INFERENCES
As the universe, which at once creates and destroys life, is a complex
of infinitely varying forces, history can never repeat itself. It is
vain, therefore, to look in the future for some paraphrase of the past.
Yet if society be, as I assume it to be, an organism operating on
mechanical principles, we may perhaps, by pondering upon history, learn
enough of those principles to enable us to view, more intelligently than
we otherwise should, the social phenomena about us. What we call
civilization is, I suspect, only, in proportion to its perfection, a
more or less thorough social centralization, while centralization, very
clearly, is an effect of applied science. Civilization is accordingly
nearly synonymous with centralization, and is caused by mechanical
discoveries, which are applications of scientific knowledge, like the
discovery of how to kindle fire, how to build and sail ships, how to
smelt metals, how to prepare explosives, how to make paper and print
books, and the like. And we perceive on a little consideration that from
the first great and fundamental discovery of how to kindle fire, every
advance in applied science has accelerated social movement, until the
discovery of steam and electricity in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries quickened movement as movement had never been quickened
before. And this quickening has caused the rise of those vast cities,
which are at once our pride and our terror.
Social consolidation is, however, not a simple problem, for social
consolidation implies an equivalent capacity for administration. I take
it to be an axiom, that perfection in administration must be
commensurate to the bulk and momentum of the mass to be administered,
otherwise the centrifugal will overcome the centripetal force, and the
mass will disintegrate. In other words, civilization would dissolve. It
is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations
have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on
administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part
supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution
of new governing classes, since, apparently, no established type of mind
can adapt itself to changes in environment, even in slow-moving
civilizations, as fast as environments change. Thus a moment arrives
when the minds of any given dominant type fail to meet the demands made
upon them, and are superseded by a younger type, which in turn is set
aside by another still younger, until the limit of the administrative
genius of that particular race has been reached. Then disintegration
sets in, the social momentum is gradually relaxed, and society sinks
back to a level at which it can cohere. To us, however, the most
distressing aspect of the situation is, that the social acceleration is
progressive in proportion to the activity of the scientific mind which
makes mechanical discoveries, and it is, therefore, a triumphant science
which produces those ever more rapidly recurring changes in environment
to which men must adapt themselves at their peril. As, under the
stimulant of modern science, the old types fail to sustain themselves,
new types have to be equally rapidly evolved, and the rise of a new
governing class is always synonymous with a social revolution and a
redistribution of property. The Industrial Revolution began almost
precisely a century and a half ago, since when the scientific mind has
continually gained in power, and, during that period, on an average of
once in two generations, the environment has so far shifted that a
social revolution has occurred, accompanied by the advent of a new
favored class, and a readjustment of wealth. I think that a glance at
American history will show this estimate to be within the truth. At the
same time such rapidity of intellectual mutation is without precedent,
and I should suppose that the mental exhaustion incident thereto must be
very considerable.
In America, in 1770, a well-defined aristocracy held control. As an
effect of the Industrial Revolution upon industry and commerce, the
Revolutionary War occurred, the colonial aristocracy misjudged the
environment, adhered to Great Britain, were exiled, lost their property,
and perished. Immediately after the American Revolution and also as a
part of the Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin was invented, and the
cotton gin created in the South another aristocracy, the cotton
planters, who flourished until 1860. At this point the changing of the
environment, caused largely by the railway, brought a pressure upon the
slave-owners against which they, also failing to comprehend their
situation, rebelled. They were conquered, suffered confiscation of their
property, and perished. Furthermore, the rebellion of the aristocracy at
the South was caused, or at all events was accompanied by, the rise of a
new dominant class at the North, whose power rested upon the development
of steam in transportation and industry. This is the class which has won
high fortune by the acceleration of the social movement, and the
consequent urban growth of the nineteenth century, and which has now for
about two generations dominated in the land. If this class, like its
predecessors, has in its turn mistaken its environment, a redistribution
of property must occur, distressing, as previous redistributions have
been, in proportion to the inflexibility of the sufferers. The last two
redistributions have been painful, and, if we examine passing phenomena
from this standpoint, they hardly appear to promise much that is
reassuring for the future.
Administration is the capacity of coördinating many, and often
conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they
shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a
series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all
of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very
highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality
because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and
yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which
social stability rests, but is, possibly, the highest faculty of the
human mind. It is precisely in this preëminent requisite for success in
government that I suspect the modern capitalistic class to be weak. The
scope of the human intellect is necessarily limited, and modern
capitalists appear to have been evolved under the stress of an
environment which demanded excessive specialization in the direction of
a genius adapted to money-making under highly complex industrial
conditions. To this money-making attribute all else has been sacrificed,
and the modern capitalist not only thinks in terms of money, but he
thinks in terms of money more exclusively than the French aristocrat or
lawyer ever thought in terms of caste. The modern capitalist looks upon
life as a financial combat of a very specialized kind, regulated by a
code which he understands and has indeed himself concocted, but which is
recognized by no one else in the world. He conceives sovereign powers to
be for sale. He may, he thinks, buy them; and if he buys them; he may
use them as he pleases. He believes, for instance, that it is the
lawful, nay more! in America, that it is the constitutional right of the
citizen to buy the national highways, and, having bought them, to use
them as a common carrier might use a horse and cart upon a public road.
He may sell his service to whom he pleases at what price may suit him,
and if by doing so he ruins men and cities, it is nothing to him. He is
not responsible, for he is not a trustee for the public. If he be
restrained by legislation, that legislation is in his eye an oppression
and an outrage, to be annulled or eluded by any means which will not
lead to the penitentiary. He knows nothing and cares less, for the
relation which highways always have held, and always must hold, to every
civilized population, and if he be asked to inform himself on such
subjects he resents the suggestion as an insult. He is too specialized
to comprehend a social relation, even a fundamental one like this,
beyond the narrow circle of his private interests. He might, had he so
chosen, have evolved a system of governmental railway regulation, and
have administered the system personally, or by his own agents, but he
could never be brought to see the advantage to himself of rational
concession to obtain a resultant of forces. He resisted all restraint,
especially national restraint, believing that his one weapon
--money--would be more effective in obtaining what he wanted in
state legislatures than in Congress. Thus, of necessity, he precipitates
a conflict, instead of establishing an adjustment. He is, therefore, in
essence, a revolutionist without being aware of it. The same specialized
thinking appears in his reasoning touching actual government. New York
City will serve as an illustration.
New York has for two generations been noted for a civic corruption which
has been, theoretically, abominable to all good citizens, and which the
capitalistic class has denounced as abominable to itself. I suspect this
to be an imaginative conception of the situation. Tammany Hall is, I
take it, the administrative bureau through which capital purchases its
privileges. An incorruptible government would offend capital, because,
under such a government, capital would have to obey the law, and
privilege would cease. Occasionally, Tammany grows rapacious and exacts
too much for its services. Then a reform movement is undertaken, and
finally a new management is imposed on Tammany; but when Tammany has
consented to a satisfactory scale of prices, the reform ends. To change
the system would imply a shift in the seat of power. In fine, money is
the weapon of the capitalist as the sword was the weapon of the
mediaeval soldier; only, as the capitalist is more highly specialized
than the soldier ever was, he is more helpless when his single weapon
fails him. From the days of William the Conqueror to our own, the great
soldier has been, very commonly, a famous statesman also, but I do not
now remember, in English or American history, a single capitalist who
has earned eminence for comprehensive statesmanship. On the contrary,
although many have participated in public affairs, have held high
office, and have shown ability therein, capitalists have not unusually,
however unjustly, been suspected of having ulterior objects in view,
unconnected with the public welfare, such as tariffs or land grants.
Certainly, so far as I am aware, no capitalist has ever acquired such
influence over his contemporaries as has been attained with apparent
ease by men like Cromwell, Washington, or even Jackson.
And this leads, advancing in an orderly manner step by step, to what is,
perhaps, to me, the most curious and interesting of all modern
intellectual phenomena connected with the specialized mind,--the
attitude of the capitalist toward the law. Naturally the capitalist, of
all men, might be supposed to be he who would respect and uphold the law
most, considering that he is at once the wealthiest and most vulnerable
of human beings, when called upon to defend himself by physical force.
How defenceless and how incompetent he is in such exigencies, he proved
to the world some years ago when he plunged himself and the country into
the great Pennsylvania coal strike, with absolutely no preparation.
Nevertheless, in spite of his vulnerability, he is of all citizens the
most lawless.[42] He appears to assume that the law will always be
enforced, when he has need of it, by some special personnel whose duty
lies that way, while he may, evade the law, when convenient, or bring it
into contempt, with impunity. The capitalist seems incapable of feeling
his responsibility, as a member of the governing class, in this respect,
and that he is bound to uphold the law, no matter what the law may be,
in order that others may do the like. If the capitalist has bought some
sovereign function, and wishes to abuse it for his own behoof, he
regards the law which restrains him as a despotic invasion of his
constitutional rights, because, with his specialized mind, he cannot
grasp the relation of a sovereign function to the nation as a whole. He,
therefore, looks upon the evasion of a law devised for public
protection, but inimical to him, as innocent or even meritorious.
If an election be lost, and the legislature, which has been chosen by
the majority, cannot be pacified by money, but passes some act which
promises to be annoying, the first instinct of the capitalist is to
retain counsel, not to advise him touching his duty under the law, but
to devise a method by which he may elude it, or, if he cannot elude it,
by which he may have it annulled as unconstitutional by the courts. The
lawyer who succeeds in this branch of practice is certain to win the
highest prizes at the bar. And as capital has had now, for more than one
or even two generations, all the prizes of the law within its gift, this
attitude of capital has had a profound effect upon shaping the American
legal mind. The capitalist, as I infer, regards the constitutional form
of government which exists in the United States, as a convenient method
of obtaining his own way against a majority, but the lawyer has learned
to worship it as a fetich. Nor is this astonishing, for, were written
constitutions suppressed, he would lose most of his importance and much
of his income. Quite honestly, therefore, the American lawyer has come
to believe that a sheet of paper soiled with printers' ink and
interpreted by half-a-dozen elderly gentlemen snugly dozing in
armchairs, has some inherent and marvellous virtue by which it can
arrest the march of omnipotent Nature. And capital gladly accepts this
view of American civilization, since hitherto capitalists have usually
been able to select the magistrates who decide their causes, perhaps
directly through the intervention of some president or governor whom
they have had nominated by a convention controlled by their money, or
else, if the judiciary has been elective, they have caused sympathetic
judges to be chosen by means of a mechanism like Tammany, which they
have frankly bought.
I wish to make myself clearly understood. Neither capitalists nor
lawyers are necessarily, or even probably, other than conscientious men.
What they do is to think with specialized minds. All dominant types have
been more or less specialized, if none so much as this, and this
specialization has caused, as I understand it, that obtuseness of
perception which has been their ruin when the environment which favored
them has changed. All that is remarkable about the modern capitalist is
the excess of his excentricity, or his deviation from that resultant of
forces to which he must conform. To us, however, at present, neither
the morality nor the present mental excentricity of the capitalist is
so material as the possibility of his acquiring flexibility under
pressure, for it would seem to be almost mathematically demonstrable
that he will, in the near future, be subjected to a pressure under which
he must develop flexibility or be eliminated.
There can be no doubt that the modern environment is changing faster
than any environment ever previously changed; therefore, the social
centre of gravity constantly tends to shift more rapidly; and therefore,
modern civilization has unprecedented need of the administrative or
generalizing mind. But, as the mass and momentum of modern society is
prodigious, it will require a correspondingly prodigious energy to carry
it safely from an unstable to a stable equilibrium. The essential is to
generate the energy which brings success; and the more the mind dwells
upon the peculiarities of the modern capitalistic class, the more doubts
obtrude themselves touching their ability to make the effort, even at
present, and still more so to make it in the future as the magnitude of
the social organism grows. One source of capitalistic weakness comes
from a lack of proper instruments wherewith to work, even supposing the
will of capital to be good; and this lack of administrative ability is
somewhat due to the capitalistic attitude toward education. In the
United States capital has long owned the leading universities by right
of purchase, as it has owned the highways, the currency, and the press,
and capital has used the universities, in a general way, to develop
capitalistic ideas. This, however, is of no great moment. What is of
moment is that capital has commercialized education. Apparently modern
society, if it is to cohere, must have a high order of generalizing
mind,--a mind which can grasp a multitude of complex relations,--but
this is a mind which can, at best, only be produced in small quantity
and at high cost. Capital has preferred the specialized mind and that
not of the highest quality, since it has found it profitable to set
quantity before quality to the limit which the market will endure.
Capitalists have never insisted upon raising an educational standard
save in science and mechanics, and the relative overstimulation of the
scientific mind has now become an actual menace to order because of the
inferiority of the administrative intelligence.
Yet, even supposing the synthetic mind of the highest power to be
increasing in proportion to the population, instead of, as I suspect,
pretty rapidly decreasing, and supposing the capitalist to be fully
alive to the need of administrative improvements, a phalanx of
Washingtons would be impotent to raise the administrative level of the
United States materially, as long as the courts remain censors of
legislation; because the province of the censorial court is to dislocate
any comprehensive body of legislation, whose effect would be to change
the social status. That was the fundamental purpose which underlay the
adoption of a written constitution whose object was to keep local
sovereignties intact, especially at the South. Jefferson insisted that
each sovereignty should by means of nullification protect itself. It was
a long step in advance when the nation conquered the prerogative of
asserting its own sovereign power through the Supreme Court. Now the
intervention of the courts in legislation has become, by the change in
environment, as fatal to administration as would have been, in 1800,
the success of nullification. I find it difficult to believe that
capital, with its specialized views of what constitutes its advantages,
its duties, and its responsibilities, and stimulated by a bar moulded to
meet its prejudices and requirements, will ever voluntarily assent to
the consolidation of the United States to the point at which the
interference of the courts with legislation might be eliminated;
because, as I have pointed out, capital finds the judicial veto useful
as a means of at least temporarily evading the law, while the bar, taken
as a whole, quite honestly believes that the universe will obey the
judicial decree. No delusion could be profounder and none, perhaps, more
dangerous. Courts, I need hardly say, cannot control nature, though by
trying to do so they may, like the Parliament of Paris, create a
friction which shall induce an appalling catastrophe.
True judicial courts, whether in times of peace or of revolution, seldom
fail to be a substantial protection to the weak, because they enforce an
established _corpus juris_ and conduct trials by recognized forms. It is
startling to compare the percentage of convictions to prosecutions, for
the same class of offences, in the regular criminal courts during the
French Revolution, with the percentage in the Revolutionary Tribunal.
And once a stable social equilibrium is reached, all men tend to support
judicial courts, if judicial courts exist, from an instinct of
self-preservation. This has been amply shown by French experience, and
it is here that French history is so illuminating to the American mind.
Before the Revolution France had semi-political courts which conduced to
the overthrow of Turgot, and, therefore, wrought for violence; but more
than this, France, under the old régime, had evolved a legal profession
of a cast of mind incompatible with an equal administration of the law.
The French courts were, therefore, when trouble came, supported only by
a faction, and were cast aside. With that the old régime fell.
The young Duke of Chartres, the son of Égalité Orleans, and the future
Louis Philippe, has related in his journal an anecdote which illustrates
that subtle poison of distrust which undermines all legal authority, the
moment that suspicion of political partiality in the judiciary enters
the popular mind. In June, 1791, the Duke went down from Paris to
Vendôme to join the regiment of dragoons of which he had been
commissioned colonel. One day, soon after he joined, a messenger came to
him in haste to tell him that a mob had gathered near by who were about
to hang two priests. "I ran thither at once," wrote the Duke; "I spoke
to those who seemed most excited and impressed upon them how horrible it
was to hang men without trial; besides, to act as hangmen was to enter a
trade which they all thought infamous; that they had judges, and that
this was their affair. They answered that their judges were aristocrats,
and that they did not punish the guilty." That is to say, although the
priests were non-jurors, and, therefore, criminals in the eye of the
law, the courts would not enforce the law because of political bias.[43]
"It is your fault," I said to them, "since you elected them [the
judges], but that is no reason why you should do justice yourselves."
Danton explained in the Convention that it was because of the deep
distrust of the judiciary in the public mind, which this anecdote
shows, that the September massacres occurred, and it was because all
republicans knew that the state and the army were full of traitors like
Dumouriez, whom the ordinary courts would not punish, that Danton
brought forward his bill to organize a true political tribunal to deal
with them summarily. When Danton carried through this statute he
supposed himself to be at the apex of power and popularity, and to be
safe, if any man in France were safe. Very shortly he learned the error
In his calculation. Billaud was a member of the Committee of Public
Safety, while Danton had allowed himself to be dropped from membership.
Danton had just been married, and to an aristocratic wife, and the
turmoil of office had grown to be distasteful to him. On March 30, 1794,
Billaud somewhat casually remarked, "We must kill Danton;" for in truth
Danton, with conservative leanings, was becoming a grave danger to the
extreme Jacobins. Had he lived a few months longer he would have been a
Thermidorist. Billaud, therefore, only expressed the prevailing Jacobin
opinion; so the Jacobins arrested Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and his
other friends, and Danton at once anticipated what would be his doom. As
he entered his cell he said to his jailer: "I erected the Tribunal. I
ask pardon of God and men." But even yet he did not grasp the full
meaning of what he had done. At his trial he wished to introduce his
evidence fully, protesting "that he should understand the Tribunal since
he created it;" nevertheless, he did not understand the Tribunal, he
still regarded it as more or less a court. Topino-Lebrun, the artist,
did understand it. Topino sat on the jury which tried Danton, and
observed that the heart of one of his colleagues seemed failing him.
Topino took the waverer aside, and said: "This is not a _trial_, it is a
_measure_. Two men are impossible; one must perish. Will you kill
Robespierre?--No.--Then by that admission you condemn Danton." Lebrun in
these few words went to the root of the matter, and stated the identical
principle which underlies our whole doctrine of the Police Power. A
political court is not properly a court at all, but an administrative
board whose function is to work the will of the dominant faction for the
time being. Thus a political court becomes the most formidable of all
engines for the destruction of its creators the instant the social
equilibrium shifts. So Danton found, in the spring of 1794, when the
equilibrium shifted; and so Robespierre, who slew Danton, found the next
July, when the equilibrium shifted again.
Danton died on the 5th April, 1794; about three months later Jourdan won
the Fleurus campaign. Straightway Thermidor followed, and the Tribunal
worked as well for the party of Thermidor as it had for the Jacobins.
Carrier, who had wallowed in blood at Nantes, as the ideal Jacobin,
walked behind the cart which carried Robespierre to the scaffold,
shouting, "Down with the tyrant;" but that did not save him. In vain he
protested to the Convention that, were he guilty, the whole Convention
was guilty, "down to the President's bell." By a vote of 498 out of 500,
Carrier was sent before the Tribunal which, even though reorganized,
condemned him. Thérézia Cabarrus gaily presided at the closing of the
Jacobin Club, Tallien moved over to the benches on the right, and
therefore the court was ruthless to Fouquier. On the 11 Thermidor,
seventy members, officers, or partisans of the Commune of Paris, were
sent to the guillotine in only two batches. On the next day twelve more
followed, four of whom were jurymen. Fouquier's turn came later. It may
also be worth while for Americans to observe that a political court is
quite as effective against property as against life. The Duke of Orleans
is only the most celebrated example of a host of Frenchmen who perished,
not because of revenge, fear, or jealousy, but because the party in
power wanted their property. The famous Law touching Suspected Persons
(loi des suspects) was passed on September 17, 1793. On October 10,
1793, that is three weeks afterward, Saint-Just moved that additional
powers should be granted, by the Convention, to the Committee of Public
Safety, defining, by way of justification for his motion, those who fell
within the purview of this law. Among these, first of all, came "the
rich," who by that fact alone were to be considered, _prima facie_,
enemies to their country.
As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, history never can repeat
itself; therefore, whatever else may happen in the United States, we
certainly shall have no Revolutionary Tribunal like the French Tribunal
of 1793, but the mechanical principle of the political court always
remains the same; it is an administrative board the control of which is
useful, or may be even essential, to the success of a dominant faction,
and the instinctive comprehension which the American people have of this
truth is demonstrated by the determination with which they have, for
many years, sought to impose the will of the majority upon the
judiciary. Other means failing to meet their expectations, they have now
hit on the recall, which is as revolutionary in essence as were the
methods used during the Terror. Courts, from the Supreme Court downward,
if purged by recall, or a process tantamount to recall, would, under
proper stress, work as surely for a required purpose as did the tribunal
supervised by Fouquier-Tinville.
These considerations rather lead me to infer that the extreme complexity
of the administrative problems presented by modern industrial
civilization is beyond the compass of the capitalistic mind. If this be
so, American society, as at present organized, with capitalists for the
dominant class, can concentrate no further, and, as nothing in the
universe is at rest, if it does not concentrate, it must, probably,
begin to disintegrate. Indeed we may perceive incipient signs of
disintegration all about us. We see, for example, an universal contempt
for law, incarnated in the capitalistic class itself, which is
responsible for order, and in spite of the awful danger which impends
over every rich and physically helpless type should the coercive power
collapse. We see it even more distinctly in the chronic war between
capital and labor, which government is admittedly unable to control; we
see it in the slough of urban politics, inseparable from capitalistic
methods of maintaining its ascendancy; and, perhaps, most disquieting of
all, we see it in the dissolution of the family which has, for untold
ages, been the seat of discipline and the foundation of authority. For
the dissolution of the family is peculiarly a phenomenon of our
industrial age, and it is caused by the demand of industry for the cheap
labor of women and children. Napoleon told the lawyers who drafted the
Code that he insisted on one thing alone. They must fortify the family,
for, said he, if the family is responsible to the father and the father
to me, I can keep order in France. One of the difficulties, therefore,
which capital has to meet, by the aid of such administrative ability as
it can command, is how to keep order when society no longer rests on the
cohesive family, but on highly volatilized individuals as incohesive as
grains of sand.
Meditating upon these matters, it is hard to resist the persuasion that
unless capital can, in the immediate future, generate an intellectual
energy, beyond the sphere of its specialized calling, very much in
excess of any intellectual energy of which it has hitherto given
promise, and unless it can besides rise to an appreciation of diverse
social conditions, as well as to a level of political sagacity, far
higher than it has attained within recent years, its relative power in
the community must decline. If this be so the symptoms which indicate
social disintegration will intensify. As they intensify, the ability of
industrial capital to withstand the attacks made upon it will lessen,
and this process must go on until capital abandons the contest to defend
itself as too costly. Then nothing remains but flight. Under what
conditions industrial capital would find migration from America
possible, must remain for us beyond the bounds even of speculation. It
might escape with little or no loss. On the other hand, it might fare as
hardly as did the southern slaveholders. No man can foresee his fate. In
the event of adverse fortune, however, the position of capitalists would
hardly be improved by the existence of political courts serving a
malevolent majority. Whatever may be in store for us, here at least, we
reach an intelligible conclusion. Should Nature follow such a course as
I have suggested, she will settle all our present perplexities as simply
and as drastically as she is apt to settle human perturbations, and she
will follow logically in the infinitely extended line of her own most
impressive precedents.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] In these observations on the intellectual tendencies of capital I
speak generally. Not only individual capitalists, but great
corporations, exist, who are noble examples of law-abiding and
intelligent citizenship. Their rarity, however, and their
conspicuousness, seem to prove the general rule.
[43] By the Law of November 27, 1790, priests refusing to swear
allegiance to the "civil constitution" of the clergy were punished by
loss of pay and of rights of citizenship if they continued their
functions. By Law of August 26, 1792, by transportation to Cayenne.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Theory of Social Revolutions, by Brooks Adams