Twentieth Century Socialism Part 8

This evil, like all evils that arise from the compet.i.tive system, is not incidental or occasional, but inherent and necessary. It cannot be better stated than by Miss Woodbridge, the secretary of the Working Women's Society, in a report made to the Society on May 6, 1890:

"It is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but woman's wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to her. The very fact that some of these women receive partial support from brothers or fathers and are thus enabled to live upon less than they earn, forces other women who have no such support either to suffer for necessities or seek other means of support."

The extent to which wages are reduced below starvation rates is also stated as follows:

"The wages, which are low, we find are often reduced by excessive fines, the employers placing a value upon time lost that is not given to service rendered. The salaries of saleswomen range from $2.00 to $18.00, but the latter sum is only paid in rare instances in cloak and suit departments. The average salary in the best houses does not exceed $7.00, and averages $4.00 or $4.50 per week. Cashiers receive from $6.00 to $15.00, averaging about $9.00. Cash girls receive from $1.50 to $2.50 per week, though we know of but one store where $2.50 is paid. In the Broadway stores boys are employed, usually on commission. The average salary of one large shop for saleswomen and cash girls is $2.40; another $2.90; another $3.10; but in the latter, the employees are nearly all men and boys. We find in many stores the rule to fine from five to thirty cents for a few minutes' tardiness.

In one store all women who earn over $7.00 are fined thirty cents for ten minutes' tardiness. Cash girls who earn $1.75 per week are fined ten cents for ten minutes' tardiness."

It is hardly necessary to comment on a wage to saleswomen varying from $2.40 to $3.10 a week, and this liable to reduction by fines. It will be observed too that owners of department stores are compelled by the pressure of the market to seek this half-supported help. Miss Woodbridge says:

"In all the stores the tendency is to secure cheap help. You often see the advertis.e.m.e.nt reading thus: 'Young misses, just graduated, wanted for positions as saleswomen;' which means that being girls with homes they can afford to work cheaper than those who are self-supporting."

The words "just graduated" const.i.tute a direct appeal to the educated--that is to say, partially supported--women.

So a self-respecting young girl who desires to contribute to the expenses of the home, sets the rate of wages which drives her less fortunate sister to misery and crime, and thus becomes the unconscious instrument of her shame.

If anyone is not satisfied that the conditions above described must result, unsavory details of a kind to persuade him will be found in the report of Miss Maud E. Miner, probation officer of city magistrates' courts, published in the Survey.

Lastly, temptation would be indirectly as well as directly diminished by the absence of prost.i.tutes as a cla.s.s. It has been already intimated that prost.i.tution committed injustice to _both_ s.e.xes. By this it was intended to refer to the injustice of exposing our young men to perpetual temptation furnished by the facilities for prost.i.tution. The whole question of s.e.xual morality is mainly one of suggestion. Take eight men accustomed to believe that they cannot dispense with s.e.xual connection; put them in a crew and remove the suggestion that they can obtain relief at any time by subst.i.tuting therefor the notion of loyalty to the crew or a desire to win a race, and the desire which before seemed uncontrollable practically disappears. The moment the race is over, the old suggestion returns, and the night of a boat race has become proverbial in consequence. The same is true of men who go on hunting expeditions, yachting cruises, into lumber camps, etc. Desire becomes dormant or controllable as soon as facilities for gratifying it disappear; the moment the facility returns, the suggestion is revived, and desire becomes uncontrollable.

What, then, would be the consequence if the suggestion were minimized by the absence of prost.i.tution altogether?

But this is not all: Men who seduce young girls and married women have learned to gratify their pa.s.sions through the facility afforded by prost.i.tution. If our youths were never afforded the chance of taking that first step which leads to the _facilis descensus_, they would, from the fact of never having gratified their pa.s.sions, be less likely to undertake to gratify them at the cost of seduction. The suggestion would be absent; all women would tend to be as sacred to a man as his sister. The relation of brother and sister is due entirely to the absence of suggestion; he has learned to regard her with an unconscious respect which removes the possibility of erotic suggestion. What actually happens in the small family of to-day could also happen in the larger family of to-morrow.

This must not be understood as a contention that Socialism would destroy immorality. Far from it. All that is claimed is that it might diminish immorality and that it would put an end to prost.i.tution. This last is reason enough for it.

It is impossible to treat of the economic cause of prost.i.tution without discussing its ethical consequences, because the consequences react upon the cause. But we are here chiefly concerned with its economic features; and it is impossible to put too much emphasis upon the fact that the greatest permanent blot upon our civilization is the necessary result of a compet.i.tive system that leaves a large part of our women no other means of livelihood.

Although we have carefully distinguished between the woman who sells herself to one man for a fortune and the common prost.i.tute who sells herself to many men for a pittance, the first is often more to blame than the latter, because the latter is compelled by hunger while the former often barters her chast.i.ty out of sheer love of luxury. The whole heredity of man may be altered by the elimination through Socialism of the sordid motive for marriage. Avarice may become diminished by s.e.xual selection. For although s.e.xual selection is not to-day found to have the force in animal heredity that Darwin thought, it is an important factor in human heredity, thanks to the opportunity for deliberate selection furnished by our inst.i.tution of marriage. But this belongs to another chapter.

From a purely economic point of view, prost.i.tution is to be cla.s.sed with unemployment, which burdens the community with the support of a cla.s.s that in a cooperative commonwealth would be self-supporting. It seems hardly necessary to state that the dissipation that attends the life of a prost.i.tute unfits her for work. And not content with being idle herself, she causes others to be idle and const.i.tutes a permanent source of contagion, moral and physical, in our midst.

This is a necessary consequence of the compet.i.tive system.

-- 4. STRIKES AND LOCKOUTS

Another necessary result of a system of production that sets the man who works with his hands against the man who works with his head, is the conflict between capital and labor, that expresses itself in strikes and lockouts. The conflict itself is treated in detail in the chapter ent.i.tled Trusts and Trade Unions. Here we shall confine ourselves to its wastefulness in time and money.

The sixteenth Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor,[53] for 1901, estimates the loss to employees resulting from strikes and lockouts from January 1, 1881, to December 1, 1900--a period of twenty years--at $306,683,223, and the loss to employers during the same time at $142,659,104--together $449,342,327; or roughly--$450,000,000. It is interesting to note how much less is the loss to employers who are relatively able to bear it than to employees who are relatively unable to bear it. But without regard to the injustice of a system that bears so hardly upon the workingman, no practical American who desires to see production attended with the least waste and friction, can look upon such a loss as this without impatience and humiliation.

Quite irrespective of the misery that results from unemployment and the evils that attend it for the whole community--employed as well as unemployed--too much emphasis cannot be put upon the foolish waste of human energy that unemployment occasions. There have been for two years in this country over a million (and probably much more than a million) able-bodied men willing and anxious to a.s.sist in the production and distribution of the things we need, and who have not been permitted to do so--the energy of over a million, and probably a great many more, absolutely wasted.

I have been amazed at the indifference of our wealthy cla.s.s, and even of the philanthropists amongst our wealthy cla.s.s, at this condition of the unemployed until a clue to this indifference was furnished by the navete of a few of our captains of industry.

Here is what one of them, Daniel Guggenheim, president of the American Smelting and Refining Company, says to the _Wall Street Journal_, August 10:

"Every manufacturer in the country has lowered his costs of production, partly through cheaper prices for raw materials, but princ.i.p.ally on account of the increased efficiency of labor. The latter is one of the redeeming features of the current depression.

"For the first time in many years the employer is getting from his men the 100 per cent in efficiency for which he pays. It is a safe a.s.sertion that prior to the panic the efficiency of labor was no higher than 75 per cent, perhaps not even that.

"Another thing--wherever a thousand men are needed, twelve hundred apply. The result is that the thousand best men are picked; the others, of necessity, must be turned away. But the thousand work more conscientiously, knowing that two hundred are waiting to take the places of the incompetents."

Here again we have one small cla.s.s benefited by the misery of millions of unemployed, and willing to perpetuate this condition of unemployment in order to profit by it. Of all the waste that attends the compet.i.tive system this waste of human energy is the most unjust, and the most unjustifiable, unless it can be found that the pauperism it imposes on the millions and the heartlessness it promotes in the few, contribute, as the bourgeois tells us, "to make character!" But if the waste of human energy at the cost of human agony is a matter of indifference to business men, there is another form of waste which is likely to appeal to them. We Americans pride ourselves upon our business efficiency. In the next chapter we will consider the waste of money that attends the compet.i.tive system and how the ablest business men have set about eliminating it.

-- 5. ADULTERATION

It would seem as though the indifference of the public at large to such wicked and wasteful things as unemployment, strikes, lockouts and prost.i.tution, were due to hardness of heart; but if we observe a similar indifference to adulteration which concerns every individual to the utmost, we have to recognize that tolerance of the evils of the compet.i.tive system is due not so much to hardness of heart as to stupidity. For since the dawn of our present civilization, adulteration has been a constant and abominable evil. As the Encyclopedia Americana puts it: "Adulteration is coexistent with trade;"[54] and as the Britannica puts it: "The practice of adulteration has become an art in which the knowledge of science and the ingenuity of trade are freely exercised."

Before industrialism had reached its present development the statutes enacted against adulteration were severe. They punished it with the pillory and tumbrel. The following are the words of the statute:

"If any default shall be found in the bread of a baker in the city, the first time, let him be drawn upon a hurdle from the Guildhall to his own house through the great street where there be most people a.s.sembled, and through the great streets which are most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging from his neck; if a second time he shall be found committing the same offence, let him be drawn from the Guildhall through the great street of Cheepe, in the manner aforesaid, to the pillory, and let him be put upon the pillory, and remain there at least one hour in the day; and the third time that such default shall be found, he shall be drawn, and the oven shall be pulled down, and the baker made to forswear the trade in the city forever."[55]

As the Encyclopaedia puts it: "All this has given way to the force of free trade." In other words, freedom of industry has been interpreted to mean freedom of adulteration, and the Act of 1872 accordingly punishes adulteration with "a sum not to exceed fifty pounds," and only provides imprisonment in case of a second offence.[56]

It is interesting to take up any standard encyclopaedia and read the cold-blooded accounts of the various poisons introduced into our food and other commodities for the purpose of adulteration. The matter has been well treated by Mr. W.J. Ghent;[57] and in spite of the fact that he is a prominent Socialist his book may be read, because in every case he cites an authority, and his authorities are, for the most part, reports of State Commissions and Health Departments.

It is probable that no article enters more universally into consumption than milk, and of all the articles that we consume, it is most important that milk should be pure, because it is the food of infants and children. Yet in spite of all the laws pa.s.sed for the prevention of adulteration of milk, "in New York city, during 1902, of 3970 samples of milk taken from dealers for a.n.a.lysis, 2095, or 52.77 per cent, were found to be adulterated. The arrests in the city under the inspection acts were 193 in 1899, 460 in 1900, 464 in 1901, and 722 in 1902."[58]

The experience in Ohio has been just the same as that of New York:

"The Dairy and Food Department of that State was created in 1886.

After seventeen years of inspections, arrests and prosecutions, adulterations of milk still continue. 'Out of 1199 samples tested by the chemists,' says the report for the year ending November 15, 1903, 'about one-fourth were found to be either below the required standard in solids and b.u.t.ter fats, or adulterated with that base adulterant known as "formalin" or "formaldehyde."'"[59]

Mr. A.J. Wedderburn calculates that 15 per cent of all our products are adulterated; that is to say, $1,125,000,000 per annum.[60] And this figure does not include adulterations of wine, whisky, beer, tobacco, drugs or patent medicines.

Of eleven samples of coffee compounds a.n.a.lyzed by the Pennsylvania Department in 1897-1898, "six contained no coffee whatever, and none contained more than 25 per cent. The contents ranged from pea hulls (65 per cent in one instance) to bran and the husks of cocoa beans."[61]

The Ohio Report of 1898, in describing what is called "renovated b.u.t.ter," says as follows:

"These factories have agents in all the large markets who buy up the refuse from the commission men and retailers, taking stale, rancid, dirty and unsalable b.u.t.ter in various degrees of putrefaction; this refuse is put through a process of boiling, straining, filtering, and renovating, and is finally churned with fresh milk, giving it a more salable appearance. The effect is only temporary, however, as in a few days the stuff becomes rancid and the odor it gives off is something frightful. It is usually sold to people having a large trade who will dispose of it quickly, for if it is not consumed at once it cannot be used at all without being further renovated."[62]

After immense agitation we have had recent legislation of a character to render adulteration difficult; the Federal Food and Drug Act which went into effect January 1, 1907, since reenacted in thirty of our States, and I suppose that many of our fellow-citizens think that this Food and Drug Act is going to some extent to put an end to adulteration. But is the experience of the entire race during its entire history to be treated as of no importance in this connection?

Have we not had laws of this kind before, punishing adulteration in every way--by the pillory and tumbrel as well as by fines and imprisonment--and has any of them had any permanent effect in putting an end to adulteration? How many more centuries are to elapse before we learn the lesson that, so long as you give to one set of men an irresistible motive for adulteration, no laws--no penalties, light or severe, will materially check that impulse. If they are severe the courts will not enforce them; if they are light the trade will disregard them.

It is true that the adulteration of the things we eat and drink is more important than the adulteration of things we wear. Nevertheless it is a matter of no small importance that there is hardly a thing that we do wear that is not adulterated in an astonishing degree. An interesting paper on this subject was read before the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, 1908.[63] The art of adulterating textiles seems to be taught in our textile schools: "As a student in a textile school said to a visitor: 'Our teacher is so clever, he can spin wool and cotton together so they can never be detected;'" and adulteration appears to be practically authorized under our New York State law of 1900, which provides that "collars marked 'linen,' 'all linen,' and 'pure linen,' must contain at least one thickness or ply of pure linen." It is a common saying that, although the total supply of wool in the world is only sufficient to meet one-third of the demand, there is always wool to be had.

Of course, one princ.i.p.al reason why adulteration prevails is that it is impossible for the ordinary consumer to detect it. For example, in order to a.n.a.lyze stockings they must be destroyed. No consumer is possessed of the technical schooling necessary to distinguish all-wool or all-silk goods. Indeed it is stated by high authority that such a thing as all-silk and all-wool is not to be purchased in the market, though we continually buy articles declared to be all-wool or all-silk.

I do not know whether the advocates of the present industrial condition, on the ground that it "makes character," would go so far as to approve of adulteration for this reason. It must be admitted, however, that virtually everybody engaged in manufacture, production, and distribution is a partner in the deliberate adulteration of things for the purpose of cheating the public. This has been coexistent with trade and has become recognized as one of our modern arts. The extent to which adulteration is organized can be judged by the fact that "no less than 40,000,000 pounds of fiber made from old rags, called 'shoddy,' are annually made in Yorkshire, at an estimated value of 8,000,000 sterling, and that all is used for adulterating woolen cloth."[64]

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Industrial Commission Report, Vol. I, p. 794.

[25] Ibid., p. 101.

[26] Ibid., p. 982.