Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

III

Through all the various activities of these classes (except the wastrels and the cotters) our Benevolent Feudalism will carry on the Nation’s work. The full measure of profit is its aim; and having the substance of its desire, it shows a utilitarian scorn of the mummeries and ceremonials by which the overlordship of other days was formally acknowledged. The ancient ceremony of “homage,” the swearing of personal fidelity to the lord, is relaxed into the mere beseeching of the foreman for work. Directness and efficacy characterize its methods. The wage-system, with its mechanical simplicity, continuing in force, there is an absence of the old exactions of special work. A mere altering of the wage-scale appropriates to the noble whatever share of the product he feels he may safely demand for himself. Thus “week-work,” the three or four days’ toil in each week which the villein had to give unrecompensed to the lord, and “boon-work,” the several days of extra toil three or four times a year, will never be revived. Even the company store, the modern form of feudal exaction, will in time be given up, for at best it is but a clumsy and offensive makeshift, and defter and less irritating means are at hand for reaching the same result. There will hardly be a restoration of “relief,” the payment of a year’s dues on inheriting an allotment of land, or of “heriot,” the payment of a valuable gift from the possessions of a deceased relative. Indeed, these tithes may not be worth the bother of collecting; for the villein’s inheritance will probably be but moderate, as befits his state and the place which God and the nobility have ordained for him.

Practically all industry will be regulated in terms of wages, and the entrepreneurs, who will then have become the chief salaried officers of the nobles, will calculate to a hair the needful production for each year. Waste and other losses will thus be reduced to a minimum. A vast scheme of exact systematization will have taken the place of the old competitive chaos, and industry will be carried on as by clock-work. The workshops will be conducted practically as now. Only they will be very much larger, the individual and total output will be greater, the unit cost of production will be lessened. Wages and hours will for a time continue on something like the present level; but, despite the persistence of the unions, no considerable gains in behalf of labor are to be expected, except such as are freely given as acts of baronial grace and benevolence. The owners of all industry worth owning, the barons will laugh at threats of striking and boycotting. No competitor will be permitted to make capital out of the labor disputes of another. There may or may not be competitors. A gigantic merger of all interests, governed by a council of ten, may supplant the individual dukedoms and baronies in the different industries, or these may continue as now, the sovereign units of a federated whole. But in neither case can labor carry its point against them. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction must be guarded against as a possible menace to the régime. Wages and dividends will be nicely balanced with a watchful regard for the fostering of content; workshops and villages of yet more approved models than any of the present will be built, and a thousand Pelzers and Pullmans will arise. Old-age pensions, or at least the promise of them, will be extended to new groups, and by all possible means the lesson that protection and security are due only to faithfulness and obedience will be made plain to the entire villein class.

Gradually a change will take place in the aspirations and conduct of the younger generations. Heretofore there has been at least some degree of freedom of choice in determining one’s occupation, however much that freedom has been curtailed by actual economic conditions. But with the settling of industrial processes comes more and more constraint. The dream of the children of the farms to escape from their drudgery by migrating to the city, and from the stepping-stone of a clerkly place at three dollars a week to rise to affluence, will be given over, and they will follow the footsteps of their fathers. A like fixity of condition will be observed in the cities, and the sons of clerks and of mechanics and of day laborers will tend to accept their environment of birth and training and abide by it. It is a phenomenon observable in all countries where the economic pressure is severe, and it is yet more certain to obtain in feudal America.