CONCLUSION
H. G. Wells has asked all scholars to unite in writing a "Bible of the New Education." I am no scholar, but if Wells will take suggestions from an iron puddler, I offer him these random thoughts.
This generation is rich because the preceding generation stored up lots of capital. We are living in the houses and using the railroads that our fathers built by working overtime.
When labor loafs on the job it makes itself poor. We are not building fast enough to keep ourselves housed. Were it not for the houses our fathers built this generation would be out-of-doors right now, with no roof but the sky.
No matter who owns the capital, capital works for everybody.
Ford owns the flivver factory, but everybody owns the flivvers.
The oil king owns the gasoline, but he has to tote it to the roadside where every one can get it. Equal division is the goal that capitalism constantly approaches. No man wants all the gasoline. He wants six gallons at a time, with a service station every few miles. Capital performs this service for him. Under "capitalism," so?called wealth is more equally divided than under any other system ever known.
Work is a blessing, not a curse. This country had the good luck to be settled by the hardest workers in the world. Their big production made us rich. If we slacken production we will soon be poor. The Indians owned everything in common. They did not work.
And they were so poor that this whole continent would support less than two million of them. Thousands of Indians used to starve and freeze to death every hard winter.
The white man who doesn't want to work is sick. He needs a dose of medicine, not a dose of the millennium. The Bible says that in the sweat of his face man shall eat bread. When labor loafs, it injures labor first and capital last. For labor grows poor to-day while the capitalist gets poor to-morrow. But to-morrow never comes. The capitalist can turn laborer and raise himself a mess of pork and beans.
The laborer who does not turn capitalist and have a house and garden for his old age is lacking in foresight.
Men will never be equal. John L. Sullivan had many fights, and John always whipped the other fellow, or the other fellow whipped John. When all men are equal, every prize fight will end in a draw, and every batter will knock as many home runs as Babe Ruth.
"There is enough already created to supply everybody if it were equally divided." Yes. And there is enough ice at the North Pole to cool off the Sahara Desert if it were equally divided. There is enough water in the seven seas to flood the six continents if it were equally divided.
The time to quit work and divide the wealth is just two weeks before the end of the world. For the world's surplus of supplies is just two weeks ahead of starvation. Wheat is being harvested in one country or another every week in the year. And yet with all the hard work that men can do, they can not boost the world's supply of bread so as to increase our two weeks' lead on the wolf of famine. The wolf is ever behind us only two weeks away. And if we stumble for a moment, he gets nearer.
American machinery enabled the western farmer to raise and harvest as much wheat as twenty Russian peasants. In India where wheat is raised by hand, the labor of one family will only feed one family. But in the Dakotas, the labor of one man will deliver in Chicago enough flour to feed three hundred men a year. This increase in man's power to produce wheat caused the world's population to double itself since McCormack invented the reaper.
The Chinese and Hindu millions who would have starved to death, have been fed, and that's why they're with us to-day. The natural limit of population is starvation. The more bread the more mouths, less bread, fewer people. Europe and the Orient reached the starvation limit before America was settled. A bad crop meant a famine, and a famine started a plague. This plague and famine would sweep off a third of the population, and the rest could then raise food enough to thrive on. England and Wales have had famines, Ireland has had famines, France has had famines, Russia has a deadly famine after every bad crop year, while in India and China famine is a chronic condition.
