Political Economy of the Fire

We have space for only one set of economic considerations, that of the distribution of losses; and over this narrow field we must pass rapidly.

It is desirable to have some accurate estimate of the amount of loss in property burned up; but we must content ourselves for the present with an approximate estimate--perhaps we shall never have severely accurate tables; and for the purposes of this paper no figures are required. We omit our own calculations, remarking that the tables already published are a new proof that hyperbole is the favorite in the rhetoric of this great people.

The loss sustained by the destruction of houses, stores, machinery, goods, etc., is a dead loss; that is to say, it is labor consumed which must be replaced by other labor. In other words, this property must be restored by labor which would have been devoted to the production of new property. All the kinds of property enumerated were surplus earnings of industry, and other surplus earnings of industry must fill the place made empty.

The truth of this statement is disguised by the fact that there are losses not yet mentioned, which are in fact compensated by the beneficence of natural laws; such as rental values of houses burned, and other losses which are mere transfers of property. The burning of a bank note is of the last character. The bank is so much richer, and the last holder of the note is so much poorer. Society at large is not a loser to the amount of one cent. Treasury notes burned in the Custom House are not even a loss of this personal character; for there is no transfer. The fire did for the Government what a prudent man does for himself when his notes come into his possession.

There are still other losses which are something worse than a dead loss; such are the public records, the scientific collections, the choice books, pictures, and heirlooms.

We confine our view, for obvious reasons, to that part of our losses, the smaller part probably, which has direct and plain relations with production, which can be replaced only by labor subtracted from advancing accumulation.

How else can it be replaced? Were the mechanics who rebuild our houses unemployed? Were there no uses for the lumber, iron, stone, brick, which compose the new city? It is believed that the proportion of unemployed labor and of unused materials is too small to be seriously considered. The apparent gain at these points is greater in appearance because we easily forget all the loss of activity in building in other cities and villages. Such labor as enters into houses has not been a drug in this country for a long time, and there was no reason to apprehend a glut of it when this calamity came. The rebuilding of Chicago will partially arrest building over a wide area, and the labor expended here to repair this loss will be subtracted from other production all over the nation.

Some minds, incapable of general observation, are struck by the concentration of industry upon one point; by the impetus given to those kinds of production which go to fill this fire made void. But if there be no real loss, if the concentration be really new energy set going by the calamity, the matter ought to be capable of practical illustration. Burn down Mr. Smith's mill, and you will see, if Mr. Smith be enterprising, the same new activity about the ruins of the mill. But Mr. Smith knows perfectly well that he loses whatever it costs him to restore his mill to its former condition. He really loses more; that is, the net earnings of his mill during the time occupied in rebuilding. In Chicago, I have supposed that this loss may he compensated in various ways; but it is a piece of mental weakness to deny that what is true in detail is true in general, that what belongs to each of the parts belongs to the whole.

The fire creates a vacuum which is filled by the inflow of surplus earnings of labor from other portions of the country, and the general level of wealth is by just so much reduced.

This loss is very cunningly distributed by natural laws, or their resultant, the machinery of civilization. In such a society as ours, no man's dead losses can be altogether his own. Taxes of many sorts will be shifted from him to others, and in most cases his neighbors will suffer even more directly....

The comfort of her laborers has been a just pride of Chicago. It was to be expected that the large hearts and clear heads of the Relief Committee should instinctively recur to that condition of health, independence, and hopefulness, which had been so marked a feature of humble life among us.

It seemed an inspiration of genius to seize the occasion to make Charity extend her healing offices in the direction of this same independent condition of labor.

It was at once the cheapest charity and the wisest public economy, to aid the poor to rebuild some of those humble homes which in Chicago stand in the place of the tenement barracks of older cities. And to such extent as these restorations are promoted by the Relief Committee, Charity distributes the dead loss of this calamity over the world. Among the millions, this item will seem small in arithmetic; but is very large in its relations to future production. A million of dollars so invested would be the banner million in a record of profits made up ten years from now. It will save families from pauperism and crime, and make them producers and consumers. It saves taxation, reduces claims upon benevolence, recreates workmen, makes markets for goods, and maintains a system of artisan life which is the most hopeful in the world.

We believe that the Relief Committee has never advocated any of the patent nostrums for curing labor of poverty and other wrongs; but it has in this movement done the one only scientific thing to be done in the premises. The laborer's best hold on good wages is in habits of comfortable living. To promote that, is worth more than a volume of eight-hour statutes, or a prairie full of international-labor-reform conventions.

These are by no means all the ways in which the loss by our fire is distributed. In the language of "The Nation," "it was not the savings of the people of Chicago only which were destroyed, but the savings of at least as many more, who never come within a thousand miles of it, and with their savings nearly everything that made life sweet.... The fortunes of the whole race are being so closely linked together by science that there is nobody, from the hod carrier up to the millionaire, who may not, any morning, read in the paper news from the uttermost ends of the earth, depriving him of his fortune or his daily bread."

The political economist finds in such facts new reasons for hopefulness and also for apprehension. He is stimulated to increased confidence in the wholesomeness of the natural laws of society, to new fear of the consequences of their disobedience. We cannot forget that bad men, and careless good men, are not restrained from careless handling of great social concernments by the magnitude and range of the perils they thus invite, and when fools abound it is not cheerful to feel that any one of them may put us all to grief by one careless action or one piece of negligence.

The effect of the sudden destruction of a great mart of wealth upon human energy, in increasing or lessening its quantity or determining its direction, cannot be omitted from our survey. In one point of view, it seems probable that loss and gain are in equilibrium. On one side we see men of some years disheartened and retired from productive exertion. On the other, we see places opened for younger men. Assuming that this energy must have taken the same direction, we have only personal and moral reasons for regret. But if we consider that the young men are forced by this event into trade, who would else have been forced into letters, art, science, one perceives in the persistency of the old direction of force an absolute loss and a new danger. For, whatever retards the natural movement to higher forms of energy, whatever arrests the progress of a society to a higher life, gives to the lower order of activities facility for crystallization and lessens the probability of a better life. If in a town composed of huts, an annual fire made it necessary to annually rebuild, the people could only be hut builders and hut-dwellers. If young men are demanded to produce grain and build houses, they cannot frequent colleges, libraries, or art studios. If all the income of Mr. Smith is required to furnish shelter and bread for his family, his daughters will be inadequately educated.

That general condition of social comfort which has been the general aim of our young civilization is in itself a good never to be despised or undervalued. That this fire subtracts in thousands of homes, not in Chicago alone, from this comfortable status, is by itself an evil not covered up because patiently borne. But it is a greater evil that, mixed up with these means of comfortable home life, there were accumulations intended for the education of young men and women. On a smaller scale the fire repeats the greatest of the burdens of the war by subtracting from the education of a generation.

It is not well for us to be taught in the school of pain, until it is true that we can not learn in a better school. And therefore one may distrust the social effects of shocks given by this calamity to brave and noble men among us who are silent sufferers at home. One hears every day in soft accents of sympathetic friends, of this and that silver-haired merchant, public servant, or saints on whose bounty the poor have fed, by whose hands churches have risen out of the ground, through whose wisdom the city has been established on some of its permanent supports, from whom the fire took away not merely goods but all the forces whereby goods grew. Many a prop is gone from under the civilizing institutions that rose somewhat too slowly in Chicago.

It is not merely that these forces are gone, that some of the best of our hands are nerveless, and some of the warmest friends of charitable causes rendered helpless; the very mode of their paralysis is an evil, because sudden and undistributed as by ordinary death or failure in business and because it has destroyed some of the procreant force of charity. Some celestial color will be missed from our life at the very time when--after the charity of our neighbors has ceased to flow this way--the greatest demand for public spirit will exist with the smallest supply.

It is painful to follow the lines of distribution over which this loss travels out over the land, and to mark everywhere the disproportionate burden thrown upon the nobler uses of life. Whatever educates, as books, newspapers, magazines, higher schools, and churches, suffer out of proportion because material wants are imperious. Just because we can hide here such a large proportion of our loss, we shall the sooner recover the shows of our prosperity; but it is a loss--this of education--which has no compensation, and torments the thoughtful spirit with painful apprehensions. The vast army of counter-jumpers, bartenders, and political bummers, is recruited from among the imperfectly educated young men--the young men who have neither book learning nor trades, and want all forms of discipline and culture. 

To know a danger is to avoid it. The press and the pulpit have it in their power to greatly decrease the impending evils of diminished benevolence and education. These great lights and forces may, by giving special attention to this danger, prevent the excessive taxation of culture and charity to repair our loss. Of these we must lose much. Let our lamp-bearers see to it that we lose no more than we must.