Equality Read online

  CHAPTER XII.

  HOW INEQUALITY OF WEALTH DESTROYS LIBERTY.

  "Nevertheless," said the doctor, "I have stated only half the reason thejudges would give wherefore they could not, by returning your wealth,permit the impairment of our collective economic system and thebeginnings of economic inequality in the nation. There is another greatand equal right of all men which, though strictly included under theright of life, is by generous minds set even above it: I mean the rightof liberty--that is to say, the right not only to live, but to live inpersonal independence of one's fellows, owning only those common socialobligations resting on all alike.

  "Now, the duty of the state to safeguard the liberty of citizens wasrecognized in your day just as was its duty to safeguard their lives, butwith the same limitation, namely, that the safeguard should apply only toprotect from attacks by violence. If it were attempted to kidnap acitizen and reduce him by force to slavery, the state would interfere,but not otherwise. Nevertheless, it was true in your day of liberty andpersonal independence, as of life, that the perils to which they werechiefly exposed were not from force or violence, but resulted fromeconomic causes, the necessary consequences of inequalities of wealth.Because the state absolutely ignored this side, which was incomparablythe largest side of the liberty question, its pretense of defending theliberties of citizens was as gross a mockery as that of guaranteeingtheir lives. Nay, it was a yet more absolute mockery and on a far vasterscale.

  "For, although I have spoken of the monopolization of wealth and of theproductive machinery by a portion of the people as being first of all athreat to the lives of the rest of the community and to be resisted assuch, nevertheless the main practical effect of the system was not todeprive the masses of mankind of life outright, but to force them,through want, to buy their lives by the surrender of their liberties.That is to say, they accepted servitude to the possessing class andbecame their serfs on condition of receiving the means of subsistence.Although multitudes were always perishing from lack of subsistence, yetit was not the deliberate policy of the possessing class that they shoulddo so. The rich had no use for dead men; on the other hand, they hadendless use for human beings as servants, not only to produce morewealth, but as the instruments of their pleasure and luxury.

  "As I need not remind you who were familiar with it, the industrialsystem of the world before the great Revolution was wholly based upon thecompulsory servitude of the mass of mankind to the possessing class,enforced by the coercion of economic need."

  "Undoubtedly," I said, "the poor as a class were in the economic serviceof the rich, or, as we used to say, labor was dependent on capital foremployment, but this service and employment had become in the nineteenthcentury an entirely voluntary relation on the part of the servant oremployee. The rich had no power to compel the poor to be their servants.They only took such as came voluntarily to ask to be taken into service,and even begged to be, with tears. Surely a service so sought after couldscarcely be called compulsory."

  "Tell us, Julian," said the doctor, "did the rich go to one another andask the privilege of being one another's servants or employees?"

  "Of course not."

  "But why not?"

  "Because, naturally, no one could wish to be another's servant or subjectto his orders who could get along without it."

  "I should suppose so, but why, then, did the poor so eagerly seek toserve the rich when the rich refused with scorn to serve one another? Wasit because the poor so loved the rich?"

  "Scarcely."

  "Why then?"

  "It was, of course, for the reason that it was the only way the poorcould get a living."

  "You mean that it was only the pressure of want or the fear of it thatdrove the poor to the point of becoming the servants of the rich?"

  "That is about it."

  "And would you call that voluntary service? The distinction betweenforced service and such service as that would seem quite imperceptible tous. If a man may be said to do voluntarily that which only the pressureof bitter necessity compels him to elect to do, there has never been anysuch thing as slavery, for all the acts of a slave are at the last theacceptance of a less evil for fear of a worse. Suppose, Julian, you or afew of you owned the main water supply, or food supply, clothing supply,land supply, or main industrial opportunities in a community and couldmaintain your ownership, that fact alone would make the rest of thepeople your slaves, would it not, and that, too, without any directcompulsion on your part whatever?"

  "No doubt."

  "Suppose somebody should charge you with holding the people undercompulsory servitude, and you should answer that you laid no hand on thembut that they willingly resorted to you and kissed your hands for theprivilege of being allowed to serve you in exchange for water, food, orclothing, would not that be a very transparent evasion on your part ofthe charge of slaveholding?"

  "No doubt it would be."

  "Well, and was not that precisely the relation the capitalists oremployers as a class held toward the rest of the community through theirmonopolization of wealth and the machinery of production?"

  "I must say that it was."

  "There was a great deal said by the economists of your day," the doctorwent on, "about the freedom of contract--the voluntary, unconstrainedagreement of the laborer with the employer as to the terms of hisemployment. What hypocrisy could have been so brazen as that pretensewhen, as a matter of fact, every contract made between the capitalist whohad bread and could keep it and the laborer who must have it or die wouldhave been declared void, if fairly judged, even under your laws as acontract made under duress of hunger, cold, and nakedness, nothing lessthan the threat of death! If you own the things men must have, you ownthe men who must have them."

  "But the compulsion of want," said I, "meaning hunger and cold, is acompulsion of Nature. In that sense we are all under compulsory servitudeto Nature."

  "Yes, but not to one another. That is the whole difference betweenslavery and freedom. To-day no man serves another, but all the commongood in which we equally share. Under your system the compulsion ofNature through the appropriation by the rich of the means of supplyingNature's demands was turned into a club by which the rich made the poorpay Nature's debt of labor not only for themselves but for the rich also,with a vast overcharge besides for the needless waste of the system."

  "You make out our system to have been little better than slavery. That isa hard word."

  "It is a very hard word, and we want above all things to be fair. Let uslook at the question. Slavery exists where there is a compulsory using ofmen by other men for the benefit of the users. I think we are quiteagreed that the poor man in your day worked for the rich only because hisnecessities compelled him to. That compulsion varied in force accordingto the degree of want the worker was in. Those who had a little economicmeans would only render the lighter kinds of service on more or less easyand honorable conditions, while those who had less means or no means atall would do anything on any terms however painful or degrading. With themass of the workers the compulsion of necessity was of the sharpest kind.The chattel slave had the choice between working for his master and thelash. The wage-earner chose between laboring for an employer or starving.In the older, cruder forms of slavery the masters had to be watchingconstantly to prevent the escape of their slaves, and were troubled withthe charge of providing for them. Your system was more convenient, inthat it made Nature your taskmaster, and depended on her to keep yourservants to the task. It was a difference between the direct exercise ofcoercion, in which the slave was always on the point of rebellion, and anindirect coercion by which the same industrial result was obtained, whilethe slave, instead of rebelling against his master's authority, wasgrateful for the opportunity of serving him."

  "But," said I, "the wage-earner received wages and the slave receivednothing."

  "I beg your pardon. The slave received subsistence--clothing andshelter--and the wage-earner who could get more than these out of hiswages was rarely f
ortunate. The rate of wages, except in new countriesand under special conditions and for skilled workers, kept at about thesubsistence point, quite as often dropping below as rising above. Themain difference was that the master expended the subsistence wage of thechattel slave for him while the earner expended it for himself. This wasbetter for the worker in some ways; in others less desirable, for themaster out of self-interest usually saw that the chattel,children had enough; while the employer, having no stake in the life orhealth of the wage-earner, did not concern himself as to whether he livedor died. There were never any slave quarters so vile as the tenementhouses of the city slums where the wage-earners were housed."

  "But at least," said I, "there was this radical difference between thewage-earner of my day and the chattel slave: the former could leave hisemployer at will, the latter could not."

  "Yes, that is a difference, but one surely that told not so much in favorof as against the wage-earner. In all save temporarily fortunatecountries with sparse population the laborer would have been glad indeedto exchange the right to leave his employer for a guarantee that he wouldnot be discharged by him. Fear of losing his opportunity to work--hisjob, as you called it--was the nightmare of the laborer's life as it wasreflected in the literature of your period. Was it not so?"

  I had to admit that it was even so.

  "The privilege of leaving one employer for another," pursued the doctor,"even if it had not been more than balanced by the liability todischarge, was of very little worth to the worker, in view of the factthat the rate of wages was at about the same point wherever he might go,and the change would be merely a choice between the personal dispositionsof different masters, and that difference was slight enough, for businessrules controlled the relations of masters and men."

  I rallied once more.

  "One point of real superiority at least you must admit the wage-earnerhad over the chattel slave. He could by merit rise out of his conditionand become himself an employer, a rich man."

  "Surely, Julian, you forget that there has rarely been a slave systemunder which the more energetic, intelligent, and thrifty slaves could anddid not buy their freedom or have it given them by their masters. Thefreedmen in ancient Rome rose to places of importance and power quite asfrequently as did the born proletarian of Europe or America get out ofhis condition."

  I did not think of anything to reply at the moment, and the doctor,having compassion on me, pursued: "It is an old illustration of thedifferent view points of the centuries that precisely this point whichyou make of the possibility of the wage-earner rising, although it wasgetting to be a vanishing point in your day, seems to us the most trulydiabolical feature of the whole system. The prospect of rising as amotive to reconcile the wage-earner or the poor man in general to hissubjection, what did it amount to? It was but saying to him, 'Be a goodslave, and you, too, shall have slaves of your own.' By this wedge didyou separate the cleverer of the wage-workers from the mass of them anddignify treason to humanity by the name of ambition. No true man shouldwish to rise save to raise others with him."

  "One point of difference, however, you must at least admit," I said. "Inchattel slavery the master had a power over the persons of his slaveswhich the employer did not have over even the poorest of his employees:he could not lay his hand upon them in violence."

  "Again, Julian," said the doctor, "you have mentioned a point ofdifference that tells in favor of chattel slavery as a more humaneindustrial method than the wage system. If here and there the anger ofthe chattel slave owner made him forget his self-restraint so far as tocripple or maim his slaves, yet such cases were on the whole rare, andsuch masters were held to an account by public opinion if not by law; butunder the wage system the employer had no motive of self-restraint tospare life or limb of his employees, and he escaped responsibility by thefact of the consent and even eagerness of the needy people to undertakethe most perilous and painful tasks for the sake of bread. We read thatin the United States every year at least two hundred thousand men, women,and children were done to death or maimed in the performance of theirindustrial duties, nearly forty thousand alone in the single branch ofthe steam railroad service. No estimate seems to have ever been attemptedof the many times greater number who perished more indirectly through theinjurious effects of bad industrial conditions. What chattel-slave systemever made a record of such wastefulness of human life, as that?

  "Nay, more, the chattel-slave owner, if he smote his slave, did it inanger and, as likely as not, with some provocation; but these wholesaleslaughters of wage-earners that made your land red were done in sheercold-bloodedness, without any other motive on the part of thecapitalists, who were responsible, save gain.

  "Still again, one of the more revolting features of chattel slavery hasalways been considered the subjection of the slave women to the lust oftheir masters. How was it in this respect under the rule of the rich? Weread in our histories that great armies of women in your day were forcedby poverty to make a business of submitting their bodies to those who hadthe means of furnishing them a little bread. The books say that thesearmies amounted in your great cities to bodies of thirty or fortythousand women. Tales come down to us of the magnitude of the maidentribute levied upon the poorer classes for the gratification of the lustsof those who could pay, which the annals of antiquity could scarcelymatch for horror. Am I saying too much, Julian?"

  "You have mentioned nothing but facts which stared me in the face all mylife," I replied, "and yet it appears I have had to wait for a man ofanother century to tell me what they meant."

  "It was precisely because they stared you and your contemporaries soconstantly in the face, and always had done so, that you lost the facultyof judging their meaning. They were, as we might say, too near the eyesto be seen aright. You are far enough away from the facts now to begin tosee them clearly and to realize their significance. As you shall continueto occupy this modern view point, you will more and more completely cometo see with us that the most revolting aspect of the human conditionbefore the great Revolution was not the suffering from physical privationor even the outright starvation of multitudes which directly resultedfrom the unequal distribution of wealth, but the indirect effect of thatinequality to reduce almost the total human race to a state of degradingbondage to their fellows. As it seems to us, the offense of the old orderagainst liberty was even greater than the offense to life; and even if itwere conceivable that it could have satisfied the right of life byguaranteeing abundance to all, it must just the same have been destroyed,for, although the collective administration of the economic system hadbeen unnecessary to guarantee life, there could be no such thing asliberty so long as by the effect of inequalities of wealth and theprivate control of the means of production the opportunity of men toobtain the means of subsistence depended on the will of other men."