LABOR, WEALTH
Introduction.--Notions of labor.--Classical and mediæval
notions.--Labor has always existed.--Modern view of labor.--
Movable capital in modern society; conditions of equality;
present temporary status of the demand for men.--Effect of the
facility of winning wealth.--Chances of acquiring wealth in
modern times; effect on modern mores; speculation involved in any
change.--Mores conform to changes in life conditions; great
principles; their value and fate.--The French revolution.--
Ruling classes; special privileges; corruption of the mores.--
The standard of living.
+157.+ The topics treated in Chapter III--tools, language, and
money--belong almost entirely in the folkways. The element of esteem for
tools is sometimes very great. They are made divine and receive worship.
Nevertheless, there is little reflection stimulated to produce a sense
of their importance to welfare. Therefore the moral element pertaining
to the mores is not prominent in them. When the moral element exists at
all in regard to tools, language, or money, it is independent and rises
to the conception of prosperity, its sense and conditions. There are
notions at all stages of civilization about productive labor and wealth,
as parts of the fate of man on earth and of the conditions of his
happiness and welfare. At this point they take the character of a
philosophy, and are turned back on the work, as regulative notions of
how, and how much, to work. The mores of the struggle for existence are
in those notions. From the time when men had any accumulated wealth they
seem to have been struck by its effect on the character of the
possessor. The creature seemed to be stronger than the creator. Here
ethical reflections began. They have been more actively produced since
it has been possible for men to acquire wealth in a lifetime by their
own efforts. Envy has been awakened, and has been gratified by
theoretical discussions of the power, rights, and duties of wealth. When
wealth was due to the possession of land or to the possession of rank
and political power, the facts about its distribution seemed to be like
the differences in health, strength, beauty, etc. It now appears that
the ethics of poverty are as well worth studying as those of wealth, and
that, in short, every man's case brings its own ethics, or that there
are no ethics at all in the matter. The ideas, however, which are
current in the society at the time are conditions for the individual,
and they are a part of the mores of the environment in which the
struggle for existence must be carried on.
+158. Notions of labor.+ Nature peoples generally regard productive
labor as the business of women, unworthy of men. The Jews believed in a
God who worked six days and rested on the seventh. He differed from the
Olympian gods of Greece, who were revelers, and from Buddha who tried to
do nothing, or from Brahma who was only Thought. The Sabbath of rest
implied other days of labor. In the book of Proverbs idleness is
denounced as the cause of poverty and want.[366] Many passages are cited
from the rabbinical literature in honor of productive labor and in
disapproval of idleness.[367] In Book II, Chapter 62, of the Apostolic
Constitutions, the basis of which is a Jewish work, it is taught that
gainful occupations should be incidental and that the worship of God
should be the main work of life. Hellenic shows and theaters are to be
avoided. To this the Christian editor added heathen shows and sports of
any kind. Young men ought to work to earn their own support. The
Zoroastrian religion was a developed form of the strife between good
forces and evil forces. The good men must enlist on the side of the good
forces. This religion especially approved all the economic virtues, and
productive efforts, like the clearing of waste land, or other labor to
increase favorable conditions and to overcome harmful or obstructive
influences, were religious, and were counted as help to the good forces.
+159. Classical and mediæval notions of labor.+ The Greeks and Romans
regarded all labor for gain as degrading. The Greeks seem to have
reached this opinion through a great esteem for intellectual pursuits,
which they thought means of cultivation. The gainful occupations, or any
occupations pursued for gain, were "banausic," which meant that they had
an effect opposite to that of cultivation. The Romans seem to have
adopted the Greek view, but they were prepared for it by militarism. The
Middle Ages got the notion of labor from the Roman tradition. They mixed
this with the biblical view. Labor was a necessity, as a consequence and
penalty of sin, and directly connected, as a curse, with the "Fall." It
was correlative to a curse on the ground, by which, also as a curse for
sin, it was made hard to win subsistence by agriculture. The mediæval
philosophers, being clerics, held a life of contemplation to be far
superior to one of labor or fighting. Labor was at best an evil
necessity, a hardship, a symptom of the case of man, alienated from God
and toiling to get back, if there was a way to get back, to the kingdom
of God. The church offered a way to get back, namely, by sacraments,
devotion, ritual, etc., that is, by a technically religious life, which
could be lived successfully only if practiced exclusively. It occupied
all the time of the "religious," technically so called. Labor was used
for penance and for ascetic purposes. Often it was employed for useful
results and with beneficial effect on useful arts. The purpose, however,
was to ward off the vices of leisure. The ascetic temper and taste made
labor sweet, so long as asceticism ruled the mores of the age.[368]
Labor for economic production was not appreciated by the church. The
production of wealth was not a religious purpose. It was even
discouraged, since disapproval of wealth and luxury was one of the deep
controlling principles of mediæval Christianity. The unreality of
mediæval world philosophy appeared most distinctly in the views of
marriage and labor, the two chief interests of everyday life. Marriage
was a concession, a compromise with human weakness. There was something
better, viz. celibacy. Labor was a base necessity. Contemplation was
better.
+160. Labor has always existed.+ +Wealth became possible.+ +Land.+ In
all these cases the view of labor was dogmatic. It was enjoined by
religion. There was some sense and truth in each view, but each was
incomplete. The pursuit of gainful effort is as old as the existence of
man on earth. The development of trade and transportation, slavery,
political security, and the invention of money and credit are steps in
it which have made possible large operations, great gains, and wealth.
Some men have seized these chances and have made a powerful class.
Rulers, chiefs, and medicine men have observed this power which might
either enhance or supplant their own, and have sought to win it. In all
primitive agricultural societies land is the only possession which can
yield a large annual revenue for comfort and power. The mediæval people
of all classes got as much of it as they could. It would be very
difficult indeed to mention any time when there were no rich men, and
still harder to mention a time when the power of wealth was not admired
and envied, and given its sway (sec. 150). Thus the religions and
philosophies may have preached various doctrines about wealth, and may
have found obedience, but the production of wealth, the love of wealth,
and the power of wealth have run through all human history. The
religions and philosophies have not lacked their effect, but they have
always had to compromise with facts, just as we see them do to-day. The
compromise has been in the mores. In so far as it was imperfect and only
partly effected there have been contradictions in the mores. Such was
the case in the Middle Ages. Wealth had great power. It at last won the
day. In the fifteenth century all wanted it, and were ready to do
anything to get it. Venality became the leading trait of the mores of
the age. It affected the interpretation of the traditional doctrines of
labor, wealth, the highest good, and of virtue, so that men of high
purpose and honest hearts were carried away while professing disregard
of wealth and luxury.
+161. Modern view of labor.+ It is only in the most recent times, and
imperfectly as yet, that labor has been recognized as a blessing, or, at
worst, as a necessity which has great moral and social compensations,
and which, if rightly understood and wisely used, brings joy and
satisfaction. This can only be true, however, when labor is crowned by
achievement, and that is when it is productive of wealth. Labor for the
sake of labor is sport. It has its limits, and lies outside of the
struggle for existence, which is real, and is not play. Labor in the
struggle for existence is irksome and painful, and is never happy or
reasonably attractive except when it produces results. To glorify labor
and decry wealth is to multiply absurdities. The modern man is set in a
new dilemma. The father labors, wins, and saves that his son may have
wealth and leisure. Only too often the son finds his inheritance a
curse. Where is the error? Shall the fathers renounce their labors?
+162. Movable capital in modern society.+ +Conditions of equality.+
+Present temporary status of the demand for men.+ In modern times
movable capital has been immensely developed and even fixed capital has
been made mobile by the joint-stock device. It has disputed and largely
defeated the social power of land property. It has become the social
power. While land owners possessed the great social advantage, they
could form a class of hereditary nobles. The nobles now disappear
because their social advantage is gone. The modern financiers, masters
of industry, merchants, and transporters now hold control of movable
capital. They hold social and political power. They have not yet formed
a caste of nobles, but they may do so. They may, by intermarriages,
absorb the remnants of the old nobility and limit their marriages
further to their own set. It is thus that classes form and reform, as
new groups in the society get possession of new elements of social
power, because power produces results. The dogmas of philosophers deal
with what ought to be. What is and shall be is determined by the forces
at work. No forces appear which make men equal. Temporary conditions
occur under which no forces are at work which any one can seize upon.
Then no superiority tells, and all are approximately equal. Such
conditions exist in a new colony or state, or whenever the ratio of
population to land is small. If we take into account the reflex effect
of the new countries on Europe, it is easy to see that the whole
civilized world has been under these conditions for the last two hundred
or three hundred years. The effect of the creation of an immense stock
of movable capital, of the opportunities in commerce and industry
offered to men of talent, of the immense aid of science to industry, of
the opening of new continents and the peopling of them by the poorest
and worst in Europe, has been to produce modern mores. All our popular
faiths, hopes, enjoyments, and powers are due to these great changes in
the conditions of life. The new status makes us believe in all kinds of
rosy doctrines about human welfare, and about the struggle for existence
and the competition of life; it also gives us all our contempt for
old-fashioned kings and nobles, creates democracies, and brings forth
new social classes and gives them power. For the time being things are
so turned about that numbers are a source of power. Men are in demand,
and an increase in their number increases their value. Why then should
we not join in dithyrambic oratory, and set all our mores to optimism?
The reason is because the existing status is temporary and the
conditions in it are evanescent. That men should be in demand on the
earth is a temporary and passing status of the conjuncture which makes
things now true which in a wider view are delusive. These facts,
however, will not arrest the optimism, the self-confidence, the joy in
life, and the eagerness for the future, of the masses of to-day.
+163. Effect of the facility of winning wealth.+ All the changes in
conditions of life in the last four hundred years have refashioned the
mores and given modern society new ideas, standards, codes,
philosophies, and religions. Nothing acts more directly on the mores
than the facility with which great numbers of people can accumulate
wealth by industry. If it is difficult to do so, classes become fixed
and stable. Then there will be an old and stiff aristocracy which will
tolerate no upstarts, and other classes will settle into established
gradations of dependence. The old Russian boyars were an example of such
an aristocracy. Certain mediæval cities ran into this form. In it the
mores of conservatism are developed,--unchangeable manners, fixed usages
and ideas, unenlightenment, refusal of new ideas, subserviency of the
lower classes, and sycophancy. The government is suspicious and cruel.
If it is easily possible to gain wealth, a class of upstart rich men
arises who, in a few years, must be recognized by the aristocracy,
because they possess financial power and are needed. Struggles and civil
wars may occur, as in the Italian cities, during this change, and the
old aristocracy may long hold aloof from the new. In time, the new men
win their way. The history of every state in Europe proves it. Old
fortunes decay and old families die out. The result is inevitable. Laws
and institutions cannot prevent it. Certain mores may have been
recognized as aristocratic and there may be lamentations over their
decline. They are poetic, romantic, and adventurous. Therefore they call
out regret for their loss from those who do not think what would come
back with them if they were recalled. Ethical philosophers may see ample
reason to doubt the benefit of new mores and the vulgarization of
everything. Society cannot stand still, and its movement will run the
course set by the forces which produce it. It must be accepted and
profit must be drawn from it, as best possible.
+164. Chances of acquiring wealth in modern times; effect on modern
mores; speculation involved in any change.+ The effect of the opening of
new continents, the application of new inventions, and the expansion of
commerce has been to make it easy for men with suitable talent to
increase wealth. These changes have cheapened all luxuries, that is,
have reduced them to common necessities. They have made land easily
accessible to all, even the poorest, in the new countries, while
lowering rent in old countries. They have raised wages and raised the
standard of living and comfort. They have lessened the competition of
life throughout civilized nations, and have made the struggle for
existence far less severe. It is the changes in life conditions which
have made slavery impossible and extended humanitarian sympathy. They
have lessened social differentiation (that is, they have democratized),
and they have intensified the industrial organization. In detail, and
for individuals, this has often caused hardship. For the petty
professional and semiprofessional classes it has been made harder to
keep up the externals of a certain social position. For those classes
the standard of living has risen faster than steam has cheapened
luxuries. Discontent, anxiety, care for appearances, desire to impose by
display, envy, and mean social ambition characterize the mores, together
with energy and enterprise. Envy and discontent are amongst the very
strongest traits of modern society. Very often they are only
manifestations of irritated vanity. It is in the nature of things that
classes of men and forms of property shall go through endless
vicissitudes of advantage and disadvantage. Nobody can foresee these and
speculate upon them with success. When it is proposed to "reorganize
society" on any socialistic theory, or on no theory, it should be
noticed that such an enterprise involves a blind speculation on the
vicissitudes of classes and forms of property in the future. "Wealth,
whether in land or money, has been increased by marriages and
inheritances, reduced to fragments by divisions, even in noble families
[in spite of settlements and entails], dissipated by prodigals,
reconstituted by men of economical habits, centupled by industrious and
competent men of enterprise, scattered by the indolent, the unfortunate,
and the men of bad judgment, who have risked it unwisely. Political
events have affected it as well as the favor of princes, advantageous
offices in the state, popular revolts, wars, confiscations, from the
abolition of serfdom in the fourteenth century until the abolition, in
1790, of the dues known as feudal, although they were, for the most
part, owned by members of the bourgeoisie."[369] So it will be in the
future, in spite of all that men can do. If two men had the same sum of
money in 1200, and one bought land while the other became a money
lender, anywhere in western Europe, the former would to-day be more or
less rich according to the position of his land. He might be a great
millionaire. The other would have scarcely anything left.[370] Shall we
then all buy land now? Let those do so who can foresee the course of
values in the next seven hundred years. The popular notion is that
nobles have always owned land. The truth is that men who have acquired
wealth have bought land and got themselves ennobled. In France, "in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nineteen twentieths of those who
were called nobles were middle-class men enriched, decorated, and
possessed of land."[371] The middle class in western Europe has been
formed out of the labor class within seven hundred years. The whole
middle class, therefore, represents the successful rise of the serfs,
but, since a labor class still remains, it is asserted that there has
been no change. On the other hand, there has been a movement of nobles
and middle-class grandees downward into the labor class and the
proletariat. It was said, a few years ago, that a Plantagenet was a
butcher in a suburb of London. It is also asserted that representatives
of great mediæval families are now to be found as small farmers, farm
laborers, or tramps in modern England.[372]
+165. Mores conform to changes in life conditions; great principles;
their value and fate.+ For our purpose it suffices here to notice how
the mores have followed the changes in life conditions, how they have
reacted on the current faiths and philosophies, and how they have
produced ethical notions to justify the mores themselves. They have
produced notions of natural rights and of political philosophy to
support the new institutions. There are thousands in the United States
who believe that every adult male has a natural right to vote, and that
the vote makes the citizen. The doctrine of natural rights has received
some judicial recognition, and it has been more or less accepted and
applied in the constitutions of various states which were established in
the nineteenth century. The American doctrines of 1776 and the French
doctrines of 1789 are carried on and used in stump oratory until they
get in the way of some new popular purpose, but what produced both was
the fact that some new classes had won wealth and economic power and
they wanted political recognition. To get it they had to invent some new
"great principles" to justify their revolt against tradition. That is
the way in which all "great principles" are produced. They are always
made for an exigency. Their usefulness passes with the occasion. The
mores are forever adjusting efforts to circumstances. Sooner or later
they need new great principles. Then they obliterate the old ones. The
old jingle of words no longer wins a response. The doctrine is dead. In
1776 it seemed to every Whig in America that it was a pure axiom to say
that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed. They clung to this as a sacred dogma for over a hundred years,
because it did not affect unfavorably any interest. It is untrue.
Governments get their powers from the historical fact of their
existence. They are all ephemeral, subject to change. When a change
takes place it is controlled by the ideas and interests of the time of
change, when the popular element in self-government may be much greater
than when the constitution was last previously established. In 1898 the
popular will, in the United States, was to take possession of the
Philippine Islands and to become rulers there, not ruled, as the fathers
were in the colonies of 1776. The great doctrine of the source of due
power was quickly trampled under foot. The same fate awaits all the rest
of the "great principles." The doctrine that all men are equal is being
gradually dropped, from its inherent absurdity, and we may at any time
find it expedient to drop the jingle about a government of the people,
by the people, and for the people. It was only good historically to
destroy the doctrine, "Everything for the people; nothing by them."
+166. The French Revolution.+ The French Revolution was due to the fact
that a great change had come about in the distribution of economic power
between classes and in the class mores which correspond to economic
power. All the political institutions of a modern state are conservative
in the sense that they retain and sustain what is and has been, and
resist interference or change. The historical picture is often such that
abuses are maintained and reform seems hopeless, on account of the power
of existing institutions and customs and the depth of convictions of
social welfare which have become traditional. The student of the history
is led to believe that any reform or revolution, as a dissolution of the
inherited system of repression and retention, is worth all that it may
cost. Hence some students of history become believers in "revolution" as
a beneficent social force or engine. In the case of the French
Revolution, the passions which were set loose destroyed the whole social
order, swept away all the institutions, and even destroyed all the
inherited mores. It is evident that this last is what the revolutionists
finally aimed at. The _ancien régime_ came to mean the whole fabric of
the old society, with its codes, standards, and ideas of right, wrong,
the desirable, etc. The revolutionists also undertook to invent new
mores, that is, new codes and standards, new conceptions of things
socially desirable, a new religion, and new notions of civil duty and
responsibility. During the Directory and the Consulate there was a gulf
between the ancient and the new in which there was anarchy of the mores,
even after the civil machinery was repaired and set in operation again.
Napoleon brought back institutions and forms of social order so far as
seemed desirable for his own interest. The historical continuity was
broken and has remained so. Of the _ancien régime_ there can be found
to-day only ruins and relics. Nevertheless, the ancient mores of social
faith and morality, of social well living, of religious duty and family
virtue, are substantially what they were before the great explosion.
This is the last and greatest lesson of the revolution: it is impossible
to abolish the mores and to replace them by new ones rationally
invented. To change a monarchy into a republic is trifling. Individuals
and classes can be guillotined. Institutions can be overturned. Religion
can be abolished or put out of fashion. The mores are in the habits of
the people, and are needed and practiced every day. The revolutionists
ordered changes in the social ritual, and they brought about a disuse of
"monsieur" and "madame." All their innovations in the ritual have fallen
into disuse, and the old fashions have returned, in obedience to common
sense. The new classes have not enjoyed their victory over the old as to
courtesy, social comity, and civil good-fellowship. They have abandoned
it, and have recognized the fact that the old aristocracy had well
solved all matters of this kind. As wealth has increased and artisans
and peasants have gained new powers of production and acquisition, they
have learned to laugh at the civil philosophy and enthusiasm of the
eighteenth-century philosophers, and have ordered their lives, as far as
possible or convenient, on the old aristocratic models. Sansculottism
is inconsistent with respect for productive labor, or with the
accumulation of wealth. No one who can earn great wages or who possesses
wealth will, out of zeal for philosophical doctrines, prefer to live in
squalor and want. The relation of modern mores to new feelings in
respect to labor and trade, and to the accumulation of wealth, are to be
easily perceived from the course of modern revolutions.
+167. Ruling classes.+ +Special privileges.+ +Corruption of the mores.+
In every societal system or order there must be a ruling class or
classes; in other words, a class gets control of any society and
determines its political form or system. The ruling class, therefore,
has the power. Will it not use the power to divert social effort to its
own service and gain? It must be expected to do so, unless it is checked
by institutions which call into action opposing interests and forces.
There is no class which can be trusted to rule society with due justice
to all, not abusing its power for its own interest. The task of
constitutional government is to devise institutions which shall come
into play at the critical periods to prevent the abusive control of the
powers of a state by the controlling classes in it. The ruling classes
in mediæval society were warriors and ecclesiastics, and they used all
their power to aggrandize themselves at the expense of other classes.
Modern society is ruled by the middle class. In honor of the bourgeoisie
it must be said that they have invented institutions of civil liberty
which secure to all safety of person and property. They have not,
therefore, made a state for themselves alone or chiefly, and their state
is the only one in which no class has had to fear oppressive use of
political power. The history of the nineteenth century, however, plainly
showed the power of capital in the modern state. Special legislation,
charters, and franchises proved to be easy legislative means of using
the powers of the state for the pecuniary benefit of the few. In the
first half of the century, in the United States, banks of issue were
used to an extravagant pitch for private interest. The history is
disgraceful, and it is a permanent degradation of popular government
that power could not be found, or did not exist, in the system to
subjugate this abuse and repress this corruption of state power. The
protective-tariff system is simply an elaborate system by which certain
interests inside of a country get control of legislation in order to tax
their fellow-citizens for their own benefit. Some of the victims claim
to be taken "into the steal," and if they can make enough trouble for
the clique in power, they can force their own admission. That only
teaches all that the great way to succeed in the pursuit of wealth is to
organize a steal of some kind and get inside of it. The pension system
in the United States is an abuse which has escaped from control. There
is no longer any attempt to cope with it. It is the share of the "common
man" in the great system of public plunder. "Graft" is only a proof of
the wide extent to which this lesson to get into the steal is learned.
It only shows that the corrupt use of legislation and political power
has affected the mores. Every one must have his little sphere of plunder
and especial advantage. This conviction and taste becomes so current
that it affects all new legislation. The legislators do not doubt that
it is reasonable and right to enact laws which provide favor for special
interests, or to practice legislative strikes on insurance companies,
railroads, telephone companies, etc. They laugh at remonstrance as out
of date and "unpractical." The administrators of life-insurance
companies, savings banks, trusts, etc., proceed on the belief that men
in positions of power and control will use their positions for their own
advantage. They think that that is only common sense. "What else are we
here for?" It is the supreme test of a system of government whether its
machinery is adequate for repressing the selfish undertakings of cliques
formed on special interests and saving the public from raids of
plunderers. The modern democratic states fail under this test. There is
not a great state in the world which was not democratized in the
nineteenth century. There is not one of them which did not have great
financial scandals before the century closed. Financial scandal is the
curse of all the modern parliamentary states with a wide suffrage. They
give liberty and security, with open chances for individual enterprise,
from which results great individual satisfaction and happiness, but the
political machinery offers opportunities for manipulation and corrupt
abuse. They educate their citizens to seek advantages in the industrial
organization by legislative devices, and to use them to the uttermost.
The effect is seen in the mores. We hear of plutocracy and tainted
money, of the power of wealth, and the wickedness of corporations. The
disease is less specific. It is constitutional. The critics are as
subject to it as the criticised. A disease of the mores is a disease of
public opinion as to standards, codes, ideas of truth and right, and of
things worth working for and means of success. Such a disease affects
everybody. It penetrates and spoils every institution. It spreads from
generation to generation, and at last it destroys in the masses the
power of ethical judgment.
+168. The standard of living.+ One of the purest of all the products of
current mores is the standard of living. It belongs to a subgroup and is
a product of the mores of a subgroup. It has been called a psychological
or ethical product, which view plainly is due to an imperfect analysis
or classification. The standard of living is the measure of decency and
suitability in material comfort (diet, dress, dwelling, etc.) which is
traditional and habitual in a subgroup. It is often wise and necessary
to disregard the social standard of comfort, because it imposes foolish
expenses and contemptible ostentation, but it is very difficult to
disregard the social standard of comfort. The standard is upheld by fear
of social disapproval, if one derogates from class "respectability." The
disapproval or contempt of one's nearest associates is the sanction. The
standards and code of respectability are in the class mores. They get
inside of the mind and heart of members of the class, and betray each to
the class demands.
+169.+ If, however, the standard of living which one has inherited from
his class is adopted as an individual standard, and is made the object
of effort and self-denial, the individual and social results are of
high value. One man said, "Live like a hog and you will behave like
one"; to which another replied, "Behave like a hog and you will live
like one." Both were right in about equal measure. The social standard
of a class acts like honor. It sustains self-respect and duty to self
and family. The pain which is produced by derogation produces effort and
self-denial. The social standard may well call out and concentrate all
there is in a man to work for his social welfare. Evidently the
standard of living never can do more than that. It never can add
anything to the forces in a man's own character and attainments.
[366] Prov. xxiv. 30.
[367] _Jewish Encyc._, s.v. "Labor." The same view is found in 2
Thess. iii. 10, and Eph. iv. 28.
[368] Thomas Aquinas, _Summa_, II, 2, qu. 82, 1, 2; qu. 187, 3.
[369] D'Avenel, _Hist. Econ._, 142.
[370] D'Avenel, 397.
[371] D'Avenel, 144.
[372] Hardy used this fact in _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.