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Labor Parties
AND
LABOR REFORM.
BY
SAMUEL JOHNSON.
BOSTON:
REPRINTED FROM “THE RADICAL.”
1871.
�Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871,
By S. H. MORSE,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Cochrane, Printer, 25 Bromfield St.
�LABOR PARTIES AND LABOR REFORM.
HE Council of the “Workingmen’s International Association,” in their Defense of the Paris Communists,
define what they call “the true secret” of the world-wide
movement which they represent. It signifies, we learn, essen
tially “ a working-class government, the product of the strug
gle of the producing against the appropriating class,” — the
function of which shall be “ to transform the means of pro
duction, land and capital, into the mere instruments of free,
associated labor.” And its authorized organs, while disclaim
ing for the present any intention of appealing to violence, yet
already announce the purpose, in Europe and America alike,
to “transform all land, forests, railroads, canals, telegraphs,
quarries, and all great properties, such as manufactories, in
favor of the State,” which is to “work them for the benefit of
every person engaged in producing; ” in other words, “ for
such as earn by the sweat of the brow.” *
However startling for America, the substance of this “ true
secret” is familiar enough to French experience; being but
a new phase of the “ coercive communism ” of Babeuf, St.
Simon, and Louis Blanc. It is to make short work with pri
vate liberties and responsibilities, and apply the forces of
modern materialism in constructing such an autocracy as the
world has never seen. It would in fact substitute the State
g
* The Statement of Dr. Marx, its Secretary, is given in The New-York
Herald, of Aug. 3, 1871. For a fuller account, see Mr. Hinton’s valuable
article in The Atlantic Monthly, for May, 1871, or Eichhoff’s pamphlet,
Die Internationale Arbeiterassociation, Berlin, 186S.
3
�4
for the Person, and forcibly “transform” man, — not the
poorest men only, as monied and titled monopoly must, but
even worse, — man as such, every living soul, into a creature
of legislation, a mere functionary and machine. Such a result
would be none the less destructive, whatever the kind of leg
islation that had led to it. Here, however, we have the abso
lutist legislation of a class.
Let us do this Society justice. It denounces war; demands
education for all; adopts a noble motto, — “No rights with
out duties, no duties without rights.” It did good service to
our Union in the war with slavery. It is, moreover, the natu
ral recoil of their own enginery on the oppressing classes in
Europe. The victim of “regulation” has but grasped the
weapon which has proved so effective against him; he will
see now what it can do to make him in his turn the master.
We fully recognize also the miseries of low-paid labor, that
disgrace the most enlightened sections of our own country.
We hear its cry of endless dependence and hopeless compe
tition ; its demands that can no longer be suppressed or
ignored. And therefore we mean to enter our protest against
a method of dealing with it that would, we believe, not only
aggravate every industrial evil, but strike at the very sub
stance of manhood.
As its career is just opening in this country, this great
organizing force will doubtless be hailed as promise of relief
from their bitter burdens by thousands who can have but
slight conception of its tendencies. Many programmes of
labor reform, too, are drifting in the same direction, which
have not yet reached its principle of absolute coercion. They
contain elements already which forbid them to represent the
real interests and rights of labor much better than feudalism
or caste. They play into the very hands of monopoly, by fol
lowing its example, in putting oppressive burdens for free op
portunity and empty formulas for the laws of social science
and the forces of civilization. The era of social justice will
not be ushered in by those who have nothing better to urge
�5
than the old strife of classes for supremacy, and who make
arrogant assumption of exclusive right to the honorable title
of “ working-men.” It is in these points of view, which most
deeply concern the liberties of labor itself, that I propose to
criticise these methods of reform.
We cannot, to use an expressive phrase, “go back on” civ
ilization and reject the results of ages. The wrongs of the
worst-paid workman are not to be righted by ignoring that
breadth of meaning, which the terms of the question have
now fairly attained. To discuss rights and interests of “the
laboring class,” on the understanding that we are to exclude
from the category of labor every form of industry but manual
toil, is to ignore the whole sense of American civilization. Is
it credible that a humane and intelligent people should assume
that the work of men’s hands has an industrial value as such,
beyond that which belongs to their intellectual and sympa
thetic activities ? Will it define productive labor as work by
the job, or by the day, and refuse the name to processes of
invention that cost the mental wear of lifetimes, and even
supply the motive forces of material civilization? Will it
consent to narrow its “ laboring class,” so that the term shall
not include the professions whose toils minister, however
imperfectly, to constant demands of soul, body, and estate;
so that educators of the young and counselors of the old shall
be set off as drones in the industrial hive ? Are we to throw
out of the list of “ working-men ” the philosopher, who ex
plores moral and spiritual problems, and states the laws of
intelligence, the economies that cannot be foregone ? Or the
poet, who cheers the day with insight that brings health and
sweetness to all thought and work ? Or the artist, whether
musician, painter, sculptor, or dramatist, whose embodiments
of nature and feeling refine taste, and broaden sympathy, and
concentrate the undefined aspirations of the age into living
form and purpose ? Does labor exclude the scholar’s func
tion, — to present man under different phases of religion and
culture, and enforce universality by tracing the movement of
�6
ideas and laws through the ages of his development ? Are we
to reckon out the cares of maternity, the mutual offices of
domestic life, social efficiencies, the subtle forces of charac
ter, the friend, the lover, the “fanatic,” whose lonely dream
prospects the track for coming generations ? Are we to count
as outside of labor contribution all work that reforms the
vicious, relieves the helpless, or sets the poor in the way to
self-help ?
Stated thus, these questions may seem to answer them
selves. Yet it is easy for parties to break away from princi
ples that few of their members would theoretically deny.
This will become at once evident if we bring our test closer
to what is now technically called the labor question, and ask
further, if labor is definable as that kind of service for which
wages are paid, in distinction from-that kind of service which
consists in providing the fund out of which they are to be paid ;
from that kind of service which plans and directs the opera
tion, and bears the risk and responsibility ? In other words,
is labor as such so clearly distinguishable from capital in this
sense, that the toils of mind as well as body involved in the
application of the latter do not deserve to enter into our estitimate of “the rights of labor” ? We must be very far from
the track of science or freedom, if our definitions threaten to
fall into such arbitrariness as this.
Yet I cannot but note that the ordinary tone of labor-reform
programmes and appeals, so far, involves the assumption that
production consists in the direct creation of material values
only. Values that cannot be measured, tabulated, invoiced,
and made the basis of governmental direction, are excluded
at the very threshold. Yet every admission that purely intel
lectual or moral forces need not enter into estimates of pro
ductive industry is an admission that these forces have no
claim to share in the wealth that results from production. To
teach, as most philosophers of the new “positive” schools
do, in one or another form, teach, that arithmetical and me
chanical values are the mainsprings of civilization, is simply
V
�7
to sow the seeds of barbarism in the fields of political econ
omy.
The sweat of honest thought and just self-discipline is, to
say the least, quite as essential to the preservation of that
social order, by which all industry is maintained as that which
falls from the brow in »earning the daily bread: and for a citi
zen, whether rich or poor, to be ignorant or reckless of this
truth proves him to be, so far, socially and politically a de
structive. It is, therefore, but the dictate of common pru
dence that every sign of a tendency to depreciate invisible
production should be met at once by all trades and profes
sions as a source of demoralization to the whole body politic.
Peace, order, credit, mutual help, are as truly the contribution
of spiritual labor as the Order of Nature is a temple not
made with hands. The spur that industry feels from the
family and the home, — economy and thrift, all honest and
handsome work, waste avoided, the bitterness of competition
tempered, the conflict of interests counteracted by conscience
and good-will, —these are all products of moral and spiritual
ideas subtly circulating in the atmosphere of the time. And
these immeasurable sources of public good can only be
guarded by a jealous loyalty, sensitive to every slur cast
upon the value of non-material productive forces, whether in
the name of capital or labor, of the rich or of the poor.
And in this spirit we must demand of those who rally for a
<£ producing class,” as against the rest of the community,
where or how they will draw the line which justifies their
use of this anti-republican name of “ class.” Every one is a
producer in those respects in which he is a contributor to the
public wealth, in the broadest sense of wealth, in whatever
other respects he may fail to render service. How many
men, women, children, are there in a country like ours who
are not producers in this sense ? Whose work is of a kind so
inconspicuous that you can afford to count it out ? Even the
child in a kindergarten school is a producer, in combining
pretty colors, or constructing rude forms and figures that em
�8
body the first essays of that aesthetic sense which shall here
after make our artisans artists and all labor an education of
the higher faculties. • Every great thought and every good
thought is a source of public wealth: helping to make true
men or women, it helps to create and to save even material
values, steadying the hands that move machinery, and foster
ing real co-operation. For one, I recognize no “laboring
class ” as distinct from the great body of producers in this
largest sense, and hold it a pure delusion to suppose that our
civilization affords any basis for forming one. There are rich
laborers and poor laborers; there are laborers whose wages
do not supply their daily needs, and laborers who lay by
something from their wages ; and from this all the way on to
those who put large capital to productive service there is a
continuous line of laboring men. No movement can really
represent the interests of labor which does not recognize the
common interests of all these different human conditions. It
is radically mischievous to make this a question between
classed of persons. Labor is the grand creative energy Oi
society, the wisdom whose voice is to all the sons and daugh
ters cf men, calling them to that steady application of all pow
ers to right and helpful uses, which shall stamp each person’s
doing with productive value, and make it a common good.
This universality alone can define the word, and the lofty
claims must all pay allegiance to this.
Amidst the confused battle-cries of labor parties organizing
to put down “ the appropriating class,” the vital point of the
problem secures, it is to be feared, but an imperfect hearing.
There is surely nothing in mere labor, or production either,
as such, that can claim our allegiance : since labor may be for
mischief, as that of overspeculation, which ruins a commu
nity by the most wearing and frenzied personal toil; and pro
duction may be of things destructive, as the distiller’s prod
uct, when it swells into tide-waves of delirium and crime.
Productive labor is not that which makes one man rich by
making another poor; robbing Peter to pay Paul adds noth-
�*
9
♦
ing to the sum of wealth. But on the other hand, all labor
which increases the means of well-being in the community,
whether in the material, social, intellectual, moral, aesthetic,
or religious sphere, is productive labor, and deserves respect.
The capitalist, who contributes such increase, whatever the
form of his capital may be, is a productive laborer, in every
respectable sense; and the laborer for wages who does the
same thing is a productive capitalist in just the same sense
with the other; at once through the strength and skill which
he applies, and through that which he may lay up to invest
productively in the creation of a home, or a business, or in
the education of his children, or in any other honest way of
benefit to society, or of cultlire to himself. So that the first
step towards justifying our American “honor to labor” is to
recognize that God hath joined labor and capital, and that no
man or party has authority to put them asunder, or to declare
them foes. And the next is to recognize that what entitles
labor to honor and authority is not to be limited by any arbi
trary definition of labor, since it is for all forms thereof essen
tially one and the same thing. So that the workman who
helps produce an article of manufacture does not respect that
which really deserves respect in his own productive work,
unless he recognizes the similar claims on behalf not only
of the capitalist in business, but of th^ teacher, the artist, the
scientist, the poet, the moral reformer, the producer of any
non-material value whatever.
And the sum is that public or private movements are to
be regarded as in the interest of labor in proportion to the
breadth of their estimate of the elements of individual and
social well-being, and in that proportion only.
I cannot believe that we shall make any progress towards
solving the difficult problem of the relations of labor, until we
start with appreciating those aims and motives in which every
one, whatever his special work, is bound to share, and which
constitute the common cause. The intelligence needed for
counteracting that terrible force of natural selection, that
�IO
weeding out of the weak by the strong which holds as true of
the world of trade as of the world of species, can never receive
one genuine impulse, so long as this duty remains unrecog
nized. No body of men can be intellectually benefited by
combination with a view to their isolated interests only; it is
but individualism intensified, a leaven of mental as well as
social dissolution. They are educated in social functions only
by that spirit and by that work which adds to the sum of mu
tual understanding and mutual help. The industrial wisdom
we want most is that which understands how much more nu
merous and vital are the points of common interest which
unite different forms of industry than those antagonisms, ac
tual or supposed, upon which it is now sought to array their
representatives in definitely hostile classes. It will not improve
either the morals or the sense of the laborer for wages, any
more than it will right his wrongs, to inveigh against capital
as such, while it is in fact capital which he is constantly draw
ing on in himself, and seeking to accumulate for himself, and
applying, so far as he can obtain it, in investments which are
wise or foolish, for the general good or harm, according to the
character of his own private habits and tastes. It does not
help his cause to be ignorant that capital injures him only in
those instances in which it injtires itself; that is, where an
unfair use is made of greater capital to suppress the oppor
tunities of less.
And on the other hand it is equally mischievous for the
capitalist, whose accumulated money fund gives him every
advantage in the labor market over the man who has nothing
to sell but his wasting muscles and his fleeting time, to be
ignorant or regardless of the fact that his own capital is a part
of the great labor fund of the community, and that its devel
opment depends wholly on the free development of labor in
every form. It will not add to his security to forget that he
has no right to quarrel with such combinations as may be
necessary for the protection of wages-labor, except in so far
as these are injurious to labor itself: that is, where they em-
�II
p’oy the power of combination to cripple men in the use of
their own labor-capital, whether of muscles or of mind.
I have hope in those reformers only who can {each us to
emphasize our common interests ; to drop the old-world slo
gan, “ Labor and Capital are natural enemies,” and start with
this pass-word to an age of brotherhood, “ Labor and Capital
are interdependent forces in each and every personality, and
constitute every one a natural guardian ot their common
cause.” Let those meanings of the words have rule which
point to culture and civilization. A problem so universal in
its relations cannot dispense with ideal tests and standards,
and hastens to enforce them upon all experiment. The key
to every position is already found to be, not antagonism, but
co-operation. No other chemistry has hitherto solved a sin
gle dilemma of the industrial world. There is a class, we are
well aware, of whose utter weakness it would be pure mock
ery to bid them co-operate. And to make possible for these
the leisure, the education, the homes, the wages, that shall
permit them to do so, is the instant duty of monied capital
and manual labor alike. If they neglect it, both capital and
labor will reap the whirlwind. But the common sense and
good feeling which the freedom of our social relations makes
easy for all, can open right paths at will. This is the genius
to devise all requisite forms of partnership and mutual guar
antee. But so long as this is foreclosed, there is no step in
legislation, and no measure of compromise, that can escape
subserving the ancient greed whose record is written in social
demoralization and the misery of nations.
Of all necessities involved in the problem of labor, there is
none so practical, none so pressing, as this for which we
plead. What shall we gain, so long as the appeals of labor
reformers are made to motives which lie in the same moral
plane with those which they denounce ; so long as they cover
out of sight the essential fact that the pursuit of private or
class interest alone is equally mischievous in every condition
and form of work? By this spirit of rapacity all parties, how
�ever they may charge each other with the exclusive responsi
bility for the results of financial self-seeking, are equally liable
to be tempted. The avaricious capitalist cripples the free
development of capital. The hand workman who looks no
further than the aggrandizement of his labor club or his
aggressive pdlicy cripples the free development of labor.
The most industrious men, combining for clannish purposes,
hasten to set up the very monopoly they assail as the source
of their own wrongs. Is it intolerable that speculators, com
bining to hoard and hold back the products of nature, should
stimulate the prices of food till a great multitude are threat
ened with famine ? Where is the practical difference in mo
tive or result when men associate tor the purpose of artificially
limiting the supply of labor by restricting the number of work
men ; depriving the individual of his liberty to find education
and employment in branches of industry wherein he might,
but for such class interference, have taken his chance with his
neighbors, and enforcing obedience to organized dictation, as
the condition on which he shall be allowed to practice his
honest calling and earn his daily bread? Can labor resist
oppression without the sphere of its control by oppression
within it ?
What right have a body of workmen, engaged in a special
branch of industry, to assume themselves to be the supreme
regulators of that branch, and to vote down the equal right of
any man to engage in it, upon such terms as his honest effort
can command ? The very pretense of such authority threat
ens a social slavery infinitely worse than any form of political
absolutism yet known; all the worse because it exploits the
machinery of free institutions themselves to annihilate per
sonal freedom.
The one plausible ground fir arbitrarily limiting liberty of
access to the practice of a craft ^s the importance of disci
plines which shall guarantee excellence in the product. But
this desirable result is not to be accomplished, under modern
institutions, by antagonizing labor and capital, nor by shut
�ting out laborers for their refusal to combine in operations to
secure larger profits for the whole. It demands the most cor
dial relations between capital and labor. It involves procur
ing every form of personal talent, by opening opportunities
of culture and employment to all seekers. A high order of
product is the bloom of a genial summer of co-operative
industry. It has, moreover, its moral conditions, which no
external arrangements can secure. It requires a different
order of motives from those which find play in organizing
labor parties or managing controversies with capital,. It
depends, after all that can be said and done, upon con
science; upon the sense of a spiritual and aesthetic value in
production ; upon just that thing in which, it is but common
place to repeat, large capitalists and small capitalists gener
ally, buyers and sellers of work, managers and operatives, are
equally deficient, namely, the preference of quality to quan
tity, of faithful to gainful methods; upon the love of doing
honest, thorough, handsome, serviceable work, in the firm
conviction that this is what makes one a genuine laborer and
producer, not the mere working a given number of hours,
without regard to the character of the performance. This
real respect for labor is the one great lack, amidst all our
manifestoes of its rights and ovations to its name. This,
when it comes, will be true labor reform, to be hailed with
enthusiasm and faith. Its approach would be felt, first of all,
in an awakening of shame and indignation at the base and
ignorant work of all kinds which constantly wastes our re
sources with leakage that no man can measure, and demor
alizes social relations with petty annoyances at every turn,
while it slaughters life and sows disease on a portentous
scale.
Most of what is now called labor reform consists, in fact,
whatever the theory, in the partisan manipulation of societies
devoted to isolated interests and exclusive claims. It tends
to embitter the antagonism to capital with contempt for all
rights of vested property, even for those returns which natu-
�14
ral uses will command. The absence of feudal institutions
might seem to secure America against socialist revolution, in
Europe the natural reaction upon ages of organized wrongs.
Yet this would be but a superficial view of the grounds of
such revolution. America has no Vendome Column to over
turn, no palaces to fire, no priesthood to spoil and slay. But
it is none the less true that there lies a perilous fascination
for intensely democratic instincts in the theory that property
has no rights which the majority may not abrogate at will.
The authority of numbers, the worship of popular desire, is
pushed to its extreme in the phase of republicanism through
which we are passing. The true industrial problem for our
politics is not, how shall majorities prove the extent of their
power, but how shall they learn to respect the principle that
rights of labor and rights of property are mutual guarantees.
But there is need of something more than zeal for equality
and the “ vox populi, vox Dei,” to render a community the
true guardian of this safeguard of individual freedom. Only
as the lesson of a mature self-control, such as the Celt, for
example, has hitherto even failed to conceive, can it realize
the primal truth, that security of ownership is labor’s indis
pensable motive power, and reckless violation of ownership,
its suicide.
Respect for all real rights and uses of property is as truly
the basis of free industry as contempt for all but its spurious
ones is the basis of slavery. I know the logic that would
repeal all private ownership in land in the name of mankind.
But I know that such shift of title would also repeal the Fam
ily and the Home, which forever rest thereon. Nor is the
practical repeal of ethical relations between men to be greatly
desired. Yet the International Labor Congress last year, at
Basel, representing the democracy of labor reform, not only
indulged in denunciation of landed property as such, but
voted that society had the right, by decision of the majority,
to abolish it altogether: mere rapine seriously proposed in
the name of liberty. Proposals to abolish rent, interest, and
�!5
the profits of capital generally, have been heard at similar
meetings in this country. The crusade against rent, of which
Proudhon was the great French apostle, meant for him an
assault on the very principle of ownership. And what, in
fact, do all measures of this latter kind substantially mean ?
They would deprive property of the returns which it naturally
yields its owners, when transferred for a time in the shape of
opportunities to other persons, instead of being expended
upon present enjoyment. Rent and interest represent legiti
mate profits of capital: being payment for accommodations
absolutely required for the production of fresh values. If they
were abolished, not only would labor lose an important stimu
lus, but all mutual aid would necessarily be resolved into the
form of outright gift; so that the laborer would be stripped
of his self-respect, having become a dependent on bounty for
the supply of proper facilities in his avocation. And such
demoralization would result that it would be necessary as a
next step to abolish the benefaction, by denying the owner
ship claimed to reside in the giver. All private capital that
would natural find its uses as investment, or else as bounty,
would thus have to be declared public property, and to be dis
tributed where it is wanted, each needy applicant receiving a
part of these confiscated surplus earnings of others, as if it
were his own. How much earning there would be upon such
tenures, or absence of tenure rather, and how much produc
tive force, with this systemalic spoliation in prospect or opera
tion, it is easy to estimate.
All communistic systems have involved Proudhon’s prem
ise, “ Property is theft; ” some seeking to abolish it by free
co-operation, others by coercive means, appealing to the
State. As regards the latter class, by the way, two questions
are pertinent. If property be theft, what must the State be
in making itself sole proprietary ? And who has ever consti
tuted the joint body of producers, under the name of commu
nity, or whatever other name, prime owner of those laws and
elements of nature which are the basis of all production?
�Yet all anti-property movements are clearly associated with
this belief in politico-industrial absolutism : either as tending
towards it, intentionally or not, or else as flowing by natural
inference from it.
With us the theoretic rejection of property is rare. But the
undermining of its natural rights and uses is among the prac
tical results of a theory which already inspires political organ
izations in the supposed interest of labor. I mean the theory
that all personal rights flow from popular will, and that full
industrial justice can be extemporized and enforced in the
name of the State.
Note the radical vice of this theory. It ignores two essen
tial facts. The first is that the public virtue which men can
effect by outward regulation will not rise above the level of
their own motive, and may fall far below it. And the second
is that the great natural laws, which govern the complex rela
tions of free men, cannot be made to run in predetermined
grooves of policy. These laws must have the margin that
becomes the vastness of their sphere, and the freedom of the
individual minds and wills whose processes are their mate
rial. There are, of course, limits within which votes and
laws for the regulation of the status of labor are effective
and useful ; but it is easy to overstep these limits, and to
trench upon those organic natural methods which are larger
and wiser than our plans. And when this is done, political
manipulation and manœuvre have a clear track for working
the widest and deepest demoralization ; labor being at once
the most private and the most public of spheres, feeding
every spring of personal motive and universal good.
Organized “ labor reform ” in America is rapidly assuming
the aspect here indicated. It is becoming an unrestrained
appeal to the forces of political combination ; an absolute
faith in the all-sufficiency of programmes drawn up in the
interest of a “ laboring class,” and enacted into laws, to settle
every element of this most delicate and complex of problems.
It seems to have no conception of the existence of any limits,
�17
either to what political autocracy, thus exercised, can accom
plish, or to what the community may properly ask or expect it
to accomplish. Thus the National Labor Party proposes that
Congress should perform the function of “so regulating the
interest on bonds and the value of currency as to effect an
equitable distribution of the products of labor between money
or non-producing capital and productive industry ” ! An om
nipotent Congress indeed, and omniscient too, that shall effect
a just division of the profits of industry, and equitable rela
tions in trade, by declaring from time to time, through some
mysterious divination of the public mind, that a piece of paper
currency shall pass for so much in the market, or that govern
ment loans shall pay so much or so little to the lender ! What
conception of the laws of human nature, or of its liberties, or
of the sources of industrial inequalities and injustice can men
have, who expect such legislation, fluctuating, imperfect, itself
dependent on party interests and the strongest forces in the
market, to impose these vast results upon that whole complex
of competitive passions and untraceable relations which we
call the business world ? The same programme in which this
stupendous regeneration is laid out as the work of Congress
proposes that laws enacted for the purpose shall be executed
through the wisdom of a “board of management,” to be se
lected, it- would seem, by the “ labor party v itself, when it
shall have reached the political ascendency requisite for its
aims. As a further result of these and other political meas
ures, “ all able-bodied intelligent persons ” are to be caused
to “contribute to the common stock, by fruitful industry, a
sum equal to their own support; ” and legislation in general
is to be “ made to tend as far as possible to equitable distri
bution of surplus products.” To what extent the confiscation
of such surplus of personal property by popular majorities
shall be needed for the accomplishment of this last result is
not yet in question. But the substance of the belief is this.
A ready-made system of regulations, covering the whole field
of industrial activity, can take up the motive forces of civili
an
�18 '
zation in its hands, and shape them like potter’s clay into an
unknown equity, whose very determination nevertheless defies
all our existing social wisdom, and depends on a spirit of co
operation yet to be created and diffused 1
The managers of the Eight-hour movement promise yet
greater things. The enactment of their programme is not
only to effect the increase of wages and intelligence, needed
to undermine the whole wages system, but will “ secure such
distribution of wealth that poverty shall finally become im
possible.” * Such the miracles of legislation. It can decide
the terms on which labor shall be bought and sold; abolish
competition among laborers; set aside the working of demand
and supply ! It shall even reconstruct human nature; make it
impossible for men to wrong or to be wronged, and free them
from the natural penalties for indolence, thriftlessness, and
vice ! Can the illusions of materialism further go ?
This dream of political autocracy especially busies itself
with treating the currency as an independent element whose
character is to be fixed, like everything else, by pure force
of legislation. Settle by law what precise value this represen
tative of all values shall represent, and are we not in a way to
abolish at once the crime of being rich and the outrage of
being poor ? If only our money medium would stand for just
what we legislate it to be ! Not long since, labor reformers
proposed what was called a “ labor-currency,” to be substi
tuted for gold and silver, as well as for bank-notes supposed
to represent specie, because incapable of being made like
these, the material of monopoly, and speculation. The circu
lating medium recognized in all the markets of the world was
to be set aside for legal-tender “ certificates of service,” or
“ free money, based on commodities to be furnished anywhere
at cost; ” as if such ambiguities of phrase and arbitrary pro
cesses could suggest any guarantee for a circulating medium,
or such narrow theories of its representative value answer the
* Letter of Boston Eight-hour League to the Working-men of New York.
1871.
�I9
demands of trade. What “ commodities ” may mean in the
dialect of our labor parties it may be possible in some degree
to imagine ; but how should a currency of commodity-notes,
from free banks or elsewhere, help abolish monopoly and
speculation ? The whole basis of the expectation must lie in
assuming a superior virtue in the control of the circulating
medium by a commodity-making class, in comparison with all
owners of surplus means under the present forms of cur
rency. Alas ! the real problem is a deeper one : how to free
labor in all forms from the spirit of monopoly and over-spec
ulation. It is but an aggravation of the general misery to
invite us to escape these vices by assuming that the direct
producer of material commodities alone is free from them,
and that he has exclusive mission to expel them by political
enactment from those whom he regards as outside his class.
The National Labor Programme follows up its very just
demands for the prohibition of monopolies, with a call for
enactments against “importing coolies or other servile labor.”
In the actual absence of any such importation, the meaning
manifestly is that Chinese cheap labor should be excluded by
law; in other words, that a monopoly should at once be se
cured in behalf of native workmen as against this kind of
immigration. And this proceeds upon the ground that men
cannot sell their labor at a cheaper rate than labor parties
dictate without being slaves, and that strangers should have
no share in the opportunity to learn by their own experience
the American arts of raising wages and shortening times of
labor. Similar measures against immigrant labor are being in
augurated by the English labor reformers, in defiance of their
own long-cherished theories of free trade. When American
legislation, we care not in whose interest, or at whose dicta
tion, yields itself to this exclusive policy towards industrious
immigrants, it will have proved false to the cosmopolitan faith
which has hitherto distinguished us as the nation of nations,
and built up our noblest traditions and hopes. Let the old
world’s experience of shutting out whole classes from the free
�competitions of labor suffice. And let us be duly watchful
against admitting as representative of the real interests of
productive industry the efforts of special parties to subject its
free movement to excessive governmental regulation, in their
own behalf. We have had warning of what may be done
even in the name of the rights of labor, in the shameful dis
qualifications that have been imposed upon the Chinese in
California. One more illustration may suffice.
In the whole scheme for enfranchising the working class
proposed by the National Labor Congress there is not one
syllable that breathes of encouraging woman in the free
choice of occupation, or of securing equal pay to both sexes
for equal service. This great social duty may well have been
left out of the political programme on account of its mani
festly lying beyond the sphere of law, — though an amend
ment giving suffrage to women might deserve to have been
mentioned as likely to facilitate the performance of it. Its
absence from the Declaration of Principles also is good evi
dence how entirely the movement, as now pursued, is ab
sorbed in the ambition for purely 'political management of the
industrial interests of the country.*
Is absolutism organized by the State any better for Labor
than it is for Religion ? Yet even a republic may be drifting
towards it. It is a grave error to forget the natural limits to
* Resolutions passed by a State Convention of the Labor Party, held
at Framingham, Mass., while this article was in press, deserve notice as a
local movement in behalf of the political and industrial rights of woman.
The demand for these rights has reached a degree of recognition in this
State, which enables it to command more or less respect from all political
parties. But the facts relating to the JVdiwnaZ Labor Movement remain as
above stated. There are many good elements in these Framingham reso
lutions : but we are far from endorsing their extreme statement that labor,
in their sense of the word, is “the creator of all wealth; ” or their inter
necine war on wages, involving as it would, not only the overthrow of cer
tain unjust or degrading conditions of labor service merely, but actual
prohibition by law of that free determination in what form one shall sell his
labor to others, which is the proper meaning of a contract for wages.
�21
the power of laws in determining the relations of industry.
But it is a much graver error to give over the cause of labor
to that kind of personal management by which political organ
izations secure victory and spoils ; to get up a new political
party to supplant existing ones, upon every issue that arises
between the industrial elements; to expend the force that
should be employed in co-operative movements upon the
broadest basis of sympathy, in feeding political ambitions,
substituting personalities for principles, and heaping the fuel
of party bitterness upon every smouldering ember of discord
in factory and shop. It is of course easy to demand indig
nantly, if labor is to be denied the common right of political
combination to make laws for its own protection. The an
swer is that the question is absurd. Labor is no abstract,
distinct interest of this kind. It is the universal life — the
people themselves in their productive energy — and every
time the people go to the ballot-box they express their will,
more or less wisely, concerning its interests. This is the
constant fact, this the whole meaning of American politics,
and no believer in our institutions would think of disparaging
it: though they certainly come near to doing so, whose no
tions of “a laboring class” contract their definition of labor
within arbitrary limits. But this is what we do believe. The
genuine appeal of labor to political action in a free community
will be known by the people’s speaking in some consentient
and normal way, as having common interests, of which it
must not be supposed as a whole to be either ignorant or
regardless. In other words, its great political bodies will
include the great mass of producers; are, indeed, mainly
made up of such; and, in the main, will naturally represent
the people’s instinctive good sense, as to what can and what
cannot be accomplished for the right organization of labor by
political methods. So that a party which has to be worked
up outside and against them, yet on issues that cannot but
have been familiar already to these free voting masses, gives
but slight promise of reporting the real demands of labor.
�22
♦
An utterly impoverished and neglected class must indeed get
its claims stated in whatever way is possible for it. But our
labor-reform parties do not represent this advocacy of some
distinctive stratum which politics has forgotten; they are not
pleading for a dumb, disfranchised race, for slaves, shut out
from all political hearing by national constitution and local
law, — and certainly all labor claims but such as these can
more readily get political recognition and power by inspiring
the best among the great lines of public movement than by
acting as the foe of all. — But it must be said further of such
parties as have been described, that their conditions fit them
much less for real service to labor, as a whole, than for add
ing complications of intrigue and strife. Believe as we may
that the sway of capital over industrial machinery is grinding
the workman into dust: your labor party must prove to us
that its own passion for managing political machinery is serv
ing him any better. It must tell us what good fruit is to be
reaped by transforming the whole labor question into an open
path for the reckless personalities and flatteries of the dema
gogue on his foray: a vantage ground for working upon blind
suspicions and desires; whether by crusading against the
public creditor and the owner of capital as public enemies, or
by promising to make “poverty impossible ” bylaws enforcing •
high pay and short hours.
The theory, for instance, of a gigantic combination of capi
tal as such to oppress and enslave labor, becomes in the
hands of political management quite as gigantic a power for
working up personal detraction and the misery of social distrust. Yet all the reckless suppression of the weak by the
strong inherent in business methods, and all the rapacity ot
incorporated money power, when fully recognized, fails to
warrant the theory itself. As commonly put, it cannot be
shown to be other than pure delusion. It would seem diffi
cult to ignore more thoroughly the position which labor ac
tually holds in our civilization than they do who are continu' ally exploiting this theory. That there are indeed whole
�23
classes in its best centres requiring instant protection, per
sonal, political, social, against unscrupulous systems and mas
ters, should be plain enough to all: we advise every doubter
of this to read without delay the facts and statistics brought
out by the recent impressive Report of the Massachusetts
Labor Bureau. But it is equally plain that laboring men as
such are in this country neither discredited by custom, nor
discouraged by legal disqualification. Industry is in honor
such as it never had in any land or age. There is not a town
ship in New England that does not shine with tokens of its
large rewards to farmer and mechanic. A man has not less
but more prestige for belonging to the people: and to have
been broadly educated, or to be very wealthy, is actually,
other things being equal, a disadvantage in the race for pub
lic honors in comparison with having labored with the hands
for daily bread. Labor systematically oppressed in a country
whither the poor of all nations are fleeing in flocks from the
caste systems of the old world ! Labor systematically vic
timized in a country where it has such perfect liberty of asso
ciation and such success in self-protection as to have rendered
all separation of it from capital, even in speech, a self-contra
diction : where, as numerical force, it is itself public senti
ment and court of appeal, and capable of prosperity in exact
proportion to its own self-respect! The industry of such a
land is essentially one cause with social order and progress,
with morality and religion, with every instinct of humanity.
And the labor movement that recognizes this breadth of func
tion, not seeking the aggrandizement of a special body, nor
imitating the exclusiveness of feudal guilds, but clothing
itself in large and free co-operation for the removal of all
obstacles to honest self-support, in fact appeals to sympathies
that move through all paths and conditions: it will find the
common atmosphere of social life itself at its command, as a
freely conducting medium. How should capitalists plan or
even hope to hinder the prosperous development of such a
force ? It js impossible that its drawbacks should lie any
�24
where but in motive forces that operate in the mass of men,
without regard to class or function. They are no more refera
ble to capital as such than to labor as such. And all agitation
is blind and wasteful till it is recognized that there is not and
cannot be in these old free States to-day any general syste
matic attempt or hope to enslave labor as such : that there is
only the eager passion of men who have much for making
more, and of men who have less to have as much as they;
that this, the unbridled rage in all spheres and occupations,
is what now breeds, and what would breed, under the best
organized scheme for controlling capital any reformer can
devise, whatever miseries now befall honest labor. This is
the Ishmaelite, to whom capital and labor alike are free spoil,
and who snaps his fingers at all laws and guarantees. He
wars on no one class more than on another: he simply pil
lages society in the right of the stronger. It is foolish to
mistake this unchartered enemy for the intentional plot of a
capitalist class against labor. The master who pays his work
man the lowest pittance, or tries to control his vote by driving
him out of employ, has no special war against labor as such.
Will he not starve out his fellow capitalists as well, or swallow
them up as readily as he does his workmen, when they stand
in his way ? And as for those, on the other hand, who would
have capital stripped of all opportunity and control, and
brought under the rule of manual labor as the only produc
tive force, and as entitled to all the fruits of production,—
what would they too be likely to do with the rights of weaker
laboring men could they thus despoil property and wield its
powers ? Their cry of “ Down with capital ” is the raving of
men befooled by the very greed they charge all capital with
organizing for their destruction. What but mischief comes
of blind choice and blind rejection, “ Down with this,” and
“ Up with that,” impelled by the fiercest of despots that can
sway manners and wield the liberties and laws ?
The interests of Labor can be advanced only by what is
done in the interest of the whole of society, and with fair esti-
�25
»
mation of all the elements of productive movement. It is to
be presumed that with the exception of those who live by
speculating in fictitious values, or who live as mere drones by
the toil of others, the only unproductive classes, — everybody
is more or less sensitive to the status of labor, and feels,
more or less consciously, the harm that befalls every compo
nent force in the process of industry. No abuses in the sup
posed interest either of accumulated wealth or of manual
labor can give just ground for disparaging the public uses
that flow from both these elements. The broadest apprecia
tion of uses alone can correct all abuse; a reconciling spirit
whose war is only against the common foe.
Schemes, for instance, to drive large capitalists out of any
fair field of employment for wealth, or artificially to bar out
labor that seeks that field, do not solve the problem of false
proportion between the price of food and the price of labor.
Our help must come from the science and the experience that
can make it clear to all reasonable persons how mischiev
ous to the whole community are railroad monopolies and food
speculations, holding back products from their natural markets,
enormously raising their cost to the consumer; high tariffs
that enhance the cost of production, and so diminish the mar
ket for the product; large land grants to monopolists; gen
eral overtrading, stimulated by the powers of machinery into
such fluctuation of prices as to drive all profit from the chan
nel of fair distribution into that of self-preservation in the
competitive strife; dishonest trading, by stock or gold gamblers, in the hopes and fears of all classes ; and the want of
co-operation among laborers to hold and work capital equita
bly, and to educate labor to a skill which shall command, as
skilled labor always will, a high reward. And these real
causes of the false relations between the prices of food and
labor being duly recognized, the cure cofries in a common
effort, wisely distinguishing what can come by legislation
from what cannot, to remove them as foes to the common
good; not as if a laboring class only were ordained to get the
�26
benefit of the reform, nor with the aim to put down, or to
despoil, any of those elements on which all depend. By this
spirit, which we believe is destined to work its way to tri
umph, the scope of industrial reform will be widened to match
the magnitude of the evils that now threaten us. It will tell
alike on laborer and money-holder, in ethical as well as in ■
political directions. It§ programmes will not stop in schemes
for enforcing short hours and high wages for those who are
already employed upon terms that give them vantage to
demand better; they will look to the starvation wages of
thousands of sewing-women, and the miserable pay of female
labor generally; to the friendlessness of young immigrants
into cities where labor is uncertain and fluctuating; to the
threatening increase of the sum of ignorance, intemperance,
and squalid living. It will pursue and punish the reckless dis
regard of physiological laws which packs laborers into unven
tilated rooms or exhausts them in unhealthy forms of toil, or
exposes them to perilous surroundings without such precau
tions against disaster as science can afford. It will bring to
bear on the murderous dens of drunkenness and infamy that
flourish under the assaults of law, the infinitely stronger bat
teries of labor as a public sentiment and a personal force of
example and of aid. It will make war upon ignorance of
physical and economical laws, upon loose, unhealthy, wasteful
habits; upon the unthrift that is the father of vice and the
dupe of political jugglery. It will stop the shameless gains
of tenement speculators by providing cheap and healthy lodg
ing-houses for the poor; opening easy paths to the ownership
of real estate. It will press everywhere the claims of home ;
and facilitate in every way the taste for those domestic duties
and interests that lead men to steady work and steady saving;
and propagate the ambition, not to break down capital as a
fraud and a foe, but* to possess it as the means of personal cul
ture and public service. And in view of an unprecedented
political corruption, which no mere party changes can im
prove, it will insist on making office the permanent reward of
�27
worth and fitness instead of the carcass for unclean creatures
to prey on, to the nation’s undoing. It will understand that
of all follies there can be none greater than that of entrusting
the task to office-seekers who skillfully work up the public
sense of official misconduct, loudly proclaiming their own allsufficiency ; and whose sweeping assaults on the representa
tives of the people are of course mere contumely of the peo
ple themselves. For this is but to call on Scylla to save us
from Charybdis. That well-meaning reformers should vote
men into office whom they do not respect, in the belief that
their abilities can thus be made available, and that policy
alone will bind them to prefer the public good to schemes of
private ambition, — is sheer trifling with the life of the State.
How can there be any more public security than there is pri
vate virtue, known and trusted with affairs ? If you cannot
find this, and must commit yourselves to the chances of poli
tic good behavior from the opposite quality, it is a confession
that all is lost. They who teach that the question of the mo
tives and convictions of a candidate is of small account com
pared with his probable uses for a particular end, because we
are not to look for saints in politics, demoralize all who be
lieve them, and deal death to those ideals on which our liberty
depends. God may utilize all qualities. But is the political
manager “a special providence” to save the nation, after he
has taught it not to enquire what men purpose, if they will
but promise to execute its will ?
The ideal aim of Labor is to identify itself with every form
of personal and public culture; to represent the fullness of
productive life; the brain and heart and arm of civilization.
It is worse than time wasted to classify the friends and foes
of this work by parties or programmes : the point of moment
is the quality of individual life. Justice to Labor is the finest
of the fine arts ; the art of justice itself, and honor and love ;
it is large appreciation and faithful performance ; the art of
loyalty to the best and of service to the whole. It is the light
that sees and the love that shares. What signify political
y
�28
combinations beyond the amount they contain of that true
personality in men and women which alone renders the social
atmosphere fit for breathing ? To what end will you concen
trate rapacity and multiply waters of bitterness ? It is no less
than crime in labor reformers to promise their followers im
mense gains from laws and regulations about labor, while yet
never daring to tell them plainly that there shall be no more
relief to the poor in demanding and making such laws than
what they themselves render possible by their contribution of
qualities which political management or class ascendency can
not give. In the interest of the whole, let it be insisted that
our republican watchword, “ The dignity of labor,” shall have
rational meaning. And let us stand at the outset upon this
conviction. Crass ignorance, exclusiveness in rich or poor,
democratic or aristocratic; coarse and sensual habits ; the
arts of demagogues, and that love of flattery and worship of
noisy self-assumption which gives them following; a blind
antagonism to whatever commands special advantages in the
x competition for wealth, — all ways, in short, that unfit for ap
preciating a generous culture of the tastes and sympathies,
and for respecting, even if one does not understand, the func
tions of art, science, religion, discredit one’s cry for “ honor
to labor,” and for “the rights of labor,” and unfit him to stand
as its champion or to advocate its cause.
The large and free recognition of uses, visible and invisible,
moral, intellectual, social, and on one level for both sexes and
every race, is labor’s true capital, and capital’s real labor. Is
sue this currency far and wide: it will not depreciate, like
greenbacks, by increase ; it will not heap like gold in gam
bling and monopoly. Maintain this sole guarantee of per
sonal freedom and culture, amidst the mechanism of consoli
dation which, without it, would suppress them altogether.
Join hands, all parties, on this, the education of a free people
to the spirit that civilizes, not barbarizes ; lifting the weak and
blind with all the leverage of its united vision and strength,
�29
and calling forth every brain and hand to the self-supporting
work that redeems and dignifies man.
Let me say in closing that I hold Free Labor in America to
be the true Emancipation of Religion. It has nobler function
than to subserve the blind destructive reaction on all intuition
and faith against whose leadership the great soul of Mazzini
was obliged to warn the labor reformers in his young Italy.
It means what America means, — not an enforced labor creed,
but the integral culture of humanity. To honor constructive
labor is to associate the normal exercise of every faculty with
what deserves highest honor; in other words, with Religion.
And so religion becomes natural, human, unmonopolized, sec
ular. It teaches man no longer the old self-contempt, as a
gift by supernatural grafting, or miraculous interference, or by
special mediatorial book, church, sect, seasons, forms, that
disparage life itself; but self-respect as the voice of his famil
iar instincts, insights, energies, in the constancy of universal
law. What could effect such deliverance but free labor’s en
dowment of the whole human capacity with a sacred purpose
and authority? “My Father worketh hitherto and I work,”
says the Jesus of John. That is very grand: nothing perhaps
grander in the New Testament. But this is grander still:
for man to say, as man, as a people, as human faculty in the
broadest application, “ God worketh and I work.” Make reli
gion as broad, as practical, as natural as labor, and religion
for the first time in history stands on universal principles, and
humanity can become one with God. .
����
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Labor parties and labor reform
Creator
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Johnson, Samuel [Johnson]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Boston. Mass.
Collation: 29 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Cochrane, 25 Bromfield St. Reprinted from 'The Radical'.
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[s.n.]
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1871
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G5297
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Labour
Socialism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Labor parties and labor reform), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
United States-Politics and Government
Working Class-United States of America