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The thing which most impresses the student of the Civil War struggle, is how generally and completely the people who lived through it failed to understand it themselves. We of the present day know that the War was a clash between two incompatible types of civilisation; between an agricultural and conservative aristocracy, and a commercial and progressive democracy. We can see that each society developed in its people a separate point of view, separate customs and laws, ideals and policies, literatures and religions. We can see that their differing interests as to tariffs, police regulations, domestic improvements and foreign affairs, made political strife between them inevitable; and that finally the expansion which was necessary to the life of each brought them into a conflict which could only end with the submission of one or the other. Yet, plain as this seems to us now, the people of that time did not grasp it; through the whole long process they were dragged, as it were, by the hair of their heads, and each event as it came was a separate phenomenon, a fresh source of astonishment, alarm, and indignation. Even after the war had broken out, the vast majority of them would not be enlightened as in regard to it—a few of them have not been enlightened yet. I talked recently with an old Confederate naval officer, who said to me: “Oh, yes; it was the politicians who made the war.” I recall the astonished look which crossed the old gentleman’s face when I ventured the opinion that the politicians of this country had never yet made anything except their own livings.

It seemed not merely that they could not understand the thing; they would not. The truth did not please them, and the best and wisest of them appeared to have the idea that they had only not to see it, and it would cease to be the truth; after the manner of the learned men of Galileo’s time, who declined to look through his telescope, or to watch him drop weights from the Tower of Pisa. They made it a matter of offence that anyone should understand; the ability to predict political events was held to imply some collusion with them. When Lincoln, just before the crash, ventured to doubt the stability of “a house divided against itself,” his enemies fell upon him precisely as if he had declared, not that such a house would fall, but that he intended to knock it down. And this was the established view of all the conservatism of the country, only two or three years before there burst upon it one of the most fearful cataclysms of history.

Let us endeavour to place ourselves in the position of the average man of 1860, and see now the whole matter appeared to him.

Way back in the early thirties, eight or ten more or less insane fanatics—“apostate priests and unsexed women,” as one writer described them—had got together and begun an agitation for a wholly impossible and visionary (to say nothing of revolutionary and unconstitutional) programme—“the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves.” They formed a society and started a paper called the Liberator. When governors of Southern states protested concerning it, the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, Mayor of Boston, wrote as follows: “It appeared upon inquiry that no member of the city government, nor any person of my acquaintance, had ever heard of the publication. Sometime afterward it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few ignorant persons of all colours. This information, with the consent of the Aldermen, I communicated to the above named governors, with an utterance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of the people.”

Nevertheless, the danger of this propaganda was recognised, and before long the Abolitionists were being stoned and shot, their presses smashed, and their meetings broken up; a “broadcloth mob” put a rope round the neck of the editor of the Liberator and dragged him through the streets of the city. And still, in spite of this, the agitation went on. All the “cranks” of the country gradually rallied about the movement. Their leader was a woman’s suffragist, an infidel, a prohibitionist, and a vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution as “an agreement with Death, and a covenant with Hell.” There was one man among them who addressed meetings with clanking chains about his wrists, and a three-pronged iron slave-collar about his neck; and who declared to the people of a town that they “had better establish among them a hundred rum-shops, fifty gambling-houses and ten brothels, than one church.” They allowed Negroes to speak on the platform with them, and they opened schools for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were broken up. One of them refused to pay taxes to a slave-holding government, and went to jail for it.

Assuredly, no common-sense person would have thought that here was anything save a madness that might be allowed to run its course. Yet the Abolitionists kept at it. In the election of 1840, a wing of them split off, and nominated a candidate for the Presidency, who received seven thousand votes out of a total of two or three millions. Four years later, when the Democratic Party was on the verge of forcing the country into a war with Mexico, they raised a hue and cry that this was a “slave-driver’s enterprise,” with the result that their vote went up to sixty-two thousand. And by keeping up the ceaseless agitation all through the war, and taking advantage of a factional quarrel in New York state to nominate a politician who came into their camp for the sake of revenge, they cast, in 1848, a vote of two hundred and ninety-one thousand.

And also they had by this time succeeded in colouring a great mass of the popular thought with their views. They had gotten the country unsettled; they had made people feel that something was wrong, and all sorts of anti-slavery measures were beginning to be championed. Some wanted to exclude slavery from the new Territories; some wanted to exclude it from the National Capital; some wanted to restrict the domestic slave-trade. All of these people, of course, denied indignantly that they were Abolitionists, denied that they had any sympathy with Abolitionism, or that their measures had anything to do with it. But the South, whom the matter concerned, understood perfectly well the folly of such a claim—understood that the institution of Slavery was one which could not be made war upon, or limited, and that the first hostile move which was made against it would necessarily mean its downfall. Hence, to the South, all these people were “Abolitionists.”

Over the California question, there came at last a crisis, and all the Conservative forces of the nation were scarcely equal to the settling of it. Edward Everett and Rufus Choate and Calhoun and Clay and Webster, and a dozen others that one might name, exerted all their influence, and went about warning their countrymen of the danger, and denouncing what Webster called “the din and roll and rub-a-dub of Abolition presses and Abolition lectures.” Under these circumstances the “Compromise” was adopted, and the vote of the Abolitionist Party fell off to one hundred and fifty-six thousand.

But then came the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which brought Lincoln into politics. The Abolition clamour surged up as never before—here was one proof the more, they said, that Slavery was menacing American institutions. The whole country seemed suddenly to be full of their supporters; and the Kansas Raid only added more fuel to the flame. The Republican Party was formed, the Black Republican Party, as the slave-holders called it; and at the Presidential election of 1856, they cast more than one million three hundred thousand votes, about one-third of the total vote of the country.

After that came, in due course, the attempt of the Supreme Court to put an end to the Abolitionist agitation, declaring that Congress could not restrict slavery in the Territories, which meant that the Republican Party had no right to exist. To “cheerfully acquiesce” in the decision of the Supreme Court, was the duty of “all good citizens,” according to President Buchanan; yet the only result of the action of the Supreme Court was to cause the agitation to burst out afresh. In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln ran for senator in flat defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision, and the Republican Party all over the country went on in its revolutionary course, precisely as if no Supreme Court had ever existed. A year or two later an agitator made matters still worse by his attempt to set free the slaves by force. “It is my firm and deliberate conviction,” said Senator Douglas, “that the Harper’s Ferry crime was the natural, logical and inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican Party.” And he was perfectly right.

It was disgraceful, and yet it would not stop. The North had by this time become so full of Abolitionism, that even the Democrats were not to be trusted. When the split came, in Charleston, Yancey of Alabama explained this. “When I was a boy in the Northern States,” he said, “Abolitionists were pelted with rotten eggs. But now this band of Abolitionists has spread and grown into three bands—the Black Republicans, the Free-soilers, and the Squatter-sovereignty men—all representing the common sentiment that Slavery is wrong.” And when Abraham Lincoln was elected President by a minority of the people, upon a platform which declared that the Constitution was to be disregarded, the party of conservatism and tradition resorted to force to maintain its rights.

And what happened then? Why, simply this: a group of fanatical visionaries who had for thirty years been jeered at for demanding of the country something that was revolutionary and inconceivable—the destruction of an institution which had stood for centuries, and was built into the very framework of the nation—suddenly began to see the mighty structure totter, to see cracks open in it, to see its pillars crumble, its roof fall in; and at last, before they had fairly time to realise what was happening, the whole heaven-defying colossus lay a heap of dust and ruins at their feet!

I have said that I believe that our country is now only a few years away from a similar great transformation. In order to maintain that thesis, it will be necessary to show, first, a great underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue; and second, a consequent movement of protest, slowly making headway and ultimately permeating the whole thought of the country.

What was the cause of the Civil War? To put it into a phrase, it was the need under which Slavery laboured of securing new territory. The reader may find a contemporary exposition of the situation in Olmstead’s “Cotton Kingdom.” Slave labour was a very wasteful means of cultivation—only the top of the soil was used, and ten or fifteen crops exhausted it. Virginia was once a great exporting state, but in the forties and fifties it had become simply a slave-breeding ground for the younger generation, which had moved to the Far South. And then, when the Far South began to prove insufficient, there was another move, into Texas; and finally an attempt at still a third, into Kansas—which brought on the clash with the free states.

At the present day we have a society, industrial instead of agricultural; and the struggle which we are witnessing is that between capital and labour. It is a struggle, not for land, but for profits; and if we are to show that it is, like the Civil War, “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces,” we must show in this case also that the thing struggled for is limited in quantity, and ultimately insufficient to satisfy the needs of both the contending parties.

That our industrial system is based upon profits, and that a failure of profits would lead to its collapse, will be admitted by anyone. But how could profits ever fail? the reader asks. Will not the soil always produce? And does not every man who comes into the world bring a pair of hands with him, to produce things and earn his living? And so, can there not always be profitable exchange? There could, I answer, provided that the various pairs of hands were to remain upon equal terms. But suppose that one pair were to get some advantage over the other pairs, and use that advantage to get constantly increasing advantage; might there not then come a time when the other pairs, having less and less, were finally unable to furnish as much profits as were necessary?

We began the economic battle in this country upon equal terms. Some got the advantage and became masters, the others becoming wage-workers. This advantage—that is, capital—brought constantly increasing advantage—profit, rent, interest; and those who had not the advantage stayed meanwhile just where they were—they got enough to live on, and no more. Numerous exceptions to this do not in the least disturb the main facts—that as a class the wage-workers stayed wage-workers, and the masters stayed masters. Neither does the fact that wages rose constantly in the least disturb the main fact, for the cost of living rose also; the wage-worker got his living then, and he gets it now. And meanwhile, according to the way of nature, and in spite of the outcry of moralists and old-fashioned statesmen, the strong went on growing stronger, and fighting among each other, the victors growing ten times stronger yet; until now we have come to a stage where, industrially speaking, we are a nation of eighty million pygmies and a dozen giants. Nor is the work quite done yet—it is going straight on, in spite of anti-trust decisions and the labour of the “muckrake man”—and within a very few more years the dozen giants will be but one giant.

The dozen, meanwhile, are giants, and they are that because the industrial opportunities of the nation are their property. They are the nation, economically speaking; they own its railroads and telegraphs, its coal mines, oil fields, factories and stores. And they grant to the eighty millions of the nation the right to these opportunities and a chance to earn their living upon one certain definite condition—that of what they produce, they receive only a part, yielding up the balance to be “profits.”

It is also important to notice that these profits are not taken “in kind”—the product must first be sold, so that both wages and profits can be paid in money. It thus follows that the amount of profits is strictly limited by the amount of market that can be found; in other words, that a society whose income is limited, is also limited as to its profit-yielding capacity—that, for instance, a society of eighty millions of people receiving a mere living wage will be able to yield just so much rent, interest and dividends, and not any more.

But what it yields has in the past been enough, says the reader. Why will it not be enough for the future?

Just this is the crux of the whole matter. Rent, interest, dividends, it must be understood, are fractions; and fractions may be decreased as well by increasing the denominator, as by decreasing the numerator. A man, for instance, who invested a hundred dollars and made six, would receive six per cent. interest; but if he invested the second year one hundred and six dollars, and was able still to gain only six, his profit would be, not six per cent., but only five and a fraction. If he wished to make six, he would have to squeeze out a little more than six dollars; would have to compel the man who paid it to him to work just a little harder. And that, in miniature, is a representation of what is going on in our society to-day. You, the well-meaning reader, who are struggling to make the world better, and failing—whether the thing which you are trying to reform be politics or literature or religion, New York or Colorado or the Philippines, Fifth Avenue or Wall Street or Hell’s Kitchen—you are meeting with failure because of that little arithmetical difficulty which has just been set forth.

Consider our millionaire fortunes, how they grow. Consider, for instance, that Mr. John D. Rockefeller makes fifty per cent. a year upon his holdings in the Standard Oil Company. The stock of the Standard Oil Company is now at five hundred, and has been as high as eight hundred in the market. This is assuming that Mr. Rockefeller invested in the stock at par—though as a matter of fact, he put in only about twenty dollars a share, which would make his profit two hundred and fifty per cent. His income is at least fifty million dollars a year.

What does he do with it? Of course, he can’t spend it—if he treated himself to a St. Louis Exposition every year, he couldn’t spend it. What he does with it is to take it promptly, and reinvest it in the form of new capital; he employs a staff of thirty-two trained experts to aid him in this work. The effect of this is, of course, to make his income fifty per cent., compound interest, instead of simple; and what it will be in the course of time is a problem for those who like figures. While he is doing this, all the other capitalists are doing the same—the American millionaire lets his wife and daughters spend as much of his money as they can, but he seldom spends any himself; he is more interested in “doing things.” The consequence is, therefore, that year after year we are paying the vast mass of our people mere living wages, and all the surplus product of our toil we are selling, and devoting to the creation of new instruments of production. We have, mark you, machinery that creates products for hundreds of times as many men as it employs, and still we skim off the surplus and devote it to making new machines. Is it not obvious that this cannot go on forever? And that the time must come that we make all that we need—or rather that our people have money to buy, wages being what they are? And if that ever happens, then of course the factories will have to shut down. We shall have millions of men out of work, and starving on our streets; and when they form processions and begin agitating, demanding that we give them work, then we say—that is, our newspapers, our preachers, our politicians, everybody says—

“But, my good man, there is no more work to be done!”

“But I am starving,” insists the workingman, “we are all starving. Why is there no work?”

“The reason there is no work is ‘overproduction.’ The market is clogged with products, you must understand, and we can’t sell them. What is your trade?”

“I work in a shoe-factory.”

“But the shoe market is already glutted—there are twice as many shoes as there is any use for.”

“Twice as many shoes! But my feet are on the ground!”

“Well, we can’t help that, my good man; that’s because you have no money to buy them with.”

“And my friend here,” goes on the workingman—“he is a tailor, and he is naked because there are too many coats on the market?”

“Exactly.”

“And the baker here is starving because we are both too poor to buy his bread?”

“Exactly.”

“And then this druggist is sick because we have no money to buy medicine?”

“Exactly.”

After which, the workingman stands and scratches his head for a moment. “There is too much of everything,” he reflects. “There is no more work to be done.” And suddenly the light breaks. “Oh, I see!” he cries, “we have finished our work for the capitalists!” And you answer, “Exactly! Everything is complete, and of course there is no more room for you. Therefore you had best be off to another planet!”

So it would be, if the workingman were content to take his doctrines from the other side—from the retainers of those “to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom has entrusted the care of the property interests of the country.” But, meantime, the workingman has been thinking for himself—and evolving a quite new doctrine, all his own, concerning the property interests of the country. This doctrine is, in a word, that the means of production of wealth belong of right to no individual, but to the whole people; and that in the hour of the collapse of the profit-making system, the thing for the people to do is to take possession of the machinery, and use it to produce goods, no longer for those who own, but for those who work.

And that brings me to the second of my tasks. I have shown the “great underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue”; there remains to show the consequent “movement of protest.”

I have before me, as I write, a little pamphlet published by the “Standard Publishing Company,” of Terre Haute, Indiana, and entitled, “The American Movement,” by Eugene V. Debs. It opens with the statement that “The twentieth century, according to the prophecy of Victor Hugo, is to be the century of humanity,” and will witness “the crash of despotism and the rise of world-wide democracy, freedom and brotherhood.” The reader, continuing, soon discovers that the “American movement,” with which this pamphlet deals, is the American Socialist movement. The writer tells of its early “Utopian” forms, the Owenites and the Brook-farmers, and names the exiles who came from abroad in 1848, bringing the Marxian doctrine, and influencing such men as Horace Greeley and Parke Godwin. “The first large society to adopt and propagate Socialism in America,” he writes, “was composed of the German Gymnastic Unions. Through the sixties and seventies the agitation steadily increased, local organisations were formed in various parts of the country. Following the Paris Commune of 1871, and its tragic ending, many French radicals came to our shores and gave new spirit to the movement. In 1876 the Workingman’s Party was organised, and in 1877, at the convention held in Newark, it became the Socialist Labour Party. The Socialists were intent upon building up a working-class party for independent political action.” This party, “composed of thoughtful, intelligent men, aggressive and progressive, of rugged honesty and thrilled with the revolutionary spirit and aspiration for freedom, became from its inception a decided factor in the labour movement. The busy, ignorant world about the revolutionary nucleus knew little or nothing about it; had no conception of its significance, and looked upon its adherents as foolish fanatics whose antics were harmless and whose designs would dissolve like bubbles on the surface of a stream. In March, 1885, was inaugurated the strike of the Knights of Labour. On May 1st of the same year, the general strikes for the eight-hour work-day broke out in various parts of the country. In 1884, Laurence Gronlund published his “Coöperative Commonwealth.” In 1888 Edward Bellamy published his “Looking Backward,” and it had a wonderful effect upon the people. The editions ran into hundreds of thousands.”

The author then goes on to narrate his version of the Pullman strike of 1893. He declares that the American Railway Union, of which he was president, had won, when the General Managers’ Association caused the swearing in of “an army of deputies,” whom the Chief of Police of Chicago declared to be “thieves, thugs and ex-convicts,” and that it was these men who caused the violence which led to President Cleveland’s action, and the breaking of the strike. He then continues the story of the Socialist movement. The Coming Nation, started at Greensburg, Indiana, by J. A. Wayland, in 1893, was the first popular propaganda paper to be published in the interests of Socialism in this country. It reached a large circulation, and the proceeds were used in founding and developing the Ruskin coöperative colony in Tennessee. Later Mr. Wayland began the publication of the Appeal to Reason, and it now numbers its subscribers by the hundreds of thousands. It is not saying too much for the Appeal that it has been a great factor in preparing the American soil for the seed of Socialism. Its enormous editions have been and are being spread broadcast, and copies may be found in the remotest recesses and the most inaccessible regions. The periodical and weekly press, so necessary to any political movement, is now developing rapidly, and there is every reason to believe that within the next few years there will be a formidable array of reviews, magazines, illustrated journals, and daily and weekly papers to represent the movement and do battle for its supremacy. The last convention of the American Railway Union was the first convention of the Social Democracy of America, and this was held in Chicago, in June, 1897, the delegates voting to change the railway union into a working-class political party. The Railway Times, the official paper of the union, became the Social-Democrat, and later the Social-Democratic Herald, and is now published at Milwaukee in the interest of the Socialist Party. Since the election of 1900, there has been greater activity in organising, and a more widespread propaganda than ever before. In the elections of the past, it can scarcely be claimed that the Socialist movement was represented by a national party. It entered these contests with but few states organised, and with no resources worth mentioning to sustain it during the campaign. It is far different to-day. The Socialist Party is organised in almost every state and territory in the American Union. Its members are filled with enthusiasm and working with an energy born of the throb and thrill of revolution. The party has a press supporting it that extends from sea to sea, and is as vigilant and tireless in its labours as it is steadfast and true to the party principles.

“Viewed to-day from any intelligent standpoint, the outlook of the Socialist movement is full of promise—to the capitalist, of struggle and conquest; to the worker, of coming freedom. It is the break of dawn upon the horizon of human destiny, and it has no limitation but the walls of the universe.”

Whatever the reader may think about the foregoing narrative, there is one part of it which he cannot dismiss; the statements concerning the growth of the American Socialist Party. In 1888 the Socialist vote was two thousand. In 1892, it was twenty-one thousand. In 1896, it was thirty-six thousand. In 1900, it was one hundred and thirty-one thousand. In 1904, it was four hundred and forty-two thousand.

The Socialist Party has some twenty-seven thousand subscribing members, who pay monthly dues. It has over eighteen hundred “locals,” or centres of agitation; the members of these “locals” are for the most part workingmen, who give their spare hours to the cause, holding meetings and debates, and circulating the literature of Socialism. In the larger cities, there are generally several lectures each week, and there are a score of “national organisers,” who travel about, speaking night after night in various towns, forming new “locals,” and taking subscriptions to the Socialist publications. Of these there are four monthlies and about thirty-five weeklies. Since 1892, Wayland’s paper, The Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), has increased its paid circulation from one hundred and twenty-six thousand to over two hundred and seventy-five thousand, and last year it printed one edition of two millions and a half, and another of over three millions. Another Socialist paper, Wilshire’s Magazine (New York), has increased its circulation from fifty-five thousand to two hundred and seventy thousand in a single year. In addition to this, there are many publishing companies, which distribute books, leaflets and pamphlets, at little more than cost. I have before me a treatise, the price of which is one cent, of which over five million copies have been sold since its publication some years ago. Its title is “Why Workingmen Should Be Socialists,” by Gaylord Wilshire.

And in giving the figures of the Socialist growth, it is worth while to point out that this is not merely a local movement, but a world movement; that the United States is one of the most backward of the civilised nations in respect to Socialism. In Australia the labour unions have adopted a full Socialist program, and the labour unions hold the balance of power. In England, they have just elected twenty-seven members of Parliament; they have now members in the Cabinet of France, and in Italy they have turned out ministries. In Belgium, the vote of the party is half a million, and in Austria it is nearly a million, while in Germany it has grown from thirty thousand in 1870, to five hundred and forty-nine thousand in 1884, one million, eight hundred and seventy-six thousand in 1893, three million and eight thousand in 1903 and three million two hundred and fifty thousand in 1907. The Socialists are electing representatives in Argentina and South Africa; in spite of government persecution, the movement is now growing rapidly in Japan. Including all languages, the Socialist journals number nearly seven hundred, and the Socialist vote of the world is figured at nearly eight million. Allowing for women, and for the disfranchised proletariat of such nations as Russia, Austria, and Italy, there are estimated to be thirty million class-conscious Socialists in the world.

To overlook the significance of a movement such as this, is but to repeat upon a larger scale the error of half a century ago, and to pay with blood and anguish for blundering and indifference. The processes of time have their laws, which can be studied; and all the waste and ruin of history, which make its records scarcely to be read, are consequences of the fact that man has to be lashed to his goal through the darkness, instead of marching to it in the light. You take but a shallow view of the problems of our present time, if you do not realise that when thirty million people, in every corner of the civilised world, organise themselves into a political party, they do it because of some fundamental and tremendous motive, and that they will not be apt to abandon their efforts until they have accomplished some proportionately significant result.