You are one of two gladiators in the arena: your first duty is to amuse the multitude. But as the multitude is not going to remember very long after leaving the show who was victorious, it is not worth while to take any hurts for a merely visible advantage. So fight as to prove to yourself and to your adversary that you are the abler swordsman—that is, the more honorable man. Victory in that is important, for it is lasting, and is enjoyed ever afterward when you see or think of the vanquished. If in the battle I get a foul stroke, that is a distinct gain, for I never by any possibility forget that the man who delivered it is a foul man. That is what I wanted to think him, and the very thing which he should most strenuously have striven to prevent my knowing. I may meet him in the street, at the club, any place where I can not help it; under whatever circumstances he becomes present to my consciousness I find a fresh delight in recalling my moral superiority and in despising him anew. Is it not strange, then, that ninety-nine disputants in a hundred deliberately and in cold blood concede to their antagonists this supreme and decisive advantage in pursuit of one which is merely illusory? Their faults are, first, of course, lack of character; second, lack of sense. They are like an enraged mob engaged in hostilities without having taken the trouble to know something of the art of war. Happily for them, if they are defeated they do not know it: they have not even the sense to ascribe their sufferings to their wounds.
1899.
IN THE INFANCY OF “TRUSTS”
THE battle against the “trusts” is conspicuously “on.” I venture to predict that it will fail, and to think that it ought to fail. That it ought to fail is, in this bad world, no good reason for thinking that it will; there is a strong numerical presumption the other way. For doubting the success of this “movement” there are reasons having nothing to do with the righteousness or unrighteousness of the cause. One is that the entire trend of our modern civilization is toward combination and aggregation. In the “concert of the great powers” of Europe we see its most significant, most beneficent and grandest manifestation. Denounce it how we will, fight it as we may, we are powerless to stay its advance in any department of human activity, social, industrial, commercial, military, political. It is the dominant phenomenon of our time. Labor combines into “unions,” capital into “trusts,” and each aggregation is powerful in everything except in combating its own methods in the other. The newspaper denounces the one or the other—and joins a syndicate of newspapers. “Department stores” spring up all over the land, draw the fire of the demagogue and are impotently condemned in the platform of the political trust that he adorns. Our great hotels are examples of the same centripetal law, and offices move to the center into buildings overlooking the church spires. Small farms are disappearing; railways absorb other railways and by pooling interests with those unabsorbed, evoke impotent legislation and vain “decisions.” Cities swallow and digest their suburbs. There are such things as guilds of authors; tramps devastate in organized bodies, and there has been even a congress of religions.
In the larger politics we observe the same tendency to aggregation; everywhere the unit of control is enlarging. In the Western Hemisphere we have had Pan-American congresses and seen the genesis of the Dominion of Canada. The United States have set up, and must henceforth maintain, what is virtually a protectorate of American Republics—a policy which commits us to their defense in every dispute with a European power, gives us a living interest in all their affairs and makes every square foot of South America in some sense United States territory.
Beyond the Atlantic it is the same. The entire continent of Africa is being parted among a few European nations already swollen to enormous growth by vast accretions of colonial dominion. And all over the world colonial federation is in the air. In Europe itself states are drawn together into kingdoms, kingdoms into empires. United Italy and United Germany are conspicuous and significant examples. Whether in the Other World a movement is afoot to establish Greater Heaven by annexing Hell neither the celestial ambassadors have informed us from the pulpit, nor the infernal from the tribune.
Multiplication of international “conventions” and “treaties” is one of the most striking of contemporary political phenomena. They are a minor species of international federation, attesting and perpetuating a community of interest which statesmen no longer venture to ignore. By some hopeful spirits they are regarded as preliminary committee-work of Tennyson’s “Parliament of Man.” International arbitration is a blind step in the same direction, profitable chiefly as evidence of the general trend. The set of the currents of human interests is from all points of the compass toward fewer and fewer nuclei of control. We may dislike the direction—may clamor against the current that seems to be affecting a particular interest, but we can neither stay nor turn it. We may utter (from the pocket) our disrelish of the “trust,” the “combine,” the “monopoly”; they are phases of the movement and we shall shriek in vain.
A few of the public advantages of combinations in production may be mentioned. Economy is the most obvious. A syndicate or trust requires just as many miners to dig a million tons of coal, for example, as a dozen independent companies did; but it does not require nearly so many salaried officers, nor nearly so many expensive offices. The man who is in danger of “losing his place” is not the laborer, yet it is the laborers who are loudest in their wail. A little reflection will suggest many other ways in which economy of production is served by combination; but deeper reflection, with some knowledge of commercial phenomena, is required to make it clear that economy of production benefits anybody but the producer. It is of some potential advantage, at least, to the consumer that the producer is able, without bankruptcy, to lower the price of the product if Heaven should put it into his heart to do so.
Stability of employment is promoted by combination of capital. A single concern employing ten thousand workmen will not hold them subject to the whims and caprices of a single mind conscious of its ability to replace them, as is the case with a man employing only a dozen. To a rich corporation carrying on a large business a strike means a great loss; to a score of small concerns it means a comparatively small loss each, and is incurred with a light heart. Labor may be very sure of having its demands attentively considered by those who cannot afford to be a day without it.