WHAT STARTED THE REVOLUTION.
What did I say to the theater for that evening? was the question with
which Edith met me when we reached home. It seemed that a celebrated
historical drama of the great Revolution was to be given in Honolulu that
afternoon, and she had thought I might like to see it.
"Really you ought to attend," she said, "for the presentation of the play
is a sort of compliment to you, seeing that it is revived in response to
the popular interest in revolutionary history which your presence has
aroused."
No way of spending the evening could have been more agreeable to me, and
it was agreed that we should make up a family theater party.
"The only trouble," I said, as we sat around the tea table, "is that I
don't know enough yet about the Revolution to follow the play very
intelligently. Of course, I have heard revolutionary events referred to
frequently, but I have no connected idea of the Revolution as a whole."
"That will not matter," said Edith. "There is plenty of time before the
play for father to tell you what is necessary. The matinee does not begin
till three in the afternoon at Honolulu, and as it is only six now the
difference in time will give us a good hour before the curtain rises."
"That's rather a short time, as well as a short notice, for so big a task
as explaining the great Revolution," the doctor mildly protested, "but
under the circumstances I suppose I shall have to do the best I can."
"Beginnings are always misty," he said, when I straightway opened at him
with the question when the great Revolution began. "Perhaps St. John
disposed of that point in the simplest way when he said that 'in the
beginning was God.' To come down nearer, it might be said that Jesus
Christ stated the doctrinal basis and practical purpose of the great
Revolution when he declared that the golden rule of equal and the best
treatment for all was the only right principle on which people could live
together. To speak, however, in the language of historians, the great
Revolution, like all important events, had two sets of causes--first, the
general, necessary, and fundamental cause which must have brought it
about in the end, whatever the minor circumstances had been; and, second,
the proximate or provoking causes which, within certain limits,
determined when it actually did take place, together with the incidental
features. These immediate or provoking causes were, of course, different
in different countries, but the general, necessary, and fundamental cause
was the same in all countries, the great Revolution being, as you know,
world-wide and nearly simultaneous, as regards the more advanced nations.
"That cause, as I have often intimated in our talks, was the growth of
intelligence and diffusion of knowledge among the masses, which,
beginning with the introduction of printing, spread slowly through the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and much more rapidly
during the nineteenth, when, in the more favored countries, it began, to
be something like general. Previous to the beginning of this process of
enlightenment the condition of the mass of mankind as to intelligence,
from the most ancient times, had been practically stationary at a point
little above the level of the brutes. With no more thought or will of
their own than clay in the hands of the potter, they were unresistingly
molded to the uses of the more intelligent and powerful individuals and
groups of their kind. So it went on for innumerable ages, and nobody
dreamed of anything else until at last the conditions were ripe for the
inbreathing of an intellectual life into these inert and senseless clods.
The process by which this awakening took place was silent, gradual,
imperceptible, but no previous event or series of events in the history
of the race had been comparable to it in the effect it was to have upon
human destiny. It meant that the interest of the many instead of the few,
the welfare of the whole instead of that of a part, were henceforth to be
the paramount purpose of the social order and the goal of its evolution.
"Dimly your nineteenth-century philosophers seem to have perceived that
the general diffusion of intelligence was a new and large fact, and that
it introduced a very important force into the social evolution, but they
were wall-eyed in their failure to see the certainty with which it
foreshadowed a complete revolution of the economic basis of society in
the interest of the whole body of the people as opposed to class interest
or partial interest of every sort. Its first effect was the democratic
movement by which personal and class rule in political matters was
overthrown in the name of the supreme interest and authority of the
people. It is astonishing that there should have been any intelligent
persons among you who did not perceive that political democracy was but
the pioneer corps and advance guard of economic democracy, clearing the
way and providing the instrumentality for the substantial part of the
programme--namely, the equalization of the distribution of work and
wealth. So much for the main, general, and necessary cause and
explanation of the great Revolution--namely, the progressive diffusion of
intelligence among the masses from the sixteenth to the end of the
nineteenth centuries. Given this force in operation, and the revolution
of the economic basis of society must sooner or later have been its
outcome everywhere: whether a little sooner or later and in just what way
and with just what circumstances, the differing conditions of different
countries determined.
"In the case of America, the period of revolutionary agitation which
resulted in the establishment of the present order began almost at once
upon the close of the civil war. Some historians date the beginning of
the Revolution from 1873."
"Eighteen seventy-three!" I exclaimed; "why, that was more than a dozen
years before I fell asleep! It seems, then, that I was a contemporary and
witness of at least a part of the Revolution, and yet I saw no
Revolution. It is true that we recognized the highly serious condition of
industrial confusion and popular discontent, but we did not realize that
a Revolution was on."
"It was to have been expected that you would not," replied the doctor.
"It is very rarely that the contemporaries of great revolutionary
movements have understood their nature until they have nearly run their
course. Following generations always think that they would have been
wiser in reading the signs of the times, but that is not likely."
"But what was there," I said, "about 1873 which has led historians to
take it as the date from which to reckon the beginning of the
Revolution?"
"Simply the fact that it marked in a rather distinct way the beginning of
a period of economic distress among the American people, which continued,
with temporary and partial alleviations, until the overthrow of private
capitalism. The popular discontent resulting from this experience was the
provoking cause of the Revolution. It awoke Americans from their
self-complacent dream that the social problem had been solved or could be
solved by a system of democracy limited to merely political forms, and
set them to seeking the true solution.
"The economic distress beginning at the last third of the century, which
was the direct provocation of the Revolution, was very slight compared
with that which had been the constant lot and ancient heritage of other
nations. It represented merely the first turn or two of the screw by
which capitalism in due time squeezed dry the masses always and
everywhere. The unexampled space and richness of their new land had given
Americans a century's respite from the universal fate. Those advantages
had passed, the respite was ended, and the time had come when the people
must adapt their necks to the yoke all peoples before had worn. But
having grown high-spirited from so long an experience of comparative
welfare, the Americans resisted the imposition, and, finding mere
resistance vain, ended by making a revolution. That in brief is the whole
story of the way the great Revolution came on in America. But while this
might satisfy a languid twentieth-century curiosity as to a matter so
remote in time, you will naturally want a little more detail. There is a
particular chapter in Storiot's History of the Revolution explaining just
how and why the growth of the power of capital provoked the great
uprising, which deeply impressed me in my school days, and I don't think
I can make a better use of a part of our short time than by reading a few
paragraphs from it."
And Edith having brought the book from the library--for we still sat at
the tea table--the doctor read:
"'With reference to the evolution of the system of private capitalism to
the point where it provoked the Revolution by threatening the lives and
liberties of the people, historians divide the history of the American
Republic, from its foundation in 1787 to the great Revolution which made
it a true republic, into three periods.
"'The first comprises the decades from the foundation of the republic to
about the end of the first third of the nineteenth century--say, up to
the thirties or forties. This was the period during which the power of
capital in private hands had not as yet shown itself seriously
aggressive. The moneyed class was small and the accumulations of capital
petty. The vastness of the natural resources of the virgin country defied
as yet the lust of greed. The ample lands to be had for the taking
guaranteed independence to all at the price of labor. With this resource
no man needed to call another master. This may be considered the idyllic
period of the republic, the time when De Tocqueville saw and admired it,
though not without prescience of the doom that awaited it. The seed of
death was in the state in the principle of private capitalism, and was
sure in time to grow and ripen, but as yet the conditions were not
favorable to its development. All seemed to go well, and it is not
strange that the American people indulged in the hope that their republic
had indeed solved the social question.
"'From about 1830 or 1840, speaking of course in a general way as
to date, we consider the republic to have entered on its second
phase--namely, that in which the growth and concentration of capital
began to be rapid. The moneyed class now grew powerful, and began to
reach out and absorb the natural resources of the country and to organize
for its profit the labor of the people. In a word, the growth of the
plutocracy became vigorous. The event which gave the great impulse to
this movement, and fixed the time of the transition from the first to the
second period in the history of the nation, was of course the general
application of steam to commerce and industry. The transition may indeed
be said to have begun somewhat earlier, with the introduction of the
factory system. Of course, if neither steam nor the inventions which made
the factory system possible had ever been introduced, it would have been
merely a question of a longer time before the capitalist class,
proceeding in this case by landlordism and usury, would have reduced the
masses to vassalage, and overthrown democracy even as in the ancient
republics, but the great inventions amazingly accelerated the plutocratic
conquest. For the first time in history the capitalist in the subjugation
of his fellows had machinery for his ally, and a most potent one it was.
This was the mighty factor which, by multiplying the power of capital and
relatively dwarfing the importance of the workingman, accounts for the
extraordinary rapidity with which, during the second and third periods
the conquest of the republic by the plutocracy was carried out.
"'It is a fact creditable to Americans that they appear to have begun to
realize as early as the forties that new and dangerous tendencies were
affecting the republic and threatening to falsify its promise of a wide
diffusion of welfare. That decade is notable in American history for the
popular interest taken in the discussion of the possibility of a better
social order, and for the numerous experiments undertaken to test the
feasibility of dispensing with the private capitalist by co-operative
industry. Already the more intelligent and public-spirited citizens were
beginning to observe that their so-called popular government did not seem
to interfere in the slightest degree with the rule of the rich and the
subjection of the masses to economic masters, and to wonder, if that were
to continue to be so, of exactly how much value the so-called republican
institutions were on which they had so prided themselves.
"'This nascent agitation of the social question on radical lines was,
however, for the time destined to prove abortive by force of a condition
peculiar to America--namely, the existence on a vast scale of African
chattel slavery in the country. It was fitting in the evolution of
complete human liberty that this form of bondage, cruder and more brutal,
if not on the whole more cruel, than wage slavery, should first be put
out of the way. But for this necessity and the conditions that produced
it, we may believe that the great Revolution would have occurred in
America twenty-five years earlier. From the period of 1840 to 1870 the
slavery issue, involving as it did a conflict of stupendous forces,
absorbed all the moral and mental as well as physical energies of the
nation.
"'During the thirty or forty years from the serious beginning of the
antislavery movement till the war was ended and its issues disposed of,
the nation had no thought to spare for any other interests. During this
period the concentration of capital in few hands, already alarming to the
far-sighted in the forties, had time, almost unobserved and quite
unresisted, to push its conquest of the country and the people. Under
cover of the civil war, with its preceding and succeeding periods of
agitation over the issues of the war, the capitalists may be said to have
stolen a march upon the nation and intrenched themselves in a commanding
position.
"'Eighteen seventy-three is the point, as near as any date, at which the
country, delivered at last from the distracting ethical, and sectional
issues of slavery, first began to open its eyes to the irrepressible
conflict which the growth of capitalism had forced--a conflict between
the power of wealth and the democratic idea of the equal right of all to
life, liberty, and happiness. From about this time we date, therefore,
the beginning of the final or revolutionary period of the pseudo-American
Republic which resulted in the establishment of the present system.
"'History had furnished abundant previous illustrations of the overthrow
of republican societies by the growth and concentration of private
wealth, but never before had it recorded a revolution in the economic
basis of a great nation at once so complete and so swiftly effected. In
America before the war, as we have seen, wealth had been distributed with
a general effect of evenness never previously known in a large community.
There had been few rich men and very few considerable fortunes. It had
been in the power neither of individuals nor a class, through the
possession of overwhelming capital, to exercise oppression upon the rest
of the community. In the short space of twenty-five to thirty years these
economic conditions had been so completely reversed as to give America in
the seventies and eighties the name of the land of millionaires, and make
it famous to the ends of the earth as the country of all others where the
vastest private accumulations of wealth existed. The consequences of this
amazing concentration of wealth formerly so equally diffused, as it had
affected the industrial, the social, and the political interests of the
people, could not have been other than revolutionary.
"'Free competition in business had ceased to exist. Personal initiative
in industrial enterprises, which formerly had been open to all, was
restricted to the capitalists, and to the larger capitalists at that.
Formerly known all over the world as the land of opportunities, America
had in the time of a generation become equally celebrated as the land of
monopolies. A man no longer counted chiefly for what he was, but for what
he had. Brains and industry, if coupled with civility, might indeed win
an upper servant's place in the employ of capital, but no longer could
command a career.
"'The concentration of the economic administration of the country in the
hands of a comparatively small body of great capitalists had necessarily
consolidated and centralized in a corresponding manner all the functions
of production and distribution. Single great concerns, backed by enormous
aggregations of capital, had appropriated tracts of the business field
formerly occupied by innumerable smaller concerns. In this process, as a
matter of course, swarms of small businesses were crushed like flies, and
their former independent proprietors were fortunate to find places as
underlings in the great establishments which had supplanted them.
Straight through the seventies and eighties, every month, every week,
every day saw some fresh province of the economic state, some new branch
of industry or commerce formerly open to the enterprise of all, captured
by a combination of capitalists and turned into an intrenched camp of
monopoly. The words _syndicate_ and _trust_ were coined to
describe these monstrous growths, for which the former language of the
business world had no name.
"'Of the two great divisions of the working masses it would be hard to
say whether the wage-earner or the farmer had suffered most by the
changed order. The old personal relationship and kindly feeling between
employee and employer had passed away. The great aggregations of capital
which had taken the place of the former employers were impersonal forces,
which knew the worker no longer as a man, but as a unit of force. He was
merely a tool in the employ of a machine, the managers of which regarded
him as a necessary nuisance, who must unfortunately be retained at the
least possible expense, until he could be invented wholly out of
existence by some new mechanical contrivance.
"'The economic function and possibilities of the farmer had similarly
been dwarfed or cut off as a result of the concentration of the business
system of the country in the hands of a few. The railroads and the grain
market had, between them, absorbed the former profits of farming, and
left the farmer only the wages of a day laborer in case of a good crop,
and a mortgage debt in case of a bad one; and all this, moreover, coupled
with the responsibilities of a capitalist whose money was invested in his
farm. This latter responsibility, however, did not long continue to
trouble the farmer, for, as naturally might be supposed, the only way he
could exist from year to year under such conditions was by contracting
debts without the slightest prospect of paying them, which presently led
to the foreclosure of his land, and his reduction from the once proud
estate of an American farmer to that of a tenant on his way to become a
peasant.
"'From 1873 to 1896 the histories quote some six distinct business
crises. The periods of rallying between them were, however, so brief that
we may say a continuous crisis existed during a large part of that
period. Now, business crises had been numerous and disastrous in the
early and middle epoch of the republic, but the business system, resting
at that time on a widely extended popular initiative, had shown itself
quickly and strongly elastic, and the rallies that promptly followed the
crashes had always led to a greater prosperity than that before enjoyed.
But this elasticity, with the cause of it, was now gone. There was little
or slow reaction after the crises of the seventies, eighties, and early
nineties, but, on the contrary, a scarcely interrupted decline of prices,
wages, and the general prosperity and content of the farming and
wage-earning masses.
"'There could not be a more striking proof of the downward tendency in
the welfare of the wage-earner and the farmer than the deteriorating
quality and dwindling volume of foreign immigration which marked the
period. The rush of European emigrants to the United States as the land
of promise for the poor, since its beginning half a century before, had
continued with increasing volume, and drawn to us a great population from
the best stocks of the Old World. Soon after the war the character of the
immigration began to change, and during the eighties and nineties came to
be almost entirely made up of the lowest, most wretched, and barbarous
races of Europe--the very scum of the continent. Even to secure these
wretched recruits the agents of the transatlantic steamers and the
American land syndicates had to send their agents all over the worst
districts of Europe and flood the countries with lying circulars. Matters
had come to the point that no European peasant or workingman, who was yet
above the estate of a beggar or an exile, could any longer afford to
share the lot of the American workingman and farmer, so little time
before the envy of the toiling world.
"'While the politicians sought, especially about election time, to cheer
the workingman with the assurance of better times just ahead, the more
serious economic writers seem to have frankly admitted that the
superiority formerly enjoyed by American workingmen over those of other
countries could not be expected to last longer, that the tendency
henceforward was to be toward a world-wide level of prices and
wages--namely, the level of the country where they were lowest. In
keeping with this prediction we note that for the first time, about the
beginning of the nineties, the American employer began to find himself,
through the reduced cost of production in which wages were the main
element, in a position to undersell in foreign markets the products of
the slave gangs of British, Belgian, French, and German capitalists.
"'It was during this period, when the economic distress of the masses was
creating industrial war and making revolutionists of the most contented
and previously prosperous agricultural population in history, that the
vastest private fortunes in the history of the world were being
accumulated. The millionaire, who had been unknown before the war and was
still an unusual and portentous figure in the early seventies, was
presently succeeded by the multimillionaire, and above the
multimillionaires towered yet a new race of economic Titans, the hundred
millionaires, and already the coming of the billionaire was being
discussed. It is not difficult, nor did the people of the time find it
so, to see, in view of this comparison, where the wealth went which the
masses were losing. Tens of thousands of modest competencies disappeared,
to reappear in colossal fortunes in single hands. Visibly as the body of
the spider swells as he sucks the juices of his victims, had these vast
aggregations grown in measure as the welfare of the once prosperous
people had shrunk away.
"'The social consequences of so complete an overthrow of the former
economic equilibrium as had taken place could not have been less than
revolutionary. In America, before the war, the accumulations of wealth
were usually the result of the personal efforts of the possessor and were
consequently small and correspondingly precarious. It was a saying of the
time that there were usually but three generations from shirt-sleeves to
shirt-sleeves--meaning that if a man accumulated a little wealth, his son
generally lost it, and the grandson was again a manual laborer. Under
these circumstances the economic disparities, slight at most and
constantly fluctuating, entirely failed to furnish a basis for class
distinctions. There were recognized no laboring class as such, no leisure
class, no fixed classes of rich and poor. Riches or poverty, the
condition of being at leisure or obliged to work were considered merely
temporary accidents of fortune and not permanent conditions. All this was
now changed. The great fortunes of the new order of things by their very
magnitude were stable acquisitions, not easily liable to be lost, capable
of being handed down from generation to generation with almost as much
security as a title of nobility. On the other hand, the monopolization of
all the valuable economic opportunities in the country by the great
capitalists made it correspondingly impossible for those not of the
capitalist class to attain wealth. The hope of becoming rich some day,
which before the war every energetic American had cherished, was now
practically beyond the horizon of the man born to poverty. Between rich
and poor the door was henceforth shut. The way up, hitherto the social
safety valve, had been closed, and the bar weighted with money bags.
"'A natural reflex of the changed social conditions of the country is
seen in the new class terminology, borrowed from the Old World, which
soon after the war crept into use in the United States. It had been the
boast of the former American that everybody in this country was a
workingman; but now that term we find more and more frankly employed to
distinguish the poor from the well-to-do. For the first time in American
literature we begin to read of the lower classes, the upper classes, and
the middle classes--terms which would have been meaningless in America
before the war, but now corresponded so closely with the real facts of
the situation that those who detested them most could not avoid their
use.
"'A prodigious display of luxury such as Europe could not rival had begun
to characterize the manner of life of the possessors of the new and
unexampled fortunes. Spectacles of gilded splendor, of royal pomp and
boundless prodigality mocked the popular discontent and brought out in
dazzling light the width and depth of the gulf that was being fixed
between the masters and the masses.
"'Meanwhile the money kings took no pains to disguise the fullness of
their conviction that the day of democracy was passing and the dream of
equality nearly at an end. As the popular feeling in America had grown
bitter against them they had responded with frank indications of their
dislike of the country and disgust with its democratic institutions. The
leading American millionaires had become international personages,
spending the greater part of their time and their revenue in European
countries, sending their children there for education and in some
instances carrying their preference for the Old World to the extent of
becoming subjects of foreign powers. The disposition on the part of the
greater American capitalists to turn their backs upon democracy and ally
themselves with European and monarchical institutions was emphasized in a
striking manner by the long list of marriages arranged during this period
between great American heiresses and foreign noblemen. It seemed to be
considered that the fitting destiny for the daughter of an American
multimillionaire was such a union. These great capitalists were very
shrewd in money matters, and their investments of vast sums in the
purchase of titles for their posterity was the strongest evidence they
could give of a sincere conviction that the future of the world, like its
past, belonged not to the people but to class and privilege.
"'The influence exercised over the political government by the moneyed
class under the convenient euphemism of "the business interests," which
merely meant the interests of the rich, had always been considerable, and
at times caused grave scandals. In measure as the wealth of the country
had become concentrated and allied, its influence in the government had
naturally increased, and during the seventies, eighties, and nineties it
became a scarcely veiled dictatorship. Lest the nominal representatives
of the people should go astray in doing the will of the capitalists, the
latter were represented by bodies of picked agents at all the places of
government. These agents closely followed the conduct of all public
officials, and wherever there was any wavering in their fidelity to the
capitalists, were able to bring to bear influences of intimidation or
bribery which were rarely unsuccessful. These bodies of agents had a
recognized semi-legal place in the political system of the day under the
name of lobbyists.
"'The history of government contains few more shameful chapters than that
which records how during this period the Legislatures--municipal, State,
and national--seconded by the Executives and the courts, vied with each
other by wholesale grants of land, privileges, franchises, and monopolies
of all kinds, in turning over the country, its resources, and its people
to the domination of the capitalists, their heirs and assigns forever.
The public lands, which a few decades before had promised a boundless
inheritance to future generations, were ceded in vast domains to
syndicates and individual capitalists, to be held against the people as
the basis of a future territorial aristocracy with tributary populations
of peasants. Not only had the material substance of the national
patrimony been thus surrendered to a handful of the people, but in the
fields of commerce and of industry all the valuable economic
opportunities had been secured by franchises to monopolies, precluding
future generations from opportunity of livelihood or employment, save as
the dependents and liegemen of a hereditary capitalist class. In the
chronicles of royal misdoings there have been many dark chapters
recording how besotted or imbecile monarchs have sold their people into
bondage and sapped the welfare of their realms to enrich licentious
favorites, but the darkest of those chapters is bright beside that which
records the sale of the heritage and hopes of the American people to the
highest bidder by the so-called democratic State, national, and local
governments during the period of which we are speaking.
"'Especially necessary had it become for the plutocracy to be able to use
the powers of government at will, on account of the embittered and
desperate temper of the working masses.
"'The labor strikes often resulted in disturbances too extensive to be
dealt with by the police, and it became the common practice of the
capitalists, in case of serious strikes, to call on the State and
national governments to furnish troops to protect their property
interest. The principal function of the militia of the States had become
the suppression of strikes with bullet or bayonet, or the standing guard
over the plants of the capitalists, till hunger compelled the insurgent
workmen to surrender.
"'During the eighties the State governments entered upon a general policy
of preparing the militia for this new and ever-enlarging field of
usefulness. The National Guard was turned into a Capitalist Guard. The
force was generally reorganized, increased in numbers, improved in
discipline, and trained with especial reference to the business of
shooting riotous workingmen. The drill in street firing--a quite new
feature in the training of the American militiaman, and a most ominous
one--became the prominent test of efficiency. Stone and brick armories,
fortified against attack, loopholed for musketry and mounted with guns to
sweep the streets, were erected at the strategic points of the large
cities. In some instances the militia, which, after all, was pretty near
the people, had, however, shown such unwillingness to fire on strikers
and such symptoms of sympathy for their grievances, that the capitalists
did not trust them fully, but in serious cases preferred to depend on the
pitiless professional soldiers of the General Government, the regulars.
Consequently, the Government, upon request of the capitalists, adopted
the policy of establishing fortified camps near the great cities, and
posting heavy garrisons in them. The Indian wars were ceasing at about
this time, and the troops that had been stationed on the Western plains
to protect the white settlements from the Indians were brought East to
protect the capitalists from the white settlements. Such was the
evolution of private capitalism.
"'The extent and practical character of the use to which the capitalists
intended to put the military arm of the Government in their controversy
with the workingmen may be judged from the fact that in single years of
the early nineties armies of eight and ten thousand men were on the
march, in New York and Pennsylvania, to suppress strikes. In 1892 the
militia of five States, aided by the regulars, were under arms against
strikers simultaneously, the aggregate force of troops probably making a
larger body than General Washington ever commanded. Here surely was civil
war already.
"'Americans of the former days had laughed scornfully at the
bayonet-propped monarchies of Europe, saying rightly that a government
which needed to be defended by force from its own people was a
self-confessed failure. To this pass, however, the industrial system of
the United States was fast coming--it was becoming a government by
bayonets.
"'Thus briefly, and without attempt at detail, may be recapitulated some
of the main aspects of the transformation in the condition of the
American people, resulting from the concentration of the wealth of the
country, which first began to excite serious alarm at the close of the
civil war.
"'It might almost be said that the citizen armies of the North had
returned from saving the republic from open foes, to find that it had
been stolen from them by more stealthy but far more dangerous enemies
whom they had left at home. While they had been putting down caste rule
based on race at the South, class rule based on wealth had been set up at
the North, to be in time extended over South and North alike. While the
armies of the people had been shedding rivers of blood in the effort to
preserve the political unity of the nation, its social unity, upon which
the very life of a republic depends, had been attacked by the beginnings
of class divisions, which could only end by splitting the once coherent
nation into mutually suspicious and inimical bodies of citizens,
requiring the iron bands of despotism to hold them together in a
political organization. Four million negroes had indeed been freed from
chattel slavery, but meanwhile a nation of white men had passed under the
yoke of an economic and social vassalage which, though the common fate of
European peoples and of the ancient world, the founders of the republic
had been proudly confident their posterity would never wear.'"
* * * * *
The doctor closed the book from which he had been reading and laid it
down.
"Julian," he said, "this story of the subversion of the American Republic
by the plutocracy is an astounding one. You were a witness of the
situation it describes, and are able to judge whether the statements are
exaggerated."
"On the contrary," I replied, "I should think you had been reading aloud
from a collection of newspapers of the period. All the political, social,
and business facts and symptoms to which the writer has referred were
matters of public discussion and common notoriety. If they did not
impress me as they do now, it is simply because I imagine I never heard
them grouped and marshaled with the purpose of bringing out their
significance."
Once more the doctor asked Edith to bring him a book from the library.
Turning the pages until he had found the desired place, he said:
"Lest you should fancy that the force of Storiot's statement of the
economic situation in the United States during the last third of the
nineteenth century owes anything to the rhetorical arrangement, I want to
give you just a few hard, cold statistics as to the actual distribution
of property during that period, showing the extent to which its ownership
had been concentrated. Here is a volume made up of information on this
subject based upon analyses of census reports, tax assessments, the files
of probate courts, and other official documents. I will give you three
sets of calculations, each prepared by a separate authority and based
upon a distinct line of investigation, and all agreeing with a closeness
which, considering the magnitude of the calculation, is astounding, and
leaves no room to doubt the substantial accuracy of the conclusions.
"From the first set of tables, which was prepared in 1893 by a census
official from the returns of the United States census, we find it
estimated that out of sixty-two billions of wealth in the country a group
of millionaires and multimillionaires, representing three one-hundredths
of one per cent of the population, owned twelve billions, or one fifth.
Thirty-three billions of the rest was owned by a little less than nine
per cent of the American people, being the rich and well-to-do class less
than millionaires. That is, the millionaires, rich, and well-to-do,
making altogether but nine per cent of the whole nation, owned forty-five
billions of the total national valuation of sixty-two billions. The
remaining ninety-one per cent of the whole nation, constituting the bulk
of the people, were classed as the poor, and divided among themselves the
remaining seventeen million dollars.
"A second table, published in 1894 and based upon the surrogates' records
of estates in the great State of New York, estimates that one per cent of
the people, one one-hundredth of the nation, possessed over half, or
fifty-five per cent, of its total wealth. It finds that a further
fraction of the population, including the well-to-do, and amounting to
eleven per cent, owned over thirty-two per cent of the total wealth, so
that twelve per cent of the whole nation, including the very rich and the
well-to-do, monopolized eighty-seven per cent of the total wealth of the
country, leaving but thirteen per cent of that wealth to be shared among
the remaining eighty-eight per cent of the nation. This eighty-eight per
cent of the nation was subdivided into the poor and the very poor. The
last, constituting fifty per cent out of the eighty-eight, or half the
entire nation, had too little wealth to be estimated at all, apparently
living a hand-to-mouth existence.
"The estimates of a third computator whom I shall quote, although taken
from quite different data, agree remarkably with the others, representing
as they do about the same period. These last estimates, which were
published in 1889 and 1891, and like the others produced a strong
impression, divide the nation into three classes--the rich, the middle,
and the working class. The rich, being one and four tenths per cent of
the population, are credited with seventy per cent of the total wealth.
The middle class, representing nine and two tenths per cent of the
population, is credited with twelve per cent of the total wealth, the
rich and middle classes, together, representing ten and six tenths per
cent of the population, having therefore eighty-two per cent of the total
wealth, leaving to the working class, which constituted eighty-nine and
four tenths of the nation, but eighteen per cent of the wealth, to share
among them."
"Doctor," I exclaimed, "I knew things were pretty unequally divided in my
day, but figures like these are overwhelming. You need not take the
trouble to tell me anything further by way of explaining why the people
revolted against private capitalism. These figures were enough to turn
the very stones into revolutionists."
"I thought you would say so," replied the doctor. "And please remember
also that these tremendous figures represent only the progress made
toward the concentration of wealth mainly within the period of a single
generation. Well might Americans say to themselves 'If such things are
done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?' If private
capitalism, dealing with a community in which had previously existed a
degree of economic equality never before known, could within a period of
some thirty years make such a prodigious stride toward the complete
expropriation of the rest of the nation for the enrichment of a class,
what was likely to be left to the people at the end of a century? What
was to be left even to the next generation?"