Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

II

Bondage to the land was the basis of villeinage in the old régime; bondage to the job will be the basis of villeinage in the new. The new régime, absolving itself from all general responsibility to its workers, extends a measure of protection, solely as an act of grace, only to those who are faithful and obedient; and it holds the entire mass of its employed underlings to the terms of day-by-day service. The growth of industries has overshadowed the importance of agriculture, which is ever being pushed back into the West and into other and remote countries; and the new order finds its larger interests and its greater measure of control in the workshops rather than on the farms. The oil wells, the mines, the grain fields, the forests, and the great thoroughfares of the land are its ultimate sources of revenue; but its strongholds are in the cities. It is in these centres of activity, with their warehouses, where the harvests are hoarded; their workshops, where the metals and woods are fashioned into articles of use; their great distributing houses; their exchanges; their enormously valuable franchises to be had for the asking or the seizing, and their pressure of population, which forces an hourly increase in the exorbitant value of land, that the new Feudalism finds the field best adapted for its main operations.

Bondage to the job will be the basis of the new villeinage. The wage-system will endure, for it is a simpler and more effective means of determining the baron’s volume of profits than were the “boon-works,” the “week-works,” and the corvées of old. But with increasing concentration on the one hand, and the fiercer competition for employment on the other, the secured job will become the laborer’s fortress, which he will hardly dare to evacuate. The hope of bettering his condition by surrendering one place in the expectation of getting another will be qualified by a restraining prudence. He will no longer trust his individual strength, but when he protests against ill conditions, or, in the last resort, strikes, it will be only in company with a formidable host of his fellows. And even the collective assertion of his demands will be restrained more and more as he considers the constantly recurring failures of his efforts. Moreover, concentration gives opportunity for an almost indefinite extension of the black-list: a person of offensive activity may be denied work in every feudal shop and on every feudal farm from one end of the country to the other. He will be a hardy and reckless industrial villein indeed who will dare incur the enmity of the Duke of the Oil Trust when he knows that his actions will be promptly communicated to the banded autocracy of dukes, earls, and marquises of the steel, coal, iron, window glass, lumber, and traffic industries.

There were three under-classes in the old Feudalism,—free tenants, villeins, and cotters. The number of tenants on the farms has approximately doubled in the last twenty years, while in the great cities nearly the whole population are tenants. The cotters, with their little huts and small holdings in isolated places about the margin of cultivation, are also in process of restoration. The villeins are an already existent class, more numerous proportionately than ever before, though the exact status of their villeinage is yet to be fixed. But modern society is characterized by complexities unknown in any of its predecessors, and the specialization of functions requires a greater number of subordinate classes. It is a difficult task properly to differentiate them. They shade off almost imperceptibly into one another; and the dynamic processes of modern industry often hurl, in one mighty convulsion, great bodies of individuals from a higher to a lower class, blurring or obscuring the lines of demarcation. Nevertheless, to take a figure from geology, these convulsions become less and less frequent as the substratum of industrial processes becomes more fixed and regular; the classes become more stable and show more distinct differences, and they will tend, under the new régime, to the formal institution of graded caste. At the bottom are the wastrels, at the top the barons; and the gradation, when the new régime shall have become fully developed, whole and perfect in its parts, will be about as follows:—

I. The barons, graded on the basis of possessions.

II. The court agents and retainers.

III. The workers in pure and applied science, artists and physicians.

IV. The entrepreneurs, the managers of the great industries, transformed into a salaried class.

V. The foremen and superintendents. This class has heretofore been recruited largely from the skilled workers, but with the growth of technical education in schools and colleges, and the development of fixed caste, it is likely to become entirely differentiated.

VI. The villeins of the cities and towns, more or less regularly employed, who do skilled work and are partially protected by organization.

VII. The villeins of the cities and towns who do unskilled work and are unprotected by organization. They will comprise the laborers, domestics, and clerks.

VIII. The villeins of the manorial estates, of the great farms, the mines, and the forests.

IX. The small-unit farmers (land owning), the petty tradesmen, and manufacturers.

X. The subtenants on the manorial estates and great farms (corresponding to the class of “free tenants” in the old Feudalism).

XI. The cotters.

XII. The tramps, the occasionally employed, the unemployed—the wastrels of city and country.

The principle of gradation is the only one that can properly be applied. It is the relative degree of comfort—material, moral, and intellectual—which each class directly contributes to the nobility. The wastrels contribute least, and they are the lowest. The under-classes who do the hard work lay the basis of all wealth, but their contribution to the barons is indirect, and comes to its final goal through intermediate hands. The foremen and superintendents rightly hold a more elevated rank, and the entrepreneurs, who directly contribute most of the purely material comfort, will be found well up toward the top. Farther up in the social scale, partly from æsthetic and partly from utilitarian considerations, will be the scientists and artists. The new Feudalism, like most autocracies, will foster not only the arts, but also certain kinds of learning—particularly the kinds which are unlikely to disturb the minds of the multitude. A future Marsh or Cope or Le Conte will be liberally patronized and left free to discover what he will; and so, too, an Edison or a Marconi. Only they must not meddle with anything relating to social science. For obvious reasons, also, physicians will occupy a position of honor and comparative freedom under the new régime.

But higher yet is the rank of the court agents and retainers. This class will include the editors of “respectable” and “safe” newspapers, the pastors of “conservative” and “wealthy” churches, the professors and teachers in endowed colleges and schools, lawyers generally, and most judges and politicians. During the transition period there will be a gradual elimination of the more unserviceable of these persons, with the result that in the end this class will be largely transformed. The individual security of place and livelihood of its members will then depend on the harmony of their utterances and acts with the wishes of the great nobles. Theirs, in a sense, will be the most important function in the State—“to justify the ways of God [and the nobility] to man.” They will be the safeguards of the realm, the assuagers of popular suspicion and discontent. So long as they rightly fulfil their functions, their recompense will be generous; but such of them as have not the tact or fidelity to do or say what is expected of them will be promptly forced into class XI or XII, or, in extreme cases, banished from all classes, to become the wretched pariahs of society. At times two divisions of this class will find life rather a burdensome travail. They are the judges and the politicians. Holding their places at once by popular election and by the grace of the barons, they will be fated to a constant see-saw of conflicting obligations. They must, in some measure, satisfy the demands of the multitude, and yet, on the other hand, they must obey the commands from above.