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Title: The Reign of Gilt

Author: David Graham Phillips

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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF GILT ***




THE REIGN OF GILT




  THE
  REIGN OF GILT

  BY

  DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

  [Illustration]


  New York
  JAMES POTT & CO.
  1905




  Copyright, 1905, by JAMES POTT & CO.

  ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL, LONDON


  First Impression, September, 1905




TABLE OF CONTENTS


PART I--PLUTOCRACY

CHAPTER                                        PAGE

      I WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED               1

     II THE MANIA FOR GILT                       20

    III PLUTOCRACY AT HOME                       32

     IV YOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS            50

      V CASTE-COMPELLERS                         72

     VI PAUPER-MAKING                            91

    VII THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE               105

   VIII AND EUROPE LAUGHS                       122


  PART II--DEMOCRACY

     IX “WE, THE PEOPLE”                        141

      X THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY               159

     XI DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO                      183

    XII A NATION OF DREAMERS                    202

   XIII NOT GENEROSITY, BUT JUSTICE             210

    XIV THE INEVITABLE IDEAL                    226

     XV OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD                  239

    XVI THE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN                 253

   XVII AS TO SUCCESS                           274

  XVIII THE MAN OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW         288




PART I.--PLUTOCRACY




CHAPTER I

WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED


The eminent Bishop of the Episcopalian diocese of New York has spent
practically his whole life among people of wealth and fashion and
their associates. He has made some brief excursions, but his social
relations, his intimacies have been altogether with what Parton calls
“the triumphant classes.” He knows the plutocracy; his diocese lies in
its stronghold, includes many of its most conspicuous and aggressive
leaders both in making and spending money. There can be no question of
his qualification to speak authoritatively of it, of its mode of living
and thinking. He has said:

“Hear a group of young girls whose fresh youth one would think ought,
in the matter of their most tender and sacred affection, to be as free
from sordid instinct as from the taint of a godless cynicism. You will
find that they have their price, and are not to be had without it any
more than a Circassian slave in the market of Bagdad.”

Again:

“If the first comers to these shores were to come back to-day and see
the houses, the dress and the manners of their descendants, they would
think themselves in London in the time of Charles, or in Versailles in
the time of the Louises.”

When he went on to urge the rich “to illustrate in their habit of
life simplicity of attire, inexpensiveness in the appointments and
chasteness in the aspect, proportions, furniture and decorations of
their dwellings,” he could have meant only that he finds the Americans
whom he knows best for the most part ostentatious and extravagant in
dress, prodigal and vulgar and ignorantly profuse in their dwellings.
And when he charged them with having “the buying of legislatures as
their highest distinction” and with “appropriating the achievements
of the scholar, the inventor, the pioneer in commerce or the arts,
without rewarding them for the products of their genius,” he framed
an indictment not on belief but on knowledge which becomes tremendous
in view of the conservative character of his mind and his training,
the dignity and responsibility of his position and the unequalled
opportunity that is his to know whereof he speaks.

Lord Methuen, felled in a trifling engagement in the Boer war by one of
those flesh wounds that are most painful but not serious, telegraphed
home, “This is the bloodiest battle in history.” His point of view was
rather too personal. And somewhat so must it have been with the Bishop
when he concluded his survey of the encompassing plutocracy with this
wild, despairing cry:

“The whole people are corrupted and corrupting! Moloch is god and his
shrine is in almost every household in the republic!”

Fifth avenue and Wall street are not all of Manhattan Island: Manhattan
Island is not all of New York City; New York City is not the only city
in America; and outside the cities in every direction stretch vast
areas of American soil not without its population. The plutocracy is
a phase, not the whole. If the distinguished Bishop were as competent
to speak of the American people as he is of the plutocracy, we might
well feel that it is all over with the republic--that we Americans have
bartered our birthright for a few handfuls of yellow earth and richly
deserve our fate of social, political and industrial serfdom.

But----

It is as exact a truth as any in chemistry or mechanics that
Aristocracy is the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread
ignorance, and Democracy the natural, the inevitable sequence of
widespread intelligence.

An intelligent few may be, as in Russia to-day, crushed down by
an unintelligent mass wielded by a tyrant or group of tyrants. An
unintelligent mass may for a time get, as in modern England, some
measure of liberty through the mutual jealousies of intelligent upper
classes warring one with another for supremacy. But let intelligence
be diffused, let the sluices be opened so that it flows through the
social soil in every direction and the tendency toward Democracy
becomes irresistible. Monarchs may plot. Venerable and long-venerated
institutions of princely and priestly and property caste and privilege
may thunder, “Thus far and no farther!” Schools and colleges may give
an education of half-truths and prejudices. Philosophers may deplore
and warn, may project subtle and alluring schemes for maintaining or
rehabilitating the old tyrannies in a new form. New conditions may
produce new and subtle tyrannies that seem stronger than the old. All
in vain. As well might a concourse of parliaments and tongues resolve
that the heat of the sun be reduced one-half.

In face of any and all obstacles, in face even of the determination of
a whole people, confused by false education, refusing to be free and
rallying to the defense of some beloved tradition of caste, Democracy
marches on hardly more hindered than an epidemic by the incantations of
a “medicine man.”

Inertia is characteristic of the great mass of human beings, whatever
their stage of development. And if the combat against the instinctive,
all but universal reluctance to change had no stronger weapons than the
tongues and pens of “reformers,” men would still be huddled in caves,
gnawing bones. It is by no effort of its own that a race or a nation
moves. It is in obedience to conditions that cannot be resisted and
that now gently and now rudely compel man to readjust himself or to
perish.

Democracy does not appreciably advance by the energy and enthusiasm
of those who believe in it any more than it greatly lags because
of the machinations of those who secretly or openly oppose it.
Energy and enthusiasm may hasten its formal recognition, its formal
embodiment in written laws. On the other hand, adroitness may obtain
a lease of formal existence for the outgrown institutions. But in
neither case is the great essential fact of the progress of Democracy
altered. This progress depends upon the diffusion of intelligence; and
intelligence is not a matter of individual choice or even of formal
education. If the eyes and the ears are open, if the mental faculties
are normal, then wherever intelligence is diffusing, there the mind
must be drinking it in. A sponge thrown into the water must become
saturated. When intelligence permeates the masses, then out of the
action and reaction of the common and the conflicting interests of an
ever-increasing multitude of intelligent men there must begin to issue
a democratic compromise self-government.

Thus Democracy is not a “cult” to rise and rage and perish. It is not
a theory that may some day be discovered false. It is not a plant to
be carefully watched and watered lest peradventure it die. It is a
condition, an environment, an atmosphere. A force as irresistible
as that which keeps the stars a-swinging is behind it. The story of
history, rightly written, would be the story of the march of Democracy,
now patiently wearing away obstacles, accelerated there, now sweeping
along upon the surface, again flowing for centuries underground, but
always in action, always the one continuous, inevitable force. There
never has been any more danger of its defeat than there has been
danger that the human brain would be smoothed of its thought-bearing
convolutions and set in retreat through the stages of evolution back to
protoplasm.

Until this last half-century it was extremely difficult to study the
operations of any great world-principle. But discovery and invention
have now given us sight far more penetrating than that of the fabled
giant who could see the grass grow. The difficulty now is to avoid
seeing and knowing. And to shut out all but some relatively unimportant
phenomenon--suddenly and suspiciously acquired wealth here, a corrupt
and extravagant or degraded public administration there, a strike or
a riot or a momentary moral convulsion yonder--and from it to predict
the approach of chaos with tyranny upon its back, is as childish as the
fantastic alarms of a tribe of savages during an eclipse or a thunder
storm.

That any in America should thus shut the eyes, say “It is night,” and
grope and tremble, is more discreditable than a similar folly among
Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans. Democracy has been our familiar
from the very beginning, and self-government and the absence of rule
are as old as our oldest settlements.

Those miserable first settlers, with minds as small and mean as their
cabins, had no conception either of freedom or self-government. The
tyrannies theological and tyrannies political which they set up to make
life as hateful as it was squalid show that they had brought their
European ideas with them. But fate was against them. They were of about
the same low social rank. They were poor--and poverty is as potent a
leveller as death itself. They were isolated. They had to shift each
man for himself. So, deprived of rulers and forced to be free, since
none cared to bind them, they began to govern each man himself. And
they took the material tools which the civilization then current in
Europe forced into their hands and, to save themselves from starvation,
they set about the conquest of the land, not for a State as they
imagined, but for themselves and their children.

Freedom is not the American’s because constitutions or statutes assert
it. The constitutions, the statutes are merely written records of
a truth no more dependent upon them than the proportions in which
elements combine are dependent upon the text-books of chemistry.
Besides, constitutions and laws avail only through their interpreters.
And interpretation varies with the honesty or open-mindedness of
official interpreters, with the spirit of the time, with the caprice
of the moment even--a popular outburst, an impulse of bad courage in
the public administrations, a greedy fear or desire in some powerful
class. Legal enactments affect the surface of a society more or less
and for periods of varying brevity; but the society itself is formed
by conditions over which man has no greater control than he has over
his heart-action. Those conditions constitute what the religious call
“God in history” and the unreligious call fate or destiny or natural
evolution.

America will remain in the highway to freedom because printing presses
are whirling, because railway trains are moving, because news is
streaming along the telegraph wires, because schools and colleges and
libraries are open--because intelligence is diffused and is ever more
widely diffusing. Rights may be and constantly are assailed in isolated
instances. But each instance remains and must remain isolated. None has
become or can become a precedent. And there must be precedent or there
can be no tyranny. Prejudice, even wilful prejudice, still thrives;
truth and error have not yet been divorced from their unholy alliance
which seduces honest men to the purposes of rascals; passion still
rules the heart and the heart still rules the reason. But America must
be free, however hard it may struggle against freedom; Intelligence is
striking off the shackles. It can no more be stopped or stayed than the
law of gravitation can be suspended.

The European, or the American returning from a visit to Europe,
is always disagreeably impressed by the evidences of haste, of
imperfection in detail, by “the ragged ends sticking out.” But after
a moment’s consideration of the reasons for this slovenliness wise
criticism is disarmed. In the busiest hundred years the world has ever
seen the Americans have had to shape out of a trackless wilderness a
complete civilization containing as many as possible of the good ideas
of the world’s past and having also all the latest improvements. There
has been no time to “gather up loose ends.” The filling in of gaps, the
replacing of makeshifts with permanent structures, the finishing and
the polishing, have been perforce left to posterity. And, thanks to the
passing and the present generations, posterity will have the leisure
and the resources, and also the finer qualifications, necessary to that
part of the task of civilization-building.

The shortcomings of to-day, as nationally characteristic as our energy
and our mental alertness, are most obvious, of course, in the public
administration--disagreeable in the national administration, painful
in the state administration, shocking in the municipal administration.
Because of these spectacles of sloth, incompetence and corruption
in public officials, it is charged by many persons of reputation as
“publicists” that Democracy is a breeder of public corruption. The
truth is just the reverse. Democracy drags public corruption out of its
mole-tunnels where it undermines society, drags it into the full light
of day, draws its deadly fangs that fasten in fundamental human rights,
cuts its fatal claws that sink deep into the throat of freedom. One
sees and hears more of public corruption in a Democracy than in a
State. An organism that is expelling disease at its surface _looks_
worse than one which is hiding and fostering disease in its vitals.

Corruption is no offspring of Democracy. It is co-existent with human
passions and weaknesses. Society is but a conglomerate of individuals;
the whole, with all the strength of all the parts, has also all their
weakness. In a State the public administration is the parlor; in a
Democracy it is the servants’ hall. Public corruption in a State means
that the head of the house is corrupt; public corruption in a Democracy
means that the servants need attention.

Our serious public corruption--national, State and municipal--is of a
kind unknown to the people of two generations ago. About the middle of
the last century science developed to the point at which it was able
to give man weapons adequate to the thorough conquest of nature and of
natural difficulties. The American people at once seized these most
timely tools and began the rapid conquest of their vast, undeveloped
heritage. Forty years ago this was a sturdy but dull and monotonous
agricultural nation. It was hindered in intercourse with the rest
of civilization by the wide ocean, across which passage was slow,
painful, dangerous. It had a sparse, scattered population leading a
severe and sodden rural or semi-rural life. There were no cities in
the modern sense, practically no railroads, few and wretched wagon
roads, few factories, no great distributing agencies, no telegraphs.
Each section was shut off from, was ignorant and suspicious of, the
others. Opportunities for advancement, for individual elevation, did
not, as now, press upon even the incompetent and unworthy through very
profusion, but were rare, uncertain and narrow.

From the recent great industrial-social revolution has emerged the
America of to-day--a land undreamed by our forefathers, uncomprehended
by ourselves. In every essential of life--in education, in comfort,
in refinement--there has been an immeasurable advance. And, most
important of all, intelligence and that divine, truly democratic
spirit of discontent, which has ever been the harbinger of enlightened
progress, have penetrated to the remotest farmhouses, and fight a
valiant and a winning battle with the sloth and despair of our city
slums. Incidental to this evolution, inseparable from it, logically
and naturally a part of it, there have been myriad opportunities for
a temptation to corruption. And our corruption has complied with
corruption’s universal law. It has been in direct proportion to
opportunity.

As long as only old and familiar forms had to be combated the people
did not feel, as they do now, the inadequacy, the utter unfitness of
their electoral machinery for the work of selecting and controlling
their public administrators. This machinery, with some slight changes,
is the same that was used in Athens and that was borrowed by the Greeks
from the Egyptians. It is the crudest and clumsiest device possible for
registering the public will. It works fairly well in small communities
where the people are not busy, where everybody knows everybody else,
where public administrators can be held to strict personal account by
their neighbors, their masters.

Until the two last centuries the world had little use for electoral
machinery. And until the last fifty years, at most, there were no
conditions that forcibly demanded the invention of a new electoral
machine--one that would permit a people to register their will
quickly, without circumlocutions, and at the same time without the
haste that makes right action an accident.

In addition to this fundamental disadvantage our people are also
contending against an almost equally unfortunate limitation. The
industrial revolution presses into private service not merely all of
the best minds of the nation, but also most of the minds in which
large measures of both capacity and character are combined. Even the
mediocres who would best fill public office--which in a Democracy
should be obedient and never initiatory--have been impressed by high
pecuniary rewards into private service. But demand creates supply.
Give us a little time and our supply will once more equal the demands
upon it. We are manufacturing competent, intelligent men and women
workers by the tens and the hundreds of thousands now-a-days--faster
than private enterprise can absorb them, in such vast numbers that not
the richest plutocracy could seduce and silence all or even a large
proportion of them. Give us a little time, another thirty years or
so--at most.

Meanwhile let us not forget:--

First--That while we ought to be, and are, concerned about the purity
and efficiency of our public administrations, our vital interest is in
the projects and acts of the industrial leaders who here ignore, there
cajole or bully, the public administration, now use and now defy it.

Second--That the new form of public corruption is an
incident--melancholy, deplorable, dreadful, but still only a necessary
incident--in that swift yet permanent betterment of man’s condition
which practically began in the childhood of men still young.

Third--That while purchasers of inequality and of privilege to extort
may evade the laws of the statute books, they cannot evade that law of
Democracy which compels them to assist in raising the consuming and
producing capacities of the people, the standards of enlightenment,
of comfort, of refinement, of civilized desire--of intelligence! The
plutocrats themselves are, in the quaint irony of fate, by no means the
least efficient of our manufacturers of democrats.

It is not rational, it is distinctly irrational, to assert that moral
or mental or physical betterment can tend to disaster, that the growth
of intelligence may make men seek to tear down and tear up the fabric
of civilization. It is true that the people--not here only, but
throughout civilization and wherever civilization touches--are growing
more restless, ever less content, ever more inquisitive, ever less
reverential to tradition and authority. But are not these the very
qualities which, working in the minds of the few in the past, led the
human race up from the caves? Newspapers, libraries, schools do not
make Huns and Vandals. On the contrary, they tame and eradicate that
savagery which is the largest part of the estate we have inherited from
our ancestors; on the contrary, they destroy the Huns and Vandals of
inequality and privilege who would wrest from man his heritage under
Intelligence and Democracy.

As for our own people, whose fate has been forecast in so many
jeremiads, how would any man or body of men set about subjecting
millions upon millions who are not merely educated but are also
_intelligent_? The world has heretofore offered no opportunity for the
trial of any such experiment in enslavement. The experiment if tried
must be, indeed, original in conception and in execution. Is there
hazard in the prophecy that no man now on earth will live to see it
tried? Is there hazard even in the prophecy that it never will be
tried? To assume that such an experiment could have any measure of
success is to become involved in contradictions and absurdities. Make
out the perils that beset our Democratic path as formidable as you
please, and still it is less contradictory and absurd to assume that we
shall triumph over them.

How will we do it? It is not given to man to foresee even one minute
of his own future. But, since triumph we must, rest assured that
triumph we shall. If you wish to make a shrewd guess as to the how of
it, watch the motions of that infant of yesterday, Science. Already
Science has given to us all a thousand things that not the richest of
our grandparents could afford, nor the most powerful command. Beyond
question it will presently unlock the secrets of the composition of
matter and show us how every object that now enters into private wealth
or is rationally sought by human desire can be obtained so easily by a
little effort on the part of any human being that a man would as soon
think of devoting himself to bottling sunshine as to storing up what
is now called wealth. Less than two human generations of scientific
activity, and already what ominous groanings and crackings in the last
remaining of the artificial barriers that have so long dammed up the
riches of the earth as wealth to be withheld or doled out by the few.
Science is the emancipator, the deliverer, the mighty equalizer and
leveler--equalizing and leveling _up_. Not down, but up, always up. Not
by making the rich poor, but by making the poor rich. Not by making the
wise foolish, but by making the foolish wise. Not by enfeebling the
powerful, but by making powerful the feeble.

For signs of the world’s to-morrow, look not in the programs of
political parties, not in the plottings of princes or plutocrats, but
in the crucible of the chemist.

We have reminded ourselves of the solid ground upon which rests our
faith in ourselves as a democratic people with a democratic future.
We can therefore proceed, with fairly tranquil minds, to view some
of the “perils” to the republic. And of these the greatest, the one
that includes them all, is the plutocracy, which fills so many of our
thinkers with grim forebodings. Instead of lying awake o’ nights,
worrying about it, let us go boldly and democratically forth in the
broad day and gaze straight at it in all its grisly vulgarity.




CHAPTER II

THE MANIA FOR GILT


You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You
say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you
think this, the dam becomes a waterfall, and the waterfall swells into
a Niagara. You go round where you see the other side; you find a lake
fathoms deep and extending miles up the valley.

Precisely such a phenomenon occurred in this country a few years ago.
Behind a dam of long-established customs of simplicity and frugality,
concentrated private wealth had been rising for a generation with
amazing rapidity. Suddenly it overflowed in a waterfall of luxurious
living; and to-day the waterfall has become a Niagara.

The dam that has pent and narrowed the streams of national wealth is
the concentration of property that has come about through the imperfect
working of the law of combination which steam and electricity
established. That imperfection has produced the multi-millionaire, the
plutocrat, as the crowning inequality in a succession of inequalities.
First, the man with a million or so; then the man with ten millions
or so; then the man with fifty millions or so; now, the man with a
hundred, with five hundred, with nearly a thousand millions. Every
city has its plutocrats. In New York is the capital of plutocracy. As
businesses combine, as wealth concentrates, the directors of business,
the masters of wealth, segregate. Thus, New York is denuding the rest
of the country of its plutocrats. Most of them live in New York now;
the rest must soon come.

The mighty cataract of extravagant ostentation is continent-wide--from
Boston to San Francisco. In New York, the high-curving centre of the
down-pouring, glittering stream, the spectacle almost passes belief.
There is not the least danger of exaggeration in description; the
danger is lest they who have not seen with their own eyes may refuse
to believe that men and women can be born under the American flag wild
enough to indulge in such prodigality and pretense and folly.

A score of years ago there were in New York only a few private houses
that could accurately be spoken of as palaces; to-day there are more
than two hundred private houses that are indeed palaces in size, in
cost, and in showiness; and hardly a week passes without announcement
of several new ones of equal or surpassing splendor. Twenty years
ago there were not in all so many as a score of palace-like hotels,
apartment houses and business buildings; to-day there are more than
five hundred of these wonderful structures of marble and granite over
iron, each costing, with its equipment, decorations and furnishings,
from two to six millions.

And the whole city--business quarters and industrial, rich quarters
and poor--is in a state of chaotic upheaval, so furiously are they
tearing down the New York that was new twenty years ago, and replacing
it with a New York, in every quarter and every street significant of
the presence of colossal wealth, of stupendous private fortunes, of an
unprecedented and unbelievable number of great incomes.

Fifteen years ago the number of private equipages on New York’s streets
was noticeably small, considering the city’s size and wealth, and
their appointments for the most part extremely modest. To-day Fifth
avenue and Central Park, from September to mid-June, are thronged with
handsome private carriages, notably costly in all details of harness
and upholstery, the servants in expensive, often gaudy liveries; and
the multitude of women thus swept along in state, in beautiful dresses
and hats and wraps, frequently display fortunes in furs and jewels.

As for the shops, it seems indeed only yesterday that you found the
costly luxuries in a few fashionable places, and there in small
quantities and almost reverently handled by clerks and customers.
To-day the shops where the tens of thousands buy are more luxurious
than were most of the best shops ten years ago. And in the best
shops you are dazzled and overwhelmed by the careless torrent of
luxury--enormous quantities, enormous prices, throngs of customers.
Twenty-five dollars for a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars for a pair
of stockings, two hundred dollars for a hat, one thousand dollars for
a hat-pin or parasol, fifteen hundred for a small gold bottle for a
woman’s dressing-table, thirty or forty thousand for a tiara, a hundred
thousand for a string of pearls--these are prices which salesmen will
give you with the air of one who tells an oft-told tale.

Why has an income of ten thousand a year become a mere competence in
New York City to-day? Why do the families with ten times ten thousand
regard themselves as far from rich? Why do enough New Yorkers to make
a populous city regard it as privation if they cannot keep at least
three servants, one of them a man-servant, and ride in cabs and have a
country place in summer?

The explanation is--the multi-millionaire.

There are in New York City to-day upward of a thousand fortunes of
two or more millions. About one-fourth of these are of more than ten
millions. There are no less than forty-eight fortunes of more than
forty millions, about twenty of these being more than seventy-five
millions, and half a dozen of them between seventy-five millions and
the mountainous aggregations of the Oil King--three-quarters of a
billion, with an income beyond forty-five millions a year.

There is no way of estimating the number of fortunes of from
three-quarters of a million to two millions. The income of a million
dollars, safely invested, is about forty thousand a year. Many New
York men--several thousands--have from their profession or their
business annual incomes, available for living expenses, of forty
thousand or thereabouts, yet their holdings of property are small. But
they belong in the millionaire class because they spend money like the
millionaires and are of the most strenuous part of the plutocracy.

It is the multi-millionaires who set and force the pace--the families
with incomes of more than a quarter of a million a year. “A man with a
hundred thousand a year,” said the late Pierre Lorillard, with humorous
seriousness, “is in the unhappy position where he can see what a good
time he could have if he only had the money.” And he added that easy
circumstances meant “a thousand dollars a day--and expenses.”

Properly and comfortably to live in the style which New York most
envies and admires and encourages, a family should have an income of
three-quarters of a million at least. But by economy and abstention
from too great self-indulgence, and by Spartan resistance to many
fascinating temptations, they may keep up the appearances of a very
high degree of luxury on a quarter of a million a year. Of course,
they cannot have very many or very grand houses; they must not
think of racing stables; they would do well to keep out of yachts;
they must expect to be frequently and far outshone in jewels and in
entertainments; they must keep down their largess, their benevolences.
But they can have a small house in town, one or two more in the
country, can entertain creditably if they do not entertain too often,
and can live--if they are prudent--free from the harassments of money
cares.

The quickest way to get at the reason for this curious state of
affairs, that may seem to many a flamboyant jest rather than
conservatively presented reality, is to look at the life of the
typical New York multi-millionaire of the extravagant class. There
are multi-millionaires, scores of them, who do not belong in this
extravagant class; but there are not so many outside of it now as there
were five years ago.

Our up-to-date, luxury-hunting, luxury-teaching Mr. Multi-Millionaire
has a fortune which is estimated at thirty millions, but is ten
millions more or less in the widest fluctuations of the stock market.
His income is about a million and a half a year, but he usually spends
three-quarters of a million, and relies upon speculation to put him in
funds for extraordinary expenditures, such as a new house, a large gift
to education or charity, a large purchase of pictures or jewels.

As human beings compare themselves only with those in better
circumstances, he counts himself poor rather than rich--his
fellow-citizens, the Oil King, and the Copper King, and the Sugar King,
and the Steel King, and the Telegraph King, and the Tobacco King, and
the Real Estate King are what he calls rich. He thinks himself unlucky
rather than lucky; he avoids intimacy with men of smaller fortunes and
no fortunes unless he has known them long, because he suspects that he
is usually sought with a view to exploitation--and he is not far from
right. He thinks he is opposed to ostentation, severely criticises his
richer neighbors and loudly applauds frugality.

He has a wife who is forty-five years old and passes for “about
thirty.” They have a son who has been out of college four years, and
after learning enough of business to supervise a fortune, has settled
down to the life of a “gentleman”; a daughter, who came out last winter
and who is being guarded by her mother, her companion, her aunt and
her sophisticated self against the wiles of fortune-hunters wearing
Cupid’s livery; a son who was at Groton, is now a sophomore at Harvard;
a daughter nine years old.

They have three fixed and six or seven temporary residences.

First, there is the palace in Fifth avenue, where the family is united
for a few weeks in each year. It is closed from the first of June until
the first of October, and when the various members of the family make
flying trips into New York they take a suite at the St. Regis or at
Sherry’s. Second, there is “the cottage” at Newport, about the same
size as the palace on Fifth avenue. Most of the family usually spend
the latter part of the summer here. Third, there is the large new house
on Long Island, twenty-five miles from New York, where several members
of the family spend part of the spring and fall. Luxurious New Yorkers
are becoming more and more susceptible to the changes of the season.
They are emulating, though as yet at a distance, the smart set of
Juvenal’s Rome, with its summer and winter finger rings.

Our family have a small house at a fashionable place in North
Carolina; the mother and eldest son go there for a part of February
and March. They have a thousand acres and a comfortable house in the
Adirondacks--the head of the family likes to shoot and fish. They have
a place in the Berkshire Hills--but they do not go there now and they
are thinking of selling it. The wife has an apartment in Paris. She
must be sure of comfort when she goes over for her shopping. Every
few years they take a big house in Mayfair for the season, and go
on to Scotland for the shooting. Then there is the steam yacht, an
ocean greyhound--last year it cost them sixty thousand dollars for
maintenance, a few repairs and refittings. The grown son has persuaded
his father to start a racing stable--a small one with fifteen or twenty
thoroughbreds. His trainer costs him ten thousand dollars a year, and
his jockey five thousand more, as a retaining fee. The father estimates
the cost of this addition to the family expense at one hundred thousand
dollars a year--he hopes this will include betting losses. The son has
long had a string of polo ponies that costs, with all its embroideries,
fifteen to twenty thousand a year.

Ten years ago this family had only a small house in town--small by
comparison--and the beautiful palace on the Ocean Drive at Newport.
But they do not feel that they are now extravagant. Wherever they go
they find people of their own set and a good many “rank outsiders”
doing the same things they are doing; and they find many doing things
they would think far beyond their means.

For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand
dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi-millionaire
regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which
cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit
of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends
whom they regard as comparatively poor--the people with from fifty to
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year--are pushing them on by
concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these
moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and
each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than,
they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a
trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport
(he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith
is decently housed in town and at Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s
house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in
America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera!

There must be no standing still. There must be progress. The standards,
all the standards--house, dress, equipage, number and livery of
servants, jewels, works of art, sports, gifts--are rising, rising,
rising. Each year, more and ever more must be spent, unless one is to
fall behind, lose one’s rank, be mingled with the crowd that is ever
pressing on and trying to catch up.

In the neighborhood of these plutocrats and their parasites and
imitators, struggling thus desperately in gaudiness, it is all
but impossible not at times to fear that prosperity, concentrated
prosperity, has killed Democracy, has killed the republic. Foreigners
look at New York and the galaxy of rich cities eagerly imitating it,
and shrug their shoulders and sneer. Americans look, and try to keep
their courage and their point of view.




CHAPTER III

PLUTOCRACY AT HOME


Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is
a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street--the
view across the Park from the upper windows is superb. This palace was
the inaugural of the family’s recent fashionable career. It is the
struggle to live up to it that is making them famous in New York.

The palace was to have cost our family a million, including the site.
Up to the present time it has cost them two and a half millions, and
that does not include the one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar
set of tapestries for the dining-room which is on its way from Europe.
The site cost half a million; the house three-quarters of a million;
the rest went for furniture, and the house still looks bare to the
family. “A wretched barn,” madame calls it. There are one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in paintings and statuary in the entrance-hall,
fifty thousand dollars in paintings, statuary, and such matters in the
rest of the house. Two hundred thousand dollars could easily be spent
without overcrowding. The furniture, thinly scattered in the long and
lofty salon, cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars--it is amazing
how fast the money disappears once one goes in for old furniture.

As you look round these show rooms--the vast entrance-hall, the
enormous dining-room, the great library, the salon which is used
as ballroom, the comparatively small and exquisitely furnished
reception-rooms--you are struck by the absence of individual taste. You
are in a true palace--the dwelling-place, but in no sense the home, of
people of great wealth, but of no marked æsthetic development. They
have the money, and to a certain extent the faculty of appreciation.
But others have supplied the active, the creative brains.

You go up the grand stairway, and at the turn pause to look down at the
magnificent rug which almost covers the floor of the entrance-hall, up
at the splendid painting which adorns the ceiling. The owner--you know
him well--tells you that each cost twenty-five thousand dollars.

And then he takes you into the wife’s living-rooms. She is out of town.

Madame lives in five great rooms--a sitting-room, a dressing-room,
a bedroom, a room where her clothes in use--quantities of dresses,
hats, wraps, boots, shoes, slippers, drawers full of the finest
underclothing--are kept, and a bathroom. She is very crowded, she will
tell you. For instance, where is her secretary to sit and work when
she wishes to use her sitting-room for a private talk with her son or
daughter, or some intimate friend?

You look round these rooms and again you note the absence of individual
taste. Madame is always on the wing; she has no time to impress herself
on her immediate surroundings. But a very capable artist has been at
work and has not neglected the opportunities which his freedom in the
matter of money opened to him. He has created several marvelous color
schemes through harmonious shadings in rugs, upholstery, the brocade
coverings of the walls, the curtains, the woodwork and the ceilings.
You are not surprised that a hundred thousand dollars went in making
suitable surroundings for a lady of fashion and fortune. You know
that there are several dozen suites more expensive than this within
gun-shot, and scores almost as expensive within a radius of half a mile.

If she were at home there would be on that dressing-table five or six
thousand dollars in gold articles: brushes, combs, hand-mirrors--each
gold and rock-crystal hand-mirror cost seven hundred and fifty
dollars--bottles, button-hooks, and so forth, and so forth. If she
were here, there would be in that safe at least fifty thousand dollars
in jewelry--a small part of what she has, the rest being in the
safe-deposit vaults.

The two marvels of this suite of hers are the bed and bath-tub. The
bed is on a raised platform in a sort of alcove. The canopy and
curtains are of a wonderful shade of violet silk. The counter-pane and
roll-cover are of costly lace. The head-board and foot-board are two
splendid paintings--one of sleep, the other of awakening. You think
nine thousand dollars was cheap for this bed, even without canopy, lace
and other fineries.

The bath-tub is cut from a solid block of white marble and is sunk in
the marble floor of her huge bathroom. It is a small swimming-pool,
and its plumbing is silver, plated with gold. On the floor of this
room at the step down into the tub there is a great white bear-skin,
and there is another in front of the beautiful little dressing-table.
Three palms rise from the floor and tower--real trees--toward the lofty
ceiling.

Going on through the palace you discover that it is arranged in
suites--somewhat like a very handsome and exclusive private hotel. And
then you learn that here is not one establishment, but seven, each
separate and distinct. Our multi-millionaire’s family have outgrown
family life and are living upon the most aristocratic European plan.

In a smaller, more plainly furnished suite of rooms than those occupied
by his wife, lives the husband. In a third suite lives the grown
son; in a fourth the grown daughter; in a fifth and sixth, these the
smallest, live the young son and the young daughter. The seventh
establishment consists of forty-two personal assistants and servants.

Each member of the family has his or her own sitting-room and there
receives callers from within or without the family--except that
the daughter receives men callers in the smallest of the three
reception-rooms on the ground floor. Each has his or her own personal
attendants; each lives his or her separate social life. They rarely
meet at breakfast--it is more comfortable to breakfast in one’s
sitting-room; they rarely meet at luncheon--luncheon is the favorite
time for going to one’s intimates; they rarely meet at dinner--one or
more are sure to be dining out or the mother is giving a dinner for
married people.

It is with eyes on this lofty height that the New York family, just
emerging from obscure poverty, with five or six thousand a year,
anxiously ask themselves: “Now, can we at last afford a man to go to
the door and wait on the table?”

For the man-servant is the beginning of fashion, and its height can
be measured--as certainly as in any other way--by the number of
men-servants and the splendor of their liveries.

Of course, our family of pacemakers have an “adequate” supply of
secretaries, tutors, governesses, valets, maids; and the housekeeper
has her staff, the chef his, the butler his, the head coachman his,
the captain of the yacht his. Then there are caretakers, gardeners
and farmers, the racing-stable staff, various and numerous occasional
employees. At the request of Mr. Multi-Millionaire, his private
secretary recently drew up a list of all persons in the family’s
service. It contained--with the yacht out of commission and the Newport
place not yet opened--seventy-nine names.

Mr. Multi-Millionaire, becoming interested in statistics, went on to
have his secretary take a census of the horses and carriages owned by
the family. Of horses there were sixty-four, excluding the seventeen
thoroughbreds in the racing stable at Saratoga, but including the
hunters and the polo ponies. The little girl had the fewest. Poor
child! She had only a pair of ponies and a saddle horse, and she
complained that her sister was always loaning the hack to some friend
whom she wished to have riding with her. The grown son had the
most--thirteen; he must hunt and he must coach and he must play polo,
or try to. The father himself was almost as badly off as his little
daughter--he had only four.

Of vehicles there were at the town stables a landau, two large
victorias and a small one, two broughams, a hansom; an omnibus, seating
six; four automobiles, a tandem cart, a pony cart. At the several
country places--a coach, a drag, a surrey, a victoria phaeton, two
dos-à-dos, two T-carts, four runabouts, three buggies, two breaking
carts, making a total of thirty-one.

The secretary remarked that these vehicles, assembled and
properly distanced, would, with their animals, form a procession
about three-quarters of a mile long. He then tried to read Mr.
Multi-Millionaire some statistics of harness, saddles, and so forth,
but was forbidden.

In further pursuit of this statistical mania, Mr. Multi-Millionaire
discovered that his family and their friends--and the servants--had
drunk under his various roofs during the past year nearly two thousand
quarts of red wine, about one thousand quarts of champagne, one
hundred and fifty quarts of white wine, one hundred and fifty quarts
of whiskey, one thousand eight hundred quarts of mineral water, and an
amazing amount of brandy, chartreuse, and so forth. The family’s total
bills for drink, food, cigars, and cigarettes had been of such a size
that they represented an expenditure of about three hundred and seventy
dollars a day--about one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a
year. His wife became very angry when he showed her these last figures.
She told him that he was meddling in her business and that she didn’t
purpose to spend her whole life in watching servants.

Our multi-millionaire did not make his fortune; he inherited it. But he
has been very shrewd in managing it, for all his extravagance. Though
he is cautious about expenses in one way, he shows by the allowances he
makes to the various members of his family that he believes in carrying
out to the uttermost the idea that his family must live in state. His
wife has a million in her own name, but he makes her an allowance
of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain
herself and their households. The grown son has had an allowance of
twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and when he marries it will be
trebled--perhaps quadrupled. This is large for persons of their modest
fortune, but many fathers of smaller means are doing as much for their
children, and our multi-millionaire will not see his children suffer.
His grown daughter has an allowance of fifteen thousand dollars--more
than she needs, as she has only to buy her clothes and pay her small
expenses out of it. The boy in college has five thousand dollars a
year; he is always in debt, but his mother helps him. The youngest
child has ten dollars a week--her clothes are bought for her, and she
can always get money from her father or mother when she wishes to make
handsome presents.

The most interesting person in the family is the mother. She is its
moving force, one of the moving forces in the extravagant life of New
York City to-day. You see her name and her pictures in the newspapers
very often, always in connection with the news that she is doing
something. She was the first in New York to have huge flunkeys in
gaudy knee-breeches and silk stockings in waiting at her front door.
She was the first to have as an entertainment for a few people after
dinner several of the grand opera stars and the finest orchestra in
the country. She is a woman with ideas--ideas for new and not noisy
or gaudy, but attractive ostentations of luxury. She spends money
recklessly, but she gets what she wants.

She is one of the busiest women in town. And the main part of her
business is one which engages New York women, and men, too, ever more
and more--the fight for prolonging youth.

You would never suspect that she is the mother of a son twenty-five
years old. Indeed, you would not suspect from her looks or her
conversation that she is a mother. She is making her fight for youth
most successfully. Of course, she uses no artifices--the New York women
who care greatly about looks have long since abandoned artificiality,
except as a fad. Her hair is thick and dark and fine. It is her own,
kept vigorous by constant treatment. Her skin is clear and smooth
and healthily pale--it costs her and her beauty assistants hours of
labor to keep it thus. Her figure is tall and slender and girlish--her
masseuse could tell you how that is done. She lives, eats, exercises,
with the greatest regularity. And she eats little and drinks less.

On dress she spends about fifty-five thousand dollars a year. You will
not see her many times in the same hat or dress; and she has a passion
for real lace underclothing and for those stockings which seem to have
been woven on fairy looms of some substance so unsubstantial that only
fairies could handle it. She bought twelve thousand dollars’ worth
of underclothing when she was in Paris last spring. Her bills at the
dressmaker’s of the Rue de la Paix were twenty-seven thousand dollars,
and at the milliner’s twenty-four hundred dollars. She has about five
thousand dollars invested in parasols. She has sixty-seven thousand
dollars’ worth of wraps--sables, chinchillas and ermine cannot be
got for small sums. She has many evening dresses that cost from eight
hundred dollars to twelve hundred dollars each. She has few dresses
that cost as little as one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The average
price for her hats would be, perhaps, fifty dollars. She had one with
fur on it last winter that cost two hundred and seventy-five dollars.

The chief reason for her large expenditure for clothes is that
now-a-days every detail of each costume must be in harmony. She must
have slippers, stockings, skirt, dress, hat, parasol, all to match
or in perfect harmony. For she is one of half a dozen New York women
who are famous for style, and having established this reputation she
must live up to it. When she ceases to fight for youth--which will be
in about ten years--she will probably cut her expenditures for dress
in half. By that time extravagance will have so far advanced that her
successor will spend seventy-five thousand dollars or more on dress.
The last season has seen a three-league advance. It is now the fashion
to wear for a drive down the Avenue those delicate shades which are
ruined so quickly. Next season the color scheme of the Avenue will be
still more gorgeous and varied--and prodigiously more expensive.

But it is her mode of keeping house and entertaining that makes the
thousands and tens of thousands fly. Her establishments are maintained
like so many luxurious hotel restaurants. Though her housekeeper is
a capable person and she herself studies her accounts closely, it is
impossible to be ready at all times to house and feed an indefinite
number of people of exacting taste without spending great sums of
money. It costs to be able to say to the butler at the last moment:
“There will be ten for luncheon, instead of six,” or “There will be
twelve for dinner, instead of four,” or “There will be four for dinner,
not eight.”

Our Mrs. Multi-Millionaire lives no better in respect of her table
than scores of people in her set and around it. She pays her chef one
hundred dollars a month and her butler seventy-five dollars a month,
and so do they. She has no better supplies on hand than have they.
Her bills at the shops where they sell things out of season--peaches
at four dollars apiece, strawberries at fifty cents apiece, and peas
at a dollar a small measure--show no different kinds of items from
theirs. They, too, have Sèvres plates at five hundred dollars the
dozen. They, too, have fruit plates and finger-bowls of gold plated
on silver that cost twelve hundred dollars the dozen. They, too, have
solid-gold after-dinner coffee cups at two thousand dollars the dozen,
and solid-gold spoons at four hundred dollars the dozen. The difference
between the dinners of those of her fortune and the dinners of those of
fewer millions lies in quantity, not quality. Where they would have to
make an effort in arranging an unusual dinner and could not have more
than a dozen at table, her establishment and many more establishments
like hers would easily and without effort expand to entertain, in a
fashion once called royal, two or three scores of guests.

The main and very conspicuous characteristic of this typical leader
in New York’s extravagance is, naturally, restlessness. Like the
other women of her set, like their imitators, down and down through
the strata of New York’s wealth-scaled society, she wanders nervously
about, spending money, inventing new ways of spending it, all because
she is in search of something, she knows not what, that ever eludes
her. And this restlessness, this nervousness, this hysteria, possesses
the women and the men alike. Does it come uptown with the men from
Wall street? Does it go downtown from the women and the fever of Fifth
avenue? It is impossible to say. We only know that it possesses both
and that it influences their every relation of life, public and private.

A fashionable woman sails for Europe--more than five thousand
dollars’ worth of flowers, jewels, books, things to eat and drink,
go to the steamer on sailing day from her friends. A young couple
are married--their intimates and relatives give them three-quarters
of a million in wedding gifts. A brother meets his sister on her way
downstairs on the morning of her birthday--“Here is a little gift for
you,” he says, pausing just long enough to hand her a paper. It makes
her the owner of a million in gilt-edged securities. A husband comes
home from the office--“I’ve put through my deal,” he says. “You can
have your new house, but I won’t stand for more than a million and a
half.” A father calls his son into his study and says, “You will be
twenty-one to-morrow. I fix your allowance at seventy-five thousand
dollars a year.” A doctor goes to a banker to get a small subscription
for a new hospital--“Why not build a new hospital?” asks the banker.
“I’ll give a million. If that’s not enough I’ll give two.”

It is amazing how many great and beautiful palaces of a kind such as is
occupied by our multi-millionaire are being added yearly to New York’s
fashionable quarter. And there is not a single palace in New York that
is comfortable. No way has yet been devised for making them otherwise
than chilly and draughty. The human animal is too small for such huge
surroundings; and there are not enough competent servants or even
competent available housekeepers to make the domestic machinery run
smoothly.

The new millionaires slip into New York, into their new palaces,
attracting little attention. Men with a scant million or two are coming
all the time unobserved. If it were not necessity that drove them here,
many of them would doubtless become angry at their insignificance
and would go where less money gives distinction. But the rapid
concentration of the directing forces of the business of the country
in Manhattan Island compels them to yield to the entreaties of their
wives and daughters and remain.

Scores of these palace owners have or seem to have no way of getting
acquainted with anybody whatsoever. There are millionaires’ families
that stare drearily out of the windows, bored to death in their
isolation, and wishing they were back in the Western town where they
used to have lots of fun. There are others who give entertainments in
the vast rooms of their palaces at which you will find their clerks,
a few nondescripts male and female, and no others--these standing or
strolling awkwardly about, trying to forget that they are miserable in
reflecting on the cost of the pictures and the decorations.

In the surroundings above outlined, how could anyone, whether newly
rich or long rich, lead other than a sordid life? Money is there
necessarily the basis of all action, the determiner of the complexion
of every thought.

To the narrow vision of the palace dweller and of those who look only
at palace dwellers, America seems like a greedy, ill-mannered child
released upon a candy shop. In the wide, the true aspect it seems a
man, intelligently developing himself, fevered by a sense of the
shortness of life and the vastness of its opportunities.

In the one aspect it suggests an express rushing along, with the
engineer mad and the passengers drunk. In the other aspect it suggests
its own miraculous sky-scrapers, rising swift as an exhalation, high as
the clouds, yet securely founded upon the rock.




CHAPTER IV

YOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS


The typical young men of the America of fashion and high finance,
created by the multi-millionaire, fall into two classes--the born
successes, sons or heirs of rich men; the candidates for success. It is
hardly necessary to say that in this connection success always means
the accumulation of riches enough to enable one to make a stir even
among the very rich.

If the young man is a born success, all that is left for him to achieve
is to devise some plan for making a stir--the simplest way being
to marry some woman with a talent for doing original and striking
things. No matter how great his income, if he is not to suffer the
fate of being an obscure follower, a merely rich person, suspected
of stinginess, stupidity and vulgarity to boot, he must do something
out of the ordinary--assemble an astonishing establishment, have the
finest pictures, give the finest dinners and dances, run the fastest
horses or the most demoniac automobile, give large sums on some
original plan to education and philanthropy.

The chances are that the born success will marry in his own set--that
is, the daughter or the heiress of some rich man. This will be due in
large part to deliberation; also, neither is likely to know well many
people who are not rich or of the rich. If he is the eldest son, the
probabilities, the increasing probabilities are that he will inherit
the bulk of the fortune, no matter how many brothers and sisters he
may have. Some one in the next generation must maintain the family
magnificence. Naturally, therefore, an unwritten law of primogeniture
is rapidly growing in force and effect.

And this custom, combined with the rapidity with which great wealth
piles up in America for him who has great commercial skill, insures us
a future of ever more dazzling splendor, of luxury and extravagance--an
_immediate_ future; we will not here speculate as to that future which
is more remote, but not less certain.

A short time ago a young man--a “born success”--went to a beautiful
country house near New York to make a Saturday-to-Monday visit. He
brought with him two huge trunks. These were taken to the almost
magnificent suite of rooms which had been assigned to him. His valet
unlocked the trunks and summoned the chambermaid. The two servants
stripped from the bed the sheets and pillow-cases and covers; then
from the trunks they took the young man’s own wonderful bed-clothing,
woven especially for him by the best looms in Europe. These creations
were put on the bed in place of the silk and fine linen which the owner
of the country house, a very rich man, regarded as fit for a king,
but which this young man thought far too coarse for contact with his
delicate skin.

The host was given to extravagance, was used to and in sympathy with
the eccentric efforts of too-rich people to attract attention to
themselves. But this insulting refinement “got” on his nerves. As
his guest was a very rich man, and was therefore entitled to that
reverential deference which only the rich are capable of feeling for
and giving to the rich, the host let no outward sign of his state
of mind appear. But he confided the insult to his other guests as
a “joke,” and had them privately laughing and jeering at his young
friend.

This young man is one of the small advance guard of the new generation
of plutocrats--the generation that has about the same knowledge of life
as it is lived by the great mass of Americans that we have of the mode
of life in a Hottentot kraal. We shall soon be far better acquainted
with these sons and grandsons of somebodies than we are at present.
Soon the wealth and industrial energy of the country will be controlled
by them, or, rather, through them by a clever and unscrupulous few. Let
us therefore pause for a moment upon these American “born successes,”
taking at random some one of them as a type--one we will call, for
convenience, Jones.

His father was a great business man, and in forty years of intelligent,
incessant and unscrupulous effort amassed a vast fortune so invested
that it gave the possessor control of an enormous financial and
industrial area. The father was a self-made man; he had a profound
reverence for book-learning; he was resolved that none of his own
deficiencies should be reproduced in his son. His boy was to be a
“cultured gentleman,” moving in the “best society.” Also, the boy
should have all the “fun” which first poverty and then business cares
had denied to the old man. He sent young Jones to the most famous
schools both here and abroad; and he gave him plenty of money. It is
not definitely known whether the old man was proud of the results of
his method of bringing up a boy so far as he saw them before he died;
but there is reason to believe that he was. Certainly, the boy was as
different as it is possible to imagine from his plain, rather coarse,
very manly if also very unscrupulous father. The boy had all his
father’s supreme contempt for the ordinary moral code and for the mass
of “weaklings” who live under it and suffer themselves to be plucked.
There the resemblance between the two ends. In place of a brain, the
boy acquired at college and elsewhere a lump of vanities, affectations
and poses. Surrounded by hirelings from infancy, he became convinced
that he was the handsomest in body and the most brilliant in mind that
the world had in recent centuries produced. He thought, having been
assured of it by shopkeepers and agents, that his taste was almost too
fine for a coarse, commercial era, that his nerves were almost too
delicate even for the works of the greatest musicians and painters and
sculptors and poets, that he was living both within and without a sort
of tone-poem.

When he came into his own and descended to Wall street, he was
gratified but not surprised to learn that Wall street entertained his
own exalted opinion of himself. And when he heard on every side that,
in addition to being such an exquisite as a Lucullus or a Louis XIV
would have copied, he was the greatest financier that ever lived, a
boy-wonder at high finance, a greater than his father, the brain of a
Nathan Rothschild in the body of a young Apollo, he accepted it all
as the matter-of-course. Like so many of our very rich, he had an
economical streak in him--but this was a profound secret, hardly known
even to himself. So, he readily fell in with Wall street’s pleasant
way of saving its own money and living off the money of other people.
He plunged into the wildest extravagances, imitating and striving to
outdo the young scions of plutocracy with whom he associated uptown.
And like them, he made the people of whose trust funds his wealth gave
him control, pay the bills. It is vulgar to pay one’s own bills, but
there is no objection to their being paid out of another’s pocket. It
saves one from the degradation of counting the cost, of thinking about
prices and limits of incomes and such low things.

No sooner was he fairly launched than a half dozen of the great
plutocrats, with wild shouts of adulation, proclaimed him their leader,
put him in a commanding position in all their big swindling schemes
called “finance” in Wall street. “You’re it, my lad,” they cried. “We
take a back seat. Go up front where you belong. We’ll do whatever you
say.”

Is it strange that the young man went about as if he were Mercury of
the winged feet? Is it strange that he got into the habit of greeting
his fellow-men with that gracious sweetness which kings alone have--and
they only on the stage or in novels? And when it is added that uptown
the married women flattered him, all the girls languished upon him,
everybody pronounced him a devil of a fellow, a heart-breaker, a real,
twenty-four carat, all-wool “cuss,” is it not wonderful that he did not
go quite mad and dress in purple and wear laces and a sword?

Indeed, he did have those moments of absolute mental aberration, and
had to go to or give fancy balls to hide his lunacy from the world. At
those balls he always dressed in some ancient kingly costume; and so
evident was it that he thought himself indeed a king, holding a grand
levee, that a smirk followed in his wake as he stepped grandly about--a
smirk that burst into a titter as soon as he was out of ear-shot. Yet
really he was not the least bit more ridiculous than the other sons and
daughters of plutocracy, all dressed up as kings and queens and nobles
and grandees, and wondering if the imaginary were not the real and
their moments in ordinary clothes a nightmare.

On and on he went, madder and madder, so crazy about himself that even
his plutocratic “lieutenants,” who were using him as a stool-pigeon,
could hardly keep their faces straight. At last he got to the stage
at which the old kings of France got just before the Revolution--the
mental state superinduced by beginning their education by setting
in their copy-books as a writing model, “Kings may do whatever they
please.” He never had had any sense of trusteeship; he had been
flattered into believing that the railway or manufactory in which he
owned a large amount of stock was his very own, that wages and salaries
paid and dividends declared were his royal and gracious largess. But
he at first had a dim sense that this great truth must not be publicly
aired, that it was prudent to let the common people believe they had
some share in the enterprise. Now, however, this dim respect for, or,
rather, tolerance of, a popular delusion vanished. With rolling eyes
and haughty nose and lips and high-stepping legs he advanced boldly and
publicly into his kingdom. A Russian grand-duke said of the Russian
people, “These fleas imagine they are the dog.” Young Jones said in
effect the same thing of the depositors and stockholders in “my”
enterprises, and showed publicly that he thought it.

Great excitement. His plutocrat “lieutenants,” seeing that their graft
through this joyous young ass was imperiled, tried to quiet him.
Failing there, they tried to cajole, then to cow the insurgent “fleas.”
But all in vain. The ears of Jones, attuned only to adulatory sounds,
were assailed by such shuddering rudenesses as “Petty larceny thief!
Jackass! Swindler! Puller-in for the big gamblers! Crazy numskull!”

Frightful, wasn’t it? Not that he was in the least disturbed in his own
exalted opinion of himself. An angel come from heaven direct would
have moved him only to light, incredulous laughter by telling him the
plain truth about himself. Still, the clamor was unpleasant; the open
sneers, the sly stabs. And, above all, the ingratitude! The ingratitude
of his associates in “society” who had got so much expensive
entertainment and so much inspiration from him. The ingratitude of the
people, his vassals, whom he paid salaries and wages and dividends,
whom he permitted to deposit in his banks and to invest in his
enterprises!

His soul is brave, as becomes the soul porphyrogenetic. But, as it is
also a sensitive soul, how it is wrung!

The trouble with our young Jones is that he was premature--not in
thought, but in showing his thoughts. Only premature. The madness that
ravaged him is in the plutocratic air. Many eyes are rolling, many
fingers are twitching in the premonitory symptoms of the malady. A few
years at our plutocracy’s present rate of progress, and Jones will be
recognized as a martyr. “Jones was born a little too soon. Jones came
to a climax a little before the season,” the dandies will say.

June is the time for roses. Jones came in April. Poor Jones! Poor April
rose!

Such is the mode of the “born success”; now for the young man who is
born with brains and appetites and ambitions only. He is determined to
achieve a plutocratic success; looks about him for the road that leads
to palaces, equipages, yachts--all that gives one title to a seat at
the table of honor at this banquet of extravagant luxury. He sees at
once that to become a multi-millionaire he must use his brains to force
or to cajole the multi-millionaires to make him one of them.

He must pattern after those who are far on the way to achieving
his kind of success: this corporation lawyer earning his hundred
thousand or more a year as the legal servant of rich men; that railway
president with his fifty thousand a year and perquisites, earned as
the commercial servant of rich men; that manager getting a salary of
one hundred and twenty-five thousand as a seeker of safe investments
for surplus millions of income--again a servant of rich men; that bank
president with salary and opportunities together netting him upward
of two hundred thousand a year--again a servant of the rich; that
broker who put by half a million last year as a result of his skill
and assiduity in the service of rich operators; that doctor who made
seventy-five thousand in fees and two hundred thousand in Wall Street
last year on “tips” from grateful patients--again the rewards of
service to the rich.

Our young candidate for success has brains to sell; he wants customers
with money. He hopes ultimately to sell these brains at a very high
price; he wants customers with lots of money, millions of money, in
which he may presently share largely. He must ingratiate himself with
the rich; must go where they are to be found, not only in business
hours, but also in hours of relaxation. He must not only work hard; he
must also play hard and high--must lead the life of the rich as far as
possible. His air, his dress, his style of living, all must be such
that he will be regarded as rich and progressive. To drudge and to
economize and to keep away from the extravagance downtown and up will
mean a small success, or at best one that will not lead to the lofty
height of fashion and social position upon which he has fixed his eyes.

He may have a streak of incurable folly in him. His effort to be “a man
of the world” may draw him from discreet dissipation into that vortex
which swallows up all weaklings not secured by great wealth. But let
us suppose that he is not a weakling and that he keeps clearly in mind
that at the basis of all success lies clear-headed, incessant industry.
He works steadily at his business, commercial or professional; he shows
capacity and is advanced; he is soon getting four or five thousand
a year. At the same time he has prospered in what may be called the
uptown end of his business; he has made acquaintances among the rich
socially; several women of importance are interested in him and are
telling their husbands and their husbands’ friends that he has brains.
The men are seeing that the women are not mistaken.

In any American city except New York or Chicago, our young man would
now be regarded as a person of some consequence. In New York or Chicago
he has merely reached the point at which he can, if he is sagacious,
measure his insignificance. He has worked hard, but the real day’s toil
has only begun. He has raised himself from the class that includes
hundreds of thousands; but he is still in a class that includes tens of
thousands.

Perhaps this discourages him, makes him feel that he can never attain
the paradise of multi-millionaires, or that, if he did attain it, he
would be too exhausted to enjoy it. Perhaps experience has given him
a clearer insight into the real meaning of his ambitions, and he is
disgusted with their pettiness and sordidness, and begins to long for
self-respect and decency and manhood. Perhaps his dream of success has
been interrupted by a dream of sentiment. He may decide to marry and
settle down--he has found New York drearily cold and lonely.

In that event he gives up his bachelor apartments in the edge of the
fashionable district; he is seen no more at his club--indeed, he has
resigned from it; he is forgotten by his fashionable friends; he and
his wife live obscurely in a flat or an apartment hotel far from the
world of fashion, or in a cottage down in the country--a commuter’s
cottage, as unlike as possible the multi-millionaire’s cottage of
marble or limestone, of which he once dreamed. And as he is no longer
of the world with which we are concerned, he drops out of sight--for
the present.

But, on the other hand, perhaps his discovery of his insignificance
does not discourage him, but only serves to rouse him to greater
efforts. His close inspection of the palaces and performances of
the fashionable and extravagant rich has fired his imagination and
energy. In that case he does not marry. “I am too poor,” he says, as
he looks at his paltry income of five thousand a year and thinks on
the humble ménage it would maintain, and remembers that his poorest
married acquaintances up in the Fifth avenue or Lake Drive district
have fifteen thousand a year and cannot afford to entertain or to keep
a carriage, and are always fretting about money. He considers what a
“decent” hat or dress for a woman costs, and--well, his tailor’s bill
was seven hundred dollars last year and he has almost no clothes.
He remembers his bills for the few small and very modest dinners
he gave--a week’s earnings gone in a few minutes and the dinner a
poor affair beside the poorest he has had at the houses of his rich
acquaintances. To console himself for his heroic sacrifice of sentiment
to ambition, he takes a somewhat better apartment for his bachelor
self in a more fashionable apartment house--his rent is twelve hundred
a year. He works hard downtown; he continues to work hard uptown. He
works as cleverly in the one quarter as in the other. He is always
seen with rich people; he belongs to fashionable clubs; he dines in
palaces; he goes for Saturday-to-Monday visits at great, extravagantly
maintained country houses; he is seen in boxes at the opera, at the
horse show; he expands his tastes and his expenditures with his rapidly
expanding income. His “fixed charges” are now fifteen thousand a
year--very moderate for a man of his associations.

In addition to these absolute necessities he spends about fifteen
thousand more upon presents and entertaining. Half a dozen men living
in the apartment house he lives in spend twice as much as he does and
do not consider themselves, and are not considered, either extravagant
or dissipated.

He is making a great deal of money, but he feels--and is--poor.
However, he is sustained and soothed by the certainty of riches
immediately ahead. He has been spending, but it has been in the nature
of an investment--a most judicious investment from the standpoint of
his purposes. And presently his cleverness and audacity and “large
ideas” have their reward; and then he marries.

She has tastes which are exactly his. She is willing to marry him
because she has not made the success she and her mother dreamed of and
strove for. She has some money--their joint income, while not imposing
as New York incomes go, is still large enough to enable them to make “a
decent start in life,” as their “set” interprets life.

Presently we find them installed in a “small” house or “little”
apartment--the rent is more than ten thousand a year, and they have
twelve servants. His skill as a money-maker is talked about; her
dresses are admired and envied; their equipages, their surroundings,
their dinners are models of luxurious good taste. As both are shrewd
managers, their forty thousand a year enables them to seem to be
spending twice that amount. They are in the high-road of plutocratic
happiness and are creditably charioted. And as the years pass, their
increasing wealth rolls up on itself as large wealth has a habit of
doing. They annually tour the multi-millionaire circuit in great
state--North Carolina, Hempstead, the Hudson, London, Paris, Newport.
They have children.

No healthier, rosier, more intelligent children can be found
anywhere than theirs. They have the best care that competent nurses
and governesses can give. They live by the clock, are fed the most
expensive and at the same time the most sensible food. They are
dressed in a manner that makes plain mothers blink and stare. There
are only two of them and the elder is only seven, but their clothing
bill last year was fourteen hundred. It will be less, much less, as
they grow older, for it is not good form to dress boys and girls
extravagantly--at least not yet. They speak French and German as
fluently as they speak English, and far more correctly. They have
everything for mind and body--except the direct constant care of their
mother. They have everything--that money can buy.

Let us go back to the cross-roads and take a candidate for success
who, when he achieved his modest five thousand a year, married and
went to live in a flat or small suite in an apartment hotel of the
kind that would have been called luxurious a dozen years ago, but is
now third-class. Let us assume that his wife, whether she came from
out-of-town or from the city, is the typical present-day big-city
woman of extravagant ideas--is, like her husband, wealth-crazy and
luxury-crazy and society-mad.

In all probability they will have no children. Children are not popular
among the extravagant in New York--dogs are less expensive, less
troublesome, fully as affectionate and far less unfashionable. The
extravagant rich still tolerate children, possibly because of a quaint,
made-in-England theory that aristocratic families should maintain the
“family line.” But “climbers” cannot afford the necessary time and
money. It was Swift--was it not?--who first called attention to the
fact that the attitude in climbing and in crawling is the same.

Our young climber is busy all day downtown--busy making money. His
wife is busy uptown--busy spending the money he makes, or as much of
it as she can threaten or wheedle away from him. She falls into a set
of young married women with husbands and tastes like hers. They, like
their husbands, think only of wealth and extravagance. And while they
wait for their dreams to come true they invest every cent they can lay
their hands upon in an imitative vain show.

Our young man’s wife reads the fashionable intelligence with her
coffee. She presently goes forth as fashionably dressed as if their
income were three or four times what it is. She walks in fashionable
streets or sits in some fashionable restaurant, there to view and study
and envy the fashionable women she reads about. She “shops” in the
fashionable millinery and dressmaking establishments--not to buy, but
to steal hints for the use of her own cheaper milliner and dressmaker
in getting together her imitation costumes. She strives to model her
person, her dress, her walk, her conduct, her conversation upon the
conception of what is fashionable in the multi-millionaire’s set.

As our young man has the genius for money-getting, he gradually becomes
rich. As his wealth grows he and his wife “drop” the “friends” of less
income, gather about them “friends” of their own fortune, and reach
out for “friends” who have fortunes greater than their own. And at
last, perhaps by way of a season in London under the guidance of some
impecunious woman of title, they arrive at the bliss of being able to
tour the multi-millionaire’s circuit in good company all the way. And a
crowd gapes at their palace doors and windows whenever they “entertain.”

Those city crowds that pause to gape whenever more than one carriage
halts before a palace!

Fifteen years ago the most extravagant millionaire in New York--a great
financier--spent upon his domestic establishment, everything included,
eighty thousand a year. Very few people of his set spent half as much,
and the most of them spent less than twenty-five thousand. To-day, for
the fashionable extravagant set, eighty thousand a year would not be
far from the average expenditure, taking rich and “poor” together. When
that financier’s family were the leaders, the principal entertainments
in fashionable society were modest affairs--though they were not then
regarded as economical--and were given by association. To-day every
palace has its great dining-hall and its huge ballroom. And the very
rich who have not palaces give their big entertainments individually
in hotels and restaurants, hiring a large part of the building for
the exclusive use of their guests, and spending thirty or forty
thousand dollars or more--in not a few instances far more--upon each
entertainment.

To-morrow--

In this early twentieth century--which bids fair to be known as
America’s century--New York, the capital of our plutocracy, blazes
out a world-capital. Into it are pouring wealth and luxury, pictures,
statuary and works of art of all kinds and periods; jewels and
collections of rarities. In it are rising miles on miles of palaces,
wonderful parks and driveways. It has begun to be a City Splendid. It
has already won a place in the line of world-capitals back and back
through the ages to the mighty, nameless, forgotten cities of the
Valley of the Euphrates. And New York begins where the others reached
their climax.




CHAPTER V

CASTE-COMPELLERS


It is still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable
society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades,
constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The society itself hopes so and
tries to believe so, and struggles to forget its uncertain tenure,
its sordid basis and its humble ancestry. And it is encouraged in its
pretensions by many thousands of agile and aggressive climbers who
would not for worlds lose their delusion that their climbing has a
goal, and a goal worth achieving. But uneasy doubts refuse to down,
and whenever one of the fashionables says, with a brave essay at the
careless, matter-of-course tone, “We of the upper classes,” he--or she,
for it is more often she--can’t refrain from a furtive glance to see
whether all faces within sight are perfectly sober, self-complacent and
approving.

No such uncertainty, however, exists in the case of the servants of
wealth and fashion. They know that they themselves are an aristocracy,
and they are determined that there shall be no doubt about their being
dignified, if menial, bulwarks of an aristocracy of their employers.
These servants, both male and female, are not Americans. Once in a
while you will find among them a naturalized American; once in a long
while you will find a shamefaced, apologetic American-born. But they
are essentially an immigrant aristocracy, and nine-tenths of them are
from England, where the iron caste-distinctions of feudalism have come
down even unto the present day, not only merely intact, but monstrously
exaggerated, where snobbishness is not only part of the statute law,
but deeply imbedded in the vastly more potent customary law, and is
even incorporated in the divine law, is read out from the pulpit each
Sunday and piously echoed by reverent congregations.

In Europe the “upper class” and its haughty servants are born to their
lofty stations; here the “upper class” is manufactured, largely out
of watered stock and bonds and stolen franchises, and its servants
are imported. It is the natural instinct of small people, suddenly
elevated in material wealth, to try to believe that the wealth which
relieves them of the necessity for daily labor also produces a
chemical change, a refining transformation, in the clay whereof their
singularly human-looking bodies are composed. Against this instinct is
the good old American sense of humor that recognizes in the unerasable
physical and mental mint-marks of human brotherhood Nature’s mocking
rebuke to the vanities of pose and pretense. But few people’s sense of
humor extends to themselves; and if they get the least encouragement,
off they go on a high horse. Our rich people get more than a little
encouragement from certain of their fellow-citizens and from
upper-class foreigners, who for obvious reasons cultivate and flatter
them in the delusion that it is not their bank accounts but themselves
that are superior. But the fashionable section would never have gone so
fast or so far in this hallucination had it not been for this important
menial aristocracy. Students of human development, in their passion
for dealing only with the seemingly big, with the high-sounding, often
reach conclusions ludicrously wide of the truth, often neglect those
humble but mighty causes that really shape human destiny. They find
in the great and burning thoughts of philosophers the explanations of
revolutions which a glance at the prices of bread would more justly
explain. Let us make no such mistake. In seeking the cause of our rich
people’s sudden and furious craze for caste let us not be proud. Let us
turn away from the bronze front doors and the magnificent drawing-room
and go humbly to the area gate and the backstairs quarters, where the
real cause of their curious, amusing and pitiful backsliding from the
grand concepts of Democracy is to be found.

When rich Americans first began to go abroad the servility of
English servants offended. But custom soon changed that. Servility
is insidious. The Americans, longing to feel themselves the equals
of the complacent and secure upper class in England, and realizing
that they could never hope to get deferential respect from their
fellow-countrymen--even from those willing to go into domestic
service--began to import servants. “The English servants are so much
better, you know; understand their business and their place.” But the
English servant’s “place” in the social hierarchy is dependent upon his
master’s place. Whoever seeks to lower the master in the social scale
seeks to lower the servant. On the other hand, whatever raises the
master socially raises the servant. Your Englishman who is a servant
born and bred is even more incapable of understanding and warming up
to Democracy than his king would be. He loathes Democracy--does it not
lower him in the social scale by putting all men on the same level;
does it not take away his dear gods of rank and birth and leave him
godless and adrift? He wants none of it. It may be good enough for
foreigners, but not for an Englishman.

Once the imported members of the servile aristocracy were among us in
considerable numbers they began to plot and to compel an aristocracy
above them. The general theory is that these rich Americans who have
gone crazy about themselves were infected by associating with the
aristocracies of the Old World, and no doubt that association is partly
responsible. But the main cause of the malady is that every American
family living ostentatiously, or even at all luxuriously, soon found
established within its gates an aristocracy of caste that compelled the
family to seem to put on airs. And any American family that assembles
a household staff of these aristocrats will soon be strutting and
posing, however hard it may strive to remain sensible. The servants
simply won’t have “under-bred” Democracy; they would despise themselves
if they found themselves working for men and women not their superiors.
And it isn’t in human nature, weakened by the example of all around
it, to resist the subtle and insinuating compulsion of the “well-bred”
hints and innuendos of “well-bred” servants. A man and a woman are no
longer master and mistress of themselves, not to speak of their house,
when they have given way to the luxury and vanity of a real high-class
English butler backed up by half a dozen English footmen, an English
coachman and three or four English grooms. He and she will begin to cut
pigeon-wings like a colored gentleman on the first warm day of Spring.
He and she will do it because the servants expect it, because the
servants have convinced them that it is the correct form, because the
servants will not tolerate any departure from the pose of “my lord” and
“my lady”--and because such posings are so titillating to the vanity.
And from striving to seem a truly “my lord” and a truly “my lady”
before the “well-bred” butler and coachman and their henchmen, the man
and the woman pass on naturally and by imperceptible stages to making
the same ludicrous struggle in all seriousness before their associates,
all of whom are doing precisely the same silly thing from precisely the
same silly cause.

There is a woman in one of our big cities who is now a leader of
fashion, very “classy” indeed, most glib on the subject of the
“traditions of people of our station.” Her father was an excellent
peddler, her mother a farmer’s daughter who could be induced to “help
out” a neighbor in the rush of the harvest time. This typical American
woman behaved very sensibly so long as her sensible father and mother
were alive and until the craze for English households arose. She fell
in line. But the haughty servants were most trying at first. For
instance, she loved bread spread with molasses. She ate it before the
butler once; his face told her what a hideous “break” she had made.
She tried to conquer this low taste--never did weak woman fight harder
against the gnawings of sinful appetite. At last she gave way, and in
secret and in stealth indulged. She was not caught and, encouraged, she
proceeded to add one low common habit to another until she was leading
a double life. It had its terrors; it had its compensating joys. But
before she had gone too far she was happily saved. One morning her maid
caught her, and the whole household was agog. The miseries endured in
the few following weeks completely cured her. She is now in private, as
well as in public, as sound a snob as ever reveled in “exclusiveness.”

This is no isolated case. For bread and molasses substitute any
plain, natural human habit not tolerated in England, and you have a
story in outline that would apply to hundreds. How contemptuously
our fashionables would deny if accused! How indignantly the younger
generations who have never known what it was to be free from the
English strait-jacket would protest against such coarse insinuations
about our aristocracy. But the laughable truth remains unshaken--and
also the truth that our aristocracy is wofully servant-pecked.

Fully to realize what a tremendous pressure this servile aristocracy
entrenched in the privacy of the home can exert, let us glance at the
composition of a fashionable household in America to-day. Take a family
of some aspiring money-lender or stock swindler or franchise grabber
who has got together in one way and another--principally another--a
fortune of a dozen millions or so. There are himself, his wife with
the longing to be “in it” or to keep “in it” gnawing at her, the grown
son and the grown daughter. Papa is willing to have the family show
off, but he is not quite ready to go the limit. So the establishment is
what other fashionable people call modest, and what his wife and two
children tell him is “mean.” Here is the schedule:

  _General Staff_--Housekeeper, a broken-down “gentlewoman”; butler,
  formerly with the Earl of Tyne and still with him in spirit; chef, a
  Frenchman, but thoroughly Anglicized in soul, though not in accent or
  cooking; coachman, an Englishman, recently with Her Grace the Dowager
  Duchess of Doodles; chauffeur, a Frenchman who speaks to nobody unless
  spoken to and keeps clear of the whole mess as much as possible.

  _Housekeeper’s Staff_--Two English parlor maids from the best English
  houses, most expert in handling bric-à-brac and such perishables; two
  very humble, very impudent English chambermaids; a French laundress,
  who disdains all but the butler and the coachman, and sighs for the
  haughty chauffeur; a seamstress, a great gossip and an authority on
  “fashionable intelligence”; a linen woman, daughter of an English
  tavern-keeper whose glory was that he had been valet to a duke; a
  useful woman, for packing, etc., etc., most “respectable,” most
  English; a useful man, for heavy work, windows, errands, etc., an
  Englishman who shows that he is spiritually prostrate whenever a
  superior speaks to him; three chambermaids, very English-Irish.

  _Butler’s Staff_--Two Englishmen to stand in the hall in immaculate
  livery, white silk stockings, etc., etc.; two Englishmen, equally
  immaculate, to assist at table, etc.; two other English assistants,
  not at all times immaculate.

  _Coachman’s Staff_--Four English grooms.

  _Chauffeur’s Staff_--One assistant, learning the profession.

  _Chef’s Staff_--An assistant, a Frenchwoman; two English kitchen maids
  or “scullions.”

  _Personal Servants_--Valet to the master, a quiet, well-bred, insolent
  Englishman; valet to the young master, an understudy to the other
  valet; maid to Madame (French); maid to Mademoiselle (French); valet
  to the upper caste men-servants (English); valet to the lower class
  men-servants (English); maids to the servants (three English-Irish);
  laundress to the servants (English).

Quite a staff--and it does not include Madame’s private secretary, an
American, a “gentlewoman,” thoroughly converted to the English system,
or Mademoiselle’s visiting governess, a product of ten years’ training
in a New York private school for the “young ladies of the upper class,”
or extra servants of all kinds that are constantly coming and going.
The total monthly pay-roll is never below one thousand seven hundred
dollars; often, in the height of the winter season in New York or of
the summer season at Newport, it climbs up to two thousand dollars.
And, putting the feeding of all these people at twenty dollars apiece
a month, which is exceedingly, ridiculously low, the board-bill would
be more than eight hundred dollars a month. Then, naturally, all of
them are as careless and as wasteful as they dare to be, and, wherever
possible, corrupt in the taking of commissions from the “tradespeople.”
This means a squandering of more than their wages and board together.
But it is indeed a most “modest” establishment--there are at least a
thousand in this country far more imposing. Why, our hero has not even
provided servants for the servants of his servants! And, as everybody
knows, that is always done in a really bang-up, swell, first-class
establishment. Also, his liveries, although what the “tradespeople”
would call elegant, are not nearly so sumptuous as those of the
neighboring establishments.

But, dissatisfied though the servants are, they do their best to keep
up appearances and they fight strenuously for the caste system. They
are, roughly speaking, divided into five ranks. At the top stand the
private secretary, the visiting governess, and the housekeeper. They
are almost “gentlefolk”; in fact, they are gentlefolk in abeyance, as
it were, like cadets of a royal house which has been kicked out by
its unfeeling subjects. Next come butler and coachman and chef. Each
admits the right of the other two to high rank, but each feels toward
the others as they fancy a marquis must feel toward an earl. Below
these high haughtinesses is the main body of servants, with the lowest
rank made up of stablemen, scullions, servants’ servants. Each servant
fiercely insists upon his own station, and still more fiercely insists
upon the lower station of those whom the code of caste has assigned
there. And all the servants insist upon the aristocratic principle
being enforced from top to bottom of the household. The “master” and
his wife, the boy and the girl, know that if they for an instant
drop the pose they will be the butt of ridicule and contempt in the
servants’ hall.

The effect of this incessant, subtle pressure upon the grown people
is strong enough. But they retain some glimmerings of a sane point of
view; at times they realize that there is not a little rotten nonsense
in their mode of life. But think of the children! They were born
into this noisome atmosphere; they are never allowed to breathe any
other--for, even when they go away to school, it is to some “select,”
“exclusive” institution, or to associate only with the “select” and
“exclusive” in the big college. They know no more of the free and
national and growing American life than a Mammoth Cave fish knows
of the light and the radiant waters of the upper world. They regard
Americanism as synonymous with demagoguery and anarchy. And they
become sincere and, because of their wealth and display, successful
missionaries of the gospel of snobbishness to all the children of the
rich and the well-to-do brought into contact with them.

Truly, the service is not the most important item that comes up the
back stairs of the fine houses of our plutocracy. The ideas--they are
the real item.

English servants do not, as a rule, like to come to this country.
Few of the best class, as yet, will consent to give up the splendor
and assured aristocracy of England and go to live among a lot of
vulgarians, hard though those vulgarians are striving to be worthy
of the support of an aristocratic menialdom. Those few of the best
who do condescend to exile themselves wear sad faces and show that
they keenly feel the humiliation. For they cannot blind themselves
to the truth that their masters and mistresses, striving hard to
please and to delude, are still not really “ladies” and “gentlemen,”
but just Americans. Have they titles? No. Do the common people doff
the hat to them? No. Have they “ancestry”? They pretend to have, but
the genealogical trees look about as much like real trees as the
papier-mâché palm looks like the genuine thing; and Burke’s peerage and
the Almanach de Gotha know them not. No, they are not aristocrats, and
it pains the aristocratic servants to serve them much as it would pain
a first gentleman of the bedchamber to King Edward to get on his knees
to some “big nigger” who called himself Emperor of Ashanteeland. The
commiseration of all sympathizers with sensitive souls belongs of right
to these aristocrats of menialdom in exile.

The great mass of these imported servants, excepting those who come
here for the chance to become men and women and to shake off servitude,
are a worthless lot, weedings from those perfect English gardens of
menialdom. And a hard time their American masters have with them.
Insolence, shiftlessness, drunkenness, petty thieving are tolerated
to and beyond the most asinine patience; then, one furious day, the
housekeeper, under orders from an outraged master or mistress, ejects
the whole crew and gets in an entirely new lot. But this revolt of the
downtrodden “upper classes” is rare and dangerous and often disastrous.
For this servile aristocracy is a close corporation, very limited
in numbers and fully awake to its own power over the plutocrats who
must at any cost in money, manhood and discomfort have servility and
an imitation of the English way of living. Woe, woe, woe unto the
plutocrat who gets himself on the imported servants’ black-list! He may
have actually to close in whole or in part his vast houses, and to
cease from inviting in his hordes of rich friends to see how much more
gaudily he is showing off than they are. He may have to call in colored
or plain Irish or Swedish servants, mostly women, to save him and his
family from the horrors of waiting on themselves. But one shrinks from
pushing inquiry in so harrowing a direction.

How long will it be before we have a home-grown menial aristocracy
to bolster up and make strong our fashionable aristocracy? It may
be longer than one might imagine. The educated people, the lawyers,
superintendents, merchants, social, political and financial hangers-on,
who serve the plutocracy, fall easily into servile habits. The big
corporation lawyer and his family, the fifty thousand dollars a year
dummy railway president and his family, eagerly pay court to the great
plutocrat, bow and scrape and mould themselves to his and his family’s
humors. But the “lower classes” here remain obstinately insolent. They
go into plutocratic domestic service only under stress; they act in a
manner that exasperates their servility-seeking employers; they leave
as soon as they can get any sort of job anywhere. Also, they rouse the
soundly sleeping or stunned manhood and womanhood of the imported
aristocracy-adoring servants, and so compel the constant recruiting of
the ranks of the menial aristocracy by fresh importations.

True, among the mass of our immigrants, almost all from countries
where a real caste system has prevailed always, there is a tendency
toward a searching after an aristocracy in this country. They miss
it; they cannot believe that a land in all its physical aspects like
unto the lands from which they have fled should be without what has
always seemed to them a natural and necessary part of the order of
the universe. But they hunt for this aristocracy not with the idea
of worshipping it, but with the idea of destroying it. And hence we
find that the loudest angry assertion of the existence of a true
aristocracy here comes from those of our democracy-loving citizens who
are foreign-born. They see this monstrous pretense rearing itself as
imposingly as the true aristocracies of Europe; and they do not pause
to distinguish between marble and plaster painted to look like marble.
They raise a wild shriek and demand that snickersnees be drawn and that
heads begin to fall. A natural mistake, and highly gratifying to our
would-be aristocrats. They are not terrified by the uncouth and futile
clamors; though to make the thing more realistic to themselves, they
sometimes pretend to be. But they are through and through pleased at
hearing themselves in seriousness called what they would fain believe
themselves to be; and they say delightedly: “At last, the lower classes
begin to recognize themselves, and us!”

But this rejoicing is premature. They are right in seeing that it
takes a body of self-confessed peasantry to make a prince--that the
prince proclaiming himself and proclaimed by hirelings and dependents
only is no prince at all, but a laughing-stock. But they are wrong in
seeing signs of a forming peasantry; what they see is an un-forming
peasantry--a vastly different matter.

The obstinacy of the American and thoroughly Americanized “lower
classes” seems incurable. And until it is cured, until a body of
citizens is created that will accept the aristocratic idea not as
applying to themselves and making them superior, but as applying to
a fixed class of superiors to whom they themselves must be and must
remain inferiors--until then, the plutocracy will sigh in vain for
transformation into an aristocracy. Imported servants and our own
snob graduates of snob colleges with yearnings after the “cultured
and refining influences of caste” will in vain crook the pregnant
hinges of the knee. The plutocracy will be haunted and humiliated by
the undignifying grin of the “proletariat,” incurably and militantly
democratic.

And the more excited about itself and eager to show off the plutocracy
becomes, the more insistent and imperious will become the inquiry
into the origin and the rightfulness of these vast fortunes that are
being reaped where their owners have not sown and squandered after the
proverbial manner of ill-gotten gains.




CHAPTER VI

PAUPER-MAKING


There is a story of a rich woman--an Austrian, perhaps--who was chilled
through by a long drive on a bitter winter day.

“Make a huge fire in my sitting-room,” she said to a servant as she
entered her country house, “and order wood distributed to the poor of
the village.”

She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never
mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant.
“The weather seems to have moderated.”

The theory back of this story is the popular one: that the great
comfort of great wealth hardens the rich, makes them insensible to
privation. The fact is the reverse--at least so far as America is
concerned. Nowhere in the world is the value of wealth so grossly, so
ludicrously over-estimated as among our plutocrats--not unnaturally,
since their only title to distinction is their wealth, and a man
cannot but reverence that which makes him distinguished. Nowhere,
therefore, are the discomforts of poverty so exaggerated as in the
palaces of our very rich. And so eager are the men as well as the
women for opportunities to exercise their emotions over poverty and
destitution that they are rapidly creating a huge pauper class. Demand
is creating supply.

The poor give to the poor through sympathy. The rich give to the poor
through pity. The sympathetic poor are many, and so their pennies
and food-donations, small in the single, pile up mountainously in
the total. But they are sparsely and more or less judiciously,
because intelligently, distributed. The very rich are, comparatively,
though not absolutely, many; and they almost all give what seems to
the ordinary run of well-to-do people very large sums. They give
carelessly, freely. Though warned by often-exposed abuses, they never
take warning. Each new fraud finds them credulous and eager. They want
to give; they want to show that they are generous and helpful; to
caution them is to irritate them.

Thus pauperization is a vast and thriving industry. It is said, and
there is no reason to doubt it, that there are several hundred families
on Manhattan Island--enough to populate a small city--that have lived
well for years wholly upon charity, no member of them ever doing any
work beyond writing begging letters or patrolling begging routes. In
addition there are thousands of families supported in large part by
relief got from rich men and rich women. And the same state of affairs
is found wherever the very rich, living exclusive and aloof lives, have
built their palaces.

To play Lord or Lady Bountiful is such a self-gratifying part. It is
the traditional, the conventional part of the very rich toward the
very poor. Beggars are so voluble in thanks. It sounds so well to
talk of “my worthy poor,” of what “I am doing for charity.” So many
hours that would otherwise be boresome can be filled with receiving
and patronizing cringing, slathering paupers or with nosing about
tenements, receiving on every floor noisy showers of blessings in
exchange for less than the price of a supper after the theatre.

The whole business lessens the vanity-disturbing doubts that
sometimes will arise even among the very rich as to the validity of
the distinctions in this Democracy between “upper class” and “lower
classes.” In some cases the motive is higher. In many cases there is an
admixture of the higher motive. But the persistence of the very rich
in face of the plain showings of the harm they do makes it impossible
entirely to acquit large numbers of them.

The pauperization plants of plutocracy fall into three classes--the
public, the semi-public and the private.

The politicians have expanded, where they have not out and out
established, the public plants. Instead of making the people realize
the truth--that these plants are their property, paid for out of
their wages and giving service to them not as charity, but as
their hard-earned, paid-for right, the politicians turn them into
favor-distributing centres, centres for the distribution of alms
in exchange for political power. The semi-public plants for the
manufacture of paupers are the gifts of very rich men, usually men
who made their own money; after the first generation the very rich do
not as a rule go in for large public gifts. It is never profitable or
just to examine deep into motives; sufficient to say that, with a few
exceptions, these semi-public philanthropic institutions for giving
something in exchange for nothing are avoided by all but such of the
poor as don’t mind thinking themselves paupers or being looked on and
treated as paupers.

Finally, there are the private pauperization plants. From them might be
excepted those of the rich men and the rich women who have gone into
the relief business in a systematic way and operate through thoroughly
organized, carefully and competently conducted bureaus. Their theory
of helping is not exactly consistent with the old American idea of
“root hog or die,” but neither is it wholly exploitation of their own
personal vanity without any regard to the merits of applicants. They
give relief, but they try to make sure that relief is, according to
their very liberal notion of necessity, needed.

Probably all but a very few of the families that are famous throughout
the country for wealth have organizations of this kind. But there are
upward of ten thousand millionaires concentrated in a few cities,
several hundred of them multi-millionaires. The overwhelming majority
of these go in for philanthropy, not on the carefully organized
system, but more or less haphazard giving, with never thorough
investigation, often with no investigation whatever.

It seems impossible to make people in the habit of keeping themselves
clean believe that dirt is not necessarily or even frequently a proof
positive of poverty overwhelmed by adversity against which it has made
an honest struggle. And the rich people who like the “Bountiful” pose
refuse to believe that almost all honest destitution is relieved by its
neighbors and relatives, that nine out of ten cases of destitution are
fraudulent, that all the street beggars are liars, that no one need
go hungry or shelterless or cold if he will apply to the public or
semi-public institutions ready to relieve. So, we have Lord and Lady
Bountiful relieving grown people of the necessity of “hustling,” and,
worst of all, encouraging them to bring up their children as paupers
and beggars.

So scandalous has this industry of pauper-making become that in
every city’s highways there are now children openly begging,
telling their whining lies of various more or less ingenious kinds,
pretending to sell newspapers or pencils or shoe-strings to give a
color of respectability to their shamelessness, or, rather, to the
shamelessness of their parents.

The passing generation--the rustling, hustling, money-grabbing
generation--is usually rather shrewd in its philanthropies, as well as
generous. The “old man” was a car-driver, or a brakeman, or a plow-boy,
or a peasant’s son. He has poverty’s sympathy with poverty, but also
poverty’s suspicion of the cause of poverty. Thus, our cities have got
and are getting libraries, hospitals, free dispensaries, free technical
schools of various kinds, model tenements, and the like. Millions on
millions are given annually by “self-made” men, most of it as wisely as
giving can be.

But shrewd as these men are, they often fail to see the difference
between the sympathetic, unselfish, man-to-man individual help they as
poor boys got from people of their own kind in better circumstances,
and this general, unequal, pitying, condescending charity which
gives indiscriminatingly something that is of value only to the
self-respecting, and too often takes away in exchange all, or nearly
all, self-respect.

Still, though these “self-made” men give and give largely and with many
mistakes, they have the fear of pauper-making ever in mind. And when
they give to individuals they try to be doubly careful.

In the second generation--what used to be but is no longer the
spendthrift generation--the very rich retrench in the matter of large
benefactions. The family position is established. None of the members
of it has ever known what it is to be hungry or cold without knowing
just where to turn for food and warmth. Sympathy, which was the
sentiment in the first generation, now becomes pity. Man-to-man is
changed into “Bountiful” and his or her “worthy poor.” And we have the
pauper-plant in full blast.

Each day every rich man or woman who is at all well known receives
large numbers of begging letters--from beggars in Maine and in
Texas, in Florida and in Washington, in all parts of the Union. They
want loans. They want notes or mortgages paid. They want pianos and
trousseaus. They want pensions for crippled sons or daughters. Or they
want anything from old clothes to several thousand dollars to buy a
farm or a store. The apparent effrontery of these requests disappears
as the letters are read and the amazing, even pathetic, simplicity of
the writers stands out.

Curiously enough, some of these requests, preposterous though they
are, are granted. A skilfully written letter sent to a certain kind of
rich person at just the right moment has been known to produce amazing
results. No reader of this book, however, need advise a beggar of his
acquaintance to try it. The two cents postage would be far more likely
to bring a return if invested in stocks of the mines of the mountains
in the moon. There are many of the rich who have every begging letter
that is at all reasonable or plausible thoroughly investigated by
a secretary--or by some local agent of a corporation in which the
recipient happens to be interested. Pity for the “worthy poor” is an
extremely potent force in the plutocracy.

But it is local pauper-making that has the greatest fascination for the
rich man or woman who does not care to go into charity on the Carnegie
or Rockefeller or Armour scale, or to take the trouble to organize a
bureau that works with precision and without any advertisement of its
owner. The “agony stories” cooked up by the newspapers are noted,
the slums are ransacked, the parasites on “charity,” both those who
honestly deceive themselves and those who deliberately “graft,” are
eagerly welcomed and listened to. Thus there are a good many thousands
of rich city dwellers with incomes ranging from twenty thousand to
several hundred thousands a year, each of whom has his or her circle
of “worthy poor,” or gives regularly to those myriad petty enterprises
of misdirected or barefacedly fraudulent charity which enlist the
activities of so many “workers.”

The women are the most persistent and unreasonable offenders in this
respect. Partly through idleness, partly through a craving to have
occupation and a sense of usefulness, partly through a profound pity
for their apparently unfortunate sisters, they pour out capital for
pauper-plants and search diligently for “worthy poor” to pauperize.

Among the long-very-rich there is notable shyness of the larger kinds
of giving. No doubt at bottom this is due to increasing selfishness,
increasing absorption in amusements of the wholly selfish kinds. It
costs more and more every year to play the rich man’s part; more and
more imagination is brought to bear in developing it, both by rich
men eager to find new ways of showing off and by ingenious poor men
inventing new ways of making a living out of the rich upon whose
extravagance they thrive. The rich man, even where his income is huge,
is often pinched. He hates to give--he may find that his giving has
compelled him to forego a most attractive investment or has compelled
him to abstain from some new expensive luxury or pleasure. He hoards,
to be ready for such emergencies. Then if he has several children, he
wants to leave each of them as rich as possible so that they can all
live in the style to which they have been accustomed, the style in
which their friends and associates live. For worship of wealth you must
look among the long-very-rich. Those who pass Mammon’s statue with a
nod or a half-ashamed crook of a reluctant knee will have the pleasure
of seeing very, very many of the rich “old families” flat in the dust,
noses plowing it, and not a bit ashamed.

Is this drying up of the charity of “philanthropy” wholly a matter for
regret?

Several years ago a few young Americans from various parts of
the country began to spend their summer vacations at Woods Hole,
Massachusetts. They were young; they were poor; they were obscure;
they were hard-worked and hard-working as well; they were profoundly
indifferent to money or money gain; they were not even bothering
especially about fame. They had as their common bond a passion
for science. They had as their common aim the satisfying of that
divine curiosity which makes the man who has it toil incessantly and
unweariedly over ways more arduous and through wildernesses more
dangerous than those that baffled the seekers after the Holy Grail.
They longed--these earnest, poor, obscure young Americans--to penetrate
to Nature’s innermost laboratory, her workshop of workshops, her temple
of temples, there to surprise her supreme secret--the mystery of the
origin of life.

Fifteen summers of this pursuit, free from self-seeking or sordidness
or jealousy, free from fame’s flatteries, and the Marine Biological
Laboratory of Woods Hole became famous wherever the human intellect is
respected. Its Knights of Science have not reached their goal--their
Holy Grail. But under the inspiration of the triple vow of Science for
her Knights--poverty, self-immolation and obedience to truth--they
have had adventures and have made discoveries so strange, so passing
strange, so wonderful, that all Americans are intensely proud of this
American institution, at once so small and so majestically great.

Then came the proposal to endow this little laboratory with part of the
Carnegie millions and to erect it into a rich and aristocratic palace
of science. At first glance the proposal seemed as admirable as the
purpose that prompted it. And yet----

This is a day when the numerous newcomers among our multi-millionaires
are so pouring out the millions that it looks as if presently the
necessity for struggle, the incentive to struggle, in the development
of brain power, would be almost wholly removed. In the progress of
the race, wealth in possession has played a very small part--has more
often interfered to blight than to bless. Wealth possessed means ease
and power without effort, and a sense that the goal has been reached.
It means the mind at rest, tending to sloth and slumber, with life’s
greatest fears and greatest incentives removed. Above all, it means an
atmosphere of self-complacency and satiety and languor that insensibly
relaxes the strongest fibre.

Carnegie millions may help to keep a-burning the light in that plain
little temple of science at Woods Hole--_may_, if judiciously used. But
not if they stifle the splendid, self-sacrificing, self-unconscious
enthusiasm which set that light a-blazing. The lesson is wider than
the instance--far wider. It was wealth and patronage that rotted the
splendid intellect of Greece; wealth again, and patronage, that brought
the Renaissance to an abrupt, inglorious end. And how much the English
intellect in its long period of most brilliant achievement owed to the
contempt of the English dominant classes--that of birth and that of
commerce--for scientists, writers and “those kinds of cattle!”




CHAPTER VII

THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE


We find plutocracy’s follies in full swing not alone in the great
cities, East and West, where the money-caste must have outward signs of
superiority to bolster up its pretensions, but in our national capital
as well--in what ought to be the high-set citadel of democratic dignity.

Few Americans have any adequate idea of the system of etiquette which
has grown up there. The other day a newly appointed high officer of the
Government said:

“My daughter went to lunch with the daughter of Secretary ----
yesterday. She did not come home until long after she was expected, and
her mother asked her what was the matter.

“‘Oh,’ she explained, ‘Secretary ----’s daughter was there, and none of
us could go until she left, and we thought she never would go.’ And I
find that precedent is carried out in the strictest possible way all
through Washington society in all its sets, down to the very children.”

If there are any persons in official life in Washington who do not
attach importance to precedence, do not resent being seated out of
rank at table, or being in all other ways given their exact official
amount of deference, those persons keep extremely quiet. In Washington
one ceases to be surprised at hearing men of national reputation
complaining fiercely because they have been subjected to some trivial
slight in this matter of precedence. It irritates a Cabinet officer
to be put a shade out of his rank just as much as it irritates a
Congressman from nowhere or a Government clerk.

Precedence is killing Washington as a place of residence for sensible
people. It is destroying its chief charm. If one thinks of going there
to live it is because he expects to meet in the easy circumstance of
social intercourse those who are interesting or amusing or curious.
That sort of social intercourse is becoming practically impossible.
No one giving any sort of entertainment, however informal, dares to
arrange his or her guests according to congeniality. The same people
must always be put next each other. The same man must take the same
woman in to dinner. The same youth must dance with the same girl. And
as official life expands the blight of precedence spreads.

It is difficult for an outsider to listen without laughing or
showing irritation as the Washingtonians discuss precedence and
relate incidents of national and international catastrophes almost
brought about by violation of it. But as some of the persons who most
strenuously insist upon it are otherwise high above the human average,
it would be well, before utterly condemning the Washingtonians, to
reflect whether the craze for precedence is not a universal human
weakness, latent--happily latent--in most of us because it has no
chance to show itself.

There is a certain officer who, in the official lists, is called
Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds. In fact he is “Lord
Great Chamberlain” to the President. Perhaps there was once a Lord
Great Chamberlain who was merely Superintendent of Public Buildings and
Grounds at the lower end of Pennsylvania avenue. But that was a long
time ago.

For many years the Major of Engineers assigned to that title with
the rank and pay of Colonel has been actually the chief officer of
the President’s court, the manager of what might be called his public
household. Whenever the President entertains on a grand scale he is
obviously in command, directing the ceremonials, superintending the
evolutions of his staff of dancing and small-talk army men, overseeing
the assiduities of the court retinue of servants. When a new ambassador
or other eminent personage, domestic or foreign, arrives, he is the
functionary who puts on a gorgeous uniform, drives in state in the
President’s carriage to the visitor’s lodgings, escorts him to the
President, introduces him, takes him away and escorts him back to his
lodgings. Also, he in large measure directs the expenditures from the
White House privy purse.

The Constitution and the Statute Book make no provision for a Lord
Great Chamberlain. But constitutions and institutions are vastly
different. Part of the President’s time is given to matters contained
or supposed to be contained in the written laws, the larger part to
matters set down in the unwritten laws and nowhere else. When we broke
away from Europe and European political and social ideas, we did
not get rid of those customs for high executive officers which had
been established among us by royal colonial governors, although they
were simple compared with the growing dimensions of our present-day
ceremonial.

Thus the unwritten laws say that the President must have a court like a
king or other royal reigning person. It must be disguised and modified,
but it must be “the real thing” in its essence. A court involves a
place to hold it, officers to conduct it, an etiquette to guide it, and
money to keep it going. The written laws provide for a Presidential
residence--they permit the President to sit rent-free. That provision
readily stretches to cover a place to hold the court.

Again, the written laws permit the President to detach certain public
officers for rather indefinite purposes. There you have a Lord Great
Chamberlain and a Lord High Steward, and so forth, provided with
comparative ease.

As for etiquette, that part of the unwritten law need not be reconciled
to written law, because etiquette costs nothing but headaches and
heart-burnings--and the only reason for attempting to reconcile written
law and unwritten is, of course, the matter of money expense. Finally,
the written laws provide, or can be stretched to provide, the money
for all the bigger items of court expenses--furnishings and repairs
and alterations, linen, china, flowers, cooks, scullions, butlers,
coachmen, footmen, door-openers and door-closers, card-carriers, light,
heat, everything except what is eaten and drunk. As yet no way has been
found to stretch the written law or the good nature of Congress to
cover the court appetite. It must be appeased out of the President’s
salary.

The most important, though by no means the most expensive, item in the
court budget charged against the public, is the Lord Great Chamberlain
who conducts the court and executes, either directly or indirectly,
all that pertains to the social side of life at the White House. He is
always an officer of engineers. He must be a person of knowledge, of
tact, of good appearance.

Lord Great Chamberlain has ever been a distinguished office. It was
never so distinguished as now. And, unless there is some sort of
extraordinary convulsion and revulsion, it is destined to become almost
eminent. For the White House has entered a new and dazzling period of
social splendor which may presently make it as little different from
the residence of a monarch as is the Elysée Palace, where lives the
President of France’s imperial Democracy.

The newly evolved notion of the Presidential office is that it is
the centre of political, intellectual and sociological authority
and also of social honor. Not only must the democratic--or
plutocratic--overlord, anointed with the new kind of divine oil, be the
embodiment and exponent of the popular will; he must also be the source
of honor, the recognizer of merit.

Does one sing well? Does one paint well? Does one write well? Does
one lead in education or literature or law or sociology or finance or
commerce or trade--or fashion? Is one in the forefront in any line
of activity not definitely declared criminal? Then the President of
the American people must entertain him, must take his hand in that
hand which is a sort of composite of eighty million right hands of
fellowship. The approving accents of that voice which is now conceived
to be the composite of eighty million approving voices must tickle his
ravished ears; he must, at the Presidential board, eat and drink the
composite hospitalities of the eighty millions’ dinner or luncheon
tables.

In a real plain-as-an-old-coat Democracy the President would be a
business person only, keeping his official life and his social life
separate and distinct. The one would be public, the other private.
He would have no more to do privately with those with whom he is
officially brought into contact than would the head of a big business
with his assistants, employés and customers. Social life is in a
democratic society altogether of and by the family; and theoretically
the President’s wife and children, the wives and children of the
other public officials, are left in private life when the man of the
family takes office. Practically, however, they are all elected, and
if the written law provides no honors for wife and children and other
relatives of the successful candidate, unwritten law must be created to
repair the grave, the intolerable omission.

Hence the elaborate, the complex, the awe-inspiring system of
precedence. Every one from the President and his family and their
remotest connection visiting Washington, down through all the branches
of official life to grand-niece of the scrubwoman who sees to the
basement steps of the smallest public building, has his or her exactly
defined and jealously guarded station in the social hierarchy.

Naturally, the most interesting part of the imposing structure that
descends tier on tier from the august and exalted Chief Magistrate, is
the court--the President, his Cabinet (Cabinet “ministers,” to give
them the fanciful title they love best), the ambassadors and ministers
and staffs of the various embassies and legations, the families
of all these, and this means the White House and the Lord Great
Chamberlain--the White House, the stage; the Lord Great Chamberlain,
the stage manager.

The White House was always inadequate--it would have been inadequate
only for carrying out the purely democratic idea of the Presidential
office, the idea set forth in the written laws. For the splendid,
imperial, democratic concept of the plutocracy, the White House was
ridiculous. Many a previous President and his wife, conscious of the
social possibilities of the Presidential office, and yearning to
develop them, have sighed over and moaned over and hinted about the
petty proportions of the “Executive Mansion.” But political timidity
restrained them from insisting upon expansion and elaboration. Mr.
Roosevelt, confident that the people understood and approved him, and
full of enthusiasm for his exalted concept of a new Presidency to suit
a new era of the republic, boldly ventured where other Presidents had
shrunk back. He demanded adequate quarters for the imperial-democratic
court. The result is a new White House, a fit theatre for plutocratic
social activities, a fit field for the operations of an energetic and
sympathetic Lord Great Chamberlain.

The present President entertains, not occasionally but constantly,
not exclusively but as democratically as an emperor, not meagrely but
lavishly, not a score of guests, but hundreds and thousands. He has
a multitude of guests to lunch, a multitude to dine, a multitude to
hear music or to take part in various kinds of “drawing-rooms” and
levees, a multitude to stay the night under his roof--not a multitude
all at one time, but a multitude in the aggregate. Rich and poor, snob
and democrat, plutocrat and proletarian, black and white, American
and foreigner, Maine woods guide, Western scout, fashionable and
frowzy--all equally welcome, all equal at his court. Morgan and Jacob
Riis, Countess de Castellane and Booker Washington, Wild Bill and
Bishop Potter, Duse and Rough Rider Rob, Alfred Henry Lewis and a New
York cotillon leader.

Not long ago when some one said in his hearing, “There’s no first-class
hotel in Washington,” he replied, “You forget the White House.” He has
made it indeed a national hotel, or rather a great national assembling
place. And he is ever unsatisfied, ever reaching out for more “doers,”
for more and more people of interest or importance. He wishes all
people of mark to bask in the Presidential sunshine, to give him the
benefit of their intellect or character, or whatever they may have
that is worth seeing or hearing. For he wishes to receive as well as
to give. And he is determined that his court shall be entirely and
completely representative. The world has seen nothing like it in recent
centuries; the Emperor of Germany, broad though his sympathies are, is
a snob in comparison. For a parallel we must go back to the courts of
the emperor-presidents of Rome, in the days when Rome thought itself
a republic. And the exigencies of plutocratic politics and the new
social conditions have combined to attract the leaders of plutocracy’s
fashion in plutocracy’s capitals, New York and Chicago, to favor
Washington more and more each winter with their presence and their
patronage.

The new White House, which is thus in a fair way to become the social
centre of the republic, is in one sense the first step toward an
entirely new Washington. In every street at all fit for Presidential
purposes great houses are going up for the leisurely rich, and smaller
but attractive houses for the leisurely well-to-do. It is obvious
to the most casual observer that to-morrow will see a brilliant and
numerous society seated at Washington, a society devoted to luxury
and entertaining and revolving round the President, and dazzling and
dominating the servants of the people. Of all the bribes, which is so
seductive, so insidiously corrupting as the social bribe?

At the Congressional Library are exhibited models of the Washington the
public administration purposes to build, has already begun to build.
It will be a city of magnificent boulevards and parks and drives, and
public buildings and national monuments. It will be probably the most
splendid and most beautiful city in the world. It will probably be the
one great city on earth where all who are not servants and tradespeople
think and talk chiefly politics, literature, art, science--when they
are not talking gossip and envying each other’s rank or looks or
clothes or establishments.

The made-over White House, astounding though it is as a sudden
development, is but the crude inaugural of this Washington of
to-morrow. But it is a beginning--a most audacious move on the part
of one of the most audacious men who ever rose to first place in the
republic. It is indeed audacious to be a democratic President with the
ceremonial of a king--“a ceremonial more rigid than that of the court
of the Czar,” according to the wife of one of the ambassadors.

The White House demand upon Congress for running expenses has leaped
from the former twenty-five thousand dollars to sixty thousand dollars.
As the President’s salary is just under a thousand dollars a week, and
as he evidently believes the people expect the President to spend his
salary upon the embellishment of the position, it appears that the
new White House, the new court, is now on the average costing in the
neighborhood of two thousand dollars a week, half from the pocket of
the people, the other half from the President’s private pocket.

As the heavy expense is crowded into five months of the year--December
to April, inclusive--the probabilities are that the new White House is
costing during the season not far from three thousand dollars a week.
This means that the new departure has certainly doubled, and perhaps
trebled, the cost of the White House court, for most Presidents have
contributed about half their salary toward holding court and have
called on Congress for a supplementary appropriation of twenty-five
thousand dollars a year.

A few years ago such imposing figures as these would have caused a
great outcry. In every part of the land, in city as well as country,
hands would have been thrown up, and “we, the people,” would have
ejaculated: “Three thousand dollars a week! Mercy on us! The fellow
must be crazy. What _are_ we coming to?”

But we think in large sums these days, and the establishments of our
multi-millionaires have accustomed us to big expenditures for what were
less than half a generation ago universally regarded as prodigalities.
Scores of millionaires spend several times two thousand dollars a
week in “maintaining their dignity.” There were some faint, shamefaced
mutterings in Congress against the alterations in the White House
and the lively leap of the public share in the expenses. But these
mutterings died away instead of growing stronger, and the project for
raising the Presidential salary to one hundred thousand dollars a year
has all but passed Congress.

In the competition of display, of “splurge,” shall “we, the people” be
distanced by private persons? Is not “blowing it in” the great test
of dignity and worth, the test established by our most “successful”
citizens? Yet a few years and the President will be getting one
hundred thousand dollars in salary and will think himself moderate in
calling upon the nation for twice sixty thousand a year to be spent
in maintaining the Presidential dignity. Less than that will seem
shabby in the new Washington under the spell of the new concept of
the Presidency as a social font. Simplicity and quiet as a measure of
dignity will belong to the past. It still remains true, as when Burke
said it, that “the public is poor.” True, the nation has riches, but
only a few have wealth. True, wages have not actually increased over
what they were _thirty years ago_. True, the incomes of the great mass
of Americans are just about where they used to be; true, taxation is
to them still a burden, and “making the ends meet” is still an anxious
problem. But our plutocrats and the representatives of kings and other
tax-eaters and people-plunderers must feel at home when they honor our
White House with their presence.

There is not the slightest surface indication that the Lord Great
Chamberlain will preside over a diminished office. Public business in
the narrow, strictly legal, old-fashioned democratic sense has now for
the first time wholly withdrawn from the White House and is seated in
what is derisively and not inaptly called the “Executive Hen-coop”--a
temporary office building near by. The White House has been definitely
and apparently permanently transformed into a place devoted to that
part of the Presidential office which is not recognized in written law
and which has hitherto been kept in the background.

And so rapidly is the White House developing that no one need be
astonished if it almost immediately becomes the social Mecca of
the whole American people. Any one who has studied the effect of
social life upon political life, of social customs upon politics,
will appreciate that that transformation might be of profound and
far-reaching importance. It might be significant of a new kind of
republic, of a fallen Democracy on this American continent. It
might well mean that the dream of all aggressive, self-aggrandizing
office-holders had at last been realized; that for the people-ruled
public administration contemplated by the fathers and embodied in the
Constitution had been substituted a real, a people-ruling government.

For, more powerful than any written laws, are the unwritten laws that
bind men in the slowly, noiselessly forged chains of Habit.

And what a busy, big man the Lord Great Chamberlain would be then!

But he would still be called Superintendent of Public Buildings and
Grounds, and the Most Puissant Over-lord of the Imperial Plutocracy
would still be called President of the United States. And so nobody
would in the least mind. If the waffle is named “Hot Waffle,” only a
carping, croaking pessimist notes that it is stone cold.

Such are the _surface_ indications. But surface indications are
not infallible; they have been known to be unimportant and wholly
misleading.




CHAPTER VIII

AND EUROPE LAUGHS


An attaché of one of the Continental Embassies to the King of England
was dining at the Carlton with an American, an old friend of his. The
room was filled with English and Americans. Almost all the English
were men and women of title or rank, or both. Almost all the Americans
were well known both at home and abroad because of their wealth,
their fondness for display, and their intimacies and relationships by
marriage with the aristocratic caste of Europe.

“You Americans are popular here,” said the diplomat.

“Yes,” assented the American.

“And on the Continent also,” said the diplomat.

“Yes,” replied the American. “How the German Emperor does love us--he
is almost as enthusiastic about us as is King Edward.”

“You are popular,” went on the diplomat, “and very unpopular. You were
never so popular nor so unpopular.”

“You mean we are unpopular because of the American trade invasion?”

“Not at all. That is a trifling matter. It concerns only the
politicians and a few manufacturers and the farmers, and does not
concern them very deeply. No--let me explain. Formerly we--and when I
say ‘we’ I mean the upper classes of Europe, those which still rule,
despite all this talk about the progress of Democracy--formerly we
feared you; we pretended to despise you, but in fact we were afraid.
You were the great experiment in Democracy, that is, in anarchy--in the
rule of the masses, the mob. Your success meant serious trouble for
us, if not the handwriting on the wall, because our masses were always
thinking of you.”

Here the diplomat smiled peculiarly and glanced round the room.

“Now all that has been changed,” he went on. “Europe and America are
better acquainted. We no longer fear you. Why should we?”

And again he paused to let his glance travel round the room, finally
to rest with good-humored satire upon the American’s face.

“Yes--we understand you better. Our fears have been proved groundless,
our suspicions have been justified. Your new path, after making a
wide bend, has returned into the old historic highway of caste. And
so our upper class, which hated you, now--well, it neither loves nor
admires you, but it honors and courts you. It laughs a little at your
pretensions to birth. But it respects the solid foundation of your
aristocracy--wealth. For, no matter what we may pretend, not blood, but
money, wealth, is the essence of aristocracy. As for our masses, that
once looked up to you as their ideal----” He shrugged his shoulders.

“They no longer look up to us?”

“They look down upon you. They see that you, too, have your dominating
class just as they have. And they prefer their own kind of upper
class as less sordid, less vulgar, the embodiment of a more inspiring
ideal. So long as they knew you only by report they believed in you;
and that belief still makes them restless under us. But now that they
have seen you, now that you are constantly in evidence, they see that
their hopes--at least so far as they were based upon you--were a
foolish dream. They prefer their own princes to ‘bosses’ and upstart
newly-rich.”

“But suppose these Americans whom you see over here and whom you read
most about are not representative?”

The diplomat smiled. “I have heard that before,” said he. “But, my dear
friend, they are representative. Your country has changed and you do
not realize it. You are deceived, not we. You are like the Romans who
thought they had a republic when, in fact, the republic had been dead
five hundred years. Think a moment. What sort of men did you formerly
send to us as diplomats? And what sort of men do you send now? What
has become of the old horror of court dress and rank and precedence
which they used to exhibit? You cannot deny that your diplomats are
representative. And are they not of the same class as these ladies and
gentlemen about us here, so obviously delighted with themselves and
their aristocratic company, with themselves because of their company?”

There is much truth in the diplomat’s comments on the state of European
public sentiment toward America. And the change is, as he said, due to
better acquaintance. Europe thinks it has discovered that as soon as
an American rises in prosperity above the mass of his fellow-citizens,
he enters an actual ruling class that dictates and disdains the laws,
uses them for enriching himself and for exploiting the mass of his
fellow-countrymen. Europe thinks that as soon as he reaches this stage
he turns his eyes longingly toward the Old World monarchies and begins
to plan to become as nearly like the aristocrats as possible. He may
not flaunt his power--he must respect republican forms. But he may, and
does, flaunt his wealth. And in Europe he can get open recognition of
his superior rank when such recognition as it gets at home is indirect
and more or less secret.

Thousands of Americans live in Europe. Every considerable city on the
Continent has its American colony, and year by year these colonies
grow apace. Americans--chiefly the women--have intermarried everywhere
into the European nobility. Nearly all these expatriated Americans are
people of means; many of them are rich. They lead lives of industrious
idleness. Many of them frankly express their contempt for the country
from which they draw their incomes, the country but for which they
would be miserable peasants, sweating for the amusement of some
European land-holder.

It is fortunate that their dislike of their native land has been strong
enough to take them away and to keep them away; it is a pity that the
migrating impulse does not seize upon more of their kind. The world has
room for idlers--it has room for all sorts of people. But America has
no room for them. That great workshop wants no idlers obstructing the
aisles and hindering the toilers at their tasks. That would be a sorry
day for us when our rapidly growing leisure class should “civilize” and
“refine” America into an agreeable place of residence for “ladies” and
“gentlemen” of the European pattern.

These Americans who have “outgrown” their country serve to confirm
Europe in the suspicions raised by the news that has reached it of
stupendous aristocratic changes in the American people, of rotten
political machines ruled by the rich, of toll-gates set up on every
highway of American trade and commerce for the tax-gatherers of
plutocracy, of a people fatuously imagining that it is free because it
can go to the polls and freely choose which of two sets of candidates
shielded by the plutocracy shall make and execute the laws. This brings
up the whole subject of our relations with “abroad”--and the social and
political meaning and tendency of those relations.

A few years ago Paris was the paradise of Americans, especially of the
Americans of wealth. It is so no longer. It is now for them a mere
stopping-place for buying clothes--a pause _en route_ to the true,
fashionable, American Mecca, London. A few years ago Americans, except
those of the ordinary sight-seeing, mind-improving kind, loathed
London. They knew few people there--and, like Vienna, London is an
impossible place for the stranger in search of amusement; if he does
not know natives, is not invited to their houses, a soundless desert is
a cheerful, companionable place in comparison. Further, such English as
the rich, fashionable, amusement-hunting American knew--that is, such
Englishmen “of the right sort”--were about as friendly and sociable
as they are to their servants. But that was before the “Anglo-Saxon
Alliance.”

The change came with the British discovery that the American
multi-millionaire and the American heiress were not, as had been
supposed, rarities found only occasionally after long search through
trackless and vast wildernesses of “unspeakable bounders,” but were
deposited in “the States” in quantities, were easily accessible,
were yearning for high society, for aristocracy, for titled friends,
for titled alliances. This was tidings of great joy to the English
aristocracy. For an aristocrat may not work; and no matter how heavily
“endowed” a title may be, values will shrink as time passes--not to
speak of those savage “death duties” which the rascally Liberals
enacted to the infuriating of the upper classes, who yet dare not
repeal them.

The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” began forthwith. Scores of English
upper-class families opened their hearts and their hearths to their
“cousins across the sea.” The more American friends one accumulated the
more likely was one to find an American multi-millionaire or so among
them, or at least to be by way of getting into touch with American
multi-millionaires or within “touching” distance of them.

To realize to what an extent the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” was and is
based upon this notion, one must realize how all-powerful the upper
class is in England, and how inarticulate, how socially, politically
and in every public way insignificant, are the English masses,
including the bulk of the middle classes. When you speak of English
public sentiment you mean the sentiment of the London drawing-rooms.
They are filled with the governing class, which constitutes parliaments
and ministries; they dominate the journalists, who are either of
the upper class or desperately struggling to get into it; they also
dominate the masses who have been trained by centuries of unbroken
custom to bow before rank and title.

There were excellent reasons in international politics for England’s
turning favorable, friendly, even enthusiastic eyes upon America. But
there could not have been this present passionate, personal love, this
daily and hourly working of that toothless old saw, “blood is thicker
than water,” had there not existed a reason which appealed directly to
the personal and family self-interest of every member of nearly every
upper-class family in England.

And soon the German Emperor and those about him, all of a high and
impoverishing nobility, began to work the same trusty, but never
now-a-days rusty, old saw about the thickness of blood and water--are
we not “Germanic,” we Americans? But the motive which is the less
with the King and the upper classes of England is the stronger with
our tempestuous German suitor--the motive of political, or, rather,
industrial friendship. He feels that in dining and wining and
treating, “just as if they were equals,” American owners of yachts and
multi-millionaires, he is endearing himself to the American people.
For, like practically the whole of Europe to-day, he thinks America
is no longer a Democracy, but a thinly disguised plutocracy. And
the more he reads and hears of the power and prestige of American
multi-millionaires at home, the more firmly is he convinced that when
he is tickling the vanity of these “dollar-swollen upstarts,” he is
sending delicious thrills up and down the spine of the American eagle.

Yes, European princes and potentates are rubbing noses and
back-scratching in the friendliest, most democratic fashion in the
world, with such of the American people as can afford to visit Europe
in royal luxury and get themselves admitted to royal inclosures.
The object of these condescensions to our fellow-countrymen is to
improve the relations between sundry European monarchies and the
American people. A worthy object, as is any which has at bottom the
promoting of peace on honorable terms. But Europe is wasting energy in
misdirected effort. It assumes that these American beneficiaries have
the same “rank” at home that similarly fortuned Europeans have in their
countries. And, not unnaturally, it is confirmed in its false notion by
many a petty success through this courtship of snobbish plutocrats and
plutocratic diplomats.

The American multi-millionaire and his wife and his son and his
daughter--again this does not mean all Europe-visiting Americans of
wealth--are directly responsible for Europe’s present opinion of
the American brand of Democracy. For they--not unnaturally--wish to
make themselves out the relative equals of their titled and exalted
friends. They begin to “talk tall”; and, being far away from home,
they soon are thinking as tall as they talk. They confirm each other
in the idea that they are really the “whole show” at home. They
return with retinues of caste-trained, servile domestics; they live
in colonies in our own cities into which none but dollar-hunters
and dollar-worshipers penetrate. The political bosses court them,
give them laws and senatorships and diplomatic posts in exchange for
campaign contributions. Their infatuation grows apace.

Thus the American fresh from America finds London--let us confine
ourselves to the one capital as typical--a strange, humorous spectacle
in the fashionable season. He can hardly believe his own eyes and ears.
A week or two, and so persistent are the impressions of a true American
nobility visiting Europe that he almost feels that he has been asleep
with Rip Van Winkle and has awakened to a new country and a new order
in which there is no American Republic.

And we are only at the beginning. The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” between
the English upper class and the American aspirants to be thought “upper
class,” the dragging in of the rich American pilgrim out of the fog
to the cheeriest corner of the English fire, these are matters of
yesterday. And already Paris gets but a glance from the rich Americans,
and the most foresighted of Paris shopkeepers are establishing London
branches for the “Anglo-Saxon” American who no longer can spare the
time from his or her English social duties to make the outfitting trip
across the English Channel. To-morrow--The English hearth is large;
there is room on it for every presentable or hope-inspiring American
who can afford to cross the Atlantic; and the news of the jollity
of the London season and of the round of English house parties is
spreading in America and is attracting the pretentious society of all
the large American cities. The “Alliance” is indeed booming.

It is not through English aversion to the Atlantic voyage that, though
we are the sought, we go to the home of the seeker to be sought. The
English upper classes would come to us if we insisted upon it, although
the item of expense looks larger to them than to us. But we do not
insist upon it. Our “leisure class” is made far more comfortable in
England than it is at home. America has no such facilities as has
England for amusing sheer idleness in ways that are not undisguisedly
inane. Through several centuries, the filling in of the idle hours of
professional idlers has been a study there; the houses, the streets,
the theatres, the restaurants, the whole social system is adapted to it.

Further, the American can feel so “tall,” can believe so thoroughly in
his own aristocracy and aloofness above the general run of mankind
when there are three thousand miles of barren water between him in his
grandeur and the shop where he worked as a “clark,” or the cabin where
his father was born, or the back yard where his mother, in gingham,
hung out the wash. Thus, the Americans in search of “the high life” for
which they yearn prefer to go to it rather than to have it brought to
them.

“As I study your countrymen here and get their views,” said an
Englishman, famous as a lifelong admirer of America and of the
democratic idea, “I become convinced against my will that your
Democracy is dying. It seems the ideal of Democracy is too high to
survive prosperity; apparently it can exist only in what one of your
countrymen, writing in your simple days, called the atmosphere of plain
living and high thinking. As soon as a man becomes prosperous he begins
to ‘put on airs,’ as you Americans say. And the pity of it is that
the less prosperous concede his superiority, and so make his ‘airs’
significant where they would otherwise be ridiculous. The reason our
monarchies, that is, our monarchical governments and our aristocratic
classes, are becoming friendly to you, is that you are becoming like
them. They concede something; but you--you concede your principles.
They get something--cash dividends on their condescensions. But I’m
blest if I can see what _you_ get.”

To the stay-at-home American, or, for the matter of that, to the
travelling American who retains his sense of proportion, the
exaggerating of bumptious American “diplomats” and “dollarcrats” into
a national phenomenon of peril, and the gloomy croakings or sardonic
rejoicings in Europe over the decay of the American Republic may seem
preposterous--as preposterous as an ambassador’s fancying that his
ecstasies when a king claps him on the shoulder are the ecstasies of
the entire American people. But it is a phenomenon that should not,
that cannot wisely, be left out of account. Steam and electricity have
bridged the chasm across which our ancestors fled to establish here a
system based upon sanity, simplicity and justice. And at a peculiarly
trying time there are crossing over to us European ideas and ideals
that so dangerously disguise snobbishness and plundering and injustice
under pretentious culture and such plausible frauds as the “natural
leadership of the classes that have demonstrated their superiority by
success.”

The problem is often stated cart before the horse. “What will our
plutocracy do with us?” men say in all seriousness. The question, in
fact, is, “What shall we do with our plutocracy?” It has descended
upon us swift as a cyclone, insidious as a plague. We had no adequate
warning. We have not yet, as a people, grasped the situation in its
fullness. Of all the cure-alls so confidently proposed by our political
and sociological quacks, which one does not show on its very surface to
any careful mind utter futility at best, disaster in the application as
a highly probable event?

The plutocracy itself shares in the delusion of so many of our
“publicists.” “What shall we do with America?” it insolently says in
effect.

A little patience; a little time for our eighty millions, surcharged
with Democracy, to weigh and measure and judge. Be sure, the dog will
not be wagged by the tail. And before many decades European caste will
see such a handwriting upon the western sky as has not terrified it
since our Declaration of Independence.




PART II.--DEMOCRACY




CHAPTER IX

“WE, THE PEOPLE”


It cannot, then, be denied that wealth, concentrated wealth--not so
much the plutocrat himself as the vast masterful accumulation of which
he is the appendage; one might with truth say, the victim--is not only
the most conspicuous factor in American life to-day, but also one of
the most potent factors. The plutocracy in politics, the plutocracy in
business, the plutocracy in society, the plutocracy in the home--in its
own homes--that is our “peril.”

A great monster indeed, fully up to the harrowing descriptions of our
radical orators and writers. But why does the average, common-sense
American refuse to be terrified? Because he does not see it? Hardly
that. No; the real reason is that the American is fundamentally
incapable of those caste and class feelings, without which a plutocracy
can never hope to erect itself into an aristocracy, and therefore a
real “peril.”

To see America--the America that was, and is, and shall be--we must
leave the neighborhood of the palaces of the plutocracy with its
servile parasites and imitators, its fawning menials and shopkeepers;
we must also leave the neighboring slums, where the American is so
sadly caricatured--not more sadly, in truth, than where the plutocracy
flaunts. We must go to the smaller cities and the towns and villages
and the farms, where in ten thousand homes a sane and sober life is led
by a sane and sober people. And we find there no tendencies toward the
development of caste, far-reaching though the poisonous influence of
the plutocracy is.

For our hopeful, yes, convincing comparisons, we need not bring forward
the early days of the republic, when the surviving silly old Colonial
aristocracy was strong enough to restrict the suffrage, to enforce
rigid class distinctions, to threaten us with an official aristocracy
of “birth.” We only need compare forty years ago with to-day to see the
substantial progress of true Democracy. Proportionately, are there not
vastly fewer people to-day lacking that high sense of self-respect
which caused so much open, profuse and shamefaced apologies for
electing to the Presidency a man of such “low origin” as Lincoln? At
the time of the Civil War, and even thereafter, the rich men in every
community had great political influence simply because they were rich,
and property, as property, claimed and was conceded a right to a
more potent voice in the public affairs. Is it so to-day? Is not the
property influence exercised only in secrecy and stealth? Is the rich
man a favorite for elective office, or are the people, roused by the
frequent coincidence of wealth and corruption, jealously suspicious of
the rich man in politics?

Outside the umbra and penumbra of plutocracy we find the American with
the inborn sense of equality, the American that rejoices in humble
origin as proof of the personal worth of him who has risen. We are
still a nation of working men and women, the sons and daughters of
working people. And just as soon as one of us becomes ashamed of his
birth or of his own past, becomes infected with the cheap and silly
vulgarisms that Europe is always thrusting upon us, just so soon
does he or she begin to fall behind in the procession. Influential
relatives will not long save him or her, nor inherited property;
misused opportunity to better education will only hasten the downfall.

Never was country made up of more _kinds_ of people than the United
States; but we have no classes. There is no condition to which one is
born from which one may not escape. Class means such a condition. Now,
were caste altogether a matter to be determined by the rich, by those
“on top,” we might well tremble for the future of our social state.
The rich of a thousand localities would not be slow to take advantage
of the chance were it offered them. But fortunately _caste is made by
those who look up, not by those who look down_.

However many Americans there may be who would like to look _down_,
there are few, there are ever fewer, with the quaint fancy for looking
_up_. It is true that in our so-called “foreign element” there seems
to lie the possibility of a dangerous influence. This vast mass of
foreigners, coming from lands where class distinctions are centuries
old, is regarded with hope, consciously and unconsciously, by our
plutocratic with caste aspirations. But let us recall the facts about
that other flood of immigration, the Irish and the Germans who came
in the middle part of the last century--proportionately a greater
flood than the one which has been sweeping in upon us for the last
twenty years. In the fifties of the last century, as to-day, it was
confidently predicted that the downfall of Democracy had already
begun. The slavocracy of the South struck hands with the then existing
manufacturing plutocracy of the North, and the basis of the Northern
plutocracy was the hordes of ignorant immigrants. What happened?
The war? More than that. Democracy absorbed away the basis of the
rising Northern aristocracy just as the war swept away the basis of
slavocracy. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants became the
most strenuous of Americans.

Our “foreign element” does not remain foreign. It comes here to become
American, and it sets about the accomplishment of its purpose with an
energy and a resolution that are unconquerable. When our plutocracy of
to-day leans upon the “foreign element” it leans upon a breaking reed.
And the more heavily it leans the worse will be the fall.

       *       *       *       *       *

In manners more easily than any other way can we see Democracy in
progress. There should be no confusing that respectful consideration
for others, which in an honest way most of us have, with the European
idea of deference. Whether at home or abroad, the big asset of the
American is his lack of deference, his freedom from that which angered
Walt Whitman into crying out haughtily:

“By heaven, there has been about enough of doffing and deprecating. I
find no sweeter fat than that which clings to my own bones.”

Manners bespeak mental attitude; and mental attitude is the man.
Americans should be careful how they permit themselves to trifle with
their manners. We are hearing a great deal about “growing distinctions
between class and mass” now-a-days. Many are “viewing with alarm” and
“deeply deploring” such evidences of it as, to use the most often cited
instance, the increasing tendency of well-to-do parents to send their
children to private schools instead of, as formerly, to the public
school.

The viewers with alarm seem to miss the point. It is not the “mass”
that is going to suffer by this imported passion for exclusiveness; it
is the “class.” The “class” cuts itself off from the “mass,” from the
full, strong currents of democratic life which alone give vitality and
endurance. The mass remains vital and energetic and progressive; the
class withers and shrivels and sloughs away.

Nevertheless, the disposition on the part of some Americans to despise
and forsake the splendid triumph-producing ideas of their country for
the mean and petty, disaster and decay-producing ideas of the Old
World, is a matter which should not be passed over without comment. Of
necessity our snobs will be pushed aside and trampled in the resistless
onrush of the Democratic idea. The nation would be feeble indeed if it
could be halted or even slackened by such an obstacle. But the snobs
ought to be noted and warned. Disobedience to the great laws which
determine the evolution of mankind is important only to the disobedient
individual. But it is part of our humanitarian duty as democrats to be
patient with the ignorant, the weak and the erring, and to be helpful
to them as far as we can. It is impossible for any one with the broad
sympathies which Democracy engenders not to feel the impulses of pity
when he sees fellow-beings, through vanity or ignorance, flinging
themselves and their innocent young children across the very pathway of
the mighty wave of Democracy.

A snob is a person who feels inferior and wants company in his misery,
and longs for the consolation of finding those even lower than himself.
Snobism should be exterminated, just as, more and more scientifically,
bodily disease is being stamped out. The snob is the only one who
wants class distinctions, or who can encourage their existence. It is
the snob who returns from abroad deeply impressed by courtesies shown
him over there in expectation of and in exchange for tips. He uses
his first intake of native air to fall afoul of the native manners.
And no doubt our manners do need improving. We have always been in a
great hurry under press of work, and there is still a great deal more
to do than our competent doers can find time for. But in polishing
our manners we must be careful to use a sound brand of democratic
polish, not the English brand so much admired by those who yearn for a
deference from others which they would not when alone venture to show
themselves.

Back of manners is instinct. Often a man’s lack of manners enables us
to see whether his instincts are right or not. Aristocratic manners
hide moral and mental defects, just as whiskers and clothes hide
physical defects. What we ought to develop is sincere manners--not the
bowings and scrapings of fear and cupidity and servility. Democratic
manners!

Good manners among the various kinds of public and semi-public servants
in England would not be considered good manners here. Without disputing
the point with those admirers of the English servant, we must insist
that it would be ridiculous for a self-respecting American citizen to
grovel and scrape and look and act “humble.” We want no servility here,
much as we would like to please those persons who constantly feel the
need of assurances from others that they are as grand folks as they
would like to think themselves.

Scraping and cringing, whether in a duke or in a domestic, are as bad
manners for a human being as are arrogance and impertinence.

The grotesque nature of the snob complaints against the manners of our
everyday people is striking when one recognizes a certain criticism
that can justly be made against us. It is among so-called well-bred
people, a certain brand of them, our snobs, that bad manners are most
prevalent. For out of them is left that on which alone good manners
can be built--the proud, erect, democratic spirit.

It is not difficult to have good manners in a graded social system. It
is extremely difficult to have good manners in a Democracy. Any one can
easily be a snob, a looker-up and a looker-down. But how very difficult
it is to be a simple, unaffected man or woman, considerate, courteous,
looking all other men and women straight in the eyes and saying: “You
are certainly as good as I am. I hope I am as good as you are.”

“I am your equal” is at the basis of democratic bad manners. “You are
my equal” is the basis of democratic good manners.

Again and again in fashionable society, frequently among those most
prone to call their poorer countrymen and women ill-mannered, there are
barbarities and repulsive lapses of good taste not merely tolerated,
but approved as marks of fashion and refinement. For example: A rich
woman gives a cotillon, provides many thousand dollars’ worth of
handsome favors. You look about the ballroom--there sits a circle of
girls, pretty and ugly and passable, attractive and unattractive. Some
are loaded down with favors--you can hardly see their radiant faces
for the mass of articles which testify to their popularity.

Others have only a few favors, and those of the poorest. Yet there
they must sit, acting as foils for the pretty and lucky girls who are
emphasizing their homeliness and bad luck. Their sufferings do not show
in their faces--at least not very plainly. But they would not be human
if they did not feel the pangs of humiliated and wounded vanity at this
most conspicuous advertisement of their inferiority in charm.

Yet the cotillon is regarded as the very highest kind of refined social
entertainment. And hostesses will beam upon this sorry scene with
never a thought for the sufferings of their slighted and wounded girl
guests. In a truly refined society would any one ever give any form of
entertainment at which there would be frank discrimination among the
guests?

Again, a woman gives a dinner. You go to her house and find her
receiving in a magnificent dress and displaying hundreds of thousands
of dollars’ worth of jewelry. She is far and away the most gorgeously,
the most expensively dressed person at her dinner. She outshines all
her women guests. In a truly sensitively refined society would a
hostess do this? Would she not rather dress simply, even plainly?
Her dinner, and its service, should of course be the best she can
provide--there she is honoring her guests. But in her own dress, in
the one feature of her entertainment where invidious and humiliating
comparisons could be instantly made, she would think not of gratifying
her own vanity, but of putting her guests at their ease. And so she
would save her best jewels and dresses for places other than her own
house and eyes other than those of her own guests.

The kinds of grossly bad manners of which these are fair and familiar
examples would not surprise us in Europe, where the education is narrow
and souls are shaped in pettiness and vulgarity by class distinctions.
But they would and do surprise us in America.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is one trait in our national character that is a veritable
Gibraltar against caste tendencies. It is that passion for
up-to-dateness, which is so American, which is the cause of American
progress, which is the secret of the ever rising plane of the comfort
and intelligence of the American masses.

A European landowner or manufacturer, filled with the spirit of
conservatism, the spirit of “good enough” and “it will do” and “don’t
destroy old landmarks,” clings to musty and rusty antiquities, hampers
himself and his associates and neighbors, drags and makes them drag
at the wheels of advance. With the American, how quickly is the new
building, the new machine, the new method already improved into
antiquity! Away with it! Replace it by the latest and best. Better
one big item in the profit and loss account than steadily decreasing
profits and wages and products, and steadily increasing losses through
the triumphs of competitors. The new, always the new! The new, always
hopeful of the new! Give the new a trial! To-day must be better than
yesterday; to-morrow will surely be better still. That is America.

And this same spirit wages incessant and successful war against caste.
If the new man is the best man we put him to the front. Does our
“irreverence” for things ancient sometimes offend a super-æsthetic
few? It is a pity they are so enraptured by European picturesqueness
of the antique that they fail to note the European peasant bending
and groaning under the weight of the past. Does this disrespect for
hampering tradition proclaim us “new”? That is well. When did youth
become a calamity and a reproach? May we ever be “new,” looking at the
problems of life with hopeful young eyes, confident that better, more
beautiful things lie in the future than past suns ever shone upon.

There are two kinds of stability--the stability of the ship rotting at
its wharf; the stability of the ship, strong and steady, on its way
through the midst of the sea.

America is all for the latter. It abhors barnacles and rust. And it
combats monopolistic tendencies most fiercely because, however adroitly
disguised as “communities of interest,” they promote the stability of
stagnation, blindfold the eager eyes of competition, bribe brain and
muscle to sloth, hold up the heavy hands of sluggard and incompetent,
and discourage individual ambition and hope. There should be no
structure of any kind whatsoever, whether national or social, which,
when it has clearly outlived its use, can be saved by sentiment or
interest or bulwarks of brainless boodle-bags. And Democracy will have
none such. Let those who tremble for our future be calmed. As for those
who fancy they can in their own interest create such structures, let
them read history and learn to laugh at their folly.

The principle applies to those less tangible but more insidious
structures--those ideas that would give permanence or prominence to
people because of what some one else has been, or what they have been
in the past--structures existent only in the minds of comparatively
few, gone daft in their love of European imitation. But we tear down
too quickly for them. While the fine building of class distinctions is
constructing, changes occur that knock out the foundation stones.

An old New York “aristocrat”--his grandfather came over in the
steerage--glanced around the Metropolitan Opera House one night not
long ago and said: “There are not a dozen families on the list of
boxholders twenty years ago that are on that list to-day. All new
people--and from heaven knows where.” Where were the new people from?
Why, from whence this old “aristocrat’s” grandparents came, from where
his grandchildren will be.

Whenever a fence is put up by any group of people around themselves
one of two things happens. Either those inside grow terribly weary of
their exclusiveness, and, finding that no particular benefit seems to
be coming from it, voluntarily let down the fence; or the society-mad
herd, seeing the fence, makes a rush for it to get in. A coarse
rattling of hoofs and horns, a discovery of a loose paling, a crash, a
mad scramble, and there are more inside than out.

Democracy is as much the law of our social order as gravitation is of
our physical order. Those who don’t like it will, if they are wise,
either leave the country or adjust themselves and their children to
its conditions. For if they stay and bring up their children out of
harmony with the existing and unalterable order, their children will
be punished, even though they themselves, through obedience in their
earlier lives, escape the worst consequences of their folly.

The part of the coming generation that is trained in Democracy is the
part that will survive and prosper and progress. The part that is bred
in exclusiveness and caste feeling is going to be bitterly discontented
and deplorably unprogressive certainly, and in all probability, except
in a few rare cases, downright unprosperous.

Why do not the plutocratic “exclusives” and aspirants to exclusiveness
see these things and take warning? Because vanity is so much stronger
in influence over the average human being than is reason. They pile up
the millions, make safe investments, plot monopolies that will insure
stability of property, and imagine that their family line will be
secure. Then they educate their children to folly and superciliousness
and economic helplessness or at best give them a training not in
business, in useful labor, but in the truly aristocratic chicanery of
high finance. Thus does Nature, abhorring permanence, craftily use them
for their own undoing. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make
drunk on the fumes of vanity.

The plutocracy and its imitators bring up their children in hot-houses.
Some of the youngsters are ejected from the hot-house and exposed as
soon as they are grown--or sooner; others remain in the hot-house
and perhaps breed there. But the day of fate comes. The hot-house is
emptied or destroyed.

Fortunately for the masses and their children, fortunately for the
prosperity and progress of the race, few can build these hot-houses;
only a few can dwell in them. And with the swift progress of Democracy
in these modern days, this cruel, mocking favoritism swiftly decreases.

Manners there can be, but they must be democratic manners. Refinement,
culture, there can be, but it must be democratic. Idealism there can
be, but it must be true idealism, broad, deep and high, not a “class”
matter, not a vanity, not a pretentious crushing down of millions to
make luxurious holiday for a few.

The aristocratic idealisms in manners, education, politics, religion,
mode of life, are fleeing like shades of night before the bright
daylight of Democracy. Only ignorance could ever have thought them
fair.




CHAPTER X

THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY


Ever since the first tall chimneys unfurled the sooty banners of the
new, the industrial civilization, we have had the cry that the power
machine is a monster whose reign means the debasement of the masses
of mankind. And latterly, throughout the world, but most loudly in
America, which has been foremost in promoting the new order, it has
been charged that the men in control of the new order, the business
men, are merciless and relentless; that in the struggle for markets and
for profits they are trampling morality and all the other restraints
and ideals. Now comes Thorstein Veblen, lately Assistant Professor of
Political Economy at the University of Chicago, to formulate these
charges upon a scientific basis. In his _Theory of Business Enterprise_
he makes the following declarations of scientific principle:

First: That “the machine is a leveller, a vulgarizer, whose ends seem
to be the extirpation of all that is respectable, noble and dignified
in human intercourse and ideals”; that “in the nature of the case the
cultural growth dominated by the machine industry is of a skeptical,
matter-of-fact complexion, materialistic, unmoral, unpatriotic,
undevout”; that “the machine, their (the masses’) master, is no
respecter of persons, and knows neither morality nor dignity, nor
prescriptive right, divine or human.”

Second: That “the machine methods which are corrupting the hearts and
manners of the workmen are profitable to the business man.”

Third: That “the economic welfare of the community at large is best
secured by a facile and uninterrupted interplay of the various
processes which make up the industrial system at large; but the
pecuniary interests of the business men, in whose hands lies the
discretion in the matter, are not necessarily best served by an
unbroken maintenance of the industrial balance. Especially is this
true as regards those greater business men whose interests are very
extensive. Gain may come to them from a given disturbance of the
system, whether the disturbance makes for heightened facility or for
widespread hardship, very much as a speculator in grain futures may be
either a bull or a bear.”

Fourth: That, these being the facts, there has arisen a “class of
pecuniary experts” who “have an interest in making the disturbances
of the system large and frequent”; that, under the new civilization,
industry being carried on for business, and not business for the sake
of industry, such disturbances are as a matter of fact both large
and frequent, are incident to a merciless struggle among business
men for the supremacy which monopoly alone gives; that, while the
business man, in common with other men, is moved by humane ideals,
“motives of this kind detract from business efficiency, and an undue
yielding to them on the part of business men is to be deprecated as an
infirmity”; that, while sentiment has a certain force “in restraint
upon pecuniary advantage, not in abrogation of it,” the “code of
business ethics consists, after all, of mitigations of the maxim,
_caveat emptor_ (let the buyer beware)”; that, “under the system of
handicraft and neighborhood industry, the adage ‘Honesty is the best
policy’ seems, on the whole, to have been accepted and to have been
true. This adage has come down from the days before the machine’s
régime and before modern business enterprise”; that, under modern
circumstances of lack of personal contact between business man and
customer, “business management has a chance to proceed on a temperate
and sagacious calculation of profit and loss, untroubled by sentimental
considerations of human kindness or irritation or of honesty.”

Professor Veblen’s ideas have been given in his own language so far
as has been permitted by his passionate professorial predilection for
polysyllables--or, has he used long words and involved phrases from
the prudent motive of screening from “the vulgar” the ferocity of his
attack upon business men, rather than from the reactionary motive of
scholastic snobbery? However this may be, to close study he makes it
clear enough that, according to his reading of political economy:

First: The machine is a monster.

Second: It is making monsters of men--brutal serfs of the masses;
bandits, liars, thieves and cheats of the managers and directors.

A savage indictment that! A terrifying, topsy-turvying of the dearest
beliefs and hopes of us who look upon steam and electricity as
efficient agents of Democracy, the strong and inevitable unshacklers
of the bodies and minds of mankind. But Professor Veblen has stated
only the extreme of what is said without denial every day; he is simply
the courageous spokesman of the majority of the classes who write and
speak; he is putting into scientific formula the sneer of every snob
who professes contempt of business and, indeed, of all other forms of
modern democratic activity. His book, therefore, serves admirably as
a provocation for presenting a few facts and suggestions on the other
side.

Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our industrial
civilization is degrading the masses into mere appurtenances of the
machine, mere mechanical aids to the heaping up of vast profits in the
treasuries of the few? Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our
business men, whether great or small, whether captains of industry or
sub-officers, are degenerating into dishonesty and the short-sighted
selfishness of the slave-master?

A surface survey of our time reveals much that seems to compel a
reluctant affirmative answer. To glance at a newspaper is to read
of the cynical tyrannies of beef, oil, coal, iron, grain, railway
magnates, who make their infamies nauseating by ardent professions of
patriotism and piety. And from time to time the shameless adulterations
of food and drink culminate in some sensational slaughter of people
wholesale, suggesting vastly greater slaughters effected quietly from
day to day.

And we see persons grown enormously rich upon stolen privileges of
various kinds exhibiting themselves in luxurious ostentation, offering
tempting rewards to sycophancy and pauperizing those fighting on the
poverty line by supercilious gifts and condescensions. We see rascality
rewarded with wealth and honors, success bought with self-sale. We see
corruption, conspicuous and hideous, everywhere upon the surface of the
social body. And we turn away heartsick, convinced that the Veblens
have stated the truth with moderation.

But if we turn away to read history--not the fables and fancies, the
poetical romances and romantic poems from which the Veblens draw their
“facts,” but the true story of the mankind that was--if we read that
painful recital, we turn again to the mankind of our day, and it is
like a landscape from which the storms of winter are rolling away. The
corruption which revolted us is still there, just as hideous as before;
but we now see that it is the poison which was working in the veins and
arteries of the patient and is now at the surface, on its way out of
the body before the victorious legions of health.

Professor Veblen, and his like, are prone to use, in writing and
speaking, words of many meanings; they unconsciously play upon these
words, and so fall into grievous error. For instance, Professor Veblen
talks of ours as a “machine” civilization--as if the machine were its
new and characteristic factor, determining its form and its destiny.
In fact, civilization from its very inception has been “machine-made.”
It began when our remotest ancestor snatched the bough of a tree
and decided thenceforth to walk erect, using the bough as staff and
club--that is, as a machine. Every tool of every kind has been a
machine; and the progress of the race has been determined by the
number and efficiency of its machines, both those designed to compel
peace and those designed to further the arts of peace. If you wish
to measure the actual value of any civilization--value in producing
healthy minds in healthy bodies--you need only inquire into the kind
and number and efficiency of its machines. Why? Because the machine
represents the effort of man to adjust himself to his environment, his
environment to himself. It gives power to him, whoever he may be, that
learns to use it; it leaves him who does not avail himself of its aid,
whether through idleness or ignorance or intemperance or incapacity,
about where he would have been--certainly no worse off than he would
have been--had mankind remained in the helpless, machineless “state of
nature.”

Evolution has so unevenly affected the human race that, fortunately for
us in the foremost files of progress, we need not rely upon history
and cautious conjecture for our encouraging and inspiring knowledge of
the world of the past, which enables us to see how far and how high we
have got, and that the journey is still swiftly, if steeply, upward.
There is hardly a stage of human progress that is not now represented
on the earth, inviting any man with a passion for the “glorious past,”
to disillusionize himself and cheer his pessimism. And we are enabled
easily to reconstruct any period of the past. Thus, we have visual
confirmation of the truth about Athens which history can only suggest.
We know that the Athens of Plato and Praxiteles was no more the true
Athens than is the intellect and tradition of Booker Washington a true
type of the intelligence and condition of the overwhelming mass of our
eight million negroes. We come to understand what Athens’ twenty-five
thousand free citizens and many hundred thousand slaves really meant;
we penetrate into the profligacy of the Athenian rich, the degradation
of the Athenian masses; we realize why Aristides was banished for being
just and Alcibiades carried on the shoulders of the Athenian Democracy
(!) because he was a degenerate and a debauchee. And so on through all
the past.

In like manner, we need not rely upon the poets and poetical
historians, as Professor Veblen apparently does, for knowledge of what
the “handicraft” civilization meant. We can study it, as it survives
practically unchanged in the miserable hovels of Bohemian and Italian
and Spanish peasants, where men and beasts rot together in conditions
of sanitation that would not long be tolerated in any place where the
“machine civilization” has inaugurated its high and ever higher moral
and physical standards. We need not go so far from home. To get a
picture of a prosperous handicraft city of the middle ages, go to New
York’s East Side, where are the fast disappearing sweatshops that were
transplanted from “handicraft neighborhoods” of Europe. The poets have
it otherwise; and so do those historians who like to paint alluring
pictures for their readers--and hate to grub for facts. But there is
the grisly truth. Contrast the average sweatshop with the average
factory. No; contrast the best sweatshop with the worst factory.

Partly because some men are so much shrewder and more persistent and
more far-sighted than the masses of their fellows, but chiefly because
the mass of mankind has not been long enough emancipated by the power
of the machine to learn how to work intelligently and efficiently,
the power machine, become enormously beneficent through steam and
electricity, has not yet done all, or even more than a very small part,
of what it can do, and shall do, for mankind. But already--in less
than ten decades, less than seven--what a forward stride! In place of
a world where all but a handful toiled early and late--from dawn until
far into the night--toiled that others might reap all and they only
blows and the meagre bread of bitterness, we now have a world where
millions upon millions are comfortable. And as for the masses and
toilers still in the shackles of the old régime, are they not better
off than they were under that régime where wages were alms, and alms
of the scantiest; where the only lights in the black darkness of utter
ignorance were the will-o’-the-wisps of Superstition, drawing man
farther and farther into the morass of slavery to king and noble and
priest?

In writing works on political economy, professors should not study the
conditions of labor before steam and electricity in poems and romances
and from orchestra stalls at productions of “Die Meistersinger.” There
is not a serf toiling in the deepest depth of the most hell-like mine
in Siberia, upon whose shoulders, and upon whose soul, the burden is
not lighter for the modern expansion of the civilization of the machine.

The truth is, steam and electricity have made the human race suddenly
and acutely self-conscious as a race for the first time in its
existence. They have constructed a mighty mirror wherein humanity sees
itself, with all its faults and follies, and diseases and deformities.
And the sudden, unprecedented spectacle is so startling, is in such
abhorrent contrast with poetical pictures of the past, painted in
school and popular text-books, that men of defective perspective
shrink, and shriek: “Mankind has become monstrous!” But not so. Man,
rising, rising, rising through the ages, is not nearer to the dark and
bloody and cruel place of his origin than to the promised land toward
which his ideals are drawing him. His diseases and deformities are
of the past; and virtues that were, up to a few decades ago, almost
unattainable ideals, are now so nearly a part of his natural adornment
that hope of the nearness of the luminous penumbra of the Golden Age
seems not unjustified.

What our grandfathers regarded as the natural and just demands of
employer upon employé are now regarded as rigorous and tyrannous
exactions of a brute. And in trying still to continue such exactions
men slink behind the lawyer-constructed shield of the corporation, that
they may be easier in conscience by trying to believe they are not
“personally” responsible.

This brings us, naturally, to the charges against business men.

Professor Veblen does not, in so many words, assert that there was a
time when business men were in business with other motives--presumably
idealistic--more potent than profits. But he forces his readers to
infer that this was the case--and that lofty view is always taken by
the assailants of our present civilization. That is, man used to be an
altruistic animal; Democracy and the machine--for you will find that
these assailants are always hitting at Democracy over the shoulders of
the machine--have made him a selfish and cruel rascal.

False weights were found in the ruins of the oldest city that has
yet been exhumed. And false weights will probably be consumed when
the earth drops into the sun and the heavens are rolled together
like a scroll. Ancient records and ancient statute books are full of
evidence that every new plundering device--from capitalistic and labor
monopolies, secret rebates and majority owners swindling minority
owners, down to adulterations and crooked scales--was familiar to our
ancestors of the plateau of Iran before the migrations. Vice is the
old inhabitant; virtue is the newcomer, the immigrant, received with
reluctance and compelled to fight for every inch of ground he gains.
As for specific testimony as to past ages, we have the testimony of
all the old writers that the mercantile classes, the business men,
were “without honor,” mean of soul, oppressors of their employés,
robbers of their customers. We happen to know, also, that as for the
other classes--the proud kings and haughty nobles and the rest--they
certainly had a very quaint interpretation of that word “honor” when a
murderer, a tyrant, a gambler, a practitioner of every vice that rots
its slave and ruins its victims could yet be a “gentleman of unsullied
honor.” And we know, finally, that only with the rise of the business
men to influence and authority did the standard of honor become what
all the world now recognizes as “ideal.” The very Biblical phrases in
which honesty is enjoined are altogether commercial, are the language
of the business world, of business men.

There are two vital facts about our new industrial civilization which
its critics neglect:

First--It has created an unprecedented and infinitely great number
of opportunities to dishonesty of the kinds that are, to as yet but
slightly enlightened human nature, potently tempting.

Second--It has created new conditions of the moral, as well as of the
material, relations of man to the masses of his fellow-men which are as
yet imperfectly understood and constitute a debatable ground for even
the fairest and rigidest consciences. Men now see that large action of
any kind involves large evil as well as large good; and the balance of
right and wrong is not easy to adjust, except in the tranquil studies
of critics and theorists.

To the first of these two facts may justly be attributed the
unquestionably large amount of dishonesty--dishonesty clearly and
generally recognized as such. To the second of these two facts is
undoubtedly due the most of the wrong-doing by men who in their private
relations are above reproach. These statements are not put forward to
justify men for yielding to temptation to dishonesty and to justify
men in acts, approval of which can be got from conscience by sophistry
only, if at all. They are put forward simply to explain why it is that,
when there are actually more honesty and conscientiousness, and they of
a higher quality, than ever before in human history, there should be a
seeming of more dishonesty and consciencelessness. Further in support
of the same view, while wrongdoers of the past were hidden or veiled
by the imperfect means of publicity, wrongdoers of to-day are at once
searched out and pilloried by the press and by public opinion. Up to
the middle of the last century men knew little of the large evil done
them, and that little imperfectly; now, knowledge of individual acts
of uprightness, once scattered everywhere by being immortalized in
tradition, rhymed and prose, is lost in the vast revelations of huge
and ancient wrongs persisting.

It is no new thing for a man to be admired and envied for wealth and
station, regardless of how he got them. But it is a new thing in
the world for the public conscience to be so sensitive that a man
in possession of wealth or station, got not by outright and open
robbery--methods not long ago regarded without grave disapproval--but
by means that are questionable and suspicious merely, should be in an
apologetic attitude, should feel called upon to defend himself and
to give large sums in philanthropy in the effort to justify and to
rehabilitate himself. Steam and electricity have given to man a sudden,
vast power. It is not strange that he should commit errors and crimes
in working out its unfamiliar possibilities. It is not strange that
abuses, as old as the selfish struggle for existence, should succeed in
adapting themselves to the new conditions, should contrive to persist.
But is it not strange that professors of political economy, supposedly
familiar with the truth about the past, should be so narrow and twisted
in historic and psychological perspective as to misunderstand these
simple phenomena? And what must we think of them if, in support of
their pessimistic and unwarranted jeremiads, they conjure the fantastic
and preposterous and long-exploded myth of humanity’s past Golden Age?

According to Professor Veblen, honesty is no longer the best _policy_.
What an incredible misreading of the very sign-board of our time! Under
the old régime of priest or soldier or prince, honesty was distinctly
not the best policy. Strategy, dexterity, chicane, finesse, sophistry,
cozening--these were the sure, the only ways to preferment. For, under
those régimes preferment meant securing the right to live without work
upon the toil of others. And, to confine ourselves to the mercantile
classes, was not the successful business man he who got from prince or
priest or tyrant the right to rob the people, he who got a monopoly or
a license or a concession?

How is it under the new régime, the democratic, the “vulgarizing”
régime of the business man? Our chief troubles come from survivals
into the present of the tenacious roots of the past’s methods to
success, come from the persistence of the idea that by wit and not
by wisdom and justice does the truly strong man truly prevail. But
slowly--and surely!--the “vulgar” régime is enforcing the laws and
sanctions of “vulgar” morality. Even our robber barons demand honesty,
strict honesty, among themselves in their conspiracies to monopolize
to their own profit the benefits intended for all. When they violate
the law of honesty, they do it in secrecy and make haste to deny their
crime and to return to their allegiance to the law. Honesty is the
very ground upon which a commercial civilization must rest. That our
business men are, as a class, and with rare exceptions, honest, keeping
their bargains, giving and receiving the value agreed upon, is proved
beyond question by the fact that we as a nation prosper, that our
abject poverty is almost confined to newly arrived immigrants and to
our only recently emancipated negroes.

Where a prince is armed with power arbitrarily to suspend the natural
laws governing the intercourse of human beings, lies and dishonesty
may, for a time, prosper; but not where the sole basis of intercourse
is the voluntary belief of men in each other’s integrity. And more
than ninety per cent. of our business is done upon credit! Under the
old order, the very laws and customs, the very morality taught by the
church, was grounded upon the justice of the unjust distribution of the
products of labor; under the new régime, under “business enterprise,”
law and custom and religion teach only value for value received.

Professor Veblen does well to criticise the misguided attempts of
philanthropy and so-called charity to restore the old relations of
superior and inferior. But his criticism that they are insufficient and
not in keeping with the “machine civilization’s” merciless demand for
economic efficiency does not go far enough. They are also unnecessary,
and in large measure productive of greater ills--of pauperism and
dependence--than those they seek to mitigate. The ills are not
machine-created. They are inherent in the imperfect nature of man.
They will tend wholly to disappear only when the machine’s “merciless”
demand for efficiency is rigidly enforced. For, what is that
“merciless” demand? What does the machine say to man? It says, “Work
is not a curse, but a blessing. In a leisure class the only culture
is of the germs of profligacy, superciliousness, snobbery and decay.
All men must work, and must learn to work well. All men must serve
that they may pay for service rendered. And where that order prevails,
to the worker will come the full reward for his work. I, the machine,
will make your burden into a blessing, your toil into labor, the noble,
the dignified, the producer of civilization and self-respect. I will
widen your horizon until you see that all men are brothers, brothers
in the business of, by business enterprise, increasing and creating
wants, and of, by business enterprise, satisfying them. I will give
you ideals that are true and just--not loyalty to idle, thieving
prince, not slavery to irrational superstition, not bondage to bloody
soldier-tyrant, but intelligent loyalty to truth and justice and
progress. I will make you master of nature and of yourself, servant of
the true religion and the true morality.”

Until now has been reserved the inquiry into how it happens that these
critics of industrialism fall into their fatal errors. That inquiry
will not long detain us. Professor Veblen naïvely gives himself and
his fellow-critics away. He confesses why he hates the régime of
the business man, what he means when he calls the machine industry
“materialistic, unmoral, undevout.” “Business life,” he says, “does
not further the growth of manners and breeding, pride of caste,
punctilios of honor or even religious fervor.” And he finds his hope
for the future in militarism and imperialism--which he, by the way,
unjustly charges to the business men instead of to the politicians
pandering to the still lively passions of man’s inheritance from the
past when all the world was militaristic and imperialistic. “There can
be no serious question,” says he, “but that a consistent return to
the ancient virtues of allegiance, piety, servility, graded dignity,
class prerogatives, and prescriptive authority would greatly conduce
to popular content and to the facile management of affairs.” Nor does
he conceal under the ponderous sarcasm lurking in that statement the
truth of his own fixed belief in at least a measure of those “ancient
virtues.” For his whole book, and the speeches and writings of
practically all the critics of industrialism, show that these critics
abhor the new virtues as “materialistic.”

The motive in the mind of each critic is a little different from that
of his fellow-critics. One wishes college professors and the like
to be in control; another is for the supremacy of birth; another for
the supremacy of culture, whatever that may mean. Another wants the
preacher back at the helm, with mankind an open-mouthed, uncritical
congregation. Each wants the particular class or condition to which
he himself has the good fortune to belong, to have the chief say in
affairs. But all agree in denouncing the business man who is actually
in control--and will remain there. They profess to despise money, yet
they hate him for his profits. They profess to prefer the intellectual
and moral dividends which their own intellectual and moral enterprises
declare; yet their dainty fingers twitch for the material dividends
which his material enterprises naturally declare. They would deny him
the gains which are the only--and, as they loudly profess, the poor
enough--rewards for wasting his life upon the gross and sordid things.

The business man--and that means the worker, the “toiler”--is in
control, is there to stay, because the human animal is so constituted
that its material affairs--proper food, proper clothing, proper
shelter--must always be primal. Not of the _highest_ importance, but
of the _first_ importance. And if those material matters are well
attended to--as they will be when the worker’s instinct pervades the
whole race--the spiritual matters, the growth of body and soul, must
inevitably prosper. The worker, the worker’s instinct, provides the
right soil for a soul to grow in--a real soil, full of the natural
and nourishing substances, not a fanciful, unsubstantial soil of
false ideals, fraudulent culture and barren fiddle-faddle of closet
theorizings.

For proof that the business instinct will provide the right soil we
need only point to our own country as it is. In America, the great
business nation of the nations, there lives a race of idealists,
eighty millions earnest, dominated by the instincts for self-help and
helpfulness to others, afire with the passion for improvement, for
education, for knowledge of all kinds and from any and all sources.

The world has wandered in the swamps of vain and sentimental imaginings
long enough. By all means, let us have it established on the firm
ground and in the straight, upward roads of science and business.
The sun shines upon those roads by day, the moon and the stars light
them by night; the flowers bloom beside them--and within reach of the
humblest wayfarer.

This gospel will not be attractive to _poseurs_ and to the lazy and
the incompetent. But it is gospel, the gospel of Democracy, America’s
gospel. In the cargo of merchandise, Enlightenment and Democracy always
travel as stowaway missionaries; when the cargo is landed, they go
ashore and begin to preach.




CHAPTER XI

DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO


Education is the huge dynamo which supplies power to the American
people. Not in history or in legend is there recorded such an outburst
of international curiosity as that about the real America, as
distinguished from the America created in the minds of Europeans by
our multi-millionaires, since it became not merely agricultural but
also an industrial world-factor, inevitably dominant in an era whose
civilization is the first based upon peace and indissolubly wedded to
peaceful arts. Europe has not been satisfied with inspecting what comes
to her. Such specimens only whetted her curiosity to an edge as fine
as that which cut the home ties of adventurous spirits when Columbus
exhibited his Indians and his gold at the court of his patrons.

The Europeans, and the Asiatics, too, hastened to dispatch to us all
manner of commissioners, semi-official and private, from princes of
reigning houses to delegates from labor unions. And each of these
spies--of the splendid modern kind--has been charged to seek and find
and forthwith bring home an answer to the all-important question: “How
_do_ they do it?”

And these gentlemen have peeked and poked and peered in the
friendliest, most flattering way imaginable. They have examined palace
and tenement and cottage, and their tenants. They have eaten and drunk
of all the products of the land, and have listened to speeches numerous
and have read newspapers numberless. They have watched wheels go round
in factories--and in heads as well. They have heard those who say “the
captains of industry did it,” those who say “it was done in spite of
the captains of industry and the high financiers.” And after tasting
and seeing and smelling and touching and hearing, from Maine to the
Golden Gate, these envoys have gone back, and with one accord have
replied:

“They do it by education.”

From the end of the Civil War--an interruption of our progress to rid
ourselves of a drag upon it--we have been educating as we never did
before, as no other people ever did or now does. Immigrants have
poured in; our great “infant industry” which protectionist and free
trader alike believe in protecting and fostering, has been exceedingly
expansive. And we have put home and foreign product into the great
educational plant--from half to two-thirds of all between five years
old and twenty going through school and academy and college. The
average annual number who now receive formal education is one-fifth
of our total population. And more than a million of our young men and
women--one in every ten of both sexes of the higher education age, one
in every six young men of that age--are annually in the universities,
colleges, academies, business and professional schools. Not enough, not
nearly enough; but in hopeful proportion to what used to be.

“I think, therefore I am,” runs the Descartes formula. We teach our
youth to think in order that they may really _be_--be individual, be
proud and self-respecting and self-reliant, be free with the freedom no
government or law can give or secure, or take away. In the educational
institutions this impulse gets form and direction that it may develop
efficient manhood. And against the thinking toiler all the forces
of ignorance and passion and wasteful luxury, of base and foolish
political, social, industrial ideas, cannot prevail.

The first free school opened on these shores was in New York City on
Manhattan Island. Of all the settlers who came to America the Dutch
alone understood and believed in the free public school, offering free
education not as alms but as a right. They had had it at home. They
established it here, and set the example which was followed by the
other colonists, first of all by those New Englanders who had lived in
the Holland that fought Alva and Philip, and had there absorbed some
democratic ideas. Holland was the godmother of modern Democracy, was
the nursery of the modern public school.

These words are from the pen of John of Nassau, the oldest brother of
that friend of civil and religious liberty, William the Silent:

“Soldiers and patriots thus educated (in free schools) are better than
all armies, arsenals, armories, munitions, alliances and treaties that
can be had or imagined in the world.”

Those words, written three hundred years ago by a man who had devoted
his life to the study of the rights and wrongs of the common man, sum
up the whole story. How his eloquent common sense contrasts with the
shrieking of those little Americans who think that a cannon shot can
penetrate further than a noble idea! How this old friend of freedom
rebukes the puny, alleged statesmen who fancy that the manhood of
this republic was developed on the battlefields, instead of realizing
that military prowess is only one matter-of-course evidence of its
existence! Enlightenment and Democracy make men who _live_ for their
country--and that is the new force in the world.

Let the people who fear for the future of the democratic spirit
of this people look upon the spectacle of our free schools, those
millions of young heads bent over books, those millions of young
brains learning to think, to reason, learning to use mind and body in
the service of civilization, real civilization. Enlightenment has won
all the victories of the republic in the past. Its eternal warfare
upon ignorance and incompetence, upon craft of plutocrat and craft of
demagogue, and plausible idealism of reactionary, is the safeguard of
the republic’s future. And one of the great agents of enlightenment, of
Democracy--not the only great agent, not the greatest agent--is formal
education in school, academy and college.

And more important even than the formal education of the boys is the
formal education of the girls. The other means to enlightenment are
more accessible to the men--indeed, they compel the men to become less
ignorant and less prejudiced in spite of themselves. But to reach
the women, the formal education is almost indispensable, for their
ignorance and their prejudice are more sheltered, less open to the
light of Democracy that floods the arenas and the market places.

And educated, enlightened, democratic women are of the highest
importance to America, whose mission seems to be to lead the world in
the march upward to that Arcady where every human unit shall have the
chance to count as one.

Our extensive and our expanding system of higher education of women
is often bitterly assailed by educated men, by educators. Bourbonism,
especially when bulwarked by vanity, does not yield easily. And it will
be many a day before death reaps the last man with the passion for
looking down on his fellow-creatures. To avoid useless dispute, admit
that woman should look up to man. Still there remains unimpaired the
truth that woman’s two highest functions are to be the companion of
man and the mother of men. The profitable companion for an educated
man must be an educated woman--educated not merely for man’s “hours of
ease,” nor for his happily infrequent hours “when pain and anguish rack
the brow,” but also for the hours of development and endeavor.

So long as so-called education consisted in a little Latin and less
Greek, forgotten as speedily as the business of life could crowd it
from the mind, higher education was as unimportant to women as--well,
as it was to man. But now that education consists in teaching not how
the Greeks and Romans lived, but how “you and I” must live to-day and
to-morrow, the gap between the man who has had the higher education
and the woman who has not had it and has not supplied the deficiency,
is wide indeed and will grow wider. If as much attention were given to
the relations between men and women from five years after marriage on
to the end as is given to their relations during the purely sentimental
and transitory mating season this difference would appear in its true
importance.

The same point of view applies to woman as a mother. So long as the
training of children centred around the slipper and the switch, an
ignorant mother was not at a great disadvantage--the best educated
mothers knew little. But now-a-days the child of the highly educated
mother has an enormous advantage, other things being equal, because
such a mother applies science to the conduct of her home as her husband
applies it to the conduct of his profession or business.

No education in the mother will compensate for lack of character.
Character without education is infinitely better than education without
character. But character plus education is the true ideal--and it is
attainable.

If we are speedily to enter more fully into the rich promised land
which Democracy opens to us, we must have not only the man who knows
but the woman who knows. After all, is not our ultimate excuse for
being alive that we are the parents of the next generation? And there
the woman, with practically absolute control over the next generation
at its vital, formative age, has the better of the man. If anything,
does she not need the higher education more than does the man?

Education for the men; education for the women. But it must be
_enlightened and enlightening_ education.

Our national ideal is not a powerful state, famed and feared for
bluster and appetite, not a people welded by unthinking passion for
military glory into an instrument to the greed and vanity of the few;
but manhood and womanhood, a citizenship ever wiser and stronger and
more civilized, with ever more and more individual units that cannot
be controlled in the mass--the democratic man and the democratic
woman--alert, enlightened, self-reliant, free.

Now, there can be no difference of opinion as to the way to this ideal,
the way to make the individual capable to work out his own salvation
without hindrance from the aggressiveness of his neighbor or neighbors,
without hindrance from the prejudices begotten in and of the darkness
of his own ignorance.

Against all these foes, those without, those within, there is just one
effective weapon--education.

It is impossible for an ignorant man to be free. No matter what
constitutions you establish, no matter what laws you pass, no matter
how assiduously you safeguard individual rights and liberties, the
ignorant man will still be a slave. He rejoices in his chains, his
prejudices and his superstitions. He clings to them. He beats off those
who seek to deliver. He welcomes those who seek to bind. He shouts for
chains, he votes for chains--chains for himself, chains for others. If
he is ever in the right it is because he is mistaken. And you may be
certain that a demagogue or other slave-hunter will soon recapture him
and restore him to his beloved bondage of error.

This is why the man who aspires to freedom instinctively reaches for
the weapon of education. This is why the American people always have
had as their dominant passion the passion for education. This is why on
the frontier the schoolhouse is finished before the home is furnished;
why the washerwoman and the drayman toil to keep their children in
school and to send at least one son to college; why our self-made men
pour out their wealth in educational endowments; why there are all
these colossal public appropriations for schools, academies, colleges,
universities.

What is an ignorant man?

Of course there are the illiterates and the almost illiterate. But,
numerous though they are, they do not count for much in this republic.
They do not decide elections. They do not select candidates. They do
not propose and compel legislation. The so-called ignorant vote is not
a national or a local peril. It is not a national, rarely even a local
factor.

The ignorance that counts in a Democracy is educated ignorance.
Sometimes it has only been part of the way through the common schools.
Sometimes it has one or more university degrees. Sometimes it struts
and preens itself as “the scholar in politics.” Only too often it
writes books, especially histories, and in the magazines and in the
newspapers tells how and for whom we ought to vote. More often than
not the very conspicuous members of this ignorant class are full to
the overflowing with knowledge, knowledge from books, knowledge from
experience, knowledge from travel.

No, education--democratic education--is not knowledge. It is not even
experience. Profound, deadly, dangerous ignorance is compatible with
both.

What, then, is ignorance?

All its shades and kinds can be so classified as to exclude none who
ought to be included, include none who has the right to go free. Is not
the dangerous, ignorant man of the Democracy the man who cannot reason,
cannot think for himself?

What does it mean to think for one’s self?

Fortunately, it does not mean original thinking. If that were so there
would instantly arise in the world the most contracted and exclusive
aristocracy it has ever known. To think for one’s self does not even
mean correctly to reason out one’s own conclusions from given premises.
That would involve an amount of mental labor from which many brains
might shrink. It merely means to be able to follow reasoning that is
laid before one; to hear both sides and suspend judgment until both are
heard; to recognize which is sound and which fallacious, and upon that
independent and clear judgment to accept the true, or rather, to reject
the false.

A Democracy must breed citizens who think for themselves. Without them
it cannot live. With them it cannot die. Hence it follows that in a
Democracy education means to cultivate the ability to think for one’s
self. Democracy means the right of private judgment. Education in and
for a Democracy means development of the capacity to form private
judgment.

So far as the Democracy is concerned, so far as the equable
distribution of rights and liberties is concerned, no education that
does not increase reasonableness is of the slightest value.

The education that has for its chief aims, its only real aims, culture,
refinement, knowledge, learning, may be useful to an aristocracy like
Great Britain, to an empire like Germany, to an autocracy like Russia.
But it is not only not helpful to but actually hostile to democratic
ideas and ideals. It breeds contempt on the one hand, fear and
suspicion and hate on the other--the few looking down upon the many,
the many looking up at the few. It makes the powerful supercilious. It
makes the weak, whether educated or uneducated, helpless. It fills the
brain; it does not necessarily strengthen the brain. It _gives_ a man
something; it does not compel him to make something of himself.

The truth about democratic education is indirectly recognized in
practice more and more as science and its rigidly logical methods have
grown in educational importance. All our modern systems of education
are based perforce, rather than by design, in part upon teaching the
brain to reason. But do we realize fully as yet that for us, for our
democratic purposes of self-development and self-government, teaching
the brain to think is not only the whole foundation of education, but
also the sustaining part of the superstructure?

Take up any one of the great newspapers of the country, the great
reflectors of the public mind and heart and taste. A few minutes’
searching among the advertisements will discover columns on columns
of notices of astrologers and palmists and clairvoyants, of mediums
and crystal gazers and cure-all doctors with their cure-all medicines.
To whom do these dealers in the secrets of life and death, the future
and the beyond, appeal for their comfortable incomes? To those who
cannot read? Manifestly not. To the people in the humbler walks of
life? Certainly not. No, they are inviting the educated classes to
call--merchants and bankers and artisans, their wives and their
daughters, the “well-to-do,” the reading public, the “substantial,”
the part of the people which is commonly called “the backbone of the
republic.”

Go on to the news columns. You find some account of the doings of
a band of thieves who have got possession of some department or
departments of the city or state government, and have substituted for
the statute law the law of loot. Who turned over the keys to them?
The illiterate, the dishonest, the criminal? Not at all. Look at the
primary rolls of the organization whom these wretches disgrace, and
you find a thoroughly respectable, in the main intelligent, certainly
honest, body of voters. By no stretch of the meaning could you call
them uneducated in the sense in which that term is commonly used.

In the very next column, perhaps, you read how a statesman of pious
mien and impressive manner has been assuring his fellow-countrymen
that they have a commission from the Almighty (which he begs leave to
execute) calling them from their peaceful and orderly occupations and
sending them forth to slaughter certain other men of whom they had
not heard until a few months ago, to seize persons and property and
to administer upon them arbitrarily. And who cheered wildly as these
tidings of morality and civilization were proclaiming? Illiterates?
Certainly not; but educated men, many of them highly educated, men
who would hardly characterize such performances in private life as
“manifest destiny” and “plain duty.”

A few columns further on and you read how one is wailing like a lost
soul over heaps of scrap metal and rags and waste paper, because he
cannot get permission to work them over into money and so make us
all millionaires. And who is he? A college graduate. And who are his
supporters? Millions who have gone to school and take in the newspapers
and magazines.

These few illustrations of the reign of illogic are cited from the
multitude available with a double purpose. In the first place, they
faintly suggest to what an extent the citizen of a Democracy is prey
to charlatanism. In countries with other forms of government--in
monarchies and the like--a few charlatans are licensed and erected into
respectability and power, and given the range of the people, while all
others are rigidly repressed. In a Democracy any charlatan may license
himself. The people are prey to every and any form of charlatanism,
fraudulent or both. They must protect themselves, or they will not be
protected at all. And right education is the only means.

The second point made obvious by these examples of superstition
theological, superstition medical, superstition political, is that
our education in the past must have been defective and must still be
so. It has been seeking, it now seeks, as its chief object, to impart
knowledge, not to cultivate the art of using knowledge, the art of
thinking correctly.

The ideal has been an education that is reminiscent and is only
incidentally constructive. The democratic ideal is the education that
is constructive and only incidentally reminiscent.

There is only one way to this true education. Just as a child is taught
to walk, to ride, to swim, just as it is taught to read, to write, to
cipher, with just as much care, with just as much patience, with just
as much deliberateness of purpose, must it be taught to reason.

This is not in advocacy of courses in formal logic. Those courses do
not teach men to think. They teach men what certain other men have
thought about the processes of thinking. And too often they teach it
in such a way as to discourage the exercise of the reasoning faculty.
No; the education that will soundly educate must make of every kind
of lesson a lesson in logic, an incessant pointing out of reasons,
reasons, reasons why certain facts are so, certain allegations false;
an incessant demand that reasons, reasons, reasons be given--always
reasons. The interrogation point should be the symbol over the door
of every school, high and low, as the indication of what is going on
within.

The average child starts in life with a question mark at the tip of
every sense. Why does this inquisitiveness gradually disappear or
become perverted into curiosity about trivialities? Why does going to
school become a burden? Why are so many classes at college listless and
inattentive? Why does the light, the frivolous, the thoughtless attract
and hold, while that which is in reality far more interesting wearies
and repels? Is it not because this reasoning faculty is allowed to grow
up “any which way,” and is discouraged or suppressed wherever memory or
some other form of some one’s else ideas can be substituted? Is it not
because to reason comes to seem a burden, a bore, a pain? Would that be
so if education were rightly based, rightly built?

We Americans reason better, perhaps, than any other nation about a
wider range of affairs; probably not with so much depth as some other
peoples, but certainly with greater clearness. But this is due to a
compulsory training almost altogether outside of the schoolroom. It is
due to Democracy, that compels the mind to grow as Spring’s sunshine
compels the seed. As our affairs, both public and private, have grown
more complex, the defects due to this haphazard education of the
reasoning faculty, this treatment of it almost as if it were a weed,
become more and more apparent, more and more in need of correction.

Common sense is looked upon as a gift of the gods, a sort of intuition.
Is it not in reality merely the result of a somewhat better natural or
acquired reasoning faculty? Ought not common sense to be the attainable
possession of every American? And where but the schoolhouse is the
place to obtain this possession, this means to self-rule, to freedom,
to the full splendor of the noblest of human ideals, Democracy?

In a Democracy the school should not be the temple of knowledge. It
should be the temple of reason. And it shall be! And that day will be a
sad one for charlatanism and for charlatans.




CHAPTER XII

A NATION OF DREAMERS


Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in
exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the
doctors and the druggists a thousand millions or so each year in
seeking relief from the consequences of our ignorance and our folly
in feeding ourselves. Some of us are too poor to get the right sort
of food, even when we know what is the right kind; others are both
ignorant and incapable of resisting the clamors of appetite. The
problems of mental and physical food are not analogous; they are two
parts of a whole. Our ignorance of chemistry and hygiene and our
unguarded appetites lead us into gastronomic folly; our ignorance of
the simple and easily learned laws of the mind and our vitiated and
undiscriminating mental appetites, called passions and prejudices, lead
us into educational follies as wild but no wilder than our gastronomic
follies. The results of the one show in poor health; the results of
the other show in confusion in the conduct of our affairs, private and
public.

Some of us have no means of getting good mental food, and would not
know what to select and what to reject if we had. Others, and these are
the overwhelming majority, have no power to discriminate between the
true and the false, the rational and the irrational, between that which
strengthens the powers of the mind and that which weakens or perverts
them. We take in cheap or worthless mental food just as we put cheap or
worthless stuff into our stomachs. We take in that which is easy and
pleasant to the taste--that is, we patronize the intellectual pastry
cooks and confectioners too liberally. Or, we go to the purveyors of
the strong waters of passion and prejudice, and under the influence of
such whiskies and brandies imagine ourselves beings of extraordinary
and fine mentality.

There is as much, indeed, there is greater, cause for alarm over the
gastronomic than over the mental follies. But neither kind is evidence
that we are on the down grade. We are more alert and wiser all the
time in matters of physical health, despite our own appetites and
foolish inclinations and lazy disinclinations, despite the pretentious
ignorance of the medical profession and the shrewd chicanery of the
quacks. In the same manner we are more and more alive to the importance
of mental health, of the well-fed, well-exercised brain; and this
improvement goes steadily forward, despite the harmful effects of
alleged literature and drama, despite the pretentious ignorance of
our regularly constituted teachers, despite the energetic educational
quackeries of false learning, false culture and false taste.
Intelligence will spread; Democracy will compel.

A hundred years ago small indeed was the part of the human race that
could be reached by an appeal to the reason. To-day in many parts of
the civilized world advances begin to be made not alone by appeals
to empty stomachs, by shouts about full and empty dinner pails, but
by real intellectual force. There are even a few rare but highly
significant instances of masses of men being induced to sacrifice a
small immediate good to gain a remoter larger good. That is, the masses
begin to show signs of that same intelligent foresight which created
and maintained class rule in times past, which makes some successful
far beyond their fellows. And those who are so greatly concerned by the
vast concentration of machinery and capital in a few hands fail to give
proper consideration to the two most important points, more important
far than the evils of concentration of wealth and power:

First: Concentrations of capital are at the mercy of brains. They are
impotent unless they are administered by brains, administered by a
multitude of brains working intelligently and harmoniously for a common
end.

Second: Their evil consequences result from lack of reasoning power,
lack of far-sightedness, due to imperfect education in the managers;
lack of knowledge how to protect their own interests on the part of the
masses.

On one hand we see an enormous increase in the brain power of the
people--a multitude able to think, eager to think, not to be prevented
from thinking, where only two or three generations ago the thinking was
done exclusively by the few. On the other hand we see the necessity for
more thinking, for vigorous stirring-up of the minds of the masses,
for more and more education. And, year by year, the stirring-up process
increases. The evils of the present day are as old as the race, as old
as ignorance, as old as human frailty. The good, the benefits, are new,
entirely new.

The material and mental forces of modern civilization have already
wrought wonders. Think of it! Less than a century and a half ago the
world for the first time heard a plea for the freedom, the dignity,
the individuality of man. To-day millions of minds have that gospel as
their fundamental creed. And freedom of thought, freedom of action, is
the realized ideal of many nations, the realizing ideal of almost all
the others. Why should we fear that the idea of manhood will lose its
charm; that the democratic ideal, which has real beauty, should prove
less attractive than the old ideal of inequality and injustice and
inhumanity, which is now seen to be in fact hideous? Why should we fear
that as we grow in enlightenment, grow in capacity to think and act
with freedom, we should care less and less about thinking and acting
with freedom?

What will come out of this vast, unbarriered flood of sunshine of
enlightenment, out of these concentrations social called cities,
these concentrations industrial called combinations? Who can say? Who
would care to destroy life’s chief interest, the veiled future, by
foreseeing? One thing we can be assured of--it will not be tyranny.
It could not be tyranny, because the light of intellect, of real
intelligence, is now in millions of minds, is kindling in millions more.

Of the many misreadings of history perhaps the silliest is that which
attributes to former times an idealism greater than that of our own
day. And of the many misreadings of our own times certainly the
silliest is that which attributes more idealism to such countries as
Germany, Austria, and Italy than to these United States.

The Middle Ages are generally cited as the period of intensest and
loftiest idealism. But looking past the artistic and literary few
of those centuries, looking at nations and peoples, what do we see?
Ignorance, squalor, inconceivable physical and mental and moral
wretchedness; ferocious tyrannies worse almost than anarchy itself and
constantly producing it; stolid and heartless indifference in almost
all to the welfare of their fellow-beings; “Every man for himself” the
universal cry. No wonder there was a passionate yearning for the life
beyond the grave with its promise of escape from a world made hideous
by “man’s inhumanity to man.” And in these modern countries where
so-called idealism is rampant, we find false and oppressive social and
industrial conditions in the ascendant, we find a deplorable incapacity
for dealing with the problems of life or an ignorant insensibility to
them.

If idealism means inanely beating the empty air, if it means the
worship of the vague, the remote and the purely fanciful, then this
age cannot be charged with idealism and our country must plead guilty
to the charge of gross materialism; and for idealism we must look to
seclusions and deserts, where a few surviving dirty and distracted
hermits and yogis spend their time in fantastical imaginings. But if
idealism means rational, realizable and realizing dreams of a to-morrow
that shall be as much better than to-day as to-day is better than
yesterday, then the world was never before so idealistic, and America
is the chief prophet and chief apostle of idealism.

In this sense the Declaration of Independence is the most idealistic
literary product of the human mind; the so-called idealism of
superstition, of chivalry, of kingship and aristocracy, of the
divinely appointed few taking care of the many, of “never mind this
world; all will be righted in the next,” has the cheap, dull glitter
of “fool’s gold” and paste diamonds. These fallacies were, and
still are, poisonous, because of their interference with the growth
of true idealism--the idealism of self-help and helping others to
help themselves. And to show them up and then to show them down and
out--especially down and out of our colleges and universities--we need
another Cervantes and a revised and enlarged Don Quixote.

Never before was the true ideal, humanity, clear and universal. “Light
from the East” was the old proverb; the new proverb is “Light from the
West!” For ours is the dawn-land of the Golden Age. We are a nation,
a race of idealists, of dreamers. Even our plutocrats, with their
Americanism submerged and all but suffocated in their wealth, still
dream fitfully of justice and equality and universal enlightenment and
the brotherhood of man.

We are a nation of dreamers who make their dreams come true!




CHAPTER XIII

NOT GENEROSITY, BUT JUSTICE


It is reasonable, and not unkind, to assume that the time will come
when we shall no longer have John D. Rockefeller with us. He may not
die; as a vindication and a reward he may be honored with the unique
distinction of Enoch and Elijah. But, whether by the vulgar route or
in fiery chariot with angel escort, go he will, and his son will reign
in his stead. The word reign is here used in the metaphoric sense in
which it is almost always used now-a-days. For, the son of Rockefeller
will not be free literally to reign. He will be hedged about with
a thousand and one restraints. His acts will be the result not of
his own intellect and will, but of his training, his tradition, his
environment. He will be little of the autocrat, a great deal of the
agent and servant. But, suppose that he would be really free, really
self-owned, really capable of the mastership of his vast inheritance,
instead of its slave, doing its bidding, acting always as a son of John
D. Rockefeller and a member of the class multi-millionaire. Suppose
this possible. What could he do with his nearly a thousand millions,
for the most part so massed that they control many of the great vital
industries of the country? Imbued with a deep sense of trusteeship to
humanity instead of to the quaint Rockefeller god, and endowed with the
intelligence to act upon that sense, what could he do to make the world
the better for his sojourn in it? What would be his opportunities?

Of course, in the reality his opportunities will be small indeed. His
limitations, through heredity, education and environment, are too
narrow. But under our fanciful, even fantastic, “if,” there must be
surely some way for a rich man to serve his fellow-men and demonstrate
high qualities of mind and heart other than by these commonplace, more
or less “cheap and nasty” schemes of so-called philanthropy. To all men
in the past, and to the small man still--that is, to any man incapable
of grasping the splendid and lofty idealism of Democracy--there
could be nothing more captivating than playing the rôle of my Lord
Bountiful. Not merely the paying of one’s just debts, not merely
the doing of the commands of one’s own self-respect, but graciously
condescending to part with one’s wealth for the gratification of
one’s vanity and for the development of deference and humility in the
recipients of the bounty. Philanthropy as it is practiced is more often
than not a vice both in its origin and in its results. So, we will
not make our imaginary young Rockefeller a philanthropist. We will
not subject him to the temptation to make of himself a supercilious
Pharisee and to make of others paupers and parasites and courtiers.

He is free; he is young; he is fearless. He is absolute master of his
colossal inheritance. He looks up at the vast structure his father
built. He reads upon it the motto his father placed there--“I am a
clamorer for dividends.” His face sobers as he reads, and out of his
mind go his half-formed projects to endow missions and colleges and
hospitals and libraries. “Perhaps I have not so much to give as I
thought,” he says to himself. “I must first see. What are the sources
of my income? Am I stealing from anybody? Should I be giving away that
which is not rightfully mine to give?”

And as a preliminary move he tears down the offensive “I am a clamorer
for dividends,” and puts in its stead “I am a clamorer for justice.”

“Let us first be just,” he says. “Perhaps we shall not be able to be
generous. Perhaps we shall even, hat in hand, and upon our knees, be
compelled to crave the generous forgiveness of our fellow-men.” All
this time he has been standing at the rear or business end of the
paternal structure. He now goes round to the front or philanthropic
side of it. He closes the doors there with a sign, “Philanthropy
suspended during the taking of the inventory.”

And so we find our ideal young Rockefeller, his ears shut against
the importunities of paupers and panderers and parasites, plunging
deep and resolutely into the details of business--of the several vast
enterprises which he, by inheritance, owns or controls. And soon all
his father’s old friends, with the approval of all the leading men in
finance and industry, are discussing whether a commission ought not
to be obtained, and cannot be obtained, to inquire into the sanity of
the young man. Not dividends, but honesty and justice! Why, the young
fellow’s brain is turned! Denouncing business methods approved by the
best lawyers at the bar, sanctified by the use of the greatest captains
of industry? Insisting that commodities should be sold at only a fair
profit over and above the cost of production? Dismissing men skilled in
legal and business chicane? Insisting that no man in his employ shall
have less than a decent living wage? Calling for the reorganization of
great properties, not to increase but to decrease the bonds and stocks
on whose interest and dividends a hundred of our best people are able
to lead lives of elegant leisure and look down with amused pity on
those who have to toil? There is no escape from the conclusion that the
young man is mad, mad as a hatter, mad as a March hare.

If he had established soup kitchens to tempt the hard-working to knock
off and join the army of lusty beggars, if he had given millions to
enable missionaries to live at ease while they gratified their abnormal
passion for meddling in other people’s business, if he had subsidized
faculties to teach only “safe and sane” doctrines, if he had set aside
vast corruption funds for debauching legislatures to suffer the people
to be despoiled, if he had poured rivers of water into the stocks and
bonds of his enterprises, had cut down wages and raised prices, if he
had built himself half a dozen palaces, and conducted himself like a
monkey that has been given a red cap and a pink jacket--why, that would
have been sane, eminently sane. But honesty and justice! And in his own
affairs! A real, practical application! Hear the shouts of derisive
laughter. See the winks, the tongues in derisive cheeks. “The man’s
mad! The man’s mad!” cries a generation tainted with the coarse ideals
of riches, show and condescension.

But let us suppose that he is not strait-jacketed by his friends nor
daunted by the hoots of the crowd. Let us suppose that he remains
at large and has his way. And then, let us look at his first great
“philanthropy.”

At first glance there seems nothing to look at, no important change.
The same old machinery of these several huge Rockefeller industries of
manufacture, trade and transportation seems to be moving on in much the
same old way. The only obvious change is in the fortune and the income
of the young iconoclast and his fellow-stockholders. There is seen an
enormous shrinkage--enough to have endowed hundreds of colleges, enough
to have made millions of paupers. The difference between the old order
and the new is chiefly in moral tone. An honest man and a criminal go
through precisely the same routine each day--dressing, eating, talking,
sleeping. The abysmal difference between the two is invisible to human
eyes.

Nor does the example of the new order seem to amount to much. Such
doings are too expensive. Charity, donations, subscriptions, cost
far less, do not interfere with dividends and interest, and bring
returns in public applause. Why be honest and just when nobody else
is--when nobody appreciates it--when the very victims of the system of
dishonesty and injustice have less respect for you? Why refrain from
“respectable” robbery when indulging in it gives power and prestige?

But the young iconoclast is not discouraged. He keeps hammering
away--establishing the new order where he has control, making a fierce
and incessant and public fight for it in those corporations in which
he is a director sitting for a minority interest. And gradually the
fury of the “respectable” rises against him. He has outraged the great
“respectable” lawyers, who fatten on fraud and crime; he has inflamed
the stockholders and bondholders, great and small, who find their
incomes cut down; he has exasperated all who, but for the pickings
and stealings under the old system, would have to work instead of
idling about, pitying and patronizing workers. He has stirred to awful
fury the whole capitalistic class, the honest ones no less than the
dishonest; for the honest capitalist, while he looks askance at his
dishonest fellow-member of the capitalistic solidarity, yet regards him
as a wronged brother whenever any one by criticising him seems to be
criticising capitalism. And these cyclonic ragings against the young
man slowly rouse the masses of the people, slowly waken the slumbering
moral sense of a society that has yielded to the seductions of the
practical maxim, “Put money in thy purse.” And he is greatly cheered by
the swelling, stentorian applause of the people.

He has cut down his income to less than one-twentieth what it was;
but still a vast sum, far more than he can possibly spend, pours in
upon him and demands investment. Further, many of the enterprises in
which he is a large but not a controlling factor are of so suspicious
a character, are so dependent for success upon roguery, that he feels
he cannot continue in them. To abandon his holdings would be merely
to add to the incomes of the rascals; he sensibly, but not without
qualms, sells out at as large a price as he can get. Looking for new
investments, he goes into the most crowded and squalid section of each
of the cities and large towns in which he has interests--into those
sections where the workers associated with his various enterprises
are congregated. He buys up whole blocks and sections of unsanitary
tenements. He tears them down and builds in place of them houses fit
for human habitation. And he adjusts the scale of rents there, not on
the familiar principle of robbing the poor because it is so easy to do,
but on the same principles that he would apply to business property of
the kinds used by people whose necessities are not so great that they
are helpless before the robber. He is content with a decent profit;
he takes no blood-money. He is a business-like, human landlord, not a
bloody bandit, not a “clamorer for dividends.”

In each of these neighborhoods he establishes a huge department store
in which he sells everything; and he gives value, not sham and shoddy.
These stores make a specialty of food. They sell only wholesome
food--and they can easily afford to sell it at the same prices
which the former purveyors to these poor got for vile, poisonous,
rotten meat and vegetables. Then he buys up the street-car lines in
his neighborhoods as far as he can, and establishes two-cent fares.
He realizes the importance of the item of car-fare to the poor, the
wickedness of stock and bond watering to keep up the cruelest of all
taxes.

And now he is in hot water! He has alienated a large and influential
section of every one of the grand divisions of respectable society. He
has against him, and purple with rage at the very mention of his name,
all the men and all the women and all the families that directly or
indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, live by exploiting the poor.
Right and left he has cut into or cut entirely away incomes, sources of
vast profit, those infamous yet “respectable” capitalizations of the
industry of picking the pockets in the tattered dress of the working
girl, in the ragged overalls of the laborer! What an uproar from all
that is articulate! They cry in the newspapers that he is worse than
his father, that he is impoverishing the “best citizens,” et cetera.
They scream that he is doing it, is using the almost infinite power
of his father’s massed millions, with an ulterior motive--solely to
increase his income.

As a matter of fact, his income has begun to increase. In a few years,
the practice of honesty and justice on a scale that makes it impossible
for the dishonest and the unjust to crush him, results in his having a
vaster fortune than ever. Everything he touches turns to gold. In his
main enterprise, the policy of low prices, honest wares and high wages
causes business to flow in and to more than make up for the old profits
lost by the abolition of the short-sighted tyrannies and monopolistic,
pound-foolish, penny-wise policies. His tenements pay; his department
stores can’t take care of the business offered; his street-car lines
are crowded. The old business principle, time-honored, was: “Raise
prices as the demand increases.” He acts on the new, the scientific
business principle: “Lower prices as demand increases. Don’t kill that
which you have been striving to create. Foster demand.”

At first he was called a “well-meaning but wildly mistaken
philanthropist.” Now he is called a shrewder business man than
his father. Like his father, he is hated and envied by all the
rich-but-not-so-rich. And, sad yet amusing to relate, he is profoundly
suspected by those whom he is striving to benefit. Such few friends as
he has left bring this to his attention. “What’s the use?” they say.
“Look at the ingrates. If you had stolen ten millions from them and
given back a hundred thousand in charity they would have cheered you to
the echo. You pamper them, and they turn on you. If there was to be a
revolution to-morrow your head would be the first to go off.”

What does the young man reply? He might invite them to note the fact
that he is making more money than his father did and is at least
escaping the odium of being regarded as a hypocrite. But he does not.
He is a peculiar young man. He simply smiles. “I am in business to
please one customer first of all,” says he. “That customer is myself.
What does it matter to me what other people think of me? I don’t have
to live with them. But I do have to live with myself.”

And he orders further reductions of prices, and further increases of
wages, buys more street-car lines, builds more tenements, opens a
half dozen other big stores. To supply these stores with meat, eggs,
butter, vegetables, et cetera, he starts in the neighborhood of each
of his cities and towns huge farms, to which he sends boys and girls
as apprentices to learn the farming business. And he engages to set
up in the farming business each boy or girl who works well. Those who
cannot be got in love with farming are to have first call on the lower
positions in his various manufacturing and distributing enterprises.

He has now been twenty years at this business of applying old
moral principles and policies to the vast modern opportunities for
concentration and combination. Twenty years of hard work, and he is
a happy, hated man of fifty and odd. He is richer than his father
ever dreamed of being. Wonder of wonders, he at last has begun to
drive the crooks and the rascals out of big business. There is just
one competition in which a crook cannot survive--the competition
with intelligent honesty. It is a competition which had never been
tried until the coming of our fanciful, fantastic scion of Standard
Oil, black sheep in the capitalistic fold. The crooked little farmer
or merchant cannot survive against the straight little farmer or
merchant. The crooked big “captain of industry” found that he couldn’t
survive against our Rockefeller, inheriting his father’s business
ability with his father’s wealth, but not inheriting his father’s
convention-calloused moral sense.

It is not until our young man is well on toward sixty that there begins
to be any real appreciation of philanthropy by making money instead of
by giving it away. The laughter at honesty and justice, in business as
well as in personal relations, in practice as well as in theory, on
week-days as well as on Sunday, toward the helpless and obscure and
unknown as well as toward the powerful and “respectable,” gradually
dies away before his ocular demonstration of its sound practical
wisdom. And his activities have been an enormous educational factor,
giving men that practical enlightenment which the school of life alone
can give, but which, under the old system, it so rarely did give.
His high wages have raised the general wage market. His tenements
and dwelling houses have raised the standard of housekeeping. His
department stores have raised the standard of food and clothing. And
when the material foundations of life rose, the moral and æsthetic
structure superimposed upon them of necessity rose also. To raise a
house, raise its foundations; don’t try to separate it from them.

As the laughter at iconoclastic business ceased, laughter at
philanthropy burst out. The rich rascals, the smug feeders of their
own vanity, the coy contributors to the conscience fund, who came in
superciliousness and condescension with their pharisaical offerings,
were greeted with hoots and jeers. Our young man of many millions,
dauntless through all those trying years, had taught the people to look
at the true inwardness of things. “Go back to your business,” they
would shout at each of these astonished almsgivers. “Go back, and take
with you this pittance of your filchings from your workmen and your
customers. You are the real object of pity and charity. Look at the
tainted sources of your income! Repent, reform, give us our rights, our
just dues. Don’t pose as a philanthropist when you are giving away our
money--and only a meagre part of the vast sums you have taken from us.
Give justice. Generosity will take care of itself!”

And in those days our young iconoclast came into his own, so everybody
said. But when his friends, wholly changed in their opinion now,
approached him with enthusiastic flattery, he smiled his old peculiar
smile. “I came into my own, years ago,” said he. “I came into it on the
day I tore down the motto ‘I am a clamorer for dividends’ and set up
‘I am a clamorer for justice’, in its place.” And when he died he did
not leave his vast fortune to his children to tempt them to forget his
training and example and become soft, idle, foolish and unhappy. He
left it to his enterprises, its income to be divided between those who
made themselves most valuable and those who, having worked well, had
earned the right to a peaceful old age.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” sang the poet, “the saddest are
these: ‘It might have been.’” Not so. It is the vain might-have-been
that gives birth to the bright shall-be!




CHAPTER XIV

THE INEVITABLE IDEAL


“Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers,” wrote Jefferson.
And again: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what
an additional title of nobility is or the ensigns of a new order are
in Europe.” The dignity of labor, the prizes to the laborer--these
ideals of a century ago, ideals born no doubt of a vanity which sought
to make a virtue of necessity, are still our ideals. But, where in
Jefferson’s day his broad and sympathetic mind was almost alone in the
belief in the loftier basis for the ideal, to-day millions of us see
that the laborer is the only good citizen, that his estate is the only
estate of dignity. No people ever had such a conception of work as we
have to-day. It is an evolution under Democracy. No previous nation
could have understood it; our ancestors did not have it, for they were
still influenced by caste ideas, hard and nobly though they strove
to outgrow them. There are vestiges of the old ideas concerning work
remaining. The class that does not work and the class that emulates it
and envies it still look down on work, still hug the vulgar, ignorant
fancy that work is a curse. But that is not important. Once more let us
remind ourselves that caste is made not by him who looks down but by
him who looks up. The vital fact is that the laborer is himself aware
of his own sovereign dignity. And, excepting a few black sheep, the
American flock still bears the ancestral markings; this is a nation
of laborers. And the markings of which our ancestors tried hard, but
with dubious success, not to be ashamed, have become the markings of
honor--not to an occasional Jefferson, but to the overwhelming mass of
our eighty millions.

This concept of labor is the first-fruit of Democracy and Enlightenment.

When sons of men of vast wealth go to work, there is much excitement
among the idlers, rich and poor. The agitation shows how hard dies
the theory that work is wholly a curse and, to a great extent, a
degradation; that the only sensible, or noble even, ideal of life is
to idle about; that there must be something of the freak in a human
being who labors when he might sit at his ease amusing himself by
counting the drops of sweat as they roll from the brows of his toiling
fellow-men.

This is indeed the old, old theory. It has the sanction of many
venerable authorities. But, like almost everything else that has come
down to us from the ignorant far past, it will not stand examination.

There was a time when work undoubtedly was both a curse and a
degradation. When the many labored under the lash that the few might
reap, when the toilers got only the toil and the idlers got all the
results, when the highest ideals of the human race were a full stomach
and fine raiment and the gratification of other crude desires and
appetites--then work was justly regarded as degrading drudgery. But not
now, hard though laziness and cheap vanity strive to keep alive such
fictitious distinctions as are given an air of actuality by phrases
like “master and servant,” “employer and employé,” “capital and labor,”
“gentleman,” “lady,” et cetera, et cetera. The truth of the dignity
of labor, the dishonesty and degradation of every form of parasitism,
however gaudily tricked out, appears despite the subtleties of snobism.

The political ideal of a barbarian is to rule others; the political
ideal of a highly civilized man is to rule himself and let his
fellow-men alone. The industrial ideal of a barbarian is to live in
empty-headed and ambitionless idleness upon the labor of others. The
industrial ideal of a civilized man is to work, and work incessantly in
conditions that permit him to reap the full reward of his efforts and
to make those efforts in the direction best suited to his capacities.
And he has a deepening scorn of all the tricks by which some men live,
taking all and giving nothing. Nor is his scorn the less when those
tricks happen to be made “respectable” by law or by custom.

Is it any wonder that a man with the brain of an Æsop or an Epictetus
should have revolted against compulsory labor that could much better
have been performed by an ox or an ass? On the other hand, is it not
amazing that any man with a thinking machine in his skull and vital
force flowing along his nerves can be content to lead a life that would
bore a grasshopper? The “curse and degradation” theory of work adapts
itself to climates. Man began in the tropics, where idleness is least
difficult; therefore for a long time absolute idleness was the ideal of
this theory. But when man moved up into the colder parts of the earth,
where to idle was to be physically miserable, the theory was slightly
modified. The curse and the degradation of work were thought to lie in
the doing of useful work. To tilt with iron-pointed sticks, to stab
and jab and cut, to spend days and weeks chasing little foxes that
could not even be eaten if by chance they were caught, to hit little
balls with little sticks, to sit all night matching monotonous picture
cards--all such “amusements,” the hardest kind of work, work at which
the thinking part of any human being might well balk, were regarded as
“worthy of a gentleman.” To plough, to sow, to reap, to manufacture
something that might be used, to perform any kind of useful labor,
mental or manual, was “low” and “menial.”

Toward the middle of the last century, with our growing wealth and the
rise of a leisure class through false education, the Old World ideas
found their way across the Atlantic. And in every community there
began to be at least a few persons who took on the supercilious and
contemptuous attitude toward work. Fortunately for the good sense and
happiness of the American people, at about that time modern industrial
conditions changed the whole system of getting and keeping prosperous.

In the old days, idle and brainless barbarians could hold on to and
even add to their possessions--agricultural land. But in the new days
of intense energy, of rapidly changing values, of trade, commerce, and
competition, of rise in the price of labor and fall in the price of
money, property is always growing wings that must be clipped daily and
often hourly to keep it from taking flight. It is getting harder and
harder to reap where one has not sown, to induce men to work without
a proper return, or, after wealth has been acquired, to hold on to it
without the use of brains and energy. And so, the old theory is dying
out, chiefly for the usual reason for any human advancement--changed
conditions compelling men to change their point of view.

The reason the rich men’s sons are going to work is that they, or at
least their sagacious fathers, know that if they don’t work, the men
who do work will get their wealth away from them. And this reason of
necessity is going to bring about a revolution where all the shrieking
of the reformers, all the logic of the moral philosophers, all the
talk about the dignity of labor and “happiness only in hard work” make
no headway worth the measuring. Maxims of good sense and good morals
can’t be pounded or preached into poor short-sighted, irrational,
shadow-chasing humanity. Nature and the laws of environment do not
preach. They quietly but relentlessly compel. And sad wrecks they make
of the pretensions and pomposities of the conceited human animal.

It is in vain that aristocracy-worshiping mothers of America dream
of an Old World upper class for their sons and daughters. It is in
vain that silly sociologists prattle about the necessity and the
advantages of a “leisure class.” Modern environment says “Work; work
hard! Be a somebody or I will make you a nobody!” And work we must.
And presently we shall hear the last of the notions that idleness or
useless employment is “noble” and “dignified” and “aristocratic.” And
only in mad-houses will be found men and women who continue in their
grown-up periods of life the pastimes of childhood--playing with blocks
and soldiers and toy tools. What of the old notions of property rights
and distribution of wealth will go by the board and what will remain,
no one can foresee. Nor does it in the least matter, since we can be
certain that no conditions will arise in which the idler will be more
comfortable or the worker less comfortable than in the past or at
present.

The change in the attitude toward work is coming from both sides of
the world. The rich are more and more forced to work. The not-rich are
demanding and compelling better opportunities to work. Look at our
national life in the broad, and you see all elements concentrating on
the democratic platform--Work! Beyond question the “workingman” is
discontented. Nor will his discontent decrease. On the contrary, the
more he has, the more he’ll want. His appetite will grow with what it
feeds on. This Republic was started by just such men, was started for
the purpose of creating ever more and more of them. The eagerness for
better pay, for better treatment, for better surroundings, whether
that eagerness be in the capitalist or in the street-cleaner, is proof
that the Republic is still doing business at the old stand in the old
way. And the more or less turbulent wrangling over the division of the
rewards will never cease. If there were any signs of its ceasing or of
its abating, then indeed might we justly despair of Democracy. Content
means caste; discontent means Democracy.

Work is democratic, not because all kinds of men engage in it and so
make it common, but because of its effect on the individual worker.
Every impulse toward Democracy is fostered by it, just as every impulse
toward caste is encouraged by leniency toward the idea of the value of
a leisure class.

The sooner ambition is roused in every man, woman and child, the sooner
they learn that by work alone can their ambitions be gratified, the
sooner will an ideal democratic condition evolve. America is ahead of
all the great nations in the race toward this ideal Democracy, because
there is the nearest approach in America in every walk of life to a
condition in which idlers are few and toilers many.

In a previous chapter the efforts of plutocratic philanthropists to
relieve a certain part of each community from the “stern and cruel
necessity to work” have been noted. But the pauper-making plutocrats
and lords and ladies Bountiful are not the only missionaries of
idleness and incompetence. Our legislatures, national, state,
municipal, are voting large sums of money for free something or other
for somebody or other, or for bolstering up some real or reputed
neglected or defective class. And leading citizens, themselves
toilers at businesses, trade and professions, are, through mistaken
sentimentality, urging the legislatures to vote still larger sums for
indiscriminate--_necessarily_ indiscriminate--alms.

If Democracy were dependent upon conscious human effort, we should
be moving rapidly and far from the old ideas of independence, of
self-reliance, of individuality; we should be hastening toward a
re-establishment of the aristocratic ideal of “molly-coddling,” of
making the citizen a hot-house plant sheltered under government
glass from the rude but invigorating forces of nature--but exposed
to withering and denuding paternalism. Everybody who did not do for
himself--whether because he would not or because he could not, we
should not stop to ask--would be provided with education, ideas,
food, clothing, shelter, amusements, baths, in short, everything but
self-respect and the power to produce self-respecting progeny. And
these things would be provided, not by private philanthropy, not by
the rich giving of their surplus, but by taxation.

Taxation simply means taking from one part of the community, chiefly
from the poor and those of moderate means, and giving to another part,
after an army of officials have had their “rake-off” in salaries and
perquisites. Taxation, therefore, means levying upon those who have
little to spare; it means crippling those who are trying to fight the
hard battle of life.

There is nothing democratic, nothing economically sound, in these
alluring schemes for making men sleek and comfortable and wise by
public bounty. They result in coddling incompetents, and in breaking
down those who are now just able to get along and who need only the
push of additional taxation to send them fairly over the precipice from
self-reliance to dependence.

A wise man once said: “Most legislation consists of A and B getting
together and deciding what C shall do for D.” We mustn’t forget C. He
pays the bills. And his name is “the people.”

The work that saves is the work of a man, by himself, for himself,
work chosen by him, mastered by him, work by which he is sometimes
mastered. He must stand or fall on the results of his efforts. This is
no programme for the timid or the halting, but it is the programme for
all grades of intelligence and opportunity, each doing for himself just
as well as he possibly can, under his circumstances.

Work--not as a means to leisure, but as in itself the aim and end. No
thought of “retiring.” No thought of social distractions that breed
only boredom, or of useless activities that dissipate manhood and
womanhood. The main thought--work. Work is _the_ ideal of the Republic.
The central point in the Old World theory which our plutocracy would
make our theory of life is that a man or woman ought to aspire not
to be a worker, but a person of leisure, to become not a doer of
useful things, but a doer of useless things. The central point of
the democratic theory of life is just the reverse. It is the worker
exalted, and his work also. Europe clings to precedent; America insists
upon judgment. Europe tends to act as “father and grandfather did”;
America has acted and should tend to act as the new situation, ever
changing, may require at any given moment.

Europe, bound by precedents, by false ideals, by traditions of class
distinctions and the nobility of idleness, simply cannot compete with
us. For the cause of Democracy, for the uplifting of the common man,
for the increase in the application of human energy to human needs,
America’s competition with Europe is more helpful than centuries of
theorizing and preaching and political maneuvering. The Great Republic
is presenting to Europe the stern alternative: Democracy or Decay.




CHAPTER XV

OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD


The European “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation
over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be
“welcoming to our shores” upwards of a million strangers a year, all
of them with no “capital”--except their muscles and the potentialities
of their minds and hearts. If Washington and Jefferson could have
looked forward to this time, they would have lifted jubilant prayers of
thankfulness that their hopes that this land would become “the refuge
of the poor and oppressed of all nations” were being superbly realized.
But many of our statesmen view the tidal-wave incursions with anything
but joy; and their woful cries find echo everywhere among those who do
not take the trouble to put facts into proper perspective. Russian and
Finn, Polack, Hun and Lithuanian, Sicilian and Greek and Syrian and
Bohemian, on they come, streaming from the noisome steerages of great
ocean liners, pouring through the gates of the immigration offices.
They are obviously poor, obviously the descendants of generations of
toilers. And with them are their wives and their children. Myriads of
anxious, troubled faces, in which hope and fear alternately triumph in
the struggle for expression. Indeed, a disquieting spectacle to those
who cannot or will not look beneath surfaces at universal human nature
with its powerful instincts for and resolves toward progress. But let
us watch this incoming flood with American eyes. Let us see what the
facts plead--the facts, as distinguished from prejudices.

What is our so-called foreign-population problem?

According to the latest census there were in the United States, of
our 76,300,000 population, no less than 26,200,000 persons of foreign
birth or parentage. Of these, ten and a half millions were born
abroad, while 11,000,000 more were born in this country of parents who
were foreign-born. Since 1880 and up to 1901 no less than 18,000,000
foreigners have come to us. That is to say, counting in arrivals and
births since the taking of our latest census, and making due mortality
allowance, we have to-day a population more than one-fourth of which
was born abroad or is of foreign parentage.

The anti-immigration crusade based upon these figures insists that
the foreigners come too fast for Americanism to digest and assimilate
them, that they will undermine and destroy free institutions. Also,
there is the cry that these recent comers are of peoples less desirable
than those that used to send their millions to us. The newcomers are
impossible in point of numbers, undesirable in point of quality.

As to numbers--Our first, and last previous, great flood of
immigration was between 1840 and 1861. In those twenty years about
13,000,000 immigrants came. Our population in 1840 was 17,000,000.
Thus, the immigration was about 80 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901,
the immigration was about 18,000,000. Our population in 1880 was
50,000,000. Thus, the immigration was not much above 35 per cent.
Clearly, the present “horde” is numerically not imposing or alarming
in comparison with the foreign invasion of half a century ago.
Our country is still sparsely inhabited; one-third of its area is
still absolutely undeveloped. If half a century ago, with the then
comparatively limited and crude means of transforming the foreigner
into the American, thirteen million foreigners did not “swamp”
seventeen million Americans, how can the present lesser immigration
seriously or permanently hinder the alert, democratically militant
America of to-day?

Then, there is the matter of distribution. Let us take New York City by
way of illustration. There the “congestion” of immigration is greater
than anywhere else; and the advocates of exclusion always point to
it as the crowning “awful example.” In the ’40s and ’50s that city
grew almost altogether by immigration from abroad. Between 1840 and
1861 New York City increased from 312,000 to 814,000--502,000. The
rate of growth, then, was just over 160 per cent. Between 1880 and
1901 the same territory increased in population from 1,200,000 to
2,050,000--850,000, and a large part of that increase was from the
smaller cities, the towns and the rural districts of the United States.
The ratio of increase was about 70 per cent., less than half what it
was during the preceding great immigration. Further, the charitable
and corrective forces, official and unofficial, at work in New York are
not much occupied with the immigrants who have come in the last twenty
years. The crime, the abject poverty, the destitution are among the
earlier immigrants and their descendants. The later immigration is not
from peoples given to excess in drink--and drunkenness is the chief
cause of the miseries of crime and pauperism.

Looking at the immigration problem thus numerically, we see that the
pessimists and the panic-stricken are afflicted with the narrowness
of geographic and historical vision which is responsible for so many
jeremiads. The shriek that the nation, and especially its cities, are
being “swamped” has no basis in mathematics.

“But the quality! The quality!” they cry. Well, what of the quality?
Turn to the files of the publications in the middle of the last
century; read what the “good Americans” then said and wrote and thought
of the vast in-marching armies of “foreign devils,” whose grandchildren
are a valuable part of our citizenship to-day. They were “the scum
of Ireland and Germany.” They were “incapable of receiving American
ideas.” They were “welcomed by the rich employers because their coming
meant cheap labor.” And loudest in lamentation and fiercest in demand
for bars and barriers were the people who had themselves just arrived!

But, that was a false alarm, say the anti-immigrationists; this is
the real thing. Again a lamentable lack of historical perspective,
a pitiful narrowness of human sympathy. The truth is that man, from
whatever clime or nation, is first of all man, the materials of
progress and civilization. If the present millions of newcomers are
ignorant, so much the less will they have to unlearn. If they have
been savagely oppressed, so much the more brightly will burn hatred of
inequality and injustice, love of equality and justice. If they are
poor--and poor they are--then, Heaven be praised! They will work hard;
and hard work and a passionate eagerness to get on in the world, and
the prospect of being able to rise by work instead of, as at home,
toiling that others might reap all, will make them hasten to become the
best possible Americans.

From poverty and experience of oppression comes the most militant
Democracy. Let us not be afraid of this our brother-man. Let us not
judge him by the superficial and unimportant differences between him
and us. Let us welcome him. He needs us, but not more than we need
him, and his familiarity with hard work, and his nature unspoiled by
over-prosperity. Above all, we need his children. They will be American
through and through. They will help us to outvote and to over-balance
and to counteract the supercilious breed of falsely educated who have
fallen away from the high and noble ideal of the equality and the
brotherhood of man. These newcomers are the descendants of the peoples
that built the splendid civilization of the past--the civilization
around the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe. For centuries the
immense energy and imagination of those peoples have been forcibly
suppressed and repressed. But they are there, and in free America they
will burst forth again. Indeed, they are already bursting forth.

We hear so much about the glories of the Civil War that we are apt to
overlook its fearful cost. One item is important here:

In the Southern States, practically all the white males able to bear
arms went to the war. In the Northern States the two and three-quarter
millions who served were, on the average, under rather than over twenty
years of age.

That is to say, to the war the South gave all its manhood; the North
gave the fathers of its present native-born generation. So abounding is
our vitality as a people that we cannot clearly see the full results of
this fearful sacrifice. But let us remember that war kills only a few;
it returns to peaceful pursuits the vast majority poisoned and weakened
by all kinds of diseases.

What is the connection between these facts and immigration? Look at
the South, which sent all its manhood to camp and march and battle;
at the South, into which almost no immigration has gone to make good
the enormous losses. The trouble with the South to-day is not the
destruction or abolition of property, not the failure of natural
resources, but the depletion, the decay, the destruction of so large
a part of the splendid stock that made the South great in ante-bellum
days. Despite its abounding natural resources, despite the valiant
efforts it has made and is making, the South advances slowly and
with difficulty. And while the North had to make no such complete
sacrifice to war, still even there, in the few places to which foreign
immigration has not penetrated, the effects of the impairment of the
sources of the best manhood are plainly visible. Not infrequently you
find a Northern town with all the natural opportunities to progress,
yet with retrogression and decay eating it away. What’s the matter? The
war; the Civil War. The best young men, the most vigorous, the most
enterprising, the most ambitious, went to the war. Many of them came
back; but they had left at the war their best--their health, their
energy. And the present generation shows it, suffers for it.

It is indeed inspiring to see young men eager to die gloriously for
their country. We also need young men eager to _live_ gloriously for
their country. And war, the arch-enemy of progress, the great trickster
of man through his finest instincts, how many of those who would have
lived most gloriously for their country has it cost us!

Do we not owe to the “hordes” from Europe, to immigration, the good
fortune that our nation has pushed on apparently almost unaffected in
its manhood by the great calamity of ’61-’64? Is it unwarranted to
suggest that but for these inpourings of vigor and vitality, the losses
in that frightful catastrophe might have all but cost us our national
greatness, would certainly have set us back several generations?

As to the political effect of immigration: Among our cities the
two most conspicuous examples of misgovernment are New York and
Philadelphia. In each the dominant political machine is scandalously
corrupt. But it is far more audacious, far more cynically and openly
contemptuous of public opinion in Philadelphia than in New York.
Philadelphia is an “American” city; New York is a “foreign” city. In
Philadelphia the corruption seems almost hopeless; in New York the
element to which every movement for betterment looks--not in vain--is
the “foreign” element. The weakness of Tammany’s control over the
masses of “German-Americans” and “Italian-Americans” and “Jewish
Russian-Americans” is the chief reason why it does not feel easy and
secure in the enjoyment of plunder. Cities where the “foreign vote”
is preponderant may be corrupt; but so also are cities where the
native American rules undisputed. Manifestly, the causes of political
corruption are deeper than immigration, are not aggravated by it. And
since our most hopeful States politically are for the most part those
into which immigration from abroad has been pouring in a vast and
steady stream for fifteen years, is there not sufficient ground for the
confident assertion that the newcomer with his untainted passion for
Democracy and his new-born hope of rising in the world is one of our
tremendous political assets?

As to the industrial effect. The overwhelming mass are farmers or
unskilled laborers. But the wages of unskilled labor cannot be much
depressed. In all ages and in all countries the unskilled laborer has
got just about enough to keep him alive--never much more, often a
little less. In America, as a whole, the condition of unskilled labor
to-day is better than it ever has been. The fact that we have so much
rough work to do in developing our vast raw resources makes America the
best market for unskilled labor the world has ever seen; and it will
be many generations before that rough work is completed, so inadequate
is our supply of unskilled labor in proportion to the demand. In the
trades the competition of the immigrant has not lowered wages. There
again we have more work to do than there are workers. _The forces
that have operated unfavorably upon wages are notoriously not forces
of competition among wage-earners, but forces tending to abolish
competition among employers for the services of the skilled laborer._
And in combating these forces, is the immigrant a help or a hindrance?
Does his vote go for tyranny or for freedom?

The disposition of prosperity to look down on poverty, to drift out
of _brotherly_ sympathy with it, to misunderstand it, is as old as
property rights. The disposition of the so-called educated to look down
on the less educated, to mistake knowledge for intellect, absurdly
to exaggerate the practical and even the æsthetic value of “polite
learning,” to under-estimate the all-round importance of that real
education which is got only in the school of rude experience--this
supercilious disposition is as old as human vanity. It insinuates
itself into the sanest characters; it makes fools and incompetents
and snobs of many promising young men. And these two errors--the one,
through prosperity; the other, through false education--are responsible
for the failure of such a large section of our “elegantly articulate”
to appreciate that we are to-day getting from abroad the best in brain
and in vitality that we have ever got.

What differentiates the immigrant from those he left behind him? Why,
he had the enterprise, the courage to protest against the slavery in
which militarism and despotism were enwrapping all. He left; he made
the long and arduous journey into this remote and unknown land. He did
not give up when conditions became too hard, did not sink into serfdom;
he boldly made a hazard of new fortunes.

Away back in the centuries, Asia’s most vigorous fled from her into
Europe--and Asia sank into the slough of despotism and Europe became
great and strong, advancing in all the arts. Now-a-days--to-day no less
than when Salem and Jamestown and New Amsterdam and New Orleans were
founding--Europe is causing her best to fly to us. Her best, indeed!
We must be American enough, democratic enough, to disregard the snob
standards of our weak wanderers off after European caste and culture;
we must look at men in the true American fashion--must look at men as
_men_.

From the common people our Democracy--like all Democracy--sprang;
by the common people is it nourished; by the common people will it
prevail. And these newcomers are of the common people, the custodians
of the highest ideals that irradiate the human imagination. Unimportant
indeed is the traffic of individuals and ideas that goes first-class
between America and Europe, in the comparison with the traffic that
goes steerage.




CHAPTER XVI

THE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN


The American woman is regarded both here and abroad as the strongest
and subtlest enemy of the American Democracy. She is pictured in
the imaginations of students of our life as ignorant of politics,
interested only in her own sovereignty over the American man, or,
rather, over his pocketbook, a snob and a climber and a worshiper
of European aristocratic institutions; a poor housekeeper and a
reluctant mother, and a very vampire for luxury and show, she hides
her superficiality and cold-heartedness under a mask that is fair and
fascinating. She is a born caste-worshiper, an instinctive hater of
Democracy.

What truth, if any, is there in these hardy criticisms?

We have noted how, under the leadership and inspiration of the capital
of plutocracy, New York, every city in the country is, with true
American rapidity, developing its individual fashionable society. It
is directed by the wives and daughters of rich men; it is, as we have
seen, devoted chiefly to spending time and money in unproductive and
more or less frivolous forms of self-amusement. The character of this
“set” varies slightly for each locality--but only slightly. In the
West the wealth-worship is franker; in the East more hypocritical,
more beslimed and bemessed with cant about birth and culture. But
whether Mammon is naked and unashamed or is draped and decorated, he
is still Mammon. The monotonous sameness of the people comprising each
division of the set, the sameness of their opportunities and aims,
the world-neighborliness which railways and telegraph and printing
press have brought about, prevent any notable differences. To dress,
to talk, to eat, to drive, to entertain, to bring up one’s children,
all in accord with the standards of “good form” established by the
aristocratic societies of Europe; to spend each day in pleasures
that permit one to shift most of the labor and all the thinking and
providing to hirelings of divers degrees, from lawyers and industrial
managers to secretaries, housekeepers, butlers, valets and maids; to
live worthlessly without useful work--these are the aims, East, West,
and South. And in rapidly increasing measure the aims are accomplished.

Universal freedom, universal opportunity, all but universal toil, have
indeed very suddenly brought vast riches to America, vast wealth to a
few. This sudden wealth, coming to a people whose characteristics are
energy, restlessness and lightning-like adaptability, has all in a day
relieved a relatively small but, in another aspect, very numerous and
most influential part of each large community from the necessity to
labor. Many, a great many, of these continue to strive to cherish the
ideals of a life of useful labor, continue to strive to set a worthy
example to their children and to their fellow-citizens--that is, to
remain sane and American. But a great many others have eagerly adopted
those alien ideals of the aristocracy of idleness and the vulgarity
of toil which appeal so strongly to the vanity and other ancient
weaknesses of the human animal the world over.

For this state of affairs women, imperfectly educated, wrongly,
sillily educated, in fact, practically uneducated, are in the main
responsible. Our women, like our men, inherit the American energy and
restlessness. Where circumstances compel, they work in the home, the
shop, the factory, the office, in the fine American way. But where
circumstances do not compel they seek other outlets for their restless
energy. And thus we find rich wives and daughters organizing elaborate
establishments and fashionable sets and international circuits, and
devoting themselves to erecting the life of frivolity and show into a
career that will at once fill their idle hours, gratify their vanity,
and give them the sense of doing something ambitious, of “getting on in
the world.”

Among a people who have always yielded a commanding position to
women, the power of this new American woman--attractive in dress
and in surroundings, so often fascinating in personality, usually
clever and so plausible that she deceives no one more completely than
herself--could not but be enormous. Is it strange that she weakens
the hold of the old ideals upon her husband and upon the men who are
drawn to her attractive house? Is it strange that they persuade their
consciences to let them neglect to-day’s duties while they help her
amuse them and herself? Is it strange that she has sons and daughters
devoted to her ideals? Is it strange that she gathers about her more
and more backsliders from the democratic conception of life?

Organized as we are, there is absolutely no useful place for a leisure
class. We do not purpose to be ruled, but, on the contrary, insist
that our public administrators shall be chosen from the main body
of toilers and shall execute, not direct, the popular will. Since
leadership in public and private activity thus falls to the toiler in
a Democracy, these fashionable “sets” provided by the women of the
rich class are wholly alien and hostile to us as a democratic people.
And they inevitably become a menace as their influence extends over
the men and women of superior education or natural endowments who
should be the leading exemplars of the American ideal. And this menace
threatens to erect itself into what pessimists would call a “peril,”
as the “community of interest” creates monopolies so intertwined with
our individual structure that to assail them is to jeopardize it, and
perpetuates wealth in certain families and groups.

Such is the anti-democratic woman. But over against her set the
American woman. The plutocratic American man, being gaudy and
conspicuous, distracts attention from the democratic American man, who
outnumbers and outvotes and out-influences him into insignificance,
except as an awful warning against flying in the face of the world’s
democratic destiny. The plutocratic American woman is even more
conspicuous than the plutocratic American man. But contrast her with
the rest of the women, especially with the women who go forth from the
homes to work. Great as is the influence against Democracy exerted by
the women of the leisure class, it is weak in comparison with that
exerted for Democracy by the professional and business women of the
United States.

Ten years ago about one-fifth of all the wage and salary earners in the
United States were women and girls. When these figures were published
there was a great outcry of wonder and alarm--wonder at the changed
conditions, alarm lest those changed conditions might be permanent
and the old-fashioned woman of the fireside and the stoveside and the
cradleside might be passing away. To-day about one-third of all the
women in the United States not on farms earn their own living outside
their own homes, and these women constitute more than one-fourth of
all the persons in the United States engaged in gainful occupations
other than agriculture.

It is evident that the changed conditions are not passing, but
permanent; that the “new woman” is the woman of the future. Yet we
still hear the old order talked of as if it were not a departing order,
and the new order criticised as if it were abnormal, a fad of a few
“freak” women.

Obviously, this change is most intimately associated with Democracy.
Democracy, work, women; women, work, Democracy. Did any of those
ancient republics we hear so much about, those whose decline and fall
Europe and our own pessimists say we must inevitably imitate, ever
number among its inhabitants a company of women wage and salary earners
such as has been so swiftly evolved in democratic, work-compelling,
work-exalting America?

In face of this army of women who work outside the home, the theory
still is that man bears the brunt of the battle for food, clothing and
shelter, while woman is sheltered and comparatively at her ease. This
theory never was sound. It never would have been accepted had writers
and thinkers kept clearly before their minds the fact that the human
race does not consist of a luxuriously comfortable class, but of vast
masses of laborious millions. From time immemorial, among the masses of
the people everywhere, the men and the women have worked equally for
the support of the family. But latterly, under the pressure of modern
conditions, which are forcing all into the general service of society,
the women have been drawn from the obscure toil of occupations within
and around the household; and also into the ranks of women toilers
have gone hundreds of thousands of women from the classes which, until
recently, did try to keep their women at home. Is it illogical to say
that we may presently see practically all the capable members of our
society, regardless of sex, self-supporting? And in such circumstances,
would not the family relations, the relations of mother to father, and
both to children, necessarily undergo a radical transformation?

To-day the women vote in four States and hold public office in all the
States and under the National Government. There are women policemen and
firemen, women locomotive engineers, women masons and plasterers and
gunsmiths, women street-car drivers and conductors, women blacksmiths
and coopers and steel and iron workers, and even women sailors--to take
only a few occupations which, on the face, would seem to exclude women.
In fact, there is not in this country a single department of skilled or
unskilled labor, except only soldier and man-o’-war’s man, which has
not its women workers in swiftly increasing numbers. In the professions
there are thousands of women doctors, lawyers, authors, professors,
musicians, artists, decorators, journalists, public speakers, and
more than a hundred thousand women teachers. In the trades there
are thousands of women hotel and restaurant keepers, insurance and
real estate agents, bookkeepers, clerks, merchants, officers in
corporations, saleswomen, stenographers, telegraph and telephone
operators. In manufactories the women operatives almost equal the men
in numbers. There are thousands of women who hold responsible positions
in the management of manufacturing corporations. All these occupations,
with the exception of such as nursing and teaching school and music,
were once exclusively in the hands of men.

The cause of the change is the same as that which has revolutionized
every part of modern society--the amazing discoveries of science,
creating an enormous number of new occupations and revolutionizing
the method of all the old occupations, from housekeeping to national
administration.

War was the department of human endeavor which not only excluded women
from itself, but also kept her fast anchored at home. Until the second
quarter of the last century war was the chief thought, the chief
pursuit of the human animal. He was either just going to war or just
coming home from war, or engaged in war or preparing for imminent war.
Obviously, so long as war occupied this position in human affairs woman
was inevitably in the background, in the secondary places, a household
drudge or plaything. But war is no longer the principal business of the
race, with peace tolerated as a breathing spell now and then. Peace and
its arts have become the serious business of civilization, the settled
order, with war as a dreadful nightmare. The wars, if not fewer, are
briefer and are carefully concentrated and confined. Civilization has
been forced upon a peace basis not by enlightenment, but by commerce
growing out of discovery and invention. It clamors for skilled hands,
not for brutal hands. Hence the vast opening for women and the
vast inrush of women. It is a democratic tide. Out of discovery and
invention comes commerce; out of commerce and its intercourse, which is
death to all forms of provincialism, both mental and physical, comes
enlightenment; in the train of enlightenment, as day in the train of
the sun, comes Democracy.

This country was remote from other great nations and, therefore, from
the ever present threat of the actuality of war. It was--perhaps
through its freedom from war and war alarms--eagerest in seizing
upon and using the mighty industrial machinery which science gave to
the race. Thus it has come to pass with us that the abolition of the
non-worker, the progress toward the industrial equality of the two
sexes, has been most rapid.

Where European societies had a very complex organization, our society
had from the beginning simplicity as its chief characteristic. We were
really all toilers--until recently almost all toilers at occupations
close to manual labor. The women and the men were throughout on that
equal basis which in Europe was, and to a great extent is yet, found
only among the peasant and shopkeeping classes. And as the new era--the
era of steam and electricity--developed with us, our women and our men
naturally remained side by side.

Our government was founded in war. Its founders assumed, from the
history of all other nations, that offense and defense were to be
its main functions. And the barbaric theory is still ignorantly or
carelessly assented to. This explains the lagging of the political
rights of women behind their industrial and civil rights--or,
rather, industrial and civil necessities; for no right has ever
been, or probably ever will be, recognized until recognition becomes
a necessity. The development with us of a class of women who are
housekeepers only and are most of the time idle or half idle, is
foreign to the spirit of our democratic era. That development cannot,
therefore, long survive, any more than an equatorial plant can long
survive in our zone. The new departures are in harmony with Democracy;
they mean increased efficiency and usefulness of the human race; they
must persist and expand and prevail.

To three causes we owe the American woman of the class that only
pretends to contribute, or at best half-heartedly contributes, toward
the support of our social system:

First, to the survival of the Old World, old era ideas of “woman’s
sphere,” of the coarsening effect of labor upon her “finer nature,”
of the “aristocratic flavor” and “high breeding” of uselessness and
idleness.

Second, to the simpler tastes of our ancestors, and the comparative
ease with which at an early period in our national life the labor of
the men in the family could provide money enough to satisfy those
tastes.

Third, to the very tardy development of the domestic laborers and
providers that now relieve woman of the confining cares of household
and nursery.

As a result of these three causes a class of idle women sprang up--not
only among the rich and well-to-do, but even among artisans, small
farmers and shopkeepers. And this class came to be regarded as typical
and exemplary. In reality it is neither. It has no place in our
tradition of mothers and grandmothers who spun and made preserves, did
their own housework, and were busy every waking moment about matters
which are now attended to in shops and factories. It has no place in
common sense--the women who insist most strenuously that child-bearing
and home-making are woman’s whole duty are the women who, as a class,
leave the care of the home to servants and bear few children and
consign them to nurses at the earliest possible moment. And manifestly
it has no place in our future; it must inevitably go the way of all
else that is undemocratic and parasitic. Our society is founded upon
the two ideas--work and equal opportunity to all to work. It abhors
the idler as nature abhors a vacuum. And as the old-time occupations
of woman are carried on in a different way, she must find other
occupations. Must, because man will be unable both to support himself
in the comfort he ever more exactingly demands and also to support her
in idleness as well as she insists upon being supported. Must, because
her own increasing aversion to restraint will not let her rest content
with the slavish and shameful position of a cajoler and dependent.

The sex instinct is powerful enough to triumph over even the instinct
of self-preservation for a time; but it cannot withstand the steady,
day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year pressure of that instinct of
self-preservation incessantly stimulated by the operations of economic
forces. The old order, bulwarked by tradition and by the sex-passion
and by woman’s ingenuity and man’s weakness where women are concerned,
will survive long, will disintegrate gradually. But how can it be saved?

Thus we have a social organization which is in process of revolutionary
change. The women are rapidly pushing out or are rapidly being pushed
out into occupations which have been transferred from the domestic to
the general sphere; they are entering upon occupations new and old
which it was thought a few years ago would be for the men only. The men
on their part not only are working as formerly, but also are entering
occupations once followed exclusively by women. Some of the new
employments of women have already been enumerated. The new employments
of men in this country include laundry work, cooking, general
housework, nursing, keeping boarding-houses, teaching primary and
kindergarten pupils, dressmaking, millinery. The list is far shorter
and, from the old viewpoint where the equal dignity of all honorable
labor was denied, seems far less dignified than the women’s list. The
reason for this is of course that the men had small room to expand
their already multiform activities, while the women had all the room in
the world.

The underlying principle of this redistribution of activities is the
common-sense principle that every unit in a society should do the work
at hand for which it is best fitted. This principle explains every
case. Where we find a man dusting, scrubbing and doing laundry work
it is because he could find nothing more remunerative to do and could
outbid the women applying for that particular task. Wherever we find
a woman plastering, or keeping books, or driving a street-car, or
managing a store or corporation, it is for the same reason. And this
modern principle wholly ignores sex and looks only at the work to be
done and at the comparative fitness of the male and female applicants
for it. We are being taught by destiny that parasitism and dependence
are no more essentials of the feminine than the brands and manacles
which at one time most men wore were essentials of the masculine.

It is not prophecy to say that, as more and more millions of women
enter the industrial fields, these readjustments and redivisions, this
absorption of some occupations by women and of other occupations by
men, will go on apace. We may not like it; but we can no more stop it
than we can stop the physical and mental development of woman, or the
use of steam and electricity.

The missionary work for Democracy done by the women already
understanding the values of work will undoubtedly eventually reach the
“exclusive,” most distinctly leisure class. Its influence is seen on
every hand, among the girls and young women of the very well-to-do,
in families where the daughters are still persuaded to remain idly at
home against their own inclinations. Probably every woman earning her
own living, who has associates among women more or less comfortably
supported in idleness, and in restraint, by men, is envied by not a
few of them, by all not hopelessly corrupted by laziness and caste.
And eventually they will be following her example. As the number
of educated, valuable women forced to work for a living increases,
the number of the same kind of women voluntarily going to work will
increase.

And finally the richer women will be reached and impelled. Their
yearning to do something will take tangible form. We may live to see
the discontented, folly-chasing daughters of the rich stepping not
down to, but up to a place beside the woman wage-earner, because they
are sick and tired of having no sensible employment, tired of the
pitiful wait for some man with the right qualifications of personal and
pecuniary attractiveness; because they have sufficiently developed in
intelligence to have not a theoretic but a practical envy of the joys
of the woman who is absolute mistress of herself and is waiting for the
right man only as a man now waits for the right woman.

There is no such simplifier of life as work. Its effect upon the dress,
the home surroundings, the very expression and manners of women once
accustomed to leisure, is enormous. It tends to make them far more
attractive to their own sex and also to such men as are not afraid
an intelligent, competent woman would at close range discover the
shallowness of their posings and pretenses. Finally, it makes them
democratic--all of them that have the wisdom to look on their work
not as a sentence to drudgery from which they hope they can presently
cajole some man into releasing them, but as a high dispensation of
destiny in their favor. The “emancipation of woman” is no mere sonorous
phrase. The new woman can, indeed must, retain all the virtues of
the “old-fashioned” woman. Feminine is as eternal and immutable
as masculine; and the other virtues of the old were the virtues
inseparable from a life of busy usefulness. The new woman can and must,
and therefore will, free herself from the vices of the old-fashioned
woman--the vices of narrowness and irrationality, of artifice that
harks back to the days when woman was the servant of man’s appetites
and had to pander to them.

The decisive advantage the men have had in the fifty years since
Democracy set its powerful forces to work upon woman has been not their
superior strength or skill or faithfulness or industry, but that woman
has worked merely as a temporary expedient. She has tenaciously assumed
that she would presently “quit work” and be supported by some man.
This dream has been largely fanciful, though none the less potent for
that. The woman, married, has usually found that she has not stopped
working, but has undertaken a far more laborious and ever grudgingly
paid occupation. The delusion has made her wages smaller. Who will not
pay more to a worker who expects to go on working than to a worker who
expects presently to stop work, and is meanwhile giving at least half
her energy to another occupation, that of catching a husband? The
delusion has also destroyed or impaired her ambition. Why struggle to
rise in an occupation which one hopes and intends presently to abandon
for another that is wholly different?

But latterly a host of women have been coming into conspicuous
positions because ambition drove them there. They have begun to work
for work’s sake. They have seen the fraud in the silly and shallow
twaddle about “woman and the home”--as if for centuries the mothers of
the men most useful to society had not been for the most part working
women who could not, if they would, have pleaded child-bearing and
nursery and housework in excuse for doing nothing to add to the family
income. The “new woman” is not a slovenly drudge waiting irritably for
the advent of a husband that she may become a tenement “sill-warmer”
or a palace parasite. She works until she is married; she continues
to work after she is married. And there is no shadow of a taint of
pecuniary interest in the love and affection she gives.

Disregard the negligible few women of the plutocracy and its environs,
as we have disregarded the unimportant few men of the same class,
and looking at all over eight millions, you find that the American
woman, like the American man, is developing in harmony with the ideal
of Democracy. Democracy is no discriminator either among persons
or between sexes. It respects the mothers of future generations as
profoundly as it respects the fathers. And it has the same gifts for
all--freedom, intelligence, the joy of work.




CHAPTER XVII

AS TO SUCCESS


It has often been said, and written, that we are about the most unhappy
people on the face of the earth, that our unhappiness increases with
our Democracy. That our unhappiness is caused by our Democracy.
Democracy and discontent, despotism and discontent, constitutional
monarchy and content--so runs the argument.

If this were true, we as Americans would say, “Happiness bought at
the price of self-respect is far too dear. Heaven itself would be
too dear at that price. And, however it may be with some Europeans,
to an American the admission that he was not the equal of any man
would be a degradation like that of the slave.” But it is not true
that we are an unhappy people. Not to be sunk in a bucolic stupor
like the peasants of Europe does not mean unhappiness. To know when
one is uncomfortable, to think how to become less uncomfortable, to
be alive, alert, aspiring, to love work as other people love play,
to love progress as other people love stagnation--that does not mean
unhappiness. There are other standards of happiness than the bucolic or
than the self-complacence of the constricted devotees of caste. Indeed,
we in America continue to doubt whether those states of mind are truly
happy. Content may or may not mean happiness. It may be the calm, numb
resignation of despair. It may be the fat, swine-like stupor of an
established aristocracy. We have our own ideas of happiness--and it is
interesting to note that these restless, forever unsatisfied longings
of ours tend to long life.

We are not unhappy; but neither are we happy, nor likely to become so,
until our corner of the world, at least, is in far better order than it
is at present or likely to be soon.

There are two kinds of optimism. There is the optimism of retreat--the
kind our critics set up as the harbinger of happiness. Our plutocrats
preach this optimism, and those of our politicians who are fattening
on the honors, salaries and spoils of office. “We are a great
people,” they say. “Look at our national wealth. Look at our per
capita circulation of money. Look at the totals of our production of
everything for man and beast. Let us rejoice and do nothing to disturb
our national prosperity. Let us stop thinking--or, rather, let the
masses of the people give the plutocrats and the politicians in power a
free hand to do the thinking and acting for the nation. Enough of this
vulgar and irritating discontent! Enough of the coarse, low talk about
wealth! Let us discuss art and literature and glory and grandeur!”

All this with the most serious face in the world. All this with perfect
honesty and a heart full of patriotism!

The answer of the American people is cruel. “Rubbish!” they say. They
are not optimists of retreat--for what but retreat is a progress that
advances a class at the expense of the mass?

Theirs is the optimism of advance--the advance of all. “We are indeed
great,” they reply to the optimists of retreat. “Let us be greater.
What Democracy we have had has carried us far. Let us have more
Democracy. The masses are better off than they used to be, thanks to
the sweeping away of some of the obstacles of class and caste. Let us
sweep away the rest of those obstacles. What we have is good. It is the
promise of better. Let us see that that promise is redeemed!”

Happiness--in the customary, narrow sense--the sense put into the word
by the long past with its reign of class and caste--that happiness we
have not. But the joy of life--the vigorous, bounding hope that beats
in the heart and throbs in the veins of the strong man growing in
strength--that we have in ever fuller measure. Such happiness never has
been in the past? Such happiness cannot be in a world of such abysmal
natural inequalities? We deny it. We are here not to live by the past,
by precedent, but to make a mockery of past and precedent. We are the
children of Democracy, not the wards of aristocracy. We propose a
wholly new world--and we are putting our proposals into effect. We have
done well, though we have barely begun. We shall do better. Another
century or so! We envy our grandchildren, not our grandfathers.

If happiness of the kind our ancestors of the world’s aristocratic
days dreamed had been the objective of the human race, man would have
retained his hairy coat, his taste for raw meat, his pleasure in
cave-dwelling. Every once in awhile we see in America people whose
object is happiness. Sooner or later they arrive at the bottom.
Sometimes they are happy there. But, happy or not, they are not to be
envied or imitated. The dominant note of the real slums is happiness.
Don’t be deceived by the squalor and rags into thinking it misery. The
unhappy slum-dwellers do not remain, but restlessly and resolutely
fight against the bestial stupor, fight their way back to the light and
the joy of life.

The joy of life is the exaltation that comes through a sense of
a life lived to the very limit of its possibilities; a life of
self-development, self-expansion, self-devotion to the emancipation
of man. Whoever you are, this joy of life can be yours. Money has
nothing to do with it, either in aiding or retarding. Money cannot
buy the essentials--health and love. It cannot avert the essential
evils--illness, bereavement. The world keeps finding this out from
generation to generation--and forgetting as soon as it rediscovers.
Solomon mentioned the matter many centuries ago, when he wrote:

  “I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards;
  I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all
  kinds of fruits; I made me pools of water to water therewith the wood
  that bringeth forth trees; I got me servants and maidens, and had
  servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and
  small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me; I gathered
  me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of
  the provinces;....

  “Then I looked on all these works that my hands had wrought and on
  the labour that I had laboured to do; and, behold, all was vanity and
  vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”

Our rich men are largely responsible for the misconception that the
American people have no ideal higher than that of money-making. The
following remarks once made by a rich philanthropist are interesting
because they are typical of the thought of a great number of persons
who speak in public to-day:

  “In contributing to the education of the suffrage the rich are but
  building for their own protection. If they neglect so to build,
  barbarism, anarchy, plunder will be the inevitable result. If the
  spirit of commercialism and greed continues to grow stronger, then
  the Twentieth Century will witness a social cataclysm unparalleled in
  history.”

Is all this true? Does the future of civilization depend upon the
generosity of rich men? If the rich men do not awaken as a class and
give more largely to the uplifting of their fellow-men, shall we have
a carnival of barbarism, anarchy and plunder?

The speaker and his kind of social students mean well. They are right
in arousing the rich to a deeper sense of duty to mankind. But they
think so intently upon their pet theory that they lose their point of
view. They exaggerate to hysteria the importance of the rich. They are
infected with the dollar-worshiping craze which they profess to abhor.
They vastly over-estimate concentrated wealth as a factor in human
progress. They erect money into a powerful deity, just as do all other
worshipers of the dollar. The difference is that they wish to make it a
benevolent deity.

It is an excellent thing that the rich should be aroused. A rich man
who does nothing for his brother-man is a contemptible fellow--almost
as contemptible as a poor man who does nothing for his brother-man.
The selfish rich man can plead in extenuation that temptations,
beyond human nature’s power to combat, have narrowed and chilled and
withered him. But, save ignorance, what excuse has the poor man for
selfishness? However, if by chance the selfish rich man become aroused
and give--give manlily, democratically--of his riches, he must not be
excited about the importance to others of what he has done. Its main
importance is purely personal. He is a better man for doing it and has
a stronger title to self-respect. But if he had not done it, the poor,
old, stupid, blundering human race would have managed to stagger along
somehow.

By all means let the rich give. For their own self-respect, for their
own self-satisfaction, they ought to give largely and intelligently.
Let the honest rich give in sympathy--let the dishonest give in
humility. But we must remember that all such gifts put together are
as a mere drop in the ocean so far as the effect upon civilization is
concerned.

We have not reached our present estate through the generosity of
any class of men. And we shall not advance to our destined higher
estate because of the generosity and benevolence of any class. The
benevolence of the rich may earn for them an honorable place in the
procession of humanity ever toiling upward, and may enable laggards or
the too heavily handicapped to keep in line. But this procession, that
has marched on over kings and emperors, over tyrants and oppressors
and false teachers, that has met and swept away army after army of
embattled wrong, is not to be perceptibly retarded or accelerated by
the errors or the virtues of a class of men who are merely rich.

Rich men did not implant in the human heart the all but universal
passion for progress. Rich men did not put into the human skull the
marvelous mechanism of the human mind. Rich men did not endow that
mind with the body to carry out its will. Wealth has not made the
great pictures or paintings, has not written the great books nor
achieved the great discoveries, nor erected the great institutions,
nor evolved any of the glories of the emancipation of man, social,
political, industrial, intellectual. _All_ these we owe to men in whom
the wealth-getting instinct was at most a shriveled rudiment. Wealth
did not build this Republic in its present majesty; Pliny the younger
said--and said truly--that wealth had ruined Rome. Concentrated wealth,
breeder of parasitism and patronage, has shriveled and rotted--always,
everywhere. If history had not been written by snobs and persons
tainted with aristocratic error, this fact would be as clear as print
could make it.

The real wealth, the real riches of humanity are these capable minds
and capable bodies, the creators of intelligent, progress-producing
thought and action.

The value of civilization, of an orderly social system, is great to,
and is keenly felt by, the rich. But that value is just as great to,
just as keenly felt by, the masses. Are they not wholly dependent upon
it for well-being, just as are the rich--no more, no less?

And the work of preparing the oncoming generation for the preservation
and improvement of the social structure is done in each generation
not by the rich, not by generosity and benevolence, but by the masses
themselves in a myriad of homes, in a myriad of schoolhouses, in the
hourly personal and helpful intercourse of a myriad intelligent,
aspiring men, women and children. It is not concentrated wealth that
places the resources of the world at the disposal of the masses. It is
the intelligence of the masses, demanding those resources, that enables
concentrated wealth to gain its too often hideously unjust demands.
Concentrated wealth may to a limited extent promote progress; but that
is overbalanced by the fact that concentrated wealth still more heavily
penalizes progress.

If civilization, freedom, love of order, were dependent for their
existence or spread in any large degree upon the rich philanthropist
and his fellow-millionaires, cataclysm would be a mild word for what
would be about to befall us.

As for the “spirit of commercialism and greed,” what reason is there to
suppose it stronger now than in the past? Because the wealth-producing
capacity of the masses has enormously increased, because the
opportunities for earning comfort have infinitely multiplied, because
millions are striving for prosperity now where the few once monopolized
it all--are these reasons for accusing us to-day of being greedy and
growing greedier?

Was there ever a time or a place in history where mere money was so
powerless and brains so mighty as the present day in the American
Republic? Was there ever a time or place where the individual man was
at once so powerful to protect his own rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, and so powerless to snatch away those rights from
others?

The conscientious rich man does well to try to whip his
fellow-millionaires into line with the procession. But he need not
torment his declining years with horrid visions of coming anarchy
if these rich men do not stop groveling and grasping and begin to
entertain worthy ambitions. Let the rich do their part; but let every
man, rich or poor, high or humble, remember that his first duty is to
see that he is doing his own part.

One loses patience with the constant precedence given the idea that
riches alone mean success. Why is it that the only men who are eagerly
interviewed and importuned to write articles on “the secret of success”
are multi-millionaires?

Are there no successful men but multi-millionaires? There are not more
than five thousand of them in the country. Carlyle once described
England as “inhabited by thirty millions, mostly fools.” And our own
country, if none has succeeded in it but the multi-millionaires, may be
described as inhabited by “eighty millions, mostly failures.”

Success is a glittering word, capable of many meanings. A man is not
necessarily a failure because he has not made money--a million dollars
or a hundred. Some very successful men have never tried to make money.
They preferred to make _something_, and if they achieved their desires
they succeeded--from their own viewpoint, at least.

Agassiz would not accept five thousand dollars a night to lecture. “I
have no time to make money,” he said. Scientific inquiry and discovery
were the objects of his life, and he succeeded in his pursuit of them.
Wellington, after conquering Mysore, was proffered a gift of five
hundred thousand dollars by the corrupt East Indian Company. He refused
to touch it. Piling up “big money” was not his idea of success, either.

When John Hancock, one of the signers of our great Declaration, was
sitting in the Continental Congress a letter was read from Washington
suggesting the destruction of Boston by bombardment. Hancock was one
of Boston’s largest property owners, but he instantly said: “All my
property is in Boston; but if the expulsion of the British from it
require that Boston be burnt to ashes, issue the order immediately.”
There was another man who didn’t believe that “success” was only
another name for millions.

Charles Sumner refused to lecture at any price. “My time belongs to
Massachusetts and the nation,” he said. Big money was not his idol.
Thomas Jefferson died insolvent. Was he therefore a failure? Abraham
Lincoln died a poor man. Was he also a failure? Grant died so poor
that his opinion on “how to succeed” would have been of no value to the
money-mad, even if he had left it.

Finally, can you imagine any of the great real benefactors of mankind
plotting to make the service they rendered a heavy tax upon posterity
for maintaining their descendants in foolish idleness and luxury?

Sooner or later there will be a reaction from this search for “the
secret of success” among the trust kings and the sudden-rich heroes
of the stock ticker. “I know of no great men,” says Voltaire, “except
those who have rendered great service to the human race.” Judged by
that true standard, the mere makers of “big money” cannot tell our
young men the “secret of success.” They do not know it themselves.

The money success is blatant and strong. It flaunts itself and tries
to absorb all attention. But it ought not to deceive any but the
superficial observers of the American people. Our ideals still centre
in the affections, not in the appetites. To be free, to love, to think,
to grow--the joy of life. That sums up America. Gilt may for the moment
reign; but gilt does not rule.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE MAN OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW


In Chicago, in Lincoln Park, there is a wonderful statue. A big,
slouching form, loose yet powerful; ungraceful, yet splendid because
it seems to be able to bear upon its Atlantean shoulders the burdens
of a mighty people. The big hands, the big feet, the great, stooped
shoulders tell the same story of commonness and strength.

Then you look at the face. You find it difficult to keep your hat upon
your head.

What a countenance! How homely, yet how beautiful; how stern, yet how
gentle; how inflexible, yet how infinitely merciful; how powerful, yet
how tender; how common, yet how sublime!

Search the world through and you will find no greater statue than
this--the statue of Abraham Lincoln, by St. Gaudens. It is Lincoln; but
it is also a great deal more. It is the glorification of the Common
Man--the apotheosis of Democracy.

As you look at that face and that figure you feel the history of the
human race, the long, the bloody, the agonized struggle of the masses
of mankind for freedom and light. You see the whole history of your
own country, founded by common men for the common people, founded upon
freedom and equality and justice.

Here is no vain haughtiness, no arrogance, no supercilious looking
down, no cringing looking upward, nothing that suggests class or rank
or aristocracy. Here is Democracy, the Common Man exalted in the
dignity of his own rights, in the splendor of the recognition of the
equal rights of all others; the Common Man, free and enlightened,
strong and just.

The statue is in the attitude of preparation to speak. What is that
brain formulating for those lips to utter?

The expression of brow and eyes and lips leaves no doubt. It is
some thought of freedom and justice, some one of those many mighty
democratic thoughts which will echo forever in the minds and hearts of
men.

Let us recall three of those thoughts:

  “The authors of the Declaration of Independence meant it to be a
  stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free
  people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”

  “That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and
  that government of the people, by the people, and for the people
  shall not perish from the earth.”

  “I say that no man is good enough to govern another man without that
  other man’s consent. I say that this is the leading principle, the
  sheet-anchor.”

These were the ideas that found this country a few ragged settlements
trembling between a hostile sea and a hostile wilderness and built
it up to its present estate of democratic grandeur. Not tyranny,
not murder disguised as war, not robbery disguised as “benevolent
guidance,” not any of the false and foolish ideas of imperialism
and aristocracy. But ideas of peace, of equal rights for all, of
self-government.

Our era, conscious of the mighty works that can be wrought, conscious
that we are all under sentence of speedy death, eagerly seeks out
the young man, the obscure man. It has need of all powers and all
talents, especially of the talents for creating, organizing, directing.
Instead of it being true that a good man doesn’t have a chance any
more, the reverse is true--inferior men have chances greatly beyond
their powers, and immature men are forced into important commands, and
discredited and ruined, so impatient is the pressure for men to do the
world’s important work. This is the day of the man who wants a chance.

It is also a day in which we hear a great deal about the “unruly
class.” This phrase is employed to designate some vague element in the
masses of the people that is naturally turbulent and ever looking about
for an excuse to “rise” and “burn, slay, kill.”

You may search through history page by page, line by line, and you
will find no trace of the doings of this alleged “unruly class.” The
more you read the more you will be struck by the universal and most
tenacious love of quiet and order in the masses of mankind. You will
see them robbed, oppressed, murdered wholesale upon mere caprice, the
victims of all manner of misery. Your cheeks will burn and your blood
run hot as you read. And you will note with wonder that they endured
with seemingly limitless patience until they were eating grass by the
wayside. Then, once in a while, but only once in a while, they “rose.”
All the machinery of law and order was in the hands of the oppressors,
so they were compelled to resort to violence. But even then they
established new machinery or patched up the old as quickly as possible.

_Every society that has been overturned from, within has been
overturned by misrule; never by the unruly._

No; the real “unruly classes” are these “respectabilities” with the
“pulls,” and these governmental officers who are “pulled”;--they
violate the laws; they purchase or enact or enforce unjust legislation;
they abuse the confidence and the tolerant good nature of the people;
they misuse the machinery of justice.

Turn to your history again. You find that every once in a while the
dominant element has begun to talk about the “unruly class,” to express
fear of “risings,” of mob violence. And in every instance you find
that the real reason for this denunciation and dread was that the
dominant element had begun to be acutely conscious of its own misdeeds.
It feared that its own weapons of injustice would be turned against
itself by outraged justice. It feared that its punishment would be in
proportion to its crimes.

Gladstone said that the Nineteenth century was summed up in the phrase,
“Unhand me!” Its science struck off the shackles of ignorance upon the
intellect--shackles of error, of false reverence, of superstitions
about the causes of the inequalities of men. Thus, the Nineteenth
century made it possible for this to be the Age of the Common Man. Not
to states, not to institutions, not to class-made law, not to castes
and orders and rank belongs the Twentieth century. It belongs to the
Common Man--to you. You with your stout heart and your willing and
capable hands. You with your active, intelligent brain, impatient of
traditional nonsense, however poetically or plausibly englamoured.
You with your enlightened sense of the equal rights of all men. You
with your passionate resolve scientifically to correct the stupid and
cruel inequalities of opportunity, that are as intolerable in an era of
science as a cannibal feast in the temple of the Most High.

What is the watchword of this new day? From lip to lip, from land to
land, from race to race, flies the “password eternal”--Democracy.

How the Nineteenth century did belie all the prophecies of pessimism!
And how the Twentieth century will belie all the prophecies of its
pessimists!

To realize this you must penetrate the dust and noise and clamor
that are the surface of things. You must discard prejudice and
that narrowness which makes you exaggerate the importance of the
things immediately at hand--the things that are mere details of the
great pattern which time is weaving in the loom of history--details
incomprehensible unless you look at the pattern as a whole. Disregard
tradition and egotism; free yourself of the small silliness that leads
you to confuse intelligence with etiquette and clothes, with formal
education which may or may not affect the intellect. Look deep into the
realities and see there the lines of the Common Man--the toiler at the
desk and bench and lever and plow, his mind bent upon his work, his
work the improvement of his own condition and the handing down of the
heritage of life richer and better in every way than he received it.

Through the ages this Common Man has been building like the coral
insect--silently, secretly, steadily, strongly. History has little to
say about him or his work, and that little misleading; the historians
have been unable to get away from courts and battlefields and the
legislation halls where fierce but futile and evanescent class
struggles rage. But the real story of the past of the human race as
an interpreter and prophet of the future is the story of the building
of the coral continent founded broadly and deeply upon freedom and
justice, upon Intelligence and Democracy. And now at last this
continent of enduring civilization begins to emerge not here and there,
not merely above the ebbtides of ignorance and tyranny, but everywhere
and for all time.

Let us read the past aright. Its departed civilizations are not a
gloomy warning, but a bright promise. If limited intelligence in a
small class produced such gleams of glory in the black sky of history,
what a day must be now dawning!


THE END




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.

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