kept clean, sane, and normal in the pursuit of little things. The
trivial household joys that fill so full the happy life of the normal
woman, the little business triumphs that keep alive in the heart of
the normal man the spirit of personal ambition, the human lust for a
fight, the ever-changing, ever-interesting, ever-luring struggle for
advantage--these are at once the burden and the safety of mankind. In
them is true happiness; in them is true humanity.
The class of which I write has lost them in its very birth. The mother
of a boy in the middle class looks forward with delight to the day when
that boy will go forth into the world to battle against circumstances.
From his earliest childhood onward he learns the necessity of labour,
he comes to regard it as his birthright. With eagerness he prepares for
it. The little triumphs of boyhood, the trivial victories of college
days, are joy unbounded to his mind, because they are but steps in
that long climb toward greatness, renown and wealth, that are his
birthright; and when at last he goes forth from college halls, from
labour on the farm, from some little clerical position that he has
held in his adolescence, to strike out for himself into the great open
world, to blaze out paths of his own choosing, his life is filled in
its every moment with new thrills of excitement, of happiness, of
accomplishment--of life, real life, not imitation.
Look at the other side. Think of the boy born, as they say, with a
golden spoon in his mouth. Perhaps, in his infancy, he does not know
that he can have everything in the world for which he asks. Perhaps
his parents are humanly wise--for many of the wealthy are; yet, even
in his very tender boyhood, the truth will come home to him. He will
learn before he is ten years old that there is a difference between
him and other boys whom he sees at play in the park. He will discover
that the difference is money. He will discover that his parents can
get whatever they like, spend as much as they please, waste fortunes
on their pleasures, throw gold away as though it were dross. He will
learn, on the other hand, that the children of the poor can have no
expensive toys like his, that they cannot be dressed as he is dressed,
that their parents must win every dollar that they spend by some hard
work, while his own parents, apparently, receive as much as they want
and more without any labour whatever.
That boy will be more than human if, by the time he is a young man,
he has not passed the entrance to the paths where the true happiness
of life is to be found. Either money will mean nothing to him, and he
will have settled down to be one of the idle rich, simply taking what
the gods send him and doing his best to enjoy it, or else a most unholy
lust for gold will have taken possession of his soul. Eliminate the
necessity for struggle, and you remove from money all its true value.
It becomes either dross, to be thrown away for other things better
worth while, or it becomes an idol, a god, the very sum and substance
of the world’s desire.
I know, of course, that there are marked exceptions. I have in my mind
as I write a young man of a Western city, born to an enormous fortune,
married to another, and trained and nurtured in the lap of luxury.
Almost everything conspired to make him either an idler or a money
worshipper. He is neither. It is an accident. In his early youth he
became an invalid, and was sent out by his father to live on a ranch.
The ranchman’s wife was a real woman, and instinct taught her how to
handle that boy. He was put to work. At first, when his father learned
through his letters that he was spending his time mending fences,
feeding pigs, watering horses, and milking cows, he objected strongly.
He wrote to the ranchman to this effect. The ranchman rebuked his wife,
and set the boy to work at other gentler things.
A week later the boy wrote an indignant letter to his father to the
effect that he was coming home if he couldn’t go back to real work.
The father saw a great light; and free permission was given to the
ranchman’s wife to do whatever she liked with the boy. When he went
home a year and a half later he was the makings of a real man. To-day
his father is dead, and he has succeeded to the command of a mighty
estate. He holds his place in the best Society of the land, but he
holds, too, his place amongst the workers. At the age of twenty-eight
he had twice refused political office, and has refused also the
presidency of a bank which he controls and of which he is a director,
on the ground that as a director he will not vote for the appointment
of a dummy officer. He is a deep, clear-headed student of events, and
money, to him, has been but the lever to move the world.
The same is true to a certain extent of the daughters of the rich.
Some of them, in spite of their wealth, are splendid women, but too
often wealth has destroyed in them the clear and beautiful springs of
life. Either they worship it as a god or they despise it, throwing it
away like water. Of the two vices, I do not know which is the worse.
I do not know, in sane and sober judgment, whether I, as a man of
wealth and fashion (and yet a man of business and of some knowledge),
despise more deeply the outright worshipper of Mammon, or the reckless,
extravagant, and foolish idle rich. Thank God, I am not obliged to
choose my friends from either, for still within the barriers of gold
there lies a little leaven of the old Society.
And if futility clings very closely to the very gold that is the basis
of our class and our estate, it clings, too, to almost everything else
that we do. Come with me to a fashionable restaurant or the dining-room
of a great hotel. At the dinner hour it is crowded with hundreds of
people. One might think that they are hungry and that they come to
eat. It is hardly so. They come to hear the orchestra, to talk with
their friends, to play with food and drink of a kind and a quantity
far beyond their needs. Dinner is but an excuse. The whole occasion
is a diversion, nothing more. Contrast an occasion like that with the
homely gathering of a few choice spirits out in a simple country home,
or in the middle-class city home if you like, and note the marvellous
difference. It has been my good fortune, on far too few occasions it is
true, to be admitted as a friend into what I might call a middle-class
home--the home of an author, not by any means rich. I will simply say,
without going into details, that every time I went there it made me
homesick, and I stopped it for that reason. I do not think I could say
more if I wrote a book about it.
Of all the melancholy travesties on fun, I think that the sports and
games of the wealthy young men and women of our day are the finest
parody ever written or acted. Drive through a country district to a
fashionable out-of-town club. At half a dozen places on your way you
will see groups of boys and girls playing ball, flying kites, paddling,
rowing, or doing something else in the natural human way. You will hear
shouts, quarrels perhaps, signs of intense and natural rivalry. When
you come to your journey’s end you will find other groups of pleasure
seekers. Go join the groups of young men and women in beautiful summer
costumes playing golf or tennis; or sit on the piazzas over the sea and
watch a game of bridge. Listen for the shouts of joy such as you heard
down the road, and you will hear the cawing of the crows. Catch the
drift of the conversation. In a very great number of cases the subject
matter of it is that it would be a lot more fun to do something else
at some other time in some other place. The dreary pleasures of the
idle rich, yachting, horseracing, golf, tennis, hunting--these are not
sports; they are schemes devised to keep us from being bored to death
by the mere fact of living.
I met a man down town the other day who told me he had bought a farm
in Alberta. For a great many years past I have met him at all sorts of
functions in all the big cities of the East, in London, and in Paris.
I asked him what in the world he was going to do with a farm. At first
he wouldn’t reply, afraid that he might hurt my feelings, but finally
he told me.
“I’m sick. There isn’t much the matter with me, but I have simply got
to have a change. My nerves have gone all to pieces. Playing bridge
gives me the “willies.” I’d sooner pick rags than go to another dance.
Golf--the way we play it in the summer--is worse than ping-pong.
Late suppers have got on my nerves. The races are a horrible bore.
I’d sooner go to Hoboken than Paris. I’ve got to do something or I
will die. Last winter in London I made friends with a young fellow
twenty-one years old who last month got into disgrace and was banished
to Alberta. Last month I heard from him--and that settled me. He
swears he has found the antidote. I’m going out to try it.”
He went. I don’t suppose he’ll stay there, because he never stayed in
any place in his life for any length of time, and I presume before long
he’ll come back and spend a lot of money on manicures and make his
hands look as if he had never worked before he plunges again into the
same Dead Sea: but, sometimes, I wish I had the nerve to follow him, or
to buy his farm from him when he grows tired of it.
If our wealth, and our pleasures, turn at last to nothing and weary
us beyond expression, no less in the more sacred things of life--real
life, I mean--does this same miserable demon of futility pursue us. As
the world has read these past two or three years the low, horrible,
depraved story of the marital relationships of scion after scion of
one of our wealthiest families, the world has turned with disgust from
the paltry record of intrigue, vile lust, dishonour, and shame. That
story is but one of many. It is true that in this, the dearest and
tenderest of all the relationships of life, we are haunted by futility.
Our young men and maidens marry in honour and hope in a world of hope,
lighted by the eternal fires of love. Too often, alas! romance becomes
tragedy, or comedy, if you look at it that way.
It is the same old story. Everything is far too easy. All the comforts,
all the luxuries, all the pleasures for which normal men and women have
to work, drop, like over-ripe fruit, into their waiting hands. There is
no struggle to hold their minds together. There is no common ambition
to fill their hearts and souls with a desire for mutual help. It is
all empty, frivolous, and vain. In time it is easy to slip away from
the paths of convention into habits of looseness and even of vice. The
old-fashioned religion is dead among us, and so one great protector of
the home has passed and gone.
I cannot find it in my heart to condemn as strongly as I should the
lapses of the idle rich from the paths of virtue; for I know exactly
how it is. It is futile. It is empty. It is a restriction of freedom.
It is a chain about your neck. You try, at first, to loosen it; at last
you determine to break it. Then the patient world is treated to another
tale of infidelity, of misery, of little picayune human weakness--a
tale to laugh at, or to weep over, according as you will.
I am not going to dwell upon this theme; for it is a beastly thing. I
have only mentioned it because it is a logical climax to this chapter
on FUTILITY. And I regard futility as the real nemesis of Society. It
turns our lives to nothing; it makes of our fairest garden a desert;
it robs us, in our very cradles, of our lives, our liberties, and our
happiness. It leaves us groping about in a world of shadows, longing
for the substance, dreaming of realities we never can know, wishing
always for change, sighing always for worlds that are out of our reach.
Of all the grim jokes that ever were perpetrated, the grimmest of all,
in my estimation, is the time-honoured coupling of the words wealth and
happiness in the formal blessing of a new-made bride.
“_If the wealthy classes so often come off second best in a
struggle with the democracy, the cause is generally to be found
in their disinclination to submit to leadership. It has always
been a failing of rich and educated men to have too high an
opinion of their own abilities. The prospect which faced the Roman
Conservatives at this moment (88 B. C.), when the Revolution, in
the person of Marius, had made itself complete master of the State,
was indeed dark enough to close up the party ranks. Yet it was only
by accident that they discovered in Sulla a fit champion for their
cause._”
--FERRERO.
_Chapter Ten_
THE DEATH KNELL OF IDLENESS
As I write, I am, myself oppressed by this nemesis of futility. Half
a dozen times while I was writing this book I stopped to reason with
myself to the effect that it wouldn’t do any good, that the rich will
not read it, and that, even if they do, it cannot pierce through the
armour of self-conceit, vanity, and arrogance. Yet I have persevered,
in the hope that perhaps some few will read and understand, and,
instead of setting me down as an alarmist and an agitator, will at
least consider me honest, and perhaps set to work for themselves to
find out the truth about these things.
That grim truth is that we as a class are condemned to death. We have
outlived our time. It is not necessary, as it was in the earlier
ages of the world’s history, that the mass of the people should be
enslaved to give leisure to an upper class in the pursuit of luxuries,
of refinement, of the factors that go to the making of civilization.
Instead of being the roof and crown of things, the wealthy class in
America to-day has sunk to the level of the parasite. The time has
come when the producing classes are about to bring it to judgment. In
fact, to-day we stand indicted before the court of civilization. We are
charged openly with being parasites; and the mass of evidence against
us is so overwhelming that there is no doubt whatever about the verdict
of history, if indeed it must come to a verdict.
Idleness is doomed as a vocation. Of that I am perfectly certain. Even
in the social world it is becoming unfashionable. Not so very long ago,
in the fashionable world of New York, it was considered bad taste, in
fact, it was a decided breach of etiquette, to inquire amongst the men
of your acquaintance what anybody did for a living. Within the past
five years there has been a very decided change in this respect, and I
constantly hear that very question asked, without rebuke, in the most
fashionable clubs of the city.
A man whom I know pretty well, himself a member of the highest social
order, but a man of indefatigable energy, recently put very neatly this
fact that many of the quondam idle class are now engaging themselves in
useful pursuits. On the street one day he met a young man, a confirmed
idler of long standing. He exchanged the time of day with him, and was
told that he was about to go to Europe to join in the social season of
London. He congratulated him and said he thought it was a good thing to
do.
A few nights later, talking to me about him, he said:
“I feel sorry for Charlie. He seems so lonely. He can’t find any one to
play with him!”
In a measure, that is true. The confirmed idler of the social world
is slowly coming to be despised instead of envied. He still infests a
few of the up-town clubs, but even here he is more and more relegated
to the bottom of the social list. It is harder and harder every social
year to fill up the ranks for social entertainment. A dinner or an
early reception can be managed very well, for the young men who work
will go to such functions, perhaps as freely as they ever went. It is
far different with the late dance or the late reception.
If you could go down into Wall Street and call the roll of the bond
houses, it would astound you to discover how many young men of the
highest social class are working very hard right at the bottom of the
ladder of industry learning the financial business. A friend of mine,
a fairly well-to-do man of a small city in the Middle West, sent his
son to me a year or so ago with a letter asking me to introduce him
in Wall Street with a view to his learning the bond business. He had
chosen that as his vocation in life, and he had taken a special course
in college as a preparation for it. I sent him, with personal letters,
to half a dozen friends of mine, partners in various houses. I told
him simply to look around, at first, and to talk freely and frankly
to these gentlemen about the chances for a young man in that line of
business.
He came back to me in the course of a week, considerably crestfallen.
He had looked forward to earning his living in an honourable way. He
found the conditions in this labour market most deplorable from his
point of view. According to his story, every one of these big bond
houses announced itself able to get all the apprentice labour that
it needed at from five dollars to ten dollars a week. His report
interested me so much that I went around myself to some of my friends
to learn the causes of this strange condition.
In the case of one bond house I discovered that it had one very skilful
and very high paid man selling bonds at retail throughout the city.
Working under him were three young men learning the bond business. I
knew them all, personally, socially. They belonged to one of the best
of the younger sets. Two of them went out a good deal, and the third
had a reputation as something of a student. One of them I knew to be
the happy possessor of four automobiles and a small stable of horses.
Both the others owned automobiles, and belonged to some of the most
expensive, as well as the best, of the up-town clubs.
One of these young men--and none of them was so very young at
that--received the salary of fifteen dollars a week. The other two
were getting ten dollars apiece. All three were college men. My friend
in this bond house told me that two of them were making good; but the
third has the “ten o’clock in the morning habit,” and will not last
very long. Of course, none of them can begin to live on the money he
receives for his work. I do not think that any one of them could pay
his tailor and haberdashery bill with his salary, and even the bond
house clerk has to eat, you know.
Further investigation showed me that there is a perfect flood of these
young men turned loose each year upon the financial districts of this
country, not only here, but in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and St.
Louis. They go to work for trivial salaries, because they care little
or nothing about the amount that they receive. They are not working for
wages, but they are working for emancipation. They do not want to be
idlers, because they know that in these days idleness is doomed. They
pick out Wall Street, particularly, I think, the bond department of
Wall Street, because that is recognized as a world of real work that
is fitted to the tastes and abilities of a well-educated but not too
rigorously trained young man.
These young men are by no means effete dilletanti. They are strong,
vigorous young men, and they plunge into what they know to be a
competitive field with a full knowledge that they are not likely to
go very far unless they earn their way. For in these same offices,
and working in the field in hot competition with them, there is still
an army of young men from the provinces, so to speak, who actually do
live upon the proceeds of their work. It gave a real personal joy to
discover that, in several of the banking houses which I looked into,
the poor young man who starts out into the world in competition with
these scions of the wealthy aristocracy is paid a better salary at the
beginning than is his moneyed competitor, and has at least an equal
chance for advancement. Indeed it is recognized that the wealthy young
man has a marked advantage through his personal acquaintance with men
of money, and more is expected of him in return from his training than
is expected of the self-supporting clerk. As a rule, however, the real
workers are given outlying districts of the country to canvass, while
the aristocracy of the profession does its work in the city.
I sketch this phenomenon in some detail, because I think it is a
very significant thing in its bearing upon the subject of this book.
Perhaps more than any other one outlet it is an avenue leading toward
honourable labour, suited to the capacity and the taste of our wealthy
young men. That the market is crowded to-day, and has been crowded for
five years past, more than it ever was crowded before in the history of
the financial profession, speaks far more eloquently than I can speak
of the change of sentiment amongst the wealthy.
In the Harvard Club, of a Saturday afternoon in winter, you will find
groups of young men sitting around and talking, just as you would have
found them fifteen years ago. There is one marked difference. Fifteen
years ago they would have been talking about social events, the sports,
and various other trivial things that went in those days to make up the
sum and substance of a fashionable young man’s career. Nowadays many of
these groups are earnestly discussing finance, not in its relation to
their own private fortunes or misfortunes in the stock market, but in
its broader aspect. You hear such phrases as “gold supply,” “premium
bond,” “over-production of securities,” “diversion of money from the
legitimate market,” “intrinsic value,” “investment outlook,” etc. They
are, in fact, talking shop; and I do not think I have ever met any
other class of men more addicted to the habit than these novitiates of
the financial game.
Even their sisters, nurtured in luxury, and taught, as they still
unhappily are, that elegant idleness is the proper portion of the sex,
are beginning to rebel. They are seeking knowledge eagerly, sometimes
in places and under circumstances that promise not the best of results.
More particularly during the past five or ten years there has been
the really extraordinary propaganda amongst the women of the younger
set in our great cities looking toward the strengthening of the body
and the building up of a vigorous and buoyant health that would have
been considered actually vulgar in the generation that preceded them.
Health, in fact, in many of the younger sets, has become almost a
religion, a sort of fetich. They study hygiene, biology, and the
mystery of life. Perhaps they are coming to know too much at too early
an age, but in excuse let it be said that it is far better to know too
much than to know too little.
On the other hand, I have already written of the tendency of the
fashionable young women of the day toward charity and reform. They
follow fads madly, working as hard and using up as much nerve force
in this pursuit as any young woman of the middle class gives to her
household work, or even to her bread-winning activities. I could name
a dozen young women of the finest families in New York who within the
past twelve months have actually thrown themselves into this sort of
function with such fiery ardour and zeal that they have either totally
neglected their social activities or broken down completely under the
strain of double labour. Such instances are more numerous year by year.
I do not know that I fully approve it, but I set it down here for the
judgment of the world.
So, on the one hand, the ranks of the doomed class are being swiftly
depleted by what I must call rank out and out desertion. The idle rich,
particularly the younger set, are depleted year by year by squadrons of
young men and women who go over to the army of workers. I do not know
that there is any one single sign in the world in which I live that
gives me greater hope than this. The dishonour of inactivity, sloth,
and idleness is coming to be widely recognized in the very best classes
of Society. Old prejudices are breaking down under the demands of the
younger men for something to do. Even labour with the hands is not
beneath them. As I pause to think, I could name at least half a dozen
young men of my own set who within the past two or three years have
gone into the railroad business, carried chains with engineering gangs
in the field, or done other real manual labour. To-day the son of one
of the oldest and noblest families in New York is superintending the
laying of sewers in a New England town under a municipal contract.
If actual desertion is thinning the ranks of the idle rich, there is
another and even greater cause which will tend in the future, as it is
tending to-day, to limit the number of this class. It lies much deeper
than the mere phenomenon of desertion. It is, in fact, nothing more nor
less than the removal of the means of making gigantic fortunes through
the exploitation of men.