they belonged equally to an America that was passing. In consequence
of the silent drift towards consolidation new philosophies were
preparing that were to rephrase the familiar American ideals and adapt
current political and economic theory to the needs of the new order.
For a decade or more the significance of that drift was obscured by
the last great wave of decentralization that swept across the prairie
commonwealths; but when the frontier had been pushed to the Pacific
Northwest and the free lands had passed into private ownership, the
movement of consolidation gathered momentum swiftly. Primarily economic
in its origins, it went forward on even foot with the industrial
revolution. The vast increase in population, the unprofitable expansion
of agriculture, the augmenting resources of liquid capital, the new
potentialities revealed by industrialism, were all engaged in the work
of transforming a scattered agricultural people into an urbanized
industrial people.
And then came the railways to hasten a movement that was implicit in
the nature of things. Effective nationality in America issued more
immediately from fluid communication than perhaps any other cause.
A depressing spirit of isolation--of provincial aloofness--had lain
like a heavy weight on the colonial mind. The barriers of distance
were made formidable by a rugged untamed country, and to open up free
communication was an arduous undertaking. Yet easy communication must
be provided if economic development were to go forward. In the early
years of the nineteenth century vast plans and great outlays of money
went into the work of linking the sundered portions of the country
by a system of waterways. The Erie canal, the great lakes, the Ohio
and the Mississippi, were creating their own America, picturesque and
individual, when the process of differentiation was rudely broken
across by the iron rails that ran East and West, disregarding natural
barriers and breaking down traditional frontiers. It was the railways
that tied the continent effectively together, providing the needed
transportation to make possible a national economic system. With the
laying of the Union Pacific rails in the late sixties the destiny of
America as a self-sufficient economic unity was fixed. Henceforth
for an indeterminate period the drift of tendency would be from the
outlying frontiers to industrial centers, and with that drift would
come far-reaching changes in the daily routine of life. The machine
would reach into the remotest villages to disrupt the traditional
domestic economy, and the division of labor would substitute for the
versatile frontiersman the specialized factory-hand. A new urban
psychology would displace the older agrarian, and with the new
psychology would come other philosophies in response to the changing
realities.
I • Winds of Economic Theory
So profound a revolution could not fail to dislocate the foundations
of all traditional schools of thought. Economic and political theory
were both thrown out of their earlier beds to flow in new channels.
By force of gravitation the main stream of economic theory--like the
main stream of political theory--poured into the broadening channels
of capitalism, and only the lesser vagrant currents followed the
old channels of agrarianism or the new channels of proletarianism.
There was much speculation on the disturbing phenomena of the great
change, and current economic theory was slow to settle into the
conformities of a school. It divided sharply, not only between the
advocates of capitalism and agrarianism, but between those who
accepted the classical English theory and those who believed that
economic conditions in America warranted an independent American
school. The first group of professional economists--Henry C. Carey,
Francis A. Walker, David A. Wells--made its appearance, and a very
considerable group of amateurs--free-lance economists and fireside
theorists--contributed to the speculation of the times in the measure
of their intelligence. These latter have received scant attention,
since the battle went against them; nevertheless they do not deserve
to be forgotten, for most often they were an expression of the social
conscience of the times--a homely protest against the exploitation
of farmer and workingman by the rising capitalism. But because they
essayed to turn the course of “manifest destiny” they were ignored
or roughly ridden down, and only one of them--Henry George--is still
widely influential.
In the primitive early days of America economic theory had been a
simple homespun product, woven on fireside looms, and following simple
domestic patterns. With the rise of industrialism it passed into the
keeping of stockbrokers and textile manufacturers and retail merchants
who were looked upon as authoritative expounders of the new science
of wealth. In his _Elements of Political Economy_, first published in
1837 and for forty years a standard textbook in American colleges,
Francis Wayland accepted this view and offered an apology for treating
of the subject at all. “It may possibly be urged,” he said, “that the
Author, having had no experience in mercantile business, should have
left this subject to be treated of by practical men.” In the days of
Henry Clay this view established itself in the halls of Congress, where
politicians who had never heard of Ricardo were on profitably intimate
terms with Nick Biddle, and respected the interests of influential
constituents far more than the principles of Manchesterism. With the
appearance of professional economists the breach between economic
theory and legislative votes widened to a chasm. Ignored by the
politicians except in so far as their views fell in with the current
paternalism, the economists retreated to the quiet of the schools and
there spun their webs quite harmlessly. Youthful undergraduates were
fed on a modified English classical theory in which the pessimism
of Ricardo and Malthus, bred of the bitter dislocations of English
industrial life, was diluted with an optimism more suited to the temper
of the new world.
The academic economists, it must be confessed, were in an unhappy
position, not unlike that of the earlier Calvinists. They lived as
remote from the realities of life as did those old ministers. Trained
in the orthodox English school they felt bound to defend _laissez
faire_; yet as members of universities dependent on wealthy patrons
they could not well offend powerful interests that wanted none of
their free-trade theory. On the whole they stuck pretty manfully
to their guns, and from Wayland to Sumner they upheld the abstract
principle of free competition; but what they could do in other ways
to appease the wrath of the protectionists they did heartily, and
the steady rapprochement of academic economic theory and capitalism
was foreordained in the nature of things academic. Agrarian and
proletarian economics were granted no hearing in the colleges. Other
schools than the English classical were not countenanced, Henry George
was ridiculed and the left-wing European economists--great thinkers
like Sismondi, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Bastiat, Proudhon, Engels,
and Karl Marx--were pretty much ignored by professors of economics in
the America of the Gilded Age. Something of the intellectual sterility
of the genteel tradition descended upon our academic economists;
yet amongst them were vigorous and capable minds that must not be
overlooked.
1 • Henry C. Carey
Henry C. Carey, son of the vigorous Irish Republican, Matthew
Carey, who made _The American Museum_ one of the ablest of the
eighteenth-century American magazines, may perhaps be justly called
our first professional economist. The eighty-six years of his life
were filled with enormous labors in the twin fields of economics and
sociology. He did his own thinking from a basis of facts that he was
at great pains to gather and tabulate, and his intellectual unfolding
followed naturally the current material development of the mid-century.
His statistics, of which he was excessively fond, no doubt were as
unreliable as most statistics that economists love to dabble in, and
like other purveyors of columned figures and impressive charts he
certainly leaned too heavily on his knotty staff; but unlike academic
economists such as Francis Wayland he tried to keep his thinking in
contact with reality and in consequence his studies possess a solidity
that is still impressive.
Although his father had early been interested in Hamilton’s national
system and for a time was president of a Philadelphia society
concerned in furthering a protective tariff--for which the great
German protectionist List published a number of letters in 1827--Carey
began as a follower of the classical school, and in the thirties he
published a treatise on political economy that expounded the Manchester
doctrine of free-trade. But under the stirring leadership of Henry
Clay the American System was making headway fast, and the facts of
American expansion impressed him as earlier they had impressed the
young List on his visit here. Turning statistician, he soon discovered,
as he believed, certain fallacies in the English classical school,
and he proceeded to examine afresh the Ricardian theory of rent.
(The change came in 1848.) According to this most celebrated of all
economic doctrines rent is measured by the difference in productivity
between the best land, which is settled first, and the poorest, which
social need later brings under cultivation; and hence in every growing
community the increment of rent constantly increases at the expense of
both labor and capital. But in the America which Carey was acquainted
with, and where the story of social development was being swiftly
recapitulated, the facts seemed to him to prove quite otherwise. Here
the poorer lands were settled first, because their physical condition
made them more easily available, and only later, when social pressure
increased and larger means were available, were the rich bottom-lands
cleared and the marshes drained.
As a result of his narrow interpretation of Ricardo’s doctrine of
social fertility, Carey lost faith in the Ricardian theory and turned
frankly to the American scene to discover, if possible, a more adequate
explanation. Soon the seeds of his intense nationalism were bearing
their fruit. An inherited dislike of England led him to fear its
industrial preëminence, and he abandoned the ideal of an international
division of labor for the ideal of independent nationality, with
America developing its individuality through the exploitation of its
own resources. Free-trade, he came to believe, is international,
it results in establishing a “single factory for the whole world,
whither all the raw produce has to be sent whatever be the cost of
transport”; whereas any society waxes individual and strong in the
measure that it develops variety of employment with its demand for
mutual help and service. Only through such associations can man develop
his capacities and further his mastery of nature. His patriotism thus
became involved in his economics and for years he waged a relentless
warfare against Manchesterism. Not only were the English doctrines
false to American fact, he pointed out, but they were vicious Tory
doctrines which if followed here would keep America poor for the
benefit of England. The great idea which came finally to dominate his
thinking is suggested by the title of a pamphlet, written in 1852, _The
Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial_--a
work that suggests Frédéric Bastiat’s _Les harmonies économiques_,
published in 1850, and influenced by Carey’s earlier speculations.[586]
It was an age much given to discovering harmonies and Carey was not
behindhand in the business. In the introduction he traced the ills
of contemporary economic life to the Manchester theories of rent and
population--theories which had thrown their black shadows over English
Parliamentary programs of relief and perverted the normal unfolding
of western civilization. In consequence the “tendency of the whole
British system of political economy is the production of discord among
nations.”[587]
In the background of Carey’s mind was a Physiocratic dislike of the
sterile middleman which sharpened his antagonism to an international
division of labor, and a sensitive social conscience that was concerned
at the ruthless exploitation of English mill-hands. An ardent believer
in natural liberty and convinced of its beneficence, he restricted
economic freedom within national boundaries. The harmony of interests
is local and not international--the tying together of the several parts
of the whole. Beyond the national boundaries it ceases. The pessimism
of the English school with its iron law of wages and its Malthusian law
of population was harshly repugnant to his buoyant optimism. From these
vicious roots, he was convinced, sprang the principle of isolation and
differentiation--that producer and consumer must live apart, with the
corollary that the poor must seek new lands in far countries to supply
the places of those from which they have been thrust, there to produce
agricultural staples to exchange for the manufactured goods produced
in thickly settled countries--a principle that taxes both producer and
consumer in the exact measure of transportation tolls, and benefits
exclusively the sterile middleman. Applied to America the policy of
free-trade must keep this country dependent upon England--keep it
agricultural for the benefit of British merchants; and the program that
Carey outlined, the complete sufficiency of which he never doubted,
was a return to the policy of Adam Smith, to that “general harmony of
interests” that must result from bringing the farmer and artisan into
neighborhood communities, fashioning the raw materials where they are
produced and consuming the farmer’s produce where it is grown. Adam
Smith “saw well,” says Carey, “that when men came thus together, there
arose a general harmony of interests, each profiting his neighbor,
and profiting by that neighbor’s success, whereas the tendency of
commercial centralization was toward poverty and discord, abroad and at
home.”[588]
To his death in 1879 Carey was the most distinguished as he had been
the most tireless advocate of a system of protection for American
manufactures. He was one of the most pugnacious pamphleteers of a
pugnacious generation.[589] He was a co-worker with Horace Greeley in
the labor of convincing a suspicious people of the common benefits
to be got from a subsidy to a class; and their joint influence gave
respectability and popularity to the appeals of business men and
politicians. Between 1849 and 1857 he “was the virtual editor of the
_New York Tribune_” in all matters regarding protection. His chief
antagonist in the long struggle was William Cullen Bryant and the
_Evening Post_; and he made frequent appeal to Bryant to meet him in
a pamphlet debate that should bring before the public both sides of
the great question of protectionism. Bryant’s refusal did not lessen
his ardor, and in successive pamphlets he laid before the American
people a well-rounded argument for tariff subsidies that ranks him in
the history of economic thought with Friedrich List, the great German
apostle of a nationalist economic system. American manufacturers owe a
heavy debt to Henry Carey.
In these early years of industrialism the manufacturer was still
dependent on the banker, and industrial development was held back,
Carey came to believe, by a false financial policy imposed on the
county by the bankers. From his boundless enthusiasm for the ideal of
a national economy sprang likewise his unorthodox views on money that
so greatly annoyed his fellow economists. Individual in his thinking
on this as on other subjects, he espoused theories that to dogmatic
bullionists like David A. Wells seemed incendiary at a time (during
the post-war years) when so many Americans were bitten with “money
heresies.” On this theme his patriotism and his democratic sympathies
ran together. He was opposed to the bullion system because it struck
at nationalism. An English system, devised by Lombard Street, did not
answer the needs of America. The price of gold is established in a
world market and the flow of bullion is always toward the great centers
already glutted with money. To throw the money of the world into a
common pool was to subject the money of poorer and remoter countries
to the control of the great financial capitals. Free-trade and the
gold standard were the twin weapons forged by England for world-wide
economic conquest, and for America to adopt a financial policy that
held her subject to Lombard Street, seemed to Carey the height of
folly. Gold follows the balance of trade, and until America had built
up an adequate domestic economy her specie would continue to drain off,
leaving too scanty a supply to do the necessary work of society.
The solution, he believed, lay in the creation of an independent
national currency; and an efficient national currency, he held with
Bishop Berkeley, was one that was non-exportable, that remained at
home to do the day’s work instead of gadding about. To provide such
a medium of exchange he proposed a currency founded on the national
credit--a “national system,” he argued, “based entirely on the credit
of the government with the people, and not liable to interference
from abroad.”[590] It was on such grounds that Carey supported the
greenback issues and favored the remonetization of silver. The ideal of
“societary circulation,” he pointed out, was credit--“that great step
towards civilization which consists in substituting _letters of credit_
for material money”; and because “the steady and regular use of the
_letter of credit_ known to the world as the ‘greenback,’ or that other
known as the ‘national bank note,’”[591] tended to wean the minds of
men from dependence on specie, he was warm in their favor.
With a sound national system, let foreigners take our gold for
whatever balance of trade they can impose upon us, having no use
among ourselves for any coin money except what we can retain under
a wholesome foreign commerce.
What we most need today is the establishment of that monetary
independence which results from maintaining absolute command over
the machinery of exchange used within our borders, leaving to
the gold dollar the performance of its duty of arranging for the
settlement of balances throughout the world.[592]
Carey’s insistence on a plentiful supply of money laid him under the
charge of being an advocate of “cheap money,” and therefore one of
those wicked persons known as “inflationists.” The charge in the main
was true. He was pungent in his contrast between the prosperity of
war times when an abundant currency released all the energies of the
American people, and the stagnation that followed upon contraction.
“Cheap money--low interest--enabled our working men to prosper,”
whereas dear money--high interest--was bringing distress and hardship.
Every reduction in the amount of currency decreases the purchasing
power of the people, and slows down the circulatory system. The attempt
to retire the greenbacks he regarded as a class attack on the common
welfare of the country. “To that end the greenback, everywhere claimed
as the people’s money, has by those in high places been denounced,
small as is the quantity, when compared with the real need for
it.”[593] Paper money is “democratic in its tendencies,” passing from
hand to hand and never seeking a bank vault to hide in.
A war upon what is called “paper money” is ... a war upon the
poor in favor of the rich; and that the war being made upon it
has precisely that effect is proved by the fact, that the western
farmer is now being so impoverished by reason of such a reduction
in the price of corn and oats that the former is being used as
fuel, while the latter sold at 8 cents a bushel, [while] houses and
lots in the neighborhood of Wall Street [are] commanding ... prices
such as had never before been heard of.[594]
Considering Carey’s reputation as an economist and his wide influence,
such doctrine, in the eyes of all “sound-money men,” was distinctly
pernicious. He was giving aid and comfort to the apostles of inflation
and repudiation, and he suffered many a sharp attack. But that would
not deter a warrior grown gray in battle, and in the very last year
of his life he fell upon the bullion theory with the ardor of a young
man. He would not suffer the bankers to go unrebuked in their mad
attack on the prosperity of the country; he would not be silent while a
policy of contraction, that so early as 1866 had reduced the per capita
circulation to $12.50--according to his statistics--was still in full
swing after the disastrous lesson of 1873. He had much in common with
Peter Cooper, who in 1876 took up the battle against Wall Street for a
“democratic” monetary system. The blood of the two old men, both born
in the last decade of the eighteenth century, had not grown cold or
sluggish with long years, but responded ardently to the great cause of
democracy that had inspired their youth. That Carey’s national system
was a house divided against itself--that industry and finance were
engaged in a mortal combat for supremacy--he probably never quite
realized. He was concerned that America should be free to create and
enjoy the wealth that lay in the potentialities of the continent, and
to that end he would have money serve industry, and not industry money.
2 • Francis A. Walker
The social conscience of Carey was colored with an optimism that was
the spontaneous expression of a generation that set no limits to the
beneficent development of American industrialism. No storm-clouds
had yet gathered on the horizon; no hostile systems challenged the
sufficiency of capitalism. But a change was at hand. By the end of
the seventies the complacency of the Gilded Age was disturbed by the
rise of pestilent heresies in the shape of new economic dogmas. The
surplus-value theory of Marx and the unearned-increment theory of Henry
George were spreading widely through America, to the unsettlement of
susceptible minds; and the Knights of Labor were preparing to launch a
general attack against the whole system of capitalistic exploitation.
Carey had sufficed the wants of his simpler day, but there was need of
a new champion to wield the sword of pure Ricardian doctrine against
these later heresies.
Francis A. Walker, son of the economist Amasa Walker, Brigadier General
in the Civil War, Professor at Sheffield Scientific School and later
President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was to be the
self-appointed champion of industrialism, the official economist of
the Gilded Age, and forerunner of a long line of academic purveyors of
economic dogma. As the author of a college textbook that superseded
Francis Wayland’s naïve _Elements of Political Economy_--a work that
had served innumerable college generations as a quarry of economic
doctrine--he elaborated a complete system of economics with a geniality
that went far to popularize the “dismal science” with vast numbers of
undergraduates; and as an authoritative apologist for entrepreneur
profits he rendered a service to capitalism that quite erased his
little Ricardian peccadillo of free-trade prejudice. There runs
through his solid pages the confident optimism of his generation--an
optimism that discovers in the heresies of socialism and single-tax
the only storm-clouds on the fair American horizons. He saw no
reason to question the ultimate good of industrialism, or to fear any
deep-seated clash between labor and capital. He carried water easily
on both shoulders, for he was so fortunate as to have worked out to
his complete satisfaction, a magic economic formula that should return
both to master and workman their just shares of the total production.
In the light of his exegesis there could be no Marxian struggle of the
classes. The captain of industry must no longer be regarded with sour
aspect as a parasite upon labor, but as a fellow worker, the creator of
those profits which are not subtracted for his benefit from the portion
of labor. From Ricardo to Marx the economists had been barking up the
wrong tree in their analysis of the rewards of the entrepreneur.
The classical school of the Gilded Age was in like position with the
eighteenth-century Calvinists; they must either abandon their dogmas
or reinterpret them to meet current needs. Walker was too good a
Ricardian to abandon them, so he proposed to reinterpret them. The
urgent problems to which he addressed himself were the sources of
profits and of wages; and the examination of those problems led him
to his theory of the function of the entrepreneur and to a rejection
of the classical wage-fund theory. He refused to discard his suit of
Ricardian clothes as Carey had done. They could never go out of style,
he believed, so long as honest thinking was respected. He accepted
most of the Ricardian dogmas without question. “Capital,” he asserted
soberly, “arises solely from saving. It stands always for self-denial
and abstinence,” and interest is the “reward of abstinence.” But
one important dogma, the classical wage-fund theory, he insisted on
stripping away. He was too genial an optimist to rest content with
the bleak conception that the margin of subsistence circumscribes the
rewards of labor, and too enlightened an apologist of industrialism
to assert that “profits are the leavings of wages.” He could not
hope to erect a theory suitable to the Gilded Age on such skimpy
hypotheses, and he scourged them from the temple of economic law.
Wages, to be sure, are the leavings after rent, interest, and profits
have been deducted from the total production; but vast and dangerous
misconceptions have arisen in regard to the portions that accrue to
these several partners, and in particular mischievous perversions
touching the share of profits. This was the crux of the problem of
distribution and until the nature of profits should be determined the
question of wages would remain to befuddle weak heads.
The heart of Walker’s doctrine, therefore, is his theory of profits.
He proposed to show that according to the true law of profits this
flexible increment is never a moiety wrested from labor, but an
additional earning of management that justly accrues to him who creates
it. The doctrine from which he deduced his theory of the entrepreneur
was the Ricardian theory of rent. On this point Walker was the most
loyal of Ricardians, and he violently attacked Carey for repudiating
the classical dogma. In a word “Ricardo’s doctrine can no more be
impugned than the sun in the heaven,” he asserted, “and those who
mouth at it simply show that they do not know what it was Ricardo
taught.”[595] What was needed was to understand its wide implications
rather than to seek to destroy it--to trace in all its reaches the
doctrine of fertility and discover how in other spheres than land the
difference between fertile and unfertile measures the return upon
economic endeavor. For the great doctrine of fertility, Walker pointed
out, following Mill, is capable of expansion to cover wider fields
than rent; it applies equally to management and labor; it broadens out
into a comprehensive principle that exactly measures the most bitterly
disputed of the several increments, the increment of profits.
This theory of fertility, introduced into the law of distribution,
is Walker’s most interesting contribution to economic speculation.
By it he supplemented the trinity of land, capital, and labor--or
in terms of distribution, of rent, interest, and wages--with a new
entity--management and the earnings of management. The argument is
highly ingenious. Assuming a no-profits employer at the lowest scale of
the entrepreneur system, by analogy from the Ricardian no-rent grade
of land, he asserted that similarly “profits are measured upwards from
the level of the no-profits class of employers,” and hence “it appears
that the gains of the employer are not taken from the earnings of the
laboring class, but measure the difference in production between the
commonplace or bad, and the able, and shrewd, and strong management of
business.”[596] Profits, then, are an added increment of management,
secured by foresight and business skill, the fruit of managerial
fertility; and since they flow solely from the entrepreneur they belong
to him alone and no portion may be justly claimed for rent, interest,
or wages. The complete theory he states thus:
Under free and full competition, the successful employers of labour
would earn a remuneration which would be exactly measured, in the
case of each man, by the amount of wealth which he could produce,
with a given application of labour and capital, over and above
what would be produced by employers of the lowest industrial,
or no-profits, grade, making use of the same amounts of labour
and capital, just as rent measures the surplus of the produce of
the better lands over and above what would be produced by the
same application of labour and capital to the least productive
lands which contribute to the supply of the market, lands which
themselves bear no rent.[597]
It is a persuasive argument of which Walker was vastly proud. The germ
of it later historians of economic thought have traced to Senior and
John Stuart Mill, who had suggested the idea of “differential rent,” or
“rent of ability,” which is the reward of “all peculiar advantages of
extraordinary qualities of body and mind.”[598] From whatever source
it issued, the usefulness of such doctrine in the days of an expanding
industrialism, and the ends it might serve in counteracting proletarian
philosophies, are too evident to need comment. The Marxian dogma of
surplus value--that profits are stealings from wages--was certainly
calculated to breed dissatisfaction in weak proletarian heads. Marx was
a good Ricardian in his major postulates and the Ricardians had failed
to analyze adequately the true sources of profits; because of such
failure the classical school had underestimated the social beneficence
of the capitalistic system. Chained to the iron law of wages the school
had been forced to envisage a bleak future with labor kept always at
the margin of subsistence. From this pessimism Walker proposed to rid
economic theory, by showing that entrepreneur profits augment the wage
fund and hence that the entrepreneur is the benefactor rather than the
exploiter of labor. With his business skill the captain of industry,
like the inventor of a new machine, lays open new sources of wealth for
all, and if he gains much for himself he gives more to society; for
every improvement in business methods accrues in the end to society as
a whole, for the new technique soon becomes a common possession.
The validity of Walker’s theory of profits does not concern us here; it
is a matter for economists to determine. To one who is under the spell
of no doctrinaire system the theory seems somewhat too neat with its
assumption of “free and full competition”;[599] and in its conscious
purpose to glorify the captain of industry it is freighted rather
too heavily with the spirit of the Gilded Age. It not only throws
the door wide to exploitation but it invites everybody to the feast.
Yet the work of the apologist was only half done. Having established
to his satisfaction the law of profits, Walker was prepared to take
equally high ground in determining the increment that falls to labor.
To glorify profits and at the same time defend the pessimism of the
wage-fund theory, would have been foolish tactics in presence of the
Marxian surplus-value theory; proletarian discontent must be dealt with
and Walker was prepared to deal with it. Having ascertained exactly
the several increments due to rent, interest, and profits--which in
his system are rigidly determined by economic law--he confidently
assigned all the residual increment to wages. Labor not only gets all
it earns, he argued, but far more, since what does not fall to the
just shares of the other partners falls to it--that is the “whole
remaining body of wealth.” If it be recalled that the total social fund
of inventions, machinery, trade processes, systems of transportation,
business methods, are alike in the service of all employers--the
no-profit entrepreneur equally with the high-profit--it follows that
the individual employer can derive from such social wealth no modicum
of profit above and beyond what his individual fertility has produced.
Where then can the income from such social fund flow except to wages?
“Every invention in mechanics, every discovery in the chemical art, no
matter by whom made, inures directly and immediately” to the benefit
of labor.[600] This, to be sure, on the hypothesis of “full and free
competition,” which may be interfered with by various means but which
in the long run prevails. How else shall one explain the constant rise
in the wage-scale that has marked the Industrial Revolution and that
has gone hand in hand with vast profits to the entrepreneur class?
It was a robust optimism that could lay down the theory that labor
is “the residual claimant to the product of industry.” Although
Walker prided himself on his discovery, it seems to have made slight
impression on later economic thought. Like too many members of the
classical school the apologist of the Gilded Age failed to keep his
feet on the plebeian earth; and his conclusions suggest how great
mischief _a priori_ reasoning may work in the speculations of academic
gentlemen. A moderate dash of realism might have lessened his buoyant
optimism; but Walker was too warm an admirer of capitalism, too eager
to assert the beneficence of industrialism, to inquire curiously into
the everyday facts of current exploitation. As a realistic statistician
he was far inferior to Carey. But why demand a plodding realism of the
economist when all America was romantic? If the economic theory of
General Walker was a pleasant blend of Ricardo and Colonel Sellers,
would it not hit the taste of the age to a nicety? Its sturdy optimism
was a soothing antidote to the Jeremiads of the Marxians and the shrill
demands of the single-taxers. The Gold Coast of America looked to its
official economists for a confutation of all economic heresies, and who
was so well equipped for that business as a doughty Colonel Sellers
armed with a sharp Ricardian sword?
In this brisk work Walker engaged with gusto. In his onslaught upon
Marx and Henry George he was untroubled by doubt. He first demolished
the structure of their theory and then impugned their honesty. His
condemnation of single-tax is bold and sweeping. There is a bitter
asperity in his denunciation of the economic heresies of _Progress
and Poverty_, and he dismisses the proposal to tax unearned increment
with the comment, “Every honest man will resent such a proposition
as an insult.”[601] His discussion of the economics of the question
is only casual and he hastens back to the safe haven of Ricardian
doctrine.[602] In his commentary on the Knights of Labor he is somewhat
vindictive for a well-bred gentleman. He charges the syndicalistic
attack on the profits system to immigrant foreigners, asserts that the
law of profit fertility is an insuperable obstacle to any proletarian
control of industry, and finally damns it as un-American. The honest,
native American “knows that for himself and his children the way is
open clear to the top”; his “spirit is that of civility, reciprocity
and fair play”; and he concludes:
Had it been left to our native population alone, not one of those
violent and reckless attacks upon production and transportation,
which have, within the past two or three years, shocked the whole
industrial system and have come near to produce a general crisis of
trade, would ever have taken place.[603]
Yet in spite of his genial optimism he discovered specks on the fair
picture of society. To the Ricardian logic the stupidity of men is a
constant irritant; if only men were rational the path of progress would
be so much easier! After economic law has been demonstrated with the
finality of a Euclidian theorem, it is disconcerting to see how the
multitude will not be reasoned with, but persist in following after the
last false prophet who cries in the market-place. The clamor raised
by single-tax was especially annoying. “That such an argument,” he
remarked a bit testily, “should for a moment have imposed upon anybody,
is enough to give one a new conception of the intellectual capabilities
of mankind.”[604] Fortunate it is for society, he concludes, that while
man proposes, economic law disposes. False prophets will have their
little day, but from their secure watch-tower the Ricardians calmly
look out upon a world of which they alone hold the key.[605]
II • The Conscription of Political Theory
When the social fabric is being torn rudely across by a changing
economics, political theory and practice will suffer from the attendant
confusions. The America of the Gilded Age accounted itself a democracy
and was outwardly content to make use of the familiar democratic
machinery; but until it was determined whether majority or minority
rule should prevail, whether the well-being of the many or the property
of the few should be the chief object of government, there would be
no serious effort to create a political state for adequate social
control. In the meantime the old individualisms would range the land
seeking what they might devour, and the common attitude toward the
political state would remain one of good-natured contempt. A shambling
government, corrupt and incompetent, awakened no man’s hope or
pride, and amidst the slovenly anarchisms of the times, with a crude
exploitation in the saddle, the state would be pretty much ignored
except when its services might prove useful to such exploitation. The
plutocracy would oppose the erection of a vigorous state until such
time as it felt strong enough to control its activities. The principle
of the majority-will held grave potentialities that might threaten the
eventual mastership of wealth, and until the plutocracy had created its
strongholds within the framework of the democracy it would bitterly
oppose any extension of democratic control.
Broadly two great movements were going forward side by side in the
unconscious drift of political tendency--the democratic and the
plutocratic. The former, drawn chiefly from agrarian and labor
elements with a considerable following of the middle and professional
classes, was determined to carry forward and supplement the Jacksonian
movement. It was honestly concerned for the development of the
democratic principle. It would purify government by the application of
civil service reform, it would steadily enlarge the bounds of social
control of economic forces, and it would strengthen the political
state to enable it to cope with corporate wealth and constrain the
ambitions of the plutocracy into conformity with democratic ends. To
such a democratic program the plutocracy was necessarily opposed. It
professed the warmest loyalty to the abstract principle of democracy
while bending every energy to emasculate effective democratic control.
The problem confronting it was the familiar Federalistic problem--how
to protect the minority from the majority and set property interests
above human interests; but the problem had been immensely complicated
by the strategic advances made by democracy. The democratic principle
could not be easily thrust aside, it must be undermined. And so while
awaiting the time when it should be strong enough to set up boldly
its mastery of society, plutocracy took refuge in two principles,
the superman theory and the _laissez-faire_ theory, both of which it
asserted to be democratic, the very essence of democracy. The former
was “The public be damned” theory, which held that the economic leaders
of society must be left free to manage their properties as they saw
fit; and the latter was the familiar doctrine of individual initiative,
that looked with suspicion on any interference by the political state
with economic activity. If a bureaucracy may stick its nose into the
citizen’s private affairs what becomes of individual liberty?
But the plutocracy was building its real defenses elsewhere. Shrewdly
aware of the potentialities of a Constitution that had been designed
for the protection of property interests, it followed two main lines
of development: it furthered the popular development of a cult of
the Constitution by praising the excellence of a system of checks and
balances, and spreading the view that to tamper with any provisions
of the instrument was little short of sacrilege; and at the same time
it bent every energy to extend the range of judicial prerogative and
bring the legislative branch under control of the judiciary. It sought
extra-constitutional indulgences that were dispensed by the courts in
the name of the police power. The way had been prepared by Marbury
vs. Madison and Dred Scott vs. Sanford, and during the Gilded Age a
broad path to judicial control was opened by the elaboration of the
“due process of law” principle discovered in the fourteenth amendment.
With the development of the plutocracy the extension of the doctrine
of judicial review went forward rapidly, providing an impregnable
defense for property interests that promised ill for the principle
of democratic control in the interests of the common well-being. The
democracy was being driven from the inner keep of the castle.
While the real struggle was thus going on in the court-room, with the
outcome in the hands of the judges, political speculation was playing
havoc with certain of our oldest and most cherished doctrines. Pursuing
the path suggested by Webster and Francis Lieber, it turned away from
the particularism of Calhoun to explore the reaches of a consolidating
nationalism. The inevitable drift towards unity--whether democratic
or plutocratic--was daily gathering momentum. The destruction of the
states-rights program and party had cleared the ground for a new
conception of the dignity and powers of the political state. With the
social shift from dispersion to centralization the federal government
was destined to grow in authority; and political theory was destined to
follow the same course, seeking to justify in principle what was being
accomplished in fact. The end of the philosophy of dispersion was in
sight. The tide was running toward an exaltation of the doctrine of
sovereignty, with the consequent exaltation of the abstract political
state. As the individual coalesced in the mass, the rights and dignity
of the individual would lessen in the presence of an engulfing
sovereignty. The traditional doctrine of natural rights was in for a
slashing attack. Centralization must destroy the shambling Jacksonian
structure and erect in its place a grandiose organic theory.
During the Gilded Age a number of systematic studies of political
theory appeared, amongst which the most significant were, Woolsey’s
_Political Science, or the State_ (1877), Bryce’s _The American
Commonwealth_ (1888), Woodrow Wilson’s _The State_ (1889), and
Burgess’s _Political Science and Constitutional Law_ (1891). Of these
the formal studies of Woolsey and Burgess may serve to illustrate
the changing thought of the times. Both are academic reflections of
the current drift of tendency, and both reveal the academic sympathy
with the master movement of centralization. The work of Woolsey was a
revision of classroom notes used between 1846 and 1871 and strongly
colored by pre-war views; the work of Burgess was the first-fruits of
the influence of German speculation on the nature of the leviathan
state.
1 • Theodore Woolsey
Theodore Dwight Woolsey, professor of Greek and president of Yale,
was an heir in direct succession of Connecticut Federalism. Nephew of
Timothy Dwight, a minister, and distinguished member of the social
oligarchy that in its decadence still held Connecticut opinion in a
strong grip, he could scarcely escape a predilection for the moralistic
authoritative dogmatisms that marked the old Connecticut _régime_. The
principle of coercive authority had lain at the heart of the political
theory of Timothy Dwight, and Theodore Woolsey was true to his Puritan
antecedents in asserting the supremacy of authority over liberty.
The only important element in his thinking that sets him apart from
his uncle was the influence of Francis Lieber, whose conception of
organic growth in social custom he made his own, and whose disciple
he professed to be. Naturally he retained the old Puritan dislike of
leveling--the traditional Connecticut distrust of democracy. He would
have no weakening of authority, no Jacobean license; and for anarchism,
socialism, communism, which he reckoned the nastiest spawn of
Jacobinism, his abhorrence was what one would expect of a Connecticut
Federalist. The two ponderous volumes that he issued in 1877 are
learned studies that bear on their dun pages many a telltale mark of
earlier times. In them Theodore Woolsey was renewing the fight against
an infidel philosophy that with its doctrine of natural rights denied
the authority of the godly to police society.
In harmony with Lieber and Calhoun he rejected the romantic doctrine
of natural rights, and substituted a composite social-moralistic
conception, that from John Winthrop and Roger Williams to Channing and
Emerson had colored the Puritan thought of New England. Natural rights,
he asserted, are those which belong to man by reason of the nature God
has endowed him with; and the state is a moral agent, arising out of
custom, to secure and guarantee such rights. It is “as truly natural as
rights are, and as society is”; for established in the social nature of
man it is the natural repository and guardian of his rights in a social
order. It is an expression of the teleological purpose that underlies
all things. The manner in which Woolsey elaborated his moralistic
theory will be evident from the following passages:
The considerations that men exist together in society, that they
have an irresistible impulse towards society, that their perfection
of soul and of outward condition can be secured only in a social
life, and, on the other hand, that recognition of rights and
obligation alone make a social life a tolerable or even a possible
thing, and that wherever men reflect on their own nature they
admit the existence of certain classes of rights and shield them
by public power, show a divine purpose which none who believe in
a Creator of the world can deny. The Creator of man, having made
him such that his temporal, moral, and spiritual perfection can be
found only in society, prepared his moral feelings for the life
for which he was destined. The destination for society; the means
within human nature by which it is fulfilled; the means by which
the individual and the community, when brought into society, are
able to secure the good and avoid the evils possible in a state
of coexistence--these form a complete, harmonious whole, which
manifest comprehension of view and forethought. It is provided
in our nature, when it is not perverted--that is, when it does
not swerve from the true idea of human nature--that we shall form
societies under law. A state of society is a state of nature, and
the only true one.
When therefore _natural_ rights are spoken of, we can accept the
term, if it be used to denote such rights as grow out of our
nature, and may be inferred from the destination to which it
points us. Another and a heathenish kind of sense was attached
to the words, when they were taken to mean the rights, or rather
uncontrolled liberties, which men possessed in a state of human
nature in which there was no organized society or government....
[Such a theory] contemplates men as enjoying certain powers of
free action in this state of nature, and these powers must serve
for a foundation of their state as members of society, or so many
of them as it cannot be shown that they gave up, in order to make
a state of law and order possible. In other words, the theory of
the derivation of these rights from a state of nature may take a
hypothetical shape, and deduce rights from what a man could do in a
state of things which exists only in a jural fiction....
We find no fault with the objects which the theories had in view,
but with the want of conformity to truth. It must be pronounced,
in _the first place_, contrary to fact, that such a state of
nature ever existed. Man has always been under law; he is a ζῷον
πολιτικόν....
_Secondly_, if it could be shown that he had such an origin, it
would prove nothing.[606]
Having thus established both society and the state in the nature of
man, and dismissed the romantic interpretation of natural rights as
heathenish, Woolsey turned to examine the true sphere and function of
the political state. He rejected in the main the _laissez-faire_ view
of Mill and Spencer, but he refused to go so far as Burgess. He will
have no omnicompetent state. A just mean must be laid down between
authority and liberty, and that mean he discovered in the dictum,
“The sphere of the state ... may reach as far as the nature of man
and needs of man and of men reach”;[607] that is to say, its control
runs far beyond mere police powers, and concerns itself not only with
material ends but with the “intellectual and aesthetic wants of the
individual, and the religious and moral nature of its citizens.” A
state swollen to great powers he regarded as likely to swallow up
liberty in paternalism, and a state immediately responsive to the
popular will is certain to run into “extreme democracy.” His ideal
government he discovered in the rule of the Connecticut oligarchy,
under which a homogeneous people, with simple agrarian habits,
disciplined by religion and responsive to moral leadership, enjoyed
a stable government administered by proved executives. Unfortunately
with the nineteenth century began a decline in American government,
resulting from economic changes, the growth of cities, lower-class
immigration, and the “gradual reception of doctrines of political
rights, which belong to extreme democracy.” Such pernicious doctrines,
in his judgment, were: the short term of office, popular election of
judges to hold for a fixed period instead of for life, the debasement
of the representative system by subjecting the representative to his
constituents, and the spoils system.[608] In a later study he added two
other evils: direct legislation through the initiative, and a popular
referendum on war and peace.[609]
In spite of an imposing display of classical learning these two
stout volumes reveal a childlike ignorance of _Realpolitik_, a
naïve inability to grasp the significance of economic groupings
that underlie all political alignments. Neither as minister nor as
college president did Theodore Woolsey learn anything about the robust
materialisms which any realistic political theory must take into great
account. His knowledge of ancient Greek institutions no doubt was
adequate, but his knowledge of American constitutional development
was singularly inadequate. He accepted without question the argument
of Story and Webster that the phrase, “We the people,” proves the
original, consolidating intention of the document; he discussed the
history of party government in the United States without touching on
the economic alignment of agrarianism and capitalism; and he could
discover only one thoroughly admirable political party--“the upright
federal party.” He extols the Supreme Court as the triumph of the
American Constitution, without considering the desirability of a
judicial veto on legislative enactments, or suggesting a potential
alignment of the judiciary with the master forces of a generation. The
moralistic bias of his thought is perhaps sufficiently revealed in a
comment on the functions of the judges. “In a higher sense, they are
not representatives of the community nor of its chief magistrates, but
of justice and of God.... They are in fact more immediately servants
of God than any other men who manage the affairs of a country, because
expediency, departure from law or from the constitution, is for them in
no circumstance a thing to be conceived of.”[610] Mark Twain, it would
seem, was not the only humorist of the Gilded Age.
In his later years Woolsey was much disturbed by the spread of
collectivist doctrine, and in the thick of the economic unrest of the
times he felt it to be his duty to assist in stemming the advance of
such doctrine. In his great work on political theory, he demolished
the communist-anarchist-socialist arguments in a few pages, and then
remarked with excellent candor, “There is an extensive literature,
relating to the subject ... with much of which I am not familiar.”
Fearful that he might not have delivered a death-blow, after further
reading he returned to the attack three years later, and in 1880
published a volume entitled _Communism and Socialism_. For so difficult
a business he was even then inadequately equipped. He did not realize
the magnitude of his task. Marx’s _Capital_ could not be undermined
in ten pages, even with the help of Cairnes, Mill, and Ricardo, and
a political scientist with a theological background was scarcely
competent to untie the close-knit threads of the Marxian economics.
His exposition in consequence is incomplete and faulty; it largely
overlooks the Marxian philosophy of history and ignores the doctrine of
economic determinism. What troubles him most is the lack of religious
faith amongst socialists. The validity of a theory he is satisfied
to test by the morality of the theorist. One can easily guess that
President Woolsey’s opinions had turned into dogmatic conviction before
a page of the literature to be examined had come under his eyes. Yet
that so shallow a book should have issued from an academic pen will
surprise no one who is aware of the incredible number of shallow books
that actually have issued from academic pens. Provocative social
thinking and the American university seem never to have got on well
together.
In the fact that Woolsey’s speculations on the nature of the state
were accounted significant contributions to political science by his
generation of Americans, the historian may find added confirmation
of the shallowness of the Gilded Age. A stale Connecticut Calvinism,
molding in the corner of the cupboard, is poor food to nourish
thinking, and a man who knows nothing about the deeper springs of
political struggle is singularly unqualified to elaborate a science of
the state. Theodore Woolsey’s weighty volumes were a dignified attempt
to rehabilitate the old Connecticut Federalism and suit it to the taste
of a new age. But what measure of political intelligence can one expect
of a people fed on pious fictions by their most authoritative expounder
of the noble art of government?
2 • John W. Burgess
Woolsey has little to say about sovereignty. The speculations of Austin
had not reached his quiet study, and the need for a coercive state in
harmony with a centralizing industrialism was not likely to be realized
by a man whose eyes were turned back fondly to a simple village
life. It was left for a younger generation to examine the problem of
sovereignty, and to that business John W. Burgess turned with zest.
A thoroughgoing Austinian, a disciple of the German state-cult, a
Hegelian, he would seem to have been ill fitted to interpret the
functions of the state to America. And yet by virtue of his European
detachment he saw clearly the direction in which America[611]
IV • Buttressing the Democratic Theory
1 • A Democratic Economics--Henry George
While the academic economists were thus providing a new body of
capitalistic theory, from the ranks of the people came a group that
was bent on bringing economic principles into greater conformity to
what they considered democratic needs. The economics of bankers and
manufacturers they regarded as a selfish class economics and they
proposed to democratize the body of economic thought as Tom Paine and
Jefferson had democratized the body of political thought. Since the
days of John Taylor such amateur economists had been plentiful in
America, and in the post-war days when the country was in the throes
of the Industrial Revolution, they sprang up at every cross-roads.
George Henry Evans, Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, Parke Godwin, Wendell
Phillips, Albert Brisbane, Hinton R. Helper, “Coin” Harvey, were only
a few out of the many who in their own way were seeking in economics a
road to freedom. They were not formal economists; they were little read
in the history of economic thought; in so far as they may be accounted
a school they were mostly the unclaimed progeny of French Physiocratic
theory who did not recognize their own father. Yet they were vastly
concerned to bring economic theory into some sort of realistic contact
with the facts of American experience and the ideals of democracy;
and their immediate objective was the overthrow of current Manchester
principles and the erection in their stead of a body of theory based on
the needs of the producer and the consumer rather than the middleman.
Of this characteristic native group, largely ignored by our formal
historians, by far the ablest and most influential was Henry George,
a thinker created by the impact of frontier economics upon a mind
singularly sensitive to the appeal of social justice, singularly
self-sufficient in its logic. He remains still our most original
economist. Beyond the Ricardian theory of rent, with its corollary of
unearned increment, he owed little to Europe and nothing to academic
American economists. From the first he was a free-lance, returning
to the origins of things--as Tom Paine had advised long before--and
thinking “as if he were the first man who ever thought.” His major
doctrines he arrived at largely independently, ignorant of the fact
that his _impôt unique_ had been earlier elaborated by the Physiocratic
school, till long after he had come to identical conclusions. His
matured philosophy was the outcome of the meditations of a Jeffersonian
idealist contemplating the divergence between the crude facts of
exploitation all about him and the eighteenth-century ideal of natural
justice; and he became, in consequence, the voice of idealistic America
seeking to adjust the economics of a rapidly changing society to the
ends of democratic well-being. The passion of the reformer was in him,
but wedded to the critical mind of the analyst; and this accounts
for the wide appeal of _Progress and Poverty_ that for thousands of
Americans removed economic theory from the academic closet and set it
in the thick of political conflict. Henry George humanized the dismal
science and brought it home to the common interest. With his extreme
simplification no doubt he fell into the same error the classical
school had fallen into before him; he left too many elements out of
his equation; but he succeeded in the same way they had succeeded--he
made of economic theory a weapon to use in the struggle between the
exploiters and the exploited. After _Progress and Poverty_ the social
economist could cross swords with the Ricardians.
Henry George is readily enough explained in the light of his
environment. He was intellectually native to the West, but it was the
West of the Gilded Age with its recollections of an earlier agrarian
order. Upon the gigantic exploitation of post-war times, carried
forward in the name of progress, he threw the experience of two
hundred and fifty years of continental expansion. That experience had
undergone a subtle change as the settlements moved through the Inland
Empire, a change marked by the spirit of capitalistic expansion with
its crop of unearned increment. On the frontier, land speculation
was often the readiest means to wealth. To the west of the Allegheny
Mountains land had long been the staple commodity, with the buying and
selling of which every community was deeply concerned; and from the
dramatic repetition of that experience in California, Henry George
clarified the principle upon which he erected his social philosophy,
namely, that a fluid economics begets an equalitarian democracy and
homespun plenty, and that with the monopolization of natural resources
a static economy succeeds, with its attendant caste regimentation and
augmenting exploitation. In the days when he was meditating his social
philosophy, California was still in the frontier stage of development,
but amidst the hurrying changes a fluid economics was visibly hardening
to the static, with a swiftness dramatic enough to impress upon him
the significance of a story that had been obscured in earlier telling
by the slowness of the dénouement. The vast cupidity of business in
preëmpting the virgin resources of California, and in particular the
technique of Leland Stanford and the Central Pacific Railway group,
provided an eloquent object-lesson that set him to examining the long
history of land-jobbing in America in its remoter social bearings. From
such inquiry emerged the cardinal principles of an economic theory that
must be reckoned the ultimate expression of a school of thought that
beginning with Quesnay a hundred years before, and first interpreted
for America by John Taylor and the Jeffersonians, was finally buried in
a common grave with the kindred doctrine of natural rights.
It was no accident that his mind fastened upon land monopoly as the
deeper source of social injustice. As a child of the frontier he
thought in terms of land as naturally as the money-broker thinks in
terms of discounts. His psychology was that of the producer rather than
the middleman. Land, with all its potential wealth of field and orchard
and forest and stream, with its unmeasured resources of coal and iron
and oil and timber, was the fruitful gift of nature to man; and the
true measure of social well-being, he believed, is the measure in which
labor is free to use such natural resources for productive purposes.
Land monopoly was an ancient evil that had laid its blight on every
civilization. The expropriation of natural resources was the origin of
rent, and rent was a social tax parasitic in nature. Unearned increment
was a moiety wrested from the producer, that waxed ever greater with
the increase of production. Henry George was well aware how deeply
rooted in American psychology was the love of unearned increment.
Since the far-off days when the agent of the Transylvania Land Company
wrote in 1775 that the Ohio Valley abounded in land-mongers, the rage
for expropriative speculation had mounted steadily; and the railway
land-grants of his day were a fitting climax to a policy that in every
generation had brought forth such fruits as the Yazoo frauds. The land
question was a perennial western problem. For years Horace Greeley in
the _Tribune_, had spread amongst the farmers the “Vote Yourself a
Farm” propaganda. The protest of the small western settler against the
middleman policy of the government in alienating great blocks of the
public domain to speculative companies, had added thousands of votes to
the Republican party, and the result was the Homestead Act of 1862. But
the fruits of the Act were partly destroyed by huge grants to railway
promoters, and the time had come, George believed, when the problem
must be envisaged in all its complexities and the American people
brought to understand how great were the stakes being gambled for.
The disease had so long been endemic in America that the remedy
must be drastic. No patent nostrums would serve. The vividness of
his experience in the West had thrown into sharp relief his earlier
experiences in the East, and made him distrustful of all social
panaceas that hopeful idealists were seeking in Europe. With any form
of collectivistic theory he would have nothing to do. Marxian socialism
he looked upon as an alien philosophy, inadequate in its diagnosis and
at fault in its prescription. The ills of America--perhaps of Europe as
well--must be cured by another regimen. _Progress and Poverty_ grew out
of his experience as he watched the heedless alienation of the public
domain. It was his reply to the policy of preëmption, exploitation, and
progress of the Gilded Age. Philadelphia-born, he early suffered in his
personal fortune from the periodic hard times that ran so disastrous a
cycle in the days when America was in thoughtless transition from an
agrarian order to an industrial. His scanty schooling came to an end
before he had reached his fourteenth year, and at sixteen he saw no
better opening in life than to ship before the mast to Australia. On
his return he learned to set type, but times were bad and opportunity
declining to knock at his door, he worked his way through the Straits
of Magellan, landing in San Francisco in 1858, on his way to Salem,
Oregon, where he worked for a time in a shop. With the exhaustion of
the diggings he made his way back to San Francisco, and began a long
series of restless ventures in the newspaper field, with only his hands
for capital--none very successful, none quite a failure, but returning
him useful dividends in the form of a serviceable prose style. At
twenty-two he plunged into an improvident marriage with a girl of
eighteen, and the next dozen years brought many privations to the
little family.
Fate had not yet taken Henry George in hand to lead him into his
life work. All the economics he then knew had been learned in the
rough and tumble ways of a western print-shop. In 1869, at the age of
thirty, while on a business trip to New York City, he was confronted
by the contrast between wealth and poverty there nakedly exposed--so
unlike what he had known at San Francisco. It was a prod to his social
conscience, and as he contemplated the wretchedness of the East Side he
registered a vow to explore the hidden causes of social disease. He had
given no serious thought to economic questions, and now almost casually
he went to the Philadelphia public library to look into John Stuart
Mill’s _Political Economy_. He accepted Mill’s views on wages without
critical examination, and wrote his first important article--on the
Chinese question in California. In the meantime a group of California
railway promoters had been buying and selling legislators in their work
of building up private fortunes out of a public monopoly; and it was
the contemplation of wealth acquired by such methods, together with the
gamble of land speculation in Oakland in consequence of the proposal to
establish there the western terminal of the continental railway, that
clarified for Henry George the great principle he was to expound in
_Progress and Poverty_ ten years later.
The first drift in his intellectual development had been a drift back
to the old Jeffersonianism from which the country was swiftly moving.
As an editor he was an outspoken Democrat of the primitive school,
opposed to protectionism, subsidies, a centralizing political state,
and the corruption that follows in the train of paternalism as sickness
follows infection. In a pamphlet written in 1870, he expounded his
political faith thus:
Railroad subsidies, like protective duties, are condemned by the
economic principle that the development of industry should be
left free to take its natural direction. They are condemned by
the political principle that government should be reduced to its
minimum--that it becomes more corrupt and more tyrannical, and
less under the control of the people, with every extension of its
powers and duties.... They are condemned by the experience of the
whole country, which shows that they have invariably led to waste,
extravagance and rascality; that they inevitably become a source of
corruption and a means of plundering the people.[612]
Having thus indoctrinated himself in the Jeffersonian liberalism
with its foundations laid in natural rights and its conception of a
decentralized society, the following year, at the age of thirty-two,
he sat down to the serious elaboration of his views. _Our Land and
Land Policy, National and State_, was an explorative pamphlet that
went to the heart of the problem as he had come to understand it. The
kernel of the work is the question of the relation of land to labor,
of rent to wages; and the conclusion to which it led was the doctrine
of the social ownership of socially created values, which justice
requires shall return to society in the form of an equalized tax that
shall absorb the unearned increment. Around this fundamental doctrine
was grouped a considerable body of ideas that had been expounded by
earlier liberals. How much he borrowed and how much he arrived at
independently, cannot easily be determined; such diverse thinkers as
James Harrington, Locke, the Physiocrats, Tom Paine, Karl Marx, John
Stuart Mill, William Ellery Channing, might well have contributed to
this provocative document, if George had been acquainted with them.
Like Harrington was the assumption of economic determinism--that
ownership of the land implies the rulership of society. From the
school of Locke came the conception of natural rights, but interpreted
rather in terms of Tom Paine and of William Ellery Channing. From
Mill came the conception of unearned increment; from Marx the law of
concentration; and from the Physiocrats the conception of a natural
order and the doctrine of an _impôt unique_. And all this set in a
framework of American economic history, which reveals with shrewd
insight the disastrous tendency of the traditional policy of land
alienation in great blocks to middle-men, with the attendant rise of
rent.
How intimately he was related in his thinking to the French liberals of
the eighteenth century, may perhaps be sufficiently suggested in his
interpretation of the doctrine of natural rights--a doctrine the new
realistic school from Calhoun to Woolsey and Burgess was subjecting to
critical analysis. By uniting the individualism of Locke’s doctrine of
property with the Physiocratic doctrine of social well-being, he gave
a sharp turn to the conception that, like Jefferson’s, set it widely
apart from the exploitative interpretation preferred by the Hamiltonian
followers of Locke. The gist of his conception is thus set down:
Now the right of every human being to himself is the foundation
of the right of property. That which a man produces is rightfully
his own, to keep, to sell, to give or to bequeath, and upon this
sure title alone can ownership of anything rightfully rest. But man
has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence--the
right to the use of so much of the free gifts of nature as may be
necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and which he
may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else;
and to this he has a title as against all the world.[613]
Much of Henry George is compressed within these few lines, that suggest
as well the diverse liaisons of his thought. In his conception of
the right of every man to himself he is in agreement with William
Ellery Channing, who used the argument in his attack on slavery, and
with Emerson, Parker, and the Transcendental radicals generally.
It is an interpretation of natural rights that sprang easily from
the Unitarian-Transcendental conception of the sacredness of the
individual, and that was given wide currency by the anti-slavery
propaganda. From his deduction that the right to property flows
from the right to self, came his theory of tax-equity that was to
play a major rôle in the formulation of his principle of taxation.
If society may not justly take from the individual what the
individual has created, it must seek its revenues elsewhere than in a
personal-property tax; and where should it look if not to those values
which society has created? The inalienable right of the individual to
what he has produced does not extend to the appropriation of wealth
he has not produced, and a sharp line is drawn between the rights
of the individual and the rights of society, between production and
exploitation. Herein lies the justification of the single-tax--a
principle derived by crossing Locke with the New England school.
From the classical economists Henry George got little. He had a quiet
contempt for them he was never at pains to conceal. He was convinced
that they had distorted the whole science of economics. As the earlier
Tories with their sacred _arcana imperii_ had done with political
government, they had involved economics in abstract theory, removing
it from the comprehension of the common man. At the best they had
dehumanized it to the status of a dismal science, with their postulate
of an economic man and their pessimistic outlook. At the worst they had
shaped it into a potent weapon for the exploiting class, who gravely
invoked economic law--which none understood--to justify class policies
of state. In an address delivered at the University of California,
Henry George paid his respects to the classical school in these words:
The name of political economy has been constantly invoked against
every effort of the working classes to increase their wages
or decrease their hours of labour.... Take the best and most
extensively circulated textbooks. While they insist upon freedom
for capital, while they justify on the ground of utility the
selfish greed that seeks to pile fortune on fortune, and the
niggard spirit that steels the heart to the wail of distress, what
sign of substantial promise do they hold out to the working man
save that he should refrain from rearing children?...[614]
For political economy thus degraded from its high place and become
the slut of private interest, Henry George proposed to do what Tom
Paine had done for political theory a hundred years before--he would
transfer it from the closet to the market-place by exposing the
shabby _arcana imperii_ and bringing it within the comprehension
of common men. He would bring home to the popular intelligence a
realization of the dynamics of economic law and its bearing upon
social well-being, that men might plot a fairer course for society.
This was the deeper purpose of _Progress and Poverty_--to humanize
and democratize political economy, that it might serve social ends
rather than class exploitation. _The Rights of Man_ and _Progress and
Poverty_ may be reckoned complementary works, applying to related
fields the spirit released to the modern world by the great thinkers
of Revolutionary France. The foundations on which they both rest is
the eighteenth-century conception of natural law, all-comprehensive,
beneficent, free, enshrined in the common heart of humanity, and
conducting to the ultimate of social justice.
As a necessary preliminary to his purpose, Henry George was forced to
clear the ground of old growths. Before he could declare the truth he
must uproot certain of the Malthusian and Ricardian heresies. He must
substitute a sociological interpretation, based on historical reality
in western civilization, for a set of economic abstractions, based on
the political and economic accidents of England in post-Napoleonic
days. The Manchester school, it must be remembered, was an embodiment
of the aspirations of the rising middle class; it was a philosophical
attack upon the vexatious restrictions laid upon capitalism by
government in the hands of the landed aristocracy. It conceived of
economic principles as of concern only to the owning classes, and
its theory took a special and narrow form from the current struggle
between the landed and capitalistic interests. In a Parliamentary
debate over the corn laws in 1814, Alexander Baring, the banker,
assumed that the working classes had no interest at stake. To argue
that they were affected, he said, was “altogether ridiculous; whether
wheat was 130s. or 80s., the laborer could only expect dry bread in
the one case and dry bread in the other.”[615] In Francis Wayland’s
_Elements of Political Economy_, published in 1837, a similar narrow
view of the field of economics was expressed. That an adequate
political economy must be social, that it must be something very much
more than a merchant’s _vade mecum_, or handbook of profit rules, Henry
George grasped as clearly as Ruskin; and he attacked certain of the
Manchester principles with the ardor of a social prophet. Of these
the classical wage-fund theory seemed to him the most vicious, and
he was at vast pains to prove that wages are drawn from the produce
of labor and not from a preëxistent capital-fund. Having established
this to his satisfaction, he turned to consider the economic effects
of monopolistic expropriation of natural resources, and discovered the
explanation of the augmenting poverty of civilization in the shutting
out of labor from the sources of subsistence, that is in land monopoly.
The argument is based on the Ricardian theory of rent. Though
George rejected the classical wage-fund theory, he accepted without
qualification the classical rent-theory, and discovered the kernel of
his philosophy in the doctrine of social fertility. If rent is the
difference between the income-value of a given piece of land and that
of the least valuable in the neighborhood, it measures the difference
between the yields per acre on the richest and the leanest soil with
a like outlay of labor and capital. So in an urban community rent
arises from what may be called social fertility--that is, from a
monopoly-value in a given neighborhood. Such monopoly-value arises from
strategic location; the desirability of a given tract for dwelling,
factory, or shop. The number of persons daily passing will determine
the rental value for shop purposes; the the accessibility to docks,
railways, raw material, power, markets, labor-surplus, will determine
its rental value for factory purposes. In every such case, however,
it is society and not the individual that augments rent, and this
unearned increment increases with the growth of the community. From
every advance of civilization it is the landlord who profits. He is
a social parasite, the nether millstone between which and material
progress the landless laborer is ground.
In every direction, the direct tendency of advancing civilization
is to increase the power of human labour to satisfy human
desires--to extirpate poverty and to banish want and the fear
of want.... But Labour cannot reap the benefits which advancing
civilization thus brings, because they are intercepted. Land being
necessary to labour, and being reduced to private ownership, every
increase in the productive power of labour but increases rent--the
price that labour must pay for the opportunity to utilise its
power; and thus all the advantages gained by the march of progress
go to the owners of land, and wages do not increase ...[616]
Labour and capital are but different forms of the same thing--human
exertion. Capital is produced by labour; it is, in fact, but
labour impressed upon matter.... The use of capital in production
is, therefore, but a mode of labour.... Hence the principle that,
under circumstances which permit free competition, operates to
bring wages to a common standard and profits to a substantial
equality--the principle that men will seek to gratify their desires
with the least exertion--operates to establish and maintain this
equilibrium between wages and interest.... And this relation fixed,
it is evident that interest and wages must rise and fall together,
and that interest cannot be increased without increasing wages, nor
wages be lowered without depressing interest.[617]
There is no inherent antagonism between labor and capital, Henry George
was early convinced. The Marxians with their theory of a class war
were mistaken in their analysis. It is rent that is the true source of
social injustice, and the clash of interests in society lies between
the producer and the parasitic rent-collector. In every society the
appropriation of measured increment has enslaved the ownerless. In all
civilizations, from ancient Peru to modern Russia, it has subjected
the worker to exploitation. Helot, villein, serf, are only different
names for a common slavery, the profits of which go to the landlord.
In modern times the Industrial Revolution has changed the form of
serfdom, only to intensify and embitter it. The Manchester factory-hand
was in worse plight than the medieval villein after the Black Plague.
Dispossessed of his acres by the enclosure movement, he had been thrown
into the hoppers of industrialism and ground to pieces. He was helpless
in the hands of the masters, who with their monopoly of land and the
machine, in control of the common heritage of trade processes, raw
materials, transportation, credit, and the law-making and law-enforcing
machinery, were taking from labor an augmenting toll of its production.
Hence the close correlation between material progress and proletarian
poverty. Hence the logical outcome of the Industrial Revolution, when
it should have run its course, was the reduction of the worker to the
level of a slave, compared with whose material condition the status
of the southern bond-slave was enviable. The southern apologists of
slavery had been right; the negro on the plantation enjoyed advantages
denied to wage-labor under industrialism.[618]
Having thus analyzed the forces at work in modern society, and wedded
a flamboyant material progress to a slattern poverty, Henry George
proposed his sovereign remedy--the return to society of social values,
hitherto expropriated by means of the private ownership of land,
and the removal of the burden of indirect taxation from the back of
productive labor. The Ricardian theory of rent, interpreted in the
light of eighteenth-century _laissez faire_--of free competition, of
a beneficent natural law, of social justice--conducted to unforeseen
social issues. If labor and capital are individual, the fruits of both
should return to their producers. Society has no just claim on what
society has not produced, and the individual has no just claim to that
which his labor or capital has not produced. Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to the individual citizen the things that
are his--such to Henry George was the sum of the law of distribution.
Land monopoly was a refined denial of natural rights. “The equal right
of all men to the use of the land is as clear as their equal right
to breathe the air--it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their
existence.”[619] Unearned increment was the shackles wherewith labor
was bound. In the name of social justice strike those shackles from the
limbs of men and progress would never again have its ears filled with
the wailings of poverty. The workman would once again sing at his work,
and the sunshine of well-being fall pleasantly on the land.
A brilliant thinker, with a passionate sympathy for the exploited of
earth, this knight-errant from out the newest West ardently believed
in the sufficiency of his social philosophy to all needs. In him the
French Revolutionary doctrine came to its most original expression
in America. No doubt, like his progenitors, he oversimplified the
problem. Society is more complex than he esteemed it; individual
motives are more complex. It is perilous to subordinate psychology
to abstract theory; the ideal of justice is always running afoul of
immediate and narrow interest. Later academic economists have dealt
sharply with Henry George, but what have they done to justify their
magisterial tone? The science of economics is still cousin-german to
philosophy in its fondness for spinning tenuous subtleties; it is still
system-ridden, still too much the apologist for things as they are.
From its servitude to a class Henry George essayed to deliver it. In
fastening upon monopoly as the prime source of social injustice, he
directed attention to the origins of exploitative capitalism. He did
more than any other man to spread through America a knowledge of the
law of economic determinism. He opened a rich vein and one that needs
further exploring. The suggestive principle of unearned increment calls
for further expansion to embrace other forms than rent, to fit it to
the needs of a complex society. What he seems not to have seen was the
wider range of economic determinism--that changes come only when the
existing order has become intolerable to great classes, and the grip of
use and wont is loosened by the rebellions born of exigent need. “For
ever the fat of the whole foundation hangeth to the priest’s beard,”
asserted a quaint Beggars’ Petition in appeal to Henry VIII against the
monasteries, and in that comment were the seeds of the Reformation.
When the beards are few to which the fat hangs, the time is ripe for
an upheaval. An arch-idealist, Henry George would hasten the change by
appeal to reason. Like Godwin and Tom Paine he believed that reason
will make its own way, forgetting that reason waits upon interest, and
the day of its freedom is long delayed. Yet if he was oversanguine, why
account that to his discredit?[620]
Footnotes
[586] See Gide and Rist, _A History of Economic Doctrines_, pp.
282-284, 327-331.
[587] _Miscellaneous Works_, Preface to _Harmony of Interests_.
[588] _Ibid._
[589] All told he published at his own print-shop some 3000 pages of
pamphlet material of his own writing.
[590] _Contraction or Expansion? Repudiation or Resumption? Letters
to the Hon. Hugh M’Culloch, Secretary of the Treasury_, Philadelphia,
1866, p. 20.
[591] _Ibid._, p. 22.
[592] Quoted in W. Elder, _Memoir of Henry C. Carey_, p. 13
(Philadelphia, 1880. With bibliography).
[593] _Shall We have Peace? Letters to President-elect Grant_, p. 39.
[594] _Contraction or Expansion? etc._, p. 20.
[595] _Land and its Rent_, p. 108.
[596] _Political Economy_, pp. 242, 348.
[597] _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, April, 1887. Quoted in Gide and
Rist, _A History of Economic Doctrine_, p. 551.
[598] _Ibid._, p. 549.
[599] For a critical examination see Gide and Rist, _A History of
Economic Doctrine_, pp. 551-558.
[600] _Political Economy_, pp. 251-258.
[601] _Land and its Rent_, Preface, p. vi.
[602] _Ibid._, pp. 181-182.
[603] _Political Economy_, p. 394.
[604] _Ibid._, p. 433.
[605] In his original plan Professor Parrington included a third
subsection on W. G. Sumner, but evidently decided against its
inclusion.--_Publisher._
[606] _Political Science_, Vol. I, pp. 23-25.
[607] _Ibid._ p. 216.
[608] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 141.
[609] _Communism and Socialism_, p. 232.
[610] _Political Science_, Vol. II, pp. 330-331.
[611] The discussion of Burgess was not completed by Professor
Parrington. At this point he planned a third section, “The New Ally:
the courts: the police power and the fourteenth amendment; the
injunction.” None of this section was written, but he has dealt with
these subjects _passim_.--_Publisher._
[612] George, _Life of Henry George_, pp. 216-217.
[613] _Ibid._, p. 223.
[614] _Ibid._, p. 277.
[615] Quoted by Wesley Clair Mitchell in _The Trend of Economics_,
edited by R. G. Tugwell, p. 5.
[616] _Progress and Poverty_, Book IV, Chapter 4.
[617] _Ibid._, Book III, Chapter 5.
[618] See _Ibid._, Book VII, Chapter 2.
[619] _Ibid._, Book VII, Chapter I.
[620] The discussion of Henry D. Lloyd, planned as the second
subsection, was not written.--_Publisher._
Chapter IV • The Beginnings of Criticism
For many thoughtful Americans the welter of frontier individualism was
a severe trial to their faith in American institutions. An ambitious
industrialism colliding with a shambling Jacksonian democracy was
forecasting consequences to government and to society that intelligent
men could not shut their eyes to. The America of Fisk and Gould, of
Boss Tweed and the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal, was far from satisfying
the requirements of any rational civilization. After a hundred years
to have come to such heroes, to have bogged down in such filth, was an
outcome to the great experiment that one could not contemplate with
pride. It was no time to be silent. No people was ever saved by dumb
preachers. The present generation was answerable for the new evils that
were springing from the graves of the old, and intelligent Americans
must not lose their heads in the thick of the common hurly-burly. So
amidst the ruck and clamor of the times a tiny note of criticism was
lifted up, timid and uncertain at first, but growing more confident and
more strident as the decade grew older. It was not searching criticism.
Sooner or later it was pretty certain to run into a blind alley of
moral indignation, overlooking the major issues and leaving the vital
factors of the problem unconsidered. Yet such as it was--shallow and
feeble enough often to excite wonder in a later generation--it marks
the rise of a spirit of skepticism towards the blowsy doctrine of
manifest destiny that since the fifties had been blowing about the land.
The determining factors in the situation confronting criticism were
political and economic, and the immediate problem that pressed for
solution was the problem whether an undisciplined people, wedded to
an old-fashioned agrarian democracy, could cope with an ambitious
industrialism that was quite cynically buying and selling the political
state. To deal with that problem most of the critics were singularly
ill equipped. Two generations of constitutional debate, seasoned with
a dash of equalitarian dogma, had left them intellectually lean and
impoverished. They had forgotten the sober realism of the eighteenth
century that never overlooked the intimate ties between economics
and politics, and with no anchors down in the plebeian mud they were
likely to drift helplessly in the moral squalls they were always
blowing up. The more distinguished critics--those who commanded the
most serious attention--were in a particularly unfortunate situation,
for not only were they uninstructed idealists with no understanding
of _Realpolitik_, but they had been reared in the classical tradition
and their minds were saturated with a decadent aristocratic culture.
To many of them the present evils of America served only to quicken an
inherited skepticism of democracy. How can society expect to function
adequately, they asked, without capable and honest leadership; and
how can such leadership be hoped for in a rough and tumble democracy
that loves the noisiest demagogue? Of this very considerable group of
belated Federalists James Russell Lowell was the most distinguished
representative. In the middle seventies he had come to believe that
America was suffering from too much democracy, and that competent
government could be had only by working back to the responsible
Federalism of earlier times, with leadership reclaimed by the better
elements of society. To the economics of the problem--the antagonistic
interests of capitalist, proletarian, and farmer, with their struggles
to control the political state--he gave no serious thought, but he
viewed with instinctive suspicion the mounting ambitions of labor and
he foresaw only evil from the bitter unrest of the farmers.
A second very considerable group, of which George William Curtis may
be taken as spokesman, rejected all such antiquated Federalistic hopes
as the foolish dreams of defeatists. They held fast to their faith
in democracy, but they were convinced that more adequate democratic
machinery must be provided. The root of the evil, they had come to
believe, was political and must be sought in the vicious Jacksonian
spoils system. With every change of administration to turn over the
country to hungry partisans to devour, was not democracy but the
negation of democracy? Government would not function satisfactorily
until a trained civil service was provided, and the need of the hour,
they pointed out, was an honest civil service reform. A third group,
very much smaller than the others, of which Edwin Lawrence Godkin was
the spokesman, was inclined to trace the plentiful evils of the times
to an unwise paternalism, asserting that the real source of the common
political scoundrelism was the lauded American System devised by Henry
Clay, as a result of which government was seduced from its proper
business of keeping the peace and was turned into a fairy godmother to
shower gifts on favored interests. The only cure for the evil was to
divorce business and politics and reëstablish in practice the police
theory of government.
In the thinking of all three groups little consideration was given
to the social consequences of the venture on which America had
entered with the vigor of thoughtless youth. Concerning the ultimate
consequences of the collision between a shambling democracy and an
ambitious industrialism, few troubled themselves greatly. To find
those who confronted the problem frankly and realistically, one must
search out obscure men, labor leaders for the most part, or _déclassé_
radicals like Wendell Phillips. The middle-class mind refused to
see what its feet were stumbling over. In consequence the Gilded
Age produced no critics of industrialism comparable to the great
English critics--Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Morris, Tawney; no social
philosophers like the great continental expounders of proletarian
ideals--Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Sorel; no left-wing economists like
the great French school--Louis Blanc, Bastiat, Proudhon. The genteel
culture of America was no better than bankrupt in presence of brutal
reality, quite unequipped to interpret the sprawling America that was
transforming itself before its eyes into something it hated but did
not understand. The time for searching criticism had not come, and
would not come until the Industrial Revolution had created in America
a proletariat such as swarmed in the English black country and amongst
the hovels of continental cities. Nevertheless such criticism as there
was must be taken into consideration, and for our present purpose it
will suffice to single out three spokesmen--a grizzled warrior of the
earlier renaissance who had the courage to face unpleasant fact, and
two critics who brought to bear on political themes the best culture of
the time. With these may be conveniently grouped certain novelists who
more or less casually suffered their pens to deal with social problems.
I • The New England Conscience and Capitalism--Wendell Phillips
Social criticism was by no means a new thing in America. For half a
century it had filled all ears with its strident clamors, and from it
had issued the motley group of reform movements that had been cheered
or mocked at by thousands. From Channing and Cooper down to Parke
Godwin and Horace Greeley it had been mustering its forces, vivid and
picturesque figures for the most part--men and women like Fanny Wright,
George Henry Evans, and Hinton R. Helper; ardent souls who beyond the
dun horizon discovered a golden morrow that only awaited the rising
of a new sun, and who lectured and wrote and argued till pretty much
all America had caught something of their contagious enthusiasm. In
this work New England came eventually to take the lead, and the golden
forties were a time when in many an obscure Yankee head programs of
reform were fermenting like a vat of malt. But unfortunately an excess
of eagerness wore out the first enthusiasm, and when the shackles had
been loosened from the negro bondmen the militancy of the New England
leadership subsided and the tired New England conscience went on
vacation.
But in these slothful times the conscience of one great New Englander
was not tired, though he gave it no rest while life lasted. Wendell
Phillips was a soldier of Puritan soul who did not lay down his arms
in ’65, but for nearly a score of years warred upon the injustices of
the Gilded Age as he had warred before upon the obscenities of negro
slavery. No sooner was the cause of abolitionism won--a cause to which
he had sacrificed much in ease and the good opinion of Beacon Street,
but from which he had gained more in self-respect and the decent
opinion of mankind--than he turned to whatever new work offered. The
lovers of justice, he knew very well, can indulge themselves in no
vacations, for the devil is on the job day and night, and while the
assailants sleep he is at work repairing any breaches in the walls of
his citadel. When conscience is tired he counts on gaining his greatest
victories.
The love of freedom has always been a dangerous possession in
Massachusetts, given to exploding in unforeseen moments and unexpected
places. No one could have foretold--certainly not he himself--that
Wendell Phillips would put away all his Brahmin loyalties and devote
forty-seven years to an unresting attack on the diverse Toryisms from
which he and his class had hitherto prospered. Son of the first mayor
of the city and a distinguished member of the Boston gentry, he was a
patrician in the fullest Boston sense. All the loyalties of his caste
summoned him to uphold the Brahmin authorities, but something deep
within him, a loyalty to other and higher ideals, held him back. When a
frock-coated mob laid its hands on Garrison to lynch him for abolition
propaganda, he drew back; he refused to follow the Mayor and the
Colonel of his regiment and other gentlemen if they betrayed the Boston
for which their grandfathers had fought. An instinctive love of justice
held him back. A fierce indignation flamed up within him at the wrong
done a citizen of Massachusetts for exercising his natural right of
free speech, and in that wild hour he discovered that he was a child of
’76 with the mentality of a revolutionist. His conscience was aroused
and he proceeded to put it in the safe keeping of Ann Terry Greene,
a brilliant young woman of radical mind, who quickened his sense of
social justice as Maria White was to quicken Lowell’s. There was to
be no backsliding in his case. From the December day in 1837 when he
replied to Attorney-General Austin’s slanders of the Revolutionary
fathers in Faneuil Hall, to the end of a life filled with enormous
labors--a life daily stabbed by Tory hornets, and that at the last is
said to have inspired the remark of Judge Hoar that he did not attend
the funeral of Wendell Phillips but he approved of it[621]--he followed
his conscience into many an unpopular cause and spoke for those for
whom few were willing to speak.
The story of his anti-slavery labors belongs to an earlier time and
need not be recounted here. His devotion to abolitionism equaled
Garrison’s and his services were as great. It is rather the nineteen
years that remained to him after Appomattox that are of present
concern--what later battles he fought and how he bore himself in those
battles. It was a difficult time for Puritan liberalism, face to face
with a new age that had forgotten the old liberalisms. The Grand Army
of Abolitionism had disbanded and new armies of other causes had
not yet been recruited. Garrison and Edmund Quincy and Whittier had
laid aside their arms, and Lowell had long since settled back into a
comfortable Brahminism; the long struggle had left them drained of
their energy. But for Wendell Phillips the battle was not over; it was
unending and he was enlisted for life. At a vast meeting that marked
the formal close of the abolition movement he took leave of his old
associates with these words: “We will not say ‘Farewell,’ but ‘all
hail.’ Welcome, new duties! We sheathe no sword. We only turn the front
of the army upon a new foe.”[622] He had long spoken for prohibition,
woman’s rights, the abolition of capital punishment, and he now joined
heartily with the courageous women engaged in such reform work. But
more provocative business was at hand, and more dangerous--causes
that touched the northern pocketbook as abolitionism had touched the
southern. The banker’s exploitation of the national currency, and the
manufacturer’s exploitation of factory labor--these were issues that a
cautious man who was careful of his good name would not meddle with.
But Wendell Phillips was never cautious and his good name had long
since been flung to the wolves. And so in the evening of his days,
with a courage that took little counsel of expediency, he embarked on
a campaign that had for its ultimate objective the impregnable citadel
of State Street. He would destroy capitalistic exploitation in all its
works. It was as hopeless a battle as King Arthur’s “last, dim, weird
battle of the west,” and entered upon as courageously.
How he came to hold the heretical views on money and labor that he
expounded from the lecture platform cannot easily be traced. Perhaps
they came from the radical fringe that envelops every great social
movement; perhaps they were the inevitable expression of his left-wing
temper. A man who had fought all Tory programs for thirty years must
eventually come to hate the ways of capitalism, and so confirmed a
democrat as Wendell Phillips would be certain to espouse the doctrine
of thorough. One who had passed through the fires of abolition
nullification, who had spoken of the Union as “built i’ the eclipse
and rigged with curses dark,” who had repudiated his citizenship and
equaled Garrison in contempt for a slave-protecting Constitution,
would have pretty well cleared his mind of conventional respect for
capitalistic law and order. He was not impressed by political cant. He
had taken the measure of existing law and order and was casting about
for a juster law and a more generous order.
In these later years, as a program of social reconstruction took shape
in his mind, he was coming to essential agreement with the program of
socialism. With the Marxians he based his thinking upon economics, and
his final objective came to be the substitution of coöperation for the
profit-motive. As ardently as Horace Greeley he asserted the rights
of labor. As early as 1860-1861 he had come to recognize a similarity
in the economic status of the wage-slave and the bond-slave, and in
1865, in a speech on the eight-hour movement, he accepted as true the
southern thesis that in western civilization all labor, whether bond or
wage, was unfree, held in the grip of a master, bought and sold in the
market;[623] and now that the shackles had been struck from the negro,
it remained to strike them from the wage-earner. To turn the negro from
a bond-slave to a wage-slave would be a sorry ending of abolitionism;
but such must be the inevitable outcome, he believed, unless all labor
should win freedom. The question of the hour for Wendell Phillips had
become the question of the relation of labor and capital.
In his thinking on the currency question--a question that became acute
in the seventies--he was soon caught up by the Greenback movement. It
may have been that his contact with Thaddeus Stevens helped to mold
his views on the money question; yet that he should have become a
Greenbacker was foreordained. He had no amiable illusions in regard to
State Street. As a tribune of the people he had long been intimately
acquainted with its ambitions, and he would not turn over the country
to its custodianship. He would have no bankers’ control of the national
currency, to augment or deflate as banking profits dictated. His
democratic sympathies recoiled from a class control of the common
medium of exchange, and in 1875 he offered a drastic solution of the
vexing question that brought down on his head all the wrath of State
Street. His plan provided for three things: the rejection of the
national banknote system; the issue of honest greenbacks, secured by
the wealth of the country, and receivable in payment for all debts
public and private--not dishonest greenbacks like the old, which the
government had repudiated at issue by refusing to accept them in
payment of custom dues; and finally the retirement of interest-bearing
bonds and the return to a cash basis for government business. How
deeply he felt in the notorious matter of credit manipulation is
suggested in the following passage with its echoes of an older America
that looked with suspicion on a consolidating capitalism.
Three times within a dozen years, [he said] capitalists with their
knives on the throat of the Government, have compelled it to
cheat its largest creditor, the people; whose claim, Burke said,
was the most sacred. First, the pledge that greenbacks should be
exchangeable with bonds was broken. Secondly, debts originally
payable in paper ... were made payable in gold. Thirdly, silver was
demonetized, and gold made the only tender. A thousand millions
were thus stolen from the people.[624]
At other times he went further. Speaking on the labor question in 1872,
he said:
I say, let the debts of the country be paid, abolish the banks, and
let the government lend every Illinois farmer (if he wants it), who
is now borrowing money at ten per cent., money on the half-value
of his land at three per cent. The same policy that gave a million
acres to the Pacific Railroad, because it was a great national
effort, will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions of money,
at three per cent., to rebuild it.[625]
When we get into power, there is one thing we mean to do. If a
man owns a single house, we will tax him one hundred dollars. If
he owns ten houses of like value, we won’t tax him one thousand
dollars, but two thousand dollars.... We’ll double and treble and
quintuple and sextuple and increase tenfold the taxes.... We’ll
crumple up wealth by making it unprofitable to be rich.... You will
say, “Is that just?” My friends, it is safe. Man is more valuable
than money. You say, “Then capital will go to Europe.” Good
heavens, let it go! If other States wish to make themselves vassals
of wealth, so will not we. We will save a country equal from end
to end. Land, private property, all sorts of property, shall be so
dearly taxed that it shall be impossible to be rich; for it is in
wealth, in incorporated, combining, perpetuated wealth, that the
danger of labor lies.[626]
The mad wicked ravings of a demagogue, such talk was accounted by
sober financiers of Boston. But it was rather the talk of an honest
equalitarian who understood how incompatible was property rule and
the ideal of equality. The arch-enemy of a worthy civilization,
Wendell Phillips had become convinced, was private capitalism with its
dehumanizing profit-motive. There could be no adequate civilization,
no Christianity, until coöperation had displaced competition, and men
were become equal in economic rights as they were in franchise rights.
At a Labor-Reform Convention held at Worcester on September 4, 1871,
resolutions drafted by him were adopted--resolutions that reveal “just
where Mr. Phillips stood for the last thirteen years of his life.” In
this “full body of faith,” and in two later speeches--_The Foundation
of the Labor Movement_, and _The Labor Question_--the man who called
himself “a Jeffersonian democrat in the darkest hour,” wrote down as
the great objective of the labor party the principle that has long been
accepted as the cardinal plank of the Socialist platform.
We affirm, as a fundamental principle, that labor, the creator of
wealth, is entitled to all it creates.
Affirming this, we avow ourselves willing to accept the final
results of the operation of a principle so radical,--such as the
overthrow of the whole profit-making system, the extinction of
all monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes, universal
education and fraternity, perfect freedom of exchange, and ... the
final obliteration of that foul stigma upon our so-called Christian
civilization--the poverty of the masses.... _Resolved_,--That we
declare war with the wages system, which demoralizes alike the
hirer and the hired, cheats both, and enslaves the workingman; war
with the present system of finance, which robs labor, and gorges
capital, ... war with these lavish grants of the public lands to
speculating companies, and whenever in power, we pledge ourselves
to use every just and legal means to resume all such grants
heretofore made; war with the system of enriching capitalists by
the creation and increase of public interest-bearing debts. We
demand that every facility, and all encouragement, shall be given
by law to co-operation in all branches of industry and trade,
and that the same aid be given to co-operative efforts that has
heretofore been given to railroads and other enterprises....[627]
When he was about to take the platform on another occasion his wife is
reported to have said to him, “Wendell, don’t shilly-shally!” Certainly
in this pronouncement, and in the speeches supporting it, there is no
shilly-shallying. He will have no halfway measures, but goes straight
to the economic core of the problem. Pretty much all of Marxianism is
there, even to the class war. The capitalists had whetted their swords
and he would have labor put its sword likewise to the grindstone. If
the war were cruel, where did labor learn it--“learned it of capital,
learned it of our enemies.” In a world of economic concentration where
caste follows property accumulation he had come to rest his hopes
on the international solidarity of labor. The cause of democratic
justice was committed to the keeping of the workingman, and if he
were defeated in his hopes the future was black indeed. The American
Revolution and the French Revolution had prepared the way gloriously
for a greater event, the revolution of labor. He was not afraid
of revolution. In America he hoped the battle would be fought with
ballots, but if it must come to bullets, so be it. The Paris Commune
met with his heartiest approval: “I have not a word to utter--far be
it from me!--against the grandest declaration of popular indignation
which Paris wrote on the pages of history in fire and blood. I honor
Paris as the vanguard of the Internationals of the world.”[628] And in
the Phi Beta Kappa address, delivered in 1881 before all the assembled
conservatisms of Boston, the old warrior with seventy years upon his
head, went so far as to defend Russian Nihilism.
Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resistance of a people
crushed under an iron rule. Nihilism is evidence of life ...
the last weapon of victims choked and manacled beyond all other
resistance.... I honor Nihilism, since it redeems human nature from
the suspicion of being utterly vile, made up only of heartless
oppressors and contented slaves.... This is the only view an
American, the child of 1620 and 1776, can take of Nihilism. Any
other unsettles and perplexes the ethics of our civilization. Born
within sight of Bunker Hill, in a commonwealth which adopts the
motto of Algernon Sydney, _sub libertate quietem_ (“accept no peace
without liberty”); son of Harvard, whose first pledge was “Truth”;
citizen of a republic based on the claim that no government is
rightful unless resting on the consent of the people, and which
assumes to lead in asserting the rights of humanity,--I at least
can say nothing else and nothing less; no, not if every tile on
Cambridge roofs were a devil hooting my words![629]
“It was a delightful discourse,” said one gentleman, “but preposterous
from beginning to end.” The doctrine was strange to Harvard
ears--wicked and perverse. And strange and disconcerting also was his
roll-call of great and noble deeds done in America in which Harvard
scholarship had had no part. To an audience of Brahmin scholars it
was not kind to say, “The greatest things have not been done for the
world by its bookmen”; nor this, “It is not the masses who have most
disgraced our political annals. I have seen many mobs ... I never saw
or heard of any but well-dressed mobs, assembled and countenanced, if
not always led in person, by respectability and what called itself
education.”[630] It was a curious scene--that gathering in a Harvard
hall listening to a son of Harvard who had gone to school to other
teachers than those brought up on Brahmin culture. The liberalism of
the forties was speaking to a generation that was concerned about
other things than a just and humane civilization. Wendell Phillips
was hopelessly old-fashioned in America of the Gilded Age--a lone
Puritan in a land of Yankees. He used to speak of himself grimly as
“that Ishmael”; his home, he said, was the sleeping-car and his only
friends the brakeman and the porter. He spent his strength and his
earnings with generous prodigality, and when he died the only treasures
he had laid up were in heaven. He was the last survivor of the great
age of Puritan conscience, and the words he spoke of Theodore Parker
may well stand for his epitaph: “The child of Puritanism is not mere
Calvinism--it is the loyalty to justice which tramples under foot the
wicked laws of its own epoch.”
II • Morality and Politics--George William Curtis
A child of Puritan conscience also was George William Curtis, like
Wendell Phillips sprung from the Puritan gentry, but unlike him wanting
in a passionate Hebraism that sought justice in all the byways and
would not turn aside from pursuing it. A reformer but never a radical,
he was a gentleman who was a lifelong friend of civilization. An
idealist, he refused to serve the gross materialisms that swept so
many of his fellows from the old moorings, but throughout a long and
honorable career he preserved unshaken his early faith in republican
ideals and the way of liberty. As an abolitionist he faced hostile
audiences with admirable poise, and as a civil service reformer he
fought off the attacks of greasy politicians with quiet contempt. A
cultivated gentleman, high-bred if not heroic, was George William
Curtis.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, of excellent stock, living most of
his life in New York City whither his father had removed to engage in
the banking business, he was brought up in affluence and spent his days
amidst dignified surroundings. Broad-minded and generous, with wide
sympathies and urbane manners, he followed his conscience and weighed
life in the scales of Puritan morality. He was no friend to compromise
or expediency, yet he was content to serve God in the station whereunto
he had been called, declining to turn rebel and become an outcast
and pariah. Endowed with excellent parts, his training was unusually
fortunate. At eighteen with his brother Burrill he went to Brook
Farm, where he spent two profitable years in an atmosphere he found
stimulating. After quitting Brook Farm he passed the better part of
two years at Concord with his brother, living at farmhouses, helping
with the crops, and for a time indulging in an experiment not unlike
Thoreau’s at Walden Pond. Then followed four years overseas--from
1846 to 1850--rambling about the continent, sloughing off the
provincial asceticism of New England, and practicing his pen by means
of letters and diaries. On his return he drifted into journalism,
wrote several volumes of travel essays and social satire, caught the
Lyceum infection, then at its malignant stage, lectured voluminously
to pay off an unfortunate debt, wrote for _Putnam’s Magazine_, became
connected with _Harper’s Weekly_, finally settling into the Easy Chair
of _Harper’s Magazine_, from which comfortable seat for years he sent
forth gracefully pointed comments on manners, society, politics, life,
yet more and more turning to politics as his particular field and
serving as volunteer political mentor and critic to the Gilded Age.
Of his several early ventures into the field of polite letters little
need be said. The work of a high-spirited young man, they were a cross
between Nathaniel Parker Willis and Thackeray with a suggestion of
Disraeli. He took his place naturally as a member of the New York
group of litterateurs who were gaily exploiting the conventional
sentimentalism of the fifties. With its pose of clever sophistication
the New York school could do no good to a serious young writer, and
the pretensions of the new-rich society of the town were a cordial
invitation to go wrong. _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ (1851), written
before the young traveler had caught the current note of social
satire, was a conscious correction of the ascetic Puritanism imbibed
at Concord, and with its frank delight in the sensuousness of the East
it gave offense to the professional bluestockings of the time. But in
_The Potiphar Papers_ (1853) he turned to satirize New York society,
then hastening to transform itself from a staid Knickerbocker world
into a Gold Coast of social climbers. That his treatment of the theme
should have been a slighter edition of Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_--less
searching and more sentimental--might be guessed even if we did not
know how greatly Curtis loved and admired the English satirist. “He
seems to be the one of all authors who takes life precisely as he finds
it,” he wrote of him. “If he finds it sad, he makes it sad: if gay,
gay. You discover in him the flexible adaptability of Horace, but with
a deep and consuming sadness which the Roman never knew, and which in
the Englishman seems to be almost sentimentality.”[631]
But in spite of their excellent model these sketches do not now seem
so sprightly as they seemed to his fellows on the staff of _Putnam’s
Magazine_. Moralism scented with patchouli is no longer the vogue,
and they have long since been laid away with the hoops and crinoline
of the fifties. His most important venture in polite literature--if
indeed even that deserves the name important--was _Prue and I_ (1856),
written in a golden summer when his pen was dipped into the inkwell of
love and he foresaw the years of his life lengthening out in the most
intimate of companionships. They are charming essays in contentment
that teach the familiar lesson that the only abiding riches are the
riches of mind and character. The old bookkeeper in black coat and
white tie who voyages to the realms of romance while watching from
the Battery outgoing ships, has discovered the vicarious pleasure of
the imagination, and the Aurelia of his dreams is Prue as she was in
her youth, and both are Anna Shaw to whom soon after he was married.
The first three sketches--“Dinner Time,” “My Chateaux,” and “Sea from
the Shore”--are humorous and tender fancies in the graceful Victorian
manner; but “Titbottom’s Spectacles” is Hawthorne-like in the tenuous
play of a grotesquely moralistic fancy, and the succeeding sketches
reveal the exhaustion of the vein. Later he tried his hand at a
novel--_Trumps_--but it refused to turn into anything but a tract and
in the early sixties he settled down in the Easy Chair which he had
first occupied as early as 1853.
Thereafter to his death in 1892 his work followed three diverse lines.
For thirty years he was essayist, orator, and political critic, to a
generation sorely in need of wise and urbane counsel. His audience was
wide and his influence great, and to his work he brought the weight
of his sane and just character. Not a great scholar and not an acute
critic, he was an enlightened and sensitive conscience, and to the bar
of his conscience he summoned the parties and policies of a heedless
and selfish generation. From the Easy Chair he sent forth his genial
comment on matters of current interest, satisfying his love of creative
writing by the grace of his talk, and recognizing his kinship with
the age of Queen Ann by adopting the words of _The Tatler_, “I shall
from time to time Report and Consider all Matters of what Kind soever
that shall occur to me.” But such work at the best is ephemeral, and
ephemeral likewise were the polished pronouncements of the occasional
orator on which far too much time and labor were expended. But New York
City must have its spokesman for formal occasions, and after Bryant’s
death George William Curtis was summoned with increasing frequency.
The rich context of his speeches, elaborated with formal dignity and
embellished with literary allusions, hit to a nicety the taste of a
generation that still delighted in oratory and preferred dignity to
informality. His addresses on Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Bryant,
and Lowell, are excellent examples of a style that is no longer the
fashion. In their polished sentences eulogy is tempered with criticism,
but the criticism is sympathetic and refuses to render judgments that
may strike his hearers as severe. It would be ungracious to intrude
unpleasant facts on dignified occasions.
But his most significant work during these busy years lay in the field
of political criticism, and it was as editor of _Harper’s Weekly_, from
1863 to his death, and as a leader in the movement of civil service
reform, that he made the deepest impress on the age. The _Weekly_,
with Nast as cartoonist, was then at the height of its popularity
and influence, and by means of its editorial page Curtis was able to
marshal a very considerable following for whatever cause or party he
espoused. He had long taken part in practical politics, was active in
caucuses and conventions, was much on the stump and kept his fingers on
party wires. Yet influential as he was--the scholar in politics, as his
own generation loved to say--he was never a serious student of politics
in the broader meaning. He was essentially an English gentleman
politician, with a fine scorn of mean and sordid policies, a warm
love of country but an equally warm love of civilization, devoted to
the cause of liberty, a friend of justice, yet with all his excellent
traits an inadequate political philosopher. Like Lowell’s his horizon
was curiously limited. Abstract political theory did not interest him
and he never critically examined diverse systems of government. Of
economics he was as ignorant as his generation. Again like Lowell the
single standard by which he judged politics was the moral standard, and
in his anxious concern for “good government” he failed to probe deeply
the sources of “bad government.” In presence of the vast corruptions of
the Gilded Age he was as helpless in diagnosing the evil as Lowell or
Norton.
Such helplessness is the more surprising considering what rare
opportunities he had enjoyed for intelligent understanding. During
the impressionable years of youth he daily associated with the most
militant group of intellectual radicals in America and heard the ideas
of Saint-Simon and Fourier and Owen eagerly canvassed. Associationism
as a cure for the evils of competition was the cardinal doctrine of
the Brook Farmists; yet his individualism passed unaffected through
all such discussions. He seems to have sympathized with the skepticism
of Hawthorne rather than the faith of Ripley and Dana. Writing to his
father from Brook Farm he fell into the genial transcendental vein and
gaily poked fun at those who would make the world over.
No wise man is long a reformer, [he wrote] for Wisdom sees plainly
that growth is steady, sure, and neither condemns nor rejects what
is, or has been. Reform is organized distrust. It says to the
universe fresh from God’s hand, “You are a miserable business; lo!
I will make you fairer!” and so deputes some Fourier or Robert Owen
to improve the bungling work of the Creator.[632]
It was as a transcendental optimist that he set out on his travels in
1846. The Europe he visited at the age of twenty was seething with
discontent that was to flame up in the revolutionary year of ’48, yet
though he wandered leisurely through Italy, Hungary, Germany, France,
and was at Paris during the great overturn, the evidence that his
biographer has gathered indicates that he was not deeply affected by
the experience. Unlike his friend Margaret Fuller, who was a passionate
volunteer in the struggle of Mazzini at Rome, or like Dana, who
followed the movement closely as foreign correspondent, he felt none
of the promptings of a revolutionist. A romantic sympathy for Kossuth
is clearly indicated, but his feelings carried him little further
than that. Even in England, seething as it was with the proletarian
unrest that culminated in the great Chartist movement, he came upon
little to quicken his transcendental pulse. It was not till he got
back home and found himself in presence of negro slavery that his
reforming ardor took fire and he proposed to engage in the business of
“organized distrust.” He threw himself into the cause with enthusiasm
and spoke from many an abolition platform. Then came the war and during
those passionate years he was swept unconsciously along the path of
consolidation, emerging from the fire a confirmed Hamiltonian with
transcendental democratic leanings.
Have you thought [he wrote Charles Eliot Norton in 1864] what a
vindication this war is of Alexander Hamilton? I wish somebody
would write his life as it ought to be written, for surely he was
one of the greatest of our great men, as Jefferson was the least of
the truly great; or am I wrong? Hamilton was generous and sincere.
Was Jefferson either?[633]
Such Hamiltonian sympathies suffice to explain some of his votes in the
New York Constitutional Convention of 1867, of which he was a member.
He advocated the appointment of the attorney-general and certain
other state officers, opposed the principle of municipal home rule,
and approved the extension of the authority of the state over local
police systems. With Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed before his eyes it was
perhaps natural that he should have sought in the power of the up-state
voter some external control over the city machine. But in spite of
such obvious leanings towards the Whig branch of the Republican party
Curtis was never a Whig. The transcendentalism he had imbibed at Brook
Farm remained with him to color much of his thinking and restrain him
from an uncritical advocacy of capitalism. He never went over body
and soul to the new gospel of exploitation. He never lent a willing
ear to the seductive appeals of the American System. He early became
a free-trader and throughout his life was opposed to all tariffs and
grants and subsidies. Discovering in the principle of liberty the
cardinal principles of American democracy, he was disposed to accept
a wide application of _laissez faire_; yet when it opened the door to
extortion he was willing to curb an anti-social individualism. When in
the seventies it was proposed by the western farmers that a national
railroad should be built from Chicago to the Atlantic seaboard, Curtis
looked upon the proposal with sympathy as likely to rescue the farmer
from extortionate tolls.[634] Unlike Dana and Godkin, he declined
to grow bitter and lose his head over the economic proposals of the
western agrarians. In the sharp alignment between agrarianism and
capitalism he stood in the main outside both parties, and although
opposed to greenbackism he discussed the question with moderation and
good sense--a rare thing in those blatant times.
But it was political decency rather than capitalistic or agrarian
programs that he was chiefly concerned about. He looked to his
conscience as guide and as editor of _Harper’s Weekly_ he used his
influence to cleanse America of the corruption he abhorred. Week after
week he appealed to the American voter to turn rascals out of office
and put honest men in. The corrupt political machine was the source of
the evil, and the machine had grown powerful through its control of
patronage. There would be vicious government so long as politicians
could create a machine by means of the spoils system. Two remedies, he
believed, were necessary to cure the evil--independent voting and civil
service reform; and to the spread of these two ideas he devoted the
last twenty years of his life, thereby bringing on his head much abuse
and incurring eventually a break with the Republican party.
His troubles began with his proposal of independent voting. To that
party-ridden generation on whom the passions of war had fastened a
tyrannical machine, the scratching of the party ticket seemed no better
than treason. It was a Copperhead device to undo the results of the war
and reëstablish the rebel leaders at Washington, and it needed courage
to advocate it publicly. Curtis put the matter fairly in a speech to
Independent Republicans at New York in 1880: