the lead of the blind Doge Dandolo is told with an almost brutal
ruthlessness quite befitting the deed itself. Nowhere else in the book
is Mr. Adams happier in his insistence upon the conflict between what
he calls the economic and the imaginative spirits. The incident sets
well with his favorite theory of the inevitable triumph of the economic
over the imaginative man, as societies grow centralized, and the no
less inevitable fossilization and ruin of the body politic which this
very triumph itself ultimately entails. The history of the English
conquest of India is only less vividly told. Incidentally, it may be
mentioned that one of Mr. Adams’s many merits is his contemptuous
refusal to be misled by modern criticism of Macaulay. He sees
Macaulay’s greatness as a historian, and his essential truthfulness on
many of the very points where he has been most sharply criticised.
Mr. Adams’s book, however, is far more than a mere succession of
brilliant episodes. He fully sees that the value of facts lies in
their relation to one another; and from the facts as he sees them he
deduces certain laws with more than a Thucydidean indifference as to
his own individual approval or disapproval of the development. The
life of nations, like any other form of life, is but one manifestation
of energy; and Mr. Adams’s decidedly gloomy philosophy of life may
be gathered from the fact that he places fear and greed as the two
forms of energy which stand conspicuously predominant; fear in the
earlier, and greed in the later, stages of evolution from barbarism
to civilization. Civilization itself he regards merely as the history
of the movement from a condition of physical distribution to one of
physical concentration. During the earlier stages of this movement
the imaginative man--the man who stands in fear of a priesthood--is,
in his opinion, the representative type, while with him, and almost
equally typical, stand the soldier and the artist. As consolidation
advances, the economic man--the man of industry, trade, and
capital--tends to supplant the emotional and artistic types of manhood,
and finally himself develops along two lines,--“the usurer in his most
formidable aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted
to thrive on scanty nutriment.” These two very unattractive types are,
in his belief, the inevitable final products of all civilization, as
civilization has hitherto developed; and when they have once been
produced there follows either a stationary period, during which the
whole body politic gradually ossifies and atrophies, or else a period
of utter disintegration.
This is not a pleasant theory; it is in many respects an entirely false
theory; but nevertheless there is in it a very ugly element of truth.
One does not have to accept either all Mr. Adams’s theories or all his
facts in order to recognize more than one disagreeable resemblance
between the world as it is to-day, and the Roman world under the
Empire, or the Greek world under the successors of Alexander. Where he
errs is in his failure to appreciate the fundamental differences which
utterly destroy any real parallelism between the two sets of cases.
Indeed, his zeal in championing his theories leads him at times into
positions which are seen at a glance to be untenable.
Probably Mr. Adams’s account of the English Reformation, and of Henry
VIII. and his instruments, is far nearer the truth than Froude’s. But
his view of the evils upon which the reformers as a whole waged war,
and of the spirit which lay behind the real leaders and spurred them
on, is certainly less accurate than the view given by Froude in his
_Erasmus_ and _Council of Trent_. It can be partly corrected by the
study of a much less readable book--Mr. Henry C. Lea’s work on _The
Inquisition_. Yet Mr. Adams’s description of the English Reformation
is very powerful, and has in it a vein of bitter truth; though on the
whole it is perhaps not so well done as his account of the suppression
of the Templars in France. If he can be said to have any heroes, the
Templars must certainly be numbered among them.
He is at his best in describing the imaginative man, and especially
the imaginative man whose energy manifests itself in the profession of
arms. His description of the tremendous change which passed over Europe
during the centuries which saw, what is commonly called, the decay of
faith is especially noteworthy. In no other history are there to be
found two sentences which portray more vividly the reasons for the
triumph of the great Pope Hildebrand over the Emperor Henry, than these:
“To Henry’s soldiers the world was a vast space peopled by those
fantastic beings which are still seen on Gothic towers. These demons
obeyed the monk of Rome, and his army, melting from the Emperor under
a nameless horror, left him helpless.”
His account of the contrast between the relations of Philip Augustus
and of Philip the Fair with the Church is dramatic in its intensity.
To Mr. Adams, Philip the Fair, even more than Henry VIII., is the
incarnation of the economic spirit in its conflict with the Church;
and he makes him an even more repulsive, though perhaps an abler, man
than Henry. In this he is probably quite right. His account of the
hounding down of Boniface, and the cruel destruction of the Templars,
is as stirring as it is truthful; but he certainly pushes his theory
to an altogether impossible extreme when he states that the moneyed
class, the _bourgeoisie_, was already the dominant force in France.
The heroes of Froissart still lay in the future; and for centuries to
come the burgher was to be outweighed by king, priest, and noble. The
economic man, the man of trade and money, was, at that time, in no
sense dominant.
That there is grave reason for some of Mr. Adams’s melancholy
forebodings, no serious student of the times, no sociologist or
reformer, and no practical politician who is interested in more than
momentary success, will deny. A foolish optimist is only less noxious
than an utter pessimist; and the pre-requisite for any effort, whether
hopeful or hopeless, to better our conditions is an accurate knowledge
of what these conditions are. There is no use in blinding ourselves
to certain of the tendencies and results of our high-pressure
civilization. Some very ominous facts have become more and more
apparent during the present century, in which the social movement of
the white race has gone on with such unexampled and ever-accelerating
rapidity. The rich have undoubtedly grown richer; and, while the most
careful students are inclined to answer with an emphatic negative
the proposition that the poor have grown poorer, it is nevertheless
certain that there has been a large absolute, though not relative,
increase of poverty, and that the very poor tend to huddle in immense
masses in the cities. Even though these masses are, relatively to
the rest of the population, smaller than they formerly were, they
constitute a standing menace, not merely to our prosperity, but to our
existence. The improvement in the means of communication, moreover,
has so far immensely increased the tendency of the urban population to
grow at the expense of the rural; and philosophers have usually been
inclined to regard the ultimate safety of a nation as resting upon
its peasantry. The improvement in machinery, the very perfection of
scientific processes, cause great, even though temporary, suffering
to unskilled laborers. Moreover, there is a certain softness of fibre
in civilized nations which, if it were to prove progressive, might
mean the development of a cultured and refined people quite unable to
hold its own in those conflicts through which alone any great race
can ultimately march to victory. There is also a tendency to become
fixed, and to lose flexibility. Most ominous of all, there has become
evident, during the last two generations, a very pronounced tendency
among the most highly civilized races, and among the most highly
civilized portions of all races, to lose the power of multiplying, and
even to decrease; so much so as to make the fears of the disciples of
Malthus a century ago seem rather absurd to the dweller in France or
New England to-day.
Mr. Adams does not believe that any individual or group of individuals
can influence the destiny of a race for good or for evil. All of us
admit that it is very hard by individual effort thus to make any
alteration in destiny; but we do not think it impossible; and Mr. Adams
will have performed a great service if he succeeds in fixing the eyes
of the men who ought to know thoroughly the problems set us to solve,
upon the essential features of these problems. I do not think his
diagnosis of the disease is in all respects accurate. I believe there
is an immense amount of healthy tissue as to the existence of which he
is blind; but there is disease, and it is serious enough to warrant
very careful examination.
However, Mr. Adams is certainly in error in putting the immense
importance he does upon the question of the expansion or contraction of
the currency. There is no doubt whatever that a nation is profoundly
affected by the character of its currency; but there seems to be
equally little doubt that the currency is only one, and by no means the
most important, among a hundred causes which profoundly affect it.
The United States has been on a gold basis, and on a silver basis; it
has been on a paper basis, and on a basis of what might be called the
scraps and odds and ends of the currencies of a dozen other nations;
but it has kept on developing along the same lines no matter what its
currency has been. If a change of currency were so enacted as to amount
to dishonesty, that is, to the repudiation of debts, it would be a very
bad thing morally; or, if a change took place in a manner that would
temporarily reduce the purchasing power of the wage-earner, it would be
a very bad thing materially; but the current of the national life would
not be wholly diverted or arrested, it would merely be checked, even
by such a radical change. The forces that most profoundly shape the
course of a nation’s life lie far deeper than the mere use of gold or
of silver, the mere question of the appreciation or depreciation of one
metal when compared with the other, or when compared with commodities
generally.
Mr. Adams unconsciously shows this in his first and extremely
interesting chapter on the Romans. In one part of this chapter he
seems to ascribe the ruin of the Roman Empire to the contraction of
the currency, saying, “with contraction came that fall of prices which
first ruined, then enslaved, and finally exterminated the native rural
population of Italy.” This he attributes to the growth of the economic
or capitalistic spirit. As he puts it, “the stronger type exterminated
the weaker, the money-lender killed out the husbandman, the soldiers
vanished, and the farms on which they once flourished were left
desolate.”
But, curiously enough, Mr. Adams himself shows that all this really
occurred during the two centuries, or thereabouts, extending from the
end of the second Punic war through the reign of the first of the Roman
emperors; and this was a period of currency expansion, not of currency
contraction. Moreover, it was emphatically a period when the military
and not the economic type was supreme. The great Romans of the first
and second centuries before Christ were soldiers, not merchants or
usurers, and they could only be said to possess the economic instinct
incidentally, in so far as it is possessed by every man of the military
type who seizes the goods accumulated by the man of the economic type.
It was during these centuries, when the military type was supreme,
and when prices were rising, that the ruin, the enslavement and the
extermination of the old rural population of Italy began. It was during
these centuries that the husbandmen left the soil and became the mob of
Rome, clamoring for free bread and the games of the amphitheatre. It
was toward the close of this period that the Roman army became an army
no longer of Roman citizens, but of barbarians trained in the Roman
manner; it was toward the close of this period that celibacy became so
crying an evil as to invoke the vain action of the legislature, and
that the Roman race lost the power of self-perpetuation. What happened
in the succeeding centuries,--the period of the contraction of the
currency and the rise of prices,--was merely the completion of the ruin
which had already been practically accomplished.
These facts seem to show clearly that the question of the currency
had really little or nothing to do with the decay of the Roman fibre.
This decay began under one set of currency conditions, and continued
unchanged when these conditions became precisely reversed. An
infinitely more important cause, as Mr. Adams himself shows, was the
immense damage done to the Italian husbandman by the importation of
Asiatic and African slaves; which was in all probability the chief of
the causes that conspired to ruin him. He was forced into competition
with races of lower vitality; races tenacious of life, who possessed a
very low standard of living, and who furnished to the great slave-owner
his cheap labor. Mr. Adams shows that the husbandman was affected, not
only by the importation of vast droves of slaves to compete with him
in Italy, but by the competition with low-class labor in Egypt and
elsewhere. These very points, if developed with Mr. Adams’s skill,
would have enabled him to show in a very striking manner the radical
contrast between the present political and social life of civilized
states, and the political and social life of Rome during what he
calls the capitalistic or closing period. At present, the minute that
the democracy becomes convinced that the workman and the peasant are
suffering from competition with cheap labor, whether this cheap
labor take the form of alien immigration, or of the importation of
goods manufactured abroad by low-class working-men, or of commodities
produced by convicts, it at once puts a stop to the competition. We
keep out the Chinese, very wisely; we have put an end to the rivalry
of convict contract labor with free labor; we are able to protect
ourselves, whenever necessary, by heavy import duties, against the
effect of too cheap labor in any foreign country; and, finally, in the
civil war, we utterly destroyed the system of slavery, which really
was threatening the life of the free working-man in a way in which it
cannot possibly be threatened by any conceivable development of the
“capitalistic” spirit.
Mr. Adams possesses a very intimate knowledge of finance, and there
are many of his discussions on this subject into which only an expert
would be competent to enter. Nevertheless, on certain financial and
economic questions, touching matters open to discussion by the man
of merely ordinary knowledge, his terminology is decidedly vague.
This is especially true when he speaks of “the producer.” Now the
producer, as portrayed by the Populist stump orator or writer of
political and economic pamphlets, is a being with whom we became quite
intimate during the recent campaign; but we have found it difficult to
understand at all definitely who this “producer” actually is. According
to one school of Populistic thinkers the farmer is the producer; but
according to another and more radical school this is not so, unless
the farmer works with his hands and not his head, this school limiting
the application of the term “producer” to the working-man who does
the immediate manual work of production. On the other hand those who
speak with scientific precision must necessarily class as producers
all men whose work results directly or indirectly in production.
Under this definition, inventors and men who improve the methods of
transportation, like railway presidents, and men who enable other
producers to work, such as bankers who loan money wisely, are all
themselves to be classed as producers, and often indeed as producers of
the most effective kind.
The great mass of the population consists of producers; and in
consequence the majority of the sales by producers are sales to other
producers. It requires one set of producers to make a market for any
other set of producers; and in consequence the rise or fall of prices
is a good or a bad thing for different bodies of producers according
to the different circumstances of each case. Mr. Adams says that the
period from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth
centuries was an interval of “almost unparalleled prosperity,” which
he apparently ascribes to the expansion of the currency, with which,
he says, “went a rise in prices, all producers grew rich, and for
more than two generations the strain of competition was so relaxed
that the different classes of the population preyed upon each other
less savagely than they are wont to do in less happy times.” It is
not exactly clear how a rise in the prices both of what one producer
sells another, and of what he in return buys from that other, can
somehow make both of them rich, and relax the strain of competition.
Certainly in the present century, competition has been just as severe
in times of high prices; and some of the periods of greatest prosperity
have coincided with the periods of very low prices. There is reason
to believe that low prices are ultimately of great benefit to the
wage-earners. A rise in prices generally injures them. Moreover, in
the century of which Mr. Adams speaks, the real non-producers were the
great territorial feudal lords and the kings and clergymen; and these
were then supreme. It was the period of the ferocious Albigensian
crusades. It is true that it ushered in a rather worse period,--that
of the struggle between England and France, with its attendant peasant
wars and Jacqueries, and huge bands of marauding free-companies.
But the alteration for the worse was due to a fresh outbreak of
“imaginative” spirit; and the first period was full of recurring
plagues and famines, besides the ordinary unrest, murder, oppression,
pillage, and general corruption. Mr. Adams says that the different
classes of the population during that happy time “preyed upon each
other less savagely” than at other times. All that need be said in
answer is that there is not now a civilized community, under no matter
what stress of capitalistic competition, in which the different classes
prey upon one another with one-tenth the savagery they then showed;
or in which famine and disease, even leaving war out of account, come
anywhere near causing so much misery to poor people, and above all to
the wage-earners, or working-men, the under strata and base of the
producing classes.
From many of the statements in Mr. Adams’s very interesting concluding
chapter I should equally differ; and yet this chapter is one which is
not merely interesting but soul-stirring, and it contains much with
which most of us would heartily agree. Through the cold impartiality
with which he strives to work merely as a recorder of facts, there
break now and then flashes of pent-up wrath and vehement scorn
for all that is mean and petty in a purely materialistic, purely
capitalistic, civilization. With his scorn of what is ignoble and
base in our development, his impatient contempt of the deification of
the stock-market, the trading-counter, and the factory, all generous
souls must agree. When we see prominent men deprecating the assertion
of national honor because it “has a bad effect upon business,” or
because it “impairs the value of securities”; when we see men seriously
accepting Mr. Edward Atkinson’s pleasant theory that patriotism is of
no consequence when compared with the price of cotton sheeting or the
capacity to undersell our competitors in foreign markets, it is no
wonder that a man who has in him the stuff of ancestors who helped to
found our Government, and helped to bring it safely through the Civil
War should think blackly of the future. But Mr. Adams should remember
that there always have been men of this merely huckstering type, or of
other types not much higher. It is not a nice thing that Mr. Eliot,
the president of one of the greatest educational institutions of the
land, should reflect discredit upon the educated men of the country
by his attitude on the Venezuela affair, carrying his desertion of
American principles so far as to find himself left in the lurch by
the very English statesman whose cause he was championing; but Mr.
Adams by turning to the “History” of the administration of Madison,
by his brother, Henry Adams, would find that Mr. Eliot had plenty of
intellectual ancestors among the “blue lights” federalists of that day.
Timothy Pickering showed the same eager desire to stand by another
country to the hurt of his own country’s honor, and Timothy Pickering
was a United States Senator whose conduct was far more reprehensible
than that of any private individual could be. We have advanced, not
retrograded, since 1812.
This applies also to what Mr. Adams says of the fall of the soldier
and the rise of the usurer. He quite overstates his case in asserting
that in Europe the soldier has lost his importance since 1871, and that
the administration of society since then has fallen into the hands of
the “economic man,” thereby making a change “more radical than any
that happened at Rome or even at Byzantium.” In the first place, a
period of a quarter of a century is altogether too short to admit of
such a generalization. In the next place, the facts do not support
this particular generalization. The Germans are quite as military in
type as ever they were, and very much more so than they were at any
period during the two centuries preceding Bismarck and Moltke. Nor is
it true to say that “the ruler of the French people has passed for the
first time from the martial to the moneyed type.” Louis XV. and Louis
Philippe can hardly be held to belong to any recognized martial type;
and the reason of the comparative sinking of the military man in France
is due not in the least to the rise of his economic fellow-countryman,
but to the rise of the other military man in Germany. Mr. Adams
says that since the capitulation of Paris the soldier has tended
to sink more and more, until he merely receives his orders from
financiers (which term when used by Mr. Adams includes all business
and working-men) with his salary, without being allowed a voice, even
in the questions which involve peace and war. Now this is precisely
the position which the soldier has occupied for two centuries among
English-speaking races; and it is during these very centuries that the
English-speaking race has produced its greatest soldiers. Marlborough
and Wellington, Nelson and Farragut, Grant and Lee, exactly fill Mr.
Adams’s definition of the position into which soldiers have “sunk”; and
the United States has just elected as President, as it so frequently
has done before, a man who owes his place in politics in large part to
his having done gallant service as a soldier, and who is in no sense a
representative of the moneyed type.