I
Among the causes making for this acquiescence in existing social conditions, there are three which may be considered here. The first is the one which so strongly impressed Professor Mosso. It is the rage for individual exploitation. The imaginations of most men are fired by the spectacle of the few achieving great fortunes; each believes that a like fortune lies somewhere within his own reach, and with blind fatuity he tolerates conditions which he instinctively feels to be inequitable, simply because he expects himself to master them. “I believe,” writes Professor Mosso, “that the desire to become wealthy is so strong and powerful in every American that, in order to reserve the opportunity of realizing such desire, Americans willingly submit to the continuance of laws which allow such accumulations.” It is the petty gambler’s faith, the conviction that, though everything be against him, he will somehow “beat the game.” And just as the petty gambler’s faith is fostered by the runners and “cappers” for faro, policy, roulette, and keno, so the faith of the industrial underling is fostered by a tremendous trumpeting of the ways and means to worldly “success.” The preaching of “success” has become, in these last five years, a distinct profession, honored and well recompensed.
A second cause of the prevailing acquiescence in the present régime applies more particularly to social reformers, and to those who, while not actively enlisted as “come-outers,” do yet sympathize with the activities of their more aggressive brethren. It is a feeling, born of years of experience in promoting some collective good, of the hopelessness of achievement. Opposed at all points, frustrated at many, there comes a time, sooner or later, when all but the most resolute reformers are forced to admit that little or nothing can be done. Many thereupon fall back into the ranks of the do-nothings and the care-nothings; while others, in whom the fire of purpose is not entirely quenched, reluctantly exchange their radical and comprehensive plans of social changes for more narrow and immediate purposes,—the giving of small charities, the doing of near-at-hand services, and the occasional support of a particular public measure.