The citizen in his relation to the industrial situation

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Industrial Situation 3

II The Citizen and the Working Man .... 41

II The Citizen And The Working Man

THE aim of these lectures, as I have already endeavored to make plain, is, if I may, to enlarge a little the horizon of our conception of citizenship. It is easy to limit this; and still easier, I apprehend, to localize it. There is, in other words, what perhaps I may venture to call a Judaic tendency in the human mind to limit our responsibilities to our own class, our own town, our own race or religion. And it ought to be the office of the university to correct this; and, in connection, e.g., with such a matter as the definition of the modern responsibilities of citizenship, to indicate, if no more, those wider relations which to-day exist, and which cannot exist without bringing responsibilities with them. One of these, especially in the case of the scholar, whose tendency always is to be a little too much withdrawn from his fellow-men, is the relation of the citizen to the working man. But in advancing in this discussion to the question of these relations and to the status and environment, as created by our modern social conditions, of the working man, I am not unmindful of the fact that, by many persons, the designation of any particular class by such a term is regarded as at once misleading and infelicitous. It is urged by these that, as a matter of fact, the vast proportion of the people of any state or community belong to the working classes; and that the enormous enlargement, both of the sphere and the variety of the occujjations alike of men and women make it at once superficial and unjustly discriminating to speak of any particular group of persons as distinctively working men or women.

There is, of course, a certain truth in this of which I would by no means wish to lose sight. A working man or woman is one who works; and this or that person who breaks stone, or lays brick, or rolls iron, or does any other manual labor, is certainly not the only person who works. Much the largest part in its dynamic efficiency, and much the most valuable part in the ultimate productiveness of the world's work, is done by men who never wielded a pick nor drove a nail. And between the two extremes of our complex social organisms—between, in other words, the capitalist who plans, the inventor who contrives, the executive who sets in motion, on the one hand, and the mill hand or miner or trackman who toils and delves, on the other,— there is a vast army of men and women who form, perhaps, the majority in our modern social and economic structure, who are neither in the one class nor in the other of these ; and yet, whose daily toil, if measured by its hours of various labor, whether of the hand or of the brain, is quite as arduous as cither's.

But when this is admitted, as it certainly ought to be, the fact still remains that when we speak of work and the working man, or of labor and the laboring man, there is, ordinarily, attached to the words a meaning at once explicit and circumscribed. ^^ Economic writers, like the world in general, do indeed recognize,'' says Mr. Mallock,^ ^4n an unscientific way, that productive exertion exhibits itself under many

1 "Labor and the Popular Welfare,'' W. H. Mallock, p. 14.

various forms ; but their admissions and statements with regard to this point are entirely confused and stultified by the almost ludicrous persistence with which they classify all these various forms under the single heading of Labor. John Stuart Mill, for instance, says that a large part of profits are really wages of the labor of superintendence. He speaks of Hhe labor of the invention of industrial processes/ 'the labor of Watt in contriving the steam-engine,' and even of ^the labor of the savant and the speculative thinker.' He employs the same word to describe the effort that invented Arkwright's spinning- frame and the commonest muscular movement of any of the mechanics who assisted with hammer or screw-driver to construct it under Arkwright's direction. He employs the same word to describe the power that perfected the electric telegraph, and the power that stretches the wires from pole to pole like clothes-lines. He confuses under one heading the functions of the employer and the employed,— of the men who lead in industry and the men who follow. He calls them all laborers, and he calls their work labor.

^^NoWj were the question merely one of literary or philosophical propriety, this inclusive use of the word labor might be defensible ; but we have nothing to do here with the niceties of such trivial criticism. We are concerned not with what a word might be made to mean, but with what practically it does mean ; and if we appeal to the ordinary use of language, — not only its use by the ordinary mass of men, but its most frequent use by economic writers, also,— we shall find that the word labor has a meaning which is practically settled; and we shall find that this meaning is not an inclusive one, but exclusive. We shall find that labor means, practically, muscular labor, or, at all events, some form of exertion of which men — common men— are universally capable; and that it not only never naturally includes any other idea, but distinctly and emphatically excludes it. For instance, when Mill, in his ^Principles of Political Economy,' devotes one of his chapters to the future of the ^Laboring Classes' he instinctively uses the word as meaning manual laborers. When, as not unfrequently happens, some opulent politician says to a popular audience, ^I, too, am a laboring man,' he is either understood to be saying something which is only true metaphorically, or is jeered at as saying something which is not true at all. The Wattses, the Stevensons, the Wentworths, the Bessemers, the Armstrongs, the Brasseys, are, according to the formal definitions of the economists, one and all of them, laborers. But what man is there who if, in speaking of a strike, he were to say that he supported, or opposed, the claims of labor, would be understood as meaning the claims of employers and millionaires like these? It is evident that no one would understand him in such a sense ; and if he used the word labor thus, he would be merely trifling with language. The word— for all practical purposes— has its meaning unequivocally fixed. It does not mean all human exertion; it emphatically means a part of it only. It means muscular and manual exertion, or exertion of which the ordinary man is capable, as distinct from industrial exertion of any other kind ; and not only as distinct from it, but as actually opposed to and struggling with it. ' '

Ah, yes ; just there, in fact, is the tragedy of the whole business ; and in that last sentence of

Mr. Mallock's lies the point of his whole argument. It is in vain, in other words, that we endeavor, by amiable sophisms which, true enough once, have long ago ceased to be true to obscure to ourselves or to others that tremendous cleavage which, in our time, has come to pass between the rest of human society and those who make up what we call the working classes. In part I have already indicated the causes of that cleavage, and they are, in turn, the influences through which, alas ! it has been too often widened and deepened.

In some degree, undoubtedly, they are the result of ignorance or of misapprehension. The development of industrial activities in the century that has just closed has resulted in a vast increase in the world's wealth; and, especially in our own country, in aggregations of wealth which have greatly accentuated to the working classes the enormous discrepancies between themselves and the capitalist classes. The commonest form in which this expresses itself is that ^^the rich are growing richer, and the poor are growing poorer, ' ' and more acute expressions of it are not greatly different from a speech which I find in an organ of labor pnblislied, curiously enough, in Boston, and in which occur these words: ^^In a land whose bowels teem with all the varieties of natural wealth, men are naked, homeless, and starving; you who bear the burden of an extravagant, a wanton, a barbaric luxury, and yet have not wherewith to appease your hunger,— starved, imprisoned, tortured into subjection, ^Pinkertoned' to death; you who, from your miserable hovels see the palaces of your masters rising around you; who can behold their luxurious equipages, and yet must trudge on foot yourselves ; you can read of their ocean greyhounds, their trips to Europe, their Newports, their Saratogas; and, deprived yourselves of air and light, with no vacations, few amusements, and less rational enjoyment, will you calmly see all this when you know that all this fabric of luxury and ease springs from your labor ?"^

The gravamen of this invective consists, as you will perceive, in the implied claim that the product of labor, which belongs of right to the laborer, is, by some adroit but essentially dishonest process, diverted from his pocket, and

1 '^The Labor Leader/' Boston, April 9, 1892.

goes— the vast proportion of it— not into tlie laborer's wage but into the employer's profit. And this is, indeed, the claim of a whole school of social economists, of whom the late Karl Marx was the leader, and whose theories have now come to be widely accepted by working men in all parts of the civilized world. The official language of what I believe was, not long ago, the largest labor organization in this or any other country, as published under the title ^^ Polity of the Labor Movement,"^ is: (1) ^^That labor creates all wealth. (2) That all wealth belongs to those who create it. ' ' From this it manifestly follows ^^that all wealth rightfully belongs to the laborer." It is not surprising that, deceived by such sophistries as these, the working man regards his employer with distrust, and considers the present social order but little better than legalized robbery. But the most melancholy feature in the whole situation is that such sophistries have been caught up by many earnest people who are not working men, but who have been moved, by what they believe to be the wrongs of working men, to espouse their cause. For, thou^gh it ought not to be necessary, it may be opportune, to say that all such teaching is as false as it is vicious, and to point out why it is so. Nothing could be more essentially grotesque than to say that labor, in the sense in which I have already defined it here, creates all wealth, or that it creates any considerable part of it. That which creates incomparably the largest part of wealth is not muscular force, or physical strength, or bodily energy.

These might toil a thousand years, if life were stretched so long, and produce no more, even then, than the fruit of their labor at the end of their first day's or first week's work. For, forever, over against the mere day-laborer who delves, or plants, or forges with his hands, stand the inexorable wants of his daily life which daily devour what he daily produces. And therefore it is only when that which is not labor, but intelligence, foresight, ability, mental cleverness, the genius of invention, the genius of organization,— call it what you will, the name is of infinitesimal consequence,— comes in and takes this labor, and touches it with its magic wand, and bends it to its clever will, and coordinates it by its masterly intuitions, that there come the vast results, in all the countless productive meclianisms and motors of the modern industrial world, that have made that world the thing that it is to-day. Mr. Mallock's image of the bronze statue is, if only a little changed, the perfect picture of the whole matter. Here before us are two colossal figures which have been fused, each, in fierce fires, and wrought of costly metals, and fashioned at last into the image of a man. The workmen who gathered the fuel and kindled the fires and mined the metal have fashioned one of them, unaided and alone, as best they could. And another set of workmen have mined and fired and fashioned their image too, but with this single difference : that, beside them as they wrought, guiding, suggesting, correcting, informing them as they toiled, was Praxiteles, or Michelangelo, or Canova, or Crawford, or St. Gaudens; and, as a consequence, when the two statues stand completed, one is worth its weight in brass, and not one penny more, and the other is worth well-nigh its weight in gold. And yet by him who has given to it all this priceless worth no ore was mined, nor fire built, nor metal forged— no, not an ounce, from first to last!

But while thus we dismiss one fallacy of the modern labor movement with no more contempt than it deserves, the graver aspects of the situation do not disappear. A recent writer on the wage question ^ has shown with great cleverness how large a proportion of the earnings of modern capital goes directly into the pocket of the working man; and, by way of heightening the force of his argument, has presented a series of contrasts which, if no more, are dramatic. In the fourteenth century, for instance, as Eden in his ^' State of the Poor" records, an inventory of the household furniture of a peasant, six years before the death of Edward I, gave this return : ^

A maize cup 6

A bed 1 6

A tripod 3

A brass pot 1

A brass cup 6

An andiron 3^

A brass dish 6

A gridiron 5

A rug or coverlet 8

5 7-1

^G. Guntor, "Wealth and Progress." 2 Eden's "State of the Poor," Vol/ I, p. 22.

In otlier words, the whole equipment of the household of a working man was in Edward I's time, ordinarily, of the value of about one dollar and thirty-seven cents. The man whose home this made earned twelve cents a week; and, lest we should suppose that his money had a much larger purchasing power than its amount implies, Hallam tells us that the diet of such an one was usually pottage, and his garment a rough hide. The history of wages is almost a literature in itself, and it would be quite impossible to follow the progress of the workman's wages in detail from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. One or two facts the enquirer will discover, of a general character, however, and we may wisely hold them in mind. For the three or four centuries that followed the thirteenth century, which we may take as sufficiently illustrating the status of the mediaeval laborer, the standard of wages changed surprisingly little. It rose slightly sometimes, but, again, it fell ; and though there was a slight advance as wealth grew and the demands of a higher civilization increased, it has been reserved for our own generation to witness the most remarkable growth in the gains of the wage-earner to be found in all his history. In a paper read before Section F at a recent meeting of the British Association,^ ^^Mr. A. L. Bowley compared the rates of increase of wages in the United States and in Great Britain between 1860 and 1891. The conclusion at which he arrived was as follows: ^In both countries real wages rose some 20 per cent, between 1860 and the maximum period of 1871-74 ; money wages rose 50 per cent, in the United States and between 30 and 40 per cent, in the United Kingdom in the same period. The rise in real wages was checked in 1879-80 in the United States, but continued with little interruption in England; money wages fell to a minimum in 1879-80 in both countries. After 1880, money wages rose continuously (with a check in 1886) till 1891, and real wages rose more rapidly in both countries. . . • In both countries money wages were at much the same level in 1873 and 1891, this level being relatively higher in the United States than in Great Britain. In both countries real wages were higher in 1891 than in 1873; and, when purchasing power is thus taken into consideration, the increase in the whole period is found to be greater in Great Britain. The relative height attained cannot be estimated exactly, but the figures lead to the conclusion that between the years 1860 and 1891 real wages increased in the United States about 60 per cent, and more than 70 per cent, in the United Kingdom.' "^

But what, it may be asked, has all this to do with the cry of the working man that capital is getting more than its fair share of the products of industry? Just this: that during the period which I have indicated, a widow having a railway bond for $5000 from which, twenty years ago, she received $350 per annum (and remember that this widow, though this $5000 bond may easily be her all,— the single plank that she has between her and absolute want,— is still one of the hated capitalistic class— a class, let me observe by the way, far more numerous, more wide-spread, and more dependent than we are apt to suppose ; a class standing often for those whom, where want pinches, it pinches worst, for such an one has been educated to have many needs which to the working

1 Quoted in "The Labor Problem/^ Drage, p. 33. 55 man are the merest affectations),— consider, I say, that this widow who, twenty years ago, received $350 per annum from her little capital, is lucky now if she gets $250 from it, and oftener still gets only $200 per annum.

In other words, and that is the point toward which I am moving, the last quarter of a century—to speak in general terms— has brought to the working man an increase in his earnings of from 60 to 70 per cent., while the same period has cost the capitalist the loss of from 20 to 30 per cent, upon his.

^^Ah, yes,'' replies the working man, *^all this may be true enough; but it does not, after all, alter in any considerable degree the essential equities of the case. Capital as such earns less than heretofore, but why? Simply because there is so much of it. In one sense it is like anything else, a commodity, and commodities are cheap because they are plenty. The borrower no longer needs to pay the capitalist 7 per cent, for his money, for the simple reason that there is so much capital that the possessors are glad to loan it on good security for 4, or even 3 J per cent. But who created the capital ? How could it have come into existence without the working man, and why is it that, having so largely created it, he so slightly benefits from its increase?"

The question recalls a spectacle which one may see in Burma, in the ship-yards at Rangoon. There, on any morning all round the year, the traveller may observe a process whose interest is even greater in its suggestiveness than in its unwontedness. As you enter the ship-yard, your eye is caught by three or four huge and unwieldy figures which, to your amazement, are, as you discover, engaged in loading, unloading, or stacking timbers. The figures are those of elephants that, with a painstaking, a method, a precision, and a patience that seem almost more than human, are seizing huge logs of oak, or mahogany, or teak wood with their trunks, balancing them carefully as they lift them from the ship 's deck that lies beside the wharf, carrying them through the winding pathways toward their destination, and when that destination is reached, lifting them, each one, to its place upon the great stack in the ship-yard, and as it rests there, gently pushing each timber with knee or trunk until it rests in its precise position, as nicely and exactly aligned as though the task had been performed with rule and square and guided by a human hand. ' ' Wonderful creature ! ' ' you exclaim. ^^Wliat a rare order of intelligence is here, and how sure and unerring the faculties that can accomplish such a work in such a way!" But, as you look a little closer, you note that, seated upon the neck of the huge animal is a slight figure, often seemingly a mere lad, with a slender wand in his hand, which, however, he rarely raises, and with which you never see him strike a blow. You watch him, however, still more closely, and you note the intermittent pressure of his heel upon the neck of the animal that he rides,— and that is all! But, indeed, just there is the secret of the whole business. The brute obeys the man. The clever intelligence and gentle touch of the Burmese rider's heel guides, directs, restrains, constrains, energizes, the enormous living bulk beneath him, and converts it from a destroying monster into a faithful and untiring servant.

The parable in these modern days is of universal application. In a thousand ways, modern genius contrives, constructs, organizes, and correlates mechanisms and forces which someliow pass into the common possession of the great mass of the people; often in such ways that they come to disassociate them wholly from their creators, and to think that the mill, the engine, the machine, and the man who fires and follows it are the creators of onr modern civilization. They are among the creators of that civilization, but, from first to last, they are dependent for its effective fruitage upon some other wholly outside of either.

It is undoubtedly true that while there are still large numbers of working men who persist in denying this, and who therefore persist in urging the unwarrantable claims to which I have referred, there are others who do nothing of the sort. They are intelligent enough to see that industry could win no victories without the captains of industry; that machinery could maintain no place of consistent achievement in the world, if there were not men who not merely contrived it but improved upon it, and whose marvellous powers of contrivance marched side by side— nay, often far in advance—of the marvellous tasks to which industrial forces have been summoned in our day. Such working men recognize and concede to tlie inventor, the capitalist, the clever executive, the master-bnilder or master-machinist, each his place of rightfully greater honor and emolument for greater service rendered. Bnt while he does so, the working man insists that, notwithstanding all that can be urged as to the rise of wages in recent years, especially in our own country, the conditions under which the working man labors make his position increasingly unsatisfactory and precarious.

And in a very real sense he is right. I have already, as you will remember, and in another connection, referred to one reason for this; for insisting upon the hardship of which, a few years ago, on some public occasion, in a neighboring city, I was very roundly abused, but as to the essential cruelty of which I shall still take leave to say there can be no smallest doubt. I refer to the results to the working man of industrial specialization. "We are moving along that line, in these times, with increasing ardor and unanimity in almost every connection. Fifty years ago an ordinary household had its family physician, who, whether one's ailment was of the heart or of the liver, was summoned with equal confidence and usually, on the whole, with equal advantage. But to-day I must wait upon one learned gentleman for an affection of my throat, and another for that of my heart, and another for disorders of my nerves. It would not be becoming a layman to speculate upon the effect of this narrowing of his range upon the medical man himself, but there can be no slightest question as to its effect, in the industrial world, upon the working man. I shall not speak now of its intolerable irksomeness, dreariness, its benumbing and stupefying influence, for I have already elsewhere referred to these; but it is most important that we should recognize those disabling effects which must inevitably have so considerable and disastrous an influence upon the Y7orking man's efficiency, his productiveness or economic utility as a wage-earner in any other than one particular mill, at one particular task, with one particular tool. In any other mill, at any other task, with any other tool, this man is worthless,— smd this is what the great march of industrial progress, over which we are all wont to rejoice, has done for him!

Do you wonder now at one result of such a situation, with which of late we have been much

Gl concerned, and wliicli, if you and I and Christian people generally are to serve the cause of the working man, it behooves us to understand,— I mean the trades-union? We are as yet too near it to realize the meaning of that tremendous change which has come to the working man during the century that has just ended. ^^For ages the rule had been that the working man himself owned his own machine as well as the raw materials of his own industry. '^ But even before the dawn of that great industrial revolution produced by modern machinery hitched to steam, electricity, and the like, there had begun that departure from this earlier and simpler state of things which introduced the merchant who dealt in raw material and the mill-owner who manufactured it. And out of this beginning of change it came to pass that the working man was separated farther and farther from his life of earlier independence, and reduced more and more, himself, to the condition of a mere machine. Until you and I have stood where he has stood, until those who are not working men and women can realize the grim despair that stares them in the face as they are held in the grip of some huge mechanism of capital and machinery, until we can understand what it is to work, or to stand idle, not as the impulse to labor or the needs of our families demand, but as the whim of the employer or the condition of the market, bare to-day and glutted to-morrow, shall decide, we are in no condition adequately to appreciate that stern necessity out of which the trades-union has grown.

I presume I should express not inaccurately the mental attitude of great multitudes of people in regard to these organizations if I said that they regard them with disfavor, and watch their growth and influence with dread. A greater blunder in estimating them could not well be made! They have, indeed, more than once earned the distrust of the community at large, and have deserved it. Here and there they have lent themselves to acts of violence for which there was no sufficient justification, and, worst of all, have broken explicit pledges with swift indifference and with scanty scruple. But when we judge them in connection with such acts, we must remember that they, too, have known what it was to have agreements disregarded or pledges cleverly evaded; and in all our criticisms of tliem we shall do well to recognize the fact that, in the final analysis of the principles of their organization, they stand for all that society itself as an organized entity stands for,— the free consent of the governed. ^^As a matter of fact," as Mr. Geoffrey Drage has admirably pnt it, ^^the value of the trades-nnion movement is to be estimated not so much by the extent to which it has raised the rate of wages or reduced the hours of labor, as by its educational influence as a preparation for the responsibilities of self-government. The greatness of the friendly-society movement must be measured not more by the material aid which it has afforded to the working man in time of need, than by the stimulus which it has given to the moral qualities of thrift and independence. The worth of the cooperative movement does not depend only on its ability to increase the capacity of the workmen's earnings, but also on the insight which it has afforded them into the complexities of business life. The education which these voluntary associations have provided for the working man has given a new purpose to his life. . . . ' Still more than all this,' Dr. Baernreither, a

C4 foreign observer, states, ^the workman who has established and who directs these associations has ceased to be an inactive spectator of the state and of society. His life has received a new purpose and character. . . . His understanding and his insight in economic matters are increasing; he is learning by his experience to recognize the difficulties which oppose themselves to the carrying out of social institutions ; he is becoming more moderate in his claims, calmer in judgment, and more contented with success. On the other hand, he is losing nothing of that pertinacity in the pursuit of his ends which has always been his distinctive characteristic. Step by step, by his meetings, journals, and congresses, he is attracting the general interest of the public, acquiring an influence in local (and even national) bodies, and becoming a more active, independent, and powerful factor in state life. But the main thing is that the world of thought is filled with things clearly practicable and attainable, and that no Utopias find place in it.' "1