PAGE 3
Some Causes Of The Prevailing Discontent
by
“The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive-tree, ‘Reign thou over us.’
“But the olive-tree said unto them, ‘Should I leave my fatness wherewith by me they honor God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?’
“And the trees said to the fig-tree, ‘Come thou and reign over us.’
“But the fig-tree said unto them, ‘Should I forsake my sweetness and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees?’
“Then said the trees unto the vine, ‘Come thou and reign over us.’
“And the vine said unto them, ‘Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?’
“Then said the trees unto the bramble, ‘Come thou and reign over us.’
“And the bramble said to the trees, ‘If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow; and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.'”
In our day a conflagration of the cedars of Lebanon has been the only result of the kingship of the bramble.
In the opinion of many, our universal education is one of the chief causes of the discontent. This might be true and not be an argument against education, for a certain amount of discontent is essential to self-development and if, as we believe, the development of the best powers of every human being is a good in itself, education ought not to be held responsible for the evils attending a transitional period. Yet we cannot ignore the danger, in the present stage, of an education that is necessarily superficial, that engenders conceit of knowledge and power, rather than real knowledge and power, and that breeds in two-thirds of those who have it a distaste for useful labor. We believe in education; but there must be something wrong in an education that sets so many people at odds with the facts of life, and, above all, does not furnish them with any protection against the wildest illusions. There is something wanting in the education that only half educates people.
Whether there is the relation of cause and effect between the two I do not pretend to say, but universal and superficial education in this country has been accompanied with the most extraordinary delusions and the evolution of the wildest theories. It is only necessary to refer, by way of illustration, to the greenback illusion, and to the whole group of spiritualistic disturbances and psychological epidemics. It sometimes seems as if half the American people were losing the power to apply logical processes to the ordinary affairs of life.
In studying the discontent in this country which takes the form of a labor movement, one is at first struck by its illogical aspects. So far as it is an organized attempt to better the condition of men by association of interests it is consistent. But it seems strange that the doctrine of individualism should so speedily have an outcome in a personal slavery, only better in the sense that it is voluntary, than that which it protested against. The revolt from authority, the assertion of the right of private judgment, has been pushed forward into a socialism which destroys individual liberty of action, or to a state of anarchy in which the weak would have no protection. I do not imagine that the leaders who preach socialism, who live by agitation and not by labor, really desire to overturn the social order and bring chaos. If social chaos came, their occupation would be gone, for if all men were reduced to a level, they would be compelled to scratch about with the rest for a living. They live by agitation, and they are confident that government will be strong enough to hold things together, so that they can continue agitation.
The strange thing is that their followers who live by labor and expect to live by it, and believe in the doctrine of individualism, and love liberty of action, should be willing to surrender their discretion to an arbitrary committee, and should expect that liberty of action would be preserved if all property were handed over to the State, which should undertake to regulate every man’s time, occupation, wages, and so on. The central committee or authority, or whatever it might be called, would be an extraordinary despotism, tempered only by the idea that it could be overturned every twenty-four hours. But what security would there be for any calculations in life in a state of things in expectation of a revolution any moment? Compared with the freedom of action in such a government as ours, any form of communism is an iniquitous and meddlesome despotism. In a less degree an association to which a man surrenders the right to say when, where, and for how much he shall work, is a despotism, and when it goes further and attempts to put a pressure on all men outside of the association, so that they are free neither to work nor to hire the workmen they choose, it is an extraordinary tyranny. It almost puts in the shade Mexican or Russian personal government. A demand is made upon a railway company that it shall discharge a certain workman because and only because he is not a member of the union. The company refuses. Then a distant committee orders a strike on that road, which throws business far and wide into confusion, and is the cause of heavy loss to tens of thousands who have no interest in any association of capital or labor, many of whom are ruined by this violence. Some of the results of this surrender of personal liberty are as illegal as illogical.