Black and White Part 7

Wm. Goodwin Moody says (_Land and Labor in the United States_, p. 77):

Instead of being able to boast, as could our fathers, that every man who tilled the soil was lord of the manor he occupied, owning no master, the last census report made a return of 1,024,701 tenant farms in our country in 1880.

A comparison of this showing with the land-holdings of Great Britain and Ireland will help to a better understanding of what these things import. The very latest statistics give the total number of holdings in England and Wales at 414,804; in Ireland, at 574,222; in Scotland, at 80,101; total, 1,069,127. Showing that in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, counting all the holdings as tenant occupations, which they are not, there are 200,000 less tenant farms than in the United States.

Again:

Among the owners of the tenant farms in our country are English, French, and German capitalists, non-residents, who have bought immense tracts of the railroad lands, and seized upon the alternate government sections lying within their railroad purchases, and on those tracts have commenced their bonanza operations, or planted their tenants on the American system.

When it is remembered that the entire network of railroads in the United States is practically under the absolute control of five or six men who, having derived their valuable franchises and more than princely land grants from the people, show the utmost disregard of the comfort, convenience or rights of the donors; when it is remembered that one family in the city of New York controls enough land with enough tenants to const.i.tute an overgrown village; and that what they do not claim as their own is held by one-fourth of the rest of the population; when it is remembered that nearly every article which has become a household necessity has been seized upon and can be obtained only through some corporation, in the manufacture of which the government has virtually granted a monopoly, as Charles granted to the Duke of Buckingham a monopoly in the sale of gold lace; when it is remembered that, even in this new country, three-fourths of the population rent their homes and cannot buy them[14]; when these things are remembered, as they should be, it will be readily seen that the condition of our work-people is fast becoming no better than that of the people of Europe, where a thousand years of false social adjustments, of usurpation and of tyranny, have reduced the proletariat cla.s.s to the verge of starvation and desperation.

True, the immigrant laborers from Europe in the North, and the colored people at the South tend to crowd into the cities, where their labor is least needed and the conditions of life for them must be at the hardest; true, in America if a man _has it in him_ the way is open for him to mount to the topmost round of the social ladder; true, too, the operatives in manufactures and the agricultural laborers here live on a far higher plane than in Europe; but the elements of degradation as well as of elevation are present in our land, and "easy in the descent" to the infernal regions. Let us be warned in time.

CHAPTER XII

_Civilization Degrades the Ma.s.ses_

There are men in all parts of the world, whose names have become synonyms of learning and genius, who proclaim it from the housetops that civilization is in a constant state of evolution to a higher, purer, n.o.bler, happier condition of the people, the great ma.s.s of mankind, who properly make up society, and who have been styled, in derision, the "_mudsills_ of society." So they are, society rests upon them; society must build upon them; without them society cannot be, because they are, in the broadest sense, society itself,--not only the "mudsills" but the _superstructure_ as well. They not only const.i.tute the great producing cla.s.s but the great consuming cla.s.s as well. They are the bone and sinew of society.

It is therefore of the utmost importance to know the condition of the people; it is not only important to know exactly what that condition is, but it is of the very first importance to the well-being of society that there should be absolutely nothing in that condition to arouse the apprehension of the sharks who live upon the carca.s.s of the people, or of the people who permit the sharks to so live. There is nothing more absolutely certain than that the people--who submit to be robbed through the intricate and multifarious processes devised by the cupidity of individuals and of governments--when aroused to a full sense of the wrongs inflicted upon them, will strike down their oppressors in a rage of desperation born of despair.

Modern tyrannies are far more insidious than the military despotisms of the past. These modern engines which crush society destroy the energy and vitality of the people by the slow process of starvation, sanctioned by the law, and in a majority of instances, are patiently borne by the victims. It is only when human nature can endure no more that protests are first heard; then armed resistance; then anarchy.

Thus it was with the French of the eighteenth century. Thus it is with the Russian, the German, the English, the Irish peoples of to-day. The heel of the tyrant is studded with too many steel nails to be borne without excruciating pain and without earnest protest.

If in their desperate conflict with the serpent that has coiled its slimy length about the body of the people the latter resort to dynamite, and seek by savage warfare to right their wrongs, they are to be condemned and controlled, for they confound the innocent with the guilty and work ruin rather than reform. Yet there is another side to be considered, for when injustice wraps itself in the robes of virtue and of law, and calls in the a.s.sistance of armies and all the destructive machinery of modern warfare to enforce its right to enslave and starve mankind, what counter warfare can be too savage, too destructive in its operations, to compel attention to the wrong?

The difficulty is that vengeance should discriminate, but that is a refinement which blind rage can hardly compa.s.s.

I believe in law and order; but I believe, as a condition precedent, that law and order should be predicated upon right and justice, pure and simple. Law is, intrinsically, a written expression of justice; if, on the contrary, it becomes instead written _injustice_, men are not, strictly speaking, bound to yield it obedience. There is no law, on the statute books of any nation of the world, which bears unjustly upon the people, which should be permitted to stand one hour. It is through the operations of law that mankind is ground to powder; it is by the prost.i.tution of the rights of the ma.s.ses, by men who pretend to be their representatives and are not, that misery, starvation and death fill the largest s.p.a.ce in the news channels of every land.

In New York City--where the intelligence, the enterprise, the wealth and the christianized humanity of the New World are supposed to have their highest exemplification--men, women and children die by the thousands, starved and frozen out of the world! Thousands die yearly in the city of New York from the effects of exposure and insufficient nutriment. The world, into which they had come unbidden, and the fruits of which a just G.o.d had declared they should enjoy as reward of the sweat of their brows, had refused them even a bare subsistance; and, this, when millions of food rot in the storehouses without purchasers! The harpies of trade prefer that their substance should resolve itself into the dirt and weed from which it sprung, rather than the poor and needy should eat of it and live.

I have walked through the tenement wards of New York, and I have seen enough want and crime and blasted virtue to condemn the civilization which produced them and which fosters them in its bosom.

I have looked upon the vast army of police which New York City maintains to protect life and so-called "vested rights," and I have concluded that there is something wrong in the social system which can only be kept intact by the expenditure of so much productive force, for this vast army, which stands on the street corners and lurks in the alley ways, "spotting," suspicious persons, "keeping an eye" on strangers who look "smart," this vast army contributes nothing to the production of wealth. It is, essentially, a parasite. And yet, without this army of idlers, life would be in constant danger and property would fall prey not only to the vicious and the desperate, but to the hungry men and women who have neither a place to shelter them from the storms of heaven, nor food to sustain nature's cravings from finding an eternal resting place in the Potter's Field. And, even after every precaution which selfishness can devise, courts of law and police officers are powerless to stay the hand of the pariahs whom society has outlawed--the men and women who are doomed to starve to death and be buried at the expense of society. The streets of every city in the Union are full of people who have been made desperate by social adjustments which prophets laud to the skies and which philosophers commend as "ideal," as far as they go.

One-half the producing power of the United States is to-day absolutely dependent upon the cold charity of the world; one fourth does not make sufficient to live beyond the day, while the other one-fourth only manages to live comfortably at the expense of the most parsimonious economy.

It is becoming a mooted question whether labor-saving machinery has not supplanted muscle-power in the production of every article to such a marvelous extent as to make thoughtful men tremble for the future of those who can only hope to live upon the produce of their labors. The machine has taken the place, largely, of man in the production of articles of consumption, of wear and of ornamentation; but no machine has, as yet, been invented to take the place of human wants. The markets of the world are actually glutted with articles produced by machine labor, but there are no purchasers with the means to buy, to consume the additional production caused by machinery and the consequent cheapening of processes of producing the articles of consumption, ornamentation, etc. When men have work they have money; and when men have money they spend it. Hence, when the toilers of a land have steady employment trade is brisk; when business stagnation forces them into idleness vice and crime afflict the country.

What avail the tireless labor of the machine and the mountains of material it places upon the market, if there are no purchasers? One man at a machine will do as much work in a factory to-day as required the work of fifty men fifty years ago; but the enhanced volume of production can have only one purchaser now where there was once fifty, hence the fitful existence of the one and the desperate struggle for existence of the forty-nine.[15] As iron and steel cannot compete with muscle and brain in the volume of production, so iron and steel cannot compete with muscle and brain in consumption. And, without consumption, what does production amount to? What does it avail us that our stores and granaries are overstocked, if the people are unable to buy? The thing is reduced to a cruel mockery when stores and granaries are over-gorged, while people clamor in vain for clothing and food, and drop dead within reach of these prime elements of warmth and sustentation.

What does it avail us if the balance of trade be in our favor by one, or two, or three hundred millions of dollars, if this result be obtained by the degradation and death of our own people? More; not only at the expense of the well being of our own people, but of the people of those countries in whose markets we are enabled to undersell them, by reason of the more systematic pauperization of our own producing cla.s.ses.

Compet.i.tion, it is declared, is the life of trade; if this be true, it is truer that it is the death of labor, of the poorer cla.s.ses. For Great Britain has established herself in the markets of the world at the expense of her laboring cla.s.ses. While the capitalists of that country hold up their heads among the proudest people of the world, her laboring cla.s.ses are absolutely ground to powder. Because of the inhuman compet.i.tion which her manufacturers have been led to adopt, and the introduction of improved labor-saving machinery, her balance of trade runs far into the millions of pounds, and political economists place their hands upon their hearts and declare that Great Britain is the most happy and prosperous country on the face of the globe. But the declaration is illusory in the extreme. No country can be happy and prosperous whose "mudsills" live in squalor, want, misery, vice and death. If Great Britain is happy and prosperous, how shall we account for the constant strikes of labor organizations for higher pay or as a protest against further reduction of wages below which man cannot live and produce? The balance of trade desire is the curse of the people of the world. It can be obtained only by underbidding other people in their own markets; and this can be done only by the maximum of production at the minimum of cost--by forcing as much labor out of the man or the machine as possible at the least possible expense.

There is death in the theory; death to our own people and death to the people with whom we compete. When a people no longer produce those articles which are absolutely necessary to sustain life the days of such people may be easily calculated.

Men talk daily of "over production," of "glutted markets," and the like; but such is not a true statement of the case. There can be no over production of anything as long as there are hungry mouths to be fed. It does not matter if the possessors of these hungry mouths are too poor to buy the bread; if they are hungry, there is no overproduction. With a balance of $150,000,000 of trade; with plethoric granaries and elevators all over the land; with millions of swine, sheep and cattle on a thousand hills; with millions of surplus revenue in the vaults of the National treasury, diverted from the regular channels of trade by an ignorant set of legislators who have not gumption enough to reduce unnecessary and burdensome taxation without upsetting the industries of the country--with all its grandiloquent exhibition of happiness and prosperity, the laboring cla.s.ses of the country starve to death, or eke out an existence still more horrible.

The factories of the land run on half time, and the men, women and children who operate them grow pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to satisfy the exactions of the landlord--a monstrosity in the midst of civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our pretensions to civilization.

Yet, "compet.i.tion" is the cry of the hour. Millionaires compete with each other in the management of vast railroads and water routes, reducing labor to the verge of subsistence while exacting mints of money as tolls for transportation from the toilers of the soil and the consumers who live by their labor in other industrial enterprises; the manufacturers join in the compet.i.tion, selling goods at the least possible profit to themselves and the least possible profit to those who labor for them; and, when no market can be found at home, boldly enter foreign markets and successfully compete with manufacturers who employ what our writers are pleased to style "pauper" labor. Every branch of industry is in the field _competing_, and the compet.i.tion is ruining every branch of industry. The constant effort to obtain the maximum of production at the minimum of cost operates injuriously upon employer and employee alike; while the shrinkage in money circulation, caused by the compet.i.tion, reduces, in every branch of industry, the wages of those who are the great consumers as well as producers; it produces those "hard times" which bear so hardly upon the poor in every walk of life. Even the laboring man has entered the race, and now competes in the labor market with his fellow for an opportunity to make a crust of bread to feed his wife and child. When things reach this stage, when the man who is working for one dollar and a half per day is underbid by a man who will work for a dollar and a quarter, then the condition of the great wealth producing and consuming cla.s.s is desperate indeed. And so it is.

Frederick Dougla.s.s, the great Negro commoner, speaking at Washington, April 16, 1883, on the "Twenty-first Anniversary of Emanc.i.p.ation in the District of Columbia," said:

Events are transpiring all around us that enforce respect of the oppressed cla.s.ses. In one form or another, by one means or another, the ideas of a common humanity against privileged cla.s.ses, of common rights against special privileges, are now rocking the world. Explosives are heard that rival the earthquake. They are causing despots to tremble, cla.s.s rule to quail, thrones to shake and oppressive a.s.sociated wealth to turn pale. It is for America to be wise in time.

And the black philosopher, who had by manly courage and matchless eloquence braved the mob law of the North and the organized brigandage and robbery of the South in the dark days of the past, days that tried men's souls, standing in the sunlight of rejuvenated manhood, still was the oracle of the oppressed in the sentiments above quoted.

All over the land the voice of the ma.s.ses is heard. Organizations in their interests are multiplying like sands on the seash.o.r.e. The fierce, hoa.r.s.e mutter of the starved and starving gives unmistakable warning that America has entered upon that fierce conflict of money-power and muscle-power which now shake to their very centers the h.o.a.ry-headed commonwealths of the old world. In _John Swintons Paper_ of a recent date I find the following editorial arraignment of the present state of "Labor and Capital:"

The cries of the people against the oppressions of capital and monopoly are heard all over the land; but the capitalist and monopolist give them no heed, and go on their way more relentlessly than ever. Congress is fully aware of the condition of things; but you cannot get any bill through there for the relief of the people. The coal lords of Pennsylvania know how abject are the tens of thousands of blackamoors of their mines; but they grind them without mercy, and cut their days' wages again whenever they squeal.

Jay Gould knows of the wide-spread ruin he has wrought in piling up his hundred millions; but he drives along faster than ever in his routine of plunder. The factory Christians of Fall River see their thousands of poor spinners struggling for the bread of life amid the whirl of machinery: but they order reduction after reduction in the rate of wages, though the veins of the corporations are swollen to congestion. The "Big Four" of Chicago, who corner grain and provisions, and the capitalists here and elsewhere who do the same thing, know well how the farmers suffer and the tables of the poor are ravaged by their operations; but they prosecute their work more extensively and recklessly than ever. The railroad and telegraph corporations know that, in putting on "all that the traffic will bear," they are taking from this country more than the people can stand; yet their only answer is that of the horseleech....

Our lawmakers know how the people are wronged through legislation in the interest of privilege and plunder; but they add statute to statute in that same interest. They know how advantageous to the producers would be the few measures asked in their name; yet they persistently refuse to adopt them. The great employers of labor, the cormorants of compet.i.tion, know through what hideous injustice they enrich themselves; but speak to them of fair play, and they flout you from their presence. The wealthy corporations owning these street car lines in New York see that their drivers and conductors are kept on the rack from sixteen to eighteen hours every day of the week, including Sundays; but when a bill is brought into the State Legislature to limit the daily working hours to twelve, they order their hired agents of the lobby to defeat it. These gamblers of Wall street know that their gains are mainly through fraud; yet forever, fast and furious, do they play with loaded dice.

The landlords of these tenement quarters know by the mortality statistics how broad is the swathe that death cuts among their victims; but they add dollar to dollar as coffin after coffin is carried into the street. * * *

These owners of the machinery of industry know how it bears upon the men who keep it flying; but they are regardless of all that, if only it fills their coffers. These owners of palaces look upon the men by whom they are built; but think all the time how to raise the rent of their hovels. These great money-lenders who hold the mortgages on countless farms know of the straits of the mortgage-bound farmers; yet they never cease to plot for higher interest and harder terms. The gilded priests of Mammon and hypocrisy cannot get away from the cries of humankind; but when do you ever hear them denouncing the guilty and responsible criminals in their velvet-cushioned pews? Harder and harder grow the exactions of capital. Harder and harder grows the lot of the millions. Louder and louder grow the cries of the sufferers.

Deafer and deafer grow the ears of the millionaires. _Yet_, if those who cry would but use their power in action, peaceful action, they could right their wrongs, or at least the most grievous of them, before the world completes the solar circuit of this year.

Wm. Goodwin Moody (_Land and Labor in the United States_, p. 338), reverting to the difficulties which beset the pathway of labor organizations, which have so far been productive of nothing but disaster to the laboring cla.s.ses, says:

Is it not time that new weapons should be adopted, and new methods introduced? * * * Will not the working men of the country learn anything from the bitter experiences they have pa.s.sed through, and abandon methods that have been so uniformly followed by the ultimate failure of all their efforts. But the great evils by which we are surrounded, and that are destroying the foundations of society, can be removed by the working-men only. They form the large majority of its members, and in our country they are all-powerful. Still it is only by absolutely united action that the working-men can accomplish any good. By disunion they may achieve any amount of evil. The enemy they have to contend against, though few in number, are strong in position and possession of great capital. Nevertheless, before the united working-men of the country, seeking really national objects and n.o.ble ends, by methods that are just and in harmony with the inst.i.tutions under which we live, the tyranny of capital will end. The working-men will also draw to their support a very large part of the best thought and intelligence of the country, that will be sure to keep even step with the labor of society in its attack upon the enemies of humanity and progress.

There is no fact truer than this, that the acc.u.mulated wealth of the land, and the sources of power, are fast becoming concentrated in the hands of a few men, who use that wealth and power to the debas.e.m.e.nt and enthrallment of the wage workers. Already it is almost impossible to obtain any legislation, in State or Federal legislatures, to ameliorate the condition of the laboring cla.s.ses. Capital has placed its tyrant grip upon the throat of the G.o.ddess of Liberty. The power of railroad and telegraph corporations, and a.s.sociated capital invested in monopolies which oppress the many, while ministering to the wealth, the comfort and the luxury of the few, has become omnipotent in halls of legislation, courts of justice, and even in the Executive Chambers of great States, so that the poor, the oppressed and the defrauded appeal in vain for justice.

Such is the deplorable condition of the laboring cla.s.ses in the west, the north and the east. They are bound to the car of capital, and are being ground to powder as fast as day follows day. They organize in vain; they protest in vain; they appeal in vain. Civilization is doing its work. "To him that hath, more shall be given; to him that hath nothing, even that shall be taken from him."

Let us turn to the South and see if a black skin has anything to do with the tyranny of capital; let us see if the cause of the laboring man is not the same in all sections, in all States, in all governments, in the Union, as it is in all the world. If this can be shown; if I can incontestably demonstrate that _the condition of the black and the white laborer is the same, and that consequently_ _their cause is common_; that they should unite under the one banner and work upon the same platform of principles for the uplifting of labor, the more equal distribution of the products of labor and capital, I shall not have written this book in vain, and the patient reader will not have read after me without profit to himself and the common cause of a common humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] W.G. Moody: _Land and Labor in the United States._

[15] Wm. Goodwin Moody shows this conclusively in his work on _Land and Labor in the United States_.

CHAPTER XIII

_Conditions of Labor in the South_