the cost of maintaining the laborer 
 and his family at a reasonable state of effi- 
 ciency being the level below which it cannot 
 for long be forced. Wages, in point of fact, 
 bear no relation whatever to the amount of 
 value created by the laborer receiving the 
 wages. Of course, if the workers do not cre- 
 ate values equal to and exceeding their wages, 
 the wage standard will be lowered. But so 
 far from wages being equivalent to the values 
 produced, it is a fact known to every econo- 
 mist that a high rate of productivity often 
 accompanies a low wage rate. Furthermore,
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 5 1 
 
 it has been conclusively demonstrated that 
 the American workingman, who is the 
 most productive workingman on earth, re- 
 ceives a smaller proportion of his product in 
 the form of wages than the workingman of 
 any other country on earth. The late Lord 
 Brassey, a capitalist of distinction to whom 
 you refer in your letter as " that model of a 
 captain of industry," 1 was never tired of em- 
 phasizing this point. It does not help one to 
 understand this confused utterance upon the 
 law of wages to make comparison of it with 
 other references in your letter to the same 
 subject. While on page five wages are de- 
 termined by " Nature," on page seven it is 
 the employer who fixes their amounts; on 
 pages nine and seventeen it is the " market." 
 Despite the fact that wages are " distributed 
 by the equitable hand of Nature," on page 
 eleven you say that " The masters are nat- 
 urally combined in the effort to keep down 
 wages." and on the following page that a 
 ' large measure of justice in the way of rec- 
 tification of wages has been won by Unionist 
 effort. . . ." These are but a few of the 
 1 Page 29.
 
 52 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 contradictory statements upon this important 
 point with which your letter abounds. 
 
 Ethics and so- The capitalist and the laborer be- 
 ciai conflict j n ^ ag ^ QU j ncaut i ous jy admit, en- 
 gaged in a great struggle, which you very 
 properly call a ' war," it seems to me quite 
 useless to attempt to propound ethical plati- 
 tudes for its solution. " War is Hell," said a 
 great American soldier, and the description 
 applies to many phases of this modern indus- 
 trial conflict. It is just as futile to preach 
 kindness and goodwill for their enemies to 
 the combatants on either side as it would be 
 to soldiers engaged in a desperate charge. 
 Of course, it is not " kind " to shoot a man 
 or to cut him with a bayonet, but it is war; 
 and of course, it is " far from kind," as you 
 say, to refuse to work with non-union men, 
 but it is an act of war. The doctrine that a 
 man has a right to work for any wage, high 
 or low, that he pleases, or under any condi- 
 tions, is not tenable. To support it, one must 
 abandon every pretense of ethical judgment. 
 What if the wage be insufficient to provide 
 decently for those dependent upon him, and 
 they become weak of body or mind, or de-
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 53 
 
 pendent upon society for maintenance ? What 
 if the hours or conditions of labor be such 
 that the man becomes devitalized to such an 
 extent that he is unable to support the fam- 
 ily dependent upon him, or disease due to the 
 conditions of labor renders him incapable of 
 work ? The doctrine of laissca faire is funda- 
 mentally immoral. Wages, like commodity 
 prices in general, are governed by the laws 
 of supply and demand, subject only to the 
 cost of production. The supply of a consid- 
 erable body of workers in any industry will- 
 ing to work for less than the usual rate of 
 wages, or to work for a greater length of time 
 for the same wages, tends inevitably to the 
 general establishment of those inferior condi- 
 tions. If your contention means anything, it 
 means that the American worker, or the 
 worker of any other country, must not resist 
 the imposition of low standards of living upon 
 him by the competition of workers whose 
 standards are low and undeveloped. 
 i.eiKurean.1 Tt is, perhaps, only your general 
 unwillingness to see the workers' 
 side of the question that prompts you to say 
 that : ' In lands where Socialism prevails
 
 54 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 Unions seem inclined to vote themselves more 
 and more freedom from work and leisure for 
 sport, at the expense of what is called ' the 
 State ' ; that is practically the tax-payer or the 
 class which has most money and fewest 
 votes.'*' * I respectfully submit that this is a 
 biased and unfair statement, wrong both as to 
 fact and its inferences therefrom. Fewer 
 hours of labor do not of necessity mean greater 
 devotion to " sport," though, even if that were 
 true, I do not know any good reason for oppos- 
 ing the change on that account. As a matter 
 of fact, to which the history of the movement 
 for shortening the daily period of toil bears 
 witness, the added leisure has been devoted to 
 many things besides sport, and the character 
 of the sports indulged in has been greatly 
 raised. 
 
 The Lancashire factory-worker of to-day is 
 no more addicted to sport than his predecessor 
 of thirty years or half a century ago, but he 
 is a better man and citizen and his sports are 
 less brutal and degrading. The American 
 and Canadian workers of to-day devote no 
 more time to sports than the workers of the 
 
 1 Page 16. Italics mine. — J. S.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 55 
 
 Middle Ages, probably, but their sports are 
 more healthful and less brutal. The Amer- 
 ican worker spends, probably, no more time 
 on baseball than the English worker of a cen- 
 tury ago spent on cock-fighting, dog-fighting 
 and other such brutal sports. He spends less 
 time in drunken debauch and more time in 
 the pursuit of culture. It is unquestionable, 
 I think, that the longer the average of the 
 working-day, and the lower the wages, the 
 more brutalized and degraded the workers 
 will be found to be. On the other hand, 
 where wages are highest and leisure is great- 
 est, there the standard of physical, mental and 
 moral development is highest. Further, it is 
 not true to suggest that taxes are higher in 
 consequence. It is not, I think, of supreme 
 importance, but as a matter of fact taxes are 
 lower in New Zealand — the country which 
 has gone further in the direction of practical 
 Socialism than any other — than in the most 
 backward countries. They are lower, for in- 
 stance, than they are in Spain, Italy, Russia, 
 or even poor, benighted India, 
 rooushand Tf preaching to the workers and 
 f,.tue«ea« filling their ears with moral plati-
 
 56 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 tudes is futile, attempting to frighten them is 
 even more futile and vain. When I read 
 your solemn warning to the workingmen and 
 ■working-women of the English-speaking 
 world against driving the capital of the coun- 
 try away, 1 I recalled that a similar cry was 
 raised against the Chartists in England, three- 
 quarters of a century ago. Later on, when 
 the trade unions grew powerful and had won 
 legal recognition, it was urged with equal 
 earnestness against them. Again, when, in 
 due time, the Social Democratic movement 
 arose there and began to spread its teaching, 
 the cry of " you will drive away the capital 
 of the country "' was sounded. I remember 
 that it was a frequent enough experience, in 
 the early days of my connection with the 
 movement, to be called upon to reply to that 
 awful objection. Many an English audience 
 has enjoyed the contemplation of the humor- 
 ous spectacle of the capitalists taking their 
 capital away to some foreign land. But the 
 years have belied that foolish fear, and the 
 growth of the movement has not had that ef- 
 fect in England, any more than it has in Ger- 
 1 Page 16.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER S7 
 
 many where the Social Democratic Party has 
 made such rapid and constant gains. 1 
 social uni- Seriously, Professor Smith, when 
 versai y 0U ta ^ a b out capital having 
 
 " wings " and intimate that it may see fit to 
 use those wings to fly from the countries 
 where there is a progressive movement of the 
 laborers, 2 where do you suppose it will fly? 
 To China, perhaps, or to Persia, or India ? 
 It would be hard to think of any other country 
 in which it would not be met by a Socialist 
 movement more formidable than that it now 
 has to reckon with in the great English-speak- 
 ing countries. I have before me as I write 
 a chart showing the relative strength of So- 
 cialism throughout the world. Fleeing from 
 Great Britain, Canada and the United States, 
 winged capital would not want to rest in the 
 
 1 In view of the results of the recent elections in Ger- 
 many, and the exultant comments of our American 
 press upon the fact that the Social Democrats lost sev- 
 eral seats in the Reichstag, it may be well to remind 
 the reader that the "defeat" of the Socialists so vo- 
 ciferously hailed, was, from a serious point of view, 
 really a victory. The party polled 3.251,005 votes, an 
 increase of 15 per cent. A few more such Pyrrhic vic- 
 tories for the Kaiser would suffice to end his rule! 
 
 2 Page 16.
 
 58 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 great English-speaking countries of Austral- 
 asia, for obvious reasons. It would not want 
 to rest in the Germanic countries for equally 
 obvious reasons. In Russia and the Slav 
 countries generally it would be met by a 
 strongly organized Socialist force. In the 
 Latin countries it would find Socialism a 
 rapidly growing movement. In the great 
 South African countries the Socialist cause 
 is making progress, and even in Japan it is a 
 considerable and growing force. Even in 
 China, the battering down of the gates of 
 Pekin let in, not only American and European 
 capital, but the inevitable world-spirit of re- 
 volt. The great works of Marx have been, I 
 am informed, translated into Chinese, and 
 their thought has begun to leaven the minds 
 of Chinese scholars and leaders. 
 private prop- I have tried often, during many 
 abstraction years, to imagine the spectacle of 
 the capitalists collectively taking their capital 
 away to escape Socialism — tried to imagine 
 how it must present itself to those who, like 
 yourself, seem to think it a probable happen- 
 ing. I must confess that I am completely 
 baffled whenever I make the attempt ! Would
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 59 
 
 Mr. Rockefeller take an oil-well under each 
 arm, and so make an almost endless number 
 of trips to the land of his choice and hope? 
 Would Air. Vanderbilt take a railway or two, 
 Mr. Carnegie a few steel-works, Mr. Baer a 
 coal mine or two, and so on through the whole 
 list of industrial enterprises? How would 
 the capitalists divide their capital, so as to as- 
 certain what each might take as his own? 
 Would a railroad company with ten thousand 
 shareholders divide the number of station- 
 buildings, engines, miles of rails, and so on, 
 by the number of shares of stock and give 
 each shareholders so many engines, so many 
 miles of steel rails, so many cars, so many 
 station buildings (or so many bricks!), ac- 
 rding to the number of shares? Even that 
 could nol be done justly, for no single indi- 
 vidual can properly be said to own a single 
 brick or rail, even though he owns a tenth 
 part of the entire stock of the company. At 
 most, he owns a tenth part of each brick, each 
 rail, each boll or screw, in the last analysis, 
 by far the greater part of the so-called " pri- 
 vate property" of capitalism is a mere ab- 
 straction, and consists of nothing more tangi-
 
 60 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 ble than the goodwill of the community. It 
 happens that I own a single share of stock in 
 an English company which has ten thousand 
 shareholders, each holding one share. The 
 company owns a building, and is a non-divi- 
 dend-paying concern. 1 Suppose I attempt to 
 determine my " property ' : in that building, 
 what happens? I find that I do not own a 
 single brick, stick, or nail. I own simply one- 
 ten-thousandth of each brick, stick and nail. 
 I cannot realize my share, however, for the 
 very simple reason that to do so would be a 
 physical impossibility. I should have to de- 
 stroy the " property " of each of the other 
 nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine, 
 and when I had done so I should, of course, 
 find that I had destroyed my own with the 
 rest. Is my property in the building anything 
 but an abstraction? 
 what the cap- Now, then, the capitalist could not 
 
 italists could . . r 
 
 take take away the great mass of ma- 
 
 chinery and equipment which I will call the 
 fixed capital to distinguish it from " circu- 
 
 1 This fact in no way invalidates the argument as will 
 be seen. The illustration would be even stronger were 
 it otherwise. — J. S.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 6 1 
 
 lating capital," money. They could not take 
 the natural resources of the country, its for- 
 ests and rivers, its great prairies and fertile 
 valleys, its wealth of coal, iron, copper, gold, 
 silver and other minerals. All that they could 
 by any possibility take away would be as much 
 of the circulating capital, or money, as they 
 could take, and heaps of documents, share 
 certificates, deeds of title, and the like, useful 
 under the circumstances only as historical 
 curios, as evidences that at one time they 
 owned certain abstract " property rights." 
 The money, as money, would be as useless as 
 the money of the Southern Confederacy now 
 is, being no longer redeemable, and possess 
 only its bullion value. If, from any country, 
 capita] flies and labor remains, the seas and 
 rivers will still give harvests of fish; the val- 
 leys and plains will still bear their plenitude 
 of fruit and grain; the hills will still yield 
 their vasl treasures of coal and other min- 
 erals; -learn and electricity will still serve 
 mankind; industry and the arts will flourish; 
 mothers will still bear and nurse 50ns and 
 daughters; the song of contentmenl and pea 
 will rise unto the starlit skies, (an you im-
 
 62 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 agine this to be true if labor were withdrawn 
 from the land and only capital, however 
 abundant, left behind? No! there would be 
 desolation and death. Farms would become 
 wildernesses and cities vast graveyards, while 
 exultant Nature would hide the mines and 
 gleaming railway lines in a riot of weeds. 
 The laborer knows this, knows that he and his 
 fellows are really not a class in the same sense 
 as the capitalists are a class, but in very truth 
 the world itself. Mrs. Gilman aptly appeals 
 to this consciousness in the fine, proud lines: 
 
 " Shall you complain who feed the world ? 
 Who clothe the world? 
 Who house the world? 
 Shall you complain who are the world, 
 Of what the world may do? 
 As from this hour 
 You use your power, 
 The world must follow you ! " 
 
 Wagedomand Like a §T eat man Y ° tner perSOllS, 
 
 you are unable to agree that the 
 wage system involves any degree of servitude 
 which can justly be called slavery. You say 
 that " No one in his cooler moments can be- 
 lieve that a man who is perfectly at liberty 
 to dispose of his own labor and has full po-
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 63 
 
 litical rights is a slave." 1 Surely, you are 
 not unaware of the fact that the so-called 
 " freedom of contract " which the worker en- 
 joys is a delusion, and that it exists only the- 
 oretically. In actual experience the worker 
 does not find himself " perfectly at liberty to 
 dispose of his own labor." I have seen men 
 struggling like wild beasts outside of the Lon- 
 don dock gates for the right to work ; outside 
 of the Chicago stockyards I have seen hun- 
 dreds of men clamoring for work, fighting 
 for places of advantage, and, when the few 
 needed were chosen, I have seen the many 
 turn away with looks of despair and anguish, 
 and. in not a few cases, with cries. Theoret- 
 ically, the worker in most civilized countries 
 is free to dispose of his labor-power. There 
 is no legal institution compelling men under 
 normal conditions to work upon terms dis- 
 -teful or disadvantageous to themselves. 
 But in actual practice the opportunities to la- 
 bor profitably arc controlled by a compara- 
 tively small number of persons, who arc thus 
 enabled to fix the conditions under which the 
 workers must labor. And the workers, theo- 
 
 1 I'age 19.
 
 64 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 retically free though they be, must accept em- 
 ployment upon these conditions or starve. 
 The "free- Of course, you will say that un- 
 
 liom " of the , , . , 
 
 workers der these circumstances the work- 
 
 ers have the alternative of seeking employment 
 elsewhere. But how will it be if there is no 
 other employer in the neighborhood, as often 
 happens, especially in connection with great 
 industries? Or, again, how will it be if there 
 are many other employers but none who de- 
 sire to employ, having all the workers they 
 can profitably employ? Of course, they can 
 remove to some other place, if they have the 
 means to do so, but if they have not the 
 means to move to distant parts they must ac- 
 cept the terms offered or perish. If they do 
 move to other parts of the country, or to 
 other countries, they will be confronted by the 
 same imperative necessity if the means of em- 
 ployment are in the control of others. Fur- 
 ther, if the workers are married men with 
 families and homes it is sheer nonsense to tell 
 them that they are " free to go elsewhere." 
 It would be just as truthful and wise to say 
 that the man who gives up his watch at the 
 demand of the highwayman who holds a
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 65 
 
 loaded pistol against his head is " free " to 
 refuse the demand as to say that the worker 
 who is driven by economic necessity, the fear 
 of hunger for himself and family, to accept 
 harsh terms of employment is a " free man." 
 So long as one man is master of another 
 man's opportunity to labor, he is master of 
 that man's bread and, therefore, of his life. 
 a concrete I w jh" ta ^' e a concrete case that is 
 in nowise exceptional to illustrate 
 this. A worker whom I will call Jones went 
 one day not long ago to an employer whom 
 I will call Bones and asked for employment 
 as a laborer. He was told that he could get 
 a job at a dollar and twenty-five cents a day 
 if he cared to accept it. Jones accepted the 
 offer though he well knew that upon such a 
 small wage he could not support his wife and 
 three children in decency and health. Do you 
 say that he accepted it of his own " free will," 
 that he was " free to decline" the position? 
 I answer no! He was driven by a force far 
 more potent than a whip in the hands of a 
 Simon Legree, the dread of hunger. At 
 ln.me there was a wife who cried because of 
 the hunger of her little ones; there were empty
 
 66 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 cupboards and unpaid bills; there was the 
 certainty that unless the rent were paid 
 promptly he and his loved ones would be 
 forced to leave their little tenement dwelling. 
 To call such a man free is to misuse language 
 and violate reason. 
 
 I have known many instances of men being 
 dismissed from their employment because they 
 chose to exercise the elemental rights of man- 
 hood, the right to follow their religious or 
 political convictions, for example. Thou- 
 sands of workers in this great republic were 
 dismissed by their employers because they 
 dared to support Mr. Bryan, for instance. 
 Many a man has been discharged for no other 
 reason than that he had become known as a 
 Socialist. I could cite many instances which 
 have come within my own limited observation 
 of men against whose character no word of 
 reproach could be uttered, and whose skill and 
 efficiency as workmen was admitted, being dis- 
 charged for such reasons as these. It is, I 
 believe, unusual to-day, but you are quite well 
 aware of the fact that many a man has been 
 discharged from his employment and forced 
 to leave the town or village simply on account
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 67 
 
 of his religious views, because he did not care 
 to attend his employer's church. 1 This is the 
 " freedom " of wagedom! 
 Theuertmon l have in m y possession an appli- 
 *?£™J or cation blank issued by a great 
 workers manufacturing concern which 
 
 must be filled in by all who apply for employ- 
 ment under the company. Not only must the 
 worker give a full account of his occupation 
 during a number of years past, with the names 
 of all employers worked for during those 
 years and the dates of employment, but he 
 must also sign a promise never to join a la- 
 bor organization while in the company's seru- 
 ice! Even while these pages are being writ- 
 ten,- the newspapers print a dispatch from 
 St. Louis containing a telegram by the presi- 
 dent of a great trade union threatening a 
 strike on the Southern Pacific Railway, be- 
 cause the company has issued an order that 
 all its blacksmiths, machinists, boilermakers, 
 carworkers, and other shopworkers, must be 
 
 1 Note: The history of nonconformity in England in 
 the early part of tin- last century, and even within my 
 
 own recollection, teems with instances of this kind. — 
 
 - Fchruary 27, 1907.
 
 68 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 measured according to the Bertillon system, 
 like so many criminals. There is no pretense 
 that this is necessary for the safe and proper 
 organization of the railway. It is frankly a 
 means of identifying men so that if any one 
 of them should at any time be dismissed for 
 agitating among his fellows to secure im- 
 proved conditions of labor, he will be known 
 and effectually barred from obtaining employ- 
 ment on any other railroad in the country. 
 Do you imagine that free Americans would 
 voluntarily submit to this outrage? 
 
 It was Carlyle, I believe, who said 
 siavedom — a that the wage-worker differed 
 
 comparison 
 
 from the chattel slave m that he 
 was bought for a short time instead of for 
 a life time. There are other differences, not 
 by any means all in favor of the wage- 
 worker. True, the wage-worker in the great 
 English-speaking countries is endowed with 
 political powers which he can use if he will 
 to end his servitude to relentless capital. In 
 so far as this is true he is, of course, in a 
 superior position to that which the negro slave 
 occupied. The chattel slave owner had to 
 keep his slaves in good condition in the
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 69 
 
 " lean " years as well as in the times of 
 greater prosperity, but the modern employer 
 has no such obligation resting upon him. In 
 Louisiana, before the war, the planters hired 
 gangs of Irish laborers to do the heavy and 
 unhealthy work, because " It was much better 
 to have the Irish do it, who cost the planter 
 nothing if they died, than to use up good 
 field hands in such severe employment." 1 In 
 some respects the wage-worker is at a disad- 
 vantage compared with the position of the 
 chattel slave. Nevertheless, I do not for a 
 moment suggest that a return to slavery would 
 be desirable. 
 The wisdom If I have paid what seems to be 
 
 of John 
 
 Adams an undue amount of attention to 
 
 this question, it is simply because the bondage 
 of the many to the few appears to me to be 
 the worst feature of capitalist society. I can- 
 not but think, Professor Smith, that you and 
 others who raise a similar protest against the 
 use of the word " slave " to designate the 
 wage-worker strain violently at gnats while 
 von swallow camels whole. I commend to 
 
 ' Phillips, The Economic Cost of Slave-Holding, 
 Polit. Sc. Quarterly, xx.271.
 
 /O CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 your notice the wise words of John Adams, 
 spoken in the Continental Congress : " It is 
 of no consequence by what name you call your 
 people, whether by that of freeman or slave. 
 In some countries the laboring poor men are 
 called freemen, in others they are called slaves, 
 but the difference is imaginary only. What 
 matters it whether a landlord employing ten 
 laborers on his farm gives them annually as 
 much as will buy the necessaries of life or 
 gives them those necessaries at short hand? " 1 
 Paternalism Your disavowal of belief in the 
 efficacy of schemes of benevolent 
 paternalism as a means of solving the great 
 social problem which confronts civilization is 
 most welcome to the Socialist. With your 
 broad vision of life, your extensive memories, 
 and your experience with all sorts and condi- 
 tions of men and women, you know how vain 
 and abortive such schemes are. The fable 
 of the dog with the golden chain and collar 
 illustrates very well a phase of human psy- 
 chology. Mankind would rather be free to 
 walk, even though the pathway chosen be full 
 
 1 Quoted by Simons, Class Struggles in America, 
 Third Edition, p. 27.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 7 1 
 
 of stones and thorns, than be led in paths of 
 others' choosing, even though these be strewn 
 with flowers. If freedom and beauty in life 
 are ever to be realized by the people, the 
 realization must come from their common ex- 
 perience; it cannot be handed down to them. 
 While you see the futility of benevolent pa- 
 ternalism clearly enough, you nevertheless 
 seem, like a great many other earnest and 
 thoughtful observers of social conditions, to 
 believe in Comte's idea of the " moralization 
 of capital." You seem to believe that kind- 
 ness and considerateness on the part of the 
 employers for their employees will remove an- 
 tagonism and make for social harmony and 
 industrial peace. That this hope is vain and 
 delusive is my profound conviction. The 
 very nature of capital as the agency by which 
 one class exploits and rules the other class 
 in society, makes it impossible that there 
 should be peace so long as capital bears that 
 relation to the laborer. That your letter is 
 intended to serve as a plea for mediation and 
 goodwill between the warring forces is evi- 
 dent, and I yield to no one in my admiration 
 for the high sense of civic duty and earnest
 
 J2, CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 patriotism which inspired it. Still, I cannot 
 persuade myself — and I have examined the 
 question in the light of history and personal 
 experience — that the result of it, and all ap- 
 peals of its kind, can be other than baleful 
 and wrong. To cry peace when there is no 
 peace possible is worse than useless : it 
 clouds the real issue, befogs the minds of the 
 masses, and restrains many from taking a 
 definite stand upon the side of what they be- 
 lieve to be the Right. The total result is to 
 dam back, as it were, the stream of progress 
 until it bursts the dam with irresistible force 
 and overwhelms society by a flood of hateful 
 passion. 
 
 The bogey o* ^ * s not strange that one whose 
 bureaucracy memory covers so long a period as 
 your own should fail to distinguish between 
 the Socialism of to-day and the Utopian So- 
 cialism of an earlier generation. Remember- 
 ing the " colonies," " phalanxes," and other' 
 formal schemes for social reconstruction in 
 which all the minutest details of life were pro- 
 vided for in elaborate schedules and codes, it 
 is easy to understand your misconception of 
 the Socialist movement of to-day; your idea
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 73 
 
 of a great bureaucracy governing the whole 
 of life with an inflexible despotism. That is 
 the conception which lies back of your chal- 
 lenge to the Socialists, demanding to know 
 whether, and how, they can devise a govern- 
 ment so omniscient as to be able to choose 
 and appoint some men to poets, artists, in- 
 ventors and philosophers and other men to be 
 laborers, mariners, artisans, farmers, and so 
 on. Your challenge summarizes the concep- 
 tion of numerous superficial critics so admir- 
 ably that, notwithstanding that it has been an- 
 swered hundreds of times, by Socialists and 
 non-Socialists alike, I quote it in full : 
 
 ' Socialism has never told us distinctly, if 
 it has tried to tell us at all, what its form of 
 government is to be. Can it devise a gov- 
 ernment which shall hold all the instruments 
 of production, distribute our industrial parts, 
 yet leave us free? Without freedom and per- 
 sonal choice of callings, how could there be 
 progress, how could there be invention, how 
 could there be dedication to intellectual pur- 
 suits? Can the government pick out invent- 
 ors, scientific discoverers, philosophers, men 
 of letters, artists, set them to work and as-
 
 74 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 sign them their reward? By what standard 
 will it measure remuneration? The products 
 of manual labor it might conceivably meas- 
 ure; but apparently those alone." x 
 socialism and The answer to your questions, and 
 
 the individual tQ ^ the unuttere( J fears implied 
 
 by them, is that modern Socialism, this great 
 world-circling political Socialism, involves the 
 creation of no such bureaucracy. It does not 
 comprehend the destruction of private prop- 
 erty, but only the socialization of such prop- 
 erty, and such agents of production, as are in 
 their very nature social, and which in private 
 hands menace the common interests and good. 
 It does not involve the destruction of per- 
 sonal liberty and the creation of a despotic 
 State, but proposes to leave the choice of oc- 
 cupation to the individual with no other re- 
 strictions than the law of supply and demand 
 and the laws of social self-protection necessi- 
 tate. It does propose to guarantee to every 
 citizen an opportunity to earn an honest liv- 
 ing, without degradation and with leisure to 
 enjoy life. These rights are fundamental to 
 life: — 
 
 1 Page 27. Italics mine. — J. S.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 75 
 
 " And the right of a man to labor and his right to labor 
 
 in joy — 
 Not all your laws can deny that right, nor the gates of 
 
 Hell destroy!" 
 
 Socialism does not propose to surround life 
 with a network of laws in the vain hope that 
 it will make men perfect and remodel human 
 nature by legal enactment, but it does pro- 
 pose to destroy, as far as that is possible for 
 collective effort, all those anti-social conditions 
 which compel men to live vain, hopeless, sor- 
 did, brutal and unworthy lives. It does not 
 expect, nor will it attempt, to override the 
 great laws of human nature and make men 
 equal, but it does make the proposal that all 
 those things which deny equal opportunities 
 and create unnatural inequalities should be 
 destroyed. It claims for every child born into 
 the world its heirship to all the vast resources 
 of wisdom and knowledge so painfully gath- 
 ered by the race through long ages; it claims 
 for every child equal opportunity for the 
 fullest and freest development of all its 
 powers, leaving only natural inequalities to 
 manifest themselves. That is the "Equality" 
 1 if Socialism. To be yet more specific, the form
 
 j6 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 The socialist °f government at which Socialism 
 aims, the form of government es- 
 sential to its very existence, is a complete politi- 
 cal democracy, resting on the broad basis of 
 adult suffrage. It thus elevates woman to the 
 plane of political and. social equality with man. 
 Industrially, the State — no longer represen- 
 tative of a class but of the whole nation — 
 will be as democratic as it is politically. The 
 State will not seek to own all the agents of 
 production and distribution and to extinguish 
 private property and private industry, but it 
 will take the great agencies of life upon which 
 all depend, and the ownership and direction of 
 which by private enterprise is shown to be 
 impossible without injury to society — the 
 things which can only be used by individuals 
 as means of exploiting other individuals — 
 and bring them under the direction of a truly 
 democratic rule of the workers engaged in 
 them and the representatives of the commun- 
 ity. It will thus set a standard of remunera- 
 tion, conditions of labor and leisure time which 
 private enterprise must accept if it is to con- 
 tinue to exist. On the other hand, no Social- 
 ist is foolish enough to believe that collective
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER JJ 
 
 ownership will continue if it does not prove 
 superior to private ownership in its efficiency. 
 Socialism seeks no privileges: it does not 
 fear the competition of private industry. 
 Here, then, is strong ground for its appeal; 
 it is capitalism which fears the test and 
 shrinks from it. 1 
 
 Means of Y ° U ask h ° W this C h an g e will be 
 
 realization brought about, and the question is 
 both natural and fair. Yet, neither I nor 
 any living being can answer it in definite 
 terms. This much is certain: when the re- 
 sults of capitalist ownership and rule prove 
 so oppressive that they are no longer en- 
 durable, the goodwill which constitutes the 
 very soul of capitalist property will be with- 
 drawn. The collective will, expressed in le- 
 gal form, will demand the assumption by the 
 body politic and social of any and all things 
 which its own safety and welfare require. It 
 may pension some owners; it may buy some 
 properties under those powers of domain and 
 ultimate ownership which underlie the juris- 
 
 1 1 have discussed this question at length in my "So- 
 cialism, a Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Prin- 
 ciples (1906), chapter IX.
 
 78 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 prudence of every civilized society. 1 Or, if 
 it chooses to do so, it may simply assume the 
 functions of production or distribution exer- 
 cised by the private owners, without touching 
 anything they own, and so accomplish the 
 
 1 Note : There is of course, no such a thing as an 
 absolute right to property of any kind except this ulti- 
 mate social right to which I refer. In the case of land, 
 this is well known. The power of municipalities and 
 states to take land (at their own valuation in many 
 cases, for public purposes, such as the building of hos- 
 pitals, the making of public parks, roads, and so on, 
 even though the nominal owners of the land do not 
 want to sell it, illustrates this point clearly. Even where 
 the land is wanted by a private corporation, for build- 
 ing a railway, for instance, these powers are frequently 
 exercised. The same principle holds good of every 
 form of property rights, though the fact is often lost 
 sight of. Taxation is a common form of confiscation. 
 The power exercised in war-time of taking food or 
 other supplies is another. Under the police powers of 
 every civilized country in case of serious accident or 
 disaster the home of any citizen, and whatever it con- 
 tains, may be lawfully seized and used. Suppose the 
 owner of a supply of food or drugs, or any other neces- 
 sity of life, should have clung to them in San Francisco 
 at the time of the disastrous earthquake and fire, does 
 any sane person believe that he would have been per- 
 mitted to enforce his ' rights ' against the urgent need 
 of the community? In the last analysis, I repeat, pri- 
 vate property is a pure abstraction, resting solely upon 
 the good will of the community.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 79 
 
 desired end. To illustrate: Suppose the 
 community decides that its best interests will 
 be served by establishing its own system of 
 transportation, and either the existing owners 
 decline to sell at a reasonable price, or the 
 community decides that there would be no 
 advantage in taking the ' plant ' of the exist- 
 ing owners. Under the circumstances it 
 might pursue precisely the same policy as the 
 capitalists have themselves always pursued and 
 establish its own plant. What would happen 
 would be simply this, that without confis- 
 cating a single item of property it would have 
 destroyed every single fraction of the value 
 hitherto owned by the private company, ex- 
 cept, of course, the sum its now useless things 
 would bring at the junk dealers'. There 
 can be no question, it seems to me, that, given 
 the will to socialize any function of produc- 
 tion or distribution, society has full power to 
 do so. 
 
 Charitr v€nn» Nothin g in - vour letter > Professor 
 Smith, is so disquieting as the ac- 
 ceptance of the pernicious doctrine that Char- 
 ity can take the place of Justice in our social 
 economy. When you say that the evil re-
 
 80 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 suiting from the accumulation of vast for- 
 tunes " is partly balanced by large benefac- 
 tions to public institutions," * you give your 
 support to one of the greatest lies of our age. 
 Victor Hugo it was, I believe, who declared 
 that " the rich will do anything for the poor 
 except get off their backs." Yet, so long as 
 they continue to exploit the poor they cannot 
 do any effective good by charity. The large 
 benefactions to public institutions which you 
 refer to do not lessen the wrongs existing, but 
 tend rather to increase them. The very idea 
 of private individuals assuming social func- 
 tions is fundamentally unjust and wrong. 
 There is a legitimate sphere for private phil- 
 anthropy, the sphere of experiment. But be- 
 yond this stage philanthropy ought never to 
 go. If I go into a city and see a beautiful 
 public library, or an art museum filled with 
 rare treasures of art, the library or museum 
 ought to express to me a certain amount of 
 general culture in the community. In point 
 of fact, under present conditions, they express 
 nothing of the sort, but merely the fact that 
 Mr. Carnegie or some other millionaire has 
 1 Page 29.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 8 1 
 
 been permitted to assume social responsibili- 
 ties and duties. Similarly, a public hospital 
 ought to be a concrete expression of the hu- 
 manitarian spirit of the citizens, of their re- 
 gard for their less fortunate fellows, but is 
 to-day, in many cases, nothing more than a 
 monument of the neglect of those things by 
 the public and the fact that private individuals 
 have done, in the name of Charity, what the 
 community ought to have done in the name of 
 Justice. That charity weakens the moral 
 fibre of the individual who becomes depen- 
 dent upon it, frequently doing far more harm 
 than it can possibly undo, is admitted. So 
 it is in the case of communities. Many of 
 our cities and towns have been pauperized by 
 the " large benefactions to public institu- 
 tions," by which our great multimillionaires 
 seek to salve their consciences, and, inci- 
 dentally, to quiet the popular discontent. 
 ourneodof T would not have my position 
 upon this matter misunderstood. 
 I do not blame the philanthropist. I do not 
 doubt that in many instances they are actuated 
 by entirely laudable desires. Indeed, I honor 
 the spirit which prompts a man to give part of
 
 82 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 his surplus wealth to relieve suffering and 
 misery, or to aid others to obtain knowledge 
 and emancipate themselves from misery. But 
 I cannot close my eyes to the fact that this 
 is the richest country in the world, and that 
 there must be something wrong with the so- 
 cial system which necessitates private philan- 
 throphy upon the gigantic scale of to-day. In 
 the richest country of the world, with re- 
 sources of fabulous richness, where the peo- 
 ple feel the need of libraries they must wait 
 in patience until Mr. Carnegie makes up his 
 mind to give them libraries for presents, and 
 as monuments to his exaggerated egoism. 
 Feeling the need of money for educational 
 purposes, we must wait for Mr. Rockefeller to 
 give it out of his vast hoard. In our richest 
 and greatest city, notwithstanding the most 
 awful need of a lying-in hospital, we wit- 
 nessed the spectacle of the city waiting help- 
 lessly until Mr. Morgan saw fit to build one 
 at his private expense. Yet, Mr. Carnegie, 
 Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Morgan, like all 
 others of their type, draw all they give in this 
 manner from the labor and life of the com- 
 munity. Because society condones the wrong
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 83 
 
 of private exploitation of public resources, it 
 must condone the further wrong of substitut- 
 ing private philanthropy for social justice. 
 
 Socialism and 1 d ° n0t a PP eal t0 y OU t0 J° in tlie 
 
 youth Socialist movement, Professor 
 
 Smith. It is a melancholy reflection that lit- 
 tle good could accrue to the Socialist cause 
 as a result of such a step on your part at this 
 late day. Your splendid career lies in the 
 Past, a monument of civic loyalty and un- 
 selfish devotion to the common good. But 
 Socialism is for the Future. Therefore, I 
 look to the younger men and women who have 
 been influenced by your life and work, and 
 who may attach much importance to your 
 utterance against Socialism. I seek and hope 
 to convince them that Socialism is the only 
 ideal worthy of their service and devotion. 
 To their unshaken faith, unsullied hope and 
 unbounded enthusiasm I appeal against the 
 skepticism and tin faith of age with its back- 
 ward vision. I appeal to them to recognize 
 the fact that to " acquiesce in our industrial 
 system," even provisionally, as you counsel 
 them to do, 1 is to deny righteousness and to 
 1 Page 38.
 
 84 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 compromise with wrong. I appeal to them to 
 face the stern fact that acquiescence with 
 capitalism is nothing less than binding the 
 soul of Truth to Mammon's altar and muz- 
 zling the spirit of Truth in the Temple of 
 Life. 
 
 The blight I see the bosom of the earth 
 of capitalism blightened and re ddened with 
 
 blood by wars made in the name of capitalism ; 
 I see genius, beauty and love strangled in a 
 cruel, stygian quagmire of poverty in the name 
 of that same capitalism ; I see childhood bound 
 to wheels, the purity of womanhood and the 
 strength of manhood ravished and destroyed 
 for capitalism and the privilege of the few. 
 And seeing these things, and unutterable 
 things worse than these, which every open- 
 minded man and woman may see, I denounce 
 the advice to acquiesce in them as an outrage 
 upon the spirit of Truth, an unholy alliance 
 with the powers of Evil, a blasphemy against 
 God and all that is noble and good in life. 
 a caii to I turn, then, to the young and 
 
 theyoui, g pkad with them f(Jr a nob j er and 
 
 better ideal, and a worthier purpose in life 
 than acquiescence with the system of greed,
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 85 
 
 ignorance and sordidness. I stand upon the 
 broad platform of Mazzini's religious faith, 
 and, adopting his very words, say to the 
 young men and women of to-day to whom this 
 great sphinx-riddle of the social problem ap- 
 peals, and upon whom the responsibility of its 
 solution must devolve: 
 
 Mazzini's " You were first slaves, then serfs. 
 Now you are hirelings. You 
 have emancipated yourselves from slavery and 
 from serfdom. Why should you not emanci- 
 pate yourselves from the yoke of hire, and 
 become free producers, and masters of the 
 totality of production which you create? 
 Wherefore should you not accomplish, 
 through your own peaceful endeavors and the 
 assistance of a society having sacred duties 
 towards each of its members, the most beauti- 
 ful revolution that can be conceived — a revo- 
 lution which, accepting labor as the commer- 
 cial basis of human intercourse, and the fruits 
 of labor as the basis of property, should grad- 
 ually abolish the class distinctions and tyranni- 
 cal dominion of one element of labor over 
 another, and by proclaiming one sole law of 
 just equilibrium between production and con-
 
 86 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 sumption, harmonize and unite all the children 
 of the country, the common mother ? 1 
 The claim of All that Socialism asks of any 
 socialism man j g a canc iicl an( \ unbiased 
 
 investigation of its principles, an honest 
 study of its claims, and that is a duty which 
 every true man owes to himself, which every 
 patriotic citizen owes to his country. The 
 Socialist movement embraces too many mil- 
 lions of earnest men and women in all lands, 
 among them the most illustrious leaders in 
 Art, Science, Literature and Politics, to per- 
 mit any intelligent person to ignore it. In 
 the firm conviction that the claims of Social- 
 ism are just and true, and believing that to 
 neglect its study is to stultify self and wrong 
 society, I urge the readers of these pages to 
 become acquainted with its literature, and, 
 equally, with the literature of the opposition 
 to it, weighing the pros and cons with open 
 minds, bent only upon the realization of the 
 truth. Read the best literature, for Social- 
 ism and against it, in the spirit of the sage 
 advice of Lord Verulam : " Read not to con- 
 tradict and confute, nor to believe and take 
 1 On the Duties of Man.
 
 CAPITALIST AND LABORER 
 
 87 
 
 for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but 
 to weigh and consider." 
 
 Faithfully yours,
 
 PART TWO 
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 A lecture delivered at the New York School 
 of Philanthropy, March 7th., 1907 
 
 89
 
 NOTE 
 
 In the comments upon Mr. Mallock's utterances con- 
 tained in the following pages I have tried to be abso- 
 lutely fair to that gentleman. It is not always possi- 
 ble, however, to be quite certain as to the meaning of 
 Mr. Mallock's incoherent and contradictory statements. 
 On the one hand he accuses Marx and his Socialist 
 followers of teaching that " wealth is produced by man- 
 ual labor alone," while, on the other hand, in summing 
 up the very first of his lectures, he laments that "At 
 present the orthodox economists and the Socialistic 
 economists alike give us all human effort tied up, as it 
 were, in a sack and ticketed ' human labor.' " Both 
 statements, it is very obvious, cannot possibly be true. 
 
 Again, the confusion of thought and language in 
 Mr. Mallock's arguments are such that, even when he 
 defines his term, the " definitions " are absolutely unin- 
 telligible and add to the general obscurity. He defines 
 labor, for instance, in the following words : " Labor 
 means the faculties of the individual applied to his own 
 labor." If this sentence was intended to mean any- 
 thing at all, the fact does not appear. In a great Amer- 
 ican University, a highly culttured audience is gravely 
 informed that labor means " faculties applied to labor ! " 
 
 More than ten years ago, while residing in England, 
 I found some intellectual diversion in touring the coun- 
 try amusing myself, and, I hope, others, by puncturing 
 the airy bubbles which Mr. Mallock's verbosity blew 
 across the pathway of our Socialist propaganda. Utter- 
 ly discredited in England, the naivete of the National 
 Civic Federation of America has given him a new 
 lease of life, and American Socialists may indulge in 
 the amusing pastime of pricking Mr. Mallock's bub- 
 bles.— J. S. 
 
 90
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 Assumption on I am honored by the invitation to 
 
 which lecture , , , . .. 
 
 is based address you today upon the sub- 
 
 ject of Modern Socialism. When I received 
 the very courteous invitation of Dr. Devine, 
 in response to which I am present this morn- 
 ing, I had no idea that the gentlemen who 
 comprise that very interesting body, the Na- 
 tional Civic Federation, were to resurrect 
 from his comparative oblivion in England the 
 genial Mr. Mallock and import him to dis- 
 cuss Socialism in some of our great American 
 Universities. It seemed to me at the time 
 best to assume that most of you would be 
 quite ignorant of the subject, notwithstand- 
 ing the fact that almost every one of you may 
 have graduated from some college or uni- 
 versity. I could not hope that any consider- 
 able number of you would know more about 
 the great subject of Socialism than the aver- 
 age professor, and it seemed best, therefore, 
 
 9i
 
 92 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 to frame my lecture upon the assumption that 
 you would have no correct ideas about So- 
 cialism and the Socialist movement, such ideas 
 as you might have being incorrect and mis- 
 leading. 
 Mr. Maiiotk's Since then you have, I hope, all 
 
 disingenuous- , 111 
 
 ness read or listened to the lectures of 
 
 Mr. Mallock. Yet, with all deference to an 
 ingenious and mildly interesting opponent, I 
 cannot think that you are any wiser for the 
 experience. It would, I think, be almost im- 
 possible for any person to add to his or her 
 stock of correct information about Socialism 
 as a result of sitting under Mr. Mallock's in- 
 struction, wherefore I shall stick to my or- 
 iginal intention of assuming that most of you 
 have very erroneous notions about Socialism 
 and that few of you have any correct ideas 
 about it. You may have noticed that, like a 
 certain class of theologians, Mr. Mallock de- 
 voted his time to a textual criticism of de- 
 tached passages from the writings of Karl 
 Marx. That many of these criticisms be- 
 trayed a lack of ingenuousness not uncom- 
 mon among controversialists, and to which 
 harsh words might be not unjustly applied,
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 93 
 
 is true, but that is not the most important 
 criticism I would make. What I would have 
 you observe today is that Socialism in 
 America cannot be destroyed or hindered by 
 the method Mr. Mallock has adopted. Marx 
 wrote half a century ago, and while there 
 can be no doubt of the vast influence of his 
 work upon the Socialist thought of our time, 
 it is not a very difficult task to show that he 
 was fallible. Because he was human he 
 could not well be otherwise. There is a 
 younger school of Socialist writers, of which 
 I am proud to be a very humble member, 
 which our opponents must deal with if they 
 would touch the Socialism of to-day, or do 
 more effective work than make straw men to 
 knock them down with academic gravity. 
 The test of our opponents' sincerity and 
 courage will be their willingness or otherwise 
 to place at the disposal of the Socialists the 
 facilities given to Mr. Mallock. It will be, 
 too, something of a test of the integrity and 
 freedom from bias of our great universities. 
 So much I say by way of prelude : Com- 
 ing to the subject of to-day's lecture, I shall 
 not weary you with textual expositions of
 
 94 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 Marxian or other formulas, nor with an 
 academic phraseology that is at once foreign 
 and archaic. In the simplest language I can 
 command, I hope to make quite plain the 
 essential feautres of the Socialism of to-day 
 as we American Socialists conceive it. 
 The word The word "Socialism'' was first 
 used in 1833 by the disciples of 
 Robert Owen, the great English philanthro- 
 pist. It was used to designate Owen's scheme 
 of universal cooperation at first, and was 
 gradually adopted as the name for all Utopian 
 dreams and experiments from Plato's Repub- 
 lic to Bellamy's Looking Backward. But, 
 while we have retained the word to desig- 
 nate our ideas and ideals, there is no other 
 relation between those universally dreamed 
 Utopian visions and modern Socialism. The 
 relation, or lack of relation, between the two 
 has been aptly likened to that of the ancient 
 alchemy to the chemistry of to-day. 
 Three phase* We ma Y consider present day So- 
 
 of the subject c { al j sm f rQm fa^ qu j te distinct 
 
 points of view. We may consider it as: 
 
 ( 1 ) A theory of social evolution 
 
 (2) A system of political economy
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 95 
 
 (3) A social ideal 
 While these are quite distinct points of view 
 from which we may consider Socialism, any- 
 extensive observations from them must inev- 
 itably merge themselves together, forming a 
 sociological synthesis which is frequently 
 spoken of as " Scientific Socialism." I pro- 
 pose to sketch a suggestive outline of Socialist 
 theory under each of the three heads. 
 
 social Evoiu- (0 As a theory of social evolu- 
 tion Socialism has for its primary 
 postulate the necessity of the constant change 
 and growth of the social organism. In olden 
 times men regarded the social state as a 
 static thing, but to-day, thanks to a host of 
 thinkers in the realms of biology and soci- 
 ology, men like Comte, Lyell, Darwin, Spen- 
 cer, Lewis H. Morgan, Bachofen, Sir Henry 
 Maine, and numerous others whose names will 
 doubtless occur to you, the idea of social 
 evolution is a firmly established one. Thanks 
 to the patient labors of these great thinkers, 
 it is now possible to trace the evolution of the 
 human race and to mark that evolution into 
 fairly definite epochs. Morgan, Maine, Lub- 
 bock, and others, have shown the long period
 
 96 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 of savagedom through which primitive races 
 lived without any idea of private property, in 
 a rude, savage, tribal communism. They 
 have shown the rise of slavery, historically 
 the first form of private property known to 
 the human race, while other writers have 
 traced with greater wealth of detail the modi- 
 fication of slavery and the rise of serfdom in 
 a feudal society. The passing of that feudal- 
 ism with its branded serfs, and the rise of 
 capitalistic society with its wage-laborers in- 
 stead of serfs, is a page of history so recent 
 that its documentary records are open to each 
 of us. So recent is it, indeed, that even those 
 of us who have not yet reached the meridian 
 of life have been privileged to see some rem- 
 nants of the old feudalism existing alongside 
 of the new form of social organization, as in 
 the Slavic countries of Europe, and to witness 
 the last desperate struggle of the feudal rem- 
 nant against extinction. 
 
 Recent ^ n our own time, we who are still 
 
 changes young have witnessed a great 
 
 transformation in the social and industrial life 
 of the world. We have seen the development 
 of new agents of production like electricity,
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 97 
 
 the passing of competition in industry and 
 commerce, and the rapid and extensive con- 
 centration of capital in commerce and indus- 
 try. Our own experience, therefore, confirms 
 the doctrine of the gradual evolution of so- 
 ciety, and we could not, in view of that ex- 
 perience, believe in the possibility of an im- 
 mediate realization of the millenium as the 
 result of adopting some scheme of social or- 
 ganization, even if we would. 
 Economic Now, the distinctive features of 
 erohriJoii the Socialist theory of social evo- 
 lution, as distinguished from other theories, is 
 the so-called " materialistic conception of his- 
 tory," formulated by Marx and his great co- 
 worker, Friederich Engels. The essence of 
 this theory, its root principle, is that the main 
 impelling force in human progress, the force 
 which to a large extent determines the time 
 and character of the changes in social organ- 
 ization which we call the epochs of history, 
 i- economic, rising out of the methods of 
 producing and distributing wealth. Slave- 
 labor broke up the pre-historic communism, 
 and the development <>f that system of pro- 
 duction established private property and an
 
 98 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 individualistic code of ethics to replace that 
 of the tribe. The rise of the feudal system 
 may be traced to definite economic causes as 
 clearly as the rise of capitalism may be traced 
 to the workshop system and its development to 
 the great mechanical inventions of the eight- 
 eenth century. Just as the term feudalism 
 comprehends something more than the eco- 
 nomic arrangements existing between lords 
 and serfs, and covers the whole social and 
 political life of an epoch in history, with its 
 military system, its jurisprudence, its intellec- 
 tual life, so the term capitalism comprehends 
 much more than a system of wage-paid labor. 
 Constitutional government, personal liberty 
 and freedom of contract are just as essential 
 parts of capitalism as steam engines, banking 
 and credit. 
 other factors I have said that the distinctive 
 
 notexclnded features of th J s theQry of SO( .; al 
 
 evolution, this philosophy of historical de- 
 velopment, is that the main determinant force 
 is economic, including in that term all the 
 economic factors, including even climate. 
 Other forces enter into the stream of causes. 
 Religion, superstition, custom, ethics and pa-
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 99 
 
 triotism have each exerted considerable influ- 
 ence, but when all possible allowance is made 
 for these great forces the sum of economic 
 conditions still remains the principal force 
 impelling the race-life onward. You will see 
 at once that this is very far from being the 
 gospel of economic fatalism which it is some- 
 times caricatured as being, alike by superficial 
 critics and friends. It does not imply that 
 individuals are inspired solely by sordid 
 greed, a proposition which no one really be- 
 lieves. It does, however, imply that men gen- 
 erally act in accordance with their consciously 
 felt interests, of which economic interests are 
 always the most important and urgent. This 
 will come to you in your work in the sphere 
 of philanthropic endeavor very often, and 
 serve to explain why kind hearted men and 
 women known to you will oppose the meas- 
 ures you are forced to advocate for social bet- 
 terment. It will help you to understand why 
 a great corporation like Trinity Church owns 
 slum property and opposes tenement house 
 legislation, and why men and women who are 
 known to you as earnest Christians and most 
 generous persons will oppose measures aim-
 
 100 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 ing to do away with evils like Child Labor. 
 If you use it wisely it will illumine for you 
 many a page of history which would other- 
 wise be obscure, but if you use it fanatically 
 and without reason it will land you in foolish 
 and untenable positions. 
 
 Meaning of the So far as we have gone many 
 "Trusts" persons who are not Socialists 
 accept this theory of social evolution. One 
 need not be a Socialist in order to accept the 
 idea that history is to a very great extent 
 dominated by economics. The further con- 
 tention of Socialism is that the present 
 methods of wealth production and distribu- 
 tion, large factories and great industrial and 
 commercial organizations popularly called 
 " Trusts," make possible the socialization of 
 industry and commerce and, indeed, compel 
 it. The centering of wealth, or the control 
 of wealth, in relatively few hands tends to 
 focalize the resulting discontent into a move- 
 ment aiming at the transformation of pri- 
 vate or semi-private monopolies into collec- 
 tive monopolies shared by all the people 
 through the instruments of democratic gov- 
 ernment. This, then, is the philosophy of
 
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM IOI 
 
 Socialism. Without regard for other things, 
 such as, for example, the theory of value or 
 the science of political economy in general, 
 a person accepting this theory may be a So- 
 cialist with a perfectly valid reason for his 
 conviction. If I may be allowed to add to 
 the number of classes into which Socialists 
 are already classified, I should call such a 
 person a philosophic Socialist. 
 Economics of ( 2 ) A * a system of political 
 socialism economy, Socialism, like all other 
 systems of political economy, concerns itself 
 with the laws governing the production and 
 distribution of wealth. It seeks to explain 
 the inequalities, to show the nature and origin 
 of what John Stuart Mill called " the enor- 
 mous share which the possessors of the in- 
 struments of industry are able to take from 
 the produce." 1 Indeed, this passage from 
 Mill's great work contains the germ of the 
 exploitation theory of value which constitutes 
 the cornerstone of the economics of modern 
 Socialism. 
 
 This system of economics was formulated 
 
 1 Principles of Political Economy (1865 Edition), p. 
 477-
 
 102 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 by a brilliant German thinker, Karl Marx, 
 whose service to the development of politi- 
 cal economy have been compared to those 
 which Darwin rendered to biology, and won 
 for him the title of " the Darwin of economic 
 science." In the brief time at our disposal 
 I can only state the principles of this system 
 of economics in bare outline, unsatisfactory as 
 such a statement must be. 
 Marx and Marx followed the lead of all the 
 "labor" great English economists, Petty, 
 
 Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and others, and ac- 
 cepted as axiomatic the principle common to 
 them all that " all wealth is produced by la- 
 bor applied to appropriate natural objects." 
 He did not, as many foolish critics suppose, 
 teach that the mere expenditure of labor up- 
 on natural objects must inevitably result in 
 the production of wealth. He knew well 
 enough that if a man spent his time digging 
 holes in the ground and filling them up again, 
 or dipping water from the ocean in a bucket 
 and pouring it back again, that the labor so 
 expended upon natural objects would not pro- 
 duce wealth of any kind. Nor did Marx 
 teach that manual labor alone produces
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM IO3 
 
 wealth, denying or ignoring the productivity 
 of mental labor and " directing genius," as 
 alleged by Mr. Mallock. Like all the great 
 economists, he included in the term " labor " 
 the totality of human energies expended in 
 production, regardless of whether those ener- 
 gies are physical or mental. He was not 
 foolish enough to believe that the intellectual 
 labors of the inventor, the designer and the 
 director could be disregraded. 1 
 The principle To state plainly what Marx be- 
 stated lieved and taught, in practically 
 
 his own words, will, I think, be sufficient to 
 destroy the whole fabric of Mr. Mallock's 
 labored and sophistic criticism. Here is the 
 principle : Wealth in modern society con- 
 sists of social use-values, of things for which 
 there is a demand giving them the quality of 
 exchangeablcncss. While, obviously, there 
 are many things possessing this quality on 
 which little or no labor has been expended, 
 
 1 Here is the definition of labor given by Marx : 
 " By labor power or capacity for labor is to be under- 
 stood the aggregate of those mental and physical capa- 
 bilities existing in a human being, which he exercises 
 whenever he produces a use-value of any description." 
 Capital, vol. 1, p. 145 ( Kerr Ed. p. 186).
 
 104 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 things found, for instance, which possess al- 
 most fabulous value because of their rarity, 
 they constitute an almost infinitesmal part of 
 the great business of life. Normally, the 
 business of modern society is the -production 
 of social use-values, and these are produced 
 by those energies of hand and brain which 
 the economists call labor, or productive effort, 
 applied to natural resources. Such a concep- 
 tion of the meaning of the term labor em- 
 braces every contribution to the sum total of 
 useful productive energies expended, from the 
 brain labor of the great Edison to the hum- 
 blest laborer. 
 Marx's contri- What Marx did which distin- 
 
 * nit ion to the . , . . 
 
 theory guishes his work in this respect 
 
 from that of the great economists who pre- 
 ceded him was to give scientific form to the 
 crude theory of value which they had de- 
 veloped. From the central fact that all 
 wealth results from the union of natural 
 forces with those of human intelligence and 
 power, the older economists had evolved 
 the simple labor theory of value, the idea that 
 the amount of human labor embodied in two 
 commodities otherwise different determined
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM IO5 
 
 their relative economic value. It is perfectly 
 obvious that this conception of value was most 
 defective and vulnerable. If two workers are 
 employed at making tables or chairs, for ex- 
 ample, and one of them, being a less efficient 
 worker, or using less efficient methods, takes 
 twice as long as the other, there being no 
 other appreciable difference in the tables ex- 
 cept that the making of one took twice as long 
 as the making of the other, it would be fool- 
 ish to suppose that any person would be 
 willing to pay twice as much for the table 
 produced by the inefficient worker, or by cum- 
 bersome methods, as for that produced in less 
 time. If that were so, we should have in 
 economics a " rent of inefficiency," and so- 
 ciety would be, even though unconsciously, 
 engaged in a great conspiracy against ef- 
 ficiency and progress. The advantages of 
 life would go to the slow and inefficient. 
 Average ro- Marx saw the error of the crude 
 
 dally neces- . 111 
 
 sary labor theory, but he also saw the ger- 
 minal truth which it contained. He realized 
 that, while the amount of labor actually em- 
 bodied in a single commodity could not be 
 the determinant of its value, there must be
 
 106 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 some relation between the value of commodi- 
 ties in general and the amount of labor spent 
 in their production. The substance of his la- 
 bor theory may be simply stated as follows: 
 " The exchange value of commodities is de- 
 termined by the amount of average labor at 
 the time socially necessary for their produc- 
 tion. This is determined, not absolutely in 
 individual cases, but approximately in gen- 
 eral, by the bargaining and higgling of the 
 market, to adopt Adam Smith's well-known 
 phrase." 1 To explain, let us return to our 
 example of the men making tables : If the 
 slower methods are those usually employed, 
 and the time taken by the slower worker is 
 the average time, the speed of the other 
 worker and his methods being wholly excep- 
 tional, then the exchange-value of tables gen- 
 erally will be determined by that standard, 
 and the worker adopting the more efficient 
 methods will be able to get the same price for 
 his tables, and, because he can produce twice 
 as many in a given time as can be produced 
 under the old, slow methods, he will be in a 
 
 1 c.f. Socialism, a Summary and Interpretation of So- 
 cialist Principles, by John Spargo, p. 196.
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 107 
 
 position of great advantage over his competi- 
 tors. But competition tends to bring about 
 the adoption of the most efficient methods, 
 and when they become general the exchange- 
 value of tables is determined by them instead 
 of the older, cumbersome and inefficient 
 methods. Then the worker who keeps to the 
 old ways is left behind in a position of great 
 economic disadvantage. 
 
 Marx did more than place the la- 
 
 Surplns-Value , , . 
 
 bor theory of value upon a scien- 
 tific basis. He. went further and showed hoiv 
 the owners of the instruments of industry 
 obtained the :< enormous share " of the pro- 
 duce which Mill noticed. He developed his 
 famous theory of "surplus-value" (mchr- 
 werth) to explain the methods by which the 
 exploitation of the producers is accomplished. 
 This is done through the medium of wages. 
 Under the methods of production prevailing 
 during the era of capitalism, it is impossible 
 to determine the product of the individual 
 worker. Instead, therefore, of each man pro- 
 ducing as an individual and selling his own 
 product, we have masses of workers employed 
 at a given wage for a given number of hours,
 
 108 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 the product belonging to the employer. The 
 employer buys their labor-power as he would 
 buy any other commodity, at a price tending 
 to the cost of its production, i.e., the main- 
 tenance of the workers and their families, 
 fluctuating according to the relation of the 
 supply of labor-power to the demand for it. 
 The iaw of ^ is sorne times contended that 
 wages wages depend upon the produc- 
 
 tivity of labor, the amount of value produced, 
 but this is not at all the case. Doubtless the 
 bald statement that the amount of a worker's 
 wages is not decided mainly by the value of 
 his product, will prove surprising to many. 
 The capitalist teachers of political economy 
 and the capitalist press have long taught 
 otherwise. But here are two instances, and 
 it would be easy to multiply them a thousand- 
 fold, which prove the assertion. — In the re- 
 ports of the Interstate Commerce Commission 
 some very interesting figures are given which 
 the workers are not so familiar with as they 
 ought to be. For instance, we find that in 
 1902 there were employed upon the railroads 
 of this country 1,179,460 workers, exclusive 
 of all officials from the grade of Division
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM TOO, 
 
 Superintendent upward, with a wage-total of 
 $653,447,162 — or an average per employe of 
 $554.02. In 1897, the number of employes 
 was 814,756, and their total wages amounted 
 to $416,609,616 — or an average of $548.15. 
 So that in the five years the average increase 
 per head was just 1 per cent. But in the 
 same period the profits rose from $369,565,- 
 009 in 1897, to $610,131,520 in 1902 — an 
 increase of 65 per cent. Thus, while profits 
 increased to the extent of 65 per cent., wages 
 increased only 1 per cent. Even stronger evi- 
 dence is afforded by the U. S. Census Re- 
 ports. We find from these that in the year 
 1890 the average wages per worker amounted 
 to $445 per year. The total value of the pro- 
 duct per worker was $842. In 1900, the av- 
 erage product per worker had risen to $872, 
 but the average wages had fallen to $437. 
 That means that each worker produced on an 
 average $30 more wealth, but received eight 
 dollars less wages! Producing more wealth, 
 we receive less wages! 
 
 ttopio-vau* Now then, the employer buys la- 
 exiiiuin.-<i bor-power, raw materials, and 
 machinery. The raw materials are used up
 
 HO MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 in the product, simply changed in form. It 
 is obvious that they cannot create anything. 
 The machinery is also used up, but less slowly. 
 It is obvious that no machinery adds to itself, 
 or to anything, being inanimate. It is only a 
 complex tool used to effect the transformation 
 of the raw materials. The labor-power is 
 also used up, but, unlike the other things, in 
 the process of being used up it adds to its 
 own value by creating new value. Thus, if 
 $1,000 worth of raw materials are used up 
 in a week, together with $1,000 worth of la- 
 bor-power (the amount of the wages paid) 
 and $100 worth of machinery and plant, we 
 have a total value of $2,100. Now if the 
 value of the product resulting is found to be 
 $2,600, it is clear that the workers have 
 created $500 worth of value for which they 
 have received no equivalent. This unpaid- 
 for labor Marx called " surplus value." To 
 obtain this surplus the capitalist goes into 
 business. It is his source of income. It is 
 divided, of course, in various ways, not go- 
 ing, necessarily, to the individual employer. 
 How it is divided is of no moment to the 
 worker. The main divisions are (1) rent,
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM III 
 
 (2) interest on borrowed capital, (3) employ- 
 ers' profits. 
 
 ix>gicofthe To combine for the purpose of 
 theory preserving their interests is nat- 
 
 ural, alike for producers and exploiters. Those 
 who accept this theory of the exploitation of 
 labor and believe that the workers, being vastly 
 more numerous than the capitalists, will find a 
 means of ending the system of exploitation by 
 transforming the great private, or quasi-pri- 
 vate, industrial and commercial monopolies 
 into social or collective monopolies, are So- 
 cialists, even though they do not accept the 
 philosophical theory of social evolution al- 
 ready outlined. You will see that the end 
 reached is the same in either case. One man 
 reasons along the lines of great generaliza- 
 tions, but fails to accept the detailed analysis; 
 another accepts the detailed analysis of 
 present facts, but rejects the broad generaliza- 
 tion, owing to the perspective with which he 
 sees the various factors of human progress. 
 Umttatiauof There are many Socialists who 
 
 < li.- M.ir\ 1-111 
 
 theory will agree that the Marxian the- 
 
 ory of value must be accepted with important 
 reservations, such, for example, as those con-
 
 112 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 tained in the so-called Austrian theory of 
 final, or marginal, utility. This theory, as I 
 have tried to show in one of my books, 1 is 
 nothing more than the old theory of supply 
 and demand determining value. Personally, 
 I have never been able to regard these the- 
 ories as mutually exclusive. To me they ap- 
 pear to be complementary. Marx himself in- 
 sisted that social use-value is essential to ex- 
 change-value, that is to say that the desire 
 of others to possess it is a condition which 
 must exist before any article can have any 
 value whatsoever. This is not a concession 
 of Marxism to its critics, but an essential 
 feature of Marxism. If a man makes 
 wooden shoes in New York where they have 
 no social use-value because nobody wants 
 them, fur overcoats in Ecuador, or straw hats 
 in the arctic circle, his labor may well be as 
 vain as if he were dipping water out of the 
 ocean with a bucket and pouring it back 
 again. But it is obvious that, whatever the 
 demand may be, it would be impossible for 
 commodities to be exchanged for less than 
 
 1 Socialism, a Summary and Interpretation of Social' 
 ist Principles (1907).
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 113 
 
 the cost of their production for any length 
 of time. Production would be lessened until 
 the supply approximated the demand. Nor, 
 in a free market, under the normal economic 
 conditions to which all economic laws must 
 apply, could they be for long maintained at 
 a price level greatly in excess of their value. 
 scarcity M a O f course, this law of value ap- 
 caose of value pHes to the p ro d U ction of com- 
 modities. There are many things whose 
 value is determined wholly without regard to 
 labor embodied in them. A picture by 
 Raphael, for instance, a statue by Michael 
 Angelo, or the manuscript of a sonnet by 
 Shakespeare, would each possess a value de- 
 termined only by the extent of the competition 
 for them by wealthy persons. Their scarcity 
 makes them desirable to such an extent that 
 some persons will give immense sums for the 
 pleasure of owning them. This desirability is 
 what is meant by the term " final utility " in 
 modern economics. At best it is an obscura- 
 tion of thought, the old terms of supply and 
 demand being much more intelligible. 
 mt,n„tuai If instead of taking Raphael's 
 " r " ,,u,ts picture, Angelo's marble, or
 
 114 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 Shakespeare's manuscript, we take the repro- 
 ductions of them which are produced as com- 
 modities, we shall find that the Marxian the- 
 ory holds good in every particular. It may, 
 I think, be admitted by the most rigid Marxist 
 of us all that the law cannot be applied to 
 purely intellectual products, such as works of 
 art and literature, without important modi- 
 fications. A sensational novel, produced in a 
 week, may have, and often does have, greater 
 exchange value than a work by a great 
 thinker like Herbert Spencer, owing to the 
 greater demand. Other examples of a like 
 nature will suggest themselves. 
 
 Mr.Mallock's THis is n0t tlle P 0mt mised h Y 
 
 argument Mn Mallock, however, in his 
 elaborate argument for the recognition of 
 genius, or ability, as a " third factor in pro- 
 duction." Mr. Mallock, after falsely repre- 
 senting Marx as claiming that " the only hu- 
 man agency involved in the production of 
 wealth is average manual labor," 1 proceeds 
 to demolish the theory, under the circum- 
 stances not a difficult task. Utterly uncon- 
 
 1 Mr. Mallock's second lecture at Columbia Univer- 
 sity, vide the New York Times, February 15, 1907.
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 11$ 
 
 scious that he is merely repeating the old 
 arguments in support of the supply and de- 
 mand theory, he chooses as an illustration suf- 
 ficient to annihilate the innocent Socialist an 
 edition of a printed book. The mechanical 
 features of our book, which is a work of 
 genius, are similar to those of " a mere com- 
 pilation of unreadable nonsense," the labor 
 spent upon both is the same in kind and 
 quality. What makes their values different, 
 then? Mr. Mallock makes two replies to this 
 question — one of them, the correct one, he 
 suggests quite accidentally and unconsciously; 
 the other, entirely wrong and unutterably 
 foolish, he makes with evident deliberation. 
 His formal answer is that the value is due 
 to the directing genius of the author, but this 
 rests upon the supposition that the work of 
 greater genius will have the greater value, 
 whereas the facts are often quite otherwise. A 
 novel by Mr. Meredith, Mr. Howells, or 
 Mark Twain sells for exactly the same price as 
 one by Laura Jean Libby, Marie Corelli, or 
 the latest nine year old prodigy of the literary 
 world. Their commodity values are equal, 
 despite the fact that the Laura Jean Libby
 
 Il6 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 book is of no literary merit or importance, 
 while the book by Mr. Meredith is a per- 
 manent enrichment of literature. 
 Trying to Further than this, Laura Jean 
 circle Libby or Marie Corelli will sell 
 
 tens of thousands of copies of their books 
 more than Mr. Meredith or Mr. Howells, per- 
 haps. Browning's " Saul " is undeniably a 
 greater poem than Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 
 " Laugh and the world laughs with you," 
 yet ten thousand persons will read the latter 
 for every dozen who will read the former. 
 Fitzgerald's translation of Omar is another 
 classic example. While mere doggerel bal- 
 lads sold by the thousand in London streets, 
 Fitzgerald's immortal work went begging. 
 To-day, however, we have forgotten the 
 names of the " best sellers," just as we have 
 forgotten the best sellers of half a dozen years 
 ago. If we were to pin Mr. Mallock down 
 to his illustration, we should be able to argue 
 from it with fair logic that the relation of 
 genius to value is entirely destructive! Mr. 
 Mallock is, however, quite incoherent, and in 
 his incoherence blurts out the real solution of 
 his problem. In the words ' whether thou-
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 117 
 
 sands of people want to read it or nobody " 
 we find him stumbling over the explanation of 
 the relative values of his work of genius and 
 his " compilation of unreadable nonsense " — 
 stumbling but unaware of the fact. It is the 
 demand which gives the one book value as 
 against the other: it is a social use-value, 
 while the other book, for which there is no 
 demand, has no value because it has no util- 
 ity. The labor embodied in it is like that 
 wasted in dipping the ocean dry, or digging 
 holes merely to refill them. Like many an- 
 other critic of Marx, starting with a misrepre- 
 sentation of the theory of value for his pre- 
 mise, Mr. Mallock gets nowhere : he moves in 
 a vicious circle and cannot escape from it. 
 "Ability ami While Marx, like all the great 
 production economists, included the ability de- 
 voted to the direction of labor in his use of the 
 term labor, Mr. Mallock makes of it an inde- 
 pendent factor. It is his " third factor in 
 production," vastly more important than la- 
 bor. He does note the great inventions and 
 their tremendous influence on the production 
 of wealth, hut he does not attempt to show 
 that the genius of the inventors is not ex-
 
 Il8 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 ploited. With the long list of great inventors 
 who have died in poverty that would have 
 been an impossible task. The " ability " and 
 " genius " which Mr. Mallock exalts is noth- 
 ing more than the commercial ability to ex- 
 ploit labor, an ability based on the possession 
 of the instruments of production, as Mill 
 showed, rather than any special moral or in- 
 tellectual superiority. The genius of a hand- 
 ful of capitalists, undistinguished for anything 
 except the possession of capital, brought the 
 genius of Eli Whitney to hardship and suffer- 
 ing. 
 
 social and '(3) As a social ideal we can only 
 idealism discuss Socialism very briefly, hav- 
 
 ing lingered too long with Mr. Mallock's 
 sophistries. We have seen that some persons 
 accept Socialism as a philosophy of social evo- 
 lution without accepting its commonly ac- 
 cepted views of political economy, while others 
 reach the same goal, come to the same posi- 
 tion with regard to the present problem of 
 society, as a result of their acceptance of those 
 economic theories, though they cannot accept 
 the philosophy of social evolution which as- 
 cribes a principal influence to economic fac-
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM HO, 
 
 tors. Still others there are who arrive at the 
 goal by yet another route. Knowing or car- 
 ing little or nothing for theories of economics 
 or philosophy, they see the ills by which man- 
 kind is beset, the needless poverty amid vast 
 stores of wealth, and the strife and bitterness 
 of the struggle for gain; and contemplating 
 these things they accept Socialism as the great 
 gospel of human brotherhood and fraternal 
 peace. They can understand clearly enough 
 that the Socialists are aiming at the removal 
 of the causes of the ills they so sincerely de- 
 plore, and embrace Socialism as a great social 
 ideal, or religion, devoting themselves to it 
 with religious fervor and enthusiasm. These 
 idealist Socialists are sometimes sneered at for 
 their " sentimentality " by those whose lives 
 are dominated by the intellect rather than by 
 the soul, yet they have their rightful place 
 among us. They bring to the movement a 
 spiritual dynamic of unquestionable value. 
 
 .. Ior ,„ iman Not only so, but all Socialists have 
 aoii.iari..v" an ifjeal The so i ( ]j er i n t h e p ar js 
 
 Commune when asked " What are you fight- 
 ing for?" drew himself up and answered. 
 " For human solidarity." And that same
 
 120 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 great ideal inspires the Socialists of the world. 
 To aim at the abolition of needless poverty 
 and suffering, the wars that drench the world 
 with blood, the needless diseases that decimate 
 the race, the dominion of man by man and 
 class by class, so that individual and collective 
 interests may at last be harmonized, is the 
 ideal which inspires even the " crass mater- 
 ialism " of the Socialist movement of which 
 you have heard so much. I need scarcely say 
 here that the Socialist has no desire to see 
 a great bureaucracy established for the pur- 
 pose of directing the life of the people. Stu- 
 pid caricatures of a Socialist state attempting 
 to establish absolute equality by feeding and 
 clothing all its citizens alike, crushing out in- 
 dividual liberty, attempting to pick out its art- 
 ists, poets, inventors and philosophers, erring 
 sometimes and putting Shakespeares and An- 
 gelos to dig ditches, are common enough. 
 The answer of the Socialist to such charges 
 as these caricatures imply is simple enough : 
 we want social ownership only of those things 
 which cannot be controlled by private owners 
 except as means of exploiting the labor of 
 others and making them bondsmen. Not less
 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 121 
 
 freedom for the individual, but more — a free- 
 dom resting upon the right of each child born 
 into the world to an equal chance. 
 socialism not The millenium of which men have 
 dream dreamed throughout all the ages 
 
 may at last be realized. Centuries, possibly 
 thousands or millions of them, may elapse 
 first, each age finding itself a little nearer the 
 goal. In that Golden Age of Love and Peace, 
 sorrow and pain, sin and folly, tears and harsh 
 words may be unknown, but Socialism does 
 not concern itself with that millenial perfec- 
 tion. It is a gospel for to-day. Its message 
 to the America of the twentieth century is sim- 
 ply this : " Let us unite to secure the greatest 
 social advantage from the long centuries of 
 social experience and effort, conscious that the 
 highest and best interest of each individual 
 will be served thereby." 
 
 Parable of the I close with a little parable which 
 I read or heard somewhere many 
 years ago. In a schoolroom a wise teacher 
 placed a beautiful rose to brighten the day for 
 her children. Soon, the boys and girls began 
 to clamor for the rose, each begging the 
 teacher for the sole possession of it. "To
 
 122 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 give it to any one boy or girl would be unjust 
 to all the others," said the teacher. " Besides, 
 it would be unwise, for whoever obtained it 
 could not possibly get more of its beauty than 
 now. I cannot divide it, for if I do the rose 
 will be destroyed and each child will have a 
 worthless petal only, there will be no rose. 
 Together, we can each enjoy it; in a real sense 
 each of us owns the rose." Social property 
 is like that. It cannot be owned by any in- 
 dividual without robbing all other individuals ; 
 it cannot be divided without ruin. Yet each 
 individual can own the whole of its real util- 
 ity and enjoy its full benefits.
 
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 !> 1968 
 
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