The

Unpopular Review

Vol. II, No. 3
July-September, 1914

Published Quarterly at 35 West 32d Street, New York, by

Henry Holt and Company

Contents

[pg 1]

Unsocial Investments

[Return to Table of Contents]

The “new social conscience” is essentially a class phenomenon. While it pretends to the rôle of inner monitor and guide to conduct for all mankind, it interprets good and evil in class terms. It manifests a special solicitude for the welfare of one social group, and a mute hostility toward another. Labor is its Esau, Capital its Jacob. Let strife arise between workingmen and their employers, and you will see the new social conscience aligning itself with the former, accepting at face value all the claims of labor, reiterating all labor’s formulæ. The suggestion that judgment should be suspended until the facts at issue are established is repudiated as the prompting of a secret sin. For, to paraphrase a recent utterance of the Survey, one of the foremost organs of the new conscience, is it not true that the workers are fighting for their livings, while the employers are fighting only for their profits? It would appear, then, that there can be no question as to the side to which justice inclines. A living is more sacred than a profit.

It is virtually never true, however, that the workers are fighting for their “living.” Contrary to Marx’s exploded “iron law” they probably had that and more before the trouble began. But of course we would not wish to restrict them to a living, if they can produce more, and want all who can’t produce that much to be provided with it—and something more at the expense of others.

It may be urged that the employer’s profits also represent the livings of a number of human beings; but this passes nowadays for a reactionary view. “We stand for [pg 2]man as against the dollar.” If you say that the “dollar” is metonymy for “the man possessed of a dollar,” with rights to defend, and reasonable expectations to be realized, you convict yourself of reaction. “These gentry” (I quote from the May Atlantic) “suppose themselves to be discussing the rights of man, when all they are discussing is the rights of stockholders.” The true view, the progressive view, is obviously that the possessors of the dollar, the recipients of profits and dividends, are excluded from the communion of humanity. Labor is mankind.

The present instance is of course not the only instance in human history of the substitution of class criteria of judgment for social criteria. Such manifestations of class conscience are doubtless justified in the large economy of human affairs; an individual must often claim all in order to gain anything, and the same may be true of a class. Besides, the ultimate arbitration of the claims of the classes is not a matter for the rational judgment. What is subject to rational analysis, however, are the methods of gaining its ends proposed by the new social conscience. Of these methods one of wide acceptance is that of fixing odium upon certain property interests, with a view to depriving them immediately of the respect still granted to property interests in general, and ultimately of the protection of the laws. It is with the rationality of what may be called the excommunication and outlawing of special property interests, that the present paper is concerned.

In passing, it is worth noting that the same ethical spirit that insists upon fixing the responsibility for social ills upon particular property interests—or property owners—insists with equal vehemence upon absolving the propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his acts. The Los Angeles dynamiters were but victims: the crime in which they were implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment was rank injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further crime, [pg 3]instead of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials, the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to pay for better habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and air. Rather, we are urged to fix responsibility upon the individual owner who receives rent from slum tenements. Perhaps we can not imprison him for his misdeeds, but we can make him an object of public reproach; expel him from social intercourse (if that, so often talked about, is ever done); fasten his iniquities upon him if ever he seeks a post of trust or honor; and ultimately we can deprive him of his property. Let him and his anti-social interests be forever excommunicate, outlawed.

II

In the country at large the property interests involved in the production and sale of alcoholic beverages are already excommunicated. The unreformed “best society” may still tolerate the presence of persons whose fortunes are derived from breweries or distilleries; but the great mass of the social-minded would deny them fire and water. In how many districts would a well organized political machine urge persons thus enriched as candidates for Congress, the bench or even the school board? In the prohibition territory excommunication of such property interests has been followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and Kansas exists by the same title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of the law. On the road to excommunication is private property in the wretched shacks that shelter the city’s poor. Outlawry is not far distant. “These tenements must go.” Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage upon the subsidence of a wave of reform. Many a rookery, officially abolished, [pg 4]will be found still tenanted, and yielding not one income, but two, one for the owner and another for the police. The property represented by enterprises paying low wages, working men for long hours or under unhealthful conditions, or employing children, is almost ripe for excommunication. Pillars of society and the church have already been seen tottering on account of revelations of working conditions in factories from which they receive dividends. Property “affected by a public use,” that is, investments in the instrumentalities of public service, is becoming a compromising possession. We are already somewhat suspicious of the personal integrity and political honor of those who receive their incomes from railways or electric lighting plants; and the odor of gas stocks is unmistakable. Even the land, once the retreat of high birth and serene dignity, is beginning to exhale a miasma of corruption. “Enriched by unearned increment”—who wishes such an epitaph? A convention is to be held in a western city in this very year, to announce to the world that the delegates and their constituencies—all honest lovers of mankind—will refuse in future to recognize any private title to land or other natural resources. Holders of such property, by continuing to be such, will place themselves beyond the pale of human society, and will forfeit all claim to sympathy when the day dawns for the universal confiscation of land.

III

The existence of categories of property interests resting under a growing weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a series of problems in private ethics that seem almost to demand a rehabilitation of the art of casuistry. A very intelligent and conscientious lady of the writer’s acquaintance became possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth interest in a Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is occupied by a saloon. Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners to secure a cancellation of the [pg 5]liquor dealer’s lease. This they refused to do, on the ground that the building in question is, by location, eminently suited to its present use, but very ill suited to any other; and that, moreover, the lessee would immediately reopen his business on the opposite corner. To yield to their partner’s desire would therefore result in a reduction of their own profits, but would advance the public welfare not one whit. Disheartened by her partners’ obstinacy, my friend is seeking to dispose of her interest in the building. As she is willing to incur a heavy sacrifice in order to get rid of her complicity in what she considers an unholy business, the transfer will doubtless soon be made. Her soul will be lightened of the profits from property put to an anti-social use. But the property will still continue in such use, and profits from it will still accrue to someone with a soul to lose or to save.

In her fascinating book, Twenty Years at Hull House, Miss Jane Addams tells of a visit to a western state where she had invested a sum of money in farm mortgages. “I was horrified,” she says, “by the wretched conditions among the farmers, which had resulted from a long period of drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my mind…. The farmer’s wife [was] a picture of despair, as she stood in the door of the bare, crude house, and the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried to keep out of sight, continually thrust forward their faces, almost covered by masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their little bare feet so black, so hard, the great cracks so filled with dust, that they looked like flattened hoofs. The children could not be compared to anything so joyous as satyrs, although they appeared but half-human. It seemed to me quite impossible to receive interest from mortgages upon farms which might at any season be reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the farmers, as speedily as possible I withdrew all my investment.” And thereby made the supply of money for such farmers [pg 6]that much less and consequently that much dearer. This is quite a fair example of much current philanthropy.

We may safely assume that, however much this action may have lightened Miss Addams’s conscience, it did not lighten the burden of debt upon the farmer, or make the periodic interest payments less painful, and it certainly did put them to the trouble and contingent expenses of a new mortgage. The moral burden was shifted, to the ease of the philanthropist, and this seems to exhaust the sum of the good results of one well intentioned deed. Do they outweigh the bad ones?

So, doubtless, there are among our friends persons who, upon proof that factories in which they have been interested pay starvation wages, have withdrawn their investments. And others who, stumbling upon a state legislature among the productive assets of a railway corporation, have sold their bonds and invested the proceeds elsewhere. It is a modern way of obeying the injunction, “Sell all thou hast and follow me.” And not a very painful way, since the irreproachable investments pay almost, if not quite, as well as those that are suspect.

It is not, however, impossible to conceive of a property owner driven from one position to another, in order to satisfy this new requirement of the social conscience, without ever finding peace. Miss Addams put the money withdrawn from those hideous farm mortgages into a flock of “innocent looking sheep.” Alas, they were not so innocent as they seemed. “The sight of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each was not reassuring to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A fortunate series of sales of mutton, wool and farm enabled the partners to end the enterprise without loss.” Sales of mutton? Let us hope those eight hundred infected hoofs are well printed on the butcher’s conscience.

And the net result of all these moral strivings? The evil investments still continue to be evil, and still yield [pg 7]profits. Doubtless they rest, in the end, upon less sensitive consciences. Marvellous moral gain!

IV

We are bound to the wheel, say the sociological fatalists. All our efforts are of no avail; the Wheel revolves as it was destined. Not so. Our strivings for purity in investments, puny as may be their results in the individual instance, may compose a sum that is imposing in its effectiveness. How their influence may be exerted will best appear from an analogy.

It is a settled conviction among Americans of Puritan antecedents, and among all other Americans, native born or alien, that have come under Puritan influence, that the dispensing of alcoholic beverages is a degrading function. This conviction has not, to be sure, notably impaired the performance of the function. But it has none the less produced a striking effect. It has set apart for the function in question those elements in the population that place the lowest valuation upon the esteem of the public, and that are, on the whole, least worthy of it. In consequence the American saloon is, by common consent, the very worst institution of its kind in the world. Such is the immediate result of good intentions working by the method of excommunication of a trade.

This degradation of the personnel and the institution proceeds at an accelerated rate as public opinion grows more bitter. In the end the evil becomes so serious, so intimately associated with all other evils, social and political, that you hear men over their very cups rise to proclaim, with husky voices, “The saloon must go!” At this point the community is ripe for prohibition: accordingly, it would seem that the initial stages in the process, unpleasant as were their consequences, were not ill-advised, after all. But prohibition does not come without a political struggle, in which the enemy, selected for brazenness and schooled in corruption, employs methods that leave [pg 8]lasting scars upon the body politic. And even when vanquished, the enemy retreats into the morasses of “unenforcible laws,” to conduct a guerilla warfare that knows no rules. Let us grant that the ultimate gain is worth all it costs: are we sure that we have taken the best possible means to achieve our ends?

In the poorer quarters of most great American cities, there is much property that it is difficult for a man to hold without losing the respect of the enlightened. Old battered tenements, dingy and ill lighted tumbledown shacks, the despair of the city reformer. Let us say that the proximity of gas tanks or noisy railways or smoky factories consign such quarters to the habitation of the very poor. Quite possibly, then, the replacement of the existing buildings by better ones would represent a heavy financial loss. The increasing social disapprobation of property vested in such wretched forms leads to the gradual substitution of owners who hold the social approval in contempt, for those who manifest a certain degree of sensitiveness. The tenants certainly gain nothing from the change. What is more likely to happen, is a screwing up of rents, an increasing promptness of evictions. Public opinion will in the end be roused against the landlords; the more timid among them will sell their holdings to others not less ruthless, but bolder and more astute. Attempts at public regulation will be fought with infinitely greater resourcefulness than could possibly have been displayed by respectable owners. Perhaps the final outcome will be that more drastic regulations are adopted than would have been the case had the shifting in ownership not taken place. There would still remain the possibility of the evasion of the law, and it is not at all improbable that the progress in the technique of evasion would outstrip the progress in regulation, thus leaving the tenant with a balance of disadvantage from the process as a whole.

The most illuminating instance of a business interest subjected first to excommunication—literally—and [pg 9]then to outlawry, is that of the usurer, or, in modern parlance, the loan shark. To the mediæval mind there was something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediæval position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an opportunity for profit—that is, a potential property interest—was outlawed. In consequence it became impossible for reputable citizens to engage in the business. Usury therefore came to be monopolized by aliens, exempt from the current ethical formulation, who were “protected,” for a consideration, by the prince, just as dubious modern property interests may be protected by the political boss.

Let us summarize the results of eight hundred years of experience in this method of dealing with the usurer’s trade. The business shifted from the control of citizens to that of aliens; from the hands of those who were aliens merely in a narrow, national sense, to the hands of those who are alien to our common humanity. Such lawless, tricky, extortionate loan sharks as now infest our cities were probably not to be found at all in mediæval or early modern times. They are a product of a secular process of selection. Their ability to evade the laws directed against them is consummate. It is true that from time to time we do succeed in catching one and fining him, or even imprisoning him. For which risk the small borrower is forced to pay, at a usurer’s rate.

Social improvement through the excommunication of property interests is inevitably a disorderly process. Wherever it is in operation we are sure to find the successive stages indicated in the foregoing examples. First, a gradual substitution of the conscienceless property holder for the one responsive to public sentiment. Next, under the threat of hostile popular action, the timid and resourceless property owner gives way to the resourceful and the bold. The third stage in the process is a vigorous political movement towards drastic regulation or abolition, [pg 10]evoking a desperate attempt on the part of the interests threatened to protect themselves by political means—that is, by gross corruption; or, if the menaced interest is a vast one, dominating a defensible territory, by armed rebellion, as in our own Civil War. If the interest is finally overwhelmed politically, and placed completely under the ban of the law, it has been given ample time to develop an unscrupulousness of personnel and an art of corruption that long enable it to exist illegally, a lasting reproach to the constituted authorities.

V

Suppression of anti-social interests by the methods in vogue amounts to little more than their banishment to the underworld. And we can well imagine the joy with which the denizens of the underworld receive such new accessions to their numbers and power. For in the nature of the case, it is inevitable that all varieties of outcasts and outlaws should join forces. The religious schismatic makes common cause with the pariah; the political offender with the thief and robber. Such association of elements vastly increases the difficulty of repressing crime. The band of thieves and robbers in the cave of Adullam doubtless found their powers of preying vastly increased through the acquisition of such a leader as David. The problem of mediæval vagabondage was rendered well-nigh incapable of solution by the fact that any beggar’s rags might conceal a holy but excommunicated friar.

Let us once more review our experience with the usurer. As an outcast he offers his support to other outcasts, and is in turn supported by them. The pawnbroker and the pickpocket are closely allied: without the pawnshop, pocketpicking would offer but a precarious living; without the picking of pockets, many pawnshops would find it impossible to meet expenses. The salary loan shark often works hand in glove with the professional gambler; each procures victims for the other. The “hole-in-the-[pg 11]wall” or “blind tiger” provides a rendezvous for all the outcasts of society. “Boot-legging” is a common subsidiary occupation for the pander, the thief and the cracksman. Where it flourishes, it serves to bridge over many a period of slack trade. Franchises whose validity is subject to political attack, bring to the aid of the underworld some of the most powerful interests in the community. The police are almost helpless when confronted by a coalition of persons of wealth and respectability with professional politicians commanding a motley array of yeggs and thugs, pimps and card-sharpers.

Let us suppose that the developing social conscience places under the ban receipt of private income from land and other natural resources, and that a powerful movement aiming at the confiscation of such resources is under way. It is superfluous to point out that the vast interests threatened would offer a desperate resistance. The warfare against an incomparably lesser interest, the liquor trade, has taxed all the resources of the modern democratic state—on the whole the most absolute political organization known. In no instance has the state come out of the struggle completely victorious; the proscribed interest is yielding ground, if at all, only very slowly. What, then, would be the outcome of a struggle against the vastly greater landed interest? Perhaps the state would be victorious in the end. But for generations the landed interest would survive, if not by title of common law, at least by title of common corruption. And in the course of the conflict, we can not doubt that political disorder would flourish as never before, and that under its shelter private vice and crime would develop almost unchecked.

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that the will of a mere majority is absolute in the state. The law is a reality only when the outlawed interests represent an insignificant minority. Arbitrarily to increase the outlawed interests is to undermine the very foundations of society.

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VI

The trend of the foregoing discussion, it will be said, is reactionary in the extreme. There are, as all must admit, private interests that are prejudicial to the public interest. Are they to be left in possession of the privilege of trading upon the public disaster—entrenching themselves, rendering still more difficult the future task of the reformer? By no means. The writer opposes no criticism to the extinction of anti-social private interests; on the contrary, he would have the state proceed against them with far greater vigor than it has hitherto displayed. It is important, however, to be sure first that a private interest is anti-social. Then the question is merely one of method. It is the author’s contention that the method of excommunication and outlawry is the very worst conceivable.

We are wont to hold up to scorn the British method of compensating liquor sellers for licenses revoked. It is an expensive method. But let us weigh its corresponding advantages. The licensee does not find himself in a position in which he must choose between personal destitution and the public interest. He dares not employ methods of resistance that would subject him to the risk of forfeiting the right to compensation. He may resist by fair means, but if he is intelligent, he will keep his skirts clear of foul. If his establishment is closed, he is not left, a ruined and desperate man, to project methods for carrying on his trade illicitly. On the contrary, the act of compensation has placed in his hands funds in which he might be mulcted if convicted of violation of the law. And if natural perversity should drive him to illegal practices, he would not find himself an object of sympathy on the part of that considerable minority that resent injustice even to those whom they regard as evil-doers.

There can be little doubt that by the adoption of the principle of adequate compensation, an American commonwealth [pg 13]could extinguish any property interest that majority opinion pronounces anti-social. We may have industries that menace the public health. Under existing conditions the interests involved exert themselves to the utmost to suppress information relative to the dangers of such industries. With the principle of compensation in operation, these very interests would be the foremost in exposing the evils in question. It is no hardship to sell your interest to the public. Does any one feel aggrieved when the public decides to appropriate his land to a public use? On the contrary, every possessor of a site at all suited for a public building or playground does everything in his power to display its advantages in the most favorable light.

And with this we have admitted a disadvantage of the compensation principle—over-compensation. We do pay excessively for property rights extinguished in the public interest. But this is largely because the principle is employed with such relative infrequency that we have not as yet developed a technique of compensation. German cities have learned how to acquire property for public use without either plundering the private owner or excessively enriching him. The British application of the Small Holdings Acts has duly protected the interests of the large landholder, without making of him a vociferous champion of the Acts.

Progressive public morality readers one private interest after another indefensible. Let the public extinguish such interests, by all means. But let the public be moral at its own expense.

A revolting doctrine, it will be said. Because men have been permitted, through gross defect in the laws, to build up interests in dealing out poisons to the public, are they to be compensated, like the purveyors of wholesome products, when the public decrees that their destructive activities shall cease? Because a corrupt legislature once gave away valuable franchises, are we and our children, [pg 14]and our children’s children, forever to pay tribute, in the shape of interest on compensation funds, to the heirs of the shameless grantees? Because the land of a country was parcelled out, in a lawless age, among the unworthy retainers of a predatory prince, must we forever pay rent on every loaf we eat—as we should do, in fact, even if we transformed great landed estates into privately held funds? Did we not abolish human slavery, without compensation, and is there any one to question the justice of the act?

We did indeed extinguish slavery without compensation to the slave owners. But if no one had ever conceived of such a policy we should have been a richer nation and a happier one. We paid for the slaves, in blood and treasure, many times the sum that would have made every slave owner eager to part with his slaves. Such enrichment of the slave owner would have been an act of social injustice, it may be said. The saying would be open to grave doubt, but the doctrine here advanced runs, not in terms of justice, but in terms of social expediency.

And expediency is commonly regarded as a cheap substitute for justice. It is wrongly so regarded. Social justice, as usually conceived, looks to the past for its validity. Its preoccupation is the correction of ancient wrongs. Social expediency looks to the future: its chief concern is the prevention of future wrongs. As a guide to political action, the superiority of the claims of social expediency is indisputable.

VII

In the foregoing argument it has been deliberately assumed that the interests to be extinguished are, for the most part, universally recognized as anti-social. Slavery, health-destroying adulteration, the maintenance of tenements that menace life and morals, these at least represent interests so abominable that all must agree upon the wisdom of extinguishing them. The only point in dispute [pg 15]must be one of method. It is the contention of the present writer that when even such interests have had time to become clothed with an appearance of regularity, the method of extinction should be through compensation. By its tolerance of such interests, the public has made itself an accomplice in the mischief to which they give rise, and accordingly has not even an equitable right to throw the whole responsibility upon the private persons concerned.

Interests thus universally recognized to be evil are necessarily few. In the vast majority of cases the establishment of interests we now seek to proscribe took place in an epoch in which no evil was imputed to them. At first a small minority, usually regarded as fanatics, attack the interests in question. This minority increases, and in the end transforms itself into a majority. But long after majority opinion has become adverse, there remains a vigorous minority opinion defending the menaced interests. A hundred years ago the distilling of spirituous liquors was almost universally regarded as an entirely legitimate industry. The enemies of the industry were few and of no political consequence. Today in many communities the industry is utterly condemned by majority opinion. There is, however, no community in which a minority honestly defending the industry is absolutely wanting. Admitting that the majority opinion is right, it remains none the less true that adherents of the minority opinion would regard themselves as most grievously wronged if the majority proceeded to a destruction of their interests.

Where moral issues alone are involved, we may perhaps accept the view that the well considered opinion of the majority is as near as may be to infallibility. But it is very rarely the case that the question of the legitimacy of a property interest can be reduced to a purely moral issue. Usually there are also at stake, technical and broad economic issues in which majority judgment is notoriously [pg 16]fallible. Thus we have at times had large minorities who believed that the bank as an institution is wholly evil, and ought to be abolished. This was the majority opinion in one period of the history of Texas, and in accordance with it, established banking interests were destroyed by law. It is only within the last fifteen years that the majority of the citizens of that commonwealth have admitted the error of the earlier view.

In the course of the last twenty-five years, notable progress has been made in the art of preserving perishable foods through refrigeration. There are differences of opinion as to the effect upon the public health of food so preserved; and further differences as to the effect of the cold storage system upon the cost of living. On neither the physiological nor the economic questions involved is majority opinion worthy of special consideration. None the less, legislative measures directed against the storage interests have been seriously considered in a large number of states, and were it not for the difficulties inherent in the regulation of interstate commerce, we should doubtless see the practice of cold storage prohibited in some jurisdictions. Those whose property would thus be destroyed would accept their losses with much bitterness, in view of the fact that the weight of expert opinion holds their industry to be in the public interest.

What still further exacerbates the feeling of injury on the part of those whose interests are proscribed, is the fact that the purity of motives of the persons most active in the campaign of proscription is not always clear. Not many years ago we had a thriving manufacture of artificial butter. The persons engaged in the industry claimed that their product was as wholesome as that produced according to the time-honored process, and that its cheapness promised an important advance in the adequate provisioning of the people. We destroyed the industry, very largely because of our strong bent toward conservatism in all matters pertaining to the table. But among the influences [pg 17]that were most active in taxing artificial butter out of existence, was the competing dairymen’s interest.

It is asserted by those who would shift the whole burden of taxation onto land that they are animated by the most unselfish motives, whereas their opponents are defending their selfish interests alone. Yet a common Single Tax appeal to the large manufacturer and the small house-owner takes the form of a computation demonstrating that those classes would gain more through the reduction in the burden on improvements than they would lose through increase in burden on the land. Let it be granted that personal advantage is not incompatible with purity of motives. The association of ideas does not, however, inspire confidence, especially in the breasts of those whose interests are threatened.

Extinction of property interests without compensation necessarily makes our legislative bodies the battleground of conflicting interests. Honest motives are combined with crooked ones in the attack upon an interest; crooked and honest motives combine in its defense. Out of the disorder issues a legislative determination that may be in the public interest or may be prejudicial to it. And most likely the law is inadequately supported by machinery of enforcement: it is effective in controlling the scrupulous; to the unscrupulous it is mere paper. In many instances its net effect is only to increase the risks connected with the conduct of a business.

When England prohibited importation of manufactures from France, the import trade continued none the less, under the form of smuggling. The risk of seizure was merely added to the risk of fire and flood. Just as one could insure against the latter risks, so the practice arose of insuring against seizure. At one time, at any rate, in the French ports were to be found brokers who would insure the evasion of a cargo of goods for a premium of fifteen per cent. At the safe distance of a century and a half, the absurd prohibition and its incompetent administration [pg 18]are equally comic. At the time, however, there was nothing comic in the contempt for law and order thus engendered, in the feeling of outrage on the part of those ruined by seizures, and in the alliance of respectable merchants with the thieves and footpads enlisted for the smuggling trade.

VIII

It is a common observation of present day social reformers that an excessive regard is displayed by our governmental organs for security of property, while security of non-property rights is neglected. And this would indeed be a serious indictment of the existing order if there were in fact a natural antithesis between the security of property and security of the person. There is, however, no such antithesis. In the course of history the establishment of security of property has, as a rule, preceded the establishment of personal security, and has provided the conditions in which personal security becomes possible. Adequate policing is essential to any form of security. Property can pay for policing; the person can not. This is a crude and materialistic interpretation of the facts, but it is essentially sound.

How much personal security existed in England, five centuries and a half ago, when it was possible for Richard to carve his way through human flesh to the throne? The lowly, certainly, enjoyed no greater security than the high born. How much personal security exists in the late Macedonian provinces of the Turkish Empire, or in northern Mexico? It is safe to issue a challenge to all the world to produce an instance, contemporary or historical, of a country in which property is insecure and in which human life and human happiness are not still more insecure. On the other hand, it is difficult to produce an instance of a state in which security of property has long been established, in which there is not a progressive sensitiveness about the non-propertied rights of man. It is in the countries [pg 19]where the sacredness of private property is a fetich, that one finds recognition of a universal right to education, of a right to protection against violence and against epidemic disease, of a right to relief in destitution. These are perhaps meagre rights; but they represent an expanding category. The right to support in time of illness and in old age is making rapid progress. The development of such rights is not only not incompatible with security of property, but it is, in large measure, a corollary of property security. Personal rights shape themselves upon the analogy of property rights; they utilize the same channels of thought and habit. One of the most powerful arguments for “social insurance” is its very name. Insurance is recognized as an essential to the security of property; it is therefore easy to make out a case for the application of the principle to non-propertied claims.

Some may claim that the security of property has now fulfilled its mission; that we can safely allow the principle to decay in order to concentrate our attention upon the task of establishing non-propertied rights. But let us remember that we are not removed from barbarism by the length of a universe. The crust of orderly civilization is deep under our feet: but not six hundred years deep. The primitive fires still smoke on our Mexican borders and in the Balkans. And blow holes open from time to time through our own seemingly solid crust—in Colorado, in West Virginia, in the Copper Country. It is evidently premature to affirm that the security of property has fulfilled its mission.

IX

The question at issue, is not, however, the rights of property against the rights of man—or more honestly—the rights of labor. The claims of labor upon the social income may advance at the expense of the claims of property. In the institutional struggle between the propertied and the propertyless, the sympathies of the writer [pg 20]are with the latter party. It is his hope and belief that an ever increasing share of the social income will assume the form of rewards for personal effort.

But this is an altogether different matter from the crushing of one private property interest after another, in the name of the social welfare or the social morality. Such detailed attacks upon property interests are, in the end, to the injury of both social classes. Frequently they amount to little more than a large loss to one property interest, and a small gain to another. They increase the element of insecurity in all forms of property; for who shall say which form is immune from attack? Now it is the slum tenement, obvious corollary of our social inequalities; next it may be the marble mansion or gilded hotel, equally obvious corollaries of the same institutional situation. Now it is the storage of meat that is under attack; it may next be the storage of flour. The fact is, our mass of income yielding possessions is essentially an organic whole. The irreproachable incomes are not exactly what they would be if those subject to reproach did not exist. If some property incomes are dirty, all property incomes become turbid.

The cleansing of property incomes, therefore, is a first obligation of the institution of property as a whole. The compensation principle throws the cost of the cleansing upon the whole mass, since, in the last analysis, any considerable burden of taxation will distribute itself over the mass. The principle is therefore consonant with justice. What is not less important, the principle, systematically developed, would go far toward freeing the legislature from the graceless function of arbitrating between selfish interests, and the administration from the necessity of putting down powerful interests outlawed by legislative act. It would give us a State working smoothly, and therefore an efficient instrument for social ends. Most important of all, it would promote that security of economic interests which is essential to social progress.

[pg 21]

A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism

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There is a persistent question regarding the distribution of property which is of peculiar interest in the season of automobile tours and summer hotels. Most thinking people acknowledge a good deal of perplexity over this question, while on most parallel ones they are generally cock-sure—on whichever is the side of their personal interests. But in this question the bias of personal interest is not very large, and therefore it may be considered with more chance of agreement than can the larger questions of the same class which parade under various disguises.

The little question is that of tipping. After we have squeezed out of it such antitoxic serum as we can, we will briefly indicate the application of it to larger questions.

Tipping is plainly a survival of the feudal relation, long before the humbler men had risen from the condition of status to that of contract, when fixed pay in the ordinary sense was unknown, and where the relation between servant and master was one of ostensible voluntary service and voluntary support, was for life, and in its best aspect was a relation of mutual dependence and kindness. Then the spasmodic payment was, as tips are now, essential to the upper man’s dignity, and very especially to the dignity of his visitor. This feudal relation survives in England today to such an extent that poor men refrain from visiting their rich relations because of the tips. In the great country-houses the tips are expected to be in gold, at least so I was told some years ago. And in England and out of it, Don Cesar’s bestowal of his last shilling on the man who had served him, still thrills the audience, at least the tipped portion of it.

Europe being on the whole less removed from feudal institutions than we are, tipping is not only more firmly [pg 22]established there, but more systematized. It is more nearly the rule that servants’ places in hotels are paid for, and they are apt to be dependent entirely upon tips. The greater wealth of America, on the other hand, and the extravagance of the nouveaux riches, has led in some institutions to more extravagant tipping than is dreamed of in Europe, and consequently has scattered through the community a number of servants from Europe who, when here, receive with gratitude from a foreigner, a tip which they would scorn from an American.

In the midst of general relations of contract—of agreed pay for agreed service, tipping is an anomaly and a constant puzzle.

It would seem strange, if it were not true of the greater questions of the same kind, that in the chronic discussion of this one, so little attention, if any, has been paid to what may be the fundamental line of division between the two sides—namely, the distinction between ideal ethics and practical ethics.

An illustration or two will help explain that distinction:

First illustration: “Thou shalt not kill” which is ideal ethics in an ideal world of peace. Practical ethics in the real world are illustrated in Washington and Lee, who for having killed their thousands, are placed beside the saints!

Second illustration: Obey the laws and tell the truth. This is ideal ethics, which our very legislatures do much to prevent being practical. For instance; they ignore the fact that in the present state of morality, taxes on personal property can be collected from virtually nobody but widows and orphans who have no one to evade the taxes for them. So the legislatures continue the attempt to tax personal property, and a judge on the bench says that a man who lies about his personal taxes shall not on that account be held an unreliable witness in other matters.

Or to take an illustration less radical: it is not in legal testimony alone that ideal ethics require everybody to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—[pg 23]that the world should have as much truth as possible; and if the world were perfectly kind, perfectly honest and perfectly wise (which last involves the first two), that ideal could be realized. For instance, in our imperfect world a man telling people when he did not like them, would be constantly giving needless pain and making needless enemies, whereas in an ideal world—made up of perfect people, there would be nobody to dislike, or, pardon the Hibernicism, if there were, the whole truth could be told without causing pain or enmity. Or again, in a world where there are dishonest people, a man telling everything about his schemes, would have them run away with by others, though in an ideal world, where there were no dishonest people, he could speak freely. In fact, the necessity of reticence in this connection does not even depend on the existence of dishonesty: for in a world where people have to look out for themselves, instead of everybody looking out for everybody else, a man exposing his plans might hurry the execution of competing plans on the part of perfectly honest people.

Farther illustration may be sufficiently furnished by the topic in hand.

In the case of most poor folks other than servants, what to do about it has lately been pretty distinctly settled: the religion of pauperization is pretty generally set aside: almsgiving, the authorities on ethics now generally hold, should be restricted to deserving cases—to people incapacitated by constitution or circumstance from taking proper care of themselves.

Now is tipping almsgiving, and are servants among the deserving classes?

How many people have asked themselves these simple questions, and how many who are educated up to habitually refusing alms unless the last of the questions is affirmatively answered, just as habitually tip servants?

Is tipping almsgiving? Not in the same sense that alms are given without any show of anything in return: the [pg 24]servant does something for the tipper. Yes, but he is paid for it by his employer. True, but only sometimes: at other times he is only partly paid, depending for the rest on tips; and sometimes the tips are so valuable that the servant pays his alleged employer for the opportunity to get them. Yet I know one hotel in Germany, and probably there are others, there and elsewhere, where the menus and other stationery bear requests against tipping. But in that one hotel I know tipping to be as rife as in hotels generally: the customers are not educated up to the landlord’s standard. And here we come to the fundamental remedy for all questionable practices—the education of the people beyond them. But this is simply the ideal condition in which ideal ethics could prevail. Meanwhile we must determine the practical ethics of the actual world.

The servant’s position is different from that of most other wage-earners, in that he is in direct contact with the person who is to benefit from his work. The man who butchers your meat or grinds your flour, you probably never see; but the man who brushes your clothes or waits on your table, holds to you a personal relation, and he can do his work so as merely to meet a necessity, or so as to rise beyond mere necessity into comfort or luxury. Outside of home servants, the necessity is all that, in the present state of human nature, his regular stipend is apt to provide; the comfort or the luxury, the feeling of personal interest, the atmosphere of promptness and cheerfulness and ease, is apt to respond only to the tip. Only in the ideal world will it be spontaneous. In the real world it must be paid for.

And why should it not be—why is it not as legitimate to pay for having your wine well cooled or carefully tempered and decanted, as to pay for the wine itself? The objection apt to be first urged is that it degrades the servant. But does it? He is not an ideal man in an ideal world, already doing his best or paid to do his best. You are not degrading him from any such standard as that, [pg 25]into the lower one of requiring tips: you are simply taking him as he is. True, if he got no tips, he would not depend upon them; but without them he would not do all you want him to; before he will do that, he must be developed into a different man—he must become a creature of an ideal world. You may in the course of ages develop him into that, and as you do, he will work better and better, and tips may grow smaller and smaller, until he does his best spontaneously, and tips have dwindled to nothing. But to withdraw them now would simply make him sulky, and lead to his doing worse than now.

Another objection urged against tips is that they put the rich tipper at an advantage over the poor one. But the rich man is at an advantage in nearly everything else, why not here? The idea of depriving him of his advantages, is rank communism, which destroys the stimulus to energy and ingenuity that, in the present state of human nature, is needed to keep the world moving. In an ideal state of human nature, the man with ability to create wealth may find stimulus enough, as some do to a considerable extent now, in the delight of distributing wealth for the general good; but we are considering what is practicable in the present state of human nature.

Another aspect of the case, or at least a wider aspect, is the more sentimental one where the tip is prompted as reciprocation for spontaneous kindness.

But in the service of private families, as distinct from service to the general public or to visitors it is notorious that constant tipping is ruinous. Occasional holidays and treats and presents at Christmas and on special occasions are useful, as promoting the general feeling of reciprocation. But from visitors the tip is generally essential to ensuring the due meed of respect. Yet we can reasonably imagine a time when it may not be; and even now, for the casual service of holding a horse or brushing off the dust, a hearty “thank you” is perhaps on the whole better than a tip.

[pg 26]Considering the morality of the question all around—the practical ethics as well as the ideal, the underlying facts are that no man ought to be a servant in the servile sense, and indeed no man ought to be poor; and in an ideal world no man would be one or the other. Just how we are to get a world without servants or servile people, is perhaps a little more plain than how we are to get Mr. Bellamy’s world without poor people, which, however, amounts to nearly the same thing. At least we will get a less servile world, as machinery and organization make service less and less personal. Bread has long been to a great extent made away from home; much of the washing is also done away in great laundries, and organizations have lately been started to call for men’s outer clothes, and keep them cleaned, repaired and pressed. There is a noticeable rise, too, in the dignity of personal service: witness the college students at the summer hotels, and the self-respecting Jap in the private family. These influences are making for the ideal world in relation to service, and when we get it, no man will take tips, and nobody will offer them.

But in our stage of evolution, the tip, like the larger prizes, is part of the general stimulus to the best exertion and the best feeling, and is therefore legitimate; but it, like every other stimulus, should not be applied in excess, and the tendency should be to abolish it. The rich man often is led by good taste and good morals to restrain his expenditure in many directions, and there are few directions, if any, in which good taste and good morals more commend the happy medium than in tips. Excess in them, however, is not always prompted by good nature and generosity and reciprocation of spontaneous kindness, but often by desire for comfort, and even by ostentation. But all such promptings require regulation for the same reason that, it is now becoming generally recognized, the promptings of even charity itself require regulation.

The head of one of the leading Fifth Avenue restaurants [pg 27]once said to the writer, substantially: “We don’t like tips: they demoralize our men. But what can we do about it? We can’t stop it, or even keep it within bounds. Our customers will give them, and people who have too much money or too little sense, give not only dollar bills or five dollar bills, but fifty dollar bills and even hundred dollar bills. We have tried to stave off customers who do such things: we believe that in the long run it would pay us to; but we can’t.”

When all the promptings of liberality or selfishness or ostentation are well regulated, we will be in the ideal world. Until then, in the actual world, it is the part of wisdom to regulate ideal ethics by practical ethics—and tip, but tip temperately.

And now to apply our principles to a wider field.

The ideal is that all men should have what they produce. The ideal is also that all men should have full shares of the good things of life. These two ideals inevitably combine into a third—that all men should produce full shares of the good things of life. But the plain fact is that they cannot—that no amount of opportunity or appliances will enable the average day laborer to produce what Mr. Edison or Mr. Hill or even the average deviser of work and guide of labor does. Then even ideal ethics cannot say in this actual world: Let both have the same. That would simply be Robin Hood ethics: rob the man who produces much, and give the plunder to the man who produces little. Hence comes the disguising of the schemes to do it, even so that they often deceive their own devisers. What then do practical ethics say? They can’t say anything more than: Help the less capable to become capable, so that he may produce more. But that is at least as slow a process as raising the servant beyond the stage of tips. Meantime the socialists are unwilling to wait, and propose to rob the present owners of the means of production, and take the control of industry from the [pg 28]men who manage it now, and put it in the hands of the men who merely can influence votes. These men certainly are no less selfish and dishonest than the captains of industry, and are vastly less able to select the profitable fields of industry, and organize and economize industry; whatever product they might squeeze out would be vastly less than now, and it would stick to their own fingers no less than does what the politicians handle now. Dividing whatever might reach the people, without reference to those who produced it, could yield the average man no more than he gets now. That’s very simple mathematics. One of the saddest sights of the day is the number of good people to whom these facts are not self-evident.

In no state of human nature that any persons now living, or the grandchild of any person now living, will witness, could such conditions be permanent. Their temporary realization might be accomplished; but if it were, the able men would not be satisfied with either the low grade of civilization inevitable unless they worked, or with being robbed of the large share of production that must result from their work. The more intelligent of the rank and file, too, would rebel against the conditions inevitably lowering the general prosperity, and they would soon realize the difference in industrial leadership between “political generals” and natural generals. Insurrection would follow, and then anarchy, after which things would start again on their present basis, but some generations behind.

But I for one do not expect these experiences, especially in America: for here probably enough men have already become property holders to make a sufficient balance of power for the preservation of property. If not, the first step toward ensuring civilization, is helping enough men to develop into property holders, and continue property holders, which general experience declares that they will not unless they develop their property themselves.

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An Experiment in Syndicalism

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During the last twenty years New Zealand has tried many social and economic experiments; these experiments have been made by her own Legislature, and her own people; and as a rule they have been remarkably successful: during the last few months she has had the experience of a new one conducted by strangers, and made at her expense. Fortunately there is reason to believe that this one will be found to have resulted in benefit to New Zealand and its people, while it may prove of service to older and larger countries. It is probable that the most widely known of New Zealand’s experiments is that which aimed at doing justice to employers and employees alike by the substitution for the Industrial strike of a Court of Arbitration, fairly constituted, on which both Workers and Employers were equally represented. This law has been branded by the supporters of the usual Strike policy with the name of “Compulsory Arbitration,” the object being to discredit it in the eyes of the workers, as an infringement of their liberty. The title is unfair and misleading. Unlike most laws, it never has been of universal application either to Workers or Employers, but only to those among them that chose to form themselves into industrial Unions, and to register those Unions as subject to the provisions of the Statute. The purpose of the Statute was an appeal to the common sense of the people, by offering them an alternative method of settling disputes and securing that fair-play for both parties which experience had shown could seldom be secured by the strike. The law, which was first introduced in 1894, had gradually appealed both to workers and employers, as worth trying, and before the close of the last century it [pg 30]had rendered the country prosperous, and had attracted the attention of thoughtful people in many other parts of the world to the “Country Without Strikes.” Efforts were made in several countries to introduce the principle of the New Zealand Statute, but with very little success, as it was generally opposed both by workers and employers:—the workers feeling confident they could obtain greater concessions by the forceful methods of the strike, and the employers suspecting that any Court of Arbitration would be likely to give the workers more than, without arbitration, they could compel the employers to surrender.

In the mean time the statutory substitute for the strike continued to succeed in New Zealand. Nearly every class of town workers, and some in the country, had formed Unions, and registered them under the arbitration law. With a single trifling exception, that was speedily put an end to by the punishment of the Union with the alternative of heavy fine or imprisonment, the country was literally as well as nominally a country without a strike. And it was something more than that: its prosperity increased year by year, and its production of goods—agricultural, pastoral, and manufactured—increased at a pace unequalled elsewhere. Yet the prosperity was most apparent in its effect on the conditions of the workers: under the successive awards of the arbitration court, wages had steadily increased until they had reached a point as high as in similar trades in America, while the cost of living was very little more than half the rate in any town in the United States. To all intelligent observers these facts were evident, and could not be concealed from the workers in other countries, especially in Australia, as the nearest geographically to New Zealand and commercially the most closely connected.

The effect, however, on the workers of Australia was not what might have been expected. Attempts had been made by some of the State Legislatures to introduce arbitration [pg 31]laws more or less like the New Zealand statute, but with very partial success. From the first these laws were opposed by the leaders of the Labor Unions, who naturally saw a menace to their influence in the fact that they became subject to punishment if they attempted to use their accustomed powers over their fellow unionists. The example of New Zealand was lauded in the Australian Legislatures and newspapers, and even in the courts, till at last a feeling of strong antagonism was developed among the more advanced class of socialistic Labor men, and it was decided by their leaders to undertake a campaign in the neighboring Dominion against the system of settling industrial questions by courts, and in favor of substituting the system of strikes, with their attendant power and profit to the Labor leaders. The first steps taken were sending men from Australia or England on lecturing tours through New Zealand, to create dissatisfaction with the Arbitration Courts by representing them as leaning to the side of the employers, and ignoring the claims of the workers. When this had gone on for about a year, workers of various classes were induced to cross from Australia, and join the Unions in New Zealand, for the purpose of influencing their fellow unionists to disloyalty towards the system under which they were registered. These men were generally competent workers and clever agitators, and many of them soon obtained prominence and official position in the Unions. As was natural, a good many of these new-comers were miners—either for coal or gold—and many of them joined the miners’ union at the great gold mine known as the Waihi, from which upwards of thirty million dollars worth of gold had been dug, and which was still yielding between three and four million dollars a year. There were nearly a thousand miners employed there, and all of them were members of a Union that was duly registered under the Arbitration statute.

There had been several questions in dispute between [pg 32]the miners and the owners, and these had been referred to the Arbitration Court some time before the arrival of the new Australian miners. The result, while it favored the Union in some respects, favored the Company in others, and this fact was used by the new-comers to convince the older hands that the Court had been unfair, and that they could secure much better terms for themselves if they would cease work, and so inflict immense loss by permitting the lower levels of the mine to become flooded. After a few months the Union decided to take advantage of the provision of the law which enabled any registered Union to withdraw its registration at six months’ notice. When the time had expired, the Union repeated the demand which had been refused by the Court, and on the refusal of the Company to agree, a strike was at once declared, and the whole of the miners ceased work. This had the effect, within a very short time, of rendering all the deeper levels of the mine unworkable. Close to the mine was a prosperous little town occupied chiefly by the miners and their families, most of the houses being the property of the mining company, and the men continued to occupy the houses while the strike was in progress. Other miners were found who were ready to take their places, but the men in possession refused to move out, and threatened with violence any miners that should attempt to work the mine. The men who had been prepared to work, finding this to be the position, withdrew. As there was no actual violence shown, there seemed to be a difficulty in the way of any interference by the Government: so several months passed, during which the mine lay idle while the miners on strike continued to occupy the houses and pay the very moderate rents demanded from employees of the company. This they were able to do partly from their savings, partly from the sympathetic contributions from Australia, and partly by some of the miners having scattered over the country and got work on the farms, and throwing their earnings into the common fund.

[pg 33]After repeated appeals by the mine-owners to the Government, an arrangement was made that the Company should employ miners willing to become members of a new Union registered under the Arbitration statute, and that the Government should send a police force sufficient to protect these in working the mine, and also to enforce the judgment of the local court in dispossessing the occupants of the houses belonging to the Company. An attempt was made by the strikers to defy this police force and prevent the new Union from working the mine; but when most of the new unionists had been sworn in as special constables, and a number of the militant strikers had been arrested, the others saw that they could not continue the struggle, and within a week or two abandoned the district, giving place to the members of the arbitration Union in both the mine and town.

Thus the first strike organized by the “Federation of Labor” in New Zealand resulted in a failure, but the miners thus defeated and driven from the little town that had been their home, in many cases for a good many years, were naturally embittered by their failure, and became an element of mischief in other districts, and especially in the coal mines, to which they turned when they found it hard to obtain employment in any of the gold mines.

The Australian Federation of Labor and its branch in New Zealand fully appreciated the fact that their first attempt to establish a system of Unionism opposed to the one recognized by the law, having proved a failure, it was necessary either to give up the attempt altogether or to make it more deliberately and on a much wider scale. The method they adopted was one that did credit to their foresight and determination. The Australian Federation is, and has always been, highly socialistic in its policy, and latterly its leaders have adopted and preached syndicalism, as promising to give the workers the control of society. New Zealand, alone among self-governing countries, having struck at the very root of their policy by [pg 34]trying to substitute a statute and a Court for the will of the associated workers, was a very tempting country for syndicalism. An island country which, owing to climate and soil, was specially suited for the production of all kinds of agricultural wealth beyond the needs of its own people, must depend on free access to the ports of other countries. This, it seemed plain, could be prevented by well managed syndicalism. It would be only necessary to organize the seamen who worked the vessels that kept the smaller harbors of such a country in touch with the larger ports at which the ocean going ships loaded and unloaded; and to organize also the stevedores at the larger ports. The bitterness of feeling that had followed the destruction of the Waihi Union, and the loss to its members not only of a good many months of good wages but of the homes they and their families had occupied for years, was a valuable asset in such a campaign. At first, of course, some of the working classes blamed the agents of “The Federation of Labor” who were responsible for the disastrous strike, but it was not difficult to turn attention from the past failure of a single strike, to the certain success that must attend a great syndical strike that would involve all the industries of the country. Most, indeed nearly all, of the disappointed Waihi strikers were ready to join with enthusiasm in carrying out the plans of The Federation, and removed to the places where they could be most effective in preparing the way for what they looked upon as a great revenge. Thus they either joined the old Unions at the principal ports, especially Auckland and Wellington, or formed new Unions, no longer registered under the Arbitration statute, but openly affiliated to The Federation of Labor, which had been established in New Zealand, but was really a branch of the Australian Federation. The four principal ports of New Zealand, indeed the only ports much frequented by the large export and import vessels, are Auckland, Wellington, Lyttleton, and Dunedin, the two first named being in the north island, [pg 35]and the other two in the south. Auckland is considerably the largest city in The Dominion, containing at least 25,000 more inhabitants than Wellington, which is not only the capital of the Dominion, but also the great distributing centre for the South island and the southern part of the North island, at the southern extremity of which it is situated. The remarkable situation of Auckland, on a very narrow isthmus about a hundred and eighty miles from the northern point of the country, is no doubt largely responsible for the growth of the city, which is the chief centre of the young manufactures of the Dominion, and the largest port of export for almost all the country produces, except wool and mutton, which are mainly raised in the South island. Thus it happens that Auckland and Wellington are at present the chief shipping ports of the Dominion, and it was to them that the Federation of Labor turned its chief attention when its leaders had definitely decided to undertake the campaign of syndicalism against the system of arbitration which had prevailed for sixteen years.

There had already been formed Unions of Waterside Workers and Seamen at each of these ports; but they were in all cases registered under the arbitration law, and of course subject to its penalties against both officials and members in cases of any breach of the statute. The Federation’s agents proceeded to collect the members of these unions who were in any way dissatisfied with the existing awards of the Arbitration Courts, and to form them into new Unions outside the statute. They had little difficulty in persuading the men that the new Unions would be free to act in many directions that were barred to the members of the old Unions. A good many of the men were thus persuaded to resign their membership in the existing Unions, and as they were very often the most active members, they gradually persuaded others to leave with them. There was nothing either in the law or custom of the ports to prevent unionists and non-unionists working [pg 36]together on the wharves or the coasting vessels; so within a comparatively short time the members of the new Federation Unions were more numerous than those that clung to the older ones. When this became the case, the officials of the new Unions approached the shipping companies with proposals for an agreement between them and the Federation Unions in some respects more favorable to the employers than the arbitration award under which the older Unions were working, and in this way gained a position which enabled them to undermine the old Unions, till they either died out for want of members or withdrew their registration, and at the end of their six months’ notice merged their Unions in those of The Federation. The Federation’s plans had been so carefully prepared that there was little or no suspicion on the part of the employers or of the public generally as to the true meaning of the movement. It was evident, of course, that it indicated a revolt against the arbitration law, but as the new unions appeared ready to give the employers rather better terms than the old ones, many reasons were found by employers for defending what began to be called the “Free Unions.” In this way things had gone on at the shipping ports for about two years from the failure of the gold miners’ strike at Waihi, before anything happened to open the eyes of the public to the real meaning of what The Federation of Labor had been doing. In that time the new Unions at each of the principal ports of the country had quietly obtained the entire control of the hands at waterside and local shipping, as well as of the Carters Unions. The time had arrived when the syndicalists believed themselves able to compel the public to submit to any demands they might see fit to make.

The occasion finally arose, as might have been expected, at Wellington, where the Federation of Labor had established its head-quarters. There was no definite dispute between the employers and workers, but for a few weeks there had been an uneasy feeling in relation to the Waterside [pg 37]Workers who, it was said, were growing more lazy and slovenly in handling cargo on the wharves and piers. A meeting had been called by The Federation to discuss some grievances of the coal miners at Westport, from which most of the coal landed in Wellington is brought. The meeting was called for the noon dinner hour, and a number of the waterside workers engaged in discharging cargo from a steamer about to sail, at once went to the meeting, and did not return to work in the afternoon. The shipping company at once engaged other men to finish their work, and when the men came back some hours later, they found their places filled up. The new men belonged to the same Union, but the men dispossessed demanded that the new ones should be dismissed at once. When the company refused the demand, the men appealed to the Council of the Federation, who at once called on the Waterside Workers and Seamens Unions at Wellington to cease work. Within a few days the position looked so serious that the Premier invited both parties to a conference, at which he presided in person, in the hope of bringing about an agreement to refer the matters in dispute to an arbitrator to be mutually agreed upon. The officials of The Federation, however, said there was nothing to submit to an arbitrator: they had made a demand, and unless it was complied with by the shipping company and the Union of merchants at Wellington who were in league with the Company in victimizing the men who took part in the meeting in aid of the Coal-miners, the strike must go on. The Merchants and Shipping Company’s Unions pointed out that what had been done was in direct opposition to the terms of the formal agreement signed less than a year before, and they refused to have anything more to do with the Federation on any terms. The conference thus ended in an open declaration of war. The time had evidently come for the Federation of Labor to make good the assertions so often made by its lecturers and agitators, of its power to force the rest of the community to submission. It would be [pg 38]difficult to imagine a more favorable position for carrying such a policy into effect: New Zealand, it must be borne in mind, is a country without an army. For some years past, it is true, a system of military training for all her young men between eighteen and twenty-five has been enforced by law, but except for training purposes, there is no military force in the Dominion, either of regulars or militia; and it is now forty-five years since the last company of British soldiers left its shores. Law has been maintained, and order enforced, by a police force under the control of the Government of the Dominion, and while the force is undoubtedly a good and trustworthy one, its numbers have never been large in proportion to the population. This year the entire force throughout the country is very little more than 850, which includes officers as well as men. It can hardly be wondered at that the officials of The Federation of Labor were convinced that, if they could arrange a general strike of the workers, the police force would be powerless to deal with it. On the failure of the attempt of the Premier to bring about a settlement between the parties by arbitration, the Federation proclaimed a general strike of all Unions affiliated to themselves throughout the country, and of all other Unions that were in sympathy with them in their policy of giving united Labor the control of society. The order to cease work was at once obeyed, as a matter of course, by all the Federation Unions, which practically meant all the workers engaged on vessels registered in the Dominion and trading on the coast, all workers on wharves and piers, carters in the cities, and coal miners throughout the country. The appeal for sympathetic assistance from Unions unconnected with the Federation was largely successful in the chief centres, though it was, of course, a direct defiance of the arbitration law under which they were registered. It has since been discovered that in nearly every case it was brought about by the unprincipled scheming of the secretaries, assisted by a few of the officials, who called [pg 39]meetings, of which notice was given only to a selected minority, and at which the question of joining a sympathetic strike was settled by a large majority of those present, but in fact in many cases a small minority of the whole membership. The sympathetic strike of Arbitration Unions was mainly confined to the cities, and Auckland, as the largest city, was the most affected by it. In Auckland the members of practically every Union ceased work, somewhere about ten thousand persons going on strike simultaneously.

The result during the first days of the strike seemed likely to confirm the expectations of the Federation orators. Industry was practically dead. At every port vessels lay at anchor, having been withdrawn from the wharves before they were deserted by their crews, and the wharves were in the possession of the Waterside strikers. The streets of the cities were empty, and a large proportion of the stores were closed, partly owing to want of business, and partly from fear of violence in case they kept open. These first few days in both New Zealand and Australia were days of triumph for the Federation leaders but the triumph was a short-lived one. The Government of the Dominion did not interfere, indeed, but the public, through their municipal authorities, did. The people of New Zealand have throughout their history been accustomed to manage their own affairs, and within four days of the declaration of war by the syndical Federation, steps were taken to meet the emergency. At Auckland and Wellington it had been evident from the first that the small police force available could not safely attempt to cope with the main body of strikers, or do more than prevent acts of aggressive violence to the citizens and their property. The local authorities, however, had confidence in the general public, and at Auckland, and afterwards at Wellington, the Mayor of the city appealed to the public to come forward as volunteers to maintain law and order, by acting as Special Constables. In both cities the appeal [pg 40]was responded to readily, nearly two thousand young men coming forward at Auckland in twenty-four hours, and upwards of a thousand at Wellington. These were at once sworn in as special constables, and armed with serviceable batons, while all the fire-arms and ammunition for sale in the city was taken charge of and withdrawn from sale by the municipal authorities. In this way the maintenance of order was fairly provided for, and the temporary closing of all licensed hotels by order of the city magistrates removed the danger of riot as the result of intemperance.

There had been some rioting in Wellington, though with little serious injury, but there was nothing that could be called a riot in Auckland. The Federation Unions waited, under the impression that time was on their side, owing to the impossibility of doing anything or getting anything done without the help of the associated workers. This had been the basis of their scheme, but like all such schemes it failed to take into account the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the people outside the Unions. As long as the strike leaders could point to the fleet of vessels lying idle in the harbor, the mills silent, and the street railroads without a moving car, and almost deserted by carts, it was easy for them to persuade their followers that complete victory was only a matter of days, or at most of weeks; they had not remembered that there were others besides themselves and their fellow townsmen interested in the question of a paralyzed industry. The trade that has been making the people of New Zealand increasingly rich during the last twenty years has been mainly derived from the land. Small holdings and close settlement have been the rule, and the rate of production has been increasingly rapid. The exports—mainly the produce of the land—have grown in proportions quite unknown in any other country, and the farmers knew that the prosperity of the country, and most directly of all the workers on the land, depended on the freedom and facilities for shipment of their ports. It was the workers on the [pg 41]land, accordingly, that came to the rescue, and solved the industrial problem. An offer was made by the President of The Farmers’ Cooperative Union to bring a sufficient number of the members into the cities to work the shipping and to prevent any interruption of the work by the men on strike. The offer was at once accepted by the municipal authorities at Auckland and Wellington, and within two days fully eighteen hundred mounted farmers rode into Auckland, and nearly a thousand into Wellington, all prepared to carry on the work and protect the workers. Their arrival practically settled the question. New Waterside Unions were formed at every port, and registered under the provisions of the Arbitration Statute; such of the country workers as were able to do so, enrolled themselves as members of the new Unions; the wharves and water fronts were taken possession of and guarded by the special constables enlisted in the cities, while the streets were patrolled by parties of the mounted volunteers. Within twenty-four hours of their arrival, some of the vessels in harbor had been brought to the wharves, and the work of unloading them was begun.

At first there were many threats of violent opposition on the part of the strikers, and crowds assembled in the principal streets and in the neighborhood of the wharves; but these were dispersed before they became dangerous, by the mounted constables, and a proclamation having been issued by the mayor calling attention to the fact that collections of people that obstructed traffic in the streets were contrary to law, the police and mounted constables cleared the streets, and forcibly arrested any persons who attempted opposition. Within two or three days, at each of the principal cities, new Unions of seamen and of carters had been formed and registered under the arbitration law, and those members of the old Federation Unions who were not enthusiastic, and began to see that the assurances of success were not likely to be realized, began to resign and apply for admission to the new Unions. After about [pg 42]two weeks the Council of The Federation of Labor, recognizing the failure of the sympathetic strike, invited the Unions that were not connected with them to declare the strike at an end, and tried by confining the strike to their own members, to maintain a solid front, which, with the help of the Australian Federation both in money for the strikers and in refusing to handle any goods either from or for New Zealand, they still hoped would carry them to at least a compromise, if not to the victory they had expected. The hopes of the Federation of Labor were not realized. Within a week or two a large proportion of the members of their own Unions, seeing their places filled, and their work being done, not by free labor, which they might hope to deal with, but by new Unions, whose members would be entitled, under the arbitration law, to preference and many other privileges, began to desert and to seek admission to the Arbitration Unions that had taken their place. For a time this was fiercely denied by the Federation officials, but as the days went on, and business of every kind was resumed in the cities, the groups of strikers at street corners and around the Federation head-quarters dwindled away; the hotels were reopened, the shops and stores were busy, the mills were at work, and even the coastal steamers were manned and running, and the federationists were forced to admit that they were hopelessly defeated. For a time they still hoped that the Australian Boycott might save them from absolute disaster, and the Labor Ministry of New South Wales tried to help the Federation by making an appeal to the New Zealand Government to arrange an arbitration to settle the dispute between The Wellington Waterside Workers and the merchants and shipping companies. The absolute refusal of the New Zealand Government to recognize The Federation of Labor, or to interfere with the new Unions under the Arbitration Act that had taken their place, finally settled the question, and completed the defeat of the strikers. The officials of the Federation [pg 43]declared the strike at an end, and the Australian Federation announced that the boycott was also at an end.

At first sight it may seem that, after all, the experiment in syndicalism was on a small scale, and that its lesson can hardly be of great value to a country like America. A little consideration may correct such a misapprehension. New Zealand was deliberately selected by the Syndicalists as a test case, for two reasons. In the first place it was the only country that had for years adopted a policy of justice according to law for both workers and employers, and from the syndicalist’s point of view it was therefore the only country that seriously attacked their own policy by showing that it was unnecessary. In the second place New Zealand was the only country with a population of British origin that could be dealt with practically by itself. With the aid of an Australian boycott it seemed as if her people must be helpless in the hands of the Federation. The result proved to be not only the defeat of the principle of lawless syndicalism, but the destruction of the industrial association that represented it in the country. No compromise was accepted, and except it may be in name, no Union attached to the Federation of Labor remains at work. The question, of course, suggests itself: What was the reason? Minor reasons may be found, no doubt, to account for failure where success was so confidently expected; but there can be little doubt that the real cause is the policy pursued by the Legislature and people of New Zealand for the last twenty years. Syndicalism, like all plans for the over turn, or reform, as their advocates would perhaps prefer to call it, of existing institutions, depends for success on the existence of wrongs by which part of the people is impoverished, while another, and very small part, has more than enough. The workers of our own race, at any rate, have enough common-sense to understand, at least when they are not hysterically excited, that imaginary wrongs are not a sufficient reason for great sacrifices. [pg 44]New Zealand’s legislation has not created an ideal society, it is true; but for twenty years it has proceeded step by step in the direction of righting the wrongs of the past, and giving opportunity to that part of its people that needed it most, on the single condition that they would use it, and respect the rights of others. To such a people, increasing steadily, year by year, in all that makes for well-being, the wild denunciations, and if possible wilder promises, of paid agitators can have little attraction. It may be possible by careful generalship to stir a small section of such a people to the hysterical excitement of an industrial war, but the mass of the people would be certain to resent it, and the movement will be doomed to a speedy collapse.

Other countries have been less enlightened and less fortunate than New Zealand in their legislation, and perhaps still less fortunate in the administration of the laws passed for the betterment of the masses of their people. They have done little to convince the great majority that they are aware of the wrongs that have been done that majority in the supposed interest of the small class of the over rich. They have not provided opportunity for those who hitherto have had none, nor have they even provided a reasonable alternative for industrial warfare. Had they done these things in the past, or were they even to begin honestly to provide for them in the future, they might confidently expect that the reign of industrial warfare, which exasperates their people, and retards the prosperity of their nation, would be as easily and effectually suppressed as the experiment of the Syndicalists has just been in New Zealand.

[pg 45]

Labor: “True Demand” and Immigrant Supply

A Restatement of the Economic Aspects of Immigration Policy

[Return to Table of Contents]

Recent historians and economists have been showing that it was anything but pure and unadulterated sense of brotherhood that prompted many of our forefathers’ fine speeches about opening the doors of America to the down-trodden and oppressed of Europe. Emerson, fifty years ago, in his essay on Fate noted the current exploitation of the immigrant: “The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.” Indeed it would not be hard to show that there was always a real or potential social surplus back of our national hospitality to the alien.

The process began long before our great nineteenth century era of industrial expansion. Colonial policies with regard to the immigrant varied according to latitude and longitude. Most of the New England colonies viewed the foreigner with distrust as a menace to Puritan theocracy. New York, Pennsylvania, and some of the Southern colonies were much more hospitable, for economic reasons. That this hospitality sometimes resembled that of the spider to the fly is evident from observations of contemporary writers. That it included whites as well as negroes in its ambiguous welcome is equally evident.

John Woolman writes in his Journal (1741-2): “In a few months after I came here my master bought several [pg 46]Scotchmen as servants, from on board a vessel, and brought them to Mount Holly to sell.” Isaac Weld, traveling in the United States in the last decade of the eighteenth century, noted methods of securing aliens in the town of York, Pennsylvania: “The inhabitants of this town as well as those of Lancaster and the adjoining country consist principally of Dutch and German immigrants and their descendants. Great numbers of these people emigrate to America every year and the importation of them forms a very considerable branch of commerce. They are for the most part brought from the Hanse towns and Rotterdam. The vessels sail thither from America laden with different kinds of produce and the masters of them on arriving there entice as many of these people on board as they can persuade to leave their native country, without demanding any money for their passages. When the vessel arrives in America an advertisement is put into the paper mentioning the different kinds of people on board whether smiths, tailors, carpenters, laborers, or the like and the people that are in want of such men flock down to the vessel. These poor Germans are then sold to the highest bidder and the captain of the vessel or the ship holder puts the money into his pocket.”

These may be, it is true, extreme cases of the economic motive for immigration. But they are quite in line with eighteenth century Mercantilist economic philosophy. Josiah Tucker, for example, in his Essay on Trade, 1753, urges the encouragement of immigration from France, and cites the value of Huguenot refugees. “Great was the outcry against them at their first coming. Poor England would be ruined! Foreigners encouraged! And our own people starving! This was the popular cry of the times. But the looms in Spittle-Fields, and the shops on Ludgate-Hill have at last sufficiently taught us another lesson … these Hugonots have … partly got, and partly saved, in the space of fifty years, a balance in our favour of, at least, fifty millions sterling…. And as England and [pg 47]France are rivals to each other, and competitors in almost all branches of commerce, every single manufacturer so coming over, would be our gain, and a double loss to France.”

The obverse side of the case appears in British hindrances to the free emigration of artisans during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Laws forbade any British subject who had been employed in the manufacture of wool, cotton, iron, brass, steel, or any other metal, of clocks, watches, etc., or who might come under the general denomination of artificer or manufacturer, to leave his own country for the purpose of residing in a foreign country out of the dominion of His Britannic Majesty. Recall the difficulty early American manufacturers encountered in introducing new English improvements in cotton manufacture; a virtual embargo was laid upon the migration of either men or machinery. Recall, too, an expression of American resentment in our Declaration of Independence at this English attitude: “He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.”

On the whole, the economic motive seems to have been uppermost in the minds of both those who fostered and those who opposed foreign immigration into the United States, up to, say, 1870. Likewise in perhaps more than ninety-nine of every hundred cases the economic motive holds in the mind of the present day immigrant, or his protagonist. Escape from political tyranny or religious persecution, at least since the revolutionary period of 1848, has operated only as a secondary motive. The industrial impulse is all the more striking in the so-called “new immigration” from the Mediterranean and South-Eastern Europe. The temporary migrant laborer, the “bird of passage,” roams about seeking his fortunes in [pg 48]much the same spirit that certain Middle Age Knights or Crusades camp followers sought theirs. This is in no way to his discredit. It is simply a fact that we are to reckon with when called upon to work out a satisfactory immigration policy. At least its recognition would eliminate a good deal of wordy sentimentality from discussions of the immigration problem.

Professor Fairchild discovered that three things attract the Greek immigrant. First and foremost, financial opportunities. Second, corollary to the first, citizenship papers which will enable him to return to Turkey, there to carry on business under the greater protection which such citizenship confers. There is a hint here to the effect that mere naturalization does not mean assimilation and permanent acceptance of the status and responsibilities of American citizenship. Third, enjoyment of certain more or less factitious “comforts of civilization.”

But the Greeks are by no means untypical. The conclusion of the Immigration Commission as to the causes of the new immigration is that while “social conditions affect the situation in some countries, the present immigration from Europe to the United States is in the largest measure due to economic causes. It should be stated, however, that emigration from Europe is not now an absolute economic necessity, and as a rule those who emigrate to the United States are impelled by a desire for betterment rather than by the necessity of escaping intolerable conditions. This fact should largely modify the natural incentive to treat the immigration movement from the standpoint of sentiment, and permit its consideration primarily as an economic problem. In other words, the economic and social welfare of the United States should now ordinarily be the determining factor in the immigration policy of the Government.”

This delimitation of the immigration problem to its economic aspects led the Immigration Commission to recommend a somewhat restrictionist policy. That they [pg 49]were not without warrant in so delimiting it is evident from the utterances of such ardent opponents of restriction as Dr. Peter Roberts and Max J. Kohler. The latter, writing in the American Economic Review (March, 1912) said: “In fact, the immigrant laborer is indispensable to our economic progress today, and we can rely upon no one else to build our houses, railroads and subways, and mine our ores for us.” Dr. Roberts’ plea is almost identical.

What a glaring misconception of the whole economic and social problem is here involved will appear if we add a clause or two to Mr. Kohler’s sentence. He should have said: “We can rely upon no one else to build our houses, railroads and subways, and mine our ores for us at $455 a year; for workers of native birth but of foreign fathers would cost us $566, and native born White Americans $666 a year.” (See Abstracts of Rep. of Immigr. Comm. vol. i., pp. 405-8.) These are the facts. This is the social situation as it should be stated if a candid discussion of the problem is sought.

Now what are the economic arguments for restricting somewhat the tide of immigration? Several studies of standards of living among American workingmen within the past ten years have shown that a large proportion of American wage earners fall below a minimum efficiency standard. Studies of American wages indicate that only a little over ten per cent of American wage earners receive enough to maintain an average family in full social efficiency. The average daily wage for the year ranges from $1.50 to $2. One-half of all American wage earners get less than $600 a year; three-quarters less than $750; only one-tenth more than $1,000.

Take in connection with these wage figures the statistics for unemployment. The proportion of idleness to work ranges from one-third in mining industries to one-fifth in other industries. In Massachusetts, 1908, manufacturers were unemployed twelve per cent of the working time. [pg 50]Professor Streightoff estimated three years ago that the average annual loss in this country through unemployment is 1,000,000 years of working time. Perhaps one-tenth of working time might be taken as a very conservative general average loss. But the worst feature of the whole problem is that, in certain industries at least, the tendency to seasonal unemployment is increasing. Ex-Commissioner Neill in his report on the Lawrence strike said: “… it is a fact that the tendency in many lines of industry, including textiles, is to become more and more seasonal and to build to meet maximum demands and competitive trade conditions more effectively. This necessarily brings it about that a large number of employés are required for the industry during its period of maximum activity who are accordingly of necessity left idle during the period of slackness.” (Senate Document 870, 62d Cong., 2d sess., 1912.)

If we recall still further that the casual laborer, who suffers most from seasonal unemployment, is the chief stumbling block in the way to a solution of the problem of poverty; that he furnishes the human power in “sweated trades:” that immigrants form the majority of unskilled and sweated laborers; if we remember that there is not a shred of evidence (except the well-meant enthusiasm of the protagonists of the immigrant) to show that immigration has “forced-up” the American laborer and his standard of living, instead of displacing him downward; if we remember that probably 10,000,000 of our people are in poverty, and that though the immigrant may not seek charity in any larger proportions than the poor of native stock, yet he does contribute heavily to our burden of relief for dependents and defectives: we are justified in assuming that an analysis of the causes of poverty confirms the evidence from studies of wages and standards of living as to the depressing effect of the new immigration, in particular, upon working conditions for the American laborer.

[pg 51]Consider, too, the question of “social surplus.” Several American economists, among them Professors Hollander, Patten and Devine, agree that we are creating annually in the United States a substantial social surplus. But it is evident from the figures of wages and standards of living quoted above that the American laborer is not participating as he might expect to participate in this economic advantage. Three factors conspire against him. First, we have yet no adequate machinery for determining exactly what the surplus is, or how to distribute it equitably. Mr. Babson with his “composite statistical charts” has made a beginning in the mathematical determination of prosperity; but it is only a beginning. Second, organized labor is not yet sufficiently organized nor sufficiently self-conscious to perceive and demand its opportunity for a larger share. The significant point here is that recent immigration has hampered and hindered the development of labor organizations, and thus indirectly held back the normal tendency of wages to rise. Third, inadequate education, particularly economic and social education. The adult illiterate constitutes a tremendous educational problem. Over 35 per cent of the “new immigration” of 1913 was illiterate, and this new immigration included over two-thirds of the total. Ignorance prevents the laborer from demanding the very education that would give him a better place in the economic system; it hinders the play of intelligent self-interest; and it actually prevents effective labor-organization, which is one of the surest means of labor-education. Jenks and Lauck, after experience with the Immigration Commission, concluded that “the fact that recent immigrants are usually of non-English speaking races, and their high degree of illiteracy, have made their absorption by the labor organizations very slow and expensive. In many cases, too, the conscious policy of the employers of mixing the races in different departments and divisions of labor, in order, by a diversity of tongues, to prevent concerted action on the [pg 52]part of employés, has made unionization of the immigrant almost impossible.”

For these reasons, and others, we are driven to the conclusion that future policies of immigration must be based on sound principles of social welfare and social economy, and not upon the economic advantage of certain special industries. Whether we want the brawn of the immigrant must be determined by what it will contribute to the general social surplus, and not by what it adds to A’s railroads or B’s iron mines.

We are told that the three classes of our population demanding unrestricted immigration are large employers of unskilled labor, transportation companies, and revolutionary anarchists. Since this is by definition an economic and not a philosophical question, we may neglect the third class. To the other two classes should be directed certain brief tests of economic good faith. Take at its face value their claim that European brawn by the ship-load is indispensable to American industry. It is becoming an accepted maxim that industry should bear its own charges, should pay its own way. American industry has long fought the contract-labor exclusion feature in current immigration law. Suppose we frankly admit that it is much better for the immigrant to come over here to a definite job than to wander about for weeks after he arrives, a prey to immigrant banks, fake employment agents, and other sharks. Suppose, accordingly, we repeal the laws against contract-labor. Let the employer contract for as many foreign laborers as he likes or says he needs. But make the contractor liable for support and deportation costs if the laborers become public charges. Also require him to assume the cost of unemployment insurance. Exact a bond for the faithful performance of these terms, guaranteed in somewhat the same way that National Banks are safeguarded. Immigration authorities now commonly require a bond from the relatives of admitted aliens who seem likely to become public charges, [pg 53]but who are allowed to enter with the benefit of the doubt. Customs and revenue rules admit dutiable goods in bond. Hence the principle of the bond is perfectly familiar, and its application to contract-immigrants would be in no sense an untried or dangerous experiment. It would establish no new precedent: for precedents, and successful ones, are already established, accepted and approved. It would be understood that all admissions of aliens can be only provisional, with no time limit on deportation. It would be understood further—and the plan would work automatically if the contractor were made such a deeply interested party—that intending immigrants must be rigidly inspected, that they be required to produce consular certificates of clean police record, freedom from chronic disease, insanity, etc.

The result of such a scheme would probably cut away entirely contract-labor; for it would not longer pay. But this does not mean barring the gate to all foreign labor. As an aid to the employer and to our own native workingman, we must, sooner or later, and the sooner the better, establish a chain of labor bureaus throughout the Union. The system must be placed under Federal direction, largely because the Department of Labor would be charged, ex officio, with ascertaining the “true demand” for immigrant labor, and it could only accomplish this end effectively through such an employment clearing system. This true demand would, of course, be based not only upon mere numerical excess of calls for labor over demands for jobs, but would also take into account the nature of the work, working conditions, and above all the prevailing level of wages. According to this true demand the Department would adjust a sliding scale of admissions of immigrant laborers.

Much might be said in favor of an absolute embargo upon all immigration until such a body as the Industrial Relations Commission has time to make an authoritative economic survey of the whole country, or until the Unemployment [pg 54]Research Commission recently called for by Miss Kellor could make the three years’ study contemplated by her as the only way out of the unemployment morass. Twenty years ago men of the type of General Walker frankly urged that the immigration gates be closed for a flat period of ten years or so. But the sliding scale plan contemplates no such radical step. Indeed it is radical in no sense whatever. The proposed immigration act now before Congress (The Burnett Bill, H.R. 6060) paves the way for it, and provides a working principle, which apparently is accepted on all sides. Section 3 includes this clause: “That skilled labor, if otherwise admissible, may be imported if labor of like kind unemployed can not be found in this country, and the question of the necessity of importing such skilled labor in any particular instance may be determined by the Secretary of Labor….” A really workable test for immigration, superior by far to the literacy test or any other so far suggested, might easily be developed by simply enlarging the scope of this clause, making it include unskilled as well as skilled labor. No machinery other than that contemplated by the present act would be required.

The immigration problem can never be satisfactorily handled until we fix upon some such means of determining just what the economic need is. There is no danger of hindering legitimate industrial expansion in times of sudden business prosperity: for the transportation companies may be safely trusted to supply in three or four weeks aliens enough to fill all the gaps in the industrial army. Neither would injustice be done to the immigrant himself. On the contrary, he would be assured of a job and respectful consideration when he arrived. The “dago” or the “bohunk” would acquire a new dignity and a more enviable status than he now occupies. The selective process thus involved would much improve the quality of the immigrant admitted, and would incidentally render assimilation of the foreigner all the easier.

[pg 55]The precise details of selection, and the machinery, are mere matters of detail. But the consular service, as long ago suggested by Catlin, Schuyler and others, seems to offer the proper base of operations. We have already recommended charging consuls with viséing certificates from police, medical, and poor-relief authorities. We should further require that declarations of intention to migrate be published (somewhat as marriage banns are published) at local administrative centers (arrondissement, Bezirk, etc.) and at United States consular offices; the consular declaration should be obligatory; perhaps the other might be optional, though in all probability foreign governments would coöperate in demanding it. These validated declarations of intention should be filed in the consular offices. When notice comes from the United States Department of Labor that so many laborers will be admitted from such and such district, the declarations are to be taken up in the order of their filing, and the proper number of persons certified for admission. The apportionment of admissions from each country might be calculated on a basis of its population, also upon the nature of the employment offered, and upon the desirability of the alien himself, his general assimilability, his willingness to become naturalized, to adopt the English language and the American standard of living among efficient workers, etc.,—all as proved by past experience with his countrymen. This plan, in so far as it provides for a sliding scale of admissions, is in line with that proposed by Professor Gulick. He advocates making all nations eligible for admission and citizenship, but would admit them only in proportion as they can be readily assimilated. This would admit annually, say, five per cent of those already naturalized, with their American children. The principle here seems to be that we can assimilate from any land in, and only in, proportion to the number already assimilated from that land. But the difficulty of applying such a test lies in the complexity of the assimilative [pg 56]process. No measure yet exists for assimilation. Anthropologists are convinced that various strains in the populations, for example of France, or Great Britain, which have been dwelling together for centuries, are not by any means assimilated. Mere naturalization is not a sufficient test of assimilation; it is only the expression of a desire to be assimilated; and it may only be a device for the promotion of business success here or in foreign parts, as we have already indicated in the case of the Greeks. Hence in working out the basis of a sound immigration policy, it would seem more practicable to consider first the question of economic utilization rather than assimilation. This, of course, does not exclude from the Secretary of Labor’s judgment the category of assimilability as one of the factors in determining the apportionment of admissions.

It will appear that the plan outlined above limits immigration policy to purely national and economic considerations. But it is, as matters now stand, a national question. And it must remain so for some time to come, even if we are reproached with a narrow Mercantilist economics. The admission of aliens is not yet a fundamental international right, or duty; it is only an example of comity within the family of nations. And the matter must rest in this state of limbo until we develop some institution or method of registering our sentiments of internationalism, and especially of determining international surplus. As it is idle to talk or dream of abolishing poverty until at least the concept of social or national surplus is pretty clearly fixed and its realization either actually at hand or fairly imminent, just so is it vain to expect an international adjustment of the immigration problem on economic grounds until the existence of an international surplus is demonstrated, and the methods of apportioning it worked out.

How soon we may expect these things it is not our province to predict. It is too early to pass final judgment [pg 57]on Professor Patten’s dictum that inter-racial coöperation is impossible without integration, and that races must therefore stand in hostile relations or finally unite. But it is perfectly apparent that we have a long way to travel before the path to integration is cleared. Such assemblages as the First Universal Races Congress which met in London in 1911 can do much to prepare the way. But it must not be forgotten that the German representative at that Congress pleaded for the maintenance of strict racial and national boundaries, and summed up his plea in the rather ominous sentence: “The brotherhood of man is a good thing, but the struggle for life is a far better one.” Meanwhile we need not anticipate serious international difficulties in the way of the sliding-scale plan; for foreign governments are watching the tide of immigration with mixed feelings. They welcome the two or three hundred million dollars sent home annually by alien residents in the United States. But they also resent the dislocations of industry, the fallow fields, the dodging of military service, and the disturbance of the level of prices which such wholesale emigrations inflict upon the mother country.

Since the protagonists of unrestricted immigration have taken largely an economic line of argument, it seemed desirable to accept their terms, and meet them on their own ground. But I should not wish to be misunderstood as limiting the immigration question to its economic phases. When we have said that the latifondisti of Southern Italy are in despair at the scarcity of laborers to work their lands at starvation wages, and that the railway builders and mine operators of America are equally anxious to have those selfsame South Italian laborers for their own exploitive enterprises, we have told a bare half of the tale. There remain all those cultural, educational, political, religious and domestic variations and adjustments which make up the general problem of assimilability of the alien and of the strength of our own national digestion. America had a giant’s undiscriminating appetite [pg 58]in the great days of expansion from 1850 to 1890. But there are many signs, economic and other, that we can no longer play Gargantua and continue a healthy nation. An unwise engineer sometimes over-stokes his boilers, and courts disaster. Is it not equally possible that national welfare may suffer from an over-dose of human fuel in our industry?

[pg 59]

The Way to Flatland

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“The next great task of preventive medicine is the inauguration of universal periodic medical examinations as an indispensable means for the control of all diseases, whether arising from injurious personal habits, from congenital or constitutional weakness, or from social and vocational conditions.” That this declaration by the Commissioner of Health of the city of New York is not the mere expression of an individual opinion, there is abundant evidence. And no one who has watched the growth of other movements towards such regulation of life as only a few years ago would have seemed wholly outside the domain of practical probability can doubt that the “Life Extension” movement, as thus outlined, will rapidly grow into prominence. Nor is there much room for doubt that, whether explicitly contemplated at present or not, compulsion as well as universality is tacitly implied in the movement.

I say that the movement is sure to grow into prominence, that it is a thing which must be seriously reckoned with; I do not say that it will march straight on to victory, or even that it is sure to prevail in the end. It is instructive, in this regard, to hark back to a recent experience in a more special, but yet an extremely important, domain. Several years ago a report on university efficiency was issued under the auspices—though, it should be added, without the official endorsement—of the Carnegie Foundation. The central feature of this report lay in its advocacy of the application to universities of those principles of system and of standardization which have been successfully applied on a large scale to the promotion of industrial efficiency, and are generally referred to by the catch-[pg 60]word, “scientific management.” In spite of the merits of the report in certain matters of detail, and of the high standing of the expert who wrote it in his own department of industrial engineering, the report evoked an almost universal chorus of contemptuous rejection not only in university circles, but also from those organs of public opinion which have any claim to be regarded as enlightened judges in questions of education and culture. The thing seemed to have been laughed out of court. And yet it turned out that a year or two afterwards a full-fledged scheme for carrying out some of the crudest and most objectionable features of this “efficiency” program was presented to the professors of Harvard University, apparently with the expectation that they would fall in with its requirements without hesitation or protest. For some days there seemed to be real danger that this would actually happen. It turned out to be a false alarm; the faculty of the foremost of American universities were guilty of no such supineness. The project was ignominiously shelved, with some sort of explanation that the springing of it on the professors was due to an error or misunderstanding. But that the attempt should have been made, and in a manner that argued so total a lack of any sense of its grossness and crudity, is a significant warning of the extent to which the notions underlying it have fastened upon the general mind.

The story of the eugenics movement in this country affords a striking illustration at once of the almost startling rapidity with which innovating ideas as to the regulation of life gain acceptance, and of the fact that this rapidity is by no means conclusive proof that their progress will be continuous. The one thing clear is that there is a large, active, and influential element in the population that is extremely hospitable to such ideas, and manifests a naïve, an almost childish, readiness to put them into immediate execution. Since, in the nature of things, this element is lively and active—since, too, what is novel and [pg 61]in motion is more interesting than what is old and at rest—at first there is almost sure to be produced a deceptive appearance that the new thing is sweeping everything before it. Just now there is evidently a lull in the onward march of legislative eugenics. This is sufficient proof of the conservatism of the people as a whole; we may be quite sure that anything beyond a very restricted application of eugenical notions will take a long time to get itself established in our laws or even in our customs. Nevertheless, it would be a great mistake to suppose that even the more extreme forms of eugenical doctrine are not forces to be reckoned with as affecting practical possibilities of a not distant future. Though no results may appear on the surface, the leaven is working. It is consonant with tendencies which in so many directions are becoming more and more dominant. So long as those tendencies continue in anything like their present strength, there can be little doubt that the idea of control in the direction of eugenics, like that of the regulation of human life in other fundamental respects, will continue to make headway, and may at any time become one of the central issues of the day.

To adduce prohibition as an illustration of this same character in the thought and the tendencies of our immediate time may seem like forcing the point. It is true, it may be said, that there has been within the past few years a rapid spread of prohibition in almost every part of the country; but the thing itself is sixty years old, has had its periods of advance and recession, and is now, in the fullness of time, reaping the fruits of two generations of agitation, investigation, and education. But to say this is to overlook the distinctive feature of the present situation regarding prohibition in the United States. A Constitutional amendment providing for the complete prohibition of the sale of liquor throughout the Union is pending in Congress. A year ago—probably six months ago—there was hardly a human being in the United States, [pg 62]other than those in the councils of the Anti-saloon League, who had so much as thought of national prohibition as a question of present-day practical politics. Suddenly it is announced that there is a distinct possibility of a prohibition amendment being passed by Congress in the near future; and one of the foremost representatives of the Anti-saloon League states, and with good show of reason, that if the amendment be passed by Congress, its ratification by the Legislatures of three fourths of the States can be only a matter of time. What the probabilities actually are, I do not undertake to say; neither am I concerned at this moment with the merits of the issue itself. What I am concerned with is the simple fact that in this situation, brought upon the country with dramatic suddenness, nobody seems to have been in the least startled, or so much as disturbed in his equanimity. There will of course be a great struggle over the question, sooner or later. But neither in Congress nor in the press has there as yet been any sign of such an assertion of the claims of personal liberty as, at any time previous to the past ten years, would have been sure to be made in such a situation. This collective silence, on an issue affecting so intimately the lives, the habits, the traditions of millions of people, is, in my judgment, by far the most impressive proof of the degree in which the public mind has grown accustomed to the inroads of regulation upon the domain of individuality.

A number of years ago, when the mathematical concept of space of more than three dimensions was attracting great popular interest, an ingenious writer undertook to make the idea intelligible to “the general” by picturing the state of mind in regard to three dimensions of a race of beings whose life and whose sensual experience was limited to space of two dimensions. He gave his little book the title “Flatland,” and it gained wide attention. In his Commencement address at Columbia last year, President [pg 63]Butler had the happy thought of applying the term in the characterization of certain aspects of the intellectual and political life of our time. He was speaking particularly of that absorption in the immediate problems of the day which makes almost impossible a true study and contemplation of the lasting concerns of mankind as embodied in history and literature. “Every ruling tendency,” he said, “is to make life a Flatland, an affair of two dimensions, with no depth, no background, no permanent root.” That this is a literal truth probably neither Dr. Butler nor anyone else would contend; but it hits off with great force and with substantial accuracy the prevailing character of thought in the circles most active and most influential in almost every department of human activity at the present time. And the tendency which President Butler describes as arising out of our absorption in current problems is still more manifest in the spirit of our actual dealings with those problems themselves. On every hand we find a surprising readiness to accept views which explicitly tend to take out of life that which gives it depth and significance and richness. Each one of the four movements we have mentioned affords an illustration of this: in following any one of them we travel straight toward Flatland. They differ very much, one from another; they have very different degrees and kinds of justification; it may be difficult in the case of some of them to strike a balance between the gain and the loss. The remarkable thing—the ominous thing, if we are to suppose that the present tone of thought will long persist—is that the loss involved in the flattening of life, as such, apparently almost wholly fails to get consideration. I say apparently, because there is, no doubt, a deep and strong undercurrent of opposition which, sooner or later, will manifest itself; in speaking of “ruling tendencies” we are apt to mean merely the tendencies that are most in evidence. But after all, it is to these that criticism of contemporary life and thought must, of necessity, be chiefly directed.

[pg 64]As I have already indicated, the attack on individuality and personal dignity in the universities was met in a spirit that is highly gratifying, and which is quite out of keeping with the tendency that I am discussing and deploring. Yet it is doubtful whether, outside the circle of the universities themselves, and of those individuals who are thoroughly imbued with the university spirit, there is any true realization of what it is that constituted the head and front of that offending. If some bureau of research were to present a formidable array of figures showing that the “output” of professorial work could be increased by so and so many per cent. through the adoption of some definitely formulated system of “scientific management,” it is by no means certain that the scheme would not receive powerful support in the highest quarters of efficiency propaganda. We should be told just how many millions of dollars a year we are spending on university education, and just how many of these millions go needlessly to waste. Even the opponents of the “reform” would probably find themselves compelled to use as their most powerful argument this and that example of great practical results which have flowed from letting men of genius go their own way. It would be pointed out that many an investigation which, to the authorities of the time, appeared wholly unpromising, turned out to be of cardinal value. We should be warned that what we gain in a thousand cases through time-clock and card-catalogue methods, might be lost ten times over through the shackling of the initiative of a single man of unrecognized genius. And all this would be very much to the purpose; but it is not upon any such special pleading that the case ought to be made to rest. The loss that would be suffered transcends all these concrete and definable instances of it. It would be pervasive, fundamental, immeasurable. Grievous as might be the injury caused by the prevention of specific achievements of exceptional importance, this would be as nothing in comparison with the intellectual [pg 65]and spiritual loss entailed by the lowering of the human level, the devitalizing of the intellectual atmosphere, which must inevitably follow upon the application of factory methods to university life.

The case of the eugenics propaganda is far more complex. In its origin, and doubtless in some of its present manifestations, it may lay claim to being directed toward aims which are particularly concerned with the higher interests of life. The author of “Hereditary Genius” certainly could not be accused of indifference to the part played in the past, or to be played in the future, by exceptional minds and characters; nor is it necessary to charge any of the present promoters of the propaganda with explicit failure to appreciate the importance of such minds and characters. The criticism is often made, from this standpoint, that the hard-and-fast rules which the eugenists propose would, in point of fact, have put under the ban some of the most illustrious names in the annals of mankind—men whose genius was accompanied with some of the very traits which they hold should most positively be prevented from appearing. But, however weighty this objection to the methods of eugenics may be, it is to be looked upon rather as an item on the debit side of the reckoning than as marking an ingrained defect, a fault at the very heart of the matter. The eugenists may well challenge those who urge merely this kind of objection to show that the losses thus pointed out are great enough to offset the gains, in the very same direction, which they regard their program as promising. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, they can at least set up the contention that, as a mere affair of quantity, genius will do better under their system than without it.

What brings the eugenics movement into the Flatland category is not its attitude toward the question of genius, or perhaps even of singularity, but its attitude toward the life of mankind as a whole—if indeed it can be said to have [pg 66]any attitude toward the life of mankind as a whole. The profound elements of that life seem not to come at all within the range of its contemplation. Of course this does not apply to everything that comes from the eugenics camp, nor to every person that calls himself a eugenist. But on the other hand it is by no means only of the crude projects of half-educated reformers, or the outgivings of the prophets of our popular magazines, that it is true. The agitation has derived much of its impetus, directly or indirectly, from the teachings of men of high scientific eminence who have attacked the question without any apparent realization of its deeper bearings on the whole character of human life. This influence often comes in the shape of exhortations, or suggestions, addressed to the public at a time when attention is centered upon some conspicuous crime or some particular phase of evil in the community; sweeping and radical regulation of the right of parenthood being urged as necessary for the prevention of all such distressing phenomena. Thus, after the attempted assassination of Mayor Gaynor, there was much talk of a “national campaign for mental hygiene,” which should have the effect of “preventing Czolgoszes and Schranks.” Its program was thus indicated by one of the foremost professors of medicine in the United States:

Provision must be made for the birth of children whose brains shall, so far as possible, be innately of good quality; this means the denial of the privilege of parenthood to those likely to transmit bad nervous systems to their offsprings.

What the carrying out of such a programme would mean to mankind at large, how profoundly it would modify those ideas about life, those standards of human dignity and human rights, which are so fundamental and so pervasive that they are taken for granted without express thought in every act and every feeling of all normal men and women—this does not seem ever to trouble the mind of the devotee of universal regulation. He sees the possibility [pg 67]of effecting a certain definite and measurable improvement; that the means by which this is accomplished must fatally impair those elemental conceptions of human life whose value transcends all measurement, he has not the insight or the imagination to recognize. The distinctions of social class, of wealth, of public honor, leave untouched the equality of men in the fundamentals of human dignity. They do not go to the vitals of self-respect; they do not interfere with a man’s sense of what is due to him, and what is due from him, in the primary relations of life. If nature has been unkind to him in his physical or mental endowments, he does not therefore feel in the least disqualified, as regards his family, his friends, his neighbors, the stranger with whom he chances to come into contact, from receiving the same kind of consideration, in the essentials of human intercourse, that is accorded to those who are more fortunate; nor does he feel in any respect absolved from the duty of playing the full part of a man. Under the régime of medical classification—and the “mental hygiene” programme can mean nothing less than that—all this would disappear. Some men would be men, others would be something less. It is true that, so far as regards the imbecile, the insane, and the criminal, such a state of things obtains as it is; but this stands wholly apart from the general life of the race, and has no influence whatever on the habitual feelings and experiences of human beings. The normal life of mankind is shot through and through with the idea that a man’s a man; all that is highest in feeling and conduct is closely bound up with it. Lessen its sway over our feelings and thoughts and instincts, and how much benefit in the shape of “preventing Czolgoszes and Schranks” would be required to compensate for the loss in nobleness, in depth, which human life would suffer?

The prohibition movement belongs, in the main, to a wholly different order of things. The fight against the [pg 68]evils of drink, as it has been carried on for a century or more, has been animated by a moral fervor which classes it rather with the fight against slavery, or with the great revivals of religion, than with those movements which owe their origin to a calculating and cold-blooded perfectionism. Its leaders have been fired with the ardor of a war directed against a devastating monster, to whose ravages was to be ascribed a large part of the misery and wickedness that afflict mankind. It is true that the economic and physiological aspects of the drink question were not ignored; the total-abstinence men were glad enough to have this second string to their bow. But the real fight was not against alcohol as one of many things concerning which the habits of men are more or less unwise; it was a fight against the Demon Rum, the ally of all the powers of darkness. The plea of the moderate drinker was rejected with scorn, not because there was any objection to moderate drinking in itself, but because total abstinence was the only true preventive of drunkenness, and drunkenness must be stamped out if mankind was to be saved. The moderate drinker was censured not because he was wasting his money, or failing to “conserve his efficiency,” but because for the sake of a trivial self-indulgence he was giving countenance to a practice which was consigning millions of his fellow men to wretchedness in this world and to everlasting damnation in the next.

Now this remarkable thing about the present extraordinary manifestation of growth and strength in the prohibition movement is that it is not in the least due to a strengthening of this sentiment. On the contrary, it is safe to say that feeling about drunkenness, about the drink evil in the sense in which it was understood a generation ago, is far less intense than it was then. The prohibition movement in its present stage is not the old prohibition movement advancing to triumph through the onward march of its proselyting zeal; of true prohibitionist zealots the number is probably less, in proportion to the [pg 69]population, than it was forty years ago. Its great accession of strength has come from the growth of that order of ideas which is common to all the “efficiency” movements of the time. And that growth helps it in two ways. On the one hand, to the little army of crusaders against the Demon Rum there has come the accession of a host of men who are not thinking about demons at all, but who calmly hold that the world would be better off without drinking, and that this is an all-sufficient reason for prohibiting it. And on the other hand, millions of persons who, in former days would have cried out against this way of improving the world—against the impairment of personal liberty and the sacrifice of social enjoyment and social variety—have no longer the courage of their convictions. The temper of the time is unfavorable to the assertion of the value of things so incapable of numerical measurement. Against the heavy battalions led by the statisticians, and the experimental psychologists, and the efficiency experts, what chance is there for successful resistance? On the opposing side can be rallied only such mere irregulars as are willing to fight for airy nothings—for the zest and colorfulness of life, for sociability and good fellowship, for preserving to each man access to those resources of relaxation and refreshment which, without injury to others, he finds conducive to his own happiness.

It is hardly necessary to say that, in taking up these various movements, no attempt has been made at anything like comprehensive discussion of their merits. Whatever may be the balance between good and ill in any of them, they all have in common one tendency that bodes danger to the highest and most permanent interests of mankind; and it is with this alone that I am concerned. What that tendency is has, I trust, been made sufficiently clear; but it will perhaps be brought out more distinctly by a consideration of the “Life Extension” [pg 70]propaganda more detailed and specific than that given to the other three.

Conspicuous in the literature of this propaganda is the appeal to standard modern practice in regard to machinery. “Those to whom the care of delicate mechanical apparatus is entrusted,” says the New York Commissioner of Health, “do not wait until a breakdown occurs, but inspect and examine the apparatus minutely, at regular intervals, and thus detect the first signs of damage.” “This principle of periodic inspection,” says the prospectus of the Life Extension Institute, “has for many years been applied to almost every kind of machinery, except the most marvelous and complex of all,—the human body.” To find fault with the drawing of this comparison, with the utilization of this analogy, would be foolish. That many persons would be greatly benefited by submitting to these inspections is certain; it is not impossible that they are desirable for most persons. And the analogy of the inspection of machinery serves excellently the purpose of suggesting such desirability. What is objectionable about its use by the Life Extension propagandists is their evident complacent satisfaction with the analogy as complete and conclusive. Yet nothing is more certain than that, even from the strictly medical standpoint, it ignores an essential distinction between the case of the man and the case of the machine. The machine is affected only by the measures that may be taken in consequence of the knowledge arising from the inspection; the man is affected by that knowledge itself. Whether the possible physical harm that may come to a man from having his mind disturbed by solicitude about his health is important or unimportant in comparison with the good that is likely to be done him by the following of the precautions or remedies prescribed, is a question of fact to which the answer varies in every individual case. It may be that in the great majority of cases the harm is insignificant in comparison with the good. However that may [pg 71]be, the question is there, and it is of itself fatal to the conclusiveness of the argumentum ex machina. That this is not a captious criticism, that it is based on substantial facts of life, ordinary experience sufficiently attests; but it may not be amiss to point to a conspicuous contemporary phenomenon which throws an interesting light on the matter. The Christian Scientists regard the ignoring of disease as the primary requisite for health and longevity. That the Christian Science doctrine is a sheer absurdity, no one can hold more emphatically than the present writer; but it cannot be denied that in thousands of cases its acceptance has been of physical benefit through its subjective effect upon the believer. Personally, I would not purchase any benefit to my physical life at such sacrifice of my intellectual integrity; I mention the point only by way of accentuating the undisputed fact that the presence or absence of concern about health may have a potent influence on one’s bodily welfare.

Although it is a still further digression from the main purpose of this paper, I must permit myself a few words on another point relating to the strictly medical claims of the plan of “universal periodic medical examination.” It is natural that its advocates say nothing about the danger of errors in diagnosis; everybody knows that this danger exists, but sensible men do not allow it to deter them from consulting a physician; in this, as in other affairs of life, they do not cry for the moon, but do the best they can. But it seems to be wholly overlooked by the advocates of the propaganda of “universal periodic examination” that the extent of this danger under present conditions affords no indication at all of what it would be under the system they contemplate. Its cardinal virtue, they constantly proclaim, would be the detection of the very slightest indication of impairment: “The task before us is to discover the first sign of departure from the normal physiological path, and promptly and effectually to apply the brake.” The consequence must necessarily be that for [pg 72]one case of false alarm that occurs today there will be a score, or a hundred, under the new régime. For, in the first place, the individuals seeking advice will not be, as they now are in the main, selected cases in which there is some antecedent presumption that there is something wrong; and secondly, the examiner, bent upon the one great object of overlooking nothing, however slight, will give warnings which, whether technically justifiable or not, will in great numbers of cases have a wholly unjustifiable significance to the mind of the subject. Who shall say how many persons will thus be made to carry through life a burden of solicitude about their health from which, if left to their own devices, they would have been wholly free?

But it is not my design to find fault with this scheme as a matter of medical benefit; if I have ventured to point out some drawbacks, it is only by way of showing that, even from the strictly medical standpoint the cult of uniformity, of standardization, of mechanical perfection, is not free from fault. But the great objection against that attitude of mind which is typified in the appeal to the analogy of machinery is far more vital. Our only interest in a machine is that we shall get out of it as much, and as exact, work as possible. Our interest in our bodies is not so limited. We may deliberately choose to forego the maximum of mechanical perfection for the sake of living our lives in a way more satisfactory to us than a constant care for that perfection would permit. Even the most ardent of health enthusiasts—unless he be an insane fanatic—draws the line somewhere. What he forgets is that other people prefer to draw the line somewhere else. They choose to run a certain amount of risk rather than have their health on their minds. To compel—whether by legal means or by social pressure—every man to take precautions concerning his own body which he deliberately prefers not to take; to make impossible, in this most intimate and personal of all human [pg 73]concerns, the various ways of acting which the infinite varieties of temperament and desire may dictate—this would be such an invasion of personal liberty, such a suppression of individuality, as would strike us all as appalling, had we not grown so habituated to the mechanical, the statistical, measurement of human values—to the Flatland view of life.

What gives to these movements that I have been discussing the character which I have been ascribing to them is not so much the specific things which they severally aim to accomplish, but the spirit in which they are carried on, and perhaps still more the spirit, or want of spirit, with which they are met. It is not that a balance is falsely struck between the benefit of the concrete, circumscribed, measurable improvement aimed at and the injury done to some deeper, more pervading, and quite immeasurable element or principle of life; it is that the balance is not struck at all. The subtler, the less tangible, element is simply ignored. It was not always so. It was not so in the last generation, or the generation before that. The phenomenon is one that is closely bound up with the ruling tendency of thought and action in all directions; it is not an accident of this or that particular agitation. Perhaps in no direction is it more convincingly manifested than in the prevailing tone of opinion, or at least of publicly expressed opinion, in regard to the objects and ideals of universities. That in the present state of the world’s economic and social development on the one hand, and of the various sciences on the other, “service”—that is, service directly conducive to the general good—should be regarded as one of the great objects of universities, is altogether right; that it should be spoken of as their only object, which is the ruling fashion, is most deplorable. The object of a university, said Mill, is to keep philosophy alive; yet it would go hard with the present generation to point to any one more truly and [pg 74]profoundly devoted to the service, the uplifting, of the masses of mankind than was John Stuart Mill. Were he living he would recognize, as thoroughly as the best efficiency man of them all, that the universities of today have opportunities and duties which were undreamed of half a century ago. But he would know, too, that in those activities which are directed to the promotion of practical efficiency, the university is but one of many agencies, and that if it were not doing the work some other means would be found for supplying the demand. Its paramount value he would find now, as he did then, in the service it renders not to the ordinary needs of the community but to the higher intellectual interests and strivings of mankind. That so few of us have the courage clearly to assert a position even distantly approaching this—such a position as was mere matter of course among university men in the last generation—is perhaps the most significant of all the indications of our drift toward Flatland.

[pg 75]

The Disfranchisement of Property

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I

It is Hawthorne, I think, who tells us that when he was a boy he used once in a while to go down to the wharves in Salem, and lay his hand on the rail of some great East India merchantman, redolent of spices, and thus bring himself in actual touch with the mysterious orient. But there is nothing strange in this: almost anything that we can feel or see may start the flight of fancy, and open to us prophetic visions. This is even true of such dry symbols as figures, for our journalists would never publish statistics as they do, unless they knew that their readers liked to see them. Travellers from other parts of the world have often laughed at our fondness for revelling in the marvellous accounts of our material dimensions, but they should remember that people who do not have a taste for poetry may yet have a taste for romance, and that big figures do appeal to the imagination.

It is true that there may be something portentous in bigness. “Tom” Reed, as he was affectionately called, said many wise things in a jesting way. At a certain crisis in our history he exclaimed: “I don’t want Cuba and Hawaii; I’ve got more country now than I can love.” A foreigner might suppose that our politicians had similarly become terror-stricken at the extent of our wealth and the rate at which it was growing. They may well give the impression that there has been created in the “money power,” a Frankenstein monster, the control of whose murderous propensities has put them at their wit’s end.

Figures are notorious liars; they may arouse emotion if looked at in any light, but they must be looked at in [pg 76]many lights if we would get an emotional effect that is truly worth while. Some very large figures relating to Savings Banks have lately been published. The deposits in these banks amount to over four and two-thirds billions of dollars, and the number of separate accounts is about ten and two-thirds millions. Savings deposits in all banks are about $7,000,000,000, the number of accounts being 17,600,000. Probably the interest paid on the savings banks deposits is 160 millions of dollars a year. I confess that these figures give me much pleasure. I like to think that so many men have taken pains to guard their wives and children against miserable want; that so many women have to some extent made sure of their independence. It would not be surprising to find that twelve millions of families, possibly half the people of the country, were in this way protected against extreme penury. Viewed in this light, the growth of wealth does not seem so terrible. One might paraphrase Burke and say that such wealth as this loses half its evil through losing all its grossness. Indeed one might go further and say that if there were twice as much of this wealth, and every person in the country had an interest in it, it would lose all of its evil.

To young people, this is all dry enough. They like to think of spending money, not of saving it. But it is not at all dry to their elders. It is what St. Beuve said of literary enjoyment, a “pure délice du goût et du coeur dans la maturité.” It is a “Pleasure of the Imagination” that can be appreciated only by those like the old Scottish lawyer, who justified his penurious prudence by saying that he had shaken hands with poverty up to the elbow when he was young, and had no intention to renew the acquaintance. We have not, at least in the Northern part of our country, had the terrible experiences of the people of Europe, who are even now hiding their money in a vague apprehension of danger, inherited from centuries of rapine; but there are few of those who have given hostages to fortune who have not had many hours, and [pg 77]even years, of distressing anxiety concerning the future of their families. The greater the provision made against this heart-corroding care by a people, the happier should that people be.

It seems so unselfish a luxury to revel in these comfortable statistics, that one is tempted to broaden his vision, and take in the four or five billions of assets heaped up by the six or seven millions of people who have insured their lives, and the one hundred and fifty or two hundred millions of dollars paid out yearly to lighten the distress attending the death of husbands and fathers of families,—to say nothing of a much greater sum repaid policy-holders. In many cases, happily, death causes no actual want; but against these cases we may offset the stupendous number of policies insuring against industrial accidents, possibly twenty-five millions of them, representing one quarter of the people of the country—for we may be sure that there are few payments made under these policies that do not actually alleviate suffering. We have here a colossal aggregate of altruism on the part of the policy-holders, an intangible national asset grander than all the material wealth which it represents; for the sordid element in all these savings is necessarily small. There is a point in the old story of the gambler on the Mississippi steamboat who listened attentively to the persuasive arguments of a life-insurance agent; he “allowed” that he was willing to bet on almost any kind of game, but declined to take a hand in one where he had to die to win. It is painful to think of the infinity of petty economies, of all the grievous deprivations, the positive hardships, undergone in so many millions of families, day by day, and year by year, to secure these policies of insurance; but, as Plato said, “the good is difficult.” There is no heroism where there is no self-sacrifice. Whoever is disquieted by the growth of “materialism” may be relieved by reflecting that when so many millions of people are denying themselves present enjoyments in order that [pg 78]others may be spared pain in the future, there is such a leaven of high motive among us as may leaven the whole lump.

It would be easy to keep on in this exalted strain, but perhaps it is a little too much in the style of a life-insurance advertisement. We may correct any such impression, by changing our point of view. When we consider the difficulties and the hindrances in the way of laying up these savings, while the moral effect of the self-sacrifice hitherto involved is enhanced, the question comes up whether this altruistic exertion can be maintained in the future. How many of the ten millions of depositors in the savings banks have considered that their rulers at Washington give away every year in military pensions a sum equal to all, and more than all, the income earned by the four billions of dollars in the banks? When after many years, it seemed that this burden might at last begin to be lightened, it was suddenly increased by the last Congress perhaps thirty millions a year. Why should so many people scrimp, year in and year out, when the equivalent of all the toil and all the self-denial is thus swept away?

Senator Aldrich has told the country that its affairs could be carried on for three hundred millions of dollars a year less than it now pays. He is a very competent witness, and no one has contradicted him. If the attempt had been made, he could perhaps have shown—he could certainly show now—that three hundred millions was an understatement. But this sum is nearly equal to the income earned by the investments of all the savings banks and all the life-insurance companies of the country. If our rulers had borrowed ten billions of dollars at three per cent. and had wasted it all, the country would be financially about where it is now. They have not borrowed this ten billions of dollars, but if Mr. Aldrich is right, they are spending the interest on it. They have in effect mortgaged the wealth of the people to the extent [pg 79]of all their deposits in the savings banks, and all their investments in life-insurance companies, and are wasting the income of these funds faster than it is earned. If anyone thinks this is stating the case too strongly, he may add the waste of our state and municipal rulers to that of those at Washington, and Mr. Aldrich’s figure will seem moderate enough.

People who are comfortably off will reply to all this that we are getting on pretty well, and seem to be on the whole doing better from year to year. There is a well known passage in Macaulay’s History which may be thought to give support to optimism of this kind. “No ordinary misfortune,” he said, “no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a nation wretched as the constant progress of physical knowledge, and the constant effort of every man to better his condition will do to make a nation prosperous.”

No one will deny that the history of England justifies this statement; but let us remember the reason that Macaulay gave for this insuperable prosperity. “Every man has felt entire confidence that the State would protect him in the possession of what had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his self-denial.”

It is impossible to maintain that every man now feels this entire confidence. The income “earned by his diligence” is henceforth to be taxed at a progressive rate, and the demagogues are already complaining that the rate is not high enough. The inheritance of his family, “hoarded by his self-denial,” protected by the State until within a few years, now pays taxes which amount to the interest on a billion of dollars. We are assured by a railroad officer that three measures of legislation have increased the expenses of his corporation alone by a sum equal to the interest on $32,000,000, with no appreciable benefit to the public. The number of such laws is incalculable, and the cost of complying with them has become [pg 80]an almost intolerable burden. The income of the railroads declines, while their taxes increase, in some cases two or three fold. Lawyers and office holders thrive and are cheerful; investors suffer and tremble.

The people of New York seem just now to be in a way to find out how the enormous taxes which their rulers have levied on them are expended; but New York has no monopoly of corrupt rulers, and the cost of investigating extravagance is itself extravagant. And yet people wonder at the increased cost of living! Unfortunately the oppressions of government do worse than discourage business enterprise; they tend to demoralize society. There are too many men who hesitate to marry because they do not have confidence in the future, too many married people who do not dare to have more than one or two children, if they dare to have any, to make it possible to maintain that there is now no dread of more than ordinary misgovernment.

It is difficult to ascertain the total wealth of the country. The census bureau is notoriously dilatory. Its latest estimate was for 1904, when this aggregate was computed to be $107,000,000,000, or about $1,300 per caput. Assuming this ratio, the wealth of our people should now be over $120,000,000,000; but the figures are largely conjectural. It happens, however, that we possess some figures that are altogether trustworthy. In the year 1909 the Federal Government imposed a tax of one per cent. on the net income of every corporation, joint stock company, or association, including insurance companies, organized for profit, whenever this net income is over $5,000. There are some other exemptions, but they are not sufficient to demand consideration, and may be disregarded. Now we may be absolutely certain of one thing, and that is that the net income of those concerns will not be overestimated. Their net income may be more than what they report for the purposes of taxation, [pg 81]but it surely cannot be less. For the past year it seems probable that this tax will produce nearly thirty-five millions of dollars net income, after deducting all expenses, losses, depreciation, interest on debts and on deposits paid by banks, and dividends from other companies subject to the tax.

It may be more, but it cannot be less. Here our certainty ends. Guesses will vary, but in view of what we know in a general way of the conditions of business during the past year, we may perhaps venture to assume that the net income of these concerns is six per cent. of their real wealth. If this assumption is correct, their total wealth is 60 billions of dollars, or one half of the total wealth of the nation.

This estimate may be confirmed to some extent by other statistics. Calling the physical value of the railroads fourteen billions, their net earnings at five per cent. would be 700 millions, which corresponds well enough with the figures of the government, although some railroad men would make their net earnings much less. We do not know the net income of the untaxed corporations. Their returns would show its amount, but the government does not supply the information. As there must be now nearly 250,000 such corporations, if their average income is only $2,000 a year, the total could be $500,000,000. If it is $4,000, their income would be almost a billion dollars. On a 5 per cent. basis, the wealth of these corporations would be nearly 20 billion dollars. It seems, on the whole, that the wealth held by corporations is probably more than half our total wealth rather than less.

The bearing of these figures on our subject is now apparent. All of this property is disfranchised. It is, economically, to a very great extent disfranchised; politically, it is altogether disfranchised. What I mean by this is that the owners of this wealth, as owners, have very little to say, and nothing to do, about its care and management. Probably [pg 82]more than half of our people are directly or indirectly interested in it as owners. They have been attracted by a desire to share, however humbly, in big and famous enterprises, by the freedom from liability of the portion of their estates outside the particular investments, and by the freedom at death or withdrawal of associates from appraisals and accountings and probable closing of the business, as is the inevitable practice in mere partnerships. Two centuries ago people who saved money could hardly find ways to invest it. The practice of incorporation has enormously increased our wealth by putting a stop to hoarding without interest, stimulating saving, and broadening industry. The number of individual owners of the bonds and stocks of corporations is incalculable, and their holdings added to those of savings banks, insurance companies, trust companies and other fiduciary institutions, churches, hospitals, and colleges, make up a total of almost fabulous extent. It is true that large sums are loaned to persons, and on mortgages of real estate; but for most people such investments are not desirable or convenient, and they are altogether inadequate to absorb the vast sums that are available. In fact probably most investments of this character are now made by corporations who gather the savings of little depositors and premium payers; and it would cost much more to make them in any other way.

Corporations, therefore, are necessary, but they necessarily separate the ownership of wealth from its management. To invest is generally to entrust your money to another, and those who invest in corporations, unless they control them, are economically disfranchised, because the stockholders in all large corporations almost never influence the management of their property, and as a rule do not know anything about it. They don’t because they can’t. A few years ago a very large number of people were much worried by the exposure of some [pg 83]scandalous doings by the managers of certain great life-insurance companies. They would have been very glad to combine and choose better managers if they could; but they couldn’t. Laws were passed for the purpose of enabling the policy-holders to select their trustees, but the only result has been a ridiculous and rather expensive fiasco. As in politics, the rank and file select the managers selected for them by a few men who understand the situation. When many thousands of people own stock in a concern, they live all over this continent and in foreign parts, and it is a physical impossibility to bring them together. They do not know one another, and very few of them know much about the affairs of the concern, and if they know anything of the candidates that may be suggested, it is generally only by hearsay.

How many of the eighty-eight thousand stockholders in the Pennsylvania Railroad, for instance, have ever attended a meeting? For that matter, how many of them have ever studied the report of the railroad? Not one in ten could spare the time to read it, perhaps not one in a hundred could master it. The report may be read in a few hours; it would take as many months, if not years to verify it. Very nearly half these stockholders are women; the average holding is 120 shares, (par $50), and one-sixth of the stockholders own less than 10 shares each. Ten thousand of them are abroad. Much stock is held by trustees, whose beneficiaries are probably very numerous, and totally incompetent to understand railroad management. There are also more than twenty thousand holders of stock in subsidiary corporations controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad. No one can tell the number of bondholders; perhaps there are as many as there are employees, making an aggregate of almost half a million.

Sometimes trustees abuse their office; but on the whole they have done pretty well, and whether they have or not, [pg 84]there is no other way in which large capitals can be managed. All civilization rests on confidence. Such a vast fabric could not be built on confidence unless confidence was deserved. As a matter of fact, a man invests his money just as he invests in a surgeon. He does not think of directing the surgeon how to operate. If the operation does not succeed, he tries another surgeon next time—if there is a next time.

Of course all this applies chiefly to the large corporations. There are many thousands of small ones, having few stockholders, who reside where the business is established. These stockholders know more or less of the details of the business; they can judge to some extent how it is carried on, they are often acquainted with the managers, or are the managers themselves, and if not, they are able sometimes to combine and change the management. And I will anticipate a little and say here that the property of such a corporation located in a small town is often to some extent not politically disfranchised, because the people of the town understand that they are directly interested in the prosperity of the business. But it seems almost impossible for the stockholders to change the management of a large corporation. It has been done a few times. Mr. Harriman notoriously did it by using the money of one concern to buy the stock of another, and that is almost the only way in which it has been done. No doubt there has been an immense deal of combination which has resulted in change of management, but this has not been because the stockholders combined to oust their trustees, but because they thought they saw a good chance to sell their stock to those who would pay high for the control, or to participate in these combinations. There have been a good many cases where an enterprising speculator has managed to get hold of a majority of the stock and change the control, and powerful bankers can sometimes get proxies enough to put a stop to bad management; but spontaneous movements of this kind [pg 85]on the part of the mass of the stockholders are extremely rare.

Beyond dispute then, the great mass of wealth held by corporations is almost wholly under the control of their managers, and not the mass of the owners. Mr. Hill has recently testified that he never knew a stockholder to attend a meeting except to make trouble; by which he perhaps meant that when a single stockholder appeared, it was to get paid for not making trouble.

It need hardly be said that no such thing as legitimate representation of corporate wealth is known in our politics, and the representation of individual wealth is very limited. The theory of government by manhood suffrage, so far as there is any theory, is now entirely personal. In early times the freemen of the town, or little commune, met and legislated according to their needs. To be a freeman one had to own property; to “have a stake in the country.” Nowadays nearly all the men who have no property can vote, and some that have property cannot. In England, they are doing away with “plural voters.” Heretofore it was thought just, when a man owned land in more than one place, that he should have his say in the government of all; but this is now forbidden. The right was never recognized in this country, partly because formerly men seldom owned property in two places, but as transportation improved the conditions changed. The “commuters” are legion. Their business and their capital are under one jurisdiction and their dwellings and families under another; but they can vote in only one. Many thousands of men own houses in both city and country. They could help in the government of both, but are disfranchised in one or the other. Under our complicated systems of registration, they are often disfranchised at both.

Of course when population increases, the town meeting becomes a physical impossibility. There is no more direct [pg 86]legislation; it has to be delegated. The power is transferred to the city councils, and to the state and national legislatures. In other words, the interests of the owners of wealth are put in charge of trustees. According to Hamilton, the theory of our government is that the people will “naturally” choose the wisest of their number to represent them. There is not much basis for this assumption. Rousseau scouted it. According to him, the volonté générale could be ascertained only in the town meeting, and he seriously maintained that the ideal government for the Roman empire was by the gangs of rioters that the politicians marshalled in the Forum at Rome under the name of comitia. All that the theory of our government requires, is that our rulers shall be such men as are designated by the majority of the voters. That they should be wise and good men may accord with the theory of aristocracy; it is no part of the theory of democracy, and is certainly a very small part of the practice.

When I say that half of the property of this country is disfranchised, I mean that the nature of this property is such that it is peculiarly subject to the power of rulers, and that the owners of it have hardly any legitimate way of defending it against the arbitrary exercise of this power. The corporation is created by the legislature; men cannot combine their capitals and avoid unlimited liability for the debts of the combination, unless the law specifically authorizes the proceeding. Of course, if the legislature has power to make such grants, it must have power to alter them. In short, property held by a corporation is held at the will of the legislature, and in a way and to an extent that property held by an individual is not. It is not very easy for the legislature to plunder or blackmail individuals, even when they are disfranchised, because it has to be done by general laws, and direct methods arouse direct opposition. But, as we have seen, stockholders as a class cannot defend their rights, and as things are now, their trustees cannot have much to say concerning [pg 87]the laws that affect their property. Managers of large corporations are now commonly denounced as unfit to be legislators, and are practically excluded from the halls of legislation. In some states they are even specifically disfranchised, so far as holding office is concerned, and, under the new despotism, ironically dubbed the new freedom, every man whose wealth and ability make his aid important to many enterprises, is to be forbidden to participate in more than one. Yet property is almost entirely subject to the disposition of the legislature! not entirely, for the courts afford some protection; but even this is now threatened: we may “progress” so far as to make it unconstitutional for a judge to declare any law unconstitutional.

It goes without saying that half the property of the country will not submit to spoliation without a struggle. If it cannot have representation legitimately, it will try to get it illegitimately or extra legitimately. The managers of corporations have in the past found many ways to influence legislation. Despite the prejudices against them, some of them have had themselves chosen as legislators; even as judges. Some have brought about the election of legislators who would act in their favor, and have even bribed legislators. Until recently it was not even unlawful for these managers to use the money of their stockholders in political contributions; some managers acted on the “Good Lord! Good Devil!” principle. Probably most of the politicians paid no railroad fares. Many of them got passes for their families and their friends; and it was certainly to be expected that they should listen to the requests of those who granted these favors. The situation became grotesque when a great ruler, seeking a nomination to office with the proclaimed purpose of enforcing the laws against rebates and passes, required the railroad managers to furnish him free transportation on his righteous mission.

There were obvious objections to these practices, and [pg 88]public opinion finally compelled our rulers to pass laws prohibiting them. Theoretically the managers of corporations are now effectually disfranchised. They dare not offer themselves as candidates for office. They scarcely dare to favor, even secretly, the choice of rulers who will listen to them. Fortunately, however, they hardly longer dare to offer bribes. Anyone on friendly terms with them is politically a suspicious character. Any lawyer who has been employed by them becomes unavailable as a candidate for office. Our legislators, as was to be expected, at once showed the effect of release from restraint. It has been uncharitably said that in revenge for the loss of their passes and other favors, they attacked the railroads; but there has been considerable voting of more mileage, and our congressmen at least voted themselves ample indemnity in larger salaries, and they opened fire on corporations in general and railroads in particular, with a broadside of statutes. Against this fire the property of millions of small holders in the corporations has been almost defenceless. Some of these statutes are so drawn that the plain business man does not know whether he is a criminal or not; if he could afford to consult the best of lawyers it would not help him much. The only safe course to pursue is to agree with the adversary quickly; to plead guilty to whatever charge is made, and beg for mercy. That one is innocent is immaterial. The expense of litigation is nothing to the rulers of the United States; but it may be ruinous to their subjects. The cost of the commissions and investigations and prosecutions of the last few years has been enormous. Only lawyers can contemplate it without consternation.

True, the managers of large corporations can make their protests heard. They can publish their pleas in the newspapers, and issue pamphlets, and they can appear before committees and commissions, and submit arguments. The managers of small corporations cannot afford such measures. You might as well refer a servant-girl who couldn’t [pg 89]collect her wages, to the Hague Tribunal, as to send a plain business man to Washington to plead his cause.

The animus of these statutes is hostility to great corporations. But it is impossible to legislate against great corporations without hitting the small ones. Take the case of the recent corporation income tax; the 244,000 corporations exempt from the tax had to make out their inventories and keep their books and report their proceedings precisely as if they were liable to the tax. A fine of from $1,000 to $10,000 and a 50 per cent. increased assessment were the penalties for failure. But the cost of complying with all the requirements of the law, for a corporation having an income of two or three thousand dollars, cannot be figured at much less than the tax. Many corporations have no net income. The managers of these concerns are not expert book-keepers, and their returns must be in many cases so inaccurate as to expose them to prosecution if the game were worth the candle. If we assume that the average cost of making out the return is only ten dollars, we have a bill of $2,400,000, which the stockholders, or the employees, or the customers, must pay for the privilege of demonstrating that the small corporations are not liable to pay anything at all.

The corporation income tax law was really an act of popular dislike of corporations exercising great monopolies. Grouping all the little corporations with them was an absurdity and a cruelty.

Corporations have no feelings. They are not wounded by the hostility of legislatures. The managers of corporations of large capital have feelings, and some of them are wounded in their pride by this hostility. But they need not suffer in their pockets. They are abundantly able to protect their own property; they know how to make money on the short side of the market as well as the long side. But the managers of the concerns of small capital are seldom able to do this. Oppressive laws cause suffering to them, to the mere holders of stock in all corporations, [pg 90]to the creditors of all, to the employees, and to the customers. Many of these laws profess to be meant to favor small people as against big people—to restrain the rich corporations so that the poor ones may have more liberty. There is no evidence to show that this result is attained, or that the country would be better off if it were attained. But there is plenty of evidence to show that half the people of the country are suffering from these legislative attacks on their property. The men who manage the great corporations, whatever their faults, are men of enterprise and courage. They are the true progressives; the prosperity that they diffuse among the whole people is ordinarily more than can be destroyed by our progressive politicians. They are now beginning to feel that their rulers are discriminating against them as a class, and are uneasy and disheartened, and reluctant to embark in new enterprises; and the progress of the country is halted by their apprehension. It is not the rich who suffer most: it is “the unemployed,” and the millions of dumb, helpless, struggling thrifty men and women whose hard earned savings constitute a large part of the capital of the corporations; and who are already alarmed at the shrinking value of these savings. It is, perhaps most of all, the mass of ignorant unthrifty poor, whose chief wealth is the wages paid them by the corporations which they are taught to look on as their oppressors.

[pg 91]

Railway Junctions

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In his illuminating essay on The Lantern-Bearers, Stevenson complains of the vacuity of that view of life which he finds expressed in the pages of most realistic writers. “This harping on life’s dulness and man’s meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of two things: the cry of the blind eye, I cannot see, or the complaint of the dumb tongue, I cannot utter.” And then, with a fine flourish, he declares:—“If I had no better hope than to continue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross.”

“If it were spent waiting at a railway junction” … Here, with his instinct for the perfect phrase, Stevenson has pointed a finger at the one experience which is commonly accepted as the acme of imaginable dulness. This man, who could be happy at a railway junction, could not have found a prouder way of boasting to posterity that he had never “faltered more or less in his great task of happiness.”

It is because railway junctions are the most unpopular places in the world that they have been singled out for praise in The Unpopular Review. Poor places, lonely and forlorn, cursed by so many, celebrated by so few,—surely they have waited over-long for an apologist…. But first of all, in order to be fair, we must consider the customary view of these points of punctuation in the text of travel.

[pg 92]Far up in Vermont, at a point vaguely to the east of Burlington, there is a place called Essex Junction. It consists of a dismal shed of a station, a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and an adjacent cemetery, thickly populated (according to a local legend) with the bodies of people who have died of old age while waiting for their trains. This elegiac locality was visited, many years ago, by the Honorable E.J. Phelps, once ambassador of the United States to the court of St. James’s. He was allotted several hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his consequent meditations moved him to the composition of a poem, in four stanzas, which is a little classic of its kind. Space is lacking for a quotation of more than the initial stanza; but the taste of a poem, as of a pie, may conveniently be judged from a quadrant of the whole.—

With saddened face and battered hat

And eye that told of blank despair,

On wooden bench the traveller sat,

Cursing the fate that brought him there.

“Nine hours,” he cried, “we’ve lingered here

With thoughts intent on distant homes,

Waiting for that delusive train

That, always coming, never comes:

Till weary, worn,

Distressed, forlorn,

And paralyzed in every function!

I hope in hell

His soul may dwell

Who first invented Essex Junction!”

It was apparently the purpose of the writer to convey the impression that his period of waiting had been passed without pleasure; but yet we may easily confute him with another quotation from The Lantern-Bearers. “One pleasure at least,” says Stevenson, “he tasted to the full—his work is there to prove it—the keen pleasure of successful literary composition.” Was this honorable author ever moved to such eloquence by an audience with Queen [pg 93]Victoria? Never; so far as we know. Was not Essex Junction, therefore, a more inspiring spot than Buckingham Palace? Undeniably. Then, why complain of Essex Junction?

For, indeed, the pleasure that we take from places is nothing more nor less than the pleasure we put into them. A person predisposed to boredom can be bored in the very nave of Amiens; and a person predisposed to happiness can be happy even in Camden, New Jersey. I know: for I have watched American tourists in Amiens; and once, when I had gone to Camden, to visit Walt Whitman in his granite tomb, I was wakened to a strange exhilaration, and wandered all about that little dust-heap of a city amazing the inhabitants with a happiness that required them to smile. “All architecture,” said Whitman, “is what you do to it when you look upon it;… all music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments”: and I must have had this passage singing in my blood when I enjoyed that monstrous courthouse dome which stands up like a mushroom in the midst of Camden.

I have never been to Essex Junction; but I should like to go there—just to see (in Whitman’s words) what I could do to it. Imagine it upon a windy night of winter, when a hundred discommoded passengers are turned out, grumbling, underneath the stars,—coughing invalids, and kicking infants, and indignant citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and picking their way from train to train. Imagine their faces, their voices, their gesticulations: here, indeed, you will see more than a theatre-full of characters. Or, if human beings do not interest you, imagine the mysterious gleam of yellow windows veiled behind a drift of intermingled smoke and steam. Listen, also, to the clang of bells, the throb and puff of the engines, and the shrill shriek of their whistles. Or peer into the station-shed, made stuffy by the breath of many loiterers; and contrast their death in life with [pg 94]the life in death of those others who loiter through eternity beneath the gravestones of the cemetery. I can imagine being happy with all this (and even writing a paragraph about it afterwards): but, above all, I should like to gather those hundred discommoded passengers upon the station-platform, and to rehearse and lead them in a solemn chant of the refrain of Phelps’s poem. Imagine a hundred voices singing lustily in unison,

“I hope in hell

His soul may dwell

Who first invented Essex Junction,”

under the vast cathedral vaulting of the night, until the adjacent dead should seem to stand up in their graves and join the anthem of anathema…. Who is there so bold to tell me that enjoyment is impossible in such a place as this?

There is very little difference between places, after all: the true difference is between the people who regard them. I should rather read a description of Hoboken by Rudyard Kipling than a description of Florence by some New England schoolmarm. To the poet, all places are poetical; to the adventurous, all places are teeming with adventure: and to experience a lack of joy in any place is merely a sign of sluggish blood in the beholder.

So, at least, it seems to me; for not otherwise can I explain the fact that, like my beloved R.L.S., I have always enjoyed waiting at railway junctions. I love not merely the marching phrases, but also the commas and the semi-colons of a journey,—those mystic moments when “we look before and after” and need not “pine for what is not.” I have never done much waiting in America, which is in the main a country of express trains, that hurl their lighted windows through the night like what Mr. Kipling calls “a damned hotel;” but there is scarcely a country of Europe except Russia whose railway junctions [pg 95]are unknown to me. In many of these little nameless places I have experienced memorable hours: and because the less enthusiastic Baedeker has neglected to star and double-star them, I have always wanted to praise them, in print somewhat larger than his own. Space is lacking in the present article for a complete guide to all the railway junctions of Europe; but I should like to commemorate a few, in gratitude for what befell me there.

There is a junction in Bavaria whose name I have forgotten; but it is very near Rothenburg, the most picturesquely medieval of all German cities. It consists merely of a station and two intersecting tracks. When you enter the station, you observe what seems to be a lunch-counter; but if you step up to it and innocently order food, a buxom girl informs you that no food is ever served there—and then everybody laughs. This pleasant cachinnation attracts your attention to the assembled company. It consists of many peasants, in their native costumes (which any painter would be willing to journey many miles to see), who are enjoying the delicious experience of travel. They are great travelers, these peasants. Once a month they take the train to Rothenburg, and once a month they journey home again, to talk of the experience for thirty days. All of them have heard of Nuremberg [which is actually less than a hundred miles away],—that vast and wonderful metropolis, so far, so very far, beyond the ultimate horizon of their lives. They would like to see it some day—as I should like to see the Taj Mahal—but meanwhile they content themselves with the great adventure of going to Rothenburg,—a city that is really much more interesting, if they could only know. In the very midst of these congregated travelers, I casually set down a suit-case which was plastered over with many labels from many lands; and this suit-case affected them as I might be affected by a messenger from Mars. They spelled out many unfamiliar languages, and a murmur of amazement swept through [pg 96]the entire company when one of them discovered that that suit-case had been to Morocco. Morocco, they assured me, was a place where black men rode on camels; and I had no heart to tell them that it was a country where white men rode on mules. Then another of these travelers—an old man, with a face like one of Albrecht Dürer’s drawings—discovered a label that read “Venezia.” “Is that,” he said, “Venedig?” with a little gasp. “Yes; Venedig,” I responded, “where the streets are water.” Slowly he removed his hat. “Ach, Venedig!” he sighed; and then he stooped down, and, with the uttermost solemnity, he kissed the label…. And then I understood the vast impulsion of that wanderlust which has pushed so many, many Germans southward, to overrun that golden city that is wedded to the sea. I have forgotten the name of that junction, as I said before; but I have never been so happy in Munich as in this lonely station where there is no food.

Speaking of food reminds me of Bobadilla, in southern Spain. Bobadilla sounds as if it ought to be the name of a medieval town, with ghosts of gaunt imaginative knights riding forth to tilt with windmills; but there is no town at all at Bobadilla,—merely two railway restaurants set on either side of several intersecting tracks. For some mysterious reason, passengers from the four quarters of the compass—that is to say, from Cordoba, Granada, Algeciras, or Sevilla—are required to alight here, and eat, and change their trains. I remember Bobadilla as the place where you spend your counterfeit money. Many of the current coins of southern Spain are made of silver; and the rest are made of lead. For leaden five-peseta pieces there is a local name, “Sevillan dollars,” which ascribes their coinage to the crafty artisans of the capital of Andalucia. These pieces, which are plentiful, are just as good as silver dollars—when you can persuade anyone to take them. The currency of any coinage, except gold, depends entirely upon the faith of those who pass and take [pg 97]it and has no reference to its intrinsic value; and, in southern Spain, the leaden dollars serve as counters for just as many commercial transactions as the dollars made of silver. The only difference is that they are commonly accepted only after protest. In every Spanish shop, a slab of marble is built into the counter, and on this slab all proffered coins are slapped before they are accepted by the merchant. The traveler soon learns to fling his change upon the pavement; and many merry arguments ensue regarding the timbre of their ring. I remember how once, in the wondrous town of Ronda, when a beggar had imposed himself upon me as a guide and led me into a church where High Mass was being chanted, I gave him a peseta to get rid of him, and at once he flung it upon the pavement of the church, and chased it, listening, across the nave. Thereafter, he protested loudly that the piece was lead, and disrupted the intoning of the priests. “Very well,” said I, “it is, in any case, a gift; if you don’t want it, I will take it back”: and he accepted it with bows and smiles, and allowed the weary priests to continue their intonings. But Bobadilla is the one place in southern Spain where money is never jingled upon marble. There is no time between trains to quibble over minor matters; and a “Sevillan dollar” accepted from one passenger is blithely handed to another who is traveling in the opposite direction. I discovered this fact on the occasion of my first visit to this interesting junction; and on subsequent occasions I have eaten my fill at one or another of the railway restaurants and settled the account with all the leaden money garnered up from weeks of traveling. There is surely no dishonesty in observing the custom of a country; and Bobadilla may be treasured by all travelers as a clearing-house for counterfeit coins.

Again, in northern France, it was merely by some accident of changing trains that I discovered the lovely little town of Dol. I found myself in Saint Malo, for obvious reasons; and I desired to go to Mont Saint-Michel, for [pg 98]reasons still more obvious—Mother Poulard’s omelettes, and architecture, and the incoming of the tide. Between them—the map told me—was situated Dol. I made inquiries of the porter in the Saint Malo hotel. He responded in English,—the English of Ici on parle anglais. “Dol,” said he, “is a dull place.” He pronounced “Dol” and “dull” in precisely the same manner, and smiled at his sickly pun. I did not like that smile; and I alighted at the town that he despised. It was a little picture-book of a place, with many toy-like medieval houses clustered side by side around a market-place where peasants twisted the tails of cows. I strolled to the cathedral—and found myself mysteriously in England. It was a manly Norman edifice, sane and reticent and strong, set in a veritable English green, with little houses round about, reminding one of Salisbury. I entered the Cathedral; and found the nave to be composed in what is called in England the “decorated” style, and the choir to give hints of “perpendicular.” And then I remembered, with a start, that the ancestors of all that is most beautiful in England had migrated from Normandy, and that here I was visiting them in their antecedent home. “Saxon and Norman and Dane are we;” and all that was Norman in me reached forth with groping hands to grasp the palms of those old builders who reared this little sacrosanct cathedral in the far-off times when one dominion extended to either side of the English Channel.

It was by a similar accident—desiring to transfer myself from Bourges to Auxerre—that I discovered the wonderful junction-town of Nevers, which, despite the guide-books, is more interesting than either of the others. It possesses a Gothic cathedral with an apse at either end, that looks as if two churches had collided and telescoped each other. There is also a Romanesque church at Nevers which is just as simple and as manly as either of the famous abbeys in Caen; and a chateau with rounded towers, which once belonged to Mazarin. But the most amusing [pg 99]feature of this town is that, though Bourges packs itself to bed at ten o’clock, Nevers sits blithely up till twelve, listening to music in cafés, and watching moving-pictures; and this amiable incongruity in a medieval town makes you bless that complication of the time-table which has forced you, against forethought, to stay there over night.

It is difficult for me to remember a railway junction in which there was nothing to do; but perhaps Pyrgos, in Greece, comes nearest to this description. At this point, you change cars on your way from Patras to Olympia. The town is made of mud: that is to say, the single-storied houses are built of unbaked clay. There is nothing to see in Pyrgos. But I amused myself by addressing the inhabitants, in the English language, with an eloquent oration that soon gathered them under my control; and thereafter I set a hundred of them at the pleasant task of trying to push the train for Olympia on its way to take me to the Hermes of Praxiteles. I knew no word of their language, nor did they of mine; but they understood that that train should be started, if human force were sufficient to help the cars upon their way: and finally, when the engine puffed and snorted with a tardily awakened sense of duty, the train was cheered by the entire population as I waved my hand from the rear platform and quoted one of Daniel Webster’s perorations.

Is it—I have often wondered—so difficult as people think, to be happy in an hour “spent waiting at a railway junction”?… The kingdom of happiness is within us; or else there is no truth in our assumption that the will of man is free: and I am inclined to pity a man who, being happy in Amalfi—the loveliest of all the places I have ever seen—cannot also manage to be happy in Pyrgos—or in Essex Junction—and to communicate his happiness to his responsive fellow-travelers.

The true enjoyment of traveling is to enjoy traveling; not to relish merely the places you are going to, but to [pg 100]relish also the adventure of the going. The most difficult train-journey I remember is the twenty-hour trip from Lisbon to Sevilla, with a change of cars in the ghastly early morning at the border-town of Badajoz and another change at noon at the sun-baked, parched, and God-forsaken town of Merida; and yet I relish as red letters on my personal map of Spain a pleasant quarrel over the price of sandwiches at Badajoz and the way a muleteer of Merida flung a colored cloak over his shoulder and posed for an unconscious moment like a painting by Zuloaga.

And this philosophy has a deeper application to life at large: for all life may be figured as a journey, and few there are who are natively equipped for the enjoyment of all the waste and waiting places on the way. The minds of most people are so fixed upon the storied capitals that are featured in those works of fiction known as guidebooks that they are impeded from enjoying the minor stations on their journey. “Hurry me to Sevilla,” cries the traveler—and misses the sight of my muleteer of Merida. In America, our society is crammed with people who fail to enjoy life on five thousand a year because their minds are fixed upon that distant time when they hope to enjoy life on twenty thousand a year. And if ever they attain that twenty thousand they will not enjoy it either; but will merely peer forward to a hypothetical enjoyment at fifty thousand a year. And this is the essence of their tragedy:—they have not learned to wait with happiness.

Is there any reason for this inordinate ambition to “get on”? Louis Stevenson was happier, as a small boy with a bull’s-eye lantern at his belt, than any king upon his throne. The secret of enjoyment is to learn to look about us, to value what our destiny has given us, to transform it into magic by some contributory gift of poetry or humor, to consider with contentment the lilies of the field. The zest of life is in the living of it; and “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

How often, in the roaring and tumultuary tide of life, [pg 101]we meet a man who sighs, “If only I could have a single day in which there was nothing that I had to do, nothing even that I had to think of, how happy I should be!” and yet this self-same man, if set down at a railway junction, will at once bestir himself to seek something to think of, something to do, and will spurn the gift of leisure. The incessant hurry of our current life has tragically lured us to forget the art of loitering. We are no longer able—like Wordsworth, on his “old gray stone”—to sit upon a trunk at some railway junction of our lives and listen reverently to the “mighty sum of things forever speaking.”

One of the loveliest women I have ever known—the late Alison Cunningham—told me a little anecdote of the author of The Lantern-Bearers which, so far as I know, has never yet been published. When little Louis was about five years old, he did something naughty, and Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him he would have to stay there for ten minutes. Then she left the room. At the end of the allotted period, she returned and said, “Time’s up, Master Lou: you may come out now.” But the little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner. “That’s enough: time’s up,” repeated Cummy. And then the child mystically raised his hand, and with a strange light in his eyes, “Hush…,” he said, “I’m telling myself a story….”

And, in the Christian Morals of Sir Thomas Browne, we may read the following passage:—“He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company. Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself; nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole world in the hermitage of himself.”

[pg 102]Wordsworth sitting quiescent and receptive in a lakeside landscape, little Louis standing in a corner, Sir Thomas Browne enjoying the whole world in the hermitage of himself:—what a rebuke is offered by these images to those who fret and fume away the leisure that is granted them at all the waiting places of their lives!… These disgruntled travelers nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita miss their privilege and duty of enjoying life merely because they miss the point that life is, in itself, enjoyable. They are so busy reading guide-books to the vague beyond that they shut their minds to all that may be going on about them, or within them, at way-stations. They close their eyes and ears to the immediate. They veto all perception of the here and now. But life itself is always here and now; and, truly to enjoy it, we must learn to look forever with unfaltering eyes into the bright face of immediacy.

And there is another point about railway junctions that reveals an important application to the larger journey of our life. A friend of mine, who is a great lover of painting, had occasion once (and only once) to change trains at Basle, in the course of a journey from Lucerne to Heidelberg. He had to wait two hours at this railway junction; and this time he pleasantly expended in eating many dishes at a restaurant, and amusing the lax porters by teaching them a method of economizing energy in shifting trunks. It should be noted that this friend of mine was not trying to “kill time;” for, like all genuine humanitarians, he of course regards that tragic process as the least excusable of murders. He was entirely happy for two hours in that railway station. But—having packed his guide-book in a trunk—it was not until he reached Darmstadt, some days later, that he discovered that several of the very greatest works of Holbein are now resident in Basle. The two hours that he had spent playing and eating might have been devoted to an examination [pg 103]of many masterpieces of that art which, more than any other, he had crossed the seas to seek. He has never yet been able to return to Basle; but for a sight of those lost portraits of the most honest and straightforward of all German painters, he would gladly sell his memories of both Lucerne and Heidelberg.

Here we have a record of a great disappointment that was occasioned merely by the common habit of despising railway junctions, and presuming them to be inevitably dull. But this same unfortunate presumption, applied to life at large, leads many people to overlook the nearness of some great adventure. Interrogate a thousand men, and you will find that none of them has first set eyes upon his greatest friend in the Mosque of Cordoba or in Trafalgar Square. Every adventure of lasting consequence has confronted all of them, without exception, in some hidden nook or cranny of the world,—some place unknown to fame. Anybody is as likely to meet the woman who is destined to become his wife, at Essex Junction on a wintry night, as in the Parthenon by moonlight in the month of May. The most romantic places in the world are often those that promised, in advance, to be the least romantic.

Since this is so, how can anybody ever dare to shut his eyes to that incalculable imminency of adventure which environs him even when he is merely changing trains on some island-platform of the New York Subway? In our daily living we are never safe from destiny; and who can ever know in what vacuous and sedentary period of his experience he may suddenly be called upon to entertain an angel unawares? It is best to be prepared for anything, at any hour of our lives,—even at those moments that must, perforce, be “spent waiting at a railway junction.”

[pg 104]

Minor Uses of the Middling Rich

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To assert today that the rich are for the most part entirely harmless is to dare much, for the contrary opinion is greatly in favor. Such wholesale condemnation of the rich assumes a more general and a more specific form. They are said to be harmful to the body politic simply because they have more money than the average: their property has been wrongly taken from persons who have a better right to it, or is withheld from people who need it more. But aside from being constructively a moral detriment from the mere possession of wealth, the rich man may do specific harm through indulging his vices, maintaining an inordinate display, charging too much for his own services, crushing his weaker competitor, corrupting the legislature and the judiciary, finally by asserting flagrantly his right to what he erroneously deems to be his own. Such are the general and specific charges of modern anti-capitalism against wealth. Like many deep rooted convictions, these rest less on analysis of particular instances than upon axioms received without criticism. The word spoliation does yeoman service in covering with one broad blanket of prejudice the most diverse cases of wealth. But spoliation is assumed, not proved. My own conviction that most wealth is quite blameless, whether under the general or specific accusation, is based on no comprehensive axiom, but simply on the knowledge of a number of particular fortunes and of their owners. Such a road towards truth is highly unromantic. The student of particular phenomena is unable to pose as the champion of the race. But the method has the modest advantage of resting not on a priori definitions, but on [pg 105]inductions from actual experience; hence of being relatively scientific.

Before sketching the line of such an investigation, let me say that in logic and common sense there is no presumption against the wealthy person. Ever since civilization began and until yesterday it has been assumed that wealth was simply ability legitimately funded and transmitted. Even modern humanitarians, while dallying with the equation wealth = spoliation, have been unwilling wholly to relinquish the historic view of the case. I have always admired the courage with which Mr. Howells faced the situation in one of those charming essays for the Easy Chair of Harper’s. Driving one night in a comfortable cab he was suddenly confronted by the long drawn out misery of the midnight bread line. For a moment the vision of these hungry fellow men overcame him. He felt guilty on his cushions, and possibly entertained some St. Martin-like project of dividing his swallowtail with the nearest unfortunate. Then common sense in the form of his companion came to his rescue. She remarked “Perhaps we are right and they are wrong.” Why not? At any rate Mr. Howells was not permitted to condemn in a moment of compassion the career of thrift, industry and genius, that had led him from a printer’s case to a premier position in American letters, or, more concretely, he received a domestic dispensation to cab it home in good conscience, though many were waiting in chilly discomfort for their gift of yesterday’s bread. The why so and why not of this incident are my real subject. For Mr. Howells is merely a particularly conspicuous instance of the kind of prosperity I have in mind. We are all too much dazzled by the rare great fortunes. The newly rich have spectacular ways with them. By dint of frequently passing us in notorious circumstances, they give the impression of a throng. They are much in the papers, their steam yachts loom large on the waters, they divorce quickly and often, they buy the most egregious, old masters. [pg 106]By such more or less innocent ostentations, a handful stretches into a procession, much as a dozen sprightly supernumeraries will keep up an endless defile of Macduff’s army on the tragic stage. Let us admit that some of the great wealth is more or less foolishly and harmfully spent; my subject is not bank accounts, but people; and very wealthy people constitute an almost negligible minority of the race. Their influence too is much less potent than is supposed. A slightly vulgarizing tendency proceeds from them, but in waves of decreasing intensity. Their vogue is chiefly a succès de scandale. Sensible people will gape at the spectacle without admiration, and even the reader of the society column in the sensational newspapers keeps more critical detachment than he is usually credited with. In any case neither the boisterous nor the shrinking multimillionaire has any representative standing. He is not what a poor person means by a rich person. Ask your laundress who is rich in your neighborhood, and she will name all who live gently and do not have to worry about next month’s bills. True pragmatist, she sees that to be exempt from any threat of poverty is to all intents and purposes to be rich. Her classification ignores certain niceties, but corresponds roughly to the fact, and has the merit of corresponding to government decree. Rich people, since the income tax, are officially those who pay the tax but not the surtax. Families with an income not less than four thousand dollars nor more than twenty thousand comprise the harmless, middling rich. Let us once for all admit that in the surtaxed classes there are many cases of quite harmless wealth, while in the lower level of the rich, harmful wealth will sometimes be found. Such exceptions do not invalidate the general rule that all but a negligible fraction of the rich are included in the first class of income taxpayers—on from four to twenty thousand, that most of the property here held is blamelessly held in good hands—wealth that in no fair estimate can be regarded as harmful. In terms [pg 107]of British currency, our category of the middling rich would include the poorer individuals of the upper classes, the richer persons of the lower middle class, and the upper middle class as a whole. This comparison is made not to apply an alien class system which holds very inadequately here in America, but simply to avow the difficulty of my task of apology. The bourgeoisie is equally suspect among radicals, reactionaries, and artists. My middling rich are nothing other than what an European essayist would quite brazenly call the haute bourgeoisie. It is quite a comprehensive class, made up chiefly of professional men, moderately successful merchants, manufacturers, and bankers with their more highly paid employees, but including also many artists, and teachers of all sorts. Incidentally it is an employing and borrowing class in various degrees, hence especially subject to the exactions of the labor union at one end, and of the great capitalist and the Trust at the other.

The general harmlessness of the wealth of this class rests upon the fact that it is in small part inherited, but mostly earned by individual effort, while such effort has usually been honestly and efficiently rendered and paid for at a moderate rate. In fact the amount of capacity that can be hired for the slightest rewards is simply amazing. It is the distinction of this class as compared both with the wage earning and the capitalist class—both of which agree in overvaluing their services and extorting payment on their own terms—that it respects its work more than it regards rewards. Consider the amount of general education and special training that go to make a capable school superintendent, or college professor; a good country doctor or clergyman—and it will be felt that no money is more honestly earned. This is equally true of many lawyers and magistrates, who are wise counsellors for an entire country side. It is no less true of hosts of small manufacturers who make a superior product with conscience. For the wealth, small enough it usually is, [pg 108]that is thus gained in positions of especial skill and confidence, absolutely no apology need be made. I sometimes wish that the Socialists for whom any degree of wealth means spoliation, would go a day’s round with a country doctor, would take the pains to learn of the cases he treats for half his fee, for a nominal sum, or for nothing; would candidly reckon his normal fee against the long years of college, medical school and hospital, and against the service itself; would then deduct the actual expenses of the day, as represented by apparatus, motor, or horse service—I can only say that if such an investigator could in any way conceive that physician as a spoliator, because he earned twice as much as a master brick-layer or five times as much as a ditch digger—if, I say, before the actual fact, our Socialist investigator in any way grudges that day’s earnings, his mental and emotional confusion is beyond ordinary remedy. And such a physician’s earnings are merely typical of those of an entire class of devoted professional men.

We do well to remind ourselves that the great body of wealth in the country has been built up slowly and honestly by the most laborious means, and accumulated and transmitted by self-sacrificing thrift. A rich person in nine cases out of ten is merely a capable, careful, saving person, often, too, a person who conducts a difficult calling with a fine sense of personal honor and a high standard of social obligation. We are too much dazzled by the occasional apparition of the lawyer who has got rich by steering guilty clients past the legal reefs, of the surgeon who plays equally on the fears and the purses of his patients, of the sensational clergyman who has made full coinage of his charlatanism. All these types exist, and all are highly exceptional. Most rich persons are self-respecting, have given ample value received for their wealth, and have less reason to apologize for it than most poor folks have to apologize for their poverty.

Furthermore: for the maintenance of certain humdrum [pg 109]but necessary human virtues, we are dependent upon these middling rich. It has been frequently remarked that a lord and a working man are likely to agree, as against a bourgeois, in generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to make sporting spirit. The right measure of these qualities makes for charm and genuine fraternity; the excess of these qualities produces an enormous amount of human waste among the wage earners and the aristocrats impartially. The great body of self-controlled, that is of reasonably socialized people, must be sought between these two extremes. In short the building up of ideals of discipline and of habits of efficiency and of good manners and of human respect is very largely the task of the middle classes. Whereas the breaking down of such ideals is, in the present posture of society, the avowed or unavowed intention of a considerable portion of laboring men and aristocrats. The scornful retort of the Socialist is at hand: “Of course the middle classes are shrewd enough to practice the virtues that pay.” Into this familiar moral bog that there are as many kinds of morality as there are economic conditions of mankind, I do not consent to plunge. I need only say that the so-called middle class virtues would pay a workman or a lord quite as well as they do a bourgeois. Moreover, while workmen and lords are prone to scorn the calculating virtues of the middle classes, there is no indication that the bourgeoisie has selfishly tried to keep its virtues to itself. On the contrary there is positive rejoicing in the middle classes over a workman who deigns to keep a contract, and an aristocrat who perceives the duty of paying a debt. In fine we of the middle classes need no more be ashamed of our highly unpicturesque virtues than we are of our inconspicuous wealth.

So far from being in danger of suppression, we middling rich people are likely to last longer than the capitalists who exploit us in practice, and the workmen who exploit us on principle. Theoretically, and perhaps practically, [pg 110]the very rich are in danger of expropriation. Theoretically the course of invention may limit or almost abolish all but the higher grades of labor. The need of the more skilful sort of service in the professions, in manufacture, in agency of all sorts, is sure to persist. The socialists expect to get such service for much less than it at present brings, that is to make us poor and yet keep us working. Such a scheme must break down, not through the refusal of the middling rich to keep at work;—for I think there is loyalty enough to the work itself to keep most necessary activities going after a fashion, even under the most untoward conditions;—but because to make us poor is to destroy the conditions under which we can efficiently render a somewhat exceptional service. Our wealth is not an extraneous thing that can be readily added or taken away. It is our possibility of self-education and of professional improvement, it is the medium in which we can work, it is our hope of children. To take away our wealth is to maim us. There is nothing humiliating in such an avowal. It is merely an assertion of the integrity of one’s life and work. As a matter of fact no class is so well fitted to face the threat of a proletarian revolution as we harmless rich. It is the class that produces generals, explorers, inventors, statesmen. A social revolution with its stern attendant regimentation would bear most heavily on the relatively undisciplined class of working people. The disciplined class of the middling rich is better prepared to meet such an eventuality. Accordingly it is no mere selfishness or complacency that leads the middling rich to oppose the pretensions of proletarianism on one side and of capitalism on the other. It is rather the assertion of sound middle class morality against two opposite yet somewhat allied forms of social immorality—the strength that exaggerates its claims, and the weakness that claims all the privileges of strength.

We are useful too as conserving certain valuable ideas. When I mention the idea of the right of private property, I [pg 111]expect to be laughed at by a large class of enthusiasts. Yet all of civilization has been built up on the distinction between meum and tuum. Without this idea there is not the slightest inducement to persistent individual effort nor possibility of progress for the individual or for the race. The fruitful diversities, the germinative inequalities between men all depend on this right. And today the right to one’s own is doubly under attack from the violence of laboring men, and the guile of those in positions of financial trust. The strikers who offer as an argument the burning of a mine or wrecking of a mill, and the directors who manipulate corporation accounts to pay unearned dividends, are both undermining the right of property. Against such counsels of force and fraud, the representatives of the common sense and funded wisdom of mankind are the middling rich. It is an unromantic service—doubtless breaking other people’s windows or scaling their bank accounts is much more thrilling—it is a public service obviously tinged with self-interest, but none the less a public service of high and timely importance. The business of keeping the sanity of the world intact as against the wilder expressions of social discontent, and the uglier expressions of personal envy and greed, may seem to lack zest and originality today. History may well take a different view of the matter. It would not be surprising to find a posthumous aureole of idealism conferred upon those who amid the trumpeting of money market messiahs, and the braying of self-appointed remodellers of the race, simply stood quietly on their own inherited rights and principles.

Such are some not wholly minor uses for the middling rich. Should they be abolished, many of the pleasanter facts and appearances of the world would disappear with them. The other day I whisked in one of their motor cars through miles of green Philadelphia suburbs dappled with pink magnolia trees and white fruit blossoms—everywhere charming houses, velvety lawns, tidy gardens. The establishing of a little paradise like that is of course a [pg 112]selfish enterprise—a mere meeting of the push and foresight of real estate operators with the thrift and sentiment of householders, yet it is an advantage inevitably shared, a benefit to the entire community, an example in reasonable working, living, and playing.

On the side of play we should especially miss these harmless rich. The sleek horses on a thousand bridle paths and meadows are theirs, the smaller winged craft that still protest against the pollution of the sea by the reek of coal and the stench of gasoline; of their furnishing are the graceful and widely shared spectacles not only of the minor yacht racing but of the field sports generally. They constitute our militia. The survival in the world of such gentler accomplishments as fencing, canoeing, and exploration rests with the middling rich. They write our books and plays, compose our music, paint our pictures, carve our statues. The pleasanter unconscious pageantry of our life is conducted by their sons and daughters. To be nice, to indulge in nice occupations, to express happiness—this is not even today a reproach to any one. Indeed if any approach to the dreamed socialized state ever be made, it will come less through regimentation than through imitation of those persons of middle condition who have managed to be reasonably faithful in their duties, and moderate in their pleasures. To keep a clean mind in a clean body is the prerogative of no class, but the lapses from this standard are unquestionably more frequent among the poor and the very rich.

It is instructive in this regard to compare with the newspapers that serve the middling rich, those that address the poor, and those that are owned in the interest of well understood capitalistic interests. The extremes of yellow journalism and of avowedly capitalistic journalism, meet in a preference for salacious or merely shocking news, and in a predilection for blatant, sophistical, or merely nugatory and time-serving editorial expressions. Between the two really allied types of newspapers are a few which [pg 113]exercise a decent censorship over questionable news, and habitually indulge in the luxury of sincere editorial opinion. There are some exceptions to the rule. In our own day we have seen a proletarian paper become a magnificent editorial organ, while somewhat illogically maintaining a random and sensational policy in its news columns. But generally the distinction is unmistakable. Imagine the plight of New York journalism if four papers, which I need not mention, ceased publication. It would mean a distinct and immediate cheapening of the mentality of the city. Then observe on any train who are reading these papers. It is plain enough what class among us makes decent journalism possible.

Much is to be said for the abolition of poverty, and something for the reduction of inordinate wealth. Poverty is being much reduced, and will be farther, the process being limited simply by the degree to which the poor will educate and discipline themselves. We shall never wholly do away with bad luck, bad inheritance, wild blood, laziness, and incapacity: so some poverty we shall always have, but much less than now, and less dire. The fact that the large class of middling rich has been evolved from a world where all began poor, is a promise of a future society where poverty shall be the exception. But such increase of the wealth of the world, and of the number of the virtually rich, will never be attained by the puerile method of expropriating the present holders of wealth. That would produce more poor people beyond doubt—but its effect in enriching the present poor would be inappreciable. You cannot change a man’s character and capacity simply by giving him the wealth of another. In wholesale expropriations and bequests the experiment has been many times tried, and always with the same results. The wealth that could not be assimilated and administered has always left the receiver or grasper in all essentials poorer than he was before. Wealth is an attribute of personality. It is not interchangeable like the parts of a [pg 114]standardized machine. The futility of dispossessing the middling rich would be as marked as its immorality.

This essentially personal character of wealth must affect the views of those who would attack what are called the inordinate fortunes. I hold no brief for or against the multi-millionaire. In many cases I believe his wealth is as personal, assimilated and legitimate as is the average moderate fortune. In many cases too, I know that such gigantic wealth is in fact the product of unfair craft and favoritism, is to that extent unassimilated and illegitimate. Yet admitting the worst of great fortunes, I think a prudent and fair minded man would hesitate before a general programme of expropriation. He would consider that in many cases the common weal needs such services as very wealthy people render, he would reflect on the practical benefits to the world, of the benevolent enterprises for education, research, invention, hygiene, medicine, which are founded and supported by great wealth. In our time The Rockefeller Institute will have stamped out that slow plague of the south, the hook worm. To the obvious retort that the government ought to do this sort of thing, the reply is equally obvious, that historically governments have not done this sort of thing until enlightened private enterprise has shown the way. Our prudent observer of mankind in general, and of the very rich in particular, would again reflect that, granting much of the socialist indictment of capital as illgained, common sense requires a statute of limitations. At a certain point restitution makes more trouble than the possession of illegitimate wealth. Debts, interest, and grudges cannot be indefinitely accumulated and extended. It is the entire disregard of this simple and generally admitted principle that has marred the socialist propaganda from the first. From the point of view of fomenting hatred between classes, to make every workingman regard himself as the residuary legatee of all the grievances of all workingmen, at all times, may be clever tactics, it is not a good way of making the workingman [pg 115]see clearly what his actual grievance and expectancy of redress are in his own day and time.

With increasingly heavy income and inheritance taxes, the very rich will have to reckon. Yet the multi-millionaire’s evident utility as the milch cow of the state, will cause statesmen, even of the anti-capitalistic stamp, to waver at the point where the cow threatens to dry up from over-milking. If the case, then, for utterly despoiling the harmful rich, is by no means clear, the prospect for the harmless rich may be regarded as fairly favorable. For the moment, caught between the headiness of working folk, the din of doctrinaires, and the wiles of corporate activity, the lot of the middling rich is not the most happy imaginable. But they seem better able to weather these flurries than the windy, cloud-compelling divinities of the hour. From the survival of the middling rich, the future common weal will be none the worse, and it may even be better.

[pg 116]

Lecturing at Chautauqua

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To render any real impression of the Chautauqua Summer Assembly, I must approach this many-mooded subject from a personal point of view. Others, more thoroughly informed in the arcana of the Institution, have written the history of its development from small beginnings to its present impressive magnitude, have analyzed the theory of its intentions, and have expounded its extraordinary influence over what may be called the middle-class culture of our present-day America. It would be beyond the scope of my equipment to add another solemn treatise to the extensive list already issued by the tireless Chautauqua Press. My own experience of Chautauqua was not that of a theoretical investigator, but that of a surprised and wondering participant. It was the experience of an alien thrust suddenly into the midst of a new but not unsympathetic world; and, if the reader will make allowance for the personal equation, some sense of the human significance of this summer seat of earnest recreation may be suggested by a mere record of my individual reactions.

I had heard of Chautauqua only vaguely, until, one sunny summer morning, I suddenly received a telegram inviting me to lecture at the Institution. I was a little disconcerted at the moment, because I was enjoying an amphibious existence in a bathing-suit, and was inclined to shudder at the thought of putting on a collar in July; but, after an hour or two, I managed to imagine that telegram as a Summons from the Great Unknown, and it was in a proper spirit of adventure that I flung together a few books, and climbed into the only available upper berth on a discomfortable train that rushed me westward.

[pg 117]In some sickly hour of the early morning, I was cast out at Westfield, on Lake Erie,—a town that looked like the back-yard of civilization, with weeds growing in it. Thence a trolley car, climbing over heightening hills that became progressively more beautiful, hauled me ultimately to the entrance of what the cynical conductor called “The Holy City.” A fence of insurmountable palings stretched away on either hand; and, at the little station, there were turn-stiles, through which pilgrims passed within. Most people pay money to obtain admittance; but I was met by a very affable young man from Dartmouth, whose business it was to welcome invited visitors, and by him I was steered officially through unopposing gates. I liked this young man for his cheerful clothes and smiling countenance; but I was rather appalled by the agglomeration of ram-shackle cottages through which we passed on our way to the hotel.

I say “the hotel,” for the Chautauqua Settlement contains but one such institution. It carries the classic name of Athenæum; but the first view of it occasioned in my sensitive constitution a sinking of the heart. The edifice dates from the early-gingerbread period of architecture. It culminates in a horrifying cupola, and is colored a discountenancing brown. The first glimpse of it reminded me of the poems of A.H. Clough, whose chief merit was to die and to offer thereby an occasion for a grave and twilit elegy by Matthew Arnold. Clough’s life-work was a continual asking of the question, “Life being unbearable, why should I not die?”—while echo, that commonplace and sapient commentator, mildly answered, “Why?”: and this was precisely the impression that I gathered from my initial vista of the Athenæum between trees.

On entering the hotel I was greeted over the desk (with what might be defined as a left-handed smile) by one of the leading students of the university with which I am associated as a teacher. He called out, “Front!” in the manner of an amateur who is amiably aping the professional, [pg 118]and assigned me to a scarcely comfortable room.

My first voluntary act in the Chautauqua Community was to take a swim. But the water was tepid, and brown, and tasteless, and unbuoyant; and I felt, rather oddly, as if I were swimming in a gigantic cup of tea. From this initial experience I proceeded, somewhat precipitately, to induce an analogy; and it seemed to me, at the time, as if I had forsaken the roar and tumble of the hoarse, tumultuous world, for the inland disassociated peace of an unaware and loitering backwater.

With hair still wet and still dishevelled, I was met by the Secretary of Instruction,—a man (as I discovered later) of wise and humorous perceptions. By him I was informed that, in an hour or so, I was to lecture, in the Hall of Philosophy, on (if I remember rightly) Edgar Allan Poe. I combed my hair, and tried to care for Poe, and made my way to the Hall of Philosophy. This turned out to be a Greek temple divested of its walls. An oaken roof, with pediments, was supported by Doric columns; and under the enlarged umbrella thus devised, about a thousand people were congregated to greet the new and unknown lecturer.

I honestly believe that that was the worst lecture I have ever imposed upon a suffering audience. I had lain awake all night, in an upper berth, on the hottest day of the year; I had found my swim in inland water unrefreshing; and, at the moment, I really cared no more for Edgar Allan Poe than I usually care for the sculptures of Bernini, the paintings of Bouguereau, or the base-ball playing of the St. Louis “Browns.” This feeling was, of course, unfair to Poe, who is (with all his emptiness of content) an admirable artist; but I was tired at the time. It pained me exceedingly to listen, for an hour, to my own dull and unilluminated lecture. And yet (and here is the pathetic point that touched me deeply) I perceived gradually that the audience was listening not only attentively but [pg 119]eagerly. Those people really wanted to hear whatever the lecturer should say: and I wandered back to the depressing hotel with bowed head, actuated by a new resolve to tell them something worthy on the morrow.

That afternoon and evening I strolled about the summer settlement of Chautauqua; and (in view of my subsequent shift of attitude) I do not mind confessing that this first aspect of the community depressed me to a perilous melancholy. I beheld a landscape that reminded me of Wordsworth’s Windermere, except that the lake was broader and the hills less high, deflowered and defamed by the huddled houses of the Chautauqua settlers. The lake was lovely; and, with this supreme adjective, I forbear from further effort at description. Upon the southern shore, a natural grove of noble and venerable trees had been invaded by a crowded horror of discomfortable tenements, thrown up by carpenters with a taste for machine-made architectural details, and colored a sickly green, an acid yellow, or an angry brown. The Chautauqua Settlement, which is surrounded by a fence of palings, covers only two or three square miles of territory; and, in the months of July and August, between fifteen and twenty thousand people are crowded into this constricted area. Hence a horror of unsightly dormitories, spawning unpredictable inhabitants upon the ambling, muddy lanes.

There have been, in the history of this Assembly, a few salutary fires,—as a result of which new buildings have been erected which are comparatively easy on the eyes. The Hall of Philosophy is really beautiful, and is nobly seated among memorable trees at the summit of a little hill. The Aula Christi tried to be beautiful, and failed; but at least the good intention is apparent. The Amphitheatre (which seats six or seven thousand auditors) is admirably adapted to its uses; and some of the more recent business buildings, like the Post Office, are inoffensive to the unexacting observer. A wooded peninsula, which is pleasantly laid out as a park, projects into [pg 120]the lake; and, at the point of this, has lately been erected a campanile which is admirable in both color and proportion. Indeed, when a fanfaronnade of sunset is blown wide behind it, you suffer a sudden tinge of homesickness for Venice or Ravenna. It is good enough for that. But beside it is a helter-skelter wooden edifice which reminds you of Surf Avenue at Coney Island. Indeed, the Settlement as a whole exhibits still an overwhelmment of the unæsthetic, and appalls the eye of the new-comer from a more considerative world.

On the way back from the lovely campanile to the hotel, I stumbled over a scattering of artificial hillocks surrounding two mud-puddles connected by a gutter. This monstrosity turned out to be a relief-map of Palestine. Little children, with uncultivated voices, shouted at each other as they lightly leaped from Jerusalem to Jericho; and waste-paper soaked itself to dingy brown in the insanitary Sea of Galilee.—Then I encountered a wooden edifice with castellated towers and machicolated battlements, which called itself (with a large label) the Men’s Club; and from this I fled, with almost a sense of relief, to the hotel itself, now sprawling low and dark beneath its Boston-brown-bread cupola.

Thus my first impression of Chautauqua was one of melancholy and resentment. But, in the subsequent few days, this emotion was altered to one of impressible satiric mirth; and, subsequently still, it was changed again to an emotion of wondering and humble admiration. I had been assured at the outset, by one who had already tried it, that, if I stayed long enough, I should end up by liking Chautauqua; and this is precisely what happened to me before a week was out.

But meanwhile I laughed very hard for three days. The thing that made me laugh most was the unexpected experience of enduring the discomfiture of fame. Chautauqua is a constricted community; and any one who lectures there becomes, by that very fact, a famous person [pg 121]in this little backwater of the world, until he is supplanted (for fame is as fickle as a ballet-dancer) by the next new-comer to the platform. The Chautauqua Press publishes a daily paper, a weekly review, a monthly magazine and a quarterly; and these publications report your lectures, tell the story of your life, comment upon your views of this and that, advertise your books, and print your picture. Everybody knows you by sight, and stops you in the street to ask you questions. Thus, on your way to the Post Office, you are intercepted by some kindly soul who says: “I am Miss Terwilliger, from Montgomery, Alabama; and do you think that Bernard Shaw is really an immoral writer?” or, “I am Mrs. Winterbottom, of Muncie, Indiana; and where do you think I had better send my boy to school? He is rather a backward boy for his age—he was ten last April—but I really think that if, etc.”

Then, when you return to the hotel, you observe that everybody is rocking vigorously on the veranda, and reading one of your books. This pleases you a little; for, though an actor may look his audience in the eyes, an author is seldom privileged to see his readers face to face. Indeed, he often wonders if anybody ever reads his writings, because he knows that his best friends never do. But very soon this tender sentiment is disrupted. There comes a sudden resurrection of the rocking-chair brigade, a rush of readers with uplifted fountain-pens, and a general request for the author’s autograph upon the flyleaf of his volume. All of this is rather flattering; but afterward these gracious and well-meaning people begin to comment on your lectures, and tell you that you have made them see a great light. And then you find yourself embarrassed.