第53章 NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR(5)

"I have now in my hands complete control of the principal rebel contracts on the continent, viz.: 206,000 yards of cloth ready for delivery, already commencing to move forward to Havre; gray but can be dyed blue in twenty days; 100,000 yards deliverable from 15th of December to 26th of January, light blue army cloth, same as ours; 100,000 blankets; 40,000 guns to be shipped in ten days; 20,000 saber bayonets to be delivered in six weeks.... The winter clothing for 100,000 men taken out of their hands, when they cannot replace it, would almost compensate for Bull Run.

There is no considerable amount of cloth to be had in Europe; the stocks are very short."The Secretary of War was as devoid of ideas as the Secretary of the Treasury was and even less equipped with resisting power.

Though he could not undo the work already done by the agents of the Government abroad, he gave way as rapidly as possible to the allied parasites whose headquarters, at the moment, were in Boston. The story grows uglier as we proceed. Two powerful commercial combinations took charge of the policy of the woolen interests--the National Woolgrowers' Association and the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, which were soon in control of this immense industry. Woolen mills sprang up so fast that a report of the New York Chamber of Commerce pronounced their increase "scarcely credible." So great was the new market created by the Government demand, and so ruthless were the parasites in forcing up prices, that dividends on mill stock rose to 10, 15, 25, and even 40 per cent. And all the while the wool growers and the wool manufacturers were clamoring to Congress for protection of the home industry, exclusion of the wicked foreign competition, and all in the name of their devoted "patriotism"--patriotism with a dividend of 40 per cent!

Of course, it is not meant that every wool grower and every woolen manufacturer was either a "disloyal" or a parasite. By no means. Numbers of them were to be found in that great host of "loyals" who put their dividends into government bonds and gave their services unpaid as auxiliaries of the Commissary Department or the Hospital Service of the Army. What is meant is that the abnormal conditions of industry, uncorrected by the Government, afforded a glaring opportunity for unscrupulous men of business who, whatever their professions, cared a hundred times more for themselves than for their country. To these was due the pitiless hampering of the army in the interest of the wool-trade. For example, many uniforms paid for at outrageous prices, turned out to be made of a miserable cheap fabric, called "shoddy," which resisted weather scarcely better than paper. This fraud gave the word "shoddy" its present significance in our American speech and produced the phrase--applied to manufacturers newly become rich--"shoddy aristocracy." An even more shameful result of the selfishness of the manufacturers and of the weakness of the Government was the use of cloth for uniforms not of the regulation colors, with the result that soldiers sometimes fired upon their comrades by mistake.

The prosperity of the capitalists who financed the woolen business did not extend to the labor employed in it. One of the ugliest details of the time was the resolute attempt of the parasites to seize the whole amount of the abnormal profits they wrung from the Government and from the people. For it must not be forgotten that the whole nation had to pay their prices. It is estimated that prices in the main advanced about 100 per cent while wages were not advanced more than sixty per cent. It is not strange that these years of war form a period of bitter antagonism between labor and capital.

What went on in the woolen business is to be found more or less in every business. Immense fortunes sprang up over night. They had but two roots: government contracts and excessive profits due to war prices. The gigantic fortunes which characterized the North at the end of the war are thus accounted for. The so-called prosperity of the time was a class prosperity and was absorbed by parasites who fattened upon the necessities of the Government and the sacrifices of the people.