The Industrial Conflict in the Light of Revelation.
By Geo. W. Rine
THE CRY OF THE OPPRESSED; OR, PENURY VERSUS OPULENCE.
NEVER before was the material wealth of the world so great as it is to-day. The United States has quadrupled her wealth during the last fifty years. Her wealth is to-day greater than was that of the entire world one hundred years ago. During the nineteenth century the wealth of Christendom increased at a rate five times as great as did that of its population. If in 1860 all the money of the United States could have been divided in such a way as to give an equal share to every man, woman, and child, each would have received $13.85. By the year 1900 this per capita share of the monetary circulation had nearly doubled, being $25.98. If the richest man in America is able to earn even a net two per cent. on his capital, it means an increase of $20,000,000 a year. The greatest thinkers of the age regard the recent fabulous augmentation of wealth as one of the most marvelous and impressive phenomena of all history. Destitution in the Midst of Plethora.
Yet, contradictory as it may appear, in the midst of our superabounding wealth a very large part of the human family is smitten with poverty as with an epidemic. The plethora of the palace stands in juxtaposition to the destitution of the hovel. Fabulous abundance on the one hand accentuating the ragged wretchedness on the other. The world is girdled with one unbroken wail of suffering and misery coming up from the huts and hovels of the poor. Beggary and semi-starvation are the estate of more than four hundred millions of Asiatics. “Unless the baleful forces that are now rampant in our civilization can be reversed, our land also will become—aye, is becoming—a receptacle for millions of famished dead.” And yet there is obviously no limit to our ability to create wealth. The world is now, as was shown in an earlier article of this series, in the very plenitude of its harvest of literal gold. There is more than abundance for all. And yet we are confronted with the painful anomaly that, tho there is more wealth in the world than ever before, there is, on the other hand, more grinding poverty, more dire suffering from sheer want, than in any age of the past. There is obviously something awry in our social and industrial system. There is either a painful lack of charity or of justice or of both in the social world of to-day. The oncoming of wide-spread poverty in the United States could not have been anticipated by the strong, rugged fathers who laid the foundations of our political and social institutions. They had come to a virgin world—a world practically inexhaustible in its sources of material riches. They made a covenant that, as far as in them lay, this land should be the home of religious, political, and industrial freedom forever. They saw that where freedom holds sway, there hope and abundance must likewise reign. Boundless were the resources of plain and valley, of field and hillside, of lake and river, of mine and forest. The late Dr. Ridpath wrote an impressively vivid description of the roseate prospect which this land of the free presented before the rapt vision of the builders of the Republic. I quote in part:— Nothing more bountiful ever offered itself to the cheerful hopes and ennobling ambitions of men than was revealed to the sober, industrious, and frugal people who came here out of smothered Europe, and began, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to occupy this glorious and prophetic land. It was the new Atlantis. Population came on like a sunrise. Intelligence abounded. Just before the Revolution there was not a native adult in all New England who could not read or write. We got on well. Poverty was unknown. Like patriot Titans we shook ourselves out of the Old-World condition and began an auspicious career of peace and plenty. We abandoned the past. We abolished primogeniture. We sent entail into the limbo of the moon. We mocked at Dei gratia as an absurd delusion of antiquity. We declared three inalienable rights of man; namely, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We ought to have added the free possession of land.
Under such auspices it is difficult to see how poverty could ever have supervened in the United States. Why should the cry of the poor be heard in this land, which was for nearly two centuries the home of open opportunity, and therefore of hope, plenty, and contentment? The condition of social equality, of free industrial pursuits, of comparatively equal distribution of wealth, of common happiness, with superfluity for none and destitution for none, continued to prevail in our country down to the outbreak of the Civil War. The humble homes of the common people abounded with the essentials of human well-being. When the French author de Tocqueville visited America in 1833, he remarked with enthusiasm that nowhere else had he seen so equable a distribution of the country’s wealth and so marked an absence of capitalistic speculation. However, fifty years later, when the Hon. James Bryce, M. P., visited America, he was so astonished at what he saw there in the shape of industrial trusts and money princes that he exclaimed, “I see the shadow of a new structure of society—an aristocracy of riches.” It is an axiom of history that just to the degree that a nation’s wealth becomes consolidated under the control of a few, does poverty, with all its attendant woes, become general and acute. Dr. Lyman Abbott recently told his readers that one hundred and twenty-five families own as much wealth as all the other families in the United States put together. This being true, must it not also be true that, in the very nature of things, scores of thousands of families must be hopelessly poor? In the terse phrase of Bishop Potter, “The growth of wealth and of luxury, wicked, wasteful, and wanton, . . . has been matched step by step by a deepening and deadening poverty.” “We are the richest people under the sun,” proudly ejaculated one of the political orators in the last presidential campaign. “And the poorest,” was the shrewd retort of a listening workman. Yes, we are both the richest and the poorest. “Despite the boast of wealth and luxury,” declares a recent writer, “we find upon inspection an increasing amount of poverty and wretchedness, coupled with unremunerative toil. Modern fortunes are no longer the reward of honest industry, but of governmental favoritism, over-exaction from the masses, and the power of cumulative wealth. . . . The iron heel of aggregated capital is tramping on the rights of the laborer, and converting him into a slave. Like a heavy pall the doom of perpetual servitude hangs over the enslaved masses, while increasing comforts, luxuries, and ease are for the favored few. The ‘communism of capital,’ which is begotten of selfish greed, and born of grasping avarice, is as heartless as Moloch. Like a vampire it sucks the life-blood of honest industry.” About four years ago the Chicago Times-Herald soberly affirmed that there were 8,000 families in that city who were suffering the agonies of slow starvation; that it had 40,000 mothers, fathers, and children begging for a pittance of food to keep body and soul together. In the winter of 1896–97, wrote the editor of a New York paper, there were, on an average, seventy families daily evicted from the New York tenements for non-payment of rent. They could get no employment, and of course could pay no rent. The sufferings of the unfortunate tenement people became so appalling that the courts finally had to refuse to issue writs of ejectment on stormy days, because the heartless landlords would place half-famished women and children in the street with no place of shelter from raging blizzards. And in that same city, perhaps the richest in the world, eight per cent. of the population own all the land on which the city is built. In a report of the New York Board of Lunacy, it is stated that in the metropolis alone, 7,000 women become insane every year as the result of their being the victims of the torturing fear and suffering begotten of extreme poverty. What a horrible travesty is this gruesome fact on the allegation repeated with so much unction by clergymen and others who ought to know better, that this is a “Christian nation”! The stinging arraignment of the “social system” which makes such a tragedy possible, uttered by the late Senator Ingalls, is most pertinent in this connection. I insert a short excerpt:— A social system which offers to tender, virtuous, dependent women the alternative between prostitution and suicide as an escape from beggary is organized crime for which some day unrelenting justice will demand atonement and expiation.
Mr. Godard, an English writer on the social sciences, commenting upon our Lord’s statement, “For the poor ye have always with you,” wrote: “To-day we take up the same bitter cry. Nay, it has grown in volume as the years have sped; and increasing prosperity seems but to accentuate it. The nation [England] has accumulated riches, but the poor remain; and the very advance of civilization, with its diversified refinements, comforts, and luxuries, its expansion of industry, and development of commerce, has given rise to forms of poverty peculiar to itself; and with the masses of the workers, has rendered their toil more severe, their surroundings more dreary, and their lot more depressing. ‘Progress and poverty’ have gone hand in hand.” Another writer declares that never before in the history of England, excepting the short, disastrous period at the beginning of the last century, has the absolute number of the very poor been so great as it is now. Nearly one-tenth5of the population are in receipt of the Poor Law relief. But a much larger portion of the English people suffer abject want without being actually penniless, and just contrive to drag on a more or less cheerless existence by means of intense and bitter drudgery. The noted English critic and orator, Mr. Frederick Harrison, said, but a few years ago:— Ninety per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind except as much as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages which barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed for the most part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss, brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism.
The Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the housing of the working classes, reported that the evils of overcrowding, especially in London, were a public scandal, and were becoming, in certain localities, more serious than ever before. Six to twelve persons of both sexes living in one small room; seven persons in an underground kitchen, six in a wash-house, thirty-eight persons in one small house, and in one instance, the husband, wife, four children, and a widow with her child, occupied a single room. They found people sleeping on shelves as on ship-board; children sleeping under their parents’ beds; and a typical case was a house of nine rooms, occupied by sixty persons, with but one bed in each room. “In the richest city in the world, one out of every five persons, or probably one of every four adults, dies a pauper’s death,” the Commission declared. The readers who have read Mr. Riis’s notable book, “How the Other Half Lives,” know that the condition of the poor in our own metropolis, New York, is almost equally terrible and hopeless. In January, 1903, Justin McCarthy, M. P., in an article contributed to the New York Independent, stated that the number of the unemployed in London is growing greater and greater every day. He says that the poor in London amount to a population numerically as great as the whole population of many a foreign capital; that in the East End of the city there was absolute starvation going on at the time he wrote. All the charitable institutions had exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents in the “garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.” Mr. McCarthy frankly avers that much of this destitution was the direct result of the fact that the nation is “overtaxed in order to meet the expenses of the recent campaigns in South Africa, and a part of the taxation has been raised by a duty on the material from which bread is made, and by an increased duty on sugar.” He significantly adds: “The mere existence of such a class of sufferers is in itself a cruel satire on the glories of war. Perhaps there may be some comfort to the men now vainly seeking for bread in London streets and lanes after their return from the fields of fight, when they call to mind the fact that they are starving in the cause of England’s supremacy over the two South African Republics.” This he wrote in a vein of scorching irony. It has been estimated by a conservative statistician that one of the richest English dukes gets as much money in one year for doing nothing as a skilled workman would get for 4,000 years of hard and useful work. Of the 40,000,000 people of the British Isles, 25,000 own more than one half of the entire national wealth. One-fifth of the 40,000,000 people live constantly “face to face with starvation.” This again shows how very rich are the English rich, and how very poor the poor. (This article will be concluded next week, by a consideration of the “Paramount Cause of Poverty.”)