L LIBRARY UNIVERSHTY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO J ACO 69 c-"1 L \i I THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS BY ALGERNON SIDNEY CRAPSEY AUTHOR OF "RELIGION AND POLITICS." "REBIRTH OF RELIGION, - "THE GREATER LOVE," ETC. NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1914 Copyright, 1914, by The Century Co. Published, September, 1914 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIB!' TO THAT GREAT COMPANY OF MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN WHO GO FORTH TO THEIR WORK AND THEIR LABOR UNTIL THE EVENING, BEARING THE BURDEN AND HEAT OF THE DAY, THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY AND GRATEFULLY DEDICATED PREFACE The industrial revolution consequent upon the invention and adoption of labor-saving machinery has profoundly modified the structure of society. The most important of these social changes are the destruction of the family as the industrial unit and the rise of the working-class. The family which from prehistoric times has been the industrial and political unit is in process of dissolution. The working-class has arisen from the servile condition of the ancient and medieval world to a state of free- dom and growing dignity and importance. Hav- ing secured the political franchise, this class is be- coming supreme in the political affairs of the world. Living as we do in the midst of these changes, we are not yet aware of their extent, nor have we grasped their full significance. We are in the control of a revolution more far- reaching in its consequences than any that has oc- curred since the passage of the higher races of men from barbarism to civilization. Civilization was based on the family as the political and industrial unit and on the servility of the working-class as the economic system. viii PREFACE The dissolution of the family and the rise of the working-class make the continuance of the old or- der impossible and compel a reorganization of so- ciety. This reorganization can come about only by a recognition on the part of all classes of its inevita- bleness. The upper classes which until now have been supreme must surrender their supremacy and merge themselves with the mass of the people. This they will not do so long as they look upon their privileges as of divine right or as of natural order. It is only by seeing things as they are and adjust- ing ourselves to them that we can hope to avert social catastrophe. In the pages that follow is an effort to present the two salient facts of present history, the disso- lution of the family and the rise of the working- class, so that the reader can fully grasp their im- port and regulate his thinking and his action in accordance with these facts. In the first chapter of my book I have made a rapid survey of social changes from the lowest period of savagery to the present time. The pur- pose of this survey is to show that human society has been from the beginning, and is now, in a condi- tion of unstable equilibrium. It has been subject to constant and violent changes. By this survey I hope to overcome, in a measure, the inveterate be- PREFACE ix lief in the permanence of the present which is the obsession of us all. In so rapid a survey there must be an absence of detail which will offend the learned reader. Let such a reader remember that this chapter is not a detailed account but a birdseye view of the course of social development. Much that is there the birdseye view does not see, but all that the birds- eye view sees is there. There must have been some order of social progress ; the order laid down in the book is the one that has justified itself to the writer. The two pioneers who have been my guides through the tangled wilderness of savagery, bar- barism, and early civilization are Lewis H. Mor- gan and Fustel de Coulanges. Morgan in his Ancient Society has done for so- ciology what Darwin in the Origin of Species did for biology. It is not to the credit of American publishers that this great work, which is recog- nized as a supreme authority by all Europe on the subject of which it treats, is available to the American reader only in the cumbersome and al- most inaccessible original library edition or in the cheap and inadequate edition issued by Charles H. Kerr & Co. of Chicago. The reediting and the reissuing of this book waits for the scholar able and the publisher willing to undertake this im- portant and beneficent task. x PREFACE The equally important book the Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges has been translated into English and may be found in any well-appointed library. Until one has mastered these two books, Morgan's Ancient Society and De Coulanges' Ancient City, one has no right to final judgment on any question relating to the periods of savagery, barbarism, and early civilization. My statements in regard to the Medieval period are based upon a careful reading of Gibbon, Hal- lam, Bryce, and many other writers on this most interesting period of human history. I have also consulted original sources as given in Henderson's Documents of the Middle Ages, the Proceedings of the Council of Constance, the Chronicles of Frois- sart and other works of like character. My statements as to recent and present-day his- tory are founded partly upon personal observation, covering a period of nearly half a century and partly upon a reading of a small portion of the voluminous literature upon the subject. For my statements as to the condition of the poor of Lon- don, I refer the reader to Charles Booth's monu- mental w r ork on that ghastly subject. My book is written frankly from the point of view of the rising working-class. It is an effort to give that point of view to the reader of the upper PREFACE xi and middle class. I ask such reader not to con- demn, but to consider. The chapter on the out-family woman is a meager outline of a vast, interesting and important sub- ject. The story of the out-family woman in all its tragedy, its pathos, and its beauty is yet to be written. The chapter on the Revolt of the Parasites is an effort to appreciate the feminist movement in its extreme manifestation ; not to praise nor to blame, but just to understand, — and to relate this move- ment to the general revolutionary movement of which it is a part. The conservative reader will find much in my book that is grossly objectionable; the radical reader much that is deplorably inadequate. But let both conservative and radical bear in mind that the writer of the book is not a partisan but an ob- server. He is not an active but a passive agent in present history. A mere looker-on in Vienna, he has endeavored to speak, as truly as he can, of the things which he has seen and heard. In conclusion let me remind my reader that the blindness of the possessing classes to inevitable changes has caused the great calamities of history. Let us all bear in mind the wise words of the wise Bishop Butler of Durham when he said, " Things are as they are and why should we wish to be deceived." CONTENTS PAGE Preface . . . . vii CnAPTEB I Social Evolution and Revolution ... 3 II The Downfall of the Father .... 51 III Responsibility of the Mother .... 72 IV The Emancipation of the Children . . 92 V The Out-Family Woman 106 VI The Revolt of the Parasites .... 133 VII The Revolt of the Workers . . . .161 VIII The Slaves of the Market 191 IX Working-Class Religion 215 X Working-Class Morality 236 XI Working-Class Politics 256 XII Working-Class Philosophy 281 XIII The Coming Age . 303 Appendix — the war against poverty . 331 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION IT is a truism to say that the world in which we live is a changing world. This fact has given his theme to the singer, his complaint to the prophet, and his problem to the thinker. Newman says the world changes and changes until we are sick of change. Job sings, " Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, he passeth away like a shadow and never continueth in one stay." Heracleitus based his philosophy of life upon the fact of change. Change, he said, is the only reality, all things are in flux, and the only affirmation that can be made is that change will come. The philosophy of Heracleitus is the popu- lar philosophy of to-day. It has been revived by Bergson and lies at the base of the pragmatism of James and his school. 3 4 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS Science, to account for the changes that are thus transpiring in the world, takes note of two proc- esses : the process of evolution and the process of revolution. We hear people saying continually, when speaking of the changes that are to come in the world, that they are evolutionists but not revo- lutionists. They think that they have said a wise thing when they have so spoken. But the fact is that the evolutionist must he a revolutionist, and the revolutionist must in turn become an evolution- ist. Each process is the occasion of the other. Evolution is the word we use to describe the orderly process by which an organism changes from within, the process of growth. Eevolution is the word that we use to describe the change that takes place in the outward condition of the organism. Evolution means change in structure; revolution means change in environment. Take, for instance, the life history of the human form. It begins with a revo- lutionary act : the instant of conception is a revolu- tionary moment in the life of the mother, an event has occurred within her reproductive organs which changes entirely their condition. With that event a process begins within her which goes on until it has accomplished the work of building up the per- fect human form. This marvelous process is evolutionary. If everything is favorable to the process, and no acci- SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND EEVOLUTION 5 dents occur,. in due time a human being is brought to perfection so far as its structure is concerned. Its brain, its heart, its vital organs, its organs of perception, locomotion, and digestion, are all the outcome of this evolutionary process. Now, when this work is done, the evolutionary process ceases and a revolutionary event occurs. As it can no longer exist in the environment of the womb, na- ture sets about the task of expelling the organism from its pre-natal home into a world prepared for it. The act of birth is purely revolutionary in its character. It makes no change whatever in the structure of the organism, but it makes a vital and radical change in its condition. By this revolu- tionary method, which is always accompanied by violence, the human being passes from one condi- tion into another ; thus we are able to see the rela- tion of evolution to revolution. This relation of the two forces to each other holds wherever life prevails. Life is ever under subjection to them. When man comes into the outer world he begins a proc- ess of evolution; by the appropriation and assimi- lation of food he enlarges his organic life, and by reason of this he increases in stature and wisdom. Beginning as a babe in arms, he grows to the stature of a man, — everything that he sees and hears, enlarges his mind; everything that he eats 6 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS and drinks, up to a certain point, increases his flesh, and bone. Throughout this process man is sub- ject to a succession of minor revolutions. As an infant in arms he has no capacity for self-move- ment, he is carried to and fro, he is fed from the breast or the bottle; he is on the plane that just distinguishes animal from vegetable life. At some period in his infancy he begins to rebel against this, he struggles out of the arms of his nurse to the floor and creeps ; he has accomplished the first revo- lutionary act of his life. He then begins by the exercise of his muscles an evolutionary process, which ends by his standing upright on his feet and gives him the freedom of the world. For many years a man finds himself under tutors and gov- ernors who tell him what to think and what to say. He grows up in the environment of the family. He has a father and a mother to guide him, and he is subject to their authority. But sooner or later there comes a time when he rebels against this sub- jection. This struggle on the part of the child to free itself from parental control is more or less vio- lent and covers a period of years. It is one of the tragedies of human life. The story of it is told in that wonderful book, Father and Son, by Edmund Gosse. In ancient times, and in some races of the present day, man never fully released himself from the family authority. Among the Chinese he is to SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND EEVOLUTION 7 his old age, as long as his father lives, under that control. This revolt of man against parental con- trol is necessary because he has developed within himself forces that demand expression. He wishes to be not a son but a father, not a hearer but a teller. In order to gratify these demands of his nature, he enters into relationship with a woman, not of his family. His act is revolutionary. It changes not his structure but his condition. When he has once entered into this relation, by the or- derly process of evolution he in turn produces a family. He becomes the father of children, and a man among men. He goes on in this evolutionary process for a number of years, and then he finds himself subject to strange and disquieting struc- tural changes. The evolutionary process, instead of building up, begins to break down; instead of progressing it is arrested; and this goes on until it is no longer possible for the living force to use the old organism; then another revolution occurs. The life force ceases to animate the organism and the man dies. The organism perishes, and a great cycle in the evolutionary-revolutionary process has been accomplished. Now what is true of the individual man is true of the various forms of society under which man has lived and is living. Human society has passed and is passing constantly through evolutionary and 8 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS revolutionary stages, the one consequent upon the other. Indeed, it may be said that the evolutionary and revolutionary processes have abandoned the phys- ical and intellectual structure of man to take up the task of social evolution and revolution. Phys- ical evolution accomplished its work ages ago. Man, as long as he continues to exist, will not be subject, in all probability, to any radical change in his physical organism. He will be the two-legged, upright being, with two short arms ending in a hand with four fingers and a thumb; he will have a head on his shoulders, with eyes and ears, nose, mouth and chin; he will have a beating heart and breathing lungs, a liver that secretes bile, a stom- ach that chemically digests food, intestines that carry away the waste; he will have a system of veins to carry his food-supply to the various parts of his body; a nervous system as the organ of his will to direct and control his various bodily func- tions. All these have been evolved and will prob- ably never be greatly changed. They can be per- fected to a degree, but no revolution will take place in the human structure. The ganglion called the brain will dominate the whole structure as its con- trolling, directing force; the heart will do the pumping; the lungs the breathing; the stomach the SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 9 digesting; the feet and legs the walking; the hands the handling. It is also true that the intellectual organism of man has passed in all essentials beyond the reach of either the evolutionary or the revolutionary process. The mind is a finished product; it was perfected thousands of years ago; its faculties of perception and apprehension, of memory and rea- son, of language, with the consequent power of ab- straction, are very ancient. No new faculty has been added to the mind of man within the historic period. It is an error to believe that the moderns discovered a new way of thinking. From the be- ginning, man has reasoned from the known to the unknown ; his senses have furnished to him the raw material of thought, and his mind has turned that raw material into the intellectual product. All we have done is to increase the range of faculty. Each generation, because of the evolution of the faculty of memory and of language, has bequeathed a heritage to the succeeding generation, and as a consequence man has increased in knowledge; but it can hardly be said that he has increased at all in the capacities and powers of his mind. There will probably never be a greater poet than Homer; a greater pure thinker than Aristotle, or Plato. The group of men that surrounded Pericles when 10 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS the Athenian civilization flowered were in posses- sion of intellects beyond which mere intellect will, probably, never go. The evolutionary-revolutionary process has let go the physical and the intellectual and has taken up the social. Man is imperfect to-day, not physically, nor intellectually, but socially. He has not yet evolved a society in which he can properly live. He has been at that work for ages and is still at it. He has passed through social changes, revolu- tionary in their character, and he is still living in a revolutionary age. When man emerged into conscious life, he found himself living in a group. It was his relationship to this group that w T as the controlling fact in his life and by means of this he attained to con- sciousness. The group was in a measure struc- tureless. The human animal herded with the hu- man animal; the male and the female cohabited indiscriminately: the whole purpose of the herd was to eat and to beget. The first social act of construction was to regu- late the sexual functions. One relationship was readily recognized : the mother and the child came to know each other. With the recognition of this fact, society in its organic form had its beginning. The length of infancy and childhood made it im- possible for the son to forget the mother, or the SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 11 mother the son. And it soon became a social cus- tom rigidly enforced, that the mother and the son should have no sexual relations with each other. Slowly the herd passed into a tribe or gens; this form of society was based upon kinship; they who belonged to it were of one blood. In the earlier tribal forms, descent was recognized through the mother, and in time sexual relationship was regu- lated on the horizontal plane. Men and women could never cohabit above or below their genera- tion. All the brothers were the common husbands of all the sisters; and all the sisters the common wives of the brothers j 1 but they could not hold sex- ual relationship either with fathers or mothers, or with sons or daughters. This social organism was common to all ancient humanity. It was slowly modified in various directions, but as long as the tribal form of organism prevailed these principles of sexual relation were more or less enforced. Industrially the tribe was a unit. It had in the beginning a common table. Not that each man did not appropriate food to himself, but he did this in the presence of the herd; and if he appro- priated at any given time more than he could con- sume, he had in that no property right and he held i During the tribal period all the men of a given genera- tion within the tribe were brothers, all the women sisters. 12 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS it at the mercy of the herd, just as the higher ani- mals do to-day. With the restrictions mentioned, the women were the common right of the men, and the men of the women. There was no such thing as private or personal property, except in mere objects of personal use and adornment. This form of social structure is probably the one that existed for the longest time and has had the greatest influence upon the development and history of the race. It must always be borne in mind that because of this, man is and always must be a group animal. He lives in society. In the ancient group, the indi- vidual and the society were one : the individual had no freedom apart from the tribe. He belonged to the tribe as a cell belongs to the body. He sub- mitted, from the beginning of his life to the end of it, to the law of the pack. To kill a member of the tribe was a crime, to kill a member of another tribe was a virtue of the highest order; to live in luxury with the tribe at the expense of other tribes was righteous. To feed oneself at the expense of one's own tribe was an offense, punishable with death. During the tribal period, when there was starvation in the camp the chief went hungry. There was leadership in the tribe, but not mas- tership. The tribe followed the leaders of its own choosing. In the earliest period women were on an SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 13 equality with men ; they met with them in the coun- cils of the tribes, and the only difference existing was a difference of occupation. The men did for the most part the hunting and the fighting, and the women had the care of the children and did the work of preparing the meals and caring for what we now call the domestic affairs of the tribe. At some period back of the historical period the social organism of the tribe was displaced by that of the family. This occurred after the capture of fire, the domestication of animals, and the discov- ery and practice of the arts and science of agricul- ture. When these things had been accomplished, the relationship between man and woman was changed structurally. A revolution of the first importance in human society was accomplished. The agnatic family came into existence. Man, who up to this time had been neither a husband nor a father, but simply the male of the species — a wild beast wandering with the wild beasts of the forest — became domesticated. This revolution was not accomplished without a struggle. Nor did it oc- cur until the old tribal forms had been more or less shattered. The war of tribe upon tribe, the in- crease of population within given areas, the con- stant effort to secure more perfect social organ- ism, were the evolutionary processes at work to bring about the great change in human relation- 14 THE RISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS ship. It has been until recent times the common belief that tie order of social progress was from the family to the tribe, and from the tribe to the State. This, however, is not now the opinion of authori- ties on this subject. The line of progress was from the tribe to the family and from the family to the State. 1 The family was cut out of the tribe. It could not come into existence until man had ceased to be a wandering animal and had acquired a settled abode. The relationship in the tribal time be- tween the man and the woman was a temporary relationship, and he was indeed, in those days, a wise child who knew his own father. The women made their choice of males upon a principle of sexual selection that gave to the braver and stronger males a preference. The union of the man and the woman had a tendency to become more and more permanent, but it was not until the es- tablishment of the family that the right of the man to exclusive cohabitation with a given woman became first a social and then a legal right. With the establishment of the family as the so- cial unit there came into existence a new form of relation and a new code of laws. The man coming home from his warfare and his hunting found a fire on the hearth and he found a cake on the ashes i Morgan's Ancient Society (Chas. H. Kerr & Co.), page 293. SOCIAL EVOLUTION" AND REVOLUTION 15 and he made himself comfortable and took posses- sion. Agriculture gave him a permanent food- supply. It was no longer necessary for him to wander far from home. He could feed himself and his beasts with the product of his land, and so man became a land-holder and a land-owner, and it was upon this fact that the family was based. The family was a social group living in one place and having exclusive use of a given area of land. Over this group the father was the absolute lord and master. He owned not only the land but also all the living creatures upon the land, including the women and the children. His power over his dominion was absolute, so far as any power can be absolute. It was limited only by the fact that in order to live himself he had to let others live and so had to feed and care for those who were subject to his control; but the family law permitted him to do away with any member of the family who in his judgment was injurious to the family life. The ancient family, while it is the source of the modern family, differed from it so essentially that the two ought really not to bear the same name. Our notion of the family is that of a single man and woman joined together in wedlock, each having a moral and legal right to exclusive cohabitation with the other, and the parents of children which each recognizes as his and her own ; this little group 16 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS increases with the birth of children until the time of child-bearing on the part of the mother ceases and then the family begins to contract. The children as they grow up leave the family home and go out into the world. This process goes on until the original elements of the family, the man and the woman, sit together as Darby and Joan, bound no longer by any desire for each other's sexual company, but held by force of habit and ripened affection. This is the ideal family in modern times. The ancient family was a far different organiza- tion. It was a group of beings under a govern- ment organized for the holding and protection of property. The owner of the property was the head of the family. Under the family law he had ex- clusive right to sexual relation with the woman whom he chose to be the mother of his heir, but the woman did not under the family law have the right to the exclusive sexual company of her husband. The family did not consist simply of the father and the mother and the children, but also of a large number of persons who were held as slaves. These persons were the weaker elements of the popula- tion when the families were established. The name of the family is derived from the word fatnul taken from the Oscan, meaning slave. 1 i The Oscan was a rustic dialect of the Latin. See Ency- clopedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Vol. 10, art. Family. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 17 The beginning of family life was undoubtedly in violence. The strong man, gathering about him- self a few weaker men and followers, seized upon a piece of land and protected it against all coiners. He took his women with him and they lived to- gether in close communion year after year. It was during this early period of the family life that man became conscious of his fatherhood. The woman with whom he lived he shut away from all other men; this woman bore a child that could be none other than his child. This conception of father- hood gave rise to a whole world of new thinking. It was the central thought in ancient life. It was the foundation of ancient religion. With the es- tablishment of fatherhood, with its possession of children and of land, man projected himself into time and space. The son was his son, continuing his life. The land was his land, extending his power. The wheat growing in his remotest field was his wheat, even though at the time it was out of the reach of his hand or his bow. Upon these two great facts human society organized itself. Man became a lord of life and a lord of land. The father as long as he lived was the lord of the house and when he died became the god of the house. The family was an industrial unit, unified in the father. The purpose of the family was to provide for the two great necessities of life, food and chil- 18 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS dren. Without food the individual dies, without children the race perishes. The family was evolved by the most advanced race of men, and because of that evolution the race in which the family orig- inated has become the dominant race of the world. The revolution that carried mankind from the tribal to the family organization is written only in surviving customs, habits, thoughts, and feelings of the ancient tribal period that have survived into later times. The family, being of comparatively recent origin and of limited area, has never been able fully to establish itself as the only institution for the pro- curing of food and the production of children. In its more perfect form it belongs only to compara- tively modern times and only to one great race of men. The family is Aryan in its origin, Aryan in its history, Aryan in its language and custom. The Aryan race in all probability had its origin in the uplands of middle Asia, along the northern slope of the Persian hills. There, where the land was rich and well watered, agriculture nourished. The land was a source of wealth, and the ownership of the land the basis of the family institution. The family was developed in all its organic functions before the first great dispersion of the Aryan race. The names given to the different organs of family life are all of Aryan origin, father, mother, and SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 19 daughter; as they are in our language to-day, they are traceable to the language spoken by the Aryan before he separated and gave rise to the Indian, the Persian, the Greek, the Roman, and the German. With every migration the Aryan carried with him the family form and the family law. The great civilizations of the West, the Greek and the Eoman, were based upon the family as the economic unit. Let us call to mind again that the ancient family existed primarily for the purpose of pro- ducing food for the family consumption ; also, that the family existed for the purpose of continuing itself. The more ancient the family, the greater the family. The State came into existence through the desire of the family for greater protection. The constant competition of family with family led to the de- struction of the weaker families and their absorp- tion into the greater. On this account the heads of the families combined for the purposes of mu- tual protection. The family was the unit of the State, the head of the family was the representa- tive of the family in the council of the State. For purposes of protection the families, instead of liv- ing each one on its own land, congregated in a cen- ter, built around that center a wall — and so gave rise to the city-state of ancient times. The story of the city-state is the history of the rise of a new 20 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS conception of society. Ancient society was based altogether upon the principle of kinship. They who belonged to the organism were of one blood. Even the slaves were in a measure incorporated into the organism by artificial processes of adop- tion and so they acquired certain rights of blood. They were members of the household and members of tribes. The family was a continuance of the tribal blood-relationship upon a narrower plan, and with the introduction of a new element: namely, the exclusive possession of a given territory. The city-state in its origin was an enlargement of the family idea. Blood was still a test ; but it became, instead of the primary element in social life, the secondary. Territory, instead of blood, was the essential principle of the political organism. The given city had jurisdiction over an area compre- hending all the land owned by all the citizens of the city. It defended this land against all comers, and when a city was conquered, then the land passed over to the conqueror and the families of the conquered city became the slaves of the victor. This new conception effected a revolution in hu- man society. The State gradually encroached on the family. It limited the range of the family law. Because the State was organized for purposes of protection, offensive and defensive, it demanded the services of all the men; and as a male child SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 21 came into youth and manhood he escaped in a de- gree from the lordship of his father and passed un- der the authority of the State. This was the first great assault made upon the ancient family or- ganization. It was a bloodless revolution. It came about because the heads of the household saw that their safety lay in granting to their sons a certain amount of individuality and freedom. But this was a very limited revolution. The relation of the son to the father was still the primary re- lation, and the women and the children and the slaves were not in the slightest degree affected by it. They remain to the close of the great family- period subject to the authority of the father. Down almost to modern times the father has had abso- lute control of the wife and the children and the household servants; their happiness has depended upon his will. They have been subject to his pun- ishment without appeal, and he has been the repre- sentative of the women and the minors in all that relates to public affairs. Fustel de Coulanges in his great book, The An- cient City, expresses his surprise that the laws of the family endured so long, being as they were a hindrance to the full development of the State. His explanation is that the family laws were in ex- istence long before the State had its origin and the State was powerless to change these ancient cus- 22 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS toms. Up to the threshold of the house the State could go, beyond that it dared not step. We have this fact expressed by the saying that the English- man's home is his castle. He has rights within it which he will defend against all comers; the chief right is to govern the members of his house- hold and to exploit the property of his household according to his own will, without let or hindrance. The reason for the continuance of the family with its laws and customs for so long a period is the fact that during all that time and down to the present, the family was the industrial unit. It was the factory and the storehouse of the world. The family worked together to produce food, cloth- ing, and shelter. It was upon the surplus of the family that the State existed. It was the inter- change on the part of families of their various products that gave rise to commerce with all that that implies ; but we must never forget that all the essentials of life were produced by the family for the family, and that the family necessarily appro- priated to itself these necessities until its own wants were satisfied and then gave of what was left over for the uses of the State and the market. This surplus of the family was at the beginning the sup- port of religion, of politics, and of art, so that the family was protected because of its enormous in- dustrial importance. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 23 The family,, however, was surrounded from the first by an unorganized human element which it was not able to assimilate. Men and women un- duly oppressed by the family-government made their escape into the wilderness and there propa- gated a population of family-outlaws. Tribes that were never able to pass into the higher order of life were elements of disorder and danger to the family institution. This out-family population increased with great rapidity in the richer regions of the world. In such cities as Nineveh and Babylon, and later in the cities in western Asia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, there was a very large population that was not included in any family organization. The cities themselves became slave-owners; as, for in- stance, the city of Athens owned silver-mines and worked the silver-mines by its own slaves. Out of this slave population were formed the great mili- tary establishments of the Western World. Very early the possessing-classes hit upon the plan of dividing the laboring-classes into two parties — the military and the domestic. To the soldier were granted certain freedoms and privileges which were not allowed to the domestic and city slave. The soldier was ready to kill his fellow-slave in defense of his own position, and that he is ready to do even to this day. This state of affairs gave rise to another revolu- 24 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS tion in the social organism of humanity. A city- state sending its armies to protect its own territory not only acted upon the defensive but also upon the offensive. To render its possessions more secure, it robbed the neighboring States of their territory and added this to its own domain. In some cases it simply subjugated other cities and made them tributary to itself. This aggression on the part of the given city re- sulted in the imperialistic system, which gave to the military power the dominant place in the gov- ernment and which reduced vast populations into subjection to a single will. Imperialism was the last phase of ancient civili- zation. Its effect upon the family and the State was disastrous. Whole populations were carried away into captivity and scattered without any re- gard to family ties. The captives taken in wars furnished labor-power at a nominal cost to the leaders of the armies. One result of this was the driving out of the small farmer and the concentra- tion of great land-holdings under the control of a single man. The land-owner and the land-worker were no longer the same person. The land-owner was simply the lord of the land, the land-worker the user of the land upon the terms granted by the lord. The city-state could not long survive under the imperial regime. It had its origin in the civili- SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 25 zation of the Mediterranean basin and it perished with that civilization. Rome reduced all of the cities of that region to one common subjection, it carried their gods cap- tive to its own Pantheon. It made the worship of the emperor the one religion of all the peoples of the Empire; it subordinated the welfare of the family to the needs and caprices of the Empire; by excessive taxation it impoverished the provinces, and in the end that great civilization, having no economic unit, perished literally of starvation. It was not the northern barbarian who conquered Rome, Rome conquered herself. Like the fabled gods, she consumed her own children, and her end was the necessary result of the policy she pursued. While that process of destruction was going on, another process of reconstruction was in operation. The great salvation-religions had already entered into the world. These new faiths were demanded by the times. Within, the Roman Empire was a vast, degraded, disfranchised population. A pop- ulation steeped in misery, starving for the bare ne- cessities of life ; trampled on, wasted by war, it was crying aloud to Heaven for redress. Among all the religions competing within that population one prevailed. Christianity had within itself the ele- mental principles necessary for reconstruction. It unified this population upon the family principle. 26 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS It asserted a common parentage. It saw in its God the origin of life; it made the human parent simply the instrument of the Divine parent, It cried : " Call no man father upon earth, for we have one Father in Heaven." As a consequence of this divine fatherhood, it asserted a human broth- erhood. It declared that all men were related to each other by ties of blood and because of this were morally bound to help one another. It made cooperation the law of its being. In the beginning, in the freshness of its enthusiasm, its members said, each man for himself, that none of the things which he possessed were his own, but that they held all things in common. It was a saying of one of their greatest writers, the writer of the Epistle to Diognetus, " We have a common table, but not a common bed." This saying is the key to the earlier period of Christianity. Christianity made war against the principle of competition which raged so fiercely among the ancient cities until it destroyed them; and then among the destroyers of those cities, the military leaders of the Eoman Empire, until they likewise perished. This new religion reconstituted the family upon a narrower basis, it did not indeed have the family welfare in mind, because the concern of this or- ganization was for itself and its individual mem- bers. Christianity related each individual to God SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 27 through itself, and to this relation it subordinated all others. In the more perfect Christian this re- lation was expected to drive out the sexual and the patriotic passions. God was the husband and the wife and the country of the true Christian. But stooping to human weakness Christianity permit- ted the members of its organization to hold prop- erty and to marry wives. The holding of property related the Christian to the State; and the marry- ing a wife, to the family. The church required, however, that a man should control both these pas- sions, the passion of family and of country, by the higher passion for God ; because of this a man could be the husband of only one wife, and promiscuous indulgence was denied him as inconsistent with his Christian existence. If a man became an adulterer, or a whoremonger, he had no inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ or of God. The effect of this teaching was to bring about a moral revolution in the conceptions of the Western World, so far as sexual relationship is concerned. The Western World has admitted the validity of the Christian contention, and has required that a man shall be the husband of only one wife and that only the children of this wife can be called his children, and so has established that ideal of the family which is the ideal of Western civilization. The Christian movement re-created the ancient 28 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS city-state. Each Christian community was a City of God. Wherever it was located, whether in Corinth or in Rome, it was an independent organ- ism, controlling its own affairs, subject only to the domination of the Christian tradition. Because Christianity followed the lines of ancient organi- zation, it progressed with great rapidity. Chris- tian churches were built up within the confines of every ancient city within the Roman Empire, and this task was accomplished in the short space of a little more than a century. So that when the old civilization died and turned to ashes, this new civilization rose from those ashes to take its place. It had already accomplished two things. It had restored the family and modified the family idea, and it had given new vitality to local organiza- tion. With the break-up of the Roman Empire this new organization stood revealed as the one power capable of bringing order into society. From the year 400 to the year 1300 the Christian Church was the great central and centralizing power of the Western World. The church Was the one institu- tion that commanded the attention, the adhesion, and the loyalty of the people. During that period the church was the representative of the people. It was their only teacher. It was the only force that could stand between them and the brutalities SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 29 that were then rampant in the outside world. Un- der the shadow of the church the family was re- stored to its ancient place as the economic unit. Within the family, as in former times, were pro- duced all the things that the family consumed. Europe reverted, in the earlier part of that period, to the last stage of barbarism. Life was reduced to barbaric simplicity, land became the one source of wealth and agriculture the one occupation. Fighting was the employment of the male, and do- mestic service of the female. Great families were established who based their power upon land-hold- ings. The landlord exercised dominion over all the occupants of his land. Some were the yeoman tenants and some were simply thralls, serfs of the soil. The modern nations of Western Europe were composed of the elements of this great land-holding class and its dependents. The land-holders com- bined to defend their territories against intrusion. Instead, however, of congregating in cities, in the earlier periods they built a castle for each great land-holder and that castle dominated the terri- tory round about it. The great struggle of the earlier period was between the landlords. Each endeavored to dominate and expropriate the other. In this way were built up the principalities and afterwards the kingdoms. In the midst of all this warfare, which went on 30 THE RISE OF THE WOBKING-CLASS without intermission, the church plied its task of protecting the common people and compelling the lords of the land to pay some obedience to the moral law. That the church was only partially success- ful in her work needs hardly to be said. She her- self came more or less under the dominance of the landlords, and little by little withdrew herself from the common people and made her alliance with the privileged portions of society. From the fall of the Empire in the fifth century, to the crowning of Charlemagne at the end of the year 800, the his- tory of Europe is little more than the history of this struggle or competition of land-holder with land-holder, and of the church with the land-hold- ing class. The church had itself become a great land-holder and had entered into competition with the laity for the possession and control of the soil. It was this fact that brought on the great struggle between the temporal and the spiritual powers, which occupied the mind and exhausted the strength of Europe for so many centuries. The church was organized by this time upon the imperial basis; the stronger churches in the great cities had acquired jurisdiction over the smaller churches, this process of centralization had gone on until the two churches of Constantinople and Rome contended for the mastery, and in that con- tention shattered the unity of Christendom, setting SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 31 up the rival imperialisms of the East and of the West, which continue to this day. In the West, Rome reigned supreme, organized religion upon strict imperialistic ideas, centraliz- ing all power in the Pope as the controller and ex- ponent of the Christian community. The secular power according to medieval ideas was invested in the Caesar. The contention on the part of the sec- ular power was that it was supreme in secular af- fairs; while the spiritual power held that the sec- ular was the servant of the spiritual ; this doctrine was finally expressed in the Bull of Boniface VIII, JJnam Sanctam; l it was this contention of the secular with the spiritual power that gave oppor- tunity for the development of a freer Europe. As in ancient times an unorganized population came into existence and warred against the system, so now a new element, that of commerce, entered into competition with agriculture. In spite of the con- tinual wars of the land-holding class with itself, certain areas of peace were established. These were the cities which the commercial class built for the purposes of the market. The rise of the free city was the beginning of the end of the Medieval World. These cities began to flourish soon after the Moslem conquest and were the result of a grow- ing complexity of living, consequent upon the in- i Henderson's Documents of the Middle Ages. 32 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS troduction of luxuries from the East. They were also the result of a growing division of labor. The families were organized upon a new basis, the basis of industry. The great land-holding classes began to seek in the cities the supply of their wants, and the citizens became members of crafts, — silver- smiths, weavers, and the like; and they found in their occupation the industrial basis of life, and upon this they established their family existence. These occupations became hereditary. Father and son succeeded each other in the possession of the industry, just as they had succeeded each other in the possession of the land. The land-holder still claimed authority over the industrial element of the population, and it was the struggle of the citi- zen or burgher with the landlord that wrote the next great chapter in human evolution and revolu- tion. The church, when this struggle began, being a great land-holder allied itself with the land-holding class. The rapidly growing nationalities with their centralizing governments allied themselves with the citizen class, and it was the struggle between these two forces that brought about the establishment of the Western States of France, England, and Holland ; the downfall of the universal church, and the complete extinction of *he imperialistic idea in Western Europe. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 33 This struggle had its dramatic beginning in the great contest between Fhilip the Fair, of France, and Pope Boniface VIII. When Philip the Fair appealed to the people against the exactions and tyrannies of the Roman See, and when, as a conse- quence of that contention, Sciarra Colonna and William of Nogaret with three hundred men be- hind them bearded the Papal Power in the person of Boniface VIII, and captured the Pope in his own city of Anagni, and Sciarra Colonna smote the Pope in the face with his mailed fist and nothing happened except the death of the Pope, then the modern world came violently to the hour of its birth. Those birth-pangs were of long duration, and in the process of the birth the mother died. Within a hundred years that Medieval World passed away. Imperialism, feudalism with its in- stitution of chivalry, universalism with its domi- nance of a single conception of religion perished, and in their place came nationalism and commer- cialism, with their accompaniment of freedom of thought and conscience. This new birth came with violence. From the league of Smalkald in the year 1531 to the Peace of Westphalia in the year 1648, Europe was one vast battlefield between the con- tending civilizations. 1 When this conflict ceased, the new civilization i Ranke, History of The League of Smalkald, passim. 34 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS controlled northern and western Europe ; England, Scandinavia, northern Germany were lost forever to the old, and were in possession of the new. In France, in Italy, and in Spain the struggle continued down to our own times, and only within our own day has the modern conception of the uni- verse been able to establish itself in these Latinized countries ; and even yet, the old is fighting with the new. Modern civilization is based upon the industrial conception of life. Within that civilization the land-owning and the industrial classes have been contending for supremacy. In the earlier period of this contention the industrial classes were led by the burghers or citizens of the great industrial cities of Flanders, Holland, and England. It was this class that led in the warfare against Rome, which had then cast in its lot altogether with the land- holders. This is the most tragic of all the conten- tions which man has held with his fellowman. It is no exaggeration to say that in the great conflict of the burgher with the landlord, millions of human beings perished by violence, one might almost say hundreds of millions, and billions of human treas- ure were trodden under foot and burned by fire. Before this contention came to an end, Germany was desolated, the Netherlands were again restored to the sea; England lost the flower of its ancient SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 35 nobility; and France experienced the most violent revolutionary movement known to the history of the world. This revolutionary period came to a close with the revolutionary wars of France on the field of Waterloo in 1815. Then the industrial classes were dominant, and human society entered upon its third period of structural organization. The first period resulted in a tribal organization based upon kinship and evolved into the family organization based partly upon kinship and partly upon property. The second period gave rise to a political organization based upon territory; this political organization had the family as its unit. The third period, in which we ourselves are living, is evolving an organization based upon industry. The establishment of the industrial class as the dominant class in society has been followed by a period of industrial expansion, both intellectual and physical, which has made of the modern world an entirely new w r orld. The intelligence of man- kind, diverted from the occupations of war and from the consideration of subtle questions of phi- losophy and religion, has given itself during this period to an examination of the physical universe in its relations to the physical life of man. The earth has been surveyed from pole to pole, from meridian to meridian, for the purpose of ascertain- 36 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS ing the elements contained in the physical globe that build up physical man. These elements have been exploited for the uses of man, and wealth has increased so that to-day man has a standard of liv- ing impossible in ancient times. The modern world in the process of its evolution has developed two great classes : the owners and the workers. Those who are in possession of the land, of the raw material, and of the moving capi- tal and those who by their labor reduce the raw materials to human uses. At the beginning of this period, these owners were the citizens and the land-owners. The burgher class of the various cities, having reduced the land- owning class to a reasonable subjection, allied them- selves with that class politically and socially, took possession of the existing government and reduced the working-class to subjection. At the close of the revolutionary period, which established indus- trialism as the main factor in life, the land-owning class was confirmed in its titles and privileges. The citizen or burgher class became itself largely a land-holding body. Land having ceased to be the main source of wealth, commerce occupying that place of privilege ; the merchant was the equal and in some respects the superior of the landlord, and it is the merchant who to-day rules the world. The development of commerce has occasioned an SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 37 elaborate financial system by which the dealer in credits has come to have a commanding position in the commercial class, so that to-day the banker is at the head of the industrial organism. Commerce is not restricted by the limitations of kin or territory. It goes into every land and makes use of every man, if thereby it can secure profit for itself. Naturally the human mind has been occu- pied with the problem of making the work of com- merce more easy and effective. The consequence is that we have to-day systems of intercommunica- tion and transportation which have made the whole world one. A few artificial restraints in the way of tariffs still exist, but in spite of these the world is one great market, exploited by those who have at their command the instruments of production and distribution. Those who are at the head are to- day called kings, princes, and barons, holding in popular estimation the places that were held in former times by those who bore these names of honor. The men who are in possession command human labor and are able to divert it into any channel which they themselves may select. Their power is in a measure limited by the fact that they must employ that labor in the first instance to supply the bare necessities of all. After they have done this, then they can, and they do, use this human 38 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS labor to provide luxuries for the possessing-class. The result of this is that the possessing-class to- day has a wide range of luxurious living, indulges itself in the pomp and pride of life to an extent never before possible in the history of the world. The various inventions which have rendered this possible have also made necessary the concentra- tion in the hands of a few dominant men of the powers controlling the production and distribution. A new form of organization in society has come into existence. It is that legal entity known as the corporation. These corporations are govern- ments within governments. They are based wholly upon industry. Their purpose is to exploit indus- try and to reap its profits. The members of these organizations may not, and for the most part do not, know one another. They have no personal relations whatever; they are bound together by no tie of blood or country. It is simply the pocket nerve that controls them. The stockholder need not, and for the most part does not, know by what methods the returns upon his stock are se- cured; all he cares for is the returns, and he de- mands that these returns shall be as large as possi- ble. Those who are in control of the corporations hold their position just so long as they satisfy the majority of the stockholders. When dividends cease, then power passes from the heads of the cor- SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND EEVOLUTION 39 poration and they fall. It is this that has given dramatic interest to the great industrial struggle of modern times. Kings have been fighting kings; princes, princes; barons, barons; with the result that the more fortunate have subdued and absorbed the less fortunate, and we have the mighty indus- trial aggregations of our age, under the supremacy of the industrial magnates, so that we have to-day a parallel to the classes that existed in the Middle Ages. We have the great magnates, the lesser magnates, their satellites, the professional class, composing the more or less privileged element of the present social organization. These enter into and enjoy the results of that organization. They are in so- ciety, and all the forces of society minister to them. They live in magnificence in comfortable houses. They eat good, substantial food. The fruit of the vine is theirs, they delight themselves with wine, women, and song. They exert the great faculties of the mind in the work of controlling the lives of others. They have the glory of mastership; they can say of themselves what the Psalmist said of God : " The earth is ours and the fullness there- of " ; they are the gods of the present age. In opposition to this class of possessors and en- joyers is the great mass of men and women who are without possession and without enjoyment. 40 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS These are they who by their work and their la- bor produce the things that are consumed by the others. They build the ships, and the railway cars and locomotives; they make all the machines, and lay the foundations and raise the walls of the houses. They follow the plow and bend over the furrows with the hoe ; they rise up early, and late take rest, and eat the bread of carefulness. 1 This great mass of working-people have been de- prived of all the privileges of social life. They do not belong to society. They have no seat at the feast ; they wait at the table. Leisure is not theirs ; they cannot loaf and become acquainted with their own souls; they cannot enrich their intelligence with the wisdom of the ages ; they are shut out from the possibilities of culture. Because of their dis- abilities they are, and always have been, a despised, degraded class. The taint of slavery is in their blood. They have been so long under the whip and scorn of the master that sufferance has become the badge of all their tribe. The working-man and the working-woman were lashed with the whip not so long ago ; to-day they are lashed with the tongue. The workers receive in return for what they give only the barest necessities of life; they eat the coarsest food, of which they have an insufficient quantity; they sleep in dark and narrow rooms i Psalm 127:3. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 41 where air is denied them. They are clothed in shoddy; their enjoyments are the cheap enjoy- ments of those who have not yet been allowed to taste the nobler pleasures of life. We see them by the thousands in all our great in- dustrial centers, underfed, and consequently under- sized ; pale, listless, seeking relief from the terrible monotony of their lives in the cheap dissipation of the saloons and the picture-show. Not only are the unskilled workers a class that is alarmingly on the increase, deprived of what the better class holds to be the goods of life, but what little they do have they possess under the most uncertain con- ditions. Their only source of income is their job, and their job is not their own. At any moment upon the mere whim or caprice of their masters their job may be taken from them and they sent adrift, jobless, to wander as vagabonds on the face of the earth; to be beaten up by the police, to be turned away from the back door, to starve with cold and hunger. More and more the members of this class are finding it difficult to secure the bare necessities of life. Hundreds and thousands of them in such cities as London, Berlin, Paris, and New York, and elsewhere are sinking below the line of sustenance. They are dying from malnu- trition. Our industrial system has not been able to give these people a permanent place in its or- 43 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS ganization, and as a consequence these people are dragging our civilization down to their level, which is the level of the despair, dissolution, and death. In the period of tribal organization and family or- ganization, it was the man without tribe and with- out family who multiplied and furnished the strength that destroyed the ancient family and tribal organization. These out-family men made up the hordes that the ancient conquerors led and by means of which they subdued the ancient tribes and reduced their members to the level of the tribe- less men. It was the man without a city, who be- came the destruction of the city. He gave his strength to the Caesars and enabled them to reduce the ancient city life to a dead level of non-citizen- ship. In our day, industry is threatened by the vagabond. It is the millions who are hiding and breeding in the purlieus of our great industrial centers that are the barbarians who are coming to overturn our present society, unless some measures are taken to change these barbarians into civilized men, to give to them the privileges of civilization and to incorporate them into society. It is this starving multitude that is furnishing the forces in the class struggle that is now going on in the modern world. The conflict to-day is be- tween the working-class and — what, for want of a better term, we will call — the monied class. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 43 Money to-day is the symbol of power. Money is the instrument by which power expresses and ex- erts itself. By means of money, land and raw ma- terial are possessed, and everything is reckoned in terms of money, and so for the purposes of our argument we divide the world into the two classes, the monied and the moneyless. The monied classes are the dominant and leisure class; the moneyless class is the subject working-class. The monied leisure class is struggling to keep its posi- tion of power and privileges; the moneyless class is fighting to secure for itself a better living condi- tion. This struggle has been going on ever since hu- man society was organized. The slaves of ancient times under such leaders as Spartacus fought for liberty ; the peasants under such men as John Ball struggled with the nobles for the right to a morsel of bread and rose up at last in overwhelming revo- lution, without leadership, among the French and swept the nobility and the clergy for the time-being out of existence. But this struggle of classes is to-day entering upon an entirely new phase. It is a highly or- ganized warfare upon both sides. The working- class to-day has advantages it never before pos- sessed. The higher classes have been compelled, little by little, to grant some of the privileges of 44 THE RISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS society to the lower classes. To-day the working- man is in possession of two points of advantage which he never had before. He is to-day a citizen. Political society has had to incorporate him into itself. In almost all countries the adult male has the right of franchise with some property restric- tions; in the United States he has this right with- out any property limitations. A man's a man when he enters the electoral booth. The working- man also has secured for himself an education which has made him a reader and consequently a thinker. He becomes more or less acquainted with the facts of the world around him. He has been studying these facts, with a view to finding out why it is that he has so little, while the other classes have so much. Modern industry also has played into his hand in another way. Commerce has unified the world. It has not only brought the merchant of one land into close contact with the merchant of another land, it has not only organized capital internation- ally, but it has brought the workman of one land into intimate relations with the workmen of other lands. Up to the present time the workmen have been divided by national and religious differences. The workmen of one country will go out at the com- mand of their superiors and slay the workmen of another country. In this way the present govern- SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND EEVOLUTION 45 ing, capitalistic class have been playing the old trick of setting slave against slave, workman against workman; but the methods of intercom- munication which capital has created has made it possible for the working-class as a working-class to be conscious of itself throughout the world. So that to-day in ever increasing numbers the work- ing-men are organizing themselves industrially. These working-men know neither land nor kin; they are not associated with their fellowmen by ties of country or bond of blood. It is their eco- nomic interests that control. They associate them- selves with those in other lands who have the same economic purposes in view. Labor to-day, like cap- ital, is international. The working-man is begin- ning to see that the interests of his class are one and the same, no matter in what land, under what form of political government, or religious institu- tions that class may be living. It is this awakening of the working-class to a consciousness of its own class existence that is the central and controlling fact in modern life. The working-class has been held in subjection by the other classes because it has been kept below the level of class consciousness. The upper classes have been awake to their own existence for ages. It is this wakefulness that has made them the ruling power in society. The laws have been made from 46 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS the beginning in their interests ; economic interests combined the slave-holders of the ancient world into a ruling-class ; * economic interests united the land-holding nobility of the Middle Age, enabling them to subject the yeoman and the peasant and the merchant. Class consciousness caused the yeo- man and the merchant to combine and overthrow the rule of the nobility. To-day, we are passing through the last phase of a revolutionary period extending over six cen- turies of time. Beginning with the struggle of Philip the Fair with Boniface VIII, it delivered the new-born nations of Europe from the domina- tion of the Pope and the Emperor. Under the leadership of such men as William of Orange, and Oliver Cromwell, it placed the merchant and the yeoman on an equality with the land-holding noble- man. The mighty sweep of the French Revolution destroyed forever the power and prestige of the old nobilities. To-day, the working-class is slowly acquiring place and power. Having the elective franchise, it can, when it will, take possession of the powers of government and use them in the in- terest of that class. Everywhere the working-men are pushing themselves into places of control. This movement of the working-class is based upon a working-class philosophy, a working-class moral- i Statutes of Hammurabi. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 47 ity, and a working-class religion. The old philos- ophy, moralities, and religions are retreating be- fore it. Whether this last and final revolution will be ac- complished without violence, no one can say. The experience of history teaches us that the kingdoms of righteousness always come by violence. Injus- tice, inequity do not easily surrender. Things as they are fight fiercely against things as they ought to be. That this great and final change should come to pass without some tremendous upheaval of social forces would be strange, and yet it is possible. The assaulting force is so much stronger than the defensive, that the defensive must inevitably give place before it without any overwhelming re- sistance. To-day the people are the power. When they determine, they cannot be long resisted. The working-class have combined in a great po- litical organization to secure for themselves their proper place and portion in the life of the world. This organization now numbers from 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 of the adult population of the West- ern World. It has a great political following in all the countries of the West. It is looking to po- litical action rather than to physical to secure its rights. The wiser leaders of the movement see that the day for physical violence is past. That the working-man has in his hands a spiritual 48 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS weapon, more potent than any sword or bomb. Violence, however, is not and cannot be altogether absent from so tremendous a movement as this, and to-day we see the working-class rising against its masters, and seeking by physical means to se- cure its rights. We are living in the midst of a so- cial war, expressing itself in the strike and the lock-out, in the boycott and the black-list, in the armed patrol and the slugging striker. The lowest stratum of the working-class of the world is now in rebellion; that most oppressed and forlorn of all the elements of the population, the working girl and woman is organizing rebellion against her in- dustrial conditions. The recent strikes of the Gar- ment Workers in New York, Philadelphia, and other American cities have made the more acute the present industrial crisis. These women and girls are aided and abetted by the men. When once they have tasted the fruits of victory, they will organize more perfectly so as to be ready for the next demand. And they are irresistible when once organized and determined to secure for themselves living conditions. The opposing class cannot shoot down women and girls in the streets of our cities, nor can it be long endured that these women and girls shall be beaten up by the police and thrown into jail, simply for asking a better portion as their lot in life. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION 49 The battle of the masses with the classes is al- ready decided. The ruling-class has against it the growing sense of humanity which is the outcome of our wider knowledge and broader sympathy. It is opposed by the democratic spirit that is increas- ing with every passing day. The religion of the Western World is escaping from its subordination to the privileges of property and place and entering into the world to stand side by side with the work- ing-men and working-women in their struggle for supremacy. The onslaught on the position of the ruling-class by the working-class cannot be arrested. It must go on until the workers shall have stormed and taken the two great citadels of the ruling-class, un- limited private ownership of land and the raw ma- terials necessary for human existence, and the un- limited private ownership of the means of produc- tion and transportation with its power to unlim- ited exploitation of human labor. These are the basic principles of our present society. When once these are destroyed, our present society will cease to be and a new order will take its place. That new order based upon the social control of all forms of private property, the production of articles of necessary consumption for use and not for sale, the establishment of cooperation as the primary princi- ple of social organization will give rise to a society 50 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS as different from ours as ours is different from the ancient tribal form, or the ancient order of the city- state, or the feudal system that prevailed in the Middle Ages. II THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER THE invention of labor-saving machinery, with its employment of the superhuman powers of steam and electricity, which has transferred from the home to the factory the brewing and the bak- ing, the spinning and the weaving, the cutting and the sewing of garments, has destroyed the family as an economic unit. The institution in modern times which bears the name of the family is no more like the ancient family than is the modern kingdom of England like the kingdom of the Plantagenets and the Tndors. The modern family is but the ghost of its ancient self. The various members of the family no longer find their industrial security within the family. In order to make a living, each member of the fam- ily must go into the outside world in search of profitable employment. If a mother or a daughter still works within the household, she does so as the servant of the other members of the family, who support her and themselves by what they re- ceive in the outside world in return for services which they render to the community. 51 52 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS The effect of this revolution has been to change entirely the relation of the father to the family. He who was once the lord of the house while he lived, and the god of the house when he died, has now fallen so low that there is no one so poor as to do him reverence. The modern conception of the father's place and dignity is expressed with brutal frankness in the doggerel, which a short time ago was so popular in the vaudeville houses and on the streets. The words of this song are as follows : Everybody works but fatber ; He sits 'round all day, Feet against tbe fire-place, Smoking bis pipe of clay. Mother takes in washing ; So does sister Ann. Everybody works in our house But my old man. This song has been sung by children in the hear- ing of their elders, and the elders have laughed. So might one laugh as he listens to the derision that is heaped upon the fallen drunkard. We do not begin to know the tragedy that lies in the fact that such a song as this can be sung. It is scorn heaped upon fallen greatness. If such words as these had been uttered thirty centuries ago they would have been punished as sacrilege. He who had dared to speak them would have been burned THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 53 by fire. Even so late as a century, or even less, ago, the young person venturing to utter such senti- ments in the presence of the father or the mother, would have been visited with the rod, imprisoned, and fed upon a diet of bread and water. The father's relation to the woman, who is at the head of his house, is no longer what it was in the days of the family greatness. In primitive times the wife was the property of her husband and down almost to our own day she was little more than a servant in the house. She had no legal rights, no political standing. All this is changed. Man no longer owns his wife as he did in the primi- tive age. There is still a reminiscence of this fact in the marriage-service when the father of the bride transfers his ownership of the woman to husband. The memory of the man's lordship still lingers in such sayings as " the master of the house," but these are nothing more than survivals from an an- cient condition that is rapidly passing away. The reason for this change in the relationship of the man to the woman in the family is that the woman is no longer economically dependent on the man. She and he are no longer co-workers in an industrial establishment. In the ancient house- hold the necessities of life were provided for the family by the family. The father was the head of this establishment and as such demanded and re- 54 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS ceived absolute obedience from all its members. He exercised in the family the same authority that is now in the hands of the heads of our great indus- trial organizations. Any infraction of the father's authority by any member of the household meant a disturbance of the household peace and a conse- quent lessening of the household productiveness. It was to the interest of all who were dependent upon the household to obey the father as long as the father administered the household affairs. This fact gave legal authority to the family custom which clothed the father with absolute power over the members of the family and gave him the sole ownership of the family estate. He was supposed to administer the family property for the benefit of all who were members of the household and he received in return the reverence and obedience of those subject to his will. It was in the family that the virtue of obedience originated and there the father acquired a rule second to none in the world. It was from the father that the State derived its right to allegiance of its citizens. The State was the over-father, giving to each head of the house- hold additional strength and dignity. The wife, while subject in all things to the authority of her husband, gradually assumed over the household a command second only to his. In his absence she was his regent. In the presence of the family the THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 55 husband was compelled to treat his wife with re- spect because of this delegated authority. He could not degrade her in the sight of the house- hold without lessening his own power to keep the family in order. So little by little, the wife ac- quired a place of security and dignity. If she brought to her husband, as in later times she did, a dowry, this gave her the rights of a partner who had contributed a certain sum to the invested capi- tal of the industrial establishment. But at no time was the wife considered the equal of the hus- band. She was at the best the queen-consort in the family kingdom. Until recently she could not hold property in her own right, nor had she power of testament. All that she brought with her at the time of her marriage became family property, the title of which was vested in her husband. This was a necessity while the family was an economic unit. A division of property-right at that time would have been fatal to the success of the domestic industrial establishment. The change which has taken place during the last fifty years in the status of the married woman is owing to the fact that just prior to that time the family ceased to be an economic establishment. It no longer produced what it consumed. Its admin- istration became a matter of minor importance. The man and the woman were related individually 56 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS to an industrial system outside the family domain. The wife could no longer with her own hands spin the thread and weave the cloth and make the gar- ment to protect her from cold and shame. She had to buy this in the market. She became de- pendent upon her husband as she had not been in the earlier periods. She had to receive from him money in order that she might purchase the neces- sities of her life. This cash relationship entailed upon her great hardship. She had, and in a meas- ure still has, to beg for that which she requires to keep herself in comfort and decency. The owner- ship of the family property by the man has en- tailed unspeakable hardships upon the woman. To remedy these evils, marriage settlements and other efforts at mitigation were made; but as the family ceased more and more to be economically independent, the condition of the wife became so intolerable that a radical change had to be made in the structure of the family institution. The wife was given by law the right to the private owner- ship of property. That which she herself earned, which came to her by gift or inheritance, was at last her own, and thus she became economically independent of her husband. To-day the man and the woman are equal before the law so far as property-rights are concerned. 1 i The position of the wife is superior to that of the husband. He is responsible for her debts. She is not responsible for his. THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 57 When the woman is endowed, she need ask nothing of her husband. If she has property and he has none, he then becomes economically dependent upon her ; and as the one who bears the purse is in control, the woman under these circumstances is the real source of authority in the domestic estab- lishment. If the woman comes to the man in these days without property, then she, being economically de- pendent upon him, has the place of an upper serv- ant. In the economy of the house, she performs those tasks that are purely personal. She does lit- tle or nothing towards sustaining the family life. If she is the only servant in the house she makes the fire, cares for the rooms, and possibly does a part of the laundry-work. She cooks the food, or rather a portion of the food, since in the modern household even the food is procured from the bak- ery and the delicatessen shop ready for the table. The position of the wife because of this change in the modern industrial system has been depleted of much of its authority and dignity. She no longer presides over an establishment employing a num- ber of people. She has no dairy to superintend, no bakery to overlook, no brewing to watch. Hers are the more menial duties of sweeping and dust- ing and making beds. For this she receives what- soever is given her by the man who supports her 58 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS upon his earnings. Against this situation the woman is in rebellion, and because of this the au- thority of the man over the woman is not only in danger, but is passing, if it has not already passed away. We shall speak later on of the woman in revolt; we are now dealing with the fallen estate of the head of the house. He who in earlier times could command must now in some cases obey, and in most cases he must request. The woman is no longer economically dependent upon the family; she can, if she will, support her- self in the industrial world that lies outside. If she gives up this freedom and her man does not treat her with the respect that she thinks is her due, she can leave him, and go back to her former occupation. The authority of the head of the house over the other women of the household, if there be such, is wholly gone. In the ancient family, the women were classified as wife, concubine, and slave. Demosthenes says : " We have wives to bear our children, and administer our household; we have concubines for our bodily attendants and comfort; we have mistresses for companionship." The slaves were of the household but not in it. The ancient father had absolute ownership of both con- cubine and slave. The one he made use of for his bodily comfort, the other, — that is the slave, — he THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 59 employed in industrial labor. No such relation- ship exists in the modern family. Concubines are no longer permitted. Slavery has ceased to exist. The domestic servants of the modern household are under the wage-system. They have freedom to come and to go. The modern man can no longer command his cook, she is independent of him and he has to be polite to her if he wishes to have his food properly cooked and served. The modern industrial system has taken from the head of the house the greatness that was his aforetime and has left him hardly a shadow of his former self. If he would live in comfort with the women of his establishment he must be careful not to exercise authority. He must maintain his place by serving instead of being served. If he wishes to keep his wife he must in these days hold her by the bonds of affection. He can no longer lord it over the woman. The woman is becoming in every respect the equal of the man. Among the very wealthy the right of the wife to discard her husband is now recognized. He can no longer indulge himself and expect her to be faithful. The double standard is no longer in force; if he bestows his affection upon mistress or concubine, the wife if she pleases may divorce him and choose another husband. Divorce among the rich has become so common an occurrence that it 60 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS no longer excites remark. Both husband and wife are received into good society and may kneel at the altars of the churches for sacramental blessing. In the middle class if the wife is dependent upon her husband, she may still have to endure his tyrannies and infidelities. But if her position be- comes intolerable, public opinion justifies her in seeking the dissolution of the marriage relation, and places upon the husband the necessity of sup- porting her, as long as she lives, if he is found guilty of marital wrong. When a man marries in these days, he assumes the risks of alimony. It is within the bounds of possibility that he may have to support a woman even after that woman has ceased to bear any other than this legal relation to him. This change in the relation of the man to the woman is revolutionary. It has altered the whole structure of society. It has made the family in the ancient sense an impossibility. The paterfamilias is no more, so far as his women are concerned. He and they have by the process of evolution been resolved into individualities. It can no longer be said that the man and the wife are one flesh. Each of them maintains a distinct existence and may at any moment sever whatever relation may from time to time exist between them. The consequence of this great social revolution is far-reaching. We are THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER Gl not yet in sight of the end of it. Man and woman will have to re-adjust their relations upon a basis that is founded in present-day facts. It can be said with truth that in this region of domestic life old things are passed away and all things are be- come new. Just what the new relation is to be, no one can say. All that can be affirmed at the present time is that the old relation is no longer tenable. The man having been deprived of his authority will no longer consent to assume the responsibili- ties which that authority placed upon him. He will refuse to enter into a relation so one-sided as that which is now proposed for him by society. The woman having come into her rights will her- self have to defend those rights against all comers. She will be compelled to make with the man the best bargain that she can. If she can win and hold his love, well; if not, it is her misfortune. The man also can no longer purchase the right to the exclusive company of the woman, either in mar- riage or out of it, and hold that right by force of law. He, too, must gain and keep the love of his consort if he expects to live in peace with her. To speak of free-love is to open oneself to serious censure; but in the new world love will demand freedom and only by freedom will it continue to exist. 62 THE RISE OF THE WORKIXG-CLASS The social revolution has not only changed rad- ically the relation of the man to the woman in the household, but it has also altered the position of the father in regard to the child. In the earlier days the child belonged to the father. It was his product and as such he owned it. In the primi- tive family it was left to the father to decide whether a new-born child was to live or die. If the family was overcrowded the father might at his discretion take his child and expose it to the cruel mercy of the elements, the beasts, and the birds. This was what happened in ancient times over and over again. Female children if they were a burden upon the household were ruthlessly sacri- ficed; and down to the present, among the Chinese, where the family is still the economic unit, the man who destroys his baby girl incurs no odium. So common is the practice of destroying these waifs of humanity, that the Chinese find it necessary to put round about their little lakes the sign, " Please do not throw your baby girls into this pond." In later life, too, the children were subject to the despotic power of the father. He could punish them as he pleased and they had no appeal. Their life was fashioned in the family mold. They were not individuals, they were mere cells in the family organization. As long as the family main- tained its existence as the economic unit of hu- THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 63 manity, so long the children were a part of that industrial establishment. As a consequence of this, during all the days of the family integrity the child was an asset. As soon as he could run about he could contribute toward his own support. And, with every day of his life he increased in industrial value. The family industries were so varied and so sim- ple that children could do much of the necessary work. When the family lived upon its own land, produced its own raw material, and reduced that material to commodities for consumption, the grow- ing child was one of the most valuable forces that the family employed. The feeding of the chick- ens, the care of the swine and the sheep, the run- ning of the household errands, were all done by the children, and because of their work the family increased in power and wealth. When the daugh- ters grew to womanhood they by their marriage made alliances that strengthened the family rela- tion. The sons growing to manhood became the support and defense of the family life. In those good old days children were a blessing, as it is written, " Blessed is he that hath his quiver full of them." This relation of the father to the children where- by the children were the support of the father, continued down almost to the present day. If 64 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS there was any exception to this state of affairs, it was among the higher classes. The noble desired an heir; beyond that, children were not necessary to him as he was in possession of slaves or serfs to do his work, and he found his support not in the living forces incarnate in children but in the dead force of legalized property. The members of the merchant-class were desirous of children for the reason that the children gave them the assistance they needed in their enterprises. A child of the household was far more valuable than a hired apprentice or clerk. Daughters by marriage widened the influence of the merchant- father, and as his sons came to manhood they re- lieved him of the cares of business. So, the more children that came to him, the merrier. He who bad stalwart sons and blooming daughters was possessed of a capital more staple than gold and silver. This has been the condition prevailing in the middle class down to the present, and it still holds to a certain degree. But even the middle class is now being revolutionized and children are no longer desired or desirable. The family of six, eight, ten, and twelve children disappeared with the nineteenth century ; we shall never see it again, except in those regions where men and women breed as rabbits breed, without a thought of the morrow. The middle-class father finds children THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 65 too troublesome, too expensive, too perilous to run the risk of producing them. In the working-class the position of the father in relation to the children is that of a man who constantly makes a losing investment. When the working-class was largely agricultural and the la- borer had his little plot of ground and his cottage, he could afford to produce children because they could do the work of the house, and the garden, and so sustain themselves and add a little to his comfort. In the towns the handicraftsmen found children profitable because they, early in life, could assist him in the work of his trade. They could relieve him of the necessity of hiring apprentices, and as he lived in the small town with the land round about him as a common for his cow and his chickens, there was occupation for the children that was a benefit to the family. But since the inven- tion of the labor-saving machinery, which has de- stroyed the handicrafts, since the greed of the landlord has enclosed the commons, and land in in- dustrial countries has become too valuable for kitchen-gardens, children have become a dead weight upon the family life. As things are now, the man who produces a child must support that child until it comes to the working age. Then if the child is to do anything for its own maintenance, it must be sent away from the family into the great 66 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS industrial establishments, and there its little life is exploited in the interest of the owners of the industries. When the child enters the industrial world it no longer cooperates with the father; it is his com- petitor. As the young lad grows to manhood, he makes the labor-power of his father less and less valuable. A boy of 18 will receive wages equal to that of his father ; a man of 30 will drive his father out of employment. It is this fact, more than any other, that is bringing about the great revolution in industrial legislation, which we are now witness- ing. The old-age pension is necessary because of the break-up of the family. The father as he en- ters upon his declining years, having invested his strength in his children finds that those children are no longer his support. They owe him nothing. He brought them into the world without their con- sent; the State compelled him to maintain them as long as they were helpless; and when they became helpful then the community took these children from the father and appropriated them to its own uses. This startling fact has not yet forced itself into the consciousness of the thinkers upon social subjects. Even so able a writer as Mrs. Bosan- quet l has written a book antagonizing old-age pen- sion, because she feels that this interference of i The Strength of The Family. THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 67 the State will tend to weaken family ties and break up the family institution. Strange it is that a woman living in London, within reach of Spittle- fields, Shoreditch, and Mile-end Road, should be unaware of the fact that so far as the poor of Eng- land are concerned, there is no family; for many of them there never has been a family : for most of them, if not all, the family is at present a by- gone thing. Not only has the father been deprived of all pecuniary advantage in his children but he has also lost control of them. The power of the father has passed away: the authority of the father over the children is to-day nothing more than the mem- ory of a past estate. The children are not his chil- dren, they belong to the community. If the father is a man of property, he can within limits control his children. He can say what they shall eat, and what they shall drink and wherewithal they shall be clothed. He can decide upon the place and method of their education. But that is not the authority of his parentage, it is the authority of his purse. He buys from the community at a price the right to direct the lives of his children. But even he, no matter how rich he may be, cannot ex- pose his children to danger. He must provide them with the care which the community determines to be their right. The law compels him to have a 68 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS physician in attendance upon his sick child, and it will even go so far as to say that that physician must not be of his choosing but must be such an one as the State has approved of and to whom the State has given its diploma. Nor will the State suffer the father to inflict upon the child any cruel punishment. Even the rod is a dangerous thing for the father to handle. Let him smite his child a little too heavily and he will find the agent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children bringing him to the bar of justice and the judge sentencing him to fine and imprisonment. The oversight of the State is continually on the increase, not only is it looking after the born, but it is taking into its purview the unborn. That which Sir Thomas More suggested in his Utopia is now seriously proposed as a part of the social order. Before a man can undertake the duty of producing a child, he must subject himself to the inspection of a jury of experts, that it may be ascertained whether or no he is able to do that task to the advantage of the public; and it is likewise proposed that the woman who is looking forward to motherhood shall be subjected to the inspection of a jury of matrons, and only upon the verdict of these juries will the man and the woman be allowed to cohabit. If the rich and the well-to-do find themselves THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 69 curtailed in the matter of their authority over the children, the working-class and the poor have lost that authority altogether. The community has un- dertaken the care of the children of the poor with one single exception. It will not feed them nor clothe them, nor house them; but beyond these physical necessities it will not permit the father to have his will. It provides for the education of the child, it does not leave this any longer to the father's discretion ; he must, whether he will or not, send his children to the schools, which the State has set up ; he must give his children that medical attendance which the State deems necessary. He may be an anti-vaccinationist, but if the State says vaccinate, then the little child must bare its arm to the surgeon's probe. If he finds the support of his children too heavy for him, and tries to send them to work before legal age, the State brings him up with a short turn and lays upon him the additional burden of paying a fine. The attitude of the State to the children of the working-class and the poor is that of the ancient despotic father. The poor, and the children of the poor, have seem- ingly no rights which the State is bound to respect. The State is the over-father of this offspring of the laboring-class, and in its wisdom decides what is best. This great social revolution, so far as the fam- 70 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS ily is concerned, has gone almost full circle. It will have to return upon itself if the family is to be restored to anything like a tolerable exist- ence. In fact, we may say that the revolution in its movement has swept humanity backward into the old condition of tribal relationship. We no longer belong to the narrow confines of the fam- ily existence ; we are part and parcel of the greater community. It is the community that cares for us from the time that we are thought of until the day of our birth, and through this human existence of ours from our cradle to our grave. We live in the community; we work for the community; we receive from the community the means of exist- ence. The family has been reduced to the mere shell of its former self. It is still the nest in which we are bred and hatched; but as soon as we begin to toddle, our steps lead away from the nest into the community barnyard where we have to scratch and pick with the crowd and get our living as best we may. This break-up of the family is the salient fact of modern life; because of it we have the indus- trial unrest which as an earthquake is heaving the solid crust of the social order and shaking ancient institutions down into shapeless ruin. It is this that is giving employment to our divorce courts, compelling the establishment of juvenile courts, THE DOWNFALL OF THE FATHER 71 making child-welfare a public concern; setting the father against the son and the son against the fa- ther, the mother against the daughter and the daughter against the mother, the wife against the husband and the husband against the wife; re- ducing to chaos the social cosmos against the time of social reconstruction. The power of the father has fallen. The forces of the industrial revolution have entered the home and destroyed its autonomy. Because of this altered condition, the father in the working-class must look forward to an old age of dependence; the more numerous his children, the greater the destitution in his time of old age. His children cannot support him, they have all that they can do to sustain themselves and their chil- dren. Youth cannot spare the crust to old age. The children demand the food and the clothing and the shelter, and because of this the father must be stinted and crowded into a corner. On this ac- count the cry has gone up from all lands where the modern system of industry prevails that the community through its political organization shall assume the care of the aged as it has taken over the protection of the young. The old man and the old woman must be fed at the common table and this not as a dole but as a right. The old-age pen- sion is now a part of the established order of every progressive nation. Ill RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER THE social revolution which has dethroned the father has exalted the mother. She has as- sumed a place in society unknown to ancient or medieval life. Her freedom has entailed upon her grave consequences. For the first time in the his- tory of the family the woman has the right to choose her own mate. Up to our day in all well-estab- lished families the woman had nothing to say as to the man whom she was to marry. This was the concern of her father or her elder brother, or who- soever at the time was at the head of the family establishment. Her marriage did not concern her- self only, it was a family affair. If she married and went out of the family, as was the custom in ancient times, her marriage was of importance to the family which she left and to the family which she joined. These two became then united by af- finity. Naturally each family wished to ally itself with the best that it could find within the circle of its acquaintance. The hand of the woman was a family asset, not to be lightly thrown away. Her elders consulted concerning her future without any 72 RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 73 regard to her feelings. She did not know, in many eases, the man to whom she was to be united for life until he was presented to her by her father; and when so presented she had no choice. She did not take her husband, she received him. She was transferred to his family, just as an ox or an ass might be transferred from one owner to another upon the payment of the purchase price. This has been the fate of the woman among all peoples where the family has been and is an estab- lished institution. Not the law of love, but the law of the house has been the controlling force in joining the man and the woman together. Econ- omy not romance is the motive of such marriages. Nor have these marriages been so disastrous as we of modern times with our greater freedom might be led to believe. The woman accepted her fate and adjusted herself to the inevitable. There was no way of escape for her, and because of this she made herself at home with the man to whom she had been joined ; his people became her people, his gods her gods, and she served him and them with fidelity. Under the old regime passion did not play so great a part as it does at present, but affection was stronger; the marriage bond was considered sacred and the woman who rebelled against it had to struggle with the religious, social, and political forces of her time. 74 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS Among ourselves all this has been changed. Our women are supposed to be free to choose their own mates, and it is considered disgraceful for a woman to marry a man whom she does not love. Because of this freedom, a greater liberty has been allowed to the young unmarried woman than has ever been permitted before. As soon as a girl begins to enter into womanhood, she is allowed to associate freely with the male of the species. She may be chap- eroned more or less strictly but this does not pre- vent free access to her on the part of any man who may seek her company. In our homes, in our schools, in our streets, in our places of business, our factories and mills, the young women and the young men are thrown together and are left to manage their own relations. The man is supposed to choose the woman; but in reality, according to the law of sex, the woman lures the man. Nature has pruned her for this purpose. It has given her beauty, and grace, and ways that are wise, and tricks that are vain, where- by she may lay hold of her mate and compel him to her embraces. The girl of twelve or even younger unconsciously exercises these powers of coquetry. As she grows older she becomes conscious of her sex-power, and she plays it against the stupid strength of the male. Left free, the woman in the great majority of cases can marry the man she RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 75 wants to marry. This is her responsibility. She chooses her mate in accordance with her own men- tal, moral, and spiritual make-up. She never knows the reality of the man whom she marries; she marries her own ideal. Any and every reason is sufficient to attach the woman to a given man. His appearance, his way of talking makes its ap- peal, draws to him her love ; and her choice is made. The teaching of the English-speaking girl for the last century has made her, in a measure, incapable of wise choice. Romanticism has been rampant. Our literature has been based upon sexual selec- tion, and the woman has been supposed to love the man whom she in the exercise of her freedom chooses to love. As a consequence of this, the woman is not ca- pable of wise selection, she knows little or nothing of the male nature. All that pertains to her sex- ual life has been kept away from her knowledge. She is ignorant not only of her own functions, but also of the dangers that lurk in the dark places of the sexual world and threaten her with destruc- tion. During the period of courtship, she, how- ever honest she may be, unconsciously deceives the man whom she is luring, and the man either con- sciously or unconsciously keeps himself a secret from the woman. While romanticism is the basis of marriage, marriage must be more or less haz- 76 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS ardous. Romanticism is not a hard and fixed real- ity, it is a condition of mind. When the days of courtship are over, and the honeymoon has gone down, and the sun rises upon the matter of fact world, then these two, whom romanticism has brought together, find themselves strangers, must make each other's acquaintance, and establish their mutual relations upon a more permanent basis. This responsibility of the woman in the choice of her mate is, even with us, more or less limited for economic reasons. A woman cannot well marry out of her class, because it is only within her class that she associates freely with the male. Some- times she oversteps the boundary of class, and mar- ries her coachman or her chauffeur. But this is a rare occurrence and it entails misery. Within the class, however, the woman is free to choose, and upon her choice depends her future happiness. In ancient times when the choice was made for her it determined her whole earthly existence. There was no way of escape but the way of death. If her husband put her away that was social death to her. A discredited and discrowned wife had no place in the ancient social system. When divorce became easy, in the later period of Roman civiliza- tion, it was because the family had ceased to be the controlling institution in the social world. In our day the outlook for the mismated woman RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 77 is not quite so hopeless. There is a way open for the dissolution of the tie which binds her to the man. But this fact does not detract essentially from the grave responsibility that is involved in her freedom of choice. A woman who fails in mar- riage fails in life. The liberation of the woman from family control is a radical change, demanding the re-adjustment of society. The woman cannot with safety be any longer secluded within the family walls from the life of the world into which she must of her own choice and will make her way. All of those mat- ters which up to this time have been tabooed must now be released and given over to the knowledge of the woman that she may have some security in making her selection. It is only recently that the female of the species in the middle and upper classes has acknowledged openly to the world that she is a two-legged animal. That atrocious con- trivance, the side-saddle, is typical of the false mod- esty which tried to conceal from the world the simplest and most beautiful of all the creations of nature, the female form. The rebellion of sensible women against this claptrap is one of the reassur- ing facts in the present movement going on in the world of woman. When the first girl dared to ride astride she accomplished for her sex a benefit greater than any that ever will come to her by way 78 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS of the ballot. She asserted her right to two legs and two feet. She was no longer ashamed of the form which nature had given her and she refused to conceal the essential fact of that form from the world. In matters more serious than this, there must be the same contempt of custom, the same open deal- ing. Matters of sex and maternity must be spoken of with the same freedom as other matters germane to the well-being of the human race. It is impos- sible to estimate the evil which has been entailed upon mankind by the seclusion of woman and her consequent ignorance of the matters most important for her to know. The agitation in favor of a health- certificate before marriage is one of the signs point- ing to a more sensible way of thinking on this vital subject. When a woman chooses a man and a man accepts a woman they have each a right to know the physical state of the person with whom they are about to enter into that closest relationship. Women must also be trained, if they are to choose wisely, in economics. Until recently the man has considered himself all-sufficient in that which con- cerns the management of the household income and expense. He has given to the woman what he con- sidered necessary and she has spent this — subject to his criticism. Consequently the woman being ignorant of the family income was in danger of RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 79 going beyond that income and of involving the family in economic difficulties. The Englishman and the American have been gravely at fault in this regard. They have not trained their daugh- ters in affairs. They have supposed that the house- hold business did not call for skilful handling. The wife enters upon her task of housekeeping, ignorant of her calling; and she is one among a thousand if she ever learns how to manage her house as a business-man manages his industrial establishment. This lack on the part of the woman hinders her in the matter of choosing wisely the man who is to be her co-worker in the family life. If a marriage be one of affection only, and the purse is not con- sidered, it is apt before many moons have passed to enter into stormy regions that may wreck its happiness forever. In the good old times, the father of the woman made careful inquiry into the financial estate of the proposed bridegroom. What was formerly done for the woman, she must do now for herself. Be- fore she yields her lips to her lover and gives him the rights of love, she must ascertain whether he is able to meet the obligations which she is laying upon him by thus yielding herself to his solicitation. This is the more incumbent because in the present state of society the woman has an additional re- 80 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS sponsibility beside that of choosing her own mate. The love of the man for the woman, and the woman for the man, is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end. It is the snare of nature to en- trap these innocent beings into doing that which otherwise they would not care to do. The outcome of gratified love is children. When the man and the woman unite, then in the course of nature we frave three beings instead of two. The purpose of the ancient family, as we have already learned, was to secure food and to produce children; and these two things are so related to each other that they form one single purpose. If there is no food, it is useless to produce children. The children live by eating, and the table must be provided for them before they enter upon life. The human young must be supported by its parents for a long period after birth. This is the peculiar problem of hu- manity. All other living creatures are more for- tunate than man in this respect. Within a week, or two or three, after birth, the young of the various animals that roam the air and the forests and the seas are independent; they seek and find their own nutriment; they earn their own living. But man is a helpless creature that must be cared for, not one year, nor two, nor three, but perhaps for twenty; and this work must be done by those who have had the temerity to bring that young ani- EESPOXSIBILITY OF THE MOTHEB 81 mal into an existence where food and clothing and shelter must 'be had by the sweat of the brow. It would be a small matter if a man had only to labor to get his own living. It is the children that make the extraordinary call upon his strength and turn his labor into sorrow. Up to recent times the responsibility of provid- ing for the children has lain upon the shoulders of the father, and it is a common thought that the father to-day is the breadwinner. This conception is one of those popular errors that are so evident that it seems as though even the blind might see their fallacy. The man is not, and never has been, the breadwinner of the family, exclusive of the woman. From the beginning of human existence down to the present, quite one-half, if not two- thirds, of all the labor entailed in providing food, shelter, and clothing for the children has been per- formed by the woman. The mother has been not a drone but a worker in the family hive. In prim- itive times and among the laboring-classes of the present day all the drudgery falls upon the mother. The most necessary work is done by her hands. The man contributes to the welfare of the family but he is far from being the sole producer. In our times this burden of caring for the young in things material is falling more and more upon the woman. As society is now organized, the fate of 82 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS the children is altogether in the power of the par- ents. The children are healthy or sickly, are rich or poor, are ignorant or cultured because of their parents. Society to-day is just beginning to take knowledge of the fact that it cannot afford to leave the fate of the young dependent upon so slender a support. But while we are socially fumbling with the problem, the situation is bringing forth its nat- ural results. The family relation to-day is so precarious that it cannot be relied upon to do the work which the family was organized to perform. The father is no longer reliable. The hazards of industry are such that thousands and thousands of fathers in the laboring-class are maimed or killed, and their children, so far as the father is concerned, are left helpless upon the world. Employment is so un- certain that the household cannot depend upon the earnings of the man for its sustenance. The social order is in such an anarchic condition, lawlessness is so widespread, that the man of the house cannot be held in the grip of his family duty. If the bur- den of the family life becomes too heavy for him he drops it and moves away and hides himself in that vast restless, shifting mass of humanity that is now surging through the world. As things are now, if the man deserts his family, is incapacitated, or dies, the support of the chil- RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 83 dren falls wholly upon the mother. Society says to her : " You were so thoughtless, so improvident, as to bring these children into the world, not know- ing of a certainty how they were to be fed and clothed and housed, and you must reap the conse- quence of your own shortsightedness! You must work your fingers to the bone, sap all your strength, break both your back and your heart to bring these little ones up to man's and woman's estate. We can do nothing for you until you yourself break down. We will stand by and watch your pitiless struggle and when you've reached the point of ex- haustion, we will put out to you the hand of charity and wet your parched lips with a little water and give you a morsel of bread to strengthen your faint- ing soul. Your children are your children, and you must take care of them." It is this new responsibility that makes mother- hood so hazardous to the modern woman. She can no longer depend upon the man, nor is there a fam- ily institution closely organized to act in the fa- ther's place when the father fails. We are living as if the family were still intact. We refuse to recognize that which lies open to our view. We pass by the household which time and revolution has wrecked and refuse to see its unroofed walls, its broken floors, its windowless casing. We per- mit children to be born, and we allow them to live 84 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS without any sane provision for their proper care. We lay the greatest burden of society upon its weaker element. We compel the woman to play the parts of both the father and the mother. She must go out of the house and earn a living for her children and at the same time she must keep the house and bring up her children. Never before in any like degree has this been required of the woman by human society. It is this cruelty on the part of society that is the source of vast social evils. The mother is driven from the nest and can no longer cover with the wings of her love her callow young and so they are exposed to the violence of the elements and to the hungry beak of every bird of prey. If it were not so serious, this situation would be the essence of comedy. A single instance will illustrate better than a page of reason. A woman came to the present writer, telling him that her husband had just died, leaving her with five children under working age. She begged of the writer that he would find her employment. She must work for wages, or she and her children must starve, go naked, and be thrown on the street. The writer, moved by her pitiful tale, went down into the city and found her employment in one of the large office-buildings. The superintendent of the building was very ready; he needed a woman, and he said with considerable satisfaction that it RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 85 was just the place for her. She would only have to come down at five o'clock in the morning and stay until nine, and then again at five o'clock in the evening and stay until nine; she could have all the rest of the day to herself in which to care for her children. For this work she would receive the sum of one dollar per day, with which to pro- vide for herself and her children the three primal necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Out of her abundant leisure she could also give them that essential of child-life, the mother's care and love. But unfortunately at the times when the mother was at home, the children were either asleep or away at school. She and they became strangers. They grew up without fostering care; they became little savages, and the last the writer heard of them they were throwing fire at each other. This is a single case of which there are thousands upon thou- sands, one might almost say millions, in our mod- ern civilized countries. In ancient and medieval times no such thing would have been possible. The failure of the fa- ther would have been far less serious to the chil- dren. The family was there with its overshadow- ing power and care, and the family was organized as an economic unit. These children were related to it, organically. As long as the family existed these children could share in the product of its 86 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS industry and in due time be themselves incorpo- rated into its productive machinery. As it is now, the failure of the father means the destitution of the children. If the mother falls under the task of a double duty, then society takes the children and herds them into institutions which are unfitted for the work of rearing the human young. The child from the orphan-asylum goes handicapped into the world. We have contrivances for relieving the hen of the necessity of hatching her chickens, and it is quite as successful as the natural method. The reason for this is that the relation of the hen to the chickens is so transitory in its nature that she can well be dispensed with after she has performed the essential function of laying the egg. As soon as the chicken emerges from the egg, it can, after a few hours, stand upon its feet and run about to secure its own living. Two weeks, more or less, is all the time that the hen devotes to her young after she has ushered them into the world. The chick learns nothing from the hen. It comes into the world with all its habits formed, and it can correlate itself at once to the conditions of its exist- ence. Not so with the human young. No inven- tion of man will be able to dispense with the serv- ices of the mother. Nature demands that the child shall have the mother-care for a long period after RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHEE 87 its birth. We could as well invent a machine to conceive the child, to build up its little skeleton and lay on that skeleton flesh, and through that flesh send the vein that carries the blood, as to hope to provide in an artificial way for the nurture of the child after its birth. The man child and the female of his species does not live on bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mother's mouth. The great mortality among chil- dren in orphan-asylums and other institutions is not occasioned by the unsanitary conditions alone, but the main cause of it is the lack of mother-love. A child to flourish must be taken in its mother's arms and fondled, it must see in the mother's eye the light of life, and it must hear in the mother's voice the sound of human words that waken it to consciousness. Artificiality in the breeding and the care of children must confine itself purely to the material environment; when it attempts to inter- fere with the great art of nature, then it can be nothing but a bungler and destroy that which it tries to preserve. The mother is essential to the child. The civilized nations are beginning to recognize this and by legislation are seeking to provide for the mother the means of caring for her child. We are at last coming to see that it is quite as neces- sary to feed the stomach of the child as it is to 88 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS cram its brain. The mother's pension is already in force in many places, and it will be universal as the new civilization progresses. We shall social- ize the food of the child but we shall not socialize the mother. The revolutionary nature of this method must be clear. We have passed out of one region into another. The child is no longer de- pendent upon the solitary pair, but it is the com- mon care of the great community. Without motherhood there can be no community. Except she bring forth her young, the people per- ish. So necessary is her function that she must be encouraged to perform it and that in the best possible manner. As things are to-day, we penal- ize the woman if she bears a child. We lay upon her a load of anxiety which is heart-breaking. We tell her to take no thought of the morrow, but we do not reveal to her any providence that cares for her morrow. We compel her to live under a sys- tem that thinks of her only as a commodity in the market, which separates her from her young during the days of her brooding, and makes her mother- hood an hourly anguish. Except for the fact that we are changing this order, it were better that the woman should never bear a child, and thousands of women, yes millions of them, are to-day declining that function because they cannot see in it for them- RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 89 selves any joy, nor can they hope for their children a happy life. Our modern world is still managing its affairs as if the ancient family were in existence. Chil- dren must be born within the family if they are to be received with honor into the world. It is un- doubtedly true that the family has played a great part in the regulation of the sexual relation and the consequent production of children. As long as the family was intact, and families were in possession of the sources of wealth and the means of produc- tion, only the children of the family had any part or lot in the industrial establishment of the family and the products of its labor. If they were born of slaves, they lived as slaves and labored for the family but did not themselves own or enjoy the fruits of their labor. If they were out-family chil- dren, born beyond the pale of wedlock they had, except if they were children of kings and nobles, to bear forever the badge and burden of shame. The bar sinister did not disgrace the noble house, -but among the middle and the lower classes the bar sinister meant exile from all that makes human life worth the living. Women who bear children ille- gally are subjected to a treatment so cruel, so de- grading, that for such women death is a blessed release. Nature and human law are in conflict and 90 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS in this conflict we crush out year by year thousands upon thousands of precious lives. When these facts are recognized the community may be compelled to modify very materially its thoughts in relation to child-production. With every passing day the question of fatherhood is becoming less and less important. It is mother- hood that demands attention, and we may in the future be glad enough at the advent of a child to welcome it, no questions asked. Nor will we very long permit the cruelty which is now practised of separating the child from the mother, simply be- cause the innocent has not complied with all the requirements of our conventions. The cry of im- morality which may be raised at this point is not pertinent. The immorality is here doing its work visiting anguish upon thousands and the immorality is the consequence of convention and law. We do not seem to be able to hinder nature in her great desire for life. The unborn are in her womb, and she will bring them forth whether our laws justify her or not. The whole matter of motherhood is in the crucible. Our conceptions of it must undergo radical change, sentiment must give place to rea- son ; we must look facts in the face and must come at last to the conclusion that a mother is a mother no matter what the male element of parentage may be, and as such she and her young are the care of RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MOTHER 91 the corninunity. One hardly dares to preach so merciful a doctrine as this to the cruel age that now is, but one will preach it because one believes that this cruel age must give place to a wiser, a better, a more merciful age that will not drive the woman and child into the wilderness, because na- ture has wrought in them the marvel of continued life. IV THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILDREN THE prophet Isaiah in speaking of the evils that afflicted the city of Jerusalem mentioned that the most disastrous was the fact that children ruled over the city. The reign of the younger over the elder was in the thought of the ancient world the last great disaster that could befall a community. Power by right belonged to the senior. Age bore the scepter until it was taken out of its dead hand, and even then that dead hand reached out from the grave to control the family life. Before the insti- tution of the family, age had asserted its right to govern. After the family was established, that right was never disputed. The father retained his lordship over the house as long as he lived. Chil- dren were expected to stand in his presence silent and uncovered. Any disrespect upon the part of youth was visited with severe punishment. This relation of the young to the old was maintained with such strictness that it has been the last of the ancient customs to feel the effects of the revolu- tionary movement which has destroyed the family 92 THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILDREN" 93 as an economic unit and related its individual mem- bers to the community as independent atoms. But at last this revolutionary wave has lifted the children upon its crest and carried them into power. On every side we are hearing the complaint that age is no longer respected, that the children are froward: that there is no law in the household, that the young are not only assuming control of themselves but are compelling the obedience of the elders. The passing of parental authority is a fact which thrusts itself upon the attention in a manner so obtrusive that it is no longer possible for any one to be ignorant of this changed relation. In our American life, this is the one thing that is remarked by the stranger within our gates. In the older na- tions, the more ancient thought still has such power that it is holding the children in check. The pre- cept " Children obey your parents " is not alto- gether obsolete beyond the seas; but with us it is largely a dead letter. Parents to-day persuade their children, they do not command them, and where there is a difference of opinion between the parent and the child in three cases out of five it is the parent that yields and not the child. The best mode of ruling the young of the house is for the head of the house, if it have one, to ascertain if he can what the younger elements desire to do 94 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS and then request those elements to do that thing. The present writer was once possessed of a dog, which he desired to teach obedience. The dog had a habit of going under the bed to lie down. Every time his master commanded him to come from un- der the bed he disobeyed, and the master was com- pelled, if he would have obedience, to command the dog to go under the bed or to stay under the bed. The will of the master had to conform to the will of the dog. So it is in our modern family. The will of the child is paramount, and the will of the parent must conform to that if there is to be peace at home. We elders, like the prophet Isaiah, see in this state of affairs the ruin of our household. Where the children rule confusion comes, we say; and we look forward to a disaster that shall be destructive of all that is best in humanity. But the forces of evolution know what they are about in thus for the time-being bringing the children to the top and leaving the parents at the bottom. The rule of the elder has had its day and accomplished its end. The family as an institution with its law of abso- lutism was a hindrance to progress. The children were compelled to be mere replica of the parents. The family belief held all the members of the fam- ily in leash; the child that dared to go beyond the family thought found itself a family outcast and THE EMANCIPATION" OF THE CHILDREN 95 had to seek the wilderness for the protection of its life. Had the family continued in unbroken power, through all the ages, we should have to-day the same way of thinking and living that prevailed on the northern slopes of the Persian hills twenty thou- sand years ago. It was the venturesome child that broke the family custom, fled from the family con- trol, and set up new things for itself in the wilder- ness, that has been the progressive element in hu- man history. Organization and life are always in conflict. They are necessary each to the other, but they can- not live in peace together. Organization limits life, and to limit life is to destroy it. Life having used one organization to the utmost, then turns upon it and destroys it and builds a new organization for its new and larger living. This is the perpetual tragedy of existence. The great conflicts are within the body: the old endeavoring to hinder the new, and the new rising to assert itself over the old. Reverence and adventure are at odds with one an- other in every family, every church, every political party that is now, ever has been, or ever will be. At certain periods reverence is in control. These are the halcyon periods of the aged ; then they float upon the waves of life, upborne by the strength of the young ; and they have for the young that feeling of contempt which man always has for those who 96 THE RISE OP THE WORKING-CLASS serve biin. But when the spirit of adventure is strong, then the aged are in the trough of the sea and destruction is their fate if they do not quickly adjust themselves to the facts of their existence. If the old insist upon ruling when the young are full of the enthusiasm of new life, then old heads are shorn from old shoulders aud the new life comes by violence. Maeterlinck in his Intelligence of the Plants tells us that the great problem of the plant is to get its young out from under its own shadow ; if the seed of the plant falls directly within the circle in which that plant itself lives, then that seed has little or no chance for existence. The plant deprives the seed of soil and light, and the seed cannot germinate. Therefore we have in na- ture all those wonderful contrivances by means of which' the plants scatter their seed and enable generations to succeed each other. The plant, be- ing fixed in its position, must thus contrive to throw its seed out into the distance. The young and the old in plant life cannot flourish in the same circle of soil and light. Now while this is essentially a plant problem, it is also a problem ©f animal life. The little animal, too, must escape from the shadow of its parent, if it is to live. It is well for the hen for a week or two to gather its young under the shadow of its wings, but if it continues this shad- owing unduly the young perish. The young must THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILDREN 97 be left free to expand its own wings, to shelter itself, if it is to increase in wisdom and in favor with God and man. Therefore it is that nature has inspired youth with the spirit of adventure. It is the burr surrounding the young life that at- taches itself to whatever comes in the way and car- ries the young life out from under the power of the old. We are to-day in one of these great periods of adventure. Our w T orld is changing more rapidly than at any other period in its history. Change has always been the lot, not only of humanity, but of all existing things ; but humanity to-day is mov- ing with ever accelerated rapidity from one basis of life to another. Man has climbed the mountain of life to one of its plateaus and is now on the downward grade toward a new valley from which he will make his next ascent. Old things are pass- ing away, and as a consequence all things are be- coming new, and this work of change is necessarily in the hands of the young. If the old are to have their way progress will cease. But this is impossi- ble, because you cannot stop motion that is in full sway downward. You may check it with your brakes, but to stop it means disaster. You must either hold it still between the top and the bottom and get nowhere, or else you must let it glide down- ward as gently as possible to its destined resting- 98 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS place. We cannot hold humanity in its present position. We are now nowhere. We have lost the family as an economic unit, and we have not yet created an econolnic unit to take its place. The decline of parental authority is owing almost en- tirely to this unrecognized fact. When the children were dependent upon the par- ent for the necessities of life, and assisted the parent in the production of those necessities, obedience was natural, necessary, and seemly; but now that the children are no longer, after they have attained to full childhood, receiving their support from the parent, such obedience is neither possible nor de- sirable. The children are not bound to their par- ents for the simple fact of existence. The parents did not have the children in mind when they were indulging themselves in the pleasures of marriage. And if to-day the parents do not provide for the children the great necessities of life, then the chil- dren are not bound to the law of obedience. If they are almost from their infancy compelled to make their own way in the world, then they must be left free to exert their powers according to the de- mands that are made upon them outside the home. The boy or girl working in the store or the factory is the better judge of what is to be done there than the father or the mother who has had no experi- ence in such situations. THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILDREN 99 Another reason for the decline of parental au- thority is the fact that in the present world the children live under a divided allegiance. The com- munity has taken upon itself the oversight of the education of the young. It leaves to the elders no choice in this matter; it has provided a vast system richly endowed for the purpose of training the chil- dren to enter equipped upon the work of life. The teacher is an authority in many respects paramount to the parent. The child in school receives impres- sions not in harmony with home instruction. That sentimental seat of learning, the mother's knee, has lost its standing in the educational world. When the teacher says one thing and the mother says another, then the child must decide between the two, and this makes the child independent. Com- ing home from school, the mother says to the child " So and so," the child answers : " My teacher says it 's not that way, it is so and so.'' The mother replies : "I do not care what your teacher says ; it is as I say." The child may for the sake of prudence be silent ; but its little mind is questioning the infallibility of the mother, and to question is to deny. Moreover, the child learns in the school a great many things of which the parents are ig- norant, and when the little one comes with his question to the father and the mother and finds them unable to answer it they fall at once in his 100 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS esteem. He knows more than father and mother, and this knowledge he uses as a pedestal upon which to climb and to make himself, in his own conceit, intellectually taller than the elders of his house- hold. The effect of the school has been to make wellnigh impossible the exercise of parental dis- cipline. On the other hand, the home constantly inter- feres with the authority of the school. When the teacher makes an assertion the boy is apt to answer : " My father says that is not so " ; and the teacher responds : " I do not care what your father says, what I say is true." The boy then begins to doubt the infallibility of the teacher, and again we say to doubt is to deny. The young mind is no longer ready to accept the say-so of the teacher as proof conclusive. The disciple escapes from under the bondage of the teacher and begins to examine freely into the facts for himself, and that is disastrous to discipline. The teacher must abdicate the throne of authority and must undertake the much more difficult task of intellectual guidance. He can no longer say to his pupil : " Thus it is " ; but he must say : " Thus I think it is," and leave the pupil at liberty to test the validity of his thought. The inestimable advantages that come from this loss of home and school authority more than com- pensate for the evils consequent upon this new state THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILDEEN 101 of affairs. Humanity will be the gainer by at least ten years in every generation. The young, no longer under slavish dependence upon the old, will be able to exert their higher powers at a much earlier period in their lives. When we have once settled down and accepted the inevitable, and no longer seek to exercise an authority which has passed away, we shall find the children becoming more gentle, more reverential toward us and toward our teachings. The president of one of our great universities was in the habit of asking questions instead of making assertions. He would always say: "Do you not think thus and so?" This gave to his teaching a persuasive power which mere dogmatism can never possess. 1 It somewhat en- feebled his influence in a dogmatic world, but it was an evidence that he at least had grasped pres- ent conditions and knew that the day of dogma was done and that the human mind was no longer to be crammed with precepts; it was to be fed upon the raw material of thought, rather than upon or- ganized thought itself. The home and the school must cease to contend for authority over the mind of the young. They must cooperate in guiding the young into the ways of wisdom but when they have found the way they must simply say to the chil- dren : " Walk therein ! " and then leave the chil- i Hon. Seth Low, Columbia University. DIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA UBKAKi 102 THE ELSE OF THE WOBKING-CLASS dren themselves to go onward, and extend their journey beyond the path already marked out by the elder. A further reason for the loss of discipline in the home is that the young of the middle and the work- ing-class must enter very early upon the activities of life. The great mass of the children of the work- ing-class do not attend school beyond the age of fourteen. Then they take up the task of earning their own living and keep at that task if they are fortunate until they die. Only recently has the age-limit been fourteen years. The present writer began his business career at the age of eleven. When a boy or a girl must leave the home with the morning light and come back to it in the dusk of evening, having spent all the day amid the varied activities of some manufacturing or commercial es- tablishment, then the home has ceased to be the mold of their lives. They are made what they are by the influences of the store, the factory, or the shop — and not by the influences of the home. It can be seen at once that this state of affairs has destroyed the home in all that is proper to the home. The men and the women who are now in active life, the boys and the girls who are thronging our streets are not the product of our homes, they are the out- come of our commercialized community. It seems strange that so patent a fact should be so completely THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILDREN 103 overlooked. You hear the cry going up all the time that this or that social doctrine if accepted will de- stroy the home ; when it is perfectly evident to any one, who will see things as they are, that the home is destroyed already. Unless we can bring back into the home the great industries and keep the father and the mother and the children in hourly contact, we can never have again that home which in old times did produce and rear its young, stamp- ing the young with the family stamp, centering their life in the family life, and making of the family a unit. Because the children are thus early independent of the parents, they necessarily become restive un- der parental authority. The wage of the boy and the girl is paid directly to them. It is theirs, and they do not see why they should spend their own according to the dictates of some one else, rather than to suit their own pleasure. As soon as there is a decided difference of opinion between the chil- dren and the heads of the household, then the younger element withdraws from that household and sets up for itself. All our cities have in them thousands upon thousands of boys and girls be- tween sixteen and twenty who for the sake of a greater independence are living on their wage, away from home. The parents are thus early de- prived of their assistance and that desolation, 104 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS which is now the lot of the working-class father and mother, falls upon them. It does not wait for their old age, it overshadows their middle life. It is impossible at the present time to forecast the outcome of existing conditions. But one thing is certain : the old family with its centralized au- thority, with its unified interest, with its great formative influences, with its beautiful amenities is not only going, it is gone. There still remain some vestiges of its former greatness; there are still millions of children that love their parents and of parents that love their children. Humanity is slowly adjusting itself to its new environment; parents no longer exercise authority — they per- suade, they do not command: the children, no longer antagonistic, have for their parents a friend- ship based upon a mutual esteem that has grown up during the period when they have all shared the family life. But the parent no longer desires to be dependent upon the child, nor will their re- lationship bear the strain of any great interference on the part of the parent with the life of the child. The new world is in many things more desirable than the old. The gain — take it for all in all — is greater than the loss. We are still in a forma- tive period; we have all the crudeness of youth, but we are growing out of this into a larger and better life than the world has ever experienced be- THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILDREN 105 fore. We who are passing away can do so with the thought that the world of our children will be bet- ter than was the world of our childhood. In the early years of the present writer, whipping was a daily occurrence. Children were humiliated in the presence of their elders and in the sight of one another. Brute force ruled in the home and in the school. The child found itself in the presence of grown-ups who treated it with contempt, harsh- ness, and cruelty. The writer was fortunate in his youthful home and school relations but he remem- bers two whippings, which he received, one at home and one at school, as examples of the unjust treat- ment of the young by the old. It was this injustice that made childhood so long. Every child watched and waited for childhood and youth to pass, even as they that watch for the morn- ing. The emancipation of the children has been costly, but it is worth the price. THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN IT is the constant assertion of the moralist that the family is the protection of the woman. The home is her sanctuary, within which her virtue is sheltered from the lust of men. Any questioning of this fact is looked upon as blasphemy, and he who dares to say ought to the contrary is cast out as a social heretic to be shunned by all right-think- ing people. It is true that the family has guarded the virtue of the woman, incorporated into the family as long as she belongs to the family. But as we have al- ready hinted, this guardianship of the virtue of the woman was not because virtue in itself was es- teemed, but because the family desired to protect itself from alien seed. The family is the creation of the male. The man instituted it in his own in- terest. It came into existence with private prop- erty in lands. Its purpose was to secure to the is- sue of the owner of the land the inheritance of the family estate. Very early in the history of the family the man asserted his divine right of rule over the family. He established that right not 106 THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 107 only in himself but also in his eldest male descend- ant. He himself reserved the right to preside over the destinies of the family from his tomb after his death. To be secure in his seed he must have the absolute right to the exclusive cohabitation with a given woman. He must of a certainty know his own child ; there must be no egg of the cuckoo laid in his nest, and because of this the chastity of the wife was guarded with a fierce jealousy; her tres- pass was punished with most fearful penalties. She was secluded from the companionship of other men; she was shut in to the company of the one man who owned her not only sexually but in every other relation in life. He was the only man who could talk to her freely, who could walk with her by the way. He and she were merged, so that her ex- istence became his. The woman belonged to the man, but the man never belonged to the woman. In the household the woman who was placed in the office of the wife had also the oversight of the house. She was employed in the work of produc- ing children and also of providing for them their food and clothing. She had the headship of an in- dustrial establishment. Her value to her husband was not only sexual, it was economic as well. Be- cause of this she gradually attained to a place of dignity in the household and through the household in the community. The community depended upon 108 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS lier industry, because it was of the surplus of the household that the community lived. So the wife was held in honor; though she was subordinate to the man in all things, he was yet compelled be- cause of her sexual and economic importance to pay her respect, to provide for her, and to give her some share of his authority. It was in the home that the woman acquired this place, this honor, this dig- nity. The wife and the daughter are the family assets, while the family is an economic unit : they are treasured by the family because they are the contributors to the family wealth. But the security of the wife and the daughter has been purchased at a great price by humanity. When we are told that the home is the security of the woman, we assert that that statement needs to be modified by saying that the home is the blessing of some women and the curse of others. If we take womankind as a whole, it is doubtful whether in the course of human history woman as woman has found the home a curse or a blessing. Granting that within the home woman has found all that her nature demands for its development, we have still the vast multitude of out-family women to con- sider. Before the establishment of the family, there was no such thing as an out-family woman. The women of the tribe, or of the still more primitive THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 109 horde, all lived the common life of the tribe. There was no law governing the exercise of the sexual function and consequently there was no sin. The women and the men came together as do the birds of the air, or the beasts of the field, or the fishes of the sea. They paired according to their affinities. The female lured its mate, the male courted his female, they united, they separated, and there was no one to say nay to any conceit they might take. It is well for us to bear in mind that it was during this period that the human form was evolved from the non-human. The children of the earlier periods were for the most part love-chil- dren; the man desired the woman and, except in cases of violence, the woman desired the man when they came together. This freedom of affection to- gether with the liberty to roam and the exercise that was required in obtaining the food-supply were the forces by which the human form were per- fected. By these men reached the upright posi- tion, and developed the body until it became a thing of beauty. If we compare the Teutonic races as they emerged from barbarism into civilization with their descend- ants of to-day, we shall see what man has lost dur- ing these ages of so-called culture. It is true that at this earlier period the Teuton was living in pairs and the faithfulness of the one man to the one 110 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS woman was established; but long before this the Teuton had acquired those physical characteristics which made of him the Viking and the Crusader. As we stand at the street-corner of our modern cities and watch the crowds go by, and see the multi- tude of undersized men and women, pallid, anemic, ugly, we are appalled as if we were in the presence of a fallen race. We conclude that our present methods of child-production must be faulty else we should not have these deplorable results. With the establishment of the family, women were divided into two classes, the women of the family and the out-family women. At no period in human history have all the women been organized into the family. A goodly proportion of them have always existed outside that institution, and they have warred against it. In the earlier period of the family history, the out-family woman held a recognized, and in many respects, a desirable position. In some ways she was the superior of the family woman, and many women of that day chose to be free rather than to be bound by family ties. It is significant that the term " free woman " was applied by the Greeks to the out-family woman. The out-family woman performed for the com- munity certain duties impossible for her sister within the family. The secluded life of the matron THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 111 and the daughter kept her ignorant, stupid, uncom- panionable. Her sole duty was to play the part of the bee in the hive. The matron was the queen bee whose function it was to produce the young, and the single women within the family were the working- bees by w T hose labor the family was sustained. These women secluded within a jealous seclusion had no part or lot in what was going on in the out- side world. Politics were unknown to them; they took some part in the great religious festivals, but during the greater part of their lives they were com- pelled to endure the cramping, deadening narrow- ness of the family life. As a consequence of this ancient custom, the men of the earliest period divided the practical from the pleasurable elements of the sexual function. They kept company with their wives from a sense of duty and for the purpose of procreating children, but for their pleasure they chose the companionship of the out-family woman. Not only were the men thus favorable to the woman who was not incorporated in the family organization, but she also was the mistress of the gods. Among the various duties performed by the out-family woman was that of yielding herself within the temple of the gods to the worshipers of the gods as an act of religion. This gave to her the dignity of a priestess. She passed her days in happiness, and when she grew tired of 112 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS her life within the sacred groves, she had only to withdraw and upon the riches which she had amassed in return for her religious offering of her body she lived in peace and plenty and honor for the rest of her days. We in modern times look back with horror to this condition of society, and there were in it germs of evil that multiplied until the disease created by those germs destroyed that civil- ization. But whether we have anything to boast over that time in the matter of the out-family woman is very doubtful. The separation of the sex principle from the godhead has made forever im- possible any return to the worship of the groves. But in place of the evils, consequent upon such a perversion of the sexual principle as was manifested in the worship of Venus, we have other evils quite as disastrous to the moral life of man. It will never be possible again for a young man to find as Alcibiades did the prosperity of religion in the fact that the women who were devoting themselves to the services of the gods were of more than usual beauty and that the men who resorted to their com- pany did so with more than usual ardor. By this argument Alcibiades sought to prove to the young men of Athens that their religion was not on the de- cline. The free-woman not only ministered to the gods, she also presided over the affairs of State. In no THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 113 department of life is it well for man to be alone, and when the Aryan man secluded his family women in the home and shut them out from all participation in public matters, he had to find some other woman to assist him in the work of government. And so among the Athenians we find the out-family woman playing the most important part. Of the matron? of Athens not a famous name, except that of Xan- tippe, has survived into history. But hetserse have left their names and deeds as an integral part of the story of one of the most glorious periods of human achievement. Aspasia was co-ruler of Greece with Pericles : she inspired that great states- man with her wisdom, and Grecian gossip went so far as to say that she composed some of his greatest orations. These free women were the constant companions of the statesmen, the philosophers, the poets, and the artists of Greece, and it is to their in- fluence that we owe much if not all that is beautiful in the Greek civilization. These women were pub- licly recognized, no shame attached to them, no blame was laid upon their mode of life. Socrates could visit Theodote and counsel her as to the best methods whereby to gain and keep the affection of her lovers, and Greece saw in that action of Socrates nothing unworthy of the great philosopher. Among the Romans, who at the beginning were small farmers, the family women lived more in the 114 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS open than they did in the neighboring peninsula of Greece. The woman had to be abroad to look after the family affairs. The Romans were a plainer folk, more prosaic; and they did not have the same jealousy concerning the women that pre- vailed in countries farther East. The Roman ma- tron was more the equal of her husband than was the Grecian matron, but even she did not share with him in any of the responsibilities of public affairs. She was mistress of the house, and there her power ended. The Roman had nothing of the delicacy of the Greek in matters of love. The wedding feasts of the Latin were characterized by a vulgarity that was an evidence of the low esteem in which the sexual relationship was held. The Roman, like the modern Latin, was intensely jealous of the woman with whom for the time-being he was in love; but when his ardor ceased, the fire of his jealousies died away, and the Roman matron was never remark- able for her chastity. The case of Lucretia was ex- ceptional. The talk of the Roman soldiers about the camp-fire was the loose talk of men who were loose in their relations with women. The free woman never acquired in Rome the dignity to which she attained in Greece, and as a consequence the Roman never developed those finer qualities of hu- man nature which find their expression in poetry, painting, and sculpture. The religion of Rome had THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 115 in it nothing of the poetic beauty that has made the Greek mythological period the priceless heritage of humanity. The Eomans were fierce in their lust and when they had acquired the means of self-in- dulgence they carried that indulgence so far that it destroyed them. They perished through their vio- lation of the delicacies, the amenities, and the beauties of the love-relationship. There were among the Romans in every period men and women who had no part or lot in the prevailing licentiousness. It was among the Romans that the Stoic philosophy with its bans upon pleasure had the largest following, and it was the virtuous element of the Roman population that flocked into the Christian church and set up there a new morality which denied to the sexual passions any goodness, which saw in matter itself the evil that afflicted the world, and which permitted even the indulgence of marriage only as a concession to the weakness of humanity. But this Puritan element in the Roman world was not sufficiently strong to control the life of the people and consequently the Roman civilization perished in its own corruption. The historian Tacitus in the Ger mania l dwells with bitterness upon the contrast between the chas- tity of the German wife and the Roman matron. i Tacitus, Germania, Bonn Edition, passim. 116 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS He tells us that among the Germans the wife was faithful to her husband and the husband to the wife. The picture that Tacitus draws of German purity must be taken with allowance, because his mind was inflamed against the women of his own people whose wickedness was open to his investiga- tion. When writing of the Roman woman he was expressing disgust at what he himself had seen and of what he had first-hand knowledge; but all that he knew of the Germans was a matter of hearsay. It is, however, highly probable that Tacitus did give expression to the truth when he described the Ger- man woman as possessed of a chastity unknown to the majority of her Latin sisters. The conditions of life under which the German woman lived were favorable to purity. There were no out-family women among the Germans. The family had not succeeded in establishing itself as the economic unit of the German people. They were still living under the tribal form of organization. The tun or town was the economic unit. They held their land for the most part in common. Their food-supply was derived from their flocks and their herds more than from the cultivation of the land. They were con- stantly on the move. They lived in tents, in wagons, and on horseback. In this arduous way of living, the woman was the equal of the man. She migrated with him from land to land, as he went on THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 117 his careers of conquest. She was with him on the field of battle and if the enemy came too near the wagons, her strong arm was a defense to the chil- dren and the stuff. This mode of life was not con- ducive to any undue indulgence of the passions of love. The men and the women were mated, they were not married. Eeligion had not yet made the marriage bond indissoluble. We have very little knowledge of what went on in the daily life of those roaming peoples, but we do know that when they settled down in the lands of middle, western, and southern Europe, they conformed in a large measure to the customs, manners, and laws of the peoples whom they conquered. France, Italy, and Spain latinized the German. In Germany and England, the Teuton maintained his distinctive race charac- teristics of law and language, but even in these countries he was subjugated by the Latin Church and came largely under the influence of the Roman law. Eeligion had sanctified the marriage relation ; had imposed upon the man the obligation of fidelity ; had denied him the companionship of more than one wife and had declared that any putting away of the wife after marriage was a sin to be punished by excommunication from the salvation of the church, thus making the sinner liable to eternal torments. This which added to the safety and the 118 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS dignity of the family woman, became an additional eurse upon the out-family woman. The condition of the out-family woman in the Middle Age was not, however, so bad as the church laws would imply. It is true that the ban of the church was upon her ; she was branded as a sinner and was denied the rites of the Christian religion. But in spite of these efforts of the religious organization, nature would have its way. The church, because of its excess, denying as it did any virtue to the passion of love, holding that passion itself to be shameful, overstepped the mark. It is one of the curiosities of human thought that the great thinkers of the church tried to separate maternity from sexuality. The birth stories that surround the advent of the Founder of Christianity have as their central figure the Madonna, the woman who without tasting the sweets or enduring the degradations of human love gave birth to a child. In accordance with this con- ception, the church held that only they were re- ligious who denied altogether the sexual passion. The monk and the nun was the ideal of the Middle Age. In the outer world of breeding, feeding, and fight- ing, life went on just about as it did before these outre doctrines were preached for the acceptance of men. The enforced celibacy of the clergy gave a new occupation to the out-family woman. Unless THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 119 history is altogether wrong, this woman became the companion and the comforter of the men who guided the destinies of the church. The relation- ship between the man devoted to the church and the woman whose life was free from church control gave rise to many of the tragedies and many of the romances of Medieval times. Abelarde and Helo- ise are examples of what was going on in those days, when the church was striving to quell nature, in high places and in low. Petrarch visited Avignon during the pontificate of Clement VI, and he has left us a picture of the papal city that almost puts ancient Rome to shame. The city on the Rhone was thronged with the most celebrated courtesans of Europe. The licentiousness of Rome itself in the time of the Renaissance is too well known to need comment. All through this period the out-family woman found her place beside the great men of the church. Not only did she console the leisure hours of the clergy, but she was also the mistress of the king and the noble. Her place was honorable and she has left her name in story. Diana of Poitiers was held in equal honor by the French people with their gal- lant King, Henri II. The stories of the Decam- eron and the Heptameron reveal to us the easy vir- tue that prevailed among the royalties and nobilities of the XIV and XV Centuries and tell us how large 120 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS a place was played by the out-family woman dur- ing these periods. Not only did the out-farmily woman in those days have the companionship of kings, but it was also within her right to become the spouse of God. The priestess of the temple was reproduced in the nun. The Christian Church did not admit women into its official priesthood; but the women, not waiting on official sanction, soon developed a priesthood of their own. The monastic system gave to women their opportunity. In every place the convent was built over against the monastery. In the convent the out-family woman had a safe refuge from the lust of men and the scorn of the family woman. Dedicating herself to God, the nun found in the ecstasies of devotion an outlet for her pent-up emo- tions. If like S. Catharine she became the spouse of Christ she was, in her own estimation and in the thought of her generation, more highly honored than any wedded wife in Christendom. The women of the convent have left on record expressions of their affection for their Lord which exhaust the vo- cabulary of love ; their intercourse with their spirit- ual spouse exceeded the joy of the bride in the arms of the bridegroom. Not only did the monastic system give the unmar- ried, out-family woman emotional satisfaction, it also afforded her opportunity for the exercise of her THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 121 faculty of organization. The convent was her home. From the abbess to the novice every woman had her allotted place and task in the household economy. Her hours divided between prayer and labor gave interest and serenity to her life. Safe within the convent walls she passed her days in peace and she died in peace and she slept in peace in her tomb under the altar, awaiting the general resurrection in the last days. At no period in the world's history has the out-family woman found so favorable a place as that which was hers in the con- ventual life of the Middle Ages. Up to this day it is the glory of the Catholic Church that it has a place for the out-family woman. Of its sisters of charity may be spoken the words of the prophet: " More are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord." With the coming of the Protestant Reformation all this was changed. The monastic life had lost its virtue. The monastery and the convent having grown rich and powerful were no longer the home of the meek of the earth. Pride, lechery, and drunkenness defiled these holy places. The younger sons and daughters of the nobility entered the mon- astery and the convent as an easy and agreeable way of getting a living without working. The serfs on the convent land worked hard and long that the women of the convent might live softly. The con- 122 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS vents of England were the easy prey of Henry VIII and Cromwell, because the life within them was cor- rupt. With the Protestant Keformation virginity ceased to have religious value and lost its place of honor. The marriage of Luther was its death blow. The clergy who embraced the new faith eagerly followed the example of their leader and since his day the Protestant clergy have been the most married men in the world. Under the Protestant regime the ancient doctrine of the subordination of woman was revived in all its rigor. Every woman was held to be the prop- erty of some man. The only honorable estate for the woman was that of marriage. Failing to marry she was without standing in the world. The term " old maid " was applied to every unmarried woman over thirty as a term of reproach. The best fate such a woman could hope for was to find a home with some relative where she could make herself useful and by self-suppression secure tolerance from her married sister. The maiden aunt has been an institution in Protestant countries. Any lapse from virtue made of the woman an out- cast. A single error was fatal. Her own father would turn her from his door, her own mother could not shelter her. Driven to a life of prostitu- tion this out-family woman has revenged herself THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 123 upon the society that disowned her by sowing within it the seeds of death. The industrial revolution which has been so dis- astrous to the family has been of the greatest ad- vantage to the out-family woman. She is no longer dependent upon father, husband, or brother, but she is making her own way in life. It is becoming as common for the woman to be without the family as for the man. She no longer keeps her hours, she does not seclude herself by day or by night. She goes about her business, whatever that business may be, without asking permission of any man. The wife and the daughter in the modern home are more or less under the restraint of ancient custom, but only so long as they see fit to remain in the home. The wife when she pleases can leave the roof of her husband and find self-supporting occupation in business life. The daughter is compelled in a mul- titude of cases to seek such occupation whether she so desires or not. The question of sex-relationship is ignored in our modern social arrangements. Men and women associate as if no such force were in existence. The consequence is that we are face to face with a condition never before experienced by man. The women have escaped from the family and they are not yet under community control. It is true that the ancient ways of thinking, the cus- toms and the laws of the past still overshadow the 124 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS life of the woman, and she is compelled to live in new ways as if these new ways were not, and the old were still with us. The out-family woman to-day is a sexual menace, a vast social waste, and a danger to the present political order. We are beginning to awaken to the fact that there is in our midst a sickness that destroys in the noon-day and a pestilence that walks in darkness. We have degraded the out-family woman until she herself has become a source of deg- radation to society. We have made it impossible by our social arrangements for a vast number of women to enter into the marriage relation, as legal- ized by the state, and have condemned them either to a life of solitary chastity or else to a secret illicit indulgence of this strongest element of their nature. It is not the purpose of the present writer to dwell upon the evils that afflict modern society because of the prostitution of woman. He will refer his readers to the work of Havelock Ellis and other writers upon this subject. But he does plead with all who read his words for those unfortunate, sacrificial victims whose blasted lives have been the price all along through history that man has paid for whatever of good the monogamic family has brought to him. The names that have been applied to this woman are no longer mentionable. She is the pitiful creature inhabiting the stews of Athens THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 125 and Rome, the brothels of every city of Medieval Europe, the disorderly houses of modern times. She flits about the streets after nightfall to prey and to be preyed upon. The time is past when we can dispose of her by means of the policeman's club, the night court, the Island, and the House of Ref- uge. She is a necessary product of our social ar- rangements, and until we have altered our plan in life so as to give some honorable place to the out- family woman; or until we have organized our family upon so large a scale that there can be no out-family woman, then we must give to this un- fortunate result of our blindness the pity, the com- passion, the uplifting help which can alone save her and us. It is not however, the woman who has openly com- mitted herself to a life that is not within the pale of family respectability that is most to be pitied. It is the woman who under the adverse circum- stances of our time is struggling to keep herself from falling under the condemnation of the social world. In the middle class, and among the labor- ing-people, marriage is becoming every day more and more hazardous. The young people are awak- ening to this fact and are not willing to commit themselves to the perils of matrimony before they see something like an assurance of an economic basis for the family life. It is possible for the 126 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS young woman to-day to earn her own living: to be free from the restraints and cares of the family life, and she will not give up that freedom unless she believes that in return for her sacrifice she will receive in the marriage estate as much security and comfort as she is able to obtain for herself while a single woman. The young man is earning f 10 or $15 a week ; the young woman nearly as much. If they pool their salaries and set up an establishment they can live in comparative comfort; but the in- stant they marry, this pooling becomes almost im- possible. The duties of the wife and the stenog- rapher conflict. The wife if she is true to her duty must take care of her husband in all that pertains to his personal comfort, cook his food, make his bed, wash his clothing, and in many cases make her and his garments. This is work enough, if prop- erly done, to occupy her time and exhaust her strength. The stenographer must be down at her office at eight o'clock with an alert mind, with muscles untired, and must be in her place until nightfall. Now it is impossible that the stenog- rapher should do what the wife does and yet be able for her own task ; as a consequence when the clerk and the stenographer marry, the income of the stenographer ceases and both must subsist upon the earnings of the clerk. But the stenographer has acquired a certain independence; has indulged THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 127 tastes, has been spending money in a way incom- patible with the narrow means upon which she and her husband must live. The young people can no longer hide this state of affairs from themselves. They know that they cannot indulge themselves in the luxuries of mar- ried love with its house and its children. Eco- nomic forces forbid the banns between these young people, and what are they to do? Society says to them : " You are to live the solitary life in the midst of a great community, you are to deny the fact of your manhood and your womanhood. You are no longer to think of yourselves as one flesh, but you are to consider yourselves as individual units in the great economic world. The system un- der which you live exploits you and your loves for its own purposes and you indulge yourselves in the affections of the heart at your own peril." In every great commercial and industrial center there are thousands upon thousands of young men and women of marriageable age who are not incor- porated in any family organization. The young men are freely indulging themselves in all that re- lates to the sexual life. They do not deny them- selves the least of its pleasures. They are living on a lower sexual plane than that of the hordes in which humanity originated. These young men are a curse to themselves and a curse to mankind. 128 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS They are spreading far and wide that dreadful dis- ease, Syphilis, that to-day more than the white plague is responsible for the misery and premature death of millions. The out-family woman is the prey of this out- family man, and even of the family man. The dreadfulness of her situation in modern life has not yet so much as entered in to the minds of men. The attention of the reformer is fixed altogether upon the so-called fallen woman, whose slavery ex- cites anger and compassion; but the condition of the white slave dreadful as it is, is in one respect at least better than that of her more respectable sister. The woman who belongs to no family, who lives in a little room, whose daily occupation sup- presses the forces of her sexual nature, suffers dis- tress that does not afflict the woman who freely in- dulges her appetites. There are thousands of these women in every city. After their day's work is over they hardly dare to go abroad at night lest they should be hunted by the men who are prowling in the streets of all our cities. They cannot receive male friends in their rooms without exciting odious suspicion. For companionship they must gather with other women, and go about in groups. This is as harmful to the nature of woman as it is to the nature of man. It is because of this that we are having a return to the unnatural vices that dis- THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 129 graced the ancient civilizations. As it was in the days of Paul, men are turning from the natural uses of the women, and women from the natural uses of the man, and are indulging in practices ut- terly ruinous to both the body and the soul. These out-family women are under a constant restraint which they themselves must exercise and because so much of their life force goes into this work of unnatural self-control their womanhood is blighted, they become unhappy and are the source of unhappiness to all who are round about them. There is nothing more pitiful in all the world than the case of the young woman in the depart- ment-store, who comes out of a Saturday night after she has been standing in the fetid atmosphere of that establishment for twelve hours, exhausted physically, mentally, and spiritually and finds her- self on the street. The man is standing there with his invitation to supper. If she accepts that invi- tation she knows the price that she is expected to pay for it. Too many of these exhausted girls are at the moment willing to pay the price, and they do pay the price, and the Saturday-night supper with its attendant pleasure becomes a habit of their lives. Among themselves they call the men who provide suppers their " meal-ticket." Nothing in the way of prostitution is so disastrous as this. Yet who shall blame these forlorn creatures! 130 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS They are the waste of our wasteful society. Na- ture created them for love and happiness; they were to cheer the lives of men with their sweet companionship; but we shut them up all day in our factories and in our stores, and make of them mere automatons; we drive them, in our indus- trial machines, up to and beyond the point of ex- haustion; we curse them and brutalize them and then we send them out of our shops, our stores, and our factories to their little lonely room; to their lunch tables; we deprive them of everything that woman needs whereby to sustain her womanhood, and then we damn them if they go wrong. Sooner or later all this violation of the laws and misuse of the forces of nature will accomplish its woeful re- sult. Unless some way out is found, our civiliza- tion will perish through this abuse of the repro- ductive forces as the civilizations which have pre- ceded it have perished. We can hardly estimate how much of charm is lost to us in life through our neglect of the out- family woman. The time is coming when we will take her into consideration; not because we fear, but because we love. Prejudices, outworn conven- tionalities will have to give place to better thoughts and wiser methods. Just how this problem is to be solved no one at present can say. But this we know that society must take up the work of re- THE OUT-FAMILY WOMAN 131 organization and that quickly. All this outcry concerning the family must cease. The family no longer exists, and even when existing the family failed to solve the problem of sex. The family blessed some women and cursed others. All women have been cramped and warped by it. The family that centered in the man, and existed for the man, has gone and it is well that it has gone. We must not close this brief discussion of the place of the out-family woman in modern life with- out remarking that once again the out-family woman has found the refuge, the solace, the occu- pation of her life in the service of religion. She is, however, no longer a spouse of the gods, she has become the mother of humanity. The Catholic ideal of the Madonna is when taken spiritually a true ideal. We have among us to-day women who are mothers, and yet who because of their mother- hood have renounced the sweets and the degrada- tions of mere human love. They are the priestesses of humanity. They take to their breast the for- saken children, they preside over the new family. This modern priestess of humanity differs alto- gether from the ancient priestess and from the medieval nun. She renounces the physical pleas- ures of her sex, but she does not renounce her sex ; she is not afraid, she goes uncovered and unblush- ing into the company of men. She controls them 132 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS by her splendid womanhood. She demands of them the right to take part with them in all that con- cerns human living. For a time they ridiculed, but to-day they tremble. They are beginning to fight this woman, because in her they see and feel the coming doom of that world which man has created for his own pleasure and in his own inter- est. The woman's world is at hand, and the place of man in that world will be altogether different from the one which he occupies in the world which he has made for himself. VI THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES QUITE the most interesting and startling phe- nomenon of present-day history is the mil- itant suffragette movement in England. Enime- line Pankhurst, the leader of that movement, is more than a woman, she is a social portent. In her a great idea is expressing itself in a way that it is impossible for the world any longer to ignore or neglect. Mrs. Pankhurst is the prophetess of an age to come, the martyr of a new religion. She may he imprisoned and die in prison, but her im- prisonment and her death will not arrest for a moment the movement which she is directing. In the militant suffragette, the struggle for the rights of women has entered into politics and it will re- main an active force until it has fully accomplished its purpose. This movement is but little more than fifty years old. It had its origin just prior to the mid- dle of the nineteenth century when a few women, most of them single women, began to assert them- selves and to claim the right to act freely in the outward political and social world. Some of them 133 134 THE EISE OF THE WOBKING-CLASS refused to enter the family and such of them as were members of the family declined any longer to be confined within its narrow boundaries. When, in an assembly of men, Susan B. Anthony stood up to speak, the men laughed and the women gasped. Such a thing as a woman speaking in public was unheard of and a violation of the most sacred tra- ditions. From that little beginning we have now the tremendous manifestation of the power of woman in every department of life. In the sphere of education the woman has claimed for herself and has secured the right to an equal training with men. In our high schools the girl graduates outnumber the boys. Our colleges for women are increasing every day, both in equipment and in the number of their students. The women have not only invaded the educational world, they have captured it. The training of the youth of America is almost entirely in the hands of women. The men have been driven from this occupation. If a man to-day is in the teaching-profession in our common or high schools he seems as sadly out of place as if he were handling a needle and thread. In the higher ranks of the educational profession man in a measure still holds his own, but the woman is pressing him closely. In colleges which are exclusively feminine, the women are already the masters. They will not, perhaps, for a long THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 135 time, be admitted to the teaching force of the ex- clusively masculine institutions of learning. But these institutions no longer hold the supreme place in the educational system which once was theirs. They do not supply the teaching-force of the coun- try. This force comes from the colleges for women. It is a fact to be pondered that during all the formative periods of life our lads are under the influence and training, not of men, but of women. The boys' school has gone out of existence, — only here and there do we find one flourishing in Amer- ica. That friction of boy with boy under the eye of the master which was so important an element in his development no longer prevails. In Eng- land, and upon the Continent, this revolution in educational forces has not gone so far as it has in the United States, but even there it is on the way, and present tendencies indicate that this revo- lution is to progress until all over the Western World the woman is supreme in matters of educa- tion. The break-up of the family has released the woman from the duty of training the young in the home and placed upon her the duty of train- ing the young in the school. The new era has given her a larger sphere and made her the educa- tional mother of a more numerous offspring. It is impossible for the mother within the home to 136 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS do anything at all commensurate with what the teacher can do for her child in the school. This is a part of that concentration of effort and divi- sion of labor which has created the modern indus- trial world. Education is now an industry. It employs its workers, it brings its children to the great buildings, and it turns out its product accord- ing to business methods. We shall never return to the more primitive system of home education, and the mother's knee will never again be the seat of childish learning. We have socialized education and by so doing have brought the women out of the home and placed them in an honorable position in the general struc- ture of society. The teaching profession has been recognized as belonging of right to woman, and she who undertakes it in no wise loses caste. It is as respectable to be a teacher as it is to be a married wife or an unemployed daughter in the household. Social necessity gained this victory for woman, and it has given her an advantage which will en- able her at last to accomplish her full emancipa- tion. The great majority of teachers are in the movement for securing political and social and legal rights for their sex. They are a mighty army and are at the well-spring of social life. The lads trained by these young women come out of the schools with their minds biased in favor of the THE REVOLT OF THE PAEASITES 137 equality of women with men in every department of life. In the business world the woman has found for herself that occupation which is denied her in her home. She has not yet fully reconciled the male world to this new state of affairs. In our offices and in our stores the presence of women as clerks and saleswomen was up to a recent time resented by the men ; but economic necessity was more pow- erful than male discontent. Woman being the cheaper commodity was bought by the commercial world in place of the dearer strength of the man. She is now driving, if she has not already driven, man out of the field of salesmanship so far as the retail business is concerned. Women do the work better and cheaper than the men; such being the case the men must by the law of commercial neces- sity give place to the women. To-day that class of men who formerly were clerks in the various com- mercial establishments are being driven into me- chanical and servile employments and have lost their place in the middle class and gone down into the rank of the workers. The effect of this revo- lution is not yet fully realized. It is a part of the process that is working toward that radical change which is to make out of the modern world the world that is to come. The higher ranks of the business world are still held by the men, and those in the 138 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS higher positions are entrenching themselves against what they feel to be a coming assault of the women. The heads of our great commercial establishments, our bankers, the captains of our industries, are the rulers of the present age; they are the bitter op- ponents of the movement for the rights of women. It is against these that the women are arraying themselves with equal bitterness in the struggle for their greater freedom. These chieftains of the business world together with their immediate sub- ordinates, the higher officials and the smaller mer- chants together with the professional class, the lawyers and the ministers of religion, compose the great conservative party in the present contest for the equality of women. The agitation for the rights of women, with a few exceptions, has left altogether unaffected the higher ranks of the social order. Among the no- bility of Europe and the very wealthy of America and of all countries the woman who is contending for the equal rights of her sex is despised, hated, and feared. The women of the upper class are now beginning to organize themselves into a party op- posing suffrage. They are having their public meetings, their parades, they appear before the investigating committees and are throwing the whole force of upper-class society in the way of this movement to prevent its further advance. THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 139 It is surprising to find the large majority of the wives of the working-men and the daughters of the working-men whp live at home, without outside employment, indifferent, or antagonistic to the con- tention for the rights of women. It is the tacit opposition of this class more than any other oppos- ing power that is delaying the accomplishment of the full emancipation of women. The condition of the working-woman would seem to place her nat- urally in the ranks of those who are struggling for the betterment of woman's life in the world, and the strangeness of their opposition demands ex- planation. We find that explanation in the make-up of the very movement itself. All of the leaders of the feminist movement, with here and there an excep- tion, are middle-class women. They are the women of the households that are well-to-do, that possess sufficient for the family to live on in comfort and to have many of the luxuries of present-day life. The middle-class woman has been affected more than any other by the great changes which have taken place in our industrial system whereby the home has been bereft of much that formerly be- longed to it. About the fifth decade of the nine- teenth century, the woman of the middle-class fam- ily awakened to the startling fact that she had really nothing to do. She had become the play- 140 THE KISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS thing of man. She had been reduced to the posi- tion of a parasite. She had to employ her sex- power to acquire her place in the world, and to depend upon that power to maintain her place. At that period a woman was created of a pattern un- known to nature and the derision of art. We who have passed middle age remember that woman. She still lives in the pages of Godey's Lady's Book. Now take that feminine journal of the nineteenth century and lay it beside the Ladies' Home Jour- nal of the twentieth and the reader will be able to compare the present-day woman with her grand- mother. The woman of the earlier period was created to answer the demands of her time. She conformed to the conception of female beauty that then prevailed. Man was then in the heyday of his lordship so far as the middle class was con- cerned. His women were to be the ornaments of his house, and the coy companions of his hours of ease. Strength was the essential of manhood: fragility of womanhood. He was the oak, grown strong in the open air, fighting the tempests of life : she was the vine, clinging to his mighty trunk and sheltering herself from the wind and the cold by hiding herself amidst his branches and beneath his leaves. She was typified as a sylph-like creature, with a waist patterned after that of the wasp which a man could span with his hands; her cheek was THE EEVOLT OF THE PARASITES 141 pale, except when suffused by the blushes of mod- esty, her main duty was to conceal the fact that she was a woman, if her feet by chance should peep out from under her petticoats she was scandalized ; she hardly dared to walk abroad lest the winds should ruffle her skirts and the sun gaze too boldly on her face. As soon as this woman attained to womanhood, she had and was to have only one object in view, and that was to secure a lover and to transform that lover into a husband. The whole of the mid- dle class of the English-speaking world was obsessed with this conception. It took possession of literature ; it enthralled painting ; it was all that people had to talk about. A woman was inter- esting from the time when she began to receive the attentions of men until one of them had chosen her and she had married him. With the ringing of the wedding bells, her day of greatness passed and she settled down into the prosaic life of a middle-class wife. The days of her youth were the precious days of her romance. She was supposed to sit still and wait for the male to come and woo her, and it was a misfortune, if that wooing ran smoothly ; it was no true love that did not have to encounter rough weather. And so w r e have had the modern novel that gives us the history ad nauseam of these incidents of courtship. Every possible complica- 142 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS tion has been worn threadbare. The irate father, the villainous rival, and the one or two or three other possibilities have been repeated over and over again until the modern novel is perishing through inanition. After her marriage the middle-class woman found herself combining within her one person the three offices that Demosthenes assigned to three distinct women. She was the wife, the mistress, and the concubine of her husband. Middle-class morality had banished the mistress and the concubine to outer darkness and had laid the duty hitherto per- formed by them upon the wife. That licentious- ness, if it were licentiousness, which gave occupa- tion to the mistress and the concubine, now wasted itself under the form of marriage within the home itself. . The woman had no rights to her own per- son. By day and by night she was subject to her man. She was kept during all the active years of her womanly life bearing and caring for children. The middle-class man brought down from the pre- ceding age the notion that children were a family asset, and he laid the duty of maternity upon his wife. It is a shame to our manhood that during so long a period we men have been untrained in all that pertains to the rightful relations of the man with the woman, and that we have acted upon impulse instead of being guided by reason. The THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 143 condition of the middle-class woman in all the com- mercial nations, and especially among the English- speaking people has not been overproductive of hap- piness. After the day of romance was gone the woman settled down to her monotonous life, brought her children into the world, struggled to give them such training as lay within her power and then passed on into a barren age. She was fortunate if she was able to secure the companion- ship of her man and these two could live together and comfort each other in the decline of life. A strange disaster fell upon the middle-class woman during the early and middle part- of the nineteenth century. It was during that time that the industrial revolution was swiftly accomplish- ing its end. Man having ceased to be a fighter and hunting being no longer possible had to find for himself some new occupation. The invention of labor-saving machinery enabled him to employ his powers in the organization of industry. One by one he robbed the home of its occupations and organized them into his great out-family system. First the spinning-wheel disappeared, then the brewing-vat, then the soap-boiler, then the candle- mold, then the mangel, and at last the oven; but worst of all he robbed the woman in her home of the needle. The middle-class woman was the one upon whom this change had the most blighting ef- 144 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS feet. She was able to employ domestics to do the menial work of the house, to make the beds, to sweep the rooms, and to cook what little food there was left to cook in the house. When this middle- class woman woke up in the morning she was at a loss for something to do. This change in methods of business which took place in the early part of the nineteenth century, whereby there was a separation of the work of production and consumption, when the living was earned outside the house and the spending was done in and from the house, was thus most dis- astrous to the woman. She was by means of that method reduced from the rank of a business part- ner to a menial. She no longer worked with her husband, she only worked for him. She did not share with him in the oversight of his affairs, she was not his partner, she was his housekeeper. He and she had little to do with each other during the hours of daylight. He left the house as soon as he had eaten his breakfast, and did not return until it was time for dinner. His wife was not at all familiar with his work, and her ignorance in that respect tended further to degrade her in his esteem. The man's business was of vast importance; the woman's work of little or no value ; he had a definite result to show, so much money earned. While she worked all day at a round of menial tasks, cooking, THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 145 washing dishes, making beds, sweeping floors, and when evening came the family wealth had not been increased but decreased. Even if she did not do these tasks herself, she superintended the servants of the house and these also were an expense. This relation of the woman to the man caused friction between them and placed the woman in a humili- ating condition. She had continually to account for all that she spent and was constantly called in question for her expenditure. The contempt of the man for the woman's work has become proverbial and is one of the irritating causes that has brought about the breach in do- mestic life. As the man held the purse, he was naturally the ruler and the woman lived in con- stant fear of his financial censure. Not only did the woman lose her place in the business world of the man by this change of method, but she almost forfeited his companionship. Dur- ing all the hours of daylight these two were sepa- rated. They onlj came together in the night. The woman no longer shared in the responsibilities of the family business, she was only the companion at bed and board. These two were not together enough in the daylight, they were too much to- gether in the dark. The woman was more and more relegated to the work of ministering to the pleasure of her man. For many women, indeed, 146 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS if not for all, the necessity of sharing the room with the man continually, is irksome and in many in- stances degrading. Economically the woman was now simply the servant of the man. Sexually she was his mistress and his concubine as well as his wife. But these women had the blood of the English- men in their veins. They were the daughters of the vikings and the freebooters who only a few hundred years ago had overrun Europe and estab- lished themselves as the lords of the Western World. Their great-grandmothers had fought in the battles by which the sovereignty of the race had been won. The blood in the veins of these women began not only to send the blush of shame to the cheek but to boil with indignation in the heart at finding themselves reduced to the position of the upper servant in the house of the man and the mere ministrant to his nightly pleasure. And by a desperate effort the more adventuresome of this subjected class threw off some of the restraints of their servitude. The movement for the emanci- pation of woman is a rebellion against parasitism. Prior to this movement the woman was an intel- lectual, a spiritual, and a physical parasite. She was expected to think as the man thought, to be- lieve as the man believed, and to eat the bread which came to her from the hand of the man. It THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 147 is true that this subjection was never complete. The woman frequently was the gray mare and her stronger mind dominated the mind of her man, but the system under which she lived condemned this, and the gray mare was a subject of derision and her mate of contempt. The struggle for emancipation originated in this middle class. Susan B. Anthony, when she rose up to speak in an assembly composed of men and women struck the first blow in America at. female parasitism. She asserted the right to think for herself and to express her thought publicly. The surprise with which this maiden effort was received is an evidence of how completely the woman was in parasitic relation to the man. From that day to this, the revolt of woman against the cramping and corrupting conditions of her life has increased in magnitude and violence until to-day it is the most important, significant, and the most dangerous of all the revolutionary forces that are threatening the present order. That simpering creature, who is pictured in the Godey's Lady's Book, who has been the heroine of innumer- able novels, has cast off her ladyhood and stands before the world a woman. She is no longer ashamed of herself or afraid of her body. She has thrown the side-saddle into the discard and rides astride; she is ready for any enterprise, from the 148 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS prize fight to the climbing a mountain; she devel- ops her muscles more than her sentiments; she is contending for her rights not only by persuasion but by violence ; she is asserting for herself the in- alienable right of the Englishman to " 'eave arf a brick." The male world stands aghast at this spectacle. He cries in alarm that this woman has lost her womanhood; he has persuaded himself in the belief that it has always been the lot of the woman to walk in the shadow of the man, to shelter herself under his protection and to receive from him the guidance in life, and he is quite convinced that fighting is his exclusive province. He is un- aware of the fact that the woman has fighting blood in her, as well as the man; and when that blood is excited she is more fatal than the male in her destructive powers. The French found that out in the great revolution; at every period in the world's history, where the woman has risen she has accomplished a work of destruction that might well excite the envy of man. It is idle to lay to Mrs. Pankhurst this great movement which has become militant in England. Mrs. Pankhurst may be the leader of the movement but she is not the movement. It created her, she did not bring it into existence. It was the pres- sure of the parasitic class against their fate that originated this movement and it is the determina- THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 149 tion of that class to escape from the deadly evil that threatens them, that will give to that movement increased momentum until the full rights of the woman are recognized and she takes her place as the physical, the social, and political equal of the man. She is no longer content to be either his housekeeper, his mistress, or his concubine. She demands that when she gives pleasure she shall receive pleasure. From this time forward, the woman will insist upon ceasing to be a chattel and will claim ownership of herself. Only under dire pressure will she ever again sell her sex-power for money, either in marriage or out of it. The militant suffragette movement is simply the natural reaction of the woman against her age- long suppression. She is avenging herself and her sex of the injuries, the insolences, the degradations which the male has heaped upon her during these many centuries. Dramatic expression has been given this revolt of the woman in Ibsen's Doll's House, and literary exposition in Olive Schreiner's Woman and Labor. By the voice of the South African woman, the whole womanhood of the West- ern World has uttered the cry : " Give us labor, or give us death." It is not liberty that women crave, it is labor. It is not pleasure that they desire, it is noble duty. They are fighting for the chance to live; to have the free play of all their 150 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS wonderful powers ; the right to walk, to run, to leap, to climb ; the right to ride, to row, to sail the seas ; the right to think, to speak, to write, — and, most of all, the right to love. Women will no longer submit to be chattels, to be bought and sold in the market. This is no longer a man's world. It is rapidly becoming a woman's world and the men must look to it lest they be relegated to that subordinate posi- tion which has been so long occupied by the woman. The invention of labor-saving machinery, the cen- tering of activity in industry, the failure of the chase, the decline of militarism are all signs of a coming change in which the masculine powers will be of less and less importance and the powers of the woman be in increasing demand. Even to-day, the woman has an equal if not a better chance for employment than the man. Every more delicate machine gives her a new opportunity. The tele- phone demands the girls. A boy is an impossi- bility in that occupation. The great factories are now so equipped that they have little or no use for mere muscular strength. All they require is the oversight of an intelligence that is quick and of a hand that is deft, and this is the woman-in- telligence and the woman-hand. The man, because he has been abroad, has the wider vision, the greater mastery of general principles. The woman, THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 151 because she has been confined, has the greater grasp of detail; and as modern business is on the whole largely a matter of detail, it calls for the woman more than for the man. The man is the organizer, but when the organization is once ac- complished, then the woman is the better adminis- trator ; and as we must sooner or later come to the end of possible organization in business, when henceforth administration only will be required, then by the law of efficiency the woman will drive the man out of business. Even on the battlefield the woman to-day can do the work as well if not better than the man. The modern instruments of death lend themselves easily to her gentle hand. She has but to move the lever of a machine and she will mow down men a mile or two away as if they were grass under a scythe; and as war has become an industry, in which woman's labor is cheaper than man's, we must expect at no distant time to find all armies equipped with a corps of women to do this more delicate work; for the woman will not refuse the task. Economic forces have already driven her from the home into the factory and they can as easily drive her to the field of battle. It would not be strange if the present revolution- ary movement were to come full circle and man find himself a parasite upon the labor of the 152 THE EISE OF THE TORKING-CLASS woman, even as for so long a time the middle-class woman has been more or less a parasite upon the labor of the man. This condition is already so common that men are living upon the earnings of women and are not ashamed. That vilest form of manhood, the cadet, does not hesitate to take from the woman of the street her earnings and spend them upon himself. And in ranks above his, there are men innumerable who are content to live with- out working so long as they can find women to work for them. The man who marries money and lives upon the money that he marries, has already entered upon a life of parasitism. And that seems to be the one ambition of the upper middle-class men and the lower gentry of the present day. Sci- ons of the British nobility marry American heir- esses and subsist without shame upon the fortunes that have been earned by the fathers of these women. Only by being received into full partner- ship, or by being made man's equal in every de- partment of life, can the woman escape from par- asitism, — or the man be saved from it. These facts are sufficient to explain the movements for woman's rights and the militant attitude of the stronger element of that movement. We do not need to seek for it in any change in the woman's na- ture. In all great races the woman has been the fellow-worker with the man, and whenever she THE KEVOLT OF THE PARASITES 153 loses her place at bis side, then the loss is not only hers but his. Wherever women are secluded and are looked upon as the mere instruments of man's pleasure, the shadows of man's existence, there you find a base and a debasing people. The Turk has failed in Europe and the Hindoo in India, largely because their women have been parasites. We are then to look with admiration upon even the most outrageous efforts which are made by the women of our race to deliver themselves from so degrading and so disastrous a condition. We can now readily understand why it is that the movement for the rights of women has not affected to any great degree the nobility of England or the extremely rich class in America. With an excep- tion here and there, these are all anti-suffragists and are bitterly opposed to any change in their political or social status. The reason for this is plain. The lives of these women are so wholly par- asitic; parasitism has been their condition for so long a period, that they have become unconscious of it ; they do not look upon it as a disgrace but as a glory. In their station of life, the great duty of the woman is not to produce, but to consume, and these women of the upper class have organized consumption on so grand a scale that they find in it the full satisfaction of their lives. They have been taught that upon their consumption depends the 154 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS prosperity of the rest of the world. Because they live in a dozen or more houses, because they are waited upon by a retinue of servants, because sea and land are traversed to find delicacies for their table, because they are dressed in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, therefore the rest of mankind is able to find employment and so to earn a living. This philosophy of the leisure class, by which it is persuaded that without its leisure no work would ever be done, is one of those queer tricks of human thinking that have done so much to lead the world astray. These women do nothing for themselves, they do not so much as put on their own clothing or take care of their own hair, they hardly bathe their own bodies. Maids without limit wait upon them. Men run their slightest errand. They are picked up and carried about and many of them have lost all sense of in- dependence. Among the English the outdoor sports have saved this class from the utter degra- dation which is the natural result of their way of living ; and because the American imitates the Eng- lish in these things, the American likewise has been delivered from the uttermost consequences of her folly. But parasitism is a disease of society that in the end is fatal. No parasitic class can long endure. And the upper class in England and their imita- THE KEVOLT OF THE PAEASITES 155 tors in America are already under sentence of death. The great landed aristocracy of England fell almost without resistance before the onslaught of a little Welsh attorney, backed as he was by thirty working-men in the House of Parliament. Future generations will wonder how it came to pass that this great order of men who had for so many generations ruled over the realm of England and established the imperial power of England in the far countries of the world succumbed so easily to the attack of its enemy. The passing of the Bill depriving the House of Lords of the absolute veto is the most significant event in present-day his- tory. With the passage of that Bill a power ante- dating the Conquest ceased to be. A revolution was accomplished in English government and a new era of political existence inaugurated. The rea- son for this is that the nobility of England had ceased to perform any necessary or useful tasks. Their women had become wholly parasitic, the fiber was eaten out of them, they had lost their vigor and so they perished. They still have the name of living, but with the outworn nobilities of France, of Italy, of Spain, and the declining no- bilities of German} 7 , they will soon be nothing other than an ornament, an historical survival, and will sink into the lassitude of utter parasitism and so gradually die out of existence. In America the 156 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS idle rich, are already doomed. They have no root in the past to give them any lengthened life. They have never added any value to the wealth of the community. They have been simply consumers and as consumers they have wasted the substance of the nation; they have corrupted themselves and have enfeebled society. The second generation of the rich in America are for the most part mere cumberers of the ground. Many of them are vile, most of them are useless, and all of them are to-day under the shadow of doom. Of course, there are among the wealthy of our nation many men of sterling character, of fine abilities, men who would adorn any station in life, but it is becoming more and more difficult for these men to exert the influ- ence which ought to be theirs, or to give full ex- pression to the life that is in them. In these days of rising democracy, the noble and the rich, are not advantaged, they are handicapped by their nobility and their riches. They are almost forced down into a life of uselessness, of ennui, and of moral de- cay. The women of this class suffer more than the men. They lose all capacity to do a woman's work in the world. If they bear a child or two, they thereafter refuse the office of maternity, and their children are put away at once to nurse ; these children are in the keeping of governesses and tu- tors, the mother simply performs the physical func- THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 157 tion of motherhood and does all the rest of her work by deputy. There are, it is true, exceptions to this, but such is the rule. Nor will these women consent to be the ministers of the pleasures of their men. They are perfectly content that their men should seek satisfaction elsewhere if they are al- lowed like liberties. These women have no time to give to such matters as occupy the minds of those who are engaged in the great effort to secure for their sex equal political, social, and economic rights. They are too busy eating, drinking, danc- ing, yachting, flirting, to have any time to spare for more serious matters. In England, up to this time, they have mixed more or less in politics, but with the passing of the Lords this too will go, and the women will then be simply creatures of pleas- ure, contributing nothing worth while to the com- mon good, and so will perish in their parasitism as the similar women have perished in the ages that are gone. The women of the working-class are not found in the movement for equal rights, — for a far dif- ferent reason. These women have not yet been forced into the degradation of parasitism. If they are the wives of working-men, they must work early and late to keep their men in working condi- tion. They are the stokers of the labor boilers. They make ready the fuel that keeps the machine 158 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS a-going. And not only this, but by and through them the labor force of the world is replenished and maintained. Unless these women gave them- selves to the task of childbearing, our present civ- ilization would perish for lack of industrial en- ergy. Nature demands of them that they shall bring into the world many children. In their class infant mortality is great, and hence a high birth- rate is required. We sometimes marvel that the women of the working-class are so fruitful. We speak of their fertility with contempt and we even abhor it. They seem to breed like maggots; and so they do and for the same reason; the maggot's life is short and uncertain and if the maggot did not multiply exceedingly, there would be no mag- gots. Because of this, the woman of the working- class can have nothing to do with any movement for her betterment. While present conditions endure, this woman has placed upon her the duty of keep- ing replenished the forces of labor. Her children that survive are the labor force of the coming gen- eration, and as long as this woman is kept in her present estate, so long she will be indifferent to that disturbance which is now agitating the mid- dle class. In her own phraseology, she " ain't got no time for sich nonsense." Her man and her babies give her enough to do and she is satisfied. The out-family working-woman is aligning her- THE REVOLT OF THE PARASITES 159 self with those who are agitating for the equal rights of women. She has found out that her pres- ent unfranchised condition prevents her from se- curing for herself anything like what she ought to have for the work which she does for the world. She is exploited by the laws which men have made in their own interests. She is held back because she has no voice or vote in matters legislative. Men ignore her on account of her powerlessness. Coming to a knowledge of this, she is now march- ing in the streets, speaking in the halls, and using every means of agitation lawful and unlawful, to deliver herself from the subjection under which she labors. It is the alliance of the out-family working-woman with the middle-class woman in the family that is giving its tremendous force to the present movement for woman's rights. Parasitism and industrial slavery are combining to overthrow the present system and to establish a new world in which men and women shall be upon the same plane, each owning himself or herself and working each with the other for mutual benefit, neither sub- ject to the other, but combining to form a partner- ship in which all the forces of life, male and female, freed from unnatural conventions and re- straints, shall put forth their utmost energy to build a human nature acceptable to the gods, and create a world in which that human nature can 160 THE RISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS live decently, joyously, lovingly. The revolt of the parasites is a good sign of the times. If they die in their effort, they will still be the saviors of the race. It is within the range of probability that Em- meline Pankhurst, the leader of this movement, may, by future historians, be reckoned with Pym and Hampden as having enlarged the liberties of the people, and her monument find a place in West- minster Abbey. VII THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS THE working-class in the modern industrial world is in a state of chronic revolt. From the very beginning of the present system there has been this spirit of discontent in the heart of the worker. At present this revolt is assuming the proportions of a revolution. Hardly a day passes that we are not compelled to read of some outbreak of hostility in the fields of industry. The strike is an hourly occurrence. The worker is now mak- ing use of the forces of the natural world in his warfare. He is using dynamite and other violent means to destroy the very tools that employ him. So widespread is this spirit of disorder that it is threatening the stability of all our institutions. Not only is the factory in danger, but the State and the Church are likewise in peril. There is a fierce hatred in the hearts of the working-men against everything that has come down from the past. Whether rightly or wrongly, they think and feel that these institutions, being a creation of the upper classes, are necessarily hostile to their wel- 161 162 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS fare. It is quite impossible that the discontent which now prevails should not increase and in the end make revolutionary changes in the present or- der of society. The worker is not in rebellion against work. He is rebelling against his task and there is a vast difference between a task and a work. Work is the delight of men. Nature has associated work and pleasure. In all the animal world, if not also in the vegetable, it has made life depend upon work. Every creature has to put forth exertion in order to secure its food-supply, and it is by means of this exertion that the animal organization is developed and kept in health and happiness. All nature is full of the joy of work. You hear the birds chirp- ing in their nests as they preen their wings in the early morning to fly abroad in search of the morn- ing meal. The dog loves the chase with a mad passion. He is beside himself with joy when he sees the rabbit and runs after it. There is noth- ing more placid, more pleasurable, than the soul of a cow as she grazes in the field and then lies down to chew her cud in quiet content. If you take away from these creatures the necessity of work, you deprive them of life. Our cattle are dying by the millions in our barns, because we have shut them up and feed them from the silo. And man is nothing other than an animal. He must THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 163 work to live, as well as live to work. If he does not work then he very soon ceases to be. If he cannot find work he must make work. To be truly healthy he must exercise all the organs of his na- ture; his hands, his feet, his heart, and his head must all be busy if the man is to develop naturally and wholesomely. True work in order to be enjoyed must be in- teresting. It must so occupy the attention and employ the faculties of the worker that he will find his delight in the work itself. Nature has so ar- ranged it that all natural, necessary work is more or less interesting. When man had to get his liv- ing by hunting and fishing he found excitement and pleasure in his occupation. He was out under the open sky, he was roaming from place to place, he was always anticipating a good catch or a good find. When he had domesticated the animals these increased immensely the range of his w T ork and consequently of his pleasure. The herdsman found delight in the occupation of leading or driv- ing his flocks or herds from pasture to pasture; and while they were feeding he could please his soul in all the goings-on of the world round about him. The birds made music for him, there was a drama enacting in the heavens for his delectation, the winds and the waters were ministering to his sense of sound; his occupation did not hinder, it 164 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS helped, the development of all his higher faculties. The pastoral life has given to the world its great- est poetry. There the highest and holiest feelings were developed; the relation of the shepherd to the sheep became the type of the relation of the man to his God. With the coming of agriculture as the principal source of the food-supply this same law of associat- ing work with pleasure continues, but not with the same force. When man became a plowman, then work among humanity began to change into a task. But this change did not greatly affect the true re- lation of the man to his work. That work was in- tensely interesting. It was done in the open. It carried on into the new era the associations of the woods and the fields. Seed-time and harvest were celebrated with festivities. Man's religion and man's work were one and the same. His gods were the gods of the field, of the waters, and of the skies. During all the period in which agriculture was the main source of wealth there was no great quarrel of man with his work; and when such discontent did arise, it was because of another reason than the work itself. The coming of handicraft, as a means of earning a living, also brought with it added pleasure to humanity. The handicraftsman w T as an artist in embryo. He could see his work grow- ing under his hand and his chief delight was in that THE EEVOLT OF THE WORKERS 165 work itself. If be were hanging out at risk carv- ing a flower upon the lintel of the door of some cathedral it was the growing flower that he loved. He did not think at all of the wage which he was to receive for carving. The carving itself was his delight. As we go into the great buildings of Eu- rope, in which there still survive the results of the handicraftsmen of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, we see that these workers are not dead; they are alive in their work. As we look at what they have done we can almost see the joy that went into every stroke of the hammer and every mark of the chisel. These men ate black bread and drank sour beer contentedly, because their life was not centered in their bread and their beer, but in the work which their hands found to do. Before and above all things then, work to be life-giving must be interesting and pleasant. If a man is to find any satisfaction in what he does, it must not only be thus interesting and de- lightful, but it must also be useful in the highest sense of that word. A living work must minister to life. When a man goes forth to his work it must be with the expectation that when he finishes that work he shall have accomplished somewhat worth while. He must add, if his work is to sat- isfy his soul, to the real wealth of the world. He must make the world an easier, a better, a more 166 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS delightful place to live in. When he sows his seed he looks forward to the harvest, and when he gath- ers in the harvest it is that he may produce the bread that strengthens man's heart and the wine that makes glad the heart of man. When he cuts down a tree he knows that the timber of that tree can be made into a house to shelter man from the heat and the cold; and when the house is builded, with the residue of the wood he can kindle the fire to make cheerful the hearth and upon the ashes of the fire he can bake his bread. And the more useful the work the more satisfactory it is to the worker. If a vagrant comes and asks for work and you appoint him to the task of carrying stones from one place to another, and then after he car- ries them tell him to carry them back again, he will rebel. The uselessness of the task disgusts him. When he asks for work he wants work, not busy idleness. Not until a man has become so parasitic that he has lost the sense of real work, can he employ himself in that which ends in noth- ing. Digging potatoes is interesting because po- tatoes mean life. To the real worker playing golf is without interest because it means simply get- ting a little ball into a hole. One of the evidences of parasitism among the upper classes of our social order is that they delight in exercise for the sake of exercise and do not employ their physical and THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 167 intellectual powers for the purpose of producing that which in itself is of value. It is also necessary that work, if it is to be of use to the worker, shall not pass beyond the limit of work into the region of labor. Work must em- ploy the energies of men, but it must not exhaust them. Just so soon as work becomes irksome, just so soon it becomes destructive. It is one thing to be pleasantly tired, it is quite another thing to be painfully tired. If a man works up to and beyond the limit of his energy, then that energy, being exhausted, is not easily replenished. So careful is nature of this law that she has provided rest after work as a necessity throughout all her ani- mal creation. So many hours to put forth energy, so many hours to draw in energy. Let man violate this law and he suffers the consequence. His de- pleted energies no longer respond to the call of his will, the forces of his life are weakened, and he passes into a state of exhaustion that ends in death. In our modern world the gospel of work has been preached until it has taken possession of the mind and made the indulgence in leisure a sin. No one to-day dares to loaf and make the acquaintance of his own soul. No one presumes to idle and by idle- ness to come into contact with the great energies that play in the idle world of nature. In nature we find work transformed into play. The sun 168 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS comes forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber and rejoices as a giant to run his course. The clouds float idly in the sky. The birds do nothing but hop from branch to branch. All true work is play. All splendid occupation is magnificent idle- ness. Poetry is the employment of the leisure hour. There is a fourth characteristic of true work which is essential, if the worker is to find satis- faction in his work, and that is, that the work must employ in due proportion all the various faculties of man's organism. It must not be monotonous; change is of the very essence of pleasurable work. The worker must pass from task to task. He must employ his muscles in walking and in handling, his mind must be occupied in thinking, his eye in seeing, his ear in hearing. Unless he has this change of occupation he soon wearies of his work and with weariness comes disgust and with disgust the end of his work. No man will long continue contentedly doing the same thing over and over again. His very life frets under such restraint until by fretting he wears himself out. There is an additional element necessary if work is to play its proper part in the life of a man, and that is, that it must be his own work. He himself must do it. It must as far as possible originate with him. It must be the outcome of his own THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 169 thought. He himself must direct it. No matter how humble that work may be, nor how noble, whether it be the digging of a ditch, or the discov- ery of a star, the man who does it must be able to say to himself : " This I have done. It is the work of my hand, the outcome of my thought, the expression of my will " ; and just in proportion as the work and the worker are one, so is the work, in itself, great and pleasurable to the worker. When a man ceases to control what he does and is altogether under the direction of a will outside himself, he becomes a machine, he ceases to be a man. All joy of working is gone from him and he goes like a " quarry slave " to his task. He is no longer a worker, he is simply worked. If our reasoning is correct, true work must be pleasurable; and in order to be delightful, it must be interesting; if it would be interesting, it must be useful. If the worker is to find continued de- light in his work, that work must never degenerate into a task, it must always be well within the limits of his endurance, it must never be so great as to break either his back or his heart; and it must al- ways remain within his own control. His will must be over the work — guiding his hand to accomplish it. The discontent of the modern workman arises from the fact that all of these laws governing work 170 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS are violated by our modern system of industry. We have destroyed the possibility of work. Under our system man has ceased to be a worker. He has become, in some instances, a laborer, in others an automaton. His work, instead of developing his manhood, destroys it. We have separated work altogether from the idea of joy. When the workman rises in the morning and takes his din- ner-pail in hand he does so with reluctance. There is no spring to him as he starts out from his home to his factory. If he has not altogether lost the soul of joy, he envies the bird on the wing, as that bird flies forth from its nest to its daily task. When the factory door closes upon him, it is as if he were a prisoner and not a worker. His occupa- tion has intervened between him and all the sources of human joy. For him there is no blue sky, nor cloud castle, nor shadow on the hills, nor music of running water, nor whispering of breezes in the tree-tops. He sees nothing but the stained and ugly walls of his work-room. His ears are as- saulted with the din and clangor of the ever rest- less machine. He cannot walk to and fro and find pleasure in walking. He is tied to one place. No one who looks into the faces of the working-men and working-women, as they go to and come from their work, can help being startled at the joyless- ness of their countenances. They seem to be as THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 171 lost creatures in a lost world. The old theological doctrine of the fall of man fits them precisely ; they have fallen from the high estate of the man who delighted in his work to the miserable condition of the man who is made wretched by his toil. The case of the women who are compelled in these days to make their living in the factory and in the store, of all things and above all things, is most pitiable. They were meant to sing at their work. The spin- ning-wheel was itself a song, and the varied house- hold tasks lent themselves to music. The Indians of the Pueblos have songs with which they accom- pany the grinding of the wheat and the making of the bread and the weaving of the mat, but in our modern system we compel the worker to a crim- inal silence. Not only is all song drowned by the racket of the factory but it is condemned as harm- ful to that efficiency which the modern industrial establishment demands of its worker. In our present industrial system, work is joy- less to the worker, because it is altogether void of interest. The great mass of men and women em- ployed in our industrial institutions cannot by any possibility find interest in their work. The di- vision of labor has been carried to such excess that the task assigned to eacli individual has no relation whatever in his mind to the task as a whole, and because of this it does not engage his thought. 172 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS When he has once mastered the little detail which" is assigned to him, then his mental powers are ar- rested; he ceases to think, and his time drags as if he were in a prison cell with nothing to do. His intelligence is beating against the cage that con- fines him and asks him to be free. The action by which he performs his task has become automatic. He himself is not in the task. His thoughts are out in the open. He is with his fellows in the sa- loon, or with his wife or children in the home, or with his best girl in the moving-picture show. Using his own strong language, he does not " care a damn " for his job ; his job is nothing to him, and he would shunt it in a moment if it were not for the wage that it brings him. No wonder that he watches the clock and as soon as the last second of the time of his sentence is past drops his tool, deserts his machine, and hurries away from the place of his confinement out into the open. Once the factory door closes upon him he is a man again, and the joylessness of his working-life finds its reaction in a feverish reach for joy as soon as his working-hours are over. It is this reaction that crowds the saloons with men and fills the pic- ture-shows with women. Discontent is the nat- ural product of a system that has deprived work of the element of joy. The modern worker does not find in his task that assurance of usefulness THE EEVOLT OF THE WORKERS 173 which is essential to the feeling of entire satisfac- tion. He is not making things to be used. He is making them to be sold. The manufacturer does not care primarily whether the products of his fac- tory are useful or not. What he desires is that they shall be salable. He is making them, not for use, but for the market, and he will make anything that will sell. He will manufacture a soothing- syrup for children and put it on the market, though he knows very well that that soothing-syrup will not be useful, but harmful. It will stupefy the child, injure its body, dwarf its intelligence, and invade the sanctities of its soul. If only articles of real use were made in our various industries, we could close at least one-half of all our factories. It is this that angers the well-meaning worker. He is compelled to do things that his soul abhors; and even where his work has usefulness as its end, he is compelled to skimp and scamp that work in order to meet the prices of the market. Our mod- ern business world is eaten to the very marrow with the germs of dishonesty. The honest man must compete with the scoundrel; the competitive system under which he lives breeds scoundrel ism just as bad air breeds tuberculosis. Our work- people are conscious of all this. Their souls are blighted because so much of their energy goes into useless production, and they will not be content 174 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS until some radical change is made that directs the forces of labor to higher, nobler purposes than those which now employ it. Work must be known to be useful if it is to continue to be interesting, and without interest in his work the worker cannot be content. But before, above, and beyond all, the modern system of industry violates that principle of true work which forbids that work shall be carried be- yond the point of reasonable endurance. It is of the very essence of our modern methods that a man shall be speeded up to and beyond the limit of his strength. He is pitted against the forces of na- ture. He is dragged in the weight of a mighty and a tireless machine. No, in this the writer is mistaken, the machine is not tireless, but the man is compelled to work with the machine and he has not the same care bestowed upon him that is given to the machine. The human element is not con- sidered. The Song of the Shirt is forgotten. " We forget that it is not linen we are wearing out, but human beings' lives." With every day in the or- dinary factory the worker is expected to spend not only the income of his energies, but a little of the capital. Each day, after a certain period, he comes less able to his task. The original sources of power within him are not so strong as they were the day before. And before he has reached middle life THE EEVOLT OF THE WORKERS 175 be finds his only capital, which is his labor-power, gone. The- bank-account is overdrawn, the purse is empty, and the man is no longer equal to his task. So, he goes into the discard; there is no pity in business for his gray hair or his dimmed eyes, or his faltering lips, or feeble grasp. He is used up, and that is the end of him. It is this that is frightening the working-class and exciting in them a mad passion of discontent. They know that they are giving more than they get. They are fighting desperately against exhaustion; and they will fight and they ought to fight until it shall be possible for a man to live in vigor beyond middle life and into old age. Society has no right to lay upon the working-class a task too heavy for it to bear, and the working-class has no right to bear that burden, which in the end breaks its power and so destroys the labor-supply of the community. The element of monotony is also a source of great discontent. No one who has been without experience knows anything of the misery that comes to the working girl and boy in the first period of their employment. The girl and the boy is each put to some detail which has to be learned by repetition that employs only one muscle of the system, that gives occupation to only one filament of the brain. This muscle has to be exercised over and over again, until it shrieks with pain; this 176 THE RISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS filament of the brain has to be held until it cries out in agony. And so it goes until use has dead- ened the muscle and the brain-cell, and then that boy or that girl becomes, so far as that work is concerned, a machine. The living creature no longer does the work as a whole. It is the auto- matic action of the nerve and the cell, and because of this the boy and the girl become more and more circumscribed in intelligence. If they are kept at their job they become expert at that task, they are able to produce a greater quantity of the com- modity which that particular function creates. Hence, they are more valuable to the system. But while they are of more worth to the factory, they are of less worth to themselves. Whole regions of their organization are rendered useless because of lack, of exercise. These outlying portions of the system do not die easily. They are continually crying out for the right to live. They are making the hours of labor miserable and breeding an un- appeasable discontent in the heart of the worker. He seeks to escape from his task because that task is killing his soul. The present writer was told by the head of a great manufacturing establish- ment that when the hours were long and the wages low the average of regular attendance was about eighty-nine per cent. Since the hours have been shortened and the wages increased the average of THE KEVOLT OF THE WORKERS 177 regular attendance has fallen to fifty-four per cent. Business men could not see the reason underlying this fact, but to the outsider the reason was evi- dent. In this establishment girls were employed in the sorting of buttons. Hour after hour the eyes were fixed, and the fingers flew. The dread- fulness of monotony distressed the worker. Her added wage enabled her to enjoy more leisure and she fled from her bench to recreate herself out of doors, to find change of occupation and to employ the other organs of her nature in their proper work. The shorter hour is a necessity arising out of the wearisoineness of the modern method of pro- duction. The division of labor demands the di- vision of time. Only a small portion of it can be given to the one little task that in our factories is assigned to the individual worker. Long hours necessarily breed discontent. The heads of the establishments are not subject to the monotony which is the lot of their workers. Their employment is interesting, varied, and does not take up all their time. When the head of a great establishment tells you that he works six- teen or eighteen hours a day and then compares himself with his workmen he is guilty of a con- structive lie. He does not work at any one task sixteen, eighteen, or even six hours a day. His mind is constantly occupied with the larger things 178 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS of life, lie is passing from one subject to another, he is going in and out, he would not submit for a single day to the desk work or machine work that he places upon those whom he employs. The chief grievance of the modern workman with his work is that he has no control over it. It is not his work, it is the work of some one else. His mind does not conceive it, his will does not direct it, it is only his muscular power, for the most part, that is employed. Because of this the man degen- erates from a self-controlling being into a con- trolled machine. Every moment of his working- life he is under direction. He is compelled, whether he will or not, to do a certain thing in a certain way. He may have ideas of his own as to how the work ought to be done, but in the vast ma- jority of cases he is told that it is not his business to think, that there are men appointed for the pur- pose of thinking, and it is his job to carry out their thought. Nothing is or can be more harassing than the perpetual nagging to which the working- man is subjected. The foreman who has the im- mediate oversight of his work, is there at his elbow all the time; and it is the duty of the foreman to find fault ; unless the foreman can make the higher powers believe that he is a necessity because of the stupidity of those who are under him he can- not maintain himself in his position. No one un- THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 179 acquainted with wliat goes ou within the walls of our various industrial establishments knows any- thing of the fret, the worry, the anger, that is ex- cited in the mind of the working-man by the con- stant and often unnecessary interference of his im- mediate superior. He is worse off in this respect than the horse. A man can curse a horse and a horse will not mind it, but injurious language wounds the soul of a man. The profanity which is hurled at the worker destroys his self-respect, excites in him a rage and a rebellion that leads to industrial outbreaks. Many a strike can be ex- plained when we once know what goes on in the factories and of the outrages which are heaped on the worker. Beside this direct interference with the volun- tary power of the worker there is that constant pressure upon his will which the system exercises. The workman has nothing to say concerning the conditions of his work, the mode of its operation, or its final output. He cannot identify himself with the establishment for which he works, because he is an outsider. All that is done by the factory, the store, or the shop is a secret from him, just as much as if he were not employed there at all. Our industrial system is organized upon a principle which in politics we have discarded. Power is centralized and descends from above. Orders are 180 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS given which must be obeyed. Imperialism is the rule in industry. We have, therefore, at the pres- ent time men who in the greater matters of life, which are controlled by the State, have the right to say what shall be done. In our cities, theoretic- ally at least, the whole body of the male citizen- ship determines the policy of the city and chooses the men who are to carry that policy into effect. The citizens assemble in meetings and freely dis- cuss all matters pertaining to the city, and we look upon that as the only possible way of securing effec- tive administration of the city's affairs. When- ever this method is neglected, and the citizens cease to take interest, then the affairs of the city are badly administered, the officials are corrupt and the city suffers loss and disgrace. In America our cities have been the source of shame because the democratic principle has been violated. We are now repenting of this and the people are resuming control of their own affairs. That which obtains in a city must also hold in a great industrial es- tablishment. It can no longer be said that any one man or small group of men own the business, and have a right to do with their own as they please. The business is the result of the combined capital and labor, intellectual and physical, of all who are engaged in the work, and every man, no matter how important or minute his task, has or ought to THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 181 have an interest in what goes on. We cannot have a democratic State training our citizens in the principles of democracy, and at the same time or- ganize the great business that goes on in industry upon monarchical, aristocratical, or imperialistic principles. There will never be content in the in- dustrial world until the working-class as a body is organized into the industries. They must be looked upon as essential elements as much and more to be considered than the capital which up to this time has reigned supreme in the business. Every well-organized industrial or commercial es- tablishment should have the whole body of the working-force in direct relation to the enterprise. Meetings of the men must be held where the poli- cies of the establishment may be discussed. In a properly organized industry or commercial enter- prise the men who are employed will be in a large measure the owners. Instead of being employed by the establishment, they will themselves elect their foreman, their superintendents and the other officers of the concern, or else they will elect a board of directors responsible to them for the con- duct of the business. This plan is already work- ing effectively in the many large cooperative insti- tutions that are now flourishing in England and on the Continent of Europe. In Leipsic there is such an institution, which is owned and controlled 182 THE KISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS by the operators. They employ the superintend- ents and other officers and these officers are directly accountable to the whole body of the workers. This experiment has been most successful. In Bel- gium the working-class are rapidly becoming co- operative and socialized. They own the tools that they use, they employ the men whom they need for direction and oversight. Not until our indus- trial system is revolutionized and the working-men are admitted into full partnership with the rest of the force, shall we have anything like peace in the industrial world. Men will not and cannot long submit to conditions that reduce them to the place of mere automatons. The exercise of the will is essential to the development of humanity, and if we have a large population who have lost their will power, then we are on the downgrade and the overthrow of our present order is not far distant. When the mass of the people have lost the power of choosing, then they are the ready victims of any stronger will that seeks to rule them. This will lead at last to the triumph of the evil forces that are perpetually at work in hu- man society for its destruction. If the disinte- grating powers are to be resisted it can only be done by the active cooperation of all the good wills in the community. If these good wills have been subjugated, then there is nothing to withstand THE KEVOLT OF THE WORKERS 183 the evil will in its effort to master mankind. It is not the wicked man that is a danger so much as it is the man of feeble will. Hence it is essential to the safety of society that the will should be con- stantly exercised, that debates should be had upon every great question, and that question decided upon its merits. Our present plan of shutting out the mass of the workers from any right to debate the conditions and the results of their employment is suicidal. The end of it will be the overthrow of a system that so ignores that which is necessary to its own safety. The final and most potent cause of present in- dustrial discontent is the unjust distribution of the products of labor. The working-man has be- come conscious of the fact that he is not getting his share of the output. He sees wealth piling up as the result of the work which 'he and his fellows are doing, and at the same time he is feeling the cramp of poverty in his own life. It is becoming more and more difficult for him to maintain a de- cent standard of living for himself and his chil- dren. Let him be as efficient as he may, let him speed up to the limit of his powers, and he still finds himself falling behind. The organization for which he works becomes more and more wealthy and powerful, the owners of that organization amass fabulous fortunes within a few years, while 184 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS the income of the working-man does not increase but rather decreases in purchasing power. This fact alarms the working-man. He sees himself slowly sliding down in the scale of living. His wife and his children are subjected to debasing con- ditions, and the prospect before him is one of fur- ther depression. To rescue himself from so dan- gerous a situation he strikes out blindly in this and that direction. He not only asks for a higher wage, but also for shorter hours, and for better working conditions. In making these various de- mands he is seeking a readjustment which will give to him and his class a more equitable place and portion in the world. In seeking thus to make justice an essential principle of the business world, the working-man is in reality striving for the more stable, condition of society. Without justice, that is, without rendering to each man that which is his due, not his mere legal due but that which be- longs to him by right when all things are fairly considered, can the social fabric stand firmly on its foundation. It is a proverb that a fair exchange is no robbery, the reverse of this is equally true, an unfair exchange is robbery, and if a man is compelled to give in exchange more than he gets, then he is robbed and this act of robbery disturbs the social order. It is a matter of no consequence whether this robbery is done within the law or THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 185 outside of it; the result is the same. TYhen the nobility and clergy of France robbed the peasantry, they did so by due process of law, but this did not prevent the robbing of the peasant from resulting in the disruption of the society of France. There is a supreme court of last appeal which pays no attention to the enactments of legislature or the quibbles of lawyers. It has regard only to the essential justice that must at last prevail be- tween man and man. This tribunal may delay its decision, but in the end it visits its penalty upon the violation of human rights. The French clergy and nobility carried their exactions to the point of exhaustion, and then the starving peasantry made its appeal to the divine right of man and visited the legalized crimes of the upper classes with capi- tal punishment. The working-class is making its appeal from the laws of men to the law of man. The Son of Man is sitting in judgment on our social arrangement. He is calling to his bar those who have defrauded the working-man and the working-woman, and at the bar of that judgment our present issues will be debated and decided and punishment will be meted out to those who have violated the fundamental laws that must govern in human society. All tricks of trade, all secret compacts will be laid bare, and they who have profited by dishonesties, 186 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS oppressions, and disregard of human rights, will suffer the penalties of their wrong-doing. The uprisings in the industrial world are only symptoms of our industrial diseases. As long as our industrial system deprives men of joy, takes all interest out of their working-life, subjects their wills constantly to the pressure of an outside will, and deprives them of the full and fair return of their labor, so long must we suffer all that we are now experiencing. If the working-class were to settle down contentedly into its lot, if it were not to desire interest in its life, joy in its heart, and freedom of will, then the end of the human race as a race would be in sight. It is only by the re- sistance of the working-class that society can be saved. Hence it is that those who have the welfare of the world at heart, who desire to see a better world take the place of the world that now is, are ranging themselves with the working-men in their struggle to improve their condition. No one who thinks at all can wish that things should remain as they are; nor can he hope that they will so re- main. As change is the rule of life, we must change for the better or the worse. The working- class as a class must either sink down into com- plete subjection, or it must attain to perfect free- dom. No right-minded man or woman can desire the debasement of the whole working-class and it THE REVOLT OP THE WORKERS 187 follows as a matter outside all debate that the en- franchisement of the class is a necessity to which all the social forces must give themselves until it is accomplished. In order to be effective and lasting this work of enfranchisement must be accomplished by the work- ers themselves. No mere reform enacted by the class at present in control of the industrial system can be more than palliative, and even these little better- ments of the system had best be left undone, if they delay at all the coming of that revolution in the industrial system which is necessary if we are to free the workman from the subjection under which he labors to-day. The employing-class complain that the working-class does not appreciate what is done for it. The answer is, that no man appre- ciates what is done for him until he has lost the power of doing for himself. No man desires to receive as a charity what is his as a right, nor will he consent as long as he maintains his self- respect to get something for nothing. If the em- ploying-class is giving to the working-class in the way of welfare work that which the working-class has no right to, then the employing-class is simply debasing the worker. But if, on the other hand, this welfare work is taken out from what the worker himself earns, then the employing-class is offering an insult to the worker. It is saying to 188 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS the worker : " We know better than you how your money ought to be spent, and we will spend it for you, and w T e will hold you ingrates if you do not agree with us as to what is best for you." This is the reason why the workers in the industrial es- tablishments where welfare work is a feature are as rebellious, if not more rebellious, than they are in other industrial establishments. They are wise enough to know that all these frills, as they call them, are paid for by their labor. These fine build- ings, these rest and lunch rooms, these meals pro- vided at cost, are not supplied from the purse of the employing-class, they all come out of the wage- fund, as it is called. Interest on the investment must be paid, a profit must be provided for, and rent before these improvements can be made, and consequently in the last analysis, it is the worker who puts up the money that is spent for his im- provement and he naturally resents the fact that this is all done for him and not by him. The slave can never be emancipated, he must emancipate himself. Consequently, it is to the working-class that the working-class as a whole must look for its deliverance. Those in other classes who ally themselves with the workers must make that alliance such as shall give to the worker the control of his movement. The working-class THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS 189 needs thinkers, but these thinkers must think with the working-class and not for them. The working- class needs leaders, but these leaders must cry: " Follow me," not : " Obey me." He who to-day throws in his lot with the great revolutionary movement that is going on in the w T orld must sac- rifice himself to the movement, He must not hope to ride upon it to power and wealth. The only privilege that can be allowed him is the privilege of sacrifice. The demand of the time is for this self-immola- tion on the part of men and women who have in- herited or received from the present order educa- tion, wealth, advantage. So only can the rise of the working-class to power, which is inevitable, be freed from those destructive elements which may make that rise disastrous to much that has already been gained by man in the course of his evolution. The principle of advancement is to prove all things and to hold fast that which is good. If the present ruling-class clings tena- ciously to its unfair advantage, fights with every weapon that it can find the force that is seeking to deprive it of that w T hich it unjustly holds, then w T e shall have a struggle to the death and in that death struggle we shall lose many things that otherwise we might preserve to the benefit of us all. If the 190 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS present ruling-class is wise, it will come out of the citadel of privilege, confer with the subjected class, and make fair terms with its industrial enemies and so secure a lasting industrial peace. VIII THE SLAVES OP THE MARKET THE economic changes that have taken place within the last century have revolutionized the relation of production to consumption. Throughout all the earlier periods, while the fam- ily was exclusively, or in a large measure, the economic unit, the producer and the consumer was, to a great extent, one and the same person. The savage who wanders about picking up roots and shell-fish consumes the product of his labor. The fisherman and the bowman take home that which they themselves have caught and killed. In agri- cultural periods the farmer, his wife, and his chil- dren made use of the things grown upon the farm. The spinning-wheel in the house created the cloth that the people of the house made into clothing. This relation of production to consumption, while it limited the range of consumption to what we now call the bare necessities of life, made those necessities secure. The man who was possessed of his land and of his own labor had no cause to fear anything except the mischances of the natural world. His enemies were the drought and the 191 192 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS flood; but as these were only occasional in their ravages, he passed his life in a sense of security altogether unknown to the man of modern times. Where the producer and the consumer are the same person, that person has the most complete inde- pendence possible to mankind. This it was that gave stability, integrity, and contentment to the members of the family as it existed in ancient and medieval times. The members of this institution did not have to consult the quotation from any market. They were not required to make any con- cessions to the purchasing power, for they them- selves were the purchasers of what they themselves produced. It was to their interest to make their products as pure and perfect as possible. When a woman preserves vegetables or meats for her own use she is under no temptation to adulterate or in any way skimp the product that she is laying in store. When a man weaves the cloth which is to make the coat of his own wearing, he will see to it that the quality of that cloth is as fine and strong as it can be made. When one is building a house in which one expects to live, the timbers of that house will be the best that can be found and the workmanship of the highest standard. This fact gave to the ancient methods of production an hon- esty, a durability, which has in a great measure been THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 193 lost through the changes that have occurred in the economic world. Production is no longer for consumption. The producer and the consumer are not only different persons but they are strangers one to another. While the producer is at work he does not have the interest of the consumer in mind. In fact, under our present arrangements, the interest of the pro- ducer and the consumer are antagonistic. When production is exclusively for sale and the product must find a buyer before it can be consumed, then we have that natural hostility which has always existed and which will always exist between the buyer and the seller. The seller wishes to get the largest return possible for his product. The buyer the largest returns possible for his money. In this conflict the seller has the buyer at his mercy. The production of commodities for sale is carried on out of sight and away from the knowledge of the buyer. The buyer has to trust to his own knowl- edge, not based upon a close acquaintance with the product which he is purchasing, but upon the mere ordinary knowledge of the outsider, and when, as in the modern world, the products are largely com- pounds, the ingredients of which can only be known by chemical analysis, the buyer is altogether at the mercy of the seller. It is this condition which has 194 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS given rise to the complications of modern commer- cial life and has compelled public interference with private affairs. Before a seller in these days can offer his commodity to a buyer he has to submit it to governmental inspection. We are to-day em- ploying a vast army of men and women to stand betw T een the buyer and the seller in order that the seller may be compelled to deal honestly with the buj^er. These changes have come to pass almost un- consciously. We are hardly aware of the fact that the doctrine of the freedom of contract, which is the basic doctrine of the modern commercial world, has already become a nullity. It is impossible to- day for two men to enter into the operation of buying and selling without submitting their con- tract to public inspection. The seller must bring the certificate of a specialist and the buyer must tender in return that which has the stamp of legal authority. These are some of the precautions that are taken to-day in order that man may not suffer unduly from that slavery to the market under which he is living. The subdivision of labor has made each individual dependent upon the process of exchange in a manner never before known to the history of the world. Not so long ago our own garden fur- nished our breakfast-table. To-day that table is supplied by products from every quarter of the THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 195 globe. Formerly man carried to the market only a small portion of that which he produced; now he carries his whole product, and seeks to exchange that product for all that he requires in order to live. This dependence on the market has reduced mankind to a condition of insecurity unknown to ancient civilization, for even the slave in ancient times was incorporated into an institution which in return for his labor provided his necessities. He ate at the master's table, he drank of the mas- ter's cup, and he was sheltered by the master's roof. In the modern world the relation of the producer to that which he consumes is so hazardous that any little accident may destroy it. The connection of each person with the market is so slender, a mere filament of cobweb, that the least of rough winds or untoward accidents can sweep it aw r ay and leave that person without any means of securing for himself the requirements of his daily life. It is this insecurity that makes of modern life such a tragedy. Once upon a time men lived in fear of a hell into which they might fall after their earthly life was ended. Now they are in constant dread of an evil which threatens their daily existence. A mere sickness of a few days may impoverish the sick man. If the market happens to change and that which we have to bring to it is no longer in 196 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS demand, then we go back from the market empty- handed. Changes in the market are constantly plunging vast portions of the population of the world into ruin. When a man's business is no longer profitable, the man fails and his failure ends his opportunity to sell and to buy in the market. The recent changes in commercial life which have brought into existence those aggregations which are called trusts, are efforts on the part of the market to prevent the final result of the law of the market which is at last the ruin of the mar- ket. The concentration that is now going on in the commercial world is not the outcome of any man's desire, criminal or innocent; it is the inevitable working of a great natural force. Se- curity is of the essence of life. As long as the old methods of production and consumption were in operation, when the consumer was the producer and the producer the consumer, there were no fluc- tuations in the market, there was no overproduc- tion, there were no commercial crises. Even when this primitive method had been displaced by the more complicated ways of mercantile life, yet the sphere of the merchant was limited. Commerce, as we know it to-day, is an altogether modern institution. The vast improvement in methods of intercommunication and transportation have made the whole world one market and each THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 197 man in the world more or less dependent upon this world-wide exchange. The farmer on the plains of Dakota, is subject to changes going on all round the world. He does not eat his wheat, he sells it, and the price of his wheat is not deter- mined by anything within his control, it is de- pendent on world-wide industrial forces and the price of this product is fixed in Chicago and in Liverpool. A frost or a flood in Argentina may add to the price of his commodity, a good season in the same country may tend to his impoverish- ment. Our life to-day does not depend upon our own effort or wisdom, it is contingent upon the vast uncertainties of a world-wide exchange. In ancient times the merchant carried his wares upon the back of a camel. He did not deal at all in the necessities of life. He bought and sold the luxuries. He carried the pearls and the purples of India to the people of Syria and Greece, and exchanged them for the gold and the silver of these countries. With that gold and silver the mer- chant purchased his own necessities, and the sur- plus of the exchange went to his enrichment. In medieval times commerce played a very small part in the life of the Western World. Most of the articles that were sold in the market, if they were transported from any distance, were carried in so costly a fashion that only the very rich could buy 198 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS them. The customers of the market were the kings, the princes, and the nobles. The common people had little or nothing to do with them. The fair, which is an occasional market, was the resort of the middle and lower classes. In these fairs exchanges were made of the overplus of the various home in- dustries. The fair was not governed by the fluctua- tions which controlled the market. The farmer brought his surplus of cattle to this common meet- ing-place, these cattle were purchased by other farmers equally acquainted with all the fine points of the ox and the cow, and the " fair " was rightly so-called, because it was a place of equal exchange. The buyer and the seller each profited by the trans- action. Neither had the better of the other, and each returned home satisfied with the results ob- tained hy exchange. As the fair changed more and more into a market, it lost somewhat this charac- teristic of perfect fairness, and there were intro- duced into its transactions the characteristics that pertained to larger commercial life. But clear up to modern times there was little or no actual traffic in the necessities of life. The bread and the beer, the cloth and the leather, were all produced not primarily for sale but for consumption. The pro- ducer had the actual consumer in mind before he set about his work of production. The housewife, as she sat at her spinning-wheel, measured with her THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 199 eye the forms of her husband and her sons while she was making her cloth. Overproduction was then an impossibility. When she had made suffi- cient cloth to supply the demands of her household she ceased spinning. When the head of the house had tanned leather sufficient for the uses of the house, he ceased making leather; and this law ap- plied to all the necessities of life. That disease of modern times, overproduction, was impossible in the ancient world. The poverty of ancient times was occasioned not by a surplus, as it is to-day, but by a deficit. Human labor might not in those times have been able to keep up with human desire, but it never overpassed that desire and by a glut stopped the wheels of production and by so doing reduced men to starvation. Overproduction is the chronic disease of modern industry. We have been placed in the absurd sit- uation of going without, not because we have not enough, but because we have too much. Produc- tion for sale instead of for consumption, is the germ of this disease. The merchant to-day has to work at haphazard. The manufacturer has to guess at the amount of his product that may be needed in the near future, and when as at the pres- ent time, the business of making and selling is car- ried on by a multitude of people, all working in the dark, we have and must have the recurrent 200 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS crises which have wrought such havoc to human happiness in our modern world. The leaders of our manufacturing and commercial life are quite aware of this condition and they are seeking a way of escape. Their effort to control the market is simply a desire on their part to bring order out of confusion. Instead of being the malefactors of great wealth which they seem to be to the on- lookers, they are really the benefactors of mankind, and their great wealth is the natural result of the benefactions which they have conferred upon the world at large. The evils which have come with this reorganization of commercial life are tem- porary, the benefits will endure to the permanent happiness of mankind. Our great masters of in- dustry are doing for the commercial world what the great statesmen of France did for that country in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They are bringing order out of chaos. As Eichelieu made of a vast number of little counties and dukedoms a strong centralized kingdom, giving to France thereby, for two centuries, the mastery of Europe, so these great lords of industry are making out of a vast inchoate competitive system an ordered cen- tralized system. France benefited immensely by the statesmanship of Eichelieu, and would have benefited still more if the French people as a whole, had been wise enough to appropriate to themselves THE SLAVES OF THE MAEKET 201 the powers engendered by the concentration which was brought about by the efforts of the statesman. France suffered untold evils because she allowed her government to be privately owned instead of making it the common property of the people. France repented of her economic and political sin in the blood and terror of the Revolution. She then made her centralized government public, and not private, property; and in spite of her many failings, the consequence of her many sins, France is to-day economically the richest country in the world and her common people the most se- cure. That which was true of France, may be true to-day of all industrial nations. Any effort to undo the work of the master class and to throw mankind back into a state of unlimited competition, will prove futile. The evils of the market are too plain and painful to permit their longer contin- uance. Man must deliver himself from the slavery to the market. He must control the market, the market must not be permitted to control him. Industry is returning upon its own orbit. It began in cooperation. It is returning in coopera- tion. Cooperation is a demand of nature. The man and the woman must cooperate in order to sat- isfy their desire for children. In the household all the members of the household work together for the purpose of producing all the requirements 202 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS of the household. Division of labor is cooperation. It is because of this that men work together instead of each one trying to produce for himself all the things that he needs. Competition may be the life of trade. It is not the life, but the death, of industry. Emulation may be conducive to the betterment of industry, but competition never. Not only in the home, but in the city, cooperation is that higher law that makes possible life in the city. In all the ancient cities the individual was simply a cell in the city life. Every man contributed to the welfare of the city and so the city became prosperous. The bread for the city was baked by the city where it was not baked for the family by the family. The medieval city had its municipal oven for the common use of all those who wished so to bake their bread. And the city did for each citizen all that each citi- zen could not well do for himself. It was not nec- essary in those days that the city should perform many functions that are now demanded of the gov- ernment, because the family was in existence doing the work that is now performed by our modern industrial system. The important function of pro- viding food, clothing, and shelter are no longer private matters, they are public affairs. The or- ganization of modern society has become so com- plicated that it is only through public control that THE SLAVES OF THE MAEKET 203 these necessities can be properly provided and dis- tributed. We are necessarily within the power of those who have the mastery of production and dis- tribution. These men of the market decide for us what we shall eat and what we shall drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed. They are our real rulers and unless we have some mastery over them, we must of necessity be their slaves. Busi- ness men know the value of cooperation and they have organized cooperatively to control the market, and by this organization they have secured their supremacy. The remedy for this evil, if it be an evil, is not to disorganize, but to carry organization one step further. It has been well said that if we are to have monopoly, then that must be a public monop- oly, and the next step in man's industrial deliver- ance is the assumption of public control over all those industrial operations that have become too large for private manipulation. This is the trend of progress at present. Wise men see that if we are to be delivered from the thralldom in which we are now held, we must, through those organ- isms which have been built up by the evolutionary process, do two things. We must, first, make the rulers of our industrial world responsible. They can no longer be left free to do what they will with their own, because what they claim as their own 204 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS is really not their own but common property. Every great industrial institution is created by various factors. The organizing genius of its orig- inator, the expanding desires of the community, and the labor of the worker, each of these fac- tors has a right to representation in the control of that industry. Our political life is based, par- tially at least, upon the principle that as all the people contribute to the well-being of the govern- ment, and really make the government what it is, therefore, government is the property of the peo- ple and the officials are simply servants to admin- ister the estate of the public. Now is not that equally true of the great industrial systems of modern times? If it were not for the expanding life of the people, the universal genius of men and women for social life, these great systems could not and would not be in existence. All their val- ues are created by the public. They are essen- tially public property, and as such should be in the control of the public. If we are to be free, we must ourselves possess some integral rights to the things necessary to life. Our bread and meat, our clothing and shelter, should not be subject to the W T hims and the whimsies of men over whom we have no power and who are regardless of our exist- ence. Social or public control is to-day encroaching THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 205 more and more upon what hitherto had been called private affairs. We are to-day employing two sets of men to do our work. We employ the so-called private business man to manufacture our cloth, to carry it to the market, and to sell it to us in the store. We hire another man to watch over him as he does this work. A great host of officials are now engaged in the task of inspecting and regu- lating business affairs, and when a private man is discovered in any act of which the public disap- proves, this private man is brought to the bar of justice and we have all the expense of countless lawsuits in order to determine the exact nature of his crime, and his punishment. This is an enor- mous waste. Sooner or later, we must reach the conclusion that public matters must be publicly managed and the managers of such concerns di- rectly responsible to the people. The manager of a railroad is equally a public servant with the chief of police or the chief of a fire-department. Each of these renders service to the public. They re- ceive their reward from the public in the way of salaries or profits and they ought to answer di- rectly to the public. All the affairs of such busi- ness should be as open to inspection as are, in theory, the affairs of our cities and States. It is inevitable that public control should evolve into public ownership. The owners themselves 206 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS will at last demand this. If they are not permitted to manage their own business in their own way, if at every turn they must submit to the direction of some outside person, then their business will in reality cease to be their own, and their interest in it will decline in proportion to the meddling that comes from without. Already there is a growing irritation in the hearts of the managers of our great railways and other enterprises, because of the assumption on the part of the public of this right to interfere with their affairs. They are begin- ning to say : " If you know how to run our rail- roads better than we do, you had best take them over. Give us what they are worth and let us go free. We cannot have the responsibility without the power." That the various governments must assume the direction of the industrial life of the people to an extent and in a manner heretofore undreamed of is as certain as anything in the future can be cer- tain. The European countries are far in advance of the United States in this matter of public con- trol. They have the ownership and operate the means of transportation and intercommunication. Railroads, telegraphs, and telephones are part of the State administration. Sooner or later the or- ganized community must assume control of the nat- ural sources of wealth. The land must be social- THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 207 ized if poverty is to be abated. Waterways cannot be left in private hands if the health of the people is to be conserved. Minerals necessary to the gen- eral good can no longer be held by private persons to the injury of the public. All this means a vast extension of public operation and a revolution in the conception of the State. Heretofore it has been the office of the government to protect the people against foreign invasion and domestic re- bellion. The army and the navy have been the chief concern of politics. But this state of affairs is rapidly receding into the past. The State is evolving into an organism to direct the general life of the people and to supervise the business of the community. This evolutionary process must go on until the people are delivered from the chaotic condition in which they are now living. The mar- ket must come under the power of the people and be regulated by the public authorities. When the railways are publicly owned, the State will have the right to discriminate as to the kinds of goods which the railways may carry. When they are needed for the transportation of wheat, they will be so used to the exclusion of less necessary arti- cles. Instead of our great fleets carrying the de- structive weapons of war, they will transport from other lands to ours the blessings of peace. The details of this organization cannot be set down, but 208 THE PJSE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS what lias already been done is a forecast of what will be done. The great nations which have as- sumed public control of the means of transporta- tion and intercommunication, will never surren- der their unlimited control. They will be the more likely because of this to extend the realm of public ownership. This coming regime will call for a wise, strong people to live under it and to administer it. A conception of citizenship will be evolved far differ- ent from that which now obtains. To-day the citi- zen has very little to do with the city. Public business is not nearly so important as private busi- ness. It is because of this that the American city has fallen into so shameful a condition of corrup- tion. The able man does not care to give his thought or time to its concerns. The city is con- fining its operation to the police and the fire-, department, the street cleaning, and the public health. These are of vast importance, but they are not a part of the everyday life of the whole citi- zenship, except in the matter of the streets. The thought of the citizen is not occupied with the life of the city, he is thinking of his own business and he does not care what the city does, if only he can get from it some illicit privilege or if at the worst it will leave him alone. When the com- munity as a community begins to take a hand in THE SLAVES OF THE MAEKET 209 the business of providing food, raiment, and shel- ter, when municipal bakeries, municipal factories, and municipal houses are in existence, then the citizen will sustain a relation to the city in nearly all that concerns his life. And because of this he will have a greater interest in the community and the community a greater interest in him. It will be to his immediate personal comfort that the city be wisely, honestly, and efficiently administered, and it will be equally necessary to the well-being of the whole community that each man be an effi- cient instrument in the work of production. Efficiency is the watchword of the modern busi- ness world, but that efficiency has to do only with the workman in his relation to his work in the factory. The modern system of efficiency is cre- ative of inefficiency. It is making men less able than they ought to be, confining them as it does to a single operation : these men are of no value out- side their own little sphere of action. And this system exhausts efficiency. It drives the man un- til he falls in the harness, and then it throws him aside and harnesses another man into his place. This method, while making for efficiency in the factory or store, makes in the largest degree for inefficiency in the community at large. The wastes of our industrial system are a charge on the public purse. When the people as a whole have resumed 210 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS control of their own affairs, they will see to it that this waste does not occur. Men will be trained to a given work so that they can do that rapidly and well, but they will also be educated to occupy their leisure time in other employments of benefit to the community as a whole. Their relation to the market will be strengthened. Instead of being at- tached to it by one little nerve, their whole nervous system will run out into public employment for the public good. The whole community will sit in judgment upon the industrial life of man, as it now sits in judgment upon his moral life. An idle man, a reckless man, will be arraigned before the bar of public justice and that condemnation and dis- cipline will be meted out to him which the public welfare demands. In the future, boys and girls will be educated into the industrial system where they must do the work of their lives. During the whole school period, each child will be tested with a view of ascertaining its bent, and it will be trained in accordance with its disposition. Our present me- chanical system of education, which stamps all the children with the same die, and. sends them forth to cast about until they find their place in the workaday world, will give place, as it is giving place, to a wiser system that ascertains what the child can best do, gives it a particular training in THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 211 that ami then a more general training in all that pertains to the fullness of living. To have control of the market, the community must have the ownership of the labor-power as well as the more material sources of wealth. In all well-ordered communities it is the law that if a man will not work, neither may he eat. When idleness and uselessness are considered as crimes against the community to be punished as such, then we shall be rid of parasites, both high and low. The prince and the pauper will be banished from every well-ordered society, and they who sim- ply talk will be subjugated by those who do the work. Herbert Spencer, in foretelling the coming of socialism, spoke of it as the coming slavery. In his mind it was the last dire calamity that was to befall the human race. To a certain degree, Spencer was right in his forecast. In the age that is coming, man will be a slave. He always has been a slave, and the only change that he can ever make is a change of masters. In times past he has been the slave of some other man, who has driven him to his work and taken from him the product of that work. In the time to come, he will be the slave of beneficent law. The law will compel him to do his work and will see to it that he receives a full return for that work. He will be his own master, because he has surrendered the ownership 212 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS of himself to the public, and he is the public. St. Paul liberated the slave Onesirnus, only to make him the slave of Jesus Christ. The new society will liberate the wage-slave only to make him the slave of the public good. It has been said that this public control of the market, both in production and consumption, will be followed by a loss of initiative and a dreary sameness in fashion. The answer to this is, that the present system has already crippled initiative and destroyed variety. It used to be a pleasure to travel from country to country if for nothing else but to study the various provincial costumes. Twenty-five years ago one could find this enjoy- ment in the various lands of Europe and Asia. Our modern system of production and exchange is destroying all this. There is no pleasure in travel to-day, so far as the people are concerned. The streets of Pekin will soon be as monotonous and as ugly as the streets of New York. The Chinaman will soon be clothed in a hand-me-down, and the China girl in a shirt-waist. It is asked who shall set the fashions under the coming society. That question is answered by another: Who sets the fashions now? Is it not a conclave of tailors and modistes in Paris and London? And do they not outrage humanity by their efforts to secure vogue for ridiculous patterns? Would it be any more THE SLAVES OF THE MARKET 213 difficult to have a fashion board in every great com- munity to settle the styles for the coming sea- son, to study the peculiarities of land and race, and bring about distinctiveness once more in the apparel of men? If the present system con- tinues, ugliness will increase. If for no other rea- son the public should lay its hand upon these great utilities that beauty may be born again. As for initiative, it is a quality of the human soul. The inventive genius will invent, no matter what hap- pens to him. To-day he is thwarted because of the great difficulties of putting his invention into opera- tion. He may work until he starves and bring to light some wonderful secret of nature, but if he have not the money, then that secret dies with him. It is in this region above all others, that public con- trol is necessary. The inventor is and should be a public servant to be rewarded by the public. His meed of honor should be the chaplet of glory which is laid on his temple by public authority and his satisfaction the pension which is granted to him, as a reward for his work. One of the most important inventions of recent times is the Babcock milk-test. Far more im- portant is this than the invention of the moving- picture or the gramophone. This test was discov- ered by Prof. Babcock of the Wisconsin University. When he was asked to patent it, he said : " Not so. 214 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS I did this in the line of duty as a servant of the State of Wisconsin. It belongs to the public." The Babcock milk-test has made cooperative dairy- farming possible, and added immensely to the wealth of the world. He has a low conception of human nature who supposes that man will stop thinking if he can no longer put a price on his thought. It is of the very essence of thought that as it has been freely received, so it must be freely given. There is and can be no valid objection to public control of the business of providing food, clothing, and shelter for the public w T hich does not lie with equal and even greater validity against the present private control. It is impossible that the public should make such a mess of things as is made by the present owmers and operators. The discontent of the working-class, the shame, the degradation, and misery that breeds and hides in the dark places of our civilized communities is a condemnation of the present method which is unanswerable. The people have the right to say that the men w T ho are now running the machine so inefficiently shall give place to a more responsible directorate, that an ef- fort may be made to establish a better working sys- tem. IX WORKING-CLASS RELIGION IN his effort to free his class from inherited po- litical, industrial, and social disabilities, that delivered from these, his class may take and hold that supreme place in the social order which be- longs to it as the most useful and most numerous class in society, the class-conscious working-man finds himself in opposition to the organized religion of his time and country. In his endeavor to change industrial conditions he is accused of being a traitor to God as well as a rebel against the State. In every country in the Western World, with some noble exceptions, the priests and the preachers are either the active or the passive allies of the politi- cians in their enmity to the rising working-class. The Catholic Church is an open and active op- ponent of the working-class movement. The va- rious Protestant denominations are, for the most part, in sympathy with the Catholic organization in its hostility to an organized working-class. The Catholic priest or Protestant minister who joins this movement does so at his peril. 215 216 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS This attitude of the organization has driven the working-class, as a class, out of the churches. It is an admitted fact that the working-class in all countries so far as it has emerged into class- consciousness, has withdrawn from the member- ship of the various Christian bodies. It looks upon this religion as a force organized in the interest of the upper classes to hold it down. And it has reason for so believing. Organized Christianity has for a thousand years and more taught the lower classes to submit themselves, as a religious duty, to the upper classes. In the language of the Eng- lish Prayer Book, they are to order themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters. These betters in England are the lords of the manor, the squires of the estates, the merchants and the man- ufacturers, and last but not least the clergy. The duty which has been thus enforced by religion is not a moral duty; it has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong ; it is simply an economic duty. The servant is to obey the master, not because that obedience is a process of moral development, but because it conserves the present order of things. It is for the well-being of the master that the serv- ant should obey him, and therefore the master class seeks religious sanction for this obedience. The Christian religion as now organized is a re- ligion based upon authority. Whatever may have WOEKING-CLASS RELIGION 217 been its constitution in the beginning, it very soon conformed itself to the imperialistic conception of the universe, which was prevalent in the Eoman Empire during the formative period of church or- ganization. One of its great sayings is: "All power is given me from above." According to this conception, the whole world is subject to an al- mighty will, which will is external to the world, operating upon it rather than within it. This ruling power issues its decrees which must be obeyed under divers penalties. It distributes re- wards and punishments according to its own pleas- ure. The extreme statement of this doctrine of divine sovereignty makes everything to depend upon the unrestricted will of the sovereign, and that will is moved only by its own pleasure. In accordance with this, Christianity was organized imperialistic- ally. The power centers in a given person. By that person it is delegated and withdrawn. In the church system, power is centered in the person of God. God the Father delegated that power, so far as this world is concerned, to the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus in turn gave to Peter the right to open and to shut. Peter in turn passed this authority on to his successor, the Christian Bishop of Rome. It is under this system that Christianity is operated to-day in its largest and most effective organiza- tion. This has given to authority a sweep wider 218 THE BISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS and more effective than ever before exercised by man upon men. It not only controls the actions of men, but seeks also to regulate the innermost movements of their intelligence and their con- science. The very thought of man must obey the dictates of this will. The saying of Paul that he must bring every thought into subjection to Christ has been made use of to force every obedient son of the Church to think as the Church thinks. Any effort at freedom of thought is condemned as a sin against God. The result of all this has been to make the habit of obedience second nature to whole generations of mankind. For a thousand years the human mind did little else but mark time. When a man kneels down and says that he wishes only to think what the church thinks and believe only what the church believes, all desire for original research is taken from him and he no longer can be a factor in the process of evolution. All he can do is to con- serve the past. Organizations, political or re- ligious, never think. They have no organ for think- ing. All they do is to memorize thought. They take the words of the wise and formulate them into dogmas and then they repeat the dogmas over and over and thus make ancient wisdom the master of all time. Not only has this principle of authority been exerted in the realm of intelligence and of the spirit, WORKING-CLASS RELIGION 219 but it has also been brought to bear upon the eco- nomic life. During the period of the supremacy of organized Christianity in Western Europe the con- dition of mankind was that of status. Each had his and her place assigned by divine decree. To attempt to leave that place was desertion. It was to the advantage of the Western World during the long chaotic period that followed the downfall of the Roman order that this principle of authority should have been taught and enforced. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Catholic Church, that con- dones many of her faults, because she was the schoolmistress of our unruly youth. Her dogma was an instrument of education. It gave to men a unified conception of the world in which they lived. Unavoidably with that dogma was asso- ciated the ethic of Jesus, and the Christian church has never been able to leave the moral teaching of Jesus altogether out of view. But it could and it did subordinate that ethical teaching to its own intellectual and political conceptions. Creed took the place of gospel, and the church was organized for purposes of government rather than for the duty of teaching. It did not say, with Jesus: " Follow me " ; it said : " Obey me ! " In the exercise of its teaching office the Church fell into the snare that always besets the school- master. It grew to believe in and finally to assert 220 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS the infallibility of its teaching body. In the doc- trine of papal infallibility proclaimed by the Coun- cil of the Vatican of 1870, the Catholic Church having raised this doctrine to the dignity of an article of faith, bound itself irrevocably to the past. It gave finality to the decrees of the popes. No one could go beyond the word of the pope in faith or morals without losing his right to Christian communion. As faith and morals cover the whole range of human endeavor, this doctrine of the Church deprived the Catholic Christian of freedom of thought and freedom of action. In a feebler way the assertion on the part of the Protestant Churches of the infallibility and suffi- ciency of Holy Scripture limits the rights of the loyal Protestant to do his thinking and his speak- ing except in subjection to a power external to his own mind. The church, both Catholic and Prot- estant, is committed to the dogma of authority ; and authority other than the authority of truth is the enemy of thought! The church because of this dogma has expelled from its Communion the free-thinking man of the modern world. It can no longer exercise authority over the intelligence of man because that intelli- gence has withdrawn itself from its jurisdiction. Its only hope now lies in keeping its hold upon the unthinking masses of mankind in both the upper WORKING-CLASS RELIGION 221 and the lower classes. Its membership, to-day, is very largely made up of the rich who dare not think, and the poor who cannot think. Anything that disturbs the mind of the people is a danger to present-day religious organizations. The ecclesiastical body is opposing the social movement among the working-people, not so much because the fundamentals of socialism are antag- onistic to the fundamentals of the gospel of Christ, for between these there is no necessary conflict, but because this movement originated in minds outside the church. The very agitation, regardless of the content of that agitation, is dangerous to the peace and even to the existence of the present ecclesiastical establishment. The religious organi- zation is falling back into the very citadel of au- thority. It is asserting the old dogma with more than ancient determination. It is making man sub- ject to a God who has delegated his authority to a given organization and only in obedience to that organization can man hope for either temporal or eternal salvation. This conflict between the working-class move- ment and organized religion is an irrepressible conflict. It is a conflict of ideas. Organized re- ligion claims the right to regulate the lives of men, to tell men what to think and what to do. For a thousand years this right was admitted. Even to 222 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-GLASS the present day it has the consent of a very large element of living men and women; and the world is as it is. Human misery exposes itself on every side. What is now seen to be curable poverty is destroying its millions and its tens of millions. The working-class is fainting under burdens which this religious organization will not lift with one of its fingers. It has built marvelous temples for its gods, magnificent palaces for its bishops, commodi- ous houses for its clergy, and it has left the poor of the people to herd in hovels, to sleep on the ground and under the arches of the bridges of the Thames. It has allowed this great modern system of labor-exploitation to grow up without a word of protest. By the working-class it is held, and that justly, responsible for things as they are, and the thinking element of the working-class is to-day in rebellion against the whole system of which or- ganized religion is the protector and beneficiary. The working-man cannot find the God of the churches in the workshop. This divinity never visits the haunts of labor, and apparently has no concern with what is going on in the great world of industry. The conception of the deity which is taught by the clergy has no place in the minds of the thinking portion of the common people. The working-man, however, is not without a God, or at least that which answers to the call for a God in WORKING-CLASS RELIGION 223 the soul of man. He is during every instant of his working-life in the presence of a Force which con- trols his every action. He and that Force are working together to accomplish common tasks. Without that Power he is nothing. Allied with that Power he has the strength of a universe. He does not find in the Force with which he is dealing those attributes of deity which are ascribed to Him by the professors of theology. The deity of or- ganized religion is a personal Force having regard to the actions of men and judging these actions upon a moral basis, and visiting upon them their proper reward or penalty. The God of the working-man is impersonal and has no regard for the moral nature of man. It will work with a bad man as efficiently as with a good man. As long as its fellow-worker is obedi- ent to its nature, this Force will assist him in the accomplishment of his task. But let him err ever so little in the direction of this Force, and it will kill him without mercy and condemn his wife and his children, if he have any, to a life of destitution. The Force with which the working-man has to do is best described by the first article of religion in the English Prayer Book. It is a God without body, parts, or passions. It is resident in all things, accomplishing its ends and dealing impar- tially with all, having regard simply to the perfec- 224 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS tion of the whole. When a working-man whose mind has been trained by this constant dealing with the great facts of nature enters one of our churches and listens to the descriptions that are given there of the Godhead, he is unable to accept, because he cannot understand. The gulf between the formal and the actual religion of the people is to-day so great that it is impossible any longer to bridge it. The clergy and the working-people in- habit different planets. They can no more influ- ence each other than can the inhabitants of Mars affect the soul and mind of the inhabitants of the Earth. The churches are still powerful because they are the custodians of the ethical teachings of Isaiah and Jesus and more because they are the refuge of a vast number of people to whom authority in mat- ters religious is a necessity ; who still live in the ancient and medieval world of myth and legend and have not yet assimilated the modern conception of the universe. The church still reigns in the region of emotion- alism and transcendentalism. Millions upon mil- lions still take from the church their thoughts of God, of heaven and hell. Millions upon millions still find emotional satisfaction in the worship of the Church. But it is only when in the church that these thoughts and emotions are active. WOEKIXG-CLASS EELIGION 225 In the workaday world man has overwhelming evidence contradicting the teaching of his church. In church he hears of a loving, merciful Father, who has regard to his children and who is both willing and able to deliver his beloved from the hand of the spoiler. During six days in the week in the mill he finds no evidence of such a presence. The mill-wheels turn swiftly and if by chance a boy or a girl should come too near the belt, he or she is grasped by that belt and hurled to destruction and no power from heaven comes down to avert this calamity. Nor is it only in the occasional mis- fortunes of his work that man finds the absence of this intervening power. The daily grind of his life, which robs him of his youth, which weakens his manhood, which cripples his age, goes on relent- lessly day after day, and he and the like of him are consumed as a sacrifice by this impersonal Force of industry. The teaching of organized religion that the present world is as it is because of the decree of a divine being, cannot be accepted by the working-class without some qualification. The difference existing between the w T orking-man and the theologian is radical. They have diamet- rically opposite conceptions of the origin of the universe. The church holds to the creationist theory. The working-man is an evolutionist. The church believes that things were made at first per- 226 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS feet and have gone backward, the working-man be lieves that things were always imperfect, always in the making and are going forward. The church believes that a power outside the world interferes at times for purposes of readjustment, that the uni- verse is a watch wound up by its maker and its owner. The working-man believes in the great aphorism of evolution that in the living world there is a constant progress from lower to higher forms by means of fixed laws and resident forces. The working-man's deity is the great worker of the uni- verse. That Force with which the worker deals is constant, uniform, and relentless. When he works with this Force, the workman accomplishes that which is for the welfare of himself and of the whole order in which he lives. When he departs in the least from the law or custom which resides in the Force, then calamity comes upon him. These two conceptions have given rise to different modes of expressing the life of religion. When the church wishes to do anything, it prays — it asks God to do this thing for it. When the working-class re- ligion desires to obtain a given result, it investi- gates; and when its investigation points the way, it follows and it receives the answer to its investi- gation in the result which it obtains. It is the con- stant cry of the church that the class-conscious working-man is irreligious and atheistic. The WORKING-CLASS RELIGION 227 same cry was uttered against Socrates by the Athenians and against St. Peter by the Romans. The truth of the matter is that these two, the work- ing-man and the clergyman, are holding to different Gods. The God of the clergyman is metaphysical. The God of the working-man is experimental. The clergyman says : " Thus, according to my way of thinking, God ought to be." The working-man says : " Thus, according to my experience, do I find that God actually is." The working-man has the advantage of the clergyman, because his method accomplishes results. The modern world is his creation. In former times, sickness was considered a visitation from God. It is now known to be the work of a nasty little germ. While the clergyman is on his knees praying to his God to take away this evil, the working-man, in the person of an energetic physician, is on a chase for the flea or the mosquito that carries the plague. So great is the advantage to mankind of the modern conception of religion, that it is quite impossible for men ever to return to their former way of thinking. They may for a time cling to ancient conceptions; but as these can never be put into practice in daily life, they must die for want of exercise. The religion of the work- ing-class is, and cannot help being, the vital re- ligion of the present and the growing religion of the future. The controversy between the old and 228 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS the new is settled. We are, so far as this matter is concerned, no longer in a stage of transition; we have arrived. The working-class conception of divinity differs from the ecclesiastical in that the latter centralizes power and the former distributes power. The God of the ancient religion was seated on his throne executing his will by agents. The deity of the modern religion is at every point, acting immedi- ately. The religion of the church is monarchical, the religion of the working-class is democratic. According to this religion, the universe is governed by itself, and every atom in the universe has a vote. When Newton proclaimed his discovery of the facts of gravitation, he democratized the world. He said that every particle of matter attracts every other particle of matter, according to a certain formula. Thus each particle of matter has its voice in the control of the whole. Power is concentrated in the great masses, such as the planets and the sun ; but it is also diffused and is resident in every particle of the mass. It is this conception that has caused the working-class to withdraw from the great or- ganized religions. The concentration of power in centers and the refusal of the central authority to grant home-rule to the outlying region is the cause of disruption of organized Christianity. The working-man has come to the conclusion that if he WOKKIXG-CLASS RELIGION 229 is to better his own condition, he cannot wait any longer for some power from outside to do this work of betterment for him. He must do it himself. Nor can he submit his plans and purposes to the control of an outside power. He must form his own plans and he must carry them out. By a process of choice and elimination he must, by ex- periment, find what is best to be done and then do it. The church in its official organization, having withdrawn itself entirely from the world of indus- try, is suffering the consequences of that with- drawal. It is ignorant of this great region of hu- man life, and all its efforts to interfere are simply an irritation to the working-class and fatal to its own interests. In the days when the clergy did govern the world, the clergy were the world. They were its plowmen and its herdsmen. They were its superintendents and having thus first hand knowledge of what was going on, these churchmen, who were also world-men, were able wisely to di- rect the course of affairs. The gradual withdrawal of the clergy from the secular into the spiritual has given them the exclusive management of the spir- itual and lost to them altogether the management of the secular. Neither the scientific nor the in- dustrial world will ever again come under ecclesi- astical control. The working-man will go his way, will fight his battle, will win his victory without 230 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS the aid of the church and in spite of its opposi- tion. In using the word Church we have so far had in mind only that great organization in the West- ern World to which the name church properly ap- plies. The other so-called churches hardly come within the range of our argument, because their in- fluence at present is so slight that what they say or do is of minor importance. The State churches of Northern Germany, Scandinavia, and England have ceased, except in the realm of emotion and transcendentalism, to influence the life of those countries. Having lost the note of authority, they are not able to command in the name of the Lord ; they can only give advice, and their advice is worth just what the personality of each individual attrib- utes to it. It is strange that this fact, which is so evident, is so constantly overlooked. The pious and gifted author of Christianity and the Social Crisis * uses in his book the word church so indefinitely as to vitiate his argument. He is expecting that " the church " is to do the work of social recon- struction, but he does not define what church is to undertake this task. He cannot expect the work to be done by the Eoman Catholic Church, because he looks upon that church as a corrupt body, de- i Christianity and the' Social Crisis, by Walter Rauschenbusch. WORKING-CLASS RELIGION 231 prived more or less of the presence of God. Neither can he hope that any one of the various non-Cath- olic bodies can do this thing, because they, by rea- son of their divisions, are so crippled that they have all that they can do to take care of themselves. The working-class has ceased to take these bodies into consideration. It welcomes individual clergy- men to the ranks of its thinkers and workers, but it does not hope nor care for the assistance of the organic bodies as such. The working-man is wise enough to know that you cannot put new wine into old wine-skins and that it is hardly worth while to patch an old garment with new cloth. Working-class religion can be stated definitely in the terms of evolution. It holds to a belief in a world governed by fixed habits and moved by resi- dent forces. It believes that change is the law of life. It believes that society is in the process of evolution, compelled to change its structure, to revolutionize its government, and that at the pres- ent this evolutionary-revolutionary process is bring- ing the working-class into power. In the language of the old theology, the working-man believes that whatever God there be is in man reconciling the world to himself. The working-man does not seek to obtain the favor of his God by any other than the way of obedience. He believes that only by 232 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS experiment can even the divine power find the right way and hence he is himself yielding to that experi- mental process and he is willing to await the result. The working-man has little or no patience with the great waste of human effort that is expended to secure the favor of God by means of what is called public worship. His God does not dwell in tem- ples made with hands. He believes that God needs no housing and that men do ! He would if he could take the houses of God and make them habitations for men, just as Oliver Cromwell took the great waste places of Yorkminster and made them a shel- ter for his yeomen and their horses. He would take the needle-work which now adorns the backs of the priests and make beautiful the person of the working-girl and working-woman. He holds with the great thinker who wrote the Fourth Gos- pel, that God is not worshiped in Jerusalem nor upon Mt. Gerizim, but that God is worshiped in every honest thought, in every true stroke of work, in every act of social justice, and that by these is the world of man perfected. The working-man is angered by what he considers this waste of human effort in the various religious organizations as they now exist. His condemnation of them is economic. They do not pay for their keep. And he feels that w r hen the forces that are now employed to maintain them in existence are released, that these forces can WORKING-CLASS RELIGION 233 and will be used to do the real work of the world that is waiting so sadly to be done. The leaders of the various religious bodies can- not afford longer to be ignorant of this attitude of the more intelligent of the working-class. Their thoughts are shared by thinking men in general and the solution of the religious problem cannot be long delayed. The day of judgment is at hand. Men are even now being compelled to choose between the conception of the God of theology and the con- ception of God that has been evolved in the scien- tific and industrial worlds. These conceptions have much in common ; but their basic notions are so antagonistic that the one must displace the other. The great Catholic organization has delib- erately chosen to hold fast to its own ancient con- ception of God and the world. The modern mind has rejected this conception. This conflict must go on until the world at last is organized by the one or the other. The outcome is not uncertain. The modern conception of the world is the living, grow- ing conception. The ancient conception is the dy- ing thought. We can stand with reverence at its death-bed, but we cannot even for its own sake desire its longer life. Death-bed agonies are not pleasant. We may deplore, but we cannot dispute the fact that it is the part of the old to die, of the young to live. The working-class religion is still 234 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS in its infancy. It has all the inefficiency and crudeness of the new-born, but in it is the promise of the future. There is nothing new under the sun, and this which is called the new religion is, in reality, sim- ply the reinstatement of the old. The working- man is in accord with the great prophets of Israel and especially with Isaiah and Jesus of Nazareth ; those two fundamental thinkers in all the concerns of the spiritual and social life of man. The funda- mental of the working-class religion is that man is the savior of man. He repeats the cry of Isaiah, " A man shall be an hiding-place from the tempests, a covert from the wind and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." He is in accord with Jesus in the declaration that all judgment concerning man is given to the Son of Man. The working-man does not identify the Son of Man with any historic person, but with man as man. In his judgment the great error of current theology is that it has made the doctrine of the incarnation historic in- stead of cosmic. The saying " God is in Christ " is to him not untrue, but insufficient. He asserts that God is in man, that the creative force has been making itself felt from the beginning of life down to the present. At no point in history can it be said that here God began his work. Whatever God there be, He has been always and He will be always. WORKING-CLASS RELIGION 235 He is ever present; or if we prefer as some do the impersonal, It has been, is, and will be. The con- clusion which the working-man draws from this religious postulate is that the working-man must save the working-man. It is by the forces present in the working-class, that the working-class is to be delivered from the evils that afflict it. Universal- ism is taking the place of both Unitarianism and Trinitarianism, as the fundamental conception of religion. Instead of saying: " There is one God," we are beginning to assert that there be gods many and lords many, and that these are all of the sub- stance of the godhead. The working-man does not think theologically, but if he did, he would express himself in the following manner. He would as- sert the divinity of the force with which he works in the factory and would declare that he himself is an incarnation of that force. He does not, will not, and cannot separate God from His world, and find between these two some accidental historical nexus. A God far away, a God that sleeps, a God that needs to be called upon, has no place in the thought of the thinking working-man. He has ceased to use the word God, because that word im- plies so much that he has rejected. He will take up the word again when the word is emptied of its false meanings and is made to express the living thought of the living age. WORKING-CLASS MORALITY FRIEDEICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE star- tled and scandalized his generation by the as- sertion that Christian morality was a slave mo- rality. He scorned Christianity on this account. He declared that the Christian religion was hin- dering instead of helping the evolution of man to a higher plane. He declared that the virtues proper to man were the direct opposite of those in- culcated by Christian teaching. He said the only man is the super-man, the man who thinks and as- serts . his own superiority, who without question compels weaker men to serve him. The master of the slave was the ideal of Nietzsche. This philos- ophy of Nietzsche brought down upon him the con- demnation of the orthodox, but so far as the Chris- tian morality is concerned, the German philosopher has undoubtedly the right of it. The virtues of the Christian are the peculiar virtues of the slave. Christianity had its origin in the subject popula- tion of the ancient world, and it was condemned by philosophers of olden times for the very reason that 236 WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 237 it is condemned by the philosopher of the nineteenth century. There is no such thing as an absolute morality. Morals are only the habits and customs that are ap- propriate to given conditions in life. Morality is like the chameleon changing its color as it changes its place. The border-line between two countries is the boundary of two moralities. Not only is morality geographically governed but it is also de- termined by conditions of class. What is emi- nently proper in the master is immoral in the slave. We have to-day two distinct moralities, striving for the control of our modern world. The morality which we preach is the morality of the subject class. The morality which we practise, when we can, is the morality of the master class. Master-class morality commends self-assertion, self-aggrandizement, pride of place, acquisitiveness, domination ; it awards the highest honor to the man who is most successful in reducing his fellow-man to an inferiority. The highest type of this morality is the conqueror, who by his genius subjugates whole nations to his sway. In our modern world, the successful business man is the exponent of this moral system. He commends himself and is com- mended by others just in proportion to the ability which he has exercised his powers in the work of subduing mankind and the success which has at- 238 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS tended his efforts. In Ms living the master man is profuse, extravagant, he is a great spender. Lux- ury is to him necessity. It is not enough for him to live in a house, he must build for himself a pal- ace. He is not satisfied to be clothed in woolen, he must have the richest of velvets and furs. His women are used for the purpose of manifesting his power and glory. He clothes his woman in the richest of silks and hangs priceless gems about her neck, in order that the world may see and know how great and rich he is. Wherever he appears, he expects to receive the obeisance of the people. They must bow down before him. Homage is his right. He wears the crown and bears the scepter. These virtues of the master class have been emu- lated by all mankind. The slave desires to escape from his slavery in order that he may take his place among the rulers of the world. And with every gradation of society, the superior practises the su- perior morality in his relation to the inferior. The man and the slave always stand in this moral re- lation. The man is haughty, the slave is cringing. The man is condescending, the slave is a suppliant. The man is independent, the slave dependent. The Christian religion, in common with the Buddhistic and all other salvation-religions, had its origin in the depressed classes of the world at the time of its origin. It was the working-class to WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 239 whom and by whom the doctrines of the Christian religion were preached and received. Its founder was a provincial carpenter; its first leaders were fishermen. It was not until it had acquired mo- mentum that it secured the adhesion and the serv- ices of the higher classes, and when a man of the upper class did join its ranks he had to leave his rank behind him. By the very fact of becoming a Christian, he became a member of the outcast, de- graded portion of the population. In this class the virtues of the slave were second nature. Obedi- ence, first and last, was of the essence of morality. Submission, deprivation, thrift, industry, comrade- ship, long suffering, patience, hope, were all en- gendered by the conditions that prevailed in the subject population of the ancient world. Those qualities of human nature to which the word human properly applies are all of slave origin. It was and it is among the poor of the earth that we find that sympathy for suffering, that mutual helpfulness by which men are able to bear one an- other's burdens, that submission to hard conditions which causes men to continue in painful and dis- agreeable tasks. Working-class morality has been up to the present time a necessity of the working- man's condition. Without these qualities he could not have been a working-man. He would have cast off his yoke and asserted his freedom. The more 240 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS powerful of the working-class are constantly doing this, are shedding the morality of the working-class and clothing themselves with the moralities of the master class. Because of this the working-class has found it hard to escape from itself. It is con- tinually losing the men who should lead it out of its slavery into the promised land. These men when they have at once escaped from their class condition become the most tyrannical of the master class. There is no one so cruel to the slave as the man who himself has been a slave. The master class have been careful to teach work- ing-class morality to working-people, because the safety of the master class depends upon the subject class's belief in the rightfulness of its subjection. And so we have preached from our pulpits and taught in our schools the virtue of humility, of thrift, of carefulness, of industry, and above all things, of obedience. The youth of our working- class are drilled in these precepts by the greatest organization for teaching which the world has ever seen. The Christian virtues are taught by the Christian church and the people are expected to practise them, but in the organization of that church as in the organization of the world outside the church, these virtues are impracticable, except for people in subjection. The rulers of the church and the rulers of the world profess these virtues, WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 241 but they do not live them, because they cannot. The master class can no more practise the virtues of the subject class than the subject class can prac- tise the virtues of the master class. All talk of hu- mility on the part of a King, a Pope, or a Bishop, is mere talk. When a Pope is carried upon the shoulders of men amid prostrate people, he is the most perfect manifestation of human pride that the world has even seen. The haughtiness of Bish- ops in dealing with the younger and lower clergy is proverbial. Profusion in expenditure is a necessity in the higher ranks of society. All that is required of the lower classes would, if practised by the upper classes, be their destruction. The consequence is that we have to-day an ironical situation. Our professed religion demands of us a way of life which we declare to be impracticable. We are taught by our great religious prophets that we are not to lay up treasure upon earth. We bow to this pre- cept but declare that if we were to obey it we should find our way to the poor-house. The cen- tral doctrine of the religion that is preached to us is that we shall not resist evil. Again we bow deferentially, and say that to practise this doctrine would be to dissolve society, and we proceed at once to arm ourselves to the teeth, to establish in- stitutions for the purpose of resisting evil. The 242 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS policeman with bis club is our practical answer to the doctrine of tbe Nazarene. It has been said that it was a misfortune that Jesus preached to the Western, instead of to the Eastern, World. The reason for this is that the people of the East, hav- ing been for ages a subject people, were ripe for the preaching of the passive virtues. In the West, the people are the children of the free men of the woods and of the seas. The northern, Germanic nations accepted Christianity without either be- lieving or understanding it. In this instance the slave converted the master, and the history of Christianity in Europe is the history of the vain effort of a master people to live the morality of a subject people. The most acquisitive, avaricious, of the peoples of the earth profess the doctrine of abstinence and detachment from the world. The most violent and warlike worship the Prince of Peace. They who declare that a man should give more quickly than he should receive are amassing fortunes by methods of legalized and unlegalized robbery. This contrast between theory and prac- tice makes of the modern world a mad-house. Only in Bedlam can people profess that which is so in- congruous to their real thought and life. The working-man has at last awakened to the fact that the morality which has been taught to him by his teachers is not profitable to him. As long WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 243 as he practises that morality he must be more or less a slave. If he is to obey, he must have a mas- ter; and if obedience is without limit, then that mastership must extend over all his life. If he is to bow down in humility, it must be to a superior ; and if sufferance and obeisance is the badge of all his tribe, then any effort on his part to stand up- right, to assume for himself those qualities which belong to his superiors, is immoral, and he is to be blamed for thus imitating those who are above and beyond him. If he is to be saving, then the less that he expends upon himself out of the prod- uct of his labor, the more must others spend, unless his labor is to glut the world with useless produc- tion. If he adopts a generous standard of living, he is violating the morality of his class, he is the scoff and the sneer of the upper class. If he prac- tises the virtue of mutual helpfulness, if he organ- izes himself into associations for the purpose of bettering the condition of himself and his fellow- workmen, he has until recent times, been outlawed. The working-man has come at last to believe that if he is to save himself from slavery he must dis- card slave morality and practise master morality. He must in the first instance be master of himself. He must control the means of making his own liv- ing, and it is for the good of the world that he should spend what he makes; it is not well that 244 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS others should dispense what he earns. Self-devel- opment demands that each man should have a cer- tain pride in himself and in his own accomplish- ment. Humility is a virtue of value only to the strong. The 'umbleness of Uriah Heep is a vice. Thrift is very well when thrift brings greater power ; but when that virtue simply means greater exploitation, then thrift is a vice. The Irish ten- ant lost the habit of thriftiness because every time he made a saving, that saving was taken away from him by his landlord. When one class is subject to another class, the thrift of the subject class only adds to the wealth of the master class. The sub- ject class is compelled to live on little in order that the master class may consume without limit. These truths are now apparent to the thinking working- man, and he is striving to throw off the morality which he has inherited and to practise a morality which he sees to be necessary to his advancing life in the world. The spirit of mastership is in him. He is to-day not a subject, but a citizen. He has a voice and a vote in affairs of State. The upper classes are beginning to acknowledge his master- ship. On or about election time, there is nothing too good for the working-man, and his labor is held up as the greatest and most dignified thing in the world. Can we expect that this new-born sovereign shall still demean himself after the custom of the WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 215 slave? The only salvation for society to-day is that the master class shall practise slave morality and the slave class practise the master morality. It were a beautiful thing and much to be commended if the master class, professing the teachings of the Christian religion, were to begin to practise Chris- tian morality. If the men of power were to say to themselves that they were not the masters but the servants of the people, and when they said it mean it; if they who were possessed of properties were to declare that their property was not their own, but the common property of all the people; if they were to trust themselves to the future and not be amassing wealth to shield themselves and their children from dependence upon the future; if they were to descend from their high places in the industrial, the social, and the political world and make common cause with the lowest of their breth- ren, — then that vision of a kingdom or order of God would, so far as the upper classes are con- cerned, begin to manifest itself in the presence of the angels. On the other hand, if the subject classes of the world to-day begin to practise the virtues of the master class, if they refuse any longer to cringe; if they stand upright and assert the full dignity of their manhood; if they would rather face starva- tion than the loss of their moral independence; if 246 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS they refuse to starve themselves and their children but claim for themselves a full portion at the table of life; if, instead of speaking with bated breath, they speak boldly; if they refuse to do that which their conscience declares to be evil ; if in their lives they develop greatness of mind, self-respect, even self-assertion, — then present miseries will begin to vanish. It is the contentedness of the poor with poverty that is the abiding cause of poverty. When the spirit of self is strong enough in the poor to stir up the poverty stricken classes to rebellion against their lot, then poverty will vanish. In the struggle the poor may be exterminated; but in their death, poverty will die with them. It is well that the up- per classes should know that such thoughts as these are fermenting to-day in the hearts of the working- people. The working-class is emerging from that age-long contempt in which it has been held. It is beginning to respect itself and it is demanding respect from others. It will no longer devote its energies subserviently to the interest of others. It claims the right to work in its own interest. The employing-class can no longer rely upon the loyalty of the working-class any more than kings can rely upon the loyalty of the subjects. To-day in poli- tics the same man is both subject and king. The modern man refuses politically to be in subjection to any other man. He will obey only laws of his WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 247 own making and officers of his own choosing. The same principle is working out in the industrial world. Men are no longer content to be simply hands. They are heads and they will not have their heads cut off when they enter the factory doors. The denial of the working-man to any rights of mastership in industry is causing the present in- dustrial confusion and that confusion will con- tinue until the rights of the working-man are fully recognized and he takes his proper place in the di- rection of industrial affairs. At present the work- ing-man is exercising his higher powers by and through his industrial organizations. The trades unions and the fraternal, mutual-benefit societies are the creation of the working-class and are an evidence of the power possessed by that class to organize and carry on great enterprises. The training which the working-man has received in these organizations has made it possible for him to enter into the direction of the industrial affairs of the world. He can do this only through the re- organization of industry upon a democratic basis. The shop, as well as the city, must be in the con- trol of those who live and work in it. The day of autocracy is over, the day of democracy has come. The morality of the working-class age which is now approaching will revolutionize many of our conceptions. The great virtue upon which our 248 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS organized religion magnifies itself is that of char- ity. Charity not in the sense in which that word is used by Paul, but in the meaning that is given to it by the modern charity organizations. The modern man buys his way into the kingdom of vir- tue by giving alms to the worthy poor, and by sup- porting institutions for the derelicts of humanity. When such an one seeks to justify his religion, he points to the hospital, to the orphan-asylum, to the home for the aged ; and in these he finds the justifi- cation of his way of living. Working-class moral- ity has for all this not only contempt, but hatred. It declares that this charity does not only cover a multitude of sins, but it is also the cloak for the vilest injustice. Working-class morality would, if it could, make forever impossible the hospital, other than as the scientific institution for the treating of disease, to which all sick people without regard to the riches or poverty of the patient would resort, and in which there would be no respect of persons. He would abolish the orphan-asylum and in its place have the pensioned mother, he would burn the home for the aged and make it possible for every old man and woman to live under his own vine and his own fig-tree. He would cut off the opportuni- ties of the rich to benefit the poor — by the aboli- tion of poverty. He would transfer the surplus from the affluent to the needy, by a process harm- WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 249 less to both. By means of income-tax and death- duties he would dissipate great fortunes, and by the wealth thus secured give steadier employment and shorter hours to the worker. Lie would make use of the instruments of government to prevent disease, to conserve the sources of natural wealth, to equalize opportunity, to socialize production and distribution and so make unnecessary this outpour- ing of wealth for purposes of relief. Prevention is the watchword of the working-man. Organize salvation before salvation becomes hopeless. Let the workman give to his work and the work give to the workman each of its best and all these vari- ous charity organizations can be scrapped as the worn-out machines of a worn-out world. In the morality of the working-class the word thrift will not be found. The working-man will give as much as he gets, and it is only by giving less than he gets that a man can be thrifty. Dur- ing the days of family dominion, the members of the family worked with and for the family and the family provided for its members. As long as the family was rich or well-to-do, no member of the family had any fear. The sick knew that they would be cared for, and the aged that their last days would be peace. But with the loss of the family as an economic unit, the sick and the aged are the prey of despair. Working-class morality 250 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS will simply restore family morality. It will say that the working-man is worthy not only of his hire but of more than his hire. He is worthy of his life, and he will be so adjusted to the com- munity that out of the work of his earlier life will be saved the provision of his later life. Community insurance against sickness, old age, and unemploy- ment, will take the place of the saving-instinct and man at last can begin to live as do the flowers of the field and the birds of the air. He can enter a little way into the wonderful words of the Master of Life, when he said : " Consider the lilies of the field how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these." The morality of the working-class will repeal the moralities of both the master and the subject class. When we are all equals, there can be no pride of place. Even to-day he is an exceptional man who as he walks the streets has any sense of superiority over his fellow-men walking the same street. When provision is made by the community for the great accidents as well as the abiding necessities of life, riches will be an excrescence, a tumor to be got rid of, rather than a badge of glory. It is even so to- day. Life is so adjusting itself to the means of production and distribution that great wealth to- day does not bring to its owner any abiding satis- WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 251 faction. It is something to be rid of. One of the richest of our contemporaries says that every man ought to die poor. If this be true, sensible men will say that the best way to die poor is to live in pov- erty. The steel-king finds a difficulty in dying poor that did not beset the Christian saint. In the pres- ent day, and more and more as time goes on, men will neither wish to live in riches, nor to die in poverty, but in that mean estate betwixt the two which has been by the wise declared to be the only sane condition of human life; and when this dispo- sition is controlling, it will be discovered that human genius and human labor are quite sufficient to provide for all reasonable human beings. As it was in the days of the family and in the days of the monastery, the community will be rich, the indi- vidual poor. The community will own all things, the individual will own only his membership in the community and the right to share in its average prosperity. The morality of the working-class is community morality. The morality that is preached in the churches and taught in the schools is largely indi- vidualistic morality. The one morality deals with the major duties of human life, the other with the minor duties of personal conduct. The current morality insists upon temperance and neglects jus- tice; it lays great stress upon the proper way of 252 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS spending money and pays no attention to the right- ful method of earning money. It pries into the private life and seeks to regulate all those actions which properly belong to the individual and it lets the public life pass without scrutiny. It is this neglect of the major morality on the part of the modern moralist that is largely to blame for the present depravity of our social life. So long as a man does not get drunk ; so long as he is, outwardly at least, faithful in the marriage relation, he is secure in his respectability. His membership in the church is unquestioned and his social standing secure. He may at the same time be grinding the faces of the poor, be robbing the community by every shift that the lawyer can devise, and all this may be well known, — but he suffers no excommuni- cation on the part either of the church or of so- ciety. On the contrary, he has the chief seat in the synagogue and in the market-place he is called master. It is this topsy-turvy condition of moral- ity that is responsible for much of our present misery. The world is turned upside down and only when it is righted, can we expect to have any- thing like decent, peaceful living. In many things the working-class moralist shocks the sensibilities of the formal moralist of the day. The working-class moralist does not seem to care whether a man does or does not drink a glass of WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 253 beer; he does not spy out the personal life of the man where it does not touch the general life of the people. His morality is a class morality. He re- quires of each man loyalty to his class. The fact that he is waging a class war causes him to demand the virtue of the soldier rather than the virtue of the private individual. The love affairs of Nelson did not concern the English people. All they asked of him was that he should lead the English navies to victory. And to-day the column of Nelson in Trafalgar Square is witness to the fact that in all great crises of the world, public morality covers many a private sin. The working-class moralist is, however, insisting on temperance, not because he wishes to interfere with the pleasures of the in- dividual, but because he knows that temperance is a public duty. The war which he is waging calls for clear judgment, steady nerves, and staying power. Hence, there is no place in this war for the drunkard, but apart from this the working- class moralist gives to the cause of temperance no thought whatever. He has not the slightest in- terest in the prohibition propaganda, nor will he spend his time or strength in seeking to compel men and women to live together when they wish to live apart. The agitation against divorce finds the working-class moralist lukewarm. He is well aware that economic conditions are the occasion 254 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS of much of the unhappiness that leads to the break- up of the home and the disruption of the fam- ily. Consequently, he gives all his energies to the effort of bettering these economic conditions. When men and women are economically free, they will be able to order their mutual relations upon the basis of mutual affection. They will not fear one another and consequently they will, if they are united in any sexual bond, love one another. This change of the basis of morality from minor to major morals, is the result of the campaign of agitation that has been carried on in the working- class during the last three-quarters of a century. The teachers of morality in the churches, the schools, and the colleges, have been outflanked by the working-class moralist. They are firing into space, the enemy has left their field of battle and is preparing to attack them in the rear. It is ab- solutely necessary that these teachers of current morality should right-about-face. If they would conquer the working-class moralist, they can do so only with the weapons and upon the battlefield of working-class morality. The revolution in moral- ity is already accomplished so far as the working- class is concerned. The men and the women of the factory and the shop will no longer accept that teaching which commands them to a life of sub- servience. They will from this time on insist upon WORKING-CLASS MORALITY 255 the right to live a full lminan life. They will call no man master upon earth, because they find the seat of mastership in their own souls. They will be ready to conform to all the beneficent laws, habits, and customs necessary to the perfection of human existence, but before they will obey any law, they must understand it and if it be a human law, they themselves must enact it. They will not render unthinking obedience any longer. They will not shed their brother's blood at the command of a superior. Nor will they give of their strength without a full equivalent in return. The master class which is the monied class in the modern world, must submit to working-class morality. It cannot hope to drive the working-class back to the old basis of morals. It cannot hope to destroy the working-class, for the destruction of the working- class is its own destruction. Hence, the master class must itself stand upon working-class moral- ity. There is no other way. XI WORKING-CLASS POLITICS AS a consequence of working-class morality, that class is to-day organized politically. It has come to the conclusion that if it is to accomplish its own deliverance it can do so only by taking over into its own* control the functions of govern- ment. The master-class morality enacted into law is enforced by the powers now ruling in politics. Master-class morality has on its side the army and the police. All the laws up to this time have been made in the interest of that class. Only after bit- ter struggle has the working-class been able to se- cure for itself any modification of the conditions under which it is compelled to live. Legal prin- ciples are derived from the times of slavery. Pri- vate property is to-day the chief concern of the law. The first property right of man was the right to own his fellow-man and reap the products of his labor. Slavery was the basic institution of the an- cient world and all the laws from the statutes of Hammurabi down almost to the present time have been concerned with the duty of protecting prop- erty against assault. The slave-holders in the an- 256 WORKING-CLASS POLITICS 257 cient world made the slave code, just as the slave- holders in the South made the black code of the South during the times of slavery. This right of the master men to the ownership of the labor of the slave class colors to-day all of our legislation. It does not enter into the miad of the legislator that each man has an inherent right to the full product of his own labor; but that what is called capital is entitled to the largest possible return, that prop- erty has the privilege of reducing human life to misery, goes almost without question. The reason for this is that it is the man of property who makes the laws. The political parties of all the western nations are organized and controlled by the prop- erty-owners. Until recent times, the property classes excluded the working-classes altogether from the exercise of political rights. The working- man had nothing whatever to do with the enacting of the laws that governed his life. He was an out- sider, his sole duty was obedience and he had to take what was given him. His masters not only made the laws, but they interpreted the laws and enforced them. The consequence was that the propertied classes took from the working-classes, by due process of law, all that the working-class produced, except that which was necessary to main- tain the working-class in a bare existence. The influence of law upon life is apparent to 258 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS every thinker. Mr. Eliliu Eoot, in a very able pamphlet, has set forth the relation that good and bad law have to human adversity and prosperity. A bad law is more blighting than a drought, more killing than a frost. The poverty that to-day af- flicts our civilization is due almost entirely to the evil working of the laws which have been made in the interests of property. It is well known that by a simple process of taxation a whole population can be depressed, impoverished, and finally starved to death. This taxation need not be direct. It may be altogether disguised from the taxpayer. If the law is made so that one man can gain advan- tage over another man, then that is simply grant- ing to the privileged person the right of taxation. Such to-day is the working of our laws. When we grant to one man unlimited private ownership of the means of production or of the sources of wealth, we turn over to that man the taxing-power. In the language of ancient times, we farm the taxes, and in all history there has been no such destruc- tive force as the farmer of the taxes. He collects not only what is due the community, but he takes also, for himself, a double portion. The farming of the taxes has been formally discarded by every civilized community of modern times; but while this is formally true, there still lurks in the legal institutions of the modern States, hiding-places WORKING-CLASS POLITICS 259 from which the tax-farmer emerges to do his de- structive work in the community. The laws shel- ter him, and by means of the laws he accomplishes his nefarious task. The working-class politician, or rather, as one should say, the working-class statesman, has mas- tered this secret of modern political organization. He has come to see the immense advantage pos- sessed by those who control the making, the inter- preting, and the enforcing of the laws. And he has made up his mind to take a hand in that work himself. He comprehends the fact that only when the laws are made in the interest of himself and his class can that class hope for deliverance. To- day it is under the law ; and, therefore, he preaches to that class that if it would be saved it must be no longer under the law but over the law, it must be able at any time to command the machinery that grinds out the law. The legislative, the judicial, and the executive power, by means of which laws are made, interpreted, and executed, must all be within the grasp of the working-man, so that he can turn those powers to the right or to the left, halt them or drive them forward as the interest of the working-class demands. In other words, he must revolutionize politics. Politics to-day sub- mits to the dictations of the property classes, it must to-morrow obey the working-classes. 260 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS Because of this, the working-class is in politics and it is there to stay. There is a political party organized in the interests of the working-class and that class only. Class-conscious politics is no new thing in political history. All political parties have been class-conscious parties. The great strug- gle that was waged in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries between the citizen and landlord classes, found their expression in political parties. The Tory party represented the landlord, the Whig party the commercial classes. To-day the Conservative party of England is the agent of what remains of the landlord class in England and the Liberal party is still the instrument of the tri- umphant mercantile classes. Both of these po- litical parties work in the interests of the property classes. They make concessions to the working- class, but these are made grudgingly and without primary regard to the needs of the working-class. The working-people have just made their entrance into the political life of England. When at elec- tion thirty members of the Labor party were chosen to represent that class in Parliament, the London Times of the next morning declared that this was a revolution in English politics, and so it has proved to be. Those thirty working-men have within the brief period of a decade accomplished more for the working-class than all that the other WOKKING-CLASS POLITICS 261 parties have granted to that class as a favor throughout their whole existence. In Germany the political party of the working- class has acquired a momentum that is giving it supremacy. It is to-day the most considerable po- litical party in the Empire. It has the largest number of representatives in the legislative body. It is able to block any anti-working-class legisla- tion. It has forced upon the Empire and upon the various German States a working-class policy. Germany is being rapidly socialized. State social- ism is the policy of the government, communistic production is becoming rapidly the policy of the various cities. Because of the presence in Ger- many of this highly organized political party in the interest of the working-class, the condition of the German working-man is far better than that of the working-man in any other country. Germany is taking the lead in all that concerns the welfare of the industrial population, and consequently is outstripping other peoples in the quality and quan- tity of its industrial products. The working-class party, however, is not content with this betterment of the class. It does not mean to rest in State socialism or to be satisfied with a partial com- munity production. Its object is not reform, but revolution. It is not yet sufficiently strong to command the whole situation. It is, however, de- 262 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS feating the enemy in detail. Every enactment, such as an old-age pension, compensation for in- dustrial injury, insurance against sickness, pen- sions for mothers, insurance against unemploy- ment, strengthens labor and weakens capital. It limits the power of capital to exploit labor; and with every such limitation, capital loses and labor gains. Capital to-day is on the defensive. It is no longer making the assault. It cannot so much as leave its entrenchments, it is in a state of siege. The working-class statesman feels that its final conquest is only a matter of time. The wiser among the leaders of the working-class movement are determined that this battle shall be fought to a conclusion on the line of political activity. So great have been the advantages which have accrued from political action, that the so-called direct ac- tionist finds himself an outlaw in the great work- ing-class political organization. His guerrilla war- fare is a hindrance instead of a help to the general cause. The working-class to-day is fighting in the open. It is obedient to the laws of civilized war- fare. It does not plot, it debates. It does not cast the bomb, it casts the vote. It knows that the only way to accomplish a lasting revolt is not by killing the ruler, but by changing the rule. You may murder kings till doomsday and kings will still rule. The only way to get rid of kings is to WORKING-CLASS POLITICS 263 abolish kingship. The war-cry of the working- class is not change jour rulers, but change your system. Working-class politics is the outward expression of a revolution that has already been accomplished in the structure of human society. Society in the first instance was based upon kinship. This gave rise to the tribe with all its customs, habits, and laws. The next organic structure was based upon territory. A given organization claimed for itself a certain portion of the earth. Modern society is based upon industry. Society has not yet fully accommodated itself to this new structural rela- tionship, but it is in the process of accommodation. The working-class political party is the necessary outcome of this basic change, and is the instrument that humanity is using to complete the alteration of its social establishment. A profound social re- adjustment is the necessity of present conditions. Mankind has abandoned race and country as the foundation of social organization. The working- class statesman recognizes this fact and organizes his politics without regard to limitations of race or territory. Working-class politics are inter- racial and international. All peoples, tongues, and nations are gathered under the banner of the work- ing-class party. For the first time in human his- tory, secular politics have passed the bounds of 264 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS nationalism. The working-class has become con- scious of itself as a class throughout the world, and is seeking the betterment of its class indus- trially and subordinating to those interests the interests of the Church, the Family, and the State. The working-class statesman sees his brother in every man who has the good of the working-class at heart. His natural brother is nothing to him if that brother is on the other side of the great in- dustrial conflict. He reaches out his hand and says : " Who is my mother, my sister, and my brother?" And his answer is: "My mother, my brother, and my sister are they who know the will of the working-class and do it." National boun- daries cannot limit the range of his statesmanship. The working-man dwells in every land and where- ever the working-man is, there the working-class party is to assert and protect his rights. For this reason the working-class party is the party most bitterly opposed to war between the nations. The nations are to-day and always have been organized for war. The hostility that existed be- tween man and man in primitive times, when every man's hand was against every man's in the strug- gle for bread, organized itself in the tribe, in the family, and in the State. So that in the thought of the ancient world the stranger was an enemy; the man on the other side of the river was the WORKING-CLASS TOLITICS 265 natural foe of the man on this side the river. And these could live in peace together only by some artificial agreement. So natural seemed this state of enmity that walls were built about the home and the city as matters of necessary precaution. Nations to-day arm themselves from top to toe that they may be secure from the hostility which each nation believes to lurk within the heart of every other nation against itself. For many cen- turies war has been the business of the political governments, and each nation has tried to subject the other nations to its own uses. This state of war which has been constant from the beginning of civilization down to the present has weighed heavily upon the working-class in all countries. It has placed the working-class at immense dis- advantage; it has divided that class into two sec- tions, the military class and the labor class. In the person of the soldier, the working-class has done the fighting and the dying, in the person of the laborer the working-class has provisioned the army. The working-class as such has had little or no interest in the wars of the nations. It makes no material difference to this class which army conquers. Its fields are wasted, its houses are burned, its men are killed, whether the French or the German are victorious. In modern times wars have been occasioned very 266 THE RISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS largely by questions relating to commerce. The capitalistic nations have invaded and subdued the non-capitalistic peoples in the interest of the mar- ket. One of the earliest and the most important of these conflicts was that between the East In- dians and the English which resulted in the sub- jection of India to the rule of England and the exploitation of its people by the commerce of Eng- land. The Napoleonic wars in the end became commercial in their character. Napoleon sought to destroy England by cutting it off from the Con- tinental market. The English mercantile class, then in power, struggled to the death to secure for itself the open market of the world. With the battle of Waterloo the triumph of England was secure and her commercial expansion followed. Neither the English people nor the French, nor any of the peoples of Continental Europe, were directly interested in the outcome of these wars. The com- mon people in all countries were impoverished by them and that poverty still exists among us, tes- tifying to the fact that the people pay and the people die, while only the ruling-class is advan- taged, by any war. This fact has been finally mastered by the work- ing-class and it is coming to the determination that as a class it will no longer be a party to Interna- tional war. The decay of patriotism is alarming WOEKING-CLASS POLITICS 267 the governments. The red flag of Internationalism is flying in the streets of the cities of all lands, as a warning to the political powers that the people will no longer give them unhesitating obedience in their efforts to gain by w r arfare the advantage of other nations. The international working-class movement is to-day the only hope for the ultimate peace of the world. The governments of the States are so deeply committed to the military principle that it is quite impossible for them to abandon it except on compulsion. The Hague conferences witness to the fact that it is out of the question to hope for the abolition of war through the action of the organized governments of the nations. Im- mediately upon the meeting of the first Hague con- ference, there followed two of the most unneces- sary, destructive wars known to recent history. The Boer war and the Eussian-Japanese war cele- brated the closing of the first conference at the Hague. These conferences had not been able to persuade any of the great powers so much as to limit their armaments. The war budgets of the various governments of Christendom make the Hague conference a laughing-stock to the working- class. The thinking working-man comprehends that all of this expression of the sentiments of peace is meant largely for his amusement and to act as a salve upon the philanthropic and religious con- 268 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS science of the upper classes. Military power is necessary to-day for the protection of the ruling- class in each nation against the subjected class. In the estimation of the working-man, this is the real reason for the maintenance of the armaments of the nation. Even the advocates of peace assert that we must still have an army, to maintain order within the several nations themselves. That is, the working-class must still be separated into two sections, the military class and the labor class proper, in order that the military may support the present ruling-class against the rising working- class. Hence it is that the leaders of the working- class are seeking to lessen, discourage, and destroy the military spirit. When a working-man has once been inoculated with working-class politics, he has no desire to put on the uniform and carry the mus- ket. It is the fear of this working-class movement which has held the military powers of Europe in check during the last quarter of a century. The mighty social democratic spirit of the German Em- pire is a curb upon the German war-lords. The social democratic spirit would resent any flagrant invasion of the rights of Germany on the part of Eussia, England, or France, but at the same time it will not consent to any mere wanton outbreak on the part of Germany against these nations. The democratic social party in convention assem- WOEKING-CLASS POLITICS 269 bled in the city of Basle, gave warning to the various powers of Europe that they must not plunge Europe into war on account of the dis- turbances in the Balkan States. This manifesto had its effect and, with other causes, has acted to prevent a general war in Europe at the present time. The thinkers of the working-class are already forecasting the organization of the world. Inter- national republicanism is their dream. This spirit would not destroy a nationality, but it would sub- ordinate nationality to a world policy. There is at the present time a world organization. Com- merce is its expression. The nations are so knit together that any break in their relationship is a pain and a disaster to all. The laboring-class in all nations are united in one body. They are be- coming conscious of their common interests ; across the border-lines they are calling each other com- rade and are exchanging thoughts. A member of the democratic social party can take his red card and travel from one country to another and be wel- comed in every place by the local of that place. Nothing like this has happened in the world since the days of early Christianity. It is impossible for the political powers to resist long this growing sentiment of comradeship in the hearts of the work- ing-people. The waving of the flag, the shouting 270 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS of the national shibboleth, no longer stirs the hearts of the working-people, and when once this class as a whole makes up its mind that it does not care to fight, there will be an end of fighting. The upper classes furnish the officers, but not the pri- vates, and when the military consists principally of officers, then it will exercise itself in military manoeuvers but will not seek to extinguish itself on fields of battle. Every one who has at heart the abolition of war should ally himself with the democratic social movement as the most available instrument whereby to accomplish this beneficent end. The order of evolution at the present time is from militarism to industrialism, from foreign affairs to home concerns. The developments of the func- tions of government within the past century has changed entirely the structure of the State and the relation of the individual to the community. The Federal government of the United States was created for the purpose of giving the States an organ whereby these various political bodies might treat with foreign nations. It was in the thought of the originators of the Federal constitution little more than a league of offense and defense. In or- der that the central government might be effective, it was given direct jurisdiction in all affairs com- mitted to it by the several States. But the States WORKING-CLASS POLITICS 271 considered themselves to be distinct nationalities, possessed of powers with which the central gov- ernment could not interfere. The first cabinet of the President of the United States contained only four departments, the Department of State, of War, of the Treasury, and of Justice. The increase in the number of departments in the cabinet has fol- lowed the line of social revolution. Instead of the four cabinet-officers who sat at the table of the first President, there are now ten members of the presidential council. Foreign affairs play but a small part in the life of the nation. The Secre- tary of State, while titularly the head of the cab- inet, is not its most important member. The de- partments of the Treasury, of the Interior, of Labor, of Commerce, and of Agriculture, are each of them employing subordinates that exceed the force of the State Departments four and five to one. Each of these departments as they have been created has marked an encroachment on the part of the Federal Government, not so much upon the rights of the States, as upon the rights of individ- uals. The government is interfering with private business in a way undreamed of by the fathers. All this is in the direction of the socializing of the means of transportation and production which is the program of the democratic social party. We have not yet come in sight of the end of this tend- 272 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS ency toward socialism. New departments will be added to the Federal and State Governments as the years go by. A department of health and one of education are necessities at the present time, and we may not be surprised in the future to find a department of eugenics regulating the produc- tion of human beings, just as the department of agriculture is to-day supervising the production of swine, horses, and cattle. The extension of governmental control is the consequence of the industrial changes which have made production, distribution and consumption not private, but public affairs. The government of the United States and that of the several States of the Union are but slowly following in the wake of the more progressive nations which have long since taken out of private hands into public con- trol such business as must be managed by the pub- lic if the people are to be protected in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Working-class politics is finding expression in all of these changes in the functions of government. It is the pressure upward of the working-class that has dislocated the ancient machinery and made it unworkable. The discontent of the industrial classes has forced the ruling-classes to make con- cessions, and this discontent will continue demand- WOKKING-CLASS POLITICS 273 ing more and more until at last the distinction be- tween the classes is obliterated and only one class, which will be the working-class, remains. The cooperative communism is the domestic pol- icy of the democratic social party. Home rule is essential to the working of the plan. Each com- munity must organize itself into its industries. It must govern its baking and its brewing, just as it now governs the cleaning of its streets and the piping of its water. The directions of the forces of labor are to be determined by the necessities of the community and not by the caprices of private speculation. The right of the community to the land which it occupies is a principle that cannot be denied very much longer. The palpable absurd- ity of a great people, such as now inhabits Man- hattan Island, paying immense tribute to a few private individuals because of some shadowy legal right, cannot maintain itself against the determina- tion of the whole body of the people, themselves to own what they create. All of the things that are done for the people must also be done by the peo- ple. This enlargement of the area of politics will compel all of the people to take part in the admin- istration of the government. It is objected that this will increase immensely the employees of the government, but this, instead of being an objection, 274 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS is an advantage. The employees of the govern- ment, if they are rendering service, are the most useful of all the members of the body politic. The letter-carrier is far more necessary to the happi- ness of the people than is the bar-keeper or the salesman who is selling cigars. Just in proportion as the energies of the people are occupied in useful public employment, so will those energies be with- drawn from harmful, private enterprise. Munic- ipal bakeries and factories having no need to adver- tise themselves by artificial means can employ more and better bakers in the making of bread. When once we have made the transition from the present to the coming system, we shall marvel at the fact that we delayed so long to make so beneficent a change. In the not distant future all of the great cen- ters of human living will be, in a measure, self- sustaining. Each community will be organized as a family to provide for its members the necessities of life. Commerce will be a public and not a pri- vate business. Either by taxation or by other means, the community will forbid the importation of articles that it considers injurious to the health of the people. We have a beginning of this new policy in the laws regulating the liquor traffic, and we can as easily forbid the buying and the selling of impure food, of shoddy clothing, as we can for- WORKING-CLASS POLITICS 275 bid the importation of the making, the buying, and the selling of wine and whisky. The objection that all this will deprive life of variety, reduce to a dreary monotony the customs and the habits of the people, is overruled by the answer already made that monotony and dreari- ness is already with us and is the outcome of our present system. The communities like families, having the greater power, could create for them- selves lovely homes and beautiful clothing; all the advantages that come from applied science, all the amenities of art and the glories of true religion, will be the natural outcome of the release of the forces of humanity from that which now occupies them into the freer life which will be theirs when thus delivered from the necessity of a constant struggle against competitors for existence. The medieval city is in some respects but a prophecy of what the city of the future is to be. These cities built themselves, they were not created by the hap- hazard planning of individuals, but were the out- come of the communal intelligence. The ugliness of the main street of an ordinary American town is an evidence of the inability of the private man to create a great public utility such as a street with its buildings should be. The city of Chester puts to shame every city of like size in the United States. The city is the home of all the citizens. No pri- 276 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS vate person should be permitted to make that pub- lic dwelling-place other than as beautiful as it can be made. The housing of the people is in the estimation of working-class politics a public function. We rec- ognize that much even in our present system. We have our building-codes and we are beginning to think about city-planning. This movement will go forward until at last the principles that are cre- ating it shall be fully acknowledged and the social- ization of the city-life be accepted as a matter of principle. It is the social democratic agitation that is at the bottom of all these changes and con- sequently of importance at the present time that this agitation be wisely directed. We may sum up working-class politics in two words, Eepublicanism and Communism. The Re- publican principle gives over to the larger central- ized government those concerns that belong to the whole population of a State, of a nation, or of the world. The various States in the United States are federal in their character. In them towns, counties, and cities are united in all that con- cerns the common welfare of the people of the State. We might say in parentheses here that our modern American States are purely artificial, are serving no real purposes of government, but are simply maintaining ancient traditions and cus- WORKING-CLASS POLITICS 277 toms. But in so far as they are a reality, they exercise a jurisdiction in the greater affairs of the people. When they interfere with the community affairs, they are harmful instead of helpful. The same is true of the great national governments. These are federations of communities for the pur- pose of transacting the business which the com- munities have with one another. The world as a whole is becoming a great federation for the inter- communication of thought and the interchange of commodities. This federal principle is necessary to the peace of the world. The various communi- ties must have some power which, they all recog- nize and to which in disputes between themselves they yield obedience. The federation of the world is near at hand, because the peoples of the world when once instructed in the principles of demo- cratic socialism, will find their interests in help- ing one another rather than in hurting one an- other. The various peoples will create a great central power which will hold unruly communities in check and bring a common public opinion to bear upon all neighborhoods. But while this principle of federation is of vast importance, it is not nearly so close to the people, so necessary to their welfare, as the principle of cooperative communism. Each community must govern itself in all that pertains to itself. It must 278 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS secure and hold the right to determine its own form of government. It must have complete jurisdic- tion in all that pertains to its own welfare. As it extends the range of its operations, it will need more and more of liberty in which to exercise the freedom of its will. The free cities of medieval Europe are an example of what the free city must be in all times. Our American federal system has shown the distinction between local and federal affairs. The principles of federation and of home rule are not antagonistic, they are coordinate. Working together they produce stability in human society. Government from a center is always dan- gerous when that center is too far removed from its circumference. The democratic social move- ment insists upon the principle of community in- dependence as essential to its strength. It also insists upon federation as necessary for the preser- vation of the community against outside aggres- sion. The political party of the working-class calls itself the democratic social party, because democ- racy and socialism are mutually dependent. De- mocracy by itself is chaos. Each individual of the demos struggling with every other individual leads to a scramble that is disgraceful to humanity and that disturbs the peace and makes decent living impossible. Pure democracy tends inevitably to imperialism. The people, tired of bickering, sur- WOKKING-CLASS POLITICS 279 render themselves into the control of a master. Pure socialism, on the other hand, is tyranny. If the social powers are in the control of the govern- ment, and that government in the possession of a single person or of a small group of persons, then every act of socializing is an infringement upon the liberties of the people and a hindrance to their prosperity. The only danger of the coming social- ism is that it may be thus used by the stronger ele- ment as a means of oppressing the weaker. The only safety for a socialized community is that it shall be democratic, that the people as a whole shall have control and keep control of all the func- tions of government. Discussion of public affairs day by day, the right to elect and recall public officers, the right to vote directly on all public questions, the subordination of the leader to the people are planks in the platform of the social dem- ocratic party, because it is only upon such a plat- form that socialism can stand. When one studies the politics of the working-class he cannot but ad- mire the wisdom with which those politics are in- formed. It would seem as if these truths were not the outcome of mere human thinking, but of what in old times was called divine revelation. They have in them the vision of the prophets and the wis- dom of the sages. They are fundamental thinking upon the social problem, and if impracticable they 280 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS are so only because at the present time they are not in accord with our inherited notions, beliefs, and habits and hence the people cannot comprehend them. It may be that for some time it will not be possible to apply these principles in their sim- plicity directly to the affairs of human society. But society must conform more and more to the ideal of the working-class until it has transformed society into its own likeness. Society as it now exists is unreasonable, illogical, insane. If man is to go forward, society must be just the opposite of all this, it must be reasonable, logical, and sane, and if this good time is ever to come it can only be when men obey the laws of social adjustment enunciated by the social democratic party whereby that which we call justice shall be at last estab- lished on earth. It has come to pass to-day as it came to pass in old times, that these necessary things have been hidden from the wise and the prudent and have been revealed unto babes. The statesman, the professor, the preacher, is ignorant of them, but they have been made known to the worker at the bench, to the digger in the ditch, and to the toiler in the mine. And because of this, the governing powers of the world are passing to-day from the one class to the other. XII WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY THE working-class movement is based upon a philosophy of history, which both its friends and its enemies agree in describing by the word materialistic. The enemy of the movement cries to its supporter with scorn : " You are a material- ist," and an advocate of the movement answers with pride : " You are right, I am a materialist." This confession on the part of the working-man at once brings on him the odium of the unthinking crowd. Materialism is in bad odor, and one who professes it is excommunicated by the orthodox philosophies. The man in the street has been taught to think that a materialist is a low fellow, indulging freely in his grosser appetites, whose mind is set on earthly things, whose god is his belly, whose energies are expended in the acquisi- tion of gold and silver and houses and lands and cattle and sheep and women. The materialist is set over against the idealist, who is supposed to be thinking of the higher values, whose heart is expanding with love for the beauti- ful and the good and the great. The idealist sac- 281 282 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS rifices himself to his ideal. He will give his life for his cause. He will starve in the interests of the truth. For this reason the working-class movement has come under the ban of many well- meaning, right-thinking people. The success of that movement is looked upon as the end of all things that makes life worth the living. The so- cialistic state is pictured as one wherein all those things that now go to make up the beauty of life and its glory will be lacking. A sordid, degraded population will fill the world, not having a thought above its eating and its drinking. The philosophy of the working-class movement is de- clared to be the philosophy of the stomach, and as such it calls for the derision of all who to-day think in terms of the intellect and of the heart. But as a matter of fact the present order which the working-class movement is seeking to overturn, that it may rebuild society after its own conception, is the most intensely materialistic known to the history of the world. Never before has the busi- ness of living been so frankly and outspokenly ma- terialistic. Our modern system of industry has murdered idealism. It has no place for it in its scheme. The higher values of life are subordinated without pity and without remorse to the lower val- ues. The soul of a girl is not reckoned when it comes to a matter of profits. Beauty is sacrificed WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOrHY 283 every day to the most crass utility. Ugliness has driven comeliness out of the lives of the people, and we have to-day a civilization resulting in the hor- rors of the slums, the unthinkable profanation of womanhood, and the degradation of manhood. No possible scheme of life could be more materialistic, in the moral sense of that word, than the one under which we are now living. The full-fed business man whose protruding abdomen will not suffer him to see his own feet, will cry out to the lean and hungry working-class agitator : " You are a ma- terialist," and the agitator drawing his belt more tightly about his hungry body, will say proudly : " You are right, I am a materialist." We have here an example of that confusion of thought which as the Duke of Argyle says, in the Reign of Law, " is constantly hiding and breeding under confusion of language." The working-class philosopher is using the word materialist in its purely philosophic sense, while his opponent is em- ploying the word in its more popular and moral meaning. In reality the working-class movement is one of the most idealistic in the history of the world ; to find its parallel in this respect one must go back to early Christianity or to any one of the great religious movements of humanity that have been for the time being the salvation of the world. If by an idealist we mean a man who dreams and 284 THE KISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS sees visions, a man who will by no means be con- tent with things as they are, but who will expend his energies for the betterment of mankind, one who sacrifices his temporal welfare to his eternal interests, who lives for a cause and will die for a cause, then the working-class movement is ideal- istic to the very core. It has had its martyrs and its confessors, and to-day it is enlisting in its serv- ice the greatest souls living on the Earth. Men are forsaking houses and lands and kindred, are placing all things at risk, because they believe that they find in this the great movement of the work- ing-class, the only present hope of humanity. The heart is stirred by the sight of the misery under which the mass of mankind are stumbling along the way of life. In the present industrial order it sees the cause of that misery and in the demo- cratic social movement the only hope of lifting the burden from the breaking back and giving hope to the breaking heart. That such a movement as this should be condemned as materialistic is one of the ironies of fate. That it should proudly claim to be materialistic is one of the strange anomalies of human thinking. That we may clear away this obscurity, we must define our words and the best definition of a word is a description. Astronomy is a materialistic philosophy of the heavens. It accounts for the WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 285 place of the various heavenly bodies, their move- ments, and their history; within the heavenly bod- ies themselves, it does not call into play any force outside of those bodies and their material elements. It will calculate an eclipse with perfect accuracy, because it knows the laws that govern these vari- ous bodies in their movements through space. And these laws, so called, are not enactments of some outside will forcing these various bodies to follow a given course, but they are the habits of the very bodies themselves. The law of motion, the law of gravitation, were not written in any code of any god or man. They are simply the mode or habit of action which we find in these bodies. When the great astronomer La Place expounded his nebular theory some one told him that there was in that theory no place for God. His answer was : " I do not require any such person for the validity of my hypothesis." Astronomy is then simply a material- istic explanation of the heavens, and as such it is an exact science and of infinite use to mankind. The same is true of geology. It is a material- istic philosophy of the earth. It explains all the various present formations of the earth from their past history. It does not ask for any intervention from the outside in order to tell the story of the continents and the seas. Frost and fire, the action of water and the interplay of these is sufficient to 286 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS account for the building-up and the breaking-down of continents, the formation of the rocks, and the breaking-up again of the rocks into sand and the transformation of sand into soil. Biology likewise is a materialistic conception of the history of life upon the earth. It discards al- together the ancient notion that each form of life now existing had its origin in the spiritual act of some great being outside the life order itself. It looks upon the story of creation, as that story is found in Genesis, as nothing but a story, having no basis whatever in matter of fact. It declares that all of the present forms of life to be found upon the earth have been the outcome of the play and interplay of natural forces. That each species is not a special creation, but the outgrowth of earlier forms of life. This science declares that the relation of the food-supply to the various ani- mal existences has had much to do with changing the forms in which life has manifested itself. Spe- cies have come into being and have passed away under the stress of a struggle for existence. The stronger have survived and the weaker have per- ished. In all this, biology is purely materialistic in the philosophic conception of that word. No one to-day cries " shame " upon the astron- omer, upon the geologist, or upon the biologist. They did, each one in his turn, incur the odium of WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 287 the idealistic philosopher. They were, each one of them iu his clay, cursed with book, bell, and candle by the theologian, but they have outlived this odium and to-day they stand upon a pedestal of honor and they who once cursed them now bow down to them and come to receive from them the wisdom that man must have in order to live sanely in the world. The great names of astronomy, geology, and biology are now written upon the scrolls of immortal fame. Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno have survived the curses of the priests and the condemnation of the schoolmen, and their teaching to-day is accepted by all the world. The same is true of all the great men of geology and biology. Darwin, at first excommunicated by priests and scholars, lived to see his doctrine of evolution universally accepted and, although at the time of his death he was not a believer in doctrinal Christianity, he nevertheless was buried with full honors in the great Christian temple at West- minster. The working-class philosophy, which is simply a scientific interpretation of history, is to-day suffer- ing from the condemnation of the world, just as the other great philosophies and sciences did in their day. Economic Determinism is nothing else than an endeavor to account for the changes which have occurred in the structure of society by nat- 288 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS ural causes. The scientific investigator discovers that these changes have been determined very largely by the food-supply, including in the term food all that man needs to sustain himself in his present existence. Any great change in the method of procuring the food-supply has been followed by a change in the social structure. In the earliest period man had to depend upon his hands to feed his mouth. He had to dig up the roots with his fingers and pluck them with his hands. He had also to rely upon the swiftness of his feet to escape from his enemy. Under these conditions, man was and could be nothing but an animal, differing from other animals simply by the fact that he had as- sumed the upright position and had evolved the hand. But this was an enormous difference. By reason of these variations man became a distinct species and began his career upon the earth. But as long as he had only his hands and his feet to work with, he had to live literally from hand to mouth; his existence was that of a horde of wild animals, herded together by the natural instincts of fear and lust. The length of infancy, differentiating the human from the non-human species, caused a division of labor on the plane of sex. The mother was com- pelled to give her time and her strength to her young for a considerable period. She was com- WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 289 pelled to make a borne and in the making of the home she discovered the properties of fire. She became a cook. This fact at once brought about a great structural revolution in human society. With the domestication of fire, fish entered into the larder of mankind. The dispersion of the race followed. Men wandered along the water-courses and dared the seas, in order that they might catch fish to eat. The importance of the woman was magnified when she became the mistress of the hearth. She was the keeper of the fire, and life was organized with the woman as its central and controlling force. The first formation of society was upon the principle of sex, and humanity passed from the structureless horde into the well-articu- lated tribe. The invention of the bow and arrow following the domestication of fire worked in the same direction. Men wandered through the for- ests in search of game, and they lost one another, and in that way became strangers to one another and enemies to those who had gone in a different direction. Kinship was the controlling factor in the gentile organization. The tribes lived in com- mon upon that which the various members of the tribe took in hunting and in fishing. Where shel- ter was required, great houses were built or tents set up, in which the tribe congregated. This tribal form of living persisted until agriculture became 290 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS the source of the food-supply. Then land had a value, and the captive taken in war was enslaved in order that he might work upon the land and grow food for his master. The family with its great institution of slavery, was the consequence of the discovery of the science and arts of agricul- ture. The families merged into the State as a necessary means of protecting themselves and their property against their natural enemies who were the peoples just across the river or just beyond the hills. The great migrations which brought the Aryan races from Asia into Europe were made necessary because of the multiplication of the pop- ulation so that it was in excess of the food-supply. Those races swarmed just as bees swarm, because they could no longer live in or upon the fatherland. The great conquests were possible only when the population had become dense in certain sections. The two considerable centers of life in the ancient world were the Nile Valley and the Valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It was possible in these regions to support a dense population, and the kings ruling over these countries had at their command vast armies of men with which to make war upon one another. Even a few instances like these are enough to show us that the philosophy of the working-class movement is not that bogy which it has been made out to be. It is just the WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 291 plainest possible statement of the causes that have produced the changes in the structure of human society. Our modern world is proving daily the principle of Economic Determinism. The invention of a new machine will cause a social displacement. The opening up of an Indian reservation will bring about a considerable migration. The passing of the industries from under the roof of the home and their massing in the great industrial establishment has, as we have already learned, hopelessly de- stroyed the most ancient of all social structures, the family. The improvement in methods of inter- communication and transportation whereby food- stuffs can be easily moved from one place to an- other, has made forever unnecessary and almost impossible the famines that used to destroy whole populations. The improved methods of agricul- ture and of manufacturing have changed the state of human society from that of a constant deficit to a condition of surplus. That all these changes should take place without affecting the very struc- ture of human society is impossible. A revolu- tion in the methods of procuring and distributing the food-supply demanded a corresponding revolu- tion in the social organization. The social unrest, which is the theme to-day of the economist and the social worker, calls for an 292 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS explanation, and every reason under the sun has been given. The decay of loyalty, of parental au- thority, of respect for law, the rashness of youth, and the loss of womanliness are all given as causes of the social disease ; whereas they are simply symp- toms or effects. The cause of the trouble lies farther back. Loyalty to country and king is no longer a necessity, because country and king to- day are subordinated to a greater power. Mere patriotism at the present time is an insolent asser- tion that our country is better than your country, and our rights of more importance than your rights. The consciousness of country which is the basis of patriotism is to-day lost in the larger conscious- ness of the world as a world. Parental authority has gone with parental responsibility. The fro- wardness of youth is required by the demands of the market. Our boys and our girls must sell their labor in the streets and they must acquire smart- ness very early in order to make the best bargain. The woman can no longer persuade herself that she is a sensitive plant to be kept under glass, when in fact she is compelled to hustle out in the morn- ing to work and in the evening plod her weary way homeward after a day spent in the soil and toil of the office and the mill. What the working-class philosopher calls learn- edly Economic Determinism is the efficient cause WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 293 of all these evils. It is the struggle for existence, the fight for bread, that is behind and commanding the battle. Economic Determinism might well be personified as a grim giant driving humanity on- ward, compelling it to adapt itself to ever new conditions, sacrificing the most sacred and ancient of beliefs, habits, customs to the insatiable maw that must have food to fill it, else man himself must perish. It is the custom of the idealist to decry the stomach, to speak of it in contemptuous terms, and we have to-day a vast number of people who have little or nothing that is good to say of this organ. And they cry out against the working-man because his philosophy takes the stomach into considera- tion. But we observe that these same idealists in their practice are very careful to give to the stom- ach what is due to the stomach. They can afford to despise it, because they keep it always well filled. The greatest idealist of them all, Plato, did the most of his idealizing at the banquet board, eating and drinking of the best with the sports of Athens. And the doctors, the teachers, and even the editors who speak so eloquently of the beauties of idealism, and have nothing but bitter contempt for the ma- terialism of the poor working-man, eat and drink and wear the best that their purse will buy. If the rulers who sit above, guiding the destinies of 294 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS mankind and watching the pranks that men play upon the earth, have any sense of humor they must split their sides with laughter as they hear some twenty-five thousand dollar preacher in his carved pulpit, beneath his fretted roof, preaching the doc- trine of idealism, expounding the beauty of sacri- fice, laying stress on the great value of love and joy and peace in the Holy Ghost, crying out against any anxiety in the matter of food and raiment and shelter; while just outside his church on a soap- box is some forlorn, half-starved advocate of ma- terialism, exalting food and clothing and shelter as good things in life, speaking with contempt of an idealism that leaves these out of account. Neither of these preachers practises his preach- ment. The idealist in the pulpit is a materialist at the dinner-table, the materialist on the soap-box is perforce an idealist at supper-time. The philosophy of socialism asserts that the di- gestive apparatus of man is quite as wonderful and even more necessary than the thinking organ of the human being. Before nature could construct a brain it had to devise a stomach and in that won- derful chemical laboratory, it had to carry on the work of changing the lower organic matter of the plant and the animal into the higher organic mat- ter necessary for the uses of the human being. This operation that goes on within the stomach WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 295 is quite as wonderful in its way as anything that transpires within the brain. The changing of food- stuff into blood and bone and muscle and nerve, which is primarily the work of the stomach, is as mysterious as the transformation of brain-cells into thought. It will never do for the brain or the heart to despise the stomach, to treat it harshly, to deprive it of what it needs in order to do its work. If this the so-called lower function is neg- lected, the higher operations soon come to naught. If a man will give due attention to his digestion, his thinking will take care of itself. We have discovered that backward children owe their disadvantage to the fact that they have not been properly nourished. Scarcity of food is to blame for much of the stupidity and crime that is in the world. The working-class is on a lower intellectual level because it has not been nourished sufficiently to enable it to do both its work and its thinking. All the great leaders of men have been well set up, have had sufficient nourishing food and we can never have a noble race of men and women except we have a well-fed race. Over- eating and under-eating are to blame for at least ninety per cent of all the ills that flesh is heir to. A philosophy of life which lays stress upon these facts is not one that mankind can at present afford to despise. 296 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS The working-class philosopher in his own lan- guage has the philosophies of the churches and the schools beat to a standstill. He knows what he is talking about. They are in a large measure talk- ing of things which they have not seen, and cannot see. The Elysian Fields of the preacher lie out- side the bourne of time and place. The ideal goods of the philosopher exist only in the brain of the philosopher. They butter no parsnips. As the working-class philosopher listens to them, he says : " Gentlemen, you are very eloquent, your language is fine, your gestures perfect, but what I want to know is how I am going to get my dinner. If you can't tell me that, then your preaching is vain, because at present my existence depends upon my getting a dinner. If that is delayed too long, I am snuffed out. So come down from your exalted place, come out from your mysterious chamber, and tell me how to make a living." The working-class philosophy does not stop at the stomach. It goes on and demands proper food for the brain and for the heart. It teaches that the stomach is the laboratory where the stuff is prepared that the brain must use in thinking and the heart in feeling. And the condemnation which the working-class philosopher passes upon the pres- ent system and its philosophy is that it does not satisfy the head-hunger and the heart-hunger of WORKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 297 the working-class. The working-man desires to think just as much as the man above him, but the blood that is sent from his heart to his brain is not rich in brain-stuff, it does not feed the great think- ing organs and he is condemned to brain-starvation and as a consequence his brain perishes; and he, instead of being able to enter into the great world of thought and exercise himself therein and specu- late on what may lie beyond and behind his Eco- nomic Determinism, is condemned to intellectual poverty. He has only the bare necessities of the intellectual life, its luxuries are beyond him. He cannot indulge in the higher emotions of love as he would because, again, his blood is not full enough, nor rich enough to flow out of his heart in a great tide of overmastering emotion. He starves in his affections. The constant struggle to keep a little food in his stomach exhausts him; and if he makes love, it is only after a brutal fashion. He has not the strength to play the lover on the grand scale. It is the glory of the human stomach that within its laboratories it changes the substance of the potato, the bean, and the apple into the sub- stance of the brain of a Shakespeare, a Newton, and a Darwin, and that it transubstantiates these same substances into the high emotions of a Jesus, a Gautama, and a St. Francis. Economic Deter- minism declares that all creation works together 298 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS to bring to pass these marvels. The sun shines, the rain falls, the seed germinates, the grass grows, in order that man may eat and drink and live. And just as he eats and drinks and lives wisely, so will he go on from strength to strength until he comes to the fullness of the stature of the sons of God. When we despise materialism, we are pouring contempt on the heavens above, on the earth beneath, and into the waters under the earth, for these are all material, in the sense in which that word is commonly used. But they are like- wise spiritual, if we use that word to describe them. In fact, the antagonism between idealism and materialism, between spiritualism and ma- terialism, are matters of words more than matters of fact. The working-class philosopher who de- cries idealism practises it. He who asserts that Economic Determinism is the only force; and that a man in all his actions is controlled by his ma- terial interests, is himself an argument destroying his own contentions. Karl Marx in the interest of Economic Determinism sacrificed his economic in- terests. A host of men have gone to prison and lived on prison fare to prove that man is altogether under the power of his material interests. All this goes to prove that no philosophy is sufficient to explain the life of man, much less the infinite uni- verse, and all philosophers can only look to their WOEKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 299 philosophy for a momentary view of that which is forever passing beyond and away from their philosophic sight. This does not, however, detract in the least from those philosophic systems which man has formu- lated the honor that is due to them. Man must have some explanation of the universe in which he lives, and as he cannot make a perfect explanation, he is compelled to put up with the best that he can devise. And if his effort does give him a working scheme, then it is invaluable. Economic Deter- minism does explain the structural changes that have taken place in society. It does point the way that man must go in order to obtain social peace. Because of this, Economic Determinism deserves to stand and will always stand as one of the great intellectual achievements of the human mind. Neither Evolution nor Economic Determinism pretend to answer the ultimate question as to the origin of the universe. Whether that is the prod- uct of intelligence, conscious and determining, or whether what is always has been and always will be, whether things are worked out according to a plan or at haphazard, whether the force of the uni- verse is a push or a pull, lies outside the sphere of Economic Determinism as of any other scientific theory. Such theories deal only with facts that come within the range of the mind of man. It is 300 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS open to any mind to choose its own belief concern- ing what lies beyond the power of the human in- telligence to either know or comprehend. It is possible for many minds to hold in this sphere of belief antagonistic propositions. One can believe that the present order of things has come to pass through a fortuitous course of cir- cumstances and yet can hold that these accidents themselves are in accordance with a divine plan. This possibility of combining both the natural and the supernatural in a common creed, is set forth with great clearness by Morgan in the last paragraph of Ancient Society. This great writer says : " It must be regarded as a marvelous fact that a portion of mankind five thousand years ago, less or more, attained to civilization. In strict- ness but two families, the Semitic and the Aryan, accomplished the work through unassisted self- development. The Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress, because it pro- duced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming the control of the earth. And yet civ- ilization must be regarded as an accident of cir- cumstances. Its attainment at some time was cer- tain; but that it should have been accomplished when it was, is still an extraordinary fact. The hindrances that held mankind in savagery were WOEKING-CLASS PHILOSOPHY 301 great and surmounted with difficulty. After reaching the middle status of barbarism, civiliza- tion hung in the balance while the barbarians were feeling their way by experiments with the native metals toward the process of smelting iron-ore. Until iron and its uses were known, civilization •was impossible. If mankind had failed to the present hour to cross this barrier, it would have afforded no just cause for surprise. When we recognize the duration of man's existence upon the Earth, the wide vicissitudes through which he has passed in savagery and in barbarism, and the progress he was compelled to make, civilization might as naturally have been delayed for several thousand years in the future, as to have occurred when it did in the good providence of God. We are forced to the conclusion that it was the result as to the time of its achievement of a series of for- tuitous circumstances. It may well serve to re- mind us that we owe our present condition with its multiplied means of safety and of happiness to the struggles, the sufferings, the heroic exertions, to the patient toil of our barbarous and, more re- motely, of our savage ancestors. Their labors, their trials, and their successes, were a part of the plan of the Supreme Intelligence to develop a bar- barian out of the savage and a civilized man out of this barbarian." 302 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS This utterance of Morgan, who was a devout Christian, proves that a man can be a scientific student of nature and society, accept without reser- vation the conclusions of science and still hold to any belief concerning that which lies outside the realm of science which may please his fancy. There is no necessary conflict between Economic Determinism and any religion from the lowest fetichism up to the highest form of Christianity. XIII THE COMING AGE SOME two thousand years ago, more or less, a little, insignificant Jew writing to a company of obscure folk gathered together in an upper-room, said to them, concerning himself and them : " We are they upon whom the ends of the world are come." This little Jew was convinced in his own mind and he succeeded in convincing his disciples that he and they were at the end of one great cycle of human living and at the beginning of an- other. He declared that old things were passing away, and that all things were becoming new. By a revolutionary act of his will he cut himself loose from his own past and from the past of his people, and attached himself to the future. At the time of his writing this Jew was but little known to the great world in which he lived; and so far as he was known to his immediate friends and neighbors, they for the most part hated him as a traitor and despised him as a fool. And yet time has justified the forecasts of Paul. He was at the end of one era of human living and at the beginning of an- other, and he was himself largely instrumental in 303 304 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS bringing about the change that he prophesied. To- day we date the years from that Jesus whom Paul preached and in whom Paul saw the creative en- ergy of the new age. The world in the midst of which Paul was living, with its empires, its tem- ples, its kings, and its gods, has passed away and a new world has come in its stead. If we had asked Paul and his fellow-workers upon what they based their assertion that the world that then was must come to an end and a new heaven and a new earth take the place of the old, he, according to his times and its way of think- ing, would have answered that the word of God had declared this unto him. It was a revelation from on high. But Paul himself in his writings gives us a clue to the natural causes that were bringing about the dissolution of that ancient so- ciety. Speaking of the Roman world, the apostle says : " Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonored among themselves; for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, for this cause God gave them up unto vile passions; for their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature ; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men, work- ing unseemliness and receiving in themselves that THE COMING AGE 305 recompense of their error which was due. And even as they refused to have God in their knowl- edge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting ; being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, in venters of evil things, disobedi- ent to parents, without understanding, covenant- breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful; who knowing the ordinance of God, that they which practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that prac- tise them." In this bitter passage, the apostle generalizes the impression that was made upon all thinking minds by the conditions prevailing in society in his time. The Claudian Julian family was giving to the world such emperors as Caius, Claudius, and Nero, and the abominations of the palace were re- peated in all the houses of the patricians and the richer plebeians and the iniquities of the imperial city were imitated and surpassed by the great cities of Asia and Africa. The old nature-religions were not merely dying, they were dead. The great Father God of the Greek Mythos had become the joke of the wine- room; the ceremonies of religion having lost their 306 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS original meaning were turned into vileness, and the chaste goddess Diana became the patroness of lewdness. The Eoman had educated himself in cruelty by means of the gladiatorial shows, and he practised that cruelty without stint in every province of the empire. The crucifixion of Jesus was not a soli- tary fact in the history of his time. It was only one of innumerable crucifixions that were occurring on almost every hilltop and at every roadside. That society was then in the throes of dissolution was evident to every clear-sighted man. The men and the women of that age, who would not follow the multitude to do evil, had to seek the solitary places of the country or to bind them- selves together in secret societies for mutual pro- tection. Such Romans as Pliny the younger chose to abandon society and politics and to live on the farm and give themselves up to the business of writing letters and books. The more active spirits endeavored to stay the process of corruption by banding together in philosophic schools and re- ligious associations. In this period Epictetus taught and Peter preached to the people of Rome. But all these efforts were sufficient only to arrest the course of the disease: they could not cure it. Slowly but surely the old civilization was dying until at last it was dead. If Paul had been trained THE COMING AGE 307 after the modern methods he would have accounted for his belief that the ends of the world were upon him by stating the facts as he saw them in the then existing state of society. There are many to-day who are as firmly con- vinced as was Paul in his day that they are living at the end of one great era of the world's history and in the beginning of another. They prophesy just as confidently as did the apostle that old things must pass away and all things become new. They are convinced that the present order is changing. The system under which men are now living is not merely breaking, it has broken down. It is quite impossible that men should continue to use present methods, as these methods are a confessed failure. Society is changing its base. From the begin- ning of civilization down to the present time, it has been a fundamental principle that it is the right and the duty of the strong man to make the w r eak man work for him. Civilization has been built up by the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The God of this present world has always been the Napoleonic God of the strongest battal- ions. Ancient society expressed this principle frankly and brutally in the institution of slavery. It was then considered a law of nature that the stronger man should appropriate to his uses the strength of the weaker man. We cannot fault civ- 308 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS ilization because of this, — it was a necessary step in human progress ; but it is well for us to remem- ber that without this sacrifice of the weak to the strong all that we call civilization could never have come to pass. All the glory of Babylon and the strength of Egypt and the beauty and wisdom of Greece and the splendor of Rome were built upon slavery as a foundation. The first property right that man legalized was his right to the ownership of another man. From the statutes of Hammu- rabi down to the slave code of the South, as we have previously remarked, this doctrine of the right of the strong to exploit the weak has been written over and over again into the laws of mankind. This economic principle, while perhaps neces- sary at the beginnings of civilization, has always proved fatal in the end. Every ancient civiliza- tion perished because it did not incorporate its people into its social and political life. The slave dragged down his master into a common slavery. Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, Athens, Carthage, and Rome perished one after another because of the evil that lurked in their economic system. Slav- ery is the most wasteful of all modes of production. Many of the letters of Pliny the Younger dwell upon this wastefulness of slave labor. These civ- ilizations were the prey of tribes of barbaric free men. THE COMING AGE 309 Serfdom, which was an advance upon slavery, giving as it did the family right to the serf — and limited independence of action, was the economic system of the Middle Ages. The great nobles, the priests, and the kings lived upon the unrequited toil of the peasant. Because of this the peasantry w r as impoverished, the land lay unfilled, and Eu- rope was forever upon the verge of a famine. Ar- thur Young in his description of the condition of France just prior to the Revolution makes known to us the utter failure of the system of production and distribution which prevailed at that time. The starving peasantry were already beginning to bestir themselves, to band together in secret, and to plot the destruction of that form of society which then oppressed them. In modern times, we have a system of exploita- tion more perfect, more destructive than even an- cient slavery or medieval serfdom. The wage sys- tem which is in vogue at the present time does not even look upon a workman as a slave or a servant. It does not give him even so much of humanity as belonged to these oppressed classes of former times. He is treated as if he were impersonal — without body, parts, or passions. He is bought and sold in the market as so much labor-commod- ity. He is speeded up to exhaustion and scrapped without mercy. He is given but a small j)ortion of 310 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS the products of his labor and is subjected to living conditions that deplete his energies and arrest his natural development. The consequence of the present system is seen in all our great industrial centers. Its product is the slum and the Great White Way. It brings forth unspeakable poverty and shameless wealth. On the one hand there are the millions living just above and far below the line of sustenance and there are the few hundred thousand rioting in lux- ury and absorbing the labor-product in useless dis- play and wasteful indulgence. One might almost say of our present society with the prophet Isaiah, that " from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot there is no soundness in it." This may seem an exaggeration even as the sayings of Isaiah and Paul in their times were considered wild say- ings by the men of their generation. But no one who walks through the East End of London, the poorer quarters of Berlin, the slums of the Ameri- can cities, can help taking note of the fact that modern society is afflicted with a running ulcer that can be nothing else than the outlet of a sorely diseased body. Nor can one who has any knowl- edge of the way of living of the so-called upper classes, who spend their days in expensive idleness, who corrupt their constitution with riotous living, who separate themselves inhumanly from human- THE COMING AGE 311 ity, help remarking, that we have here skulls al- ready cracked, spilling their brains on the ground. There are to-day, as there were in ancient times, sound elements in our social order. If it were not for these, that order could not endure for a moment, but the order itself is sick unto death. No reform-remedies can cure it. This order must pass away and in due time be decently buried ; and a new order must take its place. The keystone of present society is private prop- erty. Private property in land, in the labor of men, in the natural sources of wealth and in the means of production is the institution that the present system has created and which it exists to defend. We were told by a late President of the United States that private property is that institu- tion by means of which man has progressed from savagery up to his present highly civilized estate, and we are able to say to this exalted personage: " It is even so." Private property is the primary cause of the present condition in which humanity finds itself. It is because of this that we have both the prince and the pauper. It is private prop- erty as at present constituted that exalts the rich and depresses the poor. Because of private prop- erty, the poor of the people of England are herded by the millions in the monotonous East End of London, while the Duke of Westminster appro- 312 THE EISE OF THE WOKKING-CLASS priates a thousand acres of the best land of Eng- land for the purposes of a rabbit-warren. It is estimated that the people of London pay out a bil- lion five hundred millions of dollars yearly in rents and these rents are appropriated by his grace of Westminster and his grace of Bedford, and his grace the Bishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of London for the maintenance of parks and pal- aces, for the indulgence of every cultivated taste, for the keeping up of cathedrals and episcopal pal- aces and vast systems of divine worship. The poor of London carry daily upon their backs the gods and the priests and the kings and the nobles and the bishops and the clergy, and all their retinue of servants, their horses, and their carriages, their motor-cars, and whatsoever else the rich provide for their own indulgence. Somebody by his daily labor must earn every dollar that is spent in the world. When labor ceases, production ceases ; and with a cessation of production, there is an arrest of income. If the laboring-class were to go on a strike for six months, that strike would reduce the civilized world to common poverty. This state of affairs cannot endure indefinitely. It is already in process of destruction. The poor are awakening to a consciousness of the fact that they are doing the unrequited labor of the world. The rise of the working-class to self -consciousness THE COMING AGE 313 and class-consciousness, is putting the existing or- der in peril. Just as soon as that class-conscious- ness becomes co-existent, with even a majority of the working-class in all countries, then the present game is up. The working-class will no longer play it, and unless the working-class holds its hand, the other hand in the game is useless. That the old order is changing must be evident to the most careless. The present order is being betrayed from within. The possessing-class is growing more and more uneasy in its possessions. The spirit of humanity which is abroad, making for brotherhood, is compelling those who have to take into consideration the condition of those who have not. Statesmanship is leaving the realm of mere national and party politics to enter upon and solve the great questions of social readjustment. Every act of recent legislation that is new in principle deals with alterations in the very structure of so- ciety itself. The great budget of 1909 in England was revolutionary in its character. It struck at the privileges of the landed aristocracy. All of our laws in America which take the oversight of private business are intrusions into a region hith- erto forbidden to both State and nation. Blow after blow has been struck at that most ancient, sacred, and mighty institution, private property, until it is reeling under the assault. And this 314 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS process will go on until private property is de- throned from that place which it now holds, and instead of being the master becomes the servant of society as a whole. Private property in the beginning was a neces- sity, and within limits it is still a necessity. A man in old times required a property right in the land that he tilled, so that when he sowed his seed, he might reap his harvest. When he employed slaves, he claimed the right to all the land which he and his slaves could cultivate, and then he claimed the right to all the land which he could hold against all comers. This right to property in land and in men was consecrated by legal enact- ments. Landlord combined with landlord to make land-laws, and to-day we have unlimited right to ownership in land, whether a man uses or abuses it, whether he defends it or leaves it defenseless. The whole community combines to protect a pri- vate individual in lordship over all the land that he can by hook or crook, by honest purchase or smart deal, get into his possession. And so the land tends ever more and more to become monopo- lized. The cunning man goes out ahead of the population and gets the legal title to the land and holds up everybody who wishes to use the land for the purpose of gaining a living, and is thus enabled to tax unlimitedly the one who tills the soil. Our THE COMING AGE 315 property-laws to-day are as absolute as were the political laws and customs of former times. Not so very long ago men gave into the hands of an untried youth the right to manipulate the great powers of government, according to his wish and will. A Louis XV could take the great kingdom of France and exploit it to satisfy the insatiable demands of his concubines. Henry VIII could use the powers of government to cut off the heads of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher. But we see to-day the folly of all that. We, however, as fool- ishly commit to a youth of twenty the power that lies in accumulated property estimated at any- where from sixty to a hundred and fifty millions of dollars. We lay upon an aged woman the respon- sibility of properly disbursing the income of from a hundred to a hundred and fifty millions. We tax a whole population to maintain a snobbish hanger-on to the English nobility in the luxurious living which his snobbishness demands of him. We stand and look on at all these absurdities and we never laugh. They are as hideous as the idols that stand at the doors of the palace of the Siamese King; they are as ridiculous as the jade gods of In- dia, and yet we bow down to them and cry : " These be thy gods, O Israel, that brought thee up from the land of Egypt and from the house of bondage." But the time is at hand when these gods will be 316 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS broken and new gods set up in their places. The bogy of private property cannot much longer frighten the great mass of people who have no property. Property when it passes the limit of use is simply power of exploitation, and unlimited possession is nothing else than unlimited exploita- tion. The late head of the oil-trust possesses his billion of dollars, more or less, only because the laws gave him unlimited right of private property in the means of the transportation of oil. Without that he would to-day be the same obscure oil-refiner that he was forty years ago. It was a privilege secured to him by law that made him what he is. Unlimited private ownership in the sources of wealth, unlimited private ownership in the means of transportation and in the instruments of pro- duction, enables a little handful of men to exploit the labor of multitudes. It is against this ex- ploitation that the great working-class movement is directed. This movement asserts that such ex- ploitation is morally wrong and socially disastrous. If it goes on, it will destroy the labor-force by im- poverishment ; it will enervate the directing force through repletion; and the whole system will fall to pieces of its own rottenness. Every statesman to-day, every publicist, is beginning to awaken to the fact that, if society is to be saved, exploitation must be arrested. In his famous Armageddon THE COMING AGE 317 speech Theodore Roosevelt declared that the power of capital to exploit labor must be limited. This declaration on the part of Mr. Eoosevelt was more far-reaching that he had any notion of. It meant the end of the present order. To limit capital in its power of exploitation is to kill capitalism. Capitalism demands an ever increasing power of expansion. It must continually reinvest its profits. It must go on exploiting as long as it can find ma- terial for exploitation. When it comes to the end of the possibilities of exploitation, then it comes to the end of its own career. Already the capitalistic system is beginning to see the beginning of the end. It has exploited the populations of the various capitalistic countries themselves until these populations are reduced to a state of misery that is breeding rebellion that cannot but end in revolution; it has exploited the non-capitalistic countries until the people of these countries are adopting the capitalistic system in self-defense. The markets are already glutted, the means of production have possibilities almost un- limited, investments have absorbed nearly all the paying propositions that are in sight and the sur- plus both in goods and in money of capitalism is piling up on every hand. The great populations of China and Japan can no longer furnish markets to the Western capital- 318 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS istic system. These peoples themselves are adopt- ing that system and are competing with the West- ern systems in the markets of the world. This competition bodes a disaster to the modern system of capitalism in the Western World the like of which has never been known before in its history. When once China and Japan are fully organized capitalistically, they can undersell every Western nation until the Western nations reduce the West- ern working-class to the Chinese-Japanese standard of living. In the effort to bring about that reduc- tion, the modern capitalistic class is doomed to destruction. The working-class is to-day equipped, and organized, to resist such reduction; and the clash of the classes can only end in the destruction of the capitalistic system and the inauguration of a socialized method of production and distribu- tion. It is impossible to forecast in detail the means whereby this great change in the structure of so- ciety will be accomplished. The question is fre- quently asked how private ownership will be changed into social or public possession. The cry of confiscation is used to frighten the small prop- erty-owner. It is asserted that with the coming of anything like a socialistic organization in society, all that a man has will be taken away from him and he will be left defenseless in the world. The THE COMING AGE 319 answer to this objection is that confiscation never conies until confiscation is a dire necessity. Presi- dent Lincoln, by a few strokes of his pen, confis- cated over a billion of dollars of property legally owned by citizens of the various States. But Lin- coln did not do this in anger, he was forced to it as a war-measure. He would gladly have left the enfranchisement of the negro to the slow working of time, or he would have paid a fair compensation to their owners, had either of these modes been possible at the time and under the circumstances. When private property becomes a public danger, when it arrests the development of the people, then its confiscation follows naturally. The French no- bility and clergy lost their lands because their own- ership of the lands had impoverished the nation. If private property accumulates in the possession of fewer and fewer persons, until a small group of men are able to control the life and happiness of vast populations, then as a matter of self-preserva- tion the peoples thus oppressed must deprive these men of the power which their property gives them. If the change which is demanded by present so- cial conditions is delayed unduly, then that change will and must come by violence. If the capitalistic system continues with all its powers of exploita- tion until the Western World comes into conflict with the Eastern World for the markets of the 320 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS world, then it would seem as if nothing could pre- vent a catastrophe which would utterly destroy the present order and compel mankind to build anew. Another method of transferring private property to public control and appropriating it to social uses is by the process of taxation. All private property is possessed by its owner only so long as the laws protect it. The law-making power may at any time take for protection such a part of the property as the law-making power considers to be necessary. In times of war, heavy taxes are levied upon both real and personal property, upon in- comes and inheritances. War-taxes are justified by the fact that if the war against a given nation is successful, then all the property right is at risk, if it is not destroyed. At present society, in the language of David Lloyd George, is engaged in a war against poverty. Poverty in the estimation of this statesman is a greater peril to England than the war-power of Germany. This warfare against poverty is not confined to England, it is a conflict going on in all nations. Unless the force of pov- erty is subdued, it will destroy society and reduce the rich and the poor to a common penury. For this reason, it is entirely legitimate that organized society should appropriate freely from the accumu- lated property of the few to properly finance this great struggle. And such is the order of the day. THE COMING AGE 321 Increased taxes upon land and the increment of land-values was that feature in the budget of 1009 which gave it its revolutionary character and ar- rayed against it the hostility of the property classes. But in spite of the opposition of vested interests, we must expect this form of taxation to grow in favor until it absorbs all of the unearned increment and in effect socializes the land. In the near future all laws of primogeniture and entail will be erased from the statute-book of every nation, the division and sub-division of land will be made easy, and its distribution will follow as a consequence of these changes in the law. The land- owners will not be compensated for the loss that will come to them through these changes, because the land-owners did not create, in any way, by their own efforts, these values which are taken over by the community. The people produce the increased values and to the people these values naturally be- long. But the land-owner will be secure in all that is his, and he can sustain himself in a proper stand- ard of human living. He will not, however, be able any longer to indulge himself in all the splendor and the luxury which he has considered heretofore to be necessary to his station in life. Taxation is not confiscation, unless it takes over the whole of the property. As the working-class comes more and more into power it will as a matter of policy 322 THE EISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS use the method of taxation to finance those schemes for the betterment of the working-class which it will inaugurate. And if the working-class did hut know as much, it has in this power of taxation the only weapon that it needs to bring about an equi- table distribution of the common wealth. When the community takes over private prop- erty, it compensates the owner upon a basis which the community itself establishes. It gives to the owner not what he claims to be the value of his property, but what is considered a fair value by judges appointed by the public authorities. This method need not be departed from in the gradual transfer of the ownership of any given property from private persons to public ownership. This will always be a matter for mutual adjustment to be determined by the circumstances in each indi- vidual case. The transition may be, and ought to be, less painful than are many of the changes that take place in property-rights under the present sys- tem of private control. A change of a few points in the price of a stock on the stock market, enriches one and impoverishes another. One man gains what another man loses, but we do not find the stock market described by the present monied classes as a confiscatory institution. An orderly process whereby property rights which have be- come hostile to the public good are transferred from THE COMING AGE 323 private to public control need not and may not work any considerable hardship. Another method by which the public assumes control over that which in the present order is considered private business is by the method of duplication. The public through its organized government does for itself what heretofore has been done for it by private enterprise. In such in- stances, the public pays no attention whatever to the private business. It simply establishes its own business on the same lines. At the time of this writing, the United States Government has entered into the business of carrying parcels and in so doing has duplicated the business of the great ex- press companies. If the government were to develop this enter- prise to the fullest possible extent, it would simply drive the express companies out of business. Their stock would become worthless and the holders of that stock would not receive a penny of compensa- tion. But in this the government would do no wrong. Every stockholder in every commercial enterprise buys and holds the stock at his own risk. This method of duplication is one that may be and undoubtedly will be largely employed in bringing about the transfer of private property to public ownership. The public need not buy a sin- gle railway, telephone, or telegraph line. It has 324 THE RISE OF THE WOEKING-CLASS the labor and it lias the capital to duplicate these, and it would enrich itself by employing its surplus labor in such public enterprise. Confiscation, com- pensation, and duplication are the three ways in which the transfer from private to public owner- ship can be made. They all may be employed, they all will be employed as circumstances from time to time determine. It is useless to picture the coming age. The im- agination of man can only portray what has already come within the range of its vision. If it wishes to paint an inhabitant of the celestial regions, it puts the wings of a bird upon the form of a woman. We must leave to the future the exact portrayal of what the future creates. "We can only say at pres- ent that a new order is evolving. Judging from the past, we can say that the new order will be an ad- vance upon the old. It will differ from it essen- tially. But that difference need not and in all probability will not be for the worse, but for the better. The abolition of poverty, if it comes to pass, will relieve mankind of one of its greatest present horrors. The fear of want which now dogs man's footsteps will no longer pursue him. It will be possible for him to practise the great preach- ment of the One whom the great mass of the pres- ent population of the Western World holds to be THE COMING AGE 325 a God. He can live as the birds live, he can grow as the lily grows, and have the joys of the bird and the beauty of the lily in his life. One thing is cer- tain : private property as now established is doomed. Social control will encroach more and more upon it, until it has lost the power to oppress and to depress the people. In its stead will come the common property, which all must produce and which all may enjoy. To look forward to such a change with foreboding is the rankest pessimism. If man cannot improve upon his present social life, then the life of man is not worth the living. If we must be forever thinking of what we shall eat and what we shall drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed, then materialism, in the moral sense of that word, is all that man has to live by, and his life under such a regime is nothing worth. Humanity has within it the forces to create a world in which voluntary poverty with the human wretchedness and degradation that always follow in its camp need not exist, and having that power humanity must use it to release mankind from the bondage under which it is now laboring. Up to this time, civilization socially has been a failure. The barbarian in the upper period of barbarism lived a freer, a nobler, and a happier life. It would be better to return to that condition than to sink 326 THE EISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS down into an effete civilization wherein it is impos- sible for the great mass of mankind to live the hu- man life. It is a fact in the history of biology, that a given organism having found a certain function useful in the struggle for existence has enlarged the organ of that function until the enlarged organ absorbs and finally destroys the life of the organism. The pterodactyl found a tail useful for purposes of lo- comotion and defense. Because of this it went on growing its tail to the detriment of its organism as a whole, and in time the tail was too great for the brain to manage, and the pterodactyl perished. This has been the life-history of a multitude of or- ganisms, and it is the life-history of the present so- cial order. That order established itself in private property, private ownership in the labor of man, in the forces of nature and in the creations of so- ciety itself. This institution has grown at the ex- pense of society as a whole. If it cannot be ar- rested and in a large measure abated, it will destroy society and man will revert to a lower stage of existence. The cry of the present age is human right, not property right, and by that war-cry will the future of humanity conquer its past. Morgan in Ancient Society has stated this fact with such clearness that we can well close the argu- ment by quoting his words : " Since the advent of THE COMING AGE 327 civilization the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so ex- panded, and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become on the part of the people an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property and define the relations of the State to the property it protects, as well as the obliga- tions and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to the indi- vidual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if prog- ress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim ; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equalities in rights and privileges and universal education foreshadow the next higher plane of so- ciety, to which experience, intelligence, and knowl- edge are steadily tending. It will be a revival in a 328 THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS higher form of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes." These words were written more than fifty years ago. The writer of them prophesied of things to come. What he foretold is now coming to pass. Slowly but surely the privileges of property, whereby it is able to oppress the people, are being appropriated by the people themselves. The sig- nificant fact of present-day history is the rise of the working-class from the condition of degrada- tion, under which it has throughout the civilized era been compelled to live, to the control of the social, the political, and the religious life of the world. Upon the wisdom of that class the future depends. Its education must precede its elevation if the last state of society is not to be worse than the first. To the work of educating the future mas- ters of the world the energies of the world are now and must be directed. The working-class must have leisure to prepare itself for the destinies that await it. It is already becoming, and soon will be, the only class in society. Society in organizing itself industrially can have no place for the drone or the parasite. It will demand that every man and woman shall be in the true sense of the word a working-man and a working-woman : that each shall give to society as much as he takes from society. APPENDIX APPENDIX THE WAR AGAINST POVERTY Being a review of the Speech of David Lloyd George in presenting and explaining the Budget of 1909. (Delivered April 29th, 1909.) Read as a paper be- fore the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, N. Y., March 15th, 1910, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. THE CLOSING SENTIMENT OP THE SPEECH ON THE BUDGET. In closing his speech presenting and explaining his Budget to the House of Commons on the 29th of April 1909, David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave voice to the following significant and fateful senti- ment. Addressing the Chairman of the Committee of the Whole House, having the Bill under consideration, he said: "This, Mr. Emmott, is a War Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and be- lieving that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step toward that good time when poverty and the wretchedness and human degradation which always follow in its camp will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests. ' ' 331 332 APPENDIX THE CAUSE OF THE DEFICIT. When Lloyd George came to make up his Budget he found himself in the presence of a deficit ox sixteen million pounds. This deficit was occasioned by the extraordinary demands on the Exchequer by the Naval and Home Departments. The Naval demands were cre- ated by the fear of aggression from without; the Home Department was obliged to incur increased expenses be- cause of alarming degeneration within. The Navy called for Dreadnoughts and the Home Department for Old- Age Pensions. England can cry to-day as Paul did of old : ' ' Without are fightings and within are fears. ' ' POVERTY MORE THREATENING THAN WAR. In the mind of the present Chancellor the dangers from internal decay loom larger than do the perils from exterior enemies. In his mind not Germany but Pov- erty is most to be feared by the people and government of Great Britain. In giving expression to this senti- ment, Lloyd George calls the attention not only of his own people but of the whole world to a political phe- nomenon of grave import that lies on the surface of history, but which though always in sight is seldom or never seen. This fact is, that very few nations ever die a violent death. It is true of nations as it is of indi- vidual men and women, that here and there one dies by violence, but the great multitude die in their beds, the victims of internal disorder. APPENDIX 333 POVERTY A DISEASE OF CIVILIZATION. From the beginning human civilization has been af- flicted with a disorder which until now has been con- sidered incurable. Poverty is a disease of civilization. In the true sense of the word poverty with its attendant wretchedness and degradation is not a natural product. It breeds only in somewhat highly organized human so- cieties. In nature one tree may grow in richer soil than another, but the one is not conscious of its better, nor the other of its worse estate. And in extreme cases na- ture has a way of getting rid of poverty by ruthlessly killing it off. Where there is not food enough for all comers the strongest and the swiftest eat it and the weak and backward starve and die. There are no hospitals or organized charities in nature. She has but one cure for poverty and that is death. Nor is poverty, in its more virulent forms, to be found in the savage and barbaric periods of human development. Savages are too near to nature to breed the disease of poverty, with its sense of inequality and injustice. Whatever the tribe has is shared in common. When there is a famine in the camp the chief goes hungry; when there is nothing to eat starvation is the common lot. In the barbaric age the necessities of life were so few and so abundant, and human population so scanty, that poverty in its later manifestations was un- necessary and unknown. When animals were domesti- cated the cattle and sheep multiplied beyond human need and the care of them demanded so much of human over- 334 APPENDIX sight that there was no need for any to be idle or hun- gry. The barbarian lived a life of hardship but not of degradation. His life was simple but complete. POVERTY IS CAUSED BY WEALTH. If we would understand how entirely poverty is a disease of civilization we have but to contrast the con- dition of a Western farmer fighting his way through a blinding blizzard of snow with that of a homeless wretch who sleeps under the arches of Waterloo bridge. The farmer may perish before he reaches his home and his flesh become carrion for coyotes, but we do not think of him and his misfortune with that pity which is akin to contempt. His life is one of peril but not of degrada- tion; he dies bravely fighting the forces of nature face to face. But the man who sleeps on the benches of the embankment and under the arches of the bridge and walks the streets by night to keep himself warm is an object of contempt as well as of compassion. His keen- est sufferings come not from his material but from his mental and spiritual pains. He is oppressed not so much by the gnawing of hunger and the biting of the cold as he is by a sense of failure, of shame and injus- tice. His condition is both his fault and his misfortune. He is starving in the midst of plenty. On every side of him are comfortable homes in which he has no place, firesides that he cannot share ; in his sight is abundance of food which his hunger craves but which he dares not take. It is not nature that is cruel and niggardly, it is his brother man. This man is not a drunken sot; or APPENDIX 335 if he is, his drunkenness is more often the effect than the cause of his misery. In the greater number of cases he is an English working-man out of a job; who has spent his strength creating the wealth of England and in that wealth we are to find the sources of his pov- erty. Justice has failed to give him the due reward of his toil. His employer has taken an undue share of his earnings; the landlord and the merchant have taken an undue share of his spendings; and now that he is out of employment — because there are too many of him, or because he is sick or too old — he is on the street for- lorn and penniless, an object of pity and contempt. No one can walk through the streets of East London where thousands of these men are listlessly leaning against the wall, looking with blank, hopeless gaze on the light of day, without a feeling of horror. Are these the streets of a civilized, Christian city or are they the pavements of Hell? These men belong to a disinherited, degraded race of men. They are the children of the serfs and slaves of older periods of human history. They and the like of them have exhausted their life-energy in pro- moting the wealth of England, and now England turns them out to die in shame and sorrow. The employer, the landlord, and the merchant all live in comfort and some of them in luxury; they pass their days in the sacred atmosphere of respectability ; they die decently in their beds and are buried with pomp and piety; while these men and women, who have done the hard, rough work that renders the higher life of the privileged classes possible, are deprived of most of the comforts and 336 APPENDIX many of the necessities of life, they are despised by those whom they serve and in many cases they die in pauper beds and are buried in pauper graves. THE TWO NATIONS — THE COUNTESS AND THE COSTER NATION. It was Benjamin Disraeli who said that England was inhabited by two nations, the rich and the poor. These two nations find their typical representatives in the Countess and the coster-woman. The Countess and the coster-woman have less in common than the Countess and her greyhound bitch. The greyhound like the Countess is a high-bred creature living a life of idle- ness and luxury; the coster- woman is low-bred, living by hard labor in misery. These two nations, the Count- ess and the coster nation are superimposed the one upon the other. It is the coster nation that pays the rents and earns the profits upon which the Countess nation lives, and it takes a thousand coster-women to support one Countess. And one Countess counts for more than a thousand coster-women in the social order. She has intelligence, wealth, and social position ; behind her are generations of culture ; she is entrenched by the law in her position of privilege. She represents the brain-power of the social organism. The coster-woman represents the muscular strength of humanity. She is the hand of that body of which the Countess is the head ; behind her are ages of ignorance and dependence and unrequited toil. Her birthright is her poverty. She is by the law a landless, houseless woman. She is APPENDIX 337 unlettered, uncultured, and speaks an uncouth and bar- barous dialect. She has no share in the average pros- perity of the community in which she lives. In the struggle of the Countess nation against the coster nation it is the conflict of quality with quantity, it is the class against the mass; and in this contest quality has an im- mense advantage. Because of superior intelligence and inherited privilege the classes, with rare exceptions, have been able to control the masses. It is the presence of these two nations in every cen- ter of civilization that is the most startling phenomenon of human life. It is that common sight which every one sees, but which no one considers. THE PRIME CAUSE OF POVERTY. It is this fact which is the prime cause of poverty. The poor are poor because they give their time and strength to work that serves not their own life but the life of the classes above them. Human civilization is based upon this as upon a foundation. From the be- ginning it has been the custom, and in all ancient codes it is the written law of mankind, that the many shall serve the few, the weak shall labor for the strong, that the simple shall be the prey of the cunning. SLAVERY THE BEGINNING OF CTVILIZED LIFE. Human civilization began when the first savage war- rior had the sense to see that his captive was worth more to him alive than dead, when he took away from him the weapons of war and gave him the implements 338 APPENDIX of industry. The first property-right which men ac- quired was property-right in the labor of other men. This was the most obvious and earliest of human insti- tutions. The right of the stronger man to compel the weaker to work for him was so clear tha + - to the primi- tive mind it had all the force of a law of nature. Prop- erty in men antedated property in land ; indeed land was of no value until there were male and female slaves to work it. ANCIENT CIVILIZATION BASED ON SLAVERY. All ancient human civilization was based upon human slavery. Every captive taken in war was the slave of his captor, and the children of this slave and his children's children were born into slavery from generation to gener- ation. All the splendor of Babylon, all the glory of Rome were in the last analysis the product of slave la- bor. It was slave labor that gave the philosopher leisure to think, the artist time to create. The slave popula- tion had no rights which the master class was bound to respect. It was denied all but the barest necessities of life and even these were withheld at the pleasure of the master class. The slaves which Athens drove into her mines were deprived of light and air and clothing and the company of women. It did not pay to propa- gate slaves; it was cheaper and easier to capture them. Everywhere the slave population was overworked and underfed. The slave had no share in the mental or moral life of the community. If by chance he acquired skill or learning he became only the more valuable to his master. In the later days of Roman dominance, there APPENDIX 339 were millions of slaves captured in the East who were more cultured than their masters, and it was these who pandered to the vices of their masters, who corrupted Roman manners, and did much to disintegrate the Ro- man power. INEFFICIENCY OF SLAVE LABOR. The expensiveness and inefficiency of slave labor has been the constant complaint of those who were forced to use this method of production. The slave was hardly worth the cost of his keep. As a consequence of this the aged and the sick had little or no care and the strong and well were worked out in a few years. So it came to pass that the slave population died faster than it could be born. In the slave-quarters plagues were generated that swept over and devastated the world. Gibbon tells us that in the reign of Justinian more than one-third of the population of the Empire perished. FAILURE OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATION. The ancient civilization died chiefly because its eco- nomic system was unsound. It looked on man as a com- modity to be bought and sold in the market. It denied a fundamental fact of human life, which is "that a man 's a man for a' that"; any social order which ig- nores the right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is unstable and cannot endure. RETURN TO BARBARISM. The break-up of the Roman Empire was followed by a return to barbarism in the West and by a vicious, 340 APPENDIX stagnant, degenerate civilization in Byzantium and the East. In the West the fall of the Roman power was fol- lowed by the practical enslavement of the native work- ing-class in the provinces and Italy. The land became by conquest the property of the invading tribes and the ancient Gaul, Iberian, Tuscan, and Britain became the serf and the thrall of the Goth, the Frank, the Saxon, and the Lombard. As a consequence of this destruc- tion of the ancient order in Europe the standard of liv- ing fell to the lowest point consistent with the preserva- tion of the race. Human and animal muscular strength was the only labor-force, and the tillage of the land was the only source of wealth. During this period the labor- power was able to produce only the barest necessities of life and as soon as the labor-power got a little ahead of starvation the surplus was consumed by the barons in building their castles and by the bishops in building their cathedrals. CONDITION OF THE POOR IN THE MIDDLE AGES. The condition of the poor at that time was akin to that of the Southern slave on the best Southern planta- tions; they lived in their wattle huts under the shadow and protection of the castle, while the cathedral was their place of worship, their town-hall, their theater, their social center, and their market. As in every bar- baric age, there was a certain equality among men, in so far as the necessities of life were concerned, all were gross feeders and hard drinkers. In times of plenty APPENDIX 341 all feasted; in times of dearth, all starved. The crude methods of production made any great accumulation of wealth impossible. Population was scanty; means of intercourse, difficult and hazardous; and life was made endurable only by a religion that promised a better world to come. Population was kept down by war, famine, pes- tilence, and celibacy. MONASTIC COMMUNISM AS A SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY. The monastic system was the creation of economic con- ditions. Life was so hard that hundreds of thousands of the less aggressive men and women ran away from it. They refused to breed and take upon themselves the responsibility of children. They gathered in communi- ties, the men by themselves and the women by them- selves, and sustained their life by their common labor. It must never be forgotten that the monastery was an economic institution. The monks cultivated the soil and carried on various industries. These celibate communi- ties acquired wealth because they were centers of adult labor, where there were no useless mouths to feed. And being centers of production they also became centers of exchange. Around their walls hamlets grew to villages, villages to towns, and towns to cities. These institu- tions were the creations of the common people to meet the necessities of the times. The swine-herds and the cow-herds, the milk-maids and the plowmen were the men and women who remade the world and laid the foundations of modern civilization. The monasteries 342 APPENDIX solved the problem of poverty for vast numbers of peo- ple by the practice of celibacy and by the law of common labor for the common life. The vows of poverty, chas- tity, and obedience were the protection of the common people against the destructive forces of property, of mil- tary license, and social disorder which were then ram- pant in the world. In the monastic system the indi- vidual was poor, the community was rich ; the individual was barren, the community was fruitful; the individual was a slave, the community was free. This solution of the problem of poverty by the method of communism lasted until medieval barbarism began to merge into mod- ern civilization. THE REVIVAL OF TRADE AND THE PASSING OF MEDIEVALISM. The revival of trade with the East in the eleventh and twelfth centuries enriched the free cities of Italy. Milan and Venice became the centers of exchanges. Lombard bankers, the fathers of our modern pawn-brok- ers with their sign of the three gold balls, established themselves as money-lenders in various parts of Europe and the merchant began to compete with the soldier and the priest for social and political supremacy. "With the decadence of the monastery and the rise of the burgher class, poverty reappeared in its more virulent forms. The soldier held power by reason of his valor, the priest because of his learning, while the merchant had to depend for his influence upon his money. Ma- terial wealth in the shape of gold, silver, precious stones, APPENDIX 343 houses, lands, mortgages and bonds were the weapons with which the merchant fought the soldier and the priest. And as the power of the purse is greater in this world than the power of the sword or the power of the missal so it came to pass that the romanticism and pietism of the medieval age passed away and the modern era of Commercialism and Materialistic Realism came in their stead. The scene of the merchant's activity was the city and the city as we have already learned is the breeding-place of poverty. THE POVERTY OF ITALIAN CITIES. In the cities of the Italian Renaissance period pov- erty was held in check by pestilence. The plagues that devastated Naples, Florence, and Milan made human la- bor scarce and therefore valuable. But in spite of this there was from the very beginning of the new era such dire poverty with its attendant degradation and misery in all the cities of Italy that it aroused the benevolent energies of Sant' Antonio of Florence, called forth the sacrificial love of St. Francis, and stirred the divine in- dignation of Savonarola. MENDICANCY A CURE FOR POVERTY. The mendicant orders were the product of an effort to deal with the problem of poverty by embracing it. Since so many must be poor, let us all be poor. "Pov- erty is of God, riches are of the devil" was the cry of St. Francis and of St. Dominic. It was with this doc- trine that Francis and his little brothers tried to com- 344 APPENDIX fort that sediment of humanity that lived in squalid mis- ery outside the walls of the Italian cities and thronged their narrow streets. THE FALL OF THE MONASTERY. The fourteenth century was the watershed between medieval and modern life. In that century the old feudal militia gave place to the standing army, the knight-errant to the professional soldier. The system of land-tenure which made the occupation of land con- tingent upon service to the State was supplanted by that system of private, individual ownership, which now pre- vails. The medieval military class became the land- owning nobility and gentry of modern Europe. This class got rid of its duties but held fast to its privileges. And so we have the land-problem in the Europe of to-day. THE CONFISCATION OF MONASTIC PROPERTY IN THE INTER- ESTS OF NOBILITY AND GENTRY. The Monasteries, as they grew rich, ceased to be the homes of an austere and pious peasantry, they were seized upon by the upper classes and their revenues were wasted in luxury and licentiousness. When they were suppressed, as in England, they became the spoil of the old military and the rising burgher class. The common people who created them were driven off their lands and from their gates, and the home of the monk became the manor house of the squire and the palace of the lord. APPENDIX 345 This suppression of the Monastery, throwing as it did thousands of monks on the road, gave rise to the tramp- problem and greatly aggravated the evils of poverty. Vagabondage, beggary, and brigandage were rife and called for stringent measures of control. The poor, driven off the land by the nobles and the gentry, wan- dered from place to place, hungry and desolate, begging, and stealing, a nuisance to the world and to themselves and were hanged in batches on the cross-road gibbets. In France the clergy and the nobles claimed all the privileges and shirked all the duties of their orders and reduced the peasantry to that state of misery which is so vividly described by Arthur Young and which was avenged by the horrors of the French Revolution. THE DISCOVERY OF INDIA AND AMERICA CHANGES THE CENTERS OF EXCHANGES. With the passage of the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America the center of exchanges passed first to Lisbon, then to Amsterdam, and finally to London. These events were followed by a period of great ap- parent prosperity. Europe was enriched by the wealth of both the Indies. The conquest of Mexico and Peru brought gold and silver by the ship-load into Cadiz and first enriched and then impoverished Spain and South- ern Europe. Prices were inflated, vast and expensive wars were carried on. The people were ground between the upper and nether millstones of the Church and State, and Spain sank rapidly from the first to the third State 346 APPENDIX in Europe and entered upon that process of decline from which the nation has never recovered. The conquest and spoliation of India did for England what the conquest of Syria and Egypt did for Rome, what the spoliation of the Montezumas and the Incas did for Spain. It enriched the few and impoverished the many. The nabobs raised the price of the necessi- ties of life, they increased the rents of the landlords and the profits of the merchants and by doing this they made the condition of the poor more hopeless and more miserable. It was then that England began to breed that race of undersized, undeveloped men which is to- day her shame and her terror. England would have gone the way of Rome and of Spain to economic destruc- tion but for two things. First: She became the scene of a radical revolution in methods of production; and second : Her statesmen had the wisdom, at a critical time, to take all taxes off of exports and imports and to make the trade of England free to the world. THE MODERN METHOD OP PRODUCTION. It was in England that the modern method of pro- duction had its origin. It was there that the unlimited forces of nature were substituted for human and animal muscular forces to produce commodities for human con- sumption. The steam-engine, the spinning-jenny and the locomotive were all the invention of English genius and by these inventions the whole aspect of human life has been changed and the abolition of poverty made possible. APPENDIX 347 THE CHANGE OF BASE FROM A DEFICIT TO A SURPLUS. By the increased producing-power consequent upon these inventions the economic situation was changed from that of a chronic deficit to a chronic surplus. Modern industrial conditions have developed a new and strange disease. It is the disease of over-production. In olden times men and women had to live in poverty because there was not enough to go around, in our day they have to suffer because there is too much. The in- vention of labor-saving machinery and the organization of the labor-force, as a consequence of that invention, into the factory system have increased the productive powers of mankind to an extent that baffles calcula- tion; and the production of commodities is limited only by the capacity of mankind to consume them. Hard times come in these days not from scarcity but from plethora. There was some excuse for the poverty of the ancient and the medieval world; but in our modern world poverty is inexcusable, a shame and a disgrace. In all that relates to production the modern world is a marvel of efficiency; in all that relates to distribution the modern world is a marvel of stupidity. EVILS OF POVERTY NOT CURED BY MODERN METHOD OF PRODUCTION. The introduction of labor-saving machinery and the establishment of the factory system while it has vastly increased the productive power of mankind has been, in many respects, detrimental to the interests of the work- 348 APPENDIX ing-class. So far from solving the problem of poverty this method of increased production has so aggravated the evils of poverty that they threaten the destruction of our modern civilization. Unless some cure for these evils can be found, society as now constituted will perish and the human race will fall to a lower level, from which it will have to make a long and painful ascent. The industrial revolution, consequent upon the intro- duction of labor-saving machinery, gave rise to an eco- nomic theory which is now and for a long time has been the orthodox theory of the economic world. The cardi- nal principle of this theory is the right of the individual to freedom of contract. Prior to the adoption of this theory the condition of the working-classes, and indeed of all classes, had been a condition of status. As men were born so they lived and so they died. This tendency to heredity is a natural tendency. CHANGE OF BASIS OF INDUSTRIAL LIFE FROM STATUS TO CONTRACT. All social institutions are favorable to the hereditary principle. The church teaches the people to be content in that state of life in which it has pleased God to call them. In ancient and medieval times the state inter- fered at every point with the freedom of contract; by taxes on exports and imports and by monopolies granted to favorites men were deprived of the right of spend- ing their money according to the dictates of their own judgment; they could not buy in the cheapest nor sell in the dearest markets. The various occupations were APPENDIX 349 organized into gilds that restricted the freedom of con- tract. The member of the gilds must work according to the rules of the gild, receiving gild wages and work- ing gild hours. Any violation of the law of the gild was punished by expulsion and loss of the right to work. Apprentices were indentured for seven years and a run- away apprentice had no more rights than a runaway slave. This system gave to life stability and assurance; the individual was both restricted and protected by the restraints of the gild and the limitations to individual freedom enforced by Church and State. As long as a man staid in his place he was reasonably sure of his liv- ing. His life was monotonous, but it was secure. The adventurous spirit consequent upon the discovery of new methods could not abide this condition of status. The present era is the outcome of the revolutionary movement which has freed the individual from the shackles of society. In the Renaissance the "Western World cast off the deadening authority of the schools; in the Reformation it broke the power of the Church ; in the democratic movement it has limited the authority of the State and in the economic revolution it has destroyed the life of the old gilds. THE DEIFICATION OP LAISSEZ-FAIRE. The God of the present orthodox economy is Laissez- Faire. This God says to Church, State, and gild: "Hands-off! Let us alone." Your restraints are not helps but hindrances. If you leave men to themselves, each man will naturally seek to do the best for himself; 350 APPENDIX and what is best for himself is best for all. He will buy at the lowest and sell at the highest possible price. All the affairs of life are to be regulated not by State or Church or gilds but by individual men dealing with individual men. Life is to be carried on by a continual chaffering in the market. The God Laissez-Faire re- tained the State for police purposes only. It was the business of the State to enforce the conditions of the contracts which men made with men. Laissez-Faire had no particular use for the Church, and its power and influence have withered under the scorching heat of this economic deity. The old God of the pietistic age is permitted to exist as an object of occasional worship, but he is not allowed to meddle in the practical affairs of life. Modern business is business, and to business it subordinates both politics and religion. In our time the prizes of life are to be found in the busi- ness world. And the business man outranks the priest, the soldier, and the statesman. THE POWER OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE. As a god, Laissez-Faire has been justified of all his children. He has served the purpose of his creators as no other god ever has. The gods of the ancient world sought to make men brave and women fair and they had only a measurable degree of success; the god of the Medieval Age sought to make men good and women pure, and, except in the case of a small minority, he failed miserably ; but this god Laissez-Faire, whose prov- ince it is to make men rich, has succeeded beyond the APPENDIX 351 visions of his prophets. Not Adam Smith himself could believe it all, were he to-day to see the world as his doctrine has made it. Since the days of Laissez-Faire the wealth of the world has increased in geometrical ratio. Unto those who worship him Laissez-Faire has added luxury to luxury until they are drowning in an ocean of oil and wine, and are sinking under a burden of gold and silver. To gain the favor of Laissez-Faire there is one thing needful, which is that which every god demands of his devotees, and that is that the wor- shiper shall sacrifice every other interest to the inter- est of his God. The saying, business is business, is the creed of Laissez-Faire and expresses that complete devo- tion of the devotee by which only the favor of the deity can be secured. In this service men have sacrificed the fairest children of the human soul; justice, mercy, and truth have all been consumed in the fires of this brazen Moloch. THE DELUSION OF FREEDOM OF CONTRACT. There was never a greater delusion than that free- dom of contract was secured between man and man by the removal of the restraints of the Church, the State, and the gilds. It is nearer the truth to say that by the removal of these restraints freedom of contract was for the greater number of men made forever impossible. Freedom of contract holds only between equals. A con- tract is free only when both of the parties are at lib- erty to accept or reject its conditions. Every contract is vitiated by fraud or duress. When one party either deceives or forces the other party the contract is void 352 APPENDIX and of no effect. When freedom of contract became the economic law of the Western World, the sources of wealth and the means of production were in the hands of a limited and privileged class. The old ruling mili- tary class was in possession of the greater part of the land and the newly enfranchised burgher class had in their keeping the available capital of the country. FREEDOM OF CONTRACT A REALITY AS BETWEEN CAPITALIST AND LANDLORD. These two classes were the educated and possessing classes of the community. They were necessary each to the other and formed a natural combination. They were in control of the governmental machinery, and the police and military forces were at their command. Freedom of contract within these two classes was a real- ity, for these men could bargain with one another on equal terms. CONTRACT BETWEEN LANDLORD AND CAPITALIST AND LA- BORER VOID FOR WANT OF FREEDOM. But when the same principle was applied to the rela- tions of the landlord and the capitalist with the laborer it became the grimmest of all practical jokes. When the laborer who was without land, without money, with- out learning, was cast loose from all the protecting re- straints of the Church, the State, and the gilds and was sent naked of everything except his rights to freedom of contract to make his bargain with the landlord and the capitalist it was like sending the lamb to make a APPENDIX 353 contract with the wolf. Such a contract could have but one result; the lamb became at once the prey of the wolf. The revolution in industrial methods, consequent upon the invention of labor-saving machinery, placed the whole labor class at the mercy of the land-owning and capitalistic class. Prior to the application of steam to labor-saving machinery, that part of the population which was engaged in changing the raw material of the world to human uses was comparatively independent. THE WORKMAN SEPARATED FROM HIS TOOL. The man who made a coat or a pair of shoes could bargain on equal terms with the man who needed a coat or a pair of shoes, though the one might be a lord and the other a tailor or a cobbler. Prior to the industrial revolution there was only one considerable monopoly in England and that was the land monopoly, but with that revolution a new and more far-reaching monopoly came into being and that was the tool monopoly. Because of this change in economic method the hand of the work- man was separated from his head, he lost his independ- ence ; he became a cog in a great machine. THE NEW SOURCE OF WEALTH IS THE MACHINE. It is commonly supposed that when the Socialist as- serts that labor is the source, and therefore the measure, of all wealth, he has in mind manual or muscular labor only. There never was a more maddening error. Mere muscular power has never created wealth. As long as 354 APPENDIX man depends solely upon muscle for his living he is as poor as the bushman of Australia. He lives on roots and snails and worms, and his distended belly is the sure sign of his impoverished condition. Wealth is the crea- tion of the intelligence. It is by means of the tool that riches increase. The whole course of economic evolu- tion has been simply the evolution of the tool, from the crooked stick to the chilled plow, from the stone ham- mer to the steam sledge, from the bone needle to the Singer machine. Man has progressed just in proportion to his ability to use his brain to ease his muscle and to create a tool to supply the deficiency of his hands. Our modern wealth, is only in a limited degree, the product of manual labor. It is for the most part the product not of muscular but of brain power. It is not the man, to-day, it is the machine that is the controlling factor in the production of commodities; and the machine is noth- ing but organized thought. INCREASING MACHINE EFFICIENCY CAUSED DECREASING DE- MAND FOR MANUAL EFFICIENCY. This increasing efficiency of the machine is followed as a result by a decreasing demand for all-round effi- ciency in manual labor. The man who cuts by ma- chinery the heel of a shoe has a thousand times less need for manual efficiency than a man who by hand makes the whole shoe. Not only does the machine thus lower the quality of hand or muscular labor, but it decreases its quantity. The more a machine can do the less there is for men to do. APPENDIX 355 It is this fact, so largely ignored by orthodox econo- mists, that placed the working-man in the power of the land-owner and the capitalist. These classes owned the raw material and the tools and they needed the mus- cular power of the working-man only in some neces- sary but comparatively unimportant operations in the process that transformed the raw material into the fin- ished commodity. Every contract of the landlord and capitalistic class with the laborer was a contract under duress. These owners of raw material and tools said to the hand laborers : ' ' Work on our terms or starve, ' ' and by and by they said with greater rigor: "Work on our terms and starve." WEALTH AND POVERTY INCREASE IN NEARLY EQUAL RATIO. While the modern methods of production increased the wealth of the world a thousand-fold, it decreased the value of mere labor, and as a consequence the purchas- ing-power of the laborer in the same proportion. It is this decreased power of the laborer to purchase that is the cause of modern commercial crises. Our store- houses are at times bursting with food and clothing for which the people are starving with cold and hunger. But the naked back and the hungry belly cannot have the surplus food and clothing because these, being the property of the land-owner and tool-owner, can be had only for the price which these place upon them. So at both ends the laborer is at the mercy of the land-owner and tool-owner. In neither selling nor buying is he a 356 APPENDIX free agent, lie must sell for what he can get and he must buy for what he must pay. THE INCREASE OF POVERTY. It is because of this condition in the economic world that poverty has increased almost as rapidly as wealth. In his survey of London conditions, Chas. Booth re- ports thirty-five per cent of the population as living in poverty. The factory system was hardly established with its principles of competition and freedom of contract before it resulted in such poverty, with its consequent wretched- ness and human degradation that all England was ap- palled. THE FACTORY LAWS NECESSARY FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE WORKING-CLASS. The factory acts in England are in contravention of the right to freedom of contract. These acts were passed to remedy intolerable evils which were the result of the free play of the principle of Laissez-Faire. In the mines and the factories, men and women and children were exploited in the interests of mine-owner and fac- tory-lord as men, women, and children had never been exploited before. The slaves of Crassus in the mines of Sardinia were not more miserable than were the work- ers in the mines of the black country of England in the first half of the nineteenth century. Little children under ten years of age dragged coal-cars through the narrow ways of the mines. Naked women, lost to every APPENDIX 357 semblance of decency, became very Yahoos in that dark underworld of misery and death ; the men, brutalized by degrading toil, were happy only when they were drunk. And the factories above-ground were little better than the mines beneath. In these factories children' from six years of age and upward were worked for fourteen hours a day. These children were the children of the very poor, many of them sent from the workhouses of the country to labor in the factories and so relieve the va- rious parishes of the cost of their keep. Women were subjected to the same rigorous terms of toil. Fourteen hours was a day's work, after which the women could keep themselves clean, look after their babies, and comfort their husbands. The wages paid for this inhuman labor were just sufficient to preserve life at its lowest stand- ards. These slaves of the mine and the mill were ill- fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed. They had none of the comforts or decencies of life. They were fast lapsing into a condition of bestiality that threatened the exist- ence of the human race in England. FEEBLE EFFORTS TO SHORTEN HOURS AND IMPROVE CONDITIONS. It was then that the Earl of Shaftesbury led the great movement for reform which was legalized in the factory acts. The hours of labor were limited, conditions of labor were regulated and the State once more resumed the right to be a party to the contracts which it was its duty to enforce. At first these efforts on the part of the State to interfere with freedom of contract were 358 APPENDIX very timid. They stopped with the regulation of child and female labor. The earlier factory acts provided that children under twelve years must not work more than ten hours a day, and made some equally feeble reforms in regard to the labor of women; but not even Lord Shaftesbury dared to interfere with freedom of contract in the case of grown men. The men were left at the mercy of the masters, to make such terms as they could and so were compelled to labor for long hours at a low wage and to bear the whole weight of loss that came from sickness and accident. The condition of the working-classes in spite of parliamentary interference tended ever downward. The poor became poorer as the rich became richer. THE POOR DEPRIVED OF POLITICAL PRIVILEGES, EDUCATION, ETC. The poor were deprived of political rights, of edu- cational advantages, and of religious privileges. The electoral franchise was in the hands of the rich and the privileged. Education was a private concern. The pub- lic schools and the universities were in the possession of the upper classes and were select and expensive. The national Church was a function of the State and was used as a means of livelihood by the younger sons of the no- bility and gentry. In the first half of the nineteenth century the cleavage between Disraeli's two nations, the rich and the poor, was growing wider and wider and would have become hopeless but for two interfering forces which came to APPENDIX 359 the help of the State in its effort to cure this schism in the life of the. people. THE EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT. The first of these forces was that of religion. It is to the everlasting credit of the Evangelical movement that it stood, like Aaron, in the name of God, between the living and the dead and staid, in a measure, this plague of poverty that was wasting the lives of the peo- ple. The Evangelical religion with its doctrine of the inestimable value of a human soul came as a great light to that mass of degraded humanity that sat in dark- ness and lived in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. "Wesley, at the beginning of this period, repeated the experience of St. Francis. He so preached the love of God to the lowest of the people, that he became to them as an angel of God and they listened to him with tears of hope running down their cheeks. It was the fervor of the Evangelical religion that inspired the Earl of Shaftes- bury and made him the tribune of the people in the Houses of Parliament and in the Courts of the King. It was the Evangelical religion that roused Robert Raikes from his ease and made him the apostle of learning to the letterless masses. His Sunday Schools for ragged chil- dren were the beginning of popular education in Eng- land. It was the Evangelical religion that inspired Wil- berforce and Zachary Macaulay with a love for the negro slave that would not rest until it had secured his emanci- pation. It was this same religious fervor in its higher forms that sent Clarkson and Elizabeth Fry upon their 360 APPENDIX visits to the prisons of England and the Continent which led to the mitigation of some of the more dreadful abuses of the prison system. The Evangelical movement has done its work and gone its way, but it has left behind a fruitage for good such as can be credited to but few religious movements of the world. It has enlarged the borders of human liberty ; it has given the franchise to an ever increasing number of Englishmen ; it has given free and compulsory education to the children of the nation ; it was the stay and support of the great churchman, Gladstone, in his liberal policies ; and it has now given to the people of England the budget of Lloyd George. TRADES-UNIONS AN EFFORT TO CORRECT INDUSTRIAL EVILS. The second force that came to the rescue of humanity from the ravages of Laissez-Faire was Trades-Unionism which was the revival of the principle of the old gilds adapted to new conditions. The old gild differed from the modern trades-union in that it included both masters and men. The component elements of the gilds were masters, journey-men, and apprentices. These classes were not exclusive, not antagonistic. The apprentice in due time became a journey-man and the journey-man could at any time become a master. The trades were simple, the tools inexpensive, and the journey-man might at his pleasure set up his own shop and become his own master. The old gilds existed among other things for the purpose of protecting the consumer from the evil of untrained, inefficient workmanship and to shield the art APPENDIX 361 from the ravages of the corrupt master and the dissolute workman. The modern trades-union has a different com- position and a different purpose. Its membership con- sists of workmen only. Neither masters nor apprentices can belong to the union. The chief purpose of the union is to secure for its members a living wage under living conditions. The working-class perceived at once the helplessness of the individual workman in his dealings with the master class. The irony of the doctrine of free- dom of contract entered deeply into the soul of the work- ing-man. He saw that he was no more free to fix the price of his labor than was the dead carcass of a sheep to fix the price of its flesh. His labor was a commodity in the market subject to the law of supply and demand and the invention of labor-saving machinery was the cause of a constant glut in the labor market. Because of this there was an ever decreasing demand in the presence of an ever increasing supply. It is this condition of the labor market that causes the constant disturbance of the industrial world. It is this over-supply that tends to force the wages of labor down to the starvation-point. The effort of the trades-union is to prevent, if possible, the working of this natural law. CORPORATE CONTRACT FOR INDIVIDUAL CONTRACT. It seeks to substitute corporate contract for individual contract and by this means to shorten the hours and raise the wages of labor. In this struggle for better condi- tions, trades-unionism stands for the closed shop and re- sorts to the strike and the boycott. Unionism says to the 362 APPENDIX individual : ' ' Workman, you must surrender your indi- vidual freedom in the interests of the whole working- class." It says: "Your apparent freedom of contract is not a reality; it is a delusion. Under the whip of necessity you are free only to take the lowest wage the master class will offer. You are free only to underbid and overwork your fellow-workmen, and such individual freedom can result only in a common slavery. In the interests of your higher freedom, we demand that you surrender your individual liberty and if you do not, we will brand you as a traitor to the cause of labor and drive you out of the labor world." To the master class, the trades-union says, "We will not treat with you as indi- viduals but only as a union. You must pay union prices, employ union men and work under union conditions. If you do not, we will ruin your business. We will neither make nor buy your commodities." TRADES-UNIONISM . In Unionism the working-class is organized both for offense and defense. It is engaged in a war to secure a living wage under living conditions. PROPERTY AND LABOR ORGANIZED FOR WAR. It is this state of war that is threatening the stability of the social order. The working-class is becoming both powerful and embittered. Both the working-class and the employing-classes are organized into governments with their laws, officers, and powers of taxation. These two nations of Disraeli stand in battle array, the one APPENDIX 363 against the other; they carry on their warfare in dis- dain of the. government of the State. The employing- class calls in the police power of the government to de- fend its property rights and the laboring-class assails that power in defense of its personal rights. Unless the State can reestablish its authority over both these fac- tions, the State will perish and for a long period chaos will reign in its stead. In fact we are under the reign of chaos now. Property flouts the State and labor hates it. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE. Before proceeding further, let us for a moment con- sider the effect of the machine upon human faculty and its consequent result in human poverty. The inevitable effect of the machine is to limit human faculty. The subdivision of labor which is the result of machine methods causes the worker to be wonderfully expert in one operation to the loss of ability in every other direc- tion. The constant repetition of one action makes that ac- tion automatic. As a consequence, the worker is nothing other than a part of the machine. He does not control it : it controls him. Just as each cog in the machine repeats a given operation so many times a minute so the man, the woman, or the child is compelled to repeat the same oper- ation so many times a minute. In this operation only one faculty of the mind and one set of nerves and muscles are employed. The effect of this needs no comment. Both physically and spiritually it is ruinous to the nature of man. It cripples the body and dwarfs the mind and en- feebles the soul. "We who are not the slaves of a machine 364 APPENDIX can have no notion of the deadening effect of that con- stant repetition, minute after minute, hour after hour, of the same motion. At first the nerves and muscles rebel and the worker can keep on only by a supreme act of the will. "When the action becomes automatic the strain ceases and the worker goes through the operation with- out thought and without feeling. It is the sad lot of the modern workman that he cannot take any pleasure in his work. His task is dull to deadness; what he does is insignificant, and the only thing he has to think about is his wages. This impoverishment of the man by his work is a matter that calls for grave consideration. The work- ing-men know this danger and because of it they demand shorter hours. It is this effect of the machine upon the man that is responsible for much of the poverty in the modern industrial world. The insistent call upon one nerve-center leads to early exhaustion and premature old age. It is because of this that the trades which still re- quire considerable manual dexterity, such as the building- trades and some departments of the tailoring-trades are in a preferred class. Those engaged in these trades are more fully developed intellectually and have a longer labor-life. Machine-driven men and women are worn out before fifty and become thus early a burden on the com- munity. CAUSES OF POVERTY REMEDIABLE. It will be seen that the causes of poverty in the modern world are in a measure remediable. The causes do not in- •here in natural laws and forces but are created by the customs and laws of men. And what man has created APPENDIX 365 man can destroy. He can change his customs and amend his laws, and by so doing can alter the face of society and can banish poverty as he has already banished the plague. The chief causes of poverty are land-monopoly, tool-monopoly, and trade-monopoly, which are entrenched behind laws and customs that give the few control over the sources of wealth and enable them to grow rich by ex- ploiting the unprivileged classes of the community. THE LAND-MONOPOLY. It is against the first two of these sources of poverty that the budget of Lloyd George is chiefly directed. The Chancellor is using the power of taxation to accomplish a reform in the relation of the people of England to the soil of England. Under present conditions the people of England are a landless people. They have no title to the ground upon which they live. The ownership of their island is vested in a very small minority who dictate terms of occupation to the great majority. The peers of England own a larger part of the land of England. They use it for parks and game preserves, they build palaces and stables upon it for themselves, their horses, and their hounds, while the people suffer for want of breathing-space and are cut away from the natural sources of life. The title of the peers to their land is established by immemorial usage and is buttressed by legal enactment. In the estimation of the peers the ex- istence of England is bound up with the right of the peers to possess the land. If the Duke of Westminster should lose any of the thousands of acres which he holds 366 APPENDIX in London, Eaton, and elsewhere ; if he should have to pay any rental, in the way of taxation to the State for the protection of his property, if the people should gain any right or title directly or indirectly in his domain, then England would fall from her proud position as the im- perial nation of the world. The budget of Lloyd George was thrown out by the peers because they saw in it a menace to their existence as a land-monopoly class. But the budget in and of itself hardly scratched the scab of this abuse of land-monopoly. The budget makes no at- tack upon existing titles. It does not propose a re- distribution of the land : it only provides that the land shall pay to the people a small portion of the cost of its keep. UNEARNED-INCREMENT TAX. The simple principle that the increase in population in- creases the value of land is made the basis of taxation. It is the people, not the owners, who create this increased value and it is only fair that the people should share in what the people create. Lloyd George proposes to take one-fifth of this increment for the uses of the people. In- stead of crying against this modest tax the land-owners should thank the Chancellor for his moderation. Instead of taking a fifth he might be within his right and take it all. TAX ON LAND-HELD-FOR-A-RISE. By a tax on unused lands held for a rise the Chancellor strikes a blow at an evil which is a fruitful cause of pov- erty and distress. To hold land in idleness for specula- APPENDIX 367 tive purposes in the midst of a growing population is a crime against the community. The man who does this should pay the penalty in the shape of severe taxation. He should be forced to put his land on the market at a fair price. The effort of Lloyd George to bring the land into use has earned him the enviable hatred of the land- owning class. TOOL-MONOPOLY CURTAILED OF ITS POWER BY TAXES ON INCOMES AND INHERITANCES. By the power of taxation the Chancellor endeavors not only to stay the ravages of land-monopoly but also to mitigate the evils of tool-monopoly. The tool-owner ab- sorbs an undue share of the profit of the tool. The tool is a social product and society has an interest in it. The tool produces commodities at the cost of human life and happiness. On one side the machine throws out woolen and cotton cloth, hammered steel and molded iron; on the other side it casts out dead nerves and broken bones, dwarfed intelligences and weary souls. The tool is re- lentless. It makes no allowance for the feebleness of flesh and blood. Hood's song of the shirt, "It is not linen ye are wearing out but human beings' lives," is the song of the machine. It creates material wealth at the cost of human poverty. It is the purpose of the budget to com- pel the machine that does the damage to pay a portion of the cost of the damage. By a graduated income tax and by death duties the Chancellor is making an effort to equalize human conditions. He is taking from men who have too much and giving to men who have too little ; and 36S APPENDIX this he does not as an act of grace but as an act of justice. The income and the inheritance taxes are not novel, they have had a place in the budget for years. Every one recognizes their equity. Lloyd George is original only in the uses to which he puts the revenue of these taxes. In- stead of spending it all in building vessels of war he ap- plies a portion of it to the needs of the sick and the aged. OLD-AGE PENSIONS. The budget established old-age pensions as a settled principle of the English government, making its de- mand on the Exchequer as naturally as do war and po- lice. The present government recognizes the duty of the State to defend the people from the ravages of poverty, equally with its duty to protect them from the ravages of war. And the first duty is paramount to the second. Poverty is far more destructive to the life of a nation than war. "War sometimes purines a nation by bleed- ing' it ; poverty corrupts the blood of the nation in its veins. The care of the aged is necessary to the welfare of the community. No people can be great who permits its old men and women, after a life of honest toil, to fall into pauperism with its attendant misery and dis- grace. Old-age pensions are a necessity in our modern industrial world if we would save our working-people from hopeless deterioration. If the working-class must support its own aged it can not properly support its own young. The crust that is grudgingly given to the old man belongs really to the young child. If the nation wishes a continual supply of vigorous young life, it APPENDIX 3G9 must by means of its surplus wealth lift the burden of the aged from the shoulders of the working-class. If it is an honorable nation it will not degrade its aged by a dole, it will ennoble them by a pension; a dole is a badge of disgrace, a pension is an order of nobility. With a dole beggars are fed, with a pension heroes are rewarded. A pension is a recognition on the part of society of the right of the man who has gone forth to his work and to his labor until the evening to a little rest and peace before he goes hence and is no more seen. With the growing sense of social justice old-age pensions are sure to be a permanent charge on the public purse and the English Chancellor does well to make permanent provision for them. SICK, ACCIDENT, AND DEATH BENEFITS. And this wise statesman, with that prophetic vision which is his, sees the necessity of increased taxation upon incomes and inheritances, to meet more adequately the necessities of the working-class which arise from the sickness, the accidents, and the untimely deaths which are the outcome of the present industrial method. The factory with its noise and dust is the breeding-place of disease; the machine can destroy as well as create; it is the grim instrument of accident and death. The cost of this sickness, accident, and death is terrific and up to the present time has been paid, for the most part, by the working-classes. Whoever doubts the power of these classes to organize and control great enterprises knows nothing of the history and workings of the 370 APPENDIX Friendly Societies of England and the Fraternal Or- ders of America. These organizations embrace millions of members and pay out millions of money in sick and death benefits. It is not too much to say that but for these societies and orders, and their highly organized work of relief, our civilization could not endure for a decade. It is by this system of cooperative insurance that the working-classes have been able to survive the disasters of their calling. The Chancellor of the Ex- chequer very wisely declares that under no circum- stances should the government do anything to impair the efficiency of these organizations which the people have created to meet their own needs. But it can lend a helping hand. It can make insurance against sick- ness, accident, and death compulsory and it can pay a part of the expense of that insurance. And it can by rigid control and taxation do much to curtail the evils of the capitalistic insurance companies which prey upon the poor in their hours of sickness, misfortune, and death. This making a gain out of disease and death is the last worst outrage of the rich against the lives of the poor. In his budget Lloyd George lays down the principle that insurance against sickness, accident, and death must be under the control and so far as necessary at the expense of the State. The working-man, as a matter of State policy, should not be permitted to stint himself of food, clothing, and shelter, in his time of health to make provision for himself against sickness, accident, and death. A healthy working-man APPENDIX 371 is a social asset. Society cannot afford to allow this asset to depreciate for want of proper care. WIDOWED AND DESERTED MOTHERHOOD. In the case of widowed and forsaken motherhood the duty of society is too plain for comment. When a woman has performed the paramount duty of conceiv- ing, breeding, and bearing a citizen to the State, she ac- quires a right to protection and support which no State which values its own life can safely ignore. If her working-mate dies, or for any reason becomes incompe- tent, then the State must take the husband's duty upon itself and make due provision for the mother and the children; and this not as a matter of what in irony is called charity, but as a matter of justice and expe- diency. In this world the State is, or ought to be, the vicar of that God who is the God of the fatherless and who pleads the cause of the widow. The only wise method of helping a widowed or forsaken mother is to pay her a fixed pension sufficient to support herself and her children in a reasonable degree of comfort. To separate a mother from her children except in case of dire necessity is more cruel and unnatural than to seeth a kid in its mother's milk. To put a mother and growing children on starvation rations is an act of folly equal to that of starving an army on the eve of a battle. The time is coming, yea now is, when the humanity of a community will be gauged by the wisdom and the generosity with which it cares for its widowed and for- 372 APPENDIX saken mothers and their orphaned and forsaken children. COMPENSATION FOR WORKMEN IN TIMES OF ENFORCED IDLENESS. Perhaps the most radical of all the proposals of the budget is that the State, with the assistance of the masters and men, shall provide a fund to compensate workers for loss of time when they are laid off during seasons of trade depression. By this method the Chan- cellor desires to remedy one of the greatest wrongs of our present industrial system. There is no evil in the lot of the working-man that causes him more distress than the uncertainty of his employment. In busy times he is rushed at a breathless speed to fill the orders that come pouring into the office. As soon as the hurry is over he is put on half-time, and when business is slack he is laid off altogether and becomes an enforced idler. His expenses go on, his income ceases. He sees his little savings wasting day by day until they are exhausted and then he becomes the most miserable of all creatures, an object of charity. He makes application for relief at one of the various agencies and so takes his first step on the easy downward way to pauperism. Every period of trade-depression leaves in its wake a host of men who by enforced idleness have become idlers. Without hope, without desire, they go to swell that crowd of men who stand in the bread-line, drink stale beer, beg and pilfer and become a nuisance to themselves and others. There can be no effective warfare against poverty which does not vigorously attack this evil. The manufacturer APPENDIX 373 and the merchant support themselves during these times of dearth out of their accumulated profits. The work- man's wage is not sufficient for him to make anything like an adequate provision for such contingencies. The English Chancellor is far-sighted in wishing to aid the working-class to tide over these times of distress. Such a provision would make these crises in trade less frequent, less violent, and of shorter duration. Trade dulness comes from glut in the market. This glut in- creases with the decrease of purchasing-power on the part of the people. An idle workman earns no money and cannot buy. To lay off workmen is only to intensify and prolong the crises. Hence it is to the interest of all parties that there shall be a fund to continue the pur- chasing-power of the mass of the people until the glut is exhausted. Such a provision will have a most benef- icent influence on the labor world. It will relieve the working-class from the anxiety and degradation that come from enforced idleness ; it will make the periods of unemployment less frequent and of shorter duration, and society will be freed from the reproach of having men stand in market-places all the day idle because no man hath hired them. TAXES ON IMPORTS AND EXPORTS. In making up his budget the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer utterly refused to depart from the long estab- lished policy of England which makes the trade of that country free to the world. He would not for a moment consider the question of imposing taxes upon imports 374 APPENDIX and exports. He deplores the necessity of increasing the tax on teas. That tax he tells us is a requirement of the revenue and has in it nothing- of that mischievous ele- ment of protection which is working so much harm in America. It is a matter of congratulation that the fiscal policy of England is in the keeping of a statesman who will not be driven by temporary distress to the use of expedients, which, like quack medicines, only aggravate the evil which they claim to cure. It is a blessing to the whole world that England at the command of the Chan- cellor still flies the flag of free trade. Let him pursue this policy with unfaltering courage. The present in- sensate policy of America and Germany must sooner or later perish of its own foolishness. In America its abuses are so rank that the stench of them is in every nostril. The American tariff is the hiding- and breed- ing-place of political and commercial corruption. It is the main cause of the swollen fortunes that grow as unsightly tumors on the body politic. 1 EVILS OP THE AMERICAN TARIFF. So great and growing are the evils of the American tariff legislation that they threaten the life of the country. The American government must kill the tariff or the tariff will kill the government. It will not be long now before the American people will awaken from the mad delusion that they can grow rich by restraining their i The recent tariff act relieves the United States of some of the odium of a false and mischievous economic system. But it is only a step in the right direction which is Freedom of Trade with the world. APPENDIX 375 trade, that they can sell without buying and by legisla- tive hocus-pocus get something for nothing and make the foreigner pay their taxes. In this misguided policy America has misled the na- tions; they see the cause of her wealth, not in her vast natural resources and her great and continued free im- portation of labor, but in her policy of protection. So, the nations following her evil example say: "Go to, we also will get rich by taxation. We will not buy of the hated foreigner; we will only sell to him." It will not be long before the whole world will rue the day when it thus followed the example of the American Republic to do evil. Already men are beginning to awaken to the fact that they can no more grow rich by restraining the freedom of their trade than they can grow strong by restricting the circulation of their blood. Every man having the welfare of the world at heart must com- mend the policy of the English Chancellor and cry to him : ' ' Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. ' ' THE CHANCELLOR AND THE EXCISE. The Chancellor deals with the excise as wisely as he deals with the tariff. He puts a larger tax upon in- toxicating liquors and upon public houses not for the purpose of increasing the revenue, but with the intention of decreasing the consumption of alcoholic liquids, with its consequent drunkenness, misery, and degradation. The Chancellor congratulates himself and the country on the fact that the growing abstinence of the people has made excise taxation less profitable to the Exchequer; 376 APPENDIX and by the increasing rate of taxation he hopes still further to reduce that source of revenue. . It is not to the honor of England that it has so long battened on the vice of the people. In deriving so large a part of its revenue from the sale of spirits, it has made the State responsible for the degradation of the people. Its policy in this respect has been the acme of folly. It has been a partner in the sale of that which it punishes the people for using. It glorifies distilling and brewing and at the same time condemns the drinking that makes the brewing and distilling profitable. It sends the brewer and the distiller into the House of Lords, while it sends the drunkard to prison. It re- wards the cause and punishes the effect. The present Chancellor proposes to make the tax on liquor as nearly prohibitive as possible. He would make drunkenness a luxury for the Lords, not a necessity for the Commons. THE USE OF THE SURPLUS. We do not wonder that conservative England stands aghast at such radical and even revolutionary proposals. The very calmness and simplicity with which the Chan- cellor lays down and discusses his propositions must ir- ritate the possessing-classes to madness. They bite their nails at this little Welshman and call him a thief and a robber. When he proposes that the monopoly of the land and the monopoly of the tool shall be somewhat abridged, when Lloyd George declares that the people of England have some right and title in the land of Eng- land; when he affirms that the laborers of England APPENDIX 377 should be fairly considered when it comes to the dis- tribution of the product of their toil, then these land- owners and tool-owners lift up their hands and cry: ' ' This is robbery ; this is confiscation ! ' ' "No, gentlemen," answers the Chancellor, "this is res- toration ; this is compensation. Too long have the people of England been deprived of their just right and title in the land on which they live. It is the people of England who give value to the land of England. Let the people forsake the land and an acre in Middlesex will be as worthless as an acre in Sahara. It is but just that the values which the people create the people should share. Too long have the toilers of England been de- prived of their just portion in the prosperity of Eng- land. During the last hundred and twenty years Eng- land has been growing rich until her wealth surpasses that of any nation known to history. This wealth is a social product. It is the common product of her in- ventors, of her statesmen, of her organizers, of her arti- zans, her mechanics, and last but not least of that class which Bishop Andrews calls 'the mean workmen and the poor.' One class only has had little or no share in creating the wealth of England and that is the land- owning and the mere capitalistic tool-owning class." LAND-OWNER AND TOOL-OWNER UNDULY REWARDED. In the distribution of the common product vast in- justice has prevailed. The land-owner and the tool- owner have under the forms of law deprived the rest of the community of its due and rightful share in the 378 APPENDIX common property. The inventor too often has been de- prived of the due reward of his genius, the statesman has been thwarted in every effort at true statesman- ship and his reward too frequently has been in direct ratio to his betrayal of the rights of the people ; the artist is treated with indifference, the artizan with con- tempt, the mechanic with injustice ; all these for genera- tions have been compelled to stand cap in hand in the superior presence of the land-owner and the tool-owner ; and as for the mean workman and the poor, these have been trodden upon by the upper classes, with a cruelty worthy of Edward Hyde, into the mire of a debasing poverty. It is not to the credit of our humanity that the Lords and the Gentry resist the very reasonable ef- forts of Lloyd George to right these victims of social wrong. REDISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS. What he proposes is nothing other than a redistribu- tion of the surplus wealth of England. The wealth of England is sufficient to maintain all the people of Eng- land in comfort, and in the mind of the Chancellor the comfort of the many is to be preferred to the luxury of the few. The ruling-class of England have wasted the surplus of the country in the maintenance of an un- wieldy and expensive empire. A vast army of younger sons enjoy colonial sinecures at the expense of the pub- lic purse. In the interests of the empire unjust and wasteful wars are carried on, to the exhaustion of the Exchequer and the depletion of the life-force of the people. For the protection of the Empire, dreadnought APPENDIX 379 follows dreadnought, devouring the money that the peo- ple need for bread. Lloyd George in his budget calls a halt to this policy of mad imperialism. He says the needs of the people of England are paramount to the needs of the Empire of England. To what profit is it if we gain the whole world and lose our own life ? Let the Empire of England be in the hearts and over the lives of Englishmen; let her promote justice and equity in her own cities and on her own estates; let her educate and enfranchise all of her people ; let her make the poor the equal of the peers in the sight of the law ; let her give political rights to her women and home-rule to Ireland, — and she will have less need of dreadnoughts. Her own people will be her sufficient defense. When England is just, England need not be afraid. Lloyd George is however a practical statesman as well as a political seer, he provides for the present while he plans for the future. He proposes to give the Lords and the Gentry their dreadnoughts; all he asks is that the Lords and Gentry shall help to pay for them. CHANCELLOR AIDED BY SPIRITUAL FORCES. In his warfare against poverty Lloyd George is aided by spiritual forces that make him invincible. The Lords may be against him, but the Lord is with him. He has enlisted on his side the religious enthusiasm of the people. His budget is a practical application to the affairs of England of the Gospel of Christ. It is good news to the poor. It answers to that cry for brother- hood which comes from the life of the nobler men and 380 APPENDIX women of our times. We are in the midst of a religious movement than which none has been more important since the days of the Mosaic Exodus. The religion of our day comes with a message of hope to the bond slave of the machine and the mine. Its prophets preach in- dustrial freedom. It seeks to banish from the world the specter of want. It knows that in our Father's house is bread enough and to spare. We know to-day that poverty is not a divine institu- tion, it is a human blunder. It is not the ordinance of God that keeps the poor always with us, it is the blind selfishness and wastefulness of men. The abolition of poverty, that fair prospect which Lloyd George pre- sents to our vision, is not a foolish dream. It belongs to the working and not to the sleeping world. It is because we are awake as we have never been before to the possibilities of human life on this earth that we can no longer endure its sordidness and its misery. The growing intelligence of men which has solved so many problems of the Universe will not stand forever hope- less and perplexed before the riddle of his own wretched- ness. MEN AND WOMEN OF WEALTH DISSATISFIED. It is a sign of the times that men and women of great wealth are devoting their riches not to the relief but to the prevention of poverty. It is also ominous that the possession of great wealth is no longer honorable but rather disgraceful. The insistent question, How did you get it? disturbs the rich man in his sleep and makes his bed uneasy. The best men and women in the privi- APPENDIX 381 leged classes are becoming traitors to their class and are leading in the war against privilege and poverty. CONCLUSION. Universal education and adult suffrage is leveling hu- manity upward and old class distinctions are no longer tenable. Our common humanity is becoming more po- tent than our social distinctions. Social equality is the necessary corollary to political equality. It is not the King nor the Lords that are sovereign in England to-day, the people are sovereign and the sover- eign people will no longer consent to go ragged and hungry. The people will no longer consent to leave the most important of their affairs in irresponsible hands. The coming age will see a vast extension of the principle of social control. The principle of competi- tion must give place to the principle of cooperation. The day of Laissez-Faire is passing. Men will no longer stand by and listen to the cynical cry of "Let be; let us see whether Elias will come and save him. ' ' Man no longer looks to the skies for salvation. He knows that whatever salvation comes to him must come from the workings of his own mind and the promptings of his own heart. If he would redeem his race from the dis- grace of poverty he must do it in obedience to fixed laws and by means of resident forces. The budget of Lloyd George is an effort to cure social evils by social remedies, and we cannot help hoping and believing with him ' ' that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step toward that good time when pov- 38£ APPENDIX erty and the human wretchedness and degradation that follow in its camp will be as remote to the people of all lands as the wolves that once infested the forests." THE END UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRAR1 N? 690 ACO uv, ouu i ncnN rttblUNAL LlbHAHY (-ACJLITY AA 001 118 633 5 CENTRAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY University of California, San Diego DATE DUE Jljfll 1 7 1976 CI 39 UCSD Libr.