The Story Of Mankind - Part 31

This is part 31 of the Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION But the new engines were very expensive,

And only people of wealth could afford them.

The old carpenter,

Or shoemaker,

Who had been his own master in his little workshop,

Was obliged to hire himself out to the owners of the big mechanical tools,

And while he made more money than before,

He lost his former independence,

And he did not like that.

In the olden days,

The work of the world had been done by independent workmen who sat in their own little workshops in the front of their houses,

Who owned their tools,

Who boxed the ears of their own apprentices,

And who,

Within the limits prescribed by their guilds,

Conducted their business as it pleased them.

They lived simple lives,

And were obliged to work very long hours.

But they were their own masters.

If they got up and saw that it was a fine day to go fishing,

They went fishing,

And there was no one to say no.

But the introduction of machinery changed this.

A machine is really nothing but a greatly enlarged tool.

A railroad train,

Which carries you at the speed of a mile a minute,

Is in reality a pair of very fast legs,

And a steam hammer,

Which flattens heavy plates of iron,

Is just a terrible big fist made of steel.

But whereas we can all afford a pair of good legs and a good strong fist,

A railroad train and a steam hammer and a cotton factory are very expensive pieces of machinery,

And they are not owned by a single man,

But usually by a company of people who all contribute a certain sum,

And then divide the profits of their railroad or cotton mill according to the amount of money which they have invested.

Therefore,

When machines had been improved until they were really practical and profitable,

The builders of these large tools,

The machine manufacturers,

Began to look for customers who could afford to pay for them in cash.

During the early Middle Ages,

When land had been almost the only form of wealth,

The nobility were the only people who were considered wealthy.

But as I have told you in a previous chapter,

The gold and silver which they possessed was quite insignificant,

And they used the old system of barter,

Exchanging cows for horses and eggs for honey.

During their crusades,

The burghers of the cities had been able to gather riches from the reviving trade between the East and the West,

And they had been serious rivals of the lords and the knights.

The French Revolution had entirely destroyed the wealth of the nobility,

And had enormously increased that of the middle class or bourgeoisie.

The years of unrest which followed the Great Revolution had offered many middle-class people a chance to get more than their share of this world's goods.

The estates of the church had been confiscated by the French Convention,

And had been sold at auction.

There had been a terrific amount of graft.

Land speculators had stolen thousands of square miles of valuable land,

And,

During the Napoleonic Wars,

They had used their capital to profiteer in grain and gunpowder,

And now they possessed more wealth than they needed for the actual expenses of their households.

And they could afford to build themselves factories and to hire men and women to work the machines.

This caused a very abrupt change in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Within a few years,

Many cities doubled the number of their inhabitants,

And the old civic center,

Which had been the real home of the citizens,

Was surrounded with ugly and cheaply built suburbs,

Where the workmen slept after their eleven or twelve hours,

Or thirteen hours,

Spent in the factories,

And from where they returned to the factory as soon as the whistle blew.

Far and wide through the countryside there was talk of the fabulous slums of money that could be made in the towns.

The peasant boy,

Accustomed to a life in the open,

Went to the city.

He rapidly lost his old health amidst the smoke and dust and dirt of those early and badly ventilated workshops.

And the end,

Very often,

Was death in the poorhouse or in the hospital.

Of course,

The change from the farm to the factory on the part of so many people was not accomplished without a certain amount of opposition.

Since one engine could do as much work as a hundred men,

The ninety-nine others who were thrown out of employment did not like it.

Frequently,

They attacked the factory buildings and set fire to the machines,

But insurance companies had been organized as early as the seventeenth century,

And as a rule,

The owners were well protected against loss.

Even newer and better machines were installed.

The factory was surrounded with a high wall,

And then there was an end to the rioting.

The ancient guilds could not possibly survive in this new world of steam and iron.

They went out of existence,

And then the workmen tried to organize regular labor unions.

But the factory owners,

Who through their wealth could exercise great influence upon the politicians of the different countries,

Went to the legislature and had laws passed which forbade the forming of such trade unions,

Because they interfered with the liberty of action of the working man.

Please do not think that the good members of Parliament who passed these laws were wicked tyrants.

They were the true sons of the revolutionary period,

When everybody talked of liberty,

And when people often killed their neighbors,

Because they were not quite as liberty-loving as they ought to have been.

Since liberty was the foremost virtue of man,

It was not right that labor unions should dictate to their members the hours during which they could work,

And the wages which they must demand.

The workman must at all times be free to sell his services in the open market,

And the employer must be equally free to conduct his business as he saw fit.

The days of the mercantile system,

When the state had regulated the industrial life of the entire community,

Were coming to an end.

The new idea of freedom insisted that the state stand entirely aside and let commerce stake its course.

The last half of the eighteenth century had not merely been a time of intellectual and political doubt,

But the old economic ideas,

Too,

Had been replaced by new ones,

Which better suited the need of the hour.

Several years before the French Revolution,

Turgot,

Who had been one of the unsuccessful ministers of finance of Louis XVI,

Had preached the novel doctrine of economic liberty.

Turgot lived in a country which had suffered from too much red tape,

Too many regulations,

Too many officials trying to enforce too many laws.

Remove this official supervision,

He wrote,

Let the people do as they please,

And everything will be all right.

Soon his famous advice of Le Se Faire became the battle cry around which the economists of that period rallied.

At the same time in England,

Adam Smith was working on his mighty volumes on the wealth of nations,

Which made another plea for liberty and the natural rights of trade.

Thirty years later,

After the fall of Napoleon,

When the reactionary powers of Europe had gained their victory at Vienna,

That same freedom which was denied to the people in their political relations was forced upon them in their industrial life.

The general use of machinery,

As I have said at the beginning of this chapter,

Proved to be of great advantage to the state.

Wealth increased rapidly.

The machine made it possible for a single country like England to carry all the burdens of the great Napoleonic wars.

The capitalists,

The people who provided the money with which machines were bought,

Reaped enormous profits.

They became ambitious and began to take an interest in politics.

They tried to compete with the landed aristocracy,

Which still exercised great influence upon the government of most European countries.

In England,

Where the members of parliament were still elected according to a royal decree of the year 1265,

And where a large number of recently created industrial centers were without representation,

They brought about the passing of the Reform Bill of the year 1882,

Which changed the electoral system and gave the class of the factory owners more influence upon the legislative body.

This,

However,

Caused great discontent among the millions of factory workers,

Who were left without any voice in the government.

They too began an agitation for the right to vote.

They put their demands down in a document which came to be known as the People's Charter.

The debates about this charter grew more and more violent.

They had not yet come to an end when the revolutions of the year 1848 broke.

Frightened by the threat of a new outbreak,

Or Jacobinism,

And violence,

The English government placed the Duke of Wellington,

Who was now in his 80th year,

At the head of the army and called for volunteers.

London was placed in a state of siege and preparations were made to suppress the coming revolution.

But the Chartist movement killed itself through bad leadership and no acts of violence took place.

The new class of wealthy factory owners – I dislike the word bourgeoisie,

Which has been used to death by the apostles of a new social order – slowly increased its hold upon the government,

And the conditions of industrial life in the large cities continued to transform vast acres of pasture and wheatland into dreary slums,

Which guard the approach of every modern European town.

EMANCIPATION The general introduction of machinery did not bring about the era of happiness and prosperity which had been predicted,

By the generation which saw the stagecoach replaced by the railroad.

Several remedies were suggested,

But none of these quite solved the problem.

In the year 1831,

Just before the passing of the first reformed Bill Jeremy Bentham,

The great English student of legislative methods and the most practical political reformer of that day,

Wrote to a friend,

The way to be comfortable is to make others comfortable.

The way to make others comfortable is to appear to love them.

The way to appear to love them is to love them in reality.

Jeremy was an honest man.

He said what he believed to be true.

His opinions were shared by thousands of his countrymen.

They felt responsible for the happiness of their lost fortunate neighbors,

And they tried their very best to help them.

And heaven knows it was time that something be done.

The ideal of economic freedom had been necessary in the old society where medieval restrictions laimed all industrial effort.

But this liberty of action,

Which had been the highest law of the land,

Had led to a terrible and frightful condition.

The hours in the factory were limited only by the physical strength of the workers.

As long as a woman could sit before her loom,

Without fainting from fatigue,

She was supposed to work.

Children of five and six were taken to the cotton mills,

To save them from the dangers of the street and the life of idleness.

A law had been passed which forced the children of paupers to go to work or be punished by being chained to their machines.

In return for their services,

They got enough bad food to keep them alive,

And a sort of pixie in which they could rest at night.

Soon they were so tired that they fell asleep at their job.

To keep them awake,

A foreman with a whip made the rounds and beat them on the knuckles when it was necessary to bring them back to their duties.

Of course,

Under these circumstances,

Thousands of little children died.

This was regrettable,

And the employers,

Who after all were human beings and not without a heart,

Sincerely wished that they could abolish child labor.

But since man was free,

It followed that children were free too.

Besides,

If Mr.

Jones had tried to work his factory without the use of children of five and six,

His rival Mr.

Stone would have hired an extra supply of little boys,

And Jones would have been forced into bankruptcy.

It was therefore impossible for Jones to do without child labor,

Until such time as an act of Parliament should forbid it for all employers.

But as Parliament was no longer dominated by the old-landed aristocracy,

But was under control of the representatives from the industrial centers,

And as long as the law did not allow workmen to combine in labor unions,

Very little was accomplished.

Of course,

The intelligent and decent people of that time were not blind to these terrible conditions.

They were just helpless.

Machinery had conquered the world by surprise,

And it took a great many years and the efforts of thousands of noble men and women to make the machine what it ought to be—man's servant,

Not his master.

Curiously enough,

The first attack upon the outrageous system of employment,

Which was then common in all parts of the world,

Was made on behalf of the black slaves of Africa and America.

Slavery had been introduced into the American continent by the Spaniards.

They had tried to use the Indians as laborers in the fields and in the mines.

But the Indians,

When taken away from a life in the open,

Had lain down and died,

And to save them from extinction,

A kind-hearted priest had suggested that black people be brought from Africa to do the work.

The black people were strong and could withstand rough treatment.

Besides,

Association with a white man would give them a chance to learn Christianity,

And in this way,

They would be able to save their souls,

And so,

From every possible point of view,

It would be an excellent arrangement for both the kindly white man and for his ignorant black brother.

But with the introduction of machinery,

There had been a greater demand for cotton,

And the black people were forced to work harder than ever before,

And they too,

Like the Indians,

Began to die under the treatment which they received at the hand of the overseers.

Stories of incredible cruelty constantly found their way to Europe,

And in all countries,

Men and women began to agitate for the abolition of slavery.

In England,

William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay organized a society for the suppression of slavery.

First of all,

They got a law passed which made slave trading illegal.

And after the year 1840,

There was not a single slave in any of the British colonies.

The revolution of 1848 put an end to slavery in the French possessions.

The Portuguese passed a law in the year 1858 which promised all slaves their liberty in twenty years from date.

The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863,

And in the same year,

Tsar Alexander II returned to his serfs that liberty which had been taken away from them more than two centuries before.

In the United States of America,

The question led to grave difficulties and a prolonged war.

Although the Declaration of Independence had laid down the principle that all men were created free and equal,

An exception had been made for those men and women whose skins were dark and who worked on the plantations of the southern states.

As time went on,

The dislike of the people of the North for the institution of slavery increased,

And they made no secret of their feelings.

The Southerners,

However,

Claimed that they would not grow their cotton without slave labor,

And for almost fifty years,

A mighty debate raged in both the Congress and the Senate.

The North remained obturate,

And the South would not give in.

When it appeared impossible to reach a compromise,

The southern states threatened to leave the Union.

It was a most dangerous point in history of the Union.

Many things might have happened.

That they did not happen was the work of a very great and very good man.

On the 6th of November of the year 1860,

Abraham Lincoln,

An Illinois lawyer and the man who made his own intellectual fortune,

Had been elected president by the Republicans who were very strong in the anti-slavery states.

He knew the evils of human bondage at first hand,

And his shrewd common sense told him that there was no room on the northern continents for two rival nations.

When a number of southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America,

Lincoln accepted the challenge.

The northern states were called upon for volunteers.

Tens of thousands of young men responded with eager enthusiasm,

And there followed four years of bitter civil war.

The South,

Better prepared and following the brilliant leadership of Lee and Jackson,

Repeatedly defeated the armies of the North.

Then,

The economic strength of New England and the West began to tell.

An unknown officer,

By the name of Grant,

Arose from obscurity and became the Charles Martel of the Great Slave War.

Without interruption,

He hammered his mighty blows upon the crumbling defenses of the South.

Early in the year 1863,

President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation,

Which set all slaves free.

In April of the year 1865,

Lee surrendered the last of his brave armies at Appomattox.

A few days later,

President Lincoln was murdered by a lunatic,

But his work was done.

With the exception of Cuba,

Which was still under Spanish domination,

Slavery had come to an end in every part of the civilized world.

But while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount of liberty,

The free workman of Europe did not fare quite so well.

Indeed,

It is a matter of surprise to many contemporary writers and observers that the masses of workmen,

The so-called proletariat,

Did not die out from sheer misery.

They lived in dirty houses situated in miserable parts of the slums.

They ate bad food.

They received just enough schooling to fit them for their tasks.

In case of death or an accident,

Their families were not provided for,

But the brewery and distillery interests encouraged them to forget their woes by offering them unlimited quantities of whiskey and gin at very cheap rates.

The enormous improvement which has taken place since the 30s and the 40s of the last century is not due to the effort of a single man.

The best brains of two generations devoted themselves to the task of saving the world from the disastrous results of the all-too-sudden introduction of machinery.

They did not try to destroy the capitalistic system.

This would have been very foolish,

For the accumulated wealth of other people,

When intelligently used,

May be of very great benefit to all mankind.

But they tried to combat the notion that true equality can exist between the man who has wealth and owns the factories,

And can close their doors at will without the risk of going hungry,

And the laborer,

Who must take whatever job is offered,

At whatever wage he can get,

Or face the risk of starvation for himself,

His wife,

And his children.

They endeavored to introduce a number of laws which regulated the relations between the factory owners and the factory workers.

In this,

The reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries.

Today the majority of the laborers are well protected.

Their hours are being reduced to the excellent average of eight,

And their children are sent to the schools instead of to the mine pit,

And to the carding room of the cotton mills.

But there were other men who also contemplated the sight of all the belching smokestacks,

Who heard the rattle of the railroad trains,

Who saw the storehouses filled with a surplus of all sorts of materials,

And who wondered to what ultimate goal this tremendous activity would lead in the years to come.

They remembered that a human race had lived for hundreds of thousands of years without commercial and industrial competition.

Could they change the existing order of things and do away with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human happiness to profits?

This idea,

This vague hope for a better day,

Was not restricted to a single country.

In England,

Robert Owen,

The owner of many cotton mills,

Established a so-called Socialistic Community,

Which was a success.

But when he died,

The prosperity of New Lanark came to an end.

And an attempt of Louis Blanc,

A French journalist,

To establish social workshops all over France fared no better.

Indeed,

The increasing number of Socialistic writers soon began to see that little individual communities which remained outside of the regular industrial life would never be able to accomplish anything at all.

It was necessary to study the fundamental principles underlying the whole industrial and capitalistic society before useful remedies could be suggested.

The practical socialists like Robert Owen and Louis Blanc and François Fournier were succeeded by theoretical students of socialism like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Of these two,

Marx is the best known.

He was a very brilliant Jew whose family had for a long time lived in Germany.

He had heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he began to interest himself in questions of labors and wages and unemployment.

But his liberal views made him very unpopular with the police authorities of Germany and he was forced to flee to Brussels and then to London,

Where he lived a poor and shabby life as the correspondent of the New York Tribune.

No one thus far had paid much attention to his books on economic subjects.

But in the year 1864 he organized the first International Association of Working Men and three years later,

In 1867,

He published the first volume of his well-known treatise called Capital.

Marx believed that all history was a long struggle between those who have and those who don't have.

The introduction and general use of machinery had created a new class in society,

That of the capitalists,

Who used their surplus wealth to buy the tools,

Which were then used by the laborers to produce still more wealth,

Which was again used to build more factories,

And so on,

Until the end of time.

Meanwhile,

According to Marx,

The third estate,

The bourgeoisie,

Was growing richer and richer and the fourth estate,

The proletariat,

Was growing poorer and poorer,

And he predicted that in the end,

One man would possess all the wealth of the world,

While the others would be his employees and dependent upon his goodwill.

To prevent such a state of affairs,

Marx advised working men of all countries to unite and to fight for a number of political and economic measures,

Which he had enumerated in a manifesto in the year 1848,

The year of the last great European revolution.

These views,

Of course,

Were very unpopular with the governments of Europe.

Many countries,

Especially Prussia,

Passed severe laws against the socialists and policemen were ordered to break up the socialist meetings and to arrest the speakers.

But that sort of persecution never does any good.

Martyrs are the best possible advertisement for unpopular causes.

In Europe,

The number of socialists steadily increased and it was soon clear that the socialists did not contemplate a violent revolution,

But were using their increasing power in the different parliaments to promote the interests of the laboring classes.

Socialists were even called upon to act as cabinet ministers,

And they cooperated with progressive Catholics and Protestants,

To undo the damage that had been caused by the industrial revolution,

And to bring about a fairer division of the many benefits which had followed the introduction of machinery and the increased production of wealth.