THE PROGRESS OF PECUNIARY VALUATION
VALUES EXPRESS ORGANIZATION—DIFFERENT KINDS OF VALUE, HOW RELATED—ALL
KINDS ARE MENTALLY COMMENSURABLE—PECUNIARY VALUES SHOULD
APPARENTLY EXPRESS ALL OTHERS, BUT DO SO IMPERFECTLY—THEY ARE
MOULDED BY A SPECIAL INSTITUTIONAL PROCESS—CLASS AGAIN—ORGANIZED
RECOGNITION AND COMPETITION—CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS IN MARKET
VALUES—PROGRESS-VALUES—EXAMPLES OF UNPROGRESSIVE VALUES—NEED OF
SOCIAL GROUPS AND DISCIPLINES—INSTANCES OF PROGRESS—PROGRESS IN
THE PECUNIARY VALUATION OF MEN
To make clear what I mean by progress in pecuniary valuation, let me
recall something of the nature of values in general and of the relation
of the various kinds to one another.
Value is an expression of organization. The power of an object to
influence a man, or any other form of life, depends upon the established
tendencies of that form of life, and, accordingly, wherever we find a
system of values there is always a mental or social organization of some
kind corresponding to it. Thus in the simpler provinces of the mind
there are taste-values, touch-values, and smell-values, corresponding to
our physiological organization. In a higher sphere we have intellectual
and feeling values of many kinds, shown in our differential conduct as
regards persons, books, pictures, theories, or other influencing
objects, and indicating organized habits of thought and sentiment. So in
the larger or societal phase of life we see that each organized
tendency, the prevailing fashion, the dominant church or state, a school
of literature or painting, the general spirit of an epoch, involves a
corresponding system of values. You prefer Monet to David, or the German
view of the war to the English view, or the present style of dress to
hoop-skirts, because you are in one or another of these tendencies.
There are many ways of classifying values. In general, the kinds are
innumerable and their relations intricate: taken as a whole they express
the diversity and complex interdependence of life itself.
The question as to what are the differences among the various sorts of
value, as moral, æsthetic, legal, religious, or economic, is answered,
in general, by saying that they express differentiated phases of the
social system. If the phase is definitely organized we can usually
ascertain and distinguish the kind of value in question with
corresponding definiteness; if not, the values remain somewhat
indeterminate, though not necessarily lacking in power. Thus legal value
is a fairly definite thing, because there is a definite institution
corresponding to it and declaring it from time to time through courts,
legislatures, text-book writers, and the like. How you must draw your
will to make it legally valid is something a lawyer should be able to
tell you with precision. Economic values—if we understand economic to
mean pecuniary—are definite within the range of an active market. If
religious values mean ecclesiastical, they are easily distinguished; but
if they refer to the inclinations of the religious side of human nature,
they are not readily ascertained, because there is no definite
organization corresponding to them—or if there is, in the nature of the
mind, we know little about it. The values that are most potent over
conduct, among which the religious are to be reckoned, are often the
least definable. A psychologist, however, like the late William James,
who wrote a book on the human-nature aspect of religion, may succeed in
defining them more closely. Much the same may be said of moral and
æsthetic values. In the large human-nature sense, apart from particular
ethical conventions or schools of art, they are of the utmost interest
and moment, indeed, but do not lend themselves to precise ascertainment.
And all of these distinctions among kinds of value, whether definite or
not, are conditioned by the fact that the various kinds are, after all,
differentiated phases of a common life. It is natural that they should
overlap, that they should be largely aspects rather than separate
things. Values are motives; and we all know that the classification of a
man’s motives as economic, ethical, or æsthetic is somewhat formal and
arbitrary. The value to me of an engraving I have just bought may be
æsthetic, or economic, or perhaps ostentatious, or ethical. (We see in
Ruskin’s writings how easily an æsthetic value becomes ethical if one
takes it seriously.) It may well be all these: my impulse to cherish it
is a whole with various aspects.
In much the same way society at large has its various institutions and
tendencies, expressing themselves in values, which are more or less
distinct but whose operation you cannot wholly separate in a given case.
The distinctions among them are in the nature of organic
differentiations within a whole.
Observe, next, that there is a sort of commensurability throughout the
world of values, multifarious as it is. I mean that in a vague but real
way we are accustomed to weigh one kind of value against another and to
guide our conduct by the decision. Apart from any definite medium of
exchange there is a system of mental barter, as you might call it, in
universal operation, by which values are compared definitely enough to
make choice possible. You may say that the things that appeal to us are
often so different in kind that it is absurd to talk of comparing them;
but as a matter of fact we do it none the less. We choose between the
satisfaction of meeting a friend at the station and that of having our
dinner at the usual time, between spending an hour of æsthetic
improvement at the Metropolitan Museum and one of humanitarian expansion
at the University Settlement, between gratifying our sense of honor by
returning an excess of change and our greed by keeping it, between the
social approbation to be won by correct dress and bearing and the
physical ease of slouchiness. Almost any sort of value may come, in
practice, to be weighed against almost any other sort.
Indeed this is implied in the very conception of value as that which has
weight or worth in guiding behavior. Our behavior is a kind of synthesis
of the ideas, or values, that are working in us in face of a given
situation, and these may be any mixture that life supplies. The result
is that almost any sort of value may find itself mixed up and
synthetized with any other sort.
But the human mind, ever developing its instruments, has come to
supplement this psychical barter of values by something more precise,
communicable and uniform, and so we arrive at pecuniary valuation. This
is in some respects analogous to language, serving for organization and
growth through more exact communication; and just as language develops a
system of words, of means of record (writing, printing, and the like),
also of schools, and, withal, a literary and learned class to have
special charge of the institution, so pecuniary valuation has its money,
banks, markets, and its business class.
For our present purpose of discussing the general relation of pecuniary
to other values, as æsthetic or ethical, it is of no great importance, I
should say, to inquire minutely into the various kinds of the latter or
their precise relations to one another. The large fact to bear in mind,
in this connection, is that we have, on the one hand, a world of
psychical values, whose reality is shown in their power to influence
conduct, and, on the other, a world of prices, which apparently exists
to give all kinds of psychical value general validity and exact
expression, but which seems to do this in a partial and inadequate
manner.
This, indeed, may be called the root of the whole matter: the fact that
pecuniary value, whose functions of extension, of precision, of
motivation, of organization, are so essential and should be so
beneficent, appears in practice to ignore or depreciate many kinds of
value, and these often the highest, by withholding pecuniary
recognition; and, on the other hand, to create or exaggerate values
which seem to have little or no human merit to justify such appraisal.
Let us, then, inquire why its interpretation of life is so warped.
The answer to this I take to be, in general, that pecuniary valuation is
achieved through an institutional process, and, like all things, bears
the marks of its genesis. There are institutional conditions that
intervene between psychical values and their pecuniary expression. These
are, roughly, of two sorts, those that operate after pecuniary demand is
formed, within the processes of exchange, and those that operate
antecedently to the actual demand, in the larger social process. The
former are technical conditions within the economic organization, and
are studied by political economists; the latter spring from the social
organization as a whole, and are usually regarded as outside the
province of economics.
I may illustrate these two sorts of conditions by considering the
pecuniary value of a work of art. Thus if a sculptor cannot sell his
product for a price commensurate with its merit, this may be because,
owing to lack of information, he has not come into touch with the
market, although the market may be a good one. He has not found the
group of buyers willing to pay what his work is worth. On the other
hand, it may be because, owing to social conditions involving a low
state of taste, there _is_ no such group.
The former phase of the matter, since it lies within the familiar
provinces of economics, I need not say much about. We all know that the
processes of competition and exchange do not correspond to the economic
ideal; that they are impaired by immobility, ignorance, monopoly, lack
of intelligent organization, and other well-known defects. How serious
these are, on the whole, I need not now inquire, but will pass on to
those considerations that go behind pecuniary demand, and indicate why
this is itself no trustworthy expression of the human values actually
working in the minds of men at a given time.
Most conspicuous among them, perhaps, is the factor of class. The
pecuniary market taken as a whole, with its elaborate system of money,
credit, bargaining, accounting, forecasting of demand, business
administration, and so on, involving numerous recondite functions,
requires the existence of a technical class, which stands in the same
relation to the pecuniary institution as the clergy, politicians,
lawyers, doctors do to other institutions; that is, they have an
intimate knowledge and control of the system which enables them to guide
its working in partial independence of the rest of society. They do this
partly to the end of public service and partly to their own private
advantage; all technical classes, in one way or another, exploiting the
institutions in their charge for their own aggrandizement. If the clergy
have done this, we may assume that other classes will also: indeed it is
mostly unconscious and involves no peculiar moral reproach. Much also is
done that cannot be called exploitation, which may greatly affect
values. The commercially ascendant class has not only most of the
tangible power, but the prestige and initiative which, for better or
worse, may be even more influential. It sets fashions, perhaps of fine
ideals, perhaps of gross dissipations, which permeate society and
control the market.
To this we must, of course, add the concentration of actual buying power
in the richer class, which is largely the same as the commercial class.
The general result is that psychical values, in the course of getting
pecuniary expression, pass through and are moulded by the minds of
people of wealth and business function to an extent not easily
overstated.
In close connection with this factor of class we have the existence of
certain legal institutions, of which the rights of inheritance and
bequest are the most conspicuous, that enormously aid the concentration
of pecuniary power, and hence of control over pecuniary values, in a
comparatively small group. However defensible these rights may be, all
things considered, it is the simple truth that the concentration and
continuity they appear to involve seriously discredit, in practice, all
theories of economic freedom, and make it necessary to look for the
pecuniary recognition of values largely to the good-will of the class
that has most of the pecuniary power. The view that the administration
of the value system can be in any sense democratic must rest, under
these conditions, upon the belief that democratic ideals will permeate
the class in question, in spite of its somewhat oligarchic position.
Let us not forget, however, that class-control, of some kind or degree,
lies in the nature of organization, so that its presence in the
pecuniary institution is nothing extraordinary. Whether, or in what
respects, it is an evil calling for reform, I shall not now consider.
Interwoven with the influence of class is that of the institutional
process, of the fact that pecuniary valuation works through an
established mechanism, and that it can translate into pecuniary terms
only such values as have conformed to certain conditions. In general,
values can be expressed in the market only as they have become the
object of extended recognition in some exchangeable form, and so of
regular pecuniary competition. To attain to this they must be felt in
the organized opinion of a considerable social group, from which the
competitors are to come, and they must also, in a measure, be
standardized; that is, the degrees and kinds of value must be defined,
so that regular and precise transactions are possible.
Suppose that we consider again the case of the sculptor, and assume that
he is a young man who has begun to produce statues of a high and unique
æsthetic worth. In order that these shall have a pecuniary value
adequate to their merit, it is not sufficient that here and there an
isolated critic or connoisseur shall be strongly impressed by them. Such
a situation does not establish a market: there must be discussion, a
continuous communicating group must arise, including connoisseurs and
wealthy amateurs subject to their influence, the merits of the painter
and of his several works must be in a manner conventionalized, so that
regular competition is set up and a continuous series of prices
established.
A better illustration, for some purposes, would be one in which the
social group includes both consumers and producers, the latter
stimulated by the appreciation of the group, and at the same time
contributing to it by expert leadership, the group as a whole thus
advancing both the type of values and its pecuniary standing. This might
be the case with the painter and his public, but perhaps expert
golf-players and the makers of golf-clubs would be a better example. I
suppose that the sport is socially organized, in the sense just
indicated, and that this enables a regular progress in function and in
its pecuniary recognition. The makers turn out better and better clubs
and get well paid for them. Almost any branch of applied science will
also afford good illustrations, as mechanical engineering, or the
manufacture of electrical apparatus.
Something of this kind must take place with all new values seeking
pecuniary expression. It is not enough that they are felt by
individuals, no matter how many, in a vague and scattered way: they must
achieve a kind of system.
To put it otherwise, _the progress of market valuation, as a rule, is a
translation into pecuniary terms of values which have already become, in
some measure, a social institution_. A new design in dress, no matter
how attractive, means nothing on the market until it has become the
fashion (or is believed to be in a way to become so); then you can
hardly buy anything else; and the principle is of wide application.
Inventions and discoveries, however pregnant, will commonly have no
market standing except as they have an evident power to contribute to
pecuniary values already established. If you write an original treatise
in some branch of science, you are lucky if it pays the cost of
publication, but if you can prepare a text-book that meets the
institutional demand for the same science, you may look for affluence.
Or, to apply the principle to the highest sphere of all, there is a
sense in which it is true that the greater a moral value is the less is
its pecuniary recognition. That is, if righteous innovation, the moral
heroism of the heretics who foreshadow better institutions, is the
greatest good, then the greater the good the less the pay. This is not
because moral value is essentially non-pecuniary—people will pay for
righteousness as readily, perhaps, as for anything else, when they feel
it as such, and when it presents itself in negotiable form—but because
pecuniary valuation is essentially an institution, and values which are
anti-institutional naturally stand outside of it.
A value that is standard in a powerful institution never fails, I think,
of pecuniary recognition. In a certain church a certain type of
clergyman can get a good salary: to understand why, you must study the
history of the institution.
You may say that this is contrary to the well-known fact that a high
premium is everywhere put upon initiative and originality. But if you
look closer you will find that these qualities, in order to be well
paid, must have a demonstrable power to enhance pecuniary values already
on the market. An advertising man with a genius for novel and
efficacious appeal may demand a great salary, but if he devotes the same
genius to radical agitation he may not be allowed to hold any job at
all. It is possible, no doubt, to extend considerably the means by which
fruitful originality is anticipated and pecuniary recognition prepared
for it, as is done, for example, in the endowment of research. The
trouble here is to provide any standard of originality which shall not
become conventional, and so, in practice, merely perpetuate an
institution. Even the endowment of research, like fellowships in
theological institutions, has in some degree this effect.
We hear a great deal nowadays to the effect that the values of scholars
and teachers lack pecuniary appreciation and security in the
universities, that boards of trustees do not understand the finer kinds
of merit and often use the funds under their control to employ men of
business or administrative capacity rather than in evoking or attracting
notable men of the type to further which universities exist; also that
men are under pressure (indirectly pecuniary) not to teach anything
repugnant to the ascendant commercialism, which the authorities
unconsciously represent. In so far as this is true the remedy would seem
to be to define and promote the type, to make clear in academic groups
and in public opinion what the higher merits are, so that every board
will be intelligently eager to secure them; in a word, to foster the
institution, in the highest sense, and insist that complete freedom of
function shall be a part of it.
So the question of social betterment, in terms of valuation, is largely
a question of imparting to the psychical values that we believe to
represent betterment such precision and social recognition as shall give
them pecuniary standing, and add the inducement of market demand to
whatever other forces may be working for their realization. There are,
of course, other methods which may be of equal or greater efficacy; but
this is one with which no reform can altogether dispense. Thus the
movement which is making “social work” a regular profession, with
definite requirements of capacity and training, established methods and
ideals, and a market price in the way of salaries for those that are
competent, is a momentous thing in this field. Not only does it mean
pecuniary recognition for the humanitarian value of individuals, but,
through the institution of a class having such values at heart, all
kinds of ideas and measures working in this direction are assured of
organized support. The new profession should do for its province what
the legal profession (in spite of shortcomings) does for justice, or the
medical for health. No doubt something is lost in passing from the
heroic innovator to the standard worker on a salary; but it is thus that
we get ahead, and that the way is opened for higher kinds of innovation.
If we wish a general term to bring out the antithesis between pecuniary
values and those which are high, psychically, but non-pecuniary, we may
call the latter _progress-values_. Progress-values, in this somewhat
arbitrary sense, would be those which are not yet incorporated into the
pecuniary institution, but which, because of their intrinsic worth to
human life, deserve to be, and presumably will be. As that takes place
they will, of course, cease to be progress-values, because the pecuniary
institution will have caught up with them. Such values, otherwise
regarded, may be æsthetic, scientific, moral, industrial; may in fact
pertain to any field of life which admits of progress. The labor-saving
invention which no one, as yet, is willing to pay for has an industrial
progress-value, and similarly with the paintings of Corot before the
appreciating group has made a market for them.
It will be understood that the more obvious examples of non-pecuniary
progress-values are to be expected in those social processes which are
remote from or opposed to the economic institution, so that pecuniary
recognition is correspondingly impeded. In literature, science, and
religion they are ever conspicuous (in retrospect, that is), and still
more so in what relates to those fundamental social reforms of which the
pecuniary system, as a part of the establishment, is the natural enemy.
I need hardly add that progress-values belong, like moral and æsthetic
values, among those which have power over the human spirit, but which,
for the very reason that they are not the expression of a definite
institution, cannot be precisely ascertained.
Probably the more flagrant shortcomings of market valuation at the
present time are due in part to a rather anarchic state of the economic
system itself, considered as a mechanism, but also, quite as much, to a
weakness and confusion in the higher kinds of organization, of which
economic demand should be the expression. The market is largely under
the control of two sorts of values, both of which may be called
anti-progressive: institutional values of a somewhat outworn and
obstructive kind, and human-nature values whose crudity reflects the
present lack among us of the finer kinds of culture groups and
disciplines. By outworn institutional values I mean, for example, the
ideals of pecuniary self-assertion and display which we get, at least in
their more extravagant forms, from the regnant commercialism; also the
ideals of a superficial refinement, expressing social superiority rather
than beauty, which we inherit from a society based on caste. Crude
human-nature values may be illustrated by the various forms of
sensuality and unedifying amusement for which we spend so lavishly. The
road to something higher, in both these regards, seems to lie through
the growth of such group disciplines as I have suggested.
We particularly need such disciplines in those fields of production
which are most distinctly economic in that they are most completely
within the control of the pecuniary institution—production, chiefly, of
material goods for the ordinary uses of life. At the present time
producers, in great part, are guided by no ideals of group function and
service, but merely by the commercial principle of making what they can
sell. This attitude is anti-progressive, however matter-of-course it may
seem, because the social group in performance of a given function is
primarily responsible for its betterment. A shoe-manufacturer is no more
justified in making the worst shoes he can sell than an artist in
painting the worst pictures. Only as we all idealize our functions can
progress-values come in. And the consumers, upon whom the commercial
principle throws the whole responsibility, also lack high standards, and
organized means of enforcing those they have. The whole situation, so
far as it is of this kind, tends to the degradation of quality.
Production has not always lacked ideals, nor does it everywhere lack
them at present. They come when the producing group gets a corporate
consciousness and a sense of the social worth of its function. The
mediæval guilds developed high traditions and standards of workmanship,
and held their members to them. They thought of themselves in terms of
service, and not merely as purveyors to a demand. In our time the same
is to some extent true of trades and professions in which a sense of
workmanship has been developed by tradition and training. Doctors and
lawyers are not content to give us what we want in their line, but hold
it their duty to teach us what we ought to want, to refuse things that
are not for our best good and urge upon us those that are. Artists,
teachers, men of letters, do the same. A good carpenter, if you give him
the chance, will build a better house than the owner can appreciate; he
loves to do it and feels obscurely that it is his part to realize an
ideal of sound construction. The same principle ought to hold good
throughout society, each functional group forming ideals of its own
function and holding its members to them. Consuming and producing groups
should co-operate in this matter, each making requirements which the
other might overlook. The somewhat anarchical condition that is now
common we may hope to be transitory. The general rule is that a stable
group has a tendency to create for itself ideals of service in accord
with the ruling ideals of society at large.
Perhaps we shall succeed in achieving the higher values only as we
embody them in a system of appealing images by the aid of art. We need
to _see_ society—see it beautiful and inspiring—as a whole and in its
special meaning for us, building up the conception of democracy until it
stands before us with the grandeur and detail of great architecture.
Then we shall have a source of higher values from which the pecuniary
channels, as well as others, will be fed.[74]
The societies of the past have done this in their own way; they have had
the state and the church, heroes, dignitaries, traditions and symbols, a
visible whole which engaged the devotion of men and served as the spring
of ideal values. Montesquieu, with his eyes on France, wrote that honor
was the principle of monarchy, which “sets all the parts of the body
politic in motion,” the fount of honor being the king, and its awards
depending, ideally, on public service, as that was understood at the
time. We must do it in a new way, our own democratic way; but it must be
done. There must be the ideals, the symbols, the devotion, the detailed
and cogent interpretation for every phase of life.
It is not hard to find going on about us examples of the way in which an
onward movement, expressing itself in any of the social institutions,
may pass thence into the pecuniary system. Consider, for instance, the
movement for vocational selection and specialized education in the
schools. It is evident that the spirit of our democracy is bent on
developing competent leadership and technical efficiency in all phases
of its higher life. As this idea becomes organized it creates a demand
for teachers and specialists of every sort which the growth of society
is seen to require, and prices are set upon their services high enough
to insure the supply. If the public mind sees the need of forestry, a
supply of trained foresters, sufficiently well paid, is presently at
hand. These in turn, acting as leaders, stimulate and guide public
opinion, and a growth of organization and of values takes place along
the line of vital impulse.
Of the same character is the rise and effectuation of an art spirit,
which we are witnessing. The public mind, somewhat weary of a monotonous
commercialism, has begun to turn, vaguely but resolutely, toward
æsthetic production and enjoyment. There are a hundred manifestations of
this, but none more significant than the rise of art-handicraft teaching
in the schools. No one can say how far this will go, but there is no
apparent reason why it should stop short of restoring that union of life
with art which our recent development has so generally destroyed. If so,
the effect in creating higher types of commercial value, in commodities
and in men, will be beyond estimate. The spirit of art makes men desire
to surround themselves with objects upon which the craftsman has
impressed a joyous personal feeling, precisely as the lover of
literature needs to surround himself with books of which this is true.
It is essentially a demand for personal expression, and implies a real,
though perhaps indirect, understanding between the workman and the
consumer. In so far, then, as it prevails it evokes a class of
handicraftsmen whose work is individual and inspiriting, partly
counteracting the deadening effect of wholesale and impersonal methods.
Thus there will come to be a growing number of independent and well-paid
men, many of them dealing directly with the consumer, engaged upon work
as delightful as any that life affords.
Wholesale production will doubtless continue, because of its economy,
but even as regards this we note that variety and personal interest in
the work are coming to have a market value as they are seen to promote
contentment and efficiency in the worker.
The whole matter of fashion, especially of fashion in dress, might well
be discussed from this point of view. Although it has been the subject
of futile satire and protest so long as to seem hopeless, it is not so
unless we are prepared to admit that we are incapable of a real
self-expression in this part of life. Competent leadership, along with
the general growth of æsthetic culture and democratic sentiment, should
make this possible.
It is plain, also, that in any plan of reform of values through demand
the mind of women must have a great part. In so far as this mind seems
at present to fluctuate between conventionalism and anarchy, the cause,
perhaps, is that it lacks the guidance and discipline that might come
from the better organization of women as a social group. The working of
this should be analogous to that of the professional groups I have
cited, and should have a like power to raise the quality of the
pecuniary values which women control. The critical question here is,
will women, under conditions of freedom, develop a group consciousness
of their own, with high ideals of each function and power to discipline
the less responsible of their sex. It is hard to see how modern
civilization can dispense with something of this kind. We seem to have
abandoned compulsory discipline, and self-discipline is much needed to
take its place—or rather to do what the other could never have done:
make women full participants in democratic progress.
As regards a better pecuniary valuation of men, the same principles
hold, in general, as for other kinds of pecuniary progress. It calls for
the development of service values, along with the social organization
necessary to appreciate and define these and secure for them pecuniary
recognition. No social manipulation can be trusted to make people pay
high prices for poor service, nor will good service secure an adequate
reward without social structure to back it. The natural process is one
of the concomitant development, through a continuing group, of service
values and pecuniary appreciation.
Certainly we need a scientific and thoroughgoing cultivation of personal
productive power. This should include the study of potential capacity in
children, vocational guidance, practical training, and social culture.
We require also a practical eugenics, which shall diminish the
propagation of degenerate types and perhaps apply more searching tests
to immigrants. We need, in short, a comprehensive “scientific
management” of mankind, to the end of better personal opportunity and
social function in every possible line. But inseparable from this is the
whole question of democratic social development through the state and
other institutions, every phase of which should tend to improve the
general position, and through that the market power, of the unprivileged
masses of the people.
To put it otherwise, the institutional forces supporting market values
vary not only in different occupation groups, but along lines of general
class position, and in the case of those classes that are handicapped by
an unfavorable economic situation the weakness of these forces offers an
urgent problem, which the labor movement, in the largest sense, is an
endeavor to solve.
I do not anticipate that the struggle of classes over pecuniary
distribution will go to any great extremes. It seems more probable that
facility of intercourse, democratic education, underlying community of
interest, and the large human spirit that is growing upon us, will
maintain a working solidarity. Common ideals of some sort will pervade
the whole people; and they cannot be ideals dictated by any one class.
They must be such as can be made acceptable to an intelligent democracy,
and will rule the minds of rich and poor alike; no class will be able to
shut them out. They will be violated, but only in the clandestine way
that all accepted principles are violated. Whoever has wealth, whoever
has power, I am inclined to think that the sway of the public mind will
be such as to insure the use of these, in the main, for what is regarded
as the common welfare.
In spite of the rank growth of many abuses, our society is comparatively
free from the more stubborn obstacles to democratic betterment. I mean
long-settled habits and traditions whose spirit is opposed to such
betterment. Our theory, our formal organization, our training, are all
favorable to rational democracy. The domination of a commercial class,
so far as it exists, is but a mushroom growth, and those who, to their
own surprise, find themselves exercising it, have no deep belief in its
justice or permanence. It is an economic fact, but not a tradition or a
faith. It is but a slight thing compared with the indurated mediævalism
and militarism of Europe. Our people have not only democratic ideals,
but a well-grounded faith in their ability to realize them.
_PART VII_
INTELLIGENT PROCESS