while their barns were overflowing, their pockets were empty. That when they wanted clothes for their families, they were compelled to run from village to village to find a cobbler who would take wheat for shoes, and a trader who would give everlasting in exchange for pumpkins. Money became scarcer and scarcer every week. In the great towns the lack of it was severely felt. But in the country places it was with difficulty that a few pistareens and coppers could be scraped together toward paying the state's quota of the interest on the national debt. A few summed up their troubles in a general way, and declared the times were hard. Others protested that the times were well enough, but the people were grown extravagant and luxurious. For this, it was said, the merchants were to blame. There were too many merchants. There were too many attorneys. Money was scarce. Money was plenty. Trade was languishing. Agriculture was fallen into decay. Manufactures should be encouraged. Paper should be put out. One shrewd observer complained that his countrymen had fallen away sadly from those simple tastes which were the life-blood of republics. It was distressing to see a thrifty farmer shaking his head and muttering that taxes were ruining him at the very moment his three daughters, who would have been much better employed at the spinning-wheel, were being taught to caper by a French dancing master. It was pitiable to see a great lazy, lounging, lubberly fellow sitting days and nights in a tippling house, working perhaps two days in a week, receiving double the wages he really earned, spending the rest of his time in riot and debauch, and, when the tax-collector came round, complaining of the hardness of the times and the want of a circulating medium. Go into any coffee-house of an evening, and you were sure to overhear some fellow exclaiming, "Such times! no money to be had! taxes high! no business doing! we shall all be broken men." c) Labor and Value Wages should form the price of goods; Yes, wages should be all; Then we who work to make the goods, But, if their price be made of rent, Tithes, taxes, profits all, Then we who work to make the goods Shall have just none at all. "Quoted in the article on "Chartism," in The Dictionary of Political Economy, from The Poorman's Guardian (1831). d) The Poor in Manchester10 BY FREDERICK ENGELS The manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society to-day is revolting. They are drawn into the large cities where they breathe a poorer atmosphere than in the country; they are relegated to districts which, by reason of the method of construction, are worse ventilated than any others; they are deprived of all means of cleanliness, of water itself, since pipes are laid only when paid for, and the rivers so polluted that they are useless for such purposes; they are obliged to throw all offal and garbage, all dirty water, often all disgusting offal and excrement into the streets, being without other means of disposing of them. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, they are given damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below, or garrets that leak from above. Their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot escape. The view from the bridge is characteristic of the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. Everywhere heaps of debris, refuse and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilized to live in such a district. The whole. side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings. In truth it cannot be charged to the account of these helots of modern society if their dwellings are not more cleanly than the pigsties which are here and there to be seen among them. My description is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterize this district. e) Packingtown as a Residential Section11 BY A. M. SIMONS From the general air of hoggishness that pervades everything from the general manager's offices down to the pens beneath the buildings and up to the smoke that hangs over it all, the whole 1o Adapted from The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, 49-53 (1848). 10 "Adapted from Packingtown, 2-19. Published by Charles H. Kerr & Co. thing is purely capitalistic. One's nostrils are assailed at every point by the horribly penetrating stench that pervades everything. Great volumes of smoke roll from the forest of chimneys at all hours of the day, and drift down over the helpless neighborhood like a deep black curtain that fain would hide the suffering and misery it aggravates. The foul packing-house sewage, too horribly offensive in its putrid rottenness for further exploitation even by monopolistic greed, is spewed forth in a multitude of arteries of filth into. a branch of the Chicago River at one corner of the Yards, where it rises to the top and spreads out in a nameless indescribable cake of festering foulness and disease-breeding stench. On the banks of this sluiceway of nastiness are several acres of bristles scraped from the backs of innumerable hogs and spread out to allow the still clinging animal matter to rot away before they are made up into brushes. Tom Carey, now alderman of this ward, owns long rows of some of the most unhealthy houses in this deadly neighborhood. These houses have no connection with the sewers, and under some of them the accumulation of years of filth has gathered in a semi-liquid mass from two to three feet deep. Shabbily built in the first place and then subjected to years of neglect, they are veritable death-traps. A cast-iron pull with the Health Department renders him safe from any prosecution. f) Hallelujah on the Bum12 "O, why don't you work Like other men do?" "How in hell can I work When there's no work to do? Chorus: "Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again, Hallelujah, give us a handout― To revive us again." "O, why don't you save. All the money you earn?" "If I did not eat I'd have money to burn. "O, I like my boss He's a good friend of mine; "I can't buy a job For I ain't got the dough, So I ride in a box-car, For I'm a hobo. "Whenever I get All the money I earn, The boss will be broke, And to work he must turn." Songs of the Workers, 34. Published by the Industrial Worker. The tune is "Revive Us Again." 356. Expanding Wants and Social Unrest13 BY A CAPE COD FISHERMAN Yes, that's the trouble. My father wanted fifteen things. He didn't get 'em all. He got about ten, and worried considerable because he didn't get the other five. Now, I want forty things, and I get thirty, but I worry more about the ten I can't get than the old man used to about the five he couldn't get. B. INDIVIDUALISTIC SCHEMES OF REFORM 357. Scrub-Humanity1 BY SOLON LAUER I confess that I have never experienced this "love of mankind" which lies, or is said to lie, at the root of so much benevolence. Most men do not please me. Masses of them stink, and offend me. I am not called to minister unto such as these. Your mongrel stock, your blotched and scrub-eared curs, your flea-bitten sots, your drenched smokers and chewers and swearers, your loafers, your sensualists, with bleary eyes and blotched faces-away with them! Do not ask me to love them. I cannot bear them. I have no dollars to nourish their vices. I have no old clothes for the like of them. I will not contribute to your free lodgings for swine. Let them find some wallow where they may roll in their favorite mud! Love them? I would sweep them into the public sewers, with the other refuse of the city, but that I know Nature hath another use for them. She, who converts carrion into banks of violets, will in her own good way convert these swine into something other and higher; but She has not asked me to help her in this work! If she needs your aid, good philanthropist, give it; but come not to me. I perceive that no man can save another wherein he most needs saving. This "humanity," which the tender philanthropist loves (at a distance) and seeks to save, with his often misplaced benefactions, is to me no airy Phantom, no mere abstract Apparition. I have lived with it, worked with it, eaten and drunken with it, lodged with it; and I know it for the most part to be a most undesirable fellow for comradeship. Its breath is foul; its clothing is redolent of various odors; its speech is coarse and vulgar; its thoughts are not high; the perfume of an unfolding brain-flower,-but are for the most part mere cerebrations, mere vaporings of passion, mere ebulli18Quoted in Brooks's Social Unrest, 96–97 (1903). "From Social Laws, 112-113. Published by the Nike Publishing Co. (1901). tions of brute instincts. It is poor because it is low, and no riches could ever elevate it above its chosen state. Give it dollars, it will spend them upon its vices chiefly. It will not seek virtue first, as the chiefest wealth of the soul, but wants dollars, dollars, which represent to it more beer, more tobacco, more sensuality, more time to loaf on the street. If Is my picture unwelcome? It is no fancy picture, but painted from life. My art cannot convert loafers into typical saints. your philanthropy can do so, I shall not object to it. 358. The Promise of Co-operation1 BY FRANCIS G. PEABODY Industrial co-operation is regarded just now by many people as an antiquated and abandoned scheme. Its advantages are moderate in their dimensions and slow in their arrival. It calls for much patience and economy. It takes the world as it is and makes the best of it, instead of condemning it as incapable of good. For all these reasons co-operation is unattractive to those who expect a wholesale and immediate transformation of the industrial order. To such minds revolution looks more promising than evolution; patience seems more like a vice than a virtue; and economy seems to tempt the worker to submission rather than to inflame him with discontent. "Beware of thrift," a revolutionist has said, "it is the workingman's enemy; let him spend what he gets and demand more." The world of industry, as it might be organized under co-operation, would in its outward form seem not unlike the Co-operative Commonwealth proposed by socialists. Capitalism would be supplanted by common ownership; and the profits of production would accrue to the wage-earners themselves. Yet in their spirit the two movements have hitherto had little in common. They have stood, back to back, looking out on different worlds. One has welcomed a practical movement toward industrial justice, even though it might not realize all its dreams; the other has found such partial measures obstructive of the comprehensive plan of revolution and tempting working people to an ignoble peace. It must be admitted that the history of co-operation in the United States goes far to justify either skepticism or hostility. With few exceptions it has been a history of failure. Yet the student finds his attention arrested by the fact that in all the progressive 15 Adapted from the Introduction to Ford's Co-operation in New England, v--xiii. Copyright by the Russell Sage Foundation (1912). |