Industrial freedom. [volume] (Edison, Wash.) 1898-1???, 1898-08-06
This is What You Are Willing to
Continue.

decreased one-half. This trend of
capital into greater aggregations is
! not caused by exceptional greed or
cunning of certain individuals, but
by obedience to natural laws of econo-
my. In trade centers, where room is
necessarily an element of economy,
department store occupying but lit
tie more frontage and ground than
an ordinary store, by means of its va
rious departments, properly ordered
and adjusted into a perfect system,
and its skillfully planned apparatus,
such as elevators, carriers, etc,
serves as many buyers. and handles
as large a quantity of goods as twenty
ordinary ones.
Nor is this the only saving. The
buyer finds at hand what he would
otherwise have to visit different shops,
some of them many blocks apart, to
obtain. Thus we see that department
stores are following natural laws of
economy, and it is these laws which
enable them to succeed. But that
one such store may succeed it must
| invade half a dozen different lines of
trade, and perhaps dozen stores in
each line have been displaced-at
| least twice that number have been
crippled. This process of lessening
the number of individual owners and
controllers of wealth is going on, not
only in the retail trade, but in every
line of industry where cooperation
of labor is employed.
Lumber syndicates are absorbing
the entire industries of numbering
districts. Meat supply companies are
now supplying the market which it
formerly required thousand indie
pendent shops to supply. The great
sugar trust has absorbed the entire
sugar refining industry of the coun-
try. Great syndicates and capitalists
have obtained control of the numer-
Gus lines of railways, and consolida
ted them into few great systems.
This ACKNOWLEDGEMENT is not the result
of exceptional greed or superior
financial ability, but is the product of
the law of natural economy.
The question with each one into
whose hands great aggregations of
wealth have passed has been, Shall
| succeed or allow someone else to do
so?" Therefore instead of those men
necessarily being endowed with rare
greed or avarice, they would have to
be less selfish than the average man
in business life to adopt a course
greatly differing from the usual one.
They are but the obedient instru-
ments of law which must always be
obeyed.
1t was this law of economy which
first produced labor-saving machinery
and is bringing nearer to perfection,
and thereby uniting the many isola-
ted integral parts into a simple and
harmonious system. And however
selfish the motives. or regard
less of public veal the means
employed by those instruments in
obeying this law, the real ends
reached are the lessening of human
toll, or increasing the fruits of toll,
and preparing appliances by which
these fruits can be placed in surer
and easier reach of all. But here the
function of these instruments ends.
They cannot supply the means by
which these fruits are reached. The
means they supply is the money paid
for labor, which it is their Office toles-
sen in proportion to what it pro-
duces.
So while production is in the hands
of those whose motives are individual
gain, the benefit of this decrease of
labor accrues to them and not to the
laborer. Those who still work work
as hard, and with little or no greater
reward than before; and as produce
ton requires less and less labor in
proportion to that produced, some
are forced into idleness. It is this
which has created and is constantly
swelling the army of unemployed
men, and | suppose it is generally
conceded that with the present trend,
this army will eventually become so
great that it will one way or another
destroy the existing order.
A government can exist with a GER
tain number of its citizens annually
becoming Migrants: but there is a
limit beyond which if the percentage
of Migrants pass, government will
cease and anarchy will take its place.
This army of unemployed is by far
the most serious question that ever
confronted us as a nation, and it is
constantly becoming more serious.
The evil caused by enforced idleness
cannot be reckoned by the number
actually suffering, or by the amount
of such suffering.
60 oraat = ,,r,,, la,. q. E 49,. ...a... -.