r SEPTEMBER 1913 Ten Cent* Review A~MONTHLY-REVIEW-OF-INTERNATIONAL-SOCIALISM CONTENTS Binghamton: Who Cares ? P. L. Agrarian Discontent in Canada Gustai-us Myers The Status of the Negro in the United States . Mary White 0-dngton The Woman Suffrage Movement in England .... Theodore Rothstein Story of the Putumayo Atrocities III. Under TWO Flags »'.£. Hardenbarg The German Social Democracy and the Military Bill. Hermann n'endel Concentration, Monopoly, Competition: A New Economic Trend Louis C. Fraina The Problem of Knowledge. II. (concluded) Paul Lafargue The Pale Laugh K. E. Primus-Nyman Whirling Wheels Louise »'. Kneeland Max Eastman's Two Books Grace Potter "Use of Troops in Civil Disturbances" Naboth Hedin 150 Nassau Street New York Review NEW YORK READERS Please take notice! Published Monthly h thi We beg to inform our readers New Review Publishing Association in New York and vicinity that 150 Nassau Street, New York City beginning with August 25th, Alexander Fraser, President 1913, The NEW REVIEW will Bertha W. Howe, Treasurer be for sale regularly on all the Robert M. Lackey. Secretary newsstands of the Manhattan New Review Herman Simpson, Editor and Bronx Subway System. The New Review can also be SUBSCRIPTION PRICE had at all the stands of the One Year, .. $1.00 Six Months . $ .50 Vol. I. SEPTEMBER, 1913 Canada 1.20 Foreign 1.50 Elevated System in Brooklyn No. 20 Single Copies, 10 cents Entered at the New York Post Office SUSS, Tke NEW REVIEW as Second-Class Mail Matter Binghamton: Who Cares? After the Triangle, Binghamton! "Deplorable!" groan in chorus the respectable hell-fearing citizens as they peruse the seething editorials of their newspapers. Each similar catastrophe OUR STANDING OFFERS Become a Shareholder produces its after-birth of moral awakening, and out of gallons Regular Price Our Price of ink we splash irrefutable demonstrations of the obvious! The New Review, 1 year--$1.00 IN OUR PUBLISHING BUSINESS But who really cares ? The Larger Aspects of So- NOT TO MAKE MONEY Does the Governor care? From the ashes of Binghamton cialism. By Wm. English Walling 1.50 $2.00 BUT he makes a juicy mud-pie to spatter on Murphy's face. Do the $2.50 Fire Commissioners care ? All the laws were complied with. With an easy conscience of duty well done they can blow the fumes of The New Review, 1 year -$1.00, TO MAKE SOCIALISTS Socialism As It Is. By Wm. I /»» /JA burning flesh from their nostrils, and give themselves up to the English Walling 2.00 $ Z.OV exercise of their instincts for compassion and humari sympathy. The publication fund of the NEW $3^00 REVIEW has been raised from the Does the Legislature care? It is so weary from the task of investigating itself. The weather is sultry. Anyhow, did it not The New Review, 1 year-$1.00] sales of shares. Many men and The Masses, 1 year LOO $1.50 women prominent in the Socialist give the public long ago a rational, a safe, Fire Protection Law ? movement are stockholders. They Let the Public say what it wants. An election will soon be coming. $2.001 have contributed liberally in order, Three hundred sharp legislative ears are always pressed to the to start the enterprise. Additional The New Review, 1 year-$1.00) ground to catch the most distant rumble of the trend of public The Inter. Socialist Review capital is required to continue the publication until it is self-support- opinion. Meanwhile ... the weather is sultry! Does the Public 1 year $1.50 ing. Several thousands dollars worth care ? Oh, this poor Public! When it's not roasted on one side of stock is yet to be sold. Common it's frozen on the other. While it watches the Legislature in The New Review, 1 year- $1.00 shares are $100 each and preferred front, the cost of living swats it behind the ear. If it turns on "Comrade Yetta." By Al- shares $10 each. You may become bert Edwards 1.35 $1.90 a part owner of the NEW REVIEW the capitalists, the Legislature picks its pocket. Bless the suffering by purchasing one or more shares Public! It has troubles of its own! A tearful "Too bad!" is all $2735 of either class. Payments may be you can expect from it. The BUNDLE RATE of the New Review made in installments. is 6c. per copy Does the proletariat care? The proletariat is still learning the A B C's of human life How long will it tinker with the ancient program? Doubtless NEW REVIEW PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION Binghamton has delivered a solid bump on the public conscious- Kindly Mention the NEW REVIEW When Writing to Advertisers. ness. For a few weeks, the Public will now be delivering 738 THE- NEW REVIEW repeated bumps on the Legislature and on the Executive Depart- ment, bumps progressively diminishing in violence, and in any case much softened by fat cushions of dollar bills. All we know is that by the time the bump of public opinion comes to jar impossible laboring conditions, it will have become so tenuous, so Agrarian Discontent In Canada extremely tenuous, that the capitalist will feel scarcely a tickle. By GUSTAVUS MEYERS And we too come back to the obvious. It is obvious that if a hundred girls were sizzling in that The first faint beginnings of middle-class antagonism to Binghamton hell-pot, it was because the working class as a whole concentrated great capitalist power are in evidence in Canada. still consents to work in such hell-pots. If they worked in a fire- Antagonism properly describes the situation; it would be far- trap, it is obvious that the working-class as a whole consents still fetched at the present time to magnify the movement as one to work in such fire-traps. This is the fact of the case as well as of any intrinsic revolutionary character, even as middle-class the law. Did they not "assume the risk," willingly or un- movements go. Nevertheless, considering the long prevailing quiescent, submissive attitude that nearly all elements in Canada willingly? Were the fire-escapes inadequate? It is obvious that have taken toward capitalist rule, the agrarian agitation now the poor working girls, eager to find work and bread, condoned commencing has its social and economic significance. the inadequacy. To understand this, it is only necessary to review the con- The only essential law that has been violated in this case is ditions hitherto and still prevailing in Canada, the land of strange the law of intelligent self-interest in the workingmen. If the contradictions, where, drugged by theological dogmas, dom- workers do not know what is safe, the capitalists will surely let inated by church, saturated with ancient traditions, enslaved by them scorch and stew till they take the trouble to find out. If political formulas and destitute of original or even borrowed they know what is safe and do not insist on getting it, capitalistic intellectual thought, the mass of the people are only now be- society will surely fry them into a consciousness of their own ginning to wake out of their stupor to find that without their power. Benevolent bourgeois, working through the State ma- realizing it a great economic revolution has been going on. chinery, will give some slight reform to prop up the tottering They see to their alarm that the Trust system is here in all its capitalistic system. Here and there a few enlightened organiza- power, that mighty concentrations of capital have taken place, tions of laborers require greater fire protection than the law that vast fortunes have been created. demands. Workers in general have yet to come actively to In other words, Canada presents the phenomenon of having realize that they have the power to put fire escapes on hen coops. almost reached the apex of modern capitalist concentrated rule, Pretended patriots will mourn for Binghamton as a blot on the yet unlike the United States, this rule has come about without State. Revolutionary workers have no inclination, as they have having to encounter a single serious middle-class revolt. True, no right, to let their horror for such holocausts stop at mere tears. there were laws passed aimed at preventing combinations, but Every such catastrophe calls for an awakening in the workers to nothing more was done. Such acute middle-class revolts as the the sense that they must overthrow the social order that cannot Greenback-Labor party, the Farmers' Alliance, the Populist party even safeguard the lives of its humble and industrious slaves! and Trust investigations and prosecutions as have succeeded one another in the United States have been unknown in Canada. All of those stages of aggressive middle-class resistance to accumu- lating Trust supremacy which have so markedly characterized the economic struggle in the United States during the last forty years, have been absent in Canada. The sudden apprehension of the middle-class elements is, in- deed, pathetic and in this category there must be included the whole of the professional class and large numbers of the work- ing class. 739 740 THE NEW REVIEW AGRARIAN DISCONTENT IN CANADA 741 Perhaps nowhere in the world are the skilled workers, as a currents of modern thought and the developments of science than whole, so bourgeois in thought, attachments or views as the even, one might almost say, the rustics of some obscure New native English-speaking workers in Canada, particularly in England village. Their one unfailing source of information is Eastern Canada. Large numbers of them own their own homes, the Canadian newspaper, and this is almost invariably dull and or at least have the nominal title subject to mortgage, and their provincial, and their one invariable source of relaxation is trashy views are essentially those of the small property-owning class.