Part 15 (1/2)

Undoubtedly the opinion generally prevailed at the end of the last century that increase in price by the trust was not to be feared. But at that time trusts had not yet acquired the art of handling independent compet.i.tors. To-day the art has been acquired. Owing to the enormous capital they control and the enormous extent of territory they cover, they are in a position so to reduce prices in any one spot where compet.i.tion becomes dangerous as to crush out the compet.i.tor in that place. They adopted this method recklessly at first, crus.h.i.+ng out all compet.i.tors and then raising the price unduly. Now they have learned to maintain a group of compet.i.tors about them and to keep these compet.i.tors alive, keeping prices high so long as compet.i.tion is not dangerous and depressing them just enough to crush out compet.i.tion when it becomes dangerous.

The movement of prices since the end of last century is sufficient to demonstrate that trusts, far from reducing prices, are advancing them.

It must in all fairness to trusts be admitted that the enormous increase in the annual output of gold tends to increase prices, and it is extremely difficult to state just how much of the advance in price since the end of last century is due to the increased output of gold, and how much is due to deliberate advance on the part of the trusts.

We have, however, a guide in the relation between increase of wages and increase of prices. If the advance in prices were due entirely to increased output of gold, wages ought to increase in the same proportion. But they do not.

Of the opinion expressed at the end of the last century that trusts would improve the condition of workingmen, there is very little left to-day.

From almost every point of view, trusts have since 1900 disappointed expectations. It was claimed and with every show of reason that trusts would, by their control of the market, be able to adjust supply to demand and thus avoid the gluts that produce unemployment,[104] and that although the economies they practised might result in the shutting down of some factories and the discharge of employees, in the end the workingmen would gain because their employment would be steady and because trade unions would have only one employer to bargain with instead of many.[105]

How far has experience justified these antic.i.p.ations?

Far from diminis.h.i.+ng unemployment, the reign of the trusts has resulted in the most intense and widespread depression that we have any record of.[106] Far from benefiting the unions, trusts have crushed unions out of existence. Far from raising wages and shortening hours, the employees of the Steel Trust in Pittsburg are to-day working twelve hours at $1.80 a day, and once a fortnight twenty-four hours in a single s.h.i.+ft; whereas miners in the same district because their union has not yet been crushed by the Coal Trust, are working only eight hours at $2.36 a day.[107] And the Miners' Union has been saved from the trust only by what is still regarded by many as the improper personal intervention of President Roosevelt Oct. 31, 1902.

The conditions of labor under trust rule cannot be better described than in the Survey, an investigation published not by Socialists, nor even by persons inclined towards Socialism, but by believers in and upholders of the compet.i.tive system:[108]

”With this number, Charities and The Commons completes its presentation of the findings of the Pittsburg Survey, as to conditions of life and labor of the wage-earners of the American Steel district.

The gist of the situation, as we find it, is as follows:

”I. An altogether incredible amount of overwork by everybody, reaching its extreme in the twelve-hour s.h.i.+ft for seven days in the week in the steel mills and the railway switchyards.

”II. Low wages for the great majority of the laborers employed by the mills, not lower than other large cities, but low compared with the prices--so low as to be inadequate to the maintenance of a normal American standard of living; wages adjusted to the single man in the lodging-house, not to the responsible head of a family.

”III. Still lower wages for women, who receive for example in one of the metal trades in which the proportion of women is great enough to be menacing, one-half as much as unorganized men in the same shops and one-third as much as the men in the union.

”IV. An absentee capitalism, with bad effects strikingly a.n.a.logous to those of absentee landlordism, of which Pittsburg furnishes noteworthy examples.

”V. A continuous inflow of immigrants with low standards, attracted by a wage which is high by the standards of Southeastern Europe, and which yields a net pecuniary advantage because of abnormally low expenditures for food and shelter; and inadequate provision for the contingencies of sickness, accident, and death.

”VI. The destruction of family life, not in any imaginary or mystical sense, but by the demands of the day's work and by the very demonstrable and material method of typhoid fever and industrial accidents; both preventable, but costing in single years in Pittsburg considerably more than a thousand lives, and irretrievably shattering nearly as many homes.

”VII. Archaic social inst.i.tutions such as the aldermanic court, the ward school district, the family garbage disposal, and the unregenerate charitable inst.i.tution, still surviving after the conditions to which they were adapted have disappeared.

”VIII. The contrast--which does not become blurred by familiarity with detail, but on the contrary becomes more vivid as the outlines are filled in--the contrast between the prosperity on the one hand of the most prosperous of all the communities of our western civilization, with its vast natural resources, the generous fostering of government, the human energy, the technical development, the gigantic tonnage of the mines and mills, the enormous capital of which the bank balances afford an indication; and, on the other hand, the neglect of life, of health, of physical vigor, even of the industrial efficiency of the individual. Certainly no community before in America or Europe has ever had such a surplus, and never before has a great community applied what it had so meagerly to the rational purposes of human life. Not by gifts of libraries, galleries, technical schools, and parks, but by the cessation of toil one day in seven, and sixteen hours in the twenty-four, by the increase of wages, by the sparing of lives, by the prevention of accidents, and by raising the standards of domestic life, should the surplus come back to the people of the community in which it is created.”

It would be unfair, however, to the trusts not to recognize that in spite of the shameful conditions they create for the majority they do benefit a minority to no small degree. The highly skilled are highly paid; they are fairly safe from unemployment; they are also furnished an opportunity of purchasing stock, of which this minority avails itself. The effect of the trust system on the workingman is very much like that of the trade union; both benefit the highly skilled and highly efficient, but at the expense of all the rest.

Now those who believe in the compet.i.tive system regard this as proper; and that the highly skilled and highly efficient should fare better than the lazy and vicious is equally a part of the Socialist creed.

All that the Socialist asks is that the punishment for falling short of the highest skill and the highest efficiency be _not so severe_ as that described by the Pittsburg Survey; and this not only in the interest of the victim, but in that of the community of which he forms an essential part. It is because Socialism proposes a plan for giving to the efficient what their efficiency earns without committing the inefficient to a life of degradation, that it is ent.i.tled to the consideration of practical business men.

The degradation of the majority is not the only evil that results from the trusts. The rich are accustomed to look upon this evil as necessary and, therefore, one that they cannot hope to do more than mitigate by philanthropy. They seem unconscious of the goal to which this evil is inevitably driving them; and it is to this goal that I want above all to direct their attention.

(_a_) _The Conflict Between the Trust and the Trade Union_

It might seem as though the t.i.tle for this section ought to be the conflict between capital and labor rather than the conflict between trusts and trade unions. This, however, is a mistake. So long as labor and capital were disorganized, there was not much danger in the conflict between the two. The employer was too strong and he had on his side in case of disturbance, the police, the militia, and the law.

The moment, however, that labor became organized, it became too powerful for the police; it became dangerous even to the militia; and it has in England been strong enough to change the law; and this in spite of the fact that the organization of the workingman in unions has compelled the employers to combine in a.s.sociations and trusts.