— 14 —
are by the force of circumstances driven to run them, but who indemnifies them? There is the miner who every day risks his life, limbs, or health in the pit, the mason and house carpenter on high scaffolds, and there are hundreds of branches of work, in which the average duration of life of the operatives amounts to less than 30 years, while that of the employing class is 60 years—who offers any indemnification to such risks as these? risks that, perhaps, might be avoided, if the employers were more humane? The unnecessary loss of lives, limbs, and healthy constitutions among the operatives of Capitalistic Production is truly fearful, and causes untold misery in their families,—all for the sole benefit of soulless capital. Nobody is allowed to take a single acre of raw land, or a city lot without paying for it the full value; but Capitalistic employers are allowed to take the most precious common property of the community and state,—human labor, health, and even life,—to underpay it to the laborer, and to throw on the community the whole burden of educating the laborers, of supporting them in old age, or when out of work, and their families, when not self-supporting.
But the chief arguments against the institution of private capital are yet to be established. It will readily be conceded that a well educated person who is skillful and thorough in his self-chosen branch of labor, represents a higher capital, so to speak, than a mere dunce of a laborer who is fit for the menial kinds of work only. The difference in value between the two may be as ten to one, or, more. Now it is a fact that Capitalistic Production needs less and less well educated and thoroughly skillful laborers, it renders them superfluous by a constantly increasing division of labor, and by a larger application and a greater perfection of machinery. It is in this way that millions of skilled and independent mechanics have been superseded entirely and thrown as burdens on the community, and other millions that might be intelligent and independent men, are kept in a decreasing state of moral and mental worth. Who indemnifies these men and the state for their incalculable losses?
It is one of the most disgraceful features of Capitalstic Production that one of the means to make labor cheap is the employment of women and children, who are satisfied with less wages, in the place of men who are thereby superseded. It frequently happens that while the wife and children from their ninth year upward are toiling for ten, twelve, or more hours in the close atmosphere and at the exhausting treadmill of the factory, the husband and father is out of employment and supported by the labor of his family. He is forced by dire need to sell his wife and children into a
