[09] And so come new dangers.
The rude society resembles the creatures that though cut
into pieces will live; the highly civilized society is
like a highly organized animal: a stab in a vital part,
the suppression of a single function, is death. A savage
village may be burned and its people driven off —
but, used to direct recourse to nature, they can maintain
themselves. Highly civilized man, however, accustomed to
capital, to machinery, to the minute division of labor,
becomes helpless when suddenly deprived of these and
thrown upon nature. Under the factory system, some sixty
persons, with the aid of much costly machinery, cooperate
to the making of a pair of shoes. But, of the sixty, not
one could make a whole shoe. This is the tendency in all
branches of production, even in agriculture. How many
farmers of the new generation can use the flail? How many
farmers' wives can now make a coat from the wool? Many of
our farmers do not even make their own butter or raise
their own vegetables! There is an enormous gain in
productive power from this division of labor, which
assigns to the individual the production of but a few of
the things, or even but a small part of one of the
things, he needs, and makes each dependent upon others
with whom he never comes in contact; but the social
organization becomes more sensitive. A primitive village
community may pursue the even tenor of its life without
feeling disasters which overtake other villages but a few
miles off; but in the closely knit civilization to which
we have attained, a war, a scarcity, a commercial crisis,
in one hemisphere produces powerful effects in the other,
while shocks and jars from which a primitive community
easily recovers would to a highly civilized community
mean wreck.
[10] It is startling to think
how destructive in a civilization like ours would be such
fierce conflicts as fill the history of the past. The
wars of highly civilized countries, since the opening of
the era of steam and machinery, have been duels of armies
rather than conflicts of peoples or classes. Our only
glimpse of what might happen, wore passion fully aroused,
was in the struggle of the Paris Commune. And, since
1870, to the knowledge of petroleum has been added that
of even more destructive agents. The explosion of a
little nitro-glycerin under a few water-mains would make
a great city uninhabitable; the blowing up of a few
railroad bridges and tunnels would bring famine quicker
than the wall of circumvallation that Titus drew around
Jerusalem; the pumping of atmospheric air into the
gas-mains, and the application of a match, would tear up
every street and level every house. The Thirty Years' War
set back civilization in Germany; so fierce a war now
would all but destroy it. Not merely have destructive
powers vastly increased, but the whole social
organization has become vastly more delicate.
[11] In a simpler state master
and man, neighbor and neighbor, know each other, and
there is that touch of the elbow which, in times of
danger, enables society to rally. But present tendencies
are to the loss of this. In London, dwellers in one house
do not know those in the next; the tenants of adjoining
rooms are utter strangers to each other. Let civil
conflict break or paralyze the authority that preserves
order and the vast population would become a
terror-stricken mob, without point of rally or principle
of cohesion, and your London would be sacked and burned
by an army of thieves. London is only the greatest of
great cities. What is true of London is true of New York,
and in the same measure true of the many cities whose
hundreds of thousands are steadily growing toward
millions. These vast aggregations of humanity, where he
who seeks isolation may find it more truly than in the
desert; where wealth and poverty touch and jostle; where
one revels and another starves within a few feet of each
other, yet separated by as great a gulf as that fixed
between Dives in Hell and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom
— they are centers and types of our civilization.
Let jar or shock dislocate the complex and delicate
organization, let the policeman's club be thrown down or
wrested from him, and the fountains of the great deep are
opened, and quicker than ever before chaos comes again.
Strong as it may seem, our civilization is evolving
destructive forces. Not desert and forest, but city slums
and country roadsides are nursing the barbarians who may
be to the new what Hun and Vandal were to the old.
[12] Nor should we forget that
in civilized man still lurks the savage. The men who, in
past times, oppressed or revolted, who fought to the
death in petty quarrels and drunk fury with blood, who
burned cities and rent empires, were men essentially such
as those we daily meet. Social progress has accumulated
knowledge, softened manners, refined tastes and extended
sympathies, but man is yet capable of as blind a rage as
when, clothed in skins, he fought wild beasts with a
flint. And present tendencies, in some respects at least,
threaten to kindle passions that have so often before
flamed in destructive fury.
[13] There is in all the past
nothing to compare with the rapid changes now going on in
the civilized world. It seems as though in the European
race, and in the nineteenth century, man was just
beginning to live — just grasping his tools and
becoming conscious of his powers. The snail's pace of
crawling ages has suddenly become the headlong rush of
the locomotive, speeding faster and faster. This rapid
progress is primarily in industrial methods and material
powers. But industrial changes imply social changes and
necessitate political changes. Progressive societies
outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes. Social
progress always requires greater intelligence in the
management of public affairs; but this the more as
progress is rapid and change quicker.
[14] And that the rapid
changes now going on are bringing up problems that demand
most earnest attention may be seen on every hand.
Symptoms of danger, premonitions of violence, are
appearing all over the civilized world. Creeds are dying,
beliefs are changing; the old forces of conservatism are
melting away. Political institutions are failing, as
clearly in democratic America as in monarchical Europe.
There is growing unrest and bitterness among the masses,
whatever be the form of government, a blind groping for
escape from conditions becoming intolerable. To attribute
all this to the teachings of demagogues is like
attributing the fever to the quickened pulse. It is the
new wine beginning to ferment in old bottles. To put into
a sailing-ship the powerful engines of a first-class
ocean steamer would be to tear her to pieces with their
play. So the new powers rapidly changing all the
relations of society must shatter social and political
organizations not adapted to meet their strain.
[15] To adjust our
institutions to growing needs and changing conditions is
the task which devolves upon us. Prudence, patriotism,
human sympathy, and religious sentiment, alike call upon
us to undertake it. There is danger in reckless change;
but greater danger in blind conservatism. The problems
beginning to confront us are grave — so grave that
there is fear they may not be solved in time to prevent
great catastrophes. But their gravity comes from
indisposition to recognize frankly and grapple boldly
with them.
[16] These dangers, which
menace not one country alone, but modern civilization
itself, do but show that a higher civilization is
struggling to be born — that the needs and the
aspirations of men have outgrown conditions and
institutions that before sufficed.
[17] A civilization which
tends to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a
fortunate few, and to make of others mere human machines,
must inevitably evolve anarchy and bring destruction. But
a civilization is possible in which the poorest could
have all the comforts and conveniences now enjoyed by the
rich; in which prisons and almshouses would be needless,
and charitable societies unthought of. Such a
civilization waits only for the social intelligence that
will adapt means to ends. Powers that might give plenty
to all are already in our hands. Though there is poverty
and want, there is, yet, seeming embarrassment from the
very excess of wealth-producing forces. "Give us but a
market," say manufacturers, "and we will supply goods
without end!" "Give us but work!" cry idle men.
... read the entire essay
That the value attaching to land with social growth is
intended for social needs is shown by the final proof.
God is indeed a jealous God in the sense that nothing but
injury and disaster can attend the effort of men to do
things other than in the way he has intended; in the
sense that where the blessings he proffers to men are
refused or misused they turn to evils that scourge us.
And just as for the mother to withhold the provision that
fills her breast with the birth of the child is to
endanger physical health, so for society to refuse to
take for social uses the provision intended for them is
to breed social disease.
For refusal to take for public purposes the increasing
values that attach to land with social growth is to
necessitate the getting of public revenues by taxes that
lessen production, distort distribution and corrupt
society. It is to leave some to take what justly belongs
to all; it is to forego the only means by which it is
possible in an advanced civilization to combine the
security of possession that is necessary to improvement
with the equality of natural opportunity that is the most
important of all natural rights. It is thus at the basis
of all social life to set up an unjust inequality between
man and man, compelling some to pay others for the
privilege of living, for the chance of working, for the
advantages of civilization, for the gifts of their God.
But it is even more than this. The very robbery that the
masses of men thus suffer gives rise in advancing
communities to a new robbery. For the value that with the
increase of population and social advance attaches to
land being suffered to go to individuals who have secured
ownership of the land, it prompts to a forestalling of
and speculation in land wherever there is any prospect of
advancing population or of coming improvement, thus
producing an artificial scarcity of the natural elements
of life and labor, and a strangulation of production that
shows itself in recurring spasms of industrial depression
as disastrous to the world as destructive wars. It is
this that is driving men from the old countries to the
new countries, only to bring there the same curses. It is
this that causes our material advance not merely to fail
to improve the condition of the mere worker, but to make
the condition of large classes positively worse. It is
this that in our richest Christian countries is giving us
a large population whose lives are harder, more hopeless,
more degraded than those of the veriest savages. It is
this that leads so many men to think that God is a
bungler and is constantly bringing more people into his
world than he has made provision for; or that there is no
God, and that belief in him is a superstition which the
facts of life and the advance of science are
dispelling.
The darkness in light, the weakness in
strength, the poverty amid wealth, the seething
discontent foreboding civil strife, that characterize our
civilization of today, are the natural, the inevitable
results of our rejection of God’s beneficence, of
our ignoring of his intent. Were we on the other
hand to follow his clear, simple rule of right, leaving
scrupulously to the individual all that individual labor
produces, and taking for the community the value that
attaches to land by the growth of the community itself,
not merely could evil modes of raising public revenues be
dispensed with, but all men would be placed on an equal
level of opportunity with regard to the bounty of their
Creator, on an equal level of opportunity to exert their
labor and to enjoy its fruits. And then, without drastic
or restrictive measures the forestalling of land would
cease. For then the possession of land would mean only
security for the permanence of its use, and there would
be no object for any one to get land or to keep land
except for use; nor would his possession of better land
than others had confer any unjust advantage on him, or
unjust deprivation on them, since the equivalent of the
advantage would be taken by the state for the benefit of
all.
... read
the whole letter