THE OLD SELF-INTEREST
The corn of the coming harvest is growing so fast that, like the farmer
standing at night in his fields, we can hear it snap and crackle.
We have been fighting fire on the well-worn lines of old-fashioned
politics and political economy, regulating corporations, and leaving
competition to regulate itself. But the flames of a new economic
evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has
killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the
State and have bred individuals greater than themselves, and that the
naked issue of our time is with property becoming master instead of
servant, property in many necessaries of life becoming monopoly of the
necessaries of life.
We are still, in part, as Emerson says, in the quadruped state. Our
industry is a fight of every man for himself. The prize we give the
fittest is monopoly of the necessaries of life, and we leave these
winners of the powers of life and death to wield them over us by the
same "self-interest" with which they took them from us. In all this
we see at work a "principle" which will go into the records as one of
the historic mistakes of humanity. Institutions stand or fall by their
philosophy, and the main doctrine of industry since Adam Smith has been
the fallacy that the self-interest of the individual was a sufficient
guide to the welfare of the individual and society. Heralded as a final
truth of "science" this proves to have been nothing higher than a
temporary formula for a passing problem. It was a reflection in words
of the policy of the day.
When the Middle Ages landed on the shores of the sixteenth century
they broke ranks, and for three hundred years every one has been
scurrying about to get what he could. Society was not highly developed
enough to organize the exploration and subjugation of worlds of new
things and ideas on any broader basis than private enterprise, personal
adventure. People had to run away from each other and from the old
ideas, nativities, guilds, to seize the prizes of the new sciences, the
new land, the new liberties which make modern times. They did not go
because the philosophers told them to. The philosophers saw them going
and wrote it down in a book, and have believed themselves ever since to
be the inventors of the division of labor and the discoverers of a new
world of social science. But now we are touching elbows again, and the
dream of these picnic centuries that the social can be made secondary
to the individual is being chased out of our minds by the hard light of
the crisis into which we are waking.
"It is a law of business for each proprietor to pursue his own
interest," said the committee of Congress which in 1893 investigated
the coal combinations. "There is no hope for any of us, but the
weakest must go first," is the golden rule of business.[769] There is
no other field of human associations in which any such rule of action
is allowed. The man who should apply in his family or his citizenship
this "survival of the fittest" theory as it is practically professed
and operated in business would be a monster, and would be speedily
made extinct, as we do with monsters. To divide the supply of food
between himself and his children according to their relative powers of
calculation, to follow his conception of his own self-interest in any
matter which the self-interest of all has taken charge of, to deal as
he thinks best for himself with foreigners with whom his country is at
war, would be a short road to the penitentiary or the gallows. In trade
men have not yet risen to the level of the family life of the animals.
The true law of business is that all must pursue the interest of all.
In the law, the highest product of civilization, this has long been a
commonplace. The safety of the people is the supreme law. We are in
travail to bring industry up to this. Our century of the caprice of the
individual as the law-giver of the common toil, to employ or disemploy,
to start or stop, to open or close, to compete or combine, has been
the disorder of the school while the master slept. The happiness,
self-interest, or individuality of the whole is not more sacred than
that of each, but it is greater. They are equal in quality, but in
quantity they are greater. In the ultimate which the mathematician, the
poet, the reformer projects the two will coincide.
Our world, operated by individual motive, is the country of the
Chinese fable, in which the inhabitants went on one leg. Yes, but an
"enlightened self-interest"? The perfect self-interest of the perfect
individual is an admirable conception, but it is still individual,
and the world is social. The music of the spheres is not to be played
on one string. Nature does nothing individually. All forces are
paired like the sexes, and every particle of matter in the universe
has to obey every other particle. When the individual has progressed
to a perfect self-interest, there will be over against it, acting
and reacting with it, a correspondingly perfect self-interest of the
community. Meanwhile, we who are the creators of society have got
the times out of joint, because, less experienced than the Creator
of the balanced matter of earth, we have given the precedence to the
powers on one side. As gods we are but half-grown. For a hundred
years or so our economic theory has been one of industrial government
by the self-interest of the individual. Political government by the
self-interest of the individual we call anarchy. It is one of the
paradoxes of public opinion that the people of America, least tolerant
of this theory of anarchy in political government, lead in practising
it in industry. Politically, we are civilized; industrially, not yet.
Our century, given to this _laissez-faire_--"leave the individual
alone; he will do what is best for himself, and what is best for him is
best for all"--has done one good: it has put society at the mercy of
its own ideals, and has produced an actual anarchy in industry which is
horrifying us into a change of doctrines.
We have not been able to see the people for the persons in it. But
there is a people, and it is as different from a mere juxtaposition
of persons as a globe of glass from the handful of sand out of which
it was melted. It is becoming, socially, known to itself, with that
self-consciousness which distinguishes the quick from the dead and the
unborn. Every community, said Pascal, is a man, and every man, said
Plato, is a community. There is a new self-interest--that of the "man
called million," as Mazzini named him--and with this social motive the
other, which has so long had its own way, has now to reckon. Mankind
has gone astray following a truth seen only partially, but coronated
as a whole truth. Many civilizations must worship good men as gods
and follow the divinity of one and another before civilization sees
that these are only single stars in a firmament of humanity. Our
civilization has followed the self-interest of the individual to learn
that it was but one of the complex forces of self-interest.
The true _laissez-faire_ is, let the individual do what the individual
can do best, and let the community do what the community can do best.
The _laissez-faire_ of social self-interest, if true, cannot conflict
with the individual self-interest, if true, but it must outrank it
always. What we have called "free competition" has not been free, only
freer than what went before. The free is still to come. The pressure
we feel is notice to prepare for it. Civilization--the process of
making men citizens in their relations to each other, by exacting of
each that he give to all that which he receives from all--has reached
only those forms of common effort which, because most general and most
vital, first demanded its harmonizing touch. Men joining in the labors
of the family, the mutual sacrifices of the club or the church in the
union of forces for self-defence and for the gains of co-operation on
the largest scale in labors of universal concern, like letter-carrying,
have come to be so far civilized.
History is condensed in the catchwords of the people. In the phrases of
individual self-interest which have been the shibboleths of the main
activities of our last hundred years were prophesied: the filling up of
the Mississippi by the forest-destroying, self-seeking lumber companies
of the North; the disintegration of the American family--among the rich
by too little poverty, and among the poor by too much; the embezzlement
of public highways and public franchises into private property; the
devolution of the American merchants and manufacturers into the
business dependants--and social and political dependants, therefore--of
a few men in each great department of trade, from dry-goods to whiskey;
the devolution of the free farmer into a tenant, and of the working-man
into a fixture of the locomotive or the factory, forbidden to leave
except by permission of his employer or the public; and that mêlée of
injunctions, bayonets, idle men and idle machinery, rich man's fear of
poor man and poor man's fear of starvation, we call trade and industry.
Where the self-interest of the individual is allowed to be the rule
both of social and personal action, the level of all is forced down
to that of the lowest. Business excuses itself for the things it
does--cuts in wages, exactions in hours, tricks of competition--on
the plea that the merciful are compelled to follow the cruel. "It is
pleaded as an excuse by those" (common carriers) "who desire to obey
the" (Interstate Commerce) "law that self-preservation drives them to
violate it because other carriers persist in doing so," says Senator
Cullom. When the self-interest of society is made the standard the
lowest must rise to the average. The one pulls down, the other up. That
men's hearts are bad and that bad men will do bad things has a truth
in it. But whatever the general average of morals, the anarchy which
gives such individuals their head and leaves them to set the pace for
all will produce infinitely worse results than a policy which applies
mutual checks and inspirations. Bad kings make bad reigns, but monarchy
is bad because it is arbitrary power, and that, whether it be political
or industrial, makes even good men bad.
A partial truth universally applied as this of self-interest has been
is a universal error. Everything goes to defeat. Highways are used to
prevent travel and traffic. Ownership of the means of production is
sought in order to "shut down" production, and the means of plenty
make famine. All follow self-interest to find that though they have
created marvellous wealth it is not theirs. We pledge "our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor" to establish the rule of the majority,
and end by finding that the minority--a minority in morals, money, and
men--are our masters whichever way we turn. We agonize over "economy,"
but sell all our grain and pork and oil and cotton at exchanges where
we pay brokerage on a hundred or a thousand barrels or bushels or bales
of wind to get one real one sold. These intolerabilities--sweat-shops
where model merchants buy and sell the cast-off scarlet-fever skins
of the poor, factory and mine where childhood is forbidden to become
manhood and manhood is forbidden to die a natural death, mausoleums in
which we bury the dead rich, slums in which we bury the living poor,
coal pools with their manufacture of artificial winter--all these are
the rule of private self-interest arrived at its destination.
A really human life is impossible in our cities, but they cannot be
reconstructed under the old self-interest. Chicago was rebuilt wrong
after the fire. Able men pointed out the avenues to a wider and better
municipal life, but they could not be opened through the private
interpositions that blocked the way. The slaughter of railway men
coupling cars was shown, in a debate in the United States Senate, to be
twice as great as it would be if the men were in active service in war.
But under the scramble for private gain our society on its railway side
cannot develop the energy to introduce the improved appliances ready to
hand which would save these lives, all young and vigorous. The cost of
the change would be repaid in 100-per-cent. dividends every year by the
money value alone to us of the men now killed and wounded. But we shall
have to wait for a nobler arithmetic to give us investments so good as
that. The lean kine of self-interest devour the fat kine. The railroad
stockholder, idolater of self-interest, lets himself be robbed--like
the stockholder of all the railroads in this story--either because he
is too rich to mind, too feeble to make himself heard, or too much
implicated elsewhere as principal in the same kind of depredation to
care or dare to stir what he knows to be a universal scandal. He has
become within himself the battle-ground of a troop of warring devils of
selfishness; his selfishness as a stockholder clutched at the throat by
his selfishness as a parasite, in some "inside deal," feeding on the
stockholder; some rebate arrangement, fast-freight line, sleeping-car
company, or what not. And, as like as not, upon this one's back is
another devil of depredation from some inner ring within a ring. Torn
at the vitals, the enlightened swinishness of our _leit-motif_ is
hastening to throw itself into the sea.
We are very poor. The striking feature of our economic condition is
our poverty, not our wealth. We make ourselves "rich" by appropriating
the property of others by methods which lessen the total property of
all. Spain took such riches from America and grew poor. Modern wealth
more and more resembles the winnings of speculators in bread during
famine--worse, for to make the money it makes the famine. What we
call cheapness shows itself to be unnatural fortunes for a very few,
monstrous luxury for them and proportionate deprivation for the people,
judges debauched, trustees dishonored, Congress and State legislatures
insulted and defied, when not seduced, multitudes of honest men ruined
and driven to despair, the common carrier made a mere instrument for
the creation of a new baronage, an example set to hundreds of would-be
commercial Cæsars to repeat this rapine in other industries and call it
"business," a process set in operation all over the United States for
the progressive extinction of the independence of laboring men, and all
business men except the very rich, and their reduction to a state of
vassalage to lords or squires in each department of trade and industry.
All these--tears, ruin, dishonor, and treason--are the unmarked
additions to the "price marked on the goods."
Shall we buy cheap of Captain Kidd, and shut our ears to the agony
that rustles in his silks? Shall we believe that Captain Kidd, who
kills commerce by the act which enables him to sell at half-price, is
a cheapener? Shall we preach and practise doctrines which make the
Black Flag the emblem of success on the high seas of human interchange
of service, and complain when we see mankind's argosies of hope and
plenty shrink into private hoards of treasure, buried in selfish sands
to be lost forever, even to cupidity? If this be cheapness, it comes
by the grace of the seller, and that is the first shape of dearness,
as security in society by the grace of the ruler is the first form of
insecurity.
The new wealth now administers estates of fabulous extent from
metropolitan bureaus, and all the profits flow to men who know
nothing of the real business out of which they are made. Red tape,
complication, the hired man, conspiracy have taken the place of the
watchful eye of the owner, the old-fashioned hand at the plough that
must "hold or drive." We now have Captains of Industry, with a few
aids, rearranging from office-chairs this or that industry, by mere
contrivances of wit compelling the fruits of the labor of tens of
thousands of their fellows, who never saw them, never heard of them,
to be every day deposited unwilling and unwitting to their own credit
at the bank; setting, as by necromancy, hundreds of properties, large
and small, in a score of communities, to flying through invisible
ways into their hands; sitting calm through all the hubbub raised in
courts, legislatures, and public places, and by dictating letters
and whispering words remaining the master magicians of the scene;
defying, though private citizens, all the forces and authorities of a
whole people; by the mere mastery of compelling brain, without putting
hand to anything, opening or closing the earth's treasures of oil or
coal or gas or copper or what not; pulling down or putting up great
buildings, factories, towns themselves; moving men and their money this
way and that; inserting their will as part of the law of life of the
people--American, European, and Asiatic--and, against the protest of
a whole civilization, making themselves, their methods and principles,
its emblematic figures.
Syndicates, by one stroke, get the power of selling dear on one side,
and producing cheap on the other. Thus they keep themselves happy,
prices high, and the people hungry. What model merchant could ask
more? The dream of the king who wished that all his people had but one
neck that he might decapitate them at one blow is realized to-day in
this industrial garrote. The syndicate has but to turn its screw, and
every neck begins to break. Prices paid to such intercepters are not
an exchange of service; they are ransom paid by the people for their
lives. The ability of the citizen to pay may fluctuate; what he must
pay remains fixed, or advances like the rent of the Irish tenant to the
absentee landlord until the community interfered. Those who have this
power to draw the money from the people--from every railroad station,
every street-car, every fireplace, every salt-cellar, every bread-pan,
wash-board, and coal-scuttle--to their own safes have the further
incentive to make this money worth the most possible. By contracting
the issue of currency and contracting it again by hoarding it in their
banks, safe-deposit vaults, and the government treasury, they can
depress the prices of all that belongs to the people. Their own prices
are fixed. These are "regular prices," established by price-lists.
Given, as a ruling motive, the principles of business--to get the
most and give the least; given the legal and economic, physical and
mechanical control, possible under our present social arrangements, to
the few over the many, and the certain end of all this, if unarrested,
unreversed, can be nothing less than a return to chattel slavery. There
may be some finer name, but the fact will not be finer. Between our
present tolerance and our completed subjection the distance is not so
far as that from the equality and simplicity of our Pilgrim Fathers to
ourselves.
Everything withers--even charity. Aristocratic benevolence spends
a shrunken stream in comparison with democratic benevolence. In an
address to the public, soliciting subscriptions, the Committee of the
United Hospitals Association of New York said, in December, 1893: "The
committee have found that, through the obliteration of old methods of
individual competition by the establishment of large corporations and
trusts in modern times, the income of such charitable institutions
as are supported by the individual gifts of the benevolent has been
seriously affected."
Franklin pricked the bubble of the lottery by showing that to buy all
the tickets and win all the prizes was to be most surely the loser. Our
nascent common-sense begins to see that the many must always lose where
all spend their lives trying to get more than they give, and that all
lose when any lose. The welfare of all is more than the welfare of the
many, the few, or the one. If the few or the one are not fine enough
to accept this truth from sentiment or conscience, they can find other
reasons as convincing, though not as amiable. From the old régime of
France, the slave-holders of the South, the death-rate of tyrants,
the fear of their brothers which the rich and the great of to-day are
printing on their faces, in fugitive-slave treaties with Russia, and in
the frowning arsenals and armories building in our cities for "law and
order," they can learn how to spell self-interest.
If all will sacrifice themselves, none need be sacrificed. But if one
may sacrifice another, all are sacrificed. That is the difference
between self-interest and other-self interest. In industry we have
been substituting all the mean passions that can set man against man
in place of the irresistible power of brotherhood. To tell us of the
progressive sway of brotherhood in all human affairs is the sole
message of history. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is not the phrase
of a ritual of sentiment for the unapplied emotion of pious hours;
it is the exact formula of the force to-day operating the greatest
institutions man has established. It is as secular as sacred. Only
by each neighbor giving the other every right of free thought, free
movement, free representation which he demands for himself; only by
calling every neighbor a friend, and literally laying down his life
for his friend against foreign invasion or domestic tumult; only by
the equalization which gives the vote to all and denies kingship to
all, however strong or "fittest"--only thus is man establishing the
community, the republic, which, with all its failings, is the highest
because the realest application of the spirit of human brotherhood.
Wonderful are the dividends of this investment. You are but one, and
can give only yourself to America. You give free speech, and 65,000,000
of your countrymen will guard the freedom of your lips. Your single
offer of your right arm puts 65,000,000 of sheltering arms about you.
Does "business" pay such profits? Wealth will remain a secret unguessed
by business until it has reincorporated itself under the law which
reckons as the property of each one the total of all the possessions of
all his neighbors.
Society could not live a day, the Bishop of Peterborough said, if
it put the principles of Christ into practice. There is no rarer
gift than that of eyes to see what we see. Society is society, and
lives its day solely by virtue of having put into actual routine and
matter-of-fact application the principles of Christ and other bringers
of the same message. Imperfect and faulty though the execution, it is
these principles which are the family, the tribe, the sect, the club,
the mutual-benefit society, the State, with their mutual services,
forbearance, and guarantees. The principles of Christ are the cause
and essence of society. They are not the ideal of which we dream; they
are the applied means with which we are working out our real life in
"the light of common day." They have not been so much revealed to us
by our inspired ones as best seen and best said by them. Insurance for
fire, accident, sickness, old age, death--the ills that flesh is heir
to--has the same co-operation for its innermost forces. Limited now by
the intervention of the selfishness of profit-seeking, it needs only to
be freed from this, and added, as in New Zealand, to the growing list
of the mutualities of the general welfare operated by the State to be
seen as what it is. The golden rule is the original of every political
constitution, written and unwritten, and all our reforms are but the
pains with which we strive to improve the copy.
In the worst governments and societies that have existed one good can
be seen--so good that the horrors of them fall back into secondary
places as extrinsic, accidental. That good is the ability of men to
lead the life together. The more perfect monopoly makes itself the more
does it bring into strong lights the greatest fact of our industry, of
far more permanent value than the greed which has for the moment made
itself the cynosure of all eyes. It makes this fair world more fair to
consider the loyalties, intelligences, docilities of the multitudes who
are guarding, developing, operating with the faithfulness of brothers
and the keen interest of owners properties and industries in which
brotherhood is not known and their title is not more than a tenancy at
will. One of the largest stones in the arch of "consolidation," perhaps
the key-stone, is that men have become so intelligent, so responsive
and responsible, so co-operative that they can be intrusted in great
masses with the care of vast properties owned entirely by others and
with the operation of complicated processes, although but a slender
cost of subsistence is awarded them out of fabulous profits. The
spectacle of the million and more employés of the railroads of this
country despatching trains, maintaining tracks, collecting fares and
freights, and turning over hundreds of millions of net profits to the
owners, not one in a thousand of whom would know how to do the simplest
of these things for himself, is possible only where civilization
has reached a high average of morals and culture. More and more the
mills and mines and stores, and even the farms and forests, are being
administered by others than the owners. The virtue of the people is
taking the place Poor Richard thought only the eye of the owner could
fill. If mankind, driven by their fears and the greed of others, can do
so well, what will be their productivity and cheer when the "interest
of all" sings them to their work?
This new morality and new spring of wealth have been seized first
by the appropriating ones among us. But, as has been in government,
their intervention of greed is but a passing phase. Mankind belongs
to itself, not to kings or monopolists, and will supersede the one as
surely as the other with the institutions of democracy. Yes, Callicles,
said Socrates, the greatest are usually the bad, for they have the
power. If power could continue paternal and benign, mankind would not
be rising through one emancipation after another into a progressive
communion of equalities. The individual and society will always be
wrestling with each other in a composition of forces. But to just
the extent to which civilization prevails, society will be held as
inviolable as the individual; not subordinate--indeed inaudible--as
now in the counting-room and corporation-office. We have overworked
the self-interest of the individual. The line of conflict between
individual and social is a progressive one of the discovery of point
after point in which the two are identical. Society thus passes from
conflict to harmony, and on to another conflict. Civilization is the
unceasing accretion of these social solutions. We fight out to an
equilibrium, as in the abolition of human slavery; then upon this new
level thus built up we enter upon the struggle for a new equilibrium,
as now in the labor movement. The man for himself destroys himself and
all men; only society can foster him and them.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is only the doctrine of
self-interest writ large and made more dangerous by multitude. It is
the self-interest of the majority, and this has written some of the
unloveliest chapters of history. There have never been slaves more
miserable than those of Sparta, where the State was the owner. American
democracy prepares to repeat these distresses of the selfishness of
the many, and gives notice to its railway employés of a new divine
right--"the convenience of the public"--to which they must forego every
right of manhood. No better definition of slave could be found than
one who must work at the convenience of another. This is the position
into which recent legal decisions and acts of the Federal executive
force railway men. These speak in the name of Interstate Commerce, but
their logic can be as easily applied by State judges to State commerce,
and all working-men are manifestly as necessary, each in his function,
to the convenience of the public as the men of the rail. The greatest
happiness of all must be the formula. When Lamennais said, "I love my
family more than myself, my village more than my family, my country
more than my village, and mankind more than my country," he showed
himself not only a good lover, but the only good arithmetician.
Children yet, we run everything we do--love or war, work or leisure,
religion or liberty--to excess. Every possibility of body and mind
must be played upon till it is torn to pieces, as toys by children.
Priests, voluptuaries, tyrants, knights, ascetics--in the long
procession of fanatics a new-comer takes his place; he is called
"the model merchant"--the cruelest fanatic in history. He is the
product of ages given to progressive devotion to "trading." He is the
high-priest of the latest idolatry, the self-worship of self-interest.
Whirling-dervish of the market, self, friends, and family, body and
soul, loves, hopes, and faith, all are sacrificed to seeing how many
"turns" he can make before he drops dead. Trade began, Sir Henry Sumner
Maine tells us, not within the family or community, but without. Its
first appearances are on the neutral borderland between hostile tribes.
There, in times of peace, they meet to trade, and think it no sin
that "the buyer must beware," since the buyer is an enemy. Trade has
spread thence, carrying with itself into family and State the poison of
enmity. From the fatherhood of the old patriarchal life, where father
and brother sold each other nothing, the world has chaffered along to
the anarchy of a "free" trade which sells everything. One thing after
another has passed out from under the régime of brotherhood and passed
in under that of bargainhood. The ground we move on, the bodies we
work with, and the necessaries we live by are all being "exchanged,"
by "rules fetched with cupidity from heartless schools," into the
ownership of the Jacobs of mankind. By these rules the cunning are
the good, and the weak and the tender the bad, and the good are to
have all the goods and the weak are to have nothing. These rules give
one the power to supply or deny work to thousands, and to use the
starvation terms of the men he disemploys as the measure of the cost
of subsistence of all workmen. This must be near the end. The very
churches have become mercantilized, and are markets in which "prophets"
are paid fancy prices--"always called of God," as Milton said, "but
always to a greater benefice"--and worshippers buy and sell knee-room.
Conceptions of duty take on a correspondingly unnatural complexion.
The main exhortations the world gives beginners are how to "get
on"--the getting on so ardently inculcated being to get, like the
old-man-of-the-sea, on somebody's back. "If war fails you in the
country where you are, you must go where there is war," said one of the
successful men of the fourteenth century to a young knight who asked
him for the Laws of Life. "I shall be perfectly satisfied with you," I
heard one of the great business geniuses of America say to his son, "if
you will only always go to bed at night worth more than when you got up
in the morning." The system grows, as all systems do, more complicated,
and gets further away from its first purposes of barter of real things
and services. It goes more under the hands of men of apt selfishness,
who push it further away from general comprehension and the general
good. Tariffs, currencies, finances, freight-rate sheets, the laws,
become instruments of privilege, and just in proportion become puzzles
no people can decipher. "I have a right to buy my labor where I can buy
it cheapest"--beginning as a protest against the selfish exclusions of
antiquated trade-guilds outgrown by the new times--has at last come to
mean, "I have a right to do anything to cheapen the labor I want to
buy, even to destroying the family life of the people."
When steaming kettles grew into beasts of burden and public highways
dwindled into private property administered by private motives for
private ends, all previous tendencies were intensified into a sudden
whirl redistributing wealth and labors. It appears to have been
the destiny of the railroad to begin and of oil to lubricate to its
finish the last stage of this crazy commercialism. Business colors the
modern world as war reddened the ancient world. Out of such delirium
monsters are bred, and their excesses destroy the system that brought
them forth. There is a strong suggestion of moral insanity in the
unrelieved sameness of mood and unvarying repetition of one act in the
life of the model merchant. Sane minds by an irresistible law alternate
one tension with another. Only a lunatic is always smiling or always
weeping or always clamoring for dividends. Eras show their last stages
by producing men who sum up individually the morbid characteristics
of the mass. When the crisis comes in which the gathering tendencies
of generations shoot forward in the avalanche, there is born some
group of men perfect for their function--good be it or bad. They need
to take time for no second thought, and will not delay the unhalting
reparations of nature by so much as the time given to one tear over the
battle-field or the bargain. With their birth their mission is given
them, whether it be the mission of Lucifer or Gabriel. This mission
becomes their conscience. The righteous indignation that other men feel
against sin these men feel against that which withstands them. Sincere
as rattlesnakes, they are selfish with the unconsciousness possible to
only the entirely commonplace, without the curiosity to question their
times or the imagination to conceive the pain they inflict, and their
every ideal is satisfied by the conventionalities of church, parlor,
and counting-room. These men are the touchstones to wither the cant of
an age.
We preach "Do as you would be done by" in our churches, and "A fair
exchange no robbery" in our counting-rooms, and "All citizens are
equal as citizens" in courts and Congress. Just as we are in danger
of believing that to say these things is to do them and be them,
there come unto us these men, practical as granite and gravitation.
Taking their cue not from our lips, but from our lives, they better
the instruction, and, passing easily to the high seats at every table,
prove that we are liars and hypocrites. Their only secret is that they
do, better than we, the things we are all trying to do, but of which in
our morning and evening prayers, seen of all men, we are continually
making believe to pray: Good Lord, deliver us! When the hour strikes
for such leaders, they come and pass as by a law of nature to the
front. All follow them. It is their fate and ours that they must work
out to the end the destiny interwoven of their own insatiate ambition
and the false ideals of us who have created them and their opportunity.
If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will not
be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our
great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power
kings do not know. The forces and the wealth are new, and have been
the opportunity of new men. Without restraints of culture, experience,
the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank, these men,
intoxicated, think they are the wave instead of the float, and that
they have created the business which has created them. To them science
is but a never-ending répertoire of investments stored up by nature for
the syndicates, government but a fountain of franchises, the nations
but customers in squads, and a million the unit of a new arithmetic of
wealth written for them. They claim a power without control, exercised
through forms which make it secret, anonymous, and perpetual. The
possibilities of its gratification have been widening before them
without interruption since they began, and even at a thousand millions
they will feel no satiation and will see no place to stop. They are
gluttons of luxury and power, rough, unsocialized, believing that
mankind must be kept terrorized. Powers of pity die out of them,
because they work through agents and die in their agents, because what
they do is not for themselves.
Of gods, friends, learnings, of the uncomprehended civilization they
overrun, they ask but one question: How much? What is a good time
to sell? What is a good time to buy? The Church and the Capitol,
incarnating the sacrifices and triumphs of a procession of martyrs
and patriots since the dawn of freedom, are good enough for a
money-changer's shop for them, and a market and shambles. Their
heathen eyes see in the law and its consecrated officers nothing but
an intelligence-office and hired men to help them burglarize the
treasures accumulated for thousands of years at the altars of liberty
and justice, that they may burn their marbles for the lime of commerce.
By their windfall of new power they have been forced into the position
of public enemies. Its new forms make them seem not to be within the
jurisdiction of the social restraints which many ages of suffering
have taught us to bind about the old powers of man over man. A fury
of rule or ruin has always in the history of human affairs been a
characteristic of the "strong men" whose fate it is to be in at the
death of an expiring principle. The leaders who, two hundred years ago,
would have been crazy with conquest, to-day are crazy with competition.
To a dying era some man is always born to enfranchise it by revealing
it to itself. Men repay such benefactors by turning to rend them. Most
unhappy is the fate of him whose destiny it is to lead mankind too
far in its own path. Such is the function of these men, such will be
their lot, as that of those for whom they are building up these wizard
wealths.
Poor thinking means poor doing. In casting about for the cause of
our industrial evils, public opinion has successively found it in
"competition," "combination," the "corporations," "conspiracies,"
"trusts." But competition has ended in combination, and our new wealth
takes as it chooses the form of corporation or trust, or corporation
again, and with every change grows greater and worse. Under these
kaleidoscopic masks we begin at last to see progressing to its terminus
a steady consolidation, the end of which is one-man power. The
conspiracy ends in one, and one cannot conspire with himself. When this
solidification of many into one has been reached, we shall be at last
face to face with the naked truth that it is not only the form but the
fact of arbitrary power, of control without consent, of rule without
representation that concerns us.
Business motived by the self-interest of the individual runs into
monopoly at every point it touches the social life--land monopoly,
transportation monopoly, trade monopoly, political monopoly in all
its forms, from contraction of the currency to corruption in office.
The society in which in half a lifetime a man without a penny can
become a hundred times a millionaire is as over-ripe, industrially, as
was, politically, the Rome in which the most popular bully could lift
himself from the ranks of the legion on to the throne of the Cæsars.
Our rising issue is with business. Monopoly is business at the end of
its journey. It has got there. The irrepressible conflict is now as
distinctly with business as the issue so lately met was with slavery.
Slavery went first only because it was the cruder form of business.
Against the principles, and the men embodying them and pushing them
to extremes--by which the powers of government, given by all for all,
are used as franchises for personal aggrandizement; by which, in the
same line, the common toil of all and the common gifts of nature,
lands, forces, mines, sites, are turned from service to selfishness,
and are made by one and the same stroke to give gluts to a few and
impoverishment to the many--we must plan our campaign. The yacht of
the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have
been given to abolishing the slums, and every day it runs the labor
of hundreds of men is withdrawn from the production of helpful things
for humanity, and each of us is equally guilty who directs to his own
pleasure the labor he should turn to the wants of others. Our fanatic
of wealth reverses the rule that serving mankind is the end and wealth
an incident, and has made wealth the end and the service an accident,
until he can finally justify crime itself if it is a means to the
end--wealth--which has come to be the supreme good; and we follow him.
It is an adjudicated fact of the business and social life of America
that to receive the profits of crime and cherish the agents who
commit it does not disqualify for fellowship in the most "solid"
circles--financial, commercial, religious, or social. It illustrates
what Ruskin calls the "morbid" character of modern business that
the history of its most brilliant episodes must be studied in the
vestibules of the penitentiary. The riches of the combinations are
the winnings of a policy which, we have seen, has certain constant
features. Property to the extent of uncounted millions has been changed
from the possession of the many who owned it to the few who hold it:
1. Without the knowledge of the real owners.
2. Without their consent.
3. With no compensation to them for the value taken.
4. By falsehood, often under oath.
5. In violation of the law.
Our civilization is builded on competition, and competition
evolves itself crime--to so acute an infatuation has the lunacy of
self-interest carried our dominant opinion. We are hurried far beyond
the point of not listening to the new conscience which, pioneering in
moral exploration, declares that conduct we think right because called
"trade" is really lying, stealing, murder. "The definite result,"
Ruskin preaches, "of all our modern haste to be rich is assuredly and
constantly the murder of a certain number of persons by our hands every
year." To be unawakened by this new voice is bad enough, but we shut
our ears even against the old conscience.
We cannot deal with this unless we cleanse our hearts of all
disordering rage. "The rarer action is in virtue rather than in
vengeance." Our tyrants are our ideals incarnating themselves in men
born to command. What these men are we have made them. All governments
are representative governments; none of them more so than our
government of industry. We go hopelessly astray if we seek the solution
of our problems in the belief that our business rulers are worse men in
kind than ourselves. Worse in degree; yes. It is a race to the bad, and
the winners are the worst. A system in which the prizes go to meanness
invariably marches with the meanest men at the head. But if any could
be meaner than the meanest it would be they who run and fail and rail.
Every idea finds its especially susceptible souls. These men are
our most susceptible souls to the idea of individual self-interest.
They have believed implicitly what we have taught, and have been the
most faithful in trying to make the talent given them grow into ten
talents. They rise superior to our half-hearted social corrections:
publicity, private competition, all devices of market-opposition,
private litigation, public investigation, legislation, and criminal
prosecution--all. Their power is greater to-day than it was yesterday,
and will be greater to-morrow. The public does not withhold its favor,
but deals with them, protects them, refuses to treat their crimes as it
treats those of the poor, and admits them to the highest places. The
predominant mood is the more or less concealed regret of the citizens
that they have not been able to conceive and execute the same lucky
stroke or some other as profitable. The conclusion is irresistible that
men so given the lead are the representatives of the real "spirit of
the age," and that the protestants against them are not representative
of our times--are at the best but intimators of times which may be.
Two social energies have been in conflict, and the energy of reform has
so far proved the weaker. We have chartered the self-interest of the
individual as the rightful sovereign of conduct; we have taught that
the scramble for profit is the best method of administering the riches
of earth and the exchange of services. Only those can attack this
system who attack its central principle, that strength gives the strong
in the market the right to destroy his neighbor. Only as we have denied
that right to the strong elsewhere have we made ourselves as civilized
as we are. And we cannot make a change as long as our songs, customs,
catchwords, and public opinions tell all to do the same thing if they
can. Society, in each person of its multitudes, must recognize that the
same principles of the interest of all being the rule of all, of the
strong serving the weak, of the first being the last--"I am among you
as one that serves"--which have given us the home where the weakest
is the one surest of his rights and of the fullest service of the
strongest, and have given us the republic in which all join their labor
that the poorest may be fed, the weakest defended, and all educated
and prospered, must be applied where men associate in common toil as
wherever they associate. Not until then can the forces be reversed
which generate those obnoxious persons--our fittest.
Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and
prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems,
becoming artificial, technical, corrupt; and, as always happens in
human institutions, after noon, power is stealing from the many to the
few. Believing wealth to be good, the people believed the wealthy to
be good. But, again in history, power has intoxicated and hardened its
possessors, and Pharaohs are bred in counting-rooms as they were in
palaces. Their furniture must be banished to the world-garret, where
lie the out-worn trappings of the guilds and slavery and other old
lumber of human institutions.