Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/63

Rh other workmen from taking their places, were in reality honest, well-meaning, law-abiding citizens! But they had unhappily been "brought into conflict with great combinations of capital," and Mr. Hudson's arguments are not answerable for the result. You and I have a perfect right to use our means to manufacture sugar or to mine for coal, or to add to the prosperity and wealth of our community by adding to our own by employing it in any industry we may elect for. But we must be careful not to stand in the highway where "the competition of labor for wages" may be perchance brought into our vicinity. For that competition might happen to run up against us, and so be brought into conflict with us, and thereby "violence" might be "provoked." And then, if our business is ruined and our property destroyed, Mr. Hudson is not responsible—we had fair warning! Mr. Hudson can fill his pages with any doctrines it pleases him to invent, and find publishers for them; but he will not pay us for our smoking factories and broken machinery. That is our affair, not Mr. Hudson's.

Mr. Huxley somewhere speaks of gentlemen who put their statements "into italics as the queen puts her soldiers into bear-skin caps, to make them look formidable." Mr. Hudson puts his statements into figures for the same paramount purpose. .His picture of the bloated capitalists, by combinations extracting from the masses a sum three times as large as the national debt, is appalling, to be sure. And were this not sufficiently appalling, he adds to it the following dazzling array: "Let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that the abolition of competition will return a certain proportion of the enhanced profits to the workingman in the shape of increased wages. If the anthracite-coal pool raises the price of coal fifty cents per ton, and gives the miners ten cents of the advance, a gain of $3,000,000 is secured in the annual wages of the. miners; but a burden of $15,000,000 is imposed on the labor that consumes the coal. If the coke syndicate raises its price fifty cents per ton, and gives its workingman ten cents advance, the advantage to labor at the coke-ovens is $400,000 in a year; but a loss of many times the amount is inflicted on labor in the various forms in which that product finally reaches the consumer. If the same operation were repeated by combinations controlling every industry and every staple of consumption, what would be the result? An addition would be made to the cost of life, of which one fifth would be given back to labor in the form of increased wages, and four fifths would be drawn from labor to swell the profits of capital. Change the proportion to whatever form you like, the fact remains that all these combinations are organized to increase the profits of the capital