_CONCERNING SOME OLD FOES UNDER NEW FACES._
The history of the human race is one long story of attempts by certain
persons and classes to obtain control of the power of the State, so as
to win earthly gratifications at the expense of others. People
constantly assume that there is something metaphysical and sentimental
about government. At bottom there are two chief things with which
government has to deal. They are, the property of men and the honor of
women. These it has to defend against crime. The capital which, as we
have seen, is the condition of all welfare on earth, the fortification
of existence, and the means of growth, is an object of cupidity. Some
want to get it without paying the price of industry and economy. In
ancient times they made use of force. They organized bands of robbers.
They plundered laborers and merchants. Chief of all, however, they
found that means of robbery which consisted in gaining control of the
civil organization--the State--and using its poetry and romance as a
glamour under cover of which they made robbery lawful. They developed
high-spun theories of nationality, patriotism, and loyalty. They took
all the rank, glory, power, and prestige of the great civil
organization, and they took all the rights. They threw on others the
burdens and the duties. At one time, no doubt, feudalism was an
organization which drew together again the fragments of a dissolved
society; but when the lawyers had applied the Roman law to modern
kings, and feudal nobles had been converted into an aristocracy of
court nobles, the feudal nobility no longer served any purpose.
In modern times the great phenomenon has been the growth of the middle
class out of the mediaeval cities, the accumulation of wealth, and the
encroachment of wealth, as a social power, on the ground formerly
occupied by rank and birth. The middle class has been obliged to fight
for its rights against the feudal class, and it has, during three or
four centuries, gradually invented and established institutions to
guarantee personal and property rights against the arbitrary will of
kings and nobles.
In its turn wealth is now becoming a power in three or four centuries,
gradually invented and the State, and, like every other power, it is
liable to abuse unless restrained by checks and guarantees. There is an
insolence of wealth, as there is an insolence of rank. A plutocracy
might be even far worse than an aristocracy. Aristocrats have always
had their class vices and their class virtues. They have always been,
as a class, chargeable with licentiousness and gambling. They have,
however, as a class, despised lying and stealing. They have always
pretended to maintain a standard of honor, although the definition and
the code of honor have suffered many changes and shocking
deterioration. The middle class has always abhorred gambling and
licentiousness, but it has not always been strict about truth and
pecuniary fidelity. That there is a code and standard of mercantile
honor which is quite as pure and grand as any military code, is beyond
question, but it has never yet been established and defined by long
usage and the concurrent support of a large and influential society.
The feudal code has, through centuries, bred a high type of men, and
constituted a caste. The mercantile code has not yet done so, but the
wealthy class has attempted to merge itself in or to imitate the feudal
class.
The consequence is, that the wealth-power has been developed, while the
moral and social sanctions by which that power ought to be controlled
have not yet been developed. A plutocracy would be a civil organization
in which the power resides in wealth, in which a man might have
whatever he could buy, in which the rights, interests, and feelings of
those who could not pay would be overridden.
There is a plain tendency of all civilized governments toward
plutocracy. The power of wealth in the English House of Commons has
steadily increased for fifty years. The history of the present French
Republic has shown an extraordinary development of plutocratic spirit
and measures. In the United States many plutocratic doctrines have a
currency which is not granted them anywhere else; that is, a man's
right to have almost anything which he can pay for is more popularly
recognized here than elsewhere. So far the most successful limitation
on plutocracy has come from aristocracy, for the prestige of rank is
still great wherever it exists. The social sanctions of aristocracy
tell with great force on the plutocrats, more especially on their wives
and daughters. It has already resulted that a class of wealthy men is
growing up in regard to whom the old sarcasms of the novels and the
stage about _parvenus_ are entirely thrown away. They are men who have
no superiors, by whatever standard one chooses to measure them. Such an
interplay of social forces would, indeed, be a great and happy solution
of a new social problem, if the aristocratic forces were strong enough
for the magnitude of the task. If the feudal aristocracy, or its modern
representative--which is, in reality, not at all feudal--could carry
down into the new era and transmit to the new masters of society the
grace, elegance, breeding, and culture of the past, society would
certainly gain by that course of things, as compared with any such
rupture between past and present as occurred in the French Revolution.
The dogmatic radicals who assail "on principle" the inherited social
notions and distinctions are not serving civilization. Society can do
without patricians, but it cannot do without patrician virtues.
In the United States the opponent of plutocracy is democracy. Nowhere
else in the world has the power of wealth come to be discussed in its
political aspects as it is here. Nowhere else does the question arise
as it does here. I have given some reasons for this in former chapters.
Nowhere in the world is the danger of plutocracy as formidable as it is
here. To it we oppose the power of numbers as it is presented by
democracy. Democracy itself, however, is new and experimental. It has
not yet existed long enough to find its appropriate forms. It has no
prestige from antiquity such as aristocracy possesses. It has, indeed,
none of the surroundings which appeal to the imagination. On the other
hand, democracy is rooted in the physical, economic, and social
circumstances of the United States. This country cannot be other than
democratic for an indefinite period in the future. Its political
processes will also be republican. The affection of the people for
democracy makes them blind and uncritical in regard to it, and they are
as fond of the political fallacies to which democracy lends itself as
they are of its sound and correct interpretation, or fonder. Can
democracy develop itself and at the same time curb plutocracy?
Already the question presents itself as one of life or death to
democracy. Legislative and judicial scandals show us that the conflict
is already opened, and that it is serious. The lobby is the army of the
plutocracy. An elective judiciary is a device so much in the interest
of plutocracy, that it must be regarded as a striking proof of the
toughness of the judicial institution that it has resisted the
corruption so much as it has. The caucus, convention, and committee
lend themselves most readily to the purposes of interested speculators
and jobbers. It is just such machinery as they might have invented if
they had been trying to make political devices to serve their purpose,
and their processes call in question nothing less than the possibility
of free self-government under the forms of a democratic republic.
For now I come to the particular point which I desire to bring forward
against all the denunciations and complainings about the power of
chartered corporations and aggregated capital. If charters have been
given which confer undue powers, who gave them? Our legislators did.
Who elected these legislators. We did. If we are a free, self-governing
people, we must understand that it costs vigilance and exertion to be
self-governing. It costs far more vigilance and exertion to be so under
the democratic form, where we have no aids from tradition or prestige,
than under other forms. If we are a free, self-governing people, we can
blame nobody but ourselves for our misfortunes. No one will come to
help us out of them. It will do no good to heap law upon law, or to try
by constitutional provisions simply to abstain from the use of powers
which we find we always abuse. How can we get bad legislators to pass a
law which shall hinder bad legislators from passing a bad law? That is
what we are trying to do by many of our proposed remedies. The task
before us, however, is one which calls for fresh reserves of moral
force and political virtue from the very foundations of the social
body. Surely it is not a new thing to us to learn that men are greedy
and covetous, and that they will be selfish and tyrannical if they
dare. The plutocrats are simply trying to do what the generals, nobles,
and priests have done in the past--get the power of the State into
their hands, so as to bend the rights of others to their own advantage;
and what we need to do is to recognize the fact that we are face to
face with the same old foes--the vices and passions of human nature.
One of the oldest and most mischievous fallacies in this country has
been the notion that we are better than other nations, and that
Government has a smaller and easier task here than elsewhere. This
fallacy has hindered us from recognizing our old foes as soon as we
should have done. Then, again, these vices and passions take good care
here to deck themselves out in the trappings of democratic watchwords
and phrases, so that they are more often greeted with cheers than with
opposition when they first appear. The plan of electing men to
represent us who systematically surrender public to private interests,
and then trying to cure the mischief by newspaper and platform
declamation against capital and corporations, is an entire failure.
The new foes must be met, as the old ones were met--by institutions and
guarantees. The problem of civil liberty is constantly renewed. Solved
once, it re-appears in a new form. The old constitutional guarantees
were all aimed against king and nobles. New ones must be invented to
hold the power of wealth to that responsibility without which no power
whatever is consistent with liberty. The judiciary has given the most
satisfactory evidence that it is competent to the new duty which
devolves upon it. The courts have proved, in every case in which they
have been called upon, that there are remedies, that they are adequate,
and that they can be brought to bear upon the cases. The chief need
seems to be more power of voluntary combination and co-operation among
those who are aggrieved. Such co-operation is a constant necessity
under free self-government; and when, in any community, men lose the
power of voluntary co-operation in furtherance or defense of their own
interests, they deserve to suffer, with no other remedy than newspaper
denunciations and platform declamations. Of course, in such a state of
things, political mountebanks come forward and propose fierce measures
which can be paraded for political effect. Such measures would be
hostile to all our institutions, would destroy capital, overthrow
credit, and impair the most essential interests of society. On the side
of political machinery there is no ground for hope, but only for fear.
On the side of constitutional guarantees and the independent action of
self-governing freemen there is every ground for hope.