You must have suspected before this that, so far as the rapid accumulation of wealth is concerned, our society was in that stationary condition so much dreaded by your economists as the end of all material progress. An assumption among your thinkers that any permanent diminishment of the production of wealth is the forerunner of disaster to society, is one of those mistakes easily accounted for by the surroundings of your present stage of development. Your experience teaches you that where the wealth producing energies are in the highest stage of action, your civilization shows all its other forces equally advancing; and where on the other hand, capital and wealth are restricted, there is a state of general stagnation. These opposite conditions, however, you will find to be, more than anything else, the result of difference in degrees of intelligence, knowledge, and consequently ambition. Your aims, even the higher ones, are so indissolubly connected with wealth as the means by which most of them are promoted, that your[Pg 235] incentives to acquire riches have become a part of your intellectual constitution. Where the penalty of a straightened financial condition is the forfeiture of everything which makes life desirable, even a denial of the opportunities of association with the better class, and a surrender of offspring to the degradation and contempt which comes of limited knowledge, it may reasonably be expected that the struggle for wealth would be keen. Equally as an incentive also are the innumerable avenues of gain, which are everywhere open for the investment of capital, and the remarkable profits which accrue to keep up the spirit of money-making adventure. You will certainly agree with me that this crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels in the attempt to get money is not the best possible form or type of society: more especially since you are not all fairly and evenly equipped in this struggle, the mass of your people reap no benefit from it, and its result is only to double up the incomes of the few.
Stagnation is not necessarily a condition of the stationary state, as many of your writers lead you to believe. It is merely a revolution in the aims of society, brought about by changes which are inevitable, and[Pg 236] which your civilization is sooner or later bound to reach. Every newly applied science and invention, and above all every acre of land brought under cultivation, render this period so much dreaded by you more remote; but you will come to it all the same. It will merely be a using up of all the resources of capital to RAPIDLY multiply itself. During your present progressive period, so far as that term is applicable to the speedy gathering in of wealth, your society presents to us an aspect of mercenary abandonment beyond anything we have ever experienced ourselves, and with a full knowledge of the end that will come we look forward with a high degree of interest to that time when you will arrive at the stationary condition.
As you approach that period where the diminished profits of capital will discourage the great activity and aggressiveness which now characterize it, some very great changes will gradually be brought about. Assuming that labor will continue to enlighten itself it will slowly change its relations with capital, so that in the end instead of being below, as it is now, it will be on top, as with us. Many of the ways by which wealth now multiplies itself will be shut off, and with its acquirement no longer indispensable to the honors of life, and the difficulties[Pg 237] of its attainment in any large volume increased, society will not be given so intensely to its individual accumulation. Your intellectual activities will be turned more in the direction of other motives. To repair waste and provide for the necessities of the living will be about all that is left to employ your industries, and there will be enough for capital to do within these limits to moderately enlarge itself; while yet within this narrowed field, limited wealth will be able to provide itself with income enough to sustain and reward habits of prudential saving. Although great wealth will be exceedingly difficult to obtain, a fair competency will be within the reach of all; since labor coming to the front, owing to the weakened powers of wealth, will assume its deserving place in the forces of economy and legislation, and will demand and receive a fairer share of the profits of industry.
After the advance of civilization and knowledge beyond a certain period, the ambitions and necessities of a people will furnish abundant incentives to keep society in a state of activity. The energies of life are stimulated, not so much by the large occasional rewards which come to a few, like prizes in a lottery, as the steady and certain remuneration of each day’s output of action to all. The[Pg 238] ability to obtain from industry a considerable margin beyond the daily expenses of life is sufficient to keep alive the mental and physical energies, and is certain to bring about that general state of hopefulness, which more than anything else promotes thrift and stimulates ambition.
It may be somewhat at variance with your views of political economy, to believe that any reduction of the power and value of capital will not in a corresponding degree depress labor. You must bear in mind, however, that the stationary state, as exemplified by our society, differs from your progressive condition, not in the lesser abundance of capital, but in its better diffusion, more dependent relations, and smaller comparative profits. It follows from this as a matter of course, that it requires the possession of a larger amount of the products of labor to bring about that condition of life known as a competency than it does with you. But by a well determined arrangement in all ways in favor of those who toil, by which a fair margin is secured between income and expense, the coveted independence is always within reach.
Under our system, capital becoming diffused among the masses in comparatively small portions, and having no[Pg 239] such extraordinary uses, nor such high rates of interest as with you, it assumes its natural place as an adjunct to all the enterprises of labor. All our factories are consequently carried on by co-operation. No such a thing is known on our planet as the owner of a manufacturing establishment depressing at his will and pleasure the pay of perhaps a whole community of working people. When an establishment is required for the manufacture of some product in demand, our workmen undertake it as a business belonging wholly to themselves, and there is never any lack of means among them to do it.
The utter helpless condition of your workmen, as a class, is not entirely owing to their enforced scant share in the profits of industry. Whoever among them, by greater abstinence or otherwise, succeeds in saving any considerable portion of his earnings, hastens either to change his situation for that of employer, where self-interest inclines him to favor low wages, or to seek among the greater encouragements outside a change of occupation. By this process capital and labor are constantly being divorced, and the ranks of your workmen are left to contain only those whose necessities hold them there.
In the condition of things with us, bestowing upon[Pg 240] labor all the emoluments of industry, it becomes the most advantageous pursuit of life. With wages at a uniform and fixed sum, from which there can be no deviation except to increase, the working man proceeds to lay by his surplus, until, in a reasonable time, it can be made to do service in adding to the fruits of his toil.
In our society there is no possibility, and no one has hopes of gaining money by chance. We hold it to be a demoralizing evil that wealth should be obtained without industry. The quality of mind which you honor under the name of shrewdness, and which seldom hesitates to profit by the losses and even the miseries of others, would find life a burden on account of the odium attached, in any community on our planet. The privilege to build up an individual fortune, by taking from the substance of the whole people in any unlimited degree which an unscrupulous ingenuity can devise, is one of the peculiarities of your civilization. To this general license, with its very small limitation, is to be ascribed most of your social miseries. The lessons presented to your youth at the very first glance at the affairs of life are calculated to impress them with the belief that success is not so much for the strong and considerate, as it is for the wary and cunning;[Pg 241] and that the business of creating wealth is of the slightest importance, when compared with the many successful arts and schemes for capturing it after its production. The example is witnessed everywhere among you of money-making without loss of honor or respect, by the method of drawing from others, by taking advantage of ............