Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

8 страница из 28

So it is that I write in all seriousness that the revolution will take place in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912; and, in saying this, I claim to speak, not as a dreamer nor as a child, but as a scientist and a prophet.

ssss1

“Vooruit,” Home of the Socialist societies of GhentFACING PAGEA Socialist view of the Trustsssss1Reaping by hand and by machinery92Child labor in glass factories and coal mines114The Social contrast in New York126Coxey’s Army on the march and in Washington206The competitive vs. coöperative distribution of information220Helicon Hall274

THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC

ssss1

The thing which most impresses the student of the Civil War struggle, is how generally and completely the people who lived through it failed to understand it themselves. We of the present day know that the War was a clash between two incompatible types of civilisation; between an agricultural and conservative aristocracy, and a commercial and progressive democracy. We can see that each society developed in its people a separate point of view, separate customs and laws, ideals and policies, literatures and religions. We can see that their differing interests as to tariffs, police regulations, domestic improvements and foreign affairs, made political strife between them inevitable; and that finally the expansion which was necessary to the life of each brought them into a conflict which could only end with the submission of one or the other. Yet, plain as this seems to us now, the people of that time did not grasp it; through the whole long process they were dragged, as it were, by the hair of their heads, and each event as it came was a separate phenomenon, a fresh source of astonishment, alarm, and indignation. Even after the war had broken out, the vast majority of them would not be enlightened as in regard to it—a few of them have not been enlightened yet. I talked recently with an old Confederate naval officer, who said to me: “Oh, yes; it was the politicians who made the war.” I recall the astonished look which crossed the old gentleman’s face when I ventured the opinion that the politicians of this country had never yet made anything except their own livings.