AS TO SUCCESS
It has often been said, and written, that we are about the most unhappy
people on the face of the earth, that our unhappiness increases with
our Democracy. That our unhappiness is caused by our Democracy.
Democracy and discontent, despotism and discontent, constitutional
monarchy and content--so runs the argument.
If this were true, we as Americans would say, “Happiness bought at
the price of self-respect is far too dear. Heaven itself would be
too dear at that price. And, however it may be with some Europeans,
to an American the admission that he was not the equal of any man
would be a degradation like that of the slave.” But it is not true
that we are an unhappy people. Not to be sunk in a bucolic stupor
like the peasants of Europe does not mean unhappiness. To know when
one is uncomfortable, to think how to become less uncomfortable, to
be alive, alert, aspiring, to love work as other people love play,
to love progress as other people love stagnation--that does not mean
unhappiness. There are other standards of happiness than the bucolic or
than the self-complacence of the constricted devotees of caste. Indeed,
we in America continue to doubt whether those states of mind are truly
happy. Content may or may not mean happiness. It may be the calm, numb
resignation of despair. It may be the fat, swine-like stupor of an
established aristocracy. We have our own ideas of happiness--and it is
interesting to note that these restless, forever unsatisfied longings
of ours tend to long life.
We are not unhappy; but neither are we happy, nor likely to become so,
until our corner of the world, at least, is in far better order than it
is at present or likely to be soon.
There are two kinds of optimism. There is the optimism of retreat--the
kind our critics set up as the harbinger of happiness. Our plutocrats
preach this optimism, and those of our politicians who are fattening
on the honors, salaries and spoils of office. “We are a great
people,” they say. “Look at our national wealth. Look at our per
capita circulation of money. Look at the totals of our production of
everything for man and beast. Let us rejoice and do nothing to disturb
our national prosperity. Let us stop thinking--or, rather, let the
masses of the people give the plutocrats and the politicians in power a
free hand to do the thinking and acting for the nation. Enough of this
vulgar and irritating discontent! Enough of the coarse, low talk about
wealth! Let us discuss art and literature and glory and grandeur!”
All this with the most serious face in the world. All this with perfect
honesty and a heart full of patriotism!
The answer of the American people is cruel. “Rubbish!” they say. They
are not optimists of retreat--for what but retreat is a progress that
advances a class at the expense of the mass?
Theirs is the optimism of advance--the advance of all. “We are indeed
great,” they reply to the optimists of retreat. “Let us be greater.
What Democracy we have had has carried us far. Let us have more
Democracy. The masses are better off than they used to be, thanks to
the sweeping away of some of the obstacles of class and caste. Let us
sweep away the rest of those obstacles. What we have is good. It is the
promise of better. Let us see that that promise is redeemed!”
Happiness--in the customary, narrow sense--the sense put into the word
by the long past with its reign of class and caste--that happiness we
have not. But the joy of life--the vigorous, bounding hope that beats
in the heart and throbs in the veins of the strong man growing in
strength--that we have in ever fuller measure. Such happiness never has
been in the past? Such happiness cannot be in a world of such abysmal
natural inequalities? We deny it. We are here not to live by the past,
by precedent, but to make a mockery of past and precedent. We are the
children of Democracy, not the wards of aristocracy. We propose a
wholly new world--and we are putting our proposals into effect. We have
done well, though we have barely begun. We shall do better. Another
century or so! We envy our grandchildren, not our grandfathers.
If happiness of the kind our ancestors of the world’s aristocratic
days dreamed had been the objective of the human race, man would have
retained his hairy coat, his taste for raw meat, his pleasure in
cave-dwelling. Every once in awhile we see in America people whose
object is happiness. Sooner or later they arrive at the bottom.
Sometimes they are happy there. But, happy or not, they are not to be
envied or imitated. The dominant note of the real slums is happiness.
Don’t be deceived by the squalor and rags into thinking it misery. The
unhappy slum-dwellers do not remain, but restlessly and resolutely
fight against the bestial stupor, fight their way back to the light and
the joy of life.
The joy of life is the exaltation that comes through a sense of
a life lived to the very limit of its possibilities; a life of
self-development, self-expansion, self-devotion to the emancipation
of man. Whoever you are, this joy of life can be yours. Money has
nothing to do with it, either in aiding or retarding. Money cannot
buy the essentials--health and love. It cannot avert the essential
evils--illness, bereavement. The world keeps finding this out from
generation to generation--and forgetting as soon as it rediscovers.
Solomon mentioned the matter many centuries ago, when he wrote:
“I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards;
I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all
kinds of fruits; I made me pools of water to water therewith the wood
that bringeth forth trees; I got me servants and maidens, and had
servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and
small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me; I gathered
me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of
the provinces;....
“Then I looked on all these works that my hands had wrought and on
the labour that I had laboured to do; and, behold, all was vanity and
vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”
Our rich men are largely responsible for the misconception that the
American people have no ideal higher than that of money-making. The
following remarks once made by a rich philanthropist are interesting
because they are typical of the thought of a great number of persons
who speak in public to-day:
“In contributing to the education of the suffrage the rich are but
building for their own protection. If they neglect so to build,
barbarism, anarchy, plunder will be the inevitable result. If the
spirit of commercialism and greed continues to grow stronger, then
the Twentieth Century will witness a social cataclysm unparalleled in
history.”
Is all this true? Does the future of civilization depend upon the
generosity of rich men? If the rich men do not awaken as a class and
give more largely to the uplifting of their fellow-men, shall we have
a carnival of barbarism, anarchy and plunder?
The speaker and his kind of social students mean well. They are right
in arousing the rich to a deeper sense of duty to mankind. But they
think so intently upon their pet theory that they lose their point of
view. They exaggerate to hysteria the importance of the rich. They are
infected with the dollar-worshiping craze which they profess to abhor.
They vastly over-estimate concentrated wealth as a factor in human
progress. They erect money into a powerful deity, just as do all other
worshipers of the dollar. The difference is that they wish to make it a
benevolent deity.
It is an excellent thing that the rich should be aroused. A rich man
who does nothing for his brother-man is a contemptible fellow--almost
as contemptible as a poor man who does nothing for his brother-man.
The selfish rich man can plead in extenuation that temptations,
beyond human nature’s power to combat, have narrowed and chilled and
withered him. But, save ignorance, what excuse has the poor man for
selfishness? However, if by chance the selfish rich man become aroused
and give--give manlily, democratically--of his riches, he must not be
excited about the importance to others of what he has done. Its main
importance is purely personal. He is a better man for doing it and has
a stronger title to self-respect. But if he had not done it, the poor,
old, stupid, blundering human race would have managed to stagger along
somehow.
By all means let the rich give. For their own self-respect, for their
own self-satisfaction, they ought to give largely and intelligently.
Let the honest rich give in sympathy--let the dishonest give in
humility. But we must remember that all such gifts put together are
as a mere drop in the ocean so far as the effect upon civilization is
concerned.
We have not reached our present estate through the generosity of
any class of men. And we shall not advance to our destined higher
estate because of the generosity and benevolence of any class. The
benevolence of the rich may earn for them an honorable place in the
procession of humanity ever toiling upward, and may enable laggards or
the too heavily handicapped to keep in line. But this procession, that
has marched on over kings and emperors, over tyrants and oppressors
and false teachers, that has met and swept away army after army of
embattled wrong, is not to be perceptibly retarded or accelerated by
the errors or the virtues of a class of men who are merely rich.
Rich men did not implant in the human heart the all but universal
passion for progress. Rich men did not put into the human skull the
marvelous mechanism of the human mind. Rich men did not endow that
mind with the body to carry out its will. Wealth has not made the
great pictures or paintings, has not written the great books nor
achieved the great discoveries, nor erected the great institutions,
nor evolved any of the glories of the emancipation of man, social,
political, industrial, intellectual. _All_ these we owe to men in whom
the wealth-getting instinct was at most a shriveled rudiment. Wealth
did not build this Republic in its present majesty; Pliny the younger
said--and said truly--that wealth had ruined Rome. Concentrated wealth,
breeder of parasitism and patronage, has shriveled and rotted--always,
everywhere. If history had not been written by snobs and persons
tainted with aristocratic error, this fact would be as clear as print
could make it.
The real wealth, the real riches of humanity are these capable minds
and capable bodies, the creators of intelligent, progress-producing
thought and action.
The value of civilization, of an orderly social system, is great to,
and is keenly felt by, the rich. But that value is just as great to,
just as keenly felt by, the masses. Are they not wholly dependent upon
it for well-being, just as are the rich--no more, no less?
And the work of preparing the oncoming generation for the preservation
and improvement of the social structure is done in each generation
not by the rich, not by generosity and benevolence, but by the masses
themselves in a myriad of homes, in a myriad of schoolhouses, in the
hourly personal and helpful intercourse of a myriad intelligent,
aspiring men, women and children. It is not concentrated wealth that
places the resources of the world at the disposal of the masses. It is
the intelligence of the masses, demanding those resources, that enables
concentrated wealth to gain its too often hideously unjust demands.
Concentrated wealth may to a limited extent promote progress; but that
is overbalanced by the fact that concentrated wealth still more heavily
penalizes progress.
If civilization, freedom, love of order, were dependent for their
existence or spread in any large degree upon the rich philanthropist
and his fellow-millionaires, cataclysm would be a mild word for what
would be about to befall us.
As for the “spirit of commercialism and greed,” what reason is there to
suppose it stronger now than in the past? Because the wealth-producing
capacity of the masses has enormously increased, because the
opportunities for earning comfort have infinitely multiplied, because
millions are striving for prosperity now where the few once monopolized
it all--are these reasons for accusing us to-day of being greedy and
growing greedier?
Was there ever a time or a place in history where mere money was so
powerless and brains so mighty as the present day in the American
Republic? Was there ever a time or place where the individual man was
at once so powerful to protect his own rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, and so powerless to snatch away those rights from
others?
The conscientious rich man does well to try to whip his
fellow-millionaires into line with the procession. But he need not
torment his declining years with horrid visions of coming anarchy
if these rich men do not stop groveling and grasping and begin to
entertain worthy ambitions. Let the rich do their part; but let every
man, rich or poor, high or humble, remember that his first duty is to
see that he is doing his own part.
One loses patience with the constant precedence given the idea that
riches alone mean success. Why is it that the only men who are eagerly
interviewed and importuned to write articles on “the secret of success”
are multi-millionaires?
Are there no successful men but multi-millionaires? There are not more
than five thousand of them in the country. Carlyle once described
England as “inhabited by thirty millions, mostly fools.” And our own
country, if none has succeeded in it but the multi-millionaires, may be
described as inhabited by “eighty millions, mostly failures.”
Success is a glittering word, capable of many meanings. A man is not
necessarily a failure because he has not made money--a million dollars
or a hundred. Some very successful men have never tried to make money.
They preferred to make _something_, and if they achieved their desires
they succeeded--from their own viewpoint, at least.
Agassiz would not accept five thousand dollars a night to lecture. “I
have no time to make money,” he said. Scientific inquiry and discovery
were the objects of his life, and he succeeded in his pursuit of them.
Wellington, after conquering Mysore, was proffered a gift of five
hundred thousand dollars by the corrupt East Indian Company. He refused
to touch it. Piling up “big money” was not his idea of success, either.
When John Hancock, one of the signers of our great Declaration, was
sitting in the Continental Congress a letter was read from Washington
suggesting the destruction of Boston by bombardment. Hancock was one
of Boston’s largest property owners, but he instantly said: “All my
property is in Boston; but if the expulsion of the British from it
require that Boston be burnt to ashes, issue the order immediately.”
There was another man who didn’t believe that “success” was only
another name for millions.
Charles Sumner refused to lecture at any price. “My time belongs to
Massachusetts and the nation,” he said. Big money was not his idol.
Thomas Jefferson died insolvent. Was he therefore a failure? Abraham
Lincoln died a poor man. Was he also a failure? Grant died so poor
that his opinion on “how to succeed” would have been of no value to the
money-mad, even if he had left it.
Finally, can you imagine any of the great real benefactors of mankind
plotting to make the service they rendered a heavy tax upon posterity
for maintaining their descendants in foolish idleness and luxury?
Sooner or later there will be a reaction from this search for “the
secret of success” among the trust kings and the sudden-rich heroes
of the stock ticker. “I know of no great men,” says Voltaire, “except
those who have rendered great service to the human race.” Judged by
that true standard, the mere makers of “big money” cannot tell our
young men the “secret of success.” They do not know it themselves.
The money success is blatant and strong. It flaunts itself and tries
to absorb all attention. But it ought not to deceive any but the
superficial observers of the American people. Our ideals still centre
in the affections, not in the appetites. To be free, to love, to think,
to grow--the joy of life. That sums up America. Gilt may for the moment
reign; but gilt does not rule.