After a hearty dinner of _potage créole_, planked Chesapeake shad,
Guinea hen _en casserole_ and some respectable salad, with two or three
cocktails made of two-thirds gin, one-third Martini-Rossi vermouth and
a dash of absinthe as _Vorspiel_ and a bottle of Ruhländer 1903 to wash
it down, the following thought often bubbles up from my subconscious:
that many of the acknowledged evils of capitalism, now so horribly
visible in the world, are not due primarily to capitalism itself but
rather to democracy, that universal murrain of Christendom.
What I mean, in brief, is that capitalism, under democracy, is
constantly under hostile pressure and often has its back to the wall,
and that its barbaric manners and morals, at least in large part, are
due to that fact—that they are, in essence, precisely the same manners
and morals that are displayed by any other creature or institution so
beset. Necessity is not only the mother of invention; it is also the
mother of every imaginable excess and infamy. A woman defending her
child is notoriously willing to go to lengths that even a Turk or an
agent of the Department of Justice would regard as inordinate, and
so is a Presbyterian defending his hell, or a soldier defending his
fatherland, or a banker defending his gold. It is only when there is no
danger that the average human being is honorable, just as it is only
when there _is_ danger that he is virtuous. He would commit adultery
every day if it were safe, and he would commit murder every day if it
were necessary.
The essential thing about democracy, as every one must know, is that
it is a device for strengthening and heartening the have-nots in their
eternal war upon the haves. That war, as every one knows again, has
its psychological springs in envy pure and simple—envy of the more
fortunate man’s greater wealth, the superior pulchritude of his wife
or wives, his larger mobility and freedom, his more protean capacity
for and command of happiness—in brief, his better chance to lead a
bearable life in this worst of possible worlds. It follows that under
democracy, which gives a false power and importance to the have-nots by
counting every one of them as the legal equal of George Washington or
Beethoven, the process of government consists largely, and sometimes
almost exclusively, of efforts to spoil that advantage artificially.
Trust-busting, free silver, direct elections, Prohibition, government
ownership and all the other varieties of American political quackery
are but symptoms of the same general rage. It is the rage of the
have-not against the have, of the farmer who must drink hard cider and
forty-rod against the city man who may drink Burgundy and Scotch, of
the poor fellow who must stay at home looking at a wife who regards the
lip-stick as lewd and lascivious against the lucky fellow who may go to
Atlantic City or Palm Beach and ride up and down in a wheel-chair with
a girl who knows how to make up and has put away the fear of God.
The ignobler sort of men, of course, are too stupid to understand
various rare and exhilarating sorts of superiority, and so they do not
envy the happiness that goes with them. If they could enter into the
mind of a Wagner or a Brahms and begin to comprehend the stupendous joy
that such a man gets out of the practice of his art, they would pass
laws against it and make a criminal of him, as they have already made
criminals, in the United States, of the man with a civilized taste for
wines, the man so attractive to women that he can get all the wives he
wants without having to marry them, and the man who can make pictures
like Félicien Rops, or books like Flaubert, Zola, Dreiser, Cabell or
Rabelais. Wagner and Brahms escape, and their arts with them, because
the great masses of men cannot understand the sort of thing they
try to do, and hence do not envy the man who does it well, and gets
joy out of it. It is much different with, say, Rops. Every American
Congressman, as a small boy, covered the fence of the Sunday-School
yard with pictures in the manner of Rops. What he now remembers of the
business is that the pictures were denounced by the superintendent, and
that he was cowhided for making them; what he hears about Rops, when he
hears at all, is that the fellow is vastly esteemed, and hence probably
full of a smug æsthetic satisfaction. In consequence, it is unlawful in
the United States to transmit the principal pictures of Rops by mail,
or, indeed, “to have and possess” them. The man who owns them must
conceal them from the _okhrána_ of the Department of Justice just as
carefully as he conceals the wines and whiskeys in his cellar, or the
poor working girl he transports from the heat and noise of New York to
the salubrious calm of the Jersey coast, or his hand-tooled library set
of the “Contes Drôlatiques,” or his precious first edition of “Jurgen.”
But, as I say, the democratic pressure in such directions is relatively
feeble, for there are whole categories of more or less æsthetic
superiority and happiness that the democrat cannot understand at all,
and is in consequence virtually unaware of. It is far different with
the varieties of superiority and happiness that are the functions
of mere money. Here the democrat is extraordinarily alert and
appreciative. He can not only imagine hundreds of ways of getting
happiness out of money; he devotes almost the whole of his intellectual
activity, such as it is, to imagining them, and he seldom if ever
imagines anything else. Even his sexual fancies translate themselves
instantly into concepts of dollars and cents; the thing that confines
him so miserably to one wife, and to one, alas, so unappetizing and
depressing, is simply his lack of money; if he only had the wealth
of Diamond Jim Brady he too would be the glittering Don Giovanni
that Jim was. All the known species of democratic political theory
are grounded firmly upon this doctrine that money, and money only,
makes the mare go—that all the conceivable varieties of happiness
are possible to the man who has it. Even the Socialists, who profess
to scorn money, really worship it. Socialism, indeed, is simply the
degenerate capitalism of bankrupt capitalists. Its one genuine object
is to get more money for its professors; all its other grandiloquent
objects are afterthoughts, and most of them are bogus. The democrats
of other schools pursue the same single aim—and adorn it with false
pretenses even more transparent. In the United States the average
democrat, I suppose, would say that the establishment and safeguarding
of liberty was the chief purpose of democracy. The theory is mere
wind. The average American democrat really cares nothing whatever
for liberty, and is always willing to sell it for money. What he
actually wants, and strives to get by his politics, is more money.
His fundamental political ideas nearly all contemplate restraints and
raids upon capital, even when they appear superficially to be quite
free from economic flavor, and most of the political banshees and
bugaboos that alternately freeze and boil his blood have dollar marks
written all over them. There is no need to marshal a long catalogue of
examples from English and American political history: I simply defy any
critic of my doctrine to find a single issue of genuine appeal to the
populace, at any time during the past century, that did not involve a
more or less obvious scheme for looting a minority—the slave-owners,
Wall Street, the railroads, the dukes, or some other group representing
capital. Even the most affecting idealism of the plain people has a
thrifty basis. In the United States, during the early part of the late
war, they were very cynical about the Allied cause; it was not until
the war orders of the Allies raised their wages that they began to
believe in the noble righteousness of Lloyd-George and company. And
after Dr. Wilson had jockeyed the United States itself into the war,
and the cost of living began to increase faster than wages, he faced a
hostile country until he restored altruism by his wholesale bribery of
labor.
It is my contention that the constant exposure of capitalism to such
primitive lusts and forays is what makes it so lamentably extortionate
and unconscionable in democratic countries, and particularly in the
United States. The capitalist, warned by experience, collars all he
can while the getting is good, regardless of the commonest honesty and
decorum, because he is haunted by an uneasy feeling that his season
will not be long. His dominating passion is to pile up the largest
amount of capital possible, by fair means or foul, so that he will
have ample reserves when the next raid comes, and he has to use part
of it to bribe one part of the proletariat against the other. In the
long run, of course, he always wins, for this bribery is invariably
feasible; in the United States, indeed, every fresh struggle leaves
capital more secure than it was before. But though the capitalist thus
has no reason to fear actual defeat and disaster, he is well aware that
victory is always expensive, and his natural prudence causes him to
discount the cost in advance, even when he has planned to shift it to
other shoulders. I point, in example, to the manner in which capital
dealt with the discharged American soldiers after the war. Its first
effort was to cajole them into its service, as they had been cajoled
by the politicians after the Civil War. To this end, it borrowed
the machine erected by Dr. Wilson and his agents for debauching the
booboisie during the actual war, and by the skillful use of that
machine it quickly organized the late conscripts into the American
Legion, alarmed them with lies about a Bolshevist scheme to make slaves
of them (i. e., to cut off forever their hope of getting money), and
put them to clubbing and butchering their fellow proletarians. The
business done, the conscripts found themselves out of jobs: their
gallant war upon Bolshevism had brought down wages, and paralysed
organized labor. They now demanded pay for their work, and capital
had to meet the demand. It did so by promising them a bonus—_i. e._,
loot—out of the public treasury, and by straightway inventing a scheme
whereby the ultimate cost would fall chiefly upon poor folk.
Throughout the war, indeed, capital exhibited an inordinately
extortionate spirit, and thereby revealed its underlying dread. First
it robbed the Allies in the manner of bootleggers looting a country
distillery, then it swindled the plain people at home by first bribing
them with huge wages and then taking away all their profits and
therewith all their savings, and then it seized and made away with the
impounded property of enemy nationals—property theoretically held in
trust for them, and the booty, if it was booty at all, of the whole
American people. This triple burglary was excessive, to be sure, but
who will say that it was not prudent? The capitalists of the Republic
are efficient, and have foresight. They saw some lean and hazardous
years ahead, with all sorts of raids threatening. They took measures to
fortify their position. To-day their prevision is their salvation. They
are losing some of their accumulation, of course, but they still have
enough left to finance an effective defense of the remainder. There
was never any time in the history of any country, indeed, when capital
was so securely intrenched as it is to-day in the United States. It
has divided the proletariat into two bitterly hostile halves, it has
battered and crippled unionism almost beyond recognition, it has a firm
grip upon all three arms of the government, and it controls practically
every agency for the influencing of public opinion, from the press to
the church. Had it been less prudent when times were good, and put its
trust in God alone, the I. W. W. would have rushed it at the end of the
war.
As I say, I often entertain the thought that it would be better,
in the long run, to make terms with a power so hard to resist, and
thereby purge it of its present compulsory criminality. I doubt that
capitalists, as a class, are naturally vicious; certainly they are
no more vicious than, say, lawyers and politicians—upon whom the
plain people commonly rely, in their innocence, to save them. I have
known a good many men of great wealth in my time, and most of them
have been men showing all the customary decencies. They deplore the
harsh necessities of their profession quite as honestly as a judge
deplores the harsh necessities of his. You will never convince me that
the average American banker, during the war, got anything properly
describable as professional satisfaction out of selling Liberty bonds
at 100 to poor stenographers, and then buying them back at 83. He knew
that he’d need his usurious profit against the blue day when the boys
came home, and so he took it, but it would have given him ten times as
much pleasure if it had come from the reluctant gizzard of some other
banker. In brief, there is a pride of workmanship in capitalists, just
as there is in all other men above the general. They get the same
spiritual lift out of their sordid swindles that Swinburne got out of
composing his boozy dithyrambs, and I often incline to think that it
is quite as worthy of respect. In a democratic society, with the arts
adjourned and the sciences mere concubines of money, it is chiefly the
capitalists, in fact, who keep pride of workmanship alive. In their
principal enemies, the trades-unionists, it is almost extinct. Unionism
seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work;
almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding
bad work. A union man who, moved by professional pride, put any extra
effort into his job would probably be punished by his union as a sort
of scab. But a capitalist is still able to cherish some of the old
spirit of the guildsman. If he invents a new device for corralling the
money of those who have earned it, or operates an old device in some
new and brilliant way, he is honored and envied by his colleagues.
The late J. Pierpont Morgan was thus honored and envied, not because
he made more actual money than any other capitalist of his time—in
point of fact, he made a good deal less than some, and his own son, a
much inferior man, has made more since his death than he did during
his whole life—but because his operations showed originality, daring,
coolness, and imagination—in brief, because he was a great virtuoso in
the art he practiced.
What I contend is that the democratic system of government would be
saner and more effective in its dealings with capital if it ceased to
regard all capitalists as criminals _ipso facto_, and thereby ceased
to make their armed pursuit the chief end of practical politics—if
it gave over this vain effort to put them down by force, and tried
to bring them to decency by giving greater play and confidence to
the pride of workmanship that I have described. They would be less
ferocious and immoderate, I think, if they were treated with less
hostility, and put more upon their conscience and honor. No doubt the
average democrat, brought up upon the prevailing superstitions and
prejudices of his faith, will deny at once that they are actually
capable of conscience or honor, or that they have any recognizable
pride of workmanship. Well, let him deny it. He will make precisely
the same denial with respect to kings. Nevertheless, it must be plain
to every one who has read history attentively that the majority of the
kings of the past, even when no criticism could reach them, showed
a very great pride of workmanship—that they tried to be good kings
even when it was easier to be bad ones. The same thing is true of
the majority of capitalists—the kings of to-day. They are criminals
by our democratic law, but their criminality is chiefly artificial
and theoretical, like that of a bootlegger. If it were abolished by
repealing the laws which create it—if it became legally just as
virtuous to organize and operate a great industrial corporation, or
to combine and rehabilitate railroads, or to finance any other such
transactions as it is to organize a trades-union, a _Bauverein_, or a
lodge of Odd Fellows—then I believe that capitalists would forthwith
abandon a great deal of the scoundrelism which now marks their
proceedings, that they could be trusted to police their order at least
as vigilantly as physicians or lawyers police theirs, and that the
activities of those members of it who showed no pride of workmanship at
all would be effectively curbed.
The legal war upon them under democracy is grounded upon the false
assumption that it would be possible, given laws enough, to get rid
of them altogether. The _Ur-_Americanos, who set the tone of our
legislation and provided examples for the legislation of every other
democratic country, were chiefly what would be called Bolsheviki
to-day. They dreamed of a republic wholly purged of capitalism—and
taxes. They were have-nots of the most romantic and ambitious variety,
and saw Utopia before them. Every man of their time who thought
capitalistically—that is, who believed that things consumed had to
be paid for—was a target for their revilings: for example, Alexander
Hamilton. But they were wrong, and their modern heirs and assigns are
wrong just as surely. That wrongness of theirs, in truth, has grown
enormously since it was launched, for the early Americans were a
pastoral people, and could get along with very little capital, whereas
the Americans of to-day lead a very complex life, and need the aid of
capitalism at almost every breath they draw. Most of their primary
necessities—the railroad, the steamship lines, the trolley car,
the telephone, refrigerated meats, machine-made clothes, phonograph
records, moving-picture shows, and so on—are wholly unthinkable save
as the products of capital in large aggregations. No man of to-day can
imagine doing without them, or getting them without the aid of such
aggregations. The most even the wildest Socialist can think of is to
take the capital away from the capitalists who now have it and hand it
over to the state—in other words, to politicians. A century ago there
were still plenty of men who, like Thoreau, proposed to abolish it
altogether. But now even the radicals of the extreme left assume as a
matter of course that capital is indispensible, and that abolishing it
or dispersing it would cause a collapse of civilization.
What ails democracy, in the economic department, is that it proceeds
upon the assumption that the contrary is true—that it seeks to bring
capitalism to a state of innocuous virtue by grossly exaggerating
its viciousness—that it penalizes ignorantly what is, at bottom, a
perfectly natural and legitimate aspiration, and one necessary to
society. Such penalizings, I need not argue, never destroy the impulse
itself; surely the American experience with Prohibition should make
even a democrat aware of that. What they do is simply to make it
evasive, intemperate, and relentless. If it were legally as hazardous
in the United States to play a string quartette as it is to build up a
great bank or industrial enterprise—if the performers, struggling with
their parts, had to watch the windows in constant fear that a Bryan,
a Roosevelt, a Lloyd-George or some other such predatory mountebank
would break in, armed with a club and followed by a rabble—then string
quartette players would become as devious and anti-social in their ways
as the average American capitalist is to-day, and when, by a process of
setting one part of the mob against the rest, they managed to get a
chance to play quartettes in temporary peace, despite the general mob
hatred of them, they would forget the lovely music of Haydn and Mozart
altogether, and devote their whole time to a _fortissimo_ playing of
the worst musical felonies of Schönberg, Ravel and Strawinsky.