The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3
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Title: The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3
Author: Various
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, VOLUME II NUMBER 3 ***
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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
Unsocial Investments A.S. Johnson
A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism The Editor
An Experiment in Syndicalism Hugh H. Lusk
Labor: "True Demand" and Immigrant Supply Arthur J. Todd
The Way to Flatland Fabian Franklin
The Disfranchisement of Property David McGregor Means
Railway Junctions Clayton Hamilton
Minor Uses of the Middling Rich F.J. Mather, Jr.
Lecturing at Chautauqua Clayton Hamilton
Academic Leadership Paul Elmer More
Hypnotism, Telepathy, and Dreams The Editor
The Muses on the Hearth Mrs F.G. Allinson
The Land of the Sleepless Watchdog David Starr Jordan
En Casserole
Special to our Readers--Philosophy in Fly Time--Setting Bounds
to Laughter (A.S. Johnson)--A Post-Graduate School for Academic
Donors (F.J. Mather, Jr.)--A Suggestion Regarding
Vacations--Advertisement--Simplified Spelling
UNSOCIAL INVESTMENTS
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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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-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.
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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
A STUBBORN RELIC OF FEUDALISM
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 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--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 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, 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.
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 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 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.
AN EXPERIMENT IN SYNDICALISM
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
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 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 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.
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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.
LABOR: "TRUE DEMAND" AND IMMIGRANT SUPPLY
A RESTATEMENT OF THE ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF IMMIGRATION POLICY
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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, 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 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.
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 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 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 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?
THE WAY TO FLATLAND
"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-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
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, 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 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.
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
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 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 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 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 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" 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 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 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 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 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.
THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF PROPERTY
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 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 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
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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.
RAILWAY JUNCTIONS
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 bo
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