Great Fortunes from Railroads

by Gustavus Myers

THE SERMONIZING OF THE "BEST CLASSES."

One section of the social organization declined to accept the views of the class above it. This was the working class. Superimposed upon the working class, draining the life blood of the workers to provide them with wealth, luxuries and power, were those upper strata of society known as the "best classes." These "best classes," with a monstrous presumption, airily proclaimed their superiority and incessantly harped upon the need of elevating and regenerating the masses.

And who, it may be curiously asked, were the classes self destined or self selected to do this regenerating? The commercial and financial element, with its peculiar morals so adjusted to its interests, that it saw nothing wrong in the conditions by which it reaped its wealth —conditions that made slaves of the workers, threw them into degradation and poverty, drove multitudes of girls and women into prostitution, and made the industrial field an immense concourse of tears, agony and carnage. Hanging on to this supreme class of wealth, fawning to it, licking its very feet, were the parasites and advocates of the press, law, politics, the pulpit, and, with a few exceptions, of the professional occupations. These were the instructors who were to teach the working class what morals were; these were the eminences under whose guidance the working class was to be uplifted!

Let us turn from this sickening picture of sordid arrogance and ignorance so historically true of all aristocracies based upon money, from the remotest time to this present day, and contemplate how the organized part of the working class regarded the morals of its "superiors."

While the commercial class, on the one hand, was determined on beating down the working class at every point, it was, on the other, unceasingly warring among itself. In business dealings there was no such recognized thing as friendship. To get the better of the other was held the quintessence of mercantile shrewdness. A flint-hard, brute spirit enveloped all business transactions. The business man who lost his fortune was generally looked upon without emotion or pity, and condemned as an incapable. For self interest, business men began to combine in corporations, but these were based purely upon mercenary aims. Not a microscopic trace was visible of that spirit of fellow kindness, sympathy, collective concern and brotherhood already far developed among the organized part of the working class.

As the supereminent magnate of his day, Vanderbilt was invested with extraordinary publicity; he was extensively interviewed and quoted; his wars upon rival capitalists were matters of engrossing public concern; his slightest illness was breathlessly followed by commercialdom dom and its outcome awaited. Hosts of men, women and children perished every year of disease contracted in factories, mines and slums; but Vanderbilt's least ailment was given a transcending importance, while the scourging sweep of death among the lowly and helpless was utterly ignored.

Precisely as mercantile society bestowed no attention upon the crushed and slain, except to advance roughshod over their stricken bodies while throwing out a pittance in charity here and there, so Vanderbilt embodied in himself the qualities that capitalist society in mass practiced and glorified. "It was strong men," says Croffut, "whom he liked and sympathized with, not weak ones; the self-reliant, not the helpless. He felt that the solicitor of charity was always a lazy or drunken person, trying to live by plundering the sober and industrious." This malign distrust of fellow beings, this acrid cynicism of motives, this extraordinary imputation of evil designs on the part of the penniless, was characteristic of the capitalist class as a whole. Itself practicing the lowest and most ignoble methods, governed by the basest motives, plundering in every direction, it viewed every member of its own class with suspicion and rapacity. Then it turned about, and with immense airs of superiority, attributed all of its own vices and crimes to the impoverished masses which its own system had created, whether in America or elsewhere.

The apologist may hasten forward with the explanation that the commercial class was not to be judged by Vanderbilt's methods and qualities. In truth, however, Vanderbilt was not more inhuman than many of the contemporary shining lights of the business world.