LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. Purchased by the Hamill Missionary Fund. Division . f. t+as'h- Section. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/newworldoflaborOOeddy THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR BY APR 19 1924 A v" SHERWOOD EDDY Author of “Toeing the Crisis 99 “Everybody's World, 9 * etc . NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR. Ill PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS PAGE Foreword . ... . ... . . . vii CHAPTER I Industrial China.13 II The New Japan.37 III India’s Industrial Revolution.60 IV The Reconstruction of Russia.81 V The Evolution of Labor in the West . . . 109 VI The British Labor Movement. 130 VII Labor in Europe.149 VIII American Labor Problems.174 IX The Challenge of a New World of Labor . 197 FOREWORD On the present trip around the world during 1922 and 1923 the writer endeavored to make a study of the indus¬ trial situation and of conditions of labor in the principal countries visited. These included China, Japan and India in the Far East, Germany and the Ruhr, France, Italy and Great Britain in Europe, and finally Russia as the storm center of the labor world. However we may interpret the fact, the war seems to have marked the close of an epoch. Whether for better or for worse, we are in the midst of a period that will witness the birth of a “New World of Labor.” In order to make a study of the labor situation that has arisen since the war, the writer sought to secure an industrial expert to make the investigation but failed in the case of three successive men who had hoped to make this tour of inspection. He was finally compelled to undertake it alone. He was painfully conscious, however, of not being technically qualified for such a task. Six months before the trip was undertaken a somewhat exhaustive questionnaire on the industrial situation was sent in advance to representatives in each country, and information was gathered before our arrival. During the visit we endeavored to supplement the documentary evidence by inspection of factories, interviews with gov¬ ernment officials, labor leaders, employers and others conversant with the labor situation. The writer’s thanks are due to many friends for furnish¬ ing industrial information, for reading portions of the • • Vll Vlll FOREWORD manuscript and for criticisms and suggestions, especially to Messrs. A. Friedman on Russia, Thomas Tchou on China, T. Kagawa on Japan, H. A. Popley on India, J. J. Mallon, J. S. Middleton and E. W. Wimble on the British Labor Movement, and to certain others whose names cannot be mentioned because of their official positions. Also to Mr. J. E. Herbert of the International Labor Office in London, and to the Director of the Labor Office at the League of Nations at Geneva, M. Albert Thomas, for the use of the library for several weeks. The writer is also grateful to Waldo Stephens for his generous cooperation and to Kirby Page, E. C. Lindeman and Robert Bruere for invaluable criticism and suggestion. Unless otherwise specified, all prices and wages for the various countries are given in gold dollars and cents. As far as possible we have endeavored to let the facts speak for themselves. Where views are expressed they are personal and unofficial and do not represent those of any organization. The writer has no axe to grind and no propaganda to further, for or against any cause. The truth is that the world has been victimized by propaganda ever since 1914. It is quite probable that in the light of this, the facts stated in certain chapters, as on Russia, for instance, may not be in accord with what we have been told in the daily press. For those who have eagerly swal¬ lowed whole all that they have read, or all that has been stated by those who have been dispossessed of their privi¬ leges under the Czarist regime, the statements concerning the reconstruction of Russia may seem untrue or unpal¬ atable. Our one desire has been to tell the truth. We might run the war, but we cannot longer run the world, on propaganda. No problem is solved by simply “seeing red.” In the end the truth will out, and it will prevail against all fiction and falsehood. FOREWORD IX However we may have failed in our aim, the purpose of the book is to win sympathy for the toiling masses in the new world of labor. No student, no business man, certainly no true citizen or patriot, or professing Christian; no idealist or realist concerned with the conditions or needs of his fellow men can be indifferent to the crucial problem which confronts us in this world of labor. It is one of the four major problems of our time—the industrial problem, the international problem, the interracial problem, and underlying all these, the question of whether there is a moral dynamic and spiritual principle and power adequate for a solution of these problems, or whether men must turn to a materialistic interpretation of life as in Russia today—* these are the great issues of our time. For more than a year during this tour we have seen these men in the factory or the home in all lands doing the world’s work. We have no words fine enough to state their case. As we have sat with them on the floor of their poverty-stricken homes in China, Japan or India, as we have observed their titanic struggle against terrific odds in war, revolution, hunger and famine in Russia, as we have followed their long fight against low wages, long hours or adverse conditions, in many lands, in the crowded factory or the city slum, again and again the words of Robert Louis Stevenson have recurred to us on this journey: “In the slums of cities, moving amongst indifferent millions, to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin palace . . . often repaying the world’s scorn with service, often stand¬ ing firm upon a scruple . . . everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and courage, everywhere the eiisign of man’s ineffectual X FOREWORD goodness—ah! if I could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circum¬ stance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls.” New York, October 8, 1923. THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR Chapter I INDUSTRIAL CHINA Asia is now in the beginning of a great industrial revo¬ lution. Such an industrial revolution in the middle of the eighteenth century, from 1760 to 1832, gradually trans¬ formed rural England into a manufacturing country. In the nineteenth century it extended over Europe and America. In the twentieth century it has entered the Orient as a terrific invasion. In the continent of Asia there are some five hundred and seventy millions gainfully employed in cheap labor, more than twice the number in Europe and America combined. At present they are engaged principally in agriculture and home industries, but India, China and Japan are now being rapidly industrialized. Are they to become the sweatshop of the world, exploiting their own toiling populations and menacing the standard of living in the West? Or can Asia, avoiding generations of oppression, injustice and con¬ flict, introduce international industrial standards for the protection of the New World of Labor? According to the Government Bureau of Economic In¬ formation, China has 295,000,000 workers gainfully em¬ ployed, the largest number of any country in the world, or more than seven times the working force in the United 13 14 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR States. Here, where the struggle for life is the fiercest on earth, it is not surprising to find the Chinese the hardest working race, for they can over work and under live any other nation. There is something sublime in the endless onward march of this conservative, majestic, plodding peo¬ ple. The other ancient empires—Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Macedonian, Persian and Roman—have long since passed away; the mushroom growths of the middle ages have withered; modern governments rise and fall in the kaleidoscopic changes of the post-war map of Europe, but China goes on forever. After a tour of three months through a score of the prin¬ cipal cities, through the chief provinces from Manchurh in the North to Canton in the South, and from the coast to Hunan in Mid-China, we left the country with a deepened love and admiration for the Chinese people and unshaken confidence in their future, yet with a sense of sadness at the impending disaster which seems to threaten the central^ government, and for the terrible conditions in the sweated labor of the masses. An examination of wages, hours and conditions in China u reveals the most appalling situation found in the whole world of labor. The twelve-hour day prevails in nearly all of the modem factories. The work day in the primitive* Chinese industries ranges from twelve to sixteen, and in some cases even eighteen hours, seven days a week. In many silk filatures and cotton mills children from six to twelve years of age are working. The wages of these chil¬ dren vary from three to twelve cents a day. 1 Several hundred thousand apprentices receive nothing but their food which costs about six cents a day. Usually no com¬ pensation whatever is given for accident, permanent injury * i Figures in this chapter are given in gold dollars and cents. INDUSTRIAL CHINA 15 or death. We found much of the dangerous machinery in Chinese mills unguarded and accidents are consequently numerous. The ancient family system is breaking down under the strain of modern industry, where whole families are in the factories working on the day and night shifts. In order to study the industrial situation we met indi¬ vidual employers, Chinese and foreign, Employers’ Asso¬ ciations, Chambers of Commerce, representatives of the Cotton Mill Owners’ Association and others. We found some of these men earnestly desirous of improving present conditions. The fact that some have already introduced ^jiforms proves that the situation is not hopeless, as some ^ert, but that conditions can be changed here just as they f ave been in other lands. The industrial situation in China today was paralelled in the worst days of the industrial revolution in England a century and more ago. Chinese employers are for the most part humane and amenable to reason. Conditions have not become as im¬ personal as in the west. Capital and labor are not yet separated by an impassable gulf. There is yet time to save the situation in China from drifting into a state of settled warfare between employers and labor. As typical of the best, we found in one factory under ioreign management sanitary conditions, light, air, venti¬ lation, baths and welfare work of which any factory in America or England might be proud. The majority of the workers had an eight-hour day and one day’s rest in seven. Wages were unusually high, ranging from a minimum of nearly $5.00 to over $50.00 a month. The manager took i just pride in his factory and a deep interest in the work¬ ers. In every city we found certain progressive open- riinded employers who were well aware that present con¬ ditions are not right and are deeply anxious to change 16 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR them. It is very difficult, however, for one employer to act alone when some of his competitors care for nothing but their profits. We visited one Chinese Christian employer in Shanghai who has reduced the working time from fourteen to ten hours a day. He told us that he is now producing more in ten hours than he formely did in fourteen. He gives one day’s rest in seven and pays relatively high wages ranging from $8.00 to $16.00 a month. He has classes for his boys, training groups for his foremen, welfare work for his em¬ ployees, a co-operative store and a savings bank for the workers. And yet he earns an honest twelve per cent profit. We visited the Commercial Press of Shanghai with three thousand employees. They employ no child labor, they have a minimum age limit of sixteen years, a nine-hour day, one day’s rest in seven, a free school for five hundred boys and girls and an “Industrial Association” for the workers. Their wage scale runs from $3.50 a month to over $25.00. The firm has a plan of profit sharing, a savings bank, pension system, dispensary and hospital. Mothers are given a month’s leave of absence before and after childbirth with special bonuses. One or two such examples prove that changes can be made in the present system. Unfortunately conditions for the vast majority of the workers fall far below these standards. According to the Government Bureau of Economic Information, in cotton mills wages for men run from a minimum of 5 cents to a maximum of 67 cents gold with an average of 16% cents; the wages for women from 5 to 40 cents with an average of 13 cents a day. In steel, copper and iron works, wages for men run from 6 to 42 cents, with an average of 15% cents, and for women from 5 to 15 cents a day. The average for the basic industries of China is only 18% INDUSTRIAL CHINA 17 cents, and wages for unskilled laborers seldom exceed 12% cents a day. 1 Over 70 per cent of all the laborers of China are working seven days a week. Professor J. B. Taylor of Peking and Miss W. T. Zung of Shanghai state that, “The maximum daily wages for men in twenty-nine of the chief industries embracing 300,000 workers range from 20% to 51% cents with an average of 37 cents a day gold, while the minimum average is 4% cents a day. For 221,000 women, the maxi¬ mum is 2% to 42% cents, averaging 18 cents and the minimum is from 1 to 17^2 cents with an average of 4% cents. 2 The minimum living wage for a man without dependents in the port cities has been calculated as 12% cents, and for a man with an average family 28% cents a day. “In Shanghai a careful study of the cost of living gives $5.93 a month as a living wage for a single man and $10.67 as an adequate Iminimum family income.” 3 If these figures are correct some 40 per cent are living below the poverty line. Side by side with the most modern machinery in China are conditions of work corresponding to those in England more than a hundred years ago. In the factories a twelve- hour shift both day and night is the rule. Where there are not two shifts the work day runs from ten to as high as eighteen hours in the primitive industries. In certain coal mines in the North they work a shift of twenty-four hours underground with twelve hours free above. 1 Government Bureau of Economic Information, Peking. According to the sta¬ tistics of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, a farm laborer averages 1234 cents a day with board and lodging. The Report of the Industrial Survey showed that in Shanghai, where wages are the highest in China, skilled workers earn from $6.00 to $18.00 a month gold, averaging $10.00; foremen receive from $10.00 to $12.50; unskilled workers average $4.50; women $4.00, and children only $3.00 a month. * International Labor Review, July, 1923, p. 8. * Ibid., p. 9. 18 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR Miss Agatha Harrison, formerly of the .London School of Economics and now the industrial expert of the Y. W. C. A. in China, has done a notable work in the effort to improve these conditions. She states in most of the factories there is practically no fencing of dangerous machinery or sanitary equipment of any kind. Women and children, because they will accept lower wages, are rapidly being drawn into the factories. In some of the factories visited, women were working with babies bound on their backs, and in one case a woman had her baby strapped in front in order to feed it while at the same time working with both hands and a foot. Brought up in the factory atmosphere, children learn to do odd jobs at a very early age and when six, seven and eight years old are regularly employed. Commenting upon the great amount of dust in one factory the manager was asked if any records were kept of sickness. His answer was, “No, there are constantly new faces. They either go to the next mill for more money or to Kingdom Come.” No wonder Dr. Speer said of the present industrial sys¬ tem: “If there are too many lives in China, the present factory system will bring a murderous relief.” Professor Boss felt that the present system was grinding the life out of millions of toilers. 1 We visited certain typical factories in North, Central and South China to ascertain present conditions of labor. We first visited a match factory under Chinese management in the North. It is said to be the best of its kind in the city and the owner desires concerted action to improve 1 “Haunted by the fear of starving, men spend themselves recklessly for the sake of a wage. In many occupations men are literally killing themselves by their exer¬ tions. The treadmill coolies who propel the sternwheelers on the West River admittedly shorten their lives. Nearly all the lumber used in China is hand-sawed, and the saw¬ yers are exhausted early. Physicians agree that carrying coolies rarely live beyond forty-five or fifty years. The term of a chair-bearer is eight years, of a ricksha runner four years; for the rest of his life he is an invalid. The city coolie sleeps on a plank in an airless kennel on a filthy lane with a block for a pillow.” INDUSTRIAL CHINA 19 conditions in all the match factories together. We found in this factory eleven hundred employees, mostly boys from nine to fifteen years of age, working from 4 A. M. to 8:30 P. M., with a short intermission for meals. They work an average of fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no Sunday of rest. The boys receive from six to twelve cents and the men about twenty-five cents gold a day. The poisonous fumes of the white or “yellow” phosphorus and the dust from the other chemicals burned our lungs within half an hour. Some seventy men and boys in this plant have to visit the hospital each day for treat¬ ment. Many suffer from “phossy jaw,” where the bones of the face decay on account of the cheap grade of phos¬ phorus used. Such chemicals have been outlawed in all countries having any regard for the welfare of labor. They constitute a menace and a challenge to China to remove these inhuman conditions. We next visited a Chinese factory making the most beau¬ tiful rugs for use in the homes of millionaires in America and China. But who are making these rugs? Twelve hundred boys and young men, from nine to twenty-five years of age, are here employed. The foremen receive $8.00 while other men average $4.50 a month and their food. Men and boys are working on an average of nearly sixteen hours a day, from 5:30 A. M. to 10 P. M. The majority of the boys serve as apprentices for a period of three years and receive no pay whatever during this period but only their food. This “apprenticeship” is only a blind alley. After the boys serve three years they are then discharged and other boys are taken on to fill their places on the same terms. When they are “graduated” from their apprentice¬ ship, they can become ricksha coolies and earn an average of fifteen to twenty-five cents a day. The fifty thousand ricksha pullers in Peking average less than this amount. 20 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR After five or six years of this work they are usually broken in health and are then useless. These conditions are not due to modern industry for they existed before its entrance into China. The third plant visited was a Chinese tannery run by a Christian. The conditions here are said to be the best of all the smaller factories in the city. The usual sixteen hours of work a day is reduced by this Christian employer to ten. Men and boys earn from $5.50 to $8.50 a month. Apprentices sleep in a loft above the shop, and in addition to their food and clothes, receive thirty-five cents a month during the first year, a dollar a month the second and $4.00 a month, or thirteen cents a day, the third year. The industrial department of the Y. M. C. A. is permitted to put on a program of welfare work, athletics and games for the workers. It was most touching to see the faces of these boys light up with gratitude when they saw the industrial secretary of the Y. M. C. A. enter the shop. He knows them personally and is bringing a ray of light into the hearts of hundreds of these weary little toilers. The fourth factory was a Chinese weaving establishment making cloth upon primitive hand looms. At present there are 15,000 boys in the city working on these looms. In normal times there are 25,000 employed but many are now out of work. The wages paid to the men average $4.50 a month, or about fifteen cents a day. One manager in¬ formed us that in most of the factories the workers average eighteen hours a day, from 5 A. M. to 11 P. M., with short intermissions for meals, working seven days a week. The majority of the boys are apprentices who receive no wage whatever, only their food. They are going without educa¬ tion and are among the 80 million in China who are out of school with no educational provision whatever for them. INDUSTRIAL CHINA 21 All of the examples given above are of primitive cottage or home industries prevalent in China. Apprentices are frequently hired out by their poor parents for no pay whatever, simply to relieve them of the burden of having to feed them at a cost of six cents a day. The grim struggle for existence among the silent millions in China is tragic. No other people on earth could stand it. Let us now examine working conditions in Shanghai. We visited a modern cotton mill under Chinese management in the early hours of the morning. Here girls and boys from seven to twelve years of age are working twelve hours each on the day and night shifts and receiving eight cents a day. Women of all ages are earning about fifteen cents for twelve hours work. Common laborers are paid from fifteen to eighteen cents, while skilled workers receive from twenty to thirty cents a day. Down the long rows of machines we occasionally see a woman who has fallen asleep before daybreak over her work. Here and there babies are asleep on piles of waste or playing about the machines at which their mothers work during the long night. It is now 5:30 A. M. and the night workers are just pouring out of the cotton mill. This motley mass of hu¬ manity comprise all ages from one to sixty years, the babies being carried in the arms of their mothers. Here is a woman who has earned fourteen cents for her long night’s toil leading her child of twelve who has earned seven cents. The mother, who is hobbling along on her bound feet, is carrying a small baby that is forced to spend half of its life in the roaring factory where it will play about the machines until it is old enough to work. Here are wheel¬ barrows, each pushed by a man, carrying eight women with bound feet or feeble ankles a mile or so to their homes, at a cost of fifty-two cents a month from their slender wages. The chimneys are belching forth black clouds of smoke 22 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR over the teeming city on this dark winter morning, while the alleys and streets are pouring forth their streams of human life back into the ceaseless roar of the giant fac¬ tories. We note a casual line in the newspaper telling of a little girl under twelve years of age, dragged into the machinery by the feet while asleep after four o’clock in the morning. But why are little girls under twelve working in these fac¬ tories at that time of night? Each morning before daylight we hear the hoarse note of the whistles throughout the city calling the weary toilers back to their work for the day, and relieving the fatigued men, women and children from the long night shift in these mills. We noted the following in the China Press on November 29, 1922: “A Chinese woman employed in a cotton mill on Gordon Road was choked to death yesterday when her scarf caught and dragged her into the machinery. The scarf twisted and tightened about her neck until she dropped dead from strangulation.” The modern factories of the industrial revolution are strangling the life out of thousands in Asia today physically, mentally and spirit¬ ually. We visited a silk filature where a thousand employees toil from 5:30 A. M. to 6 P. M. Here we found little girls six years old earning ten cents a day. Here are mothers working with nursing babies lying on the floor beside them. The children learn to work as soon as they are able to walk. Here they toil in the hot steam, their hands deftly manipu¬ lating the cocoons in the boiling water. The employers say the agile hands of little children are best adapted to this rapid work. We next visited the dwellings of these workers. Here is a carpenter who has courteously invited us into his “home.” His neck is full of running sores from scrofula, INDUSTRIAL CHINA 23 pouring out tubercular infection to the several families crowded in one small house. He is earning thirty-five cents a day, or about ten dollars a month, to support his family of three. Here in a two-story house that is sub¬ divided into little rooms, dark holes and shelves, forty people, including four families and their relatives, try to live. We found one room ten feet square with ten people living in it, half sleeping during the day and half during the night shift. They have no stove in the room and no chimney to carry out the smoke from the fire under an iron pot in which all the cooking is done. There was no latrine or lavatory in the house, but simply a bucket in this room where day and night ten people, men, women and children, cook, eat, sleep and live. “Live!” No, rather exist! The house opens on a filthy alley six feet wide which is little more than an open latrine. Several children were suffering from sore eyes while others in the alley had run¬ ning sores on their heads and faces caused solely by filth and lack of care. There is, of course, no bath room nor place to wash in these crowded quarters. We climbed up broken stairs to a loft where we found several dark rooms divided into shelves. Each hole rented for a dollar a month. Some were so dark we could not at first see whether there were inmates or not. Here is one shelf serving as a home for six people with just room enough to lie side by side. One man is dying of tuberculosis, coughing day and night. The five other in¬ mates are packed in with him on this shelf, which rents for $1.15 per month. For these masses, these human “person¬ alities,” there is no available park, no playground, church, Y. M. C. A., club or reading room. They cannot read or write. Life is bounded by the factory, one dark street, and the hole or hovel in which they exist. As we came out of this house a flock of crows was perched upon a neighbor- 24 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR ing tree in the cold winter wind. We envied those crows on the clean limbs of that tree and pitied these human beings in their poverty, cold, hunger, filth and squalor. They were made for better things. They were meant to live. From these homes we proceeded to the neighboring little industrial hospital where the work is carried on in an old house by a kind-hearted medical doctor. It is the only strictly industrial hospital that we have found in China. On the first cot is a boy of seven years of age who has lost two fingers in an unprotected machine in the cotton mill. He was working with his two little sisters. The three of them combined were earning about eleven cents a day. He will receive no damages from the company for this ac¬ cident. On the second cot lies a little girl of twelve who has lost a portion of her hand in an unguarded machine. Her face expressed a strangely quiet content for she is hav¬ ing the first complete rest and probably the first sufficient food that she has ever known in her life of toil. In the next room of the hospital is a little girl of thir¬ teen with the flesh torn from her arm which will disable her for life. Here also is a man whose arm had been torn off. He had fallen in a fit of apoplexy into the machinery. Fortunately the machine was not injured! He was form¬ erly earning sixteen cents a day but now that he is unprofit¬ able he has been discharged and there is nothing left for him to do but to beg or starve. And so it goes down the wards of this hospital which is treating some ten thousand patients a year from the mills. Most of the factories are paying ten cents a day for board and treatment in this hos¬ pital. In some of the Chinese mills the managers refuse to send accident cases to the hospital to avoid paying this paltry amount. Ordinarily no damages are paid for acci¬ dent, maiming or death. In one mine recently, however, where a number of men were killed by an explosion, the INDUSTRIAL CHINA 25 company allowed twenty dollars for each man’s life. The mules lost were valued at fifty dollars a head, but human¬ ity is still the cheapest commodity in China. Working such long hours for such wages it will be seen in what a favorable position this places the employers of China. Thus we read in the Maritime Customs Report for 1920 concerning a certain Cotton Spinning Factory which paid over 100 per cent a year following the war, “The profits of the factory again surpassed $500,000. . . . For the past two years it has been running day and night, with scarcely any intermission. The number of hands em¬ ployed is 2,500, and the following is the wage table per day: 1 Skilled labor: Minimum Maximum Men. . 17M 30 Women. . 15 25 Ordinary Labor: Men. . 15 25 Women. . 10 15 Boys, aged about 15 years. . 10 15 Girls, aged about 15 years. . 05 10 Small boys, aged about 10 years. .05 10 Small girls, aged about 10 years. . 03 y 2 05 “It will be seen that the company is in an exceptionally favorable position. With the raw material at their doors, an abundant and absurdly cheap labor supply to draw on, and no vexatious factory laws to observe, it is not surpris¬ ing that their annual profits should have exceeded their total capital on at least three occasions.” Truly the com¬ pany is in an exceptionally “favorable position” making over a hundred per cent profit a year after the war while paying children of ten from 3% to 5 cents a day, and a maximum of 30 cents for skilled men and foremen. Space forbids a description of the factories in Canton and South China where conditions were similar to those in 1 Quoted by Bishop McConnell. All figures are given in gold, not Mexican. 26 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR the North. In Canton we were invited to meet with the leaders of eighty labor unions who had formed a Federa¬ tion of Labor. As we met these men we were impressed by the seriousness of the situation and the desperate industrial conditions for which some remedy must be found. It is no wonder that under such inhuman conditions there is a growing unrest on the part of labor. This has been caused by the world-wide awakening after the war, the example of Russia, the agitation of the professors and students of the Renaissance Movement, the articles in the press and the spontaneous uprising of long oppressed masses of Chinese labor. The movement began in North China with the student strike in Peking over the Shantung ques¬ tion, and in the South in Canton in 1920. During 1921 there was a successful strike in almost every industry in Canton. The celebrated Seamen’s strike in Hong Kong in January, 1922, stimulated a labor movement all over China. The president of the Seamen’s Union complaining of the discrimination against Chinese seamen stated their case as follows: “The Chinese have taken a stand against deprivation of their rights, rough treatment, 14 hours’ work a day, and an existence bordering on semi-starvation.” After presenting three petitions without any satisfactory answer, 1,500 seamen struck on January 13, 1922. By Jan¬ uary 27 the number of strikers had reached 30,000. When the British Government of Hong Kong proclaimed the Sea¬ men’s Union an unlawful society, a sympathetic strike of coolies, domestic servants and other laborers increased the number to some 50,000. Within a month 166 steamers were held up with a loss of two and a half million dollars. Workers in other parts of China stood by the strikers. The strike lasted nearly three months from January 13 till March 5 and resulted in the almost complete paralysis of the industrial life of INDUSTRIAL CHINA 27 Hong Kong. On March 6 the combined forces of the government and capital capitulated, the order was rescinded which had declared the Seamen’s Union unlawful, and a gigantic parade replaced the signboard of the union which had been raided by the police. This was the electric spark which flashed a current of hope through China’s new world of labor. March 6, 1922, will mark a milestone in the industrial history of China like the celebrated Dockers’ Strike in England which organized successfully the un¬ skilled workers in 1889. The signal victory of the seamen in Hong Kong spread like a contagion among the workers of China, prepared by the solidarity of the family clan and guild to act together. The movement extended northward along the coast, up the rivers and along the railways to the miners in the far north. During the latter half of 1922, sixty labor organizations were formed in Shanghai alone and fifty strikes occurred. Unfortunately the “industrial labor spy” described by Professor Richard Cabot of Harvard has crept into the situation in China, as in Japan. Of sixty-eight of the larger strikes recently conducted only four failed, six were undecided and fifty-eight were successful. It was as in¬ evitable as it was desirable that Chinese labor should organize to improve its conditions. The modern trade union and employers’ associations in China are developments growing out of the common soil of the ancient guild which united both employer and em¬ ployee in one movement, like the ancient guilds of England. These Chinese guilds date back at least a thousand and in some cases possibly two thousand years. They were formed to stabilize business, to secure justice, settle disputes and enforce their own law upon competing employers or recal¬ citrant employees in these local self-governing democracies. 28 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR The power of the guild was so great that its extreme penal¬ ties, like those of the all-powerful caste system of India, might mean social ostracism or economic death. Member¬ ship was practically compulsory. The guild standardized and stabilized wages and con¬ ditions. The employer seldom tried to lower or the work¬ men to raise the fixed standard. All the members of a trade or craft belonged to the guild in a city or province, with a membership ranging from 100 to as high as 600,000 members, as in the Chihli cotton weavers guild, where they are now fighting for their very life in competition with the modern factory system. 1 The invasion of modern industry has created two groups with conflicting and diverging interests in the trade union and the employers’ association developing out of the com¬ mon root of the guild. In the wealthier trades of the north the guilds have tended to become employers associa¬ tions. In the south we found the workers trade unions still often called guilds, half evolved from the old system. All the evils of modern competitive capitalism are now invading China. The Chinese genius for disciplined sol¬ idarity in the joint family, the clan and the guild enables them to get together quickly and act effectively in union. Both employers and workers are somewhat timid and ready for compromise. A small and determined group have the power of intimidation so that labor leaders can coerce the men. The first National Labor Conference in China met in Canton May 1-6, 1922, where 160 delegates from 12 cities 1 Sfee Peking, a Social Survey, by S. D. Gamble, pp. 163-222, and “The Guilds of China,” by H. B. Morse, who says: “The Chinese trade guilds establish rules and compel obedience to them; they fix prices and enforce adhesion; they settle or modify trade customs and obtain instant acquiescence; they impose their will on traders in and out of the guilds, and may even, through the measure known as the ‘cessation of all business,’ cause the government to modify or withdraw its orders.” INDUSTRIAL CHINA 29 claimed to represent over 300,000 workers from some 200 unions. Here the unions pledged one another their finan¬ cial support in case of strikes; agreed to stand for a final eight-hour day, determined that the movement should be economic rather than political in character, and decided to form a permanent National Federation of Labor. The mass of labor in China is uneducated, illiterate and easily led. Some 200,000 factory workers are now organized in the industrial cities and about 185,000 miners and railway men. In most of the trades the old craft guilds are still strong while the trade union movement is weak or un¬ organized. The striking miners of the Kailan Mining Administration thus state their case: “The Administration holds us down with great severity, just as if we were brigands. In respect to our dangerous work in the mines, we are treated with less consideration than a horse or a mule. ... If a horse or a mule is killed the Administration is out one or two hundred dollars, but if a man is killed the Administration does not pay his family even fifty dollars. When a worker is injured he is taken out and discarded without regard to whether he lives or dies afterwards. But if a horse is in¬ jured while in charge of a worker, the worker is fined by the Administration. The life of the worker is considered as of no value. We workers in the mines going down into the bowels of the earth are as if in hell itself. We are now possessed of the firm purpose to better our condition. We shall not stop in our efforts though it cost us our lives.” A labor leader in Shanghai thus states the contention of his fellow-workers: “The occasion for all these strikes lies in the general injustice of wages and conditions in industry today. Laborers in Shanghai are working at least ten hours a day, some fourteen hours and a few sixteen hours a day. As for boys there are many instances of wages of 30 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR $1.50 to $2.50 per month being paid. It is useless for the employers to get the police to suppress our organizations and close our headquarters. The spirit still remains and will break out in a strike. The only thing that will settle the struggle is a conference.” Unfortunately conference between employer and employees is still denied to labor in some parts of China. In some places we found detectives employed to arrest the leaders under false charges and prevent labor’s effec¬ tive organization. They were being so hunted by the police in one city that it was difficult for us even to find the leaders. Such a policy will bring its own retribution as in other countries. Many of the evils in the West are due to a misguided industrial revolution. The people today are suffering from the exploitation of the workers in the last generation. The frank recognition of labor’s right to organize, to conferences between workers and employers, to workers’ education, reasonable wages, hours and conditions in China today would save her from possible violence and bloodshed. It is sad if history is read to no purpose and if the Orient must go on repeating the blind and selfish mistakes of the misguided Occident. When will East and West alike learn that justice and nothing less than justice will meet the situation in the new world of labor? Labor in China as in Japan is drifting into radicalism. If you do not give men justice they finally rise in fury to take more than justice; if you do not allow evolution, you force them to revolution. It is the old alternative between the British open safety valve of liberty and the Czarist method of repression which finally results in a vast volcanic upheaval of hatred and destruction. China’s socialism dates from her great socialist philos¬ opher and statesman, Wang An Shih of 1021 A. D., before the time of the Norman Conquest or the Magna Charta of INDUSTRIAL CHINA 31 England. His state socialism was tolerantly given a ten years’ trial under the emperor Shen Tsung. 1 A new public conscience concerning the wrongs of labor is being quickened among the intellectuals and in the student class. The movement in the North is led by the professors and students of the National University in Pe¬ king. Professor Chen Tu Hsin was put out of the Univer¬ sity because of his advanced ideas. The professors send out the students to organize labor and to start night schools and workers education. The employers now have the opportunity to change con¬ ditions if they will. It is their innings. If they maintain that nothing can be done, labor and the intellectuals are determined to see if Russian methods can improve condi¬ tions. The propaganda of Moscow has been spread broad¬ cast in Tientsin, Shanghai, Hankow and Canton as in Japan. The day of labor’s acquiescence in its own ex¬ ploitation is passing forever. Viewing the country as a whole, the people of China are slowly, all too slowly, rising in their standard of life. The Chinese have steadily evolved and developed as a people in the social unity of the family, the guild and the race. They are, however, as yet undeveloped in three important points: in individual initiative, in the realization of social responsibility, and in national solidarity in the spirit of patriotism with a democratic sense of obligation for good government. The effective solidarity that marks Japan is still wanting in China. 1 Wang An Shih advocated the following ideas: 1. That the State take the entire management of commerce, industry and agriculture into its own hands with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them being “ground into the dust of the rich.” 2. That tribunals be established throughout the land to regulate the daily wage and the daily price of merchandise. 3. That the soil be measured and divided into equal areas, graded according to its fertility in order that there might be a new basis of taxation. 4. That taxes be provided by the rich, and the poor be exempt. 5. That pensions be provided for the aged and employment for the unemployed. Julian Arnold, American Commercial Attache. 32 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR There is, however, a revolution in the mind of Asia that is affecting the leaders of this vast continent. If we look beneath the surface and come in contact with the Renais¬ sance or “New Thought Movement’’ which is sweeping over the students and intellectuals we find the first evidence of the birth of a new China. These awakened students are the vanguard of a future democracy. The movement marks the transition from the mediaeval to the modern world. During the last two decades China’s trade has increased 600 per cent, now standing at approximately one and a half billion dollars. She is still a poor country and her wealth like that of India does not greatly exceed $100.00 per capita. According to the Special Report of the Geological Survey of China, her mineral resources have been greatly overestimated. Her coal reserve of some fifty billion tons is only one-third that of Great Britain but she possesses about half of the world’s known resources in antimony. Nevertheless, with large undeveloped resources and the greatest supply of cheap labor in the world, China is now being rapidly industrialized. The coming of modem in¬ dustry has been described as “a terrific invasion” for it is entering a social environment as unprepared for it as was mediaeval Europe. Thirty years ago there was not a western modern factory in China. Industry was simple handicrafts. Twenty years ago there were but two modern cotton mills in China with 65,000 spindles. Today there are already 102 mills with 3,165,566 spindles. Two-thirds of these are in mills owned by the Chinese and about half of them have been added in the last four years. The large iron works near Hankow at full capacity em¬ ploys 6,000 men and can turn out about 300 steel rails a day. In its cotton factories, China now has 3,165,566 spindles as compared with 3,813,680 in Japan and 34,000,000 INDUSTRIAL CHINA 33 in the United States. Nearly 100 electric light plants have been installed within the last dozen years. According to the Report of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce there has been a sudden invasion of industry in the Yangtze Valley. 1 This development has affected some fifty cities in China. The present foreign sections of Shanghai were mud flats and rice fields a little more than a generation ago. Today the city has over 1,000,000 population, its trade has passed $500,000,000 and it is one of the great ports of the world. It will become one of the most populous cities at the mouth of the world’s greatest water shed, which claims one-tenth of the world’s population. Hankow with 1,500,000 is in the center of the iron and coal region. Canton has a population of 950,000, and Peking 811,556. Already modern industry is cutting the workers off from their old social life and moral sanctions. Here are millions now divorced from the land without property and forced to live a hand to mouth existence, as casual labor menaced by the industrial revolution. Though China has never had a census her total popula¬ tion is conventionally estimated at 400,000,000. The Gov- 1 Within the last two years there have sprung up in the YangtzeValley 53 factories, 26 electric plants, 18 transportation companies, 16 cotton mills, 16 agricultural enter¬ prises, 15 commercial houses, 12 mining companies, 3 fisheries and 8 miscellaneous companies, aggregating a total investment of $74,187,470. Annual Report of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. There are few foreign-type articles of domestic consumption that are not now manufactured in China by factories on modern lines, the majority of them without foreign assistance. Of over 1,400 factories in China, 339 are foreign and over 1,000 Chinese. There are 218 silk filatures, 102 ootton spinning and weaving mills and 121 oil mills. The “Commercial Hand Book” lists among the manufacturing industries that are assuming a position of importance, soap and candle factories, match factories, ioe and aerated water factories, factories for the preparation of egg products, knitting mills, canneries, cement and brick works, chemical works, dockyards, shipbuilding and engineering works, furniture factories, glass and porcelain works, cold-storage plants, tanneries, oil mills, paper mills, printing and lithographic works, railway shops, rice hulling and cleaning mills, sawmills, modern silk filatures, silk mills, sugar refineries, tobacco factories, water works, woolen factories and arsenals. 34 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR ernment Bureau of Economic Information in Peking esti¬ mates the number gainfully employed at 295,000,000. Of these over 80 per cent are engaged in agriculture. Probably a million are engaged in modern and semi-modern factories, and the balance in simple handicrafts and home industries 1 which one sees in the open doorways and on the streets of every city and village in China. A deep discontent is spreading through the ranks of labor in China. Strikes are now occurring in almost every trade. The workers are being stirred to action. The leaders of the Christian Church are beginning to realize their social responsibility. 2 Articles are now appearing in the press challenging employers responsible for child labor, and the conscience of the community is beginning to awaken. 1 Professor C. F. Remer of St. John’s University, Shanghai, tabulates 565,255 factory workers of whom 234,152 are men and 231,103 are women, and estimates there are 49,028,864 families engaged in agriculture. The Ministry of the Interior puts the average number of children per family in China at 5.5. 2 In substantiation of our impressions of a three months’ visit to China, we may quote from the findings of the National Christian Conference: a. “Wealth is becoming concentrated in a few hands and the masses are left as poor as before but with the added handicap of not owning their own tools. b. “A working day of 14 to 16 hours or even more, made worse by the necessity of long trips between home and factory, is the rule. c. “China’s time-honored family system breaks down when whole families are in the factory for day and night shifts, and the development of a better home life, which is one of the deepest concerns of the Christian Church, is made impossible. d. “Grave risks and accidents come with the use of high-powered machinery and of certain dangerous processes of manufacture. e. “The health of women is seriously impaired both by night work and by the economic necessity of working up to and too soon after childbirth. /. “ The child labor problem, with its heavy toll on the minds and bodies of Chinese citizens, is at its worst here; thousands of children from 6 years of age up are employed on both day and night shifts of from 12 to 16 hours. The same arguments which had to be met in the West are advanced here by both parents and employers: ‘They are better off than at home. They must earn money.’ The fact that their tiny wage lowers the whole wage scale is lost sight of in the vicious circle. g. “Conflict between labor and capital has not yet developed in any serious acute form, but there are many signs that labor is beginning to be restless and to seek organ¬ ization. Unless the obvious mistakes are avoided it is likely to adopt some of the more reckless measures of the labor movement of the West but with infinitely more serious results due to ignorance.” INDUSTRIAL CHINA 35 At the National Christian Conference held in Shanghai representing all the Christian forces of the nation, Chinese and foreign, the industrial situation was studied by a Commission on Economic and Industrial Problems which reported as follows: “In view of the difficulty of immediate application of the League of Nations standard to the in¬ dustrial situation in China, the following standard shall be adopted and promoted by the Church for application now: “1. No employment of children under 12 full years of age. “2. One day’s rest in seven. “3. The safeguarding of health of workers, e. g., limitation of working hours, improvement of sanitary conditions, and installation of safety devices.” When the writer was in China he could not find a single law in existence for the protection of labor, national, provincial or municipal. News comes from the Interna¬ tional Labor Office, Geneva, that China has just taken the first steps toward the State regulation of labor conditions. In the present condition of the national government it will doubtless be some time before this becomes effective. Nevertheless special Labor Sections have been created at Peking in the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, and provisional Factory Regulations have been pro¬ mulgated. These regulations provide for— The limitation of hours of work to ten hours a day; The prohibition of the employment of boys under 10 and girls under 12; The limitation of hours of work of children to eight hours a day for boys under 17 and girls under 18; The granting of five weeks’ rest before and after child¬ birth and a money benefit to women employed in industry. 36 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR These measures, which as yet exist only on paper, may be credited largely to the able efforts of the International Labor Organization of the League of Nations, at Geneva, to promote universal standards of labor. The number and character of her people and the extent and variety of her resources make it inevitable that China will become one of the dominant factors in the world’s industry. Her industrial future is a matter of moment to us all as to whether it shall be a menace or a blessing to humanity. China is now importing, not the worn out rusty junk of a bygone age but the most up-to-date inventions and machinery for her modern plants. Does she not need also the most advanced, efficient and humane methods of dealing with the far more important and vital human problem in labor? Now is the crucial time for determining the nature of China’s industrial future. Her people are still demo¬ cratic and plastic and have not yet broken into the antagon¬ ism of class war. All will now depend upon the treatment labor receives. Employers have their opportunity now to change conditions before it is too late. Chapter II THE NEW JAPAN As we go to press the recent earthquake has devastated portions of industrial Japan. It may take several years to recover the industrial level described in this chapter. The statements here made refer to pre-earthquake condi¬ tions. Upon arrival in the Far East we found evidence of the rise of a new and liberal Japan. The feudal, medieval Nippon of a generation ago laid aside its bows and arrows, learned of modern nations the lessons of militarism, in¬ dustry and commerce and suddenly took its place as a world power. The progressive element of the new Japan is as rapidly learning the lesson that militarism is now dis¬ credited and with equal earnestness is entering upon a new era of liberalism, disarmament and democracy. No nation in history so quickly learned the arts of war, of commerce and of material prosperity, and perhaps none will more quickly learn the art of peace. We found that the Wash¬ ington Conference had cleared the air of the dark war clouds that threatened the Far East, and the new progres¬ sive party is rising to power in Japan. As Dr. Ebina, President of the Doshisha University, expressed it, like a chick breaking from its shell, the liberal Japan is today breaking through the hard, encrusted repression of feudal militarism and a new nation is coming to birth. During the war Japan doubled her manufacturing capac¬ ity, adding 14,000 new factories. She also increased the volume of her banking business four-fold. At the same time she decreased her national debt till it is now the small¬ est of any of the allied nations, or only about one-twenty- 37 38 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR fifth that of the United States. In thirty years the total number of factory workers advanced from twenty-five thousand to over a million and a half. 1 In fourteen years, 1904H919, the per capita wealth increased from $250 to $765. At the close of the war the national wealth was esti¬ mated at $43,000,000,000. The number who paid income tax on fortunes declared at over $50,000 increased during the war from twenty-two to three hundred and thirty-six. But the poverty of the poor increased yet more rapidly. While a few of the rich have been getting richer, the masses of the poor have been getting poorer so far as their real wages are concerned. Fourteen families and great firms practically control the wealth and industries of the coun¬ try. The Mitsui Company alone, with a working capital of $100,000,000, does one-third of the entire import-and- export business of the empire, while the Mitsubishi family; controls and operates the leading steamship line. The marvelous progress of Japan’s industries has not failed, however, to leave its mark upon her people. One of the first things that one notices in Japan is the terrific strain to which her whole population is subjected on ac¬ count of the pressure of the present industrial revolution. She possesses only a few volcanic islands of sand and lava lying out in the Pacific. Her supplies of coal, iron and raw materials are quite inadequate for her own expanding needs. A large part of her territory is mountainous, and only seventeen per cent can be cultivated, as compared with ninety per cent in a country like Germany. Despite her scientific methods of caring for her mountain forests, she is compelled even to import timber from America. Already i According to Factory Statistics for 1919, published by the Department of Agri¬ culture and Commerce, the number of factories employing more than five workers, was 43,949, with a total of 1,611,990 laborers, 741,193 males and 870,797 females being engaged in industry. THE NEW JAPAN 39 overcrowded, with three hundred and sixty people to the square mile, as against thirty-three to the square mile in the United States, her population is increasing at the rate of over 700,000 a year. Her rice land is inferior to the best farm land in America, yet it sells for five times as much. Her staple crop is rice. With the production of this the most important food supply increasing at the rate of four per cent a decade while the number of mouths to be fed in¬ creases twelve per cent, Japan is forced to import an in¬ creasingly large amount of food supplies from other coun¬ tries. Worst of all Japan is in the grip of domestic and world competition and is being ground between the upper and nether mill stones of the cheap labor of the Orient, and the massed wealth and efficient industrial organization of the Occident. On the one side she is forced to compete with the cheap labor of China where children of ten are working for a daily wage of five and ten cents, and women for twenty cents a day. The Japanese cannot compete with cheaper Chinese laborers who underlive and out-work them. On the other side are the western countries with their great stores of raw material, well organized factories with modern machinery, and accumulated wealth which make competition so difficult for the new industrial Japan. According to statistics furnished by the Ohara Institute of Social Research of Osaka, 1 92.7 per cent of the families 1 Statistics showing percentage of rich and poor: No. of Per cent houses of total Below $250 a year. 9,007,856 92.7 Between— $ 250-$ 500 . 556,770 5.7 500- 1,000. 102,663 1.0 1,000- 1,500 . 25,506 0.3 1.500- 2,500. 16,312 0.2 2.500- 10,000. 10,517 0.1 From $10,000 and upward. 812 .... 40 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR in Japan were living on an income of less than $250 a year, or 68 cents a day for a family of five, while at the other extreme 812 families were receiving $10,000 or more a year. Although Japan is being rapidly industrialized, her rural population is still seventy per cent of the whole. The five and a half million farming families in Japan cultivate some fifteen million acres, or an average of about two and three- fourths acres per family. Nearly half are tenant farmers. The American farmers average 148 acres per family, or over fifty times as much as the Japanese farmer. A grow¬ ing unrest among the agrarian toilers who cannot pay their rent and taxes or who cannot live upon their slender wages is increasingly manifest. Even in feudal times there were “peasant uprisings” among the oppressed agrarians, but radical ideas are now brought home by members of the farming families returning from the manufacturing dis¬ tricts so that tenant troubles are increasing. In the prov¬ ince of Gifu alone, 114 tenant unions have been organized recently. These unions have been successful in securing their demands and enabling the farmers to obtain better terms from the landlords, to decrease their rent as tenants or increase their wages as workers. Japan’s crucial problem today is economic and industrial. There are now approximately 1,611,990 industrial workers engaged in 43,949 factories. 1 A large proportion of these 1 Industrial workers in Japan. 1,611,990 Farming families in Japan. 5,481,187 Per cent. Gainfully employed in United States_ 41,609,192 50.3 Or, 50.3 per cent of population over 10 years of age. Gainfully employed in manufacturing in United States. 12,812,701 30.8 Gainfully employed in agriculture. 10,951,074 26.3 U. S. Census 1920, THE NEW JAPAN 41 are women. Independent researches of the Home Office put Japanese child operatives, apprentices, servants, etc., roughly at 1,397,000, of whom 715,000 are boys and 682,000 girls. Their working hours were from ten to eleven a day. As yet Japan has no law regulating child labor outside of factories. Many thousands of children are employed who are below the legal age but “face” is saved by giving their nominal age. A Japanese professor who made a careful investigation found that in Shinshu, Northern Japan, nearly a third of the workers are between ten and fifteen years of age. The fathers are paid from $40.00 to $60.00 for each child delivered to the factory. They are kept in dormitories which are for some of them almost a prison. Japan has an area a little larger than the British Isles or about equal to the state of California, with a population now estimated at about fifty-six millions for Japan proper, or seventy-seven millions for the Empire as a whole. 1 She possesses all of the five conditions necessary for rapid industrialization mentioned by Mr. J. A. Hobson in his “Evolution of Modern Capitalism”: “Accumulated wealth, a proletariat or propertyless laboring class, machinery and industrial arts developed to a high degree, large accessible markets and the capitalistic spirit.” Japan possesses also the solidarity to move together and act unitedly and ef¬ fectively in whatever project her leaders undertake in the military, political or industrial field. In the short half century from the time she entered the modern world in 1868, her trade increased from $13,000,000 to $2,141,000,000 1 According to the Census of 1920, the population of Japan was as follows: Japan Proper. 55,961,140 Korea. 17,284,207 Formosa. 3,654,398 Karafuto. 105,765 Total for Japanese Empire. 77,005,510 The Japan Year Book, 1921-22. 42 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR in 1920, 1 or more than one hundred and sixty-fold. Her trade has increased ten-fold in volume during the last quar¬ ter of a century. No change has taken place as suddenly as in the so- called industrial revolution in England but the simple do¬ mestic industries are being gradually transferred to the modern shops and factories. The five great industrial cities have increased in size thirteen times as rapidly as the country as a whole. Tokyo, the Chicago of Japan, has a population of over two millions, and Osaka, the smoke- covered Pittsburgh, has nearly a million and a half. The wages paid to industrial workers in Japan are quite inadequate to the high cost of living since the war. The Japan Year Book states the average daily wage for men is 55 cents and for women 27 cents. 2 In the poorer paid in¬ dustries the women average only 20 cents a day. A thor¬ ough investigation conducted by one of the foremost econo¬ mists in Japan revealed the fact that the average wage paid to the workers in the leading industries in Tokyo is less than fifty cents a day. In some of the iron and steel mills the minimum wage for unskilled labor runs as low as 20 cents for twelve hours’ work. The maximum for skilled workers is one or two dollars a day. With their compli¬ cated wage scale, which deducts so much in fines for petty 1 The Japan Year Book, 1921-1922, p. 387. Labor Year Book, 1921, p. 449. 2 The average daily wage of workers is as follows: (figures in gold): 1920 Weaver, male. $ 0.87 Weaver, female. -47 Carpenter. 1-25 Silk-spinner, female. .36 Tailor. -48 Farm labor, a day. .72 Farm labor, a year, female. 43.30 Farm labor, a year, male. 70.50 Japan Year Book, 1921-1922, pp. 176-177, figures in gold. THE NEW JAPAN 43 mistakes on the part of the workers, wages in some fac¬ tories fluctuate from month to month until the men are never sure of the amount they will receive. Perhaps the worst conditions among the workers are found in the mining areas. The Report of the Bureau of Mines showed that the number of miners employed at the end of June, 1920, was 439,159, of whom 108,300 were women. Of the total number of women workers 68,321 were working underground. They go down into the mines where in many places the veins of coal are only about two and a half feet thick. There they work long hours for less than fifty cents a day. Women are employed to push the coal cars to the shafts. Stripped to the waist, they toil for a pittance for twelve hours on each shift. An in¬ vestigation conducted by Professor Kitazawa, of the De¬ partment of Economics in Waseda University, revealed the fact that the actual wages were often below those published in the Government reports. His figures run from a mini¬ mum of twenty cents to a maximum of a dollar a day. An investigation concerning hours of work showed that the average working day in the cotton mills was 14 hours. The average working day in steel mills was 12 hours. Only 12 per cent of all the workers have an eight-hour day. The average working week in Japan is 63 hours, or seven days of nine hours each. Many of the workers enjoy two rest days a month. One night in Tokyo we met the employers in the paternal organization for the “Conciliation of Capital and Labor.” They have collected a fund of $1,250,000 for propaganda contributed by employers. The Industrial Club is also a capitalists’ organization backed by $5,000,000, the money being used for propaganda in order to get the employers .and laborers together that production may be increased. 44 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR The benevolent intentions and useful work of many of the men connected with these organizations is undoubted. From this meeting with the capitalists, we went down into the slums to meet a dozen labor leaders. One of the employers had just stated that there was no unrest among the laborers in Japan and that the workers would be quite contented if only left alone. The labor leaders laughed with scorn at this. Some members of the group said they were earning from thirty to sixty cents a day. One man was trying to support a family of eight on a little more than a dollar a day. He had been forced to give one child away to keep it from starving. The next man, a Christian labor leader, then told his story. He had worked long hours for twenty-five cents a day at first, but finding it impossible to support himself and his family on this amount, he started to work overtime to increase his income. Although working long after the regular hours he could only make fifty cents a day. He found it difficult to support his family even by adding two or more hours to the regular shift of fourteen hours a day. At times on a change of shift, he had to work for thirty or more hours at a stretch. For two weeks straight he worked twenty hours a day with only four hours for sleep. After fourteen years of such work, his health was broken on account of lack of rest and proper nourishment. He said: “My body was broken, my mind dulled, and my whole character was disintegrating. I had no time for my family, no interest in production or in anything else. I lost my skill. I had sunk with the masses of *ny fellow- workers into poverty and had become like a part of the machinery. Then the trade union movement came and I seized upon it with hope, for it gave us a chance to fight for higher wages, shorter hours and one rest day a week. But this is only our first step. Frankly, we are out to THE NEW JAPAN 45 completely abolish industrial slavery and in the end the capitalist wage system. They may not recognize our unions or acknowledge that we have any right, but we shall be¬ come strong enough to enforce our will. For myself, I am a Christian communist. If they have failed in Russia, that is because they have not had a fair chance with the in¬ vasion of the Allied armies and with the leaders of the world against them.” Another of the leaders said: “To be frank with you, we are all radicals and out to abolish the present system, be¬ cause the government, the capitalistic courts, and the big business men are all united against us. We have arrived late upon the scene in the labor world, but we have started with advanced ideas and principles. Today we are per¬ secuted, hounded, and betrayed, but in the end we will win. If a few of us meet together to discuss the calling of a strike, or even the forming of a labor union, the police can punish us on suspicion without trial. Several hundred men in the labor unions have been thus persecuted. The police, the severe laws, “special orders” and all the forces of militarism and capitalism are used to crush our labor movement. The employers dismiss our leaders whose names are placed on the blacklists of the government and of the business men. “Another injustice which we have to deal with is the labor spy system. Spies are scattered among the workers to learn their plans. They seek to stir up dissension, under- jmine the workers and leaders, and break up their unions like the Fascisti in Italy. The government and capitalists have used ruffians and gamblers, who are members of the so-called ‘Nationalistic Society’ which is used to fight labor. These ruffians make raids on the labor meetings, using violence and sometimes seriously injuring those who are taking part. Many have been wounded and several killed 46 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR by these tools of capital and the government. The police shadow our leaders and frequently raid our headquarters. But we are not discouraged. We will win justice in the end; we are out for no halfway measures; no ‘welfare’ or paternal schemes will satisfy us; we want nothing less than social justice. As it is, we have not been allowed to send our own bona fide labor representatives to the Labor Con¬ ferences at Washington or Geneva. The workers utterly repudiated the tools sent by the government and the capi¬ talists on behalf of the laborers of Japan.” Following a dinner given by the managers of the Sumi¬ tomo Copper Works in Osaka, we met the labor leaders in their little stuffy, dirty headquarters to talk over industrial problems there as we had in Tokyo. Hard grinding toil, prison sentences and uncertainty of employment have left their marks forever on the faces of these men, and the injustice of the present system has left a bitterness in their hearts. One leader said: “The government will not allow the unions to use men for picketing. The strikers are not allowed to hold meetings, and if they come together for any kind of discussion they are prevented from saying anything pertaining to the strike or their rights. Freedom of speech is out of the question during a strike, for the policemen and hired ruffians break up the meetings and prevent the speakers from delivering their message to the workers. Here in Japan the capitalists are doing all they can to break the unions and prevent the workers from coming together. If any worker belongs to a union and is trying to get others to join, he is discharged at once. “Christianity has done nothing thus far to help the labor movement and the majority of the workers feel that it has been a hindrance. The workers are not allowed to hold meetings in the churches where we can discuss our prob¬ lems or have a place to come together for study. Nearly THE NEW JAPAN 47 all of the factory managers use Christian pastors or Budd¬ hist priests to come to talk to them about their work and try to get them to see that they must not strike or cause trouble. The pastors are paid by the capitalists to use their Christian message to keep our workers down. For this reason the workers have no faith in religion as they see it today among the Buddhists or Christians. “The industrial spy system in Japan is one of the worst evils with which we have to contend. Something like five thousand spies are hired by the government and the em¬ ployers. These men are called “professional gamblers’’ by the workers. When a strike takes place these men go in to beat up the strikers. They pose as workers who stand for the country and the Emperor. They try to make use of their patriotism by fighting the men who are striking to make it appear that the strikers are traitors to their coun¬ try.” Just a hundred years ago we read that in England “the use of spies was common in all times of upper class panic .” 1 Among the Japanese employers a small number are show¬ ing a genuine interest in and intelligent sympathy with the struggles of labor for better conditions. They recognize that no fair-minded man could defend present conditions in Japan. Men like Viscount Shibusawa and Baron Sumitomo have come forward with plans for real co-operation with labor. The Sumitomo Copper Works constantly sends men to America to study the most successful plans in operation there. They have shop committees composed of an equal number of representatives elected by the thirty thousand workers and by the employers, which meet to discuss hours, wages and conditions of work. With their eight-hour work¬ ing day, their insurance against unemployment, retirement * * Hammond, “The Town Laborer,” p. 258. 48 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR allowances, accident policies, pension fund and a wage scale higher than any of the other factories in the Osaka district, the managers of this large steel and copper works are doing more to solve the problems of labor than the majority of leading concerns in America and England. But while Baron Sumitomo and nearly a hundred other employers in Osaka are providing fair treatment for their men, there are over 1,900 manufacturers in the city whose men receive little consideration. With profit as the chief motive, the workers are treated merely as cogs in a vast machine. An open-minded employer in Nagoya said to us: “Labor organizations are sure to come in Japan. It is only a matter of time. In the conflict between capital and labor today the capitalists are sixty per cent to blame and the workers forty per cent. I hold the employers responsible for the trouble because we are trying to make too much profit and refusing to pay the workers as much as they deserve. They are also refusing to allow the men to have any voice in their own affairs concerning working hours, wages and conditions of labor. It is the refusal to recog¬ nize that the men who are doing the hard work are human that is causing the trouble.” In sympathy with these laboring masses are many young officials in all departments of the government. Long before Japan has to face any foreign foe she must reckon with her real problem: the rise of an insistent democracy and the demands of the growing radicalism of her discontented poor. The revolutionary upheaval in the West has made a profound impression on the masses in Japan. An investigation in Tokyo showed that from the physical standpoint a steady process of deterioration of the work¬ ers is going on. Most of them come from the country. In the city they find bad air in homes and factories; food THE NEW JAPAN 49 poorly cooked and of inferior quality; often low, damp, floors in houses situated on flats which are flooded with every heavy storm; sanitary conditions which breed con¬ tagion and dangerous sickness; long hours of work, standing from twelve to sixteen hours at high powered machines; unhygienic factory conditions, with dust and chemicals in the air; overcrowding of dormitories; night work for women and girls; child labor with the stunting of growth. The approximately half million workers recruited annually from the best blood of the country is like a pure mountain stream polluting itself as it pours into the stagnant waters of a swamp. 1 Generally speaking labor in Japan is working long hours for low wages under conditions of poverty. A living stand¬ ard for Japan has been calculated by the Rev. T. Kagawa of Kobe and his industrial research department for an average family of five persons. They require two rooms, each a little less than ten feet square, and a wage of $41.25 for five persons, or about $8.00 a month per person. The majority of the workers in Japan, however, receive less than $35.00 a month per family, or about a dollar a day, and have less than this housing accommodation. According to the official inquiry of the Home Office in 1915, 1 The Japan Chronicle states: “Few can stand the strain for more than one year, when death, sickness or desertion is the outcome. Thus eighty per cent leave the mills every year through various causes, their places being taken immediately by new hands. . . . The women on the day and night shifts are obliged to share the same bed. . . . Consumption and other epidemics take a terrible toll of the workers. The number of women recruited as factory workers each year reaches 200,000. Of these, 120,000 do not return to the parental roof. Either they become birds of passage mov¬ ing from one factory to another, or go as maids in dubious tea houses or as illicit pros¬ titutes. Among the 80,000 who return home, 13,000 are found to be sick, 25 per cent having contracted consumption.” An investigation in the Shinshu district showed that 20 per cent of the industrial patients in the hospital were there because of undernourishment and approximately 40 per cent on account of tuberculosis. 50 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR the monthly earnings of the poor in the industrial slums ranged from $2.50 to $10.00 a month. 1 It is one thing to note these facts on poverty in abstract statistics, but it is quite another to see them in actual life. We went through the foul slums of Tokyo where 34 per cent of the people in this section of the city are working, eating and sleeping in one small room which affords each family of five less than eight feet square, or about the space of a double bed. The other 66 per cent in the slums have an average space of less than ten feet square for a family. In each block there are from twenty to thirty little alleys. Each alley six feet wide serves as a street for twenty or more families which inhabit the little one room hovels. In Osaka and Kobe we found conditions worse than in Tokjm. Crowded into two small districts are thousands of people living in little dark, dog kennels, six feet wide and eight feet long. Twenty-eight families live in each alley, at either end of which are two filthy latrines used by all. The inhabitants are underfed, overcrowded until they have to sleep side by side, men, women and children, all together. There is the foul air from the open sewers and the smoke of the factories, the people die like flies. We could see the great chimneys of the factories where Osaka, with her rapid industrialization, is making money, but is burning up her childhood under the dark pall of factory smoke. Here in the heart of the greatest industrial district is Osaka with the highest death rate of any city in the world, and Kobe which ranks fourth, following two starving German cities. Here are the diseased, the feeble¬ minded, criminals, deserted wives and children, the families of men who are now in prison, ex-convicts and masses of the poor. Twenty thousand human beings herded together like dumb beasts are trying to live on less than twenty 1 Japan Year Book, 1922, p. 178. THE NEW JAPAN 51 cents a day each. From such families eighty per cent of the prostitutes have been driven to their present life on account of poverty. A father of a starving family can now lease his daughter for three years for the sum of $800. The majority of the people in Japan have no home of their own, no land, no tools, no certain means of livelihood. Wages are quite inadequate for the present high cost of living. Thousands of the factory girls are working from twelve to seventeen hours a day and receiving a daily wage of from twenty to thirty cents. About one-fourth of the laborers of Japan are boys and girls. These patient toilers show signs of breaking under the terrific strain of modern industrialism. The average family consists of five persons, but in very many cases two or more families occupy the same room. In addition, many laborers board in such homes and sleep indiscriminately with the family. The moral con¬ ditions of the dormitories for girl workers in some fac¬ tories, especally certain spinning mills, are extremely bad. Unscrupulous overseers and wardens in some cases are known to hold girls in virtual moral slavery. One expert on factory conditions states that it is not uncommon for one-half of the girls employed in certain mills to lose their virtue within a year after entering the mill. Long working hours and extreme fatigue induce the de¬ sire for unhealthful excitement and vicious pleasures. After working, the laborer finds it easy to spend his spare time in heavy drinking, gambling and in other forms of vice. The “Kitchin Yado,” or cheap workingmen’s boarding houses in which thousands throng, give little else but bestial or degrading amusements for the inmates. The wretched women of the neighborhood are on hand to sell themselves for five cents or more, while gambling and drinking to- 52 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR gether with venereal diseases take a terrible toll of the stalwart workers of the industrial district. 1 Working with such wages, hours and conditions, it is not to be wondered at that there is a widespread spirit of unrest spreading among Japan’s patiently toiling multi¬ tudes. The infection is everywhere. From their own im¬ poverished conditions, from the daily press, from the In¬ ternational Conference of Labor at Washington, from the stimulus of revolutionary Russia, from labor leaders and agitators, from the intellectuals, professors and students in the universities, from the very atmosphere of the time, unrest is spreading. As a result of this growing unrest on the part of labor, there were three or four hundred strikes a year, even in the hard times following the war. 2 The Japanese laborer, though usually patient and hard working, when aroused is volcanic in temperament like the molten lava underlying his mountainous islands. This was manifested in the sud¬ den and fierce rice riots of 1918 when some 300,000 took part in violent demonstrations against the high cost of living. The assassination of Mr. Yasuda, the millionaire miser and profiteer, and of Premier Hara also showed the temper of the times. “Industrial Conditions in Japan,” p. 7. * Strikes in Japan: Cases 1918 . 417 1919 . 497 Strikes in the United States: 1918 . 3,248 1919 . 3,444 1920 . 3,109 Japan Year Book, 1922, p. 180; World Almanac, 1922, p. 291. According to Article 17 of the Police Order of 1900, which is still in force in Japan strikes are forbidden and all acts of agitation which might lead to a strike are pun¬ ishable by imprisonment. “Those who, with the object of causing a strike, seduce or incite others shall be sentenced to major imprisonment of one to six months with additional fines.” A closed safety valve means explosion; autocracy and repression cause revolution. THE NEW JAPAN 53 The strike in Kobe in 1921 was typical of the new spirit observable after the war. This strike was led by the Rever¬ end T. Kagawa, perhaps the most spiritual pastor in Japan. He himself thus describes it: “On Sunday, the tenth of July, 35,000 workmen made a great demonstration, march¬ ing in a procession about five miles long. The Kawaski and Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Yards did indeed at last put down this disturbance by closing the works and enlisting military force, but it required the exertions of two battalions of soldiers and four thousand police for its suppression, when for the first time in Japan blood was shed in this connection. The strike failed, but the sympathy of Japan was with the strikers. During the forty days that the strike lasted, the city people gladly bought wares of the six thousand peddlars in order to help on the success of the strike; and they set out thousands of pounds of ice in front of their shops for the refreshment of the strikers. I was sent to prison, charged with the crime of disturbance of the peace, with a hundred and twenty other leaders.” The workers’ program comprised in the main these con¬ ditions: joint control of workshops, recognition of workers’ right to form or join labor unions, collective bargaining, adoption of an 8 hour day, increase of wages, allowance in case of dismissal, etc. Is it to be wondered at that in the midst of such conditions labor has struggled to organize? Today the majority are controlled by radical leaders. Many of the members who called themselves socialists a few years ago have gone over to the radical Third Interna¬ tional of Russia. At the presnt time there are about forty radical groups in and around Tokyo, deeply tinged with the ideas of revolution and influenced by Bolshevism. The first trade unions were organized some forty years ago by Christian leaders who had studied in foreign lands. The intellectuals in the labor movement of the early days 54 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR have been supplanted by radical workingmen who wish to control their own unions. The police law of 1919 made agitation for strikes a crime and trade unions largely collapsed. They are still unrecog¬ nized and unlawful, but the steady growth of public opinion and the fear of violence from the growing spirit of unrest in all ranks of labor has restrained the authorities from continued oppression. In 1920 the Japan Socialist Feder¬ ation was formed in Tokyo with some two thousand mem¬ bers. This year the socialist groups and labor unions put on a parade, which was not opposed, in which they carried not only the red flags of socialism but also six black flags of anarchism. Economic injustice and oppression are driving the under¬ paid and dissatisfied masses of Japan into open enmity against the existing social order. At present it is estimated that there are some three hundred labor organizations with a membership of 365,700. With no legal status the unions when subject to government opposition are almost power¬ less. The workers rapidly gather for a strike and then hastily disperse, so that the movement at times seems checked. But this is only on the surface. Underneath there is a strong current that is constantly increasing in volume and intensity. The strength of the unions, however, should not be measured by members but by the fact that there is a class-consciousness which enables them to unite to strike and to maintain many of their demands. Perhaps we can best visualize and realize the concrete situation in the new world of labor in Japan from the life of a typical leader. In the heart of Kobe, we found Toyo- hiko Kagawa, the benefactor of the poor, the friend of little children, the guide of labor, the organizer of the despairing farmers, the arousing conscience of a satisfied church, the Saint Francis of the slums. We had crossed Japan to see THE NEW JAPAN 55 him, for in this man we found epitomized the new Japan— liberal, daring, hopeful—but grappling with the terrific problems of crushing economic need in the grinding poverty of the industrial revolution. At first he was unwilling to talk about himself, but in the course of a long day in his company we were able to extract the following facts regarding his life: He was born in Kobe in 1888. His father was a Japanese official who had squan¬ dered his inherited fortune and died when Kagawa was six years old. He was then adopted by his rich uncle in whose luxurious home the boy had everything he could desire. While attending school, he was invited to join a Bible class conducted by Dr. H. W. Myers. Gradually the story of Jesus the Carpenter of Nazareth, who poured out his life for the poor, gripped the heart of this young student. When he told his uncle, who was a Shintoist, that he had decided to become a Christian he was instantly driven from the house penniless. Dr. Myers then took Kagawa to his home as his son. During his course of study he broke down with tuberculosis. Seeking recovery he went to live in the hut of a poor fisherman on the sea-shore. After partial recovery, he returned to school and then went to live among the poor in the slums. When asked why he decided to go to the slums when he had tuberculosis, with tears in his eyes, he replied: “I thought that I had only a few years to live and I wanted to do all I could in that short time for the people who needed me most.” Dr. Myers says of Kagawa’s work in the slums: “We felt that in giving him permission to go there we were signing his death warrant, but he would take no refusal. He lived on $1.50 a month and the rest of the money given for his support and all else that came into his hands went to help the poor and suffering about him. He gave away all his clothes except what he had on his back, and to 56 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR provide for somebody who was hungry he often went with¬ out a meal. Strange to say this heroic treatment under the blessing of God cured his disease. He was preaching day and night during these years, visiting and nursing the sick, studying and writing, and doing the work of six ordinary men.” When partially recovered from sickness, he became the pastor of a little church in Shinkawa, Kobe. After spend¬ ing four years in this district, he decided to go to America to study. When the writer visited Princeton between 1914-1916, Kagawa was there as a student. Upon his return to Japan many lucrative positions were open to him. He refused them all and returned to his little room in the slums where he did not have so much as a bed, a chair or a table. The writer found the little room where he had lived for some years in a dark and filthy alley. But in his new office were several hundred of the most up-to-date books on every phase of the labor movement, sociology, politics, art and religion. We found him not a strong, robust man, but a thin, ema¬ ciated, almost pitiful figure kept going by the blazing fire of the spirit with him. He was wearing a suit of clothes that would cost less than $1.50. He is living in the midst of the foulest and most filthy slum we have ever visited in any city in the world. His first undertaking was to organize labor in order to help improve their terrible conditions. While engaged in the work of a pastor in his little church, he started to fight for social justice. Here in the industrial districts he found women working from twelve to seventeen hours a day, and receiving a daily wage of from twenty to fifty cents. With more than nine-tenths of the laborers receiving less than a living wage, and with 92 per cent of the families of Japan trying to keep alive on less than $250.00 a year, he set to THE NEW JAPAN 57 work to improve these appaling conditions of poverty. He did not ask for charity. He demanded social justice. The majority in Church or State, like the Priest and Levite, passed by on the other side. He dared to face the facts. Through his paper, the ‘‘Labor News,” of which he is the editor and proprietor, he aroused the hope of the despairing. Not satisfield with working for the cause of the indus¬ trial laborers, he began to organize the tenants and farmers in the agrarian districts where conditions were even worse. Farmers 7 unions were started, co-operative societies were organized and a paper was published to give the farmers the facts regarding the agricultural situation in Japan. With the awakening of the womanhood of Japan, he intro¬ duced a third newspaper called “The New Womanhood. 77 Kagawa is today the busiest man in Japan. During the seven years since the writer saw him in Princeton, he has written some sixteen books and pamphlets. He is con¬ tributing to a dozen magazines and editing three news¬ papers. He continues to serve as pastor of the little church in the slums where he conducts services before six o’clock in the morning for the impoverished congregation before many of them have to go off for their Sunday of merciless toil in a non-Christian country. He draws his own illus¬ trations and pen sketches for his books and articles. He is at present preparing a novel on the underworld of Osaka, like Sheldons 7 “In His Steps.” He has also been conduct¬ ing an industrial research bureau which has given him a unique insight into the industrial situation of Japan. The account of his life is appearing in three volumes. The first volume, containing the story of his conversion and his entry into the fight for social justice for the poor, has exhausted more than two hundred editions, and accord¬ ing to the publishers has been read by more than a million people. When he is announced to speak the largest halls 58 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR are filled to overflowing. Students from the Imperial Uni¬ versity eagerly crowd the meetings. His life has been “dramatized” and his books have been translated into sev¬ eral languages. He is earning some $15,000 a year by writing, but every cent is invested in downtrodden human¬ ity. He finances a free hospital and dispensary for the poor, and a dormitory for laborers who have no home. His deepest need today is money enough to build a social settlement to enable him to make a demonstration in the midst of the poverty of Japan, such as Toynbee Hall in London or Hull House in Chicago. From the money re¬ ceived from his books, he has already given more than $40,000 for the help of the impoverished labor movement, for the support of his dispensary and for the assistance of his Japanese fellow-workers in Japan, Korea and Formosa. He advocates the application of Christian principles to political, social and industrial evils. Like Mr. Gandhi of India, Kagawa is a pacifist and has a hatred of war. He believes in evolution rather than revolution, expression in place of repression, and in the power of vital social Chris¬ tianity to uplift mankind. He believes that we must Christianize society and socialize Christianity. He stands for a sane constructive policy for the Japanese labor move¬ ment in place of the radical and destructive Bolshevist program which the younger and more ignorant labor leaders have for the time adopted. Kagawa took an active part in the Kobe strike and went to prison with a hundred and twenty others. He has been arrested five times for his fearless vindication of the rights of labor and for articles printed in his newspapers. In the words of the title of his book, he is living “Beyond the Death Line.” But he walks joyous and unafraid. We left his humble home burdened with the patient suf¬ fering of the toiling masses in the noisome pestilence of THE NEW JAPAN 59 those reeking slums, with the cries of little children still ringing in our ears. W 7 e even felt sorry for a dog with its feeble bark in that foul air. Not dogs, but nine million families of our toiling brothers are trying to sustain life on less than a dollar a day in Japan, which is now one of the most expensive countries in Asia, caught in the grinding forces of the modern industrial revolution, between the sweated Orient and the organized wealth of the Occident. Amid the clash of forces old and new, of feudalism and in¬ dustrialism, wealth and poverty, autocracy and democracy, in travail of soul the new Japan is being born. Chapter III INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION After visiting the principal manufacturing cities of India we became convinced that industrial conditions are on the whole much better than in China, where the struggle for life is more fierce and relentless. The life of the average Indian worker is conditioned by the basic fact of India’s greater poverty, for it is the poorest country in the world. The per capita income of the people was estimated by Lord Cromer in 1882 as 27 rupees, or $9.00 a year; in 1900, in Lord Curzon’s time, it was estimated at 30 rupees, or $10.00. The Director of Statistics for India now reckons the per capita income as 53 rupees, or $17.66 a year. Thus the average income of this entire fifth of the human race is less than five cents a day. Such a statement is easily written or read, but what does it mean in terms of human life? It means for tens of millions in India perpetual poverty and often actual hunger. It means one or at most two scanty meals a day of millet or the cheapest grains; it means an earthern floor and four mud walls of a little one-room hovel for a large family in a smoke-filled room with no chimney, and often no bed, table, chair or stove. It means that without ade¬ quate industries in the frequent periods of drought mil¬ lions face the hunger of famine. It is this bitter poverty that drives the worker from the land in times of scarcity to the dreaded factories of Bombay or Calcutta, and from them he seeks to escape whenever his poverty permits. 60 INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 61 The terrible prevalence of debt tends to increase this poverty. In one place which we visited nine-tenths of the workers were reported to be in debt. Much of this is pre¬ ventable, incurred in unproductive expenditures, such as on marriage ceremonies. Sir Daniel Hamilton well says that the country is in the grip of the money-lender. “It is usury—the rankest, most extortionate, most merciless usury, which eats the marrow out of the raiyat and con¬ demns him to a life of penury and slavery.” The interest rate varies from 20 to 150 per cent. The writer found occasionally even higher rates among the drink-cursed miners of Bengal on short term loans without security. India has an industrial population of some eight mil¬ lions. There are approximately fourteen million people en¬ gaged in primitive or cottage industries and over two hun¬ dred millions in agriculture. In 5,312 modern factories British India has 1,367,136 workers, a number larger than in China and a little less than in Russia or Japan. 1 After considering India's poverty, we may now examine wages, hours and conditions of labor. According to the report of the Government Bureau of Statistics, the wages of the majority of common laborers were from 8 to 14 cents a day, of carpenters and iron workers 16 to 49 cents, of cot¬ ton weavers 8 to 49 cents and of rural workers 4 to 20 cents a day. 2 1 The Director of Statistics reports 1,367,136 workers in 5,312 large industrial establishments in 1922. According to the Census there are 2,106,000 in industrial plants and mines employing 20 persons or more; 2,400,000 transport workers, and 825,000 workers in subsidiary occupations. Professor Gini estimates 2,000,000 labor¬ ers in establishments employing less than 20 persons, or a total industrial population of approximately 8,000,000. There are approximately 222,000,000 gainfully employed, compared with 41,609,192 in the United States, and 295,000,000 in China according to the estimate of the Government Bureau of Economic Information, Peking. 2 A careful investigation conducted by the Labor Office of the Bombay Govern¬ ment among 194,000 workers in the cotton industry, revealed the following facts: The majority of the men when we saw them, when wages were still aUthe peak fol¬ lowing the war, earned from 24 to 50 cents a day; women earned from 24 to 33 cents; 62 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR In North and South India we found skilled artisans, car¬ penters, masons, bricklayers, blacksmiths, weavers and en¬ gine drivers receiving from $8.00 to $12.00 a month. In the coal mines of Bengal we found unskilled labor paid 10 cents a day for women, 12 cents for men. The average earned by miners in one mine was $1.49 a week; but they only cared to work three days a week. In Cawnpore we found men working for 18 cents a day, women for 9 to 13 cents and children for 8 cents a day. We cannot forget the sight of some of these children who were under age toiling in the heat, half suffocated by the stifling dust of the tan bark, in a shoe factory which has made large profits and has done nothing for its labor. A neighboring mill has declared 120 per cent profit, paying many of its women 10 cents a day, and unskilled men 16 cents a day. Last year 57 per cent of the children of these workers in Cawnpore died during the first year of their impoverished lives; that is, 570 per thousand of these poor children died during the first year, compared to 83 per thousand during the same year in favored England. * 1 In the model village furnished by one company the lives of 232 children per thousand are saved a year, but the major¬ ity of the employers seem to view with suspicion any sug¬ gestion of such welfare work or housing for their workers. the majority of the children in Ahmedabad earned from 8 to 16 cent*, and in Sholapur less than 8 cents a day. Bombay Labor Gazette, January, 1923, p. 15. The Government Report of the Central Provinces for June 30, 1922, shows rura wages ranged from 8 cents a day for unskilled to 33 cents for skilled workers j urban wages from 12 to 49 cents with an average of less than S3.00 a month. The Report for the Madras Presidency shows practically the same wage scale. An inquiry by Dr. Gilbert Slater in Madras states that the cost of living at the close of the war was $5.66 a month for a family of four. Other inquiries after the prices had risen esti¬ mated a minimum budget for a family of four at $8.00, or considerably above the average wage received in that Presidency. 1 Many women leave the city for their country home for their confinement. If the child dies after its return to the city it is registered among the deaths but not among the births, thus increasing the apparent death rate. The actual death rate is dis¬ gracefully high, but not as bad as these figures would seem to indicate. INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 63 Let us examine for a moment this wage scale!in India in the light of profits and the ability of employers to pay a living wage. During the hard times over most of the world in 1922, the mills of Bombay on an investment of some $40,000,000 made a profit of over $50,000,000, or an aver¬ age of 125 per cent. The year before they made a profit of over 170 per cent. These were certainly exceptional years, but in the meantime their wage scale for all workers averaged only $10.00 a month, or 33 cents a day. Many of the mills of Western India are now demanding a reduc¬ tion of this wage scale. Is the profit of the single manu¬ facturer or the welfare of the thousands of these stunted personalities of greater moment? A foreign cotton mill in a city in the South of India visited by the writer, after having made far more than 200 per cent profit last year, paid from 18 to 33 cents a day for unskilled labor, and from $11.00 to $21.00 a month for skilled workers. A thousand boys and a thousand girls are working here at from 16 to 24 cents a day. The com¬ pany does not believe in any welfare work and has dis¬ couraged trade unions or any effort of the people to im¬ prove their miserable condition. Which is more important, that a few foreign employers should retire with a comfort¬ able income for life, or that the more than two hundred million toilers in India should receive a living wage? On the whole we found that the foreign firms pay better wages and provide better working conditions than most of the Indian employers. In one Indian cotton mill which we inspected we found they were paying their skilled labor $8.00 a month, unskilled workers $5.00 and boys $3.00 a month, plus a temporary grant of seventy-five per cent for increased cost of living, while their printed balance sheet showed a profit of 200 per cent. In the issue of “Capital” for February 15, 1923, dividends 64 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR for certain Bombay cotton mills during the exceptionally favorable years 1921 and 1920 are declared as follows: 1921 1920 Per cent Per cent Currimbhoy Ebrahim & Sons, Crescent Mil].... 100 110 W. H. Brady & Co. Ltd., New City, Bombay... 100 160 Tata Sons Ltd., Svadeshi. 110 120 Ramnarain Harnandrai & Sons, Phoenix. 175 160 Morarjee Goculdas & Co., Sholapoor. 250 200 D. M. Petit Sons & Co., Manockjee Petit. 270 65 In the same publication the jute mills of Bengal de¬ clared dividends as follows for 1919, 1 some being almost as high and some higher for 1920: Per cent 1919 Bird & Co., Lawrence Mill. 200 Jardine, Skinner & Co., Kanknarrah. 200 Gillanders Arbuthnot, Hooghly Mills. 200 McLeod & Co., Kelvin Mill.. 225 F. W. Heilgers & Co., Kennison. 250 Macneill & Co., Ganges Mill. 270 Barry & Co., Gourepore. 420 The F. W. Heilgers & Co/s Kennison mills declared the following dividends for the five years from 1916 through 1920: 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 Per cent .. 110 .. 200 .. 250 .. 250 .. 400 What share in these enormous profits has the poor mill worker or jute cultivator received? “The inarticulate peasant himself has to work in the fields during the mon¬ soon, often standing waist deep in the water. He is satu¬ rated with malaria in these mosquito-ridden districts, and 1 “In the years 1914-1920 the'jute shares in one company went up from 145 to 1,160. The interest paid on the capital invested in the company went up from 15 per cent before the war to 160 per cent. But the price paid to the jute cultivator went down, from $4.50 before the war to $2.00 in the year 1920.” C. F. Andrews, "Christ and Labour,” pp. 43-45. INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 65 the continual dampness brings on ague, rheumatism and fever. All round his village he has to bear the stench of rotting jute fibre, the stagnation of standing pools of water, and a hundred other evils. . . . Directors of jute com¬ panies have been congratulating their shareholders on bumper dividends, and not a hint has been given in their glowing reports about the condition of peasantry from whom those dividends were extracted.” 1 We visited certain typical jute mills near Calcutta. In one we found excellent conditions and an honest effort for the welfare of the workers. In another we found very dif¬ ferent conditions. The Indian workers were driven here by hunger and would escape back to their impoverished vil¬ lages if they could. Most of the Europeans were here to make money and get out of India as soon as they could. The mill seemed a penal settlement for both. In the light of recent and present profits the wages seemed pathetically small. Unskilled men were receiving $1.00 a week, women 82 cents and boys 57 cents a week; coolies were paid 20 cents a day. The young European who showed us over the factory naively informed us that they “managed to break up all the unions” which the men tried to form to improve their miserable condition. This European spoke with con¬ tempt of the workers. “They have to be driven,” he said. In the roar and dust of the driving machinery we saw the dull toilers plodding at their work. They are handicapped by tropical heat, hookworm, illiteracy, poor pay, bad hous¬ ing and the low moral conditions reported by the inspecting lady doctor in these jute mills. Not they, but the machines and the money behind them are masters here. There lies a baby of one of the working mothers asleep on the floor in the din and dust. What chance will this child have in life? It may grow up to aspire to earn a dollar a week in this 1 Ibid. pp. 43-45. 66 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR mill. It will join the thirty million children and youth already in India for whom there is no school. What chance have these women and children, or these helpless unor¬ ganized men against the vast forces of the industrial revo¬ lution in India? But, still, “they must be driven.” How long? How long will they stand it? Crushed humanity even in obedient India, China and Japan is turning at last. The days of the fleecing of labor for the profiteer are num¬ bered, thank God, all over the world. We desire to bear testimony to the fine spirit of many employers. Some of them showed an attitude not only of fairness, but of real human concern for their workers. Regarding hours of w^ork, at the beginning of the Indian factory system, the working time lasted from sunrise to sunset, or about 12 hours. The Factory Act of 1921 lim¬ ited work to a maximum of 11 hours a day or 60 hours a week, with 6 hours for children from 12 to 15 years of age, and one day’s rest in seven. Unlike China very few modern mills in India have any night work. An inquiry showed the actual average working time in the mills of Bombay at present was ten hours a day for men and women, and about five hours, or half time, for children from 12 to 15 years of age. When we contrast this with the frequently inhuman hours of unprotected labor in China, and even with conditions in some of the backward states of America, we see how far advanced India is in her labor legislation. Several leading manufacturers testified that labor in India is now producing more in 10 hours of work than it did formerly on 12 or 14 hours. There are several evils which exist in India that greatly affect conditions of labor. The system of forced labor so widespread under Indian zemindars and native princes in certain parts of the country has been mitigated, and in INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 67 most parts of India abolished, under the British Govern¬ ment. An even worse practice was the recruiting of immigrants under the system of indentured labor to go abroad. The plan of contract, loans and debt often reduced the poor coolies to a practical state of peonage in some colonies. It was the long battle for the rights of the oppressed Indians in South Africa that led Mr. Gandhi repeatedly to go to prison with his fellow-countrymen until they won more humane treatment. The revelation of the immoral and in¬ human conditions made by Mr. C. F. Andrews and others in Fiji and other colonies finally led to the proclamation of the Viceroy on May 25, 1917, that the indenture system of Indian labor had been finally abolished. The whole question of emigration has now been delegated to the In¬ dian Legislative Assembly. 1 There is also the opium evil affecting Indian labor in some parts of the country. After investigating the indus¬ tries of Bombay, Dr. Barnes reports to the Government, ‘The universal usage of opium in Bombay. Ninety-eight per cent of the infants born to women industrial workers have opium administered to them. . . . This is used as a household remedy for every ailment of infancy and child¬ hood. . . . The great necessity for the control of the sale of opium, which is a poison, is indicated.” 2 The poor working mother who leaves her baby alone for the day before going to the mill gives the child an opium pill to keep it torpid or asleep during her absence. We even found these ignorant mothers, where in rare instances 1 The Fiji Government Medical Report of 1916, Council Paper, No. 54, revealed the whole immoral system in its statement: “When one indentured Indian woman has to serve three men as well as numerous outsiders, the results, as regards syphilis and gonorrhea, cannot be doubted.” 2 Bombay Labor Gazette, September, 1922, pp. 31, 32. 68 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR creches were provided for the care of the children, feeding the children opium each morning on general principles, even though the children were to be kept under the care of a trained nurse. 3 A further fact which handicaps Indian labor is the almost universal illiteracy. There are approximately 8,500,000 in school in India and 30,000,000 without schooling. That is, 3.4 per cent of the population is in school, compared to over 20 per cent in America. It is officially stated that 39 per cent of the children educated in India lapse into illiteracy within five years after leaving school. 4 The vast bulk of the workers are totally illiterate. This must be altered if their condition is to be improved. There is deep need of a progressive movement for universal education among the young and for a Workers’ Education Movement similar to that in England among adults. The housing of the workers is a serious problem in India. We found the worst conditions in Bombay among the “chawls” or dark tenements of the workers. The official report of the inspection by the lady doctor to the Govern¬ ment says: “For some 14 hours of the 24, the family in¬ hale an atmosphere laden with smoke and other impuri¬ ties. Nearly every chawl contained animals such as goats, fowls, cats and in some cases monkeys. Rats were also in evidence in most rooms visited. ... I have several * “The Drink and Opium Evil,” C. F. Andrews, pp. 3-13. He writes, “It was the usual practice to poison the little babies with the opium drug in order to keep them asleep while the poor mothers went out and worked in the factories. Two of the best social workers in Bombay had told me that 95 per cent of the mothers were obliged, in this distress and poverty, to drug their own little children; and the workers who went to visit them saw these ‘opium babies’ with their wizened faces, looking prema¬ turely old. The practice of the daily pill led to bowel complaints at the very beginning of life, which could never be got rid of afterwards . . . The Government had refused to shut up one opium shop in a poor slum in Calcutta when petitioned to do so, because (this was the stated reason of the Excise Officer) 2,300 people frequented it daily.” Young India, 1923, p. 235. ♦Progress of Education in India, 1912-1917, p. 122. INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 69 times verified the overcrowding of rooms. In one room, on the second floor of a chawl, measuring some 15 feet by 12 feet, I found six families living. Six separate ovens on the floor proved this statement. On enquiry I ascertained that the actual number of adults and children living in this room was thirty. . . . Three out of six women who lived in this room were shortly expecting to be delivered. . . . When I questioned the District Nurse, who accom¬ panied me, as to how she would arrange for privacy in this room, I was shown a small space some 3 feet by 4 feet which was usually screened off for the purpose. The at¬ mosphere at night of that room filled with smoke from the six ovens, and other impurities, would certainly physi¬ cally handicap any woman and infant, both before and after delivery. This was one of many such rooms I saw.” * 1 More than a fifth of the single rooms in Bombay contain from six to nine persons, over 13 per cent have ten or more persons in each room. The appalling death rate in these overcrowded, one-room tenements of Bombay, is shown by the returns of the Health Officer, Dr. J. Sandilands. In 1921, 666 of every 1,000 babies died during the first year of their lives in Bombay. 2 During the same year, 1921, in England 83 infants per thousand died under one year of age. Let us notice the effect of overcrowding upon infant mortality during the first year of life in Bombay in 1921: Deaths Per 1,000 Living in 1 room tenements. 828.5 Living in 2 room tenements. 321.9 Living in 3 room tenements. 191.4 Living in 4 or more room tenements. 133.3 In England. 83.0 1 Bombay Labor Gazette, September, 1922, p. 31. 1 Allowance must be made for mothers whose children are born in the country and who return to the city after childbirth, thus deereasing Jthe apparent birth and in¬ creasing the death rate. 70 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR That is, of every thousand babies born in England during that year 83 died and 917 lived. In the one-room tene¬ ments of Bombay, according to the necessarily incomplete returns, 172 lived and 828 died. In other words, several hundred of every thousand children in these tenements were sacrificed to existing conditions of life and labor. In Bom¬ bay 73 per cent of the workers’ children were born in these one-room tenements, while only one per cent were born in families living in four or more rooms. It was in Bombay that the average profits of the mills were 170 per cent in 1921. 1 Does it matter if a few hundred children “per thousand” live or die? What is it that really matters? Is it the profit of the few or the lives of the many? Here are five hundred and seventy millions of industrial and agricultural toilers in India, China and Japan living on a bare subsistence, often in illiteracy and ignorance, without culture or com¬ fort, lacking almost all that makes life rich or abundant for us. Yet there are those who bitterly resent any such inquiry as this or any effort to alter or improve these condi¬ tions. To what depths of sordid selfishness and hypocrisy have we sunk if we fight to maintain such conditions and to prevent all efforts for amelioration or radical change be¬ cause of our vested interests? On these great social and industrial issues we must take our stand with those who are for humanity or against it; with those who are for God or for mammon. Living with such wages and under such conditions it is not surprising that labor in India is inefficient. The pro- 1 Fortunately the Bombay Government has a housing scheme to provide for 50,000 tenants in eight years. The first ones completed which we inspected were, however, very far from satisfactory. The finest provisions we found in India for the housing of the workers were furnished by the Tata Iron and Steel Works at Tatanagar, which had invested over $2,300,000 on housing for 12,000 workers; the British India Cor¬ poration of Cawnpore; and the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills of Madras. INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 71 ductivity of the individual worker in textile and several other industries is estimated at about one-third that of British labor. The causes of this inefficiency seem to be the following: Physically, there is the enervation of a tropical climate, undernourishment, bad housing, often poor ventilation and bad working conditions in the factories, with the prevalence of hookworm, malaria and other de¬ bilitating diseases. Mentally, there is the illiteracy and find themselves in a new environment, under strange con¬ ditions sometimes result in the practice of drink, gambling and immorality. Many of the men are living in over¬ crowded tenements away from their families, with their natural instincts repressed. The migratory character of Indian labor also makes for inefficiency. The villagers find themselves in a new environment, under strange con¬ ditions, in a job that is galling and irksome. This, coupled with low wages, bad housing and labor unrest, accounts for the large turnover of labor in nearly all industries. Em¬ ployers of long experience whom we consulted, however, agreed that Indian labor was capable of great improvement and had already advanced in efficiency in recent years. The condition of women and children in labor in India calls for special consideration. Dr. Barnes in her report speaks of their state of fatigue when forced to work ten hours while standing, and then walking the long journey to their homes where they have all their own housework to do. Only a few mills provide maternity benefits before or after childbirth, and few have creches for the care of the children who must play about the floor of the factory, or in some sections of the country are given opium and left uncared for at home. The vast majority of the mills have no welfare work whatever and when the weekly wage is paid feel no further obligation for their employees. One of the deplorable features connected with the employment of 72 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR women in industry is the immorality which the system entails. The power of the foremen and middle-men in some mills enables them to make immoral overtures which if refused may lead to dismissal. The shortage of houses, overcrowding, poverty and the absence of so many of the workers from their village homes increase the moral prob¬ lem. The Report of the Mine Inspector in 1921 showed that there were 249,663 mine workers among whom there were 91,949 women and 8,548 children under 12 years of age. Some of the worst conditions we found in India were in the most backward mines of Bengal. One is reminded of recorded conditions of labor in England before 1842, when women were finally excluded from underground labor. It was then customary for women and children to drag tubs of coal by a girdle and chain, like horses, a total of from seven to nine miles daily. Even pregnant women had to work in dark, unventilated, undrained mines. The moral effect was degrading and dehumanizing. Conditions have already been improved by Government legislation in India, but there are still tens of thousands of women in India, China and Japan who could re-echo the sentiments of Isabella Hogg of Scotland in 1841 when she said: “Tell Queen Victoria that we are quiet, loyal sub¬ jects; women-people here don’t mind work; but they object to horse work.” After considering the profits of many employers and the wages and conditions of the workers, it is not to be won¬ dered at that there is a growing evidence of labor unrest in India. Indeed what human being, except a profiteer, could wish them to be contented? Sir Thomas Holland, speaking in the Imperial Legislative Council, declared he w r ould rather see the mill industry of Bombay wiped out than ac¬ cept the perpetuation of the conditions which had goaded INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 73 the workers to their last great strike. Labor unrest is the first hope of improvement. During the typical years of 1921 there were 341 strikes and industrial disputes reported, or about the same number as in Japan. Of these 110 were won by the workers and 225 were unsuccessful or indefinite in their terms of settlement. Before the war, conditions in many mills in Ahmedabad and elsewhere were intolerable. Abusive language and sometimes thrashing were resorted to. In 1917 the poor workers struck. Again in 1918 the Ahmedabad weavers and 10,000 workers under the leadership of their townsman, Mr. Gandhi, went on a long strike which was finally settled by arbitration. The great strike in the textile factories of Bombay in 1920, which began as a lockout, was entered into by over 150,000 workmen though ignorant and unor¬ ganized. India, like Japan and China, was feeling the influence of the universal upheaval in the labor world after the war. The employers failed to realize the new spirit of the workers. The men were driven by the goading sense of injustice, the pinch of hunger for many, the squalor and misery of their surroundings, exhausting drudgery and lack of personal touch between the employers and the em¬ ployed. One mine superintendent said to the writer: “I can’t beat the men as I once did. There is a new spirit among the workers since Gandhi appeared. For two years I have not dared lay hands on a man. If you beat one now, a hundred others will go for you. The workers have been quite spoiled by this new movement.” The year 1921 witnessed a remarkable growth of the Trade Union Movement throughout India and the world. Mr. N. M. Joshi of Bombay, the able labor representative in the Legislative Assembly, places the present number of Trade Unions in all India at about 150 and their member¬ ship at nearly 200,000. It is impossible to state numbers 74 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR with accuracy as many of the unions, owing to their poverty, ignorance, lack of experience and absence of indigenous labor leadership are little more than strike com¬ mittees. When we visited the Government Labor Office in Bombay in 1923 we found five blue flags locating on the map the five strikes then in progress. Only three weeks during the previous ten months had been free from strikes in that city. There is almost a complete absence in India of radical and especially of Bolshevik influence which one finds in Japan and China. A wise and generous attitude on the part of the Government and employers may win the whole movement to a fair policy of constitutional co-operation, while a selfish and reactionary policy will drive it toward radicalism as in other countries. The Trade Union Movement is in its infancy in India and the great mass of the workers are too illiterate and untrained to be leaders. During this period many bar¬ risters, philanthropists and others are leading the move¬ ment. These men are of two kinds: interested and disin¬ terested. Self-appointed labor leaders who are seeking personal notoriety are not only exploiting labor but deeply wronging this needy cause and bringing it into ill repute. On the other hand we cannot agree with the employers, like those of several other countries we have visited, who refuse to see or recognize any but their own employees. Labor is now in a vicious circle of low wages, illiteracy and unorganized helplessness. If we wait till labor is able to furnish its own leadership for how many generations will it be exploited? The employers are strongly organized and financed and they can afford the best legal counsel. Are the impotent workers alone to be denied all help from out¬ side? INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 75 Article 427 of the Peace Treaty, to which India was a signatory, lays down “the right of association for all law¬ ful purposes by the employed as well as by the employers.” The right of collective bargaining and trade union organi¬ zation has long been recognized in Great Britain. 1 Lord Reading in September, 1922, said: “We hope to place our considered decision regarding the protection and legal status of trade unions before you.” In considering the question of labor legislation, full credit should be given to the Government of India for its wise and generous policy for the protection of labor. India was almost the first country in the world to ratify the action of the Washing¬ ton Labor Conference. No other country has been more responsive to world public opinion regarding industrial con¬ ditions or has more improved its labor legislation since the war. In the debates in the Council of State in Delhi, we heard repeated assurances of India's loyalty to the Labor Organization of the League of Nations. India has far sur¬ passed Japan and has set a shining example to China in her labor legislation. The outstanding achievements of India's industrial legis¬ lation since the war have been the Indian Factories Act 1 The Industrial Disputes Committee appointed by the Government of Bombay expresses the “sincere hope that there will be, neither on the part of the State nor of industry, any hostility to the free evolution of the Trade Union Movement . The outside friend of labor, if he is a genuine friend of labor and is not using his influ¬ ence for other purposes, is in present conditions a necessity ... As soon as a genuine Trade Union organization emerges it should be officially recognized as the channel of communication between employers and employed.” They further recommend Works’ Committees, welfare work which they regard as “efficiency work,” medical attendance, maternity benefits, creches for children of working mothers, work¬ ers’ education, cloth shops for employees, tea shops and restaurants for the sale of cooked food at cost, better housing, the removal of liquor and bucket shops, and, when all other agencies fail, an Industrial Court of Inquiry to be followed by an Industrial Court of Conciliation, half representing the employers and half the operatives, with a neutral chairman. Altogether their report is most wise, just and statesmanlike. Bombay Labor Gazette, April, 1922, p. 23-31, 76 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR which was followed by the Mines Act and the Workmen’s Compensation Act. 1 India has increased her trade about ten-fold in half a century, built 37,700 miles of railway, and improved 27,000,000 acres of land by the most colossal system of irrigation in the world. The present political situation affects industrial condi¬ tions. India today is swept by a vast revolution of thought affecting one-fifth of the human race. The 320 millions of India are divided between some four thousand different castes. Yet in spite of being the most divided country in the world, the leaders of India after the war were forged and fused into one burning unit of new national aspiration. Under the leadership of Mr. Gandhi they de¬ manded “swaraj,” or complete self-determination, the ma¬ jority preferring home rule within the Empire. They pro¬ posed to attain this not by violence or military force but by moral suasion or “soul-force,” by non-violent, non¬ cooperation with the government. They demand economic self-determination under their own self-government. India, like China, has large undeveloped resources. Her output of coal has doubled since 1910 with an annual pro¬ duction of over 22,500,000 tons, or a little greater than that i The Indian Factories (Amendment) Act, 1922, provides for a maximum 11-hour working day and a 60-hour week, which was allowed to India by the Washington Labor Conference, as against 48 hours for Europe, or an average of six days of 10 hours each; for one rest day in seven; for fixed hours of employment and periods of rest. Work is forbidden for children under 12, those from 12 to 15 may work half time, not exceeding 6 hours a day. There is no night work for women. We only wish that every state in America had such a law. The Indian Mines Act of 1924 provides^ for one day’s rest in seven, work above ground limited to 60 hours a week, below ground to 54 hours, no children under 13 to be employed either below or above ground; with provisions for inspectors, health and safety of workers, etc. The Workmen’s Compensation Act provides for com¬ pensation for injury and death to cover over 3,000,000 workers in factories, mines, railways, ships, etc. This is most important as in Bombay alone diming the last decade 12,000 workers were incapacitated permanently or temporarily by accidents; in many cases without any compensation from their employers. INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 77 of China and nearly equal to Japan. 1 She has large de¬ posits of iron ore which are among the best in the world. India is the fourth country in the world in her railway mileage, exceeding that of France or Great Britain. Her cotton industry exceeds that of Italy, Belgium or Japan. She has a monopoly of jute which supplies the world with sacking and packing materials. India stands first in the world in her production of rice, sugar, tea and jute; second in production of wheat and cotton, with a large production of manganese, oil, etc. Why is it then, though India has large natural resources and next to China the largest supply of cheap labor in the world, that she is very backward in her industrial develop¬ ment? India’s stores of money have lain idle and Indian capital has been shy of industrial investment. Her labor has been inefficient though capable of great improvement. She has been dependent on foreign leadership in commerce and industry and her own intelligentsia had no taste for industrialism. Nine-tenths of India’s teeming population is in her 737,000 villages. Each is a small isolated self-sufficient community surrounded by farm land owned individually or collectively. The land is sub-divided in minute frag¬ mentation like a checker board. The size of an average farm is from one to five acres, though sometimes an acre is cut up into more than a score of small holdings. About 72 per cent of the population is engaged in agriculture or pasture. 2 3 1 The coal production of the world in millions of tons is approximately 1,500, of whioh the United States produce 550 to 650, Great Britain 300, France 50, Belgium 25, Japan 30, India 22, China 20, Canada 15, etc. World Almanac, 1923, p. 758. 3 By the Census of 1921, India has more than 220 millions engaged in Agriculture and 220 million acres of land under cultivation, or one acre per person. The Co¬ operative Movement is one of the chief factors of progress in India. Beginning in 1904, it has increased rapidly in recent years until in 1921 there were 47,000 societies with 1,750,000 members and active adherents, with a collective capital of about $417,000. 78 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR Following Japan’s victory over Russia in 1906 the Swadeshi Movement, supported by the educated classes for the patriotic patronage of home production, was the first sign of the industrial awakening of the Indian people. It was the war, however, that did most to revolutionize industry. It showed clearly the danger of India’s reliance on imports from overseas and forced the Government to take vigorous measures to make the country more self- contained, both economically and for purposes of defence. The appointment of the Industrial Commission, 1916-1918, marked a change in public opinion. During the past few years the industrial development of the country has made rapid progress. Amongst the nu¬ merous activities of the Central and Provincial Depart¬ ments of Industries, might be mentioned the opening of a number of trades schools and training centres, and the financing of numerous pioneer industries such as the manu¬ facture of glassware, rubber goods, soap, ink, aluminum, pencils, condensed piilk, matches, etc. In other directions Indian industry has made rapid strides. The high pro¬ tective duties of the past few years have considerably in¬ creased the demand for Indian and woolen goods, steel and iron ware, but high tariffs will make the rich richer and the poor poorer in India. With her vast supply of cheap labor, which can be obtained at from ten to twenty cents a day, with her large resources in raw materials and the new nationalistic de¬ mand for the fostering of her own industries, India will take an important place in the industrial world. Already As it brings together a whole village in economic solidarity and is the people’s own affair, it has possibilities for rural reorganization and adult education that are of great promise for India. It has made a spendid beginning in co-operative credit and will doubtless soon extend in productive and distributive developments as in Europe. See Co-operative Movement, International Labor Review, February, 1922, pp. 229-250, and Indian Co-operative Studies by R. B. Eubank. INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 79 she has been recognized by the Council of the League of Nations as one of the eight chief industrial countries of the world. 1 Calcutta is now the center of the jute industry. Bengal has over a thousand mills, employing more than 430,000. Bombay, now one of the great cotton centers of the world, has 954 mills with 312,000 operatives. Madras has over 500 establishments with some 100,000 workers. India’s principal manufactures are cotton and jute, followed by wool, iron and steel, paper, etc. During the twenty-six years from 1892 to the close of the war, the number of India’s factories had increased 398 per cent and industrial laborers 239 per cent. India’s foreign trade has increased over forty-five fold since 1834 and at the close of the war reached over one and a half billion dollars, being a little less than that of Japan and more than that of China. The Tatas are a fine example of Indian enterprise. Be¬ ginning about 1850 with almost nothing, they built up their large fortune out of their cotton mills in Bombay and Nagpur. The great iron and steel works at Tatanagar reduced what was a barren jungle in Bengal in 1908, to a great model industrial city, comfortably housing some forty thousand of their own employees and fifty thousand others employed in subsidiary enterprises. Their invest- i Lord Chelmsford, the late Viceroy of India, in speaking on behalf of India's indus¬ trial importance at the Council of the League of Nations, referred to India as one of the first countries to convert the Resolutions of the Washington Labor Conference into statutory form. Although claiming the industrial population of India as 20 millions, on the basis of Professor Gini’s figures for the League, he compared the industrial population of the leading countries affiliated with the League having over a million workers among which India ranks fourth. United Kingdom Germany. France. India. Italy. Japan . 13,000,000 12,000,000 S, 000,000 8,000,000 5,500,000 5,000,000 80 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR ment of millions with five modern blast furnaces now claims to be turning out the cheapest pig iron in the world. Their vast hydro-electrical plants are harnessing the power of the rainfall of western India at a cost of over $50,000,000 to develop finally over 150,000 horse-power for Bombay, a city of a million people. Their engineering works, cement companies, oil mills, sugar corporation, industrial bank and hotel companies are a further mark of the enterprise of this great Indian firm. With an eight-hour day in Tata- nagar, shop committees, a relatively high wage scale, work¬ men’s insurance and wise welfare work, they are setting an example to both Indian and foreign employers. They suggest the possibilities of India’s future industrial develop¬ ment. Chapter IV THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA As the storm center of the chief problems which now confront the new world of labor, the writer again visited Russia. Concerning no other country has there been such a flood of propaganda, both red and white, such exaggera¬ tion and distortion of fact in the interest of passion and prejudice. In no other country did we find it so difficult simply to see and to tell the truth objectively. For in¬ stance, as we crossed the border we saw the red flag and the soldiers of the red army. To one traveler in our com¬ partment they suggested the red of bloodshed and the Terror, to another the great principle of the blood of a common humanity of one brotherhood. The determining factor was the attitude of the observer. It is so throughout Russia. Some can see nothing good, and others nothing bad. Our one desire has been to keep an open mind and to be fair; to record impartially and objectively what we saw. During our visit, from Riga through Russia and back to the Polish border, in Moscow or Petrograd, we moved everywhere with perfect freedom. We went anywhere alone by night or day, chose our own interpreters, selected the factories we wished to inspect, saw everything we de¬ sired and talked with everybody we wished, whether they were friends or foes of the present regime. Nowhere have we been accorded greater kindness, courtesy and freedom of movement, or met more frank, fearless and honest men 81 82 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR than some of the leaders we interviewed. We criticized freely the methods of the present government to their face and told them the evils we observed in their system. With all its faults the present government impressed us as better than the hideous regime of old Czarist Russia which we found a decade ago. Instead of the hunger and famine in Moscow, “the city of the dead,” of two years before, it is now throbbing with new life and its population increased from one to two millions. Shops are open, private business, buying and selling in industry and agriculture are in full swing; there is an apparent trade boom, everywhere streets are being paved, houses repaired and painted and life quickened by a new hope. We attended the great All-Russian Agricultural and Home Industries Exhibition where the whole life of Russia is focused and visualized from the Arctic to the semi¬ tropics, from the Esquimaux of the Pacific to Turkestan and the borders of India. We saw their exhibits of indus¬ try, agriculture, peasant life and the working of their great Co-operatives. We observed their demonstrations and tourist parties for nearly a million peasants brought in from all the Russias to be instructed at the Exhibit in the use of tractors, modern machinery, demonstrations in methods of farming, the conduct of community centers, social welfare and training for citizenship. With all its mistakes, which are many, we found an actual government composed for the most part of working¬ men, administering with growing success the most vast state in the world. And they are in a measure economically succeeding after facing for six years probably the most colossal combination of difficulties which ever confronted a single people in the same period of time. They have had to overcome the inheritance of a corrupt Czarist regime, the greatest loss of any nation in the world war, a world THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 83 blockade and two revolutions. They have had to meet allied invasion from without and counter revolutionary white armies within, fighting at one time on twelve fronts. They have had to contend with the strike and sabotage of almost their whole bureaucracy and united bourgeois oppo¬ sition. Finally, they have had to pass in turn through chaos, bankruptcy and awful famine. Despite the almost daily prophecy of their speedy down¬ fall, and their widespread unpopularity, they have emerged from all this not only more firmly entrenched than ever, but apparently the most enduring cabinet or party in Europe today. The Conservative Baldwin Government in Britain, and that of Poincare in France, Stresemann in Germany and Mussolini in Italy give promise of falling long before that in Russia. Lenine has broken down, but he is hardly missed, for the Government of Russia is not and never has been a one-man regime. We refer in this connection to the government as enduring, in the British sense of the cabinet or party in power, not to the social order. Nearly all responsible leaders in Russia agree that the people are utterly sick of further war, or revolution, or foreign intervention which proved such a miserable failure and that there is no other party in sight that could preserve law and order in Russia. Now let us face the facts. Here is a movement of vast possible significance for good or evil, which must be studied and interpreted if we are to understand the present inter¬ national situation or the new world of labor. As we left the country we endeavored to focus our thought and sum up our conflicting impressions of Russia. They cannot be reduced to a single formula. Rather we were forced to note the contrasts between things good and evil. Among the glaring evils of the present system are the following: v 84 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR 1. There is a frankly avowed atheism, materialism and anti-religious policy of the individual members of the Com¬ munist Party, despite the measure of liberty of conscience and religious toleration which the government officially has allowed to the Church. We appreciate the deep, mystical religious consciousness of the Russian people, their unique capacity for suffering and sacrifice, and the sublime elements of worth in the Orthodox Church once it is reformed. But when it is remembered how some of Russia’s present leaders suffered at the hands of the Church as well as of the State, and what a caricature of religion was presented to them in the superstition, hypocrisy and corruption typified by such men as Rasputin, their rejection of the religion which they knew is not so much to be wondered at as their measure of tolera¬ tion. They have, however, been merciless to those whom they believed were guilty of counter-revolutionary plotting and meddling in politics. 2. There is the Orthodox Marxian policy of the class war and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They believe that other countries have a veiled dictatorship of the privileged one-tenth, while they claim a frank dictatorship on behalf of the hitherto unprivileged nine-tenths who constitute the working masses. They claim that this dictatorship is tem¬ porary, and that once it has been fully established by a minority on behalf of the majority, it will automatically terminate all class distinctions, abolish itself and take in the whole united communal society. But the love of power may prove an evil and a tyranny as great as the love of money which they decry. There is, however, some evidence and promise of a lessening of this dictatorship. 3. There is a fundamental denial of liberty to all who oppose the government, similar to that of the old regime. Russia has always had a strong, stern, centralized, auto- THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 85 cratic government. As we compare Russia under the Bol¬ sheviks and under the Czar as we saw it a decade ago, the present government appears to be far better than that of the old system. But there is little room for the expression of public opinion, no freedom of the press, and no liberty for voting or acting on economic, social or religious issues in opposition to the policy of the present government. For the present at least they frankly profess dictatorship rather than democracy. The priceless possession of the human spirit of liberty, after a thousand years of struggle, has been abandoned, at least for the time being. 4. There is a continued bureaucracy, compulsion and state control of life, often similar to that of the old regime, that does not allow the same free play for independence and individual initiative found in other countries. 5. There is an evident lowering of standards in higher education, especially in the universities. Russia has a remarkable plan for primary, practical and technical edu¬ cation, though they lack means as yet adequately to carry it out. But there has been a frank suppression of idealistic . teaching in philosophy, theology and cultural studies; a suppression of academic freedom, and a dilution of the universities in the interest of practical, utilitarian education for the working classes, at the expense of the former cul¬ tural education for the few. There is a whole Russian university in Berlin composed largely of professors and students who were banished for their idealism or who fled from the Terror. 6. There is a lowering of moral and spiritual standards in some areas of life, chiefly as the result of the inherited corruption of the Czarist regime, the pressure of poverty, and a materialistic and atheistic interpretation of life. As a result of this situation, liberty, religion and idealism will 86 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR have to fight for their very life in Russia during this generation as in no other country in the world. There is a remarkable discipline in the Communist Party which is today guiding the destinies of the 132,000,000 people of Russia. Of the body politic, the directing brain and nervous system may be compared to the Communist Party of 450,000; the body and hands are the workers in organized trade unions which they claim number nearly 5,000,000; the ponderous limbs are the more than 110,000,- 000 peasants who constitute 85 per cent of the population. The rest are considered vestigial survivals like the appendix which once had a functional use. The government is making a tremendous fight against graft and bribery, under the inherited traditions of the old regime of abysmal corruption. Conditions are, how¬ ever, still very bad. Nevertheless, despite these failings Russia constitutes an economic and industrial challenge, wherever ruthless capitalism exists in the world. In refer¬ ring to “ruthless capitalism” we fully recognize the legiti¬ mate and necessary accumulation of capital without which modern industry cannot be conducted. Throughout this book what we mean by ruthless capitalism is the exces¬ sive concentration of power and privilege as a result of vast wealth in the hands of a few; monopoly of natural resources for private gain at the expense of public welfare; autocratic control of industry; production for individual profit and power rather than for social use and service, with consequent extravagant luxury for some while many live in poverty and want. We do not believe that State Capitalism, State Socialism or Military Communism fur¬ nish any panacea for the evils of our present system. While we wish to be fair and to do justice to any elements of truth in this and every other system, we do not believe in the Bolshevik theory of life for the reasons already THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 87 stated—its anti-religious policy, its class war and dic¬ tatorship, its fundamental denial of liberty, the state con¬ trol of life, the lowering of standards in higher education and the lowering of moral and spiritual ideals. The fundamental instincts of human nature, hunger and love, both in the material and spiritual realm, cannot be crushed and conquered either by capitalism or Com¬ munism. Both systems in their worst applications have outraged the free spirit of man. But man survived the enthroning of a painted Goddess of Reason in the endur¬ ing cathedral of Notre Dame, the red terror of the Guil¬ lotine, and the militarism and sordid vanity of the coarse Corsican butcher who made a caricature of the French Revolution. France still bears the scars of the evils of that period. Yet the great ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity lived on in a freer Europe despite the wild license and debasing mixture of good and evil in the move¬ ment. We do not condone the evils of either the French or Russian revolutions, but we should appreciate the full significance of each. We shall reserve final criticism of the Bolshevik regime until the closing chapter, endeavoring in this only to state the facts in the case impartially and to describe industrial conditions as we found them. The significance of Russia is enhanced by its very mass and magnitude. Midway between East and West, the Rus¬ sian Empire at the opening of the war contained more than one-seventh of the land surface of the globe and about one- ninth of its population. 1 Stretching for over six thousand miles across Asia and Europe, it was approximately twice the size of all the rest of Europe. Siberia alone with its 1915 1923 Area in Square Miles. 8,417,118 8,166,130 Population (estimated). 182,182,600 131,546,045 Statesman’s Year Book, 1923, p. 1278. Losses were in Poland, Esthonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, etc. 88 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR vast resources has an area one and a half times that of the United States, and if peopled with the same density of population as Belgium, would hold almost twice the present population of the world. When a state with such resources and with the largest white population in the world tries the boldest social experiment in all history, it must be reckoned with. At least we shall not solve the problem by telling lies about the present government such as the ridiculous statement that all women had been nationalized, or other baseless propaganda, furnished by members of the old order dispossessed of their privileges under the Czar, or other interested parties, determined that a workingman’s government should not succeed. Further, the significance of the present movement in Russia can only be adequately understood in the light of its past history. Russia has been marked for suffering for a thousand years. It has been the land of autocracy and revolution. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries the land was laid waste by eighty-three civil wars. For the next two centuries (1238-1467 A. D.) it was swept by invasion under the galling Tartar or Mongol domination; it was rent by ninety internal conflicts and more than a hundred and fifty foreign wars. Then for five centuries Russia suffered under the autoc¬ racy of the Czars. Ivan the Terrible began a reign of terror which lasted for twenty-five years. Before the last feeble Czar, Nicholas II, came to the throne in 1894, for two decades an average of some twenty thousand victims a year had been sent to Siberia. The government of the last Czar had banished 180,000 political exiles. We stood in Petrograd in the dark fortress of Peter and Paul between the tombs of the dead Czars on the one hand, and the cells of their former political prisoners on the other. For centuries the finest spirits in Russia had 89 THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA cherished their dream of a new sc'/ml order. They had lived for it, suffered for it in dungeon and exile, thousands had died for it. They had dreamed of a country that should be free of police and spies, free from the caricature of religion in a State Church that had become almost an adjunct of the police department and of the spy system, free from the exploiter and profiteer, from all autocracy, aristocracy and plutocracy. They had dreamed of world brotherhood, of communal well-being in mutual service without the motive of private profit and selfish hoarding. We stood in the Revolutionary Museum in the Czar's Winter Palace in Petrograd, where one sees the portrayal of the long century of struggle for freedom, from the revo¬ lution of 1825 to the present. A blind bureaucracy had opposed all reformers, suppressed the conquered national¬ ities, dissolved or treated with contempt the Duma and legislative assemblies, outlawed trade unions and had put- down peasant revolts and industrial strikes with bloodshed. The spy system and secret police both in state and church developed into “a vast secret society which permeated and poisoned the whole of Russian social life.” This was the stern school of autocracy and oppression in which the present rules of Russia studied. And this must be remem¬ bered in judging the present government. Most of the evils of the present system were found in the old Czarist regime which our government recognized. In the World War Russia suffered more than any other great nation. Of some 15,000,000 called to the colors 1,700,000 fell among the battle dead, and a total of over 3,000,000 died of wounds, disease, neglect and starvation. Betrayed by their corrupt leaders, left often without muni¬ tions and supplies to fight with sticks and stones, the morale of the troops at the front was finally broken, and the hungry mobs in Petrograd rose in bread riots, only to 90 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR be shot down by the soldiers. In all the terrible events that followed in the downfall of Russia the malign influence of Germany must be fully recognized. It is said that every country gets the kind of revolution it deserves. On March 12, 1917, the first revolution broke out in Russia, beginning with a strike of the industrial workers threatened with starvation. Regiments sent to crush the revolt joined the strikers; and the Czar, Nicholas II, finally abdicated. A provisional government under Prince Lvoff was followed by a new cabinet under Keren¬ sky, but neither satisfied the demands of the people. Liberty had given place to license, discipline was at an end, chaos reigned. The peasants wanted land, the indus¬ trial workers demanded control of the factories, there were constant demonstrations and threatened uprisings, while the central government was weak and nerveless. Russia was on the verge of breaking up into rival revolutionary states in endless civil war. One party alone now emerged that knew just what it wanted and had the power to enforce its demands. 1 During the war, councils or soviets of workers were formed in the factories, of peasants in the country, and soldiers in the army. As the peasants had not been given the land nor the town workers bread, a popular revolt began. This second Russian Workers’ Revolution took place on November 7, 1917. As soon as the Petrograd Soviet obtained a Bolshevik majority they seized the Gov¬ ernment and handed it over to the All-Russia Congress 1 There had been three revolutionary groups in Russia, the Communist followers of Marx, the Anarchist followers of Bakunin and Prince Kropotkin, and the Social¬ ist Revolutionaries, one wing of which pursued the policy of terrorism. The first group organized the Marxian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898 among the town workers. In the division which arose in the party the Mensheviki favored co-opera¬ tion with the bourgeois Liberals, while the Bolsheviki under Lenine favored the dic¬ tatorship of the proletarian workers on their own account. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 91 of Soviets. The Czarist Empire had now become the “Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic.” 1 The Bolshevik Government withdrew from what they regarded as an imperialist war and signed the separate and humiliating peace of Brest-Litovsk. They then endeav¬ ored to make the colossal transition from a capitalist to a socialist order. Two series of decrees were now issued, one aiming at the destruction of the old order, and the other at the establishment of the new through the improvement of the social conditions of the people. A Declaration of Rights was passed at the Third All-Russia Soviet Con¬ gress and a Constitution was adopted at the fifth Congress. Russia became a Republic of Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. Private property in land was abolished, all land becoming, in theory at least, the common property of the people. The State declared its ownership of all forests, mines, national resources, factories, railways and other means of production and transport. The Republic became a free Socialist community of all laboring classes. Freedom of conscience, of opinion, of the press and of meeting were guaranteed. The franchise was granted irrespective of religion, nationality or sex to all citizens over eighteen engaged in productive labor; it was denied to all who exploited the labor of others for profit, or lived on unearned income, also to monks, priests, members of the former police and criminals. It cannot be maintained that all of the above ideals or guarantees were carried into practice. Religious liberty, for instance, was hedged about with many restrictions. Russia is the only country which the writer has visited in thirty years where no Student Christian Movement is as yet permitted. 1 At the Tenth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, December 23-27, 1922, it was de¬ cided to unite all the Soviet Republics in a single federal state. The present official name is the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics or the S. S. S. R. 92 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR Private property and trade were now to be replaced by the free exchange of the products of industry for food from the country. But when industry ceased effectively to produce, the burden of the support of the population fell upon the peasants, who had all their surplus crops taken from them. To eliminate the money power of the bourgeoisie, paper currency was deliberately debased by a flood of paper money which soon became worthless and which the peasants were unwilling to receive. Peasant uprisings began to increase and the area cultivated was reduced to half what it had been before the war. The Bolshevik Revolution was accomplished with re¬ markably little bloodshed and employees and men of all classes were invited to co-operate with the new govern¬ ment. With the beginning of the destruction of the old capitalist regime and the erection of a new social order, almost the entire bourgeois, professional and technically skilled class went on strike, adopted the method of sabot¬ age, and organized a counter revolutionary movement with the aid of foreign powers. Fighting now for their very existence, the government replied by the Extraordinary Commission and the Terror, the worst features of which, however, were abolished as soon as counter-revolutionary activity ceased. We make no defence of this terror, any more than we do of that of the French Revolution. Its severity can hardly be exaggerated. For three years private shops were closed and there was almost no buying and selling. A period of “military com¬ munism” was instituted in which the state tried to organize the whole life of the people on a communal basis. The peasants’ entire surplus grain was taken by the state for the support of the army, the industrial workers and the rest of the population. Resenting this forcible seizure of their grain, the peas- THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 93 ants ceased to raise more than they needed for themselves and the government was now compelled to face a world of enemies from without and within the country. For six years they were forced to meet obstacles and opposition unparalleled in history. They had inherited the corruption of five centuries of Czardom. The country was exhausted by the war and impoverished by a world blockade. It was crushed by Germany in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. It suffered from invasion, as it had to fight against the Central Powers, the English, French, Japanese, Czecho¬ slovaks, Poles, Finns, Greeks, and Roumanians. Even an American army invaded their territory. The white armies of Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, Kras- noff, Semenoff, Wrangel, Petlura, Balakhovitch and the Cossacks were not only fighting but some of them perpe¬ trating atrocities upon the helpless inhabitants equal to anything in history. Under the White Terror in Finland alone out of a small population of 3,000,000 some 17,000 are said to have perished. In the meantime Russia was devastated by red and white terror alike. After six years of warfare following 1914, Russia col¬ lapsed in sheer exhaustion. She was devastated by war and revolution, swept by vast epidemics, bankrupt and threatened with chaos. Following all this came the awful famine of 1921. The American Relief Administration reported 23,895,000 starving out of a population of 42,000,- 000 in the famine area. 1 Reliable witnesses informed the writer that frozen corpses, dogs and even children were eaten by persons frenzied by hunger. Some three millions are said to have perished of starvation and a total of not 1 The A. R. A. reported nearly 15,000,000 fed, 12,000 medical institutions assisted, 7,000,000 persons inoculated or vaccinated, 912,121 tons of food imported, and a total expenditure of some $75,000,000. The work of the A. R. A. was beyond all praise and has left an enduring gratitude in the hearts of the Russian people that will have an important influence upon the future relations of these two great'nations. 94 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR less than ten millions from all causes of war, revolution, famine and disease. In the face of such titanic obstacles the policy of mili¬ tary communism broke down. Russia had attempted to pass at a bound from primitive agriculture and a disorgan¬ ized industrial system to State Socialism and Communism. This was impossible. The new state had destroyed its credit. With the abolition of private wealth there was almost nothing left to tax, for state industries were running at a loss. A flood of paper money to pay the government’s bills ruined the currency. The workers were for a time demoralized by the new license. Even school children had their committees for running the schools, as the soldiers tried to run the army and the workers the factories. But all reserves were soon exhausted, and the state could not even provide adequate food rations to keep the workers from hunger. The period of destruction was at an end. Now began the more difficult task of reconstruction. The government had failed and confessed it . 1 Lenine and his colleagues had the sagacity to see it in time, frankly admit their failure, and turn right about face, in the adoption of “The New Economic Policy.” The Communist leaders received the shock of a rude awakening when there was a peasant uprising in the province of Tambov, and the fortress of Cronstadt re- 1 See Izvestia, August 11, 1921. Lenine frankly said: “We can only continue to exist by making an appeal to the peasants . . . The role of the proletariat in such a situation is to supervise and guide these small farmers in their transition to socialized, collective, communal labor . . . Ten years at least, and, in view of our present ruin, probably more will be required for this transition . . . We must decide which of two policies we shall choose. Either we forbid absolutely every private exchange of goods or we take the trouble to make it a state capitalism . . . State capital¬ ism is a step forward toward the destruction of the small bourgeois attitude . The kernel of the situation is that one must find a means of directing the evolution of capitalism in the bed of state capitalism so as to insure the transition of state capitalism into Socialism.” THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 95 volted. Production in industry had fallen to a desperate fraction of the pre-war basis and of the national needs. 1 The new economic policy embraced: 1. The substitution for the requisition of all the peasants’ surplus grain by a definite food tax, taking a maximum of 20 per cent of his crop. 2. Freedom of trade within Russia. 3. The dena¬ tionalization of small business, the revival of private small capitalist production, and of banks and shops on a profit¬ making basis. Also the leasing of the majority of state- controlled enterprises. 4. The concentration of state control to the more important nationalized industries, and their combination in autonomous state “trusts” under the Supreme Economic Council. 5. The institution of a State Bank and the encouragement of the Co-operative Societies which had been temporarily absorbed by the state. 2 It is only fair to say that the “new” economic policy was in fact a frank retreat, and in part a return to the old methods of capitalism which had been so condemned. The government has not, however, abandoned its ideal and aim. The present policy is only a temporary concession. Their plan is State Capitalism now, State Socialism as 1 Larin, the Communist economist, contrasted the production of 1920 with 1914 as follows: The production of coal had declined 75 per cent, petroleum 67, gold 88, cast iron 97.6, iron and steel 96, cotton and wool 80, rubber 98 and chemicals 89.6 per cent. 2 See Statesman’s Year Book 1923, p. 1286. The sweeping changes in the policy and laws of Soviet Russia are shown by the following: November 14, 1917, Decree giving Workers’ Committees complete control of all industries; May, 1921, Law re¬ pealed, individual management restored; November 24, 1917, Decree abolishing all existing courts and legal institutions, Extraordinary Commission or Cheka established; January, 1922, New system of courts established, Cheka abolished; December 14, 1917, all banks closed, nationalized and assets confiscated; December, 1921, new bank law passed and State Bank with branches established; August 20, 1918, nationalization of land, prohibiting private ownership of real estate; June 1, 1922, Decree passed giving perpetual right to possession and right to inherit same; June 29, 1918, all industries nationalized; June, 1922, many of smaller industries surrendered. Owners given preference in leasing others on long-time leases, 50 to 100 years, etc. Ex-Governor Goodrich, of Indiana, “The Evolution of Soviet Russia,” p. 223. 96 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR soon as possible, and ultimately pure Communism that will obviate state control. History proves, however, that once this ground is sur¬ rendered it will be difficult to recover. In Rome under the Republic and the Empire no citizen ever held title to his land as a personal possession. Under English law all the land theoretically belongs to the crown, but this is now a mere fiction and it would be fatal to try and reclaim it. When the peasants of Russia have long possessed the land, when private industry has been re-established, when leases have been made to private capitalists and conces¬ sions granted to foreign governments for recognition, when Russia comes again into the family of nations with the constant influence and pressure of the rest of the world upon her, it will be difficult if not impossible for one nation to live under an economy of pure communism if all the rest of the world is upon a basis of unrestricted capitalism. In the meantime, the Soviet Government maintains an almost absolute political and economic control. It retains the monopoly of foreign trade, the control of heavy indus¬ try, the railways, the banking system and of most prop¬ erty. A new capitalist class is again springing up under the present system of private trading. In spite of all its concessions, the new economic policy, while it has succeeded superficially in stimulating trade upon the surface, has not as yet restored production to its pre-war level nor attracted a large amount of capital, either foreign or domestic. Within Russia there is not much private capital left to attract. Its pre-war estimated wealth of only $40,000,000,000 has been reduced to little more than half. Russia’s greatest economic needs at the moment are capital, credit and confidence, but she is slowly gaining ground in all three. The average wage for an unskilled worker in 1916 was THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 97 $141.00 a year, or $11.75 a month; it was only $77.50 a year, or $6.41 a month, in 1923, in spite of the high cost of living. 1 Trotsky in his report to the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party in 1923 stated that the total income from industry and agriculture in 1922 was only 60 per cent of what it was in 1913. While the agricultural income was approximately two-thirds of the pre-war standard, that from industry had fallen from $2,200,000,000 in 1913 to $650,000,000 in 1922, or less than one-third of its pre¬ war value. The gold value of the money in circulation is approxi¬ mately only one-tenth what it was before the war. Russia’s chief resources lie in grain, timber, coal, iron, oil, gold, platinum, manganese, flax and cotton. 2 In all of these, production has fallen off greatly. Compared to the pre¬ war standard of 1913, Russia’s production in 1922, accord¬ ing to the most reliable statistics obtainable, was as follows: Oil 49 per cent, salt 36, coal 34, electro-technical supplies 26, wool 27, chemicals 21, matches 20, paper 17, sugar 12, glass 9, platinum 15, gold 7, brass 3.5, steel 7.4, pig iron 3.9, iron ore 2.2, plows and reapers 6, railway carriages only 4 per cent of pre-war production. The writer spent most of his time in Russia investigating labor conditions, visiting factories, interviewing officials, trade union leaders and representatives of the public con¬ cerning industrial problems. It must be remembered that Russia is still a primitive agricultural country, more than a century behind Western Europe in its cultural standards, 1 Stroumiline in the official Moscow Trade and Industrial Journal. 2 Before the war Russia stood sixth among the nations of the world in the produc¬ tion of coal, second in petroleum, fourth in iron, and provided nine-tenths of the world’s supply of platinum. Russia took first place in the production of rye, second in wheat and oats, and third in the number of cattle, and second in her railway system of 42,504 miles. Russia is a land of raw products and vast potential wealth. 98 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR and that only in recent decades had it witnessed the begin¬ ning of an industrial revolution and the development of its wealth. Apart from the independent republics, Russia claims 7,785 factories with 1,744,000 workers, or little more than Japan or India. According to official figures there were 1,180,000 less industrial workers in 1923 than in 1913. In visiting Russian factories we selected first certain nationalized rubber works in Petrograd and Moscow. The total production of each factory was about one-third of its pre-war output. The individual worker, owing to the disorganization of industry, produces from 50 to 60 per cent of what he did before the war. In one factory the workers had been reduced from 18,000 to 8,000. Industry as a whole has been constitutionalized and each factory had its printed constitution or standard contract sent from Moscow, and worked upon the basis of a signed agreement between the government “Trust” of the industry on the one hand and the workers’ trade union on the other. The management and technical staff were men of the old regime working loyally with the new order and receiv¬ ing from $2.00 to $4.00 a day. Labor showed a will to work; there was evidence of discipline and of deference paid to the management on the part of the workers. Labor’s interference with management and the workers’ control of two years before had almost entirely ceased. The wages of the workers, which were chiefly on a piece¬ work basis, ran from $6.50 to $45.00 a month in Petrograd, and from $10.00 to $50.00 in Moscow. Highly skilled workers received about a dollar a day. The working day had been reduced from 10 hours before the war to 8 hours. Conditions for the workers in the factories were excellent. There was a thorough organization both of workers and management under a government constitution with elabo- THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 99 rate provision for the settlement of disputes and conflicts. There was a local trade union committee in each factory; a conflict committee composed of half workers and half management; a district council to which appeal could be made, and final arrangement for arbitration. Most dis¬ agreements were settled before reaching the stage of strikes, which, however, were not forbidden as a last resort. Approximately 28 per cent of the wage bill of each fac¬ tory was set aside for social insurance for the workers. There were so many taxes and restrictions that at present there was no indication that the factories were making a profit for the state. The cost of the product was about double that of pre-war days, the cost of living was also doubled, the real wages of the workers were less, and the profit of the factory had disappeared. Too many cooks tended to spoil the broth. The moral standards of the workers were not high. Throughout the factories we noticed signs, “Discharge for Theft/’ and observed that we ourselves and all workers were searched on leaving the factory to see if we had any stolen goods upon us. In the state flour mills employees stole so much of the flour that profits vanished and some were offered to their former owners or to private capitalists. This may be attributed to long-continued poverty, a period of lawlessness, and to the confessed materialism and dictatorship of the present regime. Nevertheless, in production, in method and in relation¬ ships, conditions were steadily if slowly improving every¬ where. Two years ago nearly all writers like H. G. Wells and Sokoloff were speaking of industry as being “rapidly ruined” and of impending disaster. There is evidence now of progressive adjustment and adaptation and the promise of stable and permanent success in industry. In textile factories we found wages running from ap- 100 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR proximately $4.00 to $30.00 a month, or from seventeen cents to a dollar a day. We met one director receiving $1.25 a day. The real wages of the workers were about 65 per cent of the pre-war standard. Production in the individual factory had fallen off from 10 to 20 per cent of the pre-war level but was much better than two years ago. In the textile industry as a whole, however, produc¬ tion is scarcely a fifth of what it was in 1913. Concerning the settlement of labor disagreements we found more disputes and less strikes in Russia than in almost any other industrial country. The right to strike is maintained both in state and private enterprises, but recourse to arbitration is compulsory before a strike can be declared. In spite of low wages in Russia today the cost of liv¬ ing is much higher than before the war. My first meal in a Moscow hotel with two courses for two person' 1 cost over $5.00 gold. A pair of shoe laces cost me 65,000,000 roubles. The face value of this before the war would have been a fortune of $32,500,000, but with roubles at 480,- 000,000 to the dollar, and falling daily, the cost of the shoe laces in American money was about thirteen cents. My first street car fare was 26,000,000 rubles. For half a large loaf of bread I paid 96,000,000 roubles. A pound of tea costs from $1.00 to $4.00, or over 480,000,000 roubles, and a cheap suit of clothes 12,000,000,000. The writer found much discontent among unskilled and poorly paid workers outside the ranks of the Communist Party. Within this favored group, industry, the govern¬ ment, everything is theirs and utopia lies just over the brow of the next hill. The two chief causes of complaint on the part of non-Communists, however, were poor pay and lack of liberty. Voting is not by secret ballot but openly. Any¬ one is free to oppose if he dares to become a marked man, THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 101 vote against the policy of the Party and take the conse¬ quences. The lowered voice and furtive glance often bore witness to the shadow of the Terror that still lingers in the memory. One quiet but fearless worker testified to having been imprisoned four times under the present government and fourteen times in his lifetime, because he dared to stand for his principles. We met no working men in all Russia, however, who, even for increased wages, would be willing to return to the regime of the Czar or of Liberalism after the first revolution. Poor as it is, it remains a workingman's gov¬ ernment, in many respects nearer the people than any other in the world. Even among the bourgeoisie I found a grow¬ ing number who feel that their early sabotage against the government was a great mistake, that their trust in futile British and French intervention had been disastrous and that there is no other possible government in sight that can maintain law and order. They say the whole country is sick of war and revolution, and that they should now loyally co-operate with the government in its present progressive policy and hope for a growing measure of liberty in the future. The truth is that Russia has never yet known liberty, nor enjoyed a government sure enough of itself and of its principles to allow the free criticism of enlightened public opinion and a free press. The entire press today with all its sources of news and editorial interpretation of events is the controlled mouthpiece of the state. With the in¬ creasing stability and confidence of the present government there is more freedom. But no system will ever commend itself to well paid, well housed, educated Anglo-Saxon workers who have tasted hard-won liberty, if it can only maintain itself by an iron dictatorship of force, and dare 102 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR not trust truth to the full blaze of democratic discussion and opposition. The money of the new system is of three kinds: side by side with the depreciated paper currency there is the stabilized currency upon a gold basis. One paper cher- vonetz, or ten gold roubles, is worth a little more than an English pound or a little less than $5.00. Workmen are frequently paid, however, and wage agreements calculated in the “tovarni,” commodity or goods rouble. This is based upon the index figure of fifteen principal articles, and represents, therefore, a real wage which will always pur¬ chase the same amount of supplies. At present one tovarni rouble is equivalent to about two gold roubles in Moscow. Thus Russia has already adopted this scientific method of payment, similar to the plan proposed by Professor Irving Fisher of Yale for stabilizing the dollar, which still seems distant and utopian in progressive America. We found Russia a land of organized labor and trade unions, and they have greater power than in any other country in the world. Representation on the All-Russian Congress of Soviets is in the proportion of one worker to every 25,000 electors in the towns, but only one peasant to every 125,000 from the provinces, thus giving the in¬ dustrial workers proportionally five times as many delegates as the farmers. It is a workingman’s government and country. This is often indignantly denied by those who claim that it is a government of intellectuals, and that the workers are the mere pawns of this oligarchy, but in the estima¬ tion of the writer this is not true. The sources of informa¬ tion and interpretation for most American visitors and readers are the old dispossessed bourgeoise class, who are not unprejudiced witnesses. It is true that they have been often cruelly treated. We saw men of this class loyally THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 103 trying to work with the present government, but who were held under suspicion by it and who were allowed neither employment within Russia nor permission to leave the country. From the point of view of this class alone the present government is indeed cruelly unjust, but from the standpoint of the long-exploited masses it is a prodigious effort at emancipation and justice. Most of us are too bitter and partisan, too near to the events in question to see the movement in perspective as we now can see the French Revolution. Strangely enough we now view this movement with the same horror and indignation as the royalists of France did the French Revolution, and as the aristocracy of England viewed the rebellion of the ungrate¬ ful colonists in America. Uqder the autocratic Czarist regime it was illegal to be a member of a trade union prior to 1905, and free labor organizations and strikes were strictly prohibited. It was the power of repressed organized labor driven underground that finally broke in volcanic upheaval, organized its Soviets and led the revolution for the overthrow of the old order. In February, 1917, there were only three trade unions in Russia with a membership of 1,385. Upon gaining their liberty, within six months a thousand labor organizations had enrolled some two million members. In 1923 there were 4,828,000 members, including workers by hand and brain in industry, agriculture, the professions and government employment. 1 The personnel of the Soviet Government is drawn chiefly from the ranks of labor. Within the Communist Party 55 per cent are from the industrial workers, 30 per cent are 1 Labor statistics in this chapter are taken whenever possible from the publications of the All-Russian Central Soviet of Labor Unions, and State Department of Labor translated from the Russian. Numbers 1 to 6, 1923. 104 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR peasants, and 15 per cent are intellectuals. Although fourteen out of the sixteen Peoples’ Commissars of two years ago were professional men or university graduates, yet this class is held under suspicion unless they have been seasoned in prison or enlisted in the cause before the revolution of 1905. The trade unions are an integral part of the ma¬ chinery of state organization. They have their represen¬ tatives in nearly all important industrial and political bodies. They have the right to nominate candidates for nearly all important offices in industry or government, in the management of each factory and trust. By the Labor Code of 1922 they are given large powers in fixing wages, working hours and conditions of labor. Where labor demands, as it frequently does, increased wages, shorter hours or better working conditions, labor also, as rep¬ resented in industrial management and government must answer the question, Where is the money to come from? As yet there has never been enough to go round, never enough to carry out the reforms for education, social in¬ surance, and increased wages which all desire. The worker in Russia has more power and less wages than in other in¬ dustrial countries. Thus far he has succeeded in securing favorable labor legislation and industrial and political con¬ trol, but not in the production of enough “surplus value” to improve his economic condition. Members of the trade unions are given special privilege in education, in schools for workers to prepare them for the universities, to which they must be admitted after a three-year course without examination. The government has aimed at and achieved a large measure of social equalization. In general, a single standard of living has been established. Apart from a few secret profiteers no gross inequalities of fortune exist, for the THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 105 reason that all are poor together. Life has been levelled down rather than up. Lenine and the Soviet leaders get a salary not exceeding two dollars a day, with certain allowances and privileges. They are men of simple life, who daily sacrifice for a cause that has for them the force of a religion. But in many respects the early decrees and efforts of the Party to achieve power, privilege and comfort for the working class have failed. In some cases, such as social insurance, the legislation remains but is still partially ineffective, owing to insuffi¬ cient funds. In other cases new legislation has withdrawn the privileges granted to the workers, which proved harm¬ ful or impossible of fulfillment. An example of this is found in workers’ control of the factories. This was tried and proved a failure under existing conditions, as it did later in Italy, and as it did in the Russian army when sol¬ diers’ committees endeavored to take the place of the offi¬ cers. It is difficult to conduct an orchestra by a divided committee or soviet; someone has to beat time and be the sole director for the moment. On November 14, 1917, a Workers’ Control Decree gave the workers almost complete supervision of industries, in¬ cluding the purchase and sale of raw materials and manu¬ factures. After disastrous experiences of mismanagement, in May, 1921, the law was repealed, workers’ control was abolished, individual management was restored and in some instances former owners were put in charge. On December 28, 1921, the central committee of the Communist Party, in agreement with the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, adopted the following resolution covering large- scale industry: “Conditions in Russia unquestionably de¬ mand concentration of all power in the hands of the man¬ agement of the factories. The direct intervention of 10 6 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR trade unions in the management of undertakings is also inadmissible.” 1 There is now a steady evolutionary development of labor within revolutionary Russia. Forced labor has been abol¬ ished. Membership in a trade union is no longer compul¬ sory, but it is almost universal because there are so many advantages of membership and such limitations placed upon “free” labor. Strikes are no longer forbidden as anti¬ revolutionary. Competition is now resorted to between the state and co-operative and private industries, while scien¬ tific management, piece work, special rewards for excellence and many other devices to stimulate production are re¬ sorted to. There is also a growing tendency toward the recognition of certain rights of private property in Russia. In a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Council in May, 1922, citizens were granted the right to hold property which had not already been municipalized and to transfer it by rental contracts. Private persons can acquire land on a forty-nine-year lease from local authorities and build upon it. Individuals may hold all movable property, including capital, factories, shops and personal property. Security of copyright, inventions and trade-marks were restored. Property may be mortgaged or bequeathed to one’s family up to the value of $5,000. Property expropriated by revo¬ lutionary laws was not restored. But with increased inter¬ course and trade relations conditions in Russia are con¬ stantly approximating those of other nations. An impartial perusal of Labor Legislation in the Labor Code of 1922 reveals the fact that the new Government of Russia in five years has produced a more advanced body of legislation on paper than many other countries in a century. Almost the first law passed was for an eight-hour day 1 Labor Conditions in Soviet Russia. International Labor Office, Geneva, pp. 48, 49. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA 107 and a forty-eight-hour week, 1 a law which a century after the industrial revolution has never been enacted in Britain or America. Work is limited to 8 hours for day work, 7 for night work and 6 for unhealthy industries. Every worker has the right to a weekly rest of 42 hours, if possible on Sunday. Women are safeguarded from night work, overtime and unhealthy industries. Provision on full wages is made for mothers for 8 weeks before and 8 weeks after confinement. Creches or homes are provided for the children of workers. For young persons the normal working day must not ex¬ ceed 6 hours from 16 to 18 years, and 4 hours for 14 to 16. Children under 14 are not allowed to work. 2 In glaring contrast to the factories in China, Japan, and the backward states in America, the writer saw no child workers in any factory in Russia. An elaborate plan of Social Insurance is provided by levying from 12 to 28 per cent of the wage bill upon all industries, state or private. This covers the cost of sick¬ ness, accidents, incapacity for work, forced unemployment, confinement for women, old age and burial. “The Russian proletariat has taken as its motto the complete social insur¬ ance of salaried workers as well as the poor in the towns and villages.” Until industry becomes more profitable, however, and more successful in production, funds are in¬ adequate for the fulfillment of more than a part of this program. We may look upon Russia as a vast laboratory for social experiment . In a world fettered and bound by conserva¬ tive custom and tradition, with its incubus and inheritance 1 Izvestia, October 31, 1917, No. 212. Authorization for work overtime in’certain cases specified by law may be obtained temporarily through the trade union or labor inspectorate for men over eighteen. 2 The labor laws in this chapter are taken from the Russian Labor Code published in 1922. 108 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR of medievalism and absolutism, its uncorrected results of a laissez-faire industrial revolution, its enormous injustices and inequalities, its masses often in poverty and ignorance, without adequate opportunity for expression or self-realiza¬ tion, it may be of some real value to have at least one coun¬ try free to test certain theories by a system of trial and error. In so far as they are true they will eventually suc¬ ceed, but where they are false they will finally fail. If we have open minds we shall learn much both from the success and failure of the good and the evil in Russia. We repeat that even as they had the sagacity to profit by their mis¬ takes and adopt a new economic policy, so they and the new world of labor may yet learn valuable lessons in this great laboratory of life. If Russia finally succeeds in¬ dustrially she will make a profound impression upon the world. Chapter V THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST A general survey of present economic conditions in China and Japan and India reveals the fact that Asia is in the beginning of a great industrial revolution, and presents a situation strikingly similar to that in England a century and more ago. We see the same long hours, low wages, bad housing, inhuman conditions and terrific poverty in the industrial cities of the East that prevailed in the West be¬ fore the reforms of the last century. Can these conditions be radically improved? Can Asia be saved from the mis¬ takes of the West, or must the workers toil through the same long period of exploitation and misery? In passing from Asia to western Europe one enters not only a different continent but another century. To under¬ stand the change we shall briefly review the evolution of labor in the West. A survey of the past in its broad general outlines reveals such an unmistakable movement of prog¬ ress that it should fill us with hope for the future of in¬ dustry in Orient and Occident alike. A true reading of history includes not merely the brilliant achievements of a few exceptional individuals, but the mighty upward struggle of the dumb masses to freedom. The story of the rise of labor must be traced slowly up from slavery, serf¬ dom and poverty, through the medieval feudal system and the agrarian and industrial revolutions, to the achieve¬ ment of political liberty and the gradual growth of in¬ dustrial democracy, that have won for labor its present position in the West. 109 110 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR If we trace man’s economic evolution through the hunting, pastoral, agricultural, handicraft and industrial stages, we often find that the story of organized manual labor begins in slavery , a condition as old as human history. The great pyramid in Egypt built some five thousand years ago stands as the earliest remaining monument erected by slave labor. Slavery is based upon the desire “to use the bodily powers of another person as a means of ministering to one’s own ease or pleasure.” 1 This desire to exploit labor for selfish purposes has persisted from the days of slavery down to the present. Finding slavery as an established institution, Aristotle and the Greeks developed a philosophy to justify it. The Romans gave it foundation in the legal fiction of a supposed agreement between the victor and the van¬ quished, in which the latter accepted the mercy of perpetual slavery in lieu of the life he had forfeited in battle. This was the beginning of that long unbroken series of interested explanations and comfortable philosophies to justify “man’s inhumanity to man,” and salve the conscience of the privi¬ leged few for the wrongs of the enslaved many. Under Roman law the slave became more and more a chattel or thing, divested alike of rights and duties. Basing the status of the slave upon the theory of capture in battle, the absolute right of life and death was supposed to remain with the master. The very inhumanity of the system was justified as relatively merciful. The majority were usually kindly treated just as animals are today, but it was not by legal right but merely by the mercy of the master. The slave was “his property” and he could do as he liked with him regardless of the welfare of the individual worker or society. The master owned the worker. Property was 1 Gilbert Stone, “A History of Labour,” p. 25. We are especially indebted in this chapter to this volume, to Webb’s History of Trade Unionism, Hammond’s “The/Town Labourer,” and “The Village Labourer.” THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 111 supreme, not persons. The slave could legally be sold or given away, bequeathed as any other thing, treated kindly or cruelly at the pleasure of his owner. The fact that prevailingly so many were kindly treated did not justify a system which gave to one man, by virtue of a theory of unlimited personal property, such enormous power over the lives of others. The slave could become a persona or human being only by a legal act of emancipation. He was even excluded from the worship of the Roman deities other than the god of slaves. If a slave was suspected of crime, his evidence was obtained by torture and if he informed against his master, even as late as the time of Constantine, he was crucified without trial. Nero confirmed the custom that if a slave killed his master all the slaves in the house were to be put to death. The slave could not legally marry. His wife and children were not his before the law. Slaves had no power of in¬ dividual or collective bargaining, no control over their own circumstances or destinies. They were at the mercy of another. Yet this was the system justified for eighteen centuries by philosophers, historians, theologians and churchmen, blinded by their own interests, alike upon grounds of Scripture and of reason, and as late as 1923 there is a movement to abolish the system in the mandated territories of Africa. Gradually the almost unlimited rights of the masters were circumscribed and those of the slaves increased. They began to develop the ancient collegia, or friendly societies of slaves, providing them free burial and certain other privileges. These in certain respects forecast the medieval social guilds, and modern labor organizations. Under the influence of Christianity the condition of the slave was gradually improved by a growing body of humane legisla¬ tion, until slavery was finally abolished. 112 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR Slavery gradually gave place to serfdom which lasted almost until modern times. Feudalism had developed in England by the ninth century. By a convenient theory all the land was supposed to be the personal property of the King by divine right. In return for grants of land his tenants or subjects pledged their loyalty and service. The lords of the manors in turn divided their holdings among smaller tenants, whether free men or serfs. Under this system the serf had rights which the slave never had. I He was protected against all men except his lord. Like the slave he was usually kindly treated but he could be sold, given away or have his personal property seized by his master. The law gave no protection to the honor of female serfs against their lord. The serf remained in dense and unbroken ignorance. He often had no motive for work save that of fear. He was not his own but was wholly dependent upon the will of another. The lord usually looked upon “the unfree child as so much livestock.” He controlled equally property and persons, the land and the serfs upon it. Serfs could be protected, however, from maiming or death just as animals are now. Even as late as the tenth century man was still a cheap commodity. The price of a linen shirt was equal to that of a slave, and a fine piece of armour more than ten serfs, or fifty cattle. At this time the majority of the long handicapped class of manual workers were either slaves or seifs. But gradually a change took place. It was found that unfree labor whether of the slave or serf was not efficient or profitable. From the twelfth century the serfs became a dying class. With the awakening of a new conscience in England there gradually came a growing conviction against serfdom, as previously there had been against slavery. The twelfth century marked the dawn of a new era. With the rise of the free towns of Europe the relation THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 113 of lord and serf gradually gave way to that of master and worker. The growth of a strong central government gave protec¬ tion and safety to the manual worker who had so long been helplessly dependent upon his owner or master. The Crusades helped to break the hardened crust of dead cus¬ tom. They brought in new ideas and new learning which finally led to the Renaissance with its awakening and emancipation of the human mind. Thus began a move¬ ment lasting from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, marked by the rise of a middle class, the development of craft and industry, the growth of the free cities as trading communities, and the beginning of the emancipation of the masses. We shall study the movement chiefly in England as the home of political liberty and later the source of the industrial revolution. The center of social life now gradually shifted from the manor of the feudal lord to the free town of trade, and of primitive industry. Three centuries record the patient efforts of the common people in the development of free municipalities, in the widening of the circle of royal pro¬ tection and justice, to raise the status of the masses from serfdom to freedom. With the growth of freedom came the increase both of population and prosperity. With liberty man began to enter upon his long-withheld birthright. Under the guild system apprentices were bound for pe¬ riods usually from eight to twelve years, receiving food and clothing and a fixed sum at the end of the term. They worked from sunrise to sunset. Wages in the fourteenth century were from four to eight cents a day, while food cost four cents a day for a worker. The Justices estab¬ lished maximum wages to protect the consumer but not minimum wages to protect the producer. By the sixteenth 114 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR century the serf was almost completely emancipated; trade and industry were flourishing. Poverty marked the third stage in the long story of the suffering of manual labor. The evils of slavery and serf¬ dom were now followed by even greater suffering and want. The worker gained personal but not economic freedom. In the sixteenth century the movement began of enclosing thousands of acres of the common land which the poor farmer, free or serf, had for centuries enjoyed. Peasants were driven from the land. Some 300,000 workers were thrown out of employment and poverty became widespread. Unemployment and want drove the workers to rebellion in 1549. But this only ended in defeat and brought no relief to labor. “Merry England” was now passing into a land of large estates and poorhouses. Instead of providing for the unemployed who had been thrown out of work by the existing social system, they were penalized by severe legis¬ lation so that “sturdy beggars” were to be thrashed “till the body was bloody.” Thousands of peasants driven homeless from the land became fugitives or “vagabonds.” The harshness of the Justices in some, districts also caused migration. Cruel laws were passed to prevent the free movement of workers, fugitive laborers, or artificers. If caught they could be branded on the forehead or even enslaved. The Govern¬ ment seemed to contemplate a return to slavery for, by an Act of Edward VI*s reign in 1547, it was ordered that any man or woman who lived idly for three days, who should refuse to labor, should be branded with a redhot iron on the breast with the letter V and should become the slave for two years of any person informing against him. The master could feed his slave on bread and water and refuse meat. He had the legal right to force him to do any work with whip and chains. If the slave were absent a fortnight, THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 115 he could be condemned to slavery for life and branded on the forehead or back. If he ran away thrice, he was to be executed. 1 There were also laws against combinations of laborers to improve their conditions which made offenders liable to fine, the pillory, loss of an ear, etc. These men existed not in their own right but as “a means of ministering” to the “ease or pleasure” of another class. Laws were framed for the protection of the property of this class, not for the personality of men of another class. The discovery of the new world by Columbus opened up new sources of wealth but they were not for the poor. Many were driven by hunger to the gallows, and in the reign of Henry VIII alone, 72,000 persons were put to death for stealing, often for petty theft to appease their hunger. Poverty was accompanied by the dense ignorance of the masses. Education was confined chiefly to gentlemen and the clergy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century unskilled or common workmen received a little less than two cents a day, or $6.66 a year, while skilled workers re¬ ceived three cents a day, or $10.00 a year. These were “maximum” rates. By the agrarian and industrial revolutions, England was changed in one eventful century from a country of farming into a land of smoky cities and factories. Both move¬ ments led to the great future prosperity of England, but both at the time wrought incalculable hardship to multi¬ tudes of workers. The agrarian revolution turned the peas¬ ant proprietor into a dependent agricultural laborer or drove him as a homeless wanderer from the land. The industrial revolution forced him into the factory. The Enclosure Acts, which dispossessed the workers, * “A History of Labour,” pp. 59, 96.1 116 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR could, up to 1774, be passed by the limited franchise of the favored few, without the people concerned even hearing that their eviction from the land was contemplated. Legis¬ lation was enacted chiefly by the property-holding classes and naturally in their own interests. The masses without the vote were politically powerless. The enclosure of the common land had left many of them in abject poverty. Village laborers were receiving from sixty to ninety cents a week in wages. Hunger and want drove many of them to poaching in the rich game preserves for food. Cobbett tells of a young man working at breaking stones who when asked how he could live upon sixty-two cents a week re¬ plied: “I don’t live upon it. I poach; it is better to be hanged than to be starved to death.” 1 In the three years between 1827 and 1830, 8,502 per¬ sons were convicted under the Game Laws, or one in seven of all criminal convictions. Most were driven to crime by sheer want. The woods were strewn with deadly spring guns that dealt death without warning. One man testified to the judge at his trial for poaching before being hanged: “Sir, I had a pregnant wife, with one infant at her knee, and another at her breast; I was anxious to obtain work, I offered myself in all directions, but without success. . . . I was allowed. . . . What? Why, for myself, my babes, and my wife, in a condition requiring more than common support and unable to labour, I was allowed seven shillings ($1.75) a week for all; for which I was expected to work on the roads from light to dark, and to pay three guineas ($15.00) for the hovel which sheltered us.” 2 Every suggestion to alter the laws in favor of the poor met with indignant opposition. The great Burke well 1 The Village Labourer, p. 167. 2 Ibid., p. 169. THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 117 stated the social philosophy of the time. “The body of the people . . . must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their consolation in the final propor¬ tions of eternal justice.” It was the dictum of the time that the poor had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The Hammonds conclude the description of the Village Laborer of the time by a contrast of the brilliant accom¬ plishments and sparkling wit of the class of privilege with the “dim and meagre records of the disinherited peasants that are the shadow of its wealth; of the exiled labourers that are the shadow of its pleasures; of the villages sinking in poverty and crime and shame that are the shadow of its power and its pride.” 1 The industrial revolution that transformed England be¬ tween 1760 and 1832 was the beginning of a vast world movement that was to affect first Europe, then America and finally Asia. The agrarian revolution as we have seen, had driven the rural worker from the land, the mechanical revolution enabled man to harness the power first of water and then of steam to the new inventions for increased mass produc¬ tion; while the social and financial development produced the transformation known as the industrial revolution. This vast change embraced the displacement of labor from agriculture to industry, the massing of large populations in the cities, the speeding up of work, the mechanical dis¬ cipline of life, the lessening of leisure, the increase of “free” Ilbid., pp. 247, 265, 274, 308. 118 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR and fierce competition, and the rise of a capitalist and a proletarian class. After the discovery of Watt’s steam engine in 1765, the power of steam from coal was harnessed to the needs of man. This power was applied in turn to the production of cotton, wool, iron and steel. Labor no longer was inde¬ pendent with its simple tools, but was gradually massed in city factories requiring large capital, plant and credit. The cities were gradually linked together in a network of indus¬ trial life by railways, steamships, cables, telegraphs and telephones. Massed production wrought massed wealth. But while man mastered matter he became also its slave. Though he drove his machine, it in turn drove him. While wages in¬ creased, life in many ways was cheapened. The machine made wealth but it divided men. The sunny fields of England gave place to the “black country” of smoke and dirt. With the congestion of the city, and its cheap crowded dwellings around the over¬ crowded factory, came that spawn of the industrial revolu¬ tion, the city slum. England today, according to Mr. Lloyd George, is still a country with three and a half mil¬ lions in its slums though it could spend fifty billion dollars for the last war. “Men turned their cities into shambles of childhood, poverty was embittered, civil strife in mine, mill and factory became endemic, wars on an unprece¬ dented scale engaged nations and groups of nations.” 1 Man has already harnessed by machinery a hundred and fifty million horsepower from the energy of coal alone. But he has not yet appropriated the spiritual power or moral dynamic to utilize this material energy to secure the “good life” for all. The industrial revolution which might 1 Bru6re, “The Coining of Coal,” p. 2. THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 119 have brought, and may yet ultimately bring, great enrich¬ ment to the common life was at first used too often as a means of privilege for the few and exploitation of the many. It increased life in quantity, but in quality it could only be adequately augmented by a spiritual revolution. The in¬ dustrial revolution affected England from the middle of the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth century it spread to the rest of Europe and America; in the twentieth cen¬ tury it is beginning to transform Asia. In England workers began in the mines in some cases as early as four or five years of age. Children were used as chimney sweeps at five and six years. The Parliamen¬ tary Committee of Investigation found that many were kidnapped and put to work. “The employment of chil¬ dren on a vast scale became the most important social feature of English life.” Mr. and Mrs. J. L. Hammond in “The Town Labourer,” drawing their account from the report of the Parliamentary Committee, have described how children were used like animals in the mines. “A girdle is put round the naked waist, to which a chain from the carriage is hooked and passed between the legs, and the boys crawl on their hands and knees, drawing the car¬ riage after them. . . . Chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half naked—crawling upon their hands and feet, and drag¬ ging their heavy loads behind them—they present an ap¬ pearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural.” 1 It was not the children of the poor that mattered but the divine institution of property for the rich as a means of their comfort and luxury. Its greater importance is voiced by the eloquent Macaulay as “that great institution for the sake of which chiefly all other institutions exist, i Hammond, “The Town Labourer,” pp. 173, 174. 120 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR that great institution to which we owe all knowledge, all commerce, all industry, all civilization.” 1 A century ago in 1819 twelve hundred cotton workers of Carlisle protested at working from fourteen to seventeen hours a day for a wage of five to seven shillings a week, or $1.75, while many could get no work even at that price for their destitute families. At the Felling Pit, boys worked from eighteen to twenty hours a day. At Varley’s Mill the hours in summer were from 3:30 A. M. to 9.30 P. M. One of the employers urged that “nothing is more favorable to morals than early subordination.” 2 Some four hundred masters and a thousand boys were engaged in the business of sweeping chimneys. They started with a period of extreme misery. “Their terror of the pitch-dark and often suffocating passage had to be overcome by the pressure of a greater terror below. In order to induce them to climb up . . . the less humane masters would set straw on fire below, or thrust pins into their feet. . . . There were many months of acute physical suffering from the sores on elbcws and knees. . . . When their extremities were hardened and their fears subdued, they settled down to their grimy lives. . . . A witness in 1788 stated that he had known many boys serve four or five years without being once washed.” 3 As late as 1818 chimneys seven inches square which boys must sweep were still being built. “It was, in fact, in big mansions and public offices that the difficult chimneys were found. The child would make his way up to the top 1 Ibid., p. 320. “Organized industry became, as it were, pock-marked with various evils which men came to look upon as natural attributes instead of what in truth they were, the conseauences of non-natural and diseased conditions. An attitude of mind grew up in which the man was regarded as a subject for exploitation and in which the master was regarded as an exploiter.” Stone, “A History of Labor,” p. 320. 2 Hammond, “The Town Labourer,” pp. 28, 159, 163. * Ibid., p. 179, “House of Commons Journal,” May 1, 1788. THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 121 of the chimney, and then descend slowly, sweeping the soot down as he went. When he reached the bend where the flue turned at right angles, he would find great masses of soot into which he might slide as into a death trap. If he lost his head and got jammed, his fate was sealed, unless his cries could bring help in time. Opposition to the use of machines came chiefly from the more prosperous master sweeps.” 1 Even during the industrial revolution in England a few employers were aware of the injustice of the system and were making individual efforts for better things, but up to 1840 such examples were unhappily rare and standards were usually set by the worst instead of the best employers. Members of Parliament conscientiously objected to educa¬ tion for the laboring classes as “prejudicial to their morals and happiness”! Even in the face of all these crying wrongs, the Com¬ bination Laws of 1799 and 1800 prevented Trade Union or¬ ganizations from making any effort to raise wages or im¬ prove the condition of the workers. Any such effort was considered conspiracy and treason against the sacred rights of property. At Peterloo, on the outskirts of Manchester, a large gathering had assembled to demand universal suf¬ frage, vote by ballot, and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The crowd was charged by the soldiers who killed eleven and wounded over four hundred, a hundred and thirteen of them being defenceless women. “The scene at Peterloo illustrates very vividly all the conditions of the time. The working people who met there were excluded from the rights of citizens: they were refused representation, edu¬ cation, liberty to combine in answer to the combinations of their masters. The law existed solely for their repression i Hammond, “The Town Labourer,” p. 185. 122 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR and punishment. They were nowhere recognized as be¬ longing to society, except in the sense in which his wheels and engines belonged to the owner of a mill.” 1 Magis¬ trates and yeomanry cared “little for the lives of a sub¬ jected class. . . . The Cheshire magistrates in 1819 wanted to suppress the Sunday-schools. The spirit of the times was embodied in the common expression ‘policing the poor/ ” As late as 1860 Broughton Charlton, the county magis¬ trate of Nottingham, declared that “Children of nine or ten years are dragged from the squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.” 2 During the latter half of the nineteenth century a new social conscience was awakened. The reign of Queen Vic¬ toria alone witnessed a vast reform movement, the exten¬ sion of democratic government and the franchise to work¬ ers, the spread of education, the improvement in the con¬ dition of the poor, and especially the recognition of the right of labor to organize in order to win its way to a decent human life. We gain a picture of early Victorian conditions in the Life of Lord Shaftesbury: “The mill children deformed in spine and knee and stupefied with weariness, the infant mine ‘trappers’ quaking from the blackness and solitude of the rat-ridden pits, the all but naked women harnessed to the coal carts, the cancerous chimney-climbing boys, their raw knees and elbows steeped in brine, the lunatic women crawling, bearded and ragged, in the filth of uncontrolled asylums, the whole defile of 1 “The Town Labourer,” pp. 91-93. 2 Bertrand Russell, “ Proposed Roads to Freedom,” pp. 19, 20. THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 123 spectres from the lower of the ‘Two Nations’ into which industrialism had divided England.” 1 The contrast be¬ tween the beginning and end of the reign can be realized by the summary of Dean Farrar: “When the reign began, lit¬ tle paupers were beaten and starved; naval apprentices in coal-boats and merchant vessels were subject to horrible barbarities; the poor little climbing boys, grimed with soot and skin diseases, were maimed and suffocated in choked and crooked chimneys; children were worked in cotton mills for unbroken hours which would have been crushing to grown men. They were brutally treated in brick fields, in canal boats, in agriculture gangs, in pantomimes, in dan¬ gerous performances, in the hands of beggars and hawkers and acrobats. Waifs and strays, criminal and semi-crimi¬ nal, unwashed, untaught, unfed, weltered in an atmosphere of blasphemy and gin, in lairs and dens of human wild beasts, such as are now swept away by the merciful hand of law.” 2 On the one hand these changes were wrought chiefly by the steady evolutionary and educational advances of or¬ ganized labor as it won the legal right of collective bar¬ gaining. On the other hand, by the co-operation of the liberals, enlightened employers like Robert Owen, and great philanthropists like Lord Shaftesbury, a body of new legislation was secured in the Factory Acts and Acts con¬ cerning Education, Workmen’s Compensation, Old Age Pension, National Insurance, Public Health, Housing, etc. 3 Out of their hardships and handicaps the workers evolved the trade union as a means of raising their standard of 1 “Life of Lord Shaftesbury,” by J. L. and Barbara Hammond. 2 “A History of Labour,” p. 249. * Mr. Gilbert Stone in “ A History of Labour,” p. 287, lists sixty-six principal Factory, Workshop and Mining Acts passed between 1800 and the present time in England alone. Several of these acts have done more than all previous centuries to change the conditions of the poor in industry. 124 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR life. Strikes are older than recorded history, going back for more than thirty centuries to the revolt of the Hebrew brick makers of Egypt under their autocratic employer Pharoah, and doubtless before that time. The earliest permanent combination of workers in England precedes the factory system by a century, and even as early as 1383 we find “conspiracies of workmen” to better their condition prohibited. From the end of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century the state had recognized its responsibility for regulating industry in the interests of a certain standard of living for the workers. By the close of the eighteenth century, however, state control had given way to individual bargaining and the helpless workers were left unprotected at the mercy of the employers. The publication of Adam Smith’s epoch making Wealth of Nations in 1776, while it displayed trade as a life of mutual service, furnished the employing and governing class with its political philosophy of freedom of contract and “natural liberty” as a justification for their huge profits. 1 Finding at the end of the eighteenth century that the mis¬ erable state of the workers was driving them to organize, and fearing the result of such organization, the government of the day rushed through the House of Commons in 1799 and 1800 two Acts, known as the Combination Laws, pro¬ hibiting in drastic manner any union of workmen designed 1 He contended that “ the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men.” He says further that “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is, in reality, instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. . . . The upper classes allowed no values to the workpeople but those which the slaveowner appreciates in the slave.” Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter IX; and Book V, Chapter I. THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 125 for the common protection of their wages or conditions of work. Until the end of the eighteenth century the worker had been afforded some protection by the law, but in 1814 the last remnant of that legislative code disappeared and the individual worker, dependent upon his weekly wage, was left in unrestricted freedom to make such bargain as he could with an employer who had behind him much greater capital resources than had ever been known prior to the industrial revolution. Thus was the policy of laissez-faire ruthlessly followed. Statutory protection was taken from the worker while he was forbidden to protect himself. The hardship and injustice of the Combination Laws, however, attracted the attention of a small but influential group of radicals, led by Francis Place and Joseph Hume. Place, a tailor of Charing Cross, worked most assiduously for the repeal of the laws and was the inspirer of Hume, who fought the case through the House of Commons. After a Committee of Enquiry, which had reported that the Com¬ bination Laws had given a “violent character” to workmen’s societies, an act of repeal passed through Parliament in 1824 and was modified by a further act in 1825. These acts were immediately followed by much trade union activity and associations were formed all through the country. A number of strikes occurred but met with uniform failure. Small unions and sectional strikes having failed, the workers next turned to the “one big union” idea. It was at this time that Robert Owen, an employer with high ideals, was preaching co-operative production and advocating the one big union. The mill which he suc¬ cessfully worked at Lanark was undoubtedly a model for other employers of the time. In 1834 he succeeded in forming the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, and immediately thousands of 126 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR workers all over the country flocked to join its ranks. But the time was not yet ripe for a venture of this type, and after the transportation of six Dorchester laborers for merely administering an oath of admittance to a lodge of the Union, the Grand National quickly collapsed. After this third setback trade unionism lay dormant for the whole of the next decade. In the meantime, however, the workers again turned their thoughts to the political sphere and in 1838 the Chartist Movement was at its »•** height. Pessimistic regarding their pow T ers in the industrial sphere, disappointed wfith the Reform Act of 1832, which had enfranchised the middle class but left the workers voteless, and goaded by the new Poor Law of 1834, a cam¬ paign was launched and a program of reform proposed. This program, known as the “People’s Charter,” demanded adult suffrage, annual Parliaments, the abolition of the property qualification for members, equal electoral dis¬ tricts, vote by ballot and payment of members. Alive as this movement undoubtedly was, it achieved no immediate success. In spite of its apparent failure, however, before the end of the century the most important points of the Chartist program became law. After the failure of the political Chartist Movement, the pendulum swung again toward industrial trade union activ¬ ity, which began to revive about 1845. Most of the unions collected and administered extensive friendly benefits, and in this policy of combining benefits with the trade club lay the security and stability of the new unions, which attracted a steady and comparatively prosperous class of artisans. This was the real beginning of the modern trade union movement and from this time forward trade union¬ ism steadily grew towards its present-day position. The dock strike of 1889 gave a great impetus to the organization THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 127 of the general laborer, who is now catered for by unions as large and as important as those of the skilled artisan. Although a combination of workmen was not, as such, any longer illegal, it was not recognized at law and nu¬ merous acts which, if done by an individual were legal, were, if committed by a combination, illegal. The conse¬ quence of this position were first felt seriously as a result of the Taff Vale judgment. In this case the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was on strike in South Wales when the Union was sued for damages as the result of the action of one of its members. The case was fought through to the House of Lords, which decided against the Union. This was for the time being a serious setback, and through the decision and the disputes that followed the trade unions lost nearly a million dollars. Employers took every oppor¬ tunity to break the unions, which, however, doubled their membership during the following year. At the election of 1906, 29 labor members were returned to the House of Com¬ mons and the Trade Disputes Act, which still remains the “main charter of trade unionism,” was passed to remedy the position brought about by the judgment in the Taff Vale case. The next important event in the legal history of trade unions occurred in 1911, when by the Osborne judgment the House of Lords held that trade unions were not entitled to incur expenditure in political activities. This decision was of the gravest consequence to the Britsh Labor Move¬ ment, which very largely relied on the unions for its funds. After keen agitation an Act was passed in 1913 allowing unions to include in their constitution any lawful purpose whatever, including the making of a political levy, from which, however, objectors were given statutory exemption. Trade unions then became a lawful and loyal part of the 128 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR corporate life of Great Britain and today have a member¬ ship of between four and five million. We have so far very briefly noted the growth of the trade union movement, its fight for existence and then for recog¬ nition during the nineteenth century. While the workers were thus employed the state itself was, by the sheer brutality of existing conditions, compelled to take some action on its own account for the protection of the most defenceless of the workers. Before the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century the policy of laissez-faire had already outrun itself, and in 1819 the state was compelled to step in and forbid the employment of children under 16 for more than 12 hours a day, exclusive of meal times. The Factory Act of 1833 prohibited night work by persons under 18 years of age and also raised the age limit for the 12 hour day to 18 years. Under this act factory inspectors were first appointed. From this time on, as the result of the agita¬ tion of Richard Oastler and the philanthropic policy of Lord Shaftesbury, an increasing number of Acts were passed relating to conditions and hours in factories and workshops. The conditions prevailing prior to and during this period of factory legislation are almost unbelievable. There has been a long fight, lasting for centuries from the days of slavery and serfdom, through poverty and op¬ pression, through the agrarian and industrial revolutions up to the recognized status of the Trades Union Movement, now represented by a Labor Party, which is His Majesty's Opposition, and will soon probably be the Government of Britain. There has been a slow but sure evolution of labor in England. And England is typical in many respects of the movement on the continent of Europe. Mankind is still on the march. Socially he has slowly progressed from THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN THE WEST 129 status to contract, politically from despotism to democracy, industrially from slavery to freedom. The long struggle has been between the property rights of the selfish special privilege of a favored few, and the - v personal rights of the dispossessed many. But property ; rights and the power of wealth have always given political, social and industrial power over the lives of others. From the days of Rome to modern England and America, most of the laws have been framed for the protection of property * * rather than personality. A review of the gradual evolution of labor in Europe should fill us with sympathy for the workers in Asia who are suffering today from the same low wages, long hours and bad working conditions that pre¬ vailed in the West a century ago. It should fill us with hope for the future in East and West alike. It should nerve us with the resolve that we shall not rest while poverty, want and oppression exist, anywhere in the world, side by side with exorbitant wealth, luxury and privilege unshared. Chapter VI THE BRITISH LABOR MOVEMENT The Labor Movement in Great Britain was the child of the industrial revolution. It represented the effort of the workers to protect themselves against the encroachment of the machine upon human life, to win for the present better conditions in industry, and for the future a new social order. The logic of fact drove the workers to organize in sheer self-protection against the inhuman conditions which we have described in the last chapter. Colonel Perronet Thompson describes the condition of the Lancashire cotton workers during the first half of the nineteenth century in “the squalid misery, the slow, moul¬ dering, putrefying death by which the weak and feeble of the working classes are perishing.” 1 The doctrine of laissez- faire had left every man for himself and the devil to take the hindmost. Following the industrial revolution the merciless com¬ petition of an individualist society gradually gave place to the more co-operative life of the collective community. In all departments men began to unite and organize for a bet¬ ter life. One function after another that had once been left to individual direction or private profit was taken over by the community. Paving, lighting and street cleaning; protection against violence, robbery, fire or flood; the pub¬ lic supply and distribution of man’s great common needs of water, gas and electric power, and even in some cases of i Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XII, p. 730. 130 THE BRITISH LABOR MOVEMENT 131 milk and other food; the means of transportation and com¬ munication, posts and telegraph; the public care of the sick, the aged, the infirm, of widows and orphans, cripples and defectives; the protection of childhood and maternity, education for children and adults; the provision of libra¬ ries, museums, galleries, parks and playgrounds for the people; co-operation in agriculture and industry; the pro¬ vision of labor exchanges for unemployment, the settlement of industrial disputes and the administration of justice, civil and industrial—these and a score of other activities and functions have been in various degrees taken over by the community in collective or co-operative organization. 1 Consciously or unconsciously, in theory or practice, men began to learn that the ultimate law of social life is not competition, but co-operation and association. Men were driven inevitably to organize in all departments of life, political, religious, social and industrial. As the neediest section of the community it behooved labor to organize also. The British Labor Movement developed along four parallel lines: (1) The Trade Union Movement, as an or¬ ganization of producers to protect or raise the standard of their industrial life; (2) The Co-operative Movement, as an organization chiefly of consumers to safeguard the working class against high prices and profiteering, and to improve their material conditions; (3) The Labor Party, as the po¬ litical organization of the workers by hand or brain, to obtain by legislation and constitutional means a better life for all classes alike; and (4) The Workers’ Educational Movement to train themselves for democracy and for full citizenship in a new social order. 1. The first of these, the Trade Union Movement, as we 1 Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XII, p. 735. 132 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR have already seen, developed in England in the eighteenth century in self-protection against the ominous advance of the industrial revolution. The last decade has witnessed a remarkable growth of the Trade Union Movement in Britain. In 1910 the num¬ ber in organized unions was 2,435,704; at the close of the war in 1919, it was 8,023,761. 1 A trade union had been defined as “a continuous association of wage earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives.” As the name implies, they were first organized for a simple trade, or “craft,” often uniting only workers employed in a single occupation. The same neces¬ sity for protection which drove certain individual workers to unite in a craft union, finally drove other workers to combine in more comprehensive “industrial” unions, uniting all the workers engaged in a single industry. The move¬ ment toward combination was further developed by the enlarging aims of labor toward the “democratic control of industry” on the one hand, and the political control of the government on the other. There is at the present time a steady development in amalgamation and solidification in the Trade Union Movement of Great Britain. Running horizontally across industry are the craft unions, vertically within particular industries are the in¬ dustrial unions. The Miners' Federation, the National Union of Railwaymen and the Iron and Steel Trades Con¬ federation are examples of industrial unions. There is 1 Growth of the Trade Union Movement: Trade Unions Membership 1868. 34 118,368 1900. 1.302 1,971,923 1914. 1,123 3,918,809 1919. 1.315 8,023,761 The figures for 1868 represent only those represented at the first Trade Union Congress. Labor International Handbook, 1921, p. 256. THE BRITISH LABOR MOVEMENT 133 likely to be a pitched battle between these two types of unions, but the present tendency is toward the development of the greater strength and unity of the industrial union. The Triple Industrial Alliance, formed in 1915 of all or¬ ganized miners, railwaymen and transport workers, showed a tendency of unions representing related industries to form still larger combinations. Practically all of the unions are combined in the annual Trade Union Congress, which seeks to enable the whole movement to function as a unit for industrial action, and to promote legislation. 1 At Portsmouth in 1920 the writer was struck with the contrast between two epochs as he passed from the deck of Nelson’s old flagship, the Victory, to the platform of the Trade Union Congress. The one represented the imperialism, militarism and conquest on land and sea of an old order that is doomed to perish. The Congress in its resolution for peace, constitutionalism and democracy in industry and government, universal educa¬ tion, self-determination for all mature peoples and world brotherhood, stood for the new social order that must be built in the future if civilization is to be saved. The Trade Union Act of 1913 enabled the unions to take a direct part in politics. The action of the government gave them increased prestige during the war and both gov~ ernment and large employers found it to their advantage to negotiate with organized labor that could keep its con¬ tracts rather than with masses of discontented, unorgan¬ ized workers in a continual ferment of strikes. There are today over a thousand trade unions in Britain with memberships running from a score to several hundred 1 It affiliates all important trade unions of manual workers and a few brain workers. First organized in 1868 with thirty-four delegates representing 118,367 workers, by 1920 it had 955 delegates representing 6,505,482 workers. In the years following it suffered a heavy decline during the period of unemployment and financial depression. 134 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR thousand, varying in method of organization from a small craft to a large industrial union enrolling everyone skilled and unskilled of “all grades” in an industry. After the war, in 1920, the Miners’ Federation numbered some 900,000. The National Union of Railwaymen, seeking to unite all the workers in a single industry on a twentieth century “new model,” reported 481,000; the Engineering Union 453,603, and the Agricultural Laborers’ Union over 200,000 in the same year. During the present trade depression with some two mil¬ lions unemployed the trade unions are passing through a difficult period. Their membership fell from over eight to less than five millions by the end of 1923. Labor through¬ out the continent of Europe must face a period of depres¬ sion for several years owing to disturbed political and eco¬ nomic conditions, the opposition of employers and govern¬ ments, and the division in its own ranks caused by Moscow. 2. The Co-operative Movement in Britain seeks to or¬ ganize the workers as consumers, as the trade unions seek to protect them as producers. It looks back to Robert Owen, the first great factory reformer, as its founder, in his experiment begun in 1799. He endeavored to substitute co-operation for competition and industrial democracy for autocracy. But the successful type of a consumers’ co¬ operative society was started at Rochdale in 1844. Here twenty-eight poor flannel weavers saved their pennies to collect their little store of capital of one pound each, or a total of $140.00, and took turns tending their first little shop. They were unconsciously beginning one of the great financial and social movements of history. Their experi¬ ment finally improved the condition of millions of work¬ ing men, enabling them to obtain cheap provisions, to escape from penury and debt, to educate themselves, and to extend their operations from distribution to manufac- THE BRITISH LABOR MOVEMENT 135 turing, building, banking, insurance and wholesale produc¬ tion. 1 Where others had failed The Rochdale Equitable Pioneers succeeded by a new method of dealing with their profits or surplus by a “dividend on purchases.” After paying interest of five per cent or less on their share cap¬ ital, all profit was divided between the members in propor¬ tion to their purchases. This profit was credited to each member and capitalized until his share amounted to five pounds. This plan of consumers’ co-operatives owned by the purchasers spread rapidly over England, and later over the continent of Europe and the rest of the world. The British Co-operatives now own their own wheat lands in Canada, their tea estates in Ceylon, their own cotton mills, clothing and furniture factories, fishing fleets, dairy farms, ships, stores, banks and insurance companies. 2 They have their own libraries and educational facilities. Beginning with twenty-eight poor weavers less than eighty years ago, they have raised the standard of living not only for their 4,598,737 members, but with their families for over sixteen millions of people. Thus the Co-operatives already supply more than a third of the people of Britain with about half of the food they buy and a third of their cloth and furniture. They employ over 187,979 workers. Already the four and a half million co-operators in Great Britain possess nearly five hundred million dollars in cap- 1 See “Co-operation and the Future of Industry,” by Leonard S. Woolf. The Consumers Co-operative Movement, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The Story of the Co-operative Wholesale Society 1863—1913. The People’s Year Book, 1923, issued annually. 2 The Co-operative Movement in Britain consists chiefly of organizations of con¬ sumers rather than of producers. After the war, in 1921, of 1,472 co-operatives, 1,352 were societies of oonsumers and only 102 of producers. The membership of the former was 4,548,557 and their trade approximately $1,000,000,000, while the membership of the latter was but 38,360 and their trade some $30,000,000. Peoples’ Year Book, 1923, p. 17. 136 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR ital, in addition to much larger sums already declared in dividends to members. They do an annual business of a billion and a half dollars, or nearly as much as the United States Steel Corporation. Directors who are full-time salaried officials are rendering highly efficient service at salaries of little more than $2,500 a year. They are at least as efficient as members of competing systems who claim that men will not do good work except for high profits. According to the Co-operative Peoples’ Year Book for 1923 there are already some 32,000,000 co-operative mem¬ bers in the thirty principal countries of the world, repre¬ senting with their families nearly 150,000,000 people, or nearly one-tenth of the entire population of the world. Thus in Russia after forty years of struggle against opposi¬ tion under the Czarist regime, the 1,000 societies in 1905 had grown in 1919 to 25,000 societies claiming a member¬ ship of some 12,000,000. Russia and several other coun¬ tries, however, suffered a temporary decline in membership in the period of depression which followed the war. The Co-operative Movement succeeded because it dis¬ covered a great law of life. It was based on the principle of co-operation instead of competition, substituting indus¬ trial democracy for autocratic control, and the common welfare of all, for the private profit of the few. It is a movement of, by and for the working people. Its motto is “All for each and each for all.” Its aim is not merely financial profit but the development of personality, in building a community of free men based upon economic independence, from the humble beginning of a common grocery store. The simple method of a dividend on pur¬ chases, instead of on stock or share capital, secures demo¬ cratic ownership and control, keeps the movement always expanding, with the door ever open for new comers upon THE BRITISH LABOR MOVEMENT 137 a basis of equal opportunity, and avoids the danger of a monopolistic trust, or an exclusive close corporation. All members have an equal vote and no ownership of a larger amount of share capital gives any additional influence. Experience points toward the ever widening integration of the community, organized co-operatively as consumers and citizens. The world has not yet begun to explore the possibilities of co-operation. 3. The Labor Party as the political expression of the movement seeks to unite both producers and consumers in a democratic political state, based upon the trade unions which seek to build up a democracy of producers, and the co-operatives as a community chiefly of consumers. In 1892 Keir Hardie, of the Miners’ Federation, was elected to the House of Commons as the first independent labor member. The following year, in 1893, the Independ¬ ent Labor Party was formed and the present Labor Party in 1906. The remarkable growth of the party is shown by the number of candidates elected to Parliament and the votes polled from year to year. * 1 In 1900 Labor elected two members to the House of Commons, polling a total vote of 62,698. In 1922 it polled more than four and a quarter million, or one-third of all the votes cast in Great Britain. Labor now has 144 seats in the House of Commons and is officially recognized as “His Majesty’s Opposition,” being prepared to form an alternative ministry to take over the government whenever called upon. 2 It is generally con¬ ceded that labor will probably be the government of Britain Candidates elected Total labor vote i In 1900. 2 62,698 1910. 40 505,690 1918. 57 3,013,129 1922. 142 4,236,733 s In September, 1923, the 615 seats in the House of Commons were divided as follows: Conservatives 333, Labor 144, Liberals 61, National Liberals 56, Communists 1, Others 20. 138 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR within a few years. To do this they must transform their present minority of one-third to a majority of something like two-thirds of the national votes. The aims of Labor are both practical and idealistic, seeking the best possible conditions under the existing system, and ultimately changing the industrial system by establishing in industry and society such democratic con¬ ditions and relations as will satisfy the legitimate aspira¬ tions of the workers and most benefit the whole of society. The aiims of the Labor Party are explicitly stated in Labor and the New Social Order in its four pillars: 1. The Universal Enforcement of the National Minimum. 2. The Democratic Control of Industry. 3. Revolution in National Finance. 4. Surplus Wealth for the Common Good. By a National Minimum is meant the securing to every member of the community all the requisites of healthy life and worthy citizenship, resisting every movement for degradation of the workers’ standard of life by forced unemployment, sweated labor, etc. The Labor Party aims at democracy in industry as well as in government, looking toward democratic control of industry through the direct participation of trade unions in its management. It advocates more personal property rather than less, but it stands for the ultimate nationaliza¬ tion of mines, railways, canals and of the production of electricity for cheap power, light and heat. The national¬ ization of the mines was advocated by the Coal Commission appointed by the Lloyd George Government. If this is tried and proves successful, the nationalization of other services may be attempted. The Labor Party also demands a revision of national finance. The national debt now amounts to over $36,000,- 000,000. To meet the annual interest on this debt consumes THE BRITISH LABOR MOVEMENT 139 a third of the national income. Nearly five million dollars have to be taken from the product of labor each working day to defray the interest on the war debt. The Labor Party proposes to wipe out about half of the debt by a levy on capital on all fortunes over $25,000, ranging from a minimum of one per cent to over fifty per cent on large fortunes, in order to secure approximate equality of sacri¬ fice for all classes. At present about seventy-three per cent of the national income is spent for war, past and future, and twenty-seven per cent for the constructive work d employee in this regard has been recognized by leading religious bodies in America and Europe, and by employers in nearly all countries in¬ dustrially advanced, yet it is frequently denied in our own country. We have witnessed a nationwide open-shop campaign under the banner of “patriotism and true Amer¬ icanism." We are not here defending the evil methods employed by some labor leaders, nor are we unmindful of the wise practice of many employers of dealing with or¬ ganized labor, nor of their earnest efforts to find a just solution of the labor problem. But even such bodies as the New Jersey State Chamber of Commerce advise em¬ ployers to keep clear of the various “open shop" move¬ ments which are “undermining the confidence of labor in employers, and ruining the foundation of co-operation be¬ tween them." In backward sections of the country like West Virginia we have had almost medieval feudal conditions resulting in bloodshed and civil war because of the denial of labor's right to organize, as shown by the report of the investi¬ gating committee of the United States Senate. In power¬ ful organizations like the United States Steel Corporation we have had a determined and successful effort to break up and exclude the unions, an effective use of the industrial spy system, and for many years past the long continued disgrace of a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week for a CHALLENGE OF A NEW WORLD OF LABOR 203 large proportion of the steel workers, in spite of the grow¬ ing condemnation of enlightened public opinion. Only within recent months has the Corporation announced its intention of abolishing completely the twelve-hour day and seven-day week. The writer has himself read reports of spies intended for employers that made his blood boil with indignation and made him wonder whether he was in Czarist Russia or in America, “the land of the free.” The policy of organized labor in America is also a mat¬ ter of great moment. Too often trade unions have failed to co-operate with employers in the matter of efficient pro¬ duction, and have been unmindful of the interests of the public. Sometimes labor leaders have been guilty of actually obstructing and limiting production, and in some cases have caused the financial failure of important enter¬ prises. In other cases unprincipled walking delegates who have no concern in the prosperity of industry have arti¬ ficially stimulated strife and discord among the workers. Other leaders have yielded to bribery, have faithlessly broken contracts, or have resorted to intimidation and actual violence. Such men are the workers’ worst enemies. Where such evils exist organized labor must set its own house in order before it can claim the sympathy and co¬ operation of employers and the public. The American Labor Movement in numerical strength has always been below that of the most advanced nations in Europe. Almost all the labor movements of Europe have their own political representatives in large numbers in their national legislative assemblies. American Labor has followed a policy of isolation. Are the American trade unions to play a worthy part, com¬ mensurate with the population, wealth and power of the nation, in the world’s labor movement? Or are they to keep selfishly aloof from the great toiling masses of man- 204 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR kind? Are they to stand separate and superior, isolated from the unskilled, the Negro, the immigrant, the or¬ ganized workers of Europe, the whole International Labor Movement—in short from the whole new world of labor? What attitude are students to take to American labor problems? Are they to permit the widening gulf which already exists in so many older countries between the col¬ lege and labor, the educated and uneducated, the privi¬ leged and unprivileged? In no country is there normally such a large proportion of students democratically work¬ ing their way through college who ought to have contact and sympathy with the world of labor. But how many students know or care about that real world of toil? How many are intelligently informed upon these crucial indus¬ trial problems? For illustration, how many of them realize the sig¬ nificance of students acting as strikebreakers? In not one of the score of other industrial countries which the writer has visited in this last tour around the world did he find students thoughtlessly lending themselves to this prac¬ tice. Yet in some colleges in America strikebreaking has at times furnished a kind of new “outdoor sport.” With¬ out knowing or caring particularly about the moral issues involved, whether the strike was for a just cause or not, students have frequently helped to take bread from the workers’ mouths by offering themselves as “scabs,” “blacklegs” and strikebreakers. Students have unwittingly done their bit, however small, to embitter labor, and to bring one step nearer the class war in this country. The more mature students of Europe now know that this class war is no outdoor sport for sons of privilege. They are seriously studying these challenging problems. The very civilization of Europe is at stake in the vast upheaval of revolutionary forces there, while in America dances, CHALLENGE OF A NEW WORLD OF LABOR 205 athletics, exclusive fraternities and a distracting and cheap round of college “activities” absorb the life of the majority of students. Let the individual American student honestly ask him¬ self what is the purpose of his own education. Is it to fit him to enter the competitive struggle as a better money maker? Is it better to enjoy life as he inherits his father’s business? Is it more intelligently to exploit the labor of others to add to his private fortune, or is it to prepare him for fuller life and larger service for his fellow men, for the backward classes, the undeveloped races, the needier nations of humanity? Finally what is to be the attitude of the leaders of thought in America, the makers of public opinion for the press, pulpit and platform? Are they to join that reaction¬ ary class who in every age have championed the cause of the few against the many, of privilege against the masses, of wealth against poverty? Are they to look upon this inevitable, ever-repeated movement of labor to organize and improve its conditions as irregular, unnatural, dis¬ reputable or seditious? Such unfortunately has been the usual attitude of leaders of thought on the great historical moral issues between privilege and justice. This attitude is natural because the contacts of these leaders are usually closer and their interests are more in common with men of wealth. Moreover, the chief sources of information are more often controlled by men of this group. Furthermore the excesses of labor are more obvious and subject the public to more apparent inconvenience than exploitation by employers. Yet the pervasive influence of the great corporations and the domination of the money power in America over industry, politics, education and religion is a far greater menace to public welfare than the more obvious shortcomings of organized labor. 206 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR There is one thing common to all the four classes men¬ tioned above that must determine their attitude to these industrial problems, whether employers, workers, students or makers of public opinion. All are forced to make one supreme decision. Their final attitude to these labor prob¬ lems and their ultimate interpretation of life must be either material or spiritual. The consistent Christian and the Russian Communist agree in this, that “no man can serve two masters”; he cannot be true both to God and mammon. He must choose between a material and a spiritual inter¬ pretation of life. Is the thoroughgoing materialistic inter¬ pretation of history by economic determinism, or the spirit¬ ual interpretation of life valid? There seems to be no escape from this final alternative. Of those who honestly choose the former there are three classes. The materialistic Marxian Socialist who advocates the class war and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the materialistic militarist who advocates imperialism and national exploitation of conquered nations by force, and the materialistic industrialist dominated solely by the motive of self-interest, whether he be an employer or a worker. All three are equally pagan and un-Christian. Though they hate each other, logically all belong to the same class—the Communist, the militarist, the merciless employer and the self-seeking labor leader are all of a kind in their materialistic interpretation of life and in the inevi¬ table results to which this interpretation leads. The logical and inevitable result for all three classes is war, class war, international war, industrial war. And “war is hell.” The whole community and the whole of humanity suffer today from industrial, international and inter-racial war based upon selfish greed and hate. Upon this recent trip the writer found an increasing num¬ ber of the leading statesmen of Europe agreeing that an- CHALLENGE OF A NEW WORLD OF LABOR 207 other great war would mean the break-up of civilization in Europe. The outlook in that war-torn continent is alarm¬ ing if not desperate. Is there any solution? For himself the writer is driven for a solution to the other alternative—the spiritual interpretation of life. This may be defined in philosophical, esthetic, moral or religious terms. But the world’s need is so desperate that we must seek at the heart of life a moral and spiritual dynamic ade¬ quate to the whole world’s need. Is there such? Nineteen centuries ago a Galilean carpenter in an obscure province of the Roman Empire of blood and iron and gold hurled into a warring world a message of Good News. He proclaimed a new social order which he called the Kingdom of God on earth. With bold, concrete prac¬ tical idealism he interpreted life as ultimately personal and spiritual. He did not believe in an unexplained and sordid world merely of matter and force, nor in a brute struggle for existence, resulting in the survival of the fittest to fight. He did not advocate a class war motivated by hate, the dictatorship of one class, however large or needy, based upon the compulsion of armed force and a terror, red or white. He was not concerned with economic “surplus values” but with human values. For him all life derives its meaning and power from its source, and that source is not matter but spirit, not hate but love, not man but God. In him we live and move and have our being, so that all life is of infinite worth, with eternal possibilities. Life to him was not a sordid scramble for wealth and power. It was not a rushing distraction, a fiercely com¬ peting conflict of hate. It gained repose because unmov- ably centered in a single principle—love. Love meant the full sharing of life, in limitless self-giving and self-sacrifice, for the building of a new social order which was at once 208 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR “the commonweal of God” and a brotherhood of co-operant goodwill. And this new humanity, this practical ideal of a social order which was at the same time a Kingdom of God and a democracy of free men, was gloriously possible. It was worth living and dying for. How was it to be attained? His little, growing group of followers and friends were just to love—to share their life in its overflowing fulness with all in want, especially with the weary and heavy laden, the exploited masses of the poor. They were to share their life with God, as a real and personal Father—for the infinite was Personal and incar¬ nate in every hopeless, sweating toiler, as well as in the one supreme revelation of self-sacrificing and crucified Love. And they were to share their life to the full with their needy fellow men. Just to love God and their neigh¬ bor as a brother man. Those who professed to be his fol¬ lowers were to seek no selfish accumulation of hoarded wealth. Instead they were to love, not in idle sentiment, but to share with those who were hungry, thirsty, naked, sick or in prison—the least of his brother men. They were to go out as the good Samaritans of bruised and exploited humanity to heal its wounds and redeem its life. They were to rely not on wealth and armament but on the mighty dynamic of the moral and spiritual forces, the ultimate power behind the universe. And if they did this, if men would live this life of love, they would see this Kingdom of a new social order come on this earth, where God’s will was meant to be done as in heaven. This was Jesus’ way of life. This was what it meant to be a simple Christian. And straightway his followers went forth to conquer a world. Where they followed his way of life they achieved his victory. But many forgot his way and took their own. The little indomitable band of militant love became in time CHALLENGE OF A NEW WORLD OF LABOR 209 a vast and vested hierarchy of wealth and worldly power. Popes, priests, monks, kings and politicians wore his emblem of sacrifice and shame as a graceful armament. They built him cathedrals of costly stone and stained glass, instead of a social structure of a redeemed humanity. They gave their alms and “charity,” but not justice and mercy to the least of these his brethren. They made ikons and images, hard and fast ecumenical creeds and Protestant dogmas, they offered him faith and works, the gifts of their superfluous wealth, the profession of faultless orthodoxy, or even at times the zealous persecution of heretics and free thinkers when permitted by the secular state. They fought his battles with the sword, compassed sea and land to make proselytes to sectarian religion; they worshipped him; they gave their bodies to be burned in his cause. But the one thing needful they often forgot—Love, the full sharing of life here and now with their fellow meft. True, though they did not share their goods with the poor in this present world, they promised them the satis¬ faction of future bliss in heaven, in lieu of justice and mercy and life abundant here on earth. They achieved much for themselves in a personal, possessive salvation. They sang, “Oh, that will be, glory for me, for me, for me/” But it became in time quite unorthodox to speak of the social application of his way of life to such practical mat¬ ters as labor, industry and politics, or of the application of his teaching to their accumulated property. And for all this they received their reward. His fol¬ lowers in Protestant countries belonged increasingly to a prosperous middle class. They were frugal; they made money; they passed legislation to protect their vested inter¬ ests. Gradually the laboring masses, the weary and heavy laden to whom the Galilean Jesus had preached, drew apart. They became “this multitude that knoweth not the law 210 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR that is accursed”; fiercely blamed for their irreligion, their atheism, their Bolshevism—a great mass often Marxian and materialistic and finally hardened and embittered. God knows the writer would not make light of true religion in which he passionately believes, and of which there is much in the world today. He believes in vital, personal religion not only, but in necessary organization in all departments of life, including the Church as the organic, social expression of religion. 1 But the masses could not seem to believe in a future heaven promised by a prosperous class which did not prac¬ tice their professed creed here on earth. So they tried to form a gospel of their own. They, too, sought to build a new social order of brotherhood. They incorporated in their programmes and constitutions many of the principles of the spiritual social order, but they built it on force rather than on freedom, on a class rather than on an all-inclusive brotherhood, and mindful of their lot and the treatment they had received, sometimes on hatred rather than on love. But it was a gospel of a sort, for it was tangible, concrete, immediate, challenging; something here and now for this earth, for which they were willing to die, as they would have done for the spiritual gospel had they seen it lived and practiced as Jesus did. Here was a body of labor lacking only a spiritual soul; and there was the Church with a soul but no body of social expression. They represented two incomplete and comple¬ mentary fragments of one common humanity, and they needed each other. The Church needed to be socialized; labor needed to be spiritualized, or concretely, Christianized. Here is the challenge today for a new world of labor. Labor has issued the call, “Workers of the world, unite!” Yes, they will, they must unite; they already are uniting. 1 His position in this matter is stated in “Facing the Crisis,” pp. 203-231. CHALLENGE OF A NEW WORLD OF LABOR 211 But for what? For a class war, a dictatorship, a terror, a revolution? Most certainly if we drive them to it and if there is nothing left for them but that. But there is one way left. Why not try Jesus’ way of life? Why not share our whole life, economic, political, spiritual, in “creation’s final law”—the law of Love? The Church needs the new world of labor, and labor needs the sharing to the full of the whole life of the spirit. The issue is drawn. It cannot be evaded. Vividly here in mid-Atlantic the writer recalls the con¬ trast and challenge of a scene recently witnessed in Moscow. Just at the entrance to the Kremlin, which is the heart of Russia, the home of the Czars, the historic citadel of church and state, there stands the most sacred shrine in all the Russias, that of the Iberian Virgin. Worshippers from all parts of the land, simple peasants and devout women, night and day stand praying at this shrine, seeking its traditional blessings of healing. Just beside it, on the wall facing this chapel, the Communist Party or Soviet Government has placed without comment the familiar inscription from Karl Marx, “Religion the opium of the people.” This shrine and this inscription represent the two forces that are today contending for Russia and the world—God and mammon, the spiritual and the carnal, vital religion and materialistic atheism, Love and Hate. Let us make no mistake about the forces behind these two. Both are powerful. Behind that inscription stands the frank determination of the most enduring cabinet in Europe today to root out, by all fair means without force, that religion which they regard as pure superstition. Be¬ hind it are vast masses of labor in many lands, growingly class-conscious, disillusioned—socialist, communist, syndi¬ calist, anarchist, revolutionary or reformist—but prevail¬ ingly apathetic or antagonistic to religion. 212 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR Behind that shrine, that ikon and image, are—what? The organized Churches of the world, Greek, Roman and Protestant. Are they prepared for this struggle? Are they fit to survive just as they are? Observe the superstition of many of these worshippers at this typical shrine, as they pay for their prayers, rely upon these holy relics, bow and cross themselves with touching devotion. The Greek Orthodox Church desperately needs a thorough reformation. Let us admit the superior power and prestige of the Roman hierarchy, its wealth, political influence, sagacious diplo¬ macy along with much true piety and spiritual vitality. But is this Church reformed and ready for this task? Has it come to terms with modern science, with the democratic demand for separation of Church and State, and with the spiritual needs of the world of labor? Or, consider the divided sects and competing denominations of Protestant¬ ism. How many of these evangelical Christians are preach¬ ing and practicing Jesus’ simple way of life? Have they won the masses of labor? Have they even seriously sought to win them? Have they a living message of Good News both personal and social that transforms the individual and society? Are they living a life that humanizes, socializes and Christianizes industry and politics? Have we all together faced this challenge of Religion as the “opium of the people”? Is there any measure of truth in the assertion? Jesus’ way of life was revolution¬ ary, thoroughgoing, transforming. It meant crucifixion, resurrection, a new socialized and spiritualized community that had all things common, not in the prosaic literalism of legal compulsion, but in the communal life dominated by the one master passion of love. They actually did share the life of God and man, of rich and poor, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” CHALLENGE OF A NEW WORLD OF LABOR 213 But have not our later adaptations and compromises of religion often proved an orthodox opiate and sedative, content to worship at the shrine of the known god of Things-as-they-are, not a revolutionary challenge to seek the new social order of things-as-they-ought-to-be? For illustration, when the writer was in Japan, he found a common practice of the managers of certain factories of calling in the ministers of religion, usually Buddhist but sometimes Christian, to talk to the workers and keep them contented, in order to increase production. In one city the keeper of a brothel asked an earnest missionary to talk to the inmates. The missionary ac¬ cepted the invitation just as he would have done to any prison or other institution of need. The keeper was pro¬ fuse in his gratitude after the address, providing tea and cake. “But why/’ asked the missionary, “do> you wish me to help these poor creatures while you treat them as you do?” “Oh,” said the brothel keeper, “they are getting ‘dangerous thoughts' these days, they are no longer con¬ tented with their lot.” He was quite willing for a per¬ sonal application of religion for a future life, provided there was no social application to conditions in this; quite will¬ ing to have their souls saved provided their bodies were not. This man conceived of religion as an opiate of con¬ tentment for the status quo, not a revolutionary chal¬ lenge to change conditions. The illustration was an ex¬ treme case but typical of a common misconception of religion. After the American colonies had been driven to revolu¬ tion, King George III issued a proclamation calling a fast through tout the churches of England to atone for the sins of the rebellious colonists. On this occasion scores of ser¬ mons were preached by eminent clergymen upholding the divine right of kings, and upbraiding the revolutionists for 214. THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR their disloyalty and ingratitude. To them religion was a respectable convention, a comfortable sedative, a quieting opiate to subdue revolutionary discontent, and uphold the vested interests of Church and State. In 1793, Paley showed to his own satisfaction that there was scarcely any respect in which the poor were not more fortunate than the rich. “Some of the necessities which poverty imposes are not hardships but pleasures. Frugal¬ ity itself is a pleasure. It is an exercise of attention and contrivance, which, whenever it is successful, produces sat¬ isfaction. The very care and forecast that are necessary to keep expenses and earning upon a level, form, when not embarrassed by too great difficulties, an agreeable en¬ gagement of the thoughts. This is lost amidst abundance. A yet more serious advantage which persons in inferior sta¬ tions possess, is the ease with which they provide for their children. All the provision which a poor man’s child re¬ quires is contained in two words, ‘industry and innocence/ With these qualities, though without a shilling to set him forwards, he goes into the world prepared to become a useful, virtuous and happy man.” 1 “Happy man!” ah thrice happy if he has partaken plenti¬ fully enough of this opium of the people, of a personal possessive and exclusive religion which preaches content¬ ment to others, while it refuses to share its own well- hoarded store. When the suffering and starving workers of England were driven to revolt in 1830, under the inhuman condi¬ tions described in Chapter V many were shot down by the soldiers, the jails were filled, and four hundred and fifty men forefeited their freedom for life. When law and order was restored the thankful Privy Council asked the Archbishop to prepare a form of thinksgiving and prayer 1 Hammond’s “The Town Laborer,” p. 233. CHALLENGE OF A NEW WORLD OF LABOR 215 which read: “Defeat and frustrate the malice of wicked and turbulent men, and turn their hearts; have pity, 0 Lord, on the simple and ignorant, who have been led astray, and recall them to a sense of their duty.” When slavery was a part of the established order, for centuries it received the hearty support of most of the churches. For example, in 1853 a typical sermon was printed entitled “Plain Sermons for Servants” to keep the slaves contented, with an introduction by Bishop Meade. The following is typical of the teaching of the day: “You should remember that God has placed you where you are. God knows better than you do whether it is best for you to be rich or poor, high or low, in bondage or in liberty. Had He left you to choose your state in life for yourself, you might have made a choice that would ruin you forever! . . . Jesus Christ came especially to save you from your sins.” The last typical sermon in this volume is entitled, “The Faithful Christian Shall Wear a Crown.” The opiate is, contentment in slavery here—a crown hereafter! These men were not conscious hypocrites. They were the typical religious leaders of their day. They were simply blinded by tradition and self-interest. Are the people of this generation subject to similar temptations? Are there equally earnest and sincere men today among employers and leaders of thought who all unconsciously are using their privilege and power to support “things-as- they-are” and to brand as revolutionary every effort to make “things-as-they-ought-to-be”? Are they giving the workers reason to regard religion as the opium of the peo¬ ple, rather than what it was to Jesus, a constructive revolu¬ tionary force for the building of a new world? One and all we stand today before this final challenge, this ultimate choice. Are we to follow God or mammon? The choice is not a matter of course, a mere matter of 216 THE NEW WORLD OF LABOR profession or creed, of lip service, to a Master whose way of life we crucify and reject. “Mammon” is not a poetical scripture allusion, it means money, our money, a selfish way of living, a materialistic interpretation of life. It may be the frankly confessed way of the Marxian Com¬ munist, the secretly veiled way of the militarist, the re¬ spectable and prosperous way of the selfish capitalist, the equally selfish way of the labor leader who is out for his own gain rather than the cause of his comrades, or it may be the consciously or unconsciously hypocritical way of the religionist who professes Jesus’ way of life while he denies it in practice and makes religion “a spitting and a byeword” to the masses now in open rebellion. Let us get beyond profession to practice. How far do we actually live the life of love, measured by what we share? In the ranks of those frankly pagan materialists are men who have taken up their cross of long years in prison for their fellow men, and for a better social order. What have we suffered for Jesus’ way of life? How much of the spiritual, the social and the sacrificial does the world of labor see in our manner of life and in our measure of sharing it? Let us finally face the challenge and let us make the choice between a materialistic and a spiritual interpretation of life. What is that decision to be? Shall it not be that one and all, employers, workers by hand or brain, students and leaders of thought, we may work together, not for our class, small or large, privileged or unprivileged, propertied or proletarian, but for the common undivided humanity of one world of brother men, for the new world of laborf LIGHT UPON ECONOMIC AND INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 1. the new world of labor, by Sherwood Eddy. The result of investigation in ten principal industrial countries during a four¬ teen months tour in Europe and Asia. Considers labor conditions and problems in China, Japan, India, Russia, the continent of Europe and America. 220 pages, cloth $1.50. 2. facing the crisis, by Sherwood Eddy. The Fondren Lec¬ tures of 1922. An outgrowth of 25 years of study, observation and addresses before students in all parts of the United States, Europe, the Near East and the Orient. A challenging discussion of the vital problems of the hour—philosophical, religious, social and industrial. 241 pages, cloth-lined paper 50 cents, cloth $1.50. 3. war: its causes, consequences and cure, by Kirby Page. An analysis of the causes and consequences of the World War and a consideration of means of preventing further wars. Cloth, 192 pages, $1.25; paper, 96 pages, 15 cents. 4. Christ or mars, by Will Irwin. An extraordinarily vivid picture of modern war and a vigorous challenge to the churches by the author of “The Next War.” 187 pages, cloth $1.50. 5. CHRISTIANITY AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS, a DisCUSSion-GrOUp Text Book, prepared for the Federal Council of Churches. Kirby Page, Editor. Facts, Principles, Programs. An invaluable refer¬ ence book. 120 pages, cloth 50 cents. 6. the church and industrial reconstruction, by the Com¬ mittee on the War and the Religious Outlook. A notable book, with chapters on the Christian Ideal for Society. Unchristian Aspects of the Present Industrial Order. Present Practicable Steps Toward a More Christian Industrial Order, etc. 296 pages, paper $1.00, cloth $2.00. 7. Christianity and social science, by Chas. A. Ellwood. A stimulating discussion of the respective contributions of science and religion in building a new social order. 220 pages, cloth $1.75. 8. the constructive revolution of jesus, by Samuel Dickey. A study of some of the social attitudes of Jesus. 160 pages, cloth $1.50. 9. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF LABOR PROBLEMS, by Professor Gordon S. Watkins. This is probably the most useful book of its kind available. Up-to-date information on a wide range of subjects. 664 pages, cloth $3.00. No. 8— industrial unrest: a way out, by B. Seebohm Rowntree. 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