Part 7 (1/2)
President Hadley is even more definite than Dr. Eliot. The new educational policy so thoroughly in accord with the interests of the business and capitalist cla.s.ses demands ”for the people” every opportunity in education that will make the individual a better _worker_, while it allows his development as a _man_ and a _citizen_ to take care of itself. President Hadley urges that we follow along German lines in public education. What he feels we still lack, and ought to take from Germany, are the ”industrial training and the military training of the people”: the children are forced to go to the elementary schools for a time, and during that part of their education they are kept out of the shops and the factories. They, however, receive instructions in the rudiments of shop and factory work.”[54] In other words, the children are kept out of the factory, but the shop and the factory are permitted to enter the school. Doubtless an improvement, but not yet the sort of education any business or professional man would desire for his own children at twelve, fourteen, or sixteen years of age.[55]
”State Socialism” looks at the individual, and especially the workingman, almost wholly from the standpoint of what the community, as _at present organized_, the capitalists being the chief shareholders, is able to make out of him. Each newborn child represents so much cost to the community for his education. If he dies, the community loses so and so much. If he lives, he brings during his life such and such a sum to the community, and it is worth while to spend a considerable amount both to prevent his early death or disablement and to increase his industrial efficiency while he lives. According to this view, Professor Irving Fisher of Yale has calculated that the annual child crop in the United States is worth about seven billion dollars per annum, a sum almost equal to the annual value of our agricultural crops. In both cases great economies are possible. Professor Fisher has estimated that 47 per cent of the children who die in America less than five years old could be saved at an average cost of $20 per child, which means an annual loss to the nation of $576,000,000, according to Professor Fisher's calculation of what would have been the future value of all the children now lost (above their cost of maintenance).
”We have counted it our good fortune,” says Professor Fisher, ”to dwell in a land where nature has been so prodigal that we have not needed to fear want. We are only beginning to realize that this very prodigality of nature has produced a spirit of prodigality in men.
”It is the purpose of the conservation movement to rebuke and correct this national trait, and the resources of science are now concentrated in this mighty effort in that direction.
”The conservation of human life will, I believe, const.i.tute the grandest movement of the twentieth century.
”Not only do human beings const.i.tute by far the greatest part of our natural resources, but the waste of human life and strength is by far the greatest of all wastes. In the report of President Roosevelt's conservation commission, although his commission was primarily appointed to conserve our natural rather than our vital resources, it was pointed out that _human beings, considered as capitalized working power, are worth three to five times all our other capital_, and that, even on a very moderate estimate, the total waste and unnecessary loss of our national vitality amounts to _one and one half billions of dollars per year_.”[56]
When the ”State Socialist” policy has taken possession of the world, which may be in the very near future, or, more correctly speaking, when the world's business and politics are so organized as to give this policy a chance for a full and free application, is it not evident that every advanced nation will consider it as being to its business interest to put an end to this vast, unnecessary loss of life? And if half a billion a year is lost through unnecessary deaths of very young children, is it not probable that an equal sum is lost through death later in childhood or early youth, another similar sum through underfeeding in later life, or through lack of sufficient exercise, rest, recreation, and outdoor life, and a far larger amount through lack of industrial training? Is it not certain that unnecessary industrial accidents, sickness due to overwork and early old age due to overstrain, are responsible for another enormous loss? And, finally, is not unemployment costing a billion a year to the ”nation, considered as a business firm”? This last-named loss has been calculated, for the United States alone, as 1,300,000 years of labor time annually. If a round million of these years are saved--if we estimate their value in profits at the low figure of $1000 each,--we have another billion (even allowing for 300,000 unemployable).[57]
Is it not clear that nearly every element in the community will soon combine to do all that is humanly possible to put an end to such costly abuses and neglect; and that conscientious and wholesale efforts to preserve the public health and to secure industrial efficiency cannot be a matter of the distant future, when movements in that direction have already been initiated in Great Britain, Australia, Germany, and some other countries? Sir Joseph Ward, Premier of New Zealand, says that the people of that country have already calculated the value of each child--and, on this basis, made it the subject of certain governmental investments. He says:--
”To return to the annuity fund, apart from the a.s.sistance it gives to the wife and children if the father is sick, it also contributes the services of a medical man for a woman at childbirth, and the State pays $30 for that purpose. If all of this is not needed to pay the physician, the rest may be used for carrying on the home.
This has all been done with the view to helping the birth rate and bringing into the world children under the most healthy conditions possible, so that they may have a free chance of attaining man's or woman's estate.
”We a.s.sess the value of an adult in our country as $1500. So, _from a business standpoint and on national grounds_, we regard the expenditure of a sum up to $30 as judicious, when the value of the infant to the country may be fifty times that sum. Thus the small wage earner's wife and children are provided for, and his fear about being able to provide for a large family is decreased.”
(Italics mine.)[58]
”I am of the opinion,” declares Mr. Churchill, ”that the State should increasingly a.s.sume the position of the reserve employer of labor,” and that ”the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children.” He looks forward ”to the universal establishment of the _minimum standards_ of life and labor, and their progressive elevation as the increasing energies of production may permit.”[59]
Mr. Churchill rejects the supposition that the government intends to stop with the extension of the eight-hour law to miners. ”I welcome and support this measure, not only for its own sake,” he said, ”but more because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement which is in progress, all over the world, and in other industries besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labor with the well-ascertained laws of science and health.”[60]
It might be supposed that this measure would prove costly to employers, but this is only a short-sighted view. In the first place, working for less hours, the miners will produce somewhat more per hour, but an even more important ultimate benefit comes from the fact that the most experienced miners, those who are most profitable, being subject to less overstrain, will have a longer working life.
Another measure already enacted towards establis.h.i.+ng ”a national minimum” applies to the wages in ready-made tailoring and some less important industries, to which s.h.i.+rt-waist making is soon to be added.
These are known as the ”sweated” trades, ”where the feebleness and ignorance of the workers and their isolation from each other render them an easy prey to the tyranny of bad masters and middlemen one step above them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and themselves held in the grip of the same relentless forces,”--where ”you have a condition not of progress but of progressive degeneration.” Mr. Churchill asked Parliament to regard these industries as ”sick and diseased,” and ”to deal with them in exactly the same mood and temper as we should deal with sick people,” and accordingly boards were established for the purpose of setting up a minimum wage.[61]
But if employers are forced to pay higher wages, it may be thought that they will lose from the law. This Mr. Churchill effectively denies.
”In most instances,” he says, ”the best employers in the trade are already paying wages equal or superior to the probable minimum which the Trade Board will establish. The inquiries I have set on foot in the various trades scheduled have brought to me most satisfactory a.s.surances from nearly all the employers to whom my investigations have addressed themselves.... But most of all I have put my faith in the practical effect of a powerful band of employers, perhaps a majority, who, whether from high motives or self-interest, or from a combination of the two--they are not necessarily incompatible ideas--will form a vigilant and instructed police, knowing every turn and twist of the trade, and who will labor constantly to protect themselves from being undercut by the illegal compet.i.tion of unscrupulous rivals.”
Mr. Churchill claims that employers who are trying to pursue such trades with modern machinery and modern methods are more seriously hampered by the compet.i.tion of the ”sweaters” than they are by that of foreign employers. ”I cannot believe,” he concludes, ”that the process of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase in the price of the ultimate product. It may even sensibly diminish it through better methods.”[62] Mr. Churchill is able to point out, as with most of the other reforms, that in one country or another they are already being put into effect, the legislation against ”sweating” being already in force in Bavaria and Baden, as well as in Australia, under a somewhat different form.
But the most striking of the British labor reforms has yet to be mentioned. Not only were the present old age pensions established by the common consent of all the political parties, but a law has now been enacted--also with the approval of all parties (and only twenty-one negative votes in Parliament)--to apply the same methods of state insurance of workingmen to sickness, accidents, and even to unemployment. The old age pensions were already more radical than those of Prussia in that the workingmen do not have to contribute under the British law, while the National Insurance Bill as now enacted surpa.s.ses both the former British measure and the German precedent in everything, except that it demands a lesser total sum from the government. In the insurance against accidents, sickness, and unemployment the government, instead of contributing the whole amount, gives from two ninths to one third, one third to one half being a.s.sessed against employers and one sixth to four ninths against employees. At first this reform, it is expected, will cost only about $12,500,000, and it will be several years before the maximum expenditure of $25,000,000 is reached. But the measure is radical in several particulars: it applies to clerks, domestic servants, and many other cla.s.ses usually not reached by measures of the kind,--a total of some 14,000,000 persons; it provides $5,000,000 a year for the maintenance of sanatoria for tuberculosis and creates new health boards to improve sanitation and educate the people in hygiene; and it furnishes physicians and medicines for the insured, thus organizing practically the whole medical force and drug supply as far as the ma.s.ses are concerned.
In fact, the whole scheme may be looked on not so much as a measure to aid the sick and wounded of industry financially, as to set at work an automatic pressure working towards the preservation of the health, strength, and productive capacity of the people, and incidentally to the increase of profits. As Mr. Lloyd George said in an interview printed in the _Daily Mail_: ”I want to make the nation more healthy than it is.
The great ma.s.s of illness which afflicts us weighs us down and is easily preventable. It is a better thing to make a man healthy than to pay him so much a week when he is ill.”
Mr. Lloyd George points out that the German employers have found that the governmental insurance against accidents has proved a good investment:--
”When Bismarck was strengthening the foundation of the new German Empire, one of the very first tasks he undertook was the organization of a scheme which insured the German workmen and their families against the worst evils arising from these common accidents of life. And a superb scheme it was. It has saved an incalculable amount of human misery to hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people.