THE INEVITABLE IDEAL
“Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers,” wrote Jefferson.
And again: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what
an additional title of nobility is or the ensigns of a new order are
in Europe.” The dignity of labor, the prizes to the laborer--these
ideals of a century ago, ideals born no doubt of a vanity which sought
to make a virtue of necessity, are still our ideals. But, where in
Jefferson’s day his broad and sympathetic mind was almost alone in the
belief in the loftier basis for the ideal, to-day millions of us see
that the laborer is the only good citizen, that his estate is the only
estate of dignity. No people ever had such a conception of work as we
have to-day. It is an evolution under Democracy. No previous nation
could have understood it; our ancestors did not have it, for they were
still influenced by caste ideas, hard and nobly though they strove
to outgrow them. There are vestiges of the old ideas concerning work
remaining. The class that does not work and the class that emulates it
and envies it still look down on work, still hug the vulgar, ignorant
fancy that work is a curse. But that is not important. Once more let us
remind ourselves that caste is made not by him who looks down but by
him who looks up. The vital fact is that the laborer is himself aware
of his own sovereign dignity. And, excepting a few black sheep, the
American flock still bears the ancestral markings; this is a nation
of laborers. And the markings of which our ancestors tried hard, but
with dubious success, not to be ashamed, have become the markings of
honor--not to an occasional Jefferson, but to the overwhelming mass of
our eighty millions.
This concept of labor is the first-fruit of Democracy and Enlightenment.
When sons of men of vast wealth go to work, there is much excitement
among the idlers, rich and poor. The agitation shows how hard dies
the theory that work is wholly a curse and, to a great extent, a
degradation; that the only sensible, or noble even, ideal of life is
to idle about; that there must be something of the freak in a human
being who labors when he might sit at his ease amusing himself by
counting the drops of sweat as they roll from the brows of his toiling
fellow-men.
This is indeed the old, old theory. It has the sanction of many
venerable authorities. But, like almost everything else that has come
down to us from the ignorant far past, it will not stand examination.
There was a time when work undoubtedly was both a curse and a
degradation. When the many labored under the lash that the few might
reap, when the toilers got only the toil and the idlers got all the
results, when the highest ideals of the human race were a full stomach
and fine raiment and the gratification of other crude desires and
appetites--then work was justly regarded as degrading drudgery. But not
now, hard though laziness and cheap vanity strive to keep alive such
fictitious distinctions as are given an air of actuality by phrases
like “master and servant,” “employer and employé,” “capital and labor,”
“gentleman,” “lady,” et cetera, et cetera. The truth of the dignity
of labor, the dishonesty and degradation of every form of parasitism,
however gaudily tricked out, appears despite the subtleties of snobism.
The political ideal of a barbarian is to rule others; the political
ideal of a highly civilized man is to rule himself and let his
fellow-men alone. The industrial ideal of a barbarian is to live in
empty-headed and ambitionless idleness upon the labor of others. The
industrial ideal of a civilized man is to work, and work incessantly in
conditions that permit him to reap the full reward of his efforts and
to make those efforts in the direction best suited to his capacities.
And he has a deepening scorn of all the tricks by which some men live,
taking all and giving nothing. Nor is his scorn the less when those
tricks happen to be made “respectable” by law or by custom.
Is it any wonder that a man with the brain of an Æsop or an Epictetus
should have revolted against compulsory labor that could much better
have been performed by an ox or an ass? On the other hand, is it not
amazing that any man with a thinking machine in his skull and vital
force flowing along his nerves can be content to lead a life that would
bore a grasshopper? The “curse and degradation” theory of work adapts
itself to climates. Man began in the tropics, where idleness is least
difficult; therefore for a long time absolute idleness was the ideal of
this theory. But when man moved up into the colder parts of the earth,
where to idle was to be physically miserable, the theory was slightly
modified. The curse and the degradation of work were thought to lie in
the doing of useful work. To tilt with iron-pointed sticks, to stab
and jab and cut, to spend days and weeks chasing little foxes that
could not even be eaten if by chance they were caught, to hit little
balls with little sticks, to sit all night matching monotonous picture
cards--all such “amusements,” the hardest kind of work, work at which
the thinking part of any human being might well balk, were regarded as
“worthy of a gentleman.” To plough, to sow, to reap, to manufacture
something that might be used, to perform any kind of useful labor,
mental or manual, was “low” and “menial.”
Toward the middle of the last century, with our growing wealth and the
rise of a leisure class through false education, the Old World ideas
found their way across the Atlantic. And in every community there
began to be at least a few persons who took on the supercilious and
contemptuous attitude toward work. Fortunately for the good sense and
happiness of the American people, at about that time modern industrial
conditions changed the whole system of getting and keeping prosperous.
In the old days, idle and brainless barbarians could hold on to and
even add to their possessions--agricultural land. But in the new days
of intense energy, of rapidly changing values, of trade, commerce, and
competition, of rise in the price of labor and fall in the price of
money, property is always growing wings that must be clipped daily and
often hourly to keep it from taking flight. It is getting harder and
harder to reap where one has not sown, to induce men to work without
a proper return, or, after wealth has been acquired, to hold on to it
without the use of brains and energy. And so, the old theory is dying
out, chiefly for the usual reason for any human advancement--changed
conditions compelling men to change their point of view.
The reason the rich men’s sons are going to work is that they, or at
least their sagacious fathers, know that if they don’t work, the men
who do work will get their wealth away from them. And this reason of
necessity is going to bring about a revolution where all the shrieking
of the reformers, all the logic of the moral philosophers, all the
talk about the dignity of labor and “happiness only in hard work” make
no headway worth the measuring. Maxims of good sense and good morals
can’t be pounded or preached into poor short-sighted, irrational,
shadow-chasing humanity. Nature and the laws of environment do not
preach. They quietly but relentlessly compel. And sad wrecks they make
of the pretensions and pomposities of the conceited human animal.
It is in vain that aristocracy-worshiping mothers of America dream
of an Old World upper class for their sons and daughters. It is in
vain that silly sociologists prattle about the necessity and the
advantages of a “leisure class.” Modern environment says “Work; work
hard! Be a somebody or I will make you a nobody!” And work we must.
And presently we shall hear the last of the notions that idleness or
useless employment is “noble” and “dignified” and “aristocratic.” And
only in mad-houses will be found men and women who continue in their
grown-up periods of life the pastimes of childhood--playing with blocks
and soldiers and toy tools. What of the old notions of property rights
and distribution of wealth will go by the board and what will remain,
no one can foresee. Nor does it in the least matter, since we can be
certain that no conditions will arise in which the idler will be more
comfortable or the worker less comfortable than in the past or at
present.
The change in the attitude toward work is coming from both sides of
the world. The rich are more and more forced to work. The not-rich are
demanding and compelling better opportunities to work. Look at our
national life in the broad, and you see all elements concentrating on
the democratic platform--Work! Beyond question the “workingman” is
discontented. Nor will his discontent decrease. On the contrary, the
more he has, the more he’ll want. His appetite will grow with what it
feeds on. This Republic was started by just such men, was started for
the purpose of creating ever more and more of them. The eagerness for
better pay, for better treatment, for better surroundings, whether
that eagerness be in the capitalist or in the street-cleaner, is proof
that the Republic is still doing business at the old stand in the old
way. And the more or less turbulent wrangling over the division of the
rewards will never cease. If there were any signs of its ceasing or of
its abating, then indeed might we justly despair of Democracy. Content
means caste; discontent means Democracy.
Work is democratic, not because all kinds of men engage in it and so
make it common, but because of its effect on the individual worker.
Every impulse toward Democracy is fostered by it, just as every impulse
toward caste is encouraged by leniency toward the idea of the value of
a leisure class.
The sooner ambition is roused in every man, woman and child, the sooner
they learn that by work alone can their ambitions be gratified, the
sooner will an ideal democratic condition evolve. America is ahead of
all the great nations in the race toward this ideal Democracy, because
there is the nearest approach in America in every walk of life to a
condition in which idlers are few and toilers many.
In a previous chapter the efforts of plutocratic philanthropists to
relieve a certain part of each community from the “stern and cruel
necessity to work” have been noted. But the pauper-making plutocrats
and lords and ladies Bountiful are not the only missionaries of
idleness and incompetence. Our legislatures, national, state,
municipal, are voting large sums of money for free something or other
for somebody or other, or for bolstering up some real or reputed
neglected or defective class. And leading citizens, themselves
toilers at businesses, trade and professions, are, through mistaken
sentimentality, urging the legislatures to vote still larger sums for
indiscriminate--_necessarily_ indiscriminate--alms.
If Democracy were dependent upon conscious human effort, we should
be moving rapidly and far from the old ideas of independence, of
self-reliance, of individuality; we should be hastening toward a
re-establishment of the aristocratic ideal of “molly-coddling,” of
making the citizen a hot-house plant sheltered under government
glass from the rude but invigorating forces of nature--but exposed
to withering and denuding paternalism. Everybody who did not do for
himself--whether because he would not or because he could not, we
should not stop to ask--would be provided with education, ideas,
food, clothing, shelter, amusements, baths, in short, everything but
self-respect and the power to produce self-respecting progeny. And
these things would be provided, not by private philanthropy, not by
the rich giving of their surplus, but by taxation.
Taxation simply means taking from one part of the community, chiefly
from the poor and those of moderate means, and giving to another part,
after an army of officials have had their “rake-off” in salaries and
perquisites. Taxation, therefore, means levying upon those who have
little to spare; it means crippling those who are trying to fight the
hard battle of life.
There is nothing democratic, nothing economically sound, in these
alluring schemes for making men sleek and comfortable and wise by
public bounty. They result in coddling incompetents, and in breaking
down those who are now just able to get along and who need only the
push of additional taxation to send them fairly over the precipice from
self-reliance to dependence.
A wise man once said: “Most legislation consists of A and B getting
together and deciding what C shall do for D.” We mustn’t forget C. He
pays the bills. And his name is “the people.”
The work that saves is the work of a man, by himself, for himself,
work chosen by him, mastered by him, work by which he is sometimes
mastered. He must stand or fall on the results of his efforts. This is
no programme for the timid or the halting, but it is the programme for
all grades of intelligence and opportunity, each doing for himself just
as well as he possibly can, under his circumstances.
Work--not as a means to leisure, but as in itself the aim and end. No
thought of “retiring.” No thought of social distractions that breed
only boredom, or of useless activities that dissipate manhood and
womanhood. The main thought--work. Work is _the_ ideal of the Republic.
The central point in the Old World theory which our plutocracy would
make our theory of life is that a man or woman ought to aspire not
to be a worker, but a person of leisure, to become not a doer of
useful things, but a doer of useless things. The central point of
the democratic theory of life is just the reverse. It is the worker
exalted, and his work also. Europe clings to precedent; America insists
upon judgment. Europe tends to act as “father and grandfather did”;
America has acted and should tend to act as the new situation, ever
changing, may require at any given moment.
Europe, bound by precedents, by false ideals, by traditions of class
distinctions and the nobility of idleness, simply cannot compete with
us. For the cause of Democracy, for the uplifting of the common man,
for the increase in the application of human energy to human needs,
America’s competition with Europe is more helpful than centuries of
theorizing and preaching and political maneuvering. The Great Republic
is presenting to Europe the stern alternative: Democracy or Decay.