CHAPTER VII.

The confidential relations between our government and people have given it a parental character. It has consequently been the study of our legislation for ages past to assuage, as far as possible, those natural evils which creep in as the result of unrestricted social forces. Regarding the whole mass of our inhabitants as a family, the government could never feel that its duty was faithfully performed, while a number of its people were, relating to the ordinary enjoyments of life, in a state of suppression from any removable cause. You began your civilization, just as we began ours, by the crystallization of society into two classes. Those who at first, by thrift, acquisitiveness, or strong arms, became possessed of sufficient property to escape the necessity of daily toil for the sustenance of life; and those who, by the absence of these qualities or from other causes, were obliged from day to day to exercise their muscular and nervous energies for the benefit of those who found it profitable to use and pay for them. This condition of society is a natural and just[Pg 142] one, and there is nothing whatever in it to prevent the largest possible amount of happiness to all. But before many ages we discovered that the interests of the property class and the labor class were not equally equipped to maintain a fair and equitable relation with each other. We found that the interests of labor in the many bore no comparison in its political weight with the great power of wealth in the few; and foreseeing that subjugation in time, of one by the other, which your experience has shown, we made wide provision against it.

We acknowledge as the foundation of all material progress that the honest accumulation of wealth should be the privilege of all; and that the rights of property should be protected, and the enjoyment of it secured to everyone. Yet with these principles firmly and successfully carried out in our government, we have for many centuries, considered it necessary to support and sustain the interests of the labor class by special legislative attention. You have pursued a directly opposite course. From the beginning of your history the privilege of wealth to hold labor in subjection, and to use it as an instrument of accumulation, with about the same regard for its well being as the horse in the collar or the ox[Pg 143] under its yoke, has prevailed, without the enactment of any sincere and effective law to assist and sustain it in its unequal contest. On the contrary, your statute books are filled with oppressive laws against the labor class; and while in your most civilized districts these unjust enactments are nearly obsolete, there yet remains an average over your planet of such legal and social suppressions of the class whose strong arm supports you, as to be reckoned by us as the most unhappy and discreditable feature of your social state.

It matters not how your economists may examine and discuss the relations of labor with its co-operative interests, so long as they offer no proposals of relief to it in the unjust burthen it bears of the hardships of life. Your common view that labor must be unavoidably submitted to the law of supply and demand, and that, consequently, eighty per cent of your people are to be helplessly left to take their chances of distress and suffering at each unfavorable turn of the labor market, is peculiar to the planet upon which you live, and is one of the most mistaken and unwise conclusions among you. This heartless notion of yours is plainly the inheritance of your early cruel ages. With such a state of things you can[Pg 144] never have a very high state of civilization. With so many of you constantly under the vicissitude of such adverse changes of condition, there can be no steady progress of the whole, and but little encouragement to thrift; a lack of ambition must prevail in all the higher purposes of life, and a general surrender to improvidence and the vices which follow. For that class which has created your wealth, and is constantly renewing it, and which constitutes so large a portion of your whole population, you can show nothing of legislative effort in its favor except indirectly, through some of the purposes to smooth the way and increase the profits of capital. The opportunities of your comparatively small capitalistic class to use for its purposes, in an entirely heartless way, the larger body of wealth producers, have been made easy by natural conditions which would have been removed or corrected long ago, under a more humane and unselfish administration of your affairs, and if your governments had not been exclusively in the hands of the smaller class mentioned. We know of nothing more heartless and cruel of the governing classes of the Earth, than their careless submission of its wage-earners to the unrestricted influence of competition for employment,[Pg 145] under the compromising condition of a necessity for bread.

In our philosophy we recognize only two honest ways of accumulating wealth. One is the saving of wages, and the other the profits of capital; and our legislation has been chiefly directed to make the chances of wealth by these two methods as even as possible. To perform this service effectually, our greatest efforts have been directed toward the labor interest. We feel ourselves justified in this, because the welfare of about seven-eighths of our people is connected with this interest; because to the labor class is entirely due the creation and constant renewal of all the wealth on our planet. Because, also, that capital has natural advantages over labor, which are first, its choice of time and place for investment; second, its capacity to wait for opportunities without the risk of physical suffering by its owners, and the leisure for thought and knowledge it affords to those who control it. Also, that capital, holding the position of a voluntary employer, naturally assumes the rights and privileges of master, which labor, in its constrained and dependent situation, is obliged to acknowledge.

We have long since considered these unequal relations and tendencies, and have proceeded to remedy them.[Pg 146] Our legislation in behalf of the labor classes is the happiest and most satisfactory of any that we have. Without it our present civilization would be impossible. Before describing our methods, let me direct your attention to the immediate and indirect causes which bear down upon the labor classes of your planet.

Prominent among these is the promiscuous ownership of land. The surrendering of the Earth’s surface to the control of individual ownership is one of the most serious mistakes of your civilization. It is not to be mentioned alone as the greatest objection to this, that the planet upon which you were born is the natural inheritance of all of you, from whose surface each and every one of you is destined to derive a sustenance, and that a monopoly of it by the few is as plain a violation of justice as it would be to hold the atmosphere in private use by sections, were such a thing possible. But it is chiefly to be taken into consideration, that your land policy enables the few to dominate the many, suppresses one class and elevates another, and insensibly transfers an undue portion of the earnings of labor into the pockets of your land-holding classes.

Almost every influence now at work in the progress of[Pg 147] your society tends to throw money into the hands of your land holders, not fairly earned by themselves. While the products of labor are cheapening from day to day, partly due to increased skill, and the appliance of machinery in their manufacture, and partly, also, by the competition of labor, owing to increase of population, yet even by these very operations the value of landed property goes up.

You already estimate rent as a considerable element of cost in the production of your food materials, and you are gradually approaching a period, when by the growth of population the cost of food will be very much increased by rent charges. You have all along submitted to this monopoly of land from causes plainly apparent. In the early days of your history all private ownership of land was acquired and held by force, and it may be safely asserted that no title at present exists in any of your older countries that is not founded on violent conquest, and that has not been maintained by an organized and armed authority, whose existence depends upon retaining the system of ownership in vogue. It is plain to see that when the demand of justice to all shall be the basis of political action, and especially when the cost of your[Pg 148] food supply shall become greatly increased by the charges of rent, your present system will not be quietly endured.

In your own more favored region of the Earth may be found temporary conditions which tend not only to tolerate your present land ownership system, but to render it popular. Your large area of unoccupied agricultural surface, from which any of your citizens are permitted at small cost to select a portion with a title in perpetuity, destroys for the time being the monopolizing character of private ownership; and while these governmental acts of land distribution are the most remarkable concessions to labor in human history, we fail to discover anything in the practice but a temporary compromise between the interests of capital and labor. As your society progresses you must arrive at the time when your landless class will be as effectually excluded from the privilege of ownership as they are at present in the older countries of the world.

Your own country in the newness of its human possession, by the lavish distribution of its territory into private hands, has alleviated the burdens of labor elsewhere, as well as within itself. It has effected this in two ways: first by withdrawing from the surplus population of densely inhabited districts abroad, and second by supplying[Pg 149] from its rich agricultural lands a cheaper food supply to the older countries of the Earth than they were able to furnish from their own soils. But the most unreasonable among you cannot fail to perceive the speedy limit to these operations in the interests of labor, which after all must be considered as merely effecting a truce between that conflict of the laboring and landless many and the land-holding few which your people will surely witness in time. We manage these things very differently on Mars.