Points of friction

by Agnes Repplier

The genius which in the thirteenth century found expression in architecture and scholasticism, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found expression in art and letters, finds expression to-day in applied science and finance. Industrial capitalism, as we know it now, is the latest development of man’s restless energy. It has coloured our times, given us new values in education, and intruded itself grossly into the quiet places of life. We should bear with it patiently, we might even “admire it from afar,” if only we were sometimes suffered to forget. “Money talks,” and, by way of encouraging its garrulity, we talk about money, and in terms of money, until it would sometimes appear as if the currency of the United States were the only thing in the country vital enough to interpret every endeavour, and illustrate every situation.

Here, for example, is an imposing picture in a Sunday paper, a picture full of dignified ecclesiastics and decorous spectators. The text reads, “Breaking ground for a three-million-dollar nave.” It is a comprehensive statement, and one that conveys to the public the only circumstance which the public presumably cares to hear. But it brings a great cathedral down to the level of the million-dollar club-houses, or boat-houses, or fishing-camps which are described for us in unctuous and awe-stricken paragraphs. It is even dimly suggestive of the million-dollar babies whom reporters follow feverishly up and down Palm Beach, and who will soon have to be billion-dollar babies if they want to hold their own. We are now on terms of easy familiarity with figures which used to belong to the abstractions of arithmetic, and not to the world of life. We have become proudly aware of the infinite possibilities of accumulation and of waste.

For this is the ebb and flow of American wealth. It is heaped up with resistless energy and concentration; it is dissipated in broken and purposeless profusion. Every class resents the extravagance of every other class; but none will practise denial. The millionaire who plays with a yacht and decks his wife with pearls looks askance upon the motor and silk shirt of the artisan. The artisan, with impulses and ambitions as ignoble and as unintelligent as the millionaire’s, is sullenly aware that, waste as he may, the rich can waste more, and he is still dissatisfied. There is no especial appeal to manhood in a silk shirt, no approach to sweetness and light. It represents an ape-like imitation of something not worth imitating, a hopeless ignorance of the value and worth of money.

A universal reluctance to practise economy indicates a weakness in the moral fibre of a nation, a dangerous absence of pride. There is no power of the soul strong enough to induce thrift but pride. There is no quality stern enough to bar self-indulgence but the overmastering dictates of self-respect. There is no joy that life can yield comparable to the joy of independence. A nation is free when it submits to coercion from no other nation. A man is free when he is the arbiter of his own fate. National and individual freedom have never come cheap. The sacrifice which insures the one insures the other; the resolution which preserves the one preserves the other. When Andrew Marvell declined the bribe offered him “out of pure affection” by the Lord Treasurer, saying he had “a bladebone of mutton” in his cupboard which would suffice for dinner, he not only held his own honour inviolate, but he vindicated the liberty of letters, the liberty of Parliament, and the liberty of England. No wonder an old chronicler says that his integrity and spirit were “dreadful” to the corrupt officials of his day.

There are Americans who appear to love their country for much the same reason that Stevenson’s “child” loves the “friendly cow”:

“She gives me cream with all her might

To eat with apple tart.”

When the supply of cream runs short, the patriot’s love runs shorter. He holds virulent mass-meetings to complain of the cow, of the quality of the cream, and of its distribution. If he be an immigrant, he probably riots in the streets, not clamouring for the flesh-pots of Egypt—that immemorial cry for ease and bondage—inasmuch as the years of his thraldom had been softened by no such indulgence; but simply because the image of the cow is never absent from his mind, or from the minds of those to whom he looks for guidance. The captain of industry and the agitator, the spendthrift and the spendthrift’s wife who fling their money ostentatiously to the four winds of heaven, the working-man and the working-woman who exact the largest wage for the least labour, all are actuated by the same motive,—to get as much and to give as little as they can. It is not a principle which makes for citizenship, and it will afford no great help in the hour of the nation’s trial. Material progress and party politics are engrossing things; but perhaps Francis Parkman was right when he said that if our progress is to be at the mercy of our politics, and our politics at the mercy of our mobs, we shall have no lasting foundation for prosperity and well-being.

The tendency to gloat over the sight and sound of money may be less pervasive than it seems. It may be only a temporary predisposition, leaving us at heart clean, wise, and temperate. But there is a florid exuberance in the handling of this recurrent theme which nauseates us a little, like very rich food eaten in a close room. Why should we be told that “the world gapes in wonder” as it contemplates “an Aladdin romance of steel and gold”? The world has had other things to gape over in these sorrowful and glorious years. “Once a barefoot boy, now riding in a hundred-thousand-dollar private car.” There is a headline to catch the public eye, and make the public tongue hang watering from its mouth. That car, “early Pullman and late German Lloyd,” is to the American reader what the two thousand black slaves with jars of jewels upon their heads were to Dick Swiveller,—a vision of tasteful opulence. More intimate journalists tell us that a “Financial Potentate” eats baked potatoes for his luncheon, and gives his friends notebooks with a moral axiom on each page. We cannot really care what this unknown gentleman eats. We cannot, under any conceivable circumstance, covet a moral notebook. Yet such items of information would not be painstakingly acquired unless they afforded some mysterious gratification to their readers.

As for the “athletic millionaires,” who sport in the open like—and often with—ordinary men, they keep their chroniclers nimble. Fashions in plutocracy change with the changing times. The reporter who used to be turned loose in a nabob’s private office, and who rapturously described its “ebony centre-table on which is laid a costly cover of maroon-coloured silk plush,” and its panelled walls, “the work of a lady amateur of great ability” (I quote from a newspaper of 1890), now has to scurry round golf-links, and shiver on the outskirts of a polo-field. From him we learn that young New Yorkers, the least and lowest of whom lives in a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar house, play tennis and golf like champions, or “cut a wide swathe in polo circles with their fearless riding.” From him we learn that “automobile racing can show its number of millionaires,” as if it were at all likely to show its number of clerks and ploughmen. Extravagance may be the arch-enemy of efficiency, but it is, and has always been, the friend of aimless excess.