Kitabı oku: «Vanishing Landmarks», sayfa 5

WHAT BECOMES OF WAGES?

What becomes of this forty-five million dollars in wages annually paid by the silk mills of America? Every dollar of it is spent. We all spend all we get. We spend it for necessaries or comforts or luxuries or taxes or foolishness, or we expend it for a house, or a bond, or we deposit it in a bank and someone else spends or expends it.

Let us assume that this particular forty-five million dollars of silk mill wages is paid to western farmers for food. The western farmers send it east for knit goods and shoes and these factories pay it out again to labor and labor sends it west again for food. How often will wages make the circuit?

A man earns, say, five dollars and spends it at night for food and clothes. The merchant spends his profit and pays the balance to the producer of food and clothes. The producer keeps it as a reward for his toil or pays it for wages. In either event, it goes again for food and clothes. William McKinley estimated that wages would thus make the circuit and come back to the wage earner ten times per annum. I believe the estimate conservative. A million men annually earning one thousand dollars each, makes one billion dollars in wages. This billion dollars going to the merchant ten times a year and back to labor as often, makes an aggregate of ten billion dollars in trade every twelve months.

A SUMMARY OF ACHIEVEMENT

Now, hold your breath. The figures showing the material result of fifty years of applied common sense, will stagger you.

When the European war began, our farms were producing more than the farms of any other country on the map. Our mines yielded gold by trainload annually, and we unloaded from coastwise ships and railways on the soil of Ohio alone more iron ore than any other country in the world produced. In fifty years we had builded as many miles of railroad as all the rest of the world, and these roads, before the government began fixing rates, were carrying our freight for one-third of what was charged for like service elsewhere beneath the sky. We cut from our forests one hundred million feet of lumber for every day of the calendar year, and annually pumped from the earth beneath 250,000,000 barrels of petroleum, over sixty-five percent of the world’s gross product. Owing to the rapid exchange of wages for necessaries and comforts and then again for wages, our domestic trade had become five times as large as the aggregate international commerce of creation. Our shops and factories turned out more finished products than all the shops and all the factories of Great Britain and France and Germany combined, plus five thousand million dollars’ worth every twelve months, and we paid out as much in wages as all the rest of the human family. Achieve and be happy!

I hope you will understand that I am not defending either our form of government or our policy. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and those other immortal men, may have been blithering idiots when they chose to create a republic instead of a democracy. I only cite the fact that they did create a republic. We might have accomplished more had the government tilled the lands, built the ships, constructed and operated the railroads, erected the factories, opened the mines, transacted the business and put everyone on the public payroll. I only seek to make it clear that this was not done and that we did fairly well, considering.

During all this period, the government accepted as its appropriate function the protection of the citizen, while the citizen sought happiness and secured it through achievement. The government sought to protect him from murder, but did not always succeed. It tried to shield him from robbery, but sometimes failed. It aimed to prevent extortion but was not always successful. It did its best to see that opportunity should knock once at every door, but did nothing to force an entrance or insure a second call. Still, notwithstanding errors, weaknesses and admitted inefficiency, the American citizen has been afforded better protection against all the evils that assail mankind, than the people of any other country and, in the pursuit of happiness, Americans have enjoyed far wider liberty of action, and an infinitely greater percent of realization.

CHAPTER XIII
ALL DEPENDENT UPON THE PAYROLL

The importance of the American payroll upon which all rely is emphasized, and the necessity of safeguarding this payroll is shown together with a lesson in domestic economy.

While the government has kept as few as possible in its employ we are dependent, directly or indirectly, upon the payroll. Not only the merchant and the farmer, but the professional man and banker, have suffered when, for any cause, labor has stood in the bread line. This is well illustrated by the fact that the American people consumed 5.94 bushels of wheat per capita during 1892, only 3.44 bushels in 1894 and over 7 bushels in 1906. He who had eaten at the back door as a tramp fed himself like a prince when every wheel was turning and everyone working.

These figures are also illuminating: We imported for consumption $12.50 per capita in 1892, only $10.81 in 1896 and $16.49 in 1907. This may cause surprise when you remember that the minimum per capita importation of 1896 was when the average tariff duty collected thereon was only 20.67 percent, while in 1907 the average rate was 23.28 percent. Notwithstanding the higher rate, we actually imported for consumption sixty percent more merchandise per capita than under the lower tariff rate. No more indubitable proof can be found that when labor is employed, and the payroll large, all classes and conditions prosper.

ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY

Suppose I build a factory costing, say, one hundred thousand dollars, and enter an untried field of manufacture. I pay out two hundred thousand dollars in wages and make a net profit of fifty thousand dollars. These figures are unimportant except as an illustration. I have made fifty per cent on my investment and the world says it is too much. It is too much, notwithstanding the fact that I take all the risk, make the experiment and demonstrate the possibilities of a new industry. I also pay a wage at which my employees are glad to work. Not one of them risks a day’s toil. But, because my profits are large, if for no other reason, I am certain to have competition next year.

What shall I do with my fifty thousand dollars net profit? I can eat no more than I have eaten, and I cannot wear more than one suit of clothes at a time.

I challenge anyone to tell me how I can keep my profit away from labor except by converting it into cash and locking it in a safe deposit box. Suppose I give my daughter a big wedding and spend much money for cut flowers. Cut flowers are nature’s sunshine plus management and labor. So management and labor get that. But management is compelled to spend its share as I spend mine, and thus it all goes directly or indirectly to labor. I build for my daughter a home and fill it with furniture, china, glass and silver. Both the house and its furnishings consist of lumber in the forest, ore in the ground, clay in the pit, white sand in the bank, and other raw materials, plus management, labor and transportation – and transportation is labor. Thus labor gets all except the portion which goes to management and capital, and management and capital are compelled to turn their respective shares into labor.

Here the theoretical socialist and the scientist – I mean the man who recognizes that nothing is scientific except what stands the test of experience – part company. The socialist admits that cut flowers are sunshine plus labor and as sunshine receives no portion he demands that labor shall have it all. He forgets or refuses to recognize that without directing energy there would be no greenhouse, water system, heating plant or other essential of production. Labor and sunshine never produced anything better than a wild flower. Of course labor may and frequently does furnish the management. All the necessary equipment for the production of the various articles I have mentioned is the result of a directing genius which we call management.

Let no one accuse me of trying to deceive or cajole labor. I not only admit, but I assert, that there is far more satisfaction, though not necessarily greater happiness, in drawing dividends than wages. I have had both experiences. I am an expert, for I have either touched or seen life at every angle. I have worked to the limit, day after day, from five in the morning until nine at night for hire, with not to exceed one hour for the three meals, and have gone to bed happy. For fifteen years I was at my law office, as a rule, from seven in the morning until ten at night, and for more than thirty years of my mature life I never took a day for recreation. My wife and I are now living quite comfortably from dividends, but we look back upon those strenuous years, in which this best woman in the world joyfully and even joyously bore her share, as the happiest period of our lives. Still I repeat, dividends are better than pay envelopes or checks from clients. And I am glad they are. The All-Wise must have designed they should be, for otherwise life would be one dreary humdrum of drudgery, with little incentive to great effort and greater sacrifice, the universal quid pro quo in the great one-price store of republics.

In this connection permit me to urge every man whose wakeful hours are spent in toil, to make it exceedingly clear to his children that there is more satisfaction in drawing dividends than wages. Let the youth also know that nearly every one who now draws dividends began by drawing wages. I can recall very few men whose names are or have been known beyond the confines of local communities, whether bankers, lawyers, manufacturers, merchants or railroad presidents, whose hands have not been calloused with humble toil. This is conspicuously so of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Wanamaker and Schwab, and was equally true of E. H. Harriman, C. P. Huntington, J. J. Hill, George M. Pullman, the McCormicks and practically all others who in days past rendered conspicuous service in making America.

CHAPTER XIV
AMERICAN FORTUNES NOT LARGE, CONSIDERING

A country of such resources could not be developed as America has been without great fortunes resulting. Inequality of results in every field of human endeavor, except the acquisition of property, is welcomed and approved by everyone.

I am not surprised at the fortunes that have been made in this country. On the contrary, even greater fortunes might have been reasonably expected. As I look over the matchless resources of America, the surface of which as yet has been only scratched, and the matchless resourcefulness of our people, I marvel that even greater accumulations have not been made. I have been frequently surprised that I did not make more myself. But I can account for it, so far as I am concerned. I heard of a man who said he could write as good poetry as Shakespeare, “if he had a mind to.” His friends assured him he had discovered his handicap. That was my difficulty. I had the disposition, and I have had the opportunity. As I look back over the years of my mature life I recognize that I have failed to heed opportunities where I might have made more money than any man has made. But I did not have the vision; I did not have the courage; I did not have the “mind to.”

I can construct a highway so the worst old scrub of a horse, with his mane and tail full of cockleburrs, can keep up with a thoroughbred. Yes, I can. But the mud must needs be very deep and quite thick. When the mud is sufficiently heavy, one horse can keep up with another. But when the track is improved, the horse with aptitude for speed will soon distance the old cockleburred scrub, who would, if he could talk, very likely insist there is something wrong with our civilization, and become a socialist.

We all demand good roads, though we all know that if we have good roads we will have to take someone’s dust. The only way, my friend, to protect yourself from the other man’s dust is to have the roads so bad he cannot pass you.

A PARABLE

During the free silver campaign of 1896, a man with a full unkempt beard and shaggy hair, after several times interrupting the speaker, finally asked in squeaky voice: “Mr. Speaker, how do you account for the unequal distribution of wealth?” The answer came with promptness. “How do you account for the unequal distribution of whiskers?” When the audience had quieted down, the speaker might have said: “My friend, I did not make that remark to cause merriment at your expense. I made it to illustrate a great truth. I was born with equal opportunity and equal aptitude for whiskers with yourself. But I have dissipated mine. Whenever I have found myself in possession of any perceptible amount of whiskers, I have dissipated them. Had I conserved my whiskers, as you evidently have, I, too, would be a millionaire in whiskers.”

Tell your boys, and the boys you meet, that if ever they become millionaires in dollars as in whiskers, the chances are it will be because they conserve. John J. Blair, the pioneer railroad builder west of the Mississippi River, once told Senator Allison that the wife of Commodore Vanderbilt had many times cooked for him a five o’clock breakfast, for which she charged twenty cents. The seed from which all great fortunes have been grown was hand picked.

In the war between the states more than a million men enlisted on either side, and at the end of four and one-half years there were fifty or one hundred multi-millionaires in military achievement and military glory and ten thousand in unmarked graves. Socialists do not object to these inequalities. While they seem to welcome millionaires in art, in music, and in athletics they all point to millionaires in business as an unanswerable indictment of America’s political system. They rejoice that it can produce an Edison, but mourn that it can also produce a Rockefeller. Yet the success of these two wizards is traceable alike to extraordinary aptitude in their respective fields of achievement, plus extraordinary application. Neither of these men ever robbed me of a penny. On the contrary each has contributed to my comfort, thus adding to the worth of living, and each has cheapened for me the cost of high living. But for Mr. Edison, or someone of a different name to do what he has done, I would be deprived of electric light and many other comforts. But for Mr. Rockefeller, or some one of a different name to do what Mr. Rockefeller has done, every owner of an oil well would be pumping his product into barrels in the olden way, hauling it to town and selling on a manipulated market, while I would be deprived of a hundred by-products of petroleum, be still paying twenty-five cents per gallon for poor kerosene, and there would be no such thing known in all the world as gasoline.

CHAPTER XV
POPULAR DISSATISFACTION

It is as logical that dissatisfaction should develop because of inequality of results in “money making,” as it is that inequality in results shall follow inequality of aptitude and effort. This dissatisfaction has tended strongly to develop socialistic thought and teaching.

A century and a quarter, during which representatives were chosen because of actual or supposed aptitude, and retained in office during long periods – frequently for life – when nearly every industry was fostered, and none fathered, developed a people, the best paid, the best fed, the best clothed, the best housed, the best educated, enjoying more of the comforts of life, far more of its luxuries, enduring less hardships and privations, than any other in all history; but it is an even guess if, at the same time, we did not become more restless, discontented and unhappy.

We were not so much dissatisfied, however, with our own condition, abstractly considered, as with our relative condition. The man with rubber heels would have thought himself favored had he not seen someone with a bicycle, and the man with a bicycle was contented until his friend got a motorcycle. The man with a motorcycle thought he had the best the world afforded until he saw an automobile and the man in the automobile was happy until his neighbor got a yacht. “All this availeth me nothing so long as I see Mordecai, the Jew, sitting at the king’s gate.”

I have lived some years in this blessed land and the only criticism I have ever heard, either of our form of government or our policy, is the fact that some men have got rich.

I made this statement in a public speech some months ago and asked who had heard any other. A man answered: “Some people have got poor.” I admitted that I had known a number of fellows whose fathers had left them money and who had got poor, but I told the audience that most of the poor men whom I had known had simply remained poor. I asked my critic if he had ever fattened cattle. He admitted he had not. Then I assured him that he would seldom see a steer getting poor in a feed yard where others were doing well and most were getting fat, but he would frequently see one that remained poor, notwithstanding his environments.

Two men were standing by the side of the New York Central Railroad. One said to the other: “My, see this track of empire! Four tracks, great Mogul engines taking two thousand tons of freight at a load, passenger trains making sixty miles an hour. There comes the express!” As the train passed a cinder lit in the eye of the enthusiast, when immediately he denounced the road, cursed the management and swore at all four tracks.

In a country like ours, where conditions have been superb, resources matchless and resourcefulness unequalled, none should be surprised at the speed we have developed and no one ought to use language unfit to print simply because there are cinders in the air. Admittedly there are. We have all had them in our eyes. They are more than annoying, but the only way to prevent cinders is to tear up the tracks. And it is simply surprising the number of good people who are trying to make the world a paradise through a policy of destruction.

Socialists, near-socialists, bolsheviki, anarchists, I. W. W.’s, non-partisan leaguers, single taxers, and all the infernal bunch of disturbers and propagandists of class hatred, unintentionally led and reinforced by a large percent of the teachers of political economy and sociology in our colleges and universities, seem bent upon nothing less than a revolution in both our form of government and our policy of government. Unless something be speedily done to counteract there surely will be precipitated in America what France experienced, and what Russia is now suffering.

WHILE STATESMEN SLEEP THE EVIL ONE SOWS TARES

In the winter of 1898 I attended a much advertised lecture by George D. Herron, then Professor of Applied Christianity in one of the largest colleges west of the Mississippi. The lecture was given in the largest church of Des Moines, on a Sunday evening, and most of the other churches adjourned their services that they might hear this “remarkable man.” Several of the leading pastors occupied the pulpit with him and the pastor of the second largest church in the city introduced the lecturer, I remember, as “a Man with a Mission.” He spoke at length and his utterances were applauded by a good percent of the congregation, and by several of the pastors. Of course the vile life he was living, and the viler social belief which he then and now entertains, were unknown, but his far more dangerous teachings were well known to all and approved by many. The burden of his “mission” was denunciation of what he called the “Divine Right of Property,” which he compared to the “Divine Right of Kings” and predicted that as the latter had been overthrown by revolution, the former must be. It was indeed a “theory pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence and laid by against a day of reckoning.” I speak of this not to criticise the good people who approved his utterances, many of whom did not comprehend what was involved, but to show the prevalence of bolshevist teachings twenty years ago. Unless he has changed he should prove very satisfactory to the bolshevists of Russia, where at this writing he is supposed to be at the request of the President.

Quite recently the professor of political economy in one of the state universities of the Middle West, in the course of his daily denunciations of the policy of internal improvement as pursued by this government, and his condemnations of wealth and the possessors thereof, referred to the grant of land to the Northern Pacific Railroad and characterized it as a “gigantic steal.” A member of his class who had had rare privileges interrupted to ask: “If the lands in this grant were so valuable how do you explain the fact that Jay Cooke, after financing the Civil War, went broke in selling Northern Pacific Railroad Bonds, secured by both the road and the lands, at 85 per cent of par?” The professor inquired where the young man had obtained his information and was told: “From the memoirs of Jay Cooke.” “Well,” said the professor, “that is a subject to be considered.” But the next day he continued sowing seeds of anarchy.

During the winter of 1916 I listened to a lecture by a man of international reputation before the students of one of our very large eastern universities. Early in his tirade, improperly called lecture, he informed the students that there were two ways to make money – “one to earn it and the other to steal it.” He told them that when they worked on the street railway they earned their money, but when the company charged five cents for a ride, it stole its money. The students applauded. Later he told them that if they wanted to go to Boston over the New Haven Railroad, and all the workmen should die or strike, they would get no farther than they could walk; but if all the stockholders and bond owners were to die, they “might thank God for the dispensation but they would get to Boston just the same.” The students applauded. He closed in this language: “They talk about preparedness, and well they may, for if these conditions continue, preparedness will be necessary against the internal uprising that is certain to follow.” The students again applauded.

If there has been any systematic effort made to suppress, nullify or destroy bolshevistic teachings, not always as bold but of the same character, with which nearly every college and university is daily deluged, both from chair and rostrum, I will be glad to know when and where the counteracting forces have been applied. Many men of wealth have thought they were advancing the interest of their country and humanity generally by endowing colleges and universities. We have made education a fetich and have assumed that all education is alike good. It would be far better for America to have its youth poisoned with strychnine than with bolshevism. Poison administered through the stomach is not contagious, but what has been lodged in the brain at these hotbeds of socialism spreads, and when it breaks in epidemic no army can effect a quarantine.