Bab Bab 55 · Problem
In the year 1831, just before the passing of the first Reform Bill
Jeremy Bentham, the great English student of legislative methods and
the most practical political reformer of that day, wrote to a friend:
“The way to be comfortable is to make others comfortable. The way to
make others comfortable is to appear to love them. The way to appear
to love them is to love them in reality.” Jeremy was an honest man. He
said what he believed to be true. His opinions were shared by thousands
of his countrymen. They felt responsible for the happiness of their
less fortunate neighbours and they tried their very best to help them.
And Heaven knows it was time that something be done!
The ideal of “economic freedom” (the “laissez faire” of Turgot) had
been necessary in the old society where mediæval restrictions lamed
all industrial effort. But this “liberty of action” which had been
the highest law of the land had led to a terrible, yea, a frightful
condition. The hours in the factory were limited only by the physical
strength of the workers. As long as a woman could sit before her loom,
without fainting from fatigue, she was supposed to work. Children of
five and six were taken to the cotton mills, to save them from the
dangers of the street and a life of idleness. A law had been passed
which forced the children of paupers to go to work or be punished by
being chained to their machines. In return for their services they got
enough bad food to keep them alive and a sort of pigsty in which they
could rest at night. Often they were so tired that they fell asleep at
their job. To keep them awake a foreman with a whip made the rounds and
beat them on the knuckles when it was necessary to bring them back to
their duties. Of course, under these circumstances thousands of little
children died. This was regrettable and the employers, who after all
were human beings and not without a heart, sincerely wished that they
could abolish “child labour.” But since man was “free” it followed that
children were “free” too. Besides, if Mr. Jones had tried to work his
factory without the use of children of five and six, his rival, Mr.
Stone, would have hired an extra supply of little boys and Jones would
have been forced into bankruptcy. It was therefore impossible for Jones
to do without child labour until such time as an act of Parliament
should forbid it for all employers.
But as Parliament was no longer dominated by the old landed aristocracy
(which had despised the upstart factory-owners with their money bags
and had treated them with open contempt), but was under control of the
representatives from the industrial centres, and as long as the law
did not allow workmen to combine in labour-unions, very little was
accomplished. Of course the intelligent and decent people of that time
were not blind to these terrible conditions. They were just helpless.
Machinery had conquered the world by surprise and it took a great many
years and the efforts of thousands of noble men and women to make the
machine what it ought to be, man’s servant, and not his master.
Curiously enough, the first attack upon the outrageous system of
employment which was then common in all parts of the world, was made
on behalf of the black slaves of Africa and America. Slavery had been
introduced into the American continent by the Spaniards. They had
tried to use the Indians as labourers in the fields and in the mines,
but the Indians, when taken away from a life in the open, had lain
down and died and to save them from extinction a kind-hearted priest
had suggested that negroes be brought from Africa to do the work.
The negroes were strong and could stand rough treatment. Besides,
association with the white man would give them a chance to learn
Christianity and in this way, they would be able to save their souls,
and so from every possible point of view, it would be an excellent
arrangement both for the kindly white man and for his ignorant black
brother. But with the introduction of machinery there had been a
greater demand for cotton and the negroes were forced to work harder
than ever before, and they too, like the Indians, began to die under
the treatment which they received at the hands of the overseers.
Stories of incredible cruelty constantly found their way to Europe and
in all countries men and women began to agitate for the abolition of
slavery. In England, William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, (the
father of the great historian whose history of England you must read if
you want to know how wonderfully interesting a history-book can be,)
organised a society for the suppression of slavery. First of all they
got a law passed which made “slave trading” illegal. And after the year
1840 there was not a single slave in any of the British colonies. The
revolution of 1848 put an end to slavery in the French possessions.
The Portuguese passed a law in the year 1858 which promised all slaves
their liberty in twenty years from date. The Dutch abolished slavery in
1863 and in the same year Tsar Alexander II returned to his serfs that
liberty which had been taken away from them more than two centuries
before.
In the United States of America the question led to grave difficulties
and a prolonged war. Although the Declaration of Independence had laid
down the principle that “all men were created equal,” an exception had
been made for those men and women whose skins were dark and who worked
on the plantations of the southern states. As time went on, the dislike
of the people of the North for the institution of slavery increased and
they made no secret of their feelings. The southerners however claimed
that they could not grow their cotton without slave-labour, and for
almost fifty years a mighty debate raged in both the Congress and the
Senate.
The North remained obdurate and the South would not give in. When
it appeared impossible to reach a compromise, the southern states
threatened to leave the Union. It was a most dangerous point in the
history of the Union. Many things “might” have happened. That they did
not happen was the work of a very great and very good man.
On the sixth of November of the year 1860, Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois
lawyer, and a man who had made his own intellectual fortune, had been
elected president by the Republicans who were very strong in the
anti-slavery states. He knew the evils of human bondage at first hand
and his shrewd common-sense told him that there was no room on the
northern continent for two rival nations. When a number of southern
states seceded and formed the “Confederate States of America,” Lincoln
accepted the challenge. The Northern states were called upon for
volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of young men responded with eager
enthusiasm and there followed four years of bitter civil war. The
South, better prepared and following the brilliant leadership of Lee
and Jackson, repeatedly defeated the armies of the North. Then the
economic strength of New England and the West began to tell. An unknown
officer by the name of Grant arose from obscurity and became the
Charles Martel of the great slave war. Without interruption he hammered
his mighty blows upon the crumbling defences of the South. Early in the
year 1863, President Lincoln issued his “Emancipation Proclamation”
which set all slaves free. In April of the year 1865 Lee surrendered
the last of his brave armies at Appomattox. A few days later, President
Lincoln was murdered by a lunatic. But his work was done. With the
exception of Cuba which was still under Spanish domination, slavery
had come to an end in every part of the civilised world.
But while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount of liberty,
the “free” workmen of Europe did not fare quite so well. Indeed, it
is a matter of surprise to many contemporary writers and observers
that the masses of workmen (the so-called proletariat) did not die out
from sheer misery. They lived in dirty houses situated in miserable
parts of the slums. They ate bad food. They received just enough
schooling to fit them for their tasks. In case of death or an accident,
their families were not provided for. But the brewery and distillery
interests, (who could exercise great influence upon the Legislature,)
encouraged them to forget their woes by offering them unlimited
quantities of whisky and gin at very cheap rates.
The enormous improvement which has taken place since the thirties and
the forties of the last century is not due to the efforts of a single
man. The best brains of two generations devoted themselves to the task
of saving the world from the disastrous results of the all-too-sudden
introduction of machinery. They did not try to destroy the capitalistic
system. This would have been very foolish, for the accumulated wealth
of other people, when intelligently used, may be of very great benefit
to all mankind. But they tried to combat the notion that true equality
can exist between the man who has wealth and owns the factories and can
close their doors at will without the risk of going hungry, and the
labourer who must take whatever job is offered, at whatever wage he
can get, or face the risk of starvation for himself, his wife and his
children.
They endeavoured to introduce a number of laws which regulated the
relations between the factory owners and the factory workers. In this,
the reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries.
To-day, the majority of the labourers are well protected; their
hours are being reduced to the excellent average of eight, and their
children are sent to the schools instead of to the mine pit and to the
carding-room of the cotton mills.
But there were other men who also contemplated the sight of all the
belching smoke-stacks, who heard the rattle of the railroad trains, who
saw the store-houses filled with a surplus of all sorts of materials,
and who wondered to what ultimate goal this tremendous activity
would lead in the years to come. They remembered that the human race
had lived for hundreds of thousands of years without commercial and
industrial competition. Could they change the existing order of things
and do away with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human
happiness to profits?
This idea—this vague hope for a better day—was not restricted to
a single country. In England, Robert Owen, the owner of many cotton
mills, established a so-called “socialistic community” which was a
success. But when he died, the prosperity of New Lanark came to an
end and an attempt of Louis Blanc, a French journalist, to establish
“social workshops” all over France fared no better. Indeed, the
increasing number of socialistic writers soon began to see that
little individual communities which remained outside of the regular
industrial life, would never be able to accomplish anything at all. It
was necessary to study the fundamental principles underlying the whole
industrial and capitalistic society before useful remedies could be
suggested.
The practical socialists like Robert Owen and Louis Blanc and François
Fournier were succeeded by theoretical students of socialism like Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of these two, Marx is the best known. He was
a very brilliant Jew whose family had for a long time lived in Germany.
He had heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he began to
interest himself in questions of labour and wages and unemployment. But
his liberal views made him very unpopular with the police authorities
of Germany, and he was forced to flee to Brussels and then to London,
where he lived a poor and shabby life as the correspondent of the New
York Tribune.
No one, thus far, had paid much attention to his books on economic
subjects. But in the year 1864 he organised the first international
association of working men and three years later, in 1867, he published
the first volume of his well-known treatise called “Capital.” Marx
believed that all history was a long struggle between those who “have”
and those who “don’t have.” The introduction and general use of
machinery had created a new class in society, that of the capitalists
who used their surplus wealth to buy the tools which were then used
by the labourers to produce still more wealth, which was again used
to build more factories and so on, until the end of time. Meanwhile,
according to Marx, the third estate (the bourgeoisie) was growing
richer and richer and the fourth estate (the proletariat) was growing
poorer and poorer, and he predicted that in the end, one man would
possess all the wealth of the world while the others would be his
employees and dependent upon his good will.
To prevent such a state of affairs, Marx advised working men of all
countries to unite and to fight for a number of political and economic
measures which he had enumerated in a Manifesto in the year 1848, the
year of the last great European revolution.
These views of course were very unpopular with the governments of
Europe, many countries, especially Prussia, passed severe laws against
the Socialists and policemen were ordered to break up the Socialist
meetings and to arrest the speakers. But that sort of persecution never
does any good. Martyrs are the best possible advertisements for an
unpopular cause. In Europe the number of socialists steadily increased
and it was soon clear that the Socialists did not contemplate a violent
revolution but were using their increasing power in the different
Parliaments to promote the interests of the labouring classes.
Socialists were even called upon to act as Cabinet Ministers, and they
co-operated with progressive Catholics and Protestants to undo the
damage that had been caused by the Industrial Revolution and to bring
about a fairer division of the many benefits which had followed the
introduction of machinery and the increased production of wealth.