CHAPTER VII

“A Nation of Villagers,”

--_Bernard Shaw_

It has been said that no trust could have been created without breaking

the law. Neither could astronomy in the time of Galileo. If you build

up foolish laws and insist that invention is a crime, well--then

it is a crime. That is undeniably true, but not very interesting.

Of course, you can’t possibly treat the trusts as crimes. First of

all, nobody knows what the trust laws mean. The spectacle of an

enlightened people trying in vain for twenty-five years to find out

the intention of a statute that it has enacted--that is one of those

episodes that only madmen can appreciate. You see, it is possible to

sympathize with the difficulties of a scholar trying to decipher the

hieroglyphics of some ancient people, but when statesmen can’t read

the things they’ve written themselves, it begins to look as if some

imp had been playing pranks. The men who rule this country to-day

were all alive, and presumably sane, when the Sherman Act was passed.

They all say in public that it is a great piece of legislation--an

“exquisite instrument” someone called it the other day. The highest

paid legal intelligence has concentrated on the Act. The Supreme Court

has interpreted it many times, ending with the enormous assumption

that reason had something to do with the law. The Supreme Court was

denounced for this: the reformers said that if there was any reason in

the law, the devil himself had got hold of it. As I write, Congress is

engaged in trying to define what it thinks it means by the Act....

That uncertainty hasn’t prevented a mass of indictments, injunctions,

lawsuits. It has, if anything, invited them. But of course, you can’t

enforce the criminal law against every “unfair” business practice.

Just try to imagine the standing army of inspectors, detectives,

prosecutors, and judges, the city of courthouses and jails, the

enormous costs, and the unremitting zeal--if you cannot see the

folly, at least see the impossibility of the method. To work with it

seriously would not only bring business to a standstill, it would

drain the energy of America more thoroughly than the bitterest foreign

war. Visualize life in America, if you can, when the government at

Washington and forty-eight state governments really undertook not our

present desultory pecking, but a systematic enforcement of the criminal

law. The newspapers would enjoy it for a week, and everybody would be

excited; in two weeks it would be a bore; in six, there would be such a

revolt that everyone, radical and conservative, would be ready to wreck

the government and hang the attorney-general. For these “criminal”

practices are so deep in the texture of our lives; they affect so many,

their results are so intimate that anything like a “surgical” cutting

at evil would come close to killing the patient.

If the anti-trust people really grasped the full meaning of what they

said, and if they really had the power or the courage to do what

they propose, they would be engaged in one of the most destructive

agitations that America has known. They would be breaking up the

beginning of a collective organization, thwarting the possibility of

coöperation, and insisting upon submitting industry to the wasteful,

the planless scramble of little profiteers. They would make impossible

any deliberate and constructive use of our natural resources, they

would thwart any effort to form the great industries into coördinated

services, they would preserve commercialism as the undisputed master

of our lives, they would lay a premium on the strategy of industrial

war,--they would, if they could. For these anti-trust people have never

seen the possibilities of organized industries. They have seen only

the obvious evils, the birth-pains, the undisciplined strut of youth,

the bad manners, the greed, and the trickery. The trusts have been

ruthless, of course. No one tried to guide them; they have broken the

law in a thousand ways, largely because the law was such that they had

to.

At any rate, I should not like to answer before a just tribunal for

the harm done this country in the last twenty-five years by the

stupid hostility of anti-trust laws. How much they have perverted the

constructive genius of this country it is impossible to estimate. They

have blocked any policy of welcome and use, they have concentrated a

nation’s thinking on inessentials, they have driven creative business

men to underhand methods, and put a high money value on intrigue and

legal cunning, demagoguery and waste. The trusts have survived it all,

but in mutilated form, the battered makeshifts of a trampled promise.

They have learned every art of evasion--the only art reformers allowed

them to learn.

It is said that the economy of trusts is unreal. Yet no one has ever

tried the economies of the trust in any open, deliberate fashion. The

amount of energy that has had to go into repelling stupid attack,

the adjustments that had to be made underground--it is a wonder the

trusts achieved what they did to bring order out of chaos, and forge

an instrument for a nation’s business. You have no more right to judge

the trusts by what they are than to judge the labor movement by what it

is. Both of them are in that preliminary state where they are fighting

for existence, and any real outburst of constructive effort has been

impossible for them.

But revolutions are not stopped by blind resistance. They are only

perverted. And as an exhibition of blind resistance to a great promise,

the trust campaign of the American democracy is surely unequalled.

Think of contriving correctives for a revolution, such as ordering

business men to compete with each other. It is as if we said: “Let not

thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth; let thy right hand fight

thy left hand, and in the name of God let neither win.” Bernard Shaw

remarked several years ago that “after all, America is not submitting

to the Trusts without a struggle. The first steps have already been

taken by the village constable. He is no doubt preparing a new question

for immigrants” ... after asking them whether they are anarchists or

polygamists, he is to add “‘Do you approve of Trusts?’ but pending this

supreme measure of national defense he has declared in several states

that trusts will certainly be put in the stocks and whipped.”

There has been no American policy on the trust question: there has

been merely a widespread resentment. The small local competitors who

were wiped out became little centers of bad feeling: these nationally

organized industries were looked upon as foreign invaders. They were

arrogant, as the English in Ireland or the Germans in Alsace, and much

of the feeling for local democracy attached itself to the revolt

against these national despotisms. The trusts made enemies right and

left: they squeezed the profits of the farmer, they made life difficult

for the shopkeeper, they abolished jobbers and travelling salesmen,

they closed down factories, they exercised an enormous control over

credit through their size and through their eastern connections.

Labor was no match for them, state legislatures were impotent before

them. They came into the life of the simple American community as

a tremendous revolutionary force, upsetting custom, changing men’s

status, demanding a readjustment for which people were unready. Of

course, there was anti-trust feeling; of course, there was a blind

desire to smash them. Men had been ruined and they were too angry to

think, too hard pressed to care much about the larger life which the

trusts suggested.

This feeling came to a head in Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech

in 1896. “When you come before us and tell us that we shall disturb

your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business

interests by your action.... The man who is employed for wages is

as much a business man as his employers. The attorney in a country

town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great

metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business

man as the merchant of New York. The farmer ... is as much a business

man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price

of grain. The miners ... It is for these that we speak ... we are

fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity.”

What Bryan was really defending was the old and simple life of America,

a life that was doomed by the great organization that had come into the

world. He thought he was fighting the plutocracy: as a matter of fact

he was fighting something much deeper than that; he was fighting the

larger scale of human life. The Eastern money power controlled the new

industrial system, and Bryan fought it. But what he and his people

hated from the bottom of their souls were the economic conditions

which had upset the old life of the prairies, made new demands upon

democracy, introduced specialization and science, had destroyed village

loyalties, frustrated private ambitions, and created the impersonal

relationships of the modern world.

Bryan has never been able to adjust himself to the new world in which

he lives. That is why he is so irresistibly funny to sophisticated

newspaper men. His virtues, his habits, his ideas, are the simple,

direct, shrewd qualities of early America. He is the true Don Quixote

of our politics, for he moves in a world that has ceased to exist.

He is a more genuine conservative than some propertied bigot. Bryan

stands for the popular tradition of America, whereas most of his

enemies stand merely for the power that is destroying that tradition.

Bryan is what America was; his critics are generally defenders of what

America has become. And neither seems to have any vision of what

America is to be.

Yet there has always been great power behind Bryan, the power of those

who in one way or another were hurt by the greater organization that

America was developing. The Populists were part of that power. La

Follette and the insurgent Republicans expressed it. It was easily

a political majority of the American people. The Republican Party

disintegrated under the pressure of the revolt. The Bull Moose gathered

much of its strength from it. The Socialists have got some of it.

But in 1912 it swept the Democratic Party, and by a combination of

circumstances, carried the country. The plutocracy was beaten in

politics, and the power that Bryan spoke for in 1896, the forces that

had made muckraking popular, captured the government. They were led by

a man who was no part of the power that he represented.

Woodrow Wilson is an outsider capable of skilled interpretation. He

is an historian, and that has helped him to know the older tradition

of America. He is a student of theory, and like most theorists of his

generation he is deeply attached to the doctrines that swayed the world

when America was founded.

But Woodrow Wilson at least knows that there is a new world. “There

is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are

discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That

singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done

twenty years ago. We are in the presence of a new organization of

society.... We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from

top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our

life.” You could not make a more sweeping statement of the case. The

President is perfectly aware of what has happened, and he says at the

very outset that “our laws still deal with us on the basis of the old

system ... the old positive formulas do not fit the present problems.”

You wait eagerly for some new formula. The new formula is this: “I

believe the time has come when the governments of this country, both

state and national, have to set the stage, and set it very minutely and

carefully, for the doing of justice to men in every relationship of

life.” Now that is a new formula, because it means a willingness to use

the power of government much more extensively.

But for what purpose is this power to be used? There, of course, is

the rub. It is to be used to “_restore_ our politics to their full

spiritual vigor _again_, and our national life, whether in trade, in

industry, or in what concerns us only as families and individuals, to

its purity, its self-respect, and its _pristine_ strength and freedom.”

The ideal is the old ideal, the ideal of Bryan, the method is the new

one of government interference.

That, I believe, is the inner contradiction of Woodrow Wilson. He knows

that there is a new world demanding new methods, but he dreams of an

older world. He is torn between the two. It is a very deep conflict in

him between what he knows and what he feels.

His feeling is, as he says, for “the man on the make.” “For my part,

I want the pigmy to have a chance to come out” ... “Just let some of

the youngsters I know have a chance and they’ll give these gentlemen

points. Lend them a little money. They can’t get any now. See to it

that when they have got a local market they can’t be squeezed out of

it.” Nowhere in his speeches will you find any sense that it may be

possible to organize the fundamental industries on some deliberate plan

for national service. He is thinking always about somebody’s chance to

build up a profitable business; he likes the idea that somebody can

beat somebody else, and the small business man takes on the virtues of

David in a battle with Goliath.

“Have you found trusts that thought as much of their men as they did of

their machinery?” he asks, forgetting that few people have ever found

competitive textile mills or clothing factories that did. There isn’t

an evil of commercialism that Wilson isn’t ready to lay at the door of

the trusts. He becomes quite reckless in his denunciation of the New

Devil--Monopoly--and of course, by contrast the competitive business

takes on a halo of light. It is amazing how clearly he sees the evils

that trusts do, how blind he is to the evils that his supporters do.

You would think that the trusts were the first oppressors of labor;

you would think they were the first business organization that failed

to achieve the highest possible efficiency. The pretty record of

competition throughout the Nineteenth Century is forgotten. Suddenly

all that is a glorious past which we have lost. You would think

that competitive commercialism was really a generous, chivalrous,

high-minded stage of human culture.

“We design that the limitations on private enterprise shall be removed,

so that the next generation of youngsters, as they come along, will

not have to become protégés of benevolent trusts, but will be free

to go about making their own lives what they will; so that we shall

taste again the full cup, not of charity, but of liberty,--the only

wine that ever refreshed and renewed the spirit of a people.” That cup

of liberty--we may well ask him to go back to Manchester, to Paterson

to-day, to the garment trades of New York, and taste it for himself.

The New Freedom means the effort of small business men and farmers

to use the government against the larger collective organization of

industry. Wilson’s power comes from them; his feeling is with them; his

thinking is for them. Never a word of understanding for the new type

of administrator, the specialist, the professionally trained business

man; practically no mention of the consumer--even the tariff is for

the business man; no understanding of the new demands of labor, its

solidarity, its aspiration for some control over the management of

business; no hint that it may be necessary to organize the fundamental

industries of the country on some definite plan so that our resources

may be developed by scientific method instead of by men “on the make”;

no friendliness for the larger, collective life upon which the world

is entering, only a constant return to the commercial chances of

young men trying to set up in business. That is the push and force of

this New Freedom, a freedom for the little profiteer, but no freedom

for the nation from the narrowness, the poor incentives, the limited

vision of small competitors,--no freedom from clamorous advertisement,

from wasteful selling, from duplication of plants, from unnecessary

enterprise, from the chaos, the welter, the strategy of industrial war.

There is no doubt, I think, that President Wilson and his party

represent primarily small business in a war against the great

interests. Socialists speak of his administration as a revolution

within the bounds of capitalism. Wilson doesn’t really fight

the oppressions of property. He fights the evil done by large

property-holders to small ones. The temper of his administration was

revealed very clearly when the proposal was made to establish a Federal

Trade Commission. It was suggested at once by leading spokesmen of

the Democratic Party that corporations with a capital of less than a

million dollars should be exempted from supervision. Is that because

little corporations exploit labor or the consumer less? Not a bit of

it. It is because little corporations are in control of the political

situation.

But there are certain obstacles to the working out of the New Freedom.

First of all, there was a suspicion in Wilson’s mind, even during the

campaign, that the tendency to large organization was too powerful to

be stopped by legislation. So he left open a way of escape from the

literal achievement of what the New Freedom seemed to threaten. “_I

am for big business_,” he said, “_and I am against the trusts_.” That

is a very subtle distinction, so subtle, I suspect, that no human

legislation will ever be able to make it. The distinction is this: big

business is a business that has survived competition; a trust is an

arrangement to do away with competition. But when competition is done

away with, who is the Solomon wise enough to know whether the result

was accomplished by superior efficiency or by agreement among the

competitors or by both?

The big trusts have undoubtedly been built up in part by superior

business ability, and by successful competition, but also by ruthless

competition, by underground arrangements, by an intricate series of

facts which no earthly tribunal will ever be able to disentangle. And

why should it try? These great combinations are here. What interests

us is not their history but their future. The point is whether you are

going to split them up, and if so into how many parts. Once split,

are they to be kept from coming together again? Are you determined to

prevent men who could coöperate from coöperating? Wilson seems to imply

that a big business which has survived competition is to be let alone,

and the trusts attacked. But as there is no real way of distinguishing

between them, he leaves the question just where he found it: he must

choose between the large organization of business and the small.

It’s here that his temperament and his prejudices clash with fact

and necessity. He really would like to disintegrate large business.

“Are you not eager for the time,” he asks, “when your sons shall be

able to look forward to becoming not employees, but heads of some

small, it may be, but hopeful business...?” But to what percentage of

the population can he hold out that hope? How many small but hopeful

steel mills, coal mines, telegraph systems, oil refineries, copper

mines, can this country support? A few hundred at the outside. And for

these few hundred sons whose “best energies ... are inspired by the

knowledge that they are their own masters with the paths of the world

before them,” we are asked to give up the hope of a sane, deliberate

organization of national industry brought under democratic control.

I submit that it is an unworthy dream. I submit that the intelligent

men of my generation can find a better outlet for their energies than

in making themselves masters of little businesses. They have the vast

opportunity of introducing order and purpose into the business world,

of devising administrative methods by which the great resources of the

country can be operated on some thought-out plan. They have the whole

new field of industrial statesmanship before them, and those who prefer

the egotism of some little business are not the ones whose ambitions we

need most to cultivate.

But the disintegration which Wilson promised in the New Freedom is

not likely to be carried out. One year of public office has toned

down the audacity of the campaign speeches so much that Mr. Dooley

says you can play the President’s messages on a harp. Instead of a

“radical reconstruction” we are engaged in signing a “constitution of

peace.” These big business men who a few months ago showed not the

“least promise of disinterestedness” are to-day inspired by “a spirit

of accommodation.” The President’s own Secretary of Commerce, Mr.

Redfield, has said to the National Chamber of Commerce that the number

of trusts still operating “is conspicuously small.” Was ever wish the

father to a pleasanter thought? Was ever greater magic wrought with

less effort? Or is it that politicians in office have to pretend that

what they can’t do has happened anyway?

Wilson is against the trusts for many reasons: the political economy of

his generation was based on competition and free trade; the Democratic

Party is by tradition opposed to a strong central government, and

that opposition applies equally well to strong national business,--it

is a party attached to local rights, to village patriotism, to

humble but ambitious enterprise; its temper has always been hostile

to specialization and expert knowledge, because it admires a very

primitive man-to-man democracy. Wilson’s thought is inspired by that

outlook. It has been tempered somewhat by contact with men who have

outgrown the village culture, so that Wilson is less hostile to

experts, less oblivious to administrative problems than is Bryan.

But at the same time his speeches are marked with contempt for the

specialist: they play up quite obviously to the old democratic notion

that any man can do almost any job. You have always to except the

negro, of course, about whom the Democrats have a totally different

tradition. But among white men, special training and expert knowledge

are somewhat under suspicion in Democratic circles.

Hostility to large organization is a natural quality in village life.

Wilson is always repeating that the old personal relationships of

employer and employee have disappeared. He deplores the impersonal

nature of the modern world. Now that is a fact not to be passed over

lightly. It does change the nature of our problems enormously. Indeed,

it is just this breakdown of the old relationships which constitutes

the modern problem. So the earlier chapters of this book were devoted

to showing how in response to new organization the psychology of

business men had changed; how the very nature of property had been

altered; how the consumer has had to develop new instruments for

controlling the market, and how labor is compelled to organize its

power in order not to be trodden by gigantic economic forces.

Nobody likes the present situation very much. But where dispute arises

is over whether we can by legislation return to a simpler and more

direct stage of civilization. Bryan really hopes to do that, Wilson

does too, but his mind is too critical not to have some doubts, and

that is why he is against trusts but not against big business. But

there is a growing body of opinion which says that communication is

blotting out village culture, and opening up national and international

thought. It says that bad as big business is to-day, it has a wide

promise within it, and that the real task of our generation is to

realize it. It looks to the infusion of scientific method, the careful

application of administrative technique, the organization and education

of the consumer for control, the discipline of labor for an increasing

share of the management. Those of us who hold such a belief are pushed

from behind by what we think is an irresistible economic development,

and lured by a future which we think is possible.

We don’t imagine that the trusts are going to drift naturally into the

service of human life. We think they can be made to serve it if the

American people compel them. We think that the American people may

be able to do that if they can adjust their thinking to a new world

situation, if they apply the scientific spirit to daily life, and if

they can learn to coöperate on a large scale. Those, to be sure, are

staggering _ifs_. The conditions may never be fulfilled entirely. But

in so far as they are not fulfilled we shall drift along at the mercy

of economic forces that we are unable to master. Those who cling to

the village view of life may deflect the drift, may batter the trusts

about a bit, but they will never dominate business, never humanize its

machinery, and they will continue to be the playthings of industrial

change.

At bottom the issue is between those who are willing to enter upon an

effort for which there is no precedent, and those who aren’t. In a

real sense it is an adventure. We have still to explore the new scale

of human life which machinery has thrust upon us. We have still to

invent ways of dealing with it. We have still to adapt our abilities to

immense tasks. Of course, men shudder and beg to be let off in order

to go back to the simpler life for which they were trained. Of course,

they hope that competition will automatically produce the social

results they desire. Of course, they see all the evils of the trust and

none of its promise. They can point to the failure of empires and the

success of little cities. They can say that we are obliterating men in

the vast organizations we are permitting.

But they are not the only people who realize that man as he is to-day

is not big enough to master the modern world. It is this realization

which has made men speculate on the development of what they call

a “collective mind.” They hope that somehow we shall develop an

intelligence larger than the individual.

I see no evidence for that. There are no minds but human minds so far

as our problems go. It seems to me that this notion of a collective

mind over and above men and women is simply a myth created to meet

difficulties greater than men and women are as yet capable of handling.

It is a _deus ex machina_ invented to cover an enormous need,--a hope

that something outside ourselves will do our work for us. It would

be infinitely easier if such a power existed. But I can’t see any

ground for relying upon it. We shall have, it seems to me, to develop

within men and women themselves the power they need. It is an immense

ambition, and each man who approaches it must appear presumptuous. But

it is the problem of our generation: to analyze the weakness, to attack

the obstacles, to search for some of the possibilities, to realize if

we can the kind of effort by which we can face the puzzling world in

which we live.

PART II

CHAPTER VIII

A Big World and Little Men

Those who take city children out into the country for a day’s airing

can tell you one story after another about how squirrels and rabbits

are classed as cats, cattle as horses, sheep as woolly dogs, how green

things are just grass, a tree merely a tree. They will tell you that

this is the tragedy of urban civilization,--to rear children who live

in a half-noticed, carelessly classified universe, as dumb to them as

the stony pavements that serve as their playgrounds.

And yet city children are far from being especially dull-witted. They

are simply dull to an environment which really does not concern them. A

country boy may go fearlessly among restless animals or find a trail

through the woods, but a street-urchin will play baseball in the midst

of traffic. Yet we feel a pathetic difference between them, for one is

competent amidst enduring things, the other is quick about artificial

complications.

The city-dweller never meets as a personal problem the elements that

have ordered human life, plants and animals, the tides and the winds,

forest and hill. He may work at some abstract part of a complicated

manufacture, or spend his time in an office where he deals the day long

with papers and telephones, the symbols and shadows of events. He has

practically no sense of how he is fed, clothed, or housed, has seen no

spinning and weaving, mining or reaping. He has witnessed the milking

of one cow with mixed astonishment, has forgotten that steaks come from

cattle, and mutton chops from sheep, knows that clover occasionally

appears with four leaves and signifies good luck, and spring to him

means not sowing time, and the opening of streams, but open cars and

straw hats.

This uprooted person is the despair of all those who love the flavor

of words, for his language has gone stale and abstract in a miserly

telegraphic speech. That is why literary men are forever hunting up

folk songs and seeking out backward peasants in Galway or Cornwall.

Among country people words still taste of actual things: contact with

sun and rain and earth and harvest turns the simple prose of the day’s

work into poetry for the starved imaginations of city-bred people.

There has been, to be sure, a brave attempt in recent years to admire

slang. But one insuperable difficulty stands in the way: city slang

has risen out of the interests that meet the thwarted instincts of

a restless population, from the bleachers, the poker table, and the

saloon. Slang is often vivid but it is too deeply sundered from the

older sources of our happiness. It is not set in the spectacle of

earth and sky, as the speech of peasants, and it is for the most part

trivial, strained, and raucous. Even the slang of lust is feeble,

reflected out of halted fantasy and filtered through commercialism. The

obscenity of a smoking-room is little more than the sneaking indulgence

of peeping Toms, witty at times because it comes as a relief from the

seductive wrappings of a finicky culture. But even lust has become

elaborate and secondhand.

For the slow movement of the seasons we have substituted the flicker

of fashions. The older world changed, but it repeated itself. Birth

and youth and age, summer and winter changed the world and left it

unaltered. You could think of eternal ideas, for there was beneath the

change some permanence. But in our day change is not an illusion but a

fact: we do actually move toward novelty, there is invention, and what

has never been is created each day.

We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t a human

relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker

and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange situation. We are not

used to a complicated civilization, we don’t know how to behave when

personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no

precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age.

We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change

ourselves.

And so we are literally an eccentric people, our emotional life is

disorganized, our passions are out-of-kilter. Those who call themselves

radical float helplessly upon a stream amidst the wreckage of old

creeds and abortive new ones, and they are inclined to mistake the

motion which carries them for their own will. Those who make no

pretensions to much theory are twisted about by fashions, “crazes,”

at the mercy of milliners and dressmakers, theatrical producers,

advertising campaigns and the premeditated gossip of the newspapers.

We live in great cities without knowing our neighbors, the loyalties

of place have broken down, and our associations are stretched over

large territories, cemented by very little direct contact. But this

impersonal quality is intolerable: people don’t like to deal with

abstractions. And so you find an overwhelming demand upon the press

for human interest stories, for personal details opened to the vast

public. Gossip is organized; and we do by telegraph what was done in

the village store.

Institutions have developed a thousand inconsistencies. Our schools,

churches, courts, governments were not built for the kind of

civilization they are expected to serve. In former times you could

make some effort to teach people what they needed to know. It was

done badly, but at least it could be attempted. Men knew the kind of

problems their children would have to face. But to-day education means

a radically different thing. We have to prepare children to meet the

unexpected, for their problems will not be the same as their fathers’.

To prepare them for the unexpected means to train them in method

instead of filling them with facts and rules. They will have to find

their own facts and make their own rules, and if schools can’t give

them that power then schools no longer educate for the modern world.

The churches face a dilemma which is a matter of life and death to

them. They come down to us with a tradition that the great things

are permanent, and they meet a population that needs above all to

understand the meaning and the direction of change. No wonder the

churches are empty, no wonder their influence has declined, no wonder

that men fight against the influence they have. Ministers are as

bewildered as the rest of us, perhaps a little more so. For they are

expected to stand up every week and interpret human life in a way that

will vitalize feeling and conduct. And for this work of interpretation

they have the simple rules of a village civilization, the injunctions

of a pastoral people. Of course they can’t interpret life on Sunday so

that the interpretation will mean something on Monday. Even supposing

that the average minister understood the scientific spirit, had studied

sociology, and knew what are the forces which agitate men, even under

those circumstances, interpretation would be an almost impossible task.

For the least hampered minds, the most imaginative and experienced men,

can only stumble through to partial explanations. To ask the clergy

to find adequate meaning in this era is to expect each minister to be

an inspired thinker. If the churches really could interpret life they

would be unable to make room for the congregations; if men felt that

they could draw anything like wisdom from them, they would be besieged

by bewildered and inquiring people. Think of the lectures people flock

to, the political meetings they throng, the dull books they work their

way through. It isn’t indifference to the great problems that leaves

the churches empty; it is the sheer intellectual failure of the

churches to meet a sudden change.

The courts have not been able to adjust themselves either. But while

people can ignore the churches, they have to fight the courts. They

fight blindly without any clear notion as to what they would like the

courts to do. They are irritated and constrained by a legal system that

was developed in a different civilization, and they find the courts, as

Prof. Roscoe Pound says, “doing nothing and obstructing everything.”

They find that whenever a legislature makes an effort to fit law to the

new facts of life, a court is there to nullify the work. They find the

courts masters of our political system, and yet these masters will not

really take the initiative. They have enormous power, but they refuse

the responsibility that goes with it. The courts are making law all

the time, of course. Now if they made law that met the new situations,

there would be no revolt against the judiciary. The American voters

are not doctrinaires. They don’t care in any academic way whether

Congress, the President, or the courts, frame legislation. They form

their opinions almost entirely by the results. If the President can

legislate better than Congress, as Roosevelt and Wilson could, the

people will support the President no matter how many lawyers shout

that the rights of Congress are being usurped. If the courts made law

that dealt with modern necessities, the people would, I believe, never

question their power. It is the bad sociology of judges and their class

prejudices that are destroying the prestige of the bench. That bad

sociology and those prejudices are in the main due to the fact that

judges have not been trained for the modern world, have never learned

how to understand its temper.

And of course, when you come to the political structure of our

government you find that it has only the faintest relation to actual

conditions. Our political constituencies are to American life what

the skeleton of a two-humped camel would be to an elephant. One is

not made to fit the other’s necessities. Take the City of New York

for example. For all practical purposes the metropolitan district

extends up into Connecticut and across into New Jersey. By “practical

purposes” I mean that as a health problem, a transportation problem,

a housing problem, a food problem, a police problem, the city which

sprawls across three states ought to be treated as one unit. Or take

New England: for any decent solution of its transportation difficulties

or for any scientific use of its natural resources its state lines are

a nuisance. On the other hand, it mustn’t be imagined that the old

political units are always too small. Far from it: thus many of the

vital functions of New York City are managed by the State legislature.

The political system which comes down to us from a totally different

civilization is sometimes too large in its unit--sometimes too small,

but in a thousand bewildering ways it does not fit. Every statesman

is hampered by conflicts of jurisdiction, by divided responsibility,

by the fact that when he tries to use the government for some public

purpose, the government is a clumsy instrument.

The regulation of the trusts is made immensely difficult by the fact

that the states are too small, and the nation is often too large. There

are natural sections of the country, like the Pacific Coast, the Ohio,

the Mississippi valley, and New England which ought for many purposes

to act as a unit. No sane person, I suppose, wishes to centralize at

Washington all the power that is needed to control business, and yet

everyone knows that if you leave that control to the states, there will

be no control.

But the fitting of government to the facts of the modern world is

sure to be a very difficult task. In the past governments have

been organized as territorial units, but with the development of

transportation the importance of geography has declined. Men are bound

together to-day by common interests far more than by living in the same

place. It is the union, the trade association, the grange, the club

and the party that command allegiance rather than the county or the

state. To anyone who is not fooled by charters and forms, it is evident

that functions of government are being developed in these groups which

are not mentioned in theoretical discussions of government. Labor

unions legislate, Boards of Trade legislate, coöperative societies are

governments in a very real sense. They make rules under which people

live, often much more compelling ones than those of some official

legislature. Now in the Eighteenth Century there was a strong sentiment

against any minor sovereignty within the political state. In France,

for example, by a law of 1791 all associations were forbidden. Our

common law looked upon them with extreme disfavor, and the Sherman Act

is an expression of that same feeling. Theorists like ex-President

Eliot in our own day are against unions because they establish little

governments within the state. But the facts are against the ideas

of the Eighteenth Century. The world is so complex that no official

government can be devised to deal with it, and men have had to organize

associations of all kinds in order to create some order in the world.

They will develop more of them, I believe, for these voluntary

groupings based on common interests are the only way yet proposed by

which a complicated society can be governed. But of course, unofficial

sovereignties within the nation create very perplexing problems. They

all tend to be imperious, to reach out and absorb more and more. And

the attempt to adjust them to each other is a task for which political

science is not prepared.

I have merely touched on some of the difficulties which arise in

our domestic affairs because the anatomy of our politics does not

correspond to the anatomy of our life. When you come to international

affairs confusion is compounded. As I write, we are in the midst of the

Mexican problem. No one knows how much authority anyone has in that

country. There are all sorts of conflicting interests and all sorts of

conflicting governments.

Does the fact that Englishmen invest in Mexico entitle the British

Empire to some authority in Mexican affairs? Are we the guardians of

Mexico, and if so where does our authority end? The new imperialism

is no simple affair: it has innumerable gradations of power. As Prof.

Beard says: “This newer imperialism does not rest primarily upon the

desire for more territory, but rather upon the necessity for markets

in which to sell manufactured goods and for opportunities to invest

surplus accumulations of capital. It begins in a search for trade,

advances to intervention on behalf of the interests involved, thence to

protectorates, and finally to annexation.” Diplomacy now talks about

“effective occupation,” “hinterland,” “sphere of influence” and “Sphere

of Legitimate Aspiration.”[7]

One of the curious ironies of history is that after many generations

of effort to establish popular government in a few countries, the real

interests of the world have overflowed frontiers and eluded democracy.

We are just about to establish a democratic state, and we find that

capitalism has become international. It seems as if we were always a

little too late for the facts. We are now engaged in building up for

the world a few of the primitive devices of internal affairs. A code

of law, a few half-hearted, impotent courts, treaties, and a little

international policing. But all these things, many of which express the

fondest hopes of sensible men, are very little more than arrangements

between antagonistic nations. Anything like a world-wide coöperative

democracy is as yet no part of the expectation of any unsentimental

person.

* * * * *

Now anyone who has talked as much about the industrial problem as I

have in these chapters is, of course, expected to present a “solution.”

But as a matter of fact there can be no such thing as a “solution”

in the sense which most people understand the word. When you solve a

puzzle, you’re done with it, but the industrial puzzle has no single

key. Nor is there such a thing for it as a remedy or a cure. You have

in a very literal sense to _educate_ the industrial situation, to draw

out its promise, discipline and strengthen it.

It means that you have to do a great variety of things to industry,

invent new ones to do, and keep on doing them. You have to make a

survey of the natural resources of the country. On the basis of that

survey you must draw up a national plan for their development. You

must eliminate waste in mining, you must conserve the forests so that

their fertility is not impaired, so that stream flow is regulated, and

the water-power of the country made available. You must bring to the

farmer a knowledge of scientific agriculture, help him to organize

coöperatively, use the taxing power to prevent land speculation and

force land to the best use, coördinate markets, build up rural

credits, and create in the country a life that shall really be

interesting.

You have the intricate problem of how to make the railroads serve the

national development of our resources. That means the fixing of rates

so that railroads become available where they are most needed. Wastes

and grafts have to be cut out, and the control of transportation

made part of a national economic policy. You have to see to it that

technical schools produce men trained for such work; you have to

establish institutes of research, that shall stimulate the economic

world not only with physical inventions, but with administrative

proposals.

You have to go about deliberately to create a large class of

professional business men. You have to enlarge the scope and the vision

of the efficiency expert so that he can begin to take out of industry

the deadening effects of machine production. You have to find vast

sums of money for experiment in methods of humanizing labor.

For each industry you must discover the most satisfactory unit, and you

must encourage these units to coöperate so that every industry shall be

conducted with a minimum of friction. You must devise a banking system

so that the nation’s capital shall be available, that it shall be there

for use at the lowest possible cost.

You have to find ways of making the worker an integral part of his

industry. That means allowing him to develop his unions, and supplying

the unions with every incentive by which they can increase their

responsibility. You have to create an industrial education by which the

worker shall be turned, not into an intelligent machine, but into an

understanding, directing partner of business. You have to encourage the

long process of self-education in democracy through which unions can

develop representative government and adequate leadership. You have to

support them in their desire to turn themselves from wage-earners into

a corporate body that participates in industrial progress.

You have to devise and try out a great variety of consumers’ controls.

For some industries you may have to use public ownership, for others

the coöperative society may be more effective, for others the

regulating commission. You will not be able to come out plump for one

method as against all the others. It will depend on the nature of the

industry which instrument is the most effective. And back of all these

methods, there is the need for industrial citizenship, for creating

in the consumer a knowledge of what he wants, and of the different

ways there are of getting it. Back of that there is the still subtler

problem of making the consumer discriminating, of educating his taste

and civilizing his desires.

All this is only a little of what has to be done. It has to be done not

by some wise and superior being but by the American people themselves.

No one man, no one group can possibly do it all. It is an immense

collaboration. It will have to be carried out against the active

opposition of class interests and sectional prejudices. At every step

there will be a clash with old rights and old habits. There will be

the cries of the beaten, the protest of the discarded. For men cling

passionately to their routines.

But you cannot institute a better industrial order by decree. It is of

necessity an educational process, a work of invention, of coöperative

training, of battles against vested rights not only in property but in

acquired skill as well, a process that is sure to be intricate, and

therefore confusing.

But that is the way democracies move: they have in literal truth to

lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Those who have some simpler

method than the one I have sketched are, it seems to me, either unaware

of the nature of the problem, interested only in some one phase of

it, or unconsciously impatient with the limitations of democracy. In

the next chapter, I shall make an attempt to describe some of the

current philosophies which try to shirk the full force of the problem.

They are all excuses for trusting to luck, for relying upon something

but ourselves. They are all substitutes for the difficulties of

self-government, concessions to the drift of our natures.

Here I want only to reach a sense of the complexity of the task, its

variety and its challenge. I have skimmed the surface, nothing more.

There is no mention of the fearful obstacles of race prejudice in the

South, no mention of the threat that recent immigration brings with

it, the threat of an alien and defenseless class of servile labor. And

there is, of course, always the distracting possibility of a foreign

war, of vast responsibilities in the other Americas.

Certainly democracy has a load to carry. It has arisen in the midst of

a civilization for which men are utterly unready, a civilization so

complex that their minds cannot grasp it, so unexpected that each man

is compelled to be something of a prophet. Its future is so uncertain

that no one can feel any assurance in the face of it. Precedent has

been wrecked because we have to act upon really new facts. Anything

like a central authority to guide us has become impossible because no

authority is wise enough, because self-government has become a really

effective desire. The old shibboleths of conduct are for the most part

meaningless: they don’t work when they are tried.

Through it all our souls have become disorganized, for they have lost

the ties which bound them. In the very period when man most needs

a whole-hearted concentration on external affairs, he is disrupted

internally by a revolution in the intimacies of his life. He has lost

his place in an eternal scheme, he is losing the ancient sanctions of

love, and his sexual nature is chaotic through the immense change that

has come into the relations of parent and child, husband and wife.

Those changes distract him so deeply that the more “advanced” he is,

the more he flounders in the bogs of his own soul.

CHAPTER IX

Drift

It seems as if the most obvious way of reacting toward evil were to

consider it a lapse from grace. The New Freedom, we are told, is “only

the old revived and clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern

America.” Everywhere you hear it: that the people have been “deprived”

of ancient rights, and legislation is framed on the notion that we can

recover the alleged democracy of early America.

I once read in a learned magazine an essay on “The Oblivescence of the

Disagreeable.” As I remember it, the writer was trying to demonstrate

what he regarded as a very hopeful truth--that men tend to forget pain

more easily than pleasure. That is no doubt a comfortable faculty,

but it plays havoc with history. For in regard to those early days

of the Republic, most of our notions are marked by a well-nigh total

oblivescence of the disagreeable. We find it very difficult to

remember that there were sharp class divisions in the young Republic,

that suffrage was severely restricted, that the Fathers were a very

conscious upper class determined to maintain their privileges. Nations

make their histories to fit their illusions. That is why reformers are

so anxious to return to early America. What they know of it comes to

them filtered through the golden lies of school-books and hallowed by

the generous loyalty of their childhood.

Men generally find in the past what they miss in the present. During

the Paterson strike of 1913, I heard a very drastic I. W. W. agitator

tell a meeting of silk-weavers that they had fallen low since the

days of the great Chief Justice Marshall. In those days there were no

rich and poor, and the Constitution had not yet been abrogated by an

impudent Chief of Police! Yet in the days of Marshall even the most

peaceful trade union was outlawed, and as for the doctrines of the I.

W. W.,--imagine the sentiments of Alexander Hamilton. A few years ago

I was living in Boston when an old gentleman, unhappy over the trend

of democracy, published a book to glorify the American Tories. It

consisted largely of intimate details from the private lives of the

revolutionary heroes. Boston wouldn’t have the book, true or untrue. So

the old gentleman was denounced and his book forgotten.

For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden

age. The modern puritan locates it in the period of the most famous

ancestors from whom he can claim descent. That ancestor regretted the

loss of Eden. Rousseau’s millennial dream was a “state of nature.”

Hard-headed Adam Smith had his “original state” which was all that

England wasn’t. I know literary men who lament the passing of the

eighteenth century coffee house, and New York is full of artists

who dream of Parisian cafés. Zionists go back to David and Solomon;

Celtic revivalists worry about Kathleen ni Houlihan; Chesterton

dreams of Merrie England; scholars yearn for Fifth Century Athens;

there is a considerable vogue to-day for certain of the earlier

Egyptian dynasties, and some people, more radical than others, regard

civilization itself as a disease.

The prototype of all revivals is each man’s wistful sense of his own

childhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in the way we persist

in recalling what is by its very nature irrevocable. Perhaps each of us

is touched by unuttered disappointments, and life has not the taste we

anticipated. The weary man sinks back into the past, like a frightened

child into its mother’s arms. He glorifies what is gone when he fears

what is to come. That is why discontented husbands have a way of

admiring the cakes that mother used to bake. Beaten nations live in the

exploits of their ancestors, and all exiles lament by the waters of

Babylon. The curse of Ireland, of Poland, of Alsace is that they cannot

forget what they were. There are no people who cling so ardently to a

family tree as do those who have come down in the world. The men who

were beaten by the trusts will never see the promise of the trusts.

Whenever the future is menacing and unfamiliar, whenever the day’s

work seems insurmountable, men seek some comfort in the warmth of

memory. Only those who are really at home in their world find life more

interesting as they mature. Experience for them is not an awful chance,

but a prize they can win and embrace. They need no romance to make

life tolerable. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past

are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. They will falter

before their problems, will deal with them half-heartedly and with

diffidence. Their allegiance is not to the world. And they will never

give themselves entirely to the task of making for themselves on this

earth and in their age an adequate and civilized home.

The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is

unnecessary and happiness inevitable. The American temperament leans

generally to a kind of mystical anarchism, in which the “natural”

humanity in each man is adored as the savior of society. You meet this

faith throughout the thousand and one communistic experiments and

new religions in which America is so abundant. “If only you let men

alone, they’ll be good,” a typical American reformer said to me the

other day. He believed, as most Americans do, in the unsophisticated

man, in his basic kindliness and his instinctive practical sense. A

critical outlook seemed to the reformer an inhuman one; he distrusted,

as Bryan does, the appearance of the expert; he believed that whatever

faults the common man might show were due to some kind of Machiavellian

corruption.

He had the American dream, which may be summed up, I think, in the

statement that the undisciplined man is the salt of the earth. So when

the trusts appeared, when the free land was gone, and America had

been congested into a nation, the only philosophy with any weight of

tradition behind it was a belief in the virtues of the spontaneous,

enterprising, untrained and unsocialized man. Trust promoters cried:

Let us alone. The little business men cried: We’re the natural men, so

let us alone. And the public cried: We’re the most natural of all, so

please do stop interfering with us. Muckraking gave an utterance to

the small business men and to the larger public, who dominated reform

politics. What did they do? They tried by all the machinery and power

they could muster to restore a business world in which each man could

again be left to his own will--a world that needed no coöperative

intelligence. In the Sherman Act is symbolized this deliberate attempt

to recreate an undeliberate society. No group of people, except

the socialists, wished to take up the enormous task of disciplining

business to popular need. For the real American was dreaming of the

Golden Age in which he could drift with impunity.

But there has arisen in our time a large group of people who look to

the future. They talk a great deal about their ultimate goal. Many

of them do not differ in any essential way from those who dream of a

glorious past. They put Paradise before them instead of behind them.

They are going to be so rich, so great, and so happy some day, that

any concern about to-morrow seems a bit sordid. They didn’t fall from

Heaven, as the reactionaries say, but they are going to Heaven with the

radicals. Now this habit of reposing in the sun of a brilliant future

is very enervating. It opens a chasm between fact and fancy, and the

whole fine dream is detached from the living zone of the present. At

the only point where effort and intelligence are needed, that point

where to-day is turning into to-morrow, there these people are not

found. At the point where human direction counts most they do not

direct. So they are like most anarchists, wild in their dreams and

unimportant in their deeds. They cultivate a castle in Spain and a flat

in Harlem; a princess in the air and a drudge in the kitchen.

Then too there are the darlings of evolution. They are quite certain

that evolution, as they put it, is ever onward and upward. For them all

things conspire to achieve that well-known, though unmentioned far-off

divine event to which the whole creation moves. They seem to imply as

Moody suggested:

“I, I, last product of the toiling ages,

Goal of heroic feet that never lagged,----”

though

“A little thing in trousers, slightly jagged.”

How the conservative goes to work with the idea of evolution has been

ably exposed by William English Walling. First, assume “progress” by

calling it inevitable: this obviates the necessity for any practical

change just now. Then assert the indubitable fact that real progress

is very slow: and infer that wisdom consists in deprecating haste. Now

when you have called progress inevitable and imperceptible, you have

done about all that philosophy could do to justify impotence.

The radical view of evolution is more optimistic, but not more

intelligent. In fact, it is generally all optimism and little else. For

though it doesn’t quite dare to say that whatever is, is right, it does

assume that whatever is going to be, is going to be right. I believe

that G. K. Chesterton once called this sort of thing progressivism by

the calendar. There is complete confidence that whatever is later in

time is better in fact, that the next phase is the desirable one, that

all change is “upward,” that God and Nature are collaborating in our

blithe ascent to the Superman. Such an outlook undermines judgment and

initiative, deliberate effort, invention, plan, and sets you adrift on

the currents of time, hoping for impossible harbors.

In a constructive social movement the harm done is immeasurable. The

most vivid illustration is that of the old-fashioned, fatalistic

Marxian socialists. They have an implicit faith that human destiny

is merely the unfolding of an original plan, some of the sketches of

which are in their possession, thanks to the labors of Karl Marx.

Strictly speaking, these men are not revolutionists as they believe

themselves to be; they are the interested pedants of destiny. They are

God’s audience, and they know the plot so well that occasionally they

prompt Him. In their system all that education, unions, leadership and

thought can do is to push along what by the theory needs no pushing.

These socialists are like the clown Marceline at the Hippodrome, who is

always very busy assisting in labor that would be done whether he were

there or not. They face the ancient dilemma of fatalism: whatever they

do is right, and nothing they do matters. Go to almost any socialist

meeting and you’ll hear it said that socialism would come if the

Socialist Party had never been heard from. Perhaps so. But why organize

a Socialist Party?

Of course, socialists don’t act upon their theory. They are too deeply

impressed with the evil that exists, too eager for the future that

they see, to trust entirely in the logic of events. They do try to

shape that future. But their old fatalism hampers them enormously the

moment any kind of action is proposed. They are out of sympathy with

conservative trade unionism, but they are still more hostile to the I.

W. W. In politics they despise the reformer, but when they themselves

obtain office they do nothing that a hundred “bourgeois” reformers

haven’t done before them. The Socialist Party in this country has

failed to develop a practical program for labor or a practical program

for politics. It claims to have a different philosophy from that of

trade unionists or reformers, but when you try to judge the difference

by its concrete results, it is imperceptible.

The theory and the temper of orthodox socialism are fatalistic, and

no fatalist can really give advice. Theory and practice are widely

sundered in the American socialist movement. There is a stumbling

revolt which lives from hand to mouth, a catch-as-catch-can struggle,

and then far removed from it, standing in majesty, a great citadel of

dogma almost impervious to new ideas. For in the real world, destiny is

one of the aliases of drift.

Closely related in essence, though outwardly quite different, is what

might be called the panacea habit of mind. Beginning very often in some

penetrating insight or successful analysis, this sort of mind soon

becomes incapable of seeing anything beside that portion of reality

which sustains the insight and is subject to the analysis. A good idea,

in short, becomes a fixed idea. One group of American socialists can

see only the advantage of strikes, another of ballots. One reformer

sees the advantages of the direct primaries in Wisconsin: they become

the universal solvent of political evil. You find engineers who don’t

see why you can’t build society on the analogy of a steam engine;

you find lawyers, like Taft, who see in the courts an intimation of

heaven; sanitation experts who wish to treat the whole world as one

vast sanitarium; lovers who wish to treat it as one vast happy family;

education enthusiasts who wish to treat it as one vast nursery. No one

who undertook to be the Balzac of reform by writing its Human Comedy

could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession

tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life. The most

amazing of all are people who deal with the currency question. Somehow

or other, long meditation seems to produce in them a feeling that they

are dealing with the crux of human difficulties.

Then there is the panacea most frequently propounded by voluble

millionaires: the high cost of living is the cost of high living,

and thrift is the queen of the virtues. Sobriety is another virtue,

highly commended,--in fact there are thousands of people who seriously

regard it as the supreme social virtue. To those of us who are sober

and still discontented, the effort to found a political party on a

colossal Don’t is not very inspiring. After thrift and sobriety, there

is always efficiency, a word which covers a multitude of confusions. No

one in his senses denies the importance of efficient action, just as

no one denies thrift and sober living. It is only when these virtues

become the prime duty of man that we rejoice in the poet who has the

courage to glorify the vagabond, preach a saving indolence, and glorify

Dionysus. Be not righteous overmuch is merely a terse way of saying

that virtue can defeat its own ends. Certainly, whenever a negative

command like sobriety absorbs too much attention, and morality is

obstinate and awkward, then living men have become cluttered in what

was meant to serve them.

There are thousands to-day who, out of patience with almost everything,

believe passionately that some one change will set everything right. In

the first rank stand the suffragettes who believe that votes for women

will make men chaste. I have just read a book by a college professor

which announces that the short ballot will be as deep a revolution as

the abolition of slavery. There are innumerable Americans who believe

that a democratic constitution would create a democracy. Of course,

there are single taxers so single-minded that they believe a happy

civilization would result from the socialization of land values.

Everything else that seems to be needed would follow spontaneously if

only the land monopoly were abolished.

The syndicalists suffer from this habit of mind in an acute form. They

refuse to consider any scheme for the reorganization of industry.

All that will follow, they say, if only you can produce a General

Strike. But obviously you might paralyze society, you might make the

proletariat supreme, and still leave the proletariat without the

slightest idea of what to do with the power it had won.

What happens is that men gain some insight into society and concentrate

their energy upon it. Then when the facts rise up in their relentless

complexity, the only way to escape them is to say: Never mind, do what

I advocate, and all these other things shall be added unto you.

There is still another way of reacting toward a too complicated world.

That way is to see so much good in every reform that you can’t make up

your mind where to apply your own magnificent talents. The result is

that you don’t apply your talents at all.

Reform produces its Don Quixotes who never deal with reality; it

produces its Brands who are single-minded to the brink of ruin; and it

produces its Hamlets and its Rudins who can never make up their minds.

What is common to them all is a failure to deal with the real world in

the light of its possibilities. To try to follow all the aliases of

drift is like attacking the hydra by cutting off its heads. The few

examples given here of how men shirk self-government might be extended

indefinitely. They are as common to radicals as to conservatives. You

can find them flourishing in an orthodox church and among the most

rebellious socialists.

Men will do almost anything but govern themselves. They don’t want

the responsibility. In the main, they are looking for some benevolent

guardian, be it a “good man in office” or a perfect constitution, or

the evolution of nature. They want to be taken in charge. If they have

to think for themselves they turn either to the past or to a distant

future: but they manage to escape the real effort of the imagination

which is to weave a dream into the turning present. They trust to

destiny, a quick one or a slow one, and the whole task of judging

events is avoided. They turn to automatic devices: human initiative can

be ignored. They forbid evil, and then they feel better. They settle on

a particular analogy, or a particular virtue, or a particular policy,

and trust to luck that everything else will take care of itself.

But no one of these substitutes for self-government is really

satisfactory, and the result is that a state of chronic rebellion

appears. That is our present situation. The most hopeful thing about it

is that through the confusion we can come to some closer understanding

of why the modern man lacks stability, why his soul is scattered. We

may, perhaps, be able to see a little better just what self-government

implies.

The chronic rebellion is evident enough. I have a friend who after the

Lawrence strike was a great admirer of the I. W. W. He told me about it

one day with tears in his eyes. Two months later I met him, and he was

cursing: “They’re so successful that they’re getting ready to throw

So-and-So out of the I. W. W. for heresy.” It is one of the ironies of

the labor movement that it preaches solidarity, and seems to propagate

by fission. For there is large truth in the saying that the only thing

anarchists hate more than tyrants is an anarchist who differs with

them. Indeed the bitterness between the “red” and the “yellow” unions

is at least as great as the bitterness between the unions and the

employers. The I. W. W. hates the American Federation of Labor and many

political socialists with a vindictiveness that makes no distinction

between them and the most tyrannical boss. Revolt within the world of

revolt is an institution. If any capitalist thinks he is the object

of abuse, he ought to come and hear a debate between the Detroit I.

W. W. and the Chicago I. W. W., between believers in “direct” and in

“political” action, between “State Socialists” and Syndicalists.

The sects of the rebellious are like the variety of the Protestant

churches, and they are due to a similar cause. Once the churches

had cut off from the deeply-rooted central tradition of Rome, they

continued to cut off from each other. Now Protestantism was an effort

at a little democracy in religion, and its history is amazingly like

that of all the other revolts from the old absolutisms. For once men

had broken loose from the cohesion and obedience of the older life,

the floundering of democracy began. It was not so easy to become

self-governing as it was to bowl over a tyrant. And the long history

of schisms is really the story of how men set up a substitute for

authority, and had to revolt against it. To a man standing on the firm

foundation of an ancient faith, the instability of self-government is

its just punishment, and no doubt he smiles at the folly of men who

give up security and peace for a mess of revolt.

After Protestantism, the Romantic movement and the birth of political

democracy. It is hardly necessary to recall what troubled spirits the

romanticists were, how terrible the disillusionments. Their histories

were with few exceptions tragic: and the “unending pursuit of the

ever-fleeting object of desire” led many of them back into the arms of

the Catholic Church. One has only to read the lives of the men whose

names stand out in the nineteenth century to realize that the epoch of

revolt produced tortured and driven spirits. Whatever their virtues,

and they are many, they never attained that inner harmony whose outward

sign is a cordial human life.

No one has felt this more poignantly than the modern artist. Lost in

the clamor of commercialism, many painters seem to insist that if

they can’t make themselves admired they will at least make themselves

heard. And of course, if you live in a world of studios, drawing-rooms

and cafés, amidst idle people in little cliques, you have to draw

attention to yourself from the outside world in some other way than by

decorating or interpreting human life. The modern artist can secure

attention, but he can’t hold it. For the world is so complex that he

can’t find common experiences and common aspirations to deal with. And

because he can’t do this, he can’t become artist to a nation. He has

to be satisfied with a cult. So he specializes on some aspect of form,

exaggerates some quality of line, and produces art that only a few

people would miss if it disappeared. Then he denounces the philistine

public.

But in his heart he is unsatisfied with his work, and so he too

develops a habit of chronic rebellion: a school is no sooner founded

when there is a secession. The usual manifesto is published (they all

say about the same thing): authority and classicism are denounced in

the name of youth and adventure. “All I want,” said a friend of mine

who paints, “is to bewilder and fascinate” ... “All we need is wiggle,”

said another. “To be alive is to rebel,” said a third. But I venture to

suggest that what the rebels are rebelling against is not a classical

authority: none exists to-day that has any compelling force. They are

in rebellion against something within themselves; there are conflicts

in their souls for which they have found no solution; and their revolt

is the endless pursuit of what their own disharmony will never let them

find.

“Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

This certitude for which Matthew Arnold cries, where has it gone?

Classicists, like Prof. Babbitt of Harvard, or Mr. Paul Elmore More,

say that it has gone with the shattering of external authority in

the _débacle_ of Romanticism and the French Revolution. Their remedy

for the chaos and ineptitude of modern life is a return to what they

describe as eternal forms of justice and moderation. They would revive

authority with its dominating critics like Boileau. Romanticism for

them is a lapse from grace, full of sweet sin, and they hope to return

to the Golden Age of the classics.

I don’t see how this dream can succeed. Their solution is built on

a wild impossibility, for in order to realize it they will have to

abolish machinery and communication, newspapers and popular books. They

will have to call upon some fairy to wipe out the memory of the last

hundred years, and they will have to find a magician who can conjure up

a church and a monarchy that men will obey. They can’t do any of these

things, though they can bewail the fact and display their grief by

unremitting hostility to the modern world.

But though their remedy is, I believe, altogether academic, their

diagnosis does locate the spiritual problem. We have lost authority. We

are “emancipated” from an ordered world. We drift.

The loss of something outside ourselves which we can obey is a

revolutionary break with our habits. Never before have we had to

rely so completely upon ourselves. No guardian to think for us, no

precedent to follow without question, no lawmaker above, only ordinary

men set to deal with heart-breaking perplexity. All weakness comes

to the surface. We are homeless in a jungle of machines and untamed

powers that haunt and lure the imagination. Of course, our culture is

confused, our thinking spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. No

mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average

human being born into the twentieth century. Our ancestors thought they

knew their way from birth through all eternity: we are puzzled about

the day after to-morrow.

What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a

happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real

tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away

the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The

iconoclasts didn’t free us. They threw us into the water, and now we

have to swim.

CHAPTER X

The Rock of Ages

I happened to be in Dublin some time ago during what was undoubtedly a

crisis in Irish history: Home Rule in sight, Ulster arming itself for

rebellion, Dublin torn by a bitter strike. No one felt any assurance

as to the outcome. Before nationalism could prevail a long controversy

seemed inevitable with the Presbyterian and industrial North. And even

if Ireland became a nation it seemed as if it would have to face at

once a sharp class struggle.

Then Mr. Hilaire Belloc arrived from England one evening to lecture

before a Catholic Society. There seemed to be no doubts in Mr. Belloc’s

mind. He announced that his Church was the heir of all the arts and the

guardian of all tradition. But the Catholic employers of Dublin, who

were breaking up the workers’ union with unparalleled bitterness, must

have been somewhat puzzled by Mr. Belloc’s statement. For in an issue

of his paper two or three weeks before he had said with resounding

conviction that the European tradition of Christendom always supported

the rebellions of labor.

The same absolutism gave Mr. Belloc and the employers untroubled

conviction, but the two convictions happened to be diametrically

opposed. Neither side suffered from the malady of doubt, the employers

being ready to defy the temporal law by locking up the men’s leaders;

the men ready to defy the laws of property by throwing packing-cases

into the river Liffey.

Now this is the peculiar fact about an absolute faith: that while

it makes a man _feel_ sure of himself, it doesn’t enable him to be

sure. Mr. Belloc in his untroubled way felt certain about events that

in plain fact were full of uncertainty. It was all very well to

say in cocksure fashion that Christian tradition was this-and-that.

Christian employers, Christian priests, Christian newspapers made

it something else. But human beings seem to be made in such a way

that they cling passionately to the emotion of certainty. If only

they can retain the feeling that God and Nature and history are with

them, they go about with every appearance of conviction and practical

power. They have far less bother about their souls than the modern

man lost in a fog of introspection. For the believer in an absolute

system has projected upon the world that certainty and harmony which

he needs. His difficulties after that are merely matters of detail.

The massive structure of his faith will dwarf the puny evidence of

fact. And so, freed from doubts as to the eternal principles of

truth and righteousness, he can give undivided attention to ordinary

events. Do not wonder then at the practical efficiency of mystics,

the executive genius of priests and cardinals, and the shrewdness of

those who profess an unworldly religion. If the genuine interests

of man lie beyond this earth, why exhibit such marvelous competence

about the things which the moths eat and the dust corrupts? That’s

a good question for a debater, but not for a student of men. Belief

does not live by logic, but by the need it fills, and absolutism

quiets the uncertainties of the soul, finds answers to unsatisfied

desire, and endows men with the sense that they are part of something

greater than themselves. In the worldly power of the Roman Church, of

Christian Science, of the Salvation Army, or the Mormons, you come to

see what a colossal, practical power there is in an untroubled faith.

But in liberal thought there is chaos, for it lacks the foundations of

certainty.

Now when a man is looking for something really trustworthy he is likely

to think of something solid, like a rock. Gibraltar has always been an

excellent symbol of the qualities a man hopes to find in his insurance

companies. And those qualities, you can rest assured, are the ones

with which he would like to insure his destiny. For real comfort, give

a man a world that will stand still, that will be the same to-morrow

as it was yesterday, so that no matter how much he is buffeted about,

there will be one place he can go and not be surprised. The mother is

such a refuge to a bewildered child, and Mother Church has been that

to her bewildered children. We are none of us progressives when we are

worried or tired; few of us are revolutionists in a personal crisis.

We have to be very healthy to love variety. We have to be exuberant

and conquering to rejoice in change. And that I imagine is why man

has always attached such high emotional value to the One, the All

Embracing, the Permanent. There are people who flatly refuse to regard

Pluralism as a philosophy of life. William James recognized that and

spent a large amount of time trying to show that a disorderly world

full of variety and spontaneous creation might still give religious

satisfaction. I doubt whether he succeeded. The only people who can

stomach a pluralistic philosophy are those who in some way or another

have grown strong enough to do without an absolute faith.

It has often been said that the Catholic Church is the greatest piece

of constructive psychology that the world has ever seen. Certainly it

would be hard to duplicate the ingenious answers it has found to human

need: the cavernous mysteries of its cathedrals converging upon the

enduring altar, the knowledge of an Eternal Family that survives the

human one, the confessional where sin could be expressed and therefore

purged, the vicarious atonement by which the consequences of human

weakness were lifted off men’s shoulders, the obliteration of death,

the sense that wisdom was there inexhaustible and infallible. Those

aren’t idle dogmas, as foolish critics have imagined, but endlessly

ingenious responses to the every-day wants of men and women. And then

the invariable presence of the Church at every important crisis in

human life--at birth, at puberty, at marriage, on the battlefield, at

the death-bed,--wherever men were troubled and in need of help, there

the Church was to be found. So men might forget the Church in their

prosperity but in sorrow they returned to it. Of course, the Church was

no aid to the inventor or to anyone who was really extending the bounds

of human power. Of course, it was hostile to democracy and to every

force that tended to make people self-sufficient.

In fact, the Church was not content to meet needs and compensate

weakness. It tried to make weakness permanent. In other words, the

Church used all its tremendous power over men to keep them wanting that

which the Church could give. “What is your age? Is it twenty, thirty,

forty, or are you still older?... Death will take from you the future,

as it took from you the past, with the rapidity of lightning ... To die

... is to go ... where you will become the prey of corruption and the

food of the most hideous reptiles.” This is from the “First Exercise

on Death” in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Take this from

the Third Exercise: “Consider--1. A few moments after your death. Your

body laid on a funeral bed, wrapped in a shroud, a veil thrown over

your face; beside you the crucifix, the holy water, friends, relatives,

a priest kneeling by your sad remains, and reciting the holy prayers,

‘De profundis clamvi ad te, Domine’; the public officer who writes in

the register of the dead all the particulars of your decease.”

In the lovely little book from which I am quoting this kind of thing

is recommended for daily contemplation, a capital way, it seems to

me, of poisoning the human will. It was this that Nietzsche had in

mind when he said that “belief is always most desired, most pressingly

needed where there is a lack of will--the less a person knows how to

command, the more urgent is his desire for one who commands sternly,--a

God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party

conscience.”

Yet a stern commander is just what this age lacks. Liberalism suffuses

our lives and the outstanding fact is the decay of authority. But this

doesn’t mean for one minute that we are able to command ourselves.

In fact, if a man dare attempt to sum up the spiritual condition

of his time, he might say of ours that it has lost authority and

retained the need of it. We are freer than we are strong. We have more

responsibility than we have capacity. And if we wish to state what the

future sets for us, we might say, I think, that we must find within

ourselves the certainty which the external world has lost.

It is not fair to claim that we who attack absolutism are robbing

life of its guarantees. It is far truer to say that the enlargement

and ferment of the modern world have robbed absolutism of its excuse.

To the business man who believes sincerely in the old sanctities of

private property, the industrial situation must seem like a mine

of explosives. The legalist gasps in panic. And as for these new

aspirations of women, this push of the working-class towards an

industrial democracy, this faculty of the young for taking an interest

in life uncensored, what lamp-post is there that a man can embrace in a

giddy and reeling universe? None. It was possible to talk about eternal

principles of conduct in an old-world village where the son replaced

the father generation after generation, where the only immigrants

were babies and the only emigrants the dead. But in the new world,

where fifty races meet, and a continent is exploited, ten years is an

enormous change, a generation is a revolution.

Life has overflowed the little systems of eternity. Thought has become

humbler because its task is greater. We can invoke no monumental

creeds, because facts smile ironically upon them. And so in a changing

world, men have to cast aside the old thickset forms of their thinking

for suppler experimental ones. They think oftener. They think more

lavishly, and they don’t hang their hope of immortality on the issue

of their thoughts. It is not so comfortable. It gives none of that

harmony outside which men desire. The challenge is endless, to finer

perceptions and sharper insights. Such thinking is more accurate than

settled principles can ever be; the restless modern world has made such

thinking necessary. But gone are the repose and the sublimity and the

shelter of larger creeds. Our thought is homely, of the earth, and not

awe-inspiring. No profound homage can go out to ideas that an honest

man may have to scrap to-morrow. There is nothing of Gibraltar about

to-day’s hypothesis.

The most dramatic revelation of this crisis is among the newer

immigrants in an American city. They come suddenly from the fixed

traditions of peasant life into the distracting variety of a strange

civilization. America for them is not only a foreign country where

they have to find a living in ways to which they are unaccustomed;

America is a place where their creeds do not work, where what at home

seemed big and emphatic as the mountains is almost unnoticed. It is

a commonplace to say that the tide of emigration has shifted from

the Northwest to the Southeast of Europe, and that America to-day

is receiving a radically different stock than it did twenty years

ago. That is undoubtedly true. But the difference is not only in the

immigrants. America itself is different. Those who are coming to-day

have to bridge a much greater gap than did those who entered this

country when it was a nation of villages.

They come to a country which shatters cynically the whole structure

of their emotional life. There is a brave attempt to preserve it in

ghettos. But with no great success, and the second generation is drawn

unprotected into the new world. Parents and children often hardly

understand each others’ speech, let alone each others’ desires.

In Queenstown harbor I once talked to an Irish boy who was about to

embark for America. His home was in the West of Ireland, in a small

village where his sister and he helped their father till a meager

farm. They had saved enough for a passage to America, and they were

abandoning their home. I asked the boy whether he knew anyone in

America. He didn’t, but his parish priest at home did. He was going

to write to Father Riley every week. Would he ever return to Ireland?

“Yes,” said this boy of eighteen, “I’m going to die in Ireland.”

Where was he going to in America? To a place called New Haven. He

was, in short, going from one epoch into another, and for guidance

he had the parish priest at home and perhaps the ward boss in New

Haven. His gentleness and trust in the slums of New Haven, assaulted

by din and glare, hedged in by ugliness and cynical push,--if there

is any adventure comparable to his, I have not heard of it. At the

very moment when he needed a faith, he was cutting loose from it. If

he becomes brutal, greedy, vulgar, will it be so surprising? If he

fails to measure up to the requirements of citizenship in a world

reconstruction, is there anything strange about it?

Well, he was an immigrant in the literal sense. All of us are

immigrants spiritually. We are all of us immigrants in the industrial

world, and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted

people, newly arrived, and _nouveau riche_. As a nation we have all the

vulgarity that goes with that, all the scattering of soul. The modern

man is not yet settled in his world. It is strange to him, terrifying,

alluring, and incomprehensibly big. The evidence is everywhere: the

amusements of the city; the jokes that pass for jokes; the blare that

stands for beauty, the folksongs of Broadway, the feeble and apologetic

pulpits, the cruel standards of success, raucous purity. We make love

to ragtime and we die to it. We are blown hither and thither like

litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience.

You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we

are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do

not concern us, bored with those that do. Is it a wild mistake to say

that the absence of central authority has disorganized our souls, that

our souls are like Peer Gynt’s onion, in that they lack a kernel?

PART III

CHAPTER XI

A Note on the Woman’s Movement

Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do

with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters,

why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket

and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own

life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.

If all that women needed were “rights,”--the right to work, the right

to vote, and freedom from the authority of father and husband, then

feminism would be the easiest human question on the calendar. For while

there will be a continuing opposition, no one supposes that these

elementary freedoms can be withheld from women. In fact, they will be

forced upon millions of women who never troubled to ask for any of

these rights. And that isn’t because Ibsen wrote the Doll’s House, or

because Bernard Shaw writes prefaces. The mere withdrawal of industries

from the home has drawn millions of women out of the home, and left

millions idle within it. There are many other forces, all of which

have blasted the rock of ages where woman’s life was centered. The

self-conscious modern woman may insist that she has a life of her own

to lead, which neither father, nor priest, nor husband, nor Mrs. Grundy

is fit to prescribe for her. But when she begins to prescribe life for

herself, her real problems begin.

Every step in the woman’s movement is creative. There are no precedents

whatever, not even bad ones. Now the invention of new ways of living

is rare enough among men, but among women it has been almost unknown.

Housekeeping and baby-rearing are the two most primitive arts in the

whole world. They are almost the last occupations in which rule of

thumb and old wives’ tales have resisted the application of scientific

method. They are so immemorially backward, that nine people out of ten

hardly conceive the possibility of improving upon them. They are so

backward that we have developed a maudlin sentimentality about them,

have associated family life and the joy in childhood with all the

stupidity and wasted labor of the inefficient home. The idea of making

the home efficient will cause the average person to shudder, as if you

were uttering some blasphemy against monogamy. “Let science into the

home, where on earth will Cupid go to?” Almost in vain do women like

Mrs. Gilman insist that the institution of the family is not dependent

upon keeping woman a drudge amidst housekeeping arrangements inherited

from the early Egyptians. Women have invented almost nothing to lighten

their labor. They have made practically no attempt to specialize, to

coöperate. They have been the great routineers.

So people have said that woman was made to be the natural conservative,

the guardian of tradition. She would probably still be guarding the

tradition of weaving her own clothes in the parlor if an invention

hadn’t thwarted her. She still guards the tradition of buying food

retail, of going alone and unorganized to market. And she has been, of

course, a faithful conservator of superstition, the most docile and

credulous of believers. In all this, I am saying nothing that awakened

women themselves aren’t saying, nor am I trying to take a hand in that

most stupid of all debates as to whether men are superior to women.

Nor am I trying to make up my mind whether the higher education of

women and their political enfranchisement will produce in the next

generation several Darwins and a few Michelangelos. The question is not

even whether women can be as good doctors and lawyers and business

organizers as men.

It is much more immediate, and far less academic than that. The

feminists could almost afford to admit the worst that Schopenhauer,

Weininger, and Sir Almoth Wright can think of, and then go on pointing

to the fact that competent or incompetent they have got to adjust

themselves to a new world. The day of the definitely marked “sphere” is

passing under the action of forces greater than any that an irritated

medical man can control. It is no longer possible to hedge the life

of women in a set ritual, where their education, their work, their

opinion, their love, and their motherhood, are fixed in the structure

of custom. To insist that women need to be moulded by authority is

a shirking of the issue. For the authority that has moulded them is

passing. And if woman is fit only to live in a harem, it will have to

be a different kind of harem from any that has existed.

The more you pile up the case against woman in the past the more

significant does feminism become. For one fact is written across the

whole horizon, the prime element in any discussion. That fact is the

absolute necessity for a readjusting of woman’s position. And so,

every time you insist that women are backward you are adding to the

revolutionary meaning of their awakening. But what these anti-feminists

have in mind, of course, is that women are by nature incapable of any

readjustment. However, the test of that pudding is in the eating.

What women will do with the freedom that is being forced upon them is

something, that no person can foresee by thinking of women in the past.

Women to-day are embarked upon a career for which their tradition is

no guide. The first result, of course, is a vast amount of trouble.

The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted

prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her

own soul. She who always took what was given to her has to find for

herself. She who passed without a break from the dominance of her

father to the dominance of her husband is suddenly compelled to govern

herself. Almost at one stroke she has lost the authority of a little

world and has been thrust into a very big one, which nobody, man or

woman, understands very well. I have tried to suggest what this change

from a world of villages has meant for politicians, clergymen and

social thinkers. Well, for women, the whole problem is aggravated by

the fact that they come from a still smaller world and from a much more

rigid authority.

It is no great wonder if there is chaos among the awakening women.

Take a cry like that for a “single standard” of morality. It means two

utterly contradictory things. For the Pankhursts it is assumed that men

should adopt women’s standards, but in the minds of thousands it means

just the reverse. For some people feminism is a movement of women to

make men chaste, for others the enforced chastity of women is a sign

of their slavery. Feminism is attacked both for being too “moral” and

too “immoral.” And these contradictions represent a real conflict, not

a theoretical debate. There is in the movement an uprising of women

who rebel against marriage which means to a husband the ultimate haven

of a sexual career. There is also a rebellion of women who want for

themselves the larger experience that most men have always taken.

Christabel Pankhurst uses the new freedom of expression to drive home

an Old Testament morality with Old Testament fervor. She finds her book

suppressed by Mr. Anthony Comstock, who differs from her far less than

he imagines. And she rouses the scorn of great numbers of people who

feel that she is out, not to free women, but to enslave men. There is

an immense vacillation between a more rigid Puritanism and the idolatry

of freedom. Women are discovering what reformers of all kinds are

learning, that there is a great gap between the overthrow of authority

and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a

period of drift and doubt. We are in it to-day.

The first impulse of emancipation seems to be in the main that woman

should model her career on man’s. But she cannot do that for the simple

reason that she is a woman. Towards love and children her attitude is

not man’s, as everyone but a doctrinaire knows. She cannot taboo her

own character in order to become suddenly an amateur male. And if she

could, it would be the sheerest folly, for there are plenty of men on

this earth.

Yet at the very time when enlightened people are crying out against the

horrors of capitalism, you will find many feminists urging women to

enter capitalism as a solution of their problems. Of course, millions

have been drawn in against their will, but there is still a good number

who go in voluntarily, because they feel that their self-respect

demands it.

They go in response to the desire for economic independence. And

they find almost no real independence in the industrial world. What

has happened, it seems to me, is this: the women who argue for the

necessity of making one’s own living are almost without exception upper

class women, either because they have special talents or because they

have special opportunities. Some time ago I attended a feminist meeting

where a brilliant woman was presented to the audience as an example of

how it was possible to earn a living and have twins at the same time.

But it happened that the woman was a lecturer who could earn a very

comfortable sum by speaking a few hours a week. Another woman at the

same meeting was an actress, another had been a minister, another was a

popular novelist; the only woman present who was concerned with factory

work said not one word about the pleasure of earning your own living.

Now, only a very small percentage of men or women can enter the

professions. For the great mass, economic independence means going

to work. And the theorists of feminism have yet to make up their

minds whether they can seriously urge women to go into industry as it

is to-day or is likely to be in the near future. I, for one, should

say that the presence of women in the labor market is an evil to be

combatted by every means at our command. The army of women in industry

to-day is not a blessing but the curse of a badly organized society.

Their position there is not the outpost of an advance toward a fuller

life but an outrage upon the race, and I believe that the future will

regard it as a passing phase of human servitude.

For the great mass, women’s work in the future will, I believe, be

in the application of the arts and sciences to a deepened and more

extensively organized home. There is nothing narrowing about that, no

thrusting of women back into the chimney corner. There is opportunity

for every kind of talent, and for the sharing of every kind of

interest. It does not mean that women need not concern themselves with

industry. Far from it. For any decent kind of home women will have to

develop beyond anything we have to-day an intelligent and powerful

consumers’ control. They must go into politics, of course, for no home

exists that doesn’t touch in a hundred ways upon the government of

cities, states and the nation. They have the whole educational system

to deal with, not only from the public school up, but also, what is

beginning to be recognized as most important of all, from infancy to

school age. Nor does it mean that every woman must be an incompetent

amateur of all the arts, as she is to-day, a cook, a purchaser, a

housekeeper, a trained nurse and a kindergarten teacher. Woman’s work

can and will be specialized, as Mrs. Gilman has pointed out, so that

a woman will have a very wide choice in a host of new careers that

are going to be created. A great many things which are done in each

house will be done by the collective action of a group of houses. The

idea of having forty kitchens, forty furnaces, forty laundries, and

forty useless backyards in one square block, managed by forty separate

overworked women, each going helplessly to market, each bringing up

children by rule of thumb,--all that is a kind of individualism which

the world will get away from.

To get away from it is an effort that will provide ample careers

for most women. The elementary facts of coöperation and division of

labor are being forced upon women by the wastefulness of the old

kind of housekeeping. We see already the organization of housewives’

associations, of common playgrounds, which some people object to

when they have a roof and are called common nurseries. There are

neighborhood associations, and women’s municipal leagues. There are

kindergartens which take away from each mother the necessity of being

an accomplished teacher of the most subtly plastic period of human life.

Now with the development of some division of labor among women, they

will begin to earn salaries. To be paid for work in money is possible

only when you don’t do all the work. So the moment you divide the work

the only way you can share the product is by paying money to each

worker. A woman who does her own cooking gets no pay. A woman who does

someone else’s cooking gets pay. And when women introduce into the

work of the home the principle of division of labor and coöperative

organization, they also will receive pay, and what is called “economic

independence” will be open to them.

That will, of course, be a real emancipation. If women are trained

to do all the things that the existing home requires, that is, if

they become amateur cooks, marketers, and Montessori mothers, and

specialists in none of these things, then they have to wait till they

can have a home of their own in which to display their versatility.

They have to wait for a man who loves them enough to put up with their

general amateurishness, or one who doesn’t know any better. But the

moment they specialize, so that women can do some one thing very well,

they can begin to do homework before they are married. A kindergarten

teacher doesn’t have to bear a child before she can begin to teach a

child. She has a place in the world, a livelihood, and a self-respect

because she can do something which is needed. She can marry for love,

because she desires children of her own, because she wants what the

family can give, not because she is a detached and meaningless female

until she is married.

What this will mean for everyone is almost beyond the imagination of

most people to-day. We are just beginning to realize that the intense

narrowness of women is one of the things that thwarts human effort.

The number of wives who have egged their husbands on to ruthless

business practices, the inventive minds that have been stunted by a

fierce absorption in the little interests of the household--all the

individualism of women is a constant obstacle to a larger coöperative

life. If we knew the details of why men falter, why they are pulled

away from common action, we should find, I believe, in unnumbered cases

that there was some woman at home, a mother or a wife, who, limited in

her whole vision, was clinging desperately to some immediate, personal

advantage. And as for children, in their most educable period, they

are surrounded by an example of isolation, made to feel that the

supreme concern of human life is to look in towards the home, instead

of out from it. It is no wonder that democracy is so difficult, that

collective action is impeded by a thousand conflicting egotisms. Every

one of us is trained in a little water-tight compartment of his own.