"It organizes industry on an enormous, labor-saving scale, and abolishes childish, wasteful competition." It is a gigantic object lesson, and it preaches his political economy far more potently than he can preach it.He points to the trust, laughing scornfully in the face of the orthodox economists."You told me this thing could not be," {12} he thunders."Behold, the thing is!"He sees competition in the realm of production passing away.When the captains of industry have thoroughly organized production, and got everything running smoothly, it will be very easy for him to eliminate the profits by stepping in and having the thing run for himself.And the captain of industry, if he be good, may be given the privilege of continuing the management on a fair salary.The sixty millions of dividends which the Standard Oil Company annually declares will be distributed among the workers.The same with the great United States Steel Corporation.The president of that corporation knows his business.Very good.Let him become Secretary of the Department of Iron and Steel of the United States.
But, since the chief executive of a nation of seventy-odd millions works for $50,000 a year, the Secretary of the Department of Iron and Steel must expect to have his salary cut accordingly.And not only will the workers take to themselves the profits of national and municipal monopolies, but also the immense revenues which the dominant classes today draw from rents, and mines, and factories, and all manner of enterprises.
All this would seem very like a dream, even to the worker, if it were not for the fact that like things have been done before.He points triumphantly to the aristocrat of the eighteenth century, who fought, legislated, governed, and dominated society, but who was shorn of power and displaced by the rising bourgeoisie.Ay, the thing was done, he holds.And it shall be done again, but this time it is the proletariat who does the shearing.Sociology has taught him that m-i-g-h-t spells "right." Every society has been ruled by classes, and the classes have ruled by sheer strength, and have been overthrown by sheer strength.The bourgeoisie, because it was the stronger, dragged down the nobility of the sword; and the proletariat, because it is the strongest of all, can and will drag down the bourgeoisie.
And in that day, for better or worse, the common man becomes the master--for better, he believes.It is his intention to make the sum of human happiness far greater.No man shall work for a bare living wage, which is degradation.Every man shall have work to do, and shall be paid exceedingly well for doing it.There shall be no slum classes, no beggars.Nor shall there be hundreds of thousands of men and women condemned, for economic reasons, to lives of celibacy or sexual infertility.Every man shall be able to marry, to live in healthy, comfortable quarters, and to have all he wants to eat as many times a day as he wishes.There shall no longer be a life-and-death struggle for food and shelter.The old heartless law of development shall be annulled.
All of which is very good and very fine.And when these things have come to pass, what then? Of old, by virtue of their weakness and inefficiency in the struggle for food and shelter, the race was purged of its weak and inefficient members.But this will no longer obtain.Under the new order the weak and the progeny of the weak will have a chance for survival equal to that of the strong and the progeny of the strong.This being so, the premium upon strength will have been withdrawn, and on the face of it the average strength of each generation, instead of continuing to rise, will begin to decline.
When the common man's day shall have arrived, the new social institutions of that day will prevent the weeding out of weakness and inefficiency.All, the weak and the strong, will have an equal chance for procreation.And the progeny of all, of the weak as well as the strong, will have an equal chance for survival.This being so, and if no new effective law of development be put into operation, then progress must cease.And not only progress, for deterioration would at once set in.It is a pregnant problem.What will be the nature of this new and most necessary law of development? Can the common man pause long enough from his undermining labors to answer? Since he is bent upon dragging down the bourgeoisie and reconstructing society, can he so reconstruct that a premium, in some unguessed way or other, will still be laid upon the strong and efficient so that the human type will continue to develop? Can the common man, or the uncommon men who are allied with him, devise such a law? Or have they already devised one? And if so, what is it?
