Richard Michaelis

“ I would have proposed a tax of one percent on all property inherited by a single person, amounting upward to $10,000. An inheritance amounting to $20,000 I would have taxed two percent, $30,000 three percent, $100,000 ten percent, $200,000 twenty percent, $500,000 fifty percent. If anybody left a fortune yielding a larger sum than $250,000 to each heir, the surplus should have been considered as an income to humanity, the national, state and local governments sharing therein in a just proportion”. ”

“ The fact that your workingmen did not possess sufficient enterprise, mental discipline and independence, to establish mutual producing associations, has driven humanity into communism. That this damnable form of society is a failure is a matter of course. When humanity was at so low a standard that shoemakers had not spunk or smartness enough to start and run the shoeshops on a co-operative basis, and tailors could not manage tailorshops on a similar plan, it was simply impossible to make successful an organization which had the power to regulate all production and all consumption. ”

“ It is true that competition has been and is now abused, but every institution is subject to abuse and the misuse of a thing does not demonstrate that the thing in itself is wrong. Nobody can deny that competition during the centuries of Christian civilization has developed the brains and muscles of the human race and that the continuous best efforts of humanity, stimulated by competition during these many centuries, have lifted our race to a standard where the mode of living of common laborers is more comfortable and desirable than the everyday existence of the Kings of which Homer sings. ”

“ I pictured the consequences of this insane and annihilating competition as a constant wear on the brains and bodies of the past generation, intensified by the permanent fear of poverty. The spectre of uncertainty walked constantly beside the man of the nineteenth century, sat at his table and went to bed with him, even whispering in his ears: “Do your work ever so well, rise early and toil till late, rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security.18 Rich you may be now and still come to poverty at last. ”

“ Every member of the industrial army knows that ability and industry alone will secure a desirable position only in exceptional cases, if at all; that political influence is the almighty factor in every affair of our lives, and that the industrial army is governed by officers whom the worker must try to please, by personal adulation, by presents, by a slavish devotion to the orders of the superiors, and indirectly by inducing all the members of his family and all his friends to support every measure and every member of the administration. ”

“ Did competition really demand, that one should defraud his neighbor, grind his laborers, sweat his debtors and snatch the bread from others? Were the majority of the men of your time swindlers and Shylocks? Were the laborers all slaves, working each day until completely exhausted? I remember distinctly, that the wage-workers of your time struck frequently for eight hours, declining to work nine or ten hours per diem for good pay. ”

“ When two hundred and thirty years ago England tried to levy a tax upon tea, the Americans rose up in arms, because they would not permit the government to collect a tax unless it granted to the Americans representation in the parliament which imposed this tax. To-day the government controls the labor of all men and women for twenty-four long years, without giving the flower of the American people a chance to cast a vote, which shall shape the form and policy of the government in conformity with the wishes of those who produce the wealth of the nation. ”

“ My studies had never been directed to questions of national economy. I had never thought of comparing the merits of competition with those of communism. When Dr. Leete had explained in his positive and still fascinating manner the new order of things I had hardly noticed that it was based on communistic principles. I thought humanity had reached at last the millennium, and when Dr. Leete stated that his easy and even luxurious way of living represented the average style of the people of the twentieth century, I had no doubt that everybody was satisfied with the new order of things. ”

“ You can base the demand for the equal division of the products of labor on that principle of equality only, and if we are all equal, then there is no reason why we should live in houses of different architecture, why we should wear different clothing, why we should have a variety of meals, why one man should not have just as good a right to the love of a certain girl as any and all other men, and why one girl should not have just as fair a claim to the love of any man she may select as any other girl has. ”

“ The lobby in the halls of Congress in your days is described as a bad crowd, but to compare it with the hustlers of our days, would be like comparing a Sunday school with pandemonium. Millions of people who desire better work or promotion, and who have nothing to hope from the influence they are able to command at home, write to the hustlers at Washington to secure their services. ”

“ I do not care to endorse all the complaints, our farmers make. They may lack foundation to a great extent, but they prove the existence of a deep dissatisfaction, and such charges could simply not be made if our administration were not clothed with power hitherto unheard of in the history of mankind. It is the system itself that breeds all these evils”. ”

“ But we have in the name of equality and justice established the “right” to rob an industrious man of a part of the product of his labor and give this booty to his lazy comrade. If the workingmen of the nineteenth century, instead of sacrificing enormous sums in strikes, had organized one trade after another into co-operative associations, they would have solved what they styled the social questions with comparatively little trouble. ”

“ I simply maintain, that the principles of competition under which society worked a hundred years ago was far superior to the communism, under which we are laboring. The unjust profits of the employers, of which you complain, could have been easily done away with, if your workmen had organized themselves into co-partnerships or associations. There was no law a hundred years ago to prevent a dozen shoemakers renting a loft with steam power, purchasing a few sewing and other machines and making boots and shoes at their own risk. ”

“ I notice that you are not giving the present system of society much credit for anything done under its auspices. Don’t you think that the abolition of absolute poverty, the elevation of all men and women to a standard at least nearly equal, is a great and priceless gain to humanity? ”

“ I asked, painfully surprised to see that wire-pulling and corruption were quite as prevalent as they had been 113 years ago. “Is not the income a credit-card affords sufficient to support people?”
“You can never satisfy the people”, Forest said. “Nowadays the clever and industrious part of the people feel that they are robbed for the benefit of their lazy, awkward or stupid comrades, that they have to submit to the impudence and blackmailing of some of their superiors, or else undergo humiliating treatment. ”

“ Bellamy and his followers are quite sure that they can establish the millennium, let them try it, like the communists of the Amana Society who have started a community in the state of Iowa on a religious basis. There are many thousands of acres of good government lands left, where Mr. Bellamy and his friends may settle and show the world what they can do! But they should not ask the people of the United States to break up their present form of government and state of society, before they have given their theories a trial and proved that their calculations are correct. ”

“ We have bureaus for each industry and they are excellent examples of the most thorough manner in which a government can waste human labor. The entire field of productive and constructive industry is, as you know, divided into ten great departments, each representing a group of allied industries, each particular industry being in turn represented by a subordinate bureau, which has a complete record of the plant and force under its control, as well as of the present product and the means of increasing it. ”

“ You employed, therefore, 2,173,184 more persons than your whole population between the ages of 21 to 45 numbered, and this calculation figures, that all the people of that age are really active. You must consider the fact, that many of our population who are of the age, when they ought to do work in the industrial army, are excused from service for various reasons, for instance: permanently sick people, the weak-minded, cripples, mothers of babies, etc. You must, therefore, recognize that your people furnished a much stronger working-force than does our generation. ”

“ Every seeker after truth and reform is entitled to recognition, even if his ways and methods are not ours. Mr. Edward Bellamy’s book: “Looking Backward”, is an effort to improve the lot of mankind and therefore commendable, but his reform proposition, stripped of its fine coloring, is nothing but communism, a state of society, which has proved a failure whenever established without a religious basis and which without such basis is en vogue today only among some barbarous and cannibal tribes. ”

“ Nearly all our good qualities can be traced back to the influence the unfathomable love and patience of the mother, in her efforts to make her beloved child good and true, have exercised upon our minds and hearts. Nearly all great men had good mothers. There is nothing on earth that could compensate a child for the loss of its mother, or that could indemnify humanity for the loss of the beneficial influence mothers have on the growing generation”.
“Do you suppose that your Radicals will ever have power enough to dethrone the mothers and to abolish matrimonial life”? ”

“ As characteristic of the spirit of the civilization of the nineteenth century, I described the insane competition, where a man in a foul fight must “cheat, overreach, supplant, defraud, buy below worth and sell above, break down the business by which his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men to buy what they ought not and to sell what they should not, grind their laborers, sweat their debtors, cozen their creditors,” [1] in order to be able to support those dependent on him. ”

“ We take our meals in great steam-feeding establishments, and if our Radicals, who are in fact the logical communists, are victorious, we will all live together in lodging houses accommodating thousands of people. Marriage will be abolished, together with religion and all personal property; free love will be proclaimed and we will live together like a flock of rabbits. The natural sense of propriety which is a distinguishing quality of the finer sex, fortunately prevents most of our women and girls becoming victims of the low and degrading theories of communism. ”

“ And I am inclined to believe that by having the cooking done in the public eating houses, a great deal of material is squandered that would be saved in a private house. Besides, the public cooking houses have to prepare a large bill of fare, and there is, as a matter of course, a great deal left over that can not be used afterwards.—Therefore, the women who are members of the industrial army find actually very little time to do any work besides the labor connected with housekeeping, and the majority of them would rather do the cooking at home. ”

“ Consider, that these people were stimulated by competition, that they desired to establish themselves on an independent basis, that they put forth their best efforts, in order to secure a life free from care during their old age, and that, therefore, the years of productive labor of each individual were much longer than they are at present, and that the stimulus to succeed was a potent fact in obtaining more and better work than we can secure nowadays. ”

“ At the end of the nineteenth century, many honest, liberal and fair-minded people, whom nobody could fairly class as know-nothings, were of the opinion that the United States had all the foreign elements the country could assimilate, and that the rest of the public lands should be preserved for the children of the people living in the Union, in the year of our Lord 1887. ”

“ Forest assented. “Still, I think that such a law would have served the best interest of both the children of rich parents and humanity in general. Nothing but a law of this kind could have stemmed the tide of communism and anarchy. A child inheriting $250,000 ought to be satisfied with his lot and ought to let the surplus go to the defraying of the expenses of the government. By sacrificing a part of their enormous fortunes, the heirs would have saved the rest, and would have weakened the communistic tendency of your days. ”

“ But the trouble with our political and social system is, that it is bound to breed not only favoritism, but also corruption on the largest scale. One hundred and thirteen years ago, the men at the head of the National Government or those who were influential with them were also sometimes filling places, where for little work a good salary was paid, with unworthy women and men, but such sinecures were comparatively few and far between. ”