CHAPTER XIX

LEST THE TOWERS FALL

THE situation to-day is tense, and is daily becoming tenser. There is a haunting sense of the abyss. The cash nexus is petering out. Prophets say that we are headed for trouble; they announce the oncoming of social bankruptcy, they state that there is enough material of discontent already in solution to form a red revolution, when comes the precipitation moment. There is piling up to-day the vastest accumulation of vested rights the world has ever seen; and there is moving toward it a lava stream of insurgency. Voices cry a head-on collision not far ahead. Professor Lange, philosopher and economist, points out: "The present state of things has been frequently compared with that of the ancient world before its dissolution, and it cannot be denied that significant analogies present themselves. We have the immoderate growth of wealth, we have the proletariat, we have the decay of morals." Said Herbert Spencer in a letter to an American friend: "We have bad times before us and you have still more dreadful times before you - civil war, immense bloodshed, and eventually military despotism of the severest type." One need not be a seer to detect that the atmosphere is becoming charged and electrical. To mention but

one of the signs, the spectre of an oncoming irreligious citizenship is sufficiently consternating, and may well give pause to every lover of his country. Sane men to-day are asking if this our fair heritage of civilization is to be again overthrown.

The masses have more material comforts than they have had before, but less of justice. The share of the worker in the product of his toil is shrinking — the percentage, that is. He may be rising in the scale of materialities, but the master class is rising also, and in vastly greater degree. One boy in America, not yet fifteen, has a fortune of $72,000,000. His income is near ten thousand dollars a day. This fortune was heaped up for him in the space of one generation — a rise in the scale of living which has not been matched by an equal rise for labour throughout ten thousand years of toil. Wealth confers industrial mastership. The "dead hand" has been abolished in law. But the

power of mortmain still abides over the workshop, and hands over a hundred workmen, herd-like, to the heir.

The argument one hears for the present competitive control of industry is that its long hours and driving toil increase the supply of wealth, and that this increase overflows in some measure to the masses everywhere witness the dinner to which a day labourer sits down to-day, compared with what peasants formerly ate, and the clothes he wears, compared with the leather breeches of an earlier day. But the argument is wide of the mark. No increase in material goods can compensate for the decay of free spirits. In a civilization

based on money, the poor in purse are compelled to be poor in spirit. The labour movement is not for material goods; it is for spiritual goods. The real agitators against an iniquitous social system are never those who "feel hunger at the maw," but a class above them. The tribe that accepts a place in the bread line, free blankets, night shelters, and soup in the mission house, have not the firm material out of which democracy forges her weapons. Agitators come from the class that thinks and feels. A hungry gut bites sharp, but a sense of wrong bites sharper. And sense of wrong is arrived at in each age by comparison with one's contemporaries, not by comparison with one's ancestors.

That animal well-being is important above all else, and is to be secured at any price, was the argument which hindered more than anything else the liberation movement under Moses. As slaves in the Goshen brickyards the Israelites had an assured domicile, with stated doles of food and clothing. The exodus out of that slavery into the uncertainties of wilderness life very soon brought murmurings against their leader: "Would to God we had died in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh-pots and when we did eat bread to the full." Not without reason have the "flesh-pots of Egypt" become the synonym of ignoble contentment, moral inertia, cowardice of spirit. Jesus had to meet the argument. There were those in his day who justified the coming of the Roman Empire on the ground that, through its repression of patriotism and the higher sentiments, the people's restlessness was deadened and peace secured under the Pax Romana material gain

was increased. But he answered that "man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth"; that self-respect is more to be desired than a full belly-yes, that they who seek the full belly alone shall lose it; but that they who seek the kingdom of selfrespect first, shall have the full belly added unto them.

The argument of the flesh-pots is being heard to-day, deprecating the liberation of the negro slaves in the South on the ground that their material well-being was looked after under slavery more carefully than it is now. It is heard in every political campaign the cartoon of the full dinner pail, that stock argument of the benevolent feudalism of the day. The rich material civilization that is being created by the fiercely competitive industrialism of our time, is cited as compensation for the loss of liberty. The bath-tub in every house, the "fowl in the pot every Sunday," cheap and swift transportation, clothes tailored after the latest models, the penny newspaper, the libraries a range of material well-being which kings formerly would have envied is being held up before the eyes of the people as a salve for the hurt of industrial bondage. It is not too much to say that the "flesh-pots of Egypt" have been in every age democracy's greatest foe.

Remembering that it is ratio, and not the absolute amount of wealth received by him, that is causing the unrest and the social upheaval of our day, it is evident to the seeing eye that the coming of machinery has aggravated the sore. For machine production has shifted the control tenfold more into the hands of the baronial class. Instead of a wedge placed underneath

and lifting the entire mass equally, it has sundered square through the social body, cleaving it in twain. Sang the Greek poet Antiparos two thousand years ago, on the occasion of the introduction of the water-wheel into Europe (and the words not only bear a pertinency to the particular theme but have a broad overflow on the conception of nature held in the days of creative art): "Slaves who turn the mill-stone, spare your hands. The labour of young girls is performed by the waternymphs, and now they leap, shining and light, upon the wheel as it revolves. They drag around the axle which turns with its spokes and puts in motion the great stone which turns round and round." But the prophecy has gone limpingly to its fulfilment. Well-nigh three fourths of human labour to-day is so exhausting that it stupefies. The water-nymphs and their fellow handmaids have indeed been harnessed, so that the production of wealth has increased a thousand-fold over the days of hand labour. But the increase has gone to the oligarchy at the top, and only scantily to the toilers at the bottom: so that the gulf has been widened. tenth of the people own nine tenths of the wealth, and the disproportion is growing. Says John Stuart Mill: "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being." The age boasts many triumphs over time and space-a multiplicity of contrivances! But these wonder-working flames, these levers and cogways more than human, have built for the toilers no avenue to heaven.

One

As men are minds and spirits even more than they are bodies, these hugely unequal conditions are chafing