families, and whole townships have been financially ruined. Since 1860 upwards of 867 woollen-mills have been swallowed up, and the same fate has overtaken innumerable shoe-shops and other small industries. All over New England may be seen small shops and factories, that were once hives of industry and means of comfort, happiness, and manly independence, now deserted and decaying, while the broken windows and falling walls too often suggest to the laborer a corresponding degradation in his own estate. Railroads especially have impoverished multitudes, by causing industries to change location, compelling whole communities of laborers to move on, often at the sacrifice of their humble but hard-earned homes, and the severance of kindred and all the endearing associations of life. "The wholesale discharge of laborers from employment in the textile manufactures during the last quarter of the last century and the first quarter of the present, as the result of the successive inventions and improvements of machinery, required a readjustment of population to industry which amounted almost to a continuous revolution." 1 It is largely the application of steam to machinery, concentrated in great manufacturing plants, that has occasioned this readjustment of population, this continual moving of laborers, which has greatly aggravated their condition. A rolling stone not only gathers no moss, but we have the highest authority for the economical precept, "Let every man abide in the same calling." " 2 III. - Division and Consequent Degradation of Labor. "It is the same thing day by day, sir; it's the same little thing, one little, little thing, over and over and over.' The man who manages the great establishment may become rich the man who makes the pin-head loses capacity to do anything else." - MR. JOSEPH COOK. A third cause of Socialism is the Division of Labor and consequent Degradation of the Laborer. Before the age of machinery and the massing of capital 1 "The Wages Question" (Walker), p. 189. 2 1 Cor. vii. 20. and operatives in large establishments, a single workman frequently performed every part necessary to the completion of an article. This required the exercise of skill and sound judgment, gave variety to labor and a consciousness. of worth to the laborer, and caused him and his calling to be respected by the community. By the subdivision of labor the industrial function and social estimate of the laborer are lowered. "The effect of machinery is to reduce labor as much as possible to the function of attendance and guidance." In the boot and shoe industry are sixty-four distinct parts, most of which require but little experience or skill. The cobbler can no longer stick to his last, for his last has left him. It is humiliating and exasperating to a workman who, at the cost of years of toil and application, has acquired skill, which has become a source of independence and honest pride, to find himself suddenly superseded by a machine, and compelled at reduced wages to stand and guide its movements a service which can as well be, and soon is, performed by a girl. But the laborer not only suffers pecuniarily; he is socially and morally degraded. Division of labor contracts the sphere of the laborer, renders him more and more dependent upon others, dwarfs him mentally, and thus degrades him. Workmen, complaining of the monotony of their work, said to Mr. Joseph Cook, "It is the same thing day by day, sir; it's the same little thing; one little, little thing, over and over and over."—"Think," adds Dr. Josiah Strong, "of making pin-heads ten hours a day, every working day in the week, for a year, twenty, forty, fifty years! A nailer . . . does his day's work by pressing into the jaws of an ever-ravenous machine a small bar of iron. Think of making that movement for a lifetime. . . . It admits of little interest and no enthusiasm in one's work; and, worst of all, it cramps the mind and belittles the man. Once the man who made the nail could make the iron fence also; now he cannot even make the nail, but only feed a machine, that makes it." 2 1" Work and Wages" (Rogers), p. 495. ... Is it any wonder that labor protests? To adopt a system of compulsory education, which enlarges workingmen's ideas of liberty, equality, and manhood, and at the same time reduce them to industrial machines, will inevitably result in social disturbances. It is certain that the subdivision of labor cheapens production, and is therefore an economic principle which will prevail more and more in the development of industry. It is equally and lamentably certain that little or nothing has been done to counteract its baleful effect upon the character of laborers. They cannot afford to become mere automatons at the expense of their manhood. Because machinery can go on forever, it is forgotten that flesh and blood cannot do the same. Labor may be a commodity, but the laborer is not. He has social, moral, political, and religious duties to discharge; and a Christian civilization is bound to guarantee such conditions of life as will enable him to discharge them. Despairing of capitalism, the laborer turns to Socialism for relief. IV. The Separation of Industrial Classes. The first condition for Socialism is "A well-defined confrontation of the rich and the poor. .. When the rich and the poor are separated by an abyss which there is no hope of ever crossing, how pride, on the one side, and envy, on the other, rage." —ROSCHER. 66 It The separation of the laboring and employing classes is, especially in a free government, a cause of discontent. is maintained that democracy to be real must be economic as well as political." Those acquainted with the literature of Socialism have observed that its objection to the present industrial system is not solely on account of economic considerations. Its bitterest complaint is against the assumption of superiority by employers, whom employees feel to be no better than themselves. "What is required here,” said an English workman, "is to be very humble, bow very low, say good-morning, master, and be content to take a pound a week for all that." The same spirit is 1 "The Labor Movement in America " (Ely), p. 274. rapidly developing in America. What we have to fear is the segregation of a poor working class called in Europe the proletariat. So long as social conditions did not hinder individual success and advancement based on personal merit, we had little to fear; but once let class lines be so sharply drawn as to be impassable, let the gulf between. Dives and Lazarus become fixed, and we shall have, not heaven on one side and hades on the other, but hades on both sides; the one festering with pride and contempt, the other with envy and hatred. Formerly the employer and workman worked side by side; mutual sympathy and respect prevailed. The apprentice looked forward to being a journeyman, and hoped soon to preside over a shop himself. The employer and the employed were on familiar terms. Neither work nor workmen were despised. Classes were practically unknown. The history of New England shows that such an industrial and social status produces the grandest type of manhood. "Almost every New England shoe-shop was a lyceum. Not so romantic possibly as the academic groves where the Grecian seekers after truth gathered about the old-time philosophers, but quite in harmony with that Yankee combination of utility, with a keen spirit of inquiry into all things mundane and celestial. "In the little shops of Lynn, Haverhill, Milford, and other shoe centres, it was a common thing for the workmen to hire a boy to read to them while they were at work the contents of the last newspaper. Questions public, philosophic, and theoretical were discussed with zest and accumen amid uninterrupted tasks." This is not overdrawn. No picture of my boyhood comes more vividly to mind than the little shoe-shop where two or three workmen wrought early and late, and where neighbors gathered to discuss law, politics, and religion, and from which its chief went forth to the legislature as the representative of the people. Turn now to the great cotton-mill. Eight hundred operatives rarely come in contact with the employer. He is a kind-hearted, benevolent, unassuming 1 "The Labor Movement the Problem of To-day," p. 195. man, yet he and his family dress, ride, and live in a style so far beyond his operatives as to excite their ill-will and envy. This finds vent in a Fourth of July parade, in which the employer is openly insulted by the appearance of a burlesque carriage representing the employer and his family, with the inscription blazoned on a conspicuous banner, "Our First Family." We believe this incident which came under our observation is illustrative of a condition of things at which multitudes of laborers are inwardly chafing and which furnishes a reason for Socialism. Employees receiving wages that barely enable them to live feel keenly the injustice of the large remuneration of employers. The president of the New York Central Railroad is said to receive $75,000 a year. Others in New York receive $50,000 a year. The president of the New York Life Insurance Company is said to receive $60,000. The same is paid to the president of the Central Trust Company: this list could be greatly extended, while the number receiving $20,000, $30,000, and $40,000 in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston is much larger. It is not uncommon for the managers of cotton and woollen mills to receive salaries of $10,000, while many of their employees receive barely enough to keep soul and body together. Is it any wonder that such extremes of compensation among those engaged in industry, especially in a government in which equality is a fundamental principle, should provoke discontent? The separation of the laboring and employing classes is, indeed, one of the most painful and dangerous tendencies in society. It is rapidly growing, in spite of any counteracting influence now existing. It seems certain that in a few years we shall have a permanent, hereditary laboring class. It seems equally certain that the genius of free institutions is incompatible, on the one hand, with the existence of such a class, or, on the other, of aristocracies of birth or wealth. We are developing, side by side, hostile forces. Socialism is the advance guard of the labor army. Political equality, the ripe fruit of Christianity, implies all other kinds of equality that Christian ethics demand. There are inequalities or |