The Industrial Republic: A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence
9781465655165
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The thought of the time has familiarised us with the evolutionary view of things; we understand that life is the product of an inner impulse, labouring to embody itself in the world of sense; and that the product is always changing—that there is nothing permanent save the principles and laws in accordance with which development goes on. We understand that the universe of things was evolved by slow stages into what it is to-day, that all life has come into being in the same way. We have traced this process in the far-distant suns and in the strata of the earth; we have traced it in the vegetables and in the animals, in the seed and in the embryo; we have traced it in all of man’s activities, his ways of thinking and acting, of eating and dressing and working and fighting and praying. This book is an attempt to interpret in the light of evolutionary science the social problem of our present world; to consider American institutions as they exist at this hour—what forces are now at work within them, and what changes they are likely to produce. The subject-matter dealt with is not abstract speculation, but rather the everyday realities of the world we know—our present political parties and public men, our present corporations and captains of industry, our present labour unions and newspapers, colleges and churches. The thing sought is an answer to a concrete and definite question: What will America be ten years from now? Inasmuch as the people who are most interested in practical affairs are very busy people, I judge it to be a common-sense procedure to set forth my ideas in miniature at the outset; so that one may learn in two or three minutes exactly what my book contains, and judge whether he cares to read it. It is my belief that the student of a generation from now will look back upon the last two centuries of human history and interpret them as the final stage of a long process whereby man was transformed from a solitary and predatory individual to a social and peaceable member of a single world community. He will see that men, pressed by the struggle for existence, had united themselves into groups under the discipline of laws and conventions; and that the last two centuries represented the period when these laws and conventions, having done their unifying work, and secured the survival of the group, were set aside and replaced by free and voluntary social effort. The student will furthermore perceive that this evolutionary process had two manifestations, two waves, so to speak; the first political, and the second industrial; the first determined by man’s struggle to protect his life, and the second by his struggle to amass wealth. The culmination of the first occurred successively in the English revolutions, the American and French revolutions, and the other various efforts after political freedom. After each of these achievements the historian notices a period of bitterness and disillusionment, a sense of failure, it being discovered that the expected did not occur, that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity did not become the rule of men’s conduct. After that, however, succeeds a period of enlightenment, it having been realised that the work has only been half done, that man has been made only half free. The political sovereignty has been taken out of the possession of private individuals and made the property of the whole community, to be shared in by all upon equal terms; but the industrial sovereignty still remains the property of a few. A man can no longer be put in jail or taxed by a king, but he can be starved and exploited by a master; his body is now his own, but his labour is another’s—and there is very little difference between the two. So immediately there begins a new movement, the end of which is a new revolution, and the establishment of THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC.
