Page:Adolph Douai - Better Times (1877).djvu/17

 slavery that in some respects is worse than negro slavery ever was. Family life, paternal education, conjugal purity, the chastity of the rising generation of girls, are sure to be ruined by degrees, while public schooling ceases to benefit factory children. If this is not robbery, robbery protected by law, it is certainly more diabolical than robbery.

It is another feature of this system that there is in it a constant inducement to lengthen the working part of the day, and to render at the same time the labor more intense, uniform, mind-killing,—in short to make the wages laborer a slave who puts up with indignaties offered to him, who loses all power of resistance to tyrannical treatment, and becomes the mere tool of his task-master, part of his machinery, his voting cattle, and lickspittle. It is a matter of history that the English government had to throw legal obstacles into the way of this degenerating system, because the race of men from which soldiers and crews of the navy could be recruited, was dying out, and epidemics began to decimate even the well-to-do population. The factory and sanitary inspection and regulation laws which have ever since 1833 been directed to the remedy of this evil could, however, not have been carried by the influence of the workingpeople; it required the intervention of the landed aristocracy to somewhat relieve them from the shackles of the industrial lords, and it required the envious and revengeful intervention of the latter to somewhat relieve the agricultural "wretches" (that is the vulgar designation of the gangs of field hands.) In our own country we saw only last winter an effort of the mill owners in Massachusetts to increase by law the daily hours of labor (which in practice are as a rule lengthened in spite of the law) and would have been successful but for the manly opposition of our fellow-laborer } In fact the larger an industrial establishment is, the more the managers seem to act upon the belief that their laborers are their property, body and soul, and that those who oppose their absolute sway are pestilential demagogues and criminals. And the farther this industrial system spreads in any country, the more dangerous becomes the attempt of all who declare war against its abuses.

But we must still further prove that Capitalistic Production is, by the very nature of things, legalized robbery. We ask what is it that has made industrial production on an increased scale the order of the day? It is not Capital; it is the progress of the Sciences and Arts. It is the modern Discoveries and Inventions and improvements in their mechanical application. Who ever heard of a capitalist being a great inventor or discoverer? And who ever heard of great discoverers and inventors becoming great capitalists through