Outlook Editorials
[Illustration: Theodore Roosevelt
At His Desk in the Outlook Office]
Outlook Editorials
Theodore Roosevelt
[Illustration]
New York
The Outlook Company
1909
Copyright 1909 by
The Outlook Company
New York
All rights reserved
The first eleven editorials of
Theodore Roosevelt, published
in The Outlook from March
sixth to July seventeenth,
nineteen hundred and nine
Contents
PAGE
Why I Believe in the Kind of American
Journalism for Which The Outlook Stands 1
A Judicial Experience 11
A Scientific Expedition 23
Where We Cannot Work With Socialists 29
Where We Can Work With Socialists 51
Quack Cure-Alls for the Body Politic 65
The Japanese Question 71
Tolstoy 81
A Southerner’s View of the South 95
The Thraldom of Names 101
Give Me Neither Poverty Nor Riches 121
_By Way of Welcome_
_From The Outlook of March 6, 1909_
[Illustration]
_It would be a singular affectation to introduce to the readers of
The Outlook its new Associate Editor, Theodore Roosevelt. He is the
most widely known representative of the present world movement towards
industrial democracy. It is needless here to describe that movement,
so fully has it been described by editorials in The Outlook, and by
the public addresses and state papers of the retiring President of the
United States. Unconsciously co-operating, we have pursued a common
end, which in the future we shall pursue in conscious co-operation.
Our object is to bring the industrial institutions of democracy into
harmony with its political and educational institutions. Our resolve
is that the money power in America, as its political and educational
power, shall come from the people, be exercised for the people, and
be controlled by the people. Our motto is, Special privilege for
none, equality of opportunity for all. In the name of the editorial
and publishing departments of The Outlook, I frankly acknowledge our
gratification that Theodore Roosevelt has chosen this journal to be the
medium for his published utterances on social, economic and political
subjects, and in their name I welcome him as an Associate to its
editorial staff._
_LYMAN ABBOTT._
Why I Believe in the Kind of American Journalism for Which
The Outlook Stands
I first came into close contact with The Outlook when Governor of New
York, ten years ago, and I speedily grew to have a peculiar feeling
of respect and regard for Dr. Abbott and his associates. We did not
always agree, and as our convictions were strong our disagreements were
sometimes positive; but experience taught me that, in the first place,
Dr. Abbott and his associates always conscientiously strove to be fair,
and that, in the second place, they not only desired to tell the truth,
but made a serious endeavor to find out the facts. I found, moreover,
that they combined to a peculiar degree a number of qualities, each of
them good, but rarely found in combination.
Every owner, editor, or reporter of a conscientiously and ably
conducted newspaper or periodical is an asset of real value to
the whole community. It would be difficult to overestimate the
amount of good which can be done by the men responsible for such a
publication――responsible for its editorial columns, responsible for
its news columns, responsible for its general policy. We have many
newspapers and periodicals, big and little, of this kind. But we also
have many that are emphatically not of this kind.
During the last few years it has become lamentably evident that certain
daily newspapers, certain periodicals, are owned or controlled by men
of vast wealth who have gained their wealth in evil fashion, who desire
to stifle or twist the honest expression of public opinion, and who
find an instrument fit for their purpose in the guided and purchased
mendacity of those who edit and write for such papers and periodicals.
This style of sordid evil does not even constitute a temptation to The
Outlook; no influence of any kind could make the men who control The
Outlook so much as consider the question of abandonment of duty; and
they hold as their first duty inflexible adherence to the elementary
virtues of entire truth, entire courage, entire honesty.
Moreover, they are as far removed as the poles from the apostles of
that hideous yellow journalism which makes a cult of the mendacious,
the sensational, and the inane, and which, throughout its wide but
vapid field, does as much to vulgarize and degrade the popular taste,
to weaken the popular character, and to dull the edge of the popular
conscience, as any influence under which the country can suffer.
These men sneer at the very idea of paying heed to the dictates of
a sound morality; as one of their number has cynically put it, they
are concerned merely with selling the public whatever the public
will buy――a theory of conduct which would justify the existence of
every keeper of an opium den, of every foul creature who ministers to
the vices of mankind. Here, again, it is perhaps not especially to
the credit of Dr. Abbott and his associates that they have avoided
this pit; fortunately, they are so constituted that it is a simple
impossibility for them to fall into it.
But they do deserve very great credit for avoiding another type of
temptation which has much fascination for men of cultivation and
of refined taste, and which is quite as fatal to their usefulness
as indulgence in yellow journalism. A newspaper or periodical
which avoids vulgar sensationalism, which takes and cultivates an
interest in serious matters, and things literary, artistic, and
scientific――which, in short, appeals to people of taste, intelligence,
and cultivation――may nevertheless do them grave harm, and be within
its own rather narrow limits an element of serious mischief; for it
may habitually and consistently practice a malign and slanderous
untruthfulness which, though more refined than, is at least as
immoral as, the screaming sensationalism of any representative of
the journalism which it affects to despise. A cultivated man of good
intelligence who has acquired the knack of saying bitter things, but
who lacks the robustness which will enable him to feel at ease among
strong men of action, is apt, if his nature has in it anything of
meanness or untruthfulness, to strive for a reputation in what is to
him the easiest way. He can find no work which is easier――and less
worth doing――than to sit in cloistered aloofness from the men who
wage the real and important struggles of life and to endeavor, by an
unceasing output of slander in regard to them, to bolster up his own
uneasy desire to be considered superior to them. Now a paper edited by
men of this stamp does not have much popular influence, and therefore
is less detrimental to the people at large than yellow journalism; but
it may, to the extent of its power, exert a very real influence for
evil, by the way in which it teaches young men of good education, whose
talents should be at their country’s service, that decent and upright
public men are as properly subjects of foul attack as the most debased
corruptionist; that efficiency and wickedness are interchangeable;
and that the correct attitude to adopt, in facing the giant problems
of our great and troubled time, is one of sneering and supercilious
untruthfulness.
Dr. Abbott and his associates have avoided this pitfall also. With
them cultivation and good taste have not implied weakness. Demand for
righteousness in others has not led to abandonment of truth on their
own part.
The Outlook has stood for righteousness, but it has never been
self-righteous. It stands for the things of the spirit, and yet it
remembers the needs of the body. It serves lofty ideals, it believes
in a lofty idealism. But it knows that common sense is essential above
all other qualities to the idealist; for an idealist without common
sense, without the capacity to work in hard, practical fashion for
actual results, is merely a boat that is all sails, and with neither
ballast nor rudder. The Outlook’s belief in gentleness and tenderness,
in the spirit of brotherly love, never blinds it to the necessity
of cultivating those hardy, rugged, and vigorous qualities for the
want of which in the individual as in the Nation, no gentleness,
no cultivation, and, above all, no gift of money-making and no
self-indulgence in the soft ease of living, can in any way atone.
The Outlook has shown a fine scorn of untruth in every form, of
unfairness and injustice to any man or any cause. It is not given to
humanity never to err; but The Outlook makes a resolute effort to
find out what the facts actually are before passing judgment. With it
earnestness and strength of conviction go hand in hand with a sincere
desire to see and to state the other man’s point of view. It believes
that things in this world can be made better, but it does not indorse
quixotic movements which would merely leave things worse. It champions
the rights of the many. It desires in every way to represent, to guide
aright, and to uphold the interests of those whom Abraham Lincoln
called the plain people. It feels a peculiar desire to do all that
can be done for the poor and the oppressed, and to help upward those
struggling to better themselves. But it has no sympathy with moral
weakness or sentimentality. All that it can do it does and will do for
the cause of labor; but it will in no shape or way condone violence or
disorder. It stands for the rights of property, and therefore against
the abuses of property. It believes in a wise individualism, and in
encouragement of individual initiative; and therefore all the more it
believes in using the collective force of the whole people to do what
but for the use of that collective force must be left undone.
I am glad to be associated with Dr. Abbott and the group of men and
women he has gathered around him, because they practice what they
preach; and because they preach the things that are most necessary to
the salvation of this people. It is their earnest belief that every man
must earn enough to support himself and those dependent upon him; but
that when once this has been accomplished, money immediately becomes
secondary to many other things. In this matter The Outlook puts its
principles into practice. It strives in proper ways to make money. If
it did not make money it could not be run at all. But making money is
not the prime reason for its existence. The first question asked when
any matter of policy arises, so far as The Outlook is concerned, is
whether or not a given course is right, and should be followed because
it is in the real and lasting interest of the Nation. If this question
is answered in the affirmative, then The Outlook follows the course
indicated with all the courage, earnestness, and ability that are at
its disposal.
A Judicial Experience
A year after leaving Harvard I ran for the New York Legislature and was
elected. In the Legislature I was soon brought in contact with various
advocates of what is known as labor legislation; and I eyed both them
and their schemes with great distrust. When in Harvard I had studied
what were then considered the orthodox political economists; and after
leaving college the older men whom I met were for the most part lawyers
or business men of wealth who quite sincerely took the ordinary wealthy
business man’s view of labor matters. Moreover, in the Legislature,
most of the men who professed a loud and ardent interest in the welfare
of the laboring man were exceedingly unattractive persons, who, to put
it mildly, did not impress one as being either sincere or honest. Many
of the labor bills which were introduced were foolish, and were urged
in a transparently demagogic spirit, and the labor leaders who came to
Albany to argue for them eyed me with a suspicion which I cordially
reciprocated. Most of them, I am now inclined to think, were by no
means of the best type; and I, in my turn, because of my surroundings
both in the classroom and in the social and business world, was alert
to pick flaws in anything concerning a labor union, and possessed a
self-satisfied narrowness in approaching all labor questions which must
have been highly exasperating to my opponents.
My college training had biased me against all governmental schemes for
the betterment of the social and industrial conditions of laborers,
or for the control of corporations. The education which I afterwards
received in these matters, and which completely changed my views,
was gained partly from books, but more from actual experience in
governmental work, and from a constantly widening and more intimate
knowledge of the real life of different bodies of our people. My
first step in this education began when, after leaving college, I
joined, and endeavored to make myself count in, my local Republican
association――instead of joining some parlor gathering of well-meaning
dilettante reformers.
The labor unions had been demanding legislation to stop the manufacture
of cigars in tenement-houses, and during my second term in Albany the
Assembly appointed a committee to look into the conditions. My belief
is that the committee was appointed with the hope that it would not
recommend any change in the law, and that I was put on because, on
account of my education and social surroundings, it was supposed that
I would naturally take this view; and I certainly expected to take it.
One of my colleagues was a then well-known sporting Tammany politician
who afterwards abandoned politics and became a professional racing
man. There were many points on which our theories of ethics were as
far asunder as the poles; but I soon discovered that there were other
matters, and some of these of fundamental importance, on which we
thought alike, and our association ended in mutual respect and good
will. Soon after the investigation started I told him that I was a good
deal shocked at what I had seen, and was wavering in my preconceived
opinions. He answered by saying that, as far as he personally was
concerned, he was pledged in advance against recommending any change
in the law, but that he had known that I was a free agent and had
all along believed that when I looked into the matter for myself I
would be a very ardent advocate of the change. He was quite right
in his supposition. The investigation convinced me beyond shadow of
doubt that to permit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses,
which necessarily meant their manufacture not only by the men but by
the women and children of the poverty-stricken immigrants who were
engaged in the task, was an evil thing from every standpoint, social,
industrial, and hygienic. I accordingly cordially supported the
bill; which made a large number of my friends regard me as erratic
and dangerous, or else as influenced by demagogic motives. The bill
was badly drawn. No lawyer of any note had been consulted; there was
no one to pay such a lawyer. When it passed both houses, the then
Governor, Grover Cleveland, appointed a day for a hearing, and the
labor unions asked me to appear. Appear we did, several good counsel
being against us, while on our side there were, besides myself, merely
five or six representatives of the cigar-makers’ union, all of them
foreigners――battered-looking men, with whom the battle of life had
evidently gone hard. As this was long before I had established any
real relations with, or had any real understanding of, the unions,
while they felt that I was a crank, influenced by incomprehensible
motives, we worked on entirely independent lines, neither side
feeling altogether comfortable in the relationship. However, the main
argument――and indeed almost the only argument――for the bill was made
by me. I answered various questions which the Governor put to me. He
afterwards called me up and told me that, though he felt very doubtful,
yet that, in view of the state of facts I had set forth, he would sign
the bill.
The employers and tenement-house owners immediately contested the
constitutionality of the act, and after the usual long delays the
highest State court finally pronounced the measure invalid. The
cigar-makers were poor, and the great majority of them were ignorant
foreigners. They had no money and no special influence even in the
world of labor. They could not employ counsel either to draw their
bill well in the first place, or to present their case to the best
advantage when it was before the courts. The great mass of respectable,
well-to-do people were nervously sensitive to attacks on what they
considered the rights of property, and regarded as an infringement on
these rights any effort to correct the abuses of property. The judges,
as was quite natural, shared the feelings of the classes from which
they were drawn, and with which they associated. The decision went
against the dwellers in the tenement-houses. Anything like an effective
reformation of tenement-house conditions was thereby deferred for
fifteen or twenty years, and during that time men, women, and children
were guaranteed their “liberty” to fester in sodden misery.
The judges invoked a technical construction of the Constitution in
order to declare invalid a law deliberately enacted by the legislative
body; a law which I firmly believe it was entirely in the province of
the Legislature to pass. Every consideration of public morals and
public weal demanded that it should be declared valid. At the present
day few courts in any State of the Union would make such a decision
as was then made; yet the judges making it were learned in the law,
and according to their own lights were upright and honorable men.
But they were men without any sympathetic understanding or knowledge
of the needs and conditions of life of the great mass of their
fellow-countrymen. If those judges had understood “how the other half
lived,” if they had possessed a working knowledge of tenement-houses
and factories, of tenement-house dwellers and factory workers, and of
the lives that were lived where the tenement-house and the factory were
one and the same, I am absolutely certain that they would have rendered
no such decision as was rendered. They knew the life of the well-to-do,
both the business life and the home life. They knew nothing of the
lives of those who were not well-to-do. It was this lack of knowledge
and the attendant lack of sympathetic understanding that formed the
real barrier between the judges and a wise judgment.
My reason for relating this anecdote is because from that day to this I
have felt an ever-growing conviction of the need of having on the bench
men who, in addition to being learned in the law and upright, shall
possess a broad understanding of and sympathy with their countrymen
as a whole, so that the questions of humanity and of social justice
shall not be considered by them as wholly inferior to the defense of
vested rights or the upholding of liberty of contract. A hair-splitting
refinement in decisions may result in as much damage to the community
as if the judge were actually corrupt. Freedom of contract should be
permitted only so far as is compatible with the best interests of
the community; and when vested rights become intrenched wrongs, they
should be overturned. I do not for one moment believe that the mass of
our judges are actuated by any but worthy motives. Nevertheless, I do
believe that they often signally fail to protect the laboring man and
the laboring man’s widow and children in their just rights, and that
heartbreaking and pitiful injustice too often results therefrom; and
this primarily because our judges lack either the opportunity or the
power thoroughly to understand the working man’s and working woman’s
position and vital needs.
There are many judges, from the Supreme Court of the Nation down
to the district bench in each State, who do possess this sympathy
and understanding, in addition to uprightness, trained ability,
broad intelligence, and entire fearlessness in the face of wrong,
whether committed by capitalist or by laboring men; such judges are
the best and most useful of all our public servants; public opinion
should uphold them as clearly as it condemns their short-sighted and
narrow-minded brethren.
A Scientific Expedition
I am about to go to Africa as the head of the Smithsonian expedition.
It is a scientific expedition. We shall collect birds and mammals for
the National Museum at Washington, and nothing will be shot unless
for food, or for preservation as a specimen, or unless, of course,
the animal is of a noxious kind. There will be no wanton destruction
whatever.
I very earnestly hope that no representative of any newspaper or
magazine will try to accompany me or to interview me during any portion
of my trip. Until I actually get to the wilderness my trip will be
precisely like any other conventional trip on a steamboat or railway.
It will afford nothing to write about, and will afford no excuse or
warrant for any one sending to any newspaper a line in reference
thereto. After I reach the wilderness of course no one outside of my
own party will be with me, and if any one pretends to be with me or
pretends to write as to what I do, his statements should be accepted
as on their face not merely false but ludicrous. Any statement
purporting to have been made by me, or attributed to me, which may
be sent to newspapers, should be accepted as certainly false and as
calling for no denial from me. So far as possible I shall avoid seeing
my representative of the press, and shall not knowingly have any
conversation on any subject whatever with any representative of the
press beyond exchanging the ordinary civilities or courtesies. I am a
private citizen, and I am entitled to enjoy the privacy that should be
the private citizen’s right. My trip will have no public bearing of
any kind or description. It is undertaken for the National Museum at
Washington, and is simply a collecting trip for the Museum. It will be
extremely distasteful to me and of no possible benefit to any human
being to try to report or exploit the trip, or to send any one with
me, or to have any one try to meet me or see me with a view to such
reporting or exploitation. Let me repeat that while I am on steamer or
railway there will be nothing whatever to report; that when I leave
the railway for the wilderness no persons will have any knowledge which
will enable them to report anything, and that any report is to be
accepted as presumably false.
Where We Cannot Work With Socialists
It is always difficult to discuss a question when it proves impossible
to define the terms in which that question is to be discussed.
Therefore there is not much to be gained by a discussion of Socialism
_versus_ Individualism in the abstract. Neither absolute Individualism
nor absolute Socialism would be compatible with civilization at all;
and among the arguments of the extremists of either side the only
unanswerable ones are those which show the absurdity of the position of
the other. Not so much as the first step towards real civilization can
be taken until there arises some development of the right of private
property; that is, until men pass out of the stage of savage socialism
in which the violent and the thriftless forcibly constitute themselves
co-heirs with the industrious and the intelligent in what the labor
of the latter produces. But it is equally true that every step toward
civilization is marked by a check on individualism. The ages that
have passed have fettered the individualism which found expression in
physical violence, and we are now endeavoring to put shackles on that
kind of individualism which finds expression in craft and greed. There
is growth in all such matters. The individualism of the Tweed Ring type
would have seemed both commonplace and meritorious to the Merovingian
Franks, where it was not entirely beyond their comprehension; and so
in future ages, if the world progresses as we hope and believe it will
progress, the standards of conduct which permit individuals to make
money out of pestilential tenements or by the manipulation of stocks,
or to refuse to share with their employees the dreadful burdens laid
upon the latter by the inevitable physical risks in a given business,
will seem as amazing to our descendants as we now find the standards
of a society which regarded Clovis and his immediate successors as
pre-eminently fit for leadership.
With those self-styled Socialists to whom “Socialism” is merely
a vaguely conceived catchword, and who use it to express their
discontent with existing wrongs and their purpose to correct them,
there is not much need of discussion. So far as they make any proposals
which are not foolish, and which tend towards betterment, we can act
with them. But the real, logical, advanced Socialists, who teach their
faith as both a creed and a party platform, may deceive to their ruin
decent and well-meaning but short-sighted men; and there is need of
plain speaking in order accurately to show the trend of their teaching.
The immorality and absurdity of the doctrines of Socialism as
propounded by these advanced advocates are quite as great as those of
the advocates, if such there be, of an unlimited individualism. As
an academic matter there is more need of refutation of the creed of
absolute Socialism than of the creed of absolute individualism; for it
happens that at the present time a greater number of visionaries, both
sinister and merely dreamy, believe in the former than in the latter.
One difficulty in arguing with professed Socialists of the extreme,
or indeed of the opportunist type, however, is that those of them who
are sincere almost invariably suffer from great looseness of thought;
for if they did not keep their faith nebulous, it would at once become
abhorrent in the eyes of any upright and sensible man. The doctrinaire
Socialists, the extremists, the men who represent the doctrine in its
most advanced form, are, and must necessarily be, not only convinced
opponents of private property, but also bitterly hostile to religion
and morality; in short, they must be opposed to all those principles
through which, and through which alone, even an imperfect civilization
can be built up by slow advances through the ages.
Indeed, these thoroughgoing Socialists occupy, in relation to
all morality, and especially to domestic morality, a position so
revolting――and I choose my words carefully――that it is difficult
even to discuss it in a reputable paper. In America the leaders even
of this type have usually been cautious about stating frankly that
they proposed to substitute free love for married and family life
as we have it, although many of them do in a round-about way uphold
this position. In places on the continent of Europe, however, they
are more straightforward, their attitude being that of one of the
extreme French Socialist writers, M. Gabriel Deville, who announces
that the Socialists intend to do away with both prostitution and
marriage, which he regards as equally wicked――his method of doing away
with prostitution being to make unchastity universal. Professor Carl
Pearson, a leading English Socialist, states their position exactly:
“The sex relation of the future will not be regarded as a union for
the birth of children, but as the closest form of friendship between
man and woman. It will be accompanied by no child bearing or rearing,
or by this in a much more limited number than at present. With the sex
relationship, so long as it does not result in children, we hold that
the State in the future will in no wise interfere, but when it does
result in children, then the State will have a right to interfere.”
He then goes on to point out that in order to save the woman from
“economic dependence” upon the father of her children, the children
will be raised at the expense of the State; the usual plan being to
have huge buildings like foundling asylums.
Mr. Pearson is a scientific man who, in his own realm, is as worthy
of serious heed as Mr. Flinders Petrie, whom I mention later, is in
his realm; and the above quotation states in naked form just what
logical scientific Socialism would really come to. Aside from its
thoroughly repulsive quality, it ought not to be necessary to point
out that the condition of affairs aimed at would in actual practice
bring about the destruction of the race within, at most, a couple of
generations; and such destruction is heartily to be desired for any
race of such infamous character as to tolerate such a system. Moreover,
the ultra-Socialists of our own country have shown by their attitude
towards one of their leaders, Mr. Herron, that, so far as law and
public sentiment will permit, they are now ready to try to realize the
ideals set forth by Messrs. Deville and Pearson. As for Mr. Herron, I
commend to those who desire to verify what I have said, the article in
the Boston Congregationalist of June 15, 1901; and to those, by the
way, who have not the time to hunt up all the original authorities,
I would commend a book called “Socialism; the Nation of Fatherless
Children,” a book dedicated to the American Federation of Labor. The
chapters on Free Love, Homeless Children, and Two Socialist Leaders are
especially worth reading by any one who is for the moment confused by
the statements of certain Socialist leaders to the effect that advanced
Socialism does not contemplate an attack upon marriage and the family.
These same Socialist leaders, with a curious effrontery, at times deny
that the exponents of “scientific Socialism” assume a position as
regards industry which in condensed form may be stated as, that each
man is to do what work he can, or, in other words, chooses, and in
return is to take out from the common fund whatever he needs; or, what
amounts to the same thing, that each man shall have equal remuneration
with every other man, no matter what work is done. If they will turn
to a little book recently written in England called “The Case Against
Socialism,” they will find by looking at, say, pages 229 and 300, or
indeed almost at random through the book, quotations from recognized
Socialist leaders taking exactly this position; indeed, it is the
position generally taken――though it is often opposed or qualified,
for Socialist leaders usually think confusedly, and often occupy
inconsistent positions. Mrs. Besant, for instance, putting it pithily,
says that we must come to the “equal remuneration of all workers;” and
one of her colleagues, that “the whole of our creed is that industry
shall be carried on, not for the profit of those engaged in it, whether
masters or men, but for the benefit of the community.... It is not for
the miners, bootmakers, or shop assistants as such that we Socialists
claim the profits of industry, but for the citizen.” In our own
country, in “Socialism Made Plain,” a book officially circulated by the
Milwaukee division of the Socialist party, the statement is explicit:
“Under the labor time-check medium of exchange proposed by Socialists,
any laborer could exchange the wealth he produced in any given number
of hours for the wealth produced by any other laborer in the same
number of hours.” It is unnecessary to point out that the pleasing idea
of these writers could be realized only if the State undertook the duty
of taskmaster, for otherwise it is not conceivable that anybody whose
work would be worth anything would work at all under such conditions.
Under this type of Socialism, therefore, or communism, the government
would have to be the most drastic possible despotism; a despotism so
drastic that its realization would only be an ideal. Of course in
practice such a system could not work at all; and incidentally the mere
attempt to realize it would necessarily be accompanied by a corruption
so gross that the blackest spot of corruption in any existing form of
city government would seem bright by comparison.
In other words, on the social and domestic side doctrinaire Socialism
would replace the family and home life by a glorified State free-lunch
counter and State foundling asylum, deliberately enthroning
self-indulgence as the ideal, with, on its darker side, the absolute
abandonment of all morality as between man and woman; while in place
of what Socialists are pleased to call “wage slavery” there would be
created a system which would necessitate either the prompt dying out
of the community through sheer starvation, or an iron despotism over
all workers, compared to which any slave system of the past would seem
beneficent, because less utterly hopeless.
“Advanced” Socialist leaders are fond of declaiming against patriotism,
of announcing their movement as international, and of claiming to treat
all men alike; but on this point, as on all others, their system would
not stand for one moment the test of actual experiment. If the leaders
of the Socialist party in America should to-day endeavor to force their
followers to admit all negroes and Chinamen to a real equality, their
party would promptly disband, and, rather than submit to such putting
into effect of their avowed purpose, would, as a literal fact, follow
any capitalistic organization as an alternative.
It is not accident that makes thoroughgoing and radical Socialists
adopt the principles of free love as a necessary sequence to insisting
that no man shall have the right to what he earns. When Socialism of
this really advanced and logical type is tried as it was in France in
1792, and again under the Commune in 1871, it is inevitable that the
movement, ushered in with every kind of high-sounding phrase, should
rapidly spread so as to include, not merely the forcible acquisition
of the property of others, but every conceivable form of monetary
corruption, immorality, licentiousness, and murderous violence. In
theory, distinctions can be drawn between this kind of Socialism and
anarchy and nihilism; but in practice, as in 1871, the apostles of
all three act together; and if the doctrines of any of them could
be applied universally, all the troubles of society would indeed
cease, because society itself would cease. The poor and the helpless,
especially women and children, would be the first to die out, and the
few survivors would go back to the condition of skin-clad savages, so
that the whole painful and laborious work of social development would
have to begin over again. Of course, long before such an event really
happened the Socialistic régime would have been overturned, and in
the reaction men would welcome any kind of one-man tyranny that was
compatible with the existence of civilization.
So much for the academic side of unadulterated, or, as its advocates
style it, “advanced scientific” Socialism. Its representatives in
this country who have practically striven to act up to their extreme
doctrines, and have achieved leadership in any one of the branches of
the Socialist party, especially the parlor Socialists and the like,
be they lay or clerical, deserve scant consideration at the hands of
honest and clean-living men and women. What their movement leads to may
be gathered from the fact that in the last Presidential election they
nominated and voted for a man who earns his livelihood as the editor of
a paper which not merely practices every form of malignant and brutal
slander, but condones and encourages every form of brutal wrong-doing,
so long as either the slander or the violence is supposed to be at the
expense of a man who owns something, wholly without regard to whether
that man is himself a scoundrel, or a wise, kind, and helpful member of
the community. As for the so-called Christian Socialists who associate
themselves with this movement, they either are or ought to be aware of
the pornographic literature, the pornographic propaganda, which make up
one side of the movement; a pornographic side which is entirely proper
in a movement that in this country accepts as one of its heads a man
whose domestic immorality has been so open and flagrant as to merit
the epithet of shameless. That criminal nonsense should be listened to
eagerly by some men bowed down by the cruel condition of much of modern
toil is not strange; but that men who pretend to speak with culture of
mind and authority to teach, men who are or have been preachers of the
Gospel or professors in universities, should affiliate themselves with
the preachers of criminal nonsense is a sign of either grave mental or
moral shortcoming.
I wish it to be remembered that I speak from the standpoint of, and
on behalf of, the wage-worker and the tiller of the soil. These are
the two men whose welfare I have ever before me, and for their sakes I
would do anything, except anything that is wrong; and it is because I
believe that teaching them doctrine like that which I have stigmatized
represents the most cruel wrong in the long run, both to wage-worker
and to earth-tiller, that I reprobate and denounce such conduct.
We need have but scant patience with those who assert that modern
conditions are all that they should be, or that they cannot be
improved. The wildest or most vicious of Socialistic writers could
preach no more foolish doctrine than that contained in such ardent
defenses of uncontrolled capitalism and individualism as Mr. Flinders
Petrie’s “Janus,” a book which is absurd, but which, because of this
very fact, is not mischievous, for it can arouse no other emotion than
the very earnest desire that this particular archæological shoemaker
should stick to his early-Egyptian last. There are dreadful woes
in modern life, dreadful suffering among some of those who toil,
brutal wrong-doing among some of those who make colossal fortunes by
exploiting the toilers. It is the duty of every honest and upright man,
of every man who holds within his breast the capacity for righteous
indignation, to recognize these wrongs, and to strive with all his
might to bring about a better condition of things. But he will never
bring about this better condition by misstating facts and advocating
remedies which are not merely false, but fatal.
Take, for instance, the doctrine of the extreme Socialists, that all
wealth is produced by manual workers, that the entire product of
labor should be handed over every day to the laborer, that wealth is
criminal in itself. Of course wealth is no more criminal than labor.
Human society could not exist without both; and if all wealth were
abolished this week, the majority of laborers would starve next week.
As for the statement that all wealth is produced by manual workers,
in order to appreciate its folly it is merely necessary for any man
to look at what is happening right around him, in the next street, or
the next village. Here in the city where The Outlook is edited, on
Broadway between Ninth and Tenth Streets, is a huge dry goods store.
The business was originally started, and the block of which I am
speaking was built for the purpose, by an able New York merchant. It
prospered. He and those who invested under him made a good deal of
money. Their employees did well. Then he died, and certain other people
took possession of it and tried to run the business. The manual labor
was the same, the good-will was the same, the physical conditions were
the same; but the guiding intelligence at the top had changed. The
business was run at a loss. It would surely have had to shut down, and
all the employees, clerks, laborers, everybody would have been turned
adrift, to infinite suffering, if it had not again changed hands and
another business man of capacity taken charge. The business was the
same as before, the physical conditions were the same, the good-will
the same, the manual labor the same, but the guiding intelligence had
changed, and now everything once more prospered, and prospered as had
never been the case before. With such an instance before our very
eyes, with such proof of what every business proves, namely, the vast
importance of the part played by the guiding intelligence in business,
as in war, in invention, in art, in science, in every imaginable
pursuit, it is really difficult to show patience when asked to discuss
such a proposition as that all wealth is produced solely by the work
of manual workers, and that the entire product should be handed over
to them. Of course, if any such theory were really acted upon, there
would soon be no product to be handed over to the manual laborers,
and they would die of starvation. A great industry could no more be
managed by a mass-meeting of manual laborers than a battle could be won
in such fashion, than a painters’ union could paint a Rembrandt, or a
typographical union write one of Shakespeare’s plays.
The fact is that this kind of Socialism represents an effort to
enthrone privilege in its crudest form. Much of what we are fighting
against in modern civilization is privilege. We fight against privilege
when it takes the form of a franchise to a street railway company to
enjoy the use of the streets of a great city without paying an adequate
return; when it takes the form of a great business combination which
grows rich by rebates which are denied to other shippers; when it takes
the form of a stock-gambling operation which results in the watering of
railway securities so that certain inside men get an enormous profit
out of a swindle on the public. All these represent various forms of
illegal, or, if not illegal, then anti-social privilege. But there can
be no greater abuse, no greater example of corrupt and destructive
privilege, than that advocated by those who say that each man should
put into a common store what he can and take out what he needs. This is
merely another way of saying that the thriftless and the vicious, who
could or would put in but little, should be entitled to take out the
earnings of the intelligent, the foresighted, and the industrious. Such
a proposition is morally base. To choose to live by theft or by charity
means in each case degradation, a rapid lowering of self-respect and
self-reliance. The worst wrongs that capitalism can commit upon labor
would sink into insignificance when compared with the hideous wrong
done by those who would degrade labor by sapping the foundations of
self-respect and self-reliance. The Roman mob, living on the bread
given them by the State and clamoring for excitement and amusement to
be purveyed by the State, represent for all time the very nadir to
which a free and self-respecting population of workers can sink if they
grow habitually to rely upon others, and especially upon the State,
either to furnish them charity, or to permit them to plunder, as a
means of livelihood.
In short, it is simply common sense to recognize that there is the
widest inequality of service, and that therefore there must be an
equally wide inequality of reward, if our society is to rest upon
the basis of justice and wisdom. Service is the true test by which a
man’s worth should be judged. We are against privilege in any form:
privilege to the capitalist who exploits the poor man, and privilege
to the shiftless or vicious poor man who would rob his thrifty brother
of what he has earned. Certain exceedingly valuable forms of service
are rendered wholly without capital. On the other hand, there are
exceedingly valuable forms of service which can be rendered only by
means of great accumulations of capital, and not to recognize this
fact would be to deprive our whole people of one of the great agencies
for their betterment. The test of a man’s worth to the community
is the service he renders to it, and we cannot afford to make this
test by material considerations alone. One of the main vices of the
Socialism which was propounded by Proudhon, Lassalle, and Marx, and
which is preached by their disciples and imitators, is that it is
blind to everything except the merely material side of life. It is
not only indifferent, but at bottom hostile, to the intellectual, the
religious, the domestic and moral life; it is a form of communism
with no moral foundation, but essentially based on the immediate
annihilation of personal ownership of capital, and, in the near future,
the annihilation of the family, and ultimately the annihilation of
civilization.
Where We Can Work With Socialists
It is true that the doctrines of communistic Socialism, if consistently
followed, mean the ultimate annihilation of civilization. Yet the
converse is also true. Ruin faces us if we decline steadily to try
to reshape our whole civilization in accordance with the law of
service, and if we permit ourselves to be misled by any empirical or
academic consideration into refusing to exert the common power of the
community where only collective action can do what individualism has
left undone, or can remedy the wrongs done by an unrestricted and
ill-regulated individualism. There is any amount of evil in our social
and industrial conditions of to-day, and unless we recognize this fact
and try resolutely to do what we can to remedy the evil, we run great
risk of seeing men in their misery turn to the false teachers whose
doctrines would indeed lead them to greater misery, but who do at least
recognize the fact that they are now miserable. At the present time
there are scores of laws in the interest of labor――laws putting a stop
to child labor, decreasing the hours of labor where they are excessive,
putting a stop to unsanitary crowding and living, securing employers’
liability, doing away with unhealthy conditions in various trades, and
the like――which should be passed by the National and the various State
Legislatures; and those who wish to do effective work against Socialism
would do well to turn their energies into securing the enactment of
these laws.