Can Our Civilization Maintain Itself?

FOR six years we have had practically no immigration. During this period the flood of unskilled laborers almost completely died down. Before 1914 hundreds of thousands of men and women, raised at the expense of other countries, had been brought annually to our shores. They came with low standards of living, humble and willing, prepared to accept a bare subsistence wage, and content to do the rough and heavy work of the land. Their one hope was that we of our mercy would grant them, not easy, but unceasing employment. Our manufacturers had the assurance of a large supply of surplus labor; our charitable associations could expend their energies on the poor whom we had always with us; and fatalities in the mines, on the railroads, and in the dangerous trades were unfortunate, but not a real menace to our preëminence as a producing people. We were free to go ahead recklessly educating our lower classes, making nurses of domestic servants, stenographers of factory girls, teachers of the daughters of tradesmen, clerks of hod-carriers, mechanics of miners, and college professors of farm-hands. We could indulge our theories of equal opportunity for all, and a better chance for the child than for the father, without menace to our comfort and wellbeing. The silent thousands from across the seas were always coming to fill the places of those who had moved up. They asked no questions, made no complaint, accepted with humility what God and the great American people visited upon them. Perhaps they felt dimly that their children were in the line of promotion; but for themselves they did what was plainly marked out for them to do, and grew old and died doing it. Those were the good old days to which we look back, astonished that we did not more fully appreciate our blessings.

What of the situation to-day? Are the present conditions anything short of disastrous? For six years we have been compelled to manufacture our own population. Home-industry alone has had to be depended upon to supply us with hand-workers, as it had previously been depended upon to supply us with brain-workers. The latter task we have always felt competent to perform; the former has been more in the nature of an experiment. And what has been the final result of our efforts? A shortage of workers everywhere. The original shortage of manual workers induced the payment of such high wages that recruits were soon drawn from the less highly paid groups of brain-workers. This shift did not suffice to meet the demand for the unskilled worker, but it has served to spread the shortage over all branches of employment.

The shortage of farm labor bids fair to be nothing short of a national calamity. The appalling shortage of teachers may prove to be a monkey-wrench in the machinery of democracy. The inadequacy of the supply of trained nurses is so serious that having diseases or babies at home is an achievement of the past. If we must be sick, we seek the hospital; but in the hospitals the pressure is so great that there are long waiting-lists of patients, and many die before their turn arrives. In some of our insane asylums the plight of the management is so desperate that inmates who have periodic manias are discharged, reëmployed as attendants during their lucid intervals, and readmitted as patients when their violent symptoms recur. Even then the supply of nurses and attendants in such institutions is only forty per cent of normal, and at best the number allotted was always dangerously low. Who can contemplate such guardianship and care of the tragic victims of mental disease without apprehension?

The shortage of domestic servants is a byword in the humorous columns, but for families with frail old people or little children it is not a subject for mirth. Mothers struggle along with burdens too heavy for them to bear, and the integrity of family life suffers. Prohibition has withdrawn from the economic field the last hope of the overburdened American housekeeper, the faithful charwoman, sole support of a drunken husband. That patient drudge is no longer available; she is at the movies with her peers, while the ‘ladies’ wash at home. The high wages the fathers are earning permit their children to remain in school beyond the minimum working age. The resultant reduction in the number of child-workers has become a source of great discomfort to the employers of that type of labor. On the other hand, the pressure on the high schools to care for the enormously increased attendance is making school superintendents old before their time. Grown daughters and wives, in both handand brain-occupations, have celebrated the success of the masculine supporter of the family by passing from gainful pursuit into the leisure class. To make confusion worse confounded, the wage-earner himself, by the expenditure of his large wages, has brought additional pressure upon the activities of those who supply his children with amusement, his wife with furs, and his home with victrolas and parlor sets.

Nor is limitation in number of workers the sole complication. Our mines and our railroads suffer, not only from the shortage of labor, but from the recalcitrancy of labor. We do not seem to be able to bring up citizens to be content with what is meted out to them, which is almost as fatal as not bringing them up at all.

We have, then, a working population too small for the demands put upon it and too restless and intelligent to accept the pay and position of inferiority. We have never bent our energies as a nation to the manufacture of unskilled labor. We have prided ourselves on the fact that the rough work of our country had to be done by ‘foreigners.’ Must we forever depend upon that supply? Indeed, with a rejuvenated Europe, which like the phœnix must soon rise from its ashes, how long will that supply continue? Will not these ‘foreigners ’ prefer to remain natives of the land which has given them birth, and of which they are at last citizens in the full sense of the word ? And in our present national state of mind, are we likely to turn to Asia for help? Even if we could, do we want to depend on alien production of our human raw material? Do we not eventually expect to create our own citizenry?

What hope does the future hold that we shall be able to keep up the type of civilization on which we have prided ourselves, when its persistence seems to be already so seriously threatened ? Greece established a democracy which was based on the existence of slavery. The victims toiled and perished, but on the fruit of their labors was nourished the rarest culture the world has ever seen. Our democracy was founded to give the lie to such an ideal of human society. We affirm that all men are free and equal and are to be freer and more equal. What one man has, we want all men to have: a comfortable home, plenty to eat and wear, health, education, recreation. We have believed this was possible. Have those who knew better all along accepted inequality in their secret hearts while paying lipservice to the fetish of equality? For where does this bright vision lead us? It is surely not extravagant to anticipate, in the not impossible event that automobiles produced in enormous numbers can be produced at a very low cost, that every family should own one. But one of those beings whose fantastic joy it is to deal in statistics has calculated that, if each of the twenty million families in the United States possessed an automobile, it would require, for securing the raw material, and for the manufacture, repair, replacement, and upkeep of the cars, the supplying of oil and gas for their running, and the care of roads for them to run on, the entire time of eight million men. It is obvious that a population of one hundred and ten million could never spare so large a proportion of its adult males for such a purpose.

Again, is it too much to expect that the same opportunity for health of body and mind which the most favored now enjoy shall in time be the common possession of all? But if we find the present facilities for the preservation of health, hospitals, nurses, doctors, health-officers, insufficient, what would be the situation if we had any really high standards of public health? Even supposing we were intelligent enough to try prevention instead of cure, think of the experts that would be necessary to guard our people from disease and educate them in ways of preserving their health. If all our fellow citizens took care of their teeth as you and I do, the present supply of dentists would be a mere drop in the bucket. Ignorance and indifference on the part of the multitude is all that saves us from engaging in a deadly combat with our brothers for a turn in the dentist’s chair. Under compulsion we might use, in place of our present dental methods, forced extraction of teeth in childhood by machinery, and quantity production of false sets; but the plan has little to recommend it.

Shall we be compelled to consent that some be kept down in order that others may rise? Must we establish a slave class — not in name, of course, but in fact? We have the nucleus already of such a class in the individuals we impress into the service of the unproductive sides of our lives. How many working lives is even the most valuable of us entitled to appropriate without thereby infringing on the fundamental rights of man, which we are supposed to guard as our most sacred trust ? An average family in comfortable circumstances employs perhaps one chauffeur and two maids. Besides those three individuals, whose entire working time belongs to the employer, how many other whole human beings does the family enslave to its necessities and luxuries in the part time it employs of transportation-workers, clerks, farmers, mechanics, school nurses, private nurses, doctors, dentists, dressmakers, tailors, teachers, actors, confectioners, writers, printers, bankers? To how many of these economic slaves is that family or any family entitled? The head of the family is supposed to make a return in kind to the community; but can that return of the one to the many ever be sufficient? Even if, in terms of economics, it seems adequate, is it morally adequate? The transaction at best would fall short of the exquisite perfection of the Greenlanders’ method of supporting themselves by doing each other’s washing.

Is it inevitable that we cannot all be healthy and happy and intelligent? The economist will try to comfort us with the stabilizing effect of hard times on an undersupplied labor-market, the saving quality of the psychology of content, the possibilities of substituting machinery for men, the equivalent of twenty slaves of old which coal and water-power have put at the service of every human being; but what can plain people like ourselves conclude, except that we are drifting rudderless, going nowhere, and with scant facilities even for getting there?

Our complex civilization cannot be kept up apparently for all alike, even at its present not exceptional standard, by the individuals who comprise its membership. Shall its benefits be confined to one class of the population? Can we recruit our economic slaves from some of the less advanced races, or must we make some fundamental change in our standards? The luxuries of one generation can no longer axiomatically become the necessities of the next. So far, at least, we can see. But is not something much more fundamental essential ? Can we as a nation renounce the habit of material possession, which is becoming an obsession with us, and do it with the conviction that it is incompatible with the practice of democracy? or must the horrid struggle of those who have not, to get, and of those who have, to keep, go on forever?