So much, however, must be granted: that the liberty afforded the worker by capitalism has its offsets. If the employer no longer regards himself as justified in ordering the private life of his workman, neither does he feel responsible for protecting the workman against the distress accompanying sickness or superannuation, or even commercial disorder. The worker has paid for his freedom with increased insecurity of his lot. But that the freedom has been bought too dear, would be hard to maintain. Let us suppose that a landowner organizes his possessions upon a feudal plan, and invites working families to come and serve him, yielding implicit obedience to him in all personal matters as well as in matters pertaining to the technique of production. In return for their ungrudging services, let him guarantee them a sufficiency of food, rough clothing, and rude housing, together with rights to maintenance in disability and old age. How many workers will make haste to attach themselves to him? Where workers have tasted of capitalistic freedom, it is safe to say that none would accept the offered privileges.
If capitalism had offered the working class nothing but the crumbs of middle class liberty, the diatribes of the revolutionaries would be not without justification. For admittedly, liberty has been gained in far greater measure by the capitalist employer than by the workman. But capitalism has done vastly more for labor than this. It has given rise to that most interesting and important of all modern social phenomena, the solidarity of labor. As an active, working concept, the fraternity of labor is just as certainly a product of capitalism as is social toleration. The latter is the soul of capitalism, as it manifests itself in the class of employers, the former, as it manifests itself in the class of employees.
To this statement a Socialist will at once take exception. The sentiment of brotherhood, the Socialists claim, originates in the common experiences of poverty and hard labor. But the men at the passages of the Jordan who slew one another over the pronunciation of Shibboleth were doubtless manual workers, and were certainly poor. The merciless strife between Saxon and Celt in England was primarily between men who were all poor and workers. The participants in the Sicilian vendettas, in the Scottish clan struggles, in the Kentucky feuds, might well be honored with the title proletariat, by virtue of poverty and laboriousness of life. Fraternity is too luxurious a plant to bloom upon a barren soil of universal labor and poverty. Every one who reads the documents of middle nineteenth century America is aware of the uncompromising hostility of the American workingman toward the distressed Irish seeking an escape from famine. Later, there is abundant evidence of working class contempt and hostility directed toward the immigrating workmen from Germany and Scandinavia. Twenty years ago it was the Dago that experienced the inhospitality of the workingmen toward their alien brothers; today it is the Wapp--the collectivity of unfortunates of uncouth ways and unimaginable speech that seek refuge here from the poverty and oppression of southeastern Europe. No middle class worshipper of a family tree rooted in the old colonies can hold the Wapp in more profound detestation than do many of our recent arrivals. "Zese tam fools [the Wapps], zey ruins zis tam counthry."