Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

BUSINESS

Modern business derives from three passions in this order, namely: The passion for things, the passion for personal grandeur and the passion for power. Things are multiplied in use and possession when people exchange with each other the products of specialized labour. Personal grandeur may be realized in wealth. Gratification of the third passion in this way is new. Only in recent times has business become a means to great power, a kind of substitute for kingship, wherein man may sate his love of conquest, practise private vengeance, and gain dominion over people.

These passions are feeble on the Oriental side of the world, strong in parts of Europe, powerful in America. Hence the character of American business. It is unique, wherein it is so, not in principle but in degree of phenomena. For natural reasons the large objects of business are most attainable in this country. Yet this is not the essential difference. In the pursuit of them there is a characteristic American manner, as to which one may not unreasonably prefer a romantic explanation. No white man lives on this continent who has not himself or in his ancestry the will that makes desire overt and dynamic, the solitary strength to push his dream across seas. Islands had been peopled before by this kind of selection, notably England; never a continent. A reckless, egoistic, experimental spirit governs, betrays, and preserves us still.

The elemental hunger for food, warmth, and refuge gives no direct motive to business. People may live and reproduce without business. Civilization of a sort may exist without its offices. The settler who disappears into the wilderness with a wife, a gun, a few tools, and some pairs of domestic beasts, may create him an idyllic habitation, amid orchards and fields, self-contained in rude plenty; but he is lost to business until he produces a money crop, that is, a surplus of the fruits of husbandry to exchange for fancy hardware, tea, window glass, muslin, china, and luxuries.

The American wilderness swallowed up hundreds of thousands of such hearth-bearers. Business was slow to touch them. What they had to sell was bulky. The cost of transportation was prohibitive. There were no highways, only rivers, for traffic to go upon. Food was cheap, because the earth in a simple way was bounteous; but the things for which food could be exchanged were dear. This would naturally be true in a new country, where craft industry must develop slowly. It was true also for another reason, which was that the Mother Country regarded the New World as a plantation to be exploited for the benefit of its own trade and manufactures.

Great Britain’s claim to proprietary interest in America having been established against European rivals by the end of the 17th century, her struggle with the colonists began. The English wanted (1) raw materials upon which to bestow their high craft labour, (2) an exclusive market for the output of their mills and factories, and (3) a monopoly of the carrying trade. The colonists wanted industrial freedom. As long as they held themselves to chimney-corner industries, making nails, shoes, hats, and coarse cloth for their own use, there was no quarrel. But when labour even in a small way began to devote itself exclusively to handicraft, so that domestic manufactures were offered for sale in competition with imported English goods, that was business—and the British Parliament voted measures to crush it. The weaving of cloth for sale was forbidden, lest the colonists become independent of English fabrics. So was the making of beaver hats; the English were hatters. It was forbidden to set up an iron rolling-mill in America, because the English required pig iron and wished to work it themselves. To all these acts of Parliament the colonists opposed subterfuge until they were strong enough to be defiant. That impatience of legal restraints which is one of the most obstinate traits of American business was then a patriotic virtue.

Meanwhile the New England trader had appeared—that adorable, hymning, unconscious pirate who bought molasses in the French West Indies, swapped it for rum at Salem, Mass., traded the rum for Negroes on the African coast, exchanged the Negroes for tobacco in Virginia, and sold the tobacco for money in Europe, at a profit to be settled with God. This trade brought a great deal of money to the colonies; and they needed money almost more than anything else. Then the British laid a ban on trade with the French West Indies, put a tax upon coastwise traffic between the colonies; and decreed that American tobacco should be exported nowhere but to English ports, although—or because—tobacco prices were higher everywhere else in Europe. The natural consequence of this restrictive British legislation was to make American business utterly lawless. As much as a third of it was notoriously conducted in defiance of law. Smuggling both in domestic and foreign trade became a folk custom. John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a celebrated smuggler.

During the War of Independence domestic craft industry was stimulated by necessity. But the means were crude and the products imperfect; and when, after peace, British merchants with an accumulation of goods on their hands began to offer them for sale in the United States at low prices, hoping to recover their new-world trade in competitive terms, the infant industries cried out for protection. They got it. One of the first acts of the American Congress was to erect a tariff against foreign-made goods in order that the country might become self-sufficing in manufactures. This was the beginning of our protectionist policy.

Fewer than four million unbusiness-like people coming into free possession of that part of the North American continent which is named America was a fabulous business event. We cannot even now comprehend it. They had not the dimmest notion of what it was they were possessed of, nor what it meant economically. Geography ran out at the Mississippi. The tide of Westward immigration was just beginning to break over the crest of the Alleghany mountains.

Over-seas trade grew rapidly, as there was always a surplus of food and raw materials to be exchanged abroad for things which American industry was unable to provide. Foreign commerce was an important source of group-wealth and public interest was much concerned with it. Besides, it was easier to trade across seas than inland. Philadelphia until about 1835 was nearer London than Pittsburgh, not as the crow flies but as freight moves. Domestic business, arising from the internal exchange of goods, developed slowly, owing partly to the wretched state of transportation and partly to the self-contained nature of families and communities. The population was more than nine-tenths rural; rural habits survived even in the towns, where people kept cows and pigs, cured their own meats, preserved their own fruits and vegetables, and thought ready-made garments a shocking extravagance. Business under these conditions performed a subservient function. People’s relations with it were in large measure voluntary. Its uses were more luxurious than vital. There was not then, nor could any one at this time have imagined, that interdependence of individuals, groups, communities, and geographical sections which it is the blind aim of business increasingly to promote, so that at length the case is reversed and people are subservient to business.

In Southern New Jersey you may see a farm, now prosperously devoted to berry and fruit crops, on which, still in good repair, are the cedar rail fences built by a farmer whose contacts with business were six or eight trips a year over a sand road to Trenton with surplus food to exchange for some new tools, tea, coffee, and store luxuries. That old sand road has become a cement pavement—a motor highway. Each morning a New York baking corporation’s motor stops at the farm-house and the driver hands in some fresh loaves. Presently a butcher’s motor stops with fresh meat, then another one with dry groceries, and yet another from a New York department store with parcels containing ready-made garments, stockings and shoes.

Consider what these four motors symbolize.

First is an automobile industry and a system for producing, refining and distributing oil which together are worth as much as the whole estimated wealth of America three generations ago.

Back of the bakery wagon what a vista! An incorporated baking industry, mixing, kneading, roasting, and wrapping the loaf in paraffine paper without touch of human hands, all by automatic machinery. Beyond the Mississippi, in a country undiscovered until 1804, the wheat fields that are ploughed, sown, reaped by power-driven machinery. In Minnesota a milling industry in which the miller has become an impersonal flour trust. A railroad system that transports first the grain and then the flour over vast distances at rates so low that the cost of two or three thousand miles of transportation in the loaf of bread delivered to the New Jersey farm-house is inexpressible.... Back of the butcher’s motor is a meat-packing industry concentrated at Chicago. It sends fresh meat a thousand miles in iced cars and sells it to a New Jersey farmer for a price at which he can better afford to buy it than to bother about producing it for himself.... Back of the grocer’s motor are the food products and canning industries. By means of machinery they shred, peel, hull, macerate, roll, cook, cool, and pack fruits, cereals, and vegetables in cartons and containers which are made, labelled, and sealed by other automatic machinery.... And back of the department store motor are the garment-making, shoe-making, textile, and knitting industries.

If one link in all this ramified scheme of business breaks there is chaos. If the State of New Jersey were suddenly cut off from the offices of business for six months, a third of her population might perish; not that the State is unable potentially to sustain her own, but that the people have formed habits of dependence upon others, as others depend upon them, for the vital products of specialized labour.

All this has happened in the life of one cedar rail fence. You say that is only fifty or sixty years. Nevertheless it is literally so. The system under which we live has been evolved since 1860. The transformation was sudden. Never in the world were the physical conditions of a nation’s life altered so fast by economic means. Yet it did not happen for many years. The work of unconscious preparation occupied three-quarters of a century.

Man acts upon his environment with hands, tools, and imagination; and business requires above everything else the means of cheap and rapid transportation. In all the major particulars save one the founders were ill-equipped for their independent attack upon the American environment. At the beginning of the 19th century there were no roads, merely a few trails fit only for horseback travel. There were no canals yet. And the labour wherewith to perform heavy, monotonous tasks was dear and scarce and largely self-employed. Though the hands of the pioneer are restless they are not patiently industrious. There was need of machinery such as had already begun to revolutionize British industry, but the English jealously protected their mechanical knowledge.

There is a tradition that the Americans were marvellously inventive with labour-saving devices. That is to be qualified. Their special genius lay rather in the adaptation and enthusiastic use of such devices. The introduction of them was not resisted as in the older countries by labour unwilling to change its habits and fearful of unemployment. This was an important advantage.

The American textile industry was founded by British artisans who came to this country carrying contraband in their heads, that is, the plans of weaving, spinning, and knitting machines which the English guarded as carefully as military secrets.... The pre-eminence of this country in the manufacture and use of agricultural implements is set out in elementary school-books as proof of American inventiveness; yet the essential principles of the reaper were evolved in Great Britain forty years before the appearance of the historic McCormick reaper (1831) in this country, and threshing-machines were in general use in England while primitive methods of flailing, trampling, and dragging prevailed in America. As recently as 1850 the scythe and cradle reaped the American harvest and there still existed the superstition that an iron plough poisoned the soil and stimulated weeds. Of all the tools invented or adopted the one which Americans were to make the most prodigious use of was the railroad; yet the first locomotive was brought from England in 1829, the embargo on machinery having by this time been lifted—and it failed because it was too heavy!

Twenty years passed and still the possibilities of rail transportation were unperceived, which is perhaps somewhat explained by the fact that the one largest vested interest of that time existed in canals. On the map of 1850 the railroads resemble earthworms afraid to leave water and go inland. The notion of a railroad was that it supplemented water transportation, connecting lake, canal, and river routes, helping traffic over the high places.

But in the next ten years—1850 to 1860—destiny surrendered. There was that rare coincidence of seed, weather, deep ploughing, and mysterious sanction which the miracle requires. The essential power of the American was suddenly liberated. There was the discovery of gold in California. There was the Crimean War, which created a high demand abroad for our commodities. The telegraph put its indignities upon time and space. The idea of a railroad as a tool of empire seized the imagination. Railroads were deliriously constructed. The map of 1860 shows a glistening steel web from the seaboard to the Mississippi.

The gigantesque was enthroned as the national fetich. Votive offerings were mass, velocity, quantity. True cities began. The spirit of Chicago was born. Bigness and be-damnedness. In this decade the outlines of our economic development were cast for good.

In the exclusive perspective of business the Civil War is an indistinct episode. It stimulated industry in the North, shattered it in the South. The net result in a purely economic sense is a matter of free opinion. The Morse telegraph code probably created more wealth than the war directly destroyed. Or the bitter sectional row over the route of the first transcontinental railroad which postponed that project for ten years possibly cost the country more than the struggle to preserve the Union. But that is all forgotten.

After 1860 the momentum of growth, notwithstanding the war and two terrible panics, was cumulative. In the next fifty years, down to 1910, we built half as much railroad mileage as all the rest of the world. Population trebled. This fact stands alone in the data of vital statistics. Yet even more remarkable were the alterations of human activity. The number of city dwellers increased 3½ times faster than the population; the number of wage-earners, 2 times faster; clerks, salesmen, and typists, 6½ times faster; banks, 7 times faster; corporations, 6½ times faster; miners, 3 times faster; transportation-workers, 20 times faster, and the number of independent farmers decreased. Wealth in this time increased from about $500 to more than $1,500 per capita.

If America in its present state of being had been revealed to the imagination of any hard-headed economist in, say, 1850, as a mirage or dream, he would have said: “There is in all the world not enough labour and capital to do it.” He could not have guessed how the power of both would be multiplied.

First there was the enormous simple addition to the labour supply in the form of immigration. Then the evolution of machinery and time-saving methods incredibly increased the productivity of labour per human unit. Thirdly, the application of power to agriculture and the opening of all that virgin country west of the Mississippi to bonanza-farming so greatly increased the production of food per unit of rural labour that at length it required only half the population to feed the whole. The other half was free. Business and industry absorbed it.

Of what happened at the same time to capital, in which term we include also credit, there could have been no prescience at all. Even now when we think of building a railroad, a telephone system, or an automobile factory the thought is that it will take capital, as of course it will at first, but one should consider also how anything that increases the velocity with which goods are exchanged, or reduces the time in which a given amount of business may be transacted, adds to the functioning power of capital. To illustrate this: the merchant of 1850 did business very largely with his own capital unaided. He was obliged to invest heavily in merchandise stocks. The turn-over was slow. His margin of profit necessarily had to be large. But with the development of transportation and means of communication—the railroad, telegraph, and telephone—and with the parallel growth of banking facilities, the conditions of doing business were fundamentally changed. All the time-factors were foreshortened.

A merchant now has to lock up much less capital in merchandise, since his stocks are easily and swiftly replenished. The turn-over is much faster because people using suburban railways and street-cars go oftener to shop. And not only is it possible for these reasons to do a larger volume of business with a given amount of capital, but the merchant now borrows two-thirds, maybe three-quarters, of his capital at the bank in the form of credit. The same is true of the manufacturer. Formerly he locked up his capital, first in raw materials and then in finished products to be sold in season as the demand was; and there was great risk of loss in this way of matching supply to an estimated demand. Now he sells his goods before he makes them, borrows credit at the bank to buy his raw materials, even to pay his labour through the processes of manufacture, and when the customer pays on delivery of the goods with credit which he also has borrowed at the bank, the manufacturer settles with his bank and keeps the difference. An exporter was formerly one who bought commodities with his own money, loaded them on ship, sent them on chance to a foreign market, and waited for his capital to come back with a profit. Now he first sells the goods to a foreign customer by cable, then buys them on credit, loads them on ship, sells the bill of lading to a bank, uses the proceeds to pay for the goods, and counts his profit. All large business now is transacted in this way with phantom capital, called credit; money is employed to settle differences only.

The effect of this revolution of methods upon the morals and manners of business was tremendous. It destroyed the aristocracy of business by throwing the field open to men without capital. Traders and brokers over-ran it. The man doing business on borrowed capital could out-trade one doing business on his own. The more he borrowed, the harder he could trade. Salesmanship became a specialized, conscienceless art. There was no rule but to take all the traffic would bear: let the buyer look out. Dishonesty in business became so gross that it had to be sublimated in the national sense of humour. There are many still living who remember what shopping was like even in the largest city stores when nobody dreamed of paying the price first asked and counter-higgling was a universal custom. Indeed, so ingrained it was that when A. T. Stewart in New York announced the experiment of treating all buyers alike on a one-price basis his ruin was predicted by the whole merchant community.

As credit both increases competition and enables a larger business to be done on a small base of invested capital, the margin of profit in business tends to fall. Under conditions of intense rivalry among merchants and manufacturers operating more and more with phantom capital the margin of profit did fall until it was very thin indeed. This led to the abasement of goods by adulteration and tricks of manufacture, which became at length so great an evil that the government had to interfere with pure-food acts and laws forbidding wilful misrepresentation.

There was a limit beyond which the cost of production could not be reduced by degradation of quality. It was impossible to control prices with competition so wild and spontaneous and with cheapness the touchword of success. Therefore the wages of business were low, and things apparently had come to an impasse. Yet out of this chaos arose what now we know as big business. The idea was simple—mass production of standardized foods. The small, fierce units of business began to be amalgamated. As society is integrated by steps—clan, tribe, nation, State—so big business passed through mergers, combines, and trusts toward the goal of monopoly.

When a number of competing manufacturers unite to produce standard commodities in quantity, much duplication of effort is eliminated, time-saving methods are possible as not before, the cost of production is reduced. There are other advantages. They are stronger than they were separately, not only as buyers of labour, raw materials, and transportation, but as borrowers of capital. The individual or firm is the customer of a bank. The corporation makes a partnership with finance.

Now a curious thing happens. The corporation with its mass production restores the quality of goods. It is responsible for its products and guarantees them by brands, labels and trade-marks. Sugar and oatmeal come out of the anonymous barrel behind the grocer’s counter and go into attractive cartons on his shelf, bearing the name of the producer. Gloves, shirts, stockings, cutlery, furniture, meat products, jams, watches, fabrics, everything in fact becomes standardized by name and price and is advertised by the producer directly to the public over the retailer’s head, so that the small retailer is no longer a merchant in the old sense but a grumbling commission-man. Big business has delivered itself from the impasse; it has recovered control of its profits; but now the retailer’s margin of profit tends to become fixed. What does the retailer do? He applies the same principle to the last act of selling. Enter the chain-store. Obviously a corporation owning a chain of several hundred stores and working, like the manufacturer, with borrowed capital, is stronger than any one retailer to bargain with the powerful producers, and as the chain-store tends to displace the little retailer a balance is restored between the business of production and the business of retailing. Mass production is met by mass selling. The consumer as the last subject may resort to legislation for his protection.

Big business could not have evolved in this way without the aid of the railroads. Their dilemma was similar. Strife and competition had ruined their profits. To begin with, nobody knew what it cost to produce transportation. When a new line was opened it made rates according to circumstances. At points where it met water competition it charged very little, sometimes less than the cost of its fuel, and at points where there was no competition it charged all the traffic would stand. Then as competitive railroad-building excessively increased the high rates steadily fell. Once they got started people were obsessed to make railroads. They made them for speculative reasons, for feudal reasons, for political reasons, for any reason at all. Two men might quarrel in Wall Street, and one would build a thousand miles of railroad to spite the other—build it with the proceeds of shares sold to the public or hypothecated at the bank. Then there would be two roads to divide the business of one. Railroads under these conditions were unscientifically planned and over-built. The profit was rather in the building than in the working of them. There was scandal both ways. Quantities of fictitious capital were created and sold to the public. And when a railroad was built it became the plaything of its traffic manager, who conspired with other traffic managers to sell favours to shippers and to invent disastrous rate-wars in order to profit by the fall of shares on the stock market.

Rates could not be raised or held up, owing to the irresponsible nature of the competition. Transportation is a commodity that cannot be adulterated. How was the profit to be restored in this field of business? Why, by the same method as in industry. That is, by mass production.

Some one discovered that once you got a loaded train out of the terminal and rolling on the right-of-way it cost almost nothing to keep it moving. There was no money in hauling small lots of freight short distances at the highest rates that could be charged; but there was profit in moving large quantities of freight in full cars over long distances at very low rates. At this the railroad people went mad over the long, heavy haul. Here was industry seeking to concentrate itself in fewer places for purposes of mass production; and here were the railroads wanting masses of freight to move long distances. Their problems coincided.

Result: mass production gravitates to those far-apart long-haul points to get the benefit of low rates, there is congestion of industrial population at those points, industry at intermediate points is penalized by higher freight rates, and the railroads henceforth equip themselves with mass tonnage primarily in view. You begin now to have steel towns, meat towns, flour towns, textile towns, garment towns, and so on. That interdependence of communities and geographical sections which makes business is in full development.

However, the second state of the railroad is worse than the first. It is overwhelmed by the monster it has suckled. It is at the mercy of a few big shippers, masters of mass production, who bully it, extort lower and lower rates still, and at length secret rebates, under threat of transferring their tonnage to another railroad or in some cases of building their own railroad, which now they are powerful enough to do. The railroad yields; and whereas before only such industry as survived at intermediate points was penalized by higher freight rates, now all industry outside of big business is at a disadvantage, since big business is receiving secret benefits from the railroads.

There was no philosophy in any of this, not even a high order of intelligence. The will of business is anarchistic; its religion is fatalism. If let alone, it will seek its profit by any means that serve and then view the consequences as acts of Providence.

It has been noted that big business, going in for mass production, restored the honesty of goods. The motive was not ethical. It paid. The public’s good will toward a brand or a trade-mark was an asset that could be capitalized, sometimes for more than plant and equipment, and the shares representing such capitalization could be sold to the public on the Stock Exchange. But what was gained for morality in the honesty of goods was lost again in new forms of dishonesty. Standard Oil products were always cheap and honest; its oil was never watered. But the means by which the Standard Oil Company gained its dangerous trade eminence were dishonest, and the trust was dissolved for that reason by the United States Supreme Court. It happens to be only the most notable instance. There were and are still many others—combines and trusts whose products are honest but whose tradeways are either illegal or ethically repugnant.

One cannot say that business is either honest or dishonest. It is both. Evidence of permanent gain in a kind of intrinsic commercial honesty is abundant. Wild-cat banking has disappeared. A simple book entry between merchants is as good as a promissory note. The integrity of merchandise now is a trade custom. Vulgar misrepresentations have ceased save in the slums of business. The practice of making open prices to all buyers alike, wholesale and retail, is universal. It is no longer possible to print railroad shares surreptitiously overnight and flood the Stock Exchange with them the next morning, as once happened in Erie. Nowhere is character more esteemed than in business.

And yet, in spite of all this and parallel with it, runs a bitter feud between society and business. People are continually acting upon big business through the agencies of government to make it behave. What is the explanation?

Well, in the first place, the improvement in commercial honesty has been owing not so much to ethical enlightenment as to internal necessity. Big business must do its work on credit; there is no other way. Therefore credit is a sacred thing, to be preserved by all means. Men know that unless they are scrupulous in fulfilling their obligations toward it, the system will collapse. As the use of credit increases the code of business become more rigid. It must. One who breaks faith with the code is not merely dishonest, man to man; he is an enemy of credit.

If a stock-market coterie of this day could print Erie shares without notice and sell them the public would suffer of course but Wall Street would suffer much more. Its own affairs would fall into hopeless disorder. That kind of thing cannot happen again. The code has been improved. You now may be sure that anything you buy on the Stock Exchange has been regularly issued and listed. No institution is more jealous of the integrity of its transactions—transactions as such. Purchases and sales involving millions are consummated with a nod of the head and simple dishonesty is unknown. Nevertheless, it is a notorious fact that the amount of money nowadays lost on the Stock Exchange by the unwary public is vastly greater than in Jay Gould’s time. There is, you see, an important difference between formal and moral honesty.

Secondly, business morality is a term without meaning. There is no such thing. Business is neither moral nor immoral. It represents man’s acquisitive instinct acting outside of humanistic motives. Morals are personal and social. Business is impersonal and unsocial.

So far we come clear. Only now, what shall be said of the man in business? He is not a race apart. He may be any of us. How then shall we account for the fact that those evils and tyrannies of big business with which the Congress, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Board, and other agencies of the social will keep open war are not inhibited at the head by an innate social sense? Does the business man lose that sense? Or by reason of the material in which he works does he become an unsocial being? No. The answer is that the kind of business we now are talking about is not conducted by men. It is conducted by corporations.

A thing of policy purely, with only legal responsibilities and no personality, free from hope of heaven or fear of hell, the corporation is both a perfect instrument for the impersonal ends of business and a cave of refuge for the conscience. Business by corporations is highly responsible in all that pertains to business. Business by corporations is in all ethical respects anonymous. A corporation does many things which no one of its directors would do as an individual. The head of a corporation says: “If it were my own business, I should handle this labour problem very differently. But it isn’t. I am a trustee, answerable to five thousand stockholders for the security of their dividends.” Each of the five thousand stockholders says: “It isn’t my business. I am merely one of a great number of stockholders. What can I do about it?”

Nobody is personally responsible.

More than two-thirds of our national wealth is owned by corporations. They control at some point every process of economic life. Their power is so great that many have wondered whether in time it might not overwhelm popular government. Yet in all this realm of power there is nowhere that sense of personal moral liability which is acknowledged between men and without which civilized human relationships would become utterly impossible. A corporation is like a State in this respect: it cannot, if it would, make moral decisions. The right to do that is not delegated by people to a State nor by stockholders to a corporation. Both therefore are limited to material decisions.

It is probably owing as much to the power-thirsty, law-baiting temperament of the American in business as to the magnitude of the work to be done that the use of the corporation, like the use of labour-saving machinery, has been carried further here than in any other country. Railroads naturally were the first great corporations. The amount of capital required to build a railroad is beyond the resources of any small group of individuals; it must be gathered from a large number, who become shareholders. The original railroads were subsidized by the government with loans of money and enormous grants of land. Industrial and trading corporations came later. For a long time America was to all corporations a Garden of Eden. They were encouraged, not precisely that they were presumed to be innocent but because they were indispensable. Then they ate of the Tree of Political Power and the feud was on. When people began really to fear them their roots were already very deep and touched nearly everything that was solid. The sinister alliance between big business and high finance was accomplished.

One of the absurdities of the case was and is that any State according to its own laws may grant corporation-charters which carry rights of eminent domain in all other states. The Standard Oil Company was once dissolved in Ohio. It took out a new charter in New Jersey, and went on as before, even in Ohio.

Every attempt to reform their oppressive ways by law they have resisted under the constitution as an attack upon the rights of property. And there has always been much confusion as to what the law was. In one case it was construed by the United States Supreme Court to mean that bigness itself, the mere power of evil, was illegal whether it had been exercised or not; in another, that each instance must be treated on its merits by a rule of reason, and, in still another, that the potential power to restrain trade in a monopolistic manner was not in itself illegal provided it had never been used.

Nevertheless the doubt as to which should control the other—the State the corporations or the corporations the State—has been resolved. Gradually the authority of the State has been asserted. The hand of the corporation in national politics is branded. The Federal Government’s control over the rates and practices of the railroads is complete; so likewise is the control of many of the several separate States over the rates and practices of public-utility corporations. Federal authority over the tradeways of the great industrial and trading corporations whose operations are either so large or so essential, to economic life as to become clothed with public interest is far advanced; and supervision of profits is beginning.

Now what manner of profit and loss account may we write with American business?

Given to begin with an environment superb, it has made wealth available to an aggregate extent hitherto unimaginable in the world. But in doing this it has created a conscious, implacable proletariat in revolt against private profit.

In production it has brought about a marvellous economy of human effort. At the same time it has created colossal forms of social waste. It wastes the spirit by depriving the individual of that sense of personal achievement, that feeling of participation in the final result, which is the whole joy of craftsmanship, so that the mind is bored and the heart is seared. It wastes all things prodigally in the effort to create new and extravagant wants, reserving its most dazzling rewards for him that can make two glittering baubles to sell where only one was sold before. It wastes the living machine in recurring periods of frightful and unnecessary idleness.

For the distribution of goods it has perfected a web of exchange, so elaborate that the breaking of one strand is a disaster and yet so trustworthy that we take its conveniences every day for granted and never worry. But the adjustment of supply to demand is so rude and uncontrolled that we suffer periodic economic calamities, extreme trade depression, and social distress, because there has been an over-production of some things at a price-impasse between producer and consumer.

In the field of finance and credit it has evolved a mechanism of the highest dynamic intensity known; yet the speculative abuse of credit is an unmitigated scandal, and nothing whatever has been done to eliminate or diminish those alternations of high and low prices, inflation and deflation, which produce panics and perilous political disorder. On the contrary, business continues fast in the antique superstition that such things happen in obedience to inexorable laws.

In the Great War American business amazed the world, itself included. In 1914 the United States was a debtor nation, owing Europe 3 billions of dollars. By the end of 1920 we were the largest creditor nation on earth, other nations owing us 15 billions. This means simply that in six years this country produced in excess of its own needs and sent abroad commodities amounting to 18 billions of dollars. In 1921, to the naïve astonishment of business, the foreign demand for American goods slumped because foreign countries had not the means to go on buying at any such rate. The result was an acute panic in prices here, trade prostration, unemployment, and sounds of despair. The case was stated by leaders of business and finance in these ominous terms: “America is over-equipped. It has the capacity to produce more of everything than it needs. Therefore unless we continuously sell our surplus abroad, unless the American government will lend foreign countries the credit with which to buy our excess production, prosperity is shattered. Factories will shut up, fields will lie fallow, labour will suffer for want of work. Moreover, we are threatened with a deluge of foreign goods, for presently the countries that owe us 18 billions of dollars will be trying to pay us with commodities. If we open our markets to their goods our own industries will be ruined. So we must have high tariffs to protect American producers from the competition of foreign merchandise.”

Ruined by over-plenty!

We are equipped to produce more of the goods that satisfy human wants than we can use, our command over the labour of foreign countries by reason of the debt they owe us is enormous, and business desponds.

Attend. To keep our prosperity we must sell away our surplus, or if necessary give it away to foreign countries on credit, and then protect ourselves against their efforts to repay us! The simple absurdity of this proposition is self-evident. We mention it only for what it signifies. And it signifies that business is a blind, momentous sequence, with extravagant reflex powers of accommodation and extension and almost no faculty of original imagination.

American business despairing at over-production and the American Indian shivering on top of the Pennsylvania coalfields—these are twin ironies.

John Law’s Mississippi Bubble dream three centuries ago was a phantasy of escape from the boredom of toil. The bubble itself has been captured. That is the story of American business. But who has escaped, save always a few at the expense of many? There may be in fact no other way. Still, the phantasy will not lie. And nobody knows for sure what will happen when business is no longer a feudal-minded thing, with rights and institutions apart, seeking its own profit as the consummate end, and perceives itself in the light of a subordinate human function, justified by service.

Garet Garrett