Distribution

Chapter I

WHEN WE come to consider business as an affair of the centuries and as a process of evolution, we change our views concerning the individual power of our men of affairs. Instead of a great man creating a great business, we will find that the business created our great men. Men who are engaged in the commercial or industrial world do not create that world, and are not the arbiters of its destinies. The world moves forward resistless in the path of business as it moves resistless in its orbit around the sun. However high a great business may elevate a man, he has no power to assist or prevent his own success.

It is true that there is a natural process of selection in the commercial world, as well as there has been in the physical world, and many men court business and pursue commerce who fail. But this only illustrates a great truth, that instead of a man selecting a business and succeeding therein, the contrary is true, and business selects the man who will fill its requirements, and rewards him for such service.

The vast sums however, which accumulate to make great individual fortunes, must not be regarded as the reward Nature bestows upon the men whom she selects to carry on a successful business. As the whole world moves resistlessly forward, men are moved with it, and they share in all its faults, as well as in the successes.

For this reason, among many other reasons, the single individual is utterly powerless to change the tide of great events, except as he may discover new truth.

It is a very common opinion among men that if given all the money they desire, they could change the world to make it fit a pattern and theory of their own selection, but, because our world is governed by natural laws, which provide for centuries in advance of us, we may influence events, only as we discover natural laws, and as we discover the purpose of our world. We cannot interfere as individuals with the tide of events; a man cannot, for example, accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars in business and then select some avenue of spending this money, and change the world according to his idea. A revolution seeking to provide an entirely new form for society fails as absolutely. No king in history could conquer the world, however great his treasure and his army. So, also, no money king may mold society to a new form.

But although we are thus hemmed in by natural laws fixing boundaries to our affairs, we must not conclude that Nature's Law is a law of fatalism in the affairs of man. We must not conclude that because evolution during millions of years has developed our marvelous world of continents and oceans, rivers and lakes, that evolution does not require something of us who occupy the summit of development.

When man appeared on the earth, a change occurred, and he has been given power to interfere with the orderly process of nature. Man cannot, therefore, fall back upon the fatalist doctrine, and say he need do nothing to assist in the social world, because all things will come out all right in the end.

Man is an exception to the laws of physical evolution, and is a law unto himself; he has been given power to hold back the- progress of the world, although God will destroy him for his ignorance and folly.

As our affairs in society become more and more highly developed, they become more and more important as factors of evolution. We may well say that until a few generations ago the social world moved forward regardless of man, but as it moves to higher and higher levels, man becomes more and more an object of the world's regards. Man is given more power to interfere as the world advances, which power, when properly considered, is the power to assist nature in the process of evolution.

Nature has made a very rapid progress in natural selection within a very short time, and while she lifts some savages out of bondage, and brings them in communion with her God, there remain millions of savages waiting to be redeemed-.

Man, according to Herbert Spencer, was never known to do right until he had exhausted all possible ways of doing wrong.

To understand how men will grasp the reins of power and become kings and princes of finance among a slavish people, we need only to discover the same type in a primitive community, and by changing the surroundings and the opportunity to tyranize we get our modern instance of the lucky millionaire. As a type of this character, the writer knew a man who was pictured to be an exceptional gentleman of his class, and it was a small class, but he occupied the unique prominence of having shot and killed three men. This man was ordinarily quiet, hospitable and well behaved, and did not drink nor swear nor chew tobacco, but he was a gambler and sold whisky for a living. He had for a wife a quiet and modest woman, who was a good mother to several well-behaved children, and he held another young and pretty woman as his property, openly and in defiance to law and order. He kept, also, a pack of hounds that annoyed all the people thereabouts, but as he had killed three men, his hounds were treated with marked respect and consideration. His notion of feminine justice was displayed when in buying a new dress for his mistress, he bought an identical dress for his wife, so the mountain public could not charge him with invidious favoritism. He killed his men because they came into his lordly way and perchance attempted to win a smile of approval from his female property. In the last killing he carried a Winchester with shells loaded with buckshot; his first duty in the morning was to ti*y out the gun on a three-inch oak plank at fifty yards, the plank looked like it had been riddled with railroad spikes. He sought his man immediately who Vv^as unconscious of the death facing him at the time he fell.

This aristocratic citizen of lordly temper was too cowardly to risk a return shot from a wounded antagonist, and made sure that he ran no risk if he had the first shot. He had a trial as a natural consequence of his living in a free country, and he was acquitted on a plea of self-defense. He afterwards sent word to another mountaineer, who had opened a whisky shop within his territory, that unless he moved he would kill him. The other man not desiring to be killed, or to move, nor to wait and find out if he meant what he said, took the first favorable opportunity to kill this particular individual.

If you would understand the character of many of our successful men you may put this type of mountaineer under modern surroundings, where his lack of soul, and his savage egotism can find a full field for its malevolent activity. Instead of the men gambling for the money of miners and lumbermen with a few barflies for 'touts,' give him the officers of banks and corporations and boards of directors and the undistributed wealth flowing ocean deep with its hundreds of millions of dollars seeking to gamble or invest in his enterprises. Instead of a few men who are denied all health and pleasure in life, bringing a few paltry dollars, and begging for drink, give him the millions of poor to exploit who must beg for work to keep themselves and their families from want.

Instead of the primitive idea of clothing the mistress no better than the wife, he has created our great White Ways blazing in light, shining in gold, brilliant in jewels where a throng of kept women ride swiftly in sumptuous luxury, splashing the mud from the street upon the patient wives and children who shrink back in confusion and shame. Capital is a coward we are told. No, it is not true, it is the capitalist who is a coward, who fears for the men he has killed, and for the sins that will find him out, and who carries a Winchester loaded with buckshot, too cowardly to risk a return shot from his antagonist. He, also, has his pack of hounds who feed from his hand, who howl his praises to the world, and who reward him with a dog's fidelity and gratitude.

When you are told that the great salaries and emoluments of men of affairs are the natural rewards of conspicuous and exceptional talent, think before you leap in your judgment, think of the latest favorites of wealth, of the crown of jewels in the flashing light, and remember the rewards of successful prostitution among the predatory rich.

A chancellor of a university has gained some notoriety by his overflowing praises of the virtues and talents of men of wealth and by diatribes against the drunkenness and vices of the men who work. He reminds one very forcibly of the Oriental low caste woman who has no other hope for her female children but to spend patient years in training them to pander to the degenerate vices of high caste men, so they may honor her by being selected for the high caste Harem.

It is quite true, and to their credit, be it said, the common people can scarcely believe that other people have the impulses, vices and ferocity disclosed by our newspapers. They cannot comprehend a life so selfish and lawless and so lacking in boundaries of order and decency.

But we, as a rule, are hemmed in some safe harbor with a round of daily duties marked out for us; we have never been thrust into the swift currents of the storm world of hungry wealth and wolfish desire, nor been drawn into the vortex of the underworld. We cannot, therefore, understand human nature as it changes when acted upon by unjust and unequal wealth and is thrown back upon primitive and savage passions. We are startled by the killing of a prominent man and read with horror of his ferocious passions of conquest among innocent maidens that led to the tragedy. This "Maiden tribute to Modern Babylon" is a sign of the times and of the reckoning to come. This utter lack of moral responsibility, this absence of all fear, except of being found out, and this foul consolation that money will pay all damage is not the result of mere individual failing, but is the result of a stream of filth engendered by our system of distributing wealth.

Evil grows with what it feeds upon and injustice multiplies itself as it pushes back the safeguards of society. But a short time ago, and we heard of injustice and cruelty as though it was among a foreign people in the underworld of a great city, but daily it creeps closer and closer to our doors. We now hear of it all about us, it numbers among its victims our childhood acquaintances and we come in close relation to it. On every side there is evidence of great wealth and plenty, abundant riches is no longer a distance away, and in its near shadows, we see the hovering forms of poverty and despair our close neighbor. Unless a change for the better comes quickly we know that we too must cross the trail and face poverty and misery for our family. We feel the savage blood rushing to our temples and the primitive man under the skin stands ready to strike when danger comes too near.

We are now at a time of great prosperity, which we call great because the mass of the people find ready employment at living wages, we forget how the standard of living changes. In these times of prosperity the greater part of the people^ can do no more than merely live from hand to mouth, and each day they are further removed from helping themselves and become more and more dependent upon distribution. We are told that wages were never before so abundant, and yet never before has discontent been so acute, and if these times are the form and pattern of the future, then alas for the future. That civilization now faces a change is everywhere in evidence and in this change other changes must come and make conditions very much better, or very much worse. Ever since the modern age of industry began about 1830, there has been a succession of ahernate periods of prosperity and hard times and these periods were marked by the spreading of our people over new lands until they now cover the country. During each of these prosperous seasons we made a spurt to realize the true level of wages, but we could only advance by increasing our debts, and we were soon brought to a sudden stop by coming to the end of the chain of debt. These debts consist mainly of the increasing prices of land, and each advance only builds the final difficulty higher, and makes the burden heavier from day to day.

It is difficult to - imagine why a sensible man need fear a radical change in our system of wealth, why he need be in fear of wealth getting into worse hands than those now controlling it. The very names of the men to whom we are indebted for the blessings of civilization, the inventors and students and builders of society are swallowed up in the greed of bankers and financiers, and the public rarely hears of them. The owners and managers and directors of our great enterprises assume a knowledge and importance that make them ridiculous and make their control of business dangerous.

These men are the creatures and spawn of an unjust and iniquitous system of distribution who have no interest in progress, no appreciation of civiHzation, no sympathy with labor, no admiration for science and mechanics and no use for religion. A change of control from such freebooting owners to men of technical knowledge and of mechanical skill is a consummation devoutly to be wished. However complicated and confused we find our problems we must remember that the distribution of wealth is behind them and covers them all and reaches to the far corners of every undertaking.

Any derangement of distribution must, therefore, affect every inhabitant of a country and the disorder must increase and grow more complicated as the derangement continues, and when we discover the cause we may safely apply the remedy, and may feel sure the remedy itself must be harmless.

In these strenuous days it is a favorite pastime of some writers to tell us stories of the Kings and Queens of other times and how they suffered for the want of conveniences, they could not even- imagine. By such comparisons we are reminded of the inestimable blessings we now enjoy, of telephones, electricity, means of travel, of parks, museums and libraries, and we are told that the every day comforts of the common people would be luxuries undreamed by Kings and Queens not longer ago than Elizabeth of England.

Rabelais tells a story of a roast meat cookery in Paris where the cook found a porter eating his dry bread above the steam and vapor of his cooking. The cook seized the porter and demanded pay for thus furnishing the porter smoke from his meat, saying he was not obliged to nourish a vagrant porter he had never 5een before. The porter refused to pay, saying the smoke would otherwise have evaporated, and the cook lost nothing. The dispute waxed hot and was referred to Seyny John, the fool of Paris, who after hearing the evidence, decided the cook was in the right and should ht paid for furnishing savory odors as an agreeable sauce to the porter's bread. The Paris fool thereupon decreed the cook was to have judgment and the porter was required to jingle small coin in the ear of the cook so he might be paid for the smoke of his meat with the sound of the money.

The writers who enlarge upon our abounding and; marvelous prosperity speak the truth, and no extravagance of tongue or pen, no luxury of imagination can do justice to the wonderful and God-like stride of modem industry.

The figures of our stupendous undertakings and the grand totals of our achievements pass beyond the power of our understanding, and we simple individuals, are amazed and stand filled with pride at our wonderful prosperity.

Yet with it all, we feel a sense of want as though most of us were outside and were standing upon thegrating above the cook where we may only see the feast, smell the smoke and hear the music of the coin. We hear and read of hundreds of millions of dollars spent for railway terminals and equipment; of the most glorious and stupendous buildings in the world. We learn that our architects and builders now surpass the wonder work of Ancient Greece, and we build in a trice when formerly generations were required. We read of copper and its wonderful uses in the extensions of electricity, of the advances made in great office buildings, and of modern hotels which no palace on earth may rival. When we begin to analyze our great prosperity we find it consisting of great things, and the day of small undertakings seems to be passing away.

We do not hear of the mass of workers acquiring millions of new homes, and of getting independent incomes from our marvelous systems of railways, steamships, telephones and telegraphs. But on the contrary.

alas, the census tell us more homes are lost than new ones are gained, and the mass of the people are contracting stupendous and increasing debts, which they are never to repay. A prominent public man of England in a recent visit to the United States during a time of our greatest activity, is reported to have said, "The one ^reat predominating characteristic of your people, which most deeply impressed him was sadness." So soon and so true we have now become a sad people. We were taught from the earliest times that industry and thrift were the sure foundation of riches, and that ability and honesty alone was the sure bedrock of success. We look about us at the marvelous advances of men, at their undertakings, at the concentration in ownership, at riches piling mountain high. We see this concentration of wealth making kings and princes and favorites of finance, without industry or ability, and without honesty or thrift, and we become a sad people. We ask why are all our great undertakings steeped in debt? Why are all our railways bonded with more debt than they cost to build? And piled high upon this debt, are other debts for equipment and terminals until no peg is left on which to hang an obligation.

When we look abroad to consider the benefits the mass of the people enjoy, we find they are driven by the speed of steam and electricity, and are given scarcely time to eat and sleep in a mad haste to build with magic power tremendous totals of fixed property that a few men will own and control. We look again and we see the sums which have been paid to labor to do all this work, were secured by debts upon this property they create, and in this way labor is required to furnish the credit, and supply the value which other men manipulate, who secure the ownership of the entire estate of man.

No doubt, we have become a sad people because the lessons we were taught in childhood; lessons of working, of saving and of honesty, have become as fairy tales intended to amuse children, and as stories of goblins to scare them and hush them to sleep. Yes, we area sad people, because integrity has become a superstition, honor an empty dream, and liberty has become a child's toy, in our mad scramble to secure unearned wealth. It has not been long since we were taught that debt was an evil thing, we were taught to avoid debt as we would avoid the plague, and a man deeply in debt was accursed. But now Aladdin's Lamp is a playthings compared with the magic power of debt, for debt now creates our kings and princes of finance, and gives them power and prestige without a parallel in the history of the world. We were taught to avoid debt because we were told that we were bound by our most sacred honorto pay debts with our own hands, we contracted for our own benefit. Today the men of eminence, who occupy the high places of honor, the men who are regarded as patterns of integrity are men who have grown great by contracting debts for their own benefit, which other men will be required to pay. The ability to saddle debts upon the back of labor through the ownership of land, and by the machinery of corporations has caused billions of wealth to concentrate to the men who now control all our means of transportation and finance.

It is by this method that we corrupt the very source of integrity and pollute all the springs of honor. No kings or princes at any time in the history of the world could distribute favors with so lavish a hand as the modern king of finance. Before our day the revenues of the king were derived directly from the earnings of the people and he could not thus surround the people with debts and have such marvelous machinery at his command so that more than one-half the population could be made the mere creatures of his will. We are indeed a sad people, as we look upon this spectacle of irresponsible power, as we see it make and unmake Presidents, Congress, Governor and Legislature, and as we realize that it holds all the sources of preferment in the hollow of its hand, and as we see it lay the self-respecting in the dust and lift the beggar to a throne.

Do these powerful princes of finance and their favorites feel any gratitude to the mass of honest, diligent laborers who have thus dowered them with kingdoms and principalities? Far from it, for they stride the world with the most impudent and collossal assurance, claiming that without their superior wisdom and without this grant of power, the common people would die of starvation.

They not only keep their hands elbow deep in the pockets of labor in their own behalf, but they scatter other millions to equally shameless favorites, and add charity and benevolence in enormous endowments seeking to dominate the spiritual realm and thus again unite the church and state in a new king:. What defense do our public men and servants, the guardians of the interests of the people, make to this unparalleled slavery of debt.

We are told, as though it was less criminal, that these debts are not to be now paid by the living, but will be paid by the future generations. So cunningly is this hold upon the property of the country secured, that these debts are never to be paid, but are to become a new form of slavery from which there is to be no way open to redeem mankind. Could sophistry go to greater lengths than to claim that the railroads we are now building, the mammoth hotels and factories, the coal, iron and copper we are mining and goods we produce, can be paid for at some future time?

If these men we call financiers have discovered a plan whereby the unborn are to pay for our present works, they should carry this scheme to its logical conclusion and earn the everlasting gratitude of the human race. If the future population may be made to pay for the greater part of our present belongings and enjoy paying for them, as we are told they will, why deny them the pleasure of paying for everything, and why not put the time for payment so far in the future that we, nor our immediate descendants, need work or worry about it ? There seems no absurdity too great to bring to the support of our monstrous inequality of wealth and no sense of shame in advancing and supporting any outrageous doctrine.

A Personal God tke Religion of Economics.

Economics.

CHAPTER 11.

THE entire cause of the failure of our people to enjoy the blessings of civilization may be written large in one word ''Distribution." The wonderful advance of science has now made production almost automatic and fast approaching perfection. In times past the simplicity of production made it connect directly and intimately with distribution, and the one could not proceed far without the close fellowship of the other. We have made the most marvelous advances in our capacity to produce aided by automatic machinery, but we have taken no thought about distribution, seeming to believe that when production was once accomplished, the work was done, and distribution would take care of itself.

Modern production differs in many ways from that we have just passed. Science has changed our methods from the simple and direct to the compound and to the roundabout.

Instead of each worker providing in a large degree for his own wants he now works for wages and is under the dominion of the market.

Instead of a vast majority of men being engaged in producing simple things like shoes, and hats and food and clothing, which they may trade directly, they have been entirely separated from any direct connection with supplies. The greater number of laborers are now engaged at entirely new occupations; the railways alone employ one million men and have a population of about five million people depending upon them, and there are four million teachers and professional workers.

Thus you may see a great change has suddenly taken place in the civilized world, entirely unlike any other period in the history of the race.

You hear it repeatedly that laborers should receive in wages all the wealth they produce, and in times past when most men brought some concrete product to market and exchanged it for other products there was some direct connection between production and distribution.

But now the most valuable and necessary labor is intangible, it is not engaged in creating commodities having a market price. Such labor must be valued and the value with which it is paid must be included in the market price of goods in order to be distributed.

A man now works, not to feed himself with the products of his own hands, but because he must obtain a supply of value with which to buy what he wants. This struggle to obtain value on account of its purchasing power is necessary in order to live, is exciting in order to become rich, and furnishes us the motive, or cause, for all social activity. This necessity of securing value first before we may satisfy our hunger, our pride or our ambition, makes the distribution of value the most important science in the world. Thus we find we are possessed with the most pressing desire to get money which, when once secured will relieve us from all fears of poverty and distress, however the required money may have been obtained.

In order to acquire money we depend upon distribution and not upon employer and employed because the employer must also get money with which to pay the employed. Distribution is only possible through our markets, and every conceivable form of property must be valued before it may be offered for sale, and before the property so valued can be sold, the value with which to buy must have been previously distributed in the form of money or credit. The failure of all theories of political economy, of finance and of reform, is owing to the fart that value was held to be of no great importance, ar.d that distribution was held to be a matter of trade and transportation, a matter of barter made easy on account of money.

We cannot now estimate labor in terms of eoods, we car no longer say this man produces so much corn and should get so many bushels as wages, or another produces shoes and should be paid so many pairs. Society is no longer made up of groups of families independent on each other, and who may supply their own wants. Society on the contrary, is rapidly becoming complete, when all manner of property, and all labor and supplies must contribute to the life of the body politic, and must obey the natural laws of progress.

This separation of the individual worker from his means of life, making him helpless in supplying his most simple and pressing wants, has been recognized by reform writers, but has been attributed to other causes than the true one. The Socialists, for example, point to the advance of machinery and to the division of labor, to the factory system and claim that men can no longer depend upon their own hands to supply themselves, but are harnessed to machines and thus become slaves to the owners of factories and machinery. In their argument, the price of the product and the dependence of machinery upon the market has no place and they overlook the more important truth that machinery does not diminish the demand for labor.

The introduction of machinery has enormously increased the demand for labor by developing many new classes of work at wages that keep advancing, and our dependence upon labor grows greater day by day. The land reformers seeing this separation of labor from their means of life, seeing the direct connection between production and distribution has disappeared, attribute the loss of wages and lack of employment to property in land. They claim that man is a land animal and when land is divided into individual ownership, he loses his , right to land and is thus separated from the earth, and becomes the helpless slave of the landlord. They fail to see the dependence of the landlord upon the market, and that he is limited in his demands by the price of goods, they fail to see, also, that it is the price of land and not the annual rent that does the damage to society, because the price of land prevents other prices from rising, and thus prevents so much wealth from being distributed. The m.oney reformers see this dependence of .modern labor and say that neither land nor machinery has anything to do with the case, and it is a problem purely of getting money away from the control of money lenders, because they say if men can always get money for their work and exchange the value of their property for money on demand, then they will buy the land and machinery as they need it. That value has anything to do with money, or that prices control the distribution of money, or that natural law has power to regulate its circulation has never entered into the minds of currency reformers.