*THE
WORKER*
BRISBANE, SEPTEMBER 14, 1895.
Bystanders’
Notebook.
THE
SOCIAL OUTLOOK.
To the thoughtful mind the
outlook at the close of the nineteenth century is profoundly
interesting. History can furnish no parallel to it. The problems
which loom across the threshold of the new century surpass in
magnitude any that civilisation has hitherto had to encounter. We
seem to have reached a time in which there is abroad in men’s minds
an instinctive feeling that a definite stage in the evolution of
Western civilisation is drawing to a close and that we are entering
on a new era. Those who wish to see the end of the present condition
of society have, so far, taken most part in the argument. Those who
have no desire for change are of the class which always waits for
action rather than argument. But a large section of the community,
probably the largest section, while remaining unconvinced by the
arguments used, and more or less distrusting the methods proposed,
feel that some change is inevitable. It is with these will probably
rest the decisive part in shaping the course of future events. . . .
. We have entered on a new stage of social evolution in which the
minds of men are moving towards other goals; and those political
parties which still stand confronting the people with remnants of the
political programme of political equality are beginning to find that
the world is rapidly moving beyond their stand point. . . . Since the
beginning of the century applied sciences has transformed the world.
* * *
ITS
RAPID DEVELOPMENT.
But it is the more slowly
ripening fruits of the industrial revolution which arrest attention.
Social force, new strange, and altogether immeasurable, have been
released among us. Only one hundred years ago, nations and
communities were as distant from each other in time as they were at
the Christian era. Since then the ends of the world have been drawn
together, and civilised societies is becoming one vast, highly
organised and interdependent whole – the wants and requirements of
every part regulated by economic laws bewildering in their intricacy
– with a nervous system of a million miles of telegraph wire, and
an arterial system of rail ways and ocean steamships, along which the
currents of trade and population flow with a rapidity and regularly
previously unimagined. The old bonds of society have been loosened;
old forces are becoming extinct; old classes have arisen. The great
army of individual workers throughout the world is almost entirely a
growth of the past hundred years. Vast displacements of population
have taken place and are still taking place. The expansion of the
towns, one of the most remarkable features of the industrial
revolution, still continues unabated, no less in America and
Australia, than in England, Germany and France, and civilisation is
everywhere massing together, within limiter areas, large populations
extremely sensitive to innumerable social stimuli which did not exist
at the beginning of the century. The air is full of new battle
crises, of the sound of the gathering and marshalling of new forces
and the reorganisation of old ones. Socialism seems to many minds to
have been born again, and to be entering upon the positive and
practical stages. It has ceased to be a theory; it has begun to be a
kind of religion.
* * *
THE
NEMESIS OF POVERTY.
Nor does the new faith appear
to be without its credentials and its side to belief. It has, in the
products of the times, a background as luridly effective as any which
stirred the imagination of the early Christians of Rome. We are told
that the immense progress of the century and the splendid conquests
of science have brought no corresponding gain to the masses. That, on
the contrary, to the wage earning class, which carries society on its
shoulders, the century has been in many respects a period of
progressive degeneration. That the labourer has ceased to be a man as
nature made him; and that, ignorant of all else, he is only occupied
with some small detail in the huge mill of industry. That even the
skilled worker holds desperately to the small niche into which he has
been fitted, knowing that to loss place is to become part of the
helpless flotsam and jetsam of society, tossed to and fro on the tide
of poverty and misery. The adherents of the new faith ask. What
avails it that the waste places of the earth have been turned into
high ways of commerce, if the many still work and want and only the
few have leisure and grow rich? What does it profit the worker that
knowledge grows, if all the appliances of science are not to lighten
his labour? Wealth may accumulate, and public and private
magnificence may have reached a point never before attained in the
history of the world; but wherein is society the better, it is asked,
if the Nemesis of Poverty still sits like a hollow-eyed spectre at
the feast? The wheels of the world go round quicker, for science
stokes the furnace; but men work sullenly. A new patrician class, we
are told, has arisen with all the power but none of the character or
the responsibilities of the old. We hear of the “rubber knights of
capital,” and of the “unclean brigand aristocracy of the stock
Exchange.” We are told that they who profit are the organisers who
set the machine to work, who pull the levers, study its pulse, and
know its wants. They divide and govern, and the world works that they
may grow rich.
Ben Kidd
(Times may change but
somethings stay the same.)
The Worker
21 October 2019
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