The Colfax chronicle. [volume] (Colfax, Grant Parish, La.) 1877-1981, 1892-07-23
SINGLE TAX DEPARTMENT
Diagnosis Before Remedies.

plate outbreaks among the poor, with
sensational accounts of which the news
papers are often full, affords a curious
study. 1t is like the behavior of those
neighbors of Noah who thought the
deluge wouldn't be much of a shower
after ALL Here and there, however. a
note of warning is heard, and we have
seen nothing so eloquent as this from
the Detroit Journal:
"There are said to be $4,000 uner1-
ployed men in Chicago. In indianapolis
there are rioting and bloOdshed because
OF the strike of the street car employees
Nearly half a million of English miners
are about to strike to prevent reduc-
ton of wages. The miners of Pennsyl-
vania are paid barely enough to live
upon, and they must rent company
houses and trade at company
stores which rob them as
they please. The Pennsylvania miners
are practically the slaves of one
great corporation. In Spain they
are hunting down and CARROT
ing those who agitate for a
change of the social order. Anarchists
are using dynamite in Paris. The UNI
employed and starving of Austria are
turning to suicide for relief The
throne of the kaiser is being assailed by
furious mobs of hungry men who are
impudently told to emigrate if they are
not contented with things as they are
in Germany. Famine rules among 30,-
600, 600 of the peasants in Russia. In
all parts of the civilized world poverty
is taking on more hideous forms, or else
the newspapers are more active in pre-
senting the details of human misery.
Just above the unemployed and starv-
ing are thousands in the social scale for
whom one turn of the relentless wheel
would mean sharp hunger. BY the
greatest exertion in the midst of anx-
iety and fear of want they manage to
hang upon the edge of responsibility.
In some respects theirs is the deepest
suffering The whole world seems in
travail, and what is the remedy, If REM
edy there be?''
To this group of significant facts
might now be added the bread riots of
Dantzig, and then the story would not be
half told. Poverty is indeed the great
puzzle of the time. What is the remedy?
That is not the primary question. When
a doctor is called in cases of sickness,
the first question he puts to himself is
not What is the remedy?" but ''What
is the disease?" And that is the ques-
ton we must answer for society before
the efficacy Of any remedy can be con-
sidered.
What is the cause of this disease, of
which the symptoms are SO marked, so
general, and so constant, SO pitifnl, and
at times so menacing? 1t can not be
lack of wealth. Wealth is plentiful. But
more important than that, far more i'm
portant, the very men who suffer from
want are able to produce enough and
more than enough wealth to meet their
wants. And those who fear the turn
of the relentless Wheel" do they fear
lest they may not be able to keep on
producing wealth? No, that is not the
fear that hovers over them and darkens
their lives with its shadow. Neither
is inability to produce wealth that pre-
vents the others from lifting themselves
out of poverty. If we search for the
germ of disease in the incapacity of
men to produce what they need, we
shall search in vain. The labor power,
mental and physical, with which wealth
is made, and without which there would
be no wealth, we have in abundance.
In an army of hungry men there resides
all the labor power that is necessary to
supply all their wants.
| If lack of labor power is not the cause
of poverty, is it lack of willingness to
labor? As to those who fear the turn
of the relentless wheel, hat can not
be. they are now working and their
great anxiety is not that (hey may be
compelled to keep on working, but that
somehow they may be prevented from
working. And as to those who are
without work, is it not work that they
ask for? What did the bread rioters OF
Germany demand? Not bread, but
work. Not charity, but a chance to
trade the only thing they have, labor
power, for the products of other labor
power. There was no bread riot in
Berlin when the boom was on and
! building was brisk. lie must be a very
poor social doctor who, in the face OF
common and general facts which point
away from this explanation, insists
that poverty and the fear of poverty are
due to the Incidence of the poor.
| Is it not obvious that the real trouble
is lack of opportunity to work? But
why should there be any lack of oppo-
tunity to work when all who want are
willing to work in supplying want,
How can there be lack of work while
want exists? With demand for the pro
ducts of work, and ability and willing
ness to do work, why should any suffer.
Look little further. While all who
suffer are able and willing TO work, the
ability of each is limited to the produc
ton of only one kind of thing, or, a
best, of few kinds. Some can built
houses, some can contribute in various
ways to the production of food, some il
various WAYS to the production of cloth