To the intelligent reader, it is easily understood that everything produced in any given generation is paid for in the generation of the then living. After we have departed this world, we cannot pay or receive pay.
Whatever we have done on earth is closed. If the generation produced more in value than it consumed, the succeeding generation inherited that much without cost to it. Of course the generations are not distinctly separated, but wedge into each other.
I may work for you now, receiving merely your promise to pay me. As long as we both live I have an opportunity to be paid, but if I die I will never be paid. If you die I will be paid only in case you leave some thing with which to pay. If we both die everything of ours is left over for others to fuss about.
I have said that everything is paid for in the generation of the living or never. That means in a physical sense. It is the natural law, but in conflict with it mankind has created an arbitrary law by which we contract "paper debt," and agree to pay a premium (interest, dividends or profits) that never has been and never can be earned, but is simply extortion. That kind of debt can be and has been heaped increasingly upon the people of each succeeding generation. It was heaped upon us more heavily than upon any previous generation.
Unless we revoke it, we will pass it on to the next generation as a still greater burden to it, unless the people then shall possess the good sense to equitably revoke it. Those who have not considered the subject from the side of humanity, or who value the perpetuation of property accumulation more than the preservation of human integrity, may object to the term "revoke," as I have used it, but I use it advisedly, after the most serious consideration.
Unhesitatingly, I declare it to be the most solemn duty of the State to establish a system to liberate mankind from the existing industrial slavery. The masses cannot be liberated from industrial slavery without revoking many of the existing practices. It is not meant that individuals on their own responsibility should have the power to revoke, but the State must exercise that power justly to all mankind.
It is utterly indefensible that we should go on piling up debts under an arbitrary system which it is impossible to physically comply with except by reducing the masses of mankind to a constantly lower and lower industrial state. A new system to liberate the toilers, need work no hardship to any one. The products from the industry of the toilers in a very short, period measure immensely more in value than all that has been accumulated.
It is not necessarily the purpose to take from those who have to give to those who have not, for that would be no remedy. All that is necessary is to adopt a system that will enable those who produce to secure the benefit of their production, and not force them to continually remain the prey of a toll levy made by centralized wealth. Give us a system that allows us to keep what we earn. If that is done we can take care of ourselves.
We have an apt opportunity in the conduct of the war on which to base a true estimate, or at least a much more just one, than is now practiced. Wealth saw to it that the conditions would be created that would make it practically impossible for us to keep out of the war if the world continued to follow the old practice, and it is these old practices that wealth insists on following. Wealth was so greedy that it had to build greater fortunes, even if it took the sacrifice of millions of lives, and entailed suffering on more than nine-tenths of the world's population. What was its demand ?
It was the demand of wealth that we should prepare a great Navy and a great Army in order to enforce the existing political and economic system not only upon ourselves, but upon all the world--present and future. It required that we should impress into the service of war, every available man and woman at nominal pay for their time. What did wealth offer in return ? It offered to sell copper to the Government for 16 cents a pound when it costs wealth only 7 cents. It offered to loan money to the Government at 32 per cent provided the Government would raise the interest if later bonds should draw more. It offered other things provided always there was a profit to wealth, and it considered itself patriotic because it did that. But it protested against the big incomes being taxed much to support the war for which its system is responsible.
Is any government justified in impressing men and women into war service at the lowest of pay for their time, if it does not also impress the surplus property of the wealthy ? Strange, inconsistent, even lower than criminal is that practice of the governments which take the lives and the liberties of their citizens to impress into war, when at the same time they pay a premium in the form of interest or otherwise for the property of the rich to be used in carrying on the war.
No one with an ounce of brains, unless filled with injustice or a mere hireling, will defend such a practice, for when peace is restored the loans of the rich burden those who risked their lives and the families of those killed.
When our country needs us, we should respond, but it is not to be expected hereafter we will be willing to permit the lives to be sacrificed and the hardships of war to fall almost entirely upon the plain people. We were imposed upon in the past, but with the more general intelligence of this generation, we should not be so supinely stupid now. The property of the wealthy should be taken the same as we conscript the individual. The conscript is not paid the value of his time to say nothing of the risk and exposure.
The taking of property or money to pay the costs of the war should begin with the largest of the fortunes, and as these are scaled down to equal the lesser, then conjointly they should be scaled down to take in the lesser still, and so on the process should run until all the greater fortunes pay in full the material costs of wars. Those with comparatively small means should pay nothing until those with larger means had been reduced to their equal. That is the only just rule.
If that rule had been the law these last years, there would have been no careless and reckless, and, as it was in some cases wanton, traveling upon the high sea in the danger zone by neutrals, notwithstanding that the rights of the seas should be and are of right inviolable. The rich owners of the ships would not have taken the risk to carry passengers if that had been the law. They would not then have tempted any of the belligerents to violate the international laws in defiance of America's rights.
To take the centralized fortunes to pay the costs of the wars would in addition to the justice of compelling wealth to support wars, usually of its own making, relieve the plain people of the levy that is made upon them at all times for interest and profit on the excess wealth. Surely, it is not possible that any of us in this day are so stupid as not to understand that those who do the necessary work to sustain life and its requirements, really pay with their toil the extravagances of the existing system.
Because of the supreme importance it be understood by every citizen, so that no one shall be longer imposed upon without; his eyes open, I repeat that we pay in physical expenditure the full price of everything we produce. In order to have some of the things that we need, we are obliged in some cases to construct what will last thousands of years, and pay for it in full when the work has been performed. True, we issue bonds and have been stupid enough to think that that pays the debt. It only adds to the burden, and as President Jefferson said in his day, "Spending money to be paid by posterity, ... is but swindling futurity";[To John Taylor, Monticello, May 28, 1816] or perhaps you may like Ruskin's statement better, that, "National debts, paying interest are simply the purchase by the rich of the power to tax the poor."
I like Jefferson's definition better, because it applies not only to national debts, but to all debts. What Jefferson said applies to us. We are what was to him "futurity," and have been mightily swindled as he had foretold. Jefferson and Ruskin were both great men, but while those statements were true, they were not profound, for even the commonest; of us certainly should see how we have been swindled as Jefferson said we would be, and we continue to be to this very day by the existing debt system.
Incidentally consider the two New York City depots--terminals for the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railways. They cost $200,000,000--built to last forever. It was the physical energy of this generation that paid in full for them. Futurity can give not an hour towards payment. It can only keep them in repair. It consumed all the time of thousands of men for several years to get out the material and construct those terminals. Already, before they were built, the advantages for getting in and out of the city were good.
To build the world's most expensive terminals was as it would have been for the pioneer farmer, if immediately after completing his first shack and before he put his wild land into shape to produce crops, he had begun the construction of a grand and beautiful dwelling. If he had done that he and his family would have starved, and his life would have been a failure. Surely we can understand that our nation is the giant farm, and that because of many excessive extravagances we have many ill-provided-for people. There is no co-ordination between the various requirements of us all as one great nation.
The two depots to which I have briefly referred are but "a drop in the bucket" measured alongside other extravagances. In New York City alone there are more than a thousand dwelling houses for the use of single families that cost from $400,000 to $15,000,000 each, and in each of which are expended annually for their occupants from $50,000 on up to over $1,000,000. This is in New York City alone. In that city and in the other cities enormous and extravagant works take place, besides personal practices followed, merely to satisfy the vain fancies of wealth.
The millions of people working on the farm, in the shop and other fields of needed industry must support all this extravagance together with those required to work for it. Knowing that to be so, can we wonder at the constantly increasing cost, of living, even in the face of the wonderful inventions that make the energy of men immensely more productive ? Certainly not. It is simple as "a, b, c," that we have built too many superfine dwellings, blocks and other things of almost fabulous cost, before we cultivated enough fields "to grow the crops," before there were enough factories to make the shoes and the clothes and the many other things which we need for our very existence. In other words we are using too much of our energy and wealth in building to satisfy the whims and fancies of wealth. Consequently millions of our people have not the necessaries of life. It is a system that robs all who work for a living.
What--did I hear you say that this of which we have spoken gives employment to lots of people ? That is an insult to the intelligence of any thinking person, yet that statement is excusable as long as we continue the existing business and political scheme. As things now are, the main thing aimed at by the wealth grabbers is to use us--to make of us mere machines to wear out in producing wealth for them. Our children are to be dragged into our useless places and be dropped into mother earth "ashes to ashes," "dust to dust," good bye.
If that is all we are for, then God bless the Kaiser, the late Czar, the Kings, "Big Business" and all the "Big Boys" who caused the war. It will at least be interesting while it lasts. If we are made simply to wear out in their service, the harder and the more dangerous our occupation the sooner will our ashes be scattered to the earth, and serve vegetable life better, to bud in beautiful foliage of the grasses, the trees, and the flowers.
Oh, no, we have not sunk yet to mere abject passive beings, even if our occupations in many cases would, standing alone, prove that we have. We are in a big measure industrial slaves, but we are not mental imbeciles. We still have our heads filled with brains, and they act when we command them. We all know that if any particular work or employment is unnecessary, nothing could be farther from the truththan to claim that it was justified because it gave employment, yet, even in spite of our knowing the truth we do not live up to it, so as to force its importance into a realization in our concrete experience.