American socialism is not a political doctrine; it is a state of mind.
A man is an active socialist because he is afflicted with congenital
insurgency: he was born a rebel. He rebels, not only against “the
established order” in government, but against pretty nearly everything
that takes his attention and enlists his thought, though not many
things do. He is hospitable to only one idea at a time, in the service
of which he foregoes the advantage of knowing much of anything else.
He commonly, however, has an observing eye and a deep disesteem for
the decent customs and conventionalities of his time and place. The
man in jail for publication of immoralities is always a socialist,
and the socialist “organ” has usually a profitable “line” of indecent
advertisements.
As the socialist erroneously regards the criminal, so he is himself
rightly to be regarded. He is no heretic to be reclaimed, but a
patient to be restrained. He is sick. You cannot cure him; it is
useless to say to him: “Thou ailest here and there”; it is useless
to say anything to him but “Thou shalt not.” His unreason is what he
is a socialist with. That, too, is the cause of his inefficiency in
the competitions of life, for which, naturally, he would substitute
something “more nearly to the heart’s desire”—an order of things
in which all would share the rewards of efficiency. Always it is
the incapable who most loudly preaches the gospel of Equality and
Fraternity—which, being interpreted, means stand and deliver and look
pleasant about it. In the Cave of Adullam the credentialing shibboleth
is “Love me, damn you, as I love myself.”
A distinguishing feature of socialism as we have the happiness to
know it in this country is its servitude to anarchism. In theory
the two are directly antithetical. They are the North and the
South Pole of political thought, leagues and leagues removed from
zones of intellectual fertility. Anarchism says: “Ye shall have
no law”; socialism: “Law is all that ye shall have.” They “pool
their issues” and make common cause, but let them succeed in their
work of destruction and their warfare would not be accomplished:
there would remain the congenial task of destroying each other. The
present alliance is no figure of speech. It is a fact, unknown to the
follow-my-leader socialist, but not to his leader; not to observers
having acquaintance with the proselyting methods of the time; not at
the headquarters of anarchism in Paterson, New Jersey, where a great
body of socialist “literature” is written, printed and set going.
He who is not sufficiently “advanced” for anarchism is persuaded to
socialism. The babe is fed with malted milk until strong enough for the
double-distilled thunder-and-lightning of a more candid purveyance.
Whatever makes for discontent brings nearer the reign of reprisal.
Our good friends who think with their tongues and pens are ever clamant
about the national perils alurk in luxury: it causes decay in men and
states, blights patriotism, invites invasion, impoverishes the paupers
and bites a dog. Luxury will make a boy strike his father (feebly) and
persuade the old man to a life of shame. It is well known that it so
enervated the Romans that they fell off the map. One does not need to
believe all that, nor any of it. The wealthy, living under sanitary
conditions, well housed, well fed, clean, free from fatigue (which is a
poison) are, as a class, distinctly superior to the poor, physically,
mentally and morally. It is among the well-to-do that gymnasia flourish
and athletic clubs abound. Your all-around athlete is commonly in
possession of a comfortable income; the hardy out-of-door sports are
practiced almost exclusively by those who do not have to do manual
labor. The top-hatted clubman can manhandle the hulking day-laborer
with ease and accuracy. His female is larger and fitter than the other
gentleman’s underfed and overworked mate, and brings forth a better
quality of young. All this is obvious to any but the most delinquent
observation; yet wealth and its attendant luxury are prophecies and
forerunners of the decay of nations.
Hard are the steps, slow-hewn in flintiest rock,
States climb to power by; slippery those with gold
Down which they stumble to eternal mock.
To one having knowledge of the prevalence and power of some of the
primal brute passions of the human mind the reason is clear enough:
riches and luxurious living provoke envy in the vast multitude to whom
they are inaccessible through lack of efficiency; and from envy to
revenge and revolution the transition is natural and easy.
In the youth of a nation there is virtual equality of fortunes—all are
poor. Sixty years ago there were probably not a half dozen millionaires
in America; the number now is not definitely known, but it runs into
thousands; that of persons of less but considerable wealth—enough to
take attention—into the hundreds of thousands. Poverty used to be
rather proud of our millionaires; they were so few that the poor man
seldom or never saw them, to mark the contrast between their abundance
and his privation. Now the two are everywhere neighbors. The poor man
sees “the idle rich” (who mostly work like beavers) in their carriages,
while himself walks and, if it please him so to do, “takes their dust.”
He looks into the windows of ballrooms and erroneously believes that
the gorgeous creatures within are happier than he. If he happen to be
so intellectual as to be distinguished in letters, art or some other
profitless pursuit as to be sought by them, all the keener is his sense
of the difference; all the more humiliating his inability to suffer
their particular kind of disillusion. Partly because of that and
partly because he is not a thinker but a feeler, the poet, the artist
or the musician is almost invariably an audible socialist. True, some
of these “intellectuals” (they might better be called emotionals) are
themselves fairly thrifty and prosperous, and in the redistribution
of wealth which many of them impudently propose would be first to
experience the mischance of “restitution.” But doubtless they do not
expect their blessed “new order of things” to come in their day.
Meantime there are profit and a certain picturesqueness in “hailing the
dawn” of a better one, just as if it had already struck “the Sultan’s
tower with a shaft of light.”
The socialist notion appears to be that the world’s wealth is a fixed
quantity, and A can acquire only by depriving B. He is fond of figuring
the rich as living upon the poor—riding on their backs, as Tolstoi
(staggering under the weight of his wife, to whom he had given his vast
estate) was pleased to signify the situation. The plain truth of the
matter is that the poor live mostly on the rich—entirely unless with
their own hands they dig a bare subsistence out of their own farms or
gravel claims; if they do better than that they are not poor. A man
may remain in poverty all his life and be not only of no advantage
to his fellow poor men, but by his competition in the labor market
a harm to them; for in the abundance of labor lies the cause of low
wages, as even a socialist knows. As a consumer the man counts for
little, for he consumes only the bare necessaries of life. But, if
he pass from poverty to wealth he not only ceases to be a competing
laborer; he becomes a consumer of everything that he used to want—all
the luxuries by production of which nine-tenths of the labor class live
he now buys. He has added his voice to the chorus of demand. All the
industries of the world are so interrelated and interdependent that
none is unaffected in some infinitesimal degree by the new stimulation.
The good that he has done by passing from one class into another is
not so obvious as it would be if his wants were all supplied by one
versatile producer, purveying to him alone, but the sum of it is the
same. Yet the socialist finds a pleasure in directing attention to the
brass hoofs of the millionaire executing his joyous jig upon an empty
stomach—that of the prostrate pauper,—poets, muckrakers, demagogues
and other audibles fitly celebrating the performance with howls of
sensibility.
A socialist was damning the wicked extravagance of the rich. A
thoughtful person said: “In New York City was a wealthy family,
the Bradley Martins. They were driven out of the country by public
indignation because they spent their money with a free hand. In the
same city was a wealthy man named Russell Sage. He was no less reviled
and calumniated, because he spent as little as he could and lent the
rest. In which instance was our ‘fierce democracie’ wise and righteous?”
The answer was prompt and, O, so copious! Before it ceased to flow that
philosopher was a mile away from the subject, lost in an impenetrable
forest of words.
Of course Russell Sage was no less valuable an asset to the “wage
slave” than the Bradley Martins, for there is no way by which one can
get profit or pleasure out of money except by paying it out, either by
his own hand directly, or indirectly by the hand of another, for wages
to labor. Eventually, sooner or later, it all reaches the pocket of the
producer, the workingman.
We have so good a country here that more than a million a year of
Europe’s poor come over to share its advantages. In the patent fact
that it is a land of opportunity and prosperity we feel a justifiable
pride; yet the crowning proof and natural result of this—the great
number that do prosper—“the multitude of millionaires”—has come to
be resented as an intolerable wrong, and he who is most clamorous
for opportunity (which he has never for a moment been without)
most austerely condemns those who have made the best use of it. An
instinctive antipathy to all in prosperity is the common ground
upon which anarchists and socialists stand to debate their several
interpretations of anarchism and socialism. On that rock they build
their church, and the gates of—the quotation is imperfectly applicable:
the gates are friendly and hospitable to denominationaries of their
faith.
Another thing that these worthies have in common—and in common with
many unassorted sentimentaliters and effemininnies in this age of
unreason—is sympathy with crime. No avowed socialist but advocates a
rosewater penology that coddles the felon who has broken into prison to
enjoy a life of peace and plenty; none but would expel the warden and
flog the turnkey. All are proponents of the holy homily; all deny that
punishment deters from crime, although the discharged convict never
renews his offense until driven by hunger or again persuaded by his
poor brute brain that he can escape detection; he does not enter and
rob the first house that he comes to, nor murder the first enemy that
he meets.
That there are honest, clean-minded patriotic socialists goes without
saying. They are theorists and dreamers with a knowledge of life and
affairs a little profounder than that of a horse but not quite so
profound as that of a cow. But the “movement” as a social and political
force is, in this country, born of envy, the true purpose of its
activities, revenge. In the shadow of our national prosperity it whets
its knife for the throats of the prosperous. It unleashes the hounds of
hate upon the track of success—the only kind of success that it covets
and derides.
How bit and bridle this wild ass of civilization? How make the
socialist behave himself, as in Germany, or unmask himself, as in
France? It looks as if this cannot be done. It looks as if we may
eventually have to prevent the multiplication of millionaires by
setting a legal limit to private fortunes. By some such cowardly and
statesmanlike concession we may perhaps anticipate and forestall the
more drastic action of our political Apaches, incited by Envy, wrecker
of empires and assassin of civilization. Meantime, let us put poppies
in our hair and be Democrats and Republicans.
1910.