appearance of his book he saw the outbreak of the Civil War. In the
end of that war he saw the states of his beloved South bent like
reeds in a storm, its armies overthrown, its fields laid waste, its
homes destroyed, its cherished institutions gone forever. I wonder,
as I write, whether it be possible in this age of civilization and
advancement that I, too, am but a voice crying in the wilderness. Will
our capitalist class, like the old French monarchy, “learn nothing and
forget nothing?”
Many a time, while engaged in the manifold activities of social life,
at a dinner or a ball, or amusing myself in the country, this question
has come to me. I have wondered whether it is all really as it seems.
Here are gay hearts, merry voices, lives all brimming with laughter,
young men and maidens all untouched by the sterner things of life,
boys with their fortunes to inherit and high positions in life secured,
débutantes with every problem solved for them, a formulated education
leading to a formulated social routine, stately matrons born to rule
their little social world, fine men and women of more ripened years,
whose careers have led to what seemed a purposeful goal. It all seems
happy and light-hearted, and yet there _must_ be shadows, if these
men and women are really men and women, and not mere thoughtless,
heartless, brainless creatures. Is it, again, “after us the deluge?”
Again, I remember very well an occasion this past winter, when the same
thought came to me. I was dining in one of the city hotels. Music and
laughter flooded the place as sunshine floods the fields. Outwardly,
the scene had all the appearance of perfect ease and happiness. Looking
around, I lighted by chance upon a table where a group of elderly
people, all well known to me, were dining. They were people who live
well, and who take a large part in the social world as well as in
the world of business. I watched them as they talked. I noted an air
of gravity, of seriousness, and I wondered what it was all about. A
little later, as their table assumed the normal aspect, I went over and
exchanged greetings with them. Incidentally, I asked them what had made
them so very serious throughout the evening.
One of them, an old friend of mine, told me. They had been discussing a
statement that had appeared as a news item during the afternoon. It was
part of a speech made in the senate at Washington. It was an attack
upon the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. It was really
a veiled denunciation of the principle upon which Society is founded.
These men and women, all part and parcel of the social world, had spent
most of their evening discussing that item of news.
A very few years ago such an episode as this would have been dismissed
by almost any group of men and women who belonged to Society, with
hardly a single thought. Somebody might have introduced the subject;
somebody else would have abusively called the senator a demagogue, or
an agitator, or a Socialist--and the conversation would have drifted
on into the latest sporting news or talk of somebody’s ball a month or
so away. But now, the older men and women of Society know better. They
have learned, in fact, to distinguish real news from mere sensation.
They know a statesman from a demagogue and facts from sensations.
I do not say that it is general, this tendency to take seriously the
social, industrial, and economic questions of the day. In my own case,
I do know that up to a very few years ago none of these problems
bothered me very much. I know that very rarely did I hear the question
raised as to the permanence of the conditions under which we lived
within our social barriers. Nobody, in my world, considered the problem
of industry his own; and every one drifted onward through the years
secure in the conviction that in the end everything was going to be all
right.
To-day how different it is! To-day we are studying the sources of our
wealth, finding out for ourselves the real price paid by humanity to
give us the privileges of the social life which we and our fathers have
enjoyed. Excited by curiosity, we go down to inspect the mines our
fathers left to us. We watch the men at work, mere pitiful animals,
risking their lives in terrible endeavour for a meagre wage, that we,
the heirs of time and of eternity, may take our leisure in the palaces
of wealth. In the mills of Pittsburg we watch the workers in iron
and steel, toiling in the white hot blast of the furnaces that we,
who never have toiled, may draw our dividends and spend them on the
luxuries we love.
All around and about us are millions of active, industrious human
beings. How can we, the rich, longer remain idle? Is it possible
that the heroism of the wealth-producing, life-preserving population
of the world exerts no influence upon those who are not forced by
circumstances to work? I know from my own experience that those who
are worth while in the social and financial world have not only been
influenced by the activity of the world’s workers, but I can positively
state that mere pleasure-seeking idlers are disappearing so fast that
it is a question of but a few years more before their extinction is
complete.
But a very few years ago we would have visited the mines of Scranton
or the forges of Pittsburg, and we would have looked upon the workers
there with eyes of pity, perhaps, and we might have talked more or less
glibly of the hardships of labour. Yet it would not have been _our_
problem. To-day we recognize the relationship between the labour that
produces our wealth and the wealth which we enjoy.
“_It is quite plain that your government will never be able to
restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the
majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a
minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when in the
State of New York a multitude of people, none of whom have had more
than half a breakfast or expect to have more than half a dinner,
will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of
Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching
patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public
faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of
capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted
... to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in
want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is liable to be
preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more
bread?_”
--LORD MACAULAY, 1857.
_Chapter Five_
THE AWAKENING OF SOCIETY
Many are the causes that have led to this great change in the attitude
of the wealthy classes toward the world at large. First and foremost,
in my judgment, is the change in the attitude of the working classes
themselves toward the rich. For, more assiduously than anything else
in this world, we, the wealthy, seek the praise and admiration of the
crowd. It may seem a strange confession from a member of the wealthy
class, but it is true.
And the attitude of the people at large toward the rich has been
changed indeed. I remember, even in my own lifetime, a period when the
people of this country looked up with admiration and respect to their
wealthy classes. It was in the end of that long period of which I have
spoken, in which the wealth of the nation was well distributed and had
not been gathered together into the hands of the few by means of the
exploitation of the masses.
To-day how great the change! How wonderful the transformation! At first
a few weak voices told what a few eyes saw. In unheard-of journals of
the labour movement, in certain revelations of high finance, corruption
of politics, dreadful tales were told--stories long since forgotten.
In Henry Demarest Lloyd’s “Wealth vs. Commonwealth” we have a strong
voice describing what keen eyes clearly discerned. Soon were published
several profound historical studies which aroused the more thoughtful.
Then, with drum and trumpet and black banners flying, came the army of
the muck-rakers. And their revelations made the nation heartsick.
It is but five years since the white light of the noon-day sun beat
down upon the hitherto deeply buried roots of America’s industrial and
social life, and eighty-five millions knew whence the social fruitage
of our age draws its sustenance. Just what, in this connection, has
been the effect of these five years upon American opinion?
When the nineteenth century closed, America worshipped great wealth. It
sanctified its possessors. It deified the hundred-millionaire. In five
years’ time America has learned to hate great wealth. Plutocracy is
disgorging, but public opinion is relentless.
Never before in the history of the world has there been anything
analogous to the campaign of the American muck-rakers. The progressive
forces of French society raged at the monarchy and the Church before
the French Revolution. But their propaganda took thirty years to
gain power, and fifty years to accomplish its purpose. The work of
destruction here seemed to be done in a night. The “pillars of Society”
tumbled. From official statements of the President of the United States
down to the output of ten dollar a week hack-writers, our publications
teemed with the products of the popular trade of exposure. Great
commercial and industrial institutions were analyzed. National and
municipal governments were dissected. Universities and churches did
not escape the busy seeker for sin. After submerging itself in the
story of its shames, the nation turned in disgust to more pleasing
visions. But it had answered the question “How?” And the answer is by
no means forgotten.
Some day, perhaps in the twenty-first century, some Carlyle, sitting
in the shade of elms before an old country house, will head another
chapter, “Printed Paper,” and describe the war made with words upon
the crumbling ideals and ideas of an age. He will tell how a nation
from worshipping wealth on Monday learned to hate it on Saturday. He
will relate how it came that myriads of poor, blessing the alms giver
as they fell asleep in low hovels and crowded tenements, awoke with
their hearts full of bitterness and hatred for those whom they had
worshipped. He will humorously describe how the plutocracy itself,
alarmed beyond power of expression, sought to disgorge its ill-gotten
gains upon the multitude; its primal virtue, acquisition, transformed
to the crime, possession. He will recall for the amusement of students
of history the frantic endeavour of the demagogue to raise himself in
public esteem through decrying the idle rich.
To us, who, through the heyday of our popularity, simply sat in the
sunshine and throve and grew fat in happiness, it came as a terrible
shock, this change of the popular attitude. At first we laughed at it;
then we preached little sermons about it, half jesting, half serious;
then we began to talk about it among ourselves; and we held indignation
meetings every time we met our friends, and called down the wrath of
heaven on these sharp-eyed and glib-tongued investigators.
Finally--and here lies the heart of the matter--we began to read these
outpourings of the popular sentiment very seriously indeed. They came,
at last, from sources that we dared not disregard. Instead of mere
muck-raking expeditions they assumed the proportions of crusades.
Instead of the frantic mouthings of mere sensation mongers there
confronted us in the columns of the press and in the more sedate and
orderly pages of the magazines the speeches of a President, or sane,
sober editorials written by men who knew both sides, and who commanded
our respect as well as the respect and admiration of the crowd. We
recognized--those of us who thought, and saw, and felt--that instead
of being a passing phase, as we had dreamed or hoped, this change of
popular sentiment was the beginning of a revolution.
I hesitate to say how deep this arrow struck. Perhaps I can illustrate
it best by telling a story that came to my ears this past winter. A
lady of the old school was sending her daughter, a young girl, to one
of the preparatory schools here in the East. She went herself to look
at the college and to talk with some of the professors. In conversation
with the principal, she said:
“I want Estelle, right from the beginning of her course, to get a full
understanding of where wealth comes from. I want her year by year to
learn of the debt and the responsibility that she, personally, owes to
the people that work. Are these things taught in your courses?”
The principal was astounded. She protested that such education was
entirely out of line with the principles and precepts of that college.
Very delicately and tactfully she intimated that one of the foundations
of a social education was the constant instillation into the minds of
the young of the idea of the superiority of the aristocracy over the
masses. To teach Estelle that she and her class are really dependent
upon the grimy men who labour with their hands would be to turn upside
down the curriculum of that college.
The upshot of it was that Estelle to-day is enrolled as a student in a
high school in New York City. Her mother believes that the salvation of
the wealthy classes in this country depends upon the coming generation
understanding the true relationship between capital and labour.
This is, perhaps, an extreme case, for only a very few years ago that
matron herself was absolutely immersed in the whirlpools of the most
frivolous Society which has a real right to use the term in talking
about itself. Always she was a woman of a most active mind, of broad
sympathies, of excellent benevolent character; but her mind found its
full exercise in the pursuit of social fads, her sympathies found
outlet in sporadic raids upon the strongholds of misery and poverty,
and her benevolence satisfied itself with much hidden largess to
various and sundry charities. She did not really understand any of the
problems of the day.
The first awakening of this one woman came about through chance. Bored
to death at a summer resort, half sick, and therefore restricted in her
activities, a friend who stopped on the piazza to extend her sympathies
happened to leave on the table a book. The lady picked it up and
began, half absently, to turn the pages from back to front, as one
will. A heading caught her eye. Here it is:
“OUR BARBARIANS FROM ABOVE.”
She did not understand it; and her habit of mind led her to
investigate. She had lost the page, but she searched until she found
it. Then she read the paragraph:
If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will
not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from
above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into
seats of power kings do not know. The forces and the wealth are
new, and have been the opportunity of new men. Without restraints
of culture, experience, the pride or even the inherited caution
of class or rank, these intoxicated men think they are the wave
instead of the float. To them, science is but a never-ending
repertoire of investments stored up by nature for the syndicates,
government but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers
in squads, and the million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth
written for them.
She read on and on. She finished the book, and turned back to its
beginning. She could not read it all; but she read enough to realize
her profound ignorance of facts. That night, at dinner, she astounded
her husband in this wise:
“Who is Henry Demarest Lloyd?”
“He is a Socialist writer,” was the answer, “who amuses himself
attacking our class.”
“I wish,” she said, “you would get me all his books.”
From that time on her mind found new occupations, new interests, new
ideas. A world that she did not know existed came swiftly over her
horizon. She did not rush madly into extremes--she has not to this
day--but her life has changed considerably. We who knew her so little
time ago as one of the typical, clever, brilliant, and flashy purveyors
of cheer and social joy find her to-day no less charming in the matter
of mere entertainment; but we expect, when we meet her, to find in her
mind many other and more serious things. She never appears in print,
she is not a suffragist, she has dropped her little fads. She is not
that strange abnormality of her sex that neglects the old pursuits of
women to follow the strange gods of men; but she is, in every sense, a
student of the true conditions that surround her. The mists of golden
tradition have cleared from her eyes.
To-day she has plenty of company in her own set. She did not convert
them. She detests the rôle of a propagandist. They simply came of
their own accord to read and learn. And when the educated classes
really become interested, I think they study things more deeply
than any other class. Even the most violent and anarchistic of
the publications that pretend to portray the facts of the class
relationships have thousands of readers among the very wealthy.
I remember a case in point. Mr. Upton Sinclair, a pronounced Socialist
of the flamboyant type, was invited to lunch one day, by a mutual
acquaintance, with a young man of the most exclusive set in this city.
They met in a private dining-room at the Lawyers’ Club. In the course
of the lunch Mr. Sinclair referred to an article he had published in
_Wilshire’s Magazine_, a Socialist sheet of the noisy class.
“Yes,” said the other, “I read it.”
“You read it?” exclaimed Mr. Sinclair, in complete surprise.
“Oh, yes--I always read it,” said the other, in a matter-of-fact way.
There are many like him. Five years ago you probably could have counted
on the fingers of two hands the men in the wealthy classes who read the
literature that comes from below. To-day it is a very common occurrence
to hear in the best clubs of New York wealthy men discussing with
intense earnestness and real economic sense articles of which they
never would have heard five years ago.
It is not that many of us really feel the danger that impends. It is
simply that our armour of complacency and self-satisfaction has been
pierced, and our pride has been wounded.
“I used to think,” said a clubman to me last winter, “that we were
well beloved; but I guess our class is the best hated class in the
land. I am only beginning to find out why.”
Of course, I do not want to give the reader the idea that the
muck-raker wrought this change. As a matter of fact, he is but the
skirmish line. The wealthy classes would have weathered his attack
without much trouble and gone upon their all-complacent way if he
had been the culmination, instead of the mere beginning, of the hard
attack. But after him, as I have said, came a great army of sober,
sedate, forceful writers, hurling volleys of stinging facts upon
our careless trenches. We roused ourselves to meet the real attack.
Fiercely it swept upon us. Yet even that we might have met and
gone back in the end into the peace and security of our age-long
self-confidence, no whit the worse for the battle.
Worse--or better--was to come. When the pulpit and the press had done
their worst--or best--the heavy artillery opened. Senators on the floor
of the senate, governors from the chair of office, mighty lawyers
before the bar, judges from the bench, and, last, a President from the
White House, raked our outworn defences, and even the silliest and most
fatuous of men within the walls knew, at least, that we were under fire.
To-day there is a lull. Many of those who awakened to the sound of
battle but two or three years ago are slipping back into fancied
security. The older heads know better. We see the forces of labour and
poverty forming new lines upon the plains and hill sides. We see them
lashed to new fury by the whip of rising prices; we hear the stern,
stentorian voices of their tribunes calling them to battle for their
lives and liberties; we smell the reek of them as they crowd from the
dusty mines and sweaty factories.
We do not flatter ourselves, even those of us most drunk with the
strong liquor of power and the sweet wine of indolence, that the forces
of attack are weakened or weakening. We know full well that this
great lull of renewed national prosperity has been used by the forces
of the men that labour to make themselves stronger, cleaner, better
caparisoned for the long battle of to-morrow.
In the midst of the peace and calm of high prosperity we hear the
rumble of the thunder of war. We read in the papers that a great
manufacturing city of the Middle West has chosen a Socialist mayor.
Over the wires there comes to us the news that an anti-corporation
campaign in Denver has broken to atoms the organized power of both
the great political parties which, for generations, we have used as
pawns in mightier games than theirs. An able public servant is openly
and publicly branded a thief and a betrayer of trust, because, the
people say, he works with the larger capitalists to help their plans to
completion. Public clamour and disapprobation greet the plan of one of
the richest of men to incorporate his charities in order that they may
be more efficient. The people refuse absolutely to believe that there
is no ulterior project behind the incorporation.
These are incidents of warfare, not of peace. Here, as in Denver and
Milwaukee, it is an attack upon an outpost, a skirmish in force.
There, as in the case of the Rockefeller Foundation, it is a determined
effort to block what the leaders of popular thought believe to be a
strengthening of the redoubts of wealth.
Strange, it seems to me, it is that still within the gates of gold
there dwells a great host of people barely roused. For I have failed
of my aim if I have given the impression that Society is to-day wholly
roused, wholly armed, wholly awake to its danger. It is, alas! not
true. It is no more true than it was true before the rebellion that the
people of the South were all in sympathy with Helper. There were a few,
to be sure, but the rank and file of the slave-holders called him a
visionary and an alarmist.
So to-day, perchance, the vast majority of the men of wealth in this
and other cities will call me a visionary and an alarmist. I wish it
were true. Would that I could bring myself to believe that the things
I see about me are but the passing phases of a natural adjustment. I
have tried for many years to persuade myself that all is well. I have
failed.
“_Six years ago no proposition to which the great corporation
interests of the country were strongly opposed was looked upon
as having any practical chance of being realized.... The killing
and maiming or stifling of bills of this kind in committee was a
foregone conclusion, and the only answer to protests was Tweed’s
old query: ‘What are you going to do about it?_’”
--FRANKLIN FABIAN.
_Chapter Six_
FOR THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER
I have, in previous chapters, touched very briefly upon some of the
vile excrescences that have found a resting place within the gates
of our once so fair city of Society. Again, I have sketched in the
briefest outline the process by which the idle class was created. I
have shown how the seed was planted in the too fertile soil of American
industry. I have dwelt, but briefly, upon the simple fact that we of
the older orders have come to find out something about that planting
and the manner of the growth.
I turn with something like dismay from a sketch of the methods of
the culture of this growth. For it is watered with the bloody sweat
of labour and the salt tears of bitter poverty and suffering; and
it is fertilized with the dead bodies of men and women outworn in
the grim battle of life. Tended and watched it is by a foul horde of
underlings, hired judges in the law, panders in politics, prostitutes
in the pulpit, lickspittles in college chancelleries, Judases in the
press, blackmailers in business, and miserable, time-serving parasites
clinging like filthy leeches upon the administrative bodies of the
nation.