Henry Demarest Lloyd

“ If we rose to the full execution of the first, simplest, and most pressing need of our times and put an end to all private use of public powers, we should still be confronted by monopolies existing simply as private property, as in coal-mines, oil lands.
It is not a verbal accident that science is the substance of the word conscience. We must know the right before we can do the right. When it comes to know the facts the human heart can no more endure monopoly than American slavery or Roman empire. The first step to a remedy is that the people care. ”

“ While all over the earth homes are brighter, knowledge is more easily got, and civilization forwarded, because of what his head has thought and his hands have done, he has retired to what is, in fact, a life of penal exile. He has been cut off from the darlings of his brain. Like the political prisoners of Siberia, he can eat and sleep and dress, but he cannot go into the world. His mind is at work there, in every factory and pipe line and lamp; but he must sit, unknown and unrewarded, in his pine cottage on unpaved Maurice Street, ploughed up in the prairies on the outskirts of Buffalo. ”

“ Never since time began have all the sons and daughters of men been all warm, and all filled, and all shod and roofed. Never yet have all the virgins, wise or foolish, been able to fill their lamps with oil.
The world, enriched by thousands of generations of toilers and thinkers, has reached a fertility which can give every human being a plenty undreamed of even in the Utopias. But between this plenty ripening on the boughs of our civilization and the people hungering for it step the "cornerers," the syndicates, trusts, combinations, with the cry of "over-production"—too much of everything. ”

“ Shall we buy cheap of Captain Kidd, and shut our ears to the agony that rustles in his silks? Shall we believe that Captain Kidd, who kills commerce by the act which enables him to sell at half-price, is a cheapener? Shall we preach and practise doctrines which make the Black Flag the emblem of success on the high seas of human interchange of service, and complain when we see mankind's argosies of hope and plenty shrink into private hoards of treasure, buried in selfish sands to be lost forever, even to cupidity? ”

“ The welfare of all is more than the welfare of the many, the few, or the one. If the few or the one are not fine enough to accept this truth from sentiment or conscience, they can find other reasons as convincing, though not as amiable. From the old régime of France, the slave-holders of the South, the death-rate of tyrants, the fear of their brothers which the rich and the great of to-day are printing on their faces, in fugitive-slave treaties with Russia, and in the frowning arsenals and armories building in our cities for "law and order," they can learn how to spell self-interest. ”

“ In itself the Toledo enterprise is not a big one, but it will prove an object-lesson for the whole country. It will show the open door through which people may pass from under the yoke of a most gigantic, unscrupulous, and odious monopoly. And it will be surprising if this does not extend beyond gas and ultimately cover oil. We are only on the verge of a revolution that is as sure to come as that which followed the throwing overboard of a lot of tea in Boston Harbor. Neither the power nor the vulgarity of capital can long rule the people. ”

“ Every community, said Pascal, is a man, and every man, said Plato, is a community. There is a new self-interest—that of the "man called million," as Mazzini named him—and with this social motive the other, which has so long had its own way, has now to reckon. Mankind has gone astray following a truth seen only partially, but coronated as a whole truth. Many civilizations must worship good men as gods and follow the divinity of one and another before civilization sees that these are only single stars in a firmament of humanity. ”

“ The forces and the wealth are new, and have been the opportunity of new men. Without restraints of culture, experience, the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank, these men, intoxicated, think they are the wave instead of the float, and that they have created the business which has created them. To them science is but a never-ending répertoire of investments stored up by nature for the syndicates, government but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers in squads, and a million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth written for them. ”

“ In the law, the highest product of civilization, this has long been a commonplace. The safety of the people is the supreme law. We are in travail to bring industry up to this. Our century of the caprice of the individual as the law-giver of the common toil, to employ or disemploy, to start or stop, to open or close, to compete or combine, has been the disorder of the school while the master slept. The happiness, self-interest, or individuality of the whole is not more sacred than that of each, but it is greater. ”

“ Our attempts at control, regulation, are but the agitations of the Gracchi, evidencing the wrong, but not rising to the cure. We are waiting for some genius of good who will generalize into one body of doctrine our partial truths of reform, and will help us live the generalization. Never was mankind, across all lines of race, creed, and institutions, more nearly one in discontent and restless consciousness of new powers and a new hope and purpose, never more widely agitated by influences leading in one direction, never more nearly a committee of the whole on the question of the day. ”

“ To be unawakened by this new voice is bad enough, but we shut our ears even against the old conscience.
We cannot deal with this unless we cleanse our hearts of all disordering rage. "The rarer action is in virtue rather than in vengeance." Our tyrants are our ideals incarnating themselves in men born to command. What these men are we have made them. All governments are representative governments; none of them more so than our government of industry. We go hopelessly astray if we seek the solution of our problems in the belief that our business rulers are worse men in kind than ourselves. ”

“ Its new wealth is too great for the old forms. The success and beauties of our old mutualities have made us ready for new mutualities. The wonder of to-day is the modern multiplication of products by the union of forces; the marvel of to-morrow will be the greater product which will follow when that which is co-operatively produced is co-operatively enjoyed. It is the spectacle of its concentration in the private fortunes of our day which reveals this wealth to its real makers—the whole people—and summons them to extend the manners and institutions of civilization to this new tribal relation. ”

“ That entirely modern social arrangement—the private ownership of public highways—has introduced a new weapon into business warfare which means universal dominion to him who will use it with an iron hand.
This weapon is the rebate, smokeless, noiseless, invisible, of extraordinary range, and the deadliest gun known to commercial warfare. It is not a lawful weapon. Like the explosive bullet, it is not recognized by the laws of war. It has to be used secretly. All the rates he got were a secret between himself and the railroads. "It has never been otherwise," testified one of the oil combination. ”

“ He had learned that "competition," "supply and demand," "eternal laws of trade," were catchwords as impotent in the markets to give individuals their rights, if unassociated, as the incantations of royalty and loyalty, and law and order, to save people from their king until they made themselves a People. Persons fail; only a People can get and keep freedom. This Rice had begun to learn from his failure to enforce single-handed rights which all the courts declared were his, but which no court could secure. ”

“ New York would begin to die to-morrow if it were not for Illinois and Dakota. We cannot afford a revulsion in the hearts by whose union locomotives run, mills grind, factories make. Practical men are speculating to-day on the possibility that our civilization may some afternoon be flashed away by the tick of a telegraph. All these co-operations can be scattered by a word of hate too many, and we left, with no one who knows how to make a plough or a match, a civilization cut off as by the Roman curse from food and fire. Less sensitive civilizations than ours have burst apart. ”

“ In nothing has liberty justified itself more thoroughly than in the resolute determination spreading among the American people to add industrial to political independence. It is the hope of the world that good has its effects as well as evil, and that on the whole, and in the long-run, the seed of the good will overgrow the evil. "Heaven has kindly given our blood a moral flow." Liberty breeds liberties, slavery breeds slaveries, but the liberties will be the strongest stock. ”

“ It was a matter that not only these three men were interested in, but every person that lived in the community. Competition would run along to a point where you could get the oils that you use in your families, to grease your wagons, and to burn in your houses, or for any other purpose, at a price that should give the manufacturer a fair profit, and at the lowest possible price. On the other hand, if you leave that open to these parties to regulate as they saw fit, having a monopoly of the market, then you rest upon the conscience of a corporation and put your faith in a soulless individual. ”

“ Civilization is the unceasing accretion of these social solutions. We fight out to an equilibrium, as in the abolition of human slavery; then upon this new level thus built up we enter upon the struggle for a new equilibrium, as now in the labor movement. The man for himself destroys himself and all men; only society can foster him and them.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is only the doctrine of self-interest writ large and made more dangerous by multitude. It is the self-interest of the majority, and this has written some of the unloveliest chapters of history. ”

“ A new liberty will put an end to pauperism and millionairism and the crimes and death-rate born of both wretchednesses, just as the liberty of politics and religion put an end to martyrs and tyrants. The new liberty is identical in principle and purpose with the other; it is made inevitable by them. Those who love the liberties already won must open the door to the new, unless they wish to see them all take flight together. There can be no single liberty. ”

“ It is for us to decide whether we will let it go on till it breaks down of itself, dragging down to die, as a savage dies of his vice, the civilization it has gripped with its hundred hands; or whether, while we are still young, still virtuous, we will break it down, self-consciously, as the civilized man, reforming, crushes down the evil. If we cannot find a remedy, all that we love in the word America must die. ”

“ We are to apply the co-operative methods of the post-office and the public school to many other common toils, to all toils in which private sovereignty has become through monopoly a despotism over the public, and to all in which the association of the people and the organization of processes have been so far developed that the profit-hunting Captain of Industry may be replaced by the public-serving Captain of Industry. But we are to have much more. We are to have a private life of a new beauty, of which these are to be merely the mechanical exhibitions on the side of politics. ”

“ The more perfect monopoly makes itself the more does it bring into strong lights the greatest fact of our industry, of far more permanent value than the greed which has for the moment made itself the cynosure of all eyes. It makes this fair world more fair to consider the loyalties, intelligences, docilities of the multitudes who are guarding, developing, operating with the faithfulness of brothers and the keen interest of owners properties and industries in which brotherhood is not known and their title is not more than a tenancy at will. ”

“ No farm gets its plough from the cross-roads blacksmith, and no one in the chilled-steel factory knows the whole of the plough. The life of Boston hangs on a procession of reciprocities which must move, as steadily and sweetly as the roll of the planets, between its bakeries, the Falls of St. Anthony, and the valley of the Red River. Never was there a social machinery so delicate. Only on terms of love and justice can men endure contact so close.
The break-down of all other civilizations has been a slow decay. It took the Northerners hundreds of years to march to the Tiber. ”

“ New freedoms cannot be operated through the old forms of slavery. The ideals of Washington and Hamilton and Adams could not breathe under kingly rule. Idle to say they might. Under the mutual dependence of the inside and outside of things their change has all through history always been dual. Change of heart is no more redemption than hunger is dinner. We must have honesty, love, justice in the heart of the business world, but for these we must also have the forms which will fit them. ”

“ Generals were, merchants are, brothers will be, humanity's representative men.
There is to be a people in industry, as in government. The same rising genius of democracy which discovered that mankind did not co-operate in the State to provide a few with palaces and king's-evil, is disclosing that men do not co-operate in trade for any other purpose than to mobilize the labor of all for the benefit of all, and that the only true guidance comes from those who are led, and the only valid titles from those who create. Very wide must be the emancipation of this new self-interest. ”