CHAP. The Indi vidual Workers and Cap and therefore he is more restless when tied up by a strike and resorts to more ruthless measures to break the strike. The strikers realize this and become heedless of public interests in their endeavor to foil the strike-breakers. Of necessity, then, the parties to the labor conflict tend to become more reckless and lawless in their tactics. Along with the growing prominence of the capital equipment, goes a tendency toward larger production units. Every census shows that the average plant in almost every branch contains more capital and employs more men. Automatically this diminishes the importance of the individual workman to the employer and augments the importance of the employer to the workman. In a ten-man shop, the employer loses one tenth of his force and of his profit, if one disgruntled workman quits him. In a hundred-man shop, he loses only one per cent., so that, as units grow, the protesting workman is less and less considered. On the other hand, the bigger the units, the fewer, so that it becomes less likely that the workman, without changing his residence, can find another factory in his line to employ him. This automatic belittlement of the individual wage-earner gives rise to an irresistible movement toward the organization of labor. Those who work in factories not theirs, with machines not theirs, on materials not theirs, under conditions they have no voice in determining, and turn out a product that belongs to some one else, discover that they have an interest in common. Only when combined can they compel the employer to pay heed to their grievances and claims. The union of the employees of a single concern may equalize them with their employer as respects power to inflict loss, but it does not equalize the two parties in respect to holding-out power. Hence, the workers unite themselves into wide unions in order to insure themselves financial support during a strike. The hope cherished a generation ago that by cooperative proitalists Be- duction the workers would in time come to own the equipment come Dis tinct Classes with which they work has quite withered. There is no prospect whatever that the ownership of industrial capital will be disseminated through the working class. On the contrary, there is a clear tendency toward the concentration of wealth. The parties interested in machine industry more and more segregate into two groups very unequal in size-the capitalists, who con tribute no personal exertion to industry, and the much larger body of workers, who may own their homes but hold merely a trifling amount of share capital. СНАР. XVIII Position of italist Since the capital factor in industry constantly expands, the Precarious share of the total product going to ownership grows. The time the Capmay come when half or two thirds of the social income will be Class claimed in the name of property. Moreover, less and less is this sharing automatic. It is affected by the temper of the workers, their degree of organization, their feeling about their union, the state of the law, the spirit of the courts, the attitude of public officials, the tone of the press, the pulpit, and the platform, and the tenor of the instruction of the young. Hence, the more active portion of the capitalist class endeavors to spread over society an invisible net of control. The class has lost most of its political defenses hereditary upper houses, restricted suffrage, indirect election, party control, the unlimited use of money in politics but it is not without secret compensating gains. The agitation for the total overthrow of private capitalism and the substitution of an untried public capitalism naturally alarms capitalists and stimulates their endeavors to control opinion. As quietly they draw together and develop weapons and tactics to repel attack, their leaders and agents become more formidable, not only to attackers, but to inoffensive individuals and interests which stand in their way. So the capitalist class not only defends itself, but aggresses at a time when aggression is madness. This is why the position of social-minded persons identified with neither class, who wish to investigate and consider until it becomes clear what economic system will be best for society as a whole, becomes constantly more difficult. Industrialism, child of the power-driven machine, moulds society with appalling power and causes its members more and more to cluster at opposite poles of the social spindle. The situation is grave and no one can tell how much graver it will become before an adjustment will be found which will pull this thorn from humanity's flesh. СНАР. The Established Tries to Destroy Its Competitor The Real Motive of Laws UP CHAPTER XIX INSTITUTIONAL COMPETITION PON the appearance of a serious competitor the first policy of any organization or institution is to destroy the competitor. The "trust" regularly cuts the price of its products to a point below cost of production in localities in which an "independent" seeks to sell. A shipping combine will have fighting ships" which are called into play when a new steamship line enters their trade. As soon as the competitor announces a sailing date the combine advertises a steamer to sail on or near this date and offers a freight rate below the actual cost of carriage. In this way the competitor is prevented from securing a cargo. The highest social class hobbles by minute sumptuary regulaSumptuary tions the classes which aspire to come up abreast of it. In feudal Japan, for example, a man might not use his money as he would. The farmer, craftsman, or shopkeeper could not build a house as he liked or procure himself such articles of luxury as his taste might incline him to buy. The richest commoner might not order certain things to be made for him, might not imitate the habits or assume the privileges of his betters. Although urged on economic grounds, sumptuary restrictions are doubtless intended to protect the monopoly of prestige by the higher social orders. Slavery Attacked ace to the Free-labor System The spread of anti-slavery feeling among the producing people as a Men- of the North during the generation before the American Civil War was due to their perception that slavery is a menace to the .free-labor system. In accounting for the early abolition of slavery in Massachusetts John Adams remarks: Argument might have had some weight . . . but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring white people who would not longer suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury." Monogamic marriage, tolerant enough toward monastic and Shaker celibacy, which put yet greater strain on human nature, CHAP. Monogamy suppresses as a dangerous rival every laxer form of sex relation -"free love," the "complex marriage" of the Oneida community, Mormon polygamy, etc. Nor has it acknowledged any right of groups of men and women to order their relations according Easier to their own convictions and judgment. Strikes at Every Form of Bour geois PoParties litical Will Not Against a Class Party After representative government with its inevitable strife of tion parties has been established, the parties controlled by the propertied strive to crush the rising party which asserts working-class interests. To avoid meeting it in the arena of public discussion they hypocritically denounce it as anti-patriotic and subversive, a movement with criminal aims led by scoundrels and assassins, which is not entitled to the belligerent rights of a legitimate political party but deserves only to be stamped out by suppressing its propaganda and hounding its leaders. Thus was outlawed the socialist party in Germany during Bismarck's ascendancy. On the other hand, labor organizations oppose all proposals looking to state health-insurance, because many of them have developed insurance schemes of their own and they fear lest their power to hold their members will be weakened under compulsory state insurance. The whole history of religious persecution is the history of an organization trying to establish itself as a monopoly by ruthless destruction of the spokesmen of competing doctrines and movements. In Diocletian's time Roman religious beliefs were weak while the Christian beliefs were vigorous and spreading. In desperation the old system made a ferocious attempt to exterminate all Christians. A thousand years later the church stamped certain sects out of existence and strangled heresies in the cradle. Says Coulton: What Darwin took at first for a smooth unbroken grass land proved, on nearer examination, to be thick-set with tiny self-sown firs, which the cattle regularly cropped as they grew. Similarly, that which some love to picture as the harmonious growth of one great body through the Middle Ages is really a history of many divergent opinions violently strangled at birth; while hundreds more, too vigorous to be killed by the adverse surroundings, and elastic enough to take something of the outward colour of their environment, grew in spite of the hierarchy into organisms which, in their turns, profoundly modified the whole constitution of the Church. If the mediaeval theory and practice of persecution had still been in A Threatligion Al ened Re ways Per secutes Its Rival if It Can CHAP. Why the Church Reversed Her Attitude Toward the Franciscans The Puritan full force in the eighteenth century in England, nearly all the best Wesleyans would have chosen to remain within the Church rather than to shed blood in revolt; and the rest would have been killed off like wild beasts. The present unity of Romanism so far as it exists, is due less to tact than to naked force.1 Instructive is the change of front of the church with respect to the Franciscans. The religion of poverty and love propagated by Francis of Assisi took possession of the whole church. The most beautiful chants of the Middle Ages and the greatest sermons originated among the Franciscans and the Dominicans closely related to them. New life was given to art and scholarship. All the great scholars of the thirteenth century-Thomas of Aquinas, Bonaventura, Albertus — were of the begging orders. But the church which had granted authority to St. Francis and established the Little Brothers of the Poor as a monastic order turned against it when the ideal of poverty spread so far as to menace her power and riches. She declared what the Franciscans were preaching about the poverty of Christ and the Apostles to be heresy and demanded submission. All the "spiritual" Franciscans were condemned as heretics. Cardinals who still defended the ideal of poverty, a few years before so popular, fell into disgrace. There was a bitter struggle, but at the end of the fourteenth century the worldly church had crushed the propaganda of the poverty ideal. As a result the monastic orders lost in inspiration and influence and by the time of the Renaissance monasticism had fallen into "laziness and worthlessness." 2 In 1660 the English Episcopal church became established and entered upon the same policy of persecution of which formerly it had been the victim. In 1662 the Act of Uniformity was passed enforcing the use of the amended Book of Common Prayer. In 1664 the Conventicle Act made illegal all meetings for worship except according to the church. In 1665 an act was passed forbidding Nonconformist ministers to approach a borough. Not until 1689 was the endeavor to crush the sects abandoned. The Puritan theocracy in New England in its persecution of Theocracy Antinomians, Baptists, and Quakers showed a like ruthless de Sought to Crush Every Bival 1" From St. Francis to Dante, p. 40. 2 See Harnack, "The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal." |