Maladjustment of the New Creation of Wealth to Its Distribution—Have Any of the Bible Prophets Spoken on This Question?
By PROF. G. W. RINE.
UNITED STATES INDUSTRIAL COMMISSION
PROFESSOR RINE, of the Pacific Union College, has had occasion to devote much study to the industrial situation. This is the second of the articles he has contributed. Last week he recounted the changed conditions that have been produced by the facilities of this generation for travel and intercommunication. The testimony of the Bible prophets is only briefly introduced this week, but will be more fully presented in later issues. Next week the theme will be the struggle between the economic autocracy and the political and intellectual democracy. Each article is devoted to some particular phase of the subject, and is therefore complete in itself.
EDITOR.
We have seen that the scientific application of machine power has enormously increased the wealth of the civilized world. “The problem of production has been solved,” says Dr. Josiah Strong, “but that of distribution remains to keep the working man sore under a sense of injustice.” Dr. Carroll D. Wright is quoted as saying that “two hours and fifteen minutes daily work by each able-bodied man, if systematically applied, would produce all the food, clothing, and shelter that people need.” The use of modern instruments of production is here assumed.
The secretary of the treasury shows that the total wealth of the United States was, in 1850, $7,000,000,000, while in 1904 it had reached the fabulous sum of $107,000,000,000. Dr. Strong tells us that during the first two years of this century we saved two billion dollars more wealth than had been accumulated in this country from the first settlement down to 1850, a period of nearly 250 years. According to the federal census, the aggregate wealth of our nation was $135,000,000,000 in 1910. Eminent statisticians, of both the United States and Great Britain, declare this estimate to be too low. New York City alone is to-day very materially richer than was the entire country in 1850. Our per capita wealth in 1850 was $307, while in 1910 it was a trifle less than $1,420. During the past sixty years, the nation's wealth increased more than six times as fast as her population.
There were but two millionaires in the United States one hundred years ago—John Jacob Astor, of New York, and Stephen Girard, of Philadelphia. To-day there are more than six thousand of our fellow countrymen who must each use from seven to nine figures to indicate his wealth. The ten richest persons of this country possess outright property worth more than three billion dollars. The richest of the ten has repeatedly been reputed the world's first billionaire. They are all multimillionaires. Several years ago, according to press reports, one of the principal owners of the Singer sewing-machine property went to bed worth many millions, and, owing to an abrupt fluctuation in certain stocks, he woke up the next morning worth $29,000,000 more. A noted publicist estimated that if the twelve apostles had remained working men, and had been condemned to live until, by physical toil, they should have earned, at a daily wage of three dollars each, a total of $20,000,000, their sentence would not end until A.D. 2240.
The English statistician Sir Robert Giffen shows that while the population in Great Britain increases only one and three tenths per cent yearly, wealth increases three per cent. Owing to the marvelous development of industrial chemistry and the almost endless diversity in the use of machine power, Germany has increased her wealth nineteen-fold during the last fifty years. The ratio of increase in France and other civilized countries has been not much less.
THE FLOOD OF GOLD
Notwithstanding the centuries of careful hoarding of the yellow metal, there was less than $250,000,000 of gold in all Europe in the historic year 1492. Down to that time the world had plodded along with the modest production of about $40,000,000 of gold annually. By the year 1800 the yearly production had risen to $12,000,000. Because of the discovery of the famous mines in California and Australia, the world's output in 1850 was $44,450,000. A high tide of production, $161,250,000, was reached in 1856, and not again attained for thirty-eight years. The output of the year 1900 was $254,000,000; while in each of the three years 1910-1912 it reached approximately $500,000,000—twice as much as the total supply of all Europe at the time Columbus first caught sight of the New World.
To the Fortnightly Review, July, 1913, Mr. W. F. Ford, an English sociologist, contributes an article under the caption, “Decreasing Value of Gold.” He tells his readers that between 1450 and 1850 the world's total production of gold was $3,500,000,000, while during the sixty years 1851-1911 the total output of the world was $11,579,150,000.
These titanic strides made in the production of gold since 1850 have been a prime factor in making the world incomparably richer in our day than it ever was before.
DISPARITY OF DISTRIBUTION
The problem of producing wealth has assuredly been solved. But what about the problem of distribution? Has it been solved? There is no end to the social wealth of to-day. The world is flooded with gold. But how about its apportionment—its distribution among the several classes of society? The fact that wealth, phenomenal as it is in magnitude, is congested in the hands of a relatively very small number of persons, is so notoriously in evidence as to need no attestation.
Again and again statisticians have told us that one per cent of the 16,000,000 families in the United States own more of the social wealth than the remaining ninety-nine per cent. Dr. Strong reminds us that there are men in this country each of whom, because of his vast riches, holds in his hands decidedly more power than does the king of Great Britain and Ireland. It is well known that a board of twenty-four directors, whose office is in New York, practically controls the prodigious capital—slightly less than $16,000,000,000—represented by the 163,000 miles of railway in the United States. The industrial capital of the nation, including that of the railroads, is, in round numbers, $30,000,000,000. While this enormous wealth is owned by many thousands of people, yet it is, for all practical purposes, dominated by about ten of the master spirits of the money world, and, again, eight of these men are pliant in the hands of the other two.
Two years ago a writer in the Wall Street Journal gave a list of banks, trust companies, insurance companies, together with railways and industrial plants, the assets of which aggregate $9,300,000,000, all of which was either directly or indirectly controlled by the late J. P. Morgan. This was more than the entire wealth of the nation, in 1850, by two billion dollars. This vast economic power—and as ominous as it is vast—passed into the hands of Mr. Morgan's son, J. P. Morgan, Jr., at the death of the father last March. This stupendous mass of wealth, virtually directed in its flow by one man, is nearly double the total annual revenues of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Is such industrial autocracy compatible with democratic institutions?
Of all present-day signs of the times, this astounding congestion of wealth, particularly the concentration708of its control, is universally admitted to be the most portentous. Several years ago the late Justice Harlan, of the United States Supreme Court, said to Dr. Strong, “I regard the vast and increasing corporate wealth as the supreme peril of the United States.” In his “Christianity and Socialism,” Dr. Washington Gladden says, “The effect of all this concentration of capital has been to widen the distance and deepen the alienation between the employer and the employed.”
An eminent economist asseverates as follows: “There is a popular discontent in Europe which has not been equaled since the revolution of 1848. Indeed, there is a great world ferment as wide as modern civilization and as deep as the sense of injustice which has taken possession of the working men— a situation which can be ignored only at the peril of society.” Yet during the past fifty years wealth has increased in Europe three times as rapidly as has the population. Then why this widespread, deep-seated discontent on the part of the populace? In our country, as we have noted, wealth grew six times as fast as did the population during the same period. Yet with us popular discontent is as insistent and ubiquitous as in Europe.
All publicists are at one with Prince Kropotkin, the noted Russian author, when he says, “For the first time in the history of civilization, mankind has reached a point where the means of satisfying its needs are in excess of the needs themselves.” If this is true—as it assuredly is—there should be no occasion for the popular discontent, the social unrest, the class antagonism, universally epidemic in these latter days.
A very definite reason, however, does exist. The workers cherish the conviction that they are far from receiving a just share of the boundless wealth resulting from the application of modern scientific methods to industry. They see that this wealth is becoming more and more congested in the hands of the comparatively few, who, by forming themselves into trusts and syndicates, are making themselves the masters of all the sources of wealth and of the means of producing it. They dominate absolutely the business and commerce of the world. They determine the schedule of prices, regulate wage rates, and often mold legislation and corrupt courts of justice.
The people see the gulf of inequality between themselves and their economic masters widening apace. They know that men by the millions are standing idle in the market-places, while barns are filled with plenty, presses are bursting out with new wine, and warehouses are groaning with the goods for lack of which these same millions are starving. The toilers are aware of the dread fact that in New York, the richest city in the New World, 75,000 school children are shamefully underfed, and, in consequence, so anemic as to be unable to make their school work at all worth while. They know that though our wealth as a nation is twenty-fold as great as it was sixty years ago, there are ten millions of our fellows who are doomed to live in acute, chronic poverty. They know that though wealth is increasing three times as fast in England as is the population, there are nearly a million people in London alone who go perpetually hungry. They know that several hundred thousand joyless, hopeless women, with pinched faces and despairing brains, are toiling from ten to fourteen hours a day in the sweat-shops of the great cities of Christendom, while their opulent masters indulge themselves in all the luxuries and social amenities that their millions can command.
ANTICIPATED BY PROPHETS
NEW HEADQUARTERS OF THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, WASHINGTON, D. C.
Doubtless some of my readers will be surprised to learn that the unhappy conditions which obtain in the economic world of to-day were all distinctly anticipated by the ancient prophets of God. It is this solemn fact that invests current economic phenomena with more than human, more than temporal, significance. Infinite wisdom decreed that they should serve as a few of the manifold harbingers of the dawn of a new economic, a new spiritual, era—the endless era of universal righteousness, truth, peace, light, life, and love; in short, the kingdom of God and His Christ, prepared for His redeemed children from the foundation of the world.
In concluding this paper, it is fitting that we should advert to a few of the more striking of these inspired forecasts. That the second chapter of Isaiah covers a last-day or end-of-the-age prophecy is attested by the first part of the second verse: “And it shall come to pass in the last days,” etc. See also verses 17-21. In verse 7 is recorded the prophet's startlingly faithful preannouncement of one of the most obvious economic facts of our day—the unprecedented magnitude of the world's wealth. These are the prophet's words: “Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures.” Now, we must not forget that, according to verse 2, the prophet was, in rapt vision, taking note of conditions that would characterize “the last days.”
Let us now note another inspired prognostication of precisely the same bearing which has come down to us from a New Testament prophet. As given in the first part of the fifth chapter of James, that prophet foresaw that, preceding “the coming of the Lord,” “in the last days,” there would arise a class of persons distinctively called “rich men.” “Go to now, ye rich men,” says the prophet, “weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. . . . Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.” Now, let the reader revert to the “flood of gold” and the story of the phenomenal increase of wealth in the civilized world during the last sixty or more years, set forth in this article, and observe the astonishing exactness with which these prophecies have, in that time, been fulfilled.
One of the reasons why this present-day plethora of wealth has become congested in the possession of so few men, is stated by implication in verse 4 of the fifth chapter of James. The apostle continues to address the “rich men” in this fashion: “Behold, the hire of the laborers ... which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.”
No unprejudiced person would think of denying that a very large part of the compensation justly due to the workers is systematically “kept back” by the “rich men,” or capitalist employers. Of course this is only one of several reasons why they are enabled to heap treasure “for the last days.”
