Lyman Abbott

“ It does not demand that all labor shall receive equal wages, and all men possess equal wealth. It demands equity, not equality. It does not adopt as its own the motto of modern socialism: "From every man according to his ability; to every man according to his need." That is the motto of the church, not of the nation. It is the principle of benevolence, not of justice; and not benevolence but justice should be the basis of the state. But industrial democracy does demand, with Laveleye, "To each worker his produce, his entire produce, nothing but his produce." ”

“ The wealth of every millionaire comes from the resources of the land of which he has gotten control; or from natural forces, the chief grist of which falls into his meal bags; or from public franchises given by the state and created for the state; or from that general advantage which grows spontaneously out of the presence and power of a generally-diffused civilization and an increasing population. The least part of it is that which his own effort has created. The basis for a democracy of wealth is found in the fact that all wealth springs from the people. ”

“ To the men who bring them from their hiding places and make them of value to mankind? Then the forest belongs to the woodman, the coal mine to the operator, the prairie to the cultivator of the soil. Something might perhaps be said for each of these hypotheses; the one hypothesis that cannot easily be defended in the court of reason by any theory is the hypothesis on which we have in fact acted—that they belong of right to the strongest (or to the most grasping and unscrupulous) in a struggle, not for existence, but for wealth, luxury, and power. ”

“ God puts his muscles at the disposal of our brains. He is the genie of the lamp who has come to do our bidding; to be, as it were, our drudge and servant. His water courses grind our grist for us; his fire summons from the water its secret energy and puts at our service unestimated horse power to drive our machinery for us ”

“ The real origin of what men miscall our labor troubles is to be traced back to Luther. When men were taught that they had a right to think, the whole world of thought was opened to them; when they were taught that they had a right to govern themselves in the church, self-government, first in the state, and then in industry, followed as the day follows the dawn. In America, our churches, our politics, our school boards, are based on the competence of the people ”

“ Industrial democracy may be quite willing that the ratio of profit between brain worker and brawn worker, between captains of industry and privates of industry, be left to be determined in a free and open market by the law of demand and supply; but it insists, and will insist more and more strenuously, that the wealth which is not the product of individual labor shall not become individual property; that what is by its nature common wealth shall remain wealth common to all the people. ”

“ The wharfage of New York City, which with reckless lack of prevision we have allowed to become private property, is valuable solely because of the three million people who live on and about Manhattan Island. Every farmer in Illinois helps to enhance the value of the Illinois Central Railroad; every shopkeeper in New York adds to the value of every warehouse.
Thus it is clear that our wealth is in its source and origin a common wealth. Our system of exchange is a rude method of balancing values with one another. Possibly there may be no better one discoverable ”

“ But he will condemn the system which has to many workers given very much less than the entire produce of their labor, and to many others has given immensely more. Jay Gould commenced life with a mouse trap; after twenty-five years he displays securities worth $100,000,000. Who will claim that he has created this wealth by his industry? Part of it? Yes; but most of it our industrial system has enabled him to take from the public stores— from wealth of natural resources and of public highways that is the product of no man's labor and therefore of right the private property of no man. ”

“ My object is accomplished if I have succeeded in setting clearly before the reader the process of the evolution of industry—from slavery, or ownership of the laborer by the capitalist, to feudalism, or ownership by the capitalist of the land, with a lien on the laborer; from feudalism to individualism, or free competition, in an open market, of an almost wholly unorganized industry; from individualism to the wages system, or the organization of industry on oligarchic principles under captains of industry, responsible only to God and their own consciences ”

“ But the forces themselves are not private property; they belong to humanity. The very existence of our patent laws is public testimony to the truth that every such force is public property; private property only so far as the public chooses to relinquish its larger right for its own larger benefit. ”

“ Social transformations are not wrought by magic, but by patient labor and painfully slow processes of evolution. There would still be lazy folk who would rather live by begging than by industry; still inefficient folk who could live only by servitude to the more efficient. ”

“ The doctrine that it is to be used for the people, underlies the familiar doctrine of the New Testament that wealth is a trust, and the equally familiar doctrine of political economy that it must be active to be profitable. ”

“ A third source of national wealth has been in franchises created by the people for the public welfare, and transformed into private wealth through public neglect and private sagacity. The railroads of the United States are estimated as worth above eight thousand million dollars, about one half of which is represented by stock. What gives them their value? It is not the road bed, the iron or steel rails, the stations and surrounding grounds; it is that the railroads are the public highways. Formerly our public highways afforded poor facilities for locomotion, but they were free ”

“ Industrial democracy carries this evolution one stage further. It is the necessary corollary of religious and political democracy. If the people are competent to govern an empire, they are competent to govern a cotton mill; if they can select servants to administer a treasury department, they can choose servants to carry on banking; if they can conduct a gigantic civil war to a fortunate conclusion, they can conduct civil industries with successful results; if they can select their own captains for a few years of military service, they can choose their own captains of industry. ”

“ The whole labor movement, with its organizations of workingmen, its labor legislation, its strikes and boycotts, its brotherhood of industry, its demand for shorter hours and larger wages, its rude and sometimes barbaric attempts to exercise control over industrial enterprises in which it has no capital invested, its attempts at profit-sharing and cooperation, its proposed nationalization of land and of industries, is all a movement toward industrial democracy ”

“ The nation could well afford to pay liberally the men who invented the telegraph and created the railroad system. It could afford to pay well for poles and wires, for road bed and stations. If it choose to leave pole and wire, road bed and station under private control, it may certainly do so; whether that is wise or not is matter for further consideration. Here it must suffice to say that the wealth of both telegraph and railroad, of long inter-State lines and of short electric or horse-car lines, is due to the fact that they are indispensable means of intercommunication ”

“ We cannot permanently have a state based on democratic principles, and an industrial system based on oligarchical principles. We shall become, sooner or later, consistently democratic or consistently oligarchic. ”

“ The invention of steam, the spinning jenny, and the power loom, created a necessity for organized labor. Individualism gave place to combination, and combination created capitalism. I believe, and it is this faith which I wish to set before my readers in this article, that, as slavery gave place to serfdom and serfdom to the wages system, so in time the wages system will give place to industrial democracy.
What is industrial democracy? Aristotle divided government into three classes—government by the one, government by the few, government by the many. ”

“ But the doctrine that the common people are competent to administer wealth, will be received with the same sort of skepticism with which its predecessors in the evolution of democracy have been received. Democracy, the doctrine that the common people are better able to manage their own affairs than any one is to manage for them, is accepted by Protestantism in religion, by republicanism in politics, and by industrial democracy in industrialism. The Reformation assumes the capacity of men to answer each for himself the profoundest questions of life: Is there a God? ”

“ The just reformer will not condemn these makers of great fortunes. He may even commend their sagacity in discerning the opportunity, their forcefulness in seizing it, and their generosity in so using their advantage as to make the public real sharers in their wealth. ”

“ Priestcraft being repudiated, kingcraft follows. Democracy calls no man master and all men brethren; chooses its own leaders, who become, like the priests and prophets of the church, advisers, not rulers, servants, not masters. ”

“ With the individualist, he would leave each individual to a free contract in the open market; but, unlike the individualist, he would recognize the truth of the aphorism, "When combination is possible competition is impossible," and he would make unauthorized and undemocratic combinations impossible by promoting combinations of labor and capital upon democratic principles ”

“ There is a reason in justice, and a reason in expediency, why the nation should give a large measure of the first profits they yield to the men whose insight first discovers, whose wisdom first applies to useful service, these divine forces. ”

“ Industrial democracy means the recognition in private industries of Prof. Jevons's aphorism, that combinations should be perpendicular, not horizontal; that is, that there should be a combination of labor and capital in one organization, in competition with a similar combination of labor and capital in a rival organization, not a combination of all capital in battle array against a combination of all labor. ”

“ It is, indeed, the antipodes of democracy, for democracy assumes in men a competence for organization, political, educational, industrial. The one is founded upon a profound distrust of man, the other upon a profound faith in him. Industrial democracy is not nationalism or state socialism. It does not confound the functions of government and of industry ”

“ And it regards all priests and prophets as advisers, not rulers, servants, not masters, of the people. Republicanism follows Protestantism in the evolution of liberty. If man can settle for himself the problems of the kingdom of God, he can settle those of the kingdom of men. If he can solve the problems of eternity, he can solve those of time. ”

“ It therefore belongs of right to the people. For what are its sources? In twenty-five years the wealth of the nation is reported to have grown from fourteen billion to forty-four billion. Why? What is the secret of this marvelous growth of wealth? ”

“ Industrial democracy is not anarchism and does not tend toward it. Anarchism is the doctrine that government is an evil and should be abolished; the doctrine that "government is a necessary evil," pushed to its extreme by striking out the word necessary; an exaggeration of individualism ”

“ It means certainly, not a nationalization of all wealth, but such legislation as will preserve to the people the values which properly belong to the people—the mines and oil wells, the undeveloped land values, the forests, the great franchises, and the forces of nature given by our present patent laws too absolutely to the patentee, who is rarely the real discoverer or inventor. ”

“ With the socialist he would give to every man a share in the control of the world's industries, and, consequently, in their gains and losses; but, unlike the socialist, he would adjust both control and participation in the profits according to the measure of each man's contribution, not in the ratio of his need and in the inverse ratio of his contribution. ”

“ But organized injustice would disappear from our industrial organization; and with injustice would disappear dangerous, because reasonable, discontent, and the division into the two classes of the very rich and the very poor. Society would still exist in grades, but no longer in castes ”

“ We may create it by our own industry; that is, it may be the product of our labor. It may be given to us by some one who has created it by his industry, either as a free-will offering or in exchange for a product of our own ”

“ It means such reform of taxation as shall prevent the imposition of taxes on the many, to create a surplus in the treasury out of which to pay bonuses or to lend money to the few, whether the borrowers be manufacturers, railroads, ship-owners, sugar-growers, or farmers. ”

“ Shearman's estimate of the number of owners too low, but he writes: "It is quite certain that one per cent. of the families of America own as much as the remaining ninety-nine per cent."; and he adds that the concentration of wealth is worse in Great Britain. ”