I The Problem

AND so we come through our five episodes in the history of the reconstructive mind, and find ourselves in the bewildering present, comfortably seated, let us say, in the great reading room of our Columbia Library. An attendant liberates us from the maze of “Nietzsche’s Works” lying about us, and returns presently with a stack of thirty books purporting to give the latest developments in the field of social study and research. We are soon lost in their graphs and statistics, their records and results; gradually we come to feel beneath these dead facts the lives they would reveal; and as we read we see a picture.

It is the picture of one life. We see it beginning helplessly in the arms of the factory physician; it is only after some violence that it consents to breathe,—as if it hesitates to enter upon its adventure. It has a touch of consumption but is otherwise a fair enough baby, says the factory physician. It will do,—not saying for what or whom. Luckily, it is a boy, and will be able to work soon. He does; at the age of nine he becomes a newsboy; he is up at five in the morning and peddles news till eight; at nine he gets to school, fagged out but restless; he gives trouble; cannot memorize quickly enough, nor sit still long enough; plays truant, loving the hard lessons of the street; school over, he has a half-hour of play, but must then travel his news route till six; after supper he has no taste for study; if he cannot go down into the street, he will go to bed. At fourteen, hating the school where he is beaten or scolded daily, he connives with his parents at certain falsehoods which secure his premature entrance into the factory. He works hard, and for a time happily enough; there is more freedom here than in the school. He discovers sex, passes through the usual chapter of accidents, and finally achieves manhood in the form of a sexual disease. He falls in love several times, and out as many times but one; he marries, shares his disease with his wife, and begets ten children,—nearly all of them feeble, and two of them blind; he does not want so many children, but the priest has told him that religion commands it. He works harder to support them, but his health is giving way, and life becomes a heavy burden to him. The factory installs scientific management, and he finds himself performing the same operation every ten seconds from seven to twelve and from one to six;—some three thousand times a day; he protests, but is told that science commands it. He joins a union, and goes out on strike; his family suffer severely, one of the children dying of malnutrition; he wins a wage-increase of five per cent; his landlord raises his rent, and a month later his wife informs him that the prices of food and clothing have gone up six per cent. His country goes to war about a piece of territory he has never heard of; his one fairly strong boy rushes off to the defence of the colors, returns (age twenty) with one leg and almost an arm, and sits in the house smoking, drinking, and dribbling in repetitious semi-torpor his memories of battle. Then comes street-corner talk of socialism, capitalism, and other things new and therefore hard to understand; a glimmer of hope, a cloud of doubt, then resignation. Four of the children die before they are twenty; two others become consumptive weaklings. The father is sent away from the factory because he is too old and feeble; he finds work in a saloon; drink helps him to slip down; he steals a bracelet from the factory-owner’s kept woman, is arrested, tries to hang himself, but is discovered when half dead, and is restored to life against his will. He serves his sentence, returns to his family, and becomes a beggar. He dies of exposure and disease, and his widow is supported by two of his daughters, who have become successful prostitutes.

It is the picture of one life. And as you look at it you see beyond it the hundred thousand lives of which it is one; you see this suffering and meaninglessness as but one hundredth part of a thousandth part of the meaningless suffering of men; you hear the angry cries of the rebellious young, the drunken laughter of the older ones who have no more rebellion in them, the quiet weeping of the mothers of many children. Around you here you see the happy faces of young students, eloquent of comfortable homes; at your elbow a gentleman of family is writing a book on the optimism of Robert Browning. And then suddenly, beneath this world of leisure and learning, you feel the supporting brawn of the wearied workers; you vision the very pillars of this vast edifice held up painfully, hour after hour, on the backs of a million sweating men; your leisure is their labor, your learning is paid for by their ignorance, your luxury is their toil.

For a moment the great building seems to tremble, as if rebellion stirred beneath and upheaval was upon the world. Then it is still once more, and you and I are here with our thirty books.

One feels guilty of sentiment here (after reading Nietzsche!), and hurries back to the sober features of those crowded volumes. Here, in cold scientific statement, is our social problem: here are volumes biological on heredity, eugenics, dietetics, and disease; volumes sociological on marriage, prostitution, the family, the position of woman, contraception and the control of population; volumes psychological on education, criminology, and the replacement of supernatural by social religion; volumes economic on private property, poverty, child labor, industrial methods, arbitration, minimum wage, trusts, free trade, immigration, prohibition, war; volumes political on individualism and communism, anarchism and socialism, single tax, Darwinism and politics, democracy and aristocracy, patriotism, imperialism, electoral and administrative methods; methodological volumes on trade-unions and craft-unions, “direct action” and “political action,” violence and non-resistance, revolution and reform. It is a discouraging maze; we plunge into it almost hopelessly. Several of these authors have schemes for taking the social machine apart, and a few even have schemes for putting it together again; hardly one of them remembers the old warning that this machine must be kept going while it is being repaired. And each of these solutions, as its author never suspects, is but an added problem.

Let us listen to these men for a while, let us follow them for a space, and see where they bring us out. They may not bring us out at all; but perhaps that is just what we need to see.