Part 30

And what is true of Texas is true in greater or less degree of every State in the Union. Development, so dear to the heart of the patriotic and public-spirited citizen, has a tendency to transform an independent and moderately prosperous people into masters and slaves. But this is not the fault of labor-saving machinery, nor of capital, nor of development by itself considered. The more wealth labor creates, the more it should enjoy. When the reverse is the case distribution is at fault.

The substitution of expensive machinery for hand-labor eliminated the independent artisan. His productive power was multiplied; but his independence--his ability to care for himself without the cooperation of large capital-- was gone. The wheelwright could not return to his shop nor the shoemaker to his last and live in comfort. Competition with the iron fingers of the great factory were impossible. Labor must now await the pleasure of capital-- the creature has become lord of its creator. The fierce competition of idle armies forces wages down, and slowly but surely the workman is sinking back to the level occupied before the cunning brain of genius harnessed the lightning to his lathe and gave him nerves of steel and muscles of brass with which to fight his battle for bread.

With the improved machinery with which he is provided, the American workman can create as much wealth in a week as he need consume in a month; but he goes down on his knees and thanks God and the plutocracy for an opportunity to toil 300 days in the year for a bare subsistence.

. . .

Unfortunately, I have no catholicon for every industrial ill--but the political drug-stores are full of 'em. All you've got to do is to select your panacea, pull the cork and let peace and plenty overflow a grateful land--so we're told. Instead of the cure-me-quicks prescribed by the economic M.D.'s, I believe that our industrial system has been doped with entirely too many drugs. I'd throw physic to the dogs, exercise a little common-sense and give nature a chance. There's an old story of an Arkansaw doctor who invariably threw his patients into fits because he was master of that complaint; but the economic M.D.'s can't even cure fits. When they attempt it the patient goes into convulsions.

Instead of going to so much trouble to bar out cheap goods by means of tariff walls, I'd bar out cheap men. If you're making monkey-wrenches at $2 a day and some fellow abroad is building 'em for 50 cents, your boss comes to you and says:

"Jim, we've got to have a tariff to keep out the product of pauper labor or our nether garment's ripped from narrative to neck-band. I can't pay you $2 and compete with an employer who pays but 50 cents."

That sounds reasonable and you swing back on the G.O.P. tow-line and lay a tariff-tax on monkey-wrenches that looms up like an old-time Democratic majority in Texas. And while you are burning ratification tar-barrels and trying to shake hands with yourself in the mirror at the Mechanic's Exchange, that 50 cent fellow crosses the briny and robs you of your bench. Your old employer is protected all right, but where do you come in? You don't come in; you simply stand out in the industrial norther. You count the railroad ties from town to town while your wife takes in washing, your daughter goes to work in a factory at two dollars a week and your son grows up an ignorant Arab and gets into ward politics or the penitentiary. You can't compete with the importation, because you've been bred to a higher standard of living. You must have meat three times a day, a newspaper at breakfast and a new book--or the ICONOCLAST --after supper. You must have your plunge bath and spring bed, your clean shave and Sunday shirt. How can you hope to hold your job when a man is bidding for it who takes up his belly-band for breakfast, dines on slum- gullion and sucks his breath for supper; to whom literature is an unknown luxury, a bath a deplorable accident, and a crummy old blanket a comfortable bed? You can't do it, and if you'll take the Apostle's advice you'll quit trying.

No; I wouldn't prevent the immigration of worthy Europeans--men of intelligence, who dignify labor. We have millions such in America, and they are most estimable citizens. Our ancestors were all Europeans, and that man who is not proud of his parentage should have been born a beast. But I'd knock higher than Gilderoy's kite the theory that America should forever be the dumping- ground for foreign filth--that people will be warmly welcomed here whom no other country wants and the devil wouldn't have.

We have made American citizenship entirely too cheap. We permit every creature that can poise on its hind legs and call itself a man, to sway the scepter of American Sovereignty--to become an important factor in the formation of our public polity; and then, with this venal vote on the one hand, eager to be bought, and the plutocrat on the other anxious to buy, we wonder why it is that the invariable tendency of our laws is to make the rich man a prince and the poor man a Populist--why we are "great only in that strange spell, a name."

In this work of reform we've got to begin at the bottom --with the body politic itself. You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear, nor Sovereigns of men who were born to be Slaves. We've got to grade up or we're gone. Only superior Intelligence is capable of self-government-- Ignorance and Tyranny go hand in hand. You may theorize until the Bottomless Pit is transformed into a skating park; you may vote tariffs high or low and money hard or soft; you may inaugurate the Single-Tax or transform the American Republic into a commune, but the condition of the hewers of wood and the drawers of water will never be permanently bettered while Ignorance and Vice have access to the ballot-box.

We have carried the enchanting doctrine of "political equality" entirely too far and are paying the penalty. The rebound from the monstrous doctrine of the divine right of monarchs has hurried us into equal error. Disgusted with the rottenness of the established religion, the French people once crowned a courtesan as Goddess of Reason; maddened by the insolence of hereditary officialism, our fathers placed the rod of power in the hoodlum's reckless hand and bound upon the stupid brow of hopeless nescience Columbia's imperial crown. That the greater must guide the lesser intelligence is nature's immutable law. To deny this were to question our right to rule the beast and God's authority to reign King of all mankind. Self-preservation will yet compel us to guard the sacred privileges of American sovereignty as jealously as did Rome her citizenship.

. . .

Do this, and all other needed reforms will follow as surely and as swiftly as the day-god follows the dawn. Knowledge is power. When those who vote fully understand that every dollar expended by government, federal, state or municipal, must be created by the common people --that first or last, labor must furnish it forth--we'll cease having billion-dollar Congresses. We'll cease paying a hundred and forty millions per annum in federal pensions; we'll cease wasting a King's ransom annually in pretending to "improve" intermittent creeks and impossible harbors solely for political navigation; we'll cease borrowing money in time of peace to bolster up that foolish financial fetich known as the "gold-reserve"; we'll cease making so many needless laws and paying aspiring patriots fat salaries to harass us with their enforcement; we'll cease exempting from taxation the half-million dollar church and laying a heavier mulct on the mechanic's cottage and the widow's cow; we'll cease paying preachers five dollars a minute to stand up in our legislative halls and insult Almighty God with perfunctory prayers; we'll cease building so many palatial prisons where thieves and thugs may be cared for at the expense of honest people, but will divide criminals into classes--those who should be peremptorily hanged, and those who should be whipped and turned loose to hustle their own hash. Nothing knocks the sawdust out of false sentiment so quickly as the realization that it's an expensive luxury and that we must pay the freight.

Billion-dollar Congresses, eh? Do you know what that means? There are less than fifteen million wealth creators in this country, and the last farthing of it comes out of their pockets--something over $66 apiece! If you had it in silver dollars--and I suppose that most of you would accept silver--you couldn't count it in a century. Lay the coins edge to edge and they'll belt the world. Pile them on top of each other and you'll have a silver shaft more than 1,750 miles high. Sand your hands and climb it. Perchance from the top you'll see many things--among others what is oppressing the poor. And while up in that rarefied atmosphere, where the vision is good and thinking probably easy, you will look around for those other pyramids of expense annually erected by state, county and municipal government, then come down firm in the faith that if this isn't a great government it ought to be, considering what it costs. No wonder the workman carries in his pocket only an elegant assortment of holes!

We're governed entirely too much--Officialism is becoming a veritable Old Man of the Sea on the neck of Labor's Sinbad. About every fifth man you meet is a public servant of some sort, and you cannot get married or buried, purchase a drink or own a dog except with a by-your-leave to the all-pervading law of the land. In some states suicide itself is an infraction of the criminal code, and if the police don't cut you down in time to put you in jail the preachers will send you to hell. Every criminal law this state and county and city needs can be printed in a book no larger than the ICONOCLAST, and that so plain that he who runs may read and reading understand. And when so printed and so understood, without the possibility of misconstruction, they could be enforced at one-fifth the cost of the present judicial failure. We have so many laws and so much legal machinery that when you throw a man into the judicial hopper not even an astrologer can tell whether he'll come out a horse-thief or only a homicide --or whether the people will weary of waiting on the circumlocution office and take a change of venue to Judge Lynch.

This can never be a land of religious liberty--the atheist can never be considered as on a political parity with his ultra-orthodox brother--until we compel church property to bear its pro rata of the public burdens.

And right here let me say a word about the "Apostle." I have been accused by people--for whom no cherry-tree blooms or little hatchet is ground--of being a rank atheist and a red-flag anarchist. It has been broadly intimated that I'm trying to rip the Christian religion up by the roots, rob trusting hearts of their hope and deprive the preacher of his daily bread. Now I might just as well confess to you that I'm no angel. If I were I'd fly out of Texas till the bifurcated Democratic party has another "harmony" deal. When you hear people denouncing me as an atheist, just retire to your closet and pray, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." And you might add, that nobody cares. No mortal son of Adam's misery can produce one line I ever wrote, or quote one sentence I ever uttered, disrespectful of ANY religion--and that's more than you can say of most of the ministers.

But it is not right, it is not just that the little holdings of the poor should be relentlessly taxed and costly temples exempted--palatial edifices in which polite society pretends to worship One who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush. Such an arrangement signifies neither good religion nor good sense. It's the result of sanctified selfishness. I believe in taxing luxuries, and a costly church is not a necessity. At least Christ did not think so, for he never built one.

Congregations that can afford to erect fine churches and export saving grace to the pagans of foreign climes, can afford to pay taxes and thereby help American heathern out of the hole. A million men out of employment, pacing our streets in grim despair; a million children coming up in ignorance and crime; a million women hesitating between the wolf of want and the abundance of infamy, and the church--supposed to be God's ministering angel-- crying, "Give, give! If you can't give much, give little. Remember the widow's mite"--so acceptable to a pauper deity.

Give for what? To build fine temples in whose sacred shadows will lurk the gaunt specter of Famine and the grisly gorgon of Crime. To buy grand organs and costly bells to peal praises to One who had nowhere to lay his head. To pay stall-fed preachers five, ten, twenty thousand dollars a year to expound the doctrine of a poor carpenter who couldn't have kept a silver dollar in his jeans a single day while there was poverty and suffering in the world.

While the wealth-producer is robbed to pension millionaires who suffered mental anguish because of the draft, and to administer worse than useless laws, still the amount so unnecessarily abstracted would be but a mere bagatelle if labor was steadily employed and reaped its just reward. With the mighty energies of this nation in full play and the wealth remaining with its producers, we could give even all the candidates an office, with plenty to get and little to do, and still have pie in the pantry and corn in the crib. There is something more the matter than governmental waste--there's something RADICALLY wrong.

. . .

In tracing the causes of panics and periods of business depression, we invariably find our currency more or less at fault. Now don't get frightened. I'm not going to dose you with free silver nor give you the gold cure. This is neither Coin's Financial School nor a gold-bug incubator. The currency question is one you know all about. Everybody does--especially the corner-grocery politician. He understands it from A to Izzard--knows almost as much about it as a hello-girl does of the nature of electricity. Prof. Jevon truly says that "a kind of intellectual vertigo appears to seize people when they talk of money." Perhaps the Goddess of Liberty on the silver dollar has 'em Trilbyized.

We hear a great deal of late about the "science of money." It's supposed to be something very esoteric-- something that a fellow can only master by drawing heavily on his gray matter, by working his think-machine up to the limit and sweating blood. Now let me tell you that there is no "science of money," any more than there's a science of harvesting hoop poles or fighting flies. When a man begins to give you an interminable song and dance about the science of money, just you send for the police and have him locked up as a dangerous lunatic.

Here's a ticket good for so many meals at a restaurant --an order for so much wealth; and here's a silver dollar --no 'tisn't; it's a check on a--er--on a "resort"; in fact, on a saloon; an I.O.U. for 11 cents, the price of a cigar--or something--I suppose. "Man should not live by bread alone." Now what's the difference between this ticket and check and the currency issued by the government? Simply this: These are the I.O.U.'s of individual's money, the I.O.U.'s of the entire American people. These are orders for certain kinds of wealth at particular places; money is an order for all kinds of wealth at any place within the jurisdiction of the federal government. This ticket is the check of one American, drawn against his personal wealth and credit; this bill is the check of all Americans, drawn against the collective wealth and credit of the nation. That's all the difference between a cocktail check and a coin, between a meal ticket and a ten dollar bill. Neither is worth a rap unless it can be REDEEMED. Like sanctification caught at a camp-meeting, there must be a hereafter to it or its a humbug. But don't you metallists take that as a premise and jump at conclusions or you're liable to sprain your logical sequence. What kind of redemption did I have in view when I acquired this che--I mean this ticket? I expected that it would be redeemed in something that would expand my surcingle and enable me to cast a shadow--in eggs and oleomargarine, corn-bread and buttermilk. And if so redeemed on demand, is it not a GOOD TICKET--is it not WORTH ITS FACE? What kind of redemption did I expect when I acquired this bill? I expected it to be redeemed in the necessaries of life--or possibly the luxuries. Who issued it? The government. Who's the government? The people. And when the people have given me bread and butter, tobacco and transportation, clothing and cocktails, and afforded me police protection to the extent of my ten dollars hasn't it been REDEEMED in the manner I anticipated--in the only way in which money can be redeemed? If I exchange this bill for a gold eagle what have I got? Another governmental drink-check or meal- ticket that awaits redemption. And there you have the whole "science of money," over which politicians have so long puzzled their brains that their think-tanks have got full of logical wiggletails. A dollar, whether it be made of gold, silver or paper, is simply an order which the people in their official capacity give against all the wealth, actual and potential, of the nation; and unless the holder can get it promptly redeemed in food and clothing, he's in a terribly bad fix.

. . .

Every few years our industrial system gets the jim-jams. Capital flies to cover, factories close and labor goes tramping across the country seeking honest employment and receiving a warm welcome--from militia companies with shotted guns. Cheerful idiots begin to prattle of "over- production," the economic M.D.'s to refurbish all the old remedies, from conjure bags to communism. They all know exactly what caused the "crisis" and what to do for it; but despite the doctors the patient usually--survives. And the M.D. who succeeds in cramming his pet panacea down its throat claims all the credit for the recovery. We are slowly emerging from the crash of '93, and the cuckoos are cock-sure that Cleveland hoodooed with that financial rabbit-foot known as the gold-reserve--that a country fairly bursting with wealth was saved from the demnition bowwows by the blessed expedient of going into debt; that labor found salvation by shouldering an added burden in the shape of interest-bearing bonds. Hereafter when a burro tries to lie down beneath a load that's making him bench-legged, we'll just pile a brick house or two on top of him, and, with ears and tail erect, he'll strike a Nancy Hanks gait and come cavorting down the home stretch. When a statesman can see such things as that while wide awake and perfectly sober, he ought to consult a doctor. No wonder the Democratic party spilt wide open--transformed from an ascendent sun into a bifurcated Biela's comet, wandering the Lord knows whither.