conviction: This nation is betrayed. The planting of the seed of our
industrial system, whose fine flower has been reached in our class of
idle rich, was quite possible without any betrayal of the people. Even
its growth for two decades was possible without a conscious effort
on the part of the keepers of the public citadels to throw open the
doors to a public enemy. May a thinking man dare to say that the growth
of this system since 1890 could have been possible without criminal
negligence on the part of those public servants sworn to guard the true
and lawful interests of the people of this nation?
For it was perfectly evident, years ago, that the industrial evolution
of this country was a process of exploitation. It was the knowledge
of this fact that lay behind the Sherman Law of 1890; and again the
Interstate Commerce Act, which sought to restrain, to a limited extent
at least, the boundless license to plunder which had been taken unto
themselves by the railroads. No broad-minded man can read with an open
mind the facts with regard to the Homestead strike, the Pullman strike,
the war in the Cœur d’Alene, or the coal strike of very recent years,
without coming to the conclusion that no matter who was in the wrong in
the immediate circumstances leading to those national catastrophes, the
real underlying cause was a revolt on the part of a subjugated people
against the hardships of industrial slavery.
Without going into details, let us examine, in the light of history,
a few of the cardinal facts that have so far made possible a
continuance, indeed, a constant widening and deepening, of this process
of exploitation. Let us remember always, as we face the facts, that
the primary cause of this condition lay in that evolution, which was
probably inevitable, from the household stage of manufacturing in
this country to the stage that is represented by the modern trust.
That evolution stands to-day completed. It was, as a matter of fact,
completed on the day when the American Sugar Refining Company assumed
the dominating position in the sugar trade. Subsequent developments
have been but a repetition, sometimes on a larger scale, sometimes on
a smaller, of that climax. What, then, makes possible the continuance
of this process in the face of the ever-growing public knowledge of its
existence?
The answer is our public shame. This process, openly recognized by the
public, thoroughly analyzed day by day and year by year by brilliant
writers in press and periodical, exposed again and again in excellently
written books by college economists, has gone on and on through climax
after climax for the simple reason that the one power in the world
that could stop it--the will of the American people--has been turned
from its purpose, defeated in its honest efforts, and betrayed in its
administration, through the fact that in our democratic political world
the power of mobilized wealth has been sufficient to restrain the
hands of our political parties and prevent the striking of the blows
that would have put an end to the process. To-day, in America, the
people elect their statesmen; but the exercise of the people’s power
through these statesmen is curbed, directed, and controlled by groups
of moneyed interests. This is a statement that many will challenge;
it is a statement that cannot be proved or disproved. I give it as my
opinion, based upon long, careful study, and based, too, on personal
knowledge.
America, then, is a plutocracy. Always politically, the power of
a plutocracy depends upon the maintenance of the _status quo_. It
has come into being through the operation of certain industrial or
commercial conditions. It lives by virtue of the continuance of those
conditions, and by virtue of their freedom from attack by the one power
strong enough to destroy them--namely, the people.
To maintain this _status quo_ has been the gigantic task successfully
carried out by the financial interests of the United States. It is
not my intention--indeed, it is not within my power--to go into any
complete details of the methods and machinery used for this end. It
has not all been accomplished, by any means, through direct political
corruption, though much of it has been accomplished in that way. The
few scattered and unimportant instances of conviction are enough by
themselves, without going into surmise at all, to establish the fact
that in almost every state of the Union, and at the seat of the central
government itself, there has been for thirty years past widespread
corruption of political parties.
Deeper than this, more sinister even than the most recent example of an
administrative officer bound like a slave to the wheel of his master’s
chariot, has been the indirect subornation of public opinion through a
subsidized press, subsidized pulpits, and subsidized public speakers.
We have heard a great deal of demagogues and wicked Socialistic leaders
of the mob. We do not hear much of that other phenomenon, the oily
sycophant who talks to the people with words of cheer and paragraphs of
exhortation, having in his mind always the one single idea how best he
may serve the moneyed interests that stand behind him.
It is strange to me, and it has always been strange to other men who
have studied these things, that the interests of a plutocracy can be so
long maintained; for a plutocracy, of its very nature, is the weakest
possible form of government. It lives either by force or by fraud. It
lived in Rome before the days of Marius by force alone; and the lower
orders of Rome were slaves. It lived in Paris before the Terror, by a
combination of force and fraud; and the lower orders of France became
fiendish brutes. It lives in America by fraud alone; and what may we
say of the people of this nation who permit it to live?
For, strange and incongruous as it may seem, a plutocracy rarely if
ever develops a real leader save in the crisis of its lifetime. In
Rome, as Ferrero so well points out in his book, “The Greatness and
Decline of Rome,” Sulla came into his leadership of the plutocracy only
after the people in the person of Marius had seized from the hands of
the plutocracy all the power of government. In France, the plutocracy
absolutely failed to develop a leader. In England to-day, almost in the
dawn of a revolution, the propertied classes lack a single person of
commanding power. In America, no single man, no group of men, represent
in their persons the power of the plutocracy.
It is the tendency of the great and wealthy to divide into rival camps.
For some years past, in the one single subdivision of the world of
wealth that is represented by Wall Street finance, there have been at
least two great leaders of the golden host, bitterly antagonistic,
fiercely at odds, each striving to draw to himself new reinforcements,
not with the idea of strengthening the world of money as a whole, but
rather with the single idea of building up his own power to break down
or destroy the power of other leaders in that world. To-day, in this
single section of the world of business, there seems to be but one man
who stands like a giant among pygmies. Far more nearly than any other
in our history does he, in his magnificent personal power and his
splendid executive wisdom, approach the magnitude of a real leader in a
plutocracy.
In the political world it is physically next to impossible that any
man can arise in a country where the people vote who will be able
to assume at once political power as a servant of the people and
plutocratic rule as a representative of moneyed interests. In the
never-ceasing conflict between the people and their exploiters no man
by serving two sides can achieve greatness. Therefore, the wealthy
classes of America have never sought, and are not seeking to-day,
leaders from the political arena. In that arena, it is true, they
have chosen to associate themselves, from time to time, with men who,
through their ability or through the public confidence reposed in then,
exercise great political authority. In that way, more than by any
other, the plutocracy of America has maintained the _status quo_; but
every citizen of the United States who in his own mind is persuaded
that this is true of any one man who can be named in the political
world despises that man, contemns his authority, and sets him down in
the list of a nation’s traitors.
It is a losing fight, this struggle of a plutocracy against a people.
Against organized political opposition in a free country, where
citizens have a right to vote, it must crumble into dust when once the
people seriously begin the organization of political opposition. For
how different is the position of the people from the position of a
plutocracy in the matter of individual leadership! Never in the history
of the world, in any but a nation of slaves, have the people lacked a
leader. Marius in Rome, Danton and Robespierre in Paris, Cromwell in
England, you may multiply the list a hundred fold if you care to study
the pages of history. In all ages, leaders like this, when once they
are fired with enthusiasm for a cause, have been able, when they cared
to do so, to strike out policies direct and strong, and to lead the
minds of the people as they willed. Such lines of political cleavage as
these do not transpire easily. In almost every case in history there
has been transition only through war, riot, and revolution. We need a
leader. He will surely come.
In this country, already, opposition exists. Labour union parties,
reform parties, Socialistic parties, have come into being, faded
away, and died. To-day, the only independent party working in the
political world of the United States is so inextricably bound up with
and wedded to a host of economic fallacies that the sober common
sense of the American people as a whole, feeling as they do that the
great political parties of the country are hopelessly inefficient and
corrupt, will not endorse it.
We have not yet in this country marked out clearly the line of
political cleavage along which the mighty rift must be made. Perhaps
one may find the first faint tracings of it in the rise of the
insurgents in the last session of congress. From what I have learned of
the sentiment in the powerful Middle West, which more than any other
part of the Union represents an average of the people of the United
States, I am more than half convinced that this is true. If it be so,
many things may happen within the next few years, and there may be very
good reason indeed for the wide spread of uneasiness in the plutocracy.
I am not a politician. I look at this matter of political power
much as any other sober American business man looks at it. Among
my own people I seldom hear purely political discussions. When we
are discussing pro and con the relative merits of candidates or the
relative importance of political policies, the discussion almost
invariably comes down to a question of business efficiency. We care
absolutely nothing about statehood bills, pension agitation, waterway
appropriations, “pork barrels,” state rights, or any other political
question, save inasmuch as it threatens or fortifies existing business
conditions. Touch the question of the tariff, touch the issue of the
income tax, touch the problem of railroad regulation, or touch that
most vital of all business matters, the question of general federal
regulation of industrial corporations, and the people amongst whom I
live my life become immediately rabid partisans.
It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what
President holds the reins of office. We are not politicians, or public
thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how;
but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous
weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political
connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, and our
public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislation,
any political platform, any Presidential campaign, that threatens the
integrity of our estate.
I have said that the class I represent cares nothing for politics.
In a single season a plutocratic leader hurled his influence and his
money into the scale to elect a Republican governor on the Pacific
coast, and a Democratic governor on the Atlantic. The same moneyed
interest that he represented has held undisputed sway through many
administrations, Republican and Democratic, in a state in which it
had large railroad interests. Judge Lindsey, in his latest book, “The
Beast,” has shown in indisputable detail how the corporation interests
of Denver played with both great political parties. Truly can I say
that wealth has no politics save its own interests.
“_Poverty is a bitter thing, but it is not as bitter as the
existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual
flabbiness to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all
their years in that vainest of all pursuits, the pursuit of mere
pleasure as a sufficient end in itself._”
--THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
_Chapter Seven_
THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE
Sometimes an honest man of my class, reading the news of the day,
awakes to a sudden realization of the grim political truth. During
the time of the public discussion over the late tariff readjustment I
remember such an incident. We were three men, sitting together in the
smoking-room of an up-town club. One of us had brought in a copy of a
sane and honest afternoon paper, containing a quiet, dignified, careful
but powerful analysis of the results brought about under the tariff
reform measure. He had been struck by the article. He called it to the
attention of the third member of the group, who sat down to read it.
He read it through, while my friend and I talked about trivial things.
After quite a long period of silence he handed the paper back to the
giver.
“What do you think of it?” he was asked.
His cigar had gone out. He lit it before he replied. Then he said,
gravely:
“America needs a Marius, a Pitt, and a Peel. Before long it must get
one or all of them, or it will surely breed a Danton and a Robespierre.”
It may have been mere epigram, but the two of us who heard it were
startled. For the man who said it was a leader of the world of fashion,
powerful in the world of business, and descended from four generations
of the purest-blooded aristocracy this country owns.
Think, then, of the meaning of this sentiment from such a man at such
a time! Marius, a plebeian, led the slaves of Rome to the seats of
political power, broke down the age-old barriers of an aristocratic
plutocracy, and wrote into the history of the world one of its earliest
chapters on the revolt of a subjugated nation held in chains for the
benefit of a few. Pitt, Lord Chatham, the “Great Commoner,” hurled
from office by the combined power of a king, a plutocratic class, and
a subservient political machine, was forced back into office by the
will of the people, unorganized, in the face of all the banded powers
against him, and in spite of a condition of political corruption that
made his return seem a miracle. Peel gave the people of England free
corn against the banded powers of commercial greed.
And to-day, in America, an aristocrat and a member of the plutocratic
class, sitting in a great city club of fashion, reading an editorial
from a paper that is published and edited to meet the demands of that
very class, gives it as his opinion that in this country we must
raise a Marius, a Pitt, and a Peel! And the alternative--the days
of the Terror, the bloody hands, the brutish mob, the wild-eyed,
frantic leaders of the hosts that stormed the Bastile, set up the
guillotine--so runs the mind of an aristocrat and a plutocrat, reading
the _Evening Post_ in a rich man’s club on upper Fifth Avenue!
I believe that he was right. Without referring specifically to
the tariff reform--for this is no political document that I am
writing--I believe that the catalogue of legislative enactments by
our administrative machine over the past twenty years reveals beyond
the shadow of a doubt that the will of the people is subservient to
the will of the plutocracy. How can we further blind ourselves to the
truth? When such a fact is known as gospel to the people, from Maine
to California, published in every section of the press, from the
gutter-snipe class to the scholarly review, how may the best educated
class in the United States go on upon its careless way ignoring the
fact?
The result is perfectly obvious in the light of history. The
plutocracy, stripped of the artificial screens behind which it grew
to power, stands exposed to-day in the full glare of the search-light
of public knowledge. Under such circumstances, even in slave-holding
nations, there has never lacked a tribune of the people. So sprung the
Gracchi from the dust to lead the first great battle in Rome. So, even
in the dawn of popular liberty, came a Tyler and a Cade, before their
hour had struck, it is true, yet, even so, with power to call to their
backs armies of men willing to die and conquerable only by accident or
guile. So, in the fullness of time, came other greater men, a Marius, a
Pitt, a Peel, who led the people onward and upward against the citadels
of plutocracy.
To-day we of the class that rules, that draws unearned profits from
the toil of other men, know full well that the time is almost here
when there must be a true accounting. The fortunes that have been made
are made; and that is all of it. The fortunes that are in the making
through misuse of political power, through extortionate exploitation of
the people and the people’s heritage, through industrial oppression
and industrial denial of the rights of man--these must be checked.
To-morrow, in this land, the door of opportunity must be again unsealed.
We cannot go back and create more free land to take the place of the
millions upon millions of acres thrown away by a lavish, stupid,
careless, traitorous government. We cannot fill again the plundered
mines of Michigan or Montana or Pennsylvania. We cannot clothe the
hills of Maine and Michigan again with pine, or the broad bottoms of
Ohio with walnut. We cannot turn backward the hands of the clock, or
re-create the economic factors that have been eliminated to make of
their fragments the wealth and the social world to-day enjoyed by the
exploiters and their descendants.
It is not so that evolution works. That rare civilization of the Aztecs
which Cortez crushed can never be restored. Only echoes from the tombs
of Lucumons, after the lapse of twenty centuries, attest the fact that
once, in Etruria, there existed a civilization distinctive, splendid,
brilliant, until the tempest of Sulla’s vengeance blotted it from the
face of the earth. Only the ashes in the urn of history remain of
Pharaoh’s Egypt, Athens, Babylon, Persia.
So, too, the golden opportunity of yesterday is gone, never to return
within our borders. The lesson of America, however, is burned deep into
the records of time. In Canada, such a man as Laurier reads it clearly.
In the greater of the Latin republics in South America, they strive
to-day to prevent the very condition we now find in free America. In
this matter of the real substance of rulership, the United States is
to-day an example to the nations of a democracy which has deliberately
squandered its birthright.
Yet, for all our lost opportunities, much remains that can be done
and will be done. It is not my purpose here to sketch the process of
salvation that is yet possible. Only, at this point in my writings, I
would warn the people of my class, those of them who do not yet think
about these things or understand them, that the moment has arrived when
the people demand a Marius--a tribune who shall lead them onward into
freedom, a man who shall stand before the world untrammelled by the
golden chains of wealth, undefiled by the pollution of time-serving
politics, filled with the inspiration of the people’s will, courageous
to battle to the very bitter end for the rights that the people demand.
Only the morally and intellectually deaf cannot hear the sound of the
call of the people. It sweeps from the plains of Kansas in the breath
of the rustling corn; it swells from the hills of Montana in the thud
of the drill and the rising and falling of picks in the mines; it whirs
from the looms of the South and the North, where child slaves earn the
bread of labour; it moans from the lofts of New York, in the voice of
the slaves of the sweat shop; it shrieks from the forges of Pittsburg,
the charnels of Packingtown, the terrible mines of the mountains of
coal.
It is a call for a leader to freedom--the freedom we bought with our
blood and signed away in ignorance. I care not where you turn, the
voices of the people crying for their rights rise stronger, fuller,
more threatening, year by year. Day by day they organize. A meeting of
farmers at St. Louis files formal protest against the profits of the
middleman, and forms a committee to investigate and report, and puts
together a League of Reform. A machine-made politician in New York, in
Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania, is crushed by the votes of the people
he fondly had dreamed he owned. A firmly entrenched public officer is
branded a liar and a thief, no matter what committees may whitewash
him. A public document published to clear the skirts of a ruling party
of the charge of being in part responsible for the rising prices is
laughed out of court by the people themselves.
A daring and preposterous attempt on the part of organized railroad
owners to advance rates to the general public, while holding them
down for the “big interests,” is met by a storm of organized protest.
Chambers of commerce, industrial clubs, manufacturers’ guilds,
consumers’ leagues, spring up all over the country, expostulating,
pleading, threatening, hurling legal thunderbolts. A President yields
to the clamour, and an attorney-general launches the thunder of
Washington against a move that, ten years ago, would have met only the
scattered, sporadic, half-hearted, hopeless invective of the private
citizen. The railroads yield, and begin the revision of rates “at the
top,” by making agreements with the big organized shippers, the trusts.
The time is ripe, or nearly ripe; the fight begins. The _status quo_
is to be changed. In the political arena all is confusion. Already,
from the lips of the old, trained leaders, who, through long periods,
have served the interests of the plutocracy while wearing the livery
of the people, come hesitating phrases of fear and confusion. One
announces that he will retire after his present term. Another goes down
to defeat, fighting to the last for his masters. A third, branded a
corruptionist, sees ruin stalking him amid the shadows of the coming
day. Another, reading the papers, dubs them traitors, and madly curses
them before the eyes and in the ears of all the people.
And, meantime, we need a Marius, a Lincoln, a strong man of the people,
in whose hands will be the threads of political destiny. Events are
opening to this strong man the gates of mighty power. When he comes
(and he is sure to come), he will hear the clear, unmistakable call
of destiny to its chosen. Can he help but heed? History supplies the
answer. Go read it, you who rest secure within your flimsy barriers of
self-interest, self-confidence, and gold. When another Lincoln comes,
we shall know him.
“_Of all the cankers of human happiness none corrodes with so
silent yet so baneful an influence, as indolence. Body and mind
both unemployed, our being becomes a burthen, and every object
about us loathsome, even the dearest. Idleness begets ennui, ennui
the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person
was ever yet hysterical. Exercise and application produce order in
our affairs, health of body, and cheerfulness of mind; all these
make us precious to our friends. It is while we are young that the
habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterwards.
The fortune of our lives, therefore, depends on employing well the
short period of youth._”
--THOMAS JEFFERSON.
_Chapter Eight_
FIGHTING FOR LIFE
The very first direct result of the growing consciousness of conditions
throughout the country is a sudden growth in the volume of money
devoted to charity, and a sudden and quite extraordinary increase in
the personal interest shown by the wealthy in the matter of reform.