WHAT WE WERE COMING TO BUT FOR THE REVOLUTION.
"We read in the histories," said Edith's mother, "much about the amazing
extent to which particular individuals and families succeeded in
concentrating in their own hands the natural resources, industrial
machinery, and products of the several countries. Julian had only a
million dollars, but many individuals or families had, we are told,
wealth amounting to fifty, a hundred, and even two or three hundred
millions. We read of infants who in the cradle were heirs of hundreds of
millions. Now, something I never saw mentioned in the books was the
limit, for there must have been some limit fixed, to which one individual
might appropriate the earth's surface and resources, the means of
production, and the products of labor."
"There was no limit," I replied.
"Do you mean," exclaimed Edith, "that if a man were only clever and
unscrupulous enough he might appropriate, say, the entire territory of a
country and leave the people actually nothing to stand on unless by his
consent?"
"Certainly," I replied. "In fact, in many countries of the Old World
individuals owned whole provinces, and in the United States even vaster
tracts had passed and were passing into private and corporate hands.
There was no limit whatever to the extent of land which one person might
own, and of course this ownership implied the right to evict every human
being from the territory unless the owner chose to let individuals remain
on payment of tribute."
"And how about other things besides land?" asked Edith.
"It was the same," I said. "There was no limit to the extent to which an
individual might acquire the exclusive ownership of all the factories,
shops, mines, and means of industry, and commerce of every sort, so that
no person could find an opportunity to earn a living except as the
servant of the owner and on his terms."
"If we are correctly informed," said the doctor, "the concentration of
the ownership of the machinery of production and distribution, trade and
industry, had already, before you fell asleep, been carried to a point in
the United States through trusts and syndicates which excited general
alarm."
"Certainly," I replied. "It was then already in the power of a score of
men in New York city to stop at will every car-wheel in the United
States, and the combined action of a few other groups of capitalists
would have sufficed practically to arrest the industries and commerce of
the entire country, forbid employment to everybody, and starve the entire
population. The self-interest of these capitalists in keeping business
going on was the only ground of assurance the rest of the people had for
their livelihood from day to day. Indeed, when the capitalists desired to
compel the people to vote as they wished, it was their regular custom to
threaten to stop the industries of the country and produce a business
crisis if the election did not go to suit them."
"Suppose, Julian, an individual or family or group of capitalists, having
become sole owners of all the land and machinery of one nation, should
wish to go on and acquire the sole ownership of all the land and economic
means and machinery of the whole earth, would that have been inconsistent
with your law of property?"
"Not at all. If one individual, as you suggest, through the effect of
cunning and skill combined with inheritances, should obtain a legal title
to the whole globe, it would be his to do what he pleased with as
absolutely as if it were a garden patch, according to our law of
property. Nor is your supposition about one person or family becoming
owner of the whole earth a wholly fanciful one. There was, when I fell
asleep, one family of European bankers whose world-wide power and
resources were so vast and increasing at such a prodigious and
accelerating rate that they had already an influence over the destinies
of nations wider than perhaps any monarch ever exercised."
"And if I understand your system, if they had gone on and attained the
ownership of the globe to the lowest inch of standing room at low tide,
it would have been the legal right of that family or single individual,
in the name of the sacred right of property, to give the people of the
human race legal notice to move off the earth, and in case of their
failure to comply with the requirement of the notice, to call upon them
in the name of the law to form themselves into sheriffs' _posses_
and evict themselves from the earth's surface?"
"Unquestionably."
"O father," exclaimed Edith, "you and Julian are trying to make fun of
us. You must think we will believe anything if you only keep straight
faces. But you are going too far."
"I do not wonder you think so," said the doctor. "But you can easily
satisfy yourself from the books that we have in no way exaggerated the
possibilities of the old system of property. What was called under that
system the right of property meant the unlimited right of anybody who was
clever enough to deprive everybody else of any property whatever."
"It would seem, then," said Edith, "that the dream of world conquest by
an individual, if ever realized, was more likely under the old _regime
_ to be realized by economic than by military means."
"Very true," said the doctor. "Alexander and Napoleon mistook their
trade; they should have been bankers, not soldiers. But, indeed, the time
was not in their day ripe for a world-wide money dynasty, such as we have
been speaking of. Kings had a rude way of interfering with the so-called
rights of property when they conflicted with royal prestige or produced
dangerous popular discontent. Tyrants themselves, they did not willingly
brook rival tyrants in their dominions. It was not till the kings had
been shorn of power and the interregnum of sham democracy had set in,
leaving no virile force in the state or the world to resist the money
power, that the opportunity for a world-wide plutocratic despotism
arrived. Then, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when
international trade and financial relations had broken down national
barriers and the world had become one field of economic enterprise, did
the idea of a universally dominant and centralized money power become not
only possible, but, as Julian has said, had already so far materialized
itself as to cast its shadow before. If the Revolution had not come when
it did, we can not doubt that something like this universal plutocratic
dynasty or some highly centered oligarchy, based upon the complete
monopoly of all property by a small body, would long before this time
have become the government of the world. But of course the Revolution
must have come when it did, so we need not talk of what would have
happened if it had not come."