The labor advocate. [volume] (Cincinnati, Ohio) 1912-1937, 1916-12-30
THE MENACE OF SWOLLEN
FORTUNES

III ENIlSlo-odNOn nations, or nations
founded upon Anglo Saxon traditions.
customs and laws, the state is made for
man, not man for the state. In Teu-
tonic countries man is subordinatcd to
the state. Both political regimes have
their advantages and disadvantages. In
England and the United States, where
individualsm has been carried to its ex-
treme, and the doctrine of personal lib
erty raised to the nth point, we have a
society composed of groups of highly
efhcient units, supermen, as it were, and
seethlng mass of half-trained medi-
ocre people who, permit themselves to
be exploited by the few because they
can not seemingly help themselves. More
and more wealth tends to concentrate
itself into, giant combinations, and as
the economic power of the magnate
class has grown, so also has its political
power developed. AS w. ]. Client, a
writer on economies, has said "The
history OF modern democracy is the rec
ord OF more or less sustained struggle
to extend and improve the machinery
OF popular rule in order to check the in
creasing eXactons of a dominant eco
nomlc class" There is truth in this
statement. Most of the social unrest
we see in this country is due to the
rapid and enormous accumulation of
money and natural resources in the
hands of the few, to the detriment of
the many; and the baneful political in
'terterence of combinations of capital
in the affairs of the nation. The Ameri-
can workman is a liberty-lovng indi-
vidual full of initiative and strength,
and would not exchange his condition
with the proletarian of Continental Eu-
rope, and yet he looks with dismav at
his shrinking income and the sad pros
pect OF old age when he can no longer
labor. The benevolent paternalism of
Germany makes provision for the old
age of its working class. If wages are
smaller, the certainties of life are
larger, and that, perhaps, explains the
decrease of emigration from the Ger
man Empire to the United States dur
ing the last decade.
But wages have lessened in America
Prof. Scott Nearing has computed sta
tistics showing that three-quarters Of
the adult males and twentieths
of the adult females employed in in
dustries located east of the Rocky
Mountains and north of Mason and
DiXon's line receive less than 5000 a
year, whereas an income of less than
$500 year is declared by social work
ers not to permit of a decent standard
of living. We have with us continually
an unemployment problem" Machin-
cry is slowly but surely displacing the
skilled craftsman. Probably two thirds
of the men employed in the great steel
mills of the Middle West are unskiled
laborers. All these social forces are re-
ducing the masses to species of eco
nomic serfdom, Patriotism is apt to die
out in the breasts of men when con-
fronted with such conditions of life
We have heard workmen exclaim, when
told of a possible invasion of Mexico
to preserve American lives "What, send
my boys to shed their blood, and per
chance to die, defending the mining and
oil interests of Mr. A. and Mr.. b Not
on your life! Let the capitalists go to
the front and protect their silver mines.
their ranches, and their oil wells"
Mr.. Frank p Walsh. erstwhile chair
man of the U. S. Commission on In
dustrial Relations, says in recent
number of the independent: "The pos
session of an enormous fortune means
arbitrary power over the lives and des-
tinies. of other men. Nothing is clearer
than that the worlds striving for dem
ocracy is now expressing itself in the
economic field, even more than in the
political field, and we are fast coming
to realize that the forms of political
democracy avail nothing when the lives
of the many are controlled by the few
who WELD arbitrary economic power"
The New Age