THE THEORY OF SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS
BY
BROOKS ADAMS
1913
PREFATORY NOTE
The first chapter of the following book was published, in substantially
its present form, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for April, 1913. I have to
thank the editor for his courtesy in assenting to my wish to reprint.
The other chapters have not appeared before. I desire also to express my
obligations to my learned friend, Dr. M.M. Bigelow, who, most kindly, at
my request, read chapters two and three, which deal with the
constitutional law, and gave me the benefit of his most valuable
criticism.
Further than this I have but one word to add. I have written in support
of no political movement, nor for any ephemeral purpose. I have written
only to express a deep conviction which is the result of more than
twenty years of study, and reflection upon this subject.
BROOKS ADAMS.
QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS, May 17, 1913.
CONTENTS
I. THE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISTIC GOVERNMENT
II. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE JUDICIAL FUNCTION
III. AMERICAN COURTS AS LEGISLATIVE CHAMBERS
IV. THE SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM
V. POLITICAL COURTS
VI. INFERENCES
INDEX [not included in this etext]
THE THEORY OF SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS
CHAPTER I
THE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISTIC GOVERNMENT
Civilization, I apprehend, is nearly synonymous with order. However much
we may differ touching such matters as the distribution of property, the
domestic relations, the law of inheritance and the like, most of us, I
should suppose, would agree that without order civilization, as we
understand it, cannot exist. Now, although the optimist contends that,
since man cannot foresee the future, worry about the future is futile,
and that everything, in the best possible of worlds, is inevitably for
the best, I think it clear that within recent years an uneasy suspicion
has come into being that the principle of authority has been dangerously
impaired, and that the social system, if it is to cohere, must be
reorganized. So far as my observation has extended, such intuitions are
usually not without an adequate cause, and if there be reason for
anxiety anywhere, it surely should be in the United States, with its
unwieldy bulk, its heterogeneous population, and its complex government.
Therefore, I submit, that an hour may not be quite wasted which is
passed in considering some of the recent phenomena which have appeared
about us, in order to ascertain if they can be grouped together in any
comprehensible relation.
About a century ago, after, the American and French Revolutions and the
Napoleonic wars, the present industrial era opened, and brought with it
a new governing class, as every considerable change in human environment
must bring with it a governing class to give it expression. Perhaps, for
lack of a recognized name, I may describe this class as the industrial
capitalistic class, composed in the main of administrators and bankers.
As nothing in the universe is stationary, ruling classes have their
rise, culmination, and decline, and I conjecture that this class
attained to its acme of popularity and power, at least in America,
toward the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. I draw
this inference from the fact that in the next quarter resistance to
capitalistic methods began to take shape in such legislation as the
Interstate Commerce Law and the Sherman Act, and almost at the opening
of the present century a progressively rigorous opposition found for its
mouthpiece the President of the Union himself. History may not be a very
practical study, but it teaches some useful lessons, one of which is
that nothing is accidental, and that if men move in a given direction,
they do so in obedience to an impulsion as automatic as is the impulsion
of gravitation. Therefore, if Mr. Roosevelt became, what his adversaries
are pleased to call, an agitator, his agitation had a cause which is as
deserving of study as is the path of a cyclone. This problem has long
interested me, and I harbor no doubt not only that the equilibrium of
society is very rapidly shifting, but that Mr. Roosevelt has,
half-automatically, been stimulated by the instability about him to seek
for a new centre of social gravity. In plain English, I infer that he
has concluded that industrialism has induced conditions which can no
longer be controlled by the old capitalistic methods, and that the
country must be brought to a level of administrative efficiency
competent to deal with the strains and stresses of the twentieth
century, just as, a hundred and twenty-five years ago, the country was
brought to an administrative level competent for that age, by the
adoption of the Constitution. Acting on these premises, as I conjecture,
whether consciously worked out or not, Mr. Roosevelt's next step was to
begin the readjustment; but, I infer, that on attempting any correlated
measures of reform, Mr. Roosevelt found progress impossible, because of
the obstruction of the courts. Hence his instinct led him to try to
overleap that obstruction, and he suggested, without, I suspect,
examining the problem very deeply, that the people should assume the
right of "recalling" judicial decisions made in causes which involved
the nullifying of legislation. What would have happened had Mr.
Roosevelt been given the opportunity to thoroughly formulate his ideas,
even in the midst of an election, can never be known, for it chanced
that he was forced to deal with subjects as vast and complex as ever
vexed a statesman or a jurist, under difficulties at least equal to the
difficulties of the task itself. If the modern mind has developed one
characteristic more markedly than another, it is an impatience with
prolonged demands on its attention, especially if the subject be
tedious. No one could imagine that the New York press of to-day would
print the disquisitions which Hamilton wrote in 1788 in support of the
Constitution, or that, if it did, any one would read them, least of all
the lawyers; and yet Mr. Roosevelt's audience was emotional and
discursive even for a modern American audience. Hence, if he attempted
to lead at all, he had little choice but to adopt, or at least discuss,
every nostrum for reaching an immediate millennium which happened to be
uppermost; although, at the same time, he had to defend himself against
an attack compared with which any criticism to which Hamilton may have
been subjected resembled a caress. The result has been that the
Progressive movement, bearing Mr. Roosevelt with it, has degenerated
into a disintegrating rather than a constructive energy, which is, I
suspect, likely to become a danger to every one interested in the
maintenance of order, not to say in the stability of property. Mr.
Roosevelt is admittedly a strong and determined man whose instinct is
arbitrary, and yet, if my analysis be sound, we see him, at the supreme
moment of his life, diverted from his chosen path toward centralization
of power, and projected into an environment of, apparently, for the most
part, philanthropists and women, who could hardly conceivably form a
party fit to aid him in establishing a vigorous, consolidated,
administrative system. He must have found the pressure toward
disintegration resistless, and if we consider this most significant
phenomenon, in connection with an abundance of similar phenomena, in
other countries, which indicate social incoherence, we can hardly resist
a growing apprehension touching the future. Nor is that apprehension
allayed if, to reassure ourselves, we turn to history, for there we find
on every side long series of precedents more ominous still.
Were all other evidence lacking, the inference that radical changes are
at hand might be deduced from the past. In the experience of the
English-speaking race, about once in every three generations a social
convulsion has occurred; and probably such catastrophes must continue to
occur in order that laws and institutions may be adapted to physical
growth. Human society is a living organism, working mechanically, like
any other organism. It has members, a circulation, a nervous system, and
a sort of skin or envelope, consisting of its laws and institutions.
This skin, or envelope, however, does not expand automatically, as it
would had Providence intended humanity to be peaceful, but is only
fitted to new conditions by those painful and conscious efforts which we
call revolutions. Usually these revolutions are warlike, but sometimes
they are benign, as was the revolution over which General Washington,
our first great "Progressive," presided, when the rotting Confederation,
under his guidance, was converted into a relatively excellent
administrative system by the adoption of the Constitution.
Taken for all in all, I conceive General Washington to have been the
greatest man of the eighteenth century, but to me his greatness chiefly
consists in that balance of mind which enabled him to recognize when an
old order had passed away, and to perceive how a new order could be best
introduced. Joseph Story was ten years old in 1789 when the Constitution
was adopted; his earliest impressions, therefore, were of the
Confederation, and I know no better description of the interval just
subsequent to the peace of 1783, than is contained in a few lines in his
dissenting opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case:--
"In order to entertain a just view of this subject, we must go back to
that period of general bankruptcy, and distress and difficulty
(1785).... The union of the States was crumbling into ruins, under the
old Confederation. Agriculture, manufactures, and commerce were at their
lowest ebb. There was infinite danger to all the States from local
interests and jealousies, and from the apparent impossibility of a much
longer adherence to that shadow of a government, the Continental
Congress. And even four years afterwards, when every evil had been
greatly aggravated, and civil war was added to other calamities, the
Constitution of the United States was all but shipwrecked in passing
through the state conventions."[1]
This crisis, according to my computation, was the normal one of the
third generation. Between 1688 and 1765 the British Empire had
physically outgrown its legal envelope, and the consequence was a
revolution. The thirteen American colonies, which formed the western
section of the imperial mass, split from the core and drifted into
chaos, beyond the constraint of existing law. Washington was, in his
way, a large capitalist, but he was much more. He was not only a wealthy
planter, but he was an engineer, a traveller, to an extent a
manufacturer, a politician, and a soldier, and he saw that, as a
conservative, he must be "Progressive" and raise the law to a power high
enough to constrain all these thirteen refractory units. For Washington
understood that peace does not consist in talking platitudes at
conferences, but in organizing a sovereignty strong enough to coerce its
subjects.
The problem of constructing such a sovereignty was the problem which
Washington solved, temporarily at least, without violence. He prevailed
not only because of an intelligence and elevation of character which
enabled him to comprehend, and to persuade others, that, to attain a
common end, all must make sacrifices, but also because he was supported
by a body of the most remarkable men whom America has ever produced. Men
who, though doubtless in a numerical minority, taking the country as a
whole, by sheer weight of ability and energy, achieved their purpose.
Yet even Washington and his adherents could not alter the limitations
of the human mind. He could postpone, but he could not avert, the impact
of conflicting social forces. In 1789 he compromised, but he did not
determine the question of sovereignty. He eluded an impending conflict
by introducing courts as political arbitrators, and the expedient worked
more or less well until the tension reached a certain point. Then it
broke down, and the question of sovereignty had to be settled in
America, as elsewhere, on the field of battle. It was not decided until
Appomattox. But the function of the courts in American life is a subject
which I shall consider hereafter.
If the invention of gunpowder and printing in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries presaged the Reformation of the sixteenth, and if
the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth was the forerunner of
political revolutions throughout the Western World, we may well, after
the mechanical and economic cataclysm of the nineteenth, cease wondering
that twentieth-century society should be radical.
Never since man first walked erect have his relations toward nature been
so changed, within the same space of time, as they have been since
Washington was elected President and the Parisian mob stormed the
Bastille. Washington found the task of a readjustment heavy enough, but
the civilization he knew was simple. When Washington lived, the fund of
energy at man's disposal had not very sensibly augmented since the fall
of Rome. In the eighteenth, as in the fourth century, engineers had at
command only animal power, and a little wind and water power, to which
had been added, at the end of the Middle Ages, a low explosive. There
was nothing in the daily life of his age which made the legal and
administrative principles which had sufficed for Justinian insufficient
for him. Twentieth-century society rests on a basis not different so
much in degree, as in kind, from all that has gone before. Through
applied science infinite forces have been domesticated, and the action
of these infinite forces upon finite minds has been to create a tension,
together with a social acceleration and concentration, not only
unparalleled, but, apparently, without limit. Meanwhile our laws and
institutions have remained, in substance, constant. I doubt if we have
developed a single important administrative principle which would be
novel to Napoleon, were he to live again, and I am quite sure that we
have no legal principle younger than Justinian.
As a result, society has been squeezed, as it were, from its rigid
eighteenth-century legal shell, and has passed into a fourth dimension
of space, where it performs its most important functions beyond the
cognizance of the law, which remains in a space of but three dimensions.
Washington encountered a somewhat analogous problem when dealing with
the thirteen petty independent states, which had escaped from England;
but his problem was relatively rudimentary. Taking the theory of
sovereignty as it stood, he had only to apply it to communities. It was
mainly a question of concentrating a sufficient amount of energy to
enforce order in sovereign social units. The whole social detail
remained unchanged. Our conditions would seem to imply a very
considerable extension and specialization of the principle of
sovereignty, together with a commensurate increment of energy, but
unfortunately the twentieth-century American problem is still further
complicated by the character of the envelope in which this highly
volatilized society is theoretically contained. To attain his object,
Washington introduced a written organic law, which of all things is the
most inflexible. No other modern nation has to consider such an
impediment.
Moneyed capital I take to be stored human energy, as a coal measure is
stored solar energy; and moneyed capital, under the stress of modern
life, has developed at once extreme fluidity, and an equivalent
compressibility. Thus a small number of men can control it in enormous
masses, and so it comes to pass that, in a community like the United
States, a few men, or even, in certain emergencies, a single man, may
become clothed with various of the attributes of sovereignty. Sovereign
powers are powers so important that the community, in its corporate
capacity, has, as society has centralized, usually found it necessary to
monopolize them more or less absolutely, since their possession by
private persons causes revolt. These powers, when vested in some
official, as, for example, a king or emperor, have been held by him, in
all Western countries at least, as a trust to be used for the common
welfare. A breach of that trust has commonly been punished by
deposition or death. It was upon a charge of breach of trust that
Charles I, among other sovereigns, was tried and executed. In short, the
relation of sovereign and subject has been based either upon consent and
mutual obligation, or upon submission to a divine command; but, in
either case, upon recognition of responsibility. Only the relation of
master and slave implies the status of sovereign power vested in an
unaccountable superior. Nevertheless, it is in a relation somewhat
analogous to the latter, that the modern capitalist has been placed
toward his fellow citizens, by the advances in applied science. An
example or two will explain my meaning.
High among sovereign powers has always ranked the ownership and
administration of highways. And it is evident why this should have been
so. Movement is life, and the stoppage of movement is death, and the
movement of every people flows along its highways. An invader has only
to cut the communications of the invaded to paralyze him, as he would
paralyze an animal by cutting his arteries or tendons. Accordingly, in
all ages and in all lands, down to the nineteenth century, nations even
partially centralized have, in their corporate capacity, owned and cared
for their highways, either directly or through accountable agents. And
they have paid for them by direct taxes, like the Romans, or by tolls
levied upon traffic, as many mediaeval governments preferred to do.
Either method answers its purpose, provided the government recognizes
its responsibility; and no government ever recognized this
responsibility more fully than did the autocratic government of ancient
Rome. So the absolute régime of eighteenth-century France recognized
this responsibility when Louis XVI undertook to remedy the abuse of
unequal taxation, for the maintenance of the highways, by abolishing the
corvée.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the application, by
science, of steam to locomotion, made railways a favorite speculation.
Forthwith, private capital acquired these highways, and because of the
inelasticity of the old law, treated them as ordinary chattels, to be
administered for the profit of the owner exclusively. It is true that
railway companies posed as public agents when demanding the power to
take private property; but when it came to charging for use of their
ways, they claimed to be only private carriers, authorized to bargain as
they pleased. Indeed, it grew to be considered a mark of efficient
railroad management to extract the largest revenue possible from the
people, along the lines of least resistance; that is, by taxing most
heavily those individuals and localities which could least resist. And
the claim by the railroads that they might do this as a matter of right
was long upheld by the courts,[2] nor have the judges even yet, after a
generation of revolt and of legislation, altogether abandoned this
doctrine.
The courts--reluctantly, it is true, and principally at the instigation
of the railways themselves, who found the practice unprofitable--have
latterly discountenanced discrimination as to persons, but they still
uphold discrimination as to localities.[3] Now, among abuses of
sovereign power, this is one of the most galling, for of all taxes the
transportation tax is perhaps that which is most searching, most
insidious, and, when misused, most destructive. The price paid for
transportation is not so essential to the public welfare as its
equality; for neither persons nor localities can prosper when the
necessaries of life cost them more than they cost their competitors. In
towns, no cup of water can be drunk, no crust of bread eaten, no garment
worn, which has not paid the transportation tax, and the farmer's crops
must rot upon his land, if other farmers pay enough less than he to
exclude him from markets toward which they all stand in a position
otherwise equal. Yet this formidable power has been usurped by private
persons who have used it purely selfishly, as no legitimate sovereign
could have used it, and by persons who have indignantly denounced all
attempts to hold them accountable, as an infringement of their
constitutional rights. Obviously, capital cannot assume the position of
an irresponsible sovereign, living in a sphere beyond the domain of law,
without inviting the fate which has awaited all sovereigns who have
denied or abused their trust.
The operation of the New York Clearing-House is another example of the
acquisition of sovereign power by irresponsible private persons.
Primarily, of course, a clearing-house is an innocent institution
occupied with adjusting balances between banks, and has no relation to
the volume of the currency. Furthermore, among all highly centralized
nations, the regulation of the currency is one of the most jealously
guarded of the prerogatives of sovereignty, because all values hinge
upon the relation which the volume of the currency bears to the volume
of trade. Yet, as everybody knows, in moments of financial panic, the
handful of financiers who, directly or indirectly, govern the
Clearing-House, have it in their power either to expand or to contract
the currency, by issuing or by withdrawing Clearing-House certificates,
more effectually perhaps than if they controlled the Treasury of the
United States. Nor does this power, vast as it is, at all represent the
supremacy which a few bankers enjoy over values, because of their
facilities for manipulating the currency and, with the currency, credit;
facilities, which are used or abused entirely beyond the reach of the
law.
Bankers, at their conventions and through the press, are wont to
denounce the American monetary system, and without doubt all that they
say, and much more that they do not say, is true; and yet I should
suppose that there could be little doubt that American financiers might,
after the panic of 1893, and before the administration of Mr. Taft, have
obtained from Congress, at most sessions, very reasonable legislation,
had they first agreed upon the reforms they demanded, and, secondly,
manifested their readiness, as a condition precedent to such reforms, to
submit to effective government supervision in those departments of their
business which relate to the inflation or depression of values. They
have shown little inclination to submit to restraint in these
particulars, nor, perhaps, is their reluctance surprising, for the
possession by a very small favored class of the unquestioned privilege,
whether actually used or not, at recurring intervals, of subjecting the
debtor class to such pressure as the creditor may think necessary, in
order to force the debtor to surrender his property to the creditor at
the creditor's price, is a wonder beside which Aladdin's lamp burns dim.
As I have already remarked, I apprehend that sovereignty is a variable
quantity of administrative energy, which, in civilizations which we
call advancing, tends to accumulate with a rapidity proportionate to the
acceleration of movement. That is to say, the community, as it
consolidates, finds it essential to its safety to withdraw, more or less
completely, from individuals, and to monopolize, more or less strictly,
itself, a great variety of functions. At one stage of civilization the
head of the family administers justice, maintains an armed force for war
or police, wages war, makes treaties of peace, coins money, and, not
infrequently, wears a crown, usually of a form to indicate his
importance in a hierarchy. At a later stage of civilization, companies
of traders play a great part. Such aggregations of private and
irresponsible adventurers have invaded and conquered empires, founded
colonies, and administered justice to millions of human beings. In our
own time, we have seen the assumption of many of the functions of these
and similar private companies by the sovereign. We have seen the East
India Company absorbed by the British Parliament; we have seen the
railways, and the telephone and the telegraph companies, taken into
possession, very generally, by the most progressive governments of the
world; and now we have come to the necessity of dealing with the
domestic-trade monopoly, because trade has fallen into monopoly through
the centralization of capital in a constantly contracting circle of
ownership.
Among innumerable kinds of monopolies none have been more troublesome
than trade monopolies, especially those which control the price of the
necessaries of life; for, so far as I know, no people, approximately
free, have long endured such monopolies patiently. Nor could they well
have done so without constraint by overpowering physical force, for the
possession of a monopoly of a necessary of life by an individual, or by
a small privileged class, is tantamount to investing a minority,
contemptible alike in numbers and in physical force, with an arbitrary
and unlimited power to tax the majority, not for public, but for private
purposes. Therefore it has not infrequently happened that persistence in
adhering to and in enforcing such monopolies has led, first, to attempts
at regulation, and, these failing, to confiscation, and sometimes to the
proscription of the owners. An example of such a phenomenon occurs to
me which, just now, seems apposite.
In the earlier Middle Ages, before gunpowder made fortified houses
untenable when attacked by the sovereign, the highways were so dangerous
that trade and manufactures could only survive in walled towns. An
unarmed urban population had to buy its privileges, and to pay for these
a syndicate grew up in each town, which became responsible for the town
ferm, or tax, and, in return, collected what part of the municipal
expenses it could from the poorer inhabitants. These syndicates, called
guilds, as a means of raising money, regulated trade and fixed prices,
and they succeeded in fixing prices because they could prevent
competition within the walls. Presently complaints became rife of guild
oppression, and the courts had to entertain these complaints from the
outset, to keep some semblance of order; but at length the turmoil
passed beyond the reach of the courts, and Parliament intervened.
Parliament not only enacted a series of statutes regulating prices in
towns, but supervised guild membership, requiring trading companies to
receive new members upon what Parliament considered to be reasonable
terms. Nevertheless, friction continued.
With advances in science, artillery improved, and, as artillery
improved, the police strengthened until the king could arrest whom he
pleased. Then the country grew safe and manufactures migrated from the
walled and heavily taxed towns to the cheap, open villages, and from
thence undersold the guilds. As the area of competition broadened, so
the guilds weakened, until, under Edward VI, being no longer able to
defend themselves, they were ruthlessly and savagely plundered; and
fifty years later the Court of King's Bench gravely held that a royal
grant of a monopoly had always been bad at common law.[4]
Though the Court's law proved to be good, since it has stood, its
history was fantastic; for the trade-guild was the offspring of trade
monopoly, and a trade monopoly had for centuries been granted habitually
by the feudal landlord to his tenants, and indeed was the only means by
which an urban population could finance its military expenditure. Then,
in due course, the Crown tried to establish its exclusive right to
grant monopolies, and finally Parliament--or King, Lords, and Commons
combined, being the whole nation in its corporate capacity,
--appropriated this monopoly of monopolies as its supreme
prerogative. And with Parliament this monopoly has ever since remained.
In fine, monopolies, or competition in trade, appear to be recurrent
social phases which depend upon the ratio which the mass and the
fluidity of capital, or, in other words, its energy, bears to the area
within which competition is possible. In the Middle Ages, when the town
walls bounded that area, or when, at most, it was restricted to a few
lines of communication between defensible points garrisoned by the
monopolists,--as were the Staple towns of England which carried on the
wool trade with the British fortified counting-houses in Flanders,--a
small quantity of sluggish capital sufficed. But as police improved, and
the area of competition broadened faster than capital accumulated and
quickened, the competitive phase dawned, whose advent is marked by Darcy
_v_. Allein, decided in the year 1600. Finally, the issue between
monopoly and free trade was fought out in the American Revolution, for
the measure which precipitated hostilities was the effort of England to
impose her monopoly of the Eastern trade upon America. The Boston Tea
Party occurred on December 16, 1773. Then came the heyday of competition
with the acceptance of the theories of Adam Smith, and the political
domination in England, towards 1840, of the Manchester school of
political economy.
About forty years since, in America at least, the tide would appear once
more to have turned. I fix the moment of flux, as I am apt to do, by a
lawsuit. This suit was the Morris Run Coal Company _v._ Barclay Coal
Company,[5] which is the first modern anti-monopoly litigation that I
have met with in the United States. It was decided in Pennsylvania in
1871; and since 1871, while the area within which competition is
possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated
and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within this republic,
substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed mass. This mass,
obeying what amounts to being a single volition, has its heart in Wall
Street, and pervades every corner of the Union. No matter what price is
in question, whether it be the price of meat, or coal, or cotton cloth,
or of railway transportation, or of insurance, or of discounts, the
inquirer will find the price to be, in essence, a monopoly or fixed
price; and if he will follow his investigation to the end, he will also
find that the first cause in the complex chain of cause and effect which
created the monopoly in that mysterious energy which is enthroned on the
Hudson.
The presence of monopolistic prices in trade is not always a result of
conscious agreement; more frequently, perhaps, it is automatic, and is
an effect of the concentration of capital in a point where competition
ceases, as when all the capital engaged in a trade belongs to a single
owner. Supposing ownership to be enough restricted, combination is
easier and more profitable than competition; therefore combination,
conscious or unconscious, supplants competition. The inference from the
evidence is that, in the United States, capital has reached, or is
rapidly reaching, this point of concentration; and if this be true,
competition cannot be enforced by legislation. But, assuming that
competition could still be enforced by law, the only effect would be to
make the mass of capital more homogeneous by eliminating still further
such of the weaker capitalists as have survived. Ultimately, unless
indeed society is to dissolve and capital migrate elsewhere, all the
present phenomena would be intensified. Nor would free trade, probably,
have more than a very transitory effect. In no department of trade is
competition freer than in the Atlantic passenger service, and yet in no
trade is there a stricter monopoly price.
The same acceleration of the social movement which has caused this
centralization of capital has caused the centralization of another form
of human energy, which is its negative: labor unions organize labor as a
monopoly. Labor protests against the irresponsible sovereignty of
capital, as men have always protested against irresponsible sovereignty,
declaring that the capitalistic social system, as it now exists, is a
form of slavery. Very logically, therefore, the abler and bolder labor
agitators proclaim that labor levies actual war against society, and
that in that war there can be no truce until irresponsible capital has
capitulated. Also, in labor's methods of warfare the same phenomena
appear as in the autocracy of capital. Labor attacks capitalistic
society by methods beyond the purview of the law, and may, at any
moment, shatter the social system; while, under our laws and
institutions, society is helpless.
Few persons, I should imagine, who reflect on these phenomena, fail to
admit to themselves, whatever they may say publicly, that present social
conditions are unsatisfactory, and I take the cause of the stress to be
that which I have stated. We have extended the range of applied science
until we daily use infinite forces, and those forces must, apparently,
disrupt our society, unless we can raise the laws and institutions which
hold society together to an energy and efficiency commensurate to them.
How much vigor and ability would be required to accomplish such a work
may be measured by the experience of Washington, who barely prevailed in
his relatively simple task, surrounded by a generation of extraordinary
men, and with the capitalistic class of America behind him. Without the
capitalistic class he must have failed. Therefore one most momentous
problem of the future is the attitude which capital can or will assume
in this emergency.
That some of the more sagacious of the capitalistic class have
preserved that instinct of self-preservation which was so conspicuous
among men of the type of Washington, is apparent from the position taken
by the management of the United States Steel Company, and by the
Republican minority of the Congressional Committee which recently
investigated the Steel Company; but whether such men very strongly
influence the genus to which they belong is not clear. If they do not,
much improvement in existing conditions can hardly be anticipated.
If capital insists upon continuing to exercise sovereign powers, without
accepting responsibility as for a trust, the revolt against the existing
order must probably continue, and that revolt can only be dealt with, as
all servile revolts must be dealt with, by physical force. I doubt,
however, if even the most ardent and optimistic of capitalists would
care to speculate deeply upon the stability of any government capital
might organize, which rested on the fundamental principle that the
American people must be ruled by an army. On the other hand any
government to be effective must be strong. It is futile to talk of
keeping peace in labor disputes by compulsory arbitration, if the
government has not the power to command obedience to its arbitrators'
decree; but a government able to constrain a couple of hundred thousand
discontented railway employees to work against their will, must differ
considerably from the one we have. Nor is it possible to imagine that
labor will ever yield peaceful obedience to such constraint, unless
capital makes equivalent concessions,--unless, perhaps, among other
things, capital consents to erect tribunals which shall offer relief to
any citizen who can show himself to be oppressed by the monopolistic
price. In fine, a government, to promise stability in the future, must
apparently be so much more powerful than any private interest, that all
men will stand equally before its tribunals; and these tribunals must be
flexible enough to reach those categories of activity which now lie
beyond legal jurisdiction. If it be objected that the American people
are incapable of an effort so prodigious, I readily admit that this may
be true, but I also contend that the objection is beside the issue. What
the American people can or cannot do is a matter of opinion, but that
social changes are imminent appears to be almost certain. Though these
changes cannot be prevented, possibly they may, to a degree, be guided,
as Washington guided the changes of 1789. To resist them perversely, as
they were resisted at the Chicago Convention of 1912, can only make the
catastrophe, when it comes, as overwhelming as was the consequent defeat
of the Republican party.
Approached thus, that Convention of 1912 has more than a passing
importance, since it would seem to indicate the ordinary phenomenon,
that a declining favored class is incapable of appreciating an
approaching change of environment which must alter its social status. I
began with the proposition that, in any society which we now understand,
civilization is equivalent to order, and the evidence of the truth of
the proposition is, that amidst disorder, capital and credit, which
constitute the pith of our civilization, perish first. For more than a
century past, capital and credit have been absolute, or nearly so;
accordingly it has not been the martial type which has enjoyed
sovereignty, but the capitalistic. The warrior has been the capitalists'
servant. But now, if it be true that money, in certain crucial
directions, is losing its purchasing power, it is evident that
capitalists must accept a position of equality before the law under the
domination of a type of man who can enforce obedience; their own
obedience, as well as the obedience of others. Indeed, it might occur,
even to some optimists, that capitalists would be fortunate if they
could certainly obtain protection for another fifty years on terms as
favorable as these. But at Chicago, capitalists declined even to
consider receding to a secondary position. Rather than permit the advent
of a power beyond their immediate control, they preferred to shatter the
instrument by which they sustained their ascendancy. For it is clear
that Roosevelt's offence in the eyes of the capitalistic class was not
what he had actually done, for he had done nothing seriously to injure
them. The crime they resented was the assertion of the principle of
equality before the law, for equality before the law signified the end
of privilege to operate beyond the range of law. If this principle which
Roosevelt, in theory at least, certainly embodied, came to be rigorously
enforced, capitalists perceived that private persons would be precluded
from using the functions of sovereignty to enrich themselves. There lay
the parting of the ways. Sooner or later almost every successive ruling
class has had this dilemma in one of its innumerable forms presented to
them, and few have had the genius to compromise while compromise was
possible. Only a generation ago the aristocracy of the South
deliberately chose a civil war rather than admit the principle that at
some future day they might have to accept compensation for their slaves.
A thousand other instances of similar incapacity might be adduced, but I
will content myself with this alone.
Briefly the precedents induce the inference that privileged classes
seldom have the intelligence to protect themselves by adaptation when
nature turns against them, and, up to the present moment, the old
privileged class in the United States has shown little promise of being
an exception to the rule.
Be this, however, as it may, and even assuming that the great industrial
and capitalistic interests would be prepared to assist a movement toward
consolidation, as their ancestors assisted Washington, I deem it far
from probable that they could succeed with the large American middle
class, which naturally should aid, opposed, as it seems now to be, to
such a movement. Partially, doubtless, this opposition is born of fear,
since the lesser folk have learned by bitter experience that the
powerful have yielded to nothing save force, and therefore that their
only hope is to crush those who oppress them. Doubtless, also, there is
the inertia incident to long tradition, but I suspect that the
resistance is rather due to a subtle and, as yet, nearly unconscious
instinct, which teaches the numerical majority, who are inimical to
capital, that the shortest and easiest way for them to acquire
autocratic authority is to obtain an absolute mastery over those
political tribunals which we call courts. Also that mastery is being by
them rapidly acquired. So long as our courts retain their present
functions no comprehensive administrative reform is possible, whence I
conclude that the relation which our courts shall hold to politics is
now the fundamental problem which the American people must solve, before
any stable social equilibrium can be attained.
Theodore Roosevelt's enemies have been many and bitter. They have
attacked his honesty, his sobriety, his intelligence, and his judgment,
but very few of them have hitherto denied that he has a keen instinct
for political strife. Only of late has this gift been doubted, but now
eminent politicians question whether he did not make a capital mistake
when he presented the reform of our courts of law, as expounders of the
Constitution, as one of his two chief issues, in his canvass for a
nomination for a third presidential term.
After many years of study of, and reflection upon, this intricate
subject I have reached the conviction that, though Mr. Roosevelt may
have erred in the remedy which he has suggested, he is right in the
principle which he has advanced, and in my next chapter I propose to
give the evidence and explain the reasons which constrain me to believe
that American society must continue to degenerate until confusion
supervenes, if our courts shall remain semi-political chambers.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Charles River Bridge _v_. Warren Bridge, II Peters, 608, 609.
[2] Fitchburg R.R. _v_. Gage, 12 Gray 393, and innumerable cases
following it.
[3] See the decisions of the Commerce Court on the Long and Short-Haul
Clause. Atchison, T.&S.F. By. _v_. United States, 191 Federal Rep. 856.
[4] Darcy _v_. Allein, 11 Rep. 84.
[5] 68 Pa. 173.